Like two armies braced for war, the Battle Foals and Snowdrop’s forces charged towards each other, neither of whom holding back. The howling winds driving a storm of ice and snow cheered on the ensuing brawl between the bolstered battalions.
True to his promise, Tidal Wave took control of the wave of melted ice and snow, and swept the ice zombies safely away from the no pony’s land and much further away in the town outskirts. The foals assigned to the hordes of monsters then promptly charged into the real fight.
However, Spiral Galaxy lingered behind. “Alright, guys! Watch your heads! I’m opening this fight with a storm…” Standing tall and proud, she stared down the horde of monsters as she slipped her hornband off, casting it into the snow. She took a deep breath, and focused her mana.
“Spiral, no! You’ll kill yourself!!” Tidal Wave pled.
Spiral winked at him. “No, I won’t, Tidy. Not while you and all of Equestria need me!” Her horn glowed with a fierce light, and the clouds above seemed to disperse as the sky lit like a cosmic chandelier, revealing the stars. Their light shone down like spotlights, as if to bow before their queen. As the array of stellar light intensified, Spiral rose into the air, her eyes gleaming with cosmic fury. The snow around her rumbled violently as she charged vast amounts of energy.
“TAKE THIS, SNOWDROP!!!!!”
The starlight congregated into one point, and it exploded into countless meteors that rained destruction unto Snowdrop and her horde of monsters. The only defense they could muster were swiftly erected ice walls, but even those only did so much before shattering, allowing many of the monsters to be annihilated by the bombardment of cosmic hellfire. Snowdrop herself withstood the attack with incredible endurance, but the sheer force of it all caused her to stagger, leaving her open for a frontal assault.
Spiral floated back to the ground, whereupon she staggered to her hooves and rubbed her head. “SPIRAL!!” Tidal Wave shouted as he ran to her. “Are you okay?” he asked, checking on her.
The cosmic filly panted as she managed to regain her footing and stand up straight. “I’m okay, just need a minute.” She said before giving him a peck on the cheek. “Go get ‘em, tiger shark.” She said with a wink.
With a surge of confidence flowing throughout him, Tidal Wave drew his lance and looked out unto his frigid foes. “Let me at ‘em!” He charged forward, gathering some stray water from earlier and formed it around his spear, solidifying it into a larger, more fearsome weapon. “HYAAH!” With all his strength, he threw his lance like a mystical blue javelin, piercing a line of large ice bats and eagles unlucky enough to be in its path. He psychically recalled his lance while there was still some water around it. “FOR EQUESTRIA!!” he bellowed as he continued charging into the fray.
Turf War, standing staunchly at the front line, raised his hammer and slammed the ground with all his might. “HAMMER TIME, M***********S!” A powerful tremor rocked the battlefield like a ship on stormy seas, knocking many of the land-bound monsters off-balance. “SMASH ‘EM UP, Y’ALL!!!” Turf War bellowed as he shield-rammed into an ice wolf, tumbling it into more of its pack and leaving them vulnerable to be being shattered into a cluster of shards.
“Don’t need to tell me twice!” Bullseye said. With her newfound vision, she aimed an explosive arrow down sight. Unfazed by the freezing cold, her focus was entirely on a staggered ice ape, as big as the one that attacked them at the Great Horn Summit. She lined her arrow up with a small crack in its chest that barely exposed its core. Without the slightest of hesitation, Bullseye released her bowstring. The arrow soared through the air like it had a purpose, whizzing past every snowflake being driven by the violent winds, while being carried by said wind and thrust into the ape’s chest. Seconds later, it detonated, causing the beast to explode into a cloud of icy shrapnel that further staggered the other monsters around it.
Greensprout alit her Gaia Root, and the brilliant emerald light spread across the field to her friends like a torrential blessing. “STEEL YOURSELVES, MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS!!!” she called out. The Battle Foals all felt their very souls flare to life, sending a surge of raw strength throughout their battle-hardened bodies.
“MY STEEL TO YOUR NECKS!!!” Like a falcon diving towards its prey, Air Slash soared into the staggered horde, and slashed away with all his might. The magic in his swords rend whatever their cold steel couldn’t already cleave like a butcher. Once he’d flown far enough into the horde, he spun around like a tornado, sending flurries of beam blades all around him that shredded the surrounding monsters like a blender.
Airborne monsters that were unaffected by the tremor but stumbled in flight from the meteor shower hovered towards the foals, only to be shot out of the sky by Kickback’s bullets and Quantum Tech’s railgun blasts. The sharpshooting cowboy finished of numerous approaching ice bats and eagles with one or two well-placed shots. Even as the driving snow obscured his vision, all Kickback needed were his instincts to tracks his targets’ movements; and it was those instincts that sensed heavy movement behind him. Thinking quickly, he drew his whip.
From behind a ruined house came an ice cougar that had snuck its way past the front lines. It reared its claw ready to swipe, when Kickback lashed his charged whip, shattering its armor and exposing its core. He shot it, and killed it.
A few more appeared from behind it, too quickly for Kickback to charge his whip back up, but he didn’t need to. Quantum Tech’s magic turrets quickly blasted them as they pounced towards him, giving the cowboy the few precious seconds he needed to charge his whip enough to break them open and shoot their cores. “Much obliged.” He said to her.
“Of course, my love.” Quantum replied. Her systems then alerted her to incoming enemies- an entire swarm of ice bats and eagles circling her mech from above like vultures. “Sneaking up on a filly while she wasn’t looking? My, aren’t you uncouth?” She said as she aimed her turrets towards them and opened fire.
Quantum blasted away at the frigid fiends, but there were too many of them to track and aim at. She prioritized the ones she caught trying to divebomb her, as well as icicles shot her way. Using the stacks of rubble and slain ice monsters, Kickback leapt atop her mech and tightened his focus.
“<YEEEEE-HAAAAAW!!!!!”>
Kickback tossed hit hat above him like a frisbee and swiftly drew his guns. In all directions, he fired wildly, yet with some modicum of calculation. The two’s combined shooting eventually fell nearly the whole flock of frozen foes, the rest scattering away. As the mass of fallen monster plummeted, Kickback caught his hat and spun around as he put it back on, causing a fan of wind that blew the corpses away from them. A lone ice eagle tried divebombing him from the side, but Quantum swiftly blasted it apart with her railgun. The two winked at each other before resuming their combat.
Back on the front lines, Zebota stared the monsters down with his mighty Shrapnel standing above him, howling a war cry to the clouded heavens as his master focused on his brooch. A large glyph appears from under them, surging with mystical light. “Ninakuita, Ee mifupa ya dunia iliyoharibiwa. Nipe nguvu gani unayo, na unitie mafuta msuluhishi wako. Giza lenye kutisha ambalo linatishia maelewano yetu, litapigwa chini ya kwato zetu!”
Numerous orbs of multicolored light surged from the glyph and absorbed themselves into the pair. Zebota’s black and white striped coat began to glow in such a way that his movements created afterimages in his wake, afterimages that fiercely fanned away the ice and snow abusing his body. Shrapnel glowed as well, but his body of wooden armor sheened as though it had been restored from an old and weathered state, and the spiky areas of his body, along with his claws, elongated and looked considerably sharper. The glyph disappeared, and Zebota took one step forward. His hoof shook the earth beneath him. Though the ice monsters showed no fear, they seemed to acknowledge that they were dealing with a truly formidable adversary.
The empowered shaman drew his boomerang with a vengeance, breaking the sound barrier and shattering small ice columns around him. “YOU SHALL PERISH THIS DAY!” Zebota flung his boomerang across the driving snow. The intense magic absorbed it into caused it to launch powerful lightning bolts as it passed over the monsters, obliterating the smaller ones and damaging the armor of the bigger ones. As soon as the boomerang returned, Zebota commanded his monster. “TEAR THEM APART, SHRAPNEL!!!”
Shrapnel roared more ferociously than he ever had, and he leapt towards the horde. Many of his foes were the large ice gorillas, but there were smaller versions of the titanic ice tortoise that assailed Heimr Island. Each one put up a stalwart resistance despite the lightning strikes, but Shrapnel’s sheer power proved to great for them to bear. An ice gorilla threw a punch at him, but Shrapnel caught the fist in his jaws and flailed his foe like a ragdoll into another, shattering them both. A tortoise body slammed him, but Shrapnel clamped it by its shell where it neck is and forced it upwards, ripping much of the shell off an exposing its core; he thrust his claw into it, instantly shattering the tortoise. He then flung the large shell shard in his mouth at another tortoise, piercing its own shell just deep enough that its core was ruptured.
An ice golem suddenly leapt towards the wooden titan, but it was shattered when Zebota launch an empowered rock with his sling. The little mystic then ran and leapt atop his monster. Just as he did, another ice tortoise fired a powerful ice beam towards them. Shrapnel leapt high, dodging the beam and fell onto the tortoise, allowing Zebota to jump off, draw his tomahawk, and shatter the shell wide open and expose the core. He charged even more energy into his tomahawk and thrust it into the core, but it didn’t instantly rupture. Instead, it began glowing a vicious red. “SHRAPNEL, RUN!” he ordered as he climbed back atop his monster, who promptly obeyed him. The two got to safe distance before the tortoise’s core finally burst violently, creating a shockwave that shattered and staggered more ice monsters. Zebota smiled. “All is as it should be.”
In the wake of his destructive ritual, a black shadow zipped and zagged throughout the clouds of dispersed mist and snow. A flurry of blade slashes and rapid blunt strikes could be heard violently resounding from all directions. After a couple minutes of unseen unseaming of limbs, the clouds dispersed, revealing Shadow Shroud standing atop a pile of ice shards and monster corpses. She then disappeared in a puff of black smoke, immediately reappearing next to Zebota. “I never took as the type for winter gardening, Zebota.” She said.
“Times of desperation can bring out unexpected strengths, Shadow Shroud.” Zebota said.
“If we haven’t learned that by now, our entire journey was a fool’s errand.” Shroud said. “Speaking of desperate times…” An entire horde of monsters, freshly replacing the batch they all already fell, marched onto the battlefield, gnashing teeth and sharpened claws and the like ready to maul.
The two readied their weapons while Shrapnel bellowed a ferocious howl that shook the freezing winds like a pile of shriveling leaves.
But with the enemy front lines dispatched, Fire Fight, Valkyrie, and Frostbite could finally begin their assault on the orchestrator of this omnicidal blizzard.
“RAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!”
Fire Fight ignited his armor, and he erupted into a furious blaze, his body burning like a righteous sun ready to burn away the frigid darkness before him. He concentrated the inferno on his horn and gauntlets, and his blue eyes shined with fiery light.
“SCREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!”
Valkyrie, clutching her Valhalla, burst a ferocious blaze of golden. Enveloped in the light, the gilded manifestation of the raw strength of her bloodline, she poised her sword towards the greatest foe she’d ever imagined she’d face with a beating heart full courage and a cocky smile full of confidence.
“Hehehe…” Frostbite simply cracked a smug grin, cracked his draconic knuckles, and puffed ice clouds from his nostrils. He’d been primed and ready for this beatdown for a long time.
Snowdrop creased a malicious smile as she looked down upon her challengers. “You really think I’m scared of you!? I’ve been building hatred for a millennia now!! I’M READY TO RELEASE IT ALL!!!”
Fire Fight stoked the ferocious flames around him. “THEN I’M READY TO BURN IT ALL AWAY!!! HYARGH!!!”
He shot a fireball shaped like a dragon’s head at Snowdrop. It stuck her, casting a cloud of frosty steam around her. She burst away the cloud and charged vicious ice magic around the frills of her dragon armor’s head. She fired a hail of countless icicle spears that homed in on their targets, and she fired a beam of ice lightning from her tail.
Frostbite swooped in and shattered the icicles with ease, vomiting one of his own right back at her. Meanwhile, Valkyrie, with her sheer willpower alone, blocked the ice lightning with her shield. The energy threatened to freeze her over, but her ancestral light shattered it away as it neared her body. That was when Frostbite’s ice spike hit Snowdrop’s tail, interrupting the lightning beam. Valkyrie seized the opportunity to soar towards the head; she swung her sword, but Snowdrop quickly erected an icy force field around herself that completely blocked the strike.
Snowdrop laughed in the feathered warrior’s face. “You think I’m that frail, Bearer of the dumb Valhalla!?”
Valkyrie snarled. “Gonna make it personal, huh twerp!?” She said as she began wailing hopelessly at the enchanted ice, so much so that she didn’t notice Snowdrop charging a huge amount of magic.
“VALKYRIE, GET BACK!!” Fire Fight shouted. How he did it, he’ll never know, but he managed to envelope her in a field of fire. Just as he did, Snowdrop unleashed an enormous blast of ice magic that blew back even Frostbite, freezing him solid up until he hit the ground, but Valkyrie was unharmed despite being blown away herself, her shield having dispersed.
All the three could do was listen to her laugh maniacally as they seemed to be at a stalemate. They were strong together, but even then, they couldn’t help but feel as if they weren’t prepared. Be that as it may, all they could do was fight, fight, and keep fighting until the cold, bitter end…. except…
“SNOWDROP!!!” A blast of soft blue magic was fired at the ice tyrant, which she blocked, but her evil smile turned to rage as she saw who arbitrated the assault.
“LUNA!!!!”
Sure enough, the Princesses, Spike, and even the other Elements had arrived, ready to help their mighty Battle Foals defend their beloved Equestria.