Hegira: Rising Omega

by Guardian_Gryphon


Chapter 26

Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
December 13th, Gregorian Calendar

Alyra

I suddenly understood how Dad must have felt that first year of trying to learn how to fight as a Gryphon.

The disparity between what he and Mom could do, versus what I could handle, must've been about the same as the disparity between him and Mom when they first met.

If I were facing even one of those Wisps alone, it would have been a tough fight.  Winnable, but tough.  It seemed like they were all measurably slower, and less durable, in Earth's magic-deprived spacetime.  Still extremely dangerous, but not as intractably fearsome as Dad had described them to be in Equestria.

What I was pinwheeling through the center of was far less any kind of one-on-one battle, and much more a contest of two armies.  Maybe the best word to describe it would have been 'tornado.'

I was deeply, deeply thankful for the infallible sense of 'Up' and 'North' that Gryphons seemed to share with Pegasi, Dragons, and Alicorns.  Even a trained Human fighter pilot might have been, at bare minimum, fatally disoriented by the colossal tangle of smoke trails, lightning strikes, magic blasts, particle lances, railgun rounds, VTOL blades, jet contrails, and furiously beating wings.

But as a flighted creature?  Complex aerial ballet was my element.  My inner ear didn't seem to factor into balance and the horizon the way it had as a Human.  It felt more like I had some unshakeable sense of orientation relative to all that mattered.  Maybe a quantum effect.

As to the fighting?  All I had to do was keep my primary focus on surviving.  I could take a swipe with my sword, or a shot with the pistol I'd been issued whenever I saw an opportunity, but my main focus was staying between Mom, Dad, and Taranis, in the unassailable pocket of protected air the four were creating for myself, and Skye.

And then there was Celestia.

The Wisps seemed most frightened of the Gryphons, and Dragons, but she was doing far more direct damage to them than either combined group.  The Human soldiers, and all their attack vehicles, were doing half decently, but nothing compared to the damage the Equestrian fighters could do.  And to the rest of us, Celestia was like a sun to a candle.

Paradoxically, the Wisps seemed most focused on the Princess.  Much to their detriment, as every charge they made against her was broken violently by either the inescapable flame of her rage-fueled plasma, or by the metaphorical steel wall of Taranis, Skye, Mom, and Dad all focusing and coordinating fire.

The rest of Arinna, including the other Dragons, and the Human attack vehicles seemed to be making the best use of heir firepower by either circling the outside of the Wisp cloud and firing unreservedly into it with every weapon they had, or making jousting runs through the cloud, churning up dead Wisps in their wake.

From the size of the cloud of energy forms dissipating upwards into the sky, I could easily tell that we were only truly eliminating about a third of the enemies we were facing.  

The rest were just being ejected from their bodies safely as the combat platforms got shattered, melted, fused, dusted, and vaporized by the cacophony of magic, magnetic weapons, particle beams, missiles, breath weapons, and sharp edges attached to both body and blade.

I realized all at once as my blade carved lethally through a Wisp's weakened spinal armor, scored by Taranis' breath, exactly why Echelon Twelve had been scared enough to make the decision to brutalize children in the name of defense.

It didn't exonerate them.  Nothing could.  They had made not just the wrong choice, but an evil one.

But it did explain their fear.

Fighting alone, even if every soldier had access to Genesist weapons and armor, no Human army could have survived contact with something like this.  Gryphons alone with our swords and bows were more than capable of defeating EarthGov, so great was our biological advantage.

In a pitched battle, Wisps matched that, even on Earth.  If they invaded in greater numbers, even Nuclear armaments would not put the slightest dent in them, and that was without accounting for their ability to 'eject' from the host, and take a new one.

If they ever gained access to limitless breeding and cloning stock?

I had to fight hard to suppress a reflexive shiver as I backflipped over Skye, and put four successive pistol shots into a Wisp that she had already weakened with her magic.  A follow-on blast from her horn, timed to arrive at the same time as my fourth shot, killed not just the bone platform, but the Wisp inside, with a satisfying hissing, popping shrieking sound.

That was undoubtedly going to be our greatest loss of advantage in terms of fighting on Equestrian soil.  The peculiar interaction that killed not just the host, but the parasite, was not something that could easily be done with magic alone.

Celestia could obviously do it, most likely in my estimation through pure raw strength of energy across a broad spectrum.

But Auntie Skye had spent many hours, far too many that she should have spent sleeping instead, trying to find an entirely magical way to achieve the effect at lower power levels.  

To no avail.

That didn't mean it was impossible...  But it was probably not going to be easy, or readily mass produced in time to fight a war.

As Mom and Dad became primarily entangled with pushing back a particularly vicious assault together with Taranis, I changed strategy to work directly in tandem with Skye.

We operated like a chain gun turret, with me picking targets and filling them with particle energy to soften them up, Skye providing shields for us and firing the final magical bolt to coincide with each final particle lance to kill the Wisp inside the target body.

We were excellent at it.  I dearly hoped we could find a way to replicate whatever aspect of the particle energy was so detrimental to the Wisps, whether or not we could actually weaponize that advancement in any other meaningful way.

If we could just find some technological way to replicate whatever energy wave was the critical component, Skye could teach Unicorns the accompanying spell by the hundreds, or the thousands.  We could pair a Gryphon with a Unicorn as fighting tandem units...

We could have a chance at not just defeating the Wisps in a single engagement, but permanently for all future potential engagements.  Rob them of their greatest advantage.

"Oh FUCK!"

It was so much the wording, as the tone, that brought a rising sense of fear to my chest.  Auntie Skye was not one to panic, even in the heat of battle.  My head first went reflexively to her horrified expression, then laterally to an attacking Wisp to skewer it with my sword, then outwards to the source of Skye's horror.

No less than seven Wisps had managed to clump together, sacrificing dozens of their compatriots as an armored shell to corkscrew down through our field of fire, and had latched onto Celestia's hooves, head, and back.

I could see exactly which ones Mom and Dad had picked to kill.  Taranis was busy trying to shield us all as Celestia lost the ability to see and fire cogently at the enemy.

That left me and Skye as the only reinforcements that would be able to make a difference.

We shared a tenth second glance, and I shouted into my headset to make myself heard, flicking my right 'pinkie' talon to change to a direct channel.

"WE HAVE TO FREE HER HEAD!  TUCK IN AND CUT YOUR THRUSTERS!"

I don't know whether she just trusted me enough to act without knowing, or whether Skye understood what I was planning from the get-go, but regardless, she did exactly as I asked.

I stooped, tucking my own wings into shapes intended to minimize drag under powered flight, and forcing the throttle on my impulse drives all the way to their red-limits.  The hardest part of snagging Skye without hurting her was ensuring I dug into her armor enough to get a grip, but not so far as to pierce any weak points with my talons.

The collision produced a fairly big jolt for both of us, but in just a half second, Skye was slung under me, and we were flying down at Celestia's head at a good clip that my HUD told me was approaching three hundred KPH.

Much faster and I figured we risked hurting both Skye, and Celestia.

"YOU'RE TAKING THE ONE ON THE RIGHT, I'VE GOT THE LEFT, PUT YOUR SHOT AT YOUR THREE O'CLOCK LOW ONCE YOU COME OUT OF THE SPIN!"

A brief nod was all the confirmation we had time for.  As Celestia's form drew close ahead of us, I rolled and ejected Skye with a shove that put her into a flat spin at just the right rate, and angle.  

Starting a mental countdown, I vectored hard true-left, up-relative, and tucked into my own spin, shoulder-slamming the Wisp on the back of Celestia's neck so hard that the impact shattered its front legs, knocking the body completely loose from them and slicing clean through the armor.

As yellow warning markers covered my back and wing armor from the shock, and my nerves cried out in protest, I clamped down on the foreleg-less body, and struck at its head with my beak, and tail with my back claws, to keep it from attacking me properly in retaliation.

Sometimes its just easiest to be first to the punch.

The acrid taste of crystalline metal alloy filled my beak as the hooked edge eviscerated the Wisp's helmet.

I reached zero in my mental countdown, and allowed my enemy to wriggle free, tilting my head slightly to my relative left, and firing my pistol point blank into its right eye socket.

The particle beam passed through the eye socket, out the back of my enemy's head, and directly into the back of the head of the Wisp Skye had herself just disengaged from.

Her magical bolt was timed to the microsecond, and impressive feat for a Unicorn, and it appeared even in my decelerated time to occupy the same space as the particle blast for a whole tenth of a second before it whizzed past the tip of my right ear, as my bolt passed under the barrel of her chest between all four legs.

Both Wisps dropped lifeless as the final screams of the parasites made sweet, sweet music to my ears.

Two for one special.

We had no time to celebrate.  Instead, we were forced to double back and start picking off the vanguard of another attack formation rising from below.

But if we survived?

I knew we were never going to stop talking about that shot to anyone who would listen.

Neyla

I'd seen reckless fury many times before.  

Too many times looking back on my own decisions and battles for comfort, particularly from my youth.  Being alone in the world can quickly temper those behaviours, for those wise enough to learn the lesson.

But never would I have expected such behaviour from Princess Celestia.

In hindsight, as it so often does, it made perfect sense.  We are all driven powerfully by emotions at heart, especially Equestrians, of any stripe.

The nerve Nightmare had prodded in Celestia was the same one the Trolls had once awoken in our kind, unto their own ruin.  I could only hope and pray that likewise Celestia's fire and fury would be the Wisp's ruin, rather than ours.

She had been chewing through them the same way a Terran auto-harvester slashes kelp in their strange vertical silo farms.

Right up until they had gotten seven of their foul bony fighting armatures onto her.

I suddenly found myself locked in a death struggle with the one that had taken her right wing, even as Fyrenn moved to destroy the one that had snagged her left wing.  We both knew that while freeing her head was important, if she lost controlled flight, she could be injured enough from the fall to provide the enemy an even larger opening.

How I wished she'd just listened to Taranis.

We were killing a significant number of Wisps, truly killing, but the better tactical strategy in my opinion would have been to shell the entire region, uninhabited as it was, with a smothering blanket of heavy naval railgun fire for a solid half hour.  

Maybe throw in a few thousand of those magnificent 'JDAM' conventional warheads that the Humans had perfected so well over the centuries, and a brace of a hundred cruise missiles, tipped with Phosphorus/Napalm mix hybrid fuel air weapons, for a light chaser.

It wouldn't have killed any of the Wisps outright, true, but the quarter-gigaton-equivalent force application would have cost them all of the combat forms present, without putting anyone at undue risk.

Instead, we were fighting beak and claw now for Celestia's life, and by extension in many ways, our own.

Apparently the same thought had occurred to Fyrenn, because he was already shouting into his radio even as I caught glances of his own dance of death in fits and spurts between my own maneuvers.

"STRIKECON, ARINNA-ONE-FIVE;  ONE-SIX IS INCAPACITATED!  SOUND RETREAT!  PULL THE TASKFORCE FROM THE AO!  PREPARE FOR FULL SCALE ORBITAL BOMBARDMENT, FOLLOWED BY NAVAL RAILGUN STRIKE!"

Now there was a pair of words I'd never heard before in a practical battlefield context.  

Orbital Bombardment.  

Occupied as I was, I still had a few neurons leftover to appreciate hearing my love talk about heavy weapons.

And a few more to realize that it was the right call.  The Shenzhou's particle beams could cut right through the Wisps without harming us, even as we retreated in close proximity.

Once their pursuit had been foiled, Naval artillery combined with particle beams would cleanse the area of everything, reducing bleached petrified trees, soil, and rocks alike, to a uniform glass-like ash.

"NO!  WE MUST--- AUUUGH!!!"

Celestia's attempt at a countermand was cut brutally short, as the Wisp I was engaged with plunged its tail into the root of her right wing.  The limb ceased to function instantly as the tail barb found a relatively thin, and further battle weakened crease in her armor, cutting through plating, gel layer, energy matrix, fur, muscle, and down into bone in one swift stroke.

An enormous streamer of blood burst from the wound, covering Celestia, myself, and the Wisp.

A sound that I imagined was something like the first primal battle cry of the first Gryphon to ever live ripped from Fyrenn's throat, and I saw him snag his Wisp's head in both wings, dropping like a stone as his flight was arrested.

With a flick of a control, he fired both wing thrusters in a counter rotational pattern, the force popping the Wisp's head from its shoulders.  As he spread his wings to diffuse the momentum of the maneuver, he unleashed his rifle on overcharge, vaporizing the creature's body and head both with a perfectly aligned shot.

I had to wait until I was done with my own opponent to truly process what had happened simultaneously to my own engagement.

During the same moment, I brought my sword down as hard as I could onto my Wisp's tail, vaulting over its back, and firing all my suit thrusters to drive the blade down and in, like an impulse-drive-powered guillotine.

The motion severed the foul thing's tail, armor plates and all.  Celestia immediately began to fall as the weight of her other clingers-on became too much to bear with a disabled wing.

I yanked one of my two issued breaching charges from their leg pouches, and tucked to turn my vault into a complete one hundred eighty degree tumble.  As my head and forelegs came back level with my enemy, I shoved the charge into the hole in the rear that my first assault had created, and allowed myself to begin falling after Celestia.

I only waited half a second to depress the 'DETONATE NOW' control.

The Wisp's own armor served as an excellent pressure vessel to contain the power of the C4 brick, pulping its bones to fine powder in the process.  The empty armor dropped like a rock.

Fyrenn and I shared a fiftieth of a second glance, and then both folded our wings to follow Celestia's falling, twisting shape, armor impulse drives running at full power.

I prayed we would not be too late.

Celestia

My world was pain.

First physical, but that was the easiest part to handle.  

I'd been wounded grievously before.  I had the discipline and experience to do what all good fighters can;  Bottle up the suffering and push it away until the hurt becomes a distant, disconnected thing, and the mind is once again clear.

Worse was the mental and emotional anguish.

At such close physical range, the Wisps still clinging on to me could use a modicum of their emotional reflection powers, overcoming the lack of ambient magic through proximity, and a raw, unfettered conduit across space and time to The Nightmare.

I could feel her presence as surely as I could feel the blood pouring from the base joint of my right wing.

What an unbelievably, incredibly stupid mistake you just made.  You stupid, hell-bent, mindless, overeager little filly!  Why could you not have just asked the Humans to unleash their weapons on these foul things?!

But no.  You had to have your vengeance out and out.  She hurt your sister.  Tried to kill one world, and enslave yours.  Tortured your Ponies.  Butchered them to prove a point.

Vengeance was the right course.

The only problem with that being that vengeance is not your way, and you are not experienced in its dark arts.  If you had been, you would have known that, as Fyrenn did when he was aggrieved, you should have carefully plotted your reprisal.

It is not just a Gryphon saying.  All good warriors from all cultures, and many histories share the wisdom;  If the fight is not unfair in your favor, look for a different fight.

But a warrior you are not, in spite of all your experience.  Fighter, yes.  Warrior, no.

By the time I realized the stream of thought was, in itself, part of Nightmare's mental assault, it was very nearly too late.

I hadn't known that they could take me, without the aid of a machine, here on Earth.  Apparently a direct connection from the Wisps still hanging onto my withers, to Nightmare's own power, was sufficient to bypass the need for that assistive apparatus.

If my defenses failed, one of them would separate itself from its bony form, creep in through my horn, and take possession of me.  I'd be spirited away instantly, by whatever dark magic or technological power Nightmare was using to move her vessels and forces...

And I would never again know freedom.

Would be forced to watch as they performed eldritch, unspeakable magics to rejuvenate my powers to their highest heights.  

Ride along as a prisoner in my own skull as I was used to decimate all who opposed them.

Experience each intimate horror as I was used to visit the same Hell on my dear sister.  To watch her suffer the same agony.  Again.

No.

I'd die first.

I could no longer control my magic, even as the darkness began to close around my mind to the point that my vision began to flicker in and out.  But I could still move my hooves.

I reached for the controls to the breaching charge secreted in the light panniers built into the right side of the armor beneath the wing.  The touchpad on my front right hoofguard responded to the frog of my left hoof with surprising accuracy, given how unsteady my motions were, compounded by the uncontrolled tumble of my fall.

I set the charge to detonate immediately.  No sense wasting time.

My hoof was less than a millimeter from contact with the final execution control, when the world came jolting back with an intense, but merciful, even welcome sense of physical pain.

I could hear Fyrenn screaming to be heard above the wing, and the sound of his vicious, brutal, and most welcome assault on the lead Wisp.

"FIGHT IT!  STAY WITH US!"

And what of my death?  Would it not save them all from a fate far worse?

But then again...  What of dear Luna?  What would my going, in such fashion, do to her normally reasoned composure?  She was even more vulnerable to the Nightmare than I.  Uniquely so.

If you die here, she will fall to the darkness as surely as a star hurled from the heavens by force of cosmic collision.

The sound was like an actual voice in my head, firm and steely, warm, and almost familiar. Backed by light in the same way Nightmare's insidious whispers were backed by oily thick darkness.

I felt a 'THUMP' in the barrel of my chest as Neyla embraced me from below, firing her armor thrusters to arrest my descent even as Fyrenn tore at the enemies on my back with such force, that their tails and hooves rent my muscles like furrows in a field.

As Taranis' roar sounded overhead, doubtless working furiously to keep more assailants from reaching me, Neyla joined Fyrenn's calls to valor.

"STAY ALIVE!  YOU MUST STAY ALIVE!  YOU MUST BE THERE TO SEE US PUT AN END TO THESE DAMN CURS!"

The mental image of Luna in torment on the floor of the throne room, as Nightmare siphoned off her will to live, and replaced her inside her own head, was suddenly erased.

In its place, an image of Fyrenn and Neyla driving swords into the Nightmare's heart from both sides, even as Luna, muzzle twisted with a predatory leer, reached out from her horn to snap the beast's neck at the root, and Skye stood at my side to help me erase her untethered form from existence with a blast so radiant that it transformed the space into the heart of the sun itself for the briefest moment.

Yes.

That was a moment worth fighting to see!

I could still feel myself slipping, but now my hooves were dug in mentally, reducing my slide towards the black abyss of enslavement from a head over fetlocks tumble, to a slow but steady grinding, agonizing, dragging motion.

Nightmare redoubled her efforts, pressing her opportunity even as her link weakened slightly.

One of the Wisps on my back had finally given in to Fyrenn's assault, its head so thoroughly crushed that the energy being within no longer had the correct Thaumatic anchor to keep it connected to the rest of the bones.

'It starts here.  Your future's end.  The folly of your last charge, the crowning achievement of my eons of work.  It was you all along.  Their savior.  Their leader.  Their friend...  *You* were the pivot on which the lever of my hopes turned.  You gave them Conversion.  And now you will give them the Nightmare of the Sun, unleashed.  You have failed.'

And then a welcome blue light blossomed at the back of my mind, and I felt a familiar presence enter the space of the link.

I forced out a half smile, half sneer, as Nightmare's form and face became ever more real in my head, and the world began to fade once more.

'No.'

I nodded firmly to the image of the little blue and tan Unicorn behind the Nightmare's own roiling shadowy figure.

'Not.  Yet.'

Fyrenn

"IF YOU TAKE HER, I WILL BURN BOTH WORLDS JUST TO SPITE YOU, GODDAMMIT!"

I knew Nightmare could hear me through the link as I pounded away at the last Wisp's body using its own skull, still filled with the hateful blue and red energy of the being itself, though it had begun to flicker as the skull started to fracture under my assault, armor shards driven into it by the sheer force of the pummeling.

Huh.  Guess I could finally check 'beating something to death with its own skull' off my bucket list.

I just hoped, and fervently prayed, as I bloodied the knuckles of my claws with the incessant battering, that it would not be the last item I checked off the list.

The damn thing's tail had hit my side enough times to finally puncture the armor, not fully piercing, but scoring my side pretty badly nonetheless.  I could feel blood oozing out at a rate not yet critical, but serious enough that it would need attention within fifteen minutes.

I knew too, in that moment, that I meant my threat exactly as I'd said it.  

Though it would not be easy, I was sure I could find a way.  If all else failed, and all stood to lie finally in ruin, the darkest of thoughts had already crossed my mind.  I'd been taught how to deny an enemy their goal at the last, no matter the cost.

If both worlds were destroyed utterly, then at least the first wave of Genesis would survive.

If it came down to it?  If there was no other way?

Skye would help me do it.  So would Neyla, and Alyra, and Taranis.  

I could see the whole plan, suddenly, crystal clear before me.

We could do what the HLF had been planning to do;  Use one of the Barrier Retarder platforms.  Only with Skye's expertise, and with the end goal of wiping out both Earth and Equestria?

We could succeed.

Both worlds annihilated at the Quantum level, sucked instantaneously into an infinitely deep singularity, and crushed to a soup of pure entropic strange matter, with only the energy of the Wisps left alive, but trapped forever.  

Not even so much as a single Wisp would escape.

I held up the Wisp's skull as its light began to sputter intensely, and whispered as I prepared my final crushing blow.

"You can sense my emotions.  You know I will do it.  Take her?  And I will put us all at the bottom of a black hole.  The rest of us will die.  We would rather die than serve, you hear me?!  But you and your kind can exist there for all eternity, in absolute pain and anguish, unable to ever leave, or so much as even move again.  Forever."

I could feel Celestia's body relax slightly as the Nightmare's assault paused momentarily.  She was considering my words.  Then the Wisp hissed at me, separated itself from the skull voluntarily, and began to wrap itself around Celestia's horn.

I cross-drew my sidearm, and levelled the particle pistol at the base of the Alicorn's horn, right where it met her skull.

And then a familiar tan hoof came down gently, but firmly on the pistol's muzzle.  I looked up to see Skye shake her head once firmly, an expression of pure determination written all over her muzzle.

Her horn flared bright blue, a vibrant streamer arcing out to connect to the tip of Celestia's.

One last chance.

I prayed as hard as I could, and kept my index talon close to the trigger guard.  Prepared to do what was necessary if Skye should fail.  If Celestia should fail.

Please.  Don't fail.

Make it count.

Skye

They say you should fake it till you make it.

Well I'd been inside more than one deadly enemy's head at that point, so I figured?  What could possibly go wrong.

Actually I knew exactly what could go wrong;  I could give the Nightmare two new hosts, not just one.  But Fyrenn and Neyla would see to arrangements if that happened.  At least I wouldn't have to live with any more guilt, or fear.

'"YOU!"

The Nightmare's word came out more as a hiss than anything else as she rounded on me, the glowing streak of the damage I had done to her mind still visible on the side of her face.  The sight, and the fury of her emotion, gave me a surge of inner strength.

If she was angry with me, and if she couldn't repair that damage so easily?

Well then.  I lit my horn and began preparing the nastiest disruption weave I could craft in a hurry.

"Yes.  Me.  Surprised?  Name's Skye.  Skye Writer.  Make a mental note, because I am going to dedicate my life to ending yours.  As painfully as possible.  *You* are gonna have nightmares about *me* before this is all over."

The shadowy figure glowered, and a violet glow began to form around her horn as she turned fully, and began to slowly step towards me.  I shrugged, and dropped my spell.

"Ahh well.  That's ok.  I just needed you to face me, and focus on my pretty little face instead, so she could get behind you."

Celestia's barrage arrived at the same moment as the word 'behind,' a brilliant golden javelin of light that momentarily lit up the entirety of the Nightmare's skull to the point that I could see bone.

Ouch.

As she spun to return fire, I snatched the disruption weave back from the brink of the aether, having not quite let it go entirely, and fired with every ounce of strength I had to give.

I'd taken a risk, and waited a half second longer than I needed to, allowing the Nightmare to commit to firing her counterattack at Celestia before I unloaded.  I didn't know how bad the impact would be on the Princess.

But I did know that Nightmare wouldn't have time to shield herself from me.

The blue-green fractal weave of my disruption attack slammed into her head, seeking out the crack I'd put there before, and beginning to burrow like a million tiny ticks, linked together by a web of cyan energy filaments.

Through my connection to the 'search and fuck-up with maximum prejudice' spell, I felt the presence of something unusual, even as I grinned at the Nightmare's sudden screams.

The shock of Celestia's pain, and the Alicorn's own similar screams of pain, very nearly matched the shock of identifying the thing my spell had run up against.  My grin vanished.

But my plan to end the battle finally came together in that same instant.

Of *course* there was a host.  There was always a host.  It finally hit me, why the Wisps kept them around;  Without them a Wisp would have control of the body, but no way to feel its sensations, and to block out the pain of their normal existence...

They needed the mind of the host as much as the body.  Otherwise the host body was no better than an artificial platform made from bone, or Crystal.

Of course Nightmare would still have a host as well...  I could sense Veritas, if that was her real name.  The real Veritas.  She was still there.  Still alive.

Still remarkably cogent.

If I could have grinned as widely as the Grinch, I would have.  My muzzle would only turn up so far at the corners, but that was the degree of the sentiment all the same.

The Nightmare had Veritas caged very, very, very well.  But for a tiny crack my own shot across her bow had put in the very top of the cage.

I could feel Nightmare beginning to get a hold on the disruption spell, in preparation to expunge it.  So I worked quickly.  Almost as fast as thought itself, not bothering to form the entire weave first, but rather sending the changes as soon as I could invent them, I reshaped the last of the spell to grab hold of that crack like a crowbar.

And pry.

Hard.

I was rewarded with a sudden give.  And then an onyx hoof, and a violet magical blast to the face for my troubles.

The real world blinked in and out for a moment, before I managed to stabilize my link.  I felt a railgun round whizz dangerously close to my real, physical ear.  Time was running out.

Once the link stabilized, I could see Celestia again, lying weeping on the black onyx floor of the projection, tears running down her eyes, black streamers creeping up from the floor like living mist to force themselves into every orifice on her head, and wrap around her horn like barbed wire.

Oh no you fucking don't.

The Nightmare was busy, clutching her own head and struggling mightily to contain Veritas, and force out the last of the disruption spell.

That was gonna leave another mark for sure.

I fired off a bolt of pure mental energy at the dark mist, but it batted the assault to the side as effortlessly as a Dragon swats an offending tank.

"Go!  You can not save me now!"

Celestia's voice was trying to be a shout, but it came out as a pained forced whisper.  I shook my head adamantly, and began to craft a more exploratory spell, engaging the mist in a direct and dangerous dance of mind versus mind.

"Not without you!"

They were the last words I had any strength to say.  The connection to the mist was like a firehose, and I understood immediately that I had made two serious mistakes.

First, the mist was not simply Nightmare's power.  It was the power of the Void;  Of all Wisp-kind, linked and focused through the Nightmare.

It was a wonder Celestia had held out as long as she had.  

Me?  I was just a Unicorn.  

I knew right then and there that I had less than a half-second, and my own mind would be ass-whipped into the back-seat of my skull with the force of a mental neutron bomb.

So I used my half second as well as I could.

I probed, unabashedly now that I was so close to the brink.  No need to fear the loss that's already unfolding, I suppose.

It was then that I comprehended my second mistake.

I'd predicated my attack, and my probing, on the idea that Nightmare was seizing just on Celestia's mind.

But she was trying to pull at her *power* as well, bearing down from above on her conscious self, but also trying to poison the well of her innate Thaumatic tap, and bubble up from the inside as well.

The Void had already corrupted so much of it, that there was practically no light left in it at all.

Shit!  How did I miss that?!

With half of my half second up, the start of a plan began to form.

Once again I had no time to think it through.  I just acted.  

And some part of me prayed again.

'Fyrenn's God?  If you're there?  Please help me not to fuck this up so badly this time.'

I used my mental image of Fyrenn as an index anchor to quickly pull the memory, and the correct spell form, from the depths of my mind at light speed.  And then I fired it at Celestia.

The sudden infusion of power was breathtaking.

I'd done some amazing, elegant things with magic before.

Some damn fool stupid things too.  Like the time I'd tried to send my own mind back in time inside my body.  That had almost killed me dead in a hurry.

But copying the mind pattern of an Alicorn?

Inspired. And also stupid. And maybe, just maybe, really frakkin' elegant.

I could feel wings sprouting, and my size doubling inside the mental projection.

My own natural Thaumatic tap expanded of its own accord, bursting forth to match the scope of Celestia's in an instant.

An instant of pure shock and awe to the Void, and the Nightmare.

An instant for me to act with all the power of a demi-goddess, unopposed.

"ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR, MOTHERBUCKERS!"

It was a stupid thing to shout as I unleashed the kind of magic that only Alicorns and Dragons could even so much as fantasize about.  A friggin Human movie reference?  Really Skye?

My magic formed at the tip of my horn into a scythe twenty times my size.  A slicing instrument that would have made ol Grim blush with envy and embarrassment.  The thing glowed like the heat of a blue dwarf star as it fell on the inflection point between the part of Celestia's magical tap that had been overtaken, and the tiny sliver that was left uncorrupted.

Forgive me.  Oh please forgive me Princess.

But freedom and life?  Together?  The sweet double victory that had seemed so unreachable moments before? 

Worth the loss.

As the Scythe split the very fabric of reality, disconnecting Celestia from the majority of that which made her an Alicorn in the first place, it also rent the floor of the mental projection, visually representing the unholy amounts of damage my actions were causing to the mindlink itself.

As the space of the world around us began to shatter and break apart violently, cracks of immense size racing out from the impact site with the speed of fractures in tempered glass, I brought the weapon back around, and up through the floor on a continued revolution.

"This is for Astris, you *bitch!*"

The weapon was depleted enough that I couldn't do too much damage.

But I could do damage nonetheless.

The scythe split Nightmare's projection from below, slamming into her barrel, and laying her open from chest to ass in a clean straight line.  It was just a mental projection.  But her pained scream was well, well worth it.

In terms of actual damage, I'd aimed the weapon at something vulnerable, simple, and subtle, but potentially useful to the Nightmare.  

Something I knew I could completely and utterly destroy, in a way she could never repair.

I'd aimed it at the exact part of her mind that she used to infiltrate the dreams of those she could directly influence, like Chrysalis, and to reflect nightmares at those she couldn't, like Fyrenn.

I felt the apocalyptic 'CRACK' as the action permanently fried a physical part of the energy matrix that was Nightmare's mind, turning a small, but potentially potent weapon of her own into a permanent smoking crater.

"Dream of me!  Until next time!"

As the Void reacted with a violence and speed that was, in spite of my new power, truly frightening, reaching out to try and corrupt both my mind, and magic, I snagged Celestia's body in my telekinesis, and pulled the mental link's 'ripcord.'

Hard.

Taranis

At first, I was not sure what I was watching.  I heard a sound like a wind chime, the size of an aircraft carrier, struck with a tuning fork sized for a Dragon.

I snapped my jaws closed on a dozen Wisps, spitting out the pitiful remains of their armor and bones, and glanced down to see something incredible.

Where Skye had stood on Celestia's back, defended by Fyrenn, and Alyra, as the Alicorn was in turn held up by Neyla, now instead rose a shape like an angel.

At first I thought it was Celestia, somehow restored and hale.  Then I registered the tan color of the coat, and the electric blue of the mane, charged and waving in an unseen breeze as if animated by pure high voltage, and dancing with colors and patterns like a stellar nursery.

Skye, for it was Skye, was bathed in a halo of blue-white light, her horn covered in a shell of magic so luminous that it was almost hard to look at in thermal vision, her back graced with two ethereal not-quite-there transparent wings made of the same light and energy.

She locked eyes with me, and raised an eyebrow, an impossibly bright nexus of light forming at the tip of her horn.

I knew what she was suggesting.

I grinned, and nodded, batting aside a foolish Wisp with one claw as my heat sensing pits alerted me to its approach without the need to make visual contact.

The breath I inhaled was perhaps the deepest of my life, as I turned my head upwards towards the main column of Wisps, and opened my jaws.  Lightning danced all around me, inside and out, from the tips of my wings and tail, through my claws, around the edge of each scale on my chest, over my head, in my eyes, and even up from the deepest parts of my stomach and throat, to collect right at the back of my tongue.

It was more raw energy than I'd ever mustered before.  By an order of magnitude.  Desperation, and daring, pairing up to allow me access to a well of power normally the purview of Dragons many centuries older, and many sizes larger.

Skye rose beside me on the cushion of her wings, and I noted with mild interest that her Genesist armor had smartly and correctly resized to fit her changed form, though it had not formed plates over her not-quite-real wings.

The almost-Alicorn nodded, and released her magic.

The roar that followed from my jaws hurt even my ears, adapted though they were for sounds of that kind.

Light poured from both of us with such intensity, that they later informed us that the event was visible from high orbit to the naked eye.

Even the smallest of the fractals in my lightning bolts was ten times as wide as a Wisp.  The central columns from which it issued, and at the end reconstituted, were larger even than I was, widening out by a factor of twenty as it left my jaws, and then combining back to that same incredibly sized column at the other end.

Skye's magic, for its part, provided not only a conduction pathway to ground, but also a similar pathway up all the way to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere.

The sudden path for charge imbalance to traverse allowed the planet itself to produce a lightning strike bearing a force many times greater than an atom bomb, adding the energy to my own discharge seamlessly as my innate magic protected me from backflow.

The world was cast in such bright, sharp relief, that I could see the faces of shocked VTOL pilots four miles away, slack jawed behind the transparisteel of their canopy, vibrating even at that distance with the thunder of my roar.

The image was rendered with surprising clarity for my reptilian sight, considered only slightly above average in Equestrian terms.  Like a camera sensor, I could see better with more light in the visible spectrum.  Unlike other creatures, I relied on my heat pit thermal vision to see in darkness.

I could also see, through both kinds of vision, Wisps dying by the hundreds as the energy discharge reached the threshold necessary to vaporize both the bone platform, its armor, and the energy being inside. 

Violently.  

Each popped like a firecracker, matter changing over to energy and radiating outwards as a small neutron burst.

The assault went on for almost eight seconds.  

An eternity for me to watch our enemy wither, and decay.

Full on one half of the remaining enemy force simply vanished in the column of light, and the wash of my roar.

As the beam finally wound down and terminated, I turned my head to see Skye abruptly shrink back to her usual size.  All evidence of both conscious wakefulness, and her magical wings, vanished as well.

I reached out with one claw to catch her, and then cupped both wings around us, and dove to pick up speed, as the thunderous roar of air moving in to fill vacuum produced a sound so akin to Armageddon, that it probably registered on the noticeable portion Richter scale on other continents.

"Arinna main, StrikeCon;  Fallback.  Repeat;  Fallback.  Railgun rounds are already inbound."

We had more than a small gap from our enemy now with which to make our escape.  

We were all too happy to oblige.

I pressed on as fast as I could, falling into formation with Fyrenn, Neyla, and Alyra, and snagging Celestia in my other free fore-claw.

We each ignited our flight boosters in sequence, pressing madly alongside VTOLs and other flighted creatures as we made a high speed tactical retreat.

"Five."

I turned my head slightly into the jetstream of my acceleration.  I did not want to miss what was about to happen.

"Four."

I spared a moment to check Skye's pulse, and Celestia's, by adjusting my index talons.  The little Unicorn's I could find readily.  The Princess, less so.  I pulled my wings in close and attempted to eek more speed out of the impulse drives strapped to my back.

"Three."

I muttered aloud, glancing up in time to see the distant blue energy of particle beams as it fell through the clouds like a hammer.

"Be at peace, Princess.  You are safe now.  Our enemies lie in ruin.  Stay.  You will want to see the record of this when you wake."

"Two."

Somehow, in that same strange way as Pegasi and Gryphons, I could feel the railgun rounds heading towards us before the Newtonian classical physical effects should have been able to register with my brain.

I grinned wolfishly as I began to estimate the sheer power contained in the all-out assault.

"One."

Aston

As I watched the false color image in the holotank, and the live images from Shenzhou, and SatVision on the surrounding monitors, the central Amazon basin ceased to exist.

Once the lungs of the world, ruined in the fossil fuel craze of the two thousands, and then finally completely killed off by the Winnowing...  Now reduced to the largest crater on the planet by-width.

What Taranis and Skye had done had already produced an impact crater a mile wide.

What we were doing together with the Shenzhou was tripling that every thirty seconds.

Soft alarms began to trill from a dozen monitoring AI as the impacts registered with Earthquake sensors in cities all across the Western Hemisphere.

Railgun rounds, spat out by the thousands per minute, continued to belch forth from every aperture in the battlegroup, large and small.  Anything with the range to fire that far continued to fire at the upper limits of its thermal safety margins, not stopping until we finally flat ran out of rounds.

All the while Shenzhou hammered away from above, charging up the particle beams with the fusion reactors, draining every other system temporarily, firing, and then cycling back to standby to give life support, and engines, time to cope.

Even without antimatter, that thing was a monster.  Ship of exploration and transport my feathered ass.

Finally, as the aural assault of the railguns, barely damped by our headsets, ear bone plates, and the CIC's thick walls, began to abate, I heard the distinctive 'HISS-THUNK' of VLS tubes and lift-locks cycling at high rate of fire.

I whistled through my beak as Brendt leaned over the holotank, and glowered down at the readouts.

"Continuous fire.  All missile batteries, all tracks.  TAO, Actual;  Place fuel-air tipped cruise missiles into the reload pool.  Fire until dry."

Hutch raised an eye crest, and folded his forelegs.

"I wonder how much more punishment this planet can take.  This is the third of these 'once in a millennium' craters we've made in the last year."

I exhaled slowly, and closed my eyes.

He was right.  It was already going to be a brutal next few winters, taking into account the ejecta from the Vancouver incident, together with the attack on Creek Mountain...

Now this.

Finally, for the first time in my life, it truly hit me;  I was watching my homeworld die.  In real-time.

The taste of triumph turned to ash inside my beak.