A row of silver ballistas materialised on the ground dozens of metres below, and one by one they all fired their metal bolts towards the alicorn soaring through the darkened sky. All of them hit their mark, and all of them shattered against the shield protecting her, silver coming apart in bursts of electric blue sparks.
But it kept Nightmare Moon in place for a bit. Long enough for Luna to get another hit in. A shining circle of light filled with runes appeared above her spread wings and glowing horn, growing brighter and brighter until a torrent of magic like a searing beam of moonlight was unleashed from it and struck down her enemy.
The blow left a crater in the forest below, several metres wide, the trees at its edges carbonised where they hadn't been outright pulverised. Nightmare Moon stood in the middle of it like nothing had happened, snarling at Luna. "I do not have time for your games," she growled. Her wings spread, but she did not take flight. Instead the earth itself she was on rose upwards, the entire forest twisting and bending until sky and land were impossibile to tell apart.
Luna was prepared. As the other alicorn hurled herself towards her on a tide of earth and trees she released a series of silver blades of pure light, crescent shaped, aimed directly at Nightmare Moon. Most missed, instead slicing through dozens of trees like they were cutting through paper, but a few hit their target and cut through her flesh just as easily as they cut through wood. But every wound, though it led to oily darkness leaking out of Nightmare Moon's body, closed moments after it was opened and did nothing to slow down her charge.
In a couple of seconds, Nightmare Moon reached Luna. Her horn stabbed through the alicorn's chest, and she carried her further still with her momentum. Nightmare Moon grinned, taking flight and preparing to unleash her magic within Luna. But before she could do so, the body she'd impaled exploded in a blast of silver light, burning her eyes and wings and making her fall towards the ground.
She healed, of course, but not quickly enough to avoid the blade coming down on her. Though calling it a blade may have been an improper term, as its size was fit for a dragon. It looked like either the top of a massive halberd, or a piece of a gigantic guillotine. It slammed down on Nightmare Moon with all its weight, cracking her bones yet still sharp enough to dig into her flesh, and carried her down all the way to the deformed spire of wood and rock she'd ridden to reach Luna, embedding itself into it and severing her body almost in two, save her her spine still holding her front and back half together.
A circle of light appeared above the newly born mountain, much wider than the one Luna had used before, much more intricate in its design. It shone bright as daylight, and brighter still as it released all its energy in a downpour of magic that turned the entire unnatural formation, its size close to an actual mountain, into a cloud of fine ash and smoke.
Still, at the bottom of the crater, a pool of thick darkness quickly recomposed itself, and Nightmare Moon's reconstructed form violently crawled and pushed its way out of it.