//------------------------------//
// Unsigned 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
//------------------------------//

Starlight's plan, she was fully aware, relied on many, many things she had no control over needing to go the right way for her. But, thankfully, up to the point she'd gotten everything had worked out. Still, that left the most complicated part out of the whole ordeal, actually figuring out how the spell worked and how to turn it off.
It was so unlike anything she'd ever seen that for the first few seconds she didn't even know how to approach it. After that, though, knowing her time wasn't much, she quickly set to thinking things through. Almost immediately she realised the spell needed some external power source to function. Some spells existed which simply furthered themselves on their own, but anything capable of outputting that much energy would have needed to have been cast by an alicorn to reasonably fit into that category. Most likely then, it was the product of a weapon.
Finding and reaching the weapon itself was an option then. Not a particularly viable one. It involved going far too deep into hostile territory, searching blindly for something that would no doubt be heavily guarded. Even if she somehow made it there unscathed and undetected, she could never take out more than maybe a couple of guards without alerting the remaining ones. She'd need to go straight for the weapon if she wanted to stay unseen, meaning they would all still be there and they would all know about her the moment she actually interfered with it. It was simply too risky to attempt something like that, and it would have been even knowing where the theoretical weapon was exactly. Neither was it feasible to find it and destroy it from afar, whatever was powering the spell had to have enough energy to turn into a bomb if she tried to break it without finesse.
But the weapon had to be rendered unusable. Otherwise, neutralising the spell would just buy time until another one was fired. Solving that was actually the easy part of the problem. If the weapon was connected to the spell, and it had to be, then Starlight could use that connection to break down the weapon from the spell itself. Sure, the connection was probably designed to only go one way, but that didn't mean she couldn't alter it. The soldiers wouldn't realise anything was wrong until it was too late.
Hypothetically, that could also solve the entire problem. If she stopped the spell by stopping the weapon, then she wouldn't need to do anything else, meaning once she had enough of an understanding of the spell to interface with it she would only need to find and alter the connection, something she knew she could do, rather than having to spend more time figuring out exactly what to do with the spell itself. On top of that, if the problem was with the weapon malfunctioning then the soldiers would look for the cause there, and even if they would probably figure out things had started at the spell it would take them long enough to do so for her to escape.
That only left her one single issue. Understanding the spell in the first place, enough so to at least trace and latch on to its connection with the weapon. While less of a task than fully and completely comprehending a foreign piece of magic, it still wasn't an easy thing to do. She was still dealing with something she'd never encountered, and something extremely advanced. Prodding carefully with her magic, she began to study the spell as it continued to spew a hail of bullets onto the Empire.