As Sunset stood in one of Castle Dedede’s many corridors, Bandee at her side, she was starting to regret her habit of jumping to half-baked plans at the first opportunity. She had absolutely no idea just who or what this Kirby was, only that Dedede hated him and Bandee seemed utterly terrified of him. Even now, she could see the Waddle Dee shaking in place, barely able to grip his spear properly. At least the weapons they had given her were a plus.
Sunset grinned at the thought. Celestia had never let her anywhere near the armory back when she was a student. Some shit about how all the pointy objects were dangerous, to which a filly Sunset had scoffed and said that weapons were only dangerous to her if she made them dangerous. In hindsight, that was incredibly arrogant, but given that she was currently juggling a longsword, something Bandee had called a cutter blade, a spear, a quiver, and a loaded crossbow in her telekinetic grip, she felt that she had the skills to back it up at this point. She didn’t really need the weapons, per se–her purely magical strength was already more than enough to deal with most things–but with how concerned Bandee seemed, she felt like erring on the side of caution.
A shudder ran through the castle as a large explosion sounded from outside. Bandee glanced behind the two of them at the door leading to the boxing ring where Dedede waited and winced. “That sounded like Kabula just went down. Kirby’s in the building.”
A series of screams from above them confirmed it, and Sunset felt her ears involuntarily flattening against her head. She made a mental note to exercise purposefully moving her ears more; she had gotten used to a human form and a pony’s natural tendency to flatten their ears in fear or shame would get her nowhere in the lying department. Gritting her teeth, she pointed her weapons down the hall they were funneling Kirby through. According to Dedede, at least, he shouldn’t even come near the room that Twilight and Spike were hiding out in until this blew over. Not that she necessarily cared about what happened to them, but she knew that Twilight was a lot smarter than her. She needed her to figure out a way back to Equestria.
Bandee gripped his spear tighter as the double doors leading to the stairwell started banging. “He’s here.”
Sunset blanched. “Already? He just got into the castle around thirty seconds ago!”
Bandee audibly gulped.
The doors opened with a bang, and Sunset tensed, preparing herself for anything to come out of them. A horrific monster, perhaps. Or maybe something more subtle, an assassin that would slither in the dark.
Instead, she got a small pink sphere with arms and legs. Sunset blinked. There was no way that this was Kirby, right?
The being turned to stare at the two, and Bandana Dee nearly screamed. Sunset had to mentally hold herself back from laughing, though. The thing was adorable, with its wide eyes and happy smile. Seriously? This thing had the entirety of Dedede’s military petrified? It was skipping, for goodness sake!
An audible snicker finally escaped Sunset. “There’s…there’s no way, right? This thing is Kirby?”
Bandee looked at her, his expression horrified at her nonchalance, and Sunset just had to actually laugh at that. “I mean, look at him! He-” she paused to snicker again, “he barely could reach up to my elbow!”
Bandana Dee turned to face Kirby again, his spear at the ready. “Don’t let him fool you. He eats armies for breakfast.”
Sunset laughed. “What, do we need-” she had to take a deep breath to prevent another bout of laughter, “do we need the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch?”
Bandee steeled his expression and walked forward as the mare wiped a tear from her eye. Brandishing his spear, he addressed his enemy. “Alright, Kirby. If you want to get to the King, you’ll have to get through us first!”
Before he could move, though, Kirby opened his mouth, and Sunset’s laughter instantly ceased. Saying his maw unhinged like a snake would be inaccurate, since that would imply it had bones to unhinge in the first place. Instead, what was once his mouth became a gaping cavern of nothingness. The hallway’s air started to move, drawn inward like a swarm of moths to the world’s largest flame. Flaming torches flickered, the wind rushed by Sunset’s ears, and she could swear that, as she watched Kirby inhale, he was staring right at her. The clattering of a weapon hitting the ground reached her ears, but it seemed far more distant than it should be.
As quickly as the experience began, it was over. The wind stopped, the torches returned to their full glory, and Kirby returned to being a cute little pink puffball. Except the hallway had one tiny difference from before: Bandana Dee was no longer in it.
Kirby had fucking eaten him.
Instead, he now wielded a spear, and a red headband had wrapped itself around the top of his head. A golden centerpiece adorned it atop his forehead as well, but at this point Sunset didn’t much care about that.
Absently, she looked at the weapon she dropped when her brain had short-circuited. It was the sword. Kirby seemed to be politely standing there as he waited for her to do something, but instead she was just rapidly looking between him and the spear he was holding. After a few seconds though, she did recover enough to speak.
“You… You just… What in the everloving fuck was that?”
Kirby frowned, apparently unhappy with her use of an expletive. He held his spear and charged, beginning the battle.
Sunset forced herself to leap back and raise her own spear to parry his strike. No time to worry about the monstrous pink demon eating someone whole and alive right in front of her, she needed to focus on fighting it now.
Kirby struck again, this time swinging his spear in a downward arc. Despite the situation, Sunset found herself grinning as she leapt backwards again to dodge. He seemed to be using a spear like how one would fight with a blunt staff, not a pointy stick–clearly he was inexperienced with it. That was something she could use, at least. Once Kirby overextended himself again to try and strike her, she responded with a forward jab.
Unfortunately, she had underestimated just how fast Kirby was. The way he dodged seemed almost effortless, and he once more closed in for a strike. Sunset’s eyes widened as she felt her tail brush up against the wall; she’d managed to corner herself. She cringed. Using so much mana for a teleport this early on was unideal, but it was better than getting run through with a spear.
She reappeared behind Kirby, ready to strike as he whiffed a swing through her former position. Kirby, though, reacted far more quickly than she would have liked. He was still using the spear incorrectly, but apparently that didn’t matter with the sheer force he put behind spinning around and swinging.
The two spears met in the air in front of Kirby and impacted with enough force to utterly shatter both of them. Wood splinters went flying every which way and forced Sunset to raise a shield in front of her, but the pink blob seemed to care not for the debris. With a thunk, the two near-hypersonic spearheads embedded themselves in the wall, something that Sunset spared a moment to stare at with wide eyes. She really needed to stop underestimating things.
Strangely enough, Kirby seemed to have lost the headband when his spear broke, but she didn’t really have the time to consider that as he charged right towards her. Panicking, she hurled the boomerang-like cutter blade at him.
That was a mistake. Once again, Kirby opened his gaping maw, and an object disappeared inside of it. This time, though, Sunset saw the full transformation for what it was. Kirby physically squished down, nearly flattening himself to the ground. He near-instantly sprang back up, however, a wide smile on his face, a yellow cap on his head, and a cutter blade proudly held by his right arm.
Sunset paled. This thing could eat and copy weapons, and based on his stance, he felt far more comfortable wielding this than he did the spear. She glanced around at the sword on the floor and the crossbow in her grip and decided she didn’t want to take any chances. Her magic flared and gathered at the tip of her horn before shooting out in three different directions. The crossbow and quiver were both incinerated in an instant, the sword melting a moment later. She rolled her neck and stared directly at her adversary as he moved a foot back, prepared to strike. Time to stop messing around.
She began with a simple flamethrower spell, one of her favorites when she was a filly. The flame snaked forward toward its target, but based on everything Kirby had displayed so far, she doubted it would truly do much more than test the waters. Sure enough, a blade sliced through the flames and she jumped out of the way. The cutter lingered in the air for a moment, somehow staying in place and changing color twice before it rushed back to Kirby. The air around it was displaced so much, in fact, that the sudden wind managed to put the rest of her fire out.
Sunset narrowed her eyes. Alright, if those things could disrupt fire so easily, pyrokinesis wasn’t going to cut it. It was a shame; she quite liked playing with fire. Perhaps going the other way would help, then?
The temperature in the hallway dropped considerably and frost began to coat the walls as Sunset called upon the cryokinetic spells she knew. She wasn’t nearly as skilled in ice magic as she was in fire, but with any luck, Kirby wouldn’t be able to dispel them that easily. He charged forward again with a determined glint in his eye, but this time Sunset was ready.
A spike of ice shot up from the floor in front of him and even began to pierce through the ceiling. Kirby twirling around it almost seemed like a dance, but Sunset just sent another spike towards him, this time from the wall. He ducked just as she then gathered a glob of water around her horn, froze it, and hurled it at him.
He managed to deflect the iceball with a hit from his blade, sending it crashing to the floor. Said floor, though, promptly froze over around it as a thin layer of ice spread across the ground. Kirby finally, finally lost his footing and slipped up. Sunset’s horn shone brightly as she weaved another spell, all the ice in the room giving the whole area an aquamarine tint.
A moment later, Kirby was encased in a solid block of ice.
Sunset sat down hard and glared daggers at the frozen puffball. That was far more tiring than it should have been. Was she out of practice? Probably, she supposed. She had spent nearly a decade in the human world, unable to do magic. Hell, it was a wonder she had managed to keep up as much as she did during the fight. Still, though, she grinned. There was no way he was breaking out of that anytime soon. She’d invented the spell herself, after all, when Celestia had challenged her to learn more than just fire magic. The ice was far below freezing and reinforced with-
There was a cracking sound as Kirby twitched a bit inside the ice. A thin, hairline fracture appeared.
Oh shit.
The ice shattered into scores of pieces, freeing a shivering, determined, and downright angry Kirby as a cutter blade lashed out at her. Caught off guard, Sunset could do nothing as the flat of the blade slammed into her chest so hard it knocked the air out of her lungs and launched her backwards. With a shout, Kirby produced another blade and launched himself several meters into the air.
Shocked, Sunset did just about the only thing she could think of and sent a beam of pure magic at him, which successfully hit him and knocked him out of the air. In fact, it even sent his hat careening off his head and his blade launching into the now-frozen wall with the spearheads.
Sunset grinned and sent another beam his way in hopes of actually finishing him off. Instead, it turned out to be another terrible mistake as Kirby only responded by opening his mouth again and eating her magic.
The mare winced in pain as she felt the extra draw on her mana and shut her horn off immediately. Taking a moment to levitate a piece of debris and confirming that she did still have access to her powers, she glanced back at Kirby.
He now held a stylized wooden staff in his right arm, the top of it curving a bit. On his head was a traditional gray wizard’s cap, something the likes of which Sunset had only seen on Equestrian stage performers and in human pop culture. Frankly, she thought he looked like a miniature pink Gandalf.
Kirby himself looked at his new equipment curiously, but shrugged and instead pointed his staff at Sunset. With a shout, he shot a beam of bright blue magic towards her, and Sunset yelped in surprise and hastily set up a shield. At this point, she was going to assume that he could copy anything he ate and work accordingly. Luckily his magic didn’t seem all that powerful and the beam spilled off of her shield without much fuss.
Proper magic duels were something that Sunset never really had a chance to partake in–Celestia forbade her from challenging random guards to them after she hospitalized the first one. Honestly, she thought that was a bit of an overreaction; he had made a full recovery in only a week and they rebuilt the wall she burnt down within a day. It was like Celestia didn’t like her having fun.
Still, with Kirby limiting himself to firing beams of magic at random, she had this in the bag. She simply circled around him, occasionally erecting a shield if his aim improved a bit. He’d exhaust himself soon enough, after all. He had to be running on fumes at this point.
Thirty seconds later with no change, she started wondering where he was getting all this mana from. Using purely magical lasers like he was doing was terribly inefficient; it was why most combat magic focused on using the environment to your advantage. Even an alicorn might have trouble keeping up with the constant mana drain for a minute or so, but Kirby looked like he still had more than enough gas in the tank.
Sunset grit her teeth. If he had an infinite supply of mana to draw from, it would force her onto the offensive. The next beam he sent that actually went her way, instead of shielding or dodging, she met with one of her own. She smiled. Experience seemed to be on her side here, as her laser was overpowering his.
Then he crossed his arms and teleported, and Sunset felt her jaw drop.
He reappeared directly in front of her and underneath her laser in a flash of blue light and promptly decked her in the nose. The force of the blow sent her crashing into the much-abused wall, she felt and heard a crack from her right hind leg, and her face was screaming in pain. This fifty-centimeter puffball had broken her nose and her leg in a single punch!
Her labored breathing involuntarily hitched as Kirby tested out another one of his new abilities, and Sunset’s eyes widened. She hurriedly lit her horn and fixed her diaphragm. How the fuck was he using blood magic? She needed to end this now.
She used a fair amount of the rest of her mana reserves and sent a mote of light at Kirby, which he just stared at curiously. Sunset found the explosion that followed glorious, the concussive blast knocking away Kirby’s staff and hat and launching him right into the opposite wall. As the dust cleared, she stood there, panting heavily. Was it over?
Evidently not, as Kirby peeled himself off of the wall to face her again. Sunset legitimately growled. How the hell was he still standing? Her eye twitched and she used up most of the rest of her mana to send another explosion his way. Surely he couldn’t take two of them, right?
She just sighed as Kirby opened his mouth. Of course he was just going to eat the damn thing. Why hadn’t she expected that? She was running low on mana, tired, had multiple broken bones, and was frankly astonished that she was still standing. Still, she prepared herself for another magic duel.
It never came, though. Curiously, her explosion spell hadn’t given him another Gandalf cosplay, but instead a weird silvery curved hat with a star emblem on top, an amber gem embedded in the front, and some sort of lightshow going on inside. She couldn’t even get a shield up before Kirby activated it.
Sunset’s world went white.
When Sunset woke up, she couldn’t really see anything at first. Instead, everything was an indistinct blob of light and color and she shut her eyes at the intensity of it. Her ears were ringing, everything hurt, she doubted she would be able to use magic for at least a few hours, and she assumed there was some sort of internal hemorrhaging going on. Frankly, it was a miracle she was even still alive. Well, unless she wasn’t.
Is this Hell? she thought.
She felt her jaw forced open and something that tasted like tomatoes was forced inside her mouth. She worked her jaw with a great amount of effort, chewing and swallowing on instinct. Almost instantly, she felt her aches fading away and the incessant ringing in her ears stopped. She still groaned, though; she could feel some of her bones rearranging themselves as her body knit them back together at a breakneck pace.
“Wow, Kirby really did a number on you.”
Sunset cracked an eye open to look at who was speaking, and both of her eyes quickly widened in shock. “What the…? Bandee? Are we dead?”
Bandana Dee chuckled. “Well, I certainly hope not.”
There was a massive crashing sound as the wall behind Sunset’s sprawled out form collapsed. She turned her head to look at it. Spearheads, a cutter blade, a lot of frost–yep, this was the hallway she and Kirby fought in. “How…how the hell are we still alive? Everything Kirby did there should have killed me. I saw him eat you, for fuck’s sake!”
Bandee frowned. “Language.”
Sunset just responded by giving him a Look.
Bandee sighed. “I gave you a Maxim Tomato just now. That healed pretty much all of your injuries,” he explained. Sheepishly, he rubbed the back of his head. “And I probably should have warned you that Kirby eating someone doesn’t kill them. They just reappear back where they were a few minutes after Kirby’s done with the ability he got. He usually tries to avoid killing his enemies if he can help it.”
“So you mean to tell me,” Sunset seethed as she got back to her hooves, “that I was fighting like my life depended on it–and lost–and he wasn’t even trying that hard?”
Bandee cringed and gestured to the collapsed wall. “Well, clearly he was trying. But if he cut loose, I’m pretty sure the entire mountain wouldn’t exist anymore.”
Sunset’s train of thought derailed, fell off a cliff, crashed into a nuclear test site, and exploded. The thought of a half-a-meter tall round puffball with tiny arms punching with the force of a fusion bomb just did not compute. Sure, he probably nearly broke every bone in her body, but she had him on the ropes by the end of the fight, right?
Right?
Maybe it was because he was pink? Sunset shivered. Pinkie Pie may have been a high schooler, but she knew far too much, could break reality even as a human, and frankly terrified Sunset. Perhaps there was a correlation?
Bandee waved an arm in front of her face and said something, shaking her out of her stupor. “I’m sorry, what was that?”
“I was asking if you wanted to watch Dedede’s fight with Kirby.”
Sunset blinked. “That hasn’t already finished?”
“You were only unconscious for a few minutes,” Bandee said, “and the King has been specifically preparing to fight Kirby for weeks now.”
Sunset glanced at the large doors as a series of explosions sounded from behind them and she weighed her options. On one hoof, she had already fulfilled her end of the bargain. If Dedede had any sense of honor, he would have to provide her, Twilight, and Spike with at least basic necessities. On the other hoof, that fight had been a hell of a blow to her pride. It did seem like she’d be trapped here for a while, and if things in this universe really were as powerful as they seemed, that was power she could use to overthrow Celestia back home. Might as well learn from it.
“Why not?” Sunset finally answered, striding towards and opening the doors. As she and Bandee took a seat, she took a look at the room’s centerpiece: a boxing ring with a rather interesting addition. Covering the entire top of the ring was an electrified cage, underneath which the two fighters were duking it out. Kirby had a hammer now, because of course he did, and Dedede was wearing some kind of metal mask. The fight itself looked intense. Dedede was making full use of his hammer’s missile launcher, Kirby ducked and weaved between them like some kind of dancer, and both looked like they were even having fun.
Despite the battle, Sunset’s mind was elsewhere as she reassessed her entire plan. Getting on the bad side of anyone here was not a good idea. She did seem to be working her way into Dedede’s good graces, but Kirby was the one she would have to take care to not mess with. If what Bandee said was true, and with how thoroughly trounced she had been she thought it was, he could kill everyone in this castle if he wanted to. That kind of power was something she would want to manipulate and throw at her enemies, not the kind of thing she’d want to face herself.
Yet, as she watched Kirby land a final blow on Dedede, another, far more pertinent thought crossed her mind. According to Bandana Dee, Kirby tried not to kill. Which meant that Dedede just took getting launched through an electrified cage, a ceiling, and probably several walls and would be fine afterward. And the dude had taken on an alicorn and had been winning before he was interrupted.
She glanced between Kirby, who was happily waving at the two of them now, and the hole in the ceiling. She paled. Y’know what? Screw getting power for myself. If this is the kind of shit this world throws around casually, I need to get the fuck off this planet.
The door to Twilight and Spike’s room creaked open, prompting the princess to look up. That Dedede had taken Sunset’s deal was quite the surprise to her, but she wasn’t going to question his hospitality at this point. At least not to his face.
Honestly, she was a bit shocked that Sunset had even offered a deal like that, but she supposed that Sunset needed to get back home as much as she did. Speaking of, it seemed that the orange unicorn was entering. “Hi, Sunset! How did it go?”
Sunset didn’t respond for a good long while. Instead, she was just looking forward with a thousand-yard stare. It was a bit unsettling, really. “I need a nap,” she finally said.
Twilight blinked. “Didn’t you just wake up…” she glanced at the clock, “a couple hours ago?”
Sunset made her way over to a spare bed, not even bothering to give Twilight a glance. “I need a nap,” she repeated. “Wake me up for dinner.”