By the time Rainbow Dash had taken her third breath, she had already knocked over eight ponies to the ground. A retaliatory wave of angry stallions charged forward, flinging all manner of blunt bric a brac at her feathery appendages. She backflipped, reverse-somersaulted onto her hooves, grabbed a barstool in her mouth, and swung it like a club across three faces in a row. Blood and teeth littered the floor, then rattled in every direction as Rainbow slammed a pony down into the tavern’s foundation with a downswing of the stool.
The bartender leapt onto her backside, screaming bloody murder as he broke a bottle over a nearby table and jabbed the sharp end towards Rainbow’s neck.
She was already flapping her wings, sailing straight up so that her spine flattened the miscreant against the ceiling. The shattered shingles of brittle tile fell, along with the groaning weight of the bartender.
No sooner had Rainbow landed when a fresh wave of angry equines galloped her from the side.
She spun, hissing through clenched teeth as she reared her hooves in readiness.
Just then, a metal prehensile tail whipped through the air, knocking everypony to the floor. Roarke icily stood up, brushing the wooden splinters of a shattered table off her helmet. “Alright,” she murmured. “Time for swampville to enter the nuclear age.” She protruded several missiles at once.
Gasping, Rainbow pounced her and forcefully shoved the projectiles back in. “No!”
Roarke gave her a double-take. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” her voice droned through the helmet.
“For the last dang time, no missiles!” Rainbow frowned. “We don’t have to kill these guys!”
“You weren’t so quick to stop me when we were fighting in Gray Smoke!”
Rainbow spat. “Do these look like a bunch of heartless cultists to you?!”
Zaid stood up, smiling dizzily. “Hey, I’m a cultist!”
Rainbow Dash blindly backhoofed him in the chin. “Shut up, cultist!”
“Get ‘em!” A stallion at the far end stood up and pointed an angry hoof. “Tear them limb from limb!” He and twenty other ponies galloped as one furious herd.
“Well, then, Madame Morality.” Roarke lasso’d Rainbow’s forelimb with her tail and flung her forward. “Looks like you just volunteered your limbs.”
“H-hey!” Rainbow gasped, then fiercely guarded her upper body as she found herself rolling beneath an angry forest of kicks, bucks, and stomping limbs. “Nnnnghh-Hghhh! Quit it! Sonuva--Knock it off!” This last exclamation was accompanied by a wing-flapping uppercut. two ponies were knocked back into the growing mosh pit while four more leapt on Rainbow from behind.
Clenching her teeth, Rainbow spun about in a circle, her blurring body accelerating as she tossed shrieking stallions into walls, windows, tables, and countertops.
From afar, Roarke pretended to not be watching, instead examining a length of scuffed-up armor along her forelimb.
Groaning, Zaid stood up yet again, rubbing her forehead. “Unnngh… Is it just me, or did a blue tornado start doing a cheerleader act in here since I was last under?”
“She does a fair amount of sucking from time to time, if that’s what you mean.” Roarke pointed behind him. “Well, would you look at that? It’s your face in the tabletop!”
“No way!” Zaid spun and grinned into his varnished reflection. “Where?!”
Roarke kicked the back of his skull. He headplanted into the table and slumped to the floor, cold.
“Hmmphh. Breeders.” Roarke wrapped a length of metal cable around him and dragged him out the back of the bar.
In the meantime…
“Haaaaaaaugh!” Rainbow’s voice violently cracked. “This is… why I… gave up… the cider! Nnngh!” Just as she thought she had tossed the last of the cretins off her body, a particularly large stallion gripped her from behind. Two more gripped her limbs while three struggled to hold her wings in place. “Hey! No fair! Gimme back my legs! Grrrgh! I need them for shoving awesomeness down your throats!”
“End of the line, Miss Sass!” A pony approached her, rubbing his bleeding lip. “You don’t come into our town, trying to make us look like idiots!”
Rainbow sneered. “Who says I had to try, doofus?”
“We’ll see how smug you are once you’re using them wings of yours for gruntwork!” He leaned forward with a smirk. “First thing’s first.” He grasped the edge of her pendant. “You need a new collar.” Others chuckled around him.
She gasped. “No! Don’t even friggin’ think about it! That’s the worst idea in the history of the worstest!”
“Like you’re gonna do anything about it.” With that, he yanked the pendant clear off.
Rainbow’s eyes rolled back as a spasm ran through her body. She hissed, writhed her head from side to side, then reopened her sockets with a pulse of red and yellow light.
An overcast sky hung above the village.
One second, the tavern lay still.
The next second…
Kaplow!
Every window, door, vent, drain, and chimney exploded outward. Pony bodies sailed out, flying for at least two dozen feet before splashing into the river or rolling to a painful stop atop the docks. As the dust and debris settled from inside the imploding building, several stallions limped out, leaning on each other for support as they hissed and wheezed in pain. The joined their brethren who were climbing out of the riverwater as they booked it towards the far side of town, running as quickly as their panting lungs could carry them.
A minute later, Rainbow Dash limped out, her mane having exploded into a fuzzy ‘fro, like bolts of colored lightning stretching in every direction. She finished clasping the pendant of loyalty back in place. She sighed, bearing the brunt of her shivers beginning and ending in a blink. Once her eyes stopped glowing, she relaxed, resting back on her haunches as she tried in vain to shake her mane straight.
Just then, a familiar stallion’s voice shrieked through the air.
Rainbow Dash gasped, then spun around. After a few blinks, her face bore a menacing scowl.
“Roarke…”
On heavily plodding hooves, she galloped down the docks and bulleted towards the water mill where the shrieking voice echoed from.