Chapter 55 - Always a Way Out
It can't be him.
"Twi!"
Even it isn't, he would have never killed his own King. Big brother, what has gotten into you?
"Get down!"
A pair of orange hooves forced the unicorn's head to the ground, right as a spiked morning star slammed against the wall on her right. Applejack bucked away the crystal earth guard and resumed dragging the confused and heartbroken Twilight by the tail.
A stampede of Royal Guards shook the castle, and their attacks, along with Applejack and Pinkie Pie's counterattacks, cracked the crystalline floors and walls. The Geosense Corps kicked pieces of the castle at the mares like bullets. Their unicorn comrades, the Magic Corps, teleported before the fleeing mares, forcing them to retreat or turn away from their intended direction.
Yet Twilight could not understand why only one of her three friends was wielding their Elements. For Fluttershy, it was understandable, but Applejack would have already had her Sword of Truth clenched between her teeth. Instead, the orange earth pony resorted to bucking or punching any pony that dared to get close to her and her friends.
Pinkie's Pinkie Gear was active, yet she was having trouble fighting the Royal Guards. Like the Crystal Rebels, the Geosense Corps seemed to predict her trajectories, and her attempts to kick them off their hooves were met with stonewall resistance. The Geosense Corps were like statues. One was a challenge, but a platoon was almost impossible to knock down.
Now they were surrounded. From Twilight's observation, she and her companions would be between throne room and King's personal library.
"Twi, if you got a trick up your hooves, do it now!" Applejack cried.
The unicorn shook herself. This wasn't the time to worry about her brother's betrayal, and she quickly cast a dimensional spell to quickly summon a bag of grenades she salvaged from their crashed airship. But she was just one unicorn against many, and the Magic Corps quickly snatched the bag with their magic and safely detonated the explosives inside their own magical barrier.
"Applejack, I'm sorry," said Twilight.
A part of her wanted her orange friend to berate her for being distracted by her own shock of Shining Armor's actions, and so she waited for the Royal Guards to make their attack.
Their advance was suspiciously stopped right as Twilight felt half a pony's weight on her back. Pinkie Pie had one hind leg on Twilight and another on Applejack as she stood up on two to present in one hoof a stick of dynamite adorned in what was obviously a poor imitation of Asiatic ideograms that would have been drawn by a young and ignorant foal. In her other hoof was a black permanent marker.
"Stop right there!" Pinkie Pie declared. "I hold in my hoof the sacred ninja scroll of the legendary kunoichi Sakura Cherry Bomb from the faraway eastern islands of Neighpon. Don't come any closer, or else I will be forced to unleash the unbelievable fury of the nine-tailed fox spirit sealed inside this scroll!"
"Pink," said Applejack. "I don't think that's gonna fool them."
"You're probably right. Fire in the hole."
"Wait, what?"
Somehow, nopony noticed Pinkie igniting the fuse. Somehow, nopony did anything when she lobbed it at a nearest wall, and after she did, an explosion caused a minor collapse that blew out a blinding cloud of dust. Twilight barely felt being pushed and dragged into narrow spaces. A quick air spell from her horn cleared her sight, but it was still dark. She tried pushing forward, though Pinkie's butt was in the way. It was hard for her to ignore the felt threads of Applejack's Stetson hat rubbing onto her rump.
"Pinkie Pie," said Fluttershy. "That crab monster might still be here."
"Mama Pinkie Pie got this all covered," said the pink pony in the lead. "All I need to do is follow my noes, toes, and senses, and we'll make it to the exit."
"What exit?" asked Applejack. "The only ones we can get out of are blocked off."
"There's always the balcony."
"But we might get lost again," said Fluttershy, "and the balcony might be heavily guarded."
"We won't get lost. After hearing about Geosense, I can't let my Pinkie Sense get beat."
"Pinkie Sense, Geosense," said Applejack. "Now that I think about it, I think you had that ability and you didn't even know what it is."
"Pinkie Sense is a totally different thing. Unlike the boring ol' Geosense, my patented Pinkie Sense allows other ponies see what's about to come next. Ooh, my pancreas is rumbling. That means we're getting close to our destination."
"Pinkie, we can't see your pancreas."
"It's not my problem if you don't have x-ray vision, and now is not a good time to pull out my pancreas to show you. And now we're here."
"We're at a dead end."
"Are we now?"
The pink pony pressed a hidden switch, but failed to realize at the last moment that the floor beneath her was a trap door. She nearly fell through, and her bottom dangled out for the two guards below: one unicorn, and one earth pony.
"Ah, buck it," said Pinkie. "Surprise attack!"
Purposely she let go of the edge, narrowly avoiding the magic from a horn and a thrust from a spear to dish out a one-two kick that knocked out the guards. With the balcony cleared at the moment, Fluttershy flew Twilight and then Applejack down. She stayed afloat to hover over the railing so she could look over the edge.
But something bounced her back. It threw her in a short daze and eventual shock to find that now it wasn't just the entire Empire protected by a nigh-impenetrable barrier, but the entire castle as well. Applejack rushed in with her Element in sword form for a slashing attack, and while she was successful in making an incision, the magenta-shaded castle barrier immediately self-repaired itself.
Twilight wrought herself out of her shock and stupor again, and she fired a quick blast from her horn at the barrier. Hers was less effective, as it merely dissipated on the surface. Yet her attempt confirmed to her unfortunate expectations that this was Shining's magic, and it didn't seem to her that he was using every ounce of his strength to put up the castle barrier. She knew not how much he advanced his magic ever since his disappearance or if this was due to another pony influencing him. Twilight Sparkle was the First Magisister of Unicornia, one of the most powerful in her village. If she couldn't get past the barrier...
Then she had an idea. Twilight had discreetly carried the black crystal ring inside a pouch hidden underneath her mane. She procured it, and after a running start, she threw it at the barrier.
"Fluttershy, keep that ring there!" she cried. "Applejack, create another cut!"
The pegasus and the orange earth pony did as they told, and to their delight, the cut Applejack created stayed open. It was still small, but it was large enough for each of the ponies to jump through, so as long as Fluttershy keep the black crystal ring pressed against the barrier.
"Pinkie Pie, I want you to jump through the hole first and use your Pinkie Gear to soften your landing," said Twilight. "Fluttershy, I want you to fly Applejack down to the ground."
"Hold the phone," said Pinkie Pie. "What about you, Twilight?"
"We don't have time to argue. The guards are coming in, and I still have to go back and get Spike and our animal friends."
"If you're stayin', then I'm stayin' too," said Applejack.
"Applejack, I need you to find Aurea and the Crystal Rebels and plan for a counterattack."
"But I ain't leavin' you!"
The Guards' stampeding stomps grew louder. With no time left, Twilight magically levitated Pinkie through the hole, followed by Applejack, who wrestled and even attempted to cut through the purple unicorn's magic right as she was thrown out. Fluttershy, who managed to grab the ring before going through the hole, dove down after the earth pony after wrestling with her decision to stay behind or save Applejack. Twilight knew the pegasus was going to catch Applejack. She had to.
Now that she was by herself, she had to step up her own personal counterattack if she wanted to defeat Shining Armor. The dozens of Royal Guards soon arrived at the royal balcony, but the unicorn mare greeted them falling debris she caused with her magic blast. She took advantage of the confusion to zip-teleport through the Guards. A few unicorns tried to intercept her teleportation, and in the sea known as Aether Space, they appeared as long dark tentacles attempting to snatch a fast moving prey. She was faster, though. Even in Aether Space, she elicited a slight grin before phasing back to normal space. Quickly she fired a long blast to block off the hallway and temporarily paralyzed the advance of the Magic Corps. This would at least give her time to find her brother. She had to do this. He was her responsibility. She promised herself that.
After climbing back to the Royal Residence level, Twilight took down two patrolling Magic Corps unicorns by surprise, but left one conscious. She probed his mind vindictively, damning all possible long-term effects that might damage him. Twilight sifted through all the guard's audio-visual information to find the very single piece of information that would lead her back to her brother.
He was in the throne room. Twilight knocked the guard out by smashing his head against the wall and then blasted her way through more guards to crash through the tall throne room doors...
No. She wasn't in the right room. However they did it, they had managed to put a room between the grand hallway and the throne room. This anteroom was an obvious trap with very few torches and very little light pouring in. The red carpet ended abruptly at the entranceway, but a mirage-like haze at the entrance was clear evidence that Twilight had galloped into the castle's magical subspace.
She could escape, but she didn't want the oncoming guards to capture her. Twilight sealed the door, hence sealing herself in the anteroom subspace, and then she lit the area with a glow spell she shot high up into the ceiling. Now the room appeared taller and wider, and instead of the entrance door, there were now almost a hundred or so spade-shaped doors circling around Twilight horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. This wasn't an illusion, but it was magic solidified through the unique properties of the Crystal Empire.
Twilight took a deep breath to calm herself before she could even begin to panic. Time was of the essence, and it was more so if there were any magical time dilation in effect, however slight. Yet, she didn't feel as panicked as she should be. She smirked upon this elaborate light show, and this subspace trap was nothing compared to what her own mother put her through...
She remembered a time, before she mastered teleportation spells and sometime after Shining Armor's disappearance from Unicornia, a cruel test Twilight Velvet had imposed upon her young daughter. Sparkle, as she was still known at that time, had suddenly woken up inside a pitch-black cave. The filly felt around to discover that the cave was sealed all around her and claustrophobically small. She lit up a glow spell from the tip of her horn to confirm her horror of being trapped with here with no rhyme or reason.
Touching her hoof was a fragile scroll she unrolled. It had only one line:
There is always a way out.
Unmistakably it was her mother's writing and her wrath of losing Shining Armor. Sparkle had been spared from Velvet's harsh magic training when her brother was present, but she did not receive any luxury of attention. The unicorn elders took care of her. Trixie took care of her. Now Velvet had finally gave the attention Sparkle had unwittingly wanted deep in her heart.
Sparkle thought about firing a magic blast, but that might cause a cave in. Then again, she might now have enough energy to drill herself through. She could risk teleporting out, but she might become stuck and suffocate to death or have her body parts gruesomely torn apart. She even considered digging out with her bare hooves.
Instead, she screamed for help, and after an hour of screaming she instead cursed at the top of her lungs her mother's cruelty. She crumpled the scroll and threw it across the tiny cave, and even tried head-butting the walls. Nothing budged, and nothing moved.
She did not how much time had passed. Hours. Days perhaps. Sparkle had unfolded the scroll in front of her to garner any kind of secret code written with special ink or hidden within the message. Then it became clear that one of the ways out of her imprisonment was death, whether by starvation or by suicide. Not an hour went by when she entertained committing the latter. She even thought of severing her own horn and using it to impale her own heart.
Then when she thought she succumbed to the throes of death, light beamed upon her. Sure, it was a dull glow spell and she was still in the caves, but to her it was the brightest light she had seen for a while. A blue hoof had extended from above, and the desperate purple unicorn took it. Sparkle had to ride on the back of a filly the same as hers. She didn't remember the journey back to Unicornia.
The filly took Sparkle to the temple fountain at the back to help her wash up. The purple unicorn saw her own reflection and saw a gaunt and disheveled filly staring back. It could have been worse, she thought back then. I could have died, if not for my dear friend, Trixie.
Twilight Velvet had found the two fillies together. She did not say anything except issuing a punishment of solitary confinement for Trixie for rescuing her daughter. Yet Trixie's punishment was by leaps and bounds less severe than what Velvet put Sparkle through.
Sparkle had hated her mother so much that day, and with so much emotional wrath he held for Velvet, the filly did nothing. She did not even speak to her, and it would be many days when she did. Even then, the hatred still remained.
But Sparkle did pass her mother's test...
"There is always a way out," Twilight said to herself. Regaining her focus, she quickly studied the patterns of the moving doors, and found that one of them changed its decorative sills when it changed axis. That door had a dark crystal gem on the very top. That was her way out.
Twilight fired a spell-blast to the crystal gem above the moving door she kept her eyes on before it moved up to the ceiling. It stopped and slammed to ground, and all the remaining doors shattered in individual Aether Particles. Even when it opened for her, she used her hooves to force the true door to swing out quicker, and she was then bathed in light.
Too hastily, she went in.