When Rainbow Dash finally reached Lerris, she couldn't make out the village from the dark thunderclouds that had gathered above it. It was only after flying along the eastern outskirts that she realized that the weather wasn't the only reason for the black fumes. Lerris was burning—its many buildings, huts, warehouses, and homes were ablaze. In brief flashes of lightning, she could see the skeletal remains of town hall, along with chunks of debris lying across the streets in various blast waves.
The breath was sucked out of the pegasus, so that her body plummeted like a deflated blue balloon. She landed numbly on the eastern edge of the town. Before her stood the remnants of the town windmill behind Golden Happenstance's house. The buildings were charred black from flames that were started hours ago. A single windmill blame teetered back and forth, slicing the heavens like a burning, upside down pendulum. Ashes and sparks flew out of the gaping doorway to the elder pony's home.
Rainbow Dash gulped. She shivered with each step as she broke into a trot—a trot that evolved progressively into a full-fledged gallop as her voice fueled the holocaustal situation with quickening panic.
"Bellesmith?!" Rainbow Dash hyperventilated, her glossy eyes reflecting the flames to the left and right of her. "Pilate?!" Her voice cracked upon the edge of a whimper. "Kera?!"
She saw a black mass to her right as she passed the edge of the nearest house. She turned to look, grimacing. The charred black figure of a pony was dangling out a window, its rear end caught within the frame. A single hoof stretched outward, and she could make out a single line of Xonan etchings along the corpse's burnt skull.
Panting, Rainbow galloped straight into the center of town. "Belle!" She hollered. "Pilate!" The only answers were the crackling embers that laced each inferno. She weaved in and around crumbling structures, her body being rained on by splashes of red sparks. "Nnnngh—Kera! Somepony, answer me!"
Rainbow rounded a corner and froze. Lightning struck in the distance, and it wasn't until her mind registered the illuminated corpses that thunder struck. She saw the bodies of ponies scattered across the roads and avenues of the tiny town. Stallions and mares—elders aplenty—were curled up in anguished death throes, their bodies burnt stiff into curled effigies by fire and manaflame. Rings of burning blazes haloed most of them, and some were still on fire themselves, their manes billowing with smoldering ash.
In a numb lurch, Rainbow trotted through the devastation. A buildingface collapsed loudly to her left, but she barely flinched. Her eyes locked onto one pony after another as she passed each burning structure. Only a few of the ponies maintained distinguishing features, and each of their muzzles were locked in a frozen death scream. This was how she stumbled upon the vacant, horrified muzzle of Beau. Thirty seconds later, she stumbled upon the lower half of his body, entangled with a collapsed wooden balcony.
Rainbow's blood went cold. Her gaze darted back and forth, and every attempt to shout was a pitiful, mewling affair: "K-Kera? Pilate?" She sniffled. "Belle? Where are you guys? It's Rainbow Dash. I'm here. I-I'm here for you. If you're hurt, it's okay. I-I won't be freaked out. Just... just call out." She squeaked. "Say something... anything—"
She froze.
A tiny tattooed figure lay in a bloody heap at the corner of a burning storehouse.
Rainbow's lip quivered. Lightning struck, causing a resounding boom to echo overhead. She ignored it, trotting numbly forward. At last, she reached the delicate little corpse. Hesitantly, she grasped the shoulder and turned the little pony over.
A colt's face shone in the firelight, its skull fractured and its left eye a mangled mass of bloodied muscle.
Rainbow Dash was too busy grimacing to register relief. With a shuddering breath, she glanced up.
A dark figure with a white-capped horn stared back from across the dancing shadows. In a flash of lightning, he was gone.
Rainbow gasped. Her teeth clenched and she felt her wings beating before she could stop the next utterance. "Shell!" The pegasus soared ahead and hovered in the middle of the smokey intersection. She spun, looking all around, heaving. "Shell?! What have you done with them, Shell?!" She panted and seethed, looking down every burning alleyway. "Answer me!"
Another flash of lightning. She saw a darting figure to her far left, running between two burning apartments.
"Nnngh!" Rainbow flew so hard that a pocket of air knocked a smoldering buildingface to the ground behind her. She twirled through the apartments, flinching from the flames that spout out their windows, and finally emerged on the other side of the smoldering affair. What she saw next made her grind to a stop, her trembling hooves anchoring her to the blackened grass.
"And so the monster comes out of hiding," he slurred.
The Prime Enforcer stood several paces from her, but he wasn't alone. A pair of splintery wooden beams had been pilfered from one of the many burning buildings, and they were lodged into the soft earth of the valley at roughly upright angles. Strapped to each of the beams with rough lengths of rope were two bruised, bloodied ponies. As soon as one of them gave a sputtering gasp, Rainbow's heart plummeted.
"Rainbow... ?" Bellesmith hoarsely stammered, her head dangingly limply from where she hung against the beam to Shell's right. "Please... Kera... sh-she..."
A moan came from Shell's left. Rainbow's eyes darted over to see a coat of stripes illuminated by a flash of lightning. Pilate looked even more bruised than Belle, and his manasphere glistened with bloodstains from the distant flames.
"Curious how it always takes an inferno to draw you into the light," Shell hissed, twitching in the glow of the massacre. "We already did this dance back in Foxtaur, creature." He spat, his glaring eyes illuminated by a pulsating white horn at the top of his skull. "If I had counted on you being so predictable, the hunt would have ended at Blue Nova. A hundred bodies burnt... ten thousand... what would it have mattered to you?"
Rainbow gritted her teeth. "Let's test that by setting your insides on fire..." Her hooves scuffled forward.
Pilate suddenly blurted, "Rainbow, n-no! He has her!"
Schiiing! A pair of Xonan scimitars floated out from behind Shell's backside. Their immaculate metal reflected the firelight, illuminating a shivering and bloodstained filly in his telekinetic grip.
Rainbow jerked to a stop, her mouth agape.
Kera's green eyes shone like wide saucers from beneath the curtain of mixed blood coating her tattoos. She whimpered and hissed for breath as she was levitated by her throat in front of Shell. The stallion leaned forward, slowly sliding the bladed edge of one scimitar against her neck, so that its reflective surface illuminated his sneering expression above her shoulder.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Shell tightened his glowing grip on Kera's throat, causing the filly to choke and wheeze. "And christened with the juices of three different cultures here in the valley." A pulse of light shot down from his white-capped horn, and he twitched to say, "You've brought nothing but death and misery to this continent, monster, but I've come to cleanse the land pure again."
"Rainbow... pl-please..." Belle sobbed, struggling with her restraints as she dangled from the wooden beam. "Kera! You have to s-save her!"
"Like she saved you?!" Shell bellowed, his one good eye demonically bright while his bloodied socket quivered in the shadows. "Like she saved hundreds of my soldiers?! Like she... snkkkt—saved my beloved daughter Imre?!"
Rainbow blanched at that.
Belle gnashed at her teeth, her eyes darting between Shell and her friend in the flamelight.
"Your..." Rainbow's lips trembled. "Your d-daughter...?"
"Hnnngh—Was it friendship that led her to blast a hole in her delicate skull?!" Shell spat as he held the blade tighter to Kera's twitching neck. "Was it a sample of harmonic magic that led her to spit her own father in the f-face with... with..." His muzzle twisted into a sob, and he fought it off with a deep, low growl. "But the grief is over. We are now one, beloved..." He hissed, teeth gritting as his good eye flickered with lightning. "We are all... now... one!"
Rainbow's eyes darted to the white horn at the end of his skull. It sparked with unnatural magic, and she followed it down to Shell's skull where a threadbare mane gave way to necrotic veins spreading all across his brow.
"Shell... how..." She gulped. "What have you...?"
"You do not get to be speechless," he grumbled against the waves of thunder. "You are a blight from the west! A putrid alien I should have put down months ago. I've done nothing but faithfully pursue you to the ends of the earth, and yet you persist with your... d-devastation and your selfless devotion to carnage. Snkkkt..."
He grimaced from another pulse of energy down his horn. Kera's muzzle had turned blue from where the blood hadn't stained her by now.
"If I cannot destroy the flesh of the experiment... then I sh-shall shatter the spirit," he droned. "Once and for all..."
"Shell, you want me dead," Rainbow Dash said, waving a hoof. "You have always wanted me." She gulped and yelled, "Then have me! Let the filly go and we will finish it—"
"But it never finishes with you! Does it?!" Shell shouted. He produced the tiniest of bitter laughs before grunting, "And since I reunited with my beloved Imre, I realized why! It's never begun! You are still the monster belonging to a cage! Well, today... that all changes..."
He levitated the other scimitar up, then pulled at opposite ends of it with glowing telekinesis.
Rainbow gritted her teeth. "Shell, what are you—?!"
"Today, you become a pony..." Crack! The sword split into two jagged shards of metal. "Because you're going to make a choice..." He levitated them in opposite directions until they hovered before the necks of Belle and Pilate. "There are only two loyal souls in this continent, and fate has always rewarded one of them." He spat, "Until today..."
The hovering blades pressed to Belle's and Pilate's necks. Meanwhile, Shell dug the very tip of his other scimitar into the outer layer of Kera's quivering flesh. Rainbow, hyperventilating, found her head darting left and right, her moist eyes glancing feverishly at all three helpless victims.
"Can you pretend to save the ponies whom you pretend to love?" Shell's one good eye shimmered. "Live long and taste the futility of absolute faith, you monster." His tongue licked his teeth as she said, "Together, we'll bask in the shame that brought my beloved Imre to her end, like the ghosts of desolation that we both are."
"I..." Rainbow panted and shivered. "I can't..." She gritted her teeth. "Damn it, Shell! This is pointless! Don't do this!"
"Kera!" Belle shouted, sobbing. "Save Kera, Rainbow!"
Pilate's runic plate pulsed. His ears twitched in Belle's direction.
"One of them... or none of them..." Shell hissed. A whimper escaped Kera's lips as a thin line of blood trickled from where the scimitar grazed her neck. "Even you aren't fast enough, monster."
Rainbow's wings stretched out, but could do nothing but tremble. She stood grounded in the glow of the dead village behind her. Ashes pelted her blue coat, and all she could do was stare into the abyss. Discord laughed in some nebulous pocket of her mind, and it sounded a lot like her own weeping voice. She brought a hoof to her pendant, but the touch of the ruby lightning bolt was cold, lifeless, a damning weight.
Pilate's blind eyes twitched. As the agonizing seconds of the stand-off limped by, his body tensed, and his skull-plate pulsed brighter and brighter.
"Well?!" Shell shouted. "Has the experiment run out of courage that it never possessed to begin with?!" He howled. "I had the strength to bond with my daughter!" His horn pulsed. "What hollow faith do you hold onto, monster?!"
"Rainbow..." Pilate hissed in a whispery tone.
Rainbow's eyes darted towards him.
"Please..." He stammered, his runic plate glowing like a spotlight in the dark storm. "T-take care of Kera and my beloved..."
"Wh-what...?" Rainbow's vision quivered, for she saw his manasphere vibrating at the end of his choker. "Pilate..."
"I love them..." He sniffled, then clenched his jaw tight. "I love you."
"No, don't!" Rainbow's voice cracked as a tear trickled down her cheek. "Don't do this! D-don't choose for me—"
"Gggghh!" Pilate's head thrusted back. With a flash of light, the O.A.S.I.S. sphere dislodged from his choker and propelled itself sharply to the right on a burst of mana.
Shell's eye jerked to his left.
The sphere streamed past him and Kera and knocked the sword shard away from Belle's throat. Clank!
Rainbow gasped.
Shell snarled—and within that very second he thrusted the other metal shard into Pilate. The chunk of metal stuck deep into the stallion's choker. The zebra's metal plate instantly burst with sparks, and Pilate writhed torturously on the wooden beam he was strapped to.
"Aaaaaaugh!" His blind eyes lit up like candles.
"Pilate!" Belle bellowed.
"Hnnngh!" Rainbow Dash rocketed forward like a cannonblast.
Shell turned to look at her, his one eye reflecting a savage blue hoof. Wham! Rainbow speared the Prime Enforcer, who instantly dropped Kera and his scimitar. The filly fell to the burnt grass, clutching her bleeding throat and sputtering.
In the meantime, Rainbow and Shell flew straight across the clearing and went smashing—