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// Hail Hydra 
// Story: A Heart So Cold 
// by Onomonopia 
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Fluttershy stood outside the door to the lab the following morning, trying to gather up as much of her courage as she could. She had no idea how Freeze would react to her question, but she knew that if she was going to get any answer out of him she'd have to ask him about what she had heard last night. So she inhaled one last deep breath before she entered the room, finding that the snowman was still hard at work with the tube. 

"Good morning Mr. Freeze," she said to him with a smile, waiting for him to turn or respond. He said nothing as he continued to work, so she began to walk towards him, looking at the tube with interest. "What are you making there? I've never seen anything like this from anypony, even Twilight. Twilight likes to do strange experiments sometimes that I can't make heads or tails of. You might like her." Freeze said nothing as he got up and moved past her, taking something off one of the table before returning to work.

"Or maybe you would like Rarity. She makes cool suits as well," Fluttershy said with a little giggle at her own pun, but she stopped when Freeze didn't bother to respond. "Then again, I've never seen her make battle armor like yours before, so maybe the two of you wouldn't get along. Of course, there's always Rainbow Dash...but after seeing how the two of you reacted to each other I think its best that you keep apart from each other." She could tell that her small talk was getting her nowhere, as Freeze never responded or showed any indication that he had heard her. So with a sigh she walked over to where the icicle carving sat, finding that it now rested inside of a snow globe, making the lady in it look even prettier.

"That's such an amazing ice sculpture. Is that Nora in there?" she asked him. The moment she did she felt the air in the room change and when she turned to look at Freeze she found him slowly turning around to face her, his eyes hidden behind the goggles that seemed to be glowing even brighter now. But what caused her to back away in fear was that there was an emotion on his face, despite him being devoid of one the entire time she had been here. Rage. Pure rage.

"How do you know that name?!" he roared as he rushed over to her and lifted her up by the throat, fear in her eyes as she looked into his dark face. He threw her across the room into a table, where she was fairly certain she felt something break as she bounced off the table and to the ground. She didn't have any time to recover as Freeze grabbed her by the throat again as he picked up her and slammed her into the wall, pointing his freeze ray at her face. "Do you ponies have her!? Where is she?!"

"I-I only heard you say her name last night!" Fluttershy said as she began to cry, trying to hide behind her hooves from the rage that she was face to face with. "I have no idea who she is or where!" Fluttershy was full on weeping now, but Freeze barely noticed as he was thinking about what she had said and calming himself down. He had allowed his emotions to get the better of him again and now this pony knew something about his connection to Nora, which might spell doom for her if they did have her. He glared at the sobbing Fluttershy one last time before lowering her to the ground.

"Be very careful with your words," he said to her in a cold voice as he looked down at her crying state. "You might upset some people." He prepared to turn before he heard what sounded like glass shattering, only able to take a moment to register the sound before a massive silver head slammed through the side of the wall, sending him and Fluttershy across the room. The serpent's head roared before it began to destroy the room to get to him, biting down on him with its teeth and dragging him through the hole. Freeze barely had enough time to fire off a ray of ice before he was dragged outside, where he saw that this serpent had five heads and all of them were covered in a silver armor.

"What manner of beast is this?!" he yelled as he fired off a ray off ice into one of the heads, only to see that the armor protected it. The creature's others heads roared before the one that was holding him threw him towards the ground, where he crashed through a number of vending stalls before he came to a stop. He weakly got to his feet, looking through his blurry vision to see that cracks were now running through his helmet. "No...Not now...not when I'm close." The hydra hissed and tried to bite him, but he created a wall of ice that managed to temporarily stop it. While it was trying to batter the wall down, Freeze noticed something about its eyes.

'Its eyes are similar to the smoke that Sombra used,' Freeze thought to himself as he staggered behind some of the wreaked stalls, trying to think of someway to defeat the massive creature. 'He must have sent it here to kill me for dealing with him. How futile.' Freeze shot out from behind the stall and fired a narrowed blast into the hydra's eye, causing the creature to roar with pain as it reared back. But just as one head was reeling with pain, the other four attacked him all at once.

"Four times the heads," he muttered to himself as he pushed a button on his wrist, watching with a thin smile as the sound waves caused all of the heads to shriek in pain. "Four times the suffering." He had thought that he had won, but his victory was short lived as the tail of the hydra came spinning around as the creature thrashed and slammed into him. He was sent skidding across the ground, only coming to a stop when he slammed into the side of the crystal palace. He weakly groaned as he got up, but the hydra sent three of its heads to try to crunch him. He managed to dodge for the most part, but one of the heads bit down on the arm with the sonic feature in it. He froze an icicle around his head and drove it into the creature’s eye, causing the head to roar in pain as it released its grip, allowing Freeze to see that his best weapon was gone.

'Probability of survival...twenty percent,' he thought to himself as the five hydra heads all looked down at him again, drool dripping from their mouths as the heads glared at him. Freeze began to fire ice at the creatures while aiming for their eyes, but he hit mostly armor as the five heads attacked him all at once. He was almost certain that he was going to die before something slammed into his back and moved him out of the way of the five heads, which slammed into the base of the palace with a loud thud.

"You," he said to the yellow Pegasus when he turned to see who his savior was. She shakily got back to her hooves, still feeling the effects of her confrontation with Freeze earlier. "Why did you bother?"

"Because you...saved me," she said weakly, looking at Freeze with even more confusion. He had broken one of her ribs when she had angered him, but when the hydra head had burst through the wall and brought the room down, he had created a wall of ice to keep the ceiling from falling on her. "I figured that I owed you."

"You wasted your time," Freeze said in a weak voice, with a hint of dejectedness in it as he stood up to face the hydra. The creature reared all five of its heads and roared at the pair, Freeze standing his ground while Fluttershy looked up at it with sympathetic eyes.

"The poor thing's in pain," she said.

"That poor thing tried to kill us," Freeze said in a cold voice as he pointed both his arms at it, noticing with a bit of worry that the cracks in his helmet were beginning to spread. "We need to take it down." He prepared to fire, but then Fluttershy flew in front of him, narrowing her eyes at him in a way that he hadn't seen before. She then turned and flew up to the hydra's heads, leaving Freeze to wonder if he should let her be eaten or not. The hydra's heads all roared at her as she landed on the center one's nose and they all prepared to eat her.

"Bad." To the complete shock of Freeze, and everypony that had been watching the battle, all of the hydra heads stopped as she said this, shrinking under the glare that Fluttershy was giving it. The dark smoke in its eyes vanished as it cowered under her stare. "You have been a very bad hydra and I am ashamed of you. Why are you bothering these nice ponies so far away from your home?" The hydra let out a few hissing sounds and Fluttershy's gaze softened before she walked up and began to nuzzle its head. "Sombra is a wicked pony, making you do this. Don't worry; you don't have to listen to him anymore."

'I do not know what I find more unbelievable, that the creature is so soft or that the pony seems to be able to control it with ease,' Freeze thought to himself before he looked back at the cracks on his helmet and the damage to his suit, knowing that he was now working against the clock. So as Fluttershy waved goodbye to the hydra as it left, Freeze dragged himself back into the laboratory. Fluttershy had just flown down to the ground when Twilight and Rainbow Dash showed up, ahead of the others.

"Fluttershy! What happened here?" Twilight asked her as she looked around at the destruction, seeing the hydra off in the distance. She tried to go after it, but Fluttershy stopped her by putting a hoof on her shoulder.

"Its okay, the hydra was being controlled by Sombra, but he's fine now," Fluttershy said to her with a weak smile before groaning once and almost falling over, RD catching her before she could hit the ground. "Um, girls? I think that I might need to go to the hospital. I think I broke something." RD picked up her friend and flew her across the town while Twilight looked around the battlefield. Freeze had fought the creature; the ice everywhere told her so, but where was he now? Did he simply leave the fight...or was he injured? 

'So maybe you aren't the unstoppable monster that you made yourself out to be,' Twilight thought with a smile before she flew off to where the others were, knowing that they would be happy to hear this news.

{}

"I told you that the calculations were incorrect," a pony said to his friend, who had been staring at a computer screen for the better part of the day, waiting with hope that he hadn't sent the champion into another black hole again. "He hates it whenever we screw up like this, it interferes with his mission. You think that we're going to be able to catch the mare like-"

"I get it! I messed up," the pony at the computer said with a sigh of frustration before he sat back in his chair. The moment of rest was interrupted by a blast of lightning that hit behind them, causing them to jump out of their chairs. The both spun around to see Black Adam standing behind them, in significantly worse shape than when he left. His suit was torn, his face was bloodied and he was holding his arm like it had been broken. "Black Adam!" they both yelled as they got to their hooves. "Was the mission a success?"

"No, once again I was sent to the wrong multiverse," Adam said with a growl as he used his hand to wipe some of the blood off of his face. "First you send me to fight a samurai and now it is some kind of...surfer, I believe that is the term. I am getting tired of these constant mistakes."

"We're sorry, Black Adam, we're doing our best," the two said as they bowed, but Adam slammed his foot into the ground the moment they did that.

"You do not bow to me. Nopony does," he said to them as he turned to leave. "Now I must go speak with the queen. According to the vision, I am running out of time and we are no closer to finding her than we were a year ago when I fought Superman!"

"Um, if you don't mind us asking...what happened to you?" one of them asked him. "It looks like you were in a tough fight."

"I will heal quickly...but yes, it was a tough fight. I will give the surfer credit, I did not know that the power cosmic could be so...challenging. He made it clear that he would not fall easily," Adam said as he headed towards the exit with a tired sigh

"Did you win?" Adam looked back at them with a sigh.

"I failed to gain the information that I sought and a planet was destroyed in battle, so I cannot call this day a "win"," Adam said before giving them a small smile. “But if you are asking which one of us was standing at the end of the battle, then yes. I won." With that he spun and left the room, leaving the ponies awestruck.