//------------------------------// // Part 16: Opening Blows // Story: Lost in a Terrifying World // by Erisn //------------------------------// This is what betrayal feels like. The Slender Man felt the magic wash over him, burst after burst of golden light. He had never felt betrayal before. Not once, not in all of his existence. And why? Because there can be no betrayal without trust. And the Slender Man had never trusted any being before now. And he had never felt the pain of betrayal. Until now. This is what pain feels like. True pain, not the superficial cuts and bruises of the flesh. This is the pain of the soul, the pain that comes when faith is lost, when promises are broken, friendships unravel. This is the pain that cuts the souls and leaves the flesh intact. This is what sadness feels like. The magic scorched his skin. It burned him. It seared his soul. It was nothing compared to the pain in the Slender Man’s heart. Because he had a heart now, oh yes. And it was a heart that was broken. This is what betrayal feels like. This is what pain feels like. This is what sadness feels like. The emotions tore through the Slender Man’s entire being as he watched his friend, Twilight Sparkle, the Purple One, sitting behind the protective barrier as the armies of this world attacked him. He had believed. He had really believed her. For one short moment, he had trusted her and given her a bit of himself. His friendship. His faith in another being. And she had taken it, and led him into a trap, meant to end his existence. The Slender Man raised a thin tendril and examined it. Smoke, or perhaps wisps of darkness curled away from him. The magic was not strong enough to destroy him, not by a long shot. But it tore at his very existence, inflicted pain, and slowly began to erase his entire being. So. This is what the desire for vengeance feels like. The Slender Man’s tendril shot out and bounced off a shield created by the white stallion. Hundreds more appeared, and plunged into the buildings that made up Ponyville, penetrating the stone and wood frameworks of the houses and passing through effortlessly. The Slender Man flexed the tendrils as one, and Ponyville exploded in into a hail of dust and falling masonry. This is what hatred feels like. There were no more eyes upon him. Just the screams of the citizens caught in the collapsed buildings, the shouts of ponies, and the loud commands from the sun goddess pony. The Slender Man disappeared and reappeared among the army of ponies in shining gold armor. This is retribution. ---- Twilight heard the screaming begin before the dust had even settled. It came from where the Royal Guard had been stationed outside of Ponyville. She could see nothing. But Princess Celestia uttered a curse that made the air ring and leapt into the sky, winging towards the screaming. The dust from the Slender Man’s destruction of Ponyville settled, and Twilight could see what remained of her town. Nothing. Nothing but dust and rubble. Here and there a few walls remained upright, but the houses were gone. She could still hear the screaming. Muffled. It came from below. There were ponies trapped below the rubble. Friends. She knew them all. Twilight pushed against the containing force field with all her magical might and it slowly bowed outwards, and then broke. Technically, it shouldn’t have done that, but then again, Twilight was the Element of Magic. Even the greatest magics would have trouble working on an alicorn, much less the Element of Magic herself. Twilight spared one moment to look for her friends, but among the collapsed rubble of Ponyville she couldn’t make them out. They might have been buried when the Slender Man attacked. She had no fear for their safety however; despite the relative ease with which she had broken the spell without Celestia to bolster it, the shield spell was a Starswirl original, and wouldn’t break even under dragon’s fire. In any case, Twilight didn’t have the time to aid any ponies buried beneath the ground. They could survive minutes, possibly hours if need be. The screaming from outside Ponyville wasn’t stopping – it was only getting louder. Twilight raced over a mound of rubble, and looked frantically around for a good vantage point. There. What had been the town hall was now a small hill of debris. Twilight jumped into the air and soared to the highest point, until she finally located the source of the screams. The Slender Man stood among the carnage of what had been the Royal Guard. They had been forming a defensive wall just on the outskirts of Ponyville. They weren’t the most numerous of armies, but there had been hundreds in their ranks, pegasi, earth ponies and unicorns alike. Now, they were a fractured ruin of their former self, less than half their number surrounding a single figure at the heart of a circle of death. Twilight stared. This wasn’t the Slender Man of legend. It wasn’t the silent stalker, the slow killer that lay before her. This was another being entirely. The Slender Man could not move while he was watched. That was the one rule, the only rule he abided by. Twilight had supposed that was all the restriction he needed. The Slender Man certainly could not compare to beings like Cthulu, let alone the darker denizens of the Dungeon Dimensions she had read of, or so she had thought. But she had never seen the Slender Man fight. Hunt, yes. He played the game well, but that was the cat playing with a mouse. No matter what, the cat will always win, and so the mouse can struggle and escape, but the cat will never use all of its strength. It is different when a cat meets a rat, or a dog. Faced with a creature that can fight back, or even kill it, the cat becomes a whirlwind of claws and fang and fury. The difference is simple. In one situation, the cat hunts and uses stealth, speed and cunning. In the other, the cat fights for its life, and fights to kill. It does not hold back. The Slender Man’s tendrils were a part of his body. They seemed to stem from some invisible source at his back, but they could stretch out to undetermined lengths, and possessed flexibility and strength unseen in a normal appendage. Twilight had assumed they were no more than tertiary appendages, not central to the Slender Man’s abilities. But she saw their purpose now. Black tendrils shot out like spears from the Slender Man’s body, impaling earth pony, pegasus, and unicorn alike. They whipped through the air like ribbons, and sliced whatever they ran into. The finest armor, the strongest magical shield offered no more resistance than air as the Slender Man’s tendrils created a whirlwind of death around him. Twilight saw a Canterlot Guard charging the Slender Man, but three tendrils ran him through before he had even gone four steps. Another member of the Lunar Guard took to the air, but the tendrils vivisected him before his hooves had completely left the ground. It took seconds. Most of the royal guard didn’t even have time to react before they were diced, impaled, or lifted up and bodily smashed into the ground. It had been less than fifteen seconds since the Slender Man had begun his counterattack. Most of the Royal Guard lay dead, and a great deal of Luna’s guard had fallen as well. A huge swathe of blood and body parts encircled the Slender Man, a huge circle of slaughter. Twilight gazed at the carnage and felt something inside her start to scream alongside the wounded. She had known those guards. She remembered their names. And the Slender Man had killed them all. She felt numb. Horrified. Was this all his friendship with her had meant? He had gone back to killing instantly. She had tried to defend him and this was the result? Someone was flying down through the sky towards the Slender Man. Celestia, Luna, Cadence, Shining Armor were nowhere to be seen. Where had they gone? But that was a secondary concern in Twilight’s mind, for the figure drifting lazily downwards towards the Slender Man was Discord. Discord alighted before the Slender Man. He began to clap, slowly, mockingly. “Good job, I have to say. Killed the entire Canterlot Royal Guard in seconds. Nice work. Lots of blood. I believe there’s a saying for occasions like this. Hmm. How about ‘you monster!’ Or ‘oh, the horror!’” Discord snapped his fingers and grinned. “Or how about this one?” “Gotcha.” Something was stirring. Something was rising. The body parts of the royal guard were moving, oozing together. Limbs flopped around on the ground. Shattered bone seemed to melt and flow into larger puddles of…what? Flesh? No, some kind of liquid-solid matter. And they reformed themselves into… The Royal Guard stood as one pony, shining row upon row of pristine armor and gleaming coats. Twilight stared. “You didn’t really think we’d risk innocent, useless ponies against you, did you now?” Discord lounged on an invisible sofa in the air. “They’d be useless, and worse, a liability. No, what you just destroyed using so much effort was no more than a few pieces of pottery. Ponies made from clay. Add a bit of watercolor and a few buckets of paint and hey presto! Instant ponies!” Discord chuckled. “The oldest trick in the book. And you fell for it.” The Slender Man said nothing, but the air around him perceptibly darkened. Discord seemed to take notice, and went on, “I really can’t believe you fell for that. Didn’t anypony ever teach you not to be fooled by appearances? One teensy check on the soul wavelength, heck even a bit of infrared vision would have helped. But no,” Discord sighed, “you’re far too gullible. Nice work on all the dismembered limbs, by the way. So much hard work completely wasted.” One of Slender’s tendrils shot out, causing Discord to duck. But it wasn’t aimed at him. It shot past the draconequus and bounced off a sudden shimmering shield of violet light. Twilight turned to look. Surrounding Ponyville was a magical force field that Twilight recognized. Shining Armor stood on a pile of rubble, holding the magical shield in place. And behind him… The Wonderbolts were the fastest fliers in Equestria, but what many ponies forgot was that they were also the stealthiest as well. Stealth flying requires even more coordination than trick flying, and the Wonderbolts excelled in both areas. They had made their way into Ponyville while the Slender Man had been distracted with the fake royal guard and Discord and now they were sifting through the rubble of houses, pulling ponies out and air-lifting them out of Ponyville. The Slender Man fired off more tendrils at Shining Armor’s barrier, but they simply bounced off the magical field. Twilight was amazed, but she shouldn’t have been. Her brother’s shield had held off King Sombra for many weeks unaided, and he was capable of protecting all of Canterlot by himself. Even the Slender Man couldn’t break through that so easily. “You know,” Discord said, gently twining around the Slender Man in a slow, serpentine motion, “you’re really not good at this. I mean sure, you might be a big shot scary eldritch fellow, but you’re no world-destroyer that can collapse civilizations with a single sneeze. I was a bit worried when I first saw you until I realized that. But fighting you isn’t the same as taking on a Reaper. You don’t do combat. You just kill innocent, defenseless beings. So that’s why we’ve got a chance.” Discord snapped his fingers and suddenly he was covered head to toe in plate armor. “Allow us to show you what strategy and tactics mean.” Discord vanished as a flurry of tendrils streaked through the air where he had been. The Slender Man immediately directed all of the tendrils at the last of Ponyville’s inhabitants being flown off by the Wonderbolts, but they were intercepted mid-strike. A hail of arrows fell from the sky and hit the Slender Man’s tendrils. Where they struck, ice formed and froze. Twilight looked towards the source of the arrows. A hundred meters distant, she saw a company of ponies in Crystal Empire armor. These weren’t fake ponies made of clay. They were sharpshooters, firing ice arrows in an unceasing rain upon the Slender Man. The Slender Man’s tendrils froze even as they sped through the air. They began to weave, attempting to avoid the arrows but there were simply too many. The air around the Slender Man became a mass of ice as the archers continued to pour arrows on him, building up a shell of ice that began to engulf the Slender Man. But ice was nothing to Slender. Twilight knew it. What effect could a simple endothermic reaction have on a being that could ignore the effects of a black hole? Even as she watched, the ice around the Slender Man fractured and exploded into a thousand icy shards. The tendrils that had been frozen in the air flexed and sent a rain of deadly icy needles that bounced harmlessly off Shining Armor’s shield. But the tactic had worked. Even as the Slender Man’s tendrils grouped and sped at Shining Armor’s shield, Twilight saw Wonderbolts speeding away towards Canterlot, carrying the last of Ponyville’s citizens with them. Shining Armor didn’t even bother to try to defend against so many attacks. As the black mass of shadowy tendrils surged at him, he let the shield dissipate and galloped back through the rubble of Ponyville, dodging and weaving between the tendrils as they struck the ground around him. And the counteroffensive was just beginning. From the sky, Twilight suddenly saw a group of pegasi emerge from behind a cloud. They must have been hiding and waiting for a signal, for now they dropped like stones in groups of three. Each trio held between them a smaller cloud, dark and stormy, crackling with unreleased lightning. They dropped their burdens to float above the Slender Man’s head and sped back into the cloud cover overhead even as his tendrils looped back to strike at them. Twilight held her breath, amazed and terrified, but not a single pegasus was hit as they spun and wove between the thin black lines of death, disappearing behind the clouds. Each one had been wearing the blue uniform and lightning bolt of the Wonderbolts. They must have been the elite core, and no wonder. They had dropped the clouds right over the Slender Man’s head and escaped without so much as a scratch. But why leave the clouds there? Twilight’s question was answered in a second as another shape hurtled from the sky. A blue figure ducked and dove between the web of tendrils in the air, and hurtled down towards the Slender Man. A wall of tendrils rose to meet it, but the figure performed a triple barrel-roll and slipped past the tendrils. It landed on the mass of storm clouds and kicked once, twice. Spitfire took off in an instant as every tendril in the air looped back to stab the spot where she had been. She was already in the sky though, and flying high, fast as she could. Below her, the clouds she had kicked were flashing, the lightning building up as the electric potential reached a critical point. Twilight suddenly realized what was about to happen and closed her eyes— Lightning struck. ---- What is it like to stand in the center of a thunderstorm? In a true storm, hundreds of thousands of raindrops fall each second, hitting the ground with a roar that deafens all else. Visibility is gone, and there is nothing but walls of water that make the sky and land the same as the sea. There is nothing to see but water, endless oceans of water filling the world. This sight mirrored that before the Slender Man, except that instead of rain, there was only lightning in its place. A thousand, a hundred thousand, a million bolts struck and danced around the Slender Man each moment, exploding in arcs of electricity that danced along the ground. The storm clouds had been positioned for maximum effect, and the Slender Man was caught in the center of a storm made solely of lightning. It hurt. The Slender Man had no problem dealing with electromagnetics in general, but lightning possessed another element that made it dangerous to him. Light. It was part of the name, after all. Lighting was light given form, and it was that which hurt him him. Pure light, enough to drive away any darkness for a second. And it crackled about him, burning him from head to toe. The Slender Man couldn’t move, even as the lightning obscured everything else. Something was still watching him through the glare. That damned chaos god. The Slender Man had recognized him from the start, but hadn’t given him much thought. He wasn’t eldritch, only mildly related. He was simply a god, an avatar of chaos, nothing more. As much in common with the eldritch as a dragon was related to a chicken. But he had some power, and it was being used here. The Slender Man couldn’t move, and he was forced to stand through a storm of what was essentially concentrated light. The pain. But beneath that pain was only rage. Fury beyond what the Slender Man had ever felt before. What is mere pain of the body compared to pain of the soul? Betrayal. The Slender Man had only one desire; to destroy the impudent beings that dared to challenge him and then to find Twilight Sparkle. Mere lightning was nothing compared to that desire. The storm abated. The Slender Man felt the electric discharges cease. He readied his tendrils, prepared to strike down anything in sight. There was no one there. The Slender Man cast around with his senses. Some beings in what had been Ponyville, the Elements of Harmony and Twilight Sparkle, a few ponies retreating to the southwest, and a few sources of power that matched the various gods some distance away. But where was his enemy? They surely didn’t think that keeping him here would be enough. The Slender Man felt Discord’s power keeping him in one place, but freed of any distractions, he could exert his power fully. He felt the chaos god’s power over him weakening, slowly but surely, and he forced more power into crushing that thread of resistance. He felt almost able to move when something dripped onto his face. The Slender Man looked up. Well, not looked, but he cast his senses towards the sky. Something was falling on his head. He reached out with a tendril and slowly scooped up a bit of the liquid substance that had landed on him. It was some kind of multicolored liquid. It had…seven colors, all mixed together. How strange. The bright colors reminded the Slender Man of a sight he had seen after rain fell. And the liquid burned him for some reason. It almost looked like— Oh no. The Slender Man had only enough time to try ineffectually to shield his face with a few tendrils before all of Cloudsdale’s stored rainbows came crashing down on the his head. ---- Twilight watched as a lake’s worth of liquid rainbow covered the Slender Man. She wasn’t an expert on how rainbows worked, but she knew that Cloudsdale produced the rainbows by filtering light through clouds, creating rainbows in liquid form. And it looked like they had just dumped all the rainbows they had on the Slender Man. She peered up at the sky. Several Wonderbolts and what looked like Cloudsdale workers were already flying away, their part in the battle done. In fact, it looked like all the Wonderbolts were pulling out, flying away from the battlefield. “Their time’s up, I’m afraid.” Discord appeared next to Twilight, holding what looked like some kind of ceremonial folding fan. “No point in having them stick around any longer. Lighting and rainbows, very effective. But that won’t be enough to stop the old boy, and the Wonderbolts can’t do anything more than fly around and annoy him by themselves.” Discord closed his fan with a snap. “But I can’t imagine even an eldritch being would be able to take that without a wince or two. All according to plan.” Twilight looked at Discord. “You really think you’ll be able to stop him?” She asked incredulously. “With just this? All you’re doing is making him mad. You can’t possibly expect to succeed here.” “Nonsense my dear,” Discord tapped Twilight on the nose with his fan. “We know we’re outclassed and outgunned here. Celestia, Luna, and I are the only beings with real power here, and he’d wipe the floor with us in a second. No, we’re just buying time. We’ve got one shot, and one alone, but that’s going to rely on you and your friends if you’re willing to help.” “What? No! I won’t betray him!” “You don’t have much choice, Twilight Sparkle.” Something in Discord’s tone made Twilight look up. Discord’s mismatched eyes were disconcertingly serious as he spoke. “You may think he’s a nice, friendly fellow, but I know better. Celestia and I have lived long enough to know of his kind. He will kill us all unless we can stop him. This plan is the only thing that might work, and you need to decide whether you’re going to help, or watch him pull out of intestines one by one.” The figure of the Slender Man had been encased in liquid rainbow, but something was moving in the mass of color. The bright color of the rainbow seemed to be getting darker, losing its contrast. “Much of the plan revolves around you, I’m afraid. I was against it, but there’s no other way, and Celestia was right. I just hope you’ll decide to pitch in. We need to buy time for this to work, and you Elements of Harmony are more powerful than the rest of us combined.” Discord handed Twilight his fan and stood straight, dusting himself off. “Looks like he’s mad now. Time for Luna and me to do what we can.” The rainbows covering the Slender Man had lost all color, and were just stripes of gray. Then they seemed to melt off him, leaving the Slender Man standing as he had been before. But the air was even darker, and Twilight could feel the emotion pouring off him from here. It made her shudder and shake even at this distance. Discord turned to Twilight. “Remember what I said,” he said, for once sounding completely serious. “I know you think he’s a friend, but remember that you have other friends too.” Discord began to walk towards the Slender Man, a casual, jaunty walk along the uneven ground. “Why are you doing this?” Twilight asked. Discord paused, his back still towards Twilight. “Doing what, Twilight Sparkle?” “This isn’t your battle. You’re the embodiment of discord! Why would you want to stop him?” Discord paused for a moment, and then when he spoke, his voice was very far away. “Chaos, discord, anarchy, call it what you like. Some people like it, others don’t. But you can’t have any of it without an audience, someone to appreciate your work. His kind doesn’t leave anything behind. I usually like a good monster, especially one that can spread a bit of despair and confusion, but…” Discord shrugged. “I guess even I have somewhere where I draw the line.” He resumed his casual walk. “Besides, he’d kill everypony, and I’m rather fond of you. We are friends, after all, aren’t we? I guess…this is just what friends do.” Twilight felt hot, and then terribly cold. Discord’s words hit something deep in her heart. The Slender Man was something that might be a friend. He had been. But Discord was doing this because he wanted to protect them? “Discord…” she began. “Just kidding,” Discord turned back slightly, a small grin on his face. “It’s really just Fluttershy in the end. If it were just the rest of you in trouble, I’d grab a bowl of popcorn.” He turned back towards the Slender Man, who was now wreathed in a darkness that seemed to grow with each passing second. “But I’d rather be turned back into to stone and ground up into dust fragments for all eternity than let him hurt her,” he growled. The darkness and hatred from the Slender Man was now affecting Twilight’s vision, and she felt the familiar burning in her eyes. She couldn’t even look in his general direction anymore. Tears of pain began to fall from Twilight’s eyes. But out of the corner of her vision, Twilight could see Discord walking onwards towards the Slender Man. He stopped, perhaps twenty feet away from the dark cloud and writhing mass of tendrils. Discord bounced up and down on his clawed feet, and seemed to test the air to with one claw. Then he snapped his fingers and a pie appeared in his hand. Discord tossed the pie at the Slender Man. And then he pulled out another, and another. Blueberry pie, raspberry pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie…his hands became a blur as a rain of pastries flew through the air at the Slender Man. Discord charged, a pie in each hand. ---- The Slender Man hated reality-warpers. He hated rainbows. He hated lightning. But most of all, right now he hated Twilight Sparkle. The pain hurt. And what was worse, it was more than pain, now. It was injury, it was damage. They had dumped rainbows on him. Pure, unrefined rainbows. The concentrated light and happiness contained in that foul slime had caused something akin to anaphylactic shock in the Slender Man. Eldritch beings don’t suffer and experience damage in the same way mortal beings do. They don’t have any solid organs to damage, so damage to any part of them is really damage to their entire being as a whole. Rainbows meeting eldritch was akin to pouring acid on human flesh. The Slender Man’s entire being writhed and screamed in agony, and he was sure several of his higher senses had shut down from the pain. And now he was being attacked. With pies. They weren’t even magical pies. The flurry of pie crusts and fillings Discord was hurling didn’t contain even a trace element of magic. They were just pies, only dangerous if consumed in vast quantities. In other words, they were about as damaging as…well, a pie to the face. It was insulting. It was infuriating. It was unforgivable, and the Slender Man attacked with a fury that knew no bounds. But the creature, the creature refused to be hit. It looked like some kind of freakish goat-chimera, but why any god would want to appear like that Slender had no idea. It was just what gods of chaos did. And he hated that. Their unpredictability, their randomness. This one wasn’t even trying to fight. He was just provoking the Slender Man. Well, that was fine. The Slender Man might have been caught off guard by the diversion and the subsequent lightning and rainbow attacks, but he was learning each second that passed. Discord had been right; the Slender Man had never been in a true battle. But the Slender Man was eldritch, and the eldritch learned fast. ---- A tendril shot out as Discord dodged left, but he simply teleported away appeared behind the Slender Man, and tossed another pie at the back of Slender’s head. Twilight watched in horrified fascination, but Discord was actually managing to evade each and every one of the Slender Man’s attacks. There were only a limited number of ways the Slender Man could move his tendrils, and Discord never let any of them so much as get close to him. Discord pirouetted out of the way of another tendril, and hit Slender in the face with a pie. Twilight thought Slender would explode in rage, but he only raised a tendril and wiped the pie from his face before striking out at Discord again. “Ah don’t believe it.” Twilight nearly jumped out of her skin as Applejack appeared by her side. “Ah’d never thought ah’d see the day when Discord turned out ta be a valuable ally.” Twilight looked around. She had been so focused on the battle with the Slender Man that she hadn’t even noticed her friends’ arrival. They looked rather dirty, patches of mud and grime covering their coats. “How did you break out of the confinement spell?” Twilight asked stupidly. “It’s a confinement spell. You’re not supposed to be able to break out of that. A hundred Rarity’s couldn’t break through that.” “As a matter of fact darling, we didn’t have to,” Rarity said. “Although I quite appreciate your confidence in my abilities.” Twilight just looked at Rarity. “How?” “Well, we have some experience with this sort of thing,” Fluttershy put in. “Um, it’s the same kind of spell Trixie used when she had the evil amulet, remember? And…the same weak spot.” “Which is?” “You can dig under it.” Rainbow Dash’s mane was caked with mud. “Kinda a design flaw if you ask me.” She scratched one ear and dislodged a small mudslide of dirt. Then she brightened up. “But now that we’re out, we can help kick that Slender Man’s butt clean out of Equestria!” “What? No!” Rainbow Dash recoiled at the vehemence of Twilight’s words. “Why not?” Dash demanded. “Look at him! He just tried to kill the entire Royal Guard! He’s completely lost it! We gotta stop him before he hurts somepony!” “Like Discord,” Fluttershy said with concern in her voice. “He’s trying to distract the Slender Man all by himself. He could be really badly hurt.” “Yeah, but what I don’t get is why he’s using pies.” Pinkie Pie exclaimed. “It’d make a lot more sense to use my party cannon, or fireworks, or peanut butter!” “Why your cannon?” Applejack asked, confused. “Ah thought it only fired confetti.” “Yeah, but I had this great idea to load it up with rocks and bits of metal! Boom! Instant confetti maker!” “Don’t be ridiculous, Pinkie,” Rarity scoffed. “Imagine that catching on. Why, you might as well just toss rocks. It’s the same principle.” “And why peanut butter?” Rainbow Dash wanted to know. “Oh, well you know sometimes it works, and anyways, peanut butter is really sticky, so even if they don’t have an allergic reaction, you can—” “Girls!” Twilight broke in over Pinkie’s explanation. They all looked at her. “We are not going to fight the Slender Man.” “Why not?” They chorused as one. “We’d never win.” Twilight looked at the Slender Man, who seemed to have given up on hitting Discord with everything and was using two tendrils to swat at him as he dodged to and fro. “The Slender Man is a being of ancient power and isn’t bound by our laws. I don’t even know if he can be killed, and even if he could, it certainly wouldn’t be from a mere spell or two.” “Yeah, but we’ve got the Elements of Harmony,” Rainbow Dash pointed out. “And they worked on him before.” “The Elements only managed to calm him,” Twilight said. “Defeating the Slender Man is beyond even their power. No. This entire battle is stupid. Discord says Princess Celestia has some kind of plan, but if it doesn’t work, we’re all dead.” “Well then, shouldn’t we be doing our best to make sure it succeeds?” Rarity wanted to know. Twilight paused. “I still believe we can get through to the Slender Man. If we don’t attack him and stay out the battle, we might have a shot at convincing him to stop fighting, which we won’t be able to do if we attack him.” “And if he’s about to kill somepony?” Pinkie Pie wanted to know. “Are you going to stand by and let him do it?” “No.” Twilight shook her head. “Never. But we shouldn’t be fighting him at all. We should be trying to stop all this, not making it worse! If we attack him, the only beings he’s even considered remotely to be like friends, there won’t be any chance of peace.” “Twilight,” Applejack laid a hoof on her friend’s shoulder. “Bein’ as ah’m the Element of Honesty, ah feel ah should tell you something.” “Yes? And what’s that?” Applejack leaned forwards, and Twilight lowered her head to listen. Then Applejack headbutted Twilight. It wasn’t a nice headbutt either, as far as that word can be applied to one head meeting another at speed. Twilight saw a lot of stars similar to her cutie mark before her vision cleared, and she saw Applejack standing over her. “It’s too late for peace.” Her friend declared. “Ah’m no judge, but when one pony starts tearin’ other ponies to bits – even if they are clay golem-things – then it’s already too late. Sometimes, the best thing a friend can do is smack another friend in the face. Like so.” Applejack bonked Twilight on the head again with her own. “Now, are ya going to sit here all day and dither over not bein’ friends with a mass murderin’ monster, or are ya going ta help us stop him without anypony getting hurt?” Twilight stared at Applejack in open-mouthed astonishment. Then she looked at her friends. She got to her feet. Without another glance at the battle behind her, she raced with her friends into the Everfree Forest. ---- Scootaloo managed to dislodge the rock pinning her to the ground after her fifth shove. It slowly shifted off her and rolled with a crunch onto the pile of stones that had been the school. Her mind felt muzzy. She remembered last night, and eating cake, and then there had been sleep and morning, and she had gone to school (very reluctantly and ten minutes late), but there had been nopony there. And then there had been the loud voice in the sky, and then a bunch of shouting and explosions and the roof had fallen in on her and… Oh yeah. The Slender Man. Scootaloo carefully picked herself off the ground and stumbled to the top of the mound of rubble that had been her school. There he was. The Slender Man stood in a crater lined by scorch marks and a pool of what looked like some kind of black sludge. Weird. He was also sprouting several of the tendril-things, and he was surrounded by some kind of weird darkness that hurt the eyes. Oh, and he was fighting Discord. Scootaloo didn’t have much to do with Discord, nor was she an expert on history or even current events. She had hung out with him for a while, and by her standards, he was pretty cool. Defintitely above Twilight-cool, and maybe even at Pinkie Pie-cool, but too random for anything close to Rainbow Dash-cool. He was fighting the Slender Man though, using...Scootaloo squinted and rubbed her eyes. Pies, for some reason. Weird. The Slender Man on the other hand was lashing out with his tendrils, forcing Discord to dodge and weave or even teleport out of their reach. Scootaloo hadn’t been too comfortable with the Slender Man from the start, what with the nearly killing her thing and all, but she had relaxed somewhat after Pinkie Pie’s awesome party. She had even given him a small coolness award for his awesome ability to teleport around, even if he could only do it when nopony was watching. But yeah. Scratch that. The Slender Man was now at the bottom of her uncool list, right below Trixie, Diamond Tiara, Silver Spoon and Rarity. Anypony that destroyed all of Ponyville and buried her alive in a school was totally uncool. And dangerous. Scootaloo looked around vaguely. Where was everypony, anyways? She had heard shouting while she had been trapped; voices telling her to shout if she was stuck. She hadn’t shouted, obviously, because she hadn’t been stuck per se, merely inconvenienced. Maybe she should have shouted. Scootaloo turned back to the battle between Discord and the Slender Man. There wasn’t much she could do except watch them. With everypony gone, Scootaloo could theoretically escape, or maybe join in the fight, but even she was willing to admit that either option wouldn’t be much good. She shivered slightly. Not against the Slender Man. She remembered the last time she had tried to run. Nope. Better just to hope Discord managed to pie him to death or something. She brightened up a bit as a thought struck her. Maybe she could get her cutie mark in battlefield reporting! It was different from journalism after all, and she was totally sure she could do a good job of it. “Let’s see,” Scootaloo cleared her throat and spoke to the empty air as if commentating on a hoofball game. “Well, we’ve got the Slender Man guy on one side, and Discord on the other. Uh, it looks like Slender Man is trying to cut Discord up, but Discord isn’t letting him! He’s dodging, he’s ducking, he’s tumbling – and throwing pies at the same time! It’s an apple pie to the face, a blueberry pie to the midriff, and a…uh, looks like a pumpkin pie from here, but the Slender Man sliced that in half!” Scootaloo squinted down at the two figures from her perch. “It looks like the Slender Man is surrounded by some kind of uh, darkness thing. Sorta like mist. Or fog. Or something icky. And it’s, um…growing…I think that’s not a good thing.” The darkness around the Slender Man was expanding. It coalesced out the air and seemed ot suck light from the sky. And it expanded, an ever-growing mass of blackness darker than midnight that sent all the hairs on Scootaloo’s mane standing straight up. “Discord doesn’t seem to want to touch the darkness,” Scootaloo said, her voice cracking a bit with nervousness. “And that seems like a really good idea. He’s moving back, but he’s still tossing pies. That was a banana pie, I think. But the Slender Man’s blocking them, and he keeps attacking with those tentacle-tendril whip-things. But Discord’s dodging them! And he’s moving away from the cloud of darkness and—” Scootaloo’s voice choked in her throat. Discord had jumped back out of the way of the Slender Man’s tendrils and the black cloud. However, two more tendrils had suddenly erupted from the earth, having been concealed under the ground. They seized Discord by both of his mismatched legs and kept him from moving away. And the darkness around the Slender Man seethed and roiled, and expanded outwards quickly now, like an inflating balloon, covering everything in a sphere of absolute black. “Oh no.” Scootaloo forgot her commentary as she watched Discord struggle. “Get out of there, Discord.” There were no pies in Discord’s hands now. Instead he chopped furiously at the tendrils with a fire axe, then pulled out a saw from thin air and attempted to cut through the black lines holding his legs. It was no good. And now the blackness was coming towards him, reaching out like a living thing. Discord tossed his saw to the ground in disgust, and then looked up and saw the oncoming wave of midnight. Discord looked down at the tendrils holding his feet. He looked at the fog of blackness. “Oh sh—” was all Scootaloo heard before the darkness enveloped him.