I prowled forward, my hooves as silent as dust on the tiled hospital floor. Figures crossed the hallway in front of me, darting shadows that merged with the darkness like pools of ink joining together. I didn’t slow my advance, the constellation of glowing glass shards lighting me in flashes of pale illumination. I caught sight of myself in an intact window as I passed it, and I liked what I saw.
The first one rushed out of the black with a scream, wings bereft of feathers buzzing uselessly at his sides. I created an angled plane of magic beneath his feet, tripping him so that he fell at my hooves, staring up at me with fearful, shadowed eyes. I stepped past him without even glancing down. Then, before he could even think of standing and attacking my flank, my jacket reached out and wrapped around his head. A simple flick of magic sent him smashing into the window I had just been admiring myself in. The glass cracked like a crazed spider web, but didn’t shatter. It was enough, though, the pony wasn’t going to be fighting anytime soon, so I let him go and didn’t lose so much as a step.
The next was a unicorn with half her face bandaged and clearly bleeding. She levitated a fireaxe beside her, and I remember wondering exactly where she managed to find such a thing. I found out later that there was a supply closet full of all sorts of things that could be repurposed into weapons not far from there, but at the time I didn’t worry about it. I had much more fun things to focus on.
I could have ripped the axe from her magic. Heh, it would have been easy. Instead, I let her come to me, swinging the weapon with all the force her magic could muster. I ducked the clumsy swing, then rose inside the reach of the axe and stared the mare in her one good eye. She shrieked, her mouth wide enough to reveal residual burns that went all the way to her throat. It must have been incredibly painful. I reached my magic down that ruined throat, using the damage of the burn as a vector to force my power into her nervous system, then I activated every damaged nerve in her face at once.
Her eyes rolled up and she collapsed in a dead faint immediately, her axe clattering to the floor. I felt a twinge of annoyance at that, I had been hoping for something a little more dramatic. I was being creative, after all, and that effort deserved more of a reaction than instant unconsciousness. Had I just wanted to knock her out, there are much easier ways to do it. Regardless, I didn’t have time to dwell on it because a pair of ponies were advancing on me. I picked up the discarded axe and sent it whirling into them. Bones broke and skulls cracked as I used the blunt handle of the axe to bludgeon them both to the ground before they even had a chance to make a move on me.
I didn’t look at them as I moved past, and so I saw a new shadow appear at the end of the corridor, right at the entrance to the burn ward. This one gleamed in the partial light, and I could feel a sudden tension in the air: his magic probing and clashing against mine. I sent a trio of my fluorescent shards flying at him. He didn’t flinch at the incoming projectiles, either because he didn’t see them as a threat, or because he somehow knew I wasn’t trying to attack him with them. The shards stopped around him, one above and one to each side, and I bent more energy into the magic I held them with to brighten their light and show me my new opponent.
He was a pegasus pony, bald, but with jagged spurs of black crystal jutting from his head and neck in an obsidian mockery of a mane. Blood, both fresh and old, trailed down from the tears these shards made in his skin, mottling his grey coat with patches that looked like wet rust in the poor light. His wings were half-coated in solid crystal, I doubt he could still fly. He had only one eye, which burned red and green and leaked a trail of shadows that my little lights could do nothing to banish. The other eye had been destroyed by a spike of crystal that had pushed out of his eye socket and taken a good chunk of his skull out to make room. A terminal addict, in the last stages of his decline.
He cackled at me, his insane laughter echoing strangely in the hallway. Then the crystal shard jutting out of his eye socket flared with bubbling power and he fired a coherent beam of dark magic at me.
I was, to say the least, shocked. I’d seen some strange magic from the addicts before, but emotion-controlling abilities and actual magical blasts are two entirely different realms of power. I should have anticipated it. Should have remembered my first fight with a terminal addict. He had moved me telekinetically, despite being an earth pony. I should have expected that the ones who had gone that far were capable of impossible things.
At the time, of course, I wasn’t contemplating such things. Instead I reacted on instinct, charging my horn and throwing my own magic against his. The beams met between us, closer to me than to him. For a moment we were locked in a combat of wills. Of course, such a combat could have only one outcome, and the difference in our strengths became obvious quickly.
As my stream of energy overcame his, he intentionally destabilized his magic, turning it from a coherent beam into an unfocused explosion of dark power. The windows shattered and the walls rattled as his magic burst outwards. My jacket’s protections weathered the blast easily, and I was already galloping forward, ready to crush the addict. But that explosion had been a distraction, and it succeeded in blinding me to his position for a critical instant. By the time I had cleared the lingering shadows of his power, he was gone, sprinting into the burn ward and laughing at the top of his lungs.
I barrelled after him, which was a mistake, of course. The moment I was through the door, two blasts of magic lanced out. I put up a quick barrier, but the dark magic wasn’t aimed at me. Instead it was directed at the canisters of compressed oxygen that had been set up on either side of the door. They detonated with a sound like close thunder, ripping the doorway to pieces and quite nearly tearing me apart as well. Only the automatic shields I had built into my jacket saved me from injury, but the sudden pressure changes were still enough to rattle me.
I staggered away from the destroyed door, my ears flat against my hood as my head rang with the force of the blast. I coughed on air that was suddenly supersaturated with oxygen, feeling the light-headed rush of it, as if I had been hyperventilating. It wouldn’t last long, and since the room wasn’t in a sealed environment I wasn’t in any danger of hyperoxia, but it was still a problem in the midst of combat with a powerful, dangerous opponent.
He hit me while I was reeling, his crystal-encrusted wing slapping into my right foreleg. My jacket put up a barrier, the magical protections fortunately unaffected by my own impairment. I’m proud of my spellwork, and this showed that I was right to be proud, as the blow that should have snapped my leg instead merely swept my hooves out from under me. I went down, flailing and still confused, but I kept my wits enough to lash out at the addict. My attack was clumsy, a lash of telekinetic magic drawn out like a glowing magenta whip, swung around without direction or finesse. Still, it was effective, and it forced the addict back for a moment.
I took the opportunity to enact a shield spell, putting myself in a bubble of power that even a terminal addict couldn’t easily break through. It was a waste of power, but, well, I hadn’t exactly been frugal up to this point, and I had no idea that I would be needing every scrap of power I could muster later.
The shield gave me a moment to recover from the blast, and I spent as long as I dared just breathing and letting the ringing in my ears fade to a background buzz. When I let down the shield I almost expected to be attacked immediately, or for the addict to have prepared a nasty surprise for me. Instead the ward was eerily quiet and black as a deep cave.
The lights in the room were gone. Either smashed in the oxygen explosion or taken out by the addict earlier. My shards of fluorescent glass had been mostly crushed to powder, but I managed to find a couple that I could still use, fortunately. I could have just conjured light from my horn, of course, but the little glass lights served as a something that didn’t illuminate me more than they did anything I wanted to see. They didn’t glow much, but with the vision enhancements of my costume, a little was all I needed.
I waited for a moment, listening carefully for any sound that could betray where the addict had gone. I heard many noises, the sounds of rasping breath, of squeaking beds and the insistent hiss of gas escaping a pressurized environment. Nothing overtly threatening, though, and nothing that pointed me in the right direction. Absent any other course, I decided that deeper into the ward was the only option.
I passed by the nurses station, the desk covered in dirty bandages. More were pooled on the floor, the rank stench of infection and the iron tang of fresh blood curling my nose. I levitated myself over the mess, and continued to the beds.
I was surprised to find ponies in those beds. I had assumed that all the patients would be roaming the halls, driven by the dark urges the black crystal had forced on them. Apparently there were injuries too great for even that much black magic to allow a pony to ignore. I hovered a luminous shard close to one of the patients, and what I saw brought bile up my throat.
Black magic feeds on pain. Preferably emotional pain, but physical pain will do just fine, too. Very little hurts as much and for as long as being burned.
They couldn’t have been infected for more than a hoofful of hours. Even if they had fed large amounts of black crystal, it should still have taken time to go as far as I saw with them. Crystal shards jutted out of their flesh at odd angles, growing on them like some onyx fungus. With the terminal addicts I had fought, the crystal had always enmeshed itself in ways that were horrifying, but still fit with the pony. Enhancing them, strengthening them. Not so with these ponies. They had become gardens of black crystal, their bodies spurting growths that would have made it impossible to move even if their injuries had allowed it. Eyes tracked my lights, mouths worked to make sounds that never came. They were alive. They were aware.
I’m sure you can sympathise. I know that I am not without empathy because in that moment I felt for them. And what I felt was rage.
It choked me, cutting off my air and sending my heart pounding with a coherent need to do damage. My anger channelled into my horn, and it lit with my power, banishing the darkness of the ward. I didn’t care if I was seen anymore. I wanted the addict to see me. I wanted him to know exactly what what he had called forth before I crushed him.
I saw him standing at the far end of the ward, a maniacal grin on his face and a wicked-looking knife clutched in his grinding teeth. He didn’t look afraid. “Shadow Slayer,” he said, his words slurred by the knife in his mouth. “They say… you are without… mercy.” He stopped every few words to swallow noisily. I suppose the crystal growth in his skull had damaged the roof of his mouth or something similar. “I don’t… think that’s… true. I wonder… would you save… these ponies?”
“Mercy,” I said, my voice coming out as a harsh rasp as I forced the words through my fury-tightened throat. “Is not about saving anyone.”
The light shining from my horn was more than enough for me to locate the source of the hissing noise: another oxygen cylinder that had been punctured. I grabbed it and tore it open with my magic, flooding the already oxygen rich room with even more of the gas. Then, without another word I teleported out, leaving behind a simple spell used to light candles.
I reappeared in the hallway outside the burn ward just as the spell went off and the whole ward went up in flames. The sound was… satisfying. Deep and powerful, final and cleansing, like the fire that created it. I threw up a barrier that channelled the blast away from the rest of the hospital and out the window into the night. The spear of fire lanced out over the city, momentarily lighting the area as bright as the day. If the Guard didn’t know something was happening at the hospital before, they certainly would now.
I was so busy admiring that flare that I almost missed the addict rushing through the flames at me. He was on fire, of course, but that didn’t seem to bother him at all as he crashed into, and through, my barrier and hit me as hard as a bucking earth pony.
I went rolling backwards. This time I wasn’t stunned by an explosion, so I was able to right myself immediately and respond when he made an immediate follow-up attack. He’d lost the knife somewhere, which I guess was a good thing, but it didn’t seem like he really needed it. He swung his crystal-sheathed wing at me, aiming for my horn. I intercepted with my jacket, but fighting pegasi is about speed and he had lost none of his to the crystal invading his system. He jabbed out with his forehooves, hitting me once, twice, three times before I could defend myself. The protections of my costume dulled the impacts, but did not entirely negate them, forcing me to fight through sudden pain and breathlessness.
He spun, flicking his wings at me in snapping blows that I could barely register coming. Useless for flight, those wings had become formidable weapons. Worse yet, the sheath of black crystal was draining my magic with every strike that landed. I ducked under one hit only to be caught by another, thrown into the wall hard enough to feel it. More punches came at me, but I curled down and let my jacket take the brunt of it.
I lashed out with a burst of magic that threw him back, but was quickly absorbed into the crystal. He responded by firing a beam of dark power at me before I’d had a chance to recover. I dodged to the side, rolling away as he turned his head to track me with that deadly beam. I wasn’t fast enough.
The magic cut into me, a cold sensation of leaching, sucking emptiness. I lost sight of the world around me for a moment. When I came to I was flying down the hallway, my jacket unresponsive and a fresh agony blooming in my shoulder. I hit the floor face-down in a sprawl, falling into a rather undignified position. Were I not fighting for my life, I would likely have been embarrassed. I know Twilight would have been.
He fell on me, wrapping one forehoof around my middle and the other around my neck, squeezing tight enough to hurt. It was immediately clear that he wasn’t trying to kill me, and that made the contact shockingly intimate. His breath, gurgling with the saliva he had to swallow every few seconds, was hot on my ear. He smelled of burnt meat and the cloying stench of sweat. He was warm. Warm enough for me to feel it through the leather of my costume.
“No mercy,” he whispered as I struggled beneath him. “No fear... Whose shadow… are you?”
“I’m not one of your shadows,” I snarled. My mind raced as I searched for a way to end him. Preferably as messily as possible. My jacket had been knocked out of order by the magic he had hit me with, but it was already repairing itself. I’d have it working in moments. I could blast him, but to fully affect him I’d need to call upon black magic myself. That wasn’t a bad idea, but I preferred to keep my facility with dark power as a surprise. If I used it now, I might miss my chance to see Alley Cat’s shocked expression the moment before I made her skull explode. I still had my other trump cards, too, but I was just as reluctant to reveal them. I opted to let him talk and see if I could win without breaking out the big guns.
“No,” he said, his ugly voice so close it was like spiders crawling on my skin. “You are… worse.” His wings swept forward and gently, almost lovingly, touched his crystal feathers to my horn.
I gasped as a shock of power went through my system. It spread from my horn through my body, lightning in my veins. I opened my mouth to scream, but it came out as a moan. A base, savage need flooded me, making me feel warm and sticky in all the right places.
Black magic flowed in from his touch, every pulse of it drawing white magic out of me in equal measure. I couldn’t stop it. The power of the black crystal forced its way through my mental defenses with infuriating ease. Again.
My back arched up against him, and I felt a feline desire to rub myself all over the crystal spurs that jutted from his diseased flesh. There was power in those crystals, and I like power. I couldn’t deny that then, and I certainly can’t now. However, tainting the energy towards lust gave me an opening. I have my preferences, and my lust has targets. Broken, half-dead addicts are not among them. I channelled the energy, and kept my thoughts my own as my jacket came to life again.
“Give yourself… to me,” he said. “There is… so much… to feel.”
“Yes,” I hissed, and I felt him relax as he misinterpreted my answer as acquiescence. “Like pain!”
Not the best line, I’ll admit, but I still like it.
My coat flared with all the telekinetic strength I could give it. It pushed his forelegs aside to let it move, but didn’t throw him off. I had a better plan. The wings of my coat wrapped around his wings, closing tightly. The black crystal was absorbing my magic, but I had more than enough to do what I needed to do here. I yanked his wings out to either side, stretching him out painfully. Then, after a moments pause to let him realize exactly what I was about to do, I jerked hard, and tore his wings from his back.
He reeled back, hissing a whispered scream as he writhed, letting me go as he flopped around the floor. I rose slowly, still feeling the full effects of the dark magic he had poured into me. I couldn’t help but throw a sultry smile his way as I turned on him. I still held his dismembered wings with my jacket, and a delicious thought struck me as I watched him writhing.
“Was that enough?” I asked him. He stared up at me, suddenly going still. His good eye was wide with terror and agony, easily visible through the leaking shadows. I love that look. I want to wrap it around me and feel it against my coat like the leather of my costume. It’s a look that tells me everything is right with the world. “Of course not.” I grinned at him, watching the fear increase as I raised his severed wings above my head. “After all, there is so much to feel, right?”
I brought the wings down, and using their crystal-solid edges as a pair of blunt cleavers, I hacked his remaining limbs off.
It took several blows apiece, I wasn’t working with the greatest clarity or precision. I kept grinning as I did it, and I think I was chuckling to myself as well. I’d like to think that I was exacting vengeance for what he had done to the ponies in the burn ward, but, well, I wasn’t thinking of them at the time. Perhaps it was vengeance still, if not intended as such.
When I was done I threw the broken wings aside. I stomped down on his head, smashing the crystal that grew from his missing eye. He looked up at me with the kind of helpless plea that makes it all worthwhile. “You are not going to survive this,” I told him. “But if you tell me what I want to know, it doesn’t have to get any worse before it ends.”
“You are… everything… they hoped,” he said, and I could hear the defeat-tinged awe in his voice.
“I don’t care what they think,” I said. “What was your plan here? Why take over the hospital?”
“A… trap.”
My eyes narrowed. “I know that. What kind of trap?”
“A trap… for the… Guard.”
“The Guard. How? Details!”
“They have… a new commander,” he said, and I felt the unnatural lust of the dark power burn away in a flash, replaced by a new sensation. I would not call it fear, no, but it was stronger than concern. Understanding, and worry. Terrible worry. “Just arrived… He will… come to see… what we… have done… take charge… Nodes of… black crystal… will detonate… and infect… the Guards… We will… make sure… most goes… to him.”
“Celestia’s light!” The invocation felt like ashes in my mouth. The Princess wasn’t going to save Twilight’s brother. She didn’t know what was happening, what we were fighting. There was only me. Alone.
“Will you… give him… the same mercy… you gave… them?” he asked, his eyes flicking to the burned doorway of the burn ward. I growled at him as he laughed quietly as he saw my distress.
“I won’t have to,” I snarled, then wrapped my jacket around his head and twisted until it joined the rest of his extremities. “Because he’s not going to end up like them. Or like you. I’m going to stop you. Not just here, not just now, but everywhere and forever! I will not let you poison Equestria!” I threw his head to the side and turned back towards the rest of the hospital.
“I will stop you,” I said, no longer just speaking to the dead addict. “No matter what it takes.” Then I set off, my determination renewed. I should have been more careful. I should have left. I should have found another way to protect Twilight’s brother. But I didn’t. I didn’t even consider it. I was riding high on an infusion of dark power that served to obfuscate a fact that should have been foremost in my mind:
I was running out of magic.