Velvet hopped out of the collapsed room, her eyes darting frantically. She chose the path away from the soul-chilling aura, but against her own judgement she chanced a glance back and froze. The demon, what Wireframe called the Outsider, ignored her and went straight towards what looked like the grave of her bodyguard.
If I don’t do anything, he’s going to die! she thought frantically. She spun around, magic flowing into her horn. He said light-like spells, right? How about... this! She summoned a basic bright manalight and shoved it towards the Outsider’s path. With a flash, the spell sizzled into its fleshy disguise of pony skin. It opened its mouth when the light hit, black spittle spraying, and despite not hearing a noise, Velvet felt its pain and anger flowing in waves into her pulse through her like waves.
It quickly recovered, focusing its half burnt face at her and taking several steps after her. Velvet’s eyes widened and she galloped away. She managed to stay ahead of the Outsider for several minutes, darting around hallways and getting herself lost. Soon, she realized that the Outsider was gaining, gradually increasing in speed. Velvet glanced back and was horrified to see the monster merely moments from jumping her.
She focused what magic she could gather and clumsily initiated a teleport backwards. With a loud bang, she fell to the floor, gasping for breath. Then she screamed as the Outsider’s dive barely missed her fallen body, the Outsider skidding across the floor. It spun around, empty eyes locking onto her. Velvet teleported away again, but to her dismay, the Outsider stayed in the same position in her eyes.
Suddenly, the creature hissed, pulling a bit of its tail out of the wall.
That’s it! she cheered. Come on, just one more teleport! Her head pounding, she drained the last of her reserves into teleporting sideways. To her relief, the Outsider ended up imbedded in the wall because of the Outsider locking its reference frame to Velvet.
She crumpled against the back wall, shivering slightly as the adrenaline drained from her body. The castle workers walked past her, seemingly not noticing her presence. Since they seemed just the tiny bit translucent, she wasn’t exactly surprised they acted as if they weren’t there. With something dead set on killing her, Velvet couldn’t find the heart to care. All she could focus on was catching her breath.
Once her legs stopped feeling like noodles, she staggered up to her hooves and attempted to find her way back to Wireframe. If fate was in her favor, that thing would stay trapped for a while. She barely took a step when she heard a loud, un-equine screeching behind her. She fearfully glanced back... yes those were black tentacles crawling out of the wall. She turned to sprint but tripped when her legs gave out underneath her. Turns out she hadn’t recovered enough to go on another all out sprint. At best, she could only manage a unsteady limp. Limping got her another twenty meters before the Outsider crawled out, half of its body trailing behind it.
It locked eyes on her and hissed, rolling across the floor at her. Velvet whimpered helplessly, scrambling backwards. “Help me! Anypony, please!”
But like before, it was like she didn’t exist, and the various inhabitants of the castle walked past her. One even nearly walked through her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a maid walk straight into the Outsider’s body and vanish. A maid further ahead suddenly carried an extra load of cleaning supplies, like the first one never existed.
The Outsider jabbed its limbs into the ground, rearing up. Giant scythes formed around its head, raised high into the air. Velvet sobbed, holding her hooves over her head. Wind rushed around her as the monster swung.
10 minutes earlier
“Crap.”
Wireframe fell onto his plot as he managed to wriggle off the spike. The lack of a heart was greatly impeding his ability to move anything but his head, which fortunately didn’t rely on the corpse’s muscles to move since those relied on the energy he drained out of the castle. It still wasn’t enough for him to get across the castle to stop Velvet from getting killed or worse.
Burn a hole?, he thought.
>Calcutating...
>Not enough energy.
Drat. Portal?
>Not enough energy.
Eh, screw you. Fusion rocket?
>Energy available. Requires burning your body.
... Nah. Soulfire it is.
>Warning, extremely limited supply. You may not live-
Wireframe blew a weak raspberry.Exactly. Don’t got enough energy to stop me, asshole. Your loss.
Wireframe’s eyes glowed, and ethereal flames of blue erupted from his hooves. He raised his right foreleg and pointed it at the wall. He was still able to see Velvet through the walls with his enhanced sight, and noticed the Outsider crawling towards her. “Just in time.”
>I must protest-
BURN
His entire leg’s skin peeled off, revealing a cracked human arm, with more holes and missing pieces than ghostly flesh. The shoulder joint exploded, incinerating the wall as it passed through that and beyond. Blue steam shot out of his severed leg. The glow faded from his body. He laughed vindictively as the light went out of his eyes soon after.
Masonry shattered besides Velvet. A hoof stretched out of the darkness, blocking the falling scythes. She saw it, and knew hope. She grasped it, and knew rage.
A black void. Energy. So much energy, swirling around her. And all throughout the sky, points of light - no - points of life, flared and died over and over. Jealousy surged, then suppressed.
More stones exploded as the Outsider slammed its scythes into the ground. It ‘stared’ confusedly at the lack of impact when it realized that it had only managed to murder some rocks. It looked through the dust and saw her standing bipedally, squeezing right between the scythes. In her outstretched right hoof, she held a dismembered leg in a fencing pose, as if she was thrusting the air.
Muscle Memory Downloaded
Without hesitation, it pushed its scythes together, but Velvet had already rolled backwards, glaring at the Outsider from underneath her bangs, the leg held loosely at her side. She snarled.
The Outsider summoned several more limbs and sent them flying towards the unicorn. She ground her teeth and raised the dismembered leg in front of her. The Outsider froze, energy crackling along the length of its scythes. “Knew it,” she said, and swung at the scythes.
The Outsider quickly retreated, backing away from the flailing limb. It brought a pair of limbs together and launched a fireball and the sprinting unicorn. Velvet smirked and stopped, her limbs held out at her side. An updraft from literally nowhere blew the fireball off course. “Plot armor, remember?”
She teleported above the Outsider, narrowly avoiding a spike that sprouted underneath her and fell straight down over the monster, the leg held pointing towards the mass of slicing limbs.
This move left Velvet falling in a predictable path. Like the simple minded force of destruction it was, the Outsider took the bait. Like an inverted onion, pointed shadows bunched up and shot past the leg-sword from a distance and stabbed Velvet from multiple angles. The illusion shattered; instead of being impaled, Velvet was actually holding the leg above her head - the leg which was now solid black. Vines of eldritch energy jumped down the dismembered limb, onto her leg and wrapped around her shoulders and head. Within seconds, an observer would be unable to tell where Velvet ended and the dismembered limb began.
The leg thinned and lengthened, shadows peeling back to reveal a green outlined falchion. ”Cold Front” Velvet whispered, as massive amounts of energy began coursing through the blade, sending dancing sparks across the ground.
Quadruped Mode: On
Unicorn Mode: On
The Outsider summoned a cloud of limbs from its central mass and sent it flying towards Velvet. Half of its limbs were empowered with otherworldly power, in an attempt to overwrite her history with its reality warping attributes. The other half held bricks ripped from the walls and floor. Velvet elegantly alternated between running on four legs and two, flailing the sword in just the right way to slice off the Outsider’s over-extended limbs. Some of the flying bricks Velvet caught with her magic. With a bit of effort, Velvet transformed the bricks into a ring of heavy projectiles orbiting her left foreleg.
She continued stepping forwards. The Outsider had lost too much energy before Velvet received a massive skill boost granted from Wireframe’s arm, and was unable to dodge Velvet’s attacks.
What intelligence the Outsider had made it realize that it could not win this fight, and it hastily retreated, blowing up a large section of the hallway in its wake. Velvet shielded her eyes from the dust. Wait. I literally can’t get killed from these.. Trusting her instincts, she galloped left and right, managing to avoid most of the falling debris and any lethal injuries. In the distance, she saw the Outsider turn around a corner, spitting out a smoke covered filly. She decided to ignore the construct in favor of continuing the chase towards the rest of the Outsider’s body. She judged that she should be able to rip it apart with a few more attacks-
Help...
Error. File Not Responding.
Velvet blinked, wobbling slightly as if she just came out of a stupor. “...Wireframe? Wireframe!” Suddenly she realized where the construct was going: the safe room. She quickly executed a teleport, which shifted the construct that still had a coordinate-locked position (or, in layman’s terms, the construct is always going to be at the same distance, angle, and height, no matter what) intimately linked to Velvet into a chunk of stone front of the room. She glanced back and gasped when she saw Wireframe’s torn out joint. She dashed in and felt his neck. His body felt cold and lifeless.
Tears sprung from her eyes and she collapsed, hugging his limp corpse. A tiny wisp of energy torn free from the unicorn’s horn and into Wireframe’s face. A single, bloodshot eye snapped open as he sucked it in greedily, and then focused its glare on Velvet.
“Why?” he croaked.
She gasped. “You’re alive! I was so-”
“Screw that,” he hissed. “Have you forgotten my words? You are more important than anything on this godforsaken planet. It wasn’t important before, but when you fused with my arm, you can now use this.” He twitched forwards his remaining foreleg and summoned a black, oily marble rolling around his frog. “Congratulations, child. You can now use Zero Energy. This is the stuff we Outsiders are made of. It is what all reality is made of, but convinced into a lower energy state. On its own, it is completely unstable, searching for the nearest clump of matter to copy. When there is a dedicated mind controlling it, however, you can make reality copy whatever form or truth you want.”
He dropped the marble onto the floor, turning the stone underneath into bone that was fused with the stone around it for centuries.
“The Outsider knows too, and now it will abandon all pretense of subtlety and drain what remains of this plane to destroy you. You haven’t seen how we truly fight. There is no trading of blows. There is only an All In. Winner takes all. You just made everything more difficult.”
Velvet shrank back at his words, her ears folded back. A pit of guilt formed in her stomach, ironically for saving someone. Wireframe’s lips twitched slightly, but his glare eventually softened. “Don’t give me that look. I will still uphold my promise... They all have, at minimum, one weakness, no matter what energy levels they have. I will need your help to exploit it.
Velvet closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Got it. Sorry about my mistake earlier. I will do my best to whatever you ask of me.”
“Good. Remember that.” He tried standing up, but tangled up his limbs. “Help me up.”
After numerous tries, Wireframe ended up on Velvet’s back. His legs could barely support the weight of a pencil. “Alright. If you want to survive this day, you must do exactly as I tell you to do. Their weakness in being straightforward and blunt as a supernova holds true no matter how much power they have. It’s the only thing left. The moment it makes its first move, a metaphorical timer starts counting down. These excursions never take more than a few days.”
Velvet blinked and realized that barely a day has passed since her house was destroyed.
The pair slowly made their way out of the castle. Velvet flicked her eyes nervously between the road and the stewing eldritch creature glaring at nothing. “...Um, I was wondering-”
Wireframe’s glare focused on her.
“Eep!”
After a moment, he closed his eyes and exhaled. Wetly. He weakly rubbed his face. “You have one or so hours to ask me anything. Answers may or not be answered.”
Velvet shakily wet her lips. “What.... what did you do, uh, Shtik? I .. I didn’t really get a good feel.”
The corpse gestured at his arm socket. “I calculated that the most efficient option to get you out of danger was to burn off bits of my soul in order to give you enough power to fight back on your own. I stored that energy into my arm and shot it towards you. It has a limited intelligence, an instinct for combat, stored within. As you can see, it tend to be something of a last resort. Next.”
Velvet walked from a few minutes thinking about something else to ask.
“What is... the Outside like?”
Wireframe froze, then slowly fell limp, a weariness entering his form. “...It is the most freest feeling. Of nearly limitless power at your command. At countless worlds to spectate and admire. And... it is also...” He clenched his teeth as the shadows of deleted memories taunted him. “...an eternal hell. What is the point of awesomeness at the cost of your life? I never wanted this. I’m a slave, child. They won’t let me die. I can’t enjoy the beauty of the Outside, because it is so energy dense demons sprout out every second like weeds. We are always outnumbered, fighting against numberless enemies in order to keep these universes intact. And for what? The only difference between the defenders and the attackers are that the defenders now what rationing is.” He bit back a sob, and took several minutes before he composed himself.
“Hope you never see another one of us,” he went on. “If you do, ignore at all costs. Learn from somebody who’s curiosity destroyed any illusion of freedom I ever had, Be glad you don’t know what the Outside is like.”
That pretty much destroyed Velvet’s train of thought, and she ended up thinking about his words as he subtly directed her into some tunnels underneath the city.
When she helped prop the Outsider into a sitting position, no trace of his earlier breakdown showed on his face.
“First lesson,” Wireframe said.
They hid inside the abandoned tunnels underneath Canterlot: The Crystal Caverns. “Give me a bit of your magic,” Wireframe ordered. “If I’m going to teach you, I need to be more useful than a limp noodle.”
Magic flowed into Velvet’s horn. After a sufficient amount built up, she touched Wireframe’s horn with it. She gasped as she felt her mana reserves suddenly dry up. Her vision blurred, a headache forming as she fell back onto her haunches.
Wireframe stood up, chewing. “Sorry. It takes quite a bit of energy to be able to move.”
He walked around Velvet in a circle, scrawling a dirty line. “Please stand up, please.”
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Do you care about Sunny Days?”
“Who?”
“Exactly.” A line of light appeared on his remaining foreleg, which morphed into a triangle. He reared up and punched the ground. A cloud of darkness leaked out of the ceiling of the cavern, swirling into his back. A black, gooey limb shot out of his shoulder socket, clawed and writhing. He snapped his energized eyes towards Velvet’s shocked ones. The arm morphed into a giant key.
No!
She blinked, and the key was sunk into her chest. Flashes of letters danced behind her eyes.
Hello, Velvet[/smcaps, a smooth, sure voice spoke in her mind.
Wha..?
Excuse me, the voice said, returning to Wireframe’s dry, tired voice. That was your default ‘other’ voice because of reasons. What you hear is me modifying your history to have random voices talking to you, which happen to be want I want it to say. This is also happening at the speed of thought, so I will be able to transfer more information to you in the little time we have in the form of hallucinations. Ready? Don’t answer. We don’t have time.”
The world flashed in front of Velvet’ eyes.
Forgive me