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// Prompt #89: Mastery 
// Story: Ponywatching 
// by ThunderTempest 
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Twilight Sparkle could see everything from here. She could hear everything, too. That only made it worse. She closed her eyes, and breathed. In, and out. In, and out. Her senses, magical and mundane, spread over the battlefield below her like a spiderweb. In four and three-eighths of a second, she had pinpointed every single combatant within sight, both pony and non. 

“Twilight,” began Celestia, who was standing just behind and to the left of Twilight, “you don’t have to do it this way, you know.”

“I know,” said Twilight, “but they’re used to your tactics. They can extrapolate on what yours are. I’m an unknown.”

“Still, are you sure you want to do it this way?” asked Celestia. The unspoken question of ‘Can you do it this way?’ hung in the air between them.

“No,” said Twilight, “But I need to get their attention, and while a fourth Alicorn on the feild would do that, I – we decided that they needed to know that they aren’t the only ones with immense power at their disposal.”

“True enough,” said Celestia, “So, shock and awe?”

“Something like that,” said Twilight, turning back to face the battlefield below. Celestia frowned. Twilight had kept her plan unusually close to her chest, which could only mean one of two things; either she was more cunning than Celestia thought, or that Twilight wasn’t willing to share the burden of what she was about to do.

And, as Twilight’s horn lit up with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight successive coronae, Celestia realised what Twilight was going to do. She may not have recognised the spell, but she didn’t need to. The air was crackling, electrified. Sparks of raw magic occasionally jumped from Twilight’s horn to the ground, but the pressure kept building.

“Twilight, you don’t have to do it like this,” said Celestia.

“Yes, I do,” replied Twilight, adding a ninth corona to her horn.

******

The spell flowed easily. Almost too easily, Twilight thought. But such was her curse, her gift. Mastery of her absolute least favourite school of magic, Destruction. She had never cast a spell like this before, and if she’d had her way, she never would have in the first place, or would again. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and Twilight had known that this was the way it had to be since the four princesses had mentioned ‘Shock and Awe’ last night.

She could only sigh, and try to console herself that as cliché as it sounded, this really was for the best, for the overall greater good. She was dimly aware that her mane had shifted from physical to ethereal.

The voice in the back of her head that told her to destroy things cackled at what was about to occur, and Twilight had to admit to a perverse pleasure at unleashing a spell so destructive.

She opened her eyes. They shone with a brilliant, white light.

******

On the battlefield below, both sides paused in their fight, as above them, a purple glow erupted into being on the ridge above them, a giant column of purple light lancing up into the swirling clouds above. Everything on the battlefield flinched as a wall of light swept through them, causing the attackers glow slightly.

Then the heavens opened up, and hell rained down. Purple bolts of death poured from the sky, some piercing the attackers clean through, others leaving only craters and bloodstains in their wake.

Running didn’t help the attackers. Had anypony else been casting this spell, a few might have escaped. Unfortunately, this was Twilight Sparkle. This was what her magic did best, as much as she despised it. Nothing escaped that wasn’t a pony.

Up on the ridge, Celestia glanced at her old student turned equal. It was times like this that she reminded herself that Twilight Sparkle was not just a highly accomplished polymath- when she wanted to be, she was also a living engine of destruction. Celestia didn’t like subjecting Twilight to this, and if she or Luna could, they would swap schools with her in an instant, but this was Twilight’s burden to bear.