Even though she’d made other arrangements to settle her debt, Rarity did spend a full day in Crossroads trading spells with Kazakh Thul and Pinkie Pie. The rest of the party spent the time training, and helping man the depleted defenses while the priests attended to the guards’ wounds, just in case any of the remaining undead tried to attack. For the most part, however, it was a day of rest.
During lunch, Surprise tapped Pinkie Pie on the shoulder, and asked her if they could talk privately.
“Sure!” Pinkie Pie said, and led the other pegasus outside and up onto the roof of the inn. She broke off a bit of smoke from the chimney, and shaped it into a nice cushy campfire-scented cloud for the two of them to rest on, pushing it up into the open sky, far out of earshot.
Surprise flew up and joined her on it, plopping down and wiggling to get herself comfortable.
“So what’d you want to talk about?” Pinkie asked. “Is this the part where you kill me?”
Surprise laughed. “I’m pretty sure they’d figure out who did it,” she said, waving a wing to indicate the guards on the walls below them, along with everyone out on the streets. “No, I just wanted to let you know that I was taking off, so you didn’t waste time looking for me. I’m not charmed by the cult anymore, and I don’t want anything else to do with Bright Valley, ever. Seriously, buck that town into the bay already.”
“What?!” Pinkie Pie said. “But… what about your friend? And mommy?”
“They’re dead, or close enough,” Surprise said. “I’m not going to throw my life away for nothing. Besides, I heard about an opportunity up north. Something more my speed.”
Pinkie narrowed her eyes. “More treasure, less fighting?”
Surprise grinned, and punched Pinkie in the shoulder with a forehoof. “Exactly! I hear these guys are just throwing money at their recruits, if they can show they’ve got any skill, and that sounds like my kind of gig.”
“But you can’t go!” Pinkie Pie said. “I’ll miss you! And what if they turn out to be evil cultists for some other cult? What if it turns out they’ve already been taken over by the blue metal cult?” She gasped, and set her hooves on Surprise’s shoulders. “What if we end up fighting each other?”
“If we do, I’ll miss you too,” Surprise said, sitting Pinkie back down. “No promises about your friends though!”
With that, she launched into the air, and headed off to the north.
“And you just let her go?!” Rainbow Dash said, when Pinkie rejoined the rest of the party.
“What was she going to do? It’s not like we own her,” Applejack said.
“Technically, we do,” Twilight replied. “We took her as a prize in battle. As adventurers, we’re allowed to keep anything we find.”
“We’re better off without her,” Fluttershy said. “She wasn’t actually very good at fighting the kind of things we fight. I think I’m a better shot with a crossbow than she is, and I’m hardly an archer.”
“She uses techniques to increase her rate of fire and make sure her bolts hit hard, at the expense of accuracy,” Twilight said. “I’m not sure she really should be using them all the time, especially with the expensive custom bolts she likes to use.” She paused, and shrugged. “If she wants to leave, we should let her. We certainly don’t need her.”
“Also, she’s cloud-colored, good at being sneaky, and has like a fifteen minute head start by now,” Pinkie Pie said, pouting.
“Indeed,” Rarity said. “Even if we’d want to keep her with us, she’s hardly worth the effort to chase down.”
That night, the adventurers set up camp in the large field behind the inn, with all the other refugees from the undead-infested farms and other temporary residents. Normally it was used as a training area and sports field, but for now it was more important that people had somewhere to stay inside the walls. A lot of people were taking advantage of that opportunity – there wasn’t even room to set up a Grove of Respite without asking people to move their tents temporarily while the trees grew in, and since they were in town with food and water readily available, it didn’t seem worth the effort.
The temple would have given them rooms, but spending time inside a Hallowed area was unpleasant for Rarity, as an undead, and the rest of the party wanted to stick together. Of course, Rarity then proceeded to not show up at their camp, as she hadn’t yet finished copying spells out of Kazakh Thul’s spellbook. His tent was within line of sight of the party’s, if they flew up about fifteen feet to see over all the other tents, so with a bit of grumbling they decided that that was close enough. It did mean that they had to post a real watch, since they didn’t have a sleepless undead to cover for them.
Applejack was on fourth watch, just before dawn, when she spotted some of the stars wobbling and blurring and winking out, in several different places in the sky.
She crept over and quietly woke up Rainbow Dash. “Shh. Dash, I think something mighty strange is flying up there, any idea what –“
Dash had barely opened her eyes when the creatures attacked. Great balls of fire rained down on Crossroads from above, splashing onto the roofs of buildings and into the mass of tents, setting fire to wood and canvas and flesh alike! Elsewhere, sticky masses of webbing gummed up tents and doorways, holding the citizens of Crossroads in place like bugs awaiting a giant flying spider made out of fire!
The adventurers’ campsite was in the splash from one of the fireballs, waking everypony up quite efficiently, as the screams of pain and panic filled the air. Applejack and Rainbow Dash nimbly dodged out of the way of the spreading flames.
A slightly singed Twilight leapt up from her bedroll, and narrowed her eyes. “Flame drakes!” she said. “They’re trying to hover up out of range. Let’s just see about that!” Her horn glowed brightly, and a similar aura appeared around one of the blurry flying creatures’ tails, freezing it in place in midair. It frantically flapped its wings to stay aloft.
Applejack nosed into her pack and took out her wand of faerie fire. She waved it around until the magic activated, and a trail of sparkles shot up to outline and illuminate one of the other flyers. With the blur eliminated, it was indeed clearly a flame drake, with a diamond gnoll riding on its back. The drake was armored, but the rider was not.
Pinkie Pie glanced at her bombs sadly, but the drakes were far out of range. “Raaaaarity!” she shouted, “We neeed you!”
“I’m coming!” came Rarity’s reply, barely audible through the din. “But this crowd is… oh, Nightmare take them!” In a flash, she appeared among the others. “What is it you needed, dear? Hopefully not a dimension door.”
“I want some speed so I can get close enough to those drakes and knock them out of the sky!” Pinkie said.
Rarity smirked. “I’m not sure that’ll be necessary. We do have dragons of our own, after all.”
The four skeletal sky dragons converged on the drake Applejack had lit up, surrounding it and savaging it badly. Fluttershy glowered at it angrily, and its eyes rolled back up into its head as it plummeted to the ground, landing on top of the stables with a wet crunch. The rider was flung from his saddle, and from the shape of his neck and spine, didn’t survive the landing.
Rainbow Dash hovered just off the ground, looking between the splattered drake and the others flying more than a hundred feet overhead. “By the time I get up there, will there even be any left?”
“That’s why we neeeeeed speeeeed!” Pinkie Pie said. “Drink the pink potion, Dashie. It’s a better beast shape. Think ‘big bird’!”
Rainbow grabbed the indicated infusion off Pinkie Pie’s belt, and belted it down… and her skin shifted and squirmed and then expanded outwards massively, leaving her in the shape of a giant, rainbow-feathered falcon. She gave a triumphant cry, getting the attention of all the nearby drakes.
The drake Twilight was trying to grapple telekinetically managed to break free of her hold, and dove down to slam into the ground on top of a family of earth pony farmers, who scrambled away from its claws – but it ignored them, snapping viciously at Twilight instead, scratching her side with its teeth, the heat from its jaws cauterizing the wounds. The rider tossed an all-too-familiar cloud of green dust at the party, catching half of them in the glittering explosion that followed. Everyone but Twilight managed to close their eyes in time, but she cursed as her vision was obscured by sparkles.
The glitter seemed to act as a magnet, and two more drakes converged on the party, charging at Fluttershy and Macintosh, and leaving the party half-surrounded by grounded enemies. One of the riders glittered the other half of the party, while the third gummed up the whole area in a web, entangling Macintosh and Rarity.
There were more loud THUMPS elsewhere, as other drakes landed in other parts of the camp, to pick on weaker targets.
Twilight gave up on her telekinesis, and grabbed her hammer, swinging at the drake and its rider blindly. After all the times she’d been facing mirror-imaged, displaced, or invisible opponents, she’d been practicing fighting without using sight, but she still managed to miss the drake entirely. She did hit the diamond gnoll on its back, cracking several of his ribs.
Applejack lit up another drake with her faerie fire wand, since they were still blurred and she was useless against targets she couldn’t see clearly. Pinkie Pie splashed fluid from one of her bomb vials all around, dispelling the web. Rarity, freed from her bonds, cast the requested haste spell, and a flash of energy washed over them and sped up the party’s movements. It also sped up her skeletons, who’d come back to assist, one each flanking with Twilight and Macintosh while the other two focused on the drake that was menacing Fluttershy. Split up like that, they were less dramatically effective, but two of them did manage to draw blood, and the one on Macintosh’s drake distracted it enough for the giant pony to ram his lance into its scaly chest.
Rainbow Dash shoved Fluttershy aside, and rammed her giant beak into the face of the drake that had attacked the flutterpony, shattering its skull. As the nearly headless corpse collapsed at her feet, she plucked the rider off its back and shook him back and forth, lightning coursing through his body, until his back snapped and his lower half flew off into the crowd.
Pinkie Pie cackled maniacally. “Yes, my minion, destroy them all!”
The rider Twilight had mangled clutched at his chest, and shot up a firework, which exploded overhead. There was a rush of wings, and another fireball splashed across the party, tossed laterally by one of the other drakes, who had given up on savaging the civilians and were now closing in on the real threat. The other rider shot magic missiles at Rainbow Dash, the bolts slamming painfully into her feathers but doing nothing to slow her down.
Twilight suffered another painful bite from the drake in front of her, but still couldn’t see. Hasted by Rarity’s magic, her blind flailing was faster than ever, and while it did manage to hit the drake it wasn’t a hard enough hit to take it down. Pinkie Pie tossed a bomb to help her, and while it exploded in a ‘whump’ of force that knocked the drake off its feet, both the drake and rider survived the blast. It was up to Sparky II to finish the job – he leapt onto the downed drake and tore out its throat with his teeth, while rending the rider with his claws.
“That’s enough fire from you ruffians,” Rarity said, and cast a spell to protect the party. “You should really know better than to focus all your energy on a single element.”
“It’s been working just dandy for ‘em so far,” Applejack noted.
Opal leapt onto the drake Macintosh was fighting, and dragged it down, tearing out its abdomen and sinking a claw into the rider, holding him in place for Macintosh to impale with his lance. The diamond gnoll convulsed, then slid off the bloody tip to slump lifelessly in the saddle of his dying mount.
For the moment, the party was free of enemies, but the moment was unlikely to last long with more flame drakes closing in. Fluttershy used the brief respite to cast a spell to spread healing magic over the party.
“Garble, Crackle, grapple the riders!” Rarity said, and her other two sky dragons flew off to intercept the incoming second wave, easy grabbing hold of the riders, as instructed.
The two drakes whose riders weren’t grappled turned tail and ran, leaving a blast of wind as they shot off into the night at incredible speed. Not fast enough to outpace the sky dragons, but fast enough to vanish thoroughly into the darkness.
The other two stayed to try to save their riders, but had little luck. The riders were torn apart by the skeletons almost immediately, and Rainbow Dash flew up to help finish off the drakes.
The party found, unsurprisingly, that the armor the drakes were wearing was made of the blue metal, and thus a curse to be buried or destroyed. The drakes and riders did have some other magical equipment for them to claim – rings of minor cold resistance, and weak cloaks of resistance and rings of protection, as well as a few scrolls and some coin.
Meanwhile, Crossroads was on fire. While the attack had seemed focused on the refugee camp, the drakes had first made sure to set fire to every building in town in the initial assault. The acolytes and apprentice priests who could have summoned enough water to put out the dozen or so fires were focusing on getting people under shelter, in case this wasn’t the only attack – the temple itself was made of stone, and not flammable, so it remained a safe haven.
“I suppose we’ve learned our lesson,” Rarity said, watching the buildings burn.
“Don’t ignore collateral damage?” Twilight asked.
“Nope,” Pinkie Pie said. “Next time, steal the fire extinguishers!”
Fluttershy finished a summoning, and half a dozen water elementals appeared. Unfortunately, most of the fires were on the buildings’ roofs, since the attack had come from far overhead. “Twilight, can you lift them up onto the buildings? I don’t think they’ve been burning long enough for the fire to get inside yet.”
“Reckon she’s not the only one who can help with that,” Applejack said, wrapping her arms around one of the watery creatures, and taking to the air. Rainbow Dash swooped down and picked up another pair in her talons, carrying them towards the more distant flames.
The elementals didn’t last long, but they extinguished the fires instantly on touch – and as Fluttershy had said, it had been less than a minute since the buildings were ignited. Working together, Applejack, Twilight, and Rainbow Dash managed to get them in place before the summoning spell expired, and that dealt with the bulk of the flames.
Unfortunately, one of the buildings that didn’t get put out completely was the town mill, and the flour dust inside ignited explosively, destroying the building. No one was injured, but it was a total loss.
The refugees also lost many of their possessions to the smaller fires in the camp… and despite the party’s quick response and the efforts of the priests, there were scores of dead, including many of the worst-drained guards who’d been resting in an outdoor hospital tent that had been targeted deliberately. When the sun rose, it shone down on a town where orcs and ponies went about the grim business of disposing of the dead with little hope for the future.
“Wait just one cotton-picking second,” Applejack shouted at the priest who was directing the workers to bury the dead in a mass grave. “Aren’t you gonna give these folk a chance to come back with a thought in their head?”
The priest frowned. “Even if they do remember what they think is their past life, the evil spirit which animates an undead is no longer a person we can trust. We could animate them as skeletons or zombies, and put them to work watching the walls, but we feel they deserve better than to be used as tools.”
“They deserve a chance to un-live the rest of their un-lives,” Applejack said. “You’ve got plenty of dungeons to store ‘em in in case they come back wrong. I saw ‘em.”
“The dungeons are Hallowed. They won’t rise there,” the priest replied.
“Then put them there after, or just put ‘em down again. Give them a chance!”
The priest placed a hand on Applejack’s forehead, and said in a calming tone, “Please, adventurer…” He winced, as Applejack’s teeth sank into his palm. “Please let go of my hand.”
Applejack spat, then whirled and whipped her tail at him as she stalked off down the street. She soon ran into Rarity and Kazakh Thul, with their skeletons arrayed in formation. Thul was riding on his zombie drake – one of six, now – while Rarity hovered in midair with her dark cloak hanging down her sides, hiding her legs and making her look like some sort of wraith.
Rarity turned, and a fanged smile shone beneath her hood. “Ah, Applejack, excellent. I was just about to gather everypony. We must move quickly, if we’re to strike before the zebra forces are ready for our assault.”
“Zebra forces?” Applejack asked, flattening her ears.
“The priests’ scouts spotted a small force heading this way,” Kazakh Thul growled. “The drakes’ strike was to soften us up for the real attack, but they couldn’t have expected to lose so many. We must take the initiative, and drive them before us!”
It didn’t take long to find the others – they were all out in the field behind the inn. Twilight was wearing a blindfold and sparring with Rainbow Dash, while Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie cheered them on, using Sergeant Macintosh as a couch.
“I don’t like it,” Applejack said. “If there’s an army after us, I’d rather be a treed squirrel than a groundhog.”
“A strike could work to our advantage,” Twilight said. “Since we’re dictating the time of the attack, we can have all our spells cast ahead of time, and we can do a lot of damage before they can really respond. As long as Rarity prepared another Haste, we should be able to disengage easily. Plus, fighting away from the town lets us throw around fireballs and bombs without worrying about collateral damage.”
“Taking down an entire army sounds kind of awesome,” Rainbow Dash said. “I’m in.”
“I don’t know…” Applejack said. “It sounds like you’re describing a sneak attack, but with that army of undead there… we’re about as sneaky as a mariachi band. And you’re no sleek weasel yourself, sugarcube. No offense.”
“I can mix up invisibility potions for everypony,” Pinkie Pie said eagerly. She frowned. “Well, not for the skeletons. They don’t drink.”
“So you’re saying we should leave Kazakh Thul behind?” Twilight said. “Or just his undead.”
Kazakh Thul frowned. “I go nowhere without my undead. I’m far too old to stand on the front lines.”
Twilight nodded. “Then wait here, ancient one, and let us take care of everything.”
The party set out a few hours after dawn, heading into the rising sun in search of the small army the priests’ scout had spotted. Applejack was the forward scout, slinking through the grass like a ghost until she peered over the top of the ridge and spotted the enemy force.
It was a small army – about a hundred diamond gnoll archers, and a hundred zebra hoof-soldiers with lances and heavy armor. There were also a dozen armored leucrotta with diamond gnolls riding on their backs, and of course the two remaining fire drakes.
Strangely, Applejack didn’t see any sign of officers or non-combat personnel. The latter might be explained by the relatively short trip back to their home territory – it was only about a day’s march, so they could conceivably do without a baggage train – but there was no obvious explanation for the lack of leadership.
Regardless, the army seemed to be marching in close formation, as disciplined a force as she’d ever seen.
Applejack considered the formation, then carefully positioned herself atop the ridge, so as to be visible but not that visible. Then, she lowered her goggles over her eyes, and tilted her head to reflect the light from the sun onto the face of one of the leucrotta.
The beast whipped its head towards her immediately, and she could see it say something quietly to its rider, who pulled out a horn. Faster than she’d expected, the army wheeled and charged towards her as one.
She ran.
She was faster than the archers and the armored zebras, but slower than the leucrotta and of course much slower than the drakes. Still, she had a good head start, and aside from dodging a pair of fireballs from the drakes – which she evaded easily – she made it back to the party with dozens of seconds to spare.
“Get ready,” she said. “I drew off their scouts, they should be on us any second.”
Sure enough, a dozen leucrotta burst from the smoke and flames where the fire drakes had set the grass on fire, and charged towards the party.
“Yeah, we kind of noticed,” Rainbow Dash said, as Pinkie Pie passed around a communal fire resistance infusion, and Rarity sprinkled diamond dust over everypony while she tried out one of her own new spells. “What with the drakes setting everything on fire and all.”
As if they were listening in, the two drakes bathed the party in flames, to no effect, then swooped down to attack the party from behind. Pinkie Pie was ready for them, and hit one of the diving drakes with an explosion of force that knocked it out of the air, and turned the last fifty feet of its dive into an uncontrolled crash. As it struggled to get to its feet, Applejack’s dagger flew out of nowhere and embedded itself into the drake’s eye, then pulled free and returned to her mouth. The drake collapsed.
The other drake sank its fangs into Pinkie Pie’s barrier as it landed, and she flinched from the feedback. Both riders fired magic missiles at her – to no effect, as her invisible shield intercepted the attacks.
Twilight stepped towards the surviving drake and and slammed her hammer into the side of its head, following up with a blow to the rider’s chin. Macintosh tried to finish it off with a quick lance charge, but his weapon skidded off its armor.
“Rarity, have your dragons form a wall!” Twilight shouted, as Rainbow Dash joined in against the drakes, letting loose a lightning-wracked scream that knocked out the surviving drake’s rider.
“Of course, dear,” Rarity said, directing her dragons to stand between the party and the oncoming leucrotta, while she cast a mirror image spell to make herself less of an easy target.
The leucrotta cavalry crashed into the line of sky dragons, which held, although in Crackle’s case it was a close thing as one of the leucrotta managed to dislodge a good chunk of his rib cage, and all three lances found their mark. Pinkie Pie turned and tossed a bomb at Crackle’s attackers, engulfing them in thick green smoke.
Applejack charged at the surviving drake-rider, her rapier stabbing unerringly towards his kidney – only to embed itself in his saddle. Before she could pull back, the rider threw a cloud of glitter in her face, blinding her and ending any hopes she had of hiding in the near future. But before he could properly gloat, Sergeant Macintosh skewered him on the end of his lance, showering the blinded rogue with bits of shredded lung as the tip emerged from the unfortunate gnoll’s chest.
Meanwhile, Twilight brutally executed the remaining drake, and threaded her way between two of the sky dragons to engage the leucrotta. Dash joined her, letting loose another ear-piercing screech that engulfed three leucrotta and their riders. Rarity sent a small ball of fire rolling past her, which bounced off a reeling leucrotta’s face.
The gnolls and leucrotta weren’t sitting idle, but between their regeneration, resilience, and Rarity’s stone skin spell, the four sky dragons stood up to the dozen leucrotta and their riders, and it was a leucrotta that was first to fall. It didn’t help that the grass was on fire near the middle of the line where Rarity’s bouncing fire ball had ignited it, and near the south end where Pinkie’s bomb had gone off.
Pinkie threw another bomb at the north end of the line, to let those leucrotta join in the fun, while Macintosh headed around to the south where the cloud had lost its poisonous properties, and attacked from the side. Fluttershy, figuring that the sky dragons were the weakest link in the line, hovered behind Crackle and healed him with negative energy.
In the center of the line, Rainbow Dash’s efforts were starting to have some effect – three leucrotta were down, along with one of the riders.
“We need to back off, and let the army handle this!” one of the panicked gnolls said, in his own bestial language. He’d lost his mount, and looked much less confident facing gigantic skeletal sky dragons without it.
“No, you fool, we have them pinned down. If we can just hold on for another minute or two, they’ll be trapped!”
Rarity chuckled at the exchange, which they probably hadn’t expected anypony to understand, and sent a volley of magic missiles (and one flaming sphere) at the most wounded leucrotta near Twilight, finishing it off. “You won’t last a minute, darling,” she said quietly, as her sky dragons tore into the enemies, taking down several more of the leucrotta.
The enemy stood to fight, but was getting increasingly less effective as their numbers dwindled. Pinkie Pie threw another bomb into their line, while Twilight, Rainbow, Macintosh, and the sky dragons continued to fight them hoof to hoof to lance to claw…
And the line broke, or perhaps ‘collapsed’ would be a better way to put it. The last surviving leucrotta tried to run, but didn’t get far before Pinkie’s sticky fire finished it off. One of the gnolls suffered the same fate, while another had the back of his head bashed in by Twilight’s hammer. Only two diamond gnoll riders managed to break away from the party and go running back towards the army to warn their friends, and Twilight and Macintosh ran them down before they even got to the next line of smoke.
“How long have we got until the rest get here?” Twilight asked, wheeling back to rejoin the others.
“I can’t see past the smoke,” Rainbow Dash complained, after flying up to take a look and still not being able to see anything.
“They seemed to think it would be a minute or two,” Rarity said.
Pinkie Pie washed off Applejack’s glitter with one of her dispelling bombs. “Enough time to go with plan A?” she asked, glancing at the row of invisibility infusions she’d prepared.
“They’re already alert, so it won’t be a true sneak attack, but we can use the dragons as bait,” Twilight said. “Everypony else, get invisible and off to the side. When we attack, hit the archers. Otherwise it’ll be too easy for them to focus fire.”
They could hear the rumble of the zebras’ hooves before they could see them, but soon enough five ranks of twenty zebra each emerged from the smouldering grass fire where the drakes had tried to burn down Applejack, fixed their lances at the dimly-seen sky drakes half-concealed in the smoke where the party had fought the leucrotta, and charged, spreading out their lines so as to be able to curve around both flanks and surround them. Behind them, a hundred archers started firing volleys of long-range flaming arrows, a few of which found their marks but did no visible damage to the skeletons.
The zebras continued their charge towards the waiting sky dragons, who stared them down implacably. After several more volleys from the archers, they were just on the verge of finally reaching their targets when the sky dragons lifted up into the air out of reach, as one.
As the archers adjusted their aim, a massive whirlwind appeared at one end of their line, and quickly swept down it, sucking more than a dozen hapless gnolls into the air. Farther down their line, a unicorn, a griffon, a purrsian, and a massive earth pony appeared out of nowhere, slaughtering everyone within reach.
Their return fire was scattered and ineffective, especially with most of the targets protected by stoneskin and resistant to fire. The whirlwind scooped up almost half the remaining archers, and dumped them all in a huge pile of tangled limbs, which suddenly exploded in fire and poisonous smoke, as a giggling pink pegasus appeared nearby.
The remaining archers – maybe a quarter of the original number – tried to run for the line of zebras, who’d turned back around when the archers were attacked, and were already running back across the field. Before the archers got halfway, they were scooped right back up by the whirlwind, lifted high into the air and dropped to their deaths. Four out of the hundred survived to take cover behind the zebra line.
The whirlwind didn’t shy from scooping up zebras, and picked up several dozen before flying up into the air again – this proved to be fatal for it, since unlike the archers, the zebras were strong melee attackers and were able to burst the elemental from inside. Unfortunately, their victory was somewhat hollow, since falling more than a hundred feet proved to be equally fatal for them.
The survivors spread out into a line, charging at the laughably small force which was charging back towards them. Twilight, Macintosh, Rainbow Dash, and Applejack were each completely surrounded by zebras, two ranks deep, and Twilight grunted as one of the charging lances hit its mark, piercing her armor and breaking through the stony covering of her skin to scratch along her coat. She lay about with her hammer, and then everything exploded in fire, which barely hurt her but badly wounded the zebras pushing close on every side, leaving them too weak to stand up to her blows. A few seconds later, more explosions hit near Applejack and Rainbow Dash.
Then Pinkie Pie joined in with her bombs, and before half a minute had passed, there were no more zebras to fight – just five piles of smoldering corpses, and four rather winded fighters.
“So, the haste spell is almost gone,” Pinkie Pie said. “Is it time to run away?”