I've gotta say, that day, a long-held dream of mine came true. See, I'd always wanted to know what it was like, being the final boss of a video game. It sounds kinda silly, but think about it for a bit: The villain, the final boss? He's the guy you'll usually remember when the game ends. The big bad gets some of the best lines, he makes the plot move, and he tends to be the guy that everyone remembers best. Don't believe me? Well, let me ask you this then...
Where would the story be without a villain? Remove Naraku from Inuyasha, and there would be no plot at all. Naraku, his origins, his machinations, are central to the plot. Remove Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the heroes would go about leading peaceful, happy lives. Chrono Trigger is all about stopping Lavos: Without that gigantic alien porcupine, the entire world would have been at peace. 99% of Final Fantasy 7 is just about following Sephiroth around the world. Who'd read or watch Batman if he didn't have such a great Rogues Gallary? Hell, remove Skeletor from He-man, and you'd just have a story about a mary-sue-ish prince who uses a magic sword to gain an excuse to walk around in his underwear without anyone commenting on it. The villain, nine times out of ten, makes the story. The better the villain, the better the story becomes...
And it's always cool when two villains fight it out.
I've digressed a bit, sorry. Back to the story...
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*I have good news, and bad news.*
As I cracked our knuckles with a vicious grin on our face, I blanched inside. I figured that my grand plan might have some drawbacks. After all, we had essentially eaten what, back home, would have been a sun-sized nuclear reactor. While Equestria ran by different rules, and stars were... smaller here, it didn't change the fact that I had broken one of the biggest rules on the Evil Overlord list, by eating an energy field that was probably a great deal larger than my head. There had to be repercussions to that...
'Good news first.'
*The star is stable. It seems to have merged completely with our body, so currently, there is no risk of us going 'critical mass', as you might say back home.*
'That is good. The bad news?'
*What you said earlier to Sparkling Sunset, regarding our being at minimum capabilities, is correct: Our body is still weak from revival. We've sustained several injuries at a point in time when our body is still in what you might call a start-up mode. When the archon blasted you earlier, you felt no pain because your nervous system, in particular the portion which detects pain, had not yet fully revived. That lightning bolt fixed that, giving us what you might call a jump start, but we're still in a body that hasn't had sufficient time to recover. The star is giving us power, but our stamina will run out in, at a guess, five minutes. After that, we won't be able to maintain this form, or even consciousness. So, we need to beat him, and quickly, or we'll be easy prey for him.*
'Right, got it.' On the outside, my smile grew larger, and more feral. 'Then that means we don't have time to dick around.'
Arabus raised his hands up, spreading them wide in preparation for another one of his 'Thunderclaps'. No, it is not a lame pun. Look, he claps, and it makes thunder. What the fuck else should I call it?
"Oh no, you are not doing that shit anymore," I said, rushing forward, faster than I could have imagined possible. Witnesses claim that I teleported. Personally, I think it was just a flash step. What's a flash step? Ah, well... there's a thing called 'The Persistance Of Vision'. Basically, if a change occurs within the span of one fifteenth of a second, it is impossible for eyes, or at least human eyes, to see it happen. So, essentially, in the span of one fifteenth of a second, I had covered the distance between the two of us, appearing almost as if by magic right in his face, and had one hand on his throat, and the other on the wrist of his left arm. I was fast now. But not just fast.
The look of slow, horrific realization crossing Arabus face was beautiful. It became even more sublime as I asked, "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" Before he could respond, I brought my mouth, my wonderful, horrible, monstrous mouth full of teeth down upon his left shoulder, and bit down...
Sheogorath was right: Clouds do taste like butter and tears.
My right arm finished what my mouth started, and I pulled his cloudy arm off at the socket. I drew my head back, bits of cloud streaming from my teeth, and as Arabus was just beginning to scream, to even begin to feel the pain of my bite, I spun, and brought the arm around, hitting the cloud fiend in the face with, on a being of flesh and blood, would have been the wet end, knocking the cloud fiend back and increasing the distance between him and Sanctuary.
All of that transpired in less than fifteen seconds.
I had earned every trophy and achievement in Splatterhouse: I know exactly how to fight like a bloody, ruthless monster if the situation calls for it. Given the body I had to work with at the moment, that was the only way I could truly be expected to fight. I'd have loved to have engaged him in something more refined, like a battle of spells or something of that nature, but sadly, I had yet to get a handle on spell casting.
Arabus clutched at the spot where he'd once had a left arm, his face a study of anger and pain. His expression turned determined, and he seemed to concentrate for a moment. I suspect that he was trying to grow back his arm. Well, given that his body was mostly fat (How the fuck a cloud can be fat, I'll never know), he had mass to spare. However, after a moment, his expression turned shocked, and he looked down at the injury...
I'll admit, I was kinda of taken aback as well: The remnants of his left shoulder were turning black. Not the black of a dark thunder cloud, but rather the same sort of black that my body was composed of: The kind of black that you might find at the bottom of a deep cavern, one that had never seen light, and barring human intrustion or the earth splitting in two, never would. It was the darkness that even light might shun.
*Unlike our claws, it seems our mouth can inject our foes with our essence.*
'That doesn't look like pure awesomeness, so I'm pretty sure that my essence isn't in there. That looks more like what I imagined pure bastard would look like, so I'm thinking it's all you in there.'
*Heh.*
Arabus, desperate, gripped the darkness, and ripped it off completely, tearing a large chunk of his mass off with it. With the infected portion gone, he was able to regenerate his arm, but diminished in size somewhat. The chunk he ripped off, though, disintigrated in midair, and dozens of what I would swear were pony shadows shot out from it, going... wherever pony shadows go.
'Did you see that?'
*Yes. My essence is able to override his control of the shadows he swallowed. If we inject him with enough of our 'venom', he'll lose control completely.*
'A pity we don't have more mouths... Wait, let me try something crazy.'
Our form was a shadow. Shadows don't have a set shape. So, in theory...
I closed my eyes, focused, and brought to mind the first thing I could think of. If I'd been a bit less of an otaku, I might have invisioned a hydra. However, since I am what I am...
My eyes snapped open, and I said, "Yamata-no-Orochi."
*What?*
Eight serpents, four on each side, erupted from my back, their bodies long, dark, and sinuous, and their eyes a deep, dark red, filled with malice. The eight heads opened their mouths wide, revealing teeth like mine, dripping with black venom....
Something changed in Arabus. Up until that moment, there had been a confidence in his actions, one that had been somehow missing for the first stages of our encounter, when I was levitating a surfboard and flying around him, and had appeared only when he'd first performed the thunderclap. It took me a second to realize what had happened: Diretusk, upon seeing what I was about to unleash upon Arabus, had performed the famed military manuever known as the 'Fuck This, I'm Out Of Here.' Arabus was alone inside his head again, for the few seconds left of his existence.
Hard to blame little Gordy down there. I wouldn't have wanted to stick around for what was happening next, either...
The eight heads zipped forward, latching their jaws upon Arabus insubstantial body. The black corruption began spreading quickly, the serpenting jaws pumping the essence of Sombra directly into his body in far greater quantities than I had before. Before Arabus could try to remove the mouths, or to struggle to escape, I had already closed the distance again, seizing each hand by the wrist. Looking the now terrified fiend in the eyes, I said, my expression stern and serious for the first time since my transformation, "Cloudwalker, Skyrunner, Wonderwall, Daybreak, Sweet Memories, Lovely Afternoon, Last Dance, Bad Romance, Final Wish, and Distant Shores. Do those names mean anything to you?"
Arabus, frightened and confused, shook his head.
"They're the names of the first ten ponies whose shadows you stole," I stated flatly. "There's more, many more, and if I had the time, I'd tell you the name of every pony you've robbed of everything they had. They were living, feeling, thinking creatures, and you took everything from them, and you deprived their families of the ponies they loved. You swallowed them up as if they were candy, and you didn't even have the decency to remember their names."
Shadows began pouring out of Arabus by the score, his limbs and much of his body turning black and crumbling away. I retracted the eight serpents back into my body, their work done and more than done. I released my grip on his arms as they finished dissolving away, and grasped his head with both hands. His core had to be in there now, otherwise, he'd have died. Instead, he was blubbering almost incoherently, begging for mercy, as the corruption ate away at what was left for his body, and moved towards his head. He begged me to spare his miserable life, and send him back to Tartarus...
Giving him a glare that would have caused any creature with a working digestive system to void his bowels instantly, I said, "Without the princesses, there's no longer a Tartarus to send you back to." My feral grin returned, and said, "However, I know of one prison you can't escape from..."
With that, I brought my head down, and swallowed his head whole. After gulping him down, I said, "A fate both ironic and poetic: The shadow-eater, eaten by the king of shadows."
As the remains of Arabus hit my stomach, I felt an overwhelming build-up in my stomach. I opened my mouth, expecting to let out a belch. Instead...
Instead I let out the grandaddy of all lightning bolts. It shot out, flying over the army of Razorbacks, still on the ground, and who had been watching the proceedings with awe and dread. Upon seeing enough electricty to give Tesla wood from beyond the grave, a great cry went up from the mass of canned hams, and as one, they began fleeing. I won't say they went 'Wee, wee, wee, all the way home,' but I'm told that it would be two days of uncontrolled flight before Diretusk would be able to regain some level of control over his soldiers and get them back into something like order again.
But he'd be back. Some assholes just don't learn.
I felt pure electricity running through my body for a moment, and then it passed. Still, I could feel the energy there... waiting.
'Well, apparently our body runs on Kirby rules.'
*Beg pardon?*
'We eat a fiend, we gain its powers.'
*I see. Well, I hope we can gain their powers by something other than feasting on them: Lavan would be a bit too spicy for us, and we'd break a tooth on Crunch.*
'Well, maybe we can just Mega Man... uh oh...'
A wave of dizziness, followed by a bitch-slap of fatigue, swept over me, almost causing me to black out, then and there. Sombra had been too optimistic: He'd thought we'd have five minutes. Instead, we'd barely had three. The events of the day were taking their toll.
*Blast. Quickly, dimwit, get us back to Sanctuary, before you lose consciousness completely!*
I... I admit, it took everything I had, just to remain conscious long enough to get back onto Sanctuary. As I did, my body returned to its normal state, and I was pony-sized and pony-shaped once more...
I ended up on top of Sanctuary, and was able to get within a few yards of one of the entrances, when fatigue hit me again, this time like a sledgehammer, and I fell to my knees. My sight went blurry, and I began to lose consciousness.
As everything went black, I saw the mares coming running for me, concern etched on all of their faces. That was the last thing I saw before I blacked out, and I did not wake up until the following day.