Act III: Collision of Wills
Chapter 29: Dream Monster Kurama
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“Ow!”
The battle with Kurama was hard fought. Their victory had come so close to their grasp. But at the last moment, it was pulled away, and Kurama had managed to claim victory and escape. Many guards were injured from the fight and were now hospitalized for treatment. Unfortunately, Applejack hadn’t been able to walk away unscathed either.
“Are you done yet?” And she wasn’t one to patiently accept medical treatment even when things were normal. Her doctor was doing her best to tend to her injury in a timely manner, but this wasn’t the first time she’d asked.
“If I do this wrong because you insist on rushing me, your arm might not heal fully,” her doctor warned, “Is that what you want?”
Applejack looked at her doctor for a moment before letting out a defeated sigh.
“What’s the damage?” asked Twilight, her and the others having waited off to the side the whole time as they waited for the results.
“X-rays show that the damage was minor; a sprain of the forearm. That said, the sprain was severe.”
Applejack let out another annoyed grunt at the news, but her doctor ignored it.
“But if she refrains from adding any more stress to it, then her arm will recover in a week or two.”
That didn’t sit well with Applejack at all, “A week!? We don’t have that kinda time!”
“If you overstress your arm before it’s healed it’ll only get worse. It’ll take even longer before you’ll be able to use it again.”
Applejack opened her mouth to respond again, but the glare from her doctor convinced her that this was a losing battle. All she could do was remain silent and wait for her cast to be set.
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The walk back to the library was quiet. Though the doctor had managed to patch up Applejack’s arm, but she wasn’t going to be able to use it. She had to wait a week or longer for it to heal, but Kurama’s victims lasted only three days. Everyone who was under Kurama’s curse couldn’t be left to wait for her arm to heal so that she could help them. And she couldn’t fight Kurama as she was now anyway; even when she was healthy, she could barely keep up with Kurama. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but as the group arrived at the library, and Applejack took a seat, she found herself left with no choice but to accept that fact.
“Looks like I’m benched,” Applejack ran her hand through her mane and looked up to the others with regretful eyes, “Sorry, everypony…” She sighed. It just wasn’t easy to accept that she was in over her head on this one.
“You put up a good fight, A.J.,” Rainbow said, patting Applejack over the shoulder, “Who could ask for more?” Everyone could agree to that. Most importantly of all, the sprain was the only major injury she had sustained.
“Just wish I could have done more…”
“You might have done more than you think,” said Twilight, “John and I showed up by the end of the fight. We only managed to see what Kurama looked like for a few minutes. You and the others, however, managed to see firsthand just how he manages to fight in the real world. Right now, we need you to fill us in on anything you think we can use against him.”
Up until that fight, the only thing they knew about Kurama is from what little Luna had managed to tell John the night Corey got cursed. Right now, they had a chance to add to that knowledge, and maybe even use it to their advantage.
“Not sure what I saw can be considered helpful, but I’ll give it a try,” said Applejack. For a moment, she thought back to the fight, trying to focus on any details she hadn’t had the time to focus on during that skirmish, “There’s not a lot I can pitch that you probably ain’t already figured out. He’s a fox, but a strange one if I ever saw one. I mean, I know there are a lot of species out there, but I ain’t ever seen or heard of a fox that looked like that.”
“I can vouch for that,” said Fluttercruel, “Fluttershy’s seen a lot of and read up on almost every critter Equestria has to offer, and even some outside its borders. Far as we know, there isn’t a species of fox that can grow to look like Kurama did.” Even with Equestria’s vast collection of creatures, there were still limits.
“Okay, so we have an unheard-of three-tailed fox with dream walking and pyrokinetic magic,” Twilight summed up. Applejack’s statement seemed to be true; they already knew this just from the few prior encounters with Kurama. Unfortunately, they only now knew exactly what he was, but it didn’t help them get any closer to stopping him.
“Is there anything else, any detail that seemed off?” After so many failed attempts to gain an upper hand over Kurama, there was a desperate need. Even if they’d managed to overpower him, Kurama would simply find a way to escape before long. Applejack continued to think back to their fight with Kurama, thinking about what she’d experienced.
“You didn’t tell us he had tails…”
“That’s it!” Applejack said, jumping from her seat, “When you showed up, yeah, he had three tails, but when the fight started, he only had two. When I asked the guards about it, they told me they hadn’t seen any tails when they first fought him.”
Pinkie and Fluttercruel remembered that detail; the sudden sprout of the third tail had still left a question in its wake.
“I think I might have seen that,” said John, “In the dreams, he’s constantly blurring his image, so it was hard to tell. When I met him this time, I saw what I thought were two tendrils, but I just assumed they were part of an attack. Thinking about it now, he might have sprouted his second tail then.”
The group sat in silence once again as they thought it over. Twilight, in particular, had started to pace the room.
His form, his magic, and his tails… It’s so strange… yet, somehow familiar, thought Twilight. Somewhere in the back of her mind, something echoed, trying to be heard. Somewhere, mixed with all the knowledge she’d amassed over the years was the answer she wanted, but where was it?
As she continued to pace, she found herself scanning through the hundreds of books around her home. As if somewhere between them laid the answer, and she had a large hunch that it was there, if only she could remember. Continuing to scan through them, she suddenly found her eyes lay upon a single word on one of the spines. Stopping for a moment, Twilight walked up to the book for a better look.
“Mythology…”
“That’s it!” In that moment, it was like a spark had been set off in her head. She scanned through her books a second time, but now she had a clear purpose in her mind. The others watched, waiting, until she pulled out an overly large and old book from her collection. Using her magic, she placed it on the table and began flipping through the pages.
“Kurama’s form was strange to me. There was no record of real foxes of that shape, but when you brought up his tail growth, I found myself remembering something,” She continued to flip through the pages, eventually stopping on a large images a little bit before midway through it. What the others saw surprised them; it was a fox, and it had many tails.
“What’s that?” asked John.
“There may not be a record of what Kurama is here, but overseas, there is something very similar: a creature in mythology out east called a Huli Jing. In our language, that means ‘fox spirit’,” Twilight explained. Everyone stared to the image for a few minutes. Was it possible that Kurama was one of these? Did this explain his dreamwalking ability?
“What exactly is a fox spirit?” asked Rarity. Again, Twilight started to flip through the pages of the book.
“I can only tell you what the book says, “Twilight said, flipping through a few more pages, “As it stands, they’re mostly considered to be folk lore.”
Eventually, she stopped on a different page. On it was a pony walking among others, but this one seemed to have several tails sprouting out from behind him.
“It’s said that they’ll take on a mortal form, often a female form of the species they’re targeting. Once they’ve made contact, the fox spirit would feed off that species’ magic for a time before moving on to another.”
Twilight stopped on yet another page this time. This one showed several spirits with different numbers of tails.
“The number of tails a fox spirit had was said to represent their powers. The more tails one hand, the stronger they could be. Lore said some were so powerful they could feed from the essence of the sun and moon.”
The idea of something being that powerful was frightening. It came as a small relief that Kurama was nowhere near that level, or at least, he wasn’t that level just yet. Fact was, now they knew he was literally growing in power by the minute. He’d managed to get three tails in such a short period of time…
“It all makes sense now, doesn’t it…?”
John’s statement triggered the realization in each of their minds. Even if Kurama wasn’t the same as the fox spirits of myth, there were still far too many other parallels to ignore. The fact he’d been growing tails as time went on; the reason he was cursing ponies to three days of nightmares and stalling for time. It all came to one fact.
Twilight’s gaze slowly shifted towards the soundproofed door that lead to her bedroom.
“He’s literally feeding off their misery,” she finally said.
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The search for Kurama had continued soon after. Rarity and Rainbow went out this time to give those who had been in the previous search some time to rest. Not that Applejack had a choice now; her arm sprain had put her out of action. Twilight was still going through her books, trying to find anything more on fox spirit lore. She’d hoped that there might be a way to repel them. Everyone else who didn’t have an assigned task was trying their best to stay awake. They knew that if they dared to fall asleep, Kurama would try to leap into their dreams. Fortunately, though, Pinkie kept a steady supply of coffee.
John, meanwhile, was back in the dream realm. He’d been there for a few hours now. However, soon enough, he came out of it, hunching over in his chair as he let out a mildly irritated sigh.
“No luck?” asked Pinkie. John looked up to see that she was holding out a cup for him. With a smile he took the cup and took a small sip.
“Nothing,” John sighed, “Seems like he dropped off the grid after the fight today,” John rubbed his eyes, gritting his teeth for a bit, “Haven’t been able to feel any trace of him for hours now. Hope the others had better luck than I did…”
As if on cue, the door slammed open and the second search team entered the library. He could see it in their faces; they had the same luck he had.
“This is starting to get on my nerves,” said Rainbow. Kurama made Slayer look like Lyon by comparison, which said a lot, “We can spend hours searching and wasting our energy, and all he needs to do is sit around in some dark cave somewhere and wait while he gets stronger!”
She wasn’t the only one to feel like that. Further adding to their stress was the time limit. By now one of Corey’s days had passed, not to mention the other victims from that same night. Every hour that went by without them stopping Kurama was another hour off his victims’ remaining time. All they’d managed to do was prevent him from adding more to his rap sheet.
“We’ve already found a way to track him inside the dream realm,” said Twilight, “That means there must be a way to track him outside of it.”
Several books of mythology, worldly lore floated around her. John watched the determination—or desperation?—in her face as she flipped through pages upon pages of information to find an answer. If there was a way to track him, she was going to find it. Seeing the work she was putting into it, John threw his head back and downed the rest of his coffee; a feat he could not have managed without hurting himself as a human.
“I’m going back in,” in an instant, his eyes began to glow, and he dove into the realm of dreams once again.
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John could probably never get used to the place he always wound up after using the magic Luna had gifted him. The dream realm’s hub world, if one could call it that, was a vast space surrounded by stars in all directions. Each represented a sleeping pony. Though most of them shone bright white like a real star, there were some that were black as coal; the victims of Kurama’s curse. He couldn’t enter those worlds anymore.
He wasn’t able to tell whose was whose. Up until now, he’d only managed to figure out how to jump between them on any given thought. As he walked through the space, he looked over every star. He was waiting for something to shift, a feeling of distress; Kurama’s appearance. But this time, there was nothing. All was calm in the dreams of other ponies, but he couldn’t find solace in that. It meant he couldn’t find Kurama, and he couldn’t let out his building frustration on the monster that was putting his friends’ lives in jeopardy. He wasn’t going to give in, though. He was going to continue his search for as long as it took to find him again. Even if their time was running short, John had an unshakable drive.
“He’ll slip up at some point, I know it,” John opened his wings and flew deeper into the world of dreams, searching the stars for any sign that something was starting to go wrong.
And I’ll finish him the moment he does…