“The mountain is moving,” Twilight commented, too awestruck to do anything else.
“Yes,” Walleye replied, rather more urgently than Twilight, as she properly braced her rifle, centering it on the colossal mass moving towards them.
“...Why is the mountain moving?”
“What in Celestia’s name makes you think I know the answer to that?”
“I… uh…” Twilight hesitated, her brain still hung up on ‘moving mountain.’ “You've got more field experience than I do?”
“Yes,” Walleye shot back, snarkily. “Because I’ve had so much experience fighting giant moving mountains.”
“Any experience you had would be more than me. I’ve been on this job… how many days now?”
“Less babbling, more working out how to kill the mountain-monster, Insider!”
Twilight raised an eyebrow, finally pulled out of her reverie.
“...How am I supposed to work out how to kill that?”
“Find a way!” Walleye insisted, sweeping the scope of her rifle over it looking for weak points. “It’s not just mountain, by the look of it, there’s something alive in there. And if it’s alive that means it can be made dead.”
“What?” Twilight said, confusedly turning her attention back to the mountain-creature.
Her immediate impression was to disregard Walleye’s statement as that of a deluded madmare, not entirely unreasonable considering her history with the mare, and the impossibility of what she was describing. If she wasn’t witnessing it first-hand, she would insist that the ten-thousand-hoof tall object would have been incapable of locomotion entirely.
It took a few moments for Twilight’s inner scientist to assert itself, and start reviewing the evidence. If her initial conclusion that the mountain couldn’t move was false, then it stood to reason that her conclusion about its composition could be likewise false. Out of sheer curiosity, she pulled up an old intelligence gathering spell, Unicorn’s Eye, and cast it, before teleporting the featureless ‘eye’ it had conjured closer to the creature.
She inhaled sharply as the image resolved in her peripheral consciousness. It was alive, that much was clear. Bare sinew, muscle, and bone protruded from stone and gravel at unnatural, painful angles, propelling the construct forward on a haphazard, uncoordinated gait. It wasn’t the plainly-organic pieces that surprised her, however - it was their variety.
From her vantage point roughly five hundred hooflengths above the creature, she could make out at least three pairs of what appeared to be legs scattered along its height, most arranged at angles that made them pointless at best, and all of them different. And not different as in ‘front’ or ‘hind,’ either. As she inched the eye further, it became exceedingly clear that the different sets of limbs didn’t even belong to the same species, or even the same genus. Cloven hooves, plantigrade feet, an oddly reptilian claw… It was as though somepony had glued a pile of completely dissimilar creatures together and buried them in the side of a mountain.
It took a few moments before she caught view of eyes and a face amid the cacophony of body parts, and the horrible truth reared its ugly head.
“So…” Twilight croaked. “You remember how I said that I’d have been embedded in the ground if I’d arrived a few hooflengths lower?”
“Yeah?” Walleye replied. “What about it?”
Twilight didn’t reply, opting instead to emphatically point at the creature.
“What, you think…” Walleye trailed off, examining it for a moment further through her rifle scope before pulling back with a cry of disgust. “Oh, Celestia above…”
It took a tremendous level of effort for Twilight to push past the fact that what she was examining could very nearly have been her, if her luck had been fractions of a hooflength worse, and focus on the matter at hoof. What she had previously classified as a single mountainous entity comprised primarily of mountain and animated by entirely unknown means was actually a horrifying conglomeration of no less than sixteen (at her count) distinct creatures ranging in size from ‘large pony’ to ‘adult dragon,’ all fused to each other and the myriad of debris that was unfortunate enough to occupy the same space as them when they were unceremoniously dumped on this world.
The most striking aspect wasn’t the creatures’ combined collective size, or even its apparent coordination (though that was becoming a more pressing question as it shambled closer to them at speed), it was that every single creature that she could spot that was part of the conglomeration was in quite visible agony. If it wasn’t for the distance and the wind, she was quite positive that the air would have been filled with the moaning, shrieking vocalisations of the suffering of dozens upon dozens of trapped creatures.
To call Twilight Sparkle ‘horrified’ at that moment would have been an understatement of truly cosmic proportions. Disgust, nausea, outrage... her brain struggled to even find words compatible with the emotion that had, quite uninvited, parked itself at the centre of her being.
She wasn’t even sure that sufficient words existed, and that just made the entire situation orders of magnitude worse.
“It…” Twilight whispered, wrestling with the words. “It needs to die. Quickly.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Walleye asked, completely taken aback. “Not ten minutes ago you stopped me from killing a pony that had murdered a teammate, not to mention a close personal friend, and now you’re flat-out saying that something needs to die? Who are you and what have you done with the pacifist Insider that I got saddled with against my will?”
Twilight didn’t respond, running through a mental checklist of spells she had previously earmarked and categorised as ‘Heavy Combat Spells - use with caution,’ giving each in turn a small pulse of energy to initialise it and hold it ready for full activation. The Outsider Powerstone still nestled safely on the rim of her Beacon ring on her horn began to emit a faint purple glow as it was bound to the nascent spell objects, freeing Twilight’s own magic energy reserves for any more immediate tasks.
“I mean…” Walleye continued. “I’m alright with killing it. Won’t be the first thing, just tell me where to shoot, it’s just… jarring to hear you say it, after you’ve been so against cold-blooded murder this whole time.”
“This isn’t murder,” Twilight corrected. “This is mercy.”
“In what way is killing merciful?”
“Have you ever had a sick pet?”
“No…”
“Then you won’t understand.”
“And what, you do?”
“I understand,” Twilight snapped, the outburst threatening to upset her position in her checklist, “that that thing is in more pain than either of us could even hope to conceive. Do you have any idea how painful, how indescribably agonising it is to be forced to occupy the same space as solid rock? How about another living creature? I don’t, but I’ll bet my life, and the life of every single one of my alternates that it is feeling all of that, right now, and then some!”
Walleye stared at her for the longest moment, before simply nodding and turning back to look through her scope.
“Where do I shoot it?”
“Everywhere.”
“...That’s not helpful.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be. You’re too small for this.”
“Sorry, too small?”
“Yes. If we still had that thaumonuclear device you’d manipulated me into stealing, this would have been the perfect use for it. Barring that, we’ll just have to settle for me.”
At that moment, Lyra and Pinkie crested the final hill standing between them and Walleye and Twilight, visibly out of breath, exhausted, barely able to move, and quite visibly with no intention of stopping. Behind them, maybe a thousand hooflengths and closing faster than it had any right to, the monstrosity was closing the distance.
Twilight flipped a mental switch, giving the go-ahead for every one of her mental spells to flip from ‘pre-init’ to ‘standby,’ while a further three slammed all the way over to ‘active.’
An opaque force field enveloped her, forming an unyielding, utterly impenetrable barrier between herself and the outside world. In lockstep, the field and its contents were rendered invisible and teleported high into the air, far out of reach of anything, let alone the creature. A multitude of Unicorn Eyes blipped into existence before fading from sight and scattering themselves far enough to give Twilight a complete, unimpeded view of everything in a ten-thousand-hooflength radius.
As far as anypony else in that area was concerned, Twilight Sparkle had ceased to be a distinct, attackable object and for all intents and purposes was now an abstract concept, the idea of a unicorn mage that existed somewhere within that volume of space.
Twilight picked a vantage point at random, popped an offensive spell off the stack, allocated a full quarter of the Powerstone’s energy reserve to it, and loosed the spell at the creature. A half-kilothaum ball of pure destructive energy flashed into being above the creature and lanced downwards, slamming home enough energy to easily vaporise a half-ton of solid rock and keep going.
And nothing happened.
Twilight blinked.
The creature, incredibly, impossibly, responded.
With an almost audible rush, the ambient magic density in the area dropped by a factor of twelve. Twilight’s ongoing spells adjusted their power draw from her powerstone in response, compensating for the loss of ambient magic. Entire sections of her prepared spell stack dropped out of existence, reflexes dismissing them to maintain enough mental focus to hold her essential defensive spells in place, while simultaneously thinning the magic flux load on her powerstone to a level that wouldn’t deplete it in a matter of seconds.
What just happened was impossible. The creature should barely have been able to move in a coherent manner, let alone cast spells of that caliber. As it was, she was willing to explain away the fact that it was most certainly chasing down Lyra and Pinkie with violent intent through some sort of mindless impulse or deranged common thought lurking in the creatures’ minds, borne of pain and hunger and isolation. Injured animals are, of course, the most dangerous.
This was something else entirely. It had recognised the fact that Twilight had just attacked it. It had either correctly deduced or theorised close enough to the methods that she was using to protect herself. It had then picked an appropriate spell to counter her protective charms and cast it. Not to mention that fact that it had shrugged off a half-kilothaum bolt of pure, abstract destruction as though it were nothing more substantial than a housefly, and despite it, had chosen to strike back.
She was entirely incapable of harming the creature with the tools at her disposal. It was either durable enough to resist the spells she was throwing at it, had some sort of shielding enchantment, or (most likely) was using some variant of the utter dome spell she was using to protect herself, cast in response to the inbound projectile. It could swat away anything she threw at it, since, even accounting for the powerstone’s reserves, it had far more magic at its disposal.
And despite all that, it was fighting back. It could flat-out ignore her, yet it had instead opted to cast the one spell that would (eventually) make her vulnerable. It wasn’t merely defending itself, it was hostile, and malevolent.
As quick as the thought entered her head, she had queued up a further three utter dome spells, casting them around Walleye, Lyra, and Pinkie in turn, barely in time before the creature caught up and slammed into where they were, dust kicking up from where the near-irresistible force met the actually immovable solid force wall. She didn’t bother with any further protection, since the dome would outright block any physical or magical effect crossing its boundary, hostile or not, for as long as she could maintain it.
Anger and determination gripped her, a familiar burning sensation taking root at the base of her horn. Memories of the same burning, unnatural sensation flicked through her mind, memories of every instant she had come into contact with the Void. She knew the basic sensation well, any trainee unicorn mage becomes intimately familiar with the prickling-at-the-base-of-their-horn that signified an abnormally large amount of magic in an area.
But this tingling was different, more painful, darker, as though out of alignment with her own magic, at right angles, or something close to it. Ultimately, she didn’t care much about the small details, or even the how or why. For some reason, something to do with the Void had vast, untapped magical potential, and at that moment, she needed exactly what was being offered to her.
With a thought, she latched onto the sensation, focusing on its dark unfamiliarity, solidifying it into a point, before driving a sliver of magic into it, forcing it open and releasing a torrent of raw magic directly into her brain. With a sickly crackling sound, the aura surrounding her horn turned from its usual cheery magenta to a deep, malevolent black, with spiderweb-thin cracks undulating in its wake.
With careful, almost trepidative mental motions, she pulled a spell from what remained of her mental spell stack—a crude offensive spell that accepted raw magic, collimated it into a beam, and directed it at a target. Resisting the urge to smirk, she plugged her new source of energy directly into the spell, picked one of her few Unicorn Eyes as the beam origin, and kick-started the spell, opening the maw of her Void mana source wide.
A pure black beam of unformatted destructive potential lanced out of a point roughly two thousand hooflengths behind the creature, slamming home fractions of a second later. Moments after, two further identical beams formed from nothingness as Twilight sent a pair of mental ‘repeat’ commands to the spell cluster.
The creature stumbled, but remained alive, the three beams held back mere hooflengths from impact. Ignoring the rapidly-spreading black spiderweb cracks, she issued a further five repeat commands, bringing the total number of active beam spells up to eight.
Infuriatingly, it refused to fall, standing stubbornly at the centre of the converging beams, arcs of grounding magical energy flaring nearly constantly around it an into the ground, creating an ionised halo almost twice its size. Nearby cliff faces crumbled and liquefied in the magical backwash.
Fractures radiated away from her, momentarily stymied by her utter dome spell before turning back upon themselves and tunneling through her remote spell links, one-by-one severing her vantage points as the fissures spread and solidified, entire sections of reality flickering in and out of existence as they were uprooted, only to come crashing back down into the very world they had departed.
Her eye twitching slightly from frustration, Twilight reached inwards, jamming open the black void in her psyche that represented the open Void mana source as wide as possible, before wrapping the closest nearby mountain to her in magic, and ripping it cleanly out of reality, leaving a jagged-edged black Void fissure in its wake.
Struggling against her logical mind’s insistence that space did not have that many dimensions, Twilight swung the detached mountain of stone around an axis firmly outside conventional spacetime, slamming it downwards through the 8-dimensional space onto the creature. Eerily, the mountain made no noise as it arrived, completely superimposed over the creature.
Grinning almost against her will, Twilight cut her plethora of beam spells, directing a single, simple mental command at the mountain, still held in her mental grip.
Disintegrate.
The mountain, and everything contained within it, obediently complied.
Instants later, the world itself followed suit, the flow of Void magic stubbornly refusing to self-regulate as Twilight’s previous spell loads were removed, and channeling themselves outwards. Fissures spread at an almost explosive pace, fracturing the world into massive shards before violently solidifying, propelling the resultant chunks outward and upward along barely-understandable 8-dimensional vector lines.