With the barrier trap destroyed, no hostiles could warp in, allowing the group to leap ahead even as Twilight and Nefarious continued their spirited discussion. The path was blocked by another stone wall sealing off a tunnel, allowing Twilight to demonstrate that the improved Quakehammer - which she dubbed The Smash-Hammer, barring a better name - worked just as well for its original purpose.
"Say, it builds up charge from you or the Hammer moving now, right?" Qwark asked curiously.
"That's right!" Twilight preened, working on applying the modifications to Qwark and Alister's gadgets now that she'd demonstrated they didn't need to keep the original form to maintain function.
"Then couldn't you constantly swing it for small discharges of tectonic energy?" he asked curiously. "Enough to send a large group of targets flying, at any rate?"
Twilight paused on Alister's unit. She levitated Qwark's completed one over to him. "Show me what you mean," she instructed.
Grinning widely, Qwark lifted his Smash-Hammer - which had been modified with mostly yellow materials - and proceeded to swing it rapidly up over his shoulders and down into the ground and anything else in front of him, each impact releasing a small surge of tectonic energy that was enough to heavily damage anything impacted. "See?" he asked, his voice filled with boyish excitement.
Twilight rubbed her chin. "Hmm...you know, if I attached a motor, I could probably make it do that automatically..."
"Perhaps we should save that for another time?" Alister offered.
"Why?" Nefarious demanded in irritation. "What's wrong with doing it now?"
"We do have a planet to save," Alister scolded.
"Not a hero, remember?" Nefarious countered.
"Don't you want to save something to talk about for your date?" Qwark offered.
"Good point!" Nefarious admitted, turning to march forward. "But if you ever tell anyone I admitted you had a good point, I'll play jump-rope with your large intestine to a cadence of everything I hate about you, while making sure you're still awake and listening."
"Eeyurgh!" Qwark winced, pulling back from the mental image.
"You're surprisingly good at that," Alister whispered in praise.
"It's actually rather upsetting how naturally I took to politics," Qwark admitted sadly. "It's basically feeding anyone who listens whatever lie they'll swallow that will make you look the best, and fitting however much truth into it you can to avoid getting caught. My heroing career was...surprisingly good practice for that."
Alister frowned, unsure how to respond to that.
As they continued, the group received another message from Ratchet and the others, about a railway station connected to an old mining station directly below them. Spotting some cracked ground, Qwark grinned widely. "Down we go!" he called out, smashing the ground beneath him with his Smash-Hammer and letting them all drop down.
Below, the group found an explosive fruit bulb, along with gates blocking the path in either direction. Twilight solved this conundrum easily by ripping both gates out at their hinges and folding the metal in her telekinetic grip. "It's really easy to do this with materials that aren't animate," she explained as Nefarious and Alister stared. "Anything that's self-motivated - whether animal or robot - drastically increases the difficulty since their natural movement interferes with the fields..."
"You...don't seem all that surprised by this," Alister pointed out.
"Remember when Dad was telling our story?" Qwark pointed out. "And the part about how we met back in Blackwater City? When she ripped a wall from its moorings while squealing fannishly about meeting me?"
"...oh yeah..." Alister mumbled. "And that was over a decade ago..."
"And she's just gotten stronger as she's gotten older," Nefarious marveled.
Twilight blushed as she noticed all the stares. "Come on, guys! You're embarrassing me! Let's just get a move on, okay?" She tossed the neatly folded gates aside with a loud clang.
The group made their way forward at Twilight's request, fighting their way through more Dreadgrubs and bouncing on giant mushrooms...pausing long enough for Alister to convince all three others to "Stop bouncing already!" The twisting and turning paths continued to lead down into the depths of the Grove, breaking through several more similar barriers and facing more of the same hostiles they'd encountered before, dealing with them in much the same way. After a time, however, a massive purple grub could be seen writhing in the foliage in the distance.
"I...hope we don't have to fight that," Twilight murmured worriedly.
"Odds are we will," Qwark grumbled.
"It's a carnivorous Wig Wump," Nefarious indicated. "It'll probably try to eat us when we get to the rails near it."
"Let's hope we don't have to," Alister muttered. "They're really bad tempered."
Thankfully, the path seemed to lead them away from the Wig Wump, and after grinding down a few rails towards an access shaft, they found new gadgets...Jet Packs.
"Ooh!" Twilight squealed as she pulled hers off and started tinkering, her wings keeping her aloft. "This is absolutely fascinating!"
Alister, Qwark, and Nefarious all stared. "That's it!" Nefarious proclaimed firmly. "I am figuring out how to give my robotic body functional wings! They are plainly just too useful to go without at this point! It'll be worth the effort of figuring out how to install a self contained specific gravity modulator that won't drain my systems dry just keeping me in the air!"
"If you get it to work, I might just see the appeal of roboticization," Qwark challenged, unsure himself how much of what he just said was goading and how much was honest.