Outside, it was an abysmal day. The sun, once proud and radiant now sat obscured behind the thick columns of smoke that billowed from points all over Canterlot. Fires, rapidly spreading beyond the ability of local emergency-response ponies and fire-suppression spells to handle, whipped the formerly-pleasant easterly breeze into a hellish cyclone of ash and heat. Ponies the city over found themselves trapped by the expanding infernos and deteriorating structural integrity of the city’s housing.
Even the Princesses, normally quite capable of responding to the myriad of unexpected threats that befell Bastion Canterlot, found themselves overwhelmed by the scale and ferocity of the attack, and had been mostly driven back to the castle grounds, only barely protected by hastily-erected Utter Domes and teleport-denial shielding. Screams and cries of dismay, coupled with the occasional thundercrack of a collapsing building, echoed from all corners of Canterlot as what seemed like the entire population filled the streets, attempting to escape.
Twilight crawled, caked in an uncomfortable layer of dust and debris, from under the wreckage of the cornerside cafe, coughing from the burning ash that invaded her lungs, and took in the chaos.
“Why.. wha?” She stuttered. “The defenses… Why didn’t the defensive spells trigger?”
Above her, squadrons of black-clad pegasi fired volleys into any defenders that moved to challenge them, the tell-tale polychromatic beams identifying them as using Outsider weaponry, or at least something derived from it.
Above that, only barely visible through the smoke, but glowing like a small star in almost every thaumic spectra Twilight could care to name, a lone pink alicorn mare floated, casually flinging bolts of destructive energy into the city below, cackling in magically-amplified psychopathic glee as she did so.
“Oh.”
Almost unconsciously, she shrunk back, careful to avoid even thinking about casting a spell lest the emissions draw attention to her. Around her, the remainder of Team Fifteen excavated themselves from the wreckage, shaking off the after-effects of the blast that had thrown them a good hundred hooflengths and brought the building down on top of them.
“Everypony alive?” Walleye coughed. “Any injuries?”
“What in Celestia’s name?” Rarity cried as Pinkie pulled her clear of the rubble. “What was that? My ears are still ringing!”
“You may want to keep it down,” Walleye hissed back, “or you’re going to paint a target on us.”
“A what?” Rarity yelled back, before withering under Walleye’s glare. “Sorry.”
“She’s not going to paint a target for us in this chaos, boss,” Rainboom chipped in, picking splinters and chunks of plaster out of her wings. “Those pegasi are only firing on ponies that try to fight back. I bet they can’t see or hear anything this far down.”
“And what, there aren’t any of them on the ground?” Lyra countered. “Earth ponies or unicorns getting a little close-in action?”
“Why would they?” Walleye asked. “All they need to do to take us out is sit up there and shoot anypony that tries to fight or flee. Let the fire and smoke finish everypony off.”
“No,” Twilight said.
“No?”
“They have hooves on the ground. We can’t stay here.”
“And you know this how?”
“Can you honestly expect me to believe,” Twilight lectured, turning on Walleye. “That given the opportunity, if you were on the other side of this fight, wiping out a city full of enemy ponies, that you wouldn’t take the opportunity for a little sport?”
“Sport? What are you talking about?”
“Because the ponies, the Outsiders currently attacking this city are, compared to you, madam nukes-a-city-for-no-reason, orders of magnitude worse. They have hooves on the ground. Ponies, Insider and Outsider alike, are dying by the hundreds. We have maybe a minute or so before their hoofsoldiers find us.”
“I don’t have to take this horseapples from you!”
“Enough!” Rarity shouted, silencing them both. “This is disgraceful! I am not going to die in this city because you two foals were too busy bickering to come up with a plan to save us. You are both supposed to be professionals, yes? Act like it!”
Walleye glared at her, clearly torn between wanting to argue the point and accepting the obvious.
“We can go home now, right?” Pinkie asked, voice neutral.
Everypony turned to stare at her, incredulous. Twilight tilted her head in momentary confusion, before her face lit up from the realisation.
“Yes!” She cried. “Pinkie Pie, you are an absolute genius!”
“Oh, it’s the end times,” Rainboom muttered.
“I am?” Pinkie asked, confused.
“Yes!” Twilight confirmed, pointing at the pegasi above them. “How do you think they got here? And so quickly? The gates are active!”
“They’ve left themselves open,” Walleye stated, catching the realisation. “We can counterattack.”
“Exactly!”
“And what about all the ponies here?” Rarity interrupted. “Like me? While you’re off on the Exterior, everypony here gets slaughtered!”
“I’ll stay,” Twilight said, shifting her gaze back to the sky.
“Twilight, no,” Lyra said. “You’d be outnumbered at least a hundred to one, not to mention the alicorn Pie up there!”
“That’s Theta,” Walleye observed. “Looks like they let her out.”
“Crazy, equicidal, alicorn Pie,” Lyra reiterated. “Staying here is suicide.”
“No. I’m not going to leave everypony here to die,” Twilight insisted. “It is time for the killing to end.”
“I give you all of thirty seconds before Theta swats you like a fly,” Rainboom quipped. “This isn’t a fight you can win, Twilight.”
“Look, the Exterior is open for you. Go get your home back, that’s your fight,” Twilight gestured at the ongoing destruction around them. “This is mine.”
“You sure?” Walleye asked, genuine concern leaking into her voice.
“Walleye,” Twilight said, fixing her with a flat stare as she ignited her horn, the aura almost instantly snapping to a deep black as she once again delved into the darkness. “I’ve got this.”
Walleye nodded grimly, tapping her beacon and vanishing. The remainder of Team 15 summarily followed suit, the light beeps of the beacons echoing through the square, only barely audible over the cacophony.
Abstract combat, like she had engaged the material-melded abomination with only a few hours previously, would be useless against Theta. It would be trivial for the alicorn to outright destroy any unicorn eye viewports Twilight could create to cast through, and although spells like Utter Dome rendered her practically immune to any attack, such protection went both ways.
Likewise, she couldn’t use a similar area-magic-denial spell to that had been used against her, since Theta’s alicorn biology included innate magic-amplification that would largely nullify the overt effects of such a spell. The amount of power she would need to sink into such a spell in order to produce a noticeable effect would likely completely null the effects of any magic in the field’s effect for the spell duration, reducing both of them to hand-to-hand combat. While it did technically remove Theta’s thaumic advantage, she did still have a pair of wings over Twilight.
No, the only acceptable course of action was a head-on attack using as much energy that Twilight could bring to bear without shattering reality into shards, again. Provided she could divert Theta’s attention towards herself, it would give Twilight enough time to enact a plan to defend the citizens of the city from the Rogues. After that came the relatively simple matter of surviving, since Theta would no doubt try to kill her.
Careful to hold the Void magic source in her mind in an iron vice grip, she probed the local magic field, searching for the remnants of the city defense spells that had failed to act against the Rogue’s attack.
To her surprise, the results popped back almost immediately, reference pointers for well over a hundred nested protective spells slotting neatly into her mental spell stack as the disowned and deactivated array of defenses popped back to life, ready to obey her commands.
She paused for a moment, sensing attention being diverted in her direction, as though a giant searchlight had wafted over her. Words, dripping with uncontained malevolent glee, followed.
“Oh, hello little one.”
Twilight didn’t have time for indecision or deliberation. The world dropped away from underneath her feet as she spammed commands through her frontal lobe and out into the universe, organ-flattening g-forces only barely held in check as she accelerated upwards, her own words echoing in her ears.
I’ve got this.
Almost as an afterthought, she pulled two of the spell pointers from her mental stack, casually rewriting the target parameters for the first, a teleport spell, to read ‘Threats to the city’ instead of ‘Inhabitants of the city’, before triggering the set, immediately discarding the pointers to lighten her mental load.
Next, she pushed her own combat spell complement forward, offensive spells immediately dropping into her spell stack as a plethora of defensive enchantments took hold, not the least of which was an array of shaped force field plates, angled to give her maximum defensive coverage against incoming threats, while still allowing her to return fire with impunity. Wings, constructed from the same force field plates, splayed out beside and behind her, stabilising trajectory as her acceleration pushed her clean through the sound barrier, while a set of secondary, autonomous spells pushed aural and visual white noise in a partially-collimated beam ahead of her, momentarily compromising Theta’s ability to aim.
The spells came to full effect an instant before Twilight slammed into Theta at a hair under Mach 5, approximately half a second after Theta had first noticed her. Behind her, shockwaves echoed throughout the city as the Rogues were teleported out of the city to random locations in the surrounding countryside, fires likewise snuffed out as the contingency teleport spell widened its scope to include flame, smoke, and collapsing masonwork as ‘threats’.
The city’s shield began to form shortly after, the lip of purple light slowly rising from the city’s edge.
Twilight wheeled around, keeping her field wings as backswept as possible to minimise wave drag from her supersonic speed, before fixing Theta in her sights again. The crazed alicorn had been punted clear into the upper atmosphere, and was clearly having difficulties bringing her trajectory under control.
Taking advantage of the clear moment, Twilight reached into her pack, pulling her hammer out of the compressed space. Although the weapon would be largely useless at the ranges this fight was shaping up to be fought at, it provided a convenient focusing point for any offensive spells she wished to cast, allowing them to be fired off-axis or at a separate target to her primary threat, in the event that Theta summoned reinforcements.
It took all of a few seconds before Theta’s flight path stabilised. Immense columns of light materialised around her, sweeping towards Twilight and forcing her to bleed airspeed in an effort to keep them from impacting her.
“Dead pony says what?”
Twilight’s eyes went wide in surprise, searching for the source of the noise. Threat-awareness spells screeched in her peripheral consciousness as an object rapidly closed the distance with her.
“Wha-”
Consciousness returned too late for Twilight to pull herself out of her near-hypersonic earthward dive, forcing her to consider the phrase ‘lithobraking’ from an all-too-personal distance as she punched clean through Mount Canter and slowed to more manageable subsonic velocities.
She wheeled around again, foregoing visual acquisition in favor of tracking Theta’s thaumic emissions, in light of the city-sized cloud of dust that had been kicked up by the impact, and loosed a flurry of offensive spells in her general direction. Thundercracks echoed over her as her purely-thaumic targeting failed to take the intervening mountain into account, further adding to the dust and smoke.
Groaning, she vectored sideways, trying to keep her range to Theta constant while circling the mountain far enough to get a clean shot. Threat-awareness screeched in her periphery again, this time with enough forewarning for her to loose a single arcane bolt at the incoming object before blinking sideways out of the line of fire.
The dust abruptly cleared, the blue-black Exterior metal flashing momentarily through Twilight’s peripheral vision as Harmony’s Shard lanced through the cloud, the slipstream clearing it in an instant. Seconds later and far behind her, Twilight was vaguely aware of the sound of the Shard embedding itself into the ground, almost the entire width of Equestria away from her.
Without anything between them, Twilight fixed Theta with a calculating glare, almost able to feel Theta’s smug grin despite the thousands of hooflengths between them. A dull warning echoed through her mind, alerting her to the fact that Theta was accelerating towards her and charging an offensive spell.
Twilight reacted, accelerating forwards and charging an offensive beam spell of her own. With a screech not unlike shearing metal, the two beam spells met, neither gaining any ground against the other as their casters closed rapidly towards the point of intersection, playing a game of chicken with each other at velocities normally associated with re-entering meteorites, trails of superheated air trailing in their wake.
It took all of a fraction of a second for the distance to close, the two combatants meeting at a combined velocity somewhere in the region of Mach 30. Theta impacted Twilight’s force field array slightly off-centre, her flight abruptly shunted sideways towards the earth.
Twilight didn’t register either impact until she had rocketed clear to the edge of space, her flight fields having a hard time slowing her down to a manageable speed in the rarefied atmosphere, even oriented flat to the oncoming air.
“ENOUGH!”
Theta’s voice rang in her ears, magically-amplified words inserting themselves directly into her auditory cortex. Twilight, sensing the strain she was putting on the world around her as the burning, almost stabbing sensation in her horn intensified, swung her hammer back, locking a motion-mirroring spell on an appropriate nearby object.
“You are BENEATH ME!” Theta bellowed, her voice dripping with unrestrained malice. “I am a GOD compared to you, you tiny creature! And I will NOT be bullied by-”
Twilight swung.
The moon dropped clean out of its orbit as the spell forced it along a sympathetic trajectory, wheeling around and dropping onto Theta’s head. Atmosphere superheated under the compression as the air failed to get out of the way of the falling celestial body, while Earth fractured and Moon shattered as they were subjected to forces firmly outside their ability to withstand.
Twilight registered the barest hint of a confused whimper in her ears before the world lurched sideways, the universe finally yielding to the strain she was putting it under as its moorings snapped, flinging the world into the Void.
------
The world went sideways and reformed.
Walleye’s eyes went wide as the scope of the invasion she had just escaped stared back at her, easily two dozen armed and black-suited ponies scattered throughout the twenty-five metre rotunda of Gate Eight, frozen in surprise with the appearance of the interlopers. For a beat, no-pony moved, both sides lacking any sensible contingencies for dealing with the situation they now found themselves in.
“Uh… Hi?” Pinkie offered, hesitantly.
The moment broke. Everypony moved simultaneously, the Rogues going for their weapons, Team Fifteen going for the floor.
“Hose the room!” Walleye shouted.
Rainboom and Lyra complied, the former flipping her weapon over to continuous-wave mode and holding the trigger down, the latter firing a crude explosive fireball spell at the Gate’s doorway, eliciting a prompt eruption of screams as the Rogues were cut down by the polychromatic beam of Rainboom’s weapon, woefully unable to reciprocate from the combination of surprise and spell shockwave.
The smell of burning and burnt flesh diffused through the room, prompting a disgusted nose-wrinkle from Walleye as she picked herself up off the floor and levelled her rifle at the door.
“That went well,” Lyra quipped, grabbing a pair of carbines from the fallen Rogues in the grip of her magic. “What’s next?”
“We get somewhere safe,” Walleye stated, poking her head into the hallway to check for further targets. “You got any spells that can keep us away from danger?”
“Kinda, yeah…”
“Do it. This Gate isn’t going to remain empty for long.”
Lyra complied, her horn glowing for a moment before flashing out with a satisfying pop. Immediately, her pupils narrowed to pinpricks.
“We need to move.”
“How many are coming?”
“Many.”
“Okay,” Walleye said, bracing herself for a sprint. Pinkie and Rainboom did the same, the latter stretching her wings in anticipation. “Is there somewhere we can go? A clear path?”
“Right, Then left. Straight down that hallway is clear, I think.”
Walleye nodded, and shot forward, leading the team down the path Lyra had marked for them. Lyra and Pinkie went next, forced to gallop at full tilt to keep up with Walleye and not fall behind, lest they receive a sharp kick in the hindquarters from Rainboom, who brought up the rear.
The walls started to blur together as they ran, featureless blue corridor after featureless blue corridor merging together into a single endless hallway, punctuated every second or third intersection by Lyra re-casting her spell and shouting another set of directions.
By the time they reached open air, Lyra was barely standing, her stamina almost completely exhausted by the combination of non-stop running and spellcasting. High overhead, a brilliant white miniature star bathed the entire chamber in light, affording a welcome change from the endless blue hallways.
“I… No more,” She gasped, taking the opportunity to collapse against a nearby dividing wall, panting. “That's it, I’m done.”
“Rainboom, move her!” Walleye commanded, jumping over the wall. “Get her in cover! Pinkie! Get behind me!”
Pinkie, still bright-eyed and enthusiastically energetic, despite the flat-out chase, complied, bouncing behind Walleye as Rainboom half-lifted, half-dragged Lyra over the wall they were using as impromptu cover.
“How far off are they, do you think?” Walleye asked, flipping her rifle’s bipod out and sighting it on the doorway they had just come through.
“About a minute?” Lyra guessed, trying to catch her breath. “No more than that.”
“How many of them?”
“Four or five dozen within range of the spell, last I cast it…”
“Are there any Sparkles?”
“What?”
“Do they have any Sparkles with them?”
“Sparkles? I don’t think so, Why?”
“Oh good. For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”