A Battleground of Kindness

by StormDancer

When Diplomancy Fails

Remember a loooooong time ago when I said that warlocks are greedy, selfish, power hungry psychopaths with an almost comical level of deluded confidence in their own superiority? Remember how I said that warlocks are vindictive, vengeful, spiteful creatures who hold grudges for decades or even centuries? Remember how I said that seeing a warlock smile should be something that triggers survival instincts?

Well, seeing a warlock, like the Master, looking hurt is worse. It means that something they've taken as a given, is suddenly, and often violently, being put in question. This is an uncomfortable revelation, things not being as they so desire. And a warlock of the Master's caliber? Well, she can be a bit protective of the things she likes.

~~The Master loves her books...

As I was brushing the splintered remains of cobblestones off myself, listening to the fading wingbeats of the Master's secret weapon mix with the soothingly familiar sound of an inferno coming from the Master's Lair, I chanced a glance at the Master to see if she was ready to unleash hell.

~~The Master loves her tea...

And it kind of made me almost piss myself.

~~The Master loves her pillows...

She was still on the ground, looking mournfully up and reaching for her owl as flaming lumps of books and smoldering page scraps rained down around us.

~~The Master loves her lab...

No warlock should look like they're on the verge of tears. It's in the manual.

Don't give me that look! I lived with the Master for a number of weeks, I KNOW how to read manuals and I checked. I have a list!

Warlocks aren't supposed to cry.

So when I saw her looking like she was about the break the rules, I remembered all those times she'd done so in the past. Summoning sandwiches, a mage spell. Surviving lethal blunt force trauma, enough times to warrant record keeping. Blowing things up that are not IN ANY WAY explosive. Lighting fire-poofed things on.... well, fire. Dueling in the nude. Hugging rivals. Enslaving the infinite dragonflight.

... Protecting her demon.

And I knew the end was near.

I mean, if the sky suddenly changing from a prissy baby-blue into a post apocalyptic smog didn't give it away first.

I watched as her pain morphed into anger (something I am MUCH more familiar with) and dove for cover as she stood up, flared her wings and lit her horn with a snarl on her lips and a death glare in her eyes.

The explosion of pink light blinded me for a moment but the tiny thunderclap of teleportation drew my eyes skyward and away from the village; back towards the centaur who was even then stomping towards the remains of the lair.

There was a whistling as she sped out of her teleport, lifted her head and formed a brilliant point of light upon the tip of her horn. I couldn't really see details at the range, but the telltale tug of my tether told me I was about to be seeing things up close and personal, and for the first time since meeting her, I really REALLY didn't want to.

As my tether started to tug, I saw her whip her head back down, the point of light leaving a blazing scar in the sky, before unleashing a blast of magic the likes of which I have never seen before.

It was white, eye-scaldingly white, with little bubbles of golden yellow blistering up from its surface. A thin coruscating skin of blue slid along the white, while a nauseating flicker of pink and purple burned around the whole thing. From as far away as they were, it was silent for the first few seconds before a shrieking roar hit the town and drowned out all other sounds.

The minions who had come to find out about the Master's lair quickly fled, as minions do, and for once, I couldn't blame them.

That blast, even from the mile or two away, didn't stop. The Master, still in the sky, was feeding magic into it in a constant stream that just made it grow larger and larger.

And when it struck Tea-wreck, he only managed to cross his arms in front of himself to weather the blow.

The magic splashed around, a roiling sphere of destruction growing by the second, as the centaur was pressed back. The beam doubled, then tripled in size, dwarfing the Master as she fed her fury into it.

It was truly a beautiful thing to watch the Master actually fight.

And then, my tether finally drew tight and I felt myself being yanked towards that combat and I suddenly wanted VERY much not to be the Master's imp.

I arrived not a second later, phased, and leapt for a nearby outcropping of rock to watch.

No felfire bolts would be adding anything to the Master's assault, and I find myself rather attached to my own limbs, so there really wasn't any reason to interfere.

Tea-wreck was still engulfed in that blazing ball of death, but he must have got caught on something because the blaze's backward movement abruptly halted as the land itself began to burn.

I sized up the situation, conjured some fel fire, and lit a tree up because, as I JUST stated, I WAS NOT GETTING INTO THAT FIGHT. Oh HELLS NO.

And because I miss lighting things on fire. Which I could totally do since I wasn't in the lair anymore.

But the Master, apparently, wasn't satisfied with unleashing a blast of magic that would turn most armies into a memory. No. Remember how I said that warlocks are spiteful?

Well, when Tea-wreck stopped being pushed back, the Master, apparently, found that to be an insult. So, she upped the magic.

The sphere of doom that Tea-wreck was in? Completely engulfed by the beam that the Master conjured. The flare of magic from her horn blossomed to such a size that it sank into the ground from where she was flying several stories in the sky, and THEN, the beam the Master was unleashing, bloated to such a size that it out-matched even the previous attack. Tea-wreck, already several stories tall, weathering the onslaught in a searing ball of arcane fire, had that same beam lurch into a veritable mountain of exploding light as it blasted over, around, and passed him, tearing a molten path to the horizon as the Master unloaded.

Whatever had caught the centaur, finally gave way, and he was driven back, the furrow of his passage lost instantly to the fury of the Master's assault.

Finally, the spell concluded, the last of the energy soaking into the Master's target, and the beam cut out, releasing an explosion from several hundred feet away, as a ripple of pink light erupted and fled the red-golds of the blast itself, leaving an ever expanding cloud of fire and ash. This was followed by the excessive heat causing the stones that had been caught in the path to spontaneously explode, themselves, the ground to burn, the air-itself to ignite, and a column of yellow hot matter to atomize, and burst into a mushroom cloud of burning death.

And then, Tea-wreck pulled himself to his hooves and the Master landed, still sporting rage in her glare.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, all that happened in about.... oh.... fifteen seconds.

Ain't adrenaline fun?

-~oOo~-

Now, any war veteran will tell you that war is hell, and any demon will tell you that war is an average weekday, but what few every tell you is that war is a single moment in which individuals of power come to the conclusion that what's been happening needs to change, by any means necessary.

This is normally followed by speeches and drumming up support, gathering resources, mounting a respective offense or defense, and engaging the supposed foe in mortal combat with a veritable carpet of minions. This inevitably fails to address whatever was originally determined to be the source of the problem but adds fuel to the fire as one side or the other cuts corners to stay competitive. It becomes a sport, of sorts, where one side points fingers and demands the ref to penalize the other, while trying their best to distract the other side from seeing their own cheating.

Normally.

But, like I said, war is normally fought with droves of minions on the front lines while the leaders sit back and bicker about something or other while sipping tea or drinking copious amounts of Brandy. No... not alcohol... Brandy. Okay... and sometimes Scotch or Vodka or wine, depending upon the culture, but Brandy is the big one.

Jeeze... picky aren't you buggers?

Anyway, the point is that it's pretty much ALWAYS armies clashing until one side gives up, because the big guys don't tend to get their hands dirty.

And then there are Warlocks.

Warlocks aren't like those idiots. They like to mess things up in a very personal way. They like wading through all that the world slings at them. They like being pushed at and pushing back with shoves orders of magnitude larger than what came their way. They like driving a point home in the most visceral way possible.

The Master is just very good at hiding this.

Was very good at hiding this.

Because holy HELLS did she just mess up the view from her little villa. I mean, the fields are on fire. The open spaces are littered with craters. Shrapnel makes the flat spots look like beds of needles and even the sky, the fekking SKY is burnt a lovely brown-ish orange.

So, seeing Tea-wreck standing up while the emberglow of the Master's last attack casts even the fitful sun into shadow, well — she wasn't having it.

Of course, when the big guys fight, the little ones tend to get turned to mush, so I just kept watching. And to my luck, one of those fields that was on fire happened to be corn... so, snacktime.

...

Don't give me that look, popcorn is popcorn, no matter where you're from.

But anyway, opening salvos delivered, the Master and Tea-wreck stared each other down while the fires of destruction burned behind them both.

Honestly? I was a little upset about things though, too. As much as I hated it, the Master's lair ~was~ a bit.... um.... calm? Quiet? Comfortable? I don't really know. It wasn't what I'm used to, that's for sure, but it was different in a way that wasn't completely horrible, I guess?

I would have thought about it a bit more, I'm sure, but Tea-wreck's voice shook me from my musings when he said "Now I understand what your fellow princesses have done."

And then they began to fight.

Comments

[hyrushoten]

Well done good sir, well done. More substantively you really sold the weight and power both of Twilight's attack and Twilight's decision to attack. I can't wait for the rest of the fight. keep up the good work

[StormDancer]

Happy to hear you're enjoying.