A Battleground of Kindness

by StormDancer

Nuke

She did it. The Master actually did it.

I started laughing instantly. I mean, can you blame me?

For weeks I've been stuck here, being told time and again that we just don't do those kinds of thing, that no one's out to get me and that ponies simply ~don't~ hurt other ponies, and the Master covered everything up so well that I was actually starting to believe her.

Can you believe THAT? Me, an imp, an actual DEMON, starting to believe that a warlock capable of yanking me out of a contract with another warlock, was actually just some novice with a book and a weekend with a blood sacrifice?

Well, without a blood sacrifice if I understand it correctly, but still!

All those mornings with the tea and the breakfasts. All those evenings with the butler and the board games... don't look at me like that, when you can't light things on fire and murder is off-limits, you make sacrifices to stay sane. And all those newspapers rolled up in non-threatening tubes with their painless reminders to not be naughty.... and it was all a sham!

HAH! I knew it.

No warlock gets to be a warlock by NOT killing people. It's kind of in the job description.

"Want power? Glory? The terrified respect of the masses and the screaming pleas for mercy from those who have wronged you? Become a warlock and exact your revenge upon the world that foolishly refused to bend to your whim and defy you!"

It's pretty much a recruitment point to get the whack jobs with more brains than sense.

But she pulled it off... got herself a legion of hapless fools, collected a few willing minions, TOOK OVER A COUNTRY, and even fought a crazed magic sucking centaur to a standstill, then GAVE HIM HER MAGIC just so she could get willing sacrifices to activate that ancient terror of a soulstone to use as a battery for increasing her own power.

You know what? I think this might be the first time she's been more wicked than Stitchface.

What...a.... moment. I mean it... I kind of just wanted to savor it for a few minutes and stab a gnome or something.Stabbing gnomes is a legitimate stress reflex. It's proven effective time and again.

Unless you're a gnome... but the point stands.

I.... I'm actually a little scared though. I mean, yheah, willing sacrifices kind of go hand in hand with cult leaders, which I guess she kind of is, but she's using it to activate a soulstone the size of a small building. A soulstone that's been draining the life force of untold millions for hundreds, if not thousands of years. A soulstone that's apparently ROOTED to the life force that conjured that primal forest of nightmares that we're currently in the dark heart of.

You know... kind of one of those "we've dug too deep and awoke that which should have remained sleeping" kind of moments?

I mean, sure... it's just a big glowy rock if you break it down, but it's kind of a ~BIG~ glowy rock full of the combined souls of EVERY DEATH FOR THE KNOWN HISTORY OF THE LAND.

Which, admittedly, makes it perfect for the current situation, but still... kind of like using a fel cannon to put a stamp on a letter. Yes... it will exert enough force to press a small square of sticky paper to an envelope, but it will also destroy said small sticky paper, the envelope, the letter, the table, the seating arrangements, the floor, the room, the building, the company waiting at the door, and probably the surrounding architecture.

But it will certainly have enough force to stick the stamp on the letter, so it should be fine.

Overkill much?

Oh.... OH! I get it now.

It makes so much more sense!

She's a DESTRUCTION warlock. Oh.... that's a relief. For a moment, I thought she might be some kind of secret lost order of warlocks... but the rampant and callous use of violently overpowered magic to achieve insane levels of overkill for mundane things cinches it.

Phew.

Familiar territory again. Time to mess stuff up!

...

And then the soulstone activated, started dumping its magic into her, and she blew up too.

...

Well FEK!

Can't break a planet without killing a few warlocks.

-~oOo~-

I blame magic for this, just to be clear here, I completely blame magic, and not the Master.

Blowing yourself up, while pretty intimidating, serves little purpose when you're not holding your intended victim in a deathgrip.

But on the other hand, it is VERY hard core.

So much so that I was just a little stunned that I was actually out of my contract.

Sure, the Master was powerful, insane, and just a little evil, but at the same time, her going and blowing herself up WAS SIMPLY NOT IN MY CONTRACT!

What the heck was I supposed to do now? There's a giant centaur burning things to dust out there, and he's not really looking for an imp to run errands!

Of all the inconsiderate, single minded, selfish, myopic, self-centered....

... Oh, right. Warlock.

How the hells could I have forgotten that? And more importantly, why do I care?

I was just about to start in with an existential crisis when *BOOM* the soulstone thing sucked in the dust of the Master and her other minions with a whirling cloud of multi-colored magic.

Crisis averted!

And then it spat out six bubbles that ruptured with a burst of colored light, and I got to witness a horror the world need never see again: a warlock abusing ancient magical artifacts to defy death and resurrecting incompetent idiots for fun and profit.

And what a botched resurrection it was. Each one of them was farted back into existence by the consumption of an untold number of souls, consumed in the process of manifesting flesh from pure magic. Each of them boiled out of the air, erupting into the physical plane with a snap of air that sounded oddly like string instruments, glowing with vestigial ethers and sporting bizarre arcane glyphs all over their mutated horseflesh.

They seemed pleased by this as the Master opened her newly reformed eyes and gazed upwards to the riotous noise of unseen instruments and the group being surrounded by a spinning ball of multicolored light. They began floating upwards, out of the fissure and back into the light of day.

And I got drug along behind them as my tether... actually didn't pull me. Hmm.... maybe I just kind of followed along out of habit? Whatever, I really wish I hadn't.

The moment we were all topside, the giant red argument for planned parenthood howled out a roar and blasted the Master with a beam of angry red magic, which splashed harmlessly across the globe of light that held them airborne.

Instead of laughing or blowing more things up, the Master just watched, a smirk on her face.

Wait... a smirk? Was she actually smirking? When fighting?

The Master, even when she was angry, never seemed the type to condescend, even when I suggested she should. I mean, she had to deal with inferior idiots on a daily basis and it always confused me how she could hold back, but.... still, it seemed unsettling to see her doing so now.

And Tea-wreck just roared again and bitched about how it was impossible, how he'd taken all her magic.

And then the Master decided enough was enough because she smirked all the harder before yelling down to him "You're wrong, Tea-wreck. I may have given you my alicorn magic, but I carry within me the most powerful magic of all!"

And the look on her face, that self assured, confident, HUNGRY look that spoke of consuming the immortal souls of the thrice damned, that look of insidious conquest, of unmetered loathing for what stood before her... it was the look of a warlock that was done playing with its food and intended to punish the fork for touching what was her dinner.

And then she leaned back and an arc of searing purple light burst forth, splashing across his head. The centaur flinched back but stood his ground before a second arc, this one of blinding pink, lanced out and struck from another direction. A third and forth of blinding blue and amber slammed into him in rapid succession, drawing yowls of shocked pain from his titanic form before two more of shimmering white and a scintillating yellow speared him from yet two more directions.

His howls became shrieks as the Master tightened her attack, drawing the six arcs together into a blazing array of mind scarring magic before she added insult to injury and yanking his extra mass from the physical plane and banishing it to the twisting nether.

But no... she was not merciful, my Master, she wanted him to know she did not approve, that she was displeased. She wanted him to ~feel~ each and every slight against what she considered hers... and in that moment, there was no doubt in my mind that she considered the entire planet to be her sole possession... because as I watched, clouds of ash burned from his body not once, but four times, his flesh sloughing away into a gray aura of boiling matter, burning him down until he was merely the size of an average pony.

And then she unleashed her fury and drew the arcs of her wrath into a pale rainbow of terror — and Tea-wreck was no more.

...

Imps, I feel I should mention, have an instinctual fear of rainbows.

After watching one used as a weapon, I do not believe it to be unjustified.

...

Oh... and I suppose it should be said that when she was done killing Tea-wreck, she took her revenants and flew up into the sky to remind everyone why it was ~her~ world.

Remember how I said she was probably planning a spell to break the planet in half? I was wrong, she just wanted to blow up the sky.

Silly mistake on my part. Can't rule a world if you blow it up. Really should have thought of that.

Oh well... time to check the list of things to ensure the Master's happy.

...But with everything blown up, where am I going to find a library to steal some books from? DANGIT!

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

What is this a crossover of?

[StormDancer]

9376181
World of Warcraft.
In that, you can play a character class called a warlock. Warlocks can summon various demons to be their minions/battle pets/meat shields, and one of those demons is the lowly imp. So, in this case, Warcraft's interpretation of imps, their personalities, history, lore, and world view are taken to form the 'voice' of the narrator... Gakham.

As such, everything happens from Gakham's point of view (minus one or two short scenes), and is thus flavored with his understandings. It makes for a decidedly different perspective.

Hope that helps.

[Venerable Ro]

So now he's loose, and he's going to rush off and start pillaging books to re-stock her collection? I don't know how Twilight will react to that.

Though perhaps he should lay low for a while. He really doesn't want to get clipped by that much raw harmonic magic. It would react, badly, to his fel magic.