A mare and her dog

by cammera

[%timescale%][%%%+1],fragment two

"What was it called?" The creature asked itself. "Decaptation strike?"

Before any of the orchestrators could answer, the creature was hit by what seemed to be a building.

"Don't worry," Twilight paused besides them for a moment. "I made sure there wasn't anyone inside"

She disappeared in a flash of teleportation, reappearing closer to the creature and decomposing the building into its base components.

"Didn't I tell you-" The creature's head was striken by a brick. "-That I don't play by your rules anymore?"

Twilight didn't answer, instead making a flurry of bricks and mortar around the creature. If it wanted to affect the world, it needed a physical anchor. If it had a physical anchor, there was something to affect.

Flesh and bones were broken under the onslaught, the creature not bothering to avoid it in its confidence.

"Do yo-" Tired, Twilight pierced its throat with glass shards, transparent blood pouring from it. "Why do you think I need that one? We are more-" She formed all bricks of the building into a thick shell around it and altered the structure of the materials to reflect heat, then rose the temperature inside it to that of a small sun, layering several kinds of radiation shielding outside it. She felt several tries to form wormholes, but the amount of energy in the area made it impossible for them to stabilize.

-º-

The younger arcanists moved a metal box under Nanda's critical eye, trying to align it with the other metal boxes. The room, filled with pieces until recently, was now nearly bare, its white walls blackened in several parts where they had tested the boxes' effects.

-º-

Mariela's intact claw searched in reflex for something, anything, to grab a hold off, the world fading as her lungs emptied, knowing all too well that only their aviar nature had allowed her to last until then.

A terrible mass, invisible in the darkness, crushed her body under its weight. She could feel ribs and legs broken under it, and a feeling not unlike that of drowning was making itself present in her middle lung, which she knew with painful irrevocability to be, at least, pierced.

Her left side was the most badly hurt, the contents of her bag having applied extra pressure in the area. The constant, screeching alarm that the nerves of her belly and ovaries sent was the only thing keeping her conscious against the pain.

There was a crumbling noise under her, deafened by the mist that she feared was death, and then she was falling to darkness for what felt like an eternity, blood escaping from her beak now that nothing kept it closed.

"Hey!" Something slapped her. "Are you alive?" Ruby light shone over her, and a new wave of panic took hold when she realized that her left eye was now blind.

"The--" Her lungs screeched in pain when she tried to use them "The bag." She managed to say, trying to open it to make sure its contents were intact.

"Shit shit shit!" Quibra held her still "Don't move, you'll hurt yourself" He cradled her carefully with an arm and her beak with the hand and used the other to expand the tunnel upward, the armor alighting as heat built up in what little air there was, straining the enchantments. Parts of his helmet shimmered when they deflected glass particles, barely managing to stay active.

-º-

Spike bandaged Applejack's still chest with cloths he took from under his armor, his claws trembling.

If he couldn't save her...

If she, or him, or any of the girls died...

What would Twilight do?

[cen cen cen cen

-º

]/enter

mom?

yes, dear?

what is a soul?