15. Fighting Fate
The throne room was silent for a moment as the five of them stared down Briareus’ unmoving form. His magic had seemed to completely vanish, and yet no one dared even breath. The words ‘did we win?’ were on all their lips, but not one dared speak them for fear of jinxing it.
Of course, such is simply confirmation bias, and whether they’d spoken the words or not, the next five seconds would have been the same. Briareus’ body became incandescent as a new aura filled the room. Each of them had time to gasp a breath before the feeling became stifling, and in an instant before that aura struck, solidifying the very aether within each of them, Rarity vanished through a portal.
The four remaining in the room; Twilight, Rainbow, Raven, and Aiden; turned to stone as Kirin rose from his own ashes, fuming. But Rarity scarcely saw the beginnings of that as the portal closed with her on the other side, in the flower garden.
“Aiden!!! Let me out this instant!” She tried to channel magic to open a portal back out (despite how clearly ill advised that might have been), but to no avail. If she could grab them and pull them in, and all escape… but there was nothing to get hold of. The aether, usually so pliable, was like a wall of cement all around Aiden’s verse.
“Hmm… this is probably bad.”
“Aiden!” she cried, spinning around to the source of the voice… and stopping, eyes wide. Aiden was sufficed by a glowing aura, reminding Rarity a bit too strongly of Obi-wan from Empire… as in ‘dead and in spirit form’ Obi-wan. “...What happened? You’re… you’re not…” her lips trembled slightly as she looked at him.
Meanwhile, he was looking at his hands, and waving them at each other. “They can touch everything except themselves…” With that, he moved his hands through each other. It looked a bit creepy. “Huh, damn, they really can’t…” He blinked, caught her gaze, and tried to smile reassuringly. “Oh, err… no, not dead. ...Probably.”
“Well then let me out! I can grab all of you and phase us out of the castle and then the city. I may not have your speed with it but-”
“Won’t work, or at least not yet. I can’t open any portals since my brain is petrified.”
“Then what do we do?”
“I think I can break the spell on me by focusing aether from in here, but it’s going to take a minute, and I need to concentrate. ...Hopefully he doesn’t just smash me before I can succeed.”
“Agreed.” Rarity grimaced. “Err… darling… tell me something?”
Aiden sat in the grass, folding his legs under himself and shutting his eyes. “Something like what? I love you, by the way. Not the most romantic way to say it, or the best time or place, but-”
“No, not that… although you’re right and I love you, too, but… what happens to this place if you die?”
Aiden chuckled. “Oh, that. Well, assuming my soul isn’t destroyed, nothing. Just a little piece of disconnected space. The universe won’t even notice it’s still here. So… you’d have to dig your way out, figuratively, but I’m sure you’d manage just fine.”
“To be honest, I was less worried about me and more about what would happen to the others if this place suddenly manifested itself into our reality.”
“Ahh… yeah no, that wouldn’t happen; it’s not like it’s just my will holding it shut away or something. It’s stored within the magic of my soul, or some such, like a closet in the universe. Just because the guy with the key kicks the bucket doesn’t mean the door will fly open. At worst it becomes uncoupled and adrift.” He chuckled, and the glow around him increased as his will began drawing in the aether around him. “If I were some kind of bomb we could have just thrown me at the Oni mothership years ago and blown it all straight to Hell.”
“Morbid, darling.”
“Eh, I’m a soldier. Gallows humor comes standard.” His head tilted slightly, and he hissed between his teeth. “...Okay, this is really difficult, shutting up now.”
“Understood. I believe in you, Aiden.”
------------------------------------------
Kirin took several ragged breaths as he surveyed the room. As infuriating as it was to have his other form completely destroyed, it was also liberating to look around without the haze of an Oni-koru disguise marring his senses. The clarity made savoring victory all the sweeter.
...It hadn’t been total victory though. Not only had they beaten ‘Briareus’, which should not have happened without at least the diarchs assisting, but one of the unicorns had somehow escaped. Luckily it hadn’t been his new pet, nonetheless it was irksome. He strode casually over to the human statue. It looked calmly forward, no surprise in its visage despite being turned suddenly to stone mere moments prior. Kirin growled deep in his throat and picked up the little statue by its neck.
“You think yourself clever?! Powerful?! I am Kirin of the draconequii! I am Absolute power! You are nothing!” He reached out his other hand to grasp the statue’s head, intending to tear it off.
“Hello again, my former king.”
Kirin snorted, unsurprised by Garken’s presence, and proceeded to tear the head from the statue with casual ease. He flung the head at his former Grand Marshal, who caught it without breaking stride. “One down, little traitor. Or did you think you’d interrupt and stop me from killing him. Care to be next?”
Garken chuckled lightly, examining the head. “Alas, poor Aiden… I knew him, Horatio… hmph, not that he’s dead though.” He set the statue head down on the (now torn and burned) carpet before continuing to close the distance between the two of them. “You really don’t know much about magic if you think otherwise. That boy has at least two extra anchors to this mortal coil, even if he doesn’t realize it. But tell me, Kirin of the draconequii, where do you go from here? If you already are ‘absolute power’, then what’s the point of gathering aetheryte and sacrifices here?”
Kirin chuckled darkly as broken pieces of the wall and pillars formed a throne for him under the direction of his telekinesis. He sat, leaning his long, vaguely equine head on one taloned hand. “Deciding whether to rejoin me now that you remember what you’re up against?”
“Hardly. In fact I even remember how you ‘beat’ me the day you warped me into your puppet.” As he walked past the still unconscious Maegren, he sharply kicked the wounded Oni in the ribs, breaking several of them. “This trash attacked me from behind before we could properly finish our fight.”
“The result would have been the same.”
“I disagree… had you beaten me properly, perhaps you could have earned back my loyalty. But enough about the past… you’re avoiding the question. You have a sacrifice right here,” with that, he gestured to the statue of Twilight Sparkle. “What will you do with it?”
Kirin laughed darkly. “You’re making two mistakes, Warslave Caedum.”
“Is that so?”
“It is. One… you were my puppet from the day you were born. Two…” In an instant he was gone from the throne, and holding Garken in the air by the throat. “I have two sacrifices here…” He spun and slammed Garken into the marble while drawing back his free hand, claws poised to strike.
Crack!
A blast of incandescent energy struck him from behind, staggering him. In the moment of distraction, his hold on Garken loosened and the Oni blurred and was across the room in an instant, a sword in each hand as he stood with a no longer petrified Twilight Sparkle.
Kirin straightened up to his full five meter height and grinned down at them, showing off shark-like obsidian teeth. “Impressive work, child of the Seraphim. I would not have expected you to reverse the petrification on yourself.”
Twilight’s eyes narrowed as she looked up at him. “Cockatrice, years ago. I learn from just about everything. ...You look like Discord’s older, less-pleasant brother.”
“I might be, for all we knew. Our kind didn’t define family as yours does. All that matters to the draconequii is our virtue. Absolute power needs no family.”
Twilight snorted. “I can understand that, I guess. Mine is friendship.”
“Truly?” Kirin said, feigning amusement. “And I thought magic was your passion, little alicorn.”
She smiled sweetly up at him. “Didn’t you know? They’re the same thing.” Without further talk, she fired a blast from her horn while teleporting. Kirin deflected it, but the second shot from her new location hit, knocking him sideways a few steps. As this happened, Garken closed the distance, striking while Kirin was unbalanced. Both blades bounced off the thick scales of his draconic torso, sending up sparks but keeping him off balance. Twilight teleported again as a chunk of debri flew through the area she’d inhabited. Kirin blurred, bringing a fist down onto a shield that formed in an instant to meet it. It cracked and shattered, but not before she was gone again.
Garken followed him, and this time brought his swords to play against Kirin’s leg. The draconequii howled as both blades carved deep through thick muscle and sinew. He stumbled before his eyes widened and he clawed at the thickening air around his head. Twilight, horn lit, looked on as her transmutation slowly wore away at Kirin’s defenses. He looked at her in complete astonishment as he dropped to his knees and one taloned hand. Garken raised both blades for a decapitating strike as Kirin sent out a pulse of energy like a shockwave, trying to dislodge Twilight’s spell and throw Garken back. As Garken staggered and checked his swing, Maegren rose from the energy of the shockwave. Even in his wounded state he assessed the situation and immediately charged Twilight, who was pouring everything into maintaining her spell around Kirin. Garken flung a sword at him, but Maegren redirected it to Twilight with one hand.
She caught it in a telekinetic grip, but it was enough as Kirin’s defenses finally tore apart her attack. He gasped for breath, snarling with each heaving exhale. “Poison?! You… you dare… impossible… how…”
Twilight had no time to answer as she used Garken’s blade to inexpertly fend off Maegren. Kirin rose shakily to his feet and then spun and caught Garken’s other sword in one hand. “Not that easy… traitor.”
A blast behind them marked the end of Maegren’s offense as Twilight encased him in crystal. Kirin sighed angrily. “So hard to find good help…”
Garken struggled to free his weapon briefly before releasing it and throwing a punch at Kirin’s torso. As the Oni king moved to block it, he threw another, and another, each strike resonating with the aether flow in the room. Kirin stepped into the barrage, attempted to disrupt the harmonics, only to find his feet clinging to a thick paste that had once been the marble floor. He snarled and flung Garken’s sword at the persistent alicorn, only to hit nothing as she ported away. And then he could only weather the storm as Garken’s assault began shattering his magic defenses. At this rate, the control he’d asserted with the shockwave would fall, and then the blasted alicorn could resummon her poison…
Instead of attempting to defend, he struck back. Returning blow for blow, he countered Garken’s resonance with his own, shaking the building to its foundation as each strike mirrored another. A flex of his will directed some of the overflowing destructive force and shattered the crystal trapping Maegren. Regrettably it also shattered the already weakened Grand Marshal, grinding many of his bones to powder. Kirin didn’t care about that though. He reached out with his will and pulled, forcibly removing a dozen of the corrupted aether shards from the Oni’s battered body. In the chaos of striking blows, tremoring castle, and screaming aether, they were a surprise attack Garken didn’t have enough focus left to see coming. Twilight also shouldn’t have seen them coming, even from her distance away from the two. And yet she dropped her control over the floor to catch every shard that attempted to bury itself in Garken’s back.
She missed only the one headed for her own skull. It was the smallest, and nearly clear while the others had a definite onyx hue, and struck true between her horn and left eye. She screamed in pain as it drove into her head, and a final magic surge destroyed the other shards completely, crushing them in the same grip that had caught them. Kirin roared at the loss of power, but it was a brief disappointment as Garken’s attack ceased. He looked down at the stunned traitor.
His former Grand Marshal looked haunted as he gazed at his stricken rescuer. “No… not for me… why would you…?”
Kirin struck, backhanding the smaller warrior fiercely and sending him flying into the wall. “Marvelous… the both of you. I’d have never imagined it. That this world could overcome Discord was already astonishing. We were the pinnacle of magic here… the first to oppose the Demondim when they arrived… and the first to turn, or fall. That the Seraphim’s answer to us could come so far as this…” He strode to where Twilight had fallen, twitching as her will attempted to destroy the shard of crystal inside her brain. In time she would succeed, which was also astonishing. But he would not give her that time. “I see… you have known dark magic, then. Your teacher… prepared you well for such things. But not well enough. When I harvest your essence, it will only mean an even greater weapon than I once envisioned. I owe Celestia a debt, it would seem. ...Perhaps I’ll let her live long enough to mourn you. A day… perhaps two.”
He reached for her, but was stopped when a hand grabbed his wrist. He looked over at Garken, who was unsteady on his feet but had still recovered and crossed the distance in an instant. “Ah yes… my own answer to alicorns. I have only myself to blame for your resilience, I suppose. You and the other Generals receive training and magic to toughen you enough to fight the very strongest a given world has to offer. ...But never enough to fight me.” His free hand plunged forward, claws together, to stab into Garken’s chest before lifting him to stare eye to eye, inches apart. “You are nothing but a tool that dares to spite its creator. But it is of no moment. I realized earlier that you could be sacrificed as well. The other Oni are unsuitable, but you… you have this world’s magic permeating you. The wounds you received on Earth have stayed with you like an infection. You will make a fine-”
In a flash of light, Joyeuse carved through Kirin’s arm. Rarity appeared at his feet as the blade came around in a follow up that nearly blinded him; he dodged by less than an inch. He kicked at the unicorn, sight spotty from the glowing blade that had nearly taken his eyes, and missed as she sidestepped. An even brighter light shined behind them all as Aiden’s statue pieces flew together and reformed into the Esper’s unpetrified body, though his face was extremely pale.
“That was really unpleasant,” he muttered while portals began opening around the room.
“NO!” Kirin shouted pointlessly as all his targets vanished. Even his pet was gone. Only the human remained, grinning at him.
“Rough day, buddy?”
Kirin lunged, and had the satisfaction of feeling the human fail to dodge completely as his right arm was crushed under the force of a punch that broke the sound barrier. Kirin spun and swung again, hampered by missing an arm he had no time to reconstruct. This time the human blocked; a pair of bastons crossed in the air in front of him gave him time to get distance before Kirin obliterated them with a flex of power. For all the damage he’d taken, all the frustration he’d suffered, he wasn’t significantly injured. The human was buying time for the others to escape. He’d sent them all a short distance away, but Kirin could find them again. They couldn’t run. As Kirin struck again and again, keeping the human reeling on the brink of death, he could feel victory in his grasp. They-
A portal opened at the top of the throne room, and Kirin looked up, ready to block or destroy whatever came out of it. A blast of force answered him, pressing him down into the floor. Another portal opened, pressing from another direction as the human backpedaled, channeling. He was nearing the end of his stamina, in fact he should have been long exhausted. How he could push so far past his normal limits was a question for another time. Kirin roared, sending out a shockwave that disrupted the aether, unraveling both portals and stopping a third as it formed on the Esper himself. The human flickered, but the portal vanished and still he stood. An escape attempt that came too late.
“Interesting…” he said as he closed the distance his enemy had opened between them. The Esper was nearly the equal to his former Grand Marshal, which meant he was no still match for Kirin. There was no rush. “None of my army’s reports about you mentioned you channeling gravity in such a manner. ...Have you discovered the true function of a gravity drive, then?” He loomed over the human, taking his time while knowing his opponent was outmatched. His last shockwave had reclaimed the room’s aether: there would be no more portals without first getting further away, and Kirin had no intention of allowing that.
The boy was breathing heavily, and clearly in a great deal of pain. Nonetheless he grinned up at Kirin defiantly, eyes flashing green. “Sorry, no idea what you’re talking about.”
Kirin chuckled, and reconstructed his lost arm using pieces from the severed limb. “You’ll answer in time, meddler. The sooner you do the sooner I will end your suffering, as a thank you for making my arrival possible. I promise not to drag it out for more than the next three moons...” He reached out, intending to pluck off a limb to make his point.
His hand closed on chitin as green fire suffused the ‘human’.
“What?!”
*Moments Prior*
Rarity’s focus was on Twilight, so she was rather surprised when the statue of Raven suddenly became flesh in a flash of light outside of her peripheral vision. “Switch me places with Aiden, now!”
Rarity spun, eyes widening as she recognized that voice. “No… impossible… you…”
“There’s no time! Do you want that boy, and all his love, to die here and now?!” They both jerked their heads up as a portal, and another, opened. Rarity felt lightheaded as the very aether field itself seemed to funnel into those portals.
“Do it! Grab him and switch with me! For love’s sake, DO IT!” she screamed as green fire suffused her form, changing it to match Aiden’s.
*Now*
Kirin shouted in inchoate rage as a beam of green energy sliced through the hand that had gone to grab what was now clearly an impostor. The bug-like pony before him grinned… and he somehow knew that grin. “No… no no no, I will not allow-”
He staggered back as she fired another laser-like beam of force, carving through his defenses and leaving a seared line along his torso.
“Hmm… that should have bisected you,” the bug-thing noted conversationally. “I guess peripheral love from two fledglings and a battle maniac just won’t cut it. ...And by ‘it’, I mean you, you miserable trash.”
Despite the change in accent, certain cadences in her voice made her identity clear. “You will not stop me, little pet. And this time, I will show no mercy. I will tear your limbs from your-”
A blast of fire interrupted him and sent him tumbling backward into the wall. “Shh… shh. Now now, just between us villains, monologuing is bad. Also… you let your guard down.”
A portal opened, and she vanished. Kirin screamed in fury, shattering the castle walls around him, but his targets were long gone.
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Well, I suppose it is probably in Chrysalis's best interest to help them out. Not as much love in Demonkind I imagine. And hey, a little bit of brownie points with the rulers of (probably) the most powerful nation on the planet never hurt anyone.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/4/11/597681__safe_artist-colon-gray-dash-gold_artist-colon-probablyfakeblonde_queen+chrysalis_bedroom+eyes_fangs_grin_looking+at+you_portrait_simple+backgro.png
Chrysalis saves the day! I mean, technically we don't have a name yet, buuuut it's an open secret by now.
Chrysalis to the rescue.
Interesting. If I understand that correctly, each draconequus chooses and embodies an ideal. Thus Discord spreads, lives off of, and embodies Chaos. And Kirin apparently does the same with Power.
If that's the case, then he desperately needs to stop losing fights, or he will literally fade from existence. We've seen that happen before with Discord.
Thought I saw some changeling forshadowing a few chapters ago but didn't expect Chrissy.
You know, I've just thought of this, but "Sounds of Slience" sure threw a wrench in his name. Now, if only it can throw a wrench at his head...
No no no no no.
You go, Twilight! Yeah!
You hurt Twilight...
Die.
Ok, that's a pretty good line of rhetoric.
9273748
Weird... I never got a notification of this comment. I must have had the chapter open when it posted or something.
Yes, haha, the kirin in show are freakin' adorable. But oh well, the show, like me, is referencing the name from mythology so... fun coincidence. I'm borrowing specific mythology references because they're also in Final Fantasy XI (Kirin, Briareus, Joyeuse, probably a few others I can't recall on the fly). I've actually considered a silly side chapter of him meeting them and being infuriated by them for... well obvious reasons. But I'd have to see the episode first, since I wait for Netflix and binge them over the course of a few days. November 12th, finally!
I technically haven't named her here yet, but yeah it's rather clear now. All props to keroko on that one for being the first reader to call me on it many chapters ago. We'll be delving into her motivations and the like in the next chapter, which will be up in a couple days at most. Nanowrimo demands it!
Eh, Kirin's only a draconequus.
I've killed millions in my time... literally... millions.
(Goku appears) But can you block..
Alondro grrrrs at the filthy monkey. >:C