Chapter XXIX: Indigo Ice
Iceberg, fittingly for its name, was cold–extremely so. Twilight shivered as they approached the gravelly beach, and the only thing that was staving off hypothermia for herself, Rick, Coo, and Bandee was a constant warming charm. Dedede could handle it just fine, Kirby and Gooey didn’t seem to mind the cold at all, and Kine claimed that he’d swam in worse before.
Given his propensity for cryokinesis, Twilight could believe it.
Regardless of her charm, though, Twilight was absolutely glad to be out of the water. She was still soaked, but at least now she could begin actually drying off, especially since the cliff near them was acting as a nice barrier against the wind and rain. As she fluttered her wings a bit to try and fling the excess water off of them, she glanced around at the island itself.
The beach they were on was mostly made of gravel, straddling the ocean on one side and an icy cliff on the other. The cliff rose up a few dozen meters, and from what Twilight could tell swimming in, the island itself was mostly a plateau. Scaling the cliff didn’t exactly seem like an ideal option, what with most of the visible rock face being coated in ice.
Thankfully, that didn’t seem like their only option, for there was a cave in the cliff face at ground level. “Hey, Dedede,” she asked, “you’ve been here before, right?”
Dedede pointed his hammer up the cliff. “I’ve been up top–that’s where the castle on Iceberg is.” He looked at the beach they were on. “Though, this could make a decent port.”
“What about the cave there?” Twilight pointed out.
Dedede frowned, unsure, but Bandee spoke up. “We’ve sent a couple of Rockies down into Iceberg’s caves to survey them,” he said. “I think they mentioned something about a cave on a beach, so this should link up to an exit on the surface.”
“Good enough for me!” Rick called, rolling up to the cave. “It’ll be nice to have some bloody shelter!”
“Hold it!” Kine shouted from the water. Twilight watched, amazed and a bit disturbed, as he breached out of the water and flopped–albeit a bit slowly–on the land to join them. “Youse didn’t forget ‘bout me, right?”
“Are you…sure you want to come?” Bandee asked, concerned.
“‘Ey, just ‘cause I’m a fish don’t mean anythin’!” Kine answered, his voice carrying far more conviction than a talking fish flopping about on gravel had any right to. “Someone messed wit’ my wife, messed wit’ my mind, an’ messed wit’ da Rainbow Bridges. I’ve gotta send dem sleepin’ wit’ da fishes.”
Twilight narrowed her eyes at the cave, plotting their way forward. “Yeah, well, get in line,” she said. “You’re not the only one with a bone to pick with this thing.”
Coo spat some of his feathers from his beak–it seemed that he’d been preening himself in the meantime–and cleared his throat. “In any case, Kine, I do believe I may be able to help you with your mobility problem, now that we’re out of that blasted rain.”
He flapped his wings and–amazingly, for an owl that had just gotten out of the surf–lifted off easily. After grabbing onto Kine’s dorsal fin with a talon, it took considerably more effort for him to rise into the air with the fish in tow, but it worked.
“There,” Coo said, “now you won’t have to flop about everywhere.”
Dedede sauntered forward to the cave entrance, and gestured for the others to follow. “Alright, let’s get moving, then!”
Once they’d gotten a considerable way into the cave, the group switched around their order a bit. Twilight, being able to generate light with her magic, took point. Gooey was in the back, keeping watch behind them with its electricity (something that Twilight was going to have to look into at some point). Coo and Kine fluttered overhead, keeping as clear as they could from the barely-visible icy stalactites. Bandee, Dedede, and Rick stayed in the middle, while Kirby kept his claws ready at Twilight’s side to fight back if something attacked them.
Navigating the caves was a challenge enough on its own, even with Bandee having a decent enough knowledge of them for a mental map. Twilight was placing magical beacons down at every intersection they came across just to be safe. They’d already had to backtrack twice at dead ends, but the group could tell that they were moving generally upwards. That, at least, was good.
“I, uh, think we take a right, here,” Bandee said as they approached the next fork in the path.
“Ya sure on this one?” Rick asked a bit testily.
Bandee nodded, not that it was visible in the poor lighting. “We’ve gotta be close to the top, now. And that way goes up!”
“He’s got a point,” Twilight agreed.
There was a squelching sort of noise above them, and everyone stopped short. The noise did as well, before there was another squelch.
Twilight swiveled her ears.
Another squelch sounded out, this one right above her.
Coo squawked. “Princess, watch out!”
His warning came too late, however. She was tensed to move, but before she could spring away her vision suddenly went dark. Something wet and heavy had fallen directly on her face, and she let out a muffled cry as she realized that whatever it was had covered her nose and mouth as well. Reflexively, mostly in an attempt to be able to breathe again, she fired off a concussive spell directly at the tip of her horn.
It worked to force whatever it had been off of her, but she had felt it sap away some latent magical power as well. As her head felt quite a bit lighter and she could take in air again, she realized something rather pertinent: her head felt too light.
The Element of Magic was missing.
Instead of securely on Twilight’s head, it was in the grasp of a very pink octopus that had been launched a ways forward by her hasty spell. The Element was glowing brightly, clearly trying to expel whatever darkness had possessed the poor creature. But its tentacles were long, enough so to keep the tiara’s influence from its head.
In the faint light of her spell, Twilight could see that it was wearing a cute little red bow, too. By all means, it was something that Fluttershy would have fawned over. But its gaze was hard and its eyes blackened, a sure sign that the darkness was in control.
For a moment, Twilight and the octopus just stared at each other, the air between them tense.
Then it switched which tentacle it was holding the Element of Magic with and scurried off, and the tension broke.
“After it!” Twilight shouted, her hooves skidding a bit on the icy floor of the cave as she started galloping.
She nearly slammed into the wall as she rounded a corner at speed, but recovered quickly. She kept charging forward while Coo, with Kine in tow, swung around the bend as well. The fish fired out a spurt of water at the fleeing octopus while the owl flung a few feathers forward.
The octopus managed to dodge Coo’s feathers, jumping directly into Kine’s projectile. While it shivered a bit at the cold water, it was still able to use it to its advantage. The water pushed it forward even further, and it snuck into a gap in the wall that was far too thin for any of the group to get through.
Of course, that was inconsequential to Twilight. The cave on the other side of the wall was more than wide enough to accommodate her, so she simply flared her horn and performed a short-range teleport. She didn’t even slow down, resuming her pursuit of the octopus as soon as she was through.
The short lull had given it time to get further away, though, and she was able to just barely see it rounding another corner. Twilight turned the corner herself not long after, and momentarily stalled as her eyes adjusted to the sudden change in lighting. This cave led directly to the surface, and while the storm was still ongoing, the meager sunlight that got through was still far more than in the deeper caves.
It didn’t take long for her eyes to adjust, though, and she was tearing out of the cave and after the octopus only seconds later. The cave’s exit dumped them out onto a mostly flat, snow-covered plain, the cold rain on the other islands having been replaced here by softly-falling snowflakes. It was a welcome change, for sure–once she properly dried and preened her wings, Twilight would be able to actually fly again.
She was starting to miss it, which came as a bit of a surprise. The feeling of freedom that came with self-powered flight was exhilarating, sure, but she had mostly been using that skillset for simply useful circumstances. Perhaps she’d have to fly more often later.
Of course, the more pressing matter at the moment was her missing Element. The octopus thief had run off towards the only large structure she could see on the island: a small stone castle. It wasn’t nearly the size or grandiosity of Castle Dedede, nor anywhere near as intricate as the Castle of the Two Sisters or Canterlot Palace, but it was serviceable. Castles were, Twilight supposed, military installations first and foremost.
No matter where it hid, though, Twilight knew that the octopus couldn’t get away from her for long. It slipped inside the castle easily, but Twilight’s magic was uncompromising. The doors slammed open, and she galloped through the stone halls in hot pursuit of the thief.
Thirty seconds and three flights of stairs later, and Twilight had finally cornered her foe. They were at the end of a long hallway, the only defining features of which were its many windows. The octopus looked around, its dark eyes searching for any way to get out of its predicament as it shifted which tentacle was holding the crown again.
It found one fairly easily.
The sound of shattering glass rang out as the octopush defenestrated the Element of Magic. Twilight’s horn flared instantly, slamming the octopus into the wall and out of the way of the window. She fired a destructive beam of magic at the rest of the glass, shattering it and allowing her to jump out of the now-empty frame.
Her magic caught her Element easily, stalling its fall under a meter above the ground. But only now, plummeting from three stories up, did Twilight realize her mistake. Her wings were still damp and disorganized, so as she desperately flapped, it did little to properly slow her down. Her instinctive use of pegasus magic was helping, sure, but she’d still likely break a leg upon landing.
Twilight preemptively winced and shut her eyes, bracing for a painful landi-
“Gotcha!”
A powerful hand closed around the scruff of her neck, and the expected pain never came. Instead, snow flew in all directions as Dedede landed, Twilight safely held in his grasp. She had canceled her telekinesis in surprise, but thankfully Bandee was there to catch her Element as it dropped the final centimeters to the ground. She gratefully took it as Dedede dropped her and a pervading sense of calm took over as she secured it back on her head. With a stronger sticking charm, this time.
She resolved to try harder to keep it here. With it gone, she had felt overcome with rage, almost moreso than when she had fought Kirby in the skies above Castle Dedede. Clearly it had been shielding her mind from whatever emotional manipulation the darkness had sown, and her mental state without it had been…unpleasant.
Speaking of Kirby, though, it seemed that the rest of the group had caught up. The pink puffball himself had traded out his fursuit ability for a hat that looked to be made entirely of ice. Gooey was still that yellowish color, and there was a rut in the snow where Rick had rolled up to them. Dedede and Bandana Dee had been the ones to help catch her, of course, while Coo and Kine were above them, checking out the window Twilight had jumped from.
“‘Ey, Twi!” Kine called. “Ya might wanna get up ‘ere an’ finish da job. Dat octopus looks like it’s gettin’ up!”
Twilight vanished in a flash of teleportation, reappearing right back in the hallway. The octopus immediately tried to flee, but Twilight was not having it. She activated her Element near instantly, purging the fragment of darkness first from the octopus, and second from the world entirely.
“There,” Twilight said, satisfied, “that should do it.”
The octopus groaned. “Merde…What in the world was that?” she asked.
“You were momentarily possessed by something that’s been going around and destroying the Rainbow Bridges,” Twilight explained, the spiel quite well-rehearsed by now. “We’ve purged it from you and destroyed the fragment that was directly controlling you.”
The octopus blinked, her eyes now distinctly blue. “Well, thanks a ton for that! Sorry aboot attacking you.”
Twilight waved it off. “It’s a non-issue.” She gestured out the window. “The same thing happened to Coo and Kine here.” Gesturing back at herself, she continued. “I’m Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria.”
The octopus offered a tentacle to shake. “Chuchu,” she responded curtly. “A pleasure to meet you, Your Highness.”
The introduction was rather undercut by Twilight’s stomach loudly growling. She blushed and sheepishly rubbed the back of her head. “Maybe we should continue over some lunch,” she suggested. Poking her head out of the window, she shouted down at the group below. “Hey, Dedede! You said you own this castle, right?”
“I will!”
“So do you know where the food is?”
“What time is it, actually?” Cadance asked. She gestured out of Discord’s window and towards the purple abyssal void surrounding his home. “It’s a bit hard to tell.”
Pinkie’s stomach loudly growled, even moreso than Twilight’s had only moments earlier.
“It’s about three in the afternoon,” Discord answered, surprised even as he said it.
Idly, he snapped his tail and summoned a full lunch spread for his guests. Spirit of Chaos he may be, but he wasn’t a monster!
“We’ve been here for ten hours?” Shining asked, astonished.
“Time flies when you’re watching your friends engage with threats to their life and limb!” Pinkie answered before stuffing her face with a cupcake, having already located the desert section of the buffet table.
“An’ the rest of us didn’t get here ‘til ‘round seven,” Applejack pointed out.
“They do seem to be speeding up,” Rarity added. “Why, I do wager that the next three islands might not take them nearly as long as the previous three.”
“Yeah, until they have to deal with Spike,” Rainbow countered.
Rarity raised a hoof and took a breath, before considering the statement. “That is fair,” she conceded.
“Speaking of family,” Fluttershy began, turning to look at Shining, “I, um, wanted to ask…do you and Twilight’s parents know what’s happening?”
Shining frowned. “Princess Celestia said that she told them a few days before Twily’s disappearance was made public, but I haven’t heard from them in a while.” He turned towards his wife. “We might want to check in on them soon. Who knows what they might try to do to help.”
“I don’t mean no disrespect,” Applejack started, “but what exactly could they do? Princesses Celestia and Luna are already helpin’ Sunburst an’ Starlight research it!”
“Well, Night Light is an astrophysicist,” Cadance pitched in, “so he might have something to offer.” She frowned and tapped her chin. “But Velvet’s just a freelance editor, so I’m not sure she’d be able to help much.”
Shining chuckled. “Oh, trust me, you do not want to underestimate Mom. She got through raising me, Twily, and Spike, after all!”
Plus, he mentally added for the sake of not spilling government secrets, there’s the matter of who she edits for.
“So, honey, how did it go?” Twilight Velvet asked her husband as he entered their home in Canterlot.
Night Light sighed and closed the door. “Well, the Sunburst fellow mentioned that if they need an expert on supernovae, I’ll be the first to know, even if that’s vanishingly unlikely.” He chuckled a bit. “I think he was a bit shocked to talk on even hoofing with one of his former professors, though.”
“Any ancient magical artifacts that they need?” Velvet pressed. “I’m sure Daring would be more than willing to…procure them if need be.”
“None yet,” Night Light answered. “But I’m sure one or both of us will be heading down to Ponyville again soon, so we can ask again then.”
Velvet blinked in surprise. “How soon is soon?”
“Probably within a week or so,” Night Light said. “Discord apparently has a visual window into the universe Twilight’s in, and I want a good look at it.” His gaze turned down, a bit forlorn. “I just hope she’s alright, Vel.”
Velvet embraced her husband and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “I’m sure she will be,” she said, though it sounded almost like she was trying to convince herself as well. “Twilight’s tough, and she’s gotten out of worse scrapes before. Remember the first Want-it-Need-it incident?”
A ghost of a smile crossed Night Light’s face and he snorted in amusement. “How could I forget? The school was shut down for days.”
Castle Iceberg’s food stores weren’t exactly large at the moment, given that Dedede and his servants hadn’t done all that much work on restoring it, yet. But it had some nonperishables stored in the kitchens, enough for the group of eight to have a quick meal.
Of course, Kirby had been rather disappointed by his meager proportions, but food was limited.
It was filling enough for Twilight, at least, and took care of the bumps and scrapes they had accrued since Big Forest. Food here generally felt like it had more calories per gram than at home, and she supposed that that was necessary for it to heal like it did.
As the others were finishing up, she took to running her magic over her wings, searching for feathers that were out of place. There were few that she couldn’t directly correct, which was helpful, but she did still have to yank a couple of them out and discard them.
Bandee looked at her curiously as she winced in pain pulling another feather out. “What…what are you doing?”
“Preening,” Twilight answered. “I can fly better in the snow than I can in the rain, so I’m taking the downtime here to fix my wings.”
“So your wings are like a bird’s?” Bandee asked.
“Sort of,” Twilight responded. “They’re mostly just conduits for pegasus magic–they’d be too small to get me off the ground otherwise–but I still need them to provide some minimum amount of lift.”
“So you’re gonna be able to fly to the next island?” Dedede piped up.
Twilight shrugged. “I hope so! My wings are still a bit damp, but I’ve seen pegasi fly in heavy rain before. My main problem in Ripple Field had been them being waterlogged.”
There was the rumble of thunder in the distance, and Bandee looked unsure of Twilight’s hope. “It sounds like it’s getting worse out there.”
“Where’s this weather coming from, anyway, eh?” Chuchu asked. “I’ve seen Iceberg get some bad snowstorms, but this is the first thundersnow I’ve seen!”
Rick pointed out of a window, where the swirling dark clouds were visible around a mountaintop not too far away. “The gully raker looks like it’s comin’ in from Cloudy Park over there.”
Dedede’s eyes narrowed. “Kracko,” he realized.
Most of the group suddenly looked distinctly nervous, though Twilight just frowned. “Isn’t that the being you gave one of the Star Rod fragments too? And…didn’t Sunset say she fought him on Skyhigh?”
“Yeah, but…” Bandee trailed off, thinking of how to put this. “Kracko’s strong. Really strong. And I don’t know how he’ll react to the Rainbow Bridges’ destruction.”
Coo scarfed down the last of his meal and took to the air. “Well, let’s get a bloody move on, then! Don’t want to dilly dally with the cloud monster complicating things!”
Twilight nodded in agreement. “Right.” She stood and made her way to the door. “Red Canyon is closer, but we’ve nearly caught up to Spike! We can do this!”
Kirby frowned for a moment about being dragged away from his food, before he decided to simply discard his icy hat and inhale the rest of it.
The walk across the rest of Iceberg was largely uneventful. The top of the island was a mostly flat plateau, so while they did have to trudge through the snow, they could see all the way to their destination. Their destination, and the pile of icy rocks around it serving as another entrance to Iceberg’s underground caverns.
Of course, it was just their luck that, as they passed the cave, a massive roar echoed out from within it. A frosty wind blasted from the cave entrance, and Twilight just barely leapt out of the way before it hit the snow, coating it in a thick layer of ice. The ground seemed to shake as whatever had attacked them took a step, exiting the cave and being illuminated in the overcast light.
It appeared to be a dragon of some sort, albeit smaller than the dragons that Twilight was familiar with. That still meant it was rather large, standing taller than Dedede, even on its stubby legs. It had no wings, its cyan back only holding a series of small spikes, down to its clearly powerful tail. Its wide-open mouth contained only four sharp fangs, but it seemed like it took up almost the entire upper half of its body.
If it wasn’t prepared to actively attack them, Twilight might’ve even found it sort of cute.
“Sacre bleu, it’s the Ice Dragon!” Chuchu exclaimed, seeming torn between amazement and terror. “Everything happening must’ve woken it up!”
The dragon wasted no time attacking them, breathing another cone of frost at them. Twilight countered with a powerful warming charm, melting its icy breath into an ineffective puddle. Dedede rushed forward to try and add in a hammer swing, but the Ice Dragon simply took it and slid backwards, seeming no worse for wear.
It jumped high in the air–how, Twilight was unsure, given the stubbiness of its legs–before trying to crash back down directly on Coo and Kine by rapidly flailing its tail to hover.
Really, that just gave Twilight even more questions.
Thankfully, the owl saw it coming and was able to fly out of the way, and Kine shot at the falling dragon with a quick spurt of water and a call of “‘Ey, we’re flyin’, ‘ere!”
The Ice Dragon shrugged off the hit from the water easily enough, and landed directly next to Gooey. Upon landing in the snow, spikes of ice shot out in all directions, nearly spearing Gooey straight through! But the blob managed to just barely avoid it, launching itself forward and delivering an electrical shock and dark laser right to the Ice Dragon.
That finally seemed to actually do something, sending the dragon stumbling backwards a bit, but it retaliated before the group could press their advantage. It spat a beam of pure cold–another oddity in this world’s physics that Twilight resolved to study later–at Gooey, knocking it backwards and freezing it to the ground as its yellow coloration faded back to a navy blue.
Kirby wasn’t taking the abuse at his friends lying down, though. He rushed forward and inhaled one of the ice spikes the dragon had created, regaining his icy hat. The dragon tried to breathe an icy breath at him, but Kirby retaliated with one of his own, overpowering the dragon’s! It still didn’t seem to do much as it connected, but it forced the dragon to back off its assault.
It also distracted it from Rick, who was plowing through the snow as a rocky ball. He uncoiled as he got close, spitting three globs of fire right at the Ice Dragon.
That got their enemy to actually wail in pain, and it launched back into the air to escape, switching targets towards Bandee. The general dove out of the way of the ice spikes as the dragon landed, and he called out an idea that, in retrospect, seemed obvious. “Attack it with fire!” he shouted.
Kirby threw away his hat and nodded at Rick, who shot two fireballs at him and Gooey, unfreezing the latter and allowing both to copy it.
In the meantime, Bandee had batted away two icy projectiles with his spear, giving Dedede time to rush towards it, his hammer spewing fire from one of its faces. He still hit it with the non-flaming side, since the entire reason his hammer was able to do that was for thrust, but it was powerful enough to send the dragon directly into a stream of fire that spewed forth from Twilight’s horn.
She wasn’t quite as good at the subtleties of pyroturgy as Sunset was, but she had more than enough sheer power to make up for it.
Adding onto it, Kirby and Gooey both bodily launched into the Ice Dragon while coated in fireballs, with Rick adding in a bit of extra firepower as well. The dragon writhed in pain for a few seconds, but let out a roar and a pulse of cold air shot out in all directions, interrupting the group’s attack. The dragon was clearly damaged, but not out of the fight at all.
Its gaze turned to Chuchu and, disturbingly fast for a creature of its stature, launched itself at the mostly defenseless octopus. But mostly defenseless meant that she still had some defenses, and she scurried out of the way before the dragon landed. Reaching up while it was still in the air, Chuchu grabbed onto the dragon with no less than three of her tentacles, digging as many of her suckers into it as she could. With a heave of disproportionate strength, she threw the Ice Dragon back.
Twilight’s horn flared with light as she wrapped her telekinesis around it as well, keeping it from landing as long as possible. It was actually a bit lighter than she had expected, but still heavy enough to force her to grunt with effort as she slammed it into the side of the cave it had come from. It slumped down as it slid to the ground, and Kirby adding in some additional fire of his own finally proved to be too much for it.
As the Ice Dragon hit the ground again, it was unconscious.
“Right,” Rick said after the group took a moment to collect themselves. “That’s that blighter down for the count!”
Dedede pointed his hammer towards Red Canyon, the snow collecting on his cap almost looking like a powdered wig. “Let’s cross the ocean and get to the next island!” He grinned. “Just watch that darkness bastard try and stop us!”
As the group began moving again, Twilight curiously glanced up at her Element. It hadn’t glowed at all during the fight, so she supposed that the dragon hadn’t been possessed despite its pure black eyes–it had just been angry.
That was somewhat of a relief, actually. Clearly the darkness that had taken her brother wasn’t powerful enough yet to directly possess more than a few things per island. Hopefully that would stay consistent.
She winced as a rumble of thunder echoed out from Cloudy Park. There’s only one Bridge left, she mentally countered herself. Who knows what’ll happen when it’s destroyed.
Rain and wind whipped every which way, as Kracko’s power flailed about unfiltered in his anger. Lightning crashed every few seconds, some shocks managing to hit his target. But even when lightning hit the now nearly two meter tall dragon, it did nothing, seeming to simply discharge through him and into the ground with no ill effect.
Kracko didn’t particularly know why he was attacking–he’d never seen this dragon before in his life, after all–but he knew that he was wrathful.
The Darkness, of course, knew exactly why this cloud golem was angry. It was…unfortunate that it was stalling it for so long, but in the end it would only be a minor hinderance. Looking into the dragon’s biology had been a profitable choice, as it had allowed the Darkness to nonlethally rearrange his internal structure.
Dragons seemed to break down gemstones, particularly corundum, to get at the mana within their crystal structures. To do this, they had a specialized organ, coated in an insulating layer of diamond, which their magic kept hot enough to melt cryolite. Dragons–Equestrian dragons, that is–used their diamond-studded teeth to crush corundum and transfer it to this organ, where it was dissolved in the molten cryolite. A magic-induced voltage, run through silicon kept hot enough to act as a conductor, broke down the aluminum oxide and released the magic stored within the chemical bonds.
If the Darkness was capable of finding the physical processes of draconic gemstone digestion intriguing, it would have. But it had no appreciation for the subtleties of draconic biology, only interested in knowing enough to not kill its host. It found no ill effects to moving some of the silicon around, and so it did.
The dragon’s internal body temperature outside of its gemstone-digesting organ was still hot enough to allow the silicon to properly conduct electricity, so he now had an internal wire stretching from his right clawtips down to his right sole. So long as the Darkness kept the dragon’s right foot planted on the ground, the cloud golem could not harm it. No matter how much lightning it shot, it would always ground through the silicon.
It gave the Darkness further ideas, as well. If it could determine how to induce a voltage voluntarily, it may have been able to use limited electrokinesis in the dragon’s body. But for now, it had other things to worry about.
The cloud golem had been physically preventing its advance for hours now, the wind and rain forming a near impenetrable fortress. But the Darkness had broken through–at a regrettable but necessary cost to some of the dragon’s health–and was now able to directly approach the enraged cloud.
The Darkness channeled some of its power into the dragon’s right arm, stretching it to lengths far beyond what it was naturally capable of. Some of the dragon’s bones shattered in the process, but that was inconsequential to the Darkness. It would simply repair them later.
Its true goal in this battle, however, was now within its grasp. The dragon’s right claw grabbed ahold of one of the could golem’s copper spikes, its attempts at attacking with electricity futility grounding through the internal wiring. Focusing for a moment, the Darkness split some of itself and pushed it into the cloud golem. It was a bit more power than was ideal, but it would be necessary to fully bring the cloud under its control.
The wind and rain died down as the cloud’s eye blackened, becoming dark as night. The Darkness let go of the cloud, retracting the dragon’s arm back to its natural state. The cloud golem moved away, allowing the Darkness free passage to the final bridge.
As it walked past a rock that some ancient, primordial part of the dragon’s brain identified as “cool-looking,” it pushed down a niggling in the back of the dragon’s mind. The desire to hoard had been growing stronger within the dragon the more the Darkness abused its growth, but so far it had been successful in identifying, collecting, and discarding the emotion.
The intelligent part of the dragon’s mind was the part that actually concerned it. His mind had nearly awoken while it was fighting the cloud golem, and it had cost the Darkness precious time to quiet it down again. It seemed like it had underestimated the dragon’s Heart again, but it still was nothing that it couldn’t handle.
It had possessed far more difficult hosts before, after all.
The final bridge shattered behind it, a wave of apathy echoing out across the planet. It stored the final violet gemstone and looked up at the castle before it. This would do quite nicely as a base of operations to spread its influence until the Great Work could begin on this planet.
It wouldn’t be long, now, until the Whole arrived.
Until the Darkness could claim this world as its own.
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I was not expecting Chuchu, much less her to be Canadian.
Dark Matter's pride will be it's downfall.
It believeSs breaking all the bridges will stop any challengers.
It is wrong about that.
It believes quieting Spike's Heart down is easy.
Wait 'til Twilight gets here.
It believes Zero will be fast enough to conquer Popstar.
Well not if Kirby has anything to say about it.
All in all, Its chances of victory are high.
As long as you don't factor all the things against it.
Wlp looks like Dark Matter (And possibly Spike) just made an enemy for life!
Probably more bitter than with Kirby too... at least Kracko's rivalry with Kirby implies its not only about given he got angry about Mecha Kracko taking his spot in sqeak squad.
So the Dream Land 3 animals will be here too! Nice!
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DL3 just introduced its three animal friends with very little explanation or introduction, so I'm aiming to at least give the three a bit of time to shine before then!
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The Darkness went into this expecting a routine conquering. Even after it discovered Kirby, it still didn't expect it to be too much more troublesome than other worlds. But really, Dark Matter chose the wrong planet to mess with, this time.
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Kracko's rivalry with Kirby is an interesting one, since much like his rivalry with Dedede, it started out far more bitter than it's become. Barring possession/corruption like in Star Allies, modern fights with Kracko seem to be more of the vein of Kracko fighting Kirby because he feels like it, moreso than because he's actively angry.
But he is known to be rather bitter when it comes to defeats, so it remains to be seen how he'll take this one in the future.
Is Dark Matter trying to turn Spike into Spyro? Because he sure is experimenting in allowing his body to control more elements.
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Well, they are both purple dragons!
The Spyro parallels there are actually entirely coincidental, but interesting nonetheless. I haven't played a Spyro game in over a decade, though--I should go back to it at some point.
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Only if you like collecti-thons like banjo kazooie.
I thought chuchu was supposed to be a squid or jellyfish?
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Each of the animal friends are based on a few different things, but Chuchu particular is based on a flapjack octopus, according to the wiki!
Why is the octopus Canadian?