Wind Whistler v. Discord from Projected Story · 1:18am Dec 12th, 2014
This from a projected side story to Alex Warlorn's Generation Transitions and Origins and my Divine Jealousy and the Voice of Reason. The context is that Dissy has Awoken into Discord, and gotten Wind Whistler (whom he had already temporarily Discorded in an earlier scene, and from which she had long since recovered) alone with the intent of dominating her and Twisting her into his pawn. He quickly finds that she is tougher, even against his newly-empowered self, than he had realized.
Wind Whistler flew at him, and suddenly Discord was in a fight for his life.
It should have been impossible. He was more than three times her mass, more than twice her strengh, fanged and clawed and firebreathing, his skin tough as leather where it was not actually armored in dragonscale. And he could regenerate. And teleport. And cast Chaos magic.
Her eyes were calm cerise fury blazing from the center of her soul, her wings flashing with both moonsilver and flight-field blades, her hooves striking like lightning, with the force of thunder, tipped by razor-sharp battle-sabatons. She was everywhere and nowhere, fluid as the air, hard as the mountains, a force of Nature rendered into Pegasus flesh, inflicting wound after wound upon him, making him cringe in pain, then slipping away with seeming effortlessness from his strongest counterstrikes.
He tried to turn her into something harmless, and she sensed the gathering paramagnetism and jinked aside, his spells flying past her in showy wastes of power. He attempted simple ion bolts, and she twisted her flight field to deflect them harmlessly past. He tried to Twist her soul, and his own mind wrenched as she formed her own will into an iron fortress through which his Stare could not penetrate. It only worked on her the first time because I caught her unawares, he realized, and then in a moment of horror: Her will is the stronger!
In the distraction of that moment, she slipped through his defenses and delivered a rapid combination of kicks and slashes to his head and throad, so fast that he could not react. First she jabbed out both his eyes, and before he could regenerate and clear his sockets of the blood she knocked his head to and fro, so that his great brain sloshed in its armored casing, battered brutally against the inside of his skull. Had he kept all his consciousness there, like a true Pony or Dragon, the fight would have ended there -- as it was, he was dazed just long enough for her to slip a razor-sharp moonsilver wingblade, its penetration aided by her flightfield (in a technique she had once shown him but which he had never bothered to learn) right into his jugular.
He fell backward, roaring, his lifeblood fountaining and his flesh trying but failing to heal around the metal. The wound was agony, and it shouldn't have been, a very familiar agony. The Crystal Heart! he realized in horror. She imbued the blade!
He needed to defend himself, and for a moment had no idea where she was. He bought himself a little time by spraying forth Dragonfire in a wide cone, She'll have to dodge that It was almost not enough time, as he felt something larger pierce his Griffon limb, something that burned with the agony of extreme cold, but he had just enough time to throw up a spherical shield, sacrificing efficiency for complete protection.
He felt a huge drain on his power as his body fought the effect, but the cold fire was spreading. He restored his eyes and opened, them, and the first thing he saw was the Crystal-Imperial ice javelin piercing his arm, the coldness spreading, as swarms of enchanted nanites assimilated tiny amounts of his flesh in a process of catalysis that dumped the heat into a glow of coherent paramagnetism.
With one motion of his vulture claw he yanked out the javelin, tossed it away from himself. The nanites were still in his flesh, continuing to burn it with cold, but without the main body of the dart in him, he easily dispelled their enchantment, then sprayed the microscopic machines away from him as harmless dust.
He was weakening from blood loss. Had he been dependent on the maintenance of blood pressure to the same extent as a real Pony (instead of the Monster I am came the traitor thought) he would have gone into shock; as it was, keeping his organs functioning by chaotic necromancy consumed too much energy to kept up all fight long.
He felt something pressing on his force field from outside, sensed motion downward. She's putting a vector on me he thought. Does she never let up? How many moves in advance is she out-thinking me! She's inequine!
It was the work of a moment for his vulture claw to grip the wingblade. Ignoring the agony and the sensations of his own charring flesh as he touched the lethal Lawfulness of the Heartflake within the blade, he pulled it from his throat and threw it aside. Blood fountained, but now his own Chaotic regenerative powers went to work, and the wound quickly knitted.
He dropped the field and with the same motion dodged. He realized his mistake just in time to restore partial shielding as he slammed at hundreds of miles an hour downwards and sideways into the forest. Oak trees shattered into splinters against Discord's shield, and his bones would have spintered as well if he had not inertially stablized himself with a quick gravitic compensation field.
Thanks, Lulu, he thought, sarcastically. You were the one who taught me that. I'll show my gratitude by letting you live in a nice silver cage, big enough for you to spread your wings.
Thwack-thwack-thwack-shlump! Four wingblades spattered down in quick succession, three caroming off dragonscale and one sinking in the softer flesh of his belly. There was no Heartflake on that one, and Discord threw it telekinetically from his flesh, aiming it directly at the powder-blue streak already curving up for another pass.
How can she possibly be doing this? he asked himself again. She doesn't have anything like my level of power, she has no magic other than her weapons, how can she be beating me?
Beating me.
For the first time since he'd Awoken, Discord knew real fear.
This is but a Hope Spot -- Wind Whistler is using the Flutter Pony technique of massively overclocking her body (see Hive Hunger-Prime Is Falling) to speed her reflexes to the point of being able to launch a flurry of attacks against him. She knows she can't keep him up for long, doubts that she can really slay an Immortal Avatar, and has guessed from the old legends why she shouldn't even try to kill him. Her real hope is to exhaust him enough to let DIssy surface -- this comes heartbreakingly close to success, but in the end Windy is lucky to escape with her life. And, as we all know, in a later fight, he consumes her.
Just wondering what people think of my technique at depicting hardcore action.
If anyone cares, this was the music I was listening to while writing this.
This was BRILLIANT! And this really does show the G1 ponies as cool! Wind Whistler was definitely one of their best. (along with of course Firefly.)
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Yes. She may look too cool in the segment I wrote because she looks as if she's actually winning, but of course she's really not, save tactically, and she knows it because one of the things about Wind Whistler is that she's a very strategic thinker. She knows that he can't really kill Discord, because (1) he outmatches her too far and (2) he'll just transmigrate into her body (as he indeed does, later) if she by some miracle manages to actually slay an entity with a body even stronger than an Alicorn Avatar's (she knows this from the research she's been doing for some two decades now). Her plan is to temporarily overwhelm him by keeping him off balance, and then hope that the shock to the Discord-personality will be enough to permit the Dissy-personality to reintegrate to dominance, something which she will help by talking to him when he's down.
She sees all the problems with this plan, but it has two great merits: (1) it's the only plan she can think of which she has the power to execute, and (2) if it fails, she's the only one at risk (she manipulated him into fighting her one-on-one in a different location than the others), and maybe the others can get away or figure something out while she's doing this.
It does fail, but she doesn't die: in part because Discord doesn't particularly want to kill her. She's his old Teacher, and mock her as he does (in an earlier segment I haven't shown here), he actually respects her, kind of likes her, and wants to impress her with his shiny new powers (he knows that before he Awoke she would have beaten him one-on-one, despite his physical advantages). If he'd had any other good choice in their ultimate battle during their ultimate battle in the Age of Discord, he would have spared her, and essentially for similar reasons to why he spares Firefly -- he really doesn't want her dead. He's quite happy when he realizes that that her personality survives in a subordinate position in their shared body.
Celly, Lulu and Dissy all have a rather Well Done Student relationship with Wind Whistler growing up -- Celly is the most obedient student of the three (and they leave little notes for one another addressed "Dear Teacher" and "Most Faithful Student" respectively -- yes, that's where Celestia gets the practice from). Lulu hero-worships Wind Whistler as the ultimate strategist, tactician and fighter -- the one she models her own ideal conduct upon, even though, given Lulu's rather cranky personality she winds up locking horns with her regularly.
Dissy spends most of his education under Wind Whistler cutting up as a sort of class clown in their tiny little class. He makes jokes and plays pranks to make the Sisters laugh, which usually works. Wind Whistler has to be stern with him or she'd get nothing done, but what Dissy never realizes is that Wind Whistler actually thinks he's damned funny, and is only able to avoid laughing herself due to her strong self-control. (This is one of the things Windy later tells him in this scene when she launches her appeal to the Dissy inside Discord: it actually touches both personalities). In her own stoic way, Wind Whistler loved Dissy too.
Wind Whistler is doing an advanced version of what Compound does digging her way out of the spider hole in The Fall of Hive Hunger-Prime: the technique dates back to the time when the Changelings were Flutter Ponies, which is something Compound doesn't know. She knows she can only keep it up so long before she collapses.
The really impressive thing is that all Wind Whistler brings to the fight are some weapons (a few of them magic), a suit of light Imperial Derecho Guard Scout leathers, and her little white tail-bow. Any solid hit by Dissy on her could kill her, even a glancing blow could cripple her, the armor's good only for keeping him from trying to down her with area effects. She survives on pure speed, skill, and most importantly keeping inside his decision curve, thinking at least one step ahead of him at all times.
This fight is one of the reasons why Discord knows that the only reason he could beat her was because of his superior power: in an even battle, he would have lost.
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And I'm very glad you liked it -- for obvious reasons I hoped that you, in particular, would.
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You know. It's justified because of how much experience Wind Whistler has at this point.
But the REAL IRONY is that if this was a groundhog day loop story I'd call it flat out cheating. But here, since it's still the world moving forward, it feels NATURAL instead of a CHEAT.
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Seriously you did a brilliant job here.
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It's very much an Old Master vs. Young Hotshot sort of duel. Not only has Wind Whistler forgotten more than Discord as an Avatar ever knew, she winds up later learning much of what Cosmic Discord downloaded to Discord the Avatar but Discord the Avatar is too lazy to bother remmbering.
I'd say that you did a great job here. This sounds awesome to me. Discord may be analyzing things a little too well for someone in the middle of a to the death fight, but then, given what he is, he would literally have all the time he needed to do so between every blow.
Woah... that was incredible. I really, really liked it. Although, I do agree with Ardashir here. He's rather over-analytical both for him and for anyone in the middle of a fight.