Guard Lieutenant Water Sky, a green pegasus mare with a raindrop cutie mark, was already feeling tired, but more mentally than physically.
She had received the duty of commanding seven guard regiments to hold Alamare Pass against the invasion of the shadows. She had all the training and skill necessary for that, as well as a cool head, so she did her job admirably despite the stacked odds.
But commanding in the middle of such a critical situation was an immense burden on one's mind, and while she did her best to keep going, the pegasus knew that eventually it would get to be too much for her.
"Divisions four and five, take the blocking position! Division 13, prepare for a long range magical artillery barrage, fifteen thousand meters forward, charge level 4!"
Her commands were obeyed quickly and with quite a lot of precision, which managed to reduce the pressure the front lines were facing momentarily, but Water Sky could see that her soldiers were just getting more and more tired.
And like it had to happen eventually, things just got out of control. The fatigue got to one of the guards in the frontlines, and he received a deep slash from one of the shadow monsters. The line was broken, and there was a scramble as the guards tried to pick up the escalating number of wounded as well as dealing with trying to defend against the shadows coming in and rebuild the line all at once.
Even Water Sky got in on the action, flying forward and gathering huge globs of water to launch at the enemies and slow their advance, but the situation wasn't improving.
Until a voice echoed through the entire battlefield:
"Draconic Self: Salamander!"
The voice came from a small dragon that had somehow appeared right in the middle of the biggest concentration of enemies. He raised his arms and suddenly exploded in flames, their fire so hot that the closest shadow monsters disappeared almost instantly. And he wasn't done.
With another gesture, the flame expanded outwards in small waves that were perfectly targeted to destroy the front line of the shadow monsters, including the ones who were causing havoc in the middle of the ponies, while not harming any of the guards at all.
It took only a few seconds, and then he created a barrier of fire to prevent any more monsters from coming immediately. After that, he resumed his normal form and quickly made his way towards Water Sky. With a salute, he spoke:
"Lieutenant, I'm sorry for having taken so long." He said seriously "It took a bit of time to get here after I was pulled from my previous mission."
"Did Princess Celestia send you here to help us?" The pegasus asked.
"Yes. Though I'm not going to be staying long." Spike said "Me and the Crusaders have to teleport around all of Equestria to help reduce the pressure on the critical fronts."
"I understand. That was plenty." Water Sky said "How long do you think that fire barrier will last?"
"Around ten more minutes at most." Spike said.
"That's more than enough. Thank you, Knight Spike."
The dragon nooded and disappeared in a teleport. And Water Sky started giving orders to reorganize the front, taking advantage of the time she had been granted.
She also felt her nervousness lessen quite a bit. She had been looking at things the wrong way. She didn't need to do it alone. This was something that concerned the whole of Equestria, so she knew that the princesses had her back.
-0-
Meanwhile, in another front entirely, several guard divisions cheered as they saw their uncountable enemies being destroyed by a rain of minisuns and moonbeams.
-0-
Usually, the chaotic release wasn't focused enough for a proper battle. It was simply too random and unpredictable to be useful. Discord, as the Spirit of Chaos, didn't have that problem, but for most wielders of chaos magic, it was generally a coin flip whether they'd be able to accomplish whatever it was that they wanted.
However, the feelings of the wielder influenced their actions while under chaotic release, and there were few feelings that worked better at focusing chaos magic than anger, specially if your goal was defeating the target of that emotion.
As such, using such a technique was actually a great way for Twilight to start the battle, considering the kind of enemy she was facing.
"BURN!" Twilight yelled.
The power of her chaos magic combined with her anger was terrifying. The very air was set on fire, and a wave of heat similar to a volcano eruption exploded towards the enemy construct.
One of the mouths chomped down, and it was like a piece of the world had suddenly gone missing. The fire was devoured, the heat was devoured, even the energy of the spell was devoured, leaving behind a disturbing feeling of emptyness.
But Twilight, even in her chaos addled state, was smart enough to know that it would be impossible to defeat her enemy so easily, and that was okay, because she had a lot more attacks to use.
And Twilight proceeded to shift around the battlefield, releasing chaotic bursts that only had one purpose in mind: Destroying the fake Knight.
Her attacks were unbelievably violent and aggressive, reflecting her state of mind, Twilight released hundreds of seeds that exploded into trees with sharp, drill-shaped branches. Twilight pounded the ground, causing the entire earth around the battlefield to shatter into explosive shards. Twilight shot a beam upwards that hit the clouds and made them rain acid and lava. Very few things could survive having to deal with such a variety of overly destructive attacks.
Sadly, the fake Knight happened to be one of them.
Even though it was far from the level of the original, her Hunger magic was powerful (to be fair, the original was so strong she could not be described as merely powerful). And while she technically didn't have much versatility, it really wasn't needed when her extra mouths could and would devour anything.
Every single attack Twilight made was devoured. Nothing could get past the defenses of the enemy, Not Twilight's area of effect attacks that had an impressive effective range, not Twilight's sonic based magic, that reached the enemy too fast to be reacted to. The hunger mouths devoured everything that came near, forming a nearly unbeatable defense.
But nearly didn't mean completely unbeatable, and even the original Knight had struggled in battles sometimes, which meant that the fake one would have even bigger flaws on her defenses. But it wouldn't be easy to find them unless Twilight took a bit more risk, so that was what she did.
She directly stepped into the region controlled by the mouths, resuming her relentless assault.
From such a close range, and with such focus, even the nearly unbeatable defense of the mouths was not enough to protect the construct completely, and dozens of attacks rained down and battered its aura defense.
However, there was a flip side to that tactic. Twilight was now close enough to the enemy that she had to constantly worry about being devoured by the mouths. She shifted chaotically all over that small area, doing her best to avoid the effect of the mouths, but eventually it was not enough.
It was just one instant where she was at the wrong place and Twilight's front half disappeared, devoured by one of the mouths.
An instant later, she recreated the missing part of her body and kept going without interruption.
That was another reason why Twilight had decided to use the chaotic release. While her level of mastery of the chaotic body wasn't enough to recover that fast (yet), the additional power of her chaotic state allowed her to do it. And the way her chaotic body worked, as long as she wasn't eaten in a single bite, Twilight could endlessly regenerate herself, making her one of the few types of opponent that Hunger Magic users had trouble with.
And so, that extremely intense and terrifying fight continued. Twilight swarmed the opponent with countless powerful spells, forcing her to try to defend herself at the same time as she tried to attack the Knight. And the unicorn was constantly losing parts of her own body as the hunger mouths clapped shut and devoured the surrounding space, but also constantly regenerated them, keeping herself in the fight. It was definitely something that could be called a "Battle of Monsters".
Little by little, Twilight's constant attacks started to wear down the resistances of the construct. Even though only a little bit of their power reached the enemy, since they were mostly devoured by the mouths, the barrage of attacks was continuous enough that the damage started to add up, and the body of the fake Knight started to show some injuries.
In contrast to Twilight, the construct wasn't losing any body parts, but that was actually something Twilight intended. Even in her uncontrolled state, the Knight knew that taking away parts of a user of Hunger Magic was a bad idea. It only served to increase their metaphorical Emptiness, thus making them stronger.
That was a lesson that many of Aurora Dream's enemies had learned during her career. It often turned out to be the last lesson of their lives.
So, in hindsight, perhaps what happened next could be considered an inevitability.
With a roar and a phenomenal burst of magic, the construct stopped the movement of all the mouths for a moment... And then they turned and ate its body.
Somehow, every mouth took out an equal part, in a way that seemed almost ritualistic, until all that was left was the head. This all happened while Twilight was trying to free herself from being frozen by the burst of magic.
By the time she managed, it was already too late. The hunger mouths and their tentacles exploded into a ridiculous amount of black threads that looked like strands of fur. And then those threads opened up, revealing themselves to be mouths that could move independently. Mouths that could eat forever without getting full.
The Battle of the Monsters had reached a new level, but who would be the winner in the end?
-0-
Trixie had already taken note of the fact that Radiant Hope's cutie mark was different than expected, so it wasn't a complete surprise when it changed again, but the first move of the enemy was still quite sudden and ferocious.
Her cutie mark changing to a target, Radiant Hope shouted "Pursuit!" and created dozens of arrows of light that shot towards Trixie. Then the mirrors shone with magic for a moment and the arrows changed direction. Heading towards a seemingly empty patch of space.
Trixie had already changed her position again after being discovered, leaving another illusion to attract attention.
The arrows hit empty space, and forced Trixie out of hiding, though they weren't quite strong enough to break through her defenses. Radiant Hope prepared to keep on attacking, but another mirror suddenly broke, and she scrambled to use another pulse of magic to reveal Trixie's location once again.
She was just behind the enemy unicorn, who attacked her hastily, but Trixie managed to teleport away. Radiant Hope used another pulse to verify if the Trixie that appeared after the teleport was the real one, but this time Trixie hadn't replaced herself with an illusion, having predicted Radiant's reactions.
In just those few short exchanges, Trixie had already showed her skill in terms of illusionism and trickery. The thing that had been hit wasn't Trixie, but instead an invisible illusion she placed in front of her real body to take the hit and convince Radiant that her plan had worked.
Still, Radiant Hope's defenses were extremely thorough. Even though she had already seen it once, Trixie wasn't able to get around her scapegoat mirrors. That was a strange ability that interacted strangely with her opponent's body.
After that, the battle entered an extremely heated state. Radiant constantly used her magic pulses to confirm Trixie's location, preventing her from hiding herself under illusions. The Knight was forced to use illusions directly on the attacks to trick their tracking and make them veer off course.
Radiant responded to that by changing her cutie mark to one of lightning and taking over the aiming. Trixie then used illusions to trick the lightning bolts into believing they had already hit something, causing their charge to dissipate. Radiant changed her cutie mark to one of a raindrop and showered the entire arena with extremely destructive high pressure water jets, hitting even herself and relying on her mirrors to protect her.
Trixie's response to that was using an illusion to trick space itself into folding over and creating a safe space for her.
And while that might seem like Radiant Hope was completely dominating, that wasn't the case, as evidenced by the scapegoat mirrors regularly breaking during the fighting. Trixie was constantly using slow invisible illusion spells that hit Radiant and attacked her in different forms, probing at her defenses. That included even an illusion that was supposed to make her magic go out of control and explode while still inside her horn, because offensive illusion magic did not mess around at all.
Radiant Hope decided to go even further. Her cutie mark changed to a star and she summoned a horrifying amount of magical power from the world of mirrors itself, creating a galaxy of star shaped spells that warped the space around to ridiculous proportions, making it break and reform chaotically.
After another pulse of magic to confirm Trixie's position, Radiant shot her spell towards her, and then she felt a light tap to the back of her neck.
It was Trixie's horn.
"Grand Illusion: Ruler Dream." The unicorn said solemnly.
And she exploded with an amount of magic comparable to what Radiant had just used, wrestling away control of her magic, and making it attack the villainous unicorn.
At the last moment, Trixie escaped via a pre-prepared gap and let Radiant be hit by the full force of her own magic. Dozens of mirrors broke.
But she got what she wanted. Trixie had figured out Radiant Hope's secret. The unicorn had turned herself into a living artifact. As such, she was definitely still in the fight, but now that she knew about it, Trixie could get around her defenses.
The Knight let herself feel joy at a successfull plan while still keeping an eye on what the enemy would do. Her scheme had started when she figured out how to trick Radiant Hope's magic pulse detection, but deliberately refrained from doing so at first, lulling Radiant into a false sense of security.
Then she waited until the mare used a recklessly powerful attack, leaving her defenses in the weakest state. However, even with that, she would need to use a lot of power to muster a spell powerful enough to turn her power against her, and she couldn't simply charge up slowly during combat, as evading her attacks took pretty much all the power she had to spare.
Thankfully, the Knight had a solution, and it was called Sphere of Charge.
Previously, she had needed to constantly focus on a Sphere to keep it under control, so its utility was limited. But after her training in the dream world, where she had learned lessons about the self, and some work to perfect the method, Trixie managed to fuse the Sphere of Charge to her own body.
And not just one. Trixie had fused eight of them with her flesh. So it was basically like being able to use Overdrive without the drawbacks eight times every mission.
Of course, Trixie had developed her illusions even further to take advantage of that.
She was still thinking about what her next move should be when she felt something change. And it came from the area Radiant Hope was in, which was still covered by the folds of rampaging space.
"It's been a while since I've last used my true cutie mark. It's quite... refreshing." Radiant Hope's voice sounded.
With a pulse of magic, she turned the space back to normal in an instant, and Trixie was able to see her new cutie mark.
It was a mirror. But unlike the mirrors cutie mark Trixie had previously glimpsed, that one was a single, majestic crystal mirror. And Trixie could tell that Radiant's aura had changed. Even though she had only used a single spell, the Knight knew that she was ten times more dangerous than before.
That was the true power of Sombra's apprentice. The fight between the two was about to change again.
-0-
If someone were to ask Sunset for advice in fighting a powerful user of chaos magic, she would laugh and say "Don't get hit."
If she were actually speaking seriously, however, Sunset would say that the secret was being flexible. Chaos magic was constantly mutable and changing, so you had to adjust to its changes to be able to use your own abilities to the fullest.
"Eruption Burst." Sunset declared, opening up the battle with a spell that was similar to a mini volcanic eruption, in which the lava was composed of dynamite.
That was a spell powerful enough to serve as a finishing move if Sunset was the same as when she went on her first mission. But now that she had gotten so much stronger, it barely qualified as a probing attack.
It was necessary, since the opponents she was facing these days were also much stronger than before, as proven by the fact that the enemy wasn't suppressed by such a destructive attack, and instead even counter-attacked with countless tendrils of diamond, that flew through the air in Sunset's direction and exploded into a shower of shards filled with rampaging chaotic power.
Sunset took a single instant to check, and indeed, the chaotic energy made it impossible for her to teleport.
Thankfully, Sunset had already known for a long time about her weaknesses in regards to movement skills. Teleporting was fast and convenient, but there were far too many ways to make it impossible to use, so it wasn't reliable. And Sunset had still not managed to find a flight spell that agreed with her, so the unicorn's solution had been somewhat... interesting.
Considering it had to do with moving at high speed, Sunset had actually worked together with Rainbow Dash in order to create her new technique. And its name was:
"Extreme Movement!"
And then Sunset exploded. Almost literally.
She continually created thousands of small explosions of power that released shockwaves to push her into insane accelerations, like some kind of bastardization of a rocket fuel engine. Those explosions were exquisitely controlled to impart mostly kinectic energy to Sunset, and to be able to move her precisely. However, they were still powerful enough that without her amazing aura defenses, Sunset would be severely harmed by the explosions, and that was not even mentioning the sheer strain of accelerating and changing directions so sharply. There was a reason the term "breakneck speeds" existed, and Sunset was experiencing it with her own body.
However, it was definitely worth it, as Sunset flew through the air in a tightly controlled course, avoiding the areas with the highest concentration of attacks and using her shields to break through the weak spots.
Because of course there were weak spots. Chaos magic was powerful, but ordliness and precision weren't really part of what it could do. Even Twilight was unable to change that reality (she simply worked around it), much less a mindless being composed of many shards of chaos. But it wouldn't be easy to take advantage of them, which was why Sunset decided to break out another one of her new trump cards.
"Magic Charge." She declared with solemnity. A point of light appeared on her right side and started to grow.
By that point, the chaos monster had already changed up his attacks again. Its body warped itself to become a huge, fanged mouth and it expelled a breath that turned the air all around into acid. Sunset reacted instantly, using her extreme movement to fly upwards, leaving the acid area so fast that it didn't have time to corrode her defenses. And then the point of light grew into a sphere, and Sunset called a new spell.
"Destroyer Quake!"
The unicorn shot a small beam of light downwards and it reached the ground, creating a powerful earthquake directly on top of the enemy. But power wasn't even the most impressive part of that spell, being overshadowed by her exquisite control.
While earthquake magic brought to mind images of unrestrained destruction, Sunset had put in enough power on the spell to restrain it to a very small area, causing the shockwaves to keep bouncing back and growing stronger in their small space, causing havoc to the body of the enemy. This was the sort of things she used to need an Overdrive to do, but now she had something better.
It was the Magic Charge. Similar to the Sphere of Charge used by Trixie, it was a storage of power that could be activated to supply energy for extremely strong spells on a dime. But while Trixie's charges had to be prepared beforehand, Sunset had enough magic that he was capable of creating charges in the middle of a fight, simply by devoting all of her "spare" energy that wasn't being used in the fight to charge up a new sphere.
It wasn't easy. In fact, it was by far the hardest thing Sunset had ever mastered. Not only did it require for her to be able to constantly split her attention to create and feed the magic charges while she was already fighting, but using every single drop of available power all the time was the magical equivalent of continually straining one's muscles to the max without any rest, and that was as tiring and painful as you might expect. But it was definitely worth it, and Sunset started charging another sphere just as soon as her spell was released.
The following battle could be described as a study in contrasts. Sunset's violent method of moving and powerful spells contrasted with the amazing degree of control that she showed, maximizing the effect of every bit of magical power and not wasting anything. Attacking fluidly to target the constantly changing enemy, sometimes with pinpoint strikes, sometimes with area of effect blasts, and sometimes with heavily directed homing shots.
When asked whether it was better to fight smartly or overwhelm the enemy with power, Sunset would answer that the best option was smartly overwhelming the enemy with power.
The Knight didn't get it all her own way, however. This was a powerful enemy, an entity created from many shards of chaos, and it wouldn't be defeated so easily. Many times, Sunset was forced to pop off her magic charge early to create an extra defense when the attacks of the opponent got too overwhelming, and other times she watched her carefully chosen spells have no effect when the enemy changed into a form that had different weaknesses.
Still, Sunset was slowly getting the upper hand. Her attacks were slowly refined to damage the core of the opponent, targeting the structure that connected the chaos shards to form the "heart" of the creature.
As might be expected, that part was pretty tough, with many ways of redirect and diffuse damage around to prevent it from being easily destroyed, but Sunset was a specialist in destruction magic, and little by little the effects of her attacks piled up, until all the chaos shards were filled with cracks, looking like they were going to break apart at any moment.
Yet, Sunset did not ease up on her vigilance. She knew of Sombra's preference for complex tricks and tactics, and she had noticed several things during the battle that pointed towards something sneaky being brewed. Mostly unusual flows of magic and parts of the surroundings that changed slightly without apparent reason.
So, when she was sure that her next big spell would be able to destroy the opponent, Sunset spent some extra time creating additional defenses to be prepared for any eventuality before actually releasing her last attack. And sure enough, it was not wasted time.
As soon as her attack spell got close to the enemy, an extremely powerful magical formation activated itself, and the walls of the abyss broke and flowed towards Sunset's projectile.
The magic of the Knight was completely destroyed, but that still wasn't the end. More and more earth flowed away from the surroundings, except that flowed wasn't really the right word. The violence of the movement was like there was a terrifying hurricane ripping apart everything around and dragging the earth into its orbit.
The fact that Sunset had prepared her defenses was good, because even with that she was only barely able to avoid receiving injuries from the sheer chaotic whirlwind of high-speed rock shards that battered at her position.
And then it was over. The battlefield had changed completely, and instead of a relatively narrow space, similar to a well, it was actually looking more like a wasteland, where the closest walls were very far away. The thing that hadn't changed was how dark eveything looked. The wasteland was completely black and featureless, looking almost like a void.
But by far the worst part of it all was the chaotic monster. All that earth had gathered and compressed itself into an "armor" for it. Since the thing was still constantly changing, the armor was composed of hundreds of disks of earth, floating around the creature in several layers, like a lotus flower that had been endlessly reflected between two mirrors. Behind the armor, Sunset could see that the cracks on the shards of chaos had all healed.
Those disks perfectly followed the continuous changes in the body of the monster, and they were filled with runes that seemed to connect to each other in a complex magical formation. Taking one look at it, Sunset felt like there was some sort of inteligence woven among those runes, like something else had taken direct control of the monster via the formation, and so she realized what it must be.
"Formation Spirit, huh..." She whispered "Sombra is really a troublesome opponent."
And then she focused again, getting ready for the next stage of the fight.
-0-
"I'm sorry if you prepared this trap for our teachers, since you're going to have to settle for us." Rarity spoke lightly, trying to get information out of Sombra.
"Everything is according to plan." Sombra said in an emotionless voice "Simply dying is not punishment enough for them."
Rarity started having a bad feeling, but she still remembered to look at Applejack, who signaled that they were indeed facing the real Sombra.
"Really, then what exactly is your plan?" Rarity asked, already giving Ranbow Dash a signal about what the plan was.
"I want to see their faces when I show them your lifeless bodies. Only after that will they be killed." Sombra's emotionless voice changed to contain a trace of viciousness.
"That's not going to happen!" Rainbow Dash shouted, accelerating forward at great speeds, though not exactly her best.
And the reason for that was the fact that the pegasus was also preparing a technique at the same time.
"True Body: Wind Channel!" She declared.
And Rainbow Dash's physical form changed. It was something subtle, something one would need to pay particular attention in order to pinpoint, despite it being easy to notice that something had changed. Essentially, the edges of Dash's body seemed to have become slightly ethereal, almost as if the limits of her body were thinning in order to allow her to fuse with the surroudings.
Rainbow Dash suddenly appeared right in front of Sombra, and hit him with a powerful punch.
He didn't even seem to feel it, and neither was he moved even the slightest bit. Sombra looked down at the pegasus and declared:
"Shadow Legion."
It wasn't an explosion, or an eruption, or anything like that. Instead, it looked more like a spontaneous creation, as an army of shadows appeared around Sombra, an army composed of all sorts of shadows, big and small, shadows of beasts and plants, and even of objects.
Faster than even an instant, Rainbow Dash was completelu surrounded and attacked from all directions, but none of the attacks managed to hit the pegasus, who managed to slip away like a breeze and reappear next to the other Knights like a breath. There was a reason why she had been the first one to attack.
Rainbow Dash's path of development had started with trying to fuse her weather magic with her body enhancement abilities, as those were her most powerful traits.
Soon she learned (very painfully) that it wasn't simply a question of shoving weather magic through the body enhancement channels, since it wasn't pure energy, and thus could not fuse with her flesh and blood with the same ease. So the solution she found was in changing her own body, thus making it compatible with such energies, and allowing her to transcend the limitations of mere physicality. That was the True Body technique.
As soon as Rainbow Dash retreated, she immediately advanced again, having realized that Sombra's defense was due to magically removing part of his own physicality out of the world, mediated by shadows, so she simply needed to hit both his body and his shadow at the same time to get around it.
But before she had a chance to do that, Sombra declared another spell:
"Shadow Sky."
The entire arena darkened slightly.
And for a moment Rainbow Dash felt as if her body was ripping apart from the inside out. The Knight retreated back to the others at the same time as she supressed the raging magical energy in her body with an effort of will.
"He's... corrupted the weather magic?" Applejack spoke, almost not believing what she was seeing.
"Are you okay, Dash?" Rarity asked.
"I'm okay... But that makes it harder for me to use most of my abilities..." The pegasus said.
At that moment, Sombra's legion of shadows attacked, dashing straight into the group of Knights. The one to meet them was Pinkie Pie.
"Emotion Charge: Pure Joy!" She shouted, and activated her ability.
Pinkie Pie had taken her purification magic a lot farther than before. Eventually she reached the point of being able to purify her own emotions, as well as hold those purified emotions within herself to be able to use them whenever she wanted. Using those pure emotions, she could attain any Emotion Charge she needed without needing to slowly build up her emotions to the boiling point, which would be pretty difficult for a lot of them.
Of course, not every possible Emotion Charge was useful. Some of them, like Compassion, simply had effects that were far too specific, while even condensing a strand of Pure Despair had almost killed Pinkie, so she never even tried to use it on an Emotion Charge.
However, that still meant she had a lot of options, and the Pure Joy was the one most suited for the situation. The Emotion Charge of Joy interacted with her chaotic magic in a much more direct way than the anger one, to the point where it was difficult to tell where the emotion magic began and the chaos magic ended.
Essentially, Pinkie's abilities of chaotic replication and chaotic shifting were enhanced, which meant that the legion of shadows had to face a legion of constantly teleporting Pinkies. It was a surprisingly equal matchup, as both sides had constantly replenishing numbers and were capable of defeating their equals with only a single hit, resulting in a battlefield of constantly shifting black and pink.
Of course, Sombra wouldn't allow such a stalemate to continue for long.
"Shadow Shard." He declared.
And the legion of shadows exploded into destructive shards that annihilated all the Pinkie clones at once. But before anyone could react to it, Applejack shouted:
"FOLLOW ME!"
And she moved at high speeds towards a specific spot on the battlefield. The other four Knights followed her without question, and it was just in time.
The place where the Knights had been standing, along with most of the battlefield, was completely destroyed when the "walls" and "ceiling" of the place exploded into shadow shards and caused widespread destruction and havoc. Applejack had taken the group to exactly the right place in order to avoid the explosions.
And that was just the beginning. The small battlefield had transformed into a huge isolated world, and it was a world of shadows, with shadow trees, shadow clouds, shadow rivers... even the very air itself contained traces of shadow. So it wasn't really unexpected that the world itself had turned against them.
They were attacked unrelentingly. And not just physical attacks: Temperature changes, gravity manipulation, energy bursts... All sorts of attacks were sent their way. But none of those attacks managed to reach the Knights, because Applejack was continually moving and leading the other Knights into safe spots.
Eyes of Truth: Future Sight. That was the ability Applejack was using. She wasn't as showy as some of her teammates, but Applejack was still able to do some extraordinary stuff. That particular ability worked via checking possibilities, and was based on gathering all the data of the battle with the Eyes of Truth and using that data to make predictions of the most likely possibilities.
But Sombra was a skiller warlock, and he had already made plans for such things.
"Shadow Chaos." He declared.
The world seemed to start vibrating. It was a relatively minor effect, but anyone could see that it was much more powerful than one would expect. Specially considering that Applejack suddenly stopped moving to grunt in pain and rub at her eyes with a hoof.
"What happened?" Rarity asked.
"Chaos magic." Applejack answered "He's put so many random elements in the world that Ah can't account for all the possibilities." She looked at Pinkie "Can ya help?"
She shook her head "No. I could make it even more chaotic, but that wouldn't help."
Thankfully for the Knights, Sombra wasn't capable of attacking just after doing his most recent spell, so they had time for that sort of conversation. However, that time was limited, and soon the next wave of attacks showered the area where they were.
"Wind Style: Eternal Wind Barrier." Rarity declared.
And the air itself, even the parts of it that were contaminated with shadows, shaped itself into an omni-directional barrier that protected the Knights. And it truly protected them, the barrier not being simply physical but also magical, capable of blocking even esoteric attacks such as gravity changes.
That amazing barrier was only possible because of two Artifacts Rarity possessed. One of them was the newest version of the Wind Ruler Sword, while the other was the Horseshoe of Link, one of the four new artifacts she had created based on her fellow apprentices. That specific one was based on Fluttershy's empathy abilities, and she had used it to connect to Rainbow Dash, who was still in her wind state.
It was only through that connection that Rarity was able to create such a powerful barrier so easily, and it was definitely worth it, as not even a thread of the enemy attacks managed to get through, relentless though they were.
Not that they kept trying for long. Sombra wasn't the type to keep doing something that wasn't working, since that would give his opponents time to recover and counter attack. So he declared another spell.
"Shadow Crush."
And the sky fell, or at least, that was how it felt. A mountain of shadow was dropped straight into the Knights, and it was so big that only Rainbow Dash would be fast enough to get out from under it.
But escaping from it wasn't the only option. Fluttershy flew up a few feet and declared a spell of her own.
"World's Harmony." Her words seemed to echo directly in the soul.
The effect of that spell wasn't the sort of thing that could be seen in the usual manner. In fact, any normal pony who looked at the pegasus at that moment wouldn't notice anything unusual. But for skilled mages like the Knights, Fluttershy's aura, her very essence, seemed to disappear, merging into the world.
The shadow mountain crashed into Fluttershy, and broke apart into nothing. The pegasus herself didn't even flinch.
'Oh yeah...' Rainbow Dash thought 'Sunset said that Fluttershy's defensive abilities were amazing, didn't she?'
That was truly the case. Even Sunset herself had difficulty actually injuring Fluttershy.
The pegasus Knight had trained in one of the places in Equestria that were most inimical to life, and from that she had learned that instead of fighting against the environment, it was easier to use her empathy to enter into harmony with them. And from that she developed the ability to enter into harmony with the material world itself.
Thanks to that harmony, she could take on part of the conceptual toughness of matter, allowing her defense to reach such astounding levels.
But Sombra wasn't discouraged by that, and a pulse of magic swept across the shadow world, as he prepared his next spell.
The Knights kept their focus, knowing that Sombra should still have quite a lot of cards to use.