>>31752123Despite the fact that her journey was based on undoing everything he’d wrought, Coco had never bothered thinking far enough ahead as to what her final encounter with Sombra would be like. She had heard stories about him, about his defeat by the establishing of the Crystal Heart at the center of the Empire, but had assumed she would be able to worry about it as it happened, if she really made it that far. Harmony was on her side now, but it wasn’t a match for an alicorn.
Even in this grip her thoughts drifted absurdly to Tartarus, to the Empire, and to the unfought battles which still lay ahead. She had hoped never to really meet her match until the very end, when she would have every possible advantage the quest could give her, all the experience she woud need. Here, there was no chance of victory, or stalemate.
Diamond was already making her way out of the room, and she wouldn’t be heading back to the throne room if she valued her life. Escape was the first priority, then.
While she was thinking this, Luna’s horn glowed, briefly, and Coco’s leg snapped.
She cried out with the pain involuntarily, feeling the break as cleanly as if she’d really made that fall back in Manehattan. It was her right back leg, and it consumed her for a moment, blotting out the world trying to translate itself into vision. Her cry was strangled, and it fell away into silence as some other bit of magic ripped it from her.
Luna let out a grunt of animal satisfaction, and the aura focused on one of Coco’s front hooves, waiting to make another wet wrench. It was true that the defenses had been breached, that the VP had been distracted, that she had in some sense been bested by the first enemy she’d come across, but she still had the pleasures of omnipotence. Coco looked on this time at that magical glow, helpless to stop it behind the pain-signals of her first injury.
