Sweetie Belle's bamboo practice sword, she called it a shinai, clacked against mine as I tried a sweep at her. I looped mine back at hers to prevent a riposte, trying to catch hers on the cross member, the tsuba, but the blade bounced up. I fluttered my wings and avoided the hit. Good thing, too, because when I passed through the mirror, I had not turned human. I could not wear human protective gear. Getting hit by bamboo hurt, and I had the bruises to prove it.
Her move left her open for a thrust. I pushed the sword out reflexively in my magic, but I forgot I wasn't in Equestria.
Again.
Everyhuman saw me as human unless I let them touch me and feel through the illusion. Whether it was cutie map magic that followed me or broken human-world Equestrian magic, it didn't matter. Worse, though still alicorn-shaped, the only spell I could cast was Levitation, and then only to the radius the human illusion could reach.
My shinai clattered across the golden oak floor. The cotton numb of Sweetie Belle's touched my withers. Understanding the rules, I said, "Point."
I fanned my wings and lay on the floor, exhausted. "Remind me why we're doing this?"
Sweetie Belle lowered her fencing mask and said, "My sister was kidnapped along with your six friends and the siren girls."
My counterpart in this world, who sat crosslegged, resting her bandaged arm on a little pine table, said, "Don't forget that Tirek creep, Princess."
"Right," I said, closing my eyes, remembering.
My cutie mark had rung as I prepared myself a daisy sandwich, with Spike gone to Canterlot and my nose in The Journal of Spell Dynamics. I shrieked as the buzzing smacked my rear and dashed to the cutie map where my mark alone whirled above my castle. I traced another buzzing to the library where Sunset's book buzzed like a human's "cell phone."
The last entry read, "Come now. Urgent!" It spurred me to slip through the mirror without even leaving a note.
The dizzying swirl of the magical event horizon did not leave me wobbling this time as before. A good thing, considering I found I could not stand as I expected I needed to. Instead I fell forward, landing on—hooves.
Lit by street lights, I saw I had arrived at CHS late at night, as a pony. A tall figure in a grey hoody rushed at me, waving a blinking device in her hands, shouting, "Run!" I recognized Twilight's voice; I'd heard mine recorded. She made pushing motions with her hands, now running as I cantered alongside. The tip of my horn barely made it mid-way up her torso.
Objects the size of foal-horseshoes whizzed through the air. They shot way over my head, but one struck Twilight, briefly twisting her sideways, and ripping her sleeve open. She grabbed her arm with a whimper and ran faster.
We rounded the corner of the north wing of the school and encountered a gray thing that resembled an advanced version of Scootaloo's scooter with a motor. "Get on!" Twilight shouted, patting the seat behind her.
My anatomy made that almost impossible, but I managed to wrap my forelegs around her torso as the engine growled and shot us forward. She said, "You feel strange."
"I'm still a pony! Can't you tell?"
As we approached the street, a huge white-haired red complexioned man in clinging black clothing rushed us from the right, wielding what looked surprisingly like a thin, long, slightly up-curved sword. When he realized he wouldn't reach us, he dropped his sword and reached to his pack.
I craned my neck and aimed a stun spell at him. I was a pony. I expected it to work.
Nothing, not even a sparkle.
The things he threw looked amazingly like the stars on my cutie mark, but made of steel. As Twilight sped into the street along a cement walk, her path was predictable. The man—I could only think he had to be Tirek's human-counterpart—threw without a chance of missing.
"Dodge!" I cried out, reflexively reaching out with a useless levitation spell to catch the throwing stars headed at her neck and back.
At the very last instant, I caught them in my magic as we motored away. As CHS faded behind us, I carried them with me in complete shock.
I remembered last evening well, and shivered. "Right. Lord Tirek. Magic stealer. Round two."
"Tirek, huh?" In the family dojo, Sweetie Belle wiped her forehead, saying, "If you would instead pronounce Tirek Ti-re-ke-ku, it would be a bad name from my maternal family's past. If it really is a Lord Tirekku, a decendent that goes by the old 'bloodletter' clan name, someone who has assumed the title, that would be worse. In the old country, our swordsmanship schools feuded. I've heard stories of stolen honor and, even more worrisome here and now, sorcery. It's a very old feud that shouldn't have survived into the modern era. What I was told was that grandpa ended it by leaving the old country and traveling here. I do wish Dad and Mom weren't on safari; they might understand why this is happening," she ended with a whine.
I could. Equestrian magic. It might look something like sorcery lost to one family clan stolen by another, especially if a picture of Rarity levitated by magic inflow displaying pony ears made it into jealous hands.
A feud remembered beyond reason. A good excuse for one susceptible to the idea of magic stealing.
She continued. "And I wouldn't have to be alone with a social worker checking up on me."
"We're here," Twilight and I said in unison.
She smiled. "Either Mom or Dad could teach kendo better than I can. What you can learn in a day, I don't know."
"I'm a pretty good learner if I set my mind to it. And Tirek uses Kenjitsu. Boxing with my hooves won't do much good. What choice do I have?"
Rarity, it turned out, was something called a Japanese-human, basically the difference between a Saddle Arabian and an Equestrian earth pony. To me, all humans looked the same, but I could learn.
We sat on beautiful golden wood floor in a stark white room lit by bright incandescent lights. The throwing stars lay on a green cushion. I stared at the deadly silver artifacts and realized that a life without magic to protect oneself could prove lethal.
"You might be better off throwing rocks," Sweetie Belle said, emitting a squeak. "He's going to be using a katana."
"And I will, too," I said.
Sweetie Belle looked dubious.
Twilight's phone burbled and she said, "That's Mom. She said it's okay if I stay over."
I practiced more. I used everything I'd been taught, reaching with my body, but my "reach" kept limiting me. During an interesting meal of sliced apples and delicate insubstantial lettuces Sweetie Belle called "field greens," I thought about the things Zecora had taught me since that time Trixie had brought the Alicorn Amulet and challenged me to a duel. Concentration was a must. I had to trust my instincts.
Kenjitsu!
Where had my instinct to run gone?
I knew. Thanks to years of practice, it was now in my nature to help my friends and, Celestia knew, I had to hunt this fiend again.
But Sweetie Belle's teenage height gave her an advantage of reach and access to space I didn't have. I didn't like getting hit, and that made it hard to trust my instincts and act instead of react. Training my muscles to move as I moved the blade was not only exhausting, it was difficult.
Maybe she was right about the stones.
While I tried to sleep on a hard orange block of foam she called a futon, I did a lot of thinking. Would Tirek attack me during the school day at the mirror? Could I ethically risk endangering children, even to fetch Equestrian help? I thought about why the cutie map had summoned me. I thought about why I was still a pony. And I thought about the exercises Zecora taught me to clear my mind; they worked, mostly, despite the number of dunkings I'd taken in the pond.
I did my mediation laying there. They didn't bring sleep, much anyway. When the purple light of dawn streamed through the opaque frosted windows, I remembered Zecora's other lesson that day.
Maybe a pony in the human world might have an advantage.
Late that afternoon, after grazing on the lawn and the shrubs, and eating the last of five canisters of minute oats, I found myself practicing what Sweetie Belle called katas with her mother's katana. Slicing up, thrusting, sliding back, swaying, circling, cutting, fluttering, diving, repeating—it was a different type of dance. I used both my magic and my body in rhythm. I found happiness in being able to concentrate on just the movement, and the ability to switch to different patterns when Sweetie called them out. It kept my mind from wandering, thinking about my friends and Rarity in particular. Where was she imprisoned, how was she being treated? She had survived the diamond dogs, but Tirek was a whole other story. But maybe... maybe she was tougher than she presented herself. Her father was a merchant that ran a franchise of kendo and judo schools whose top instructor was Rarity's mother, which was hard to believe considering her hairstyle even in the human world. The popularity of it allowed them to indulge their daughter with a couturier boutique. It explained Rarity's high belts in judo—and I vowed to ask personal questions when I returned to Equestria.
Kenjitsu was a deadly game and Tirek was a skilled practitioner. Could I act as I had in Equestria and fight as if my world depended on it? Even if that meant I might hurt or—
That word. It didn't evoke rainbows.
I understood that the local constabulary were investigating the disappearances, but weren't discounting the possibility it was a runaway prank since they'd found no evidence of a crime or witnesses. They hadn't thought much of Sweetie's theory about an old family feud.
But there had been a crime. I looked toward Twilight, who was texting beside the practice floor of the dojo. She'd found Sunset Shimmer's locker broken into, her magic book missing, and had deduced that she had to rescue me.
She frowned at her phone, which broke my concentration; the sword escaped my radius of control, again. The katana spun across the floor, clattering.
As Sweetie advanced to collect the weapon, I asked, "What's the matter, Twilight?"
"I was texting with Mom, but now she's not responding."
Again, I found myself on the back of a scooter. I could only imagine the giddy-up the illusion had me dressed in with two katanas belted on to an improvised harness of belts buckled across my chest. It went around my forelegs and across my withers. Both Twilight and Sweetie now saw me as a pony, but nohuman else did, so I had to look like Twilight, but how was I dressed?
I didn't get Sweetie's Kill Bill reference because she was too embarrassed to explain it.
We motored through the gathering dusk into a totally different neighborhood. The vehicles parked around became progressively more shabby. The amount of litter increased. The houses seemed nice enough, except for the bars on windows and many doors. No pretty tree or flower landscaping here, just yellowing lawns, gravel, or paved front yards. No good grazing anywhere to be seen. Oddly enough, the folk tended to have Twilight's purple complexion or were deeper shades of blue like my father. It reminded me of the seedy neighborhood I grew up in, in Lower Canterlot. It also reminded me of towns where only earth ponies or pegasi lived.
"Maybe we should stop and walk to your house." I didn't want to drive into an ambush.
"I'm not getting my scooter stolen."
Twilight parked under a flickering street lamp and we approached a squat tan-painted wood slat bungalow with a wrap-around ramada porch. Other than color, the only thing distinguishing it from the house next door was the lack of a porch light being on, or any light. As I got off, I saw some neighbors across the street stand from the bench on their porch. Another, washing a car, looked, sending water into the street.
Yeah, of course. When had Twilight Sparkle gotten a twin sister?
"The door's unlocked," Twilight whispered when she turned the knob.
We entered a gloomy room of bulky shadows, illuminated by the street lights and motes of blue glow from electronic equipment. I hesitated a moment to grab the katana, then figured the illusion would hide the red glow of my magic aura. The click releasing the right blade sounded like a gong in the stillness.
Whispered: "Not in here. It's too long."
I kept it ready to pull, regardless, as we crept into the kitchen. Twilight gasped and jumped to flick on the light over the sink as I realized I stood in a puddle of sticky wet. Dazzled, I pulled the katana with a slither of steel against leather as Twilight dropped to a sprawled form—the human counterpart of my father, unconscious, bleeding from a cut across his upper-right chest. I swooped in with a flutter and applied pressure to the wound. Twilight shakily grabbed her phone out of a pocket and tapped three digits.
He breathed. Bruises on the right side of his sweaty face explained why he lay unconscious. Struck with the hilt of a katana?
I heard, "—cut him with a sword..." and an address. Moments later, I heard a crash and lifted a wing against a rain of glass that tinkled around me.
I flashed on the moment after Tirek had blasted the Golden Oak library. I had teleported myself and Owlicious. I landed outside as my past exploded in a rain of wood and books. Humans didn't have anything like force spells that could explode things, did they?
Did they?
I jumped up, scanning the kitchen. Cabinets. Steel square table with chairs. A yellow-stained stove and the scent of fried greens. A refrigerator. And a hoof-sized rock that stopped spinning as I looked.
"Twilight, come out!" I remembered that voice, that haughty imperious monster's voice. "You have something I want. I have something to trade you."
"Mother!" Twilight cried.
I flared my wings and said, "Apply pressure to the wound. Stay here."
I dashed to the rear door, opened it with my magic, and leapt with one sword held diagonal in front of me. I landed with a crunch in a graveled area. I saw a dented green car, a garage, and some craggy old apple trees. In the shadows against a fence heavy with poisonous bougainvilleas and dressed in black, a form moved, charging from a paved area with a long silver blade reflecting the kitchen light.
I grabbed gravel in my magic and threw it.
His blade swooped up, and though he deflected some stones, many hit. With a grunt, he slid in the gravel as I grabbed more. He fled.
I chased, keeping him in view as he sped down a skinny yard aside the house then used his hands to cartwheel over a wooden fence.
Applejack might have made the jump, but I knew I was incapable and would find an ambush on the other side. I rushed back through the rear door. As I galloped through the kitchen, I yelled, "Stay!" I bucked the screen door off its hinges and, with the limited aerodynamics of my wings in this world, sailed into the front yard to skid across the dried out half-dirt lawn, drawing the second blade as I skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust.
He had bet on me following him over the fence and hadn't begun to move to ambush me on the porch. I heard cries down the street as humans saw my swords flash, and saw the hypnotically-beautiful swirled artisan edge of his single sword gleam, red in places, as he walked toward me.
He asked, "Which Twilight are you?"
"Princess Twilight. You have something I want."
"Twilight Velvet. Shall we trade?"
"I want all my friends."
"In exchange for only you? That isn't much of a deal."
"I'm the one who brought magic to this world. I think it's a great deal."
He stopped three pony-lengths away, holding his sword down as if he had no fear of me lunging at him. "By all accounts, it was you but not you alone. And I'm honor bound to keep Rarity—"
"Me! It was me! Release all my friends, including the sirens, and you can have me."
"Such a selfless angel. I heard you had wings, pony ears, and a tail." He shook his head. "I don't see them. Where's your magic, now?" he asked, lunging blindingly fast, faster than I could bring my swords up to counter.
The problem for him was that I was half the height of the illusory me. His katana hissed above me, leaving himself wide open. Whether he thought I'd dodged or he'd aimed badly, he instantly twisted away from me, keeping me in view. I struck his blade hard—with a click and a long slissssh coming back—gaining time to backpedal and flutter out of his reach.
"So they teach royals swordplay in Equestria, do they?"
I stood, trembling, trying not to translate that visibly to the swords I levitated. No idea what the illusion demonstrated of my state. Logically, I knew he wanted to wound me and capture me, to capture his key to Equestrian magic. I also knew that if he could not control his swords properly, he still could inadvertently kill me. I had to whisper to keep the quaver from my voice as I said, "They teach friendship." I took a deep breath and voiced, "My offer stands."
"You'd sacrifice yourself? How pitifully noble."
I stepped to my side, trying to move farther away and to force him to put his back to the house and illuminate his face. His ruddy face was fine-boned and perfectly relaxed, nothing like the perpetual sneer and angry black eyes of the Tirek I'd vanquished back to Tartarus.
Somehow I had to beat him, or chase him back to where he held the others, but first I had to stay alive. And to do that, I had to ensure he didn't see through the illusion. He feinted, causing me to bring up the swords in a cross. He was testing my limits.
As he stepped back, he brought his sword up to face level, held across him, two-handled. He said, "For a girl your size and age you are very strong."
"I'm older than I look." So long as nothing made him doubt his eyes, I was good.
"You could always join me. These aren't your people. Why should you care about them? I have my reasons for learning your magic, and if you taught me quickly, I'd be done with you all the more quickly. Your honor would be saved, and you could go back to your world."
"Join, you?"
"What do you say, Princess Twilight?"
I began circling him and he rotated smoothly to keep his alignment. In the distance, I heard a siren.
"I want an answer, now!"
"You should just release everypony, then disappear to where you came. In this world you're incapable of learning the magic I could teach."
"I'm just going to have to find out, aren't I?" He swept his sword to his side and charged to my right.
I brought up one sword, then the other. Clang! Clang!
Then he found an opening. Again he struck to what he thought was one side of my torso but found air. I couldn't riposte in time and, in a move of opportunity, he cut toward my legs.
He nicked my upper right foreleg, drawing a trickle of blood and a yell I quickly stifled. I followed with a low growl as real pain, real immediacy, washed away the last of my nerves.
I lunged. But had to defend and got no good opening. Clang, cl-clang!
Red and blue lights flashed down the street. As he stood off from me, I saw him glance for an instant. He shook his head and made to run.
I leapt and galloped in front of him, crossing my swords in his way. Sirens or a constables' whistles, I was certain I knew that sound, especially judging by his reaction.
Which ever way he went, I jumped. He had no idea he faced a creature made to gallop. It gave me a few moments to study his black clothing and to look for something essential that my Tirek had possessed.
I blocked him again, galloping around to my right, striking back with a crossed swords and a push. The sirens came closer. Engines labored.
He yelled, "Let me go or you'll lose your friends."
"Or your brother will hurt them?" I asked, flicking a sword to point toward the hourglass lump under his black tunic.
He grabbed the chain, revealing the gold pendant. He smiled. "Tsurupan. Yes."
Tsurupan—Equestria's Scorpan, Tirek's brother, who tried to but failed to change his brother's ways, then helped Celestia capture him when he refused.
Squealing tires. Tirek was as unnerved as I'd seen him. I was ready. "Your brother who betrayed you? Your word is as worthless as that pendant is!"
We lunged at the same instant. I released my right sword and reached out to grab his sword as he swung his katana in a downward chest cut—to put me down so he could escape. The metal slithered in my magic. Though my levitation spell seemed limited to the forces that a human arm could produce, I could still focus it at a point.
That point came within a hoof's width of my left eye and stopped abruptly.
His arm continued downward, wrenching his wrist when the sword stopped as if embedded in stone. I torqued my magic, spinning the blade and completing the maneuver. Perhaps he saw me grab it with a hand and turn it as if it were a knob.
He yelled as he lost his grip, the moment before my spell hit its limit and I lost it, too. The combined force caused the katana to flip upward, hilt leading, spinning the blade toward him as it flew free. Meanwhile, I swept with my left sword upward at his legs above his knees while continuing my lunge.
He reacted predictably by managing a leap, but I swept up harder, slicing into the underside of his shoes, upsetting his trajectory, turning his gymnastic attempt into an uncontrolled fall. He came down back first on the dried grass with a loud oof. I caught his katana in my magic as it finished a 180 degree spin behind me and thrust it downward after his body. As I braked to a stop beside him, I let my left katana, resonating from striking his shoes, flip away from the both of us and grabbed my previously released right katana as it slid behind him.
Before he could twist, I held his katana pointed at, and an inch from, his right eye. He tried to kick me, but cut himself in the thigh with my other sword, painting the metal red as I brought it into position. He froze as my discarded left sword clattered on the sidewalk beyond.
He blinked, blinked again with eyes wider, then saw me. Saw the real me.
"A pony?" he hissed. "A winged unicorn? You're— A monster!"
Were I to kill him, that statement might have become true. But I wasn't going to. Could he see I couldn't? "I see only one monster here."
He calmed. Smiled. "They might not think so."
Red and blue flashing lights filled the night. Our eyes were locked. It took all my discipline not to look away, to force myself only to swivel and range with my ears to hear car doors opening, hear feet running this way and that, to hear clicks of something I feared might be weapons, and hear the frenzied shouts of constables telling each other what to do.
Since my levitation spell was limited by a radius, not by whether a human could articulate to hold something in a specific position, I backed up so I wasn't looming over him, and rotated my body to keep him in view and also see what surrounded us. I did this while holding steady the vertically levitating swords an inch from his head and his groin.
A man over a bullhorn spoke loud enough to break eardrums. "Put down the swords, now."
There were three squad cars painted blue and white. A red truck with simple flashing red lights jerked to a stop behind them. Another car roared up and screeched to a halt, disgorging two brown uniformed constables who dashed for cover behind another car.
Tirek flinched.
I flinched and found sweat dripping on my forehead, threatening my eyes.
"This is your last warning. Put the swords down."
The constables held black things in their hands that looked very much like a miniature canon.
"This man has kidnapped ten people. If I don't restrain him, he will escape."
"Put down the swords and we can talk—"
Tirek scooted left. I compensated. Hard to tell what the illusion did, but one constable yelled, "She's going to skewer him!"
I jerked back, pulling the hilt of the swords back with me and dropping them in one moment of fateful intuition. The constables were already firing their miniature canon at me in the fractions of the second that followed as I curved my levitation spell up in front of my body as if to catch something.
In the cacophony of shots, I still heard the air above my head scream, torn by flashes of metal. The constables aimed for the chest of the illusion, but without great accuracy. Shots hit Tirek's katana as it fell sideways, and my extended levitation aura. Slowed considerably, what felt like thrown stones hit my chest and withers, and one twanged off my horn, but didn't break the spell. The combined impact of the shots on my aura as well as what got through pushed me back almost a pony-length. It left me bruised and angry.
After about five seconds, the shooting stopped and I found I had a half dozen dull metal cone-things that resembled arrowheads floating before my face.
Somehuman yelled, "She's got body armor!" A lone constable shot six more times.
Tirek moved. He'd waited until the constabulary had exhausted their weapons. He rolled with swift dexterity, kicked up and out with his legs, forcing the upper part of his body up so he landed ready to run. He'd grabbed his katana by the blade and swept it upwards in his hands such that he could catch it by the hilt as he dashed for the fence to the backyard.
Since this placed him near my hindquarters, I let instinct handle the threat.
I bucked.
My hooves connected with his hip with a loud crack. He went spinning through the air then rolled across the dried lawn, coming to a rest in a crumpled ball of howling pain. The katana arced to stick into the wood of the porch.
"Princess Twilight!" Twilight cried from the broken doorway.
Constables swarmed the lawn as Twilight screamed that Tirek had kidnapped her mother and that I was saving her.
That didn't prevent constables from arresting me. One tried to put loops of plastic around my illusory wrists, but I couldn't make that work and he kept missing. When another offered steel bracelets held together by a chain, I caught them in my magic and let them be apparently snapped on midair.
It was when another insisted on trying to force me to the ground, while trying to pat me down that he ended up getting a surprise. He suddenly screamed inarticulately and began cursing something I can only translate as "Sweet Celestia!"
I kept the bracelets floating in the air. I watched his superior talk him down from his unbecoming hysteria, glancing at me as he did. I saw men dressed in yellow go in and out of the house, and finally Twilight returning to the porch, then trying to come closer, only to be stopped by the constables. "She was only trying to protect me and my mother."
A bald headed man, the superior officer, came up to me. "I need to pat you down for weapons."
The earlier constable said, "She's wearing nothing to hide them in."
He looked to Twilight. "They're dressed identically. Same hair even." Huh. Pretty much the school uniform I'd seen her in when we first met.
"She has body armor."
"No she doesn't—" A glare silenced the first constable.
I sighed, "Go ahead."
When he touched my horn, then slid across my head and down my mane, he jumped back in shock, muttering the equivalent of "horse apples!"
How I extricated myself from what became a local diplomatic incident is another story. Suffice it to say, the constables found and released my friends. Twilight Velvet was tied up in the shed next door and Night Light was arguing with the paramedics about going to hospital even to get stitches. And, except for a long string of whiny complaints from Rarity, which ended when she saw what a pony princess from Equestria looked like holding both her mother's and father's katana, things worked themselves out just fine.
Author's Note
Don't stop reading now. Read my completed novel now being serialized 4-5 times a week, starring Starlight Shimmer: The Enforcer and Her Blackmailers.
I encourage comments! Critique my story by telling what you thought I wrote, as well as what you objected to. This allows me to improve. Also, though I've fenced with a shinai, I am no expert. Please be kind when talk about my kendo descriptions.
