A/N: What I listened to while writing...

Thoughts flew through Cole's head. This was a battle that was about to be lost. There was no way the changelings would leave the ponies alive, not with so many of them swarming the sky. Then, he noticed something, something he should have noticed a long time ago.

The sky was dark. It was clouded. It was raining, and most importantly, it was breaking out into a full-sized storm...

He looked down into his hand, watching the energy dance across it. 'No.' He told himself. 'Only as a last resort.'

Looking back up, he caught the retreat of the changelings and the reforming of the pony forces in his peripheral vision. They formed around him, allowing him to stay in the first rank. Next to him, Wind Runner landed back on the ground. His wing joint was bright red, swollen, but covered in a clump of snow. His body was covered in small cuts and bruises, nothing fatal.

"You ready?" Wind Runner's voice betrayed the slightest hint of apprehension, but was hard nonetheless.

Cole nodded, looking back to the front. "What happened to your wing?"

"Blade got caught in a changeling armor piece. Ripped the wing right out of the socket. Popped it back in before I fell."

Cole raised an eyebrow, and Wind cracked a lop-sided grin. "It hurt like Tartarus."

To his left, Ash popped into existence, teleporting from somewhere. His fur was singed, and he was patting out a fire on his foreleg. He muttered something that sounded like "Damn bug" and "too close" under his breath before getting back up. Cole pulsed once, counting the shapes of his allies in his mind. Not bad. Not bad at all. Only four fatalities, and thirteen incapacitated. However, he was the only one who escaped without a scratch.

He had a solution to that. Turning around, he rubbed his hands together, and began drawing energy from the world. Power coursed through him, amp-ing up the charge in his hands, expanding it's field of influence. He tuned it slightly, warping the energy to his will. Then he released it.

A pulse of electricity erupted from the conduit, encompassing the entire army. Cuts began to stop bleeding and close as ponies watched in amazement. Bruises recolored, swellings reduced, and unconscious ponies returned to the world of the awake. All activity seemed to stop as the conduit, pleased with his handy-work, began to speak.

"Ponies. We don't have a lot of time. We were chosen to retake this city, and retake it we will. Every single one of us here is ready to lay down our life for the sake of the innocent, it's why we're here. We work not for our gain, not even for the Princess's." A few brows furrowed at that. "We work for the ponies in this world. They have been attacked by a ruthless and evil foe, it's our job to defeat that evil. Do not hesitate in your attacks, as it will lead to injury and death. Do not miss, as your fellow pony may fall due to your mistake. Hold your heads high, we are the protectors of the weak."

"OORAH!"

Ponies stood straighter, heads up. Eyes hardened, and their weapons raised together in a single cheer. The formation returned to order, and Cole turned around to face the approaching army.

A grey unicorn trotted forwards from the main army. Cole realized that this was the grey unicorn from earlier, the one who blew the changeling through the door. Strangely enough, his eyes were different colors.

"Who are you?" It asked inquiringly.

"Cole, acting captain. You?"

"Quickdraw. I lived in dees town for all my life. I am part of artillery squad for dees army. Can I help?"

Cole stopped for a second, thinking. "Yes. Go to the back, and coordinate with the unicorns there. Cover us."

"Da. Well met, comrade." Quickdraw turned on his heels, a perfect about-face, and trotted off towards the mages in the rear lines.

The swarm was nearing the army, thousands upon thousands of voices screeching in anger and defiance.

Cole flexed his wrist, and his arm lit up once again. Electricity rolled down it, and the sky rumbled. He inhaled, drawing energy from the land, and exhaled, pushing the energy back out. His breathing slowed, and his vision sharpened. Time seemed to slow as his body filled with energy.

He raised his arms, rippling with energy, as he felt the very land on his fingertips. The enemy army approached, bearing down upon the few ponies.

Cole tapped into his bio-chemical energy reserves for the second time, and he skipped forwards towards the oncoming black mass of insects. Rotating on his feet, he turned back to his army, a giant gust of wind building on his fingertips. Completing this rotation, he released the charged winds towards the insectoid army. A column of twisting winds erupted from his hands, the very clouds above rotating with it's power. Time seemed to slow as the vortex crossed the distance between the two armies, and Cole watched as Changelings scattered, trying to avoid the ionized winds.

They couldn't.

The vortex tore through the changeling army, smashing the insectoids together, ripping them apart.

[Look at A/N also please]

Changelings were hurled about, buffeted and torn apart by the massive vortex.

Cole didn't stop. Ice began to form underneath him, each of his steps taking him three forwards. Ponies surged behind him, following his lead.

Suddenly, a series of explosions tore through the air. A moment later, multiple spots in the changeling swarm burst into flames, artillery fire tearing the lines apart.

The changeling army lowered, the majority nearing the ground or on it, and their advance faltered.

Energy began to pool in Cole's hands, each one sparking with overloaded power. Whipping his arms forwards, two bolts of energy erupted from his fingertips, lancing across the ever-shrinking distance between the armies.

The two bolts impacted a changeling each with an audible sizzle, and they branched out, the energy transferring through the ranks, changeling by changeling. The front rank opened up, a gaping hole sizzling with burnt insect where a phalanx of changelings should have been.

Then, the changelings retaliated. Conjured by mages in the rear of the insect army, globs of green plasma were launched over the low-flying formations.

Cole's brows furrowed, quickened brain thinking. Plasma... fourth state of matter... IONIZED GAS!

He slid to a halt as the projectiles reached the apex of their flight. Cole raised both hands, the energy barrier within him opening, and he felt the true power of the world for the first time. He cringed as the energy flooded through him, and he finally understood what it meant to be a conduit.

It was not the ability to create his own energy, it was the ability to redirect it. Energy can only be changed and transferred, not created or destroyed. He could conduct that energy.

Pulsing against the world, he 'saw' the plasma as bright lights in the sky, falling stars. He reached out to them, feeling the raging power within, and pulled.

From his position by the conduit's side, Ash couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the plasma redirect towards them. He raised his voice in fear as the energy diverted to the ground-bound pair. He closed his eyes, and waited for the inevitable.

It never came.

Cole's body burned. The sheer energy going through him was like the entire power grid of Empire City lighting up at once, passing through him. The plasma should have eaten through his body like termites through wood. But no. His body was healing as fast as it was decaying.

The pain was excruciating, as the plasma, literally the heat of the core of the sun, streamed into Cole's body. Cole then felt the Earth open up beneath him, and the energy redirected. No longer was he Cole, the human. He was Cole, the conduit, and he lived up to his name. Energy streamed into his charged body, and as he transferred it through himself, it buried into the earth.

After what seemed like hours of grueling pain, the transfer stopped. Plasma no longer sat in the air, and Cole looked back up. The armies had just met, the black, chitinous host swallowing up the shining white army. A flume of flame burst a hole in the cloud, magical fire tearing through the changeling swarm.

Cole began to move once again, ice reforming on the ground, paving his way to the surrounded ponies. His mind was reeling with the pain of the plasma, and instinct took over. He felt his body surge with energy, knowing only what he was doing, but not how.

His body flickered out for a moment, and then winked out of existence. Not a nanosecond later, he burst through the wall of changelings separating the equine army and himself. Black bodies scattered as he tore his way back to his army.

Looking fowards, he saw a pair of ponies standing back to back. One's wing lit up with the reflection of the other's fire, and changelings were repelled by the two.

Cole raised his hands and pushed on the world. A wave of energy erupted from his hands, pushing aside the fell creatures. They struggled for a moment in midair, falling slowly towards the ground. Wasting no time, Cole reconverted the energy in his body, freezing spikes of ice in the air in front of him. With another push, the lances of cold blurred forwards, cutting down the changelings in the air.

He burst through to the pair of warriors, and with a nod, joined them in their circle.

"'Sup?" The crimson mage blasted a pair of changelings.

"N'much. Where's the rest of you?" The conduit hurled another blast of concussive energy at the wall of black in front of him, scattering the assault.

"I'm not sure. We all got broken into small groups when they swarmed." A flash of silver and spray of blackish-green innards.

"We need to regroup. Ash, give us a beacon. I'll hold off the changelings." The conduit spoke, arms lighting with energy.

The three broke apart, and Cole tapped into the second of his biochemical energy reserves. He redirected it at the ground, channeling it into the space around him.

Hundreds of spikes of ice flash froze and grew on top of each other, the crystalline stalagmites tearing through changelings, leaving some half-frozen and others impaled upon them. The very air turned cold as the spikes grew.

A pillar of flame erupted in the center of the ring of ice, a crimson unicorn pouring the last of his reserves into a pillar of celestial proportions.

A voice, somehow louder than the sounds of war, erupted over the battlefield, calling to all the living defenders of peace. With battle-cries and renewed morale, pony troops hewed their way towards their acting commander.

Cole was in the center of a ring of ponies, pulsing, he recounted the troops. Not good, the past charge had left nearly a hundred fallen, and of the remaining forces, nearly thirty had some kind of potentially crippling injury. And, as everything comes in threes, there was no possible way for him to heal them all without healing the changelings. This battle seemed to be taking a turn for the worse...

Cole's gaze redirected upwards, staring at the slowly churning storm-clouds. He could feel the tension in the air, as if the very earth was ready for action. He began to raise an arm, and then lowered it. Not yet... but maybe soon...

He turned back to the battle. The ponies had formed a full fledged defensive ring, and the changelings had backed off, leaving a few feet of space between the two forces. Excluding the magical blasts crossing this ground, which were deflected or absorbed with well-placed walls of magnetized air and magical barriers, not a creature dared to cross the gap.

His thoughts ran over themselves again, reanalyzing the situation. Ionic energy was very volatile. It could easily let super-charge the storm... but not control it. Cole thought for a moment, mind turning to the storm brewing. He had once used a storm, similar to this one, to decimate the legions of the Vermaak 88... But that was just him, and he needn't have worried about collateral damage. Here, he couldn't do that; he had an army to protect, or, atleast, what was left of one.

Cole stopped for a moment, his train of thought broken. He watched the blasts of energy fly across the gap, and continued his thoughts. He did, however, have a sort of energy that he didn't have before. He could see and even influence the very ley-lines of the world. He could tap into the very energy of the earth. Maybe he could use the storm... Electricity was, after all, the transfer of electrons... and he was a conduit...

Wind Runner approached him, pushing his way past a pair of ponies tending to their wounds.

"Cole. We need to do something. We're stuck here. Our troops are tiring, and morale is dropping. With the troops we've already lost, some of the ponies are starting to think that they won't survive the fight. One way or another, we're about to take a hit. A BIG hit."

Cole stopped for a moment, mentally debating his position. He turned towards Wind Runner and spoke. "I have an idea. It should work, and it should also give us a way out of here, if not win the fight. But either way, tell your unicorns to prepare a teleportation matrix."

Wind Runner looked at him for a moment, trying to read his face, but then turned away and started barking orders.

Cole looked back at the sky, his eyes hard. Not for the first time, he would have to control the very thing which was made to not be controlled. But he had done it before.

He brought his arms to shoulder level, and closed his eyes. He opened his mind to the world around him, and then focused on the ambient energy around him. The light of the world paled in comparison to the light in the sky. It seemed as he could see every last free electron in the clouds above him, making the swirling clouds above quite the display. He began to push and pull on the energy, focusing it in points and pushing the boundaries of the clouds above. Turning his attention back to the ground, Cole began to draw as much energy, namely electricity, into himself, charging the very ground he stood on. He examined both the sky and the earth, watching as the energies began to build. He waited as the sky charged with electrons and those in the ground drained into him.

He smiled inwardly, and then turned to the battle. Slowly, as discreetly as he could, he began pushing the electrons away from the changelings, towards the ponies. He didn't have to fully charge them, per se, he merely had to create relative charges. As the push became self-sufficient, he examined the world one last time.

The sky was brimming with electrons, nearly sparking in itself. The ground, however, was nearly devoid of them. Underneath him, inside of him, and stretching to encompass the last of the pony army, his sphere of negatively-charged particles shifted about, remaining coherent. The rest of the world, the land around him, the air away from him, and the changeling army, seemed devoid of the light, the electrons.

Cole opened his eyes, and looked up to the heavens. They churned and twisted, electrical charges barely held back.

He tapped into the last of his biochemical charges, splitting it and redirecting the energies within. He forged them into a bubble, a shield to protect his allies. Vaguely, he heard the sounds of magical discharge quiet, as if the ponies and changelings realized that they could do no damage with his shield up.

And then, with the last of the energies, he flipped the world.

Opening his eyes, he gazed upon the world, and time itself seemed to slow. For a split seconds, the scent of trioxygen assaulted his senses, burning his nose. Then, the skies lit up with the brightness of the heavens, and the air ionized with the passage of electrons.

Giant bolts of lightning lanced from the charged portions of the sky, splitting into hundreds, and then thousands of tendrils, frying changelings and glassing the ground. Billions of volts, hundreds of thousands of amperes strong impacted the thickly clustered insectoids, annihilated by the wrath of a conduit.

But not a single bolt strayed towards the conduit or his troops. His knowledge of the world too great, his skill with his energy too advanced, his own little portion of the land was actually discharging energy, not absorbing it.

The sky closed and the earth grew still as changeling corpses fell to the earth. Nothing moved. The scent of harsh ozone and burnt flesh stung the air, the bubble finally dropping. Not a pony moved. They all stared at the carnage before them, and then at the conduit who caused it.

Cole's arms hung loosely by his side, his eyes were clear, but his mind was clouded. He felt tired, so very tired, but he tried to stay awake. He vaguely noted the eyes of the troops fall upon him, and then his vision cut out.

The last thing he felt was being caught by something, and then gently laid on the cold ground.

Author's Note

[]You cannot believe how badly I wished I could write this in the bad guy Cole version. Ionic Drain abound. Hellfire missiles, Arc lightning, FIRE. Meh. Have to be good guy. Vortex and freeze work.
Am going to use a Vermaak power or more... the ice run, the precise pillars, the ice beam... or frost storm... or something... I think with the ambient magic of Equestria, Cole can easily direct his powers.
Did you know that with the storm lightning bolts, he regains ionic power charges?
Didn't edit, please comment on grammar, of give me a thumbs up for my first war-scene.