The third landed on the ground near his feet, and promptly billowed out into gas. Same color, same kind. Green with a trace of hot pink in the recesses and very edges.

That gas touched one of his hooved feet, and he stumbled.

I could see the damage. Holes riddling his hoof and lower leg, which promptly gushed blood and other fluids. The ‘maggots’ came soon after, worming out of his own flesh to devour whatever they could get their mouths on. The rims of the holes seemed to be hardened—it explained why the affected buildings hadn’t collapsed, but the flesh was soft enough for them to burrow in and bite.

He reared back, then stomped with his injured hoof. The impact of that stomp reached me a half-mile away.

More blood gushed out, but so did a tide of what looked like a hundred dead maggots.

A clap of his hands dissipated the gas and another spike that was soaring through the air. It went off course, landing in the water.

Those shockwaves. That wasn’t Prancer.

“Moose?” I asked the cold, empty air around me.

He dropped to all fours, back hunched over, and I could see the flashes of green-gold light dancing between each individual muscle.

He leaped, as far up as forward.

No, that was definitely Prancer.

It took me a full second to fathom the sheer scale of the leap. A mile and a half might have separated him and Titan Eve, and he was now on a collision course with her.

I flew to intercept. I couldn’t even fly up in time to reach him before he started his descent, but I could meet him near the landing point.

I went straight for the part of him that I knew I could get a grip on. That damaged hoof, where the rims of the holes seemed to be structurally reinforced.

Breath hissing through the mask, I flew with all of my strength. Same ideas as in the past, but with cleaner execution. In the air, there was no leverage from the ground to grant that added power when you needed. There was rotational power.

I moved the forcefield, with movements of my hand and with my own control over it. To give it spin, so it hurtled around me. The force of limbs and irregular shapes cutting through the air actually made flying forward harder, slowing me down. Titan Eve was creating a wall of hard gas in anticipation of the impact. I was going to have to deal with that too.

I reached it when he was halfway back to the ground, and the spinning forcefield raked the surface of the hoof’s underside. I grunted with exertion and sudden panic. Not what I wanted.

I could feel the sheer force and weight of him, in the moment after. I was about to have his full weight come down on top of me.