Originally, I had planned to go home the day after the ceremony was over, but seeing as Celestia’s heating charms were still in effect on my dress, I’d decided to spend that day wearing it again and just walking through the royal gardens. While I was admiring the tastefully done winter (not holiday) decorations, I realized that I could see myself wearing dresses a bit more often. I also came up with the idea to show up at the Carne Den wearing the dress, just to stun everyone there.

If I had one complaint about that day, it was that I got lost in the hedge maze a few times. Thankfully, there were pegasi guards there to help me get out.

While I was packing my stuff for the trip home, Celestia decided to pay me a visit. “I see you’re still wearing that dress” she observed. “I thought you would have wanted to be done with it as soon as possible.”

“Well, yeah, I did” I admitted. “But I’ve come to like wearing it, though I have a suspicion that that’s partially from your heating charms.”

“True, that is possible. Oh, I heard that you turned down a private flight from Fancy and Fleur for the trip home.”

“They did enough for me during the ceremony, so I politely declined their offer. I’m taking the train home.” I finished packing my clothes and award up and put the suitcases on the ground. “If you want, you could walk with me to the train station.”

Celestia gave a dramatic gasp. “Are you, the winner of the Entrepreneur Award Ceremony, offering me, the Princess of the sun, the honor of walking by your side?”

“Yeah, sure. Let’s go for a walk, and maybe get some hot chocolate on the way.”

“I do love Pony Joe’s hot chocolate. I’ll buy.”

Since I wasn’t in any rush to get to the train station, we decided to stop at Pony Joe’s to sit and talk a bit more.

“So that’s why Fleur is looking for a foal size table?” Celestia asked over our second round of hot chocolates.

“Yeah, pretty much.” I took a sip of my delicious drink. “If you can make it a bit sillier, like having some foal size meals there as well, that would be even better.”

“Hmmm. Do you think the other nobles would notice?”

“If they’re still going after me, they’ll probably notice, but not care as much as they should.” There was a sudden rumble in the ground, about as subtle as half a ton of bricks on a runaway flatbed cart at a hardware store. “What was that?”

Celestia cast a spell to do something. “Oh no.”

“What is it?”

“You remember Tirek and The Unmusician, right?”

I put my head in my hands. “It’s another of those guys, isn’t it?”

“Yep. Joe, would you mind holding on to Yang’s suitcases?”

“No problem, Your Highness” Joe said as he came over to retrieve the items.

Before he got them, I fished out the buckle from its place. “Let’s go, Princess.” As Celestia and I made our way down the mountain, the tremors got stronger and more frequent. “Aren’t you worried about the city falling apart?”

“Its construction is sound and magically reinforced” Celestia explained. “Earthquakes will not destroy the city. That being said, there shouldn’t even be any earthquakes here.”

“How big is this thing?”

We ran over a cliff edge, Celestia moving me to her back during the fall, soon glide. “About four times as tall as you are.”

“I think I can deal with that.”

Celestia turned around and into a hover partway down the cliff. Something silvery was slithering out of the rock wall. A few moments later, it was joined by another, and another, until there were nine of them, spread out evenly, as if anchoring something on the other side. Shortly after that, we heard a tremor and saw rocks fall from the cliff.

After a few more tremors, large cracks were visible on the cliffside, which was starting to cave inwards. Even though there was no immediate danger, Celestia backed away a little bit. I understood why she did a few moments later when the wall got pulled in. A big humanoid robot covered in yellow and red armor stepped out of the hole. In place of eyes, it had a visor that glowed the typical evil red color. On its shoulders were missile pods, and they looked like they were loaded. The rest of it looked like a normal giant armored robot, except there were masses of mechanical tentacles in place of its hands.

“Okay, that’s scary” I admitted. “Can you melt it down?”

“That was the first thing I tried when Luna and I fought it” Celestia said. “It didn’t work. And seeing as it’s still in good condition, it won’t work. And before you ask, we did try cutting the tentacles with our magic too. That didn’t work either.

“We called it The Destroyer, since that was all it did.”

The Destroyer looked at us before apparently dismissing us, turning around, and scaling the cliff. In response, Celestia picked up the slab of rock with her magic, brought it over the machine, melted the rock, and let the hot substance fall.

The molten rock, cooled off over The Destroyer by more magic, seemed to have done the trick. While Celestia flew back up to the city, I looked back and saw the fresh rock cracking and crumbling. “Princess, it’s breaking free!”

“Already? I’d hoped it would buy us more time. Can you hold it off?”

“I can try.” Celestia let me off at the edge of the city, overlooking a small cliff, before teleporting away, presumably back to the castle.

The guard was very quick to act. Mere minutes after Celestia’s teleport, they were already evacuating everyone in a wide area and concentrating in on my location. It looked like I would be facing the battle with some backup for once.

“Incoming up ahead!” one of the pegasus guards warned. “It’s approaching the cliffside!” I opened the clothes changing part of the buckle and went to my combat outfit. I was not about to mess up Rarity’s work. “Ten seconds!”

The tentacles anchored themselves in front of us all at once, like a hand with too many too long boneless fingers. As they slithered along towards us, the arms came into view, followed by the missile pods and head.

As the body came into view, I put the buckle on my waist, changing to my combat outfit, and despite the small energy boost that came with it, I froze up from the sudden drop in ambient temperature around me.

“THAT’S COLD!” I could only think as I fell face first onto the pavement, which was also cold and really hurt me.

It took me a couple seconds to start shivering. “Come on, Miss Xiao Long, stand up!” one of the guards said as he helped me up off the ground. I looked back at The Destroyer in time to see it weave one of its tentacle hands into a net of some kind and swatted away most of the pegasi trying to spear it, with a follow up swing taking out the rest. The wakes of wind didn’t help my condition at all either.

Some of the edge of the cold was suddenly gone when a red beam went from a unicorn guard with a red barrier up to me. “Go fight it, I’ll do what I can for you here.”

I got to my feet, still somewhat shaky, and thanked the unicorn before loading the incendiary shells into the Ember Celica. If there was a way to set The Destroyer on fire, that would manage to solve the problem of it rampaging for everyone and the problem of the cold for me.

I leapt with just enough force to be able to punch its rock encrusted face, spreading the fire from the shot across the left side of its face. The heat from the attack felt good, but I didn’t even make a dent. In the next few seconds, it looked like the uniform glow of the visor somehow shifted to focus on me, and after the failed attack, it grabbed me with most of its left hand tentacles, constricting me in a cocoon. Since I hadn’t taken any damage yet, I found myself struggling to get out.

In the very back of my mind, I thought about how the tentacles were avoiding hentai territory, a blessing on my part. More pressing though was the fact that I was captured, nothing the guards did seemed to faze the giant machine, and my heat source was slowly retreating as his teammates got tossed and smacked around, knocking them out or injuring them and wrecking nearby buildings.

After the last guard, the one that I wanted to call Firewall, was knocked away, The Destroyer turned its focus back to me. “What do you want?” I asked it. It didn’t answer, but instead tightened its grip on me before letting the tentacles go a little slack elsewhere, dangling me like a ball on a string.

After it had spun me around a few times, I concluded that it wanted to take advantage of my aura and use me as a flail, which was proven true very quickly when it swung me through a house, smashing me through the roof, a wall, and a floor. I had a little bit of time to get my senses back before getting pulled back outside through the wall, leaving a big hole.

Thanks to the metallic tentacles encasing me, my semblance didn’t have much to work with, and while I did feel a bit stronger from being swung through the house, it wasn’t by very much, and the cold was coming back to bite me fast.

Also coming at me fast was the house, as I was being flung at it again. After being smashed through the length of a wall, I was pulled back and sent back in. That happened multiple times until the house came crashing down.

The Destroyer, I realized, had effectively weaponized paddleball, with me as the ball. Sometimes, it stopped swinging me around to instead fire a volley of missiles, blowing up houses and businesses that way instead. After it blew up a restaurant that way, it tossed me into the burning wreckage and walked off.

“Yang, can you hear me?” Luna asked in my head.

“Yeah.” I coughed to get the smoke out of my lungs as I got out of the wreckage. Apparently, fire and heat immunity did not include smoke filtration and easy oxygen while in a fire. Fortunately, fresh air wasn’t far and my aura and strength let me easily walk out of something that would have cut, scratched, and burned anyone else. “Where is it?”

“Slowly approaching the castle. Just follow the trail of destruction. Celestia wants to be down there with you, but we have to coordinate the guards together. The day and night guards apparently don’t work all that well together, something we’ll have to fix.

“Oh, how are you holding up out there?”

I sniffled a bit. “It’s cold out here. What do you think?”

“I think you should turn left and run straight towards the castle.”

I walked out a bit saw the trail of destruction leading to the giant yellow robot destroying Canterlot. Pegasi and bat pony guards were firing crossbow bolts, unicorns were firing spells, and earth ponies were scattered around, along with some of their comrades. The trail of destruction had haphazard fires scattered around it, and I quickly plotted a path to approach it.

By the time I got to the first fire, I was starting to feel a bit worse, but I didn’t focus on it very much. I stayed close to the fires and their heat as I approached, switching out the yellow incendiary shells for the purple slug shells.

I stopped at a wall that was partially intact near the rampaging machine and watched its movements, trying to figure out a weakness. Not helping was the sheer amount of armor the thing had and the fuzziness creeping into my head.

Luna’s voice came back. “Yang, can you break off those launchers on the shoulders?” The missile pods fired a volley off, quickly destroying more buildings and breaking any formations the guards had. “We have an idea, and we need them gone.”

Another sniffle escaped me. “I’ll see what I can do.” I ran out from my cover and jumped up on the machine’s back to start my attack. I didn’t get much farther than the landing when my ankles got wrapped up in the tentacles, followed by the rest of my legs as I was pulled down and around, then dangled upside-down in front of the machine’s head. A glance down caught my attention because it looked like a motorcycle was sticking out of the robot’s body, somehow still in pristine condition despite the destruction and attacks sent at it. Something about it looked a bit familiar as well. “Luna, are you able to see what I’m seeing?”

There was a very brief pressure of some kind at the back of my eyes, then Luna spoke. “It looks like some kind of, what’s the word? Bicycle, it looks like there’s one of those in there with a window on the front of it. Is that what you’re seeing?”

“Close enoug-ah-ah-ACHOO!” The painful sneeze came just as I was being tossed away into another building. “Luna, I don’t feel too good” I managed to croak out.

“Don’t you have your aura to protect you?”

“I don’t know what this is.” Luna was quiet, though I could somehow feel her trying to figure something out. “So how’s your day been?”

“A couple of The Destroyer’s tentacles have suddenly and rapidly rusted and corroded off. Did you do something?”

“No, I didn’t.” I got out of my rubblehole and saw that, indeed, two of the mechanical tentacles were motionless on the ground, detached from one of the arms. “What did I do?”

The Destroyer noticed me and took a step back before firing a volley of missiles focused on me. I barely managed to jump to the side before the first missiles struck and exploded, sending me flying into the rest of them, the explosions of which sent me sky high and depleted a good chunk of my aura. It was enough to cause my semblance to ignite my hair, though I was less worried about that and more about the cold from the air sapping my will to fight.

A bit of gold colored magic helped direct my fall, literally face first onto the joint that one of the missile pods was on. A bit more magic tickled my nose enough to make me sneeze before I was forcibly removed and thrown away again. As I looked back at The Destroyer, I saw the missile pod fall off.

“It would appear that I owe my sister a double priced meal at your place, Yang” Luna said. “Your sneezes seem to be its weakness, so get back there and sneeze on it some more to save the world again.

“I can’t believe I actually said that.”

I had a feeling Luna was wrong about the weakness, but it seemed to work, so I came up with a strategy: play dead until it was gone, then sneeze on an ankle. There was no way that the plan was an excuse to just get some rest.

After I heard it walk off, I set my plan into motion, quietly sneaking out and looking around. It was easy enough to spot the machine walking around. There were no guards to distract it for me either. Since it seemed preoccupied with destruction on its path to the castle, I decided to forget the sneaking strategy and just run up to the thing.

The Destroyer was distracted enough trying to uproot something for me to get close enough that I could stand by and wait for the need to sneeze. The sneeze came just as it seemed it was about to succeed in its goal, and I managed to get a good look at what happened. Around the spots where my snot landed, the rust spread like a wildfire, which was very prominent against the brightly colored armor.

It didn’t take long for The Destroyer to notice I was still alive, but before it could get a grip on me, the ankle failed and it fell over on its back, letting me see that it definitely looked like there was a motorcycle in the body. I still couldn’t quite place where I’d seen some of the visible details on it before though.

I finally remembered that I could still punch the thing, so I did just that, sending a slug into a knee with more effort than it should have taken. The damage from the punch disabled the lower leg as well, but just to be sure, I punched it a few more times. Once I was satisfied with the non-functional knee, I did the same to the other side.

The Destroyer would not be going on any adventures any time soon.

I leaned over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath, as I really wasn’t feeling that good, like I was three days into a cold. Thankfully, I got started building up a second wind as drums began beating. As my music magic progressed and built up, I was able to clear my head and focus a bit.

When the strings entered, I made the brief climb onto The Destroyer’s chest. In time with the chants, a tentacle lashed out, I caught and wrapped it taught around my arm, and broke it with the other.

Catch, wrap, break.

Catch, wrap, break.

Catch, wrap, break.

Catch, wrap, break.

Catch, wrap, break.

Catch two, wrap two, break two.

Catch two, wrap two, break two.

Catch three, wrap three, break three.

Catch three, wrap three, break three.

Dovahkiin, Dovahkiin, naal ok zin los vahriin

I caught a glimpse of a hair on one of the last tentacles, and I felt the burst of anger.

Wah dein vokul mahfaeraak ahst vaal!

I tore off the second and final missile pod before I turned to the body.

Ahrk fin norok paal graan fod nust hon zindro zaan

The armor around the bike came off very quickly and easily.

Dovahkiin, fah hin kogaan mu draal!

The connections on the bike also came off easily. With a “HYAAH”, I pulled it out from the body, causing The Destroyer to finally stop moving. As the brief music spell died down, I finally began to succumb to my exhaustion and the cold.

As I began to drift towards the peaceful darkness behind my eyelids, I couldn’t stop myself from clinging to the liberated vehicle. It had some residual warmth to it, and I finally passed out with the motorcycle in my arms.

Author's Notes:

And with that, the third great evil has been destroyed. And Yang got a sweet ride out of it, too.

It's exactly 1300 pieces.

Why is The Destroyer yellow and red? That's what its creators decided to paint it with.