Twilight used her light frame and utter lack of fatigue to her advantage; she bounded over rocks and roots, even kicked off of them when she could do so to gain just a little more speed.  The din of dirt clods and pebbles ricocheting through the brush helped her stay focused despite her current condition.  The unicorn's mind was in turmoil; her anxiety for the upcoming attack only grew alongside the demand for her attention to keep from tripping. Despite divided focus however, the unicorn could not shake the looming worries from her thoughts.  Every faculty in Twilight's mind was completely hung up on her utter defeat and on the rat's haunting words...

"A mindless footsoldier and its crippled mother."

Despite their downplayed descriptions on Iago's part, memories of the snapping jaws and bulging muscles of the big red rodent, "its mother" the abomination, and the almost alien intelligence and language of her vermin foes as they licked their faces and laughed sent a chill into Twilight's very bones.  Amidst the tumult of running through shady, unfamiliar territory, Twilight's fears manifested themselves vividly in her mind.  Twilight's stomach sank as her mind created a small clip of the face that had pointed her in the direction of the mountain, only bloody and torn, with the vile young of the Rylkar writhing around beneath the pony's orange tinted skin.  Before stalling completely, Twilight realized that she had lost focus and shook her head to bring herself back into reality and keep moving.  With each passing second of tormenting thoughts and memories, Twilight felt every fiber of her being quiver with fear; she knew that the rats would devour the town as retaliation for her intrusion, but she desperately –childishly– wished for it not to be.  Her mind wouldn't be at ease until she saw the place for herself, however, so she continued at full sprint toward the village.

Dust hung in the air behind Twilight as she roughly closed the distance toward town, although she personally had no idea as to where exactly she was running.  Fear of failure was one of Twilight's only remaining driving forces, the imaginary prying eyes of her mentors stuck like brands to her flanks and sent her hoofsteps into a rhythmic, coursing beat.  By the time she did reach town, even the moon wasn't enough to illuminate it from the outskirts.  Twilight skidded to a halt at the precipice of a small cliff and looked down over the northern side of town.  She was further away than she'd hoped to be, but was close enough to see the quiet, dark little buildings sitting peacefully on their foundations.  There were no lights, but that wasn't an immediate alarm to the unicorn. So she approached the streets, taking care to glance behind every stone, stump and tree she approached in order to avoid any surprises.

Her hopes for a tranquil, sleeping community were dashed against the rocks as a banshee's wail came from behind her and to the west.  The piercing shriek cut through the tense air at the base of the mountain and signaled an appalling sight.  Twilight's sprint fell back to a quick prance as her vision was stabbed by the dazzling glitter of candlelight in windows; it seemed that half the ponies in town had been awakened by the shriek, which Twilight saw as a blessing in disguise.  The soft light of ponies' torches facing toward the hills cast a long curtain of visibility out onto the landscape, and what was revealed may just as well have stayed in the darkness.  Rats by the thousands poured into the ribbon of light and beyond, uprooting shrubs and kicking away rocks.  Every parcel of the landscape that they swarmed over became a living, skittering thing with more eyes than there were stars above, each one bearing an evil fire in its depths.  Twilight didn't hesitate for an instant, instead she sprinted full force into town with the intent to stop the monsters – if at all she could.  Unfortunately the rats moved at roughly the same speed as her, keeping pace and closing in from the northwest.  Twilight moved in from the north, and when they clashed the resulting storm of creatures was more violent than anything the pegasi could concoct.  

The unicorn's hooves hit cobblestone first, but soon the frantic "clip-clop" of her gallop melted into a rhythm of wet crunches and agonized cries as thousands of rats ran nearly perpendicular to her path.  She stomped down violently with her steps, killing a few, but when she looked around to assess her progress her vision was greeted by an unbroken carpet of the things running past her, some with the crushed bodies of newly dead rats clutched in their twisted, cannibalistic jaws.  The air around Twilight exploded in a cacophony of squealing rats, falling garbage cans, splintering wood and screams by the dozens as the endless river of rodents chewed their way through the streets.  Rats hurled themselves up at Twilight, who wasn't nearly as prepared for the attack as she thought she was.  The little beasts intelligently targeted her eyes and tendons, inflicting extremely painful and debilitating wounds on the unicorn.  They were nothing like the bites she received in the cave, which she knew were intended to subdue; now they wanted her and everyone around her brought to the ground and eaten alive.  The rats were taking their vengeance out on the town, and Twilight was failing to stop them.  She screamed in frustration and heaved herself forward, the sudden force of her movements throwing a portion of the rats off of her wounded body.  

Twilight ran forward amidst the chaos and surveyed the area; she could see the beasts beginning to gnaw holes into every portion of the buildings they could reach, and not even the iron hinges and bars on reinforced doors survived.  Those teeth that could pierce solid metal did unspeakable things to flesh, and their handiwork was strewn about the moving mess that had become the streets.  All the ponies could do was run away and scream, they didn't even know what direction to flee.  Their homes were being demolished right before their very eyes, as were their families, careers, and livelihoods.  Somewhere in the distance, a mare wailed the kind of hopeless wail that could only indicate that she had witnessed her child's death, and the crackle of flame peaked to a volume far higher than any torch or bonfire could produce.  Twilight's eyes flitted toward windows and open doors, catching the light of licking flames in the alley of kindling and broken homes that surrounded her.  Everything must have been knocked from their tables and shelves in the vermin siege, candles and fuel included.  The whole town was about to start burning; buildings, food, families and all.

As Twilight barreled into the ocean of rodents, a slavering, whimpering rat the size of a dog from seemingly out of nowhere sank its teeth so firmly in her fetlock that she could feel them grinding into her bones.  Twilight's screams could actually be heard over the chaos around her; she had been able to feel their bites before, but this particular attack hurt so much worse that it was unnatural.  Twilight collapsed and was immediately blanketed by the writhing, screeching balls of teeth and filth.  The unicorn tried to shake off as many as she could, sending a few dozen of them flying, but she just couldn't resist their numbers.  The bites burned into Twilight's body, and as her opponents rent her dead flesh, jolts of agonizing pain disrupted everything she tried to do.  Her screams became those of panic, and it wasn't long before her fear manifested itself through involuntary magic.  The primal desire for the rats to be as far away as she could force them to became reality as a visible, searing hot shock wave radiated from Twilight's chest.  Rats went flying in every direction, many of them singed and smoking through their arcs in the sky.  Two buildings that were, unfortunately, within the radius of the blast inevitably suffered the same damage.  Splintered pine boards and low quality insulation fell like lethal snow on the blackened, shattered opening in the facade of the two-story ranch houses.  The rapid, violent release of energy had left Twilight in somewhat of a stupor, but she did catch the flash of ponies' manes in the firelight as the inhabitants of every home in town bolted outside.  Twilight stood up and took in the sight of her perfect, rat-free circle of churned and scorched cobblestone, all the while carnage and debris fell from the sky around her.  She took the opportunity to enact a flurry of unicorn magic that she knew she could control.  With a burst of violet tinted light, the unicorn teleported over to the ruined western home and manifested right in the center of a terrified family.  Having accidentally ended up a few feet above where she's intended, Twilight let herself fall and crush the group of rats that were readying themselves to dive toward the two horrified children.  Before their glinting, yellow teeth could pierce their eyes, Twilight's entire weight crushed them into the stone.  Just as soon as she had landed, the unicorn and the family she had just saved disappeared in a dizzying, much less graceful arcane explosion.

The five ponies flashed back into existence exactly in front of the inhabitants of the eastern home, who had run much further from their abode.  The two parents seemed to have dark blue and gray manes, though the uneven light from raging fires wasn't doing their colors any justice, and their foal was clearly very pale, almost white.  Reflexively, Twilight took a very deep breath and focused the few remaining shreds of her mental fortitude into an extremely powerful spell.  Her arcane sphere managed to envelop both families and teleport everyone to the few non-burning rooftops at the edge of town which, thankfully, weren't swarming with rats.  As was common for those that weren't used to teleportation, most of the ponies that she had saved vomited as soon as they came to rest, but Twilight wouldn't allow them any time for recuperation.

"You need to run right now!  Take your foals and get out of town, stay on the rooftops until you can't, and get to the woods!"  Twilight yelled at the two families, and to accentuate the gravity of her words, grabbed the adults' faces magically to force their attentions.  "I'm not screwing around, warn everyone whose house you pass and leave!"  Twilight nudged all four parents along the rooftops in the direction of the woods she had come from; the ones seemingly devoid of Rylkar and their corruption.  She wasn't sure if her idea would work but it was the only one she could think of

"Are...  Are you going to be okay?"  One of the mares hesitated for an instant as her family got started; a good Samaritan wanting to help her heroine.

"No, I'm not.  But you can be, so I need you to leave."  Twilight didn't even think, deciding only to tell her what she felt deep in her gut; the truth.  She looked down at her own body as she stepped toward the edge of the roof, and examined her new wounds.  They felt like they were on fire, and only the intense focus of saving lives had kept Twilight from noticing them.  The bite in her rear right hoof was so deep that she felt it could fall off at any moment, and she could even feel a small, permanent hole in her cheek where one of them had tried to gouge out her eye.  These among dozens of smaller wounds riddled Twilight's non-living body, and they didn't help mask her smell.  It was a disturbing smell that she couldn't quite put her hoof on, but the matters in front of her demanded her full attention.  She instinctively blamed it on the "bath" the Rylkar had given her and decided to move on; she could clean herself once the town had been saved, and deal with it if it persisted.

Twilight's body drowned out the feelings of pain long enough to register the cool breeze flowing through her mane and tail as she leapt from the roof.  She fell for only a quarter of a second, but to her it felt like she had taken simple a step forward; so strained were her wits that perception proved much more difficult than it should have been for her.  She did, however, manage to time a modest arcane shock wave with her fall, which radiated away and propelled a few dozen more rats through the air with lethal kinetic force.  

At once Twilight sprinted deeper into town, targeted as many groups of Rylkar spawn as she could and began her unnatural rampage.  Twilight knew that most families would be too shocked to act quickly, so she bore the guise of the enemy for the civilians' sakes.  Twilight's ghoulish appearance made this approach much simpler; she splintered their doors with bone crushing magical force and let loose a primal, agonized yell after the residents until they sprinted toward the woods.  The first family she tried this on actually scrambled out a back window to escape the horrifying visage, though the second wound up cornered in their living room until Twilight magically obliterated a wall of their house.  Regardless of responses to her, the survivors of the attack all ended up running in the same direction toward the woods, so the plan worked about as well as it could have.

Deep in her gut (a portion of which was at risk of falling out due to a rapidly splitting Rylkar bite) Twilight knew that at least (if not more than) half the town would die tonight.  The Rylkar simultaneously swept every building in town and the Ponies here most likely weren't fast enough to save themselves, but she felt she had to do everything she could.  She ran from house to house and repeated her terrifying display; it was likely that most of those ponies would fear her more than the rats, but if most of them survived she could consider it a victory.  

Twilight used her intermittent time to impale, freeze, crush, electrocute, and otherwise brutalize the beastly little rats before they could get anywhere near her.  The air was tense with ozone and fading magical residue following Twilight, as she flurried back and forth to quell a violent tide of hungry monsters.  Unfortunately for her they were not the stupid animals that they appeared, and eventually began to attack with aggressive tactics and fierce strategies, basic though they were.  Twilight managed to outmaneuver them for a while, but fatigue from her magic had been hounding her since the very beginning of the fight, and she wasn't able to keep up her stamina for long.  Twilight's wall of offensive magic weakened until a few rats managed to get through, and that new distraction brought her entire defense down.  They funneled in much more quickly as soon as the chance presented itself, and Twilight was soon overwhelmed.  Unfortunately for the rats, however, she wasn't stupid either.  As one of the monstrous vermin approached, the unicorn gracefully produced her dagger and slashed its head clean off.  The beast burst into flame as soon as its head left its shoulders and the body was rendered to ash in seconds.  Upon witnessing the incredible effect of the weapon, Twilight hastily wove together a lethal dance of magic and daggerplay; though her reach wasn't perfect she still managed to kill the stragglers off with blade and hoof.  

The unicorn couldn't help but smile during the action; the pain of her wounds, new and old, disappeared in the flourish of combat, and her mind only needed to focus on staying mobile.  The only time Twilight flinched during her dance was when another muscular, blood red rat emerged from the darkness and sank its teeth into her foreleg.  This rat was much like the huge beast in the cave, but was a little bigger and bore a scar over its right eye; its bite was just as searing.  The pain of the crunch crippled her otherwise beautiful (if not improvised) display, and it was only made worse when she realized that the rat hadn't let go.  She couldn't shake free of it and, just as she was about to sink her knife into its skull, it twisted its jaws and wrestled her to the ground.  Her head bounced off of the cobblestone street and she dropped her dagger at the loss of concentration.

The high of battle had Twilight so enraged that her actions were absolutely ruthless; the desperation tactics of a cornered animal combined with an infuriated brilliant mind.  From the ground, she gave a savage kick with her hind leg that connected to the rat's inner thigh, dislocating its hip and shattering its femur.  Just as the creature loosened its jaws to shriek in pain, Twilight grabbed its neck with her hooves and shoved it into the cobblestone.  She pulled herself onto the writhing, greasy animal and used her magic to loosen a particularly large stone from the street, while keeping it pinned with her hooves.  It snapped and chattered, clearly speaking in its unusual tongue, but Twilight didn't really care what it had to say.  The magic-enveloped cobblestone came down onto its mouth and shattered its teeth at the roots, which shut the beast up.  She picked the stone up with her hooves, having lost the finesse to hold and aim it with telekinesis, and brought it down again.  She lost herself in the rhythm, imagining the beat of a battle drum as the stone smashed into the rat's head over and over again.  Twilight only stopped when the firm "bounce" that its skull gave to the rock stopped, and nothing but mush contained in a bag of furry skin remained.

The surviving rats in the immediate area displayed a frighteningly sophisticated sense of unease at the sound of their officer's final gasping breaths, which Twilight used as the perfect opportunity to utilize powerful rush from her battle high once more.  From her horn erupted another sphere of kinetic energy that expanded so quickly that it burned away the surface of everything it swept across.  The wave vaporized the body beneath her, crushed the surrounding rats like grapes and repulsed any that were leaping for her, but the structures around the unicorn took the most damage.  Four houses immediately in Twilight's vicinity splintered completely, the stones on the street for about 60 feet around her melted as pure energy flowed through them, and the shrieking of every rat in town was halted at once in a single, deafening explosion.  Though not every single rodent was killed, that final attack broke the rats' morale and the battle was won.  The rats that survived the explosion limped back toward the mountains, and the ones far enough away from Twilight to have been unaffected stopped what they were doing and fled.  Many of the smaller rats, besides killing civilians, had been gathering hay and splinters and mulch and body parts for their nefarious needs; the explosion just sounded time for them to bring what they had home.

Twilight sat flustered amongst the corpses and the falling remains of homes and ponies' earthly possessions.  The crater that her final spell had carved into the ground was deep enough to bring her nearly eye level with the many bodies of her fellow ponies lying in the street.  She could see the pain on each one's face, and there were more than she could ever want to count.  Mares, Stallions and foals in almost equal numbers had been torn to ribbons and scattered in the commotion such that you could step on several different ponies with a single hoofprint.  Twilight pressed her hooves at the lip of the crater and hauled herself up, only to see the scene pan out before her in its grisly reality.  Not only were rats falling from the sky, but so were body parts of ponies.  The sickening splat and crunch of broken bones and shredded viscera sounded like heavy rain for several seconds as the unicorn stepped through the macabre spectacle.  She didn't know the ponies, but she saw their faces and instantly knew the final questions in each one's mind:

"What's happening?"

"Where did my foreleg go?"  

"What did I do to deserve this?"

"Why did they have to kill my foals?"

Twilight stood bewildered at the destruction that continued despite her best efforts.  She had known there would be losses, but the sight of their eyes staring at her, asking her why she didn't save them instead the others broke her will.  Everyone she saw was frozen in their final seconds of agony; stallions eyes were begging the rats to stop biting them, and those without eyes wore the wounds of having run into fires, splinters, shredded metal and snapping jaws.  She couldn't even move.  The only thought in her mind was, all this... and I let them get away.

Twilight continued walking through the marsh of bodies, both friend and foe, and let her rage build at the prospect of avenging every one of their faces, until she saw one in particular.  The corpse's final breaths were only moments ago; steam was still rising from her open wounds, and Twilight fixated on her expression almost involuntarily.  As the unicorn's eyes traced down the unknown mare's body to her opened belly, a memory from her life replayed in deepest traumatic detail; she once again witnessed Rainbow Dash's violent death at her own hooves.  The image of the bifurcated pegasus sobbing, trying to scoop her innards off of the floor and back into her body, begging Celestia's guards not to kill her despite that she couldn't be saved gnawed its way into Twilight's mind and forced her to see the parallel.  She dropped onto her knees and felt her dead, dry tear ducts squeeze whatever fluid they could out onto her cheeks.  

"No... I didn't let them get away...  I made them, didn't I?"  Twilight said aloud.  She wanted the body to answer her, to hear her misdeed affirmed so that there wasn't any question, but the dead mare stayed dead.

After a long pause and a great deal of sobbing, Twilight slowly raised her eyes from the corpse and once more looked out on the path of destruction.  The fires surrounding her, the darkness of the sky, and the deep, deep red of bloodied stone and splintered wood gave Twilight's world a hellish mien.  The blood and scorching on everything dulled it to light, and the only glint she could spot was her dagger.  It had been launched by the explosion and looked to be embedded into a post at the corner of two streets.  She focused on the point, heaved herself to standing, and dragged her sundered body toward the goal.  The shambling unicorn did her absolute best to keep from stepping on corpses or rats, but the sheer volume of the dead made this impossible.  Her wounds ached so bad she didn't know whether or not she was walking through or beside the flames around her, and she didn't know what to do about her situation anymore; the only thing that moved her was the simple goal of retrieving her weapon.  The knife had buried itself at a strange angle in the signpost, quillon first and had dislodged the piece of wood that identified the particular street.  She wrenched the dagger free and looked down for the sign, only to find its bloodstained text – Placid Street – partially buried beneath a pony's severed foreleg and another one's hewn lower body.  She picked the sign up and replaced it onto the post by hammering a sharp bit of metal into it with her hoof.  Something childlike in her came out just then, a need to fix her mistake, and a need to apologize; she used her knife to carve "I'm So Sorry" into the sign, then limped away clutching her wounds in the direction of the forest.