Blackjack and Boo Survive Shadowbolt Towers destruction.

I don’t need a chance,” I replied, showing him the paper. “I have a megaspell.”

The red talisman let out a beep and suddenly everything in the room jerked sideways towards the talisman as a purple aura surrounded the orb. The moment was all I needed to grab Boo and jump out of a perfectly good tower. Far below the city, I imagined a troupe of skeletal magical phantasms around a diamond saturated with arcane power for two hundred years. A glance at my PipBuck as we fell told it all.

>Hoofington Megaspell Complex

>Access Megaspell Chamber #8.

>Lock target: Target Talisman 12964-239-428J.

>Target Locked

> Cast Megaspell Y/N?

> Y Authorization EC-1101.

> Warning, Megaspell #8 at 125% arcane saturation. Do you wish to proceed Y/N?

> Y

> Casting Megaspell: Implosion

An orb of purple light flashed out from the middle of the tower, passing through everything as it expanded further and further. I had no idea how far it would go; I might have just killed the Hoof and all my friends in it. A flock of Enclave poured in on me as I spread my wings and tried to get away… and then I felt a jerk that stopped me in midair. For a moment, I wondered if I’d been speared by a power armor tail, but a glance back saw them hanging in midair as well, seemingly just as baffled as I was. Then a soft rushing noise filled the air... and it reminded me of the sound of the air blasting out of the tower. But this wasn’t blowing out. It was sucking in.

With every bit of energy in my body, I tasked myself with flying away.

Still, I couldn’t help but look.

A hazy purple field of energy permeating the air seemed to be drawing everything into it. The branches with their gantries and equipment shook wildly, and the whole tower began to sway. The noise and motion filled the air with a bassy groan I was sure would carry for miles. Vortices twisted into the open bay doors like hungry mouths, and I watched as the Neighvarro fliers closest to the Tower were sucked in. The Raptors struggled like the Seahorse caught in rapids.

With Boo clinging to my back, I only had thoughts of getting away. Below me, the cloud layer boiled and tore like moldy fabric, thick black clouds studded with rotting vegetable matter streaking up towards the Tower in foul gray chunks. I barely got my face covered in time before getting hit with a spray of noxious lumps of mushy plants and wet cloud. A few of the greasy, tumbling balls flashed to dust in front of me, struck by stray beams from the power-armored ponies on my tail. There was a megaspell going off, and they were still trying to kill me; I couldn't decide if that was dedication or insanity. Maybe both.

Then another purple shell of magic radiated out from the tower, and when it hit me, suddenly it felt like the world had turned on its side. I flapped my wings, trying to propel myself in the direction of ‘away’, and if felt as if I were once more trying to fly straight up. Then a deep gonging noise reverberated through the air, so massive-sounding that both I and my zealous pursuers chanced another glance back.

The ring of doors and missiles was gone. So were the walls between the doors. Instead, a rumpled seam looped around the Tower where the fabrication level had been, with no gap between the parts of the Tower above and below. The world was still sideways, but the roaring wind cut off entirely; for a moment, silence prevailed. The Raptors seemed frozen in their positions, and silent clumps of cloud and fetid matter ‘fell’ past me with barely a whisper. I could see the Tower and the other spires of the Core exposed completely beneath me; not even the slightest wisp of vapor obscured the luminous boulevards below. Despite the broken buildings and sickly green glow, in an almost obscene way, it seemed... inviting. As I stared, everything seemed to hold its breath, even the city.

Then a groan, pained, tortured, and so low that it was more felt than heard, echoed across the valley. I watched the crease where the fabrication layer had been deepen and stared as it crept up and down the side of the tower. The groan grew into a wail as the building began to twist and warp before my eyes like a melting candle. The top drooped like a wilting flower for a few moments before the metal finally failed, and then all at once it was snapping and springing apart as the building disintegrated. A plate from the massive armored head reached out like an immense steel paw and caught one of the Raptors; in an instant, the warship shattered, the pieces joining the falling colossus. I only hoped it was the Blizzard and not the Castellanus.

Something was wrong, though: the tower wasn’t falling down, it was falling in. The pieces wrapped around the middle where the fabrication level had been, and the sounds of tortured metal grew to a higher and higher scream as the pieces were compressed under the force of the magic... and then another pulse of purple emanated from the shell. As it passed through me, hooks of magic dug into every particle of my being... and we all started moving towards the center of the spell. “Oh no. No no no!” I shouted as I tried my best to flap away, ‘up’ when I seemed so much heavier to the new ‘down’.

I could now hear a tremendous rushing sound. Not of wind, precisely. Not the high-pitched throaty scream of the vortexes I’d heard earlier. This noise was deeper, wetter, more like a current of water than air. As I struggled to move away and failed, I saw that all of us, fliers, Raptors, clouds, and even Thunderhead itself, had begun to orbit the crumpling sphere atop the Tower. The pull ripped away the clouds from more and more of Hoofington, pulling them towards the center of the valley in a great upward spiral, all to be compressed down around the sphere. “This is bad. This is very bad!”

Another chorus of ripping metal filled the air, and I glanced back to see that the immense, collapsing sphere of metal rotated as well, and that as it moved it was slowly stretching and twisting the Tower below it. With a resounding crunch, the foundation gave way completely, and I watched in stunned amazement as the dangling length of the M.o.A. hub flew through the air, a massive length of steel looking like so much string. Another Raptor, straining to get away, was clipped by the end as it passed. The ship snapped in half, and immediately its debris was pulled inward as well. As I watched, the closer the pieces got to the sphere, the smaller they became, as if massive hooves squeezed them to fractions of their former size. In a few more seconds, both they and the dangling tower were gone, wrapped into the orb.

Now it wasn’t just rotten plants and clouds striking me. A storm of garbage and debris from the surface began to batter us as we struggled against the mighty pull. The weight of the debris and the force of its flight increased by the second. First papers, then tin cans and dead branches, then limbs of trees... I rotated to the side so that the heavier stuff smashed into me rather than Boo. Another chance glance behind me and... no...

Where the top of Shadowbolt Tower had been was a spinning sphere of purple magic pulling in air and debris from all across the Hoof. Now there were rusty wagons in the debris, parts of houses. I barely heard the screams of the fliers as their lighter frames were buffeted by the shrieking winds. I didn’t look for them; I didn’t want to see them meet the same fate as that Raptor. And damaged pieces of Thunderhead were being plucked off and pulled into the vortex...

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea...

A little purple unicorn pointed out that the best direction right now wasn’t away, it was towards the surface. Her orange friend told me to keep flapping, and a white unicorn told me not to give up and push harder. A pink pony pointed out chunks of metal wagons and hunks of buildings heading for me, and a blue pegasus cheered me on as I looped and dodged the debris as best as I was able. The yellow pegasus just covered her face with a terrified squeak... and... and... for some reason I imagined someone was eating popcorn as they watched things unfold!

If this continued, I might have taken care of Cognitum entirely by accident. I couldn’t worry about that at the moment, though; I was flying downward as quickly as I possibly could. That it was towards the Core didn’t matter; I was resistant to Enervation, and it hadn’t seemed to affect Boo when it spiked the first time. And neither of us was immune to whirling vortices of death! With painful slowness, I pulled us down to the rooftops of the highest of the black skyscrapers... but, given how pieces of them were now flying up towards that maelstrom above, I didn’t stop there. I started moving down between two of the obsidian-sided buildings--

And then another wave of purple magic swept out, and my direction reversed. No amount of flapping increased our distance from that sphere, and gravity seemed entirely impotent. I once again passed a standing skyscraper’s roof, though, and reached out with a hoof, popped out my fingers, and grabbed the metal rail that ran around the edge of the building. Boo began to slide off me with a scream, and I reached out with my other hand to grab her forehoof.

If I’d been only half metal, I think I might have been torn in two. Now I was worried about Boo as she swung above me like a kite in a hurricane. I watched in stunned surrealism as small chunks of skyscrapers began to be pulled up towards that disk. The sturdy railing I was clasping for dear life started to bend...

And then another purple wave swept through me, but this one was heading in, collapsing around the sphere. As it passed through us, I felt one last mighty yank, and then Boo and I slammed into the roof of the building. We lay in a heap, Boo shaking in pain and me holding her as I stared up at the mess above us. In seconds, the sphere collapsed around where the megaspell had activated, then revealed a shimmery, dark orb only a dozen feet across. The disk of debris twisting around it slowed, and the orb let out a thunderous crack. A solid white sphere of cloud and pouring rain expanded, spreading like an umbrella above me

Then the orb, which I guessed was Shadowbolt Tower and everything else that’d been pulled in, fell to the earth trailing a great plume of hissing cloud and steam behind it. The sphere shot past us into the middle of the Core, and suddenly the skyscraper we clung to leapt beneath us as the entire Core rumbled. The black towers swayed, some smashing into each other as the falling sphere impacted somewhere far below. Flame and dust fountained up from thousands of nooks and crevices, blasting up into the air in dirty gray jets that covered everything in a choking layer of particulates. The rooftop we were on gave way once, and again, and again as floor after floor pancaked beneath us. The walls of the skyscraper peeled away, sending Boo and me tumbling towards the streets below.

I struggled for enough power to fly. To levitate. To do anything to prevent a bloody smack against the broken road below us. I clutched Boo close as my back slammed into strings of cables running from one building to the next, snapping them in my passing. Then again. Then again. Finally, Boo and I landed with a crash atop the rest of the rubble. Then, as if adding insult to injury, we were drenched in a cold, torrential rain. I stared, through the downpour, up the narrow canyon at the slit of now distant sky. The tiny black motes in it turned into pieces of buildings, chunks of wagons, and a barrage of all kinds of other debris falling down upon the Hoof. The shaking earth stilled for a moment, and then a deep, reverberating groan filled the city, a moan of something far below accompanied by a second, slighter tremble of the ground. Then it was gone, and the city filled with just the patter of falling debris and the hiss of rain.

“In retrospect,” I said as I lay there atop a pile of rubble in the middle of the deadliest ruin in all the Wasteland, “maybe that wasn’t the very best idea I’ve ever had.”

Then Boo straightened, her ears twitching as the clouds of dust swirled around us. “What?” I panted, but then I heard it too. A whining of engines fighting a losing battle against gravity. I stared up as the rolling gas cloud parted to reveal the bow and plasma cannons of a Raptor plunging at us, straight at us down into the gap between the buildings, its shattered dorsal propellers sheared away and its supporting storm clouds nothing but tatters. Its edges ripped and tore at the sides of the skyscrapers in a scream of metal as it descended. I made out the name, Hurricane, across its bow. As I lay there, only one thought passed through my mind before the ship struck.

Does that count as a boat?