Read The Bridge
 
fffffffffffffFFWOOOM!
 
The double sonic boom crackled just above the tree line. Apple Fritter’s eyes went wide and she hopped up with stiffened legs in a startle, the curtain of air behind the crash having torn many leaves off their branches. Apple Fritter landed back on her hooves amongst a downpour of autumn glow.
 
Now hundreds of meters away and several meters above the fading tree line, Rainbow Dash and Rodan continued to accelerate through the vapor cones forming around them. They pitched up, the tsunami of dead leaves that chased them gradually dying away as they ascended and began swinging in a wide arc around Big Smokey Mountain. Even as they slowed down slightly to curve around the peak, neither one dropped below 500 kilometers per hour.
 
As they straightened back out but hadn’t yet sped back up, Rainbow Dash turned herself around and began casually flying backwards despite the rate they were moving at.  
“Alright! You can definitely break up to mach 2! Not bad! You’d make Wonderbolts academy!”
 
She shouted at the top of her lunges to be heard over the streaming air. Rodan cracked a cheeky smirk as he too started flying backwards, offhandedly rolling his eyes.  
“THAT was the goal? I wasn’t even trying!”
 
“Oooh you’re gonna!”
 
A mutual smirk was brokered and the duo turned themselves back around and instantly accelerated back up at ever increasing rates, bursting vapor cones and resulting shockwaves signaling the breach of over 3,000 kilometers per hour speeds. Curtains of screaming air easily mistaken for thunder sliced into the snow capped mountain peaks, cutting trenches along their lengths. For a moment though the cold blasts of air filtered through the mach cone and Rodan felt a brief dip in his thermal energy. Lacking his original state’s sheer size to ward off the cold thanks to gigantothermy, the cold was slowing him down enough for Rainbow Dash to pull ahead. However the tie breaker was brief. As he crashed through more and more curtains of air, Rodan got an idea. Spreading his wings out as far as he could, he intentionally subjected himself to as much air friction as possible. It slowed him down at first, but friction with even cold surfaces can cause a lot of heat. And heat was exactly the sort of thing the omega guardian beast ran on.
 
The stunt paid off, for the moment he returned to a more streamline position, Rodan’s velocity spiked enough to easily catch up with Rainbow Dash and shoot ahead of her going fast enough to breach Mach 3. Not one to be deterred and only emboldened by the display of speed, Rainbow Dash took away some of her restraint. She had been wanting to gradually build this race up to keep it interesting for the kaiju. Something she couldn’t do in second place.  
Okay wise guy, let’s kick it up a notch!
 
She put her hooves out before her and arched her back slightly to kick off, knifing through the air and multiplying her top speed. A glowing path of dueling rainbow hues and burning light began to take shape as they sped away from the mountains. They had just begun to pass a Cloudsdalian weather factory, a sight Rodan found so bizarre he almost slowed down to get a better look at it, when the gryphon noticed something else directly in front of them. Rainbow Dash saw it too and both racers struck a confused expression as they dived upwards to avoid an impact.
 
Skidding to a halt, they looked over at each other and then back at the intruder before hovering down at it. Rodan, dumbfounded, just looked at the dark mass with a slack jaw and raised eyebrow.
 
“…. Does that cloud have a face on it?”
 
“Yes, yes I think it does.”