Preview: Al Azif and the Hard-Boiled Warlock

Here is a preview of the upcoming and refined new chapter of the Symphony of Canterlot. Will be done in a day. Thank You.

In reality I was sitting in a lotus position in the left trotway.

Nothing but a little Ectoplasmic Projection. Neither me and Merry moved after she took the belt of her trenchcoat to tie the Tinker to her back. Naturally, when they emptied about twenty rounds off their one-hundred round magazines they noticed that they were shooting at gas.

At that point I tossed to Merry one of the smoke grenades that I took from my first kill that evening. She caught it without fail, pulled the pin with her mouth and threw it onto the right trotway, engulfing it in smoke.  They immediately galloped into it; I then telekinetically moved the smoke into their nostrils and muzzle pushed it in on all four of them. They tried to cough,  but their mouths couldn’t exhale at all. They fell to their knees, unable to breathe, one of them looking at nowhere in particular with bloodshot eyes that I could see through his brass goggles.

Eventually all four suffocated in a matter of three minutes or so.  Their intact bodies laid in either trotway in an almost symmetrical fashion.

I quickly trotted towards the bodies on the right trotway first, ignoring the smoke as best I could, I coughed twice but it didn’t matter to me much.

Merry quickly caught up with me and made a very interesting point. “We could have gun them down, this seems a bit of a slow and torturous method to kill a few ponies.”

I replied in kind. “It is but I need the bodies intact; I sensed something large ahead and something tells me we are going to have to use another one of me wartime tricks. And I need to act before these bodies start defecating.”

I stood there and activated my horn and I got to work. I opened my mouth, letting out the ectoplasm that I got my body to produce and let it form into four distinct smoky orange glowing tendrils.

“Merry, would ya mind removing the gas masks? It would make things easier.”

She looked at me a bit incredulously but she did as she was told; in about forty or so seconds she removed all four of the gas masks and brass goggles.

Each of the tendrils got into a particular Thule soldier’s mouth and eye sockets. The bodies then began to convulse and shake a bit before trying to get on all fours, stumbling a bit and finally standing straight, looking to nowhere in particular as their eyes and mouths glowed the orange of my ethereal field.

I stopped inserting magic into them so that I could start removing their weapons. Something told me and Merry were going to need them. Two of them had other weapons on their backs; one had what looked like some sort of rifle, while the other had what looked like a bulkier double-barrel shotgun.

I telekinetically took the shotgun and gave it a good hard look; it had a magazine that wrapped around it, the mechanism complex but not something unlike I had seen in Maxim-Guns before. It dawned on me that this double-barrel was probably semi-automatic. Whoever designed this wanted a trench devastator, something to use as a means of clearing a section of a trench from an enemy squadron quickly the weapon was probably even better for use in corridors. This was a weapon for war. One I hadn’t seen before but definitely something that I could recognize as made by an experienced manufacturer and one bloody sheol of a mechanical engineer.

The words indicating where the ammo feed were printed in Germanian, and it looked like something the country would produce as well.

“Impressive,” I said with some sincere admiration of the weapon designer’s ingenuity.

Merry herself grabbed the other Thule soldiers weapon. She took a good look at it, the rifle she was looking at giving her a good glint in her eye.

“This is an automatic rifle… An actual automatic rifle. It’s too small to be one, but from what I can tell… it actually is.”

I looked at Merry with curiosity; that look was actually similar to the seductive one she gave me yesterday. Then I heard her speak again.

“I could kill the whole world with this thing.” The way that she actually said sounded almost with a tinge of a growl of arousal, which caught me by surprise, but at the same time gave a small grin to my rather grim face.

I then took the ammo for both weapons from the standing corpses of their former owners; I threw her the four magazines of the Germanic Automatic Rifles ammo or G.A.R.

I kept the two extra of the semi-auto shotgun that at that moment I named “Devastator.”

I placed fire runes on the standing Thule corpses’ grenades, it took about a minute considering that I was able to do it by drawing it on all sixteen grenades at once with a bit of pyrokinesis and precision to avoid killing us both via comically timed explosion.

I closed my eyes and saw the horror that was approaching. It was a terrible, indescribable thing as vast as sewer tunnels taking in both trotways—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and deforming as pustules of greenish light.

I opened my eyes in terror, sweat setting on me brow. I lit me horn and the four Thule corpses galloped, screaming in a loud “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”