//------------------------------// // Chapter thirty (x2), Circus Irks Us: Faithful Skills. // Story: Airship Mauled // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// -Fortitude- Even if I was being covered by evil clown ponies, yak stay strong and shake them all off multiple times. Friends were almost to the evil earth pony who kidnap loving food making matriarch, better be ready to signal for friend’s great plan when they reach him! “I am Fortitude the Fantastically Fragrant!” Charging forward with my shield held stiffly, I knocked down many ponies with great yak strength! I was easily keeping friend healer and nice teacher pony safe with my great might. I remember to not to hurt twisted innocent ponies too much, only just enough to knock them out. I am very good at that, why I was even knocking some of them safely out with just my smell alone! That was something I was quite proud of. Yakhalla will not see me this day! I wondered if it has visitor passes though. -Jacky- Acro Bat and Cannonade huh? They didn’t look so tough, not when I had my two sisters by my side. Well more like to my front as I stayed a decent distance away from the both of them, I was currently standing closer to Fizzle. I was a little wary of my luck at the moment. Cannonade went to hop into the vehicle while Acro took to the air. Acro looked like a moderately sized pony thug and Cannonade would look like she was some kind of scientist pony if she weren’t wearing that armor. Lighting her horn, the glowing red eyes of Cannonade seemed to frown slightly as she started playing a tune on the piano board before her and multiple cannonballs started firing upwards and out towards us in a high arc. “Dodge.” At Jade’s word we did so immediately, as cannonballs rained down all around us embedding themselves into the ground and creating small shockwaves wherever they hit. We were avoiding them pretty well. I noticed that that Acro guy was pulling his spiked bat back to do something, I saw him angling swing it towards Fizzle from a distance. Then I saw a cannonball slow in its upwards arc in front of him and realized what he was about to do. Oh you have got to be kidding, is that even possible?! Well if he was strong enough physically, then yes, it was. I turned and started running towards Fizzle who just dodged another cannonball as it slammed into the ground and inch from her. Being in the middle of a jump, the shockwave didn’t affect my sister. Jade was too busy performing her own evasive maneuvers to have seen what was about to happen. “Look out!” I got to Fizzle just as I heard a loud dinging noise. Tackling Fizzle, I managed to knock her out of the way of the redirected cannon ball moving at an insane speed towards us. We were both then blown slightly away from the force of the cannon ball hitting the ground. Fizzle ended up on her back with her head in my lap and I was facing the opposite direction I previously was. I don’t know how I got turned around in the tumbling, but I didn’t care as long as we were alive. “Fizzy, Jacky, are you two okay?” Jade had the right idea at the start of all of this, this whole thing was going to suck a lot. At least it would suck up until the main plan got off the ground, I believed in Jade’s plans and she believed in my skills. Neither of us necessarily believed in my chaotic luck as being anything other than vaguely good at any given time. “We’re fine, but…” I didn’t have time to say anything as Acro swung his bat twice and sent two more cannon balls spiraling downwards towards Jade. I mentally noted that the spikes on Acro’s bat had put a rather specific spin on them, where did Top Snide find a thestral pony that could hit cannonballs with that kind of precision? That was why the two cannon balls started to curve in strange way through air, if Jade dodged one the other would hit her and that’s because the other falling cannonballs were going to corner her. Jade was a little too busy dodging the large number of falling cannonballs aimed at her to notice the redirected balls of death coming at her. From my position on the ground I quickly mentally calculated the two cannon balls current speeds, their trajectories and possibly their weight based on what I had seen so far from multiple cannonballs hitting the ground. I licked at the tip of my beak as I sat up holding my bow horizontally and hastily pulled something out from my tail quiver. A plunger? Didn’t have time to grab anything else, it’ll have to do! I aimed and fired the plunger so that it clipped the edge of one of the cannonballs to make it spin even faster. That changed its trajectory to slam into the other cannonball loudly, it was just shy of hitting a dodging Jade in the back. Jade finally noticed how close she was to being taken out, it was just after the two cannons balls were no long going to be a threat to her thanks to my timely intervention. The colliding spinning cannonballs had one unfortunate side effect from my shot tampering with them, it made one of them come straight for my head. Darn you bad luck! There was no other explanation for its sudden swift change in trajectory to come straight at me, I did the mental math and found it impossible that it could change angles and gain speed like that. “I got you Jacky!” Fizzle hooked her hooves around my elbow and bodily heaved me completely out of the way as the cannonball dug a furrow in the ground where my body used to be. “Thanks for the save sis and good job saving our sister Fizzle, I even think that’s all the cannonballs.” Don’t know about you Jade, but I think you were speaking too soon. Jade tried to go towards the vehicle only to dodge backwards when Acro came down and swung his bat at her. The swing, despite not connecting, sent out a pressure wave that had Jade rolling backwards until she came to a stop in a crouch with all her claws digging into the ground. “Okay, don’t get hit by the bat named Bat or his bat. It’s likely to break more than your ribs with that kind of swing.” “Gee, you think? Every act Snide has had waiting for us so far has been more dangerous than the last to deal with Jade!” Fizzle and I got up to go to aid her in fighting Acro Bat, only we stopped as we noticed the upper half of the vehicle that Cannonade was in rotated. She stayed still in the central portion as the two small front facing cannons and one really large main looking one disappeared to its rear and the twenty or so arcing cannons were now pointing backwards. This rotation also revealed five more small cannons that were now pointing forwards instead backwards and there was a large funnel that was close to the ground beneath them that looked to be of similar size to the main cannon on the front. Why hadn’t Cannonade fired that main cannon at us while we were prone? Cannonade pressed a specific note and the funnel started glowing a dark red color. Her playing caused every cannon ball to start glowing that color as well, one at a time with each key pressed they lit up until they were all slowly rolling towards the funnel as if magnetized. She was reloading the arcing cannons! Fizzle ran forward to prevent the vehicle from doing anything and one of the now forward pointing cannons quickly turned slightly and fired at her. Fizzle dropped under the spiraling cannonball that almost took her head off. Said cannonball seemed to hang above her head for second confusing me. We both immediately noticed the wire connected to the spinning cannonball which swiftly retreated it back into the cannon that fired it. So not only does this vehicle provide short range artillery, it also basically had an infinite amount of ammo to work with. I’m calling those small cannons, bungie cannons. This made me wonder what Cannonade was using for a firing mechanism, it certainly wasn’t powder based. It would be more deafening around here if that were the case. Also a powder based system wouldn’t work with those bungie cannons and would eventually destroy or weaken the wires required for them to even work like they do. Turning to see Jade was currently engaging Acro Bat, he just flipped back out of the way of a wildly thrown haymaker by Jade. He then twirled forward and brought the bat around in an upward arc for Jade’s chin. Only to miss as Jade stepped forward into his swing. She went straight through his hastily attempted guard to block his spiked bat wielding leg by grabbing it and then, while she held him in place, she punched him solidly in his fanged face with a straight left. At most Acro Bat stumbled back only slightly dazed and then came back swinging for her, almost striking her with a one handed swing for her right shoulder as she quickly backpedaled away from him. “He’s sturdy too. Doesn’t even look it, but he can certainly take hit!” Shaking out her hand, Jade looked to be in a slight amount of pain from having punched the guy’s thick skull. She would have been in more pain if she hadn’t jumped away as Acro brought his bat down in an overhead two handed swing, the floor exploded in a shower of dirt and rocks leaving a crater in the ground. The bat was undamaged by the force of that attack, so he wasn’t the only one that was sturdy. “Hit and run tactics or distance attacks recommended!” Good advice Captain, I’ll heed it if I have to fight him. Turning around, I started to fire a few rocks at the clown ponies that were starting giving Arizona, Maries and Velvet trouble. Jade fired a magic missile only to surprisingly get it batted back into her face knocking her down. While that was happening, I noticed some incoming trouble for us. I fired two rocks and watched as the four oncoming flying clown ponies dropped to the ground, there were about thirty of those still left in the air. There were definitely many more earth and unicorn clown ponies still standing, dancing and or attacking our friends. I turned back to Fizzle who was having trouble getting close to the vehicle to attack the driver. Only narrowly avoiding the cannonballs launching and pulling back as if they were oddly shaped paddle ball toys. I considered something for a moment. My bad luck was running at an all-time high at the moment to the point that my luck could turn lethal at any moment, but I might as well take the risk! “Jade… Fizzle… go on ahead without me, I’ll take them both on!” They both looked towards me a little surprised, Fizzle’s surprise ended first. Even when she was busy avoiding getting brained by a dangerous weapon, Jade still had the time to tell me what she thought of that. “Jacky, we’re not leaving you alone to fight these two by yourself!” Honorable of you Captain and I liked you for that, but I wasn’t asking you to leave me behind. I was telling you to! “We can’t get stuck here! We need Snide’s active attention and to draw him into combat for plan A or B to work, plan F is not going to work at this rate.” By the time I said this the Cannon Cascade’s upper half turned around and Acro Bat was airborne once again ready to start redirecting cannon balls at us. “I can this handle myself, trust me!” Another volley launched into the air and Acro started striking several Cannonballs sending them curving towards us. I pulled out one of my packs of ice cream sticks and started to fire them one after another while avoiding cannonballs on the move. Not all my shots hit, but enough did to send Acro’s redirected cannonballs off course. The Cannon Cascade’s top turned once more and started to draw the cannonballs in. The two bungie cannons on the front of the vehicle wouldn’t be all too hard to dodge, it was the cannon ball rain that I was going to have issues with. I looked up and started moving a safe distance away from the next volley of falling cannonballs. I still hadn’t seen the main front facing cannon fire once, it must do something special or else it wouldn’t be there. I’d have to watch out for whenever it did anything. I was the best suited to take these two on, I had a bow that could fire anything after all! Thinking on it, my bow did have some unique properties to turn this situation in my favor no matter how unlucky I got, provided that I use it right. “Are you sure Jacky?” Fizzle looked at me worriedly and I clenched my fist and pumped it while hopefully looking determined when the task ahead of me was quite daunting. I wasn’t going to back down in the face of danger or imminent death, I would have never have tried to leave Turtle Toga if I didn’t think I could face the world head on with or without a captain to guide me! I preferred to do it with a captain worthy of my adoration. “Of course I am. Go get Snide for taking our mother, I can do this!” Or at least hoped I could, two against one were not good odds. Not when this many cannons were involved or the thestral with enough physical strength to fly around while a carrying heavy metal bat like that. “What, we can’t just abandon…!” Jade started off only for Fizzle to send her a look, even I sent her one that was quite pleading. Jade looked to me and then to Fizzle, followed by the cannons on the vehicle as they started firing cannonballs high into the air in our given direction. “Okay, but you better stay alive Jacky, I don’t want to lose my sister and favorite pirate to something this mundane! Last potion Fizzle, close up!” Jade turned and darted towards Fizzle and they both tried to get around the vehicle to the right at the same time. Only for Acro to come down and try to get in the way. Jade simply threw down what was apparently the last teleportation potion taking both her and Fizzle behind the Cannon Cascade machine as Acro whiffed his bat through the space they used to occupy. Once they were behind the machine they avoided several bungie cannon shots as they moved forwards and I could hear Top Snide taunting them with the fact that they were leaving me behind. You have yet to see what we can truly do Snide. I don’t quit at life and I won’t quit at being who I am, I am one of my cat mother’s daughters! “Hey, stop attacking my sisters and focus on me!” Yelling this as I hopped backwards and out of the way of several cannonballs raining on my position coming very close to hitting me with a staccato of heavy metal death. I reached into my tail quiver and pulled out a handful of small and decently sharp rocks. I was running low on good rocks and would have to start picking them up from the ground soon, otherwise I’d have to start using my special ammunition. I could vaguely hear Top Snide announcing the next act as I focused on the two before me and started to fire rocks at them. Acro blocked all my shots towards him with his bat by turning so that his side was facing me, he was making his profile smaller and harder for me to hit. It also made it easier for his bat to block my shots. Adjusting my aim and I fired several rocks at Cannonade, she simply blocked them all with the back of her armadillo styled leg armor crossed in front of her. My shots did a meager, nearly negligible, amount of damage to the armor. I dodged to the left as a cannonball slammed down next to me and I rolled back to the right avoiding another cannonball falling from the air. I narrowed my eyes and thought about how to deal with the vehicle, it looked pretty complicated and if I knew a single thing about complicated vehicles… it was how easy it was for them to break down over the slightest thing. Knowing every way you could bring down an airship and the tiniest of things that would do it, I needed to find a weak point here. I couldn’t just keep dodging like this forever, I also couldn’t afford to just fire my shots wildly and expect them to do something grand! I dove forward as a cannonball slammed straight down from above right where I was, that cannonball was thanks to Acro’s actions. I’m glad that powder cannons weren’t being used here or else I wouldn’t have been able to hear the cannonballs being hit by his bat. Speaking of the annoying thestral. I rolled right while getting my feet under me in a crouch, dived to my left and then roll forwards. Three cannonballs all slammed into the ground one after another following my path. A thought came to mind, how do you stop a cannon from firing? I was a pirate and knew a lot about how to use a cannon to… idea! A brilliant one if I do say so myself. I still had my own cannon on me, but when to use it and could it effectively fire a cannonball? Party cannons weren’t exactly the highest grade of cannons you could get, but I have been tweaking mine a lot for higher yield blasts. It should work, "‘should’". Now that I thought of it, why was I holding back right now?! What was wrong with me, was I that worried about my luck? I should be getting angry, show them both and Snide just exactly how dangerous I am when you mess with our mom! I narrowed my eyes as the vehicle performed its revolution to present its five bungie cannons to me and started pulling in the cannonballs to reload. It seems I’d have to put a hold on the idea of using my party cannon for the moment, because Acro was currently coming for me. He swung for my side and I ducked under the swing and he continue his momentum to bring it down on me, I smirked and held my bow up towards him string first. The bat struck the string and bent it, then suddenly the bat was shooting for the roof of the tent out of Acro’s confused hooves. I hopped to the left and swung the backwards held bow towards him and once the string connected with his body he went flying into the Cannon Cascade where he collided with one of the cannons painfully. After that he swooped away and grabbed his bat and flew high up into the air. You’re not avoiding me that easily! You are dealing with a Jacky who’s managed to work herself into a fervor now, no more sitting passively by and analyzing everything! I pulled out a particularly flat rock and a conical one, perfect for my needs as I charged towards the machine still pulling in cannonballs. I fired the flat rock almost straight upward and then the second one once it was high enough. Firing a shot directly at Acro Bat who, upon seeing it coming, deflected it and I smiled. He soon let out screech as the conical rock he didn’t see coming dug into his right wing’s joint after ricocheting off the flat rock that I fired a second ago. As he fell, I got close to the vehicle and then threw myself to the ground as Cannonade fired two of the outer bungie cannons pointing inwards towards me. The spinning cannonballs crossed overhead, unlikely to tangle their taut pulled wires. Before they could reel or pull back in. I crawled backwards, got up and darted backwards away from them as Acro fell onto both the wires where they crossed forcing them into the ground and in doing so, made both the cannonballs hit the ground and bounce up and over him. I hastily pulled a fork from my quiver, yes the kind of fork you’d eat food with, and fired it directly for Acro hoping he’d do what I thought he would. He quickly rolled out of the way, just like I wanted. While he avoided getting trapped in the wires, they lifted up from the ground slightly while still close together. That’s when my forks prongs caught both of the wires and became twisted up in them. The two bungie cannonballs loop around one another getting tangled up even worse. Now to sit back and witness the carnage. With both bungie cannons trying to pull the cannonballs back in, the results was the two cannons crunching inwards violently on the other three cannons making them completely useless. The funnel was still operational and taking in cannonballs, I’d deal with that soon enough. The Cannon Cascade started rotating again and Acro came at me a little bit more carefully. I calmly stowed my bow, reached behind my back and waited. He darted towards me wound up his bat for a swing and just when he was about to ram me into me with what would have been a deadly blow, I quickly pulled my party cannon out and held it in front of me with my eyes shut. With a strange sucking noise, one that I will never know how the cannon even created in the first place, I opened one eye and now noticed I had a thestral inexorably lodged in my cannon. I giggled slightly at the fact that that had actually worked. Acro just went head first into it while dropping his bat. His rear legs were kicking wildly at the air as he struggled to pull himself free. Smiling, I took aim and yanked the cord blasting him slightly above the Cannon Cascade as it started to fire more arcing shots and a cannon ball struck him in the spine flipping him in the air. Acro then hit the ground on his back, I was actually a little worried about his health for a moment. Acro Bat groaned and rolled over, he slowly staggering to his hooves. His red glowing eyes flickered between brown and red for quite a bit before settling on red again. He was just hit in the spine by a cannonball and he could still stand? Talk about tough! Also I should probably dodge the incoming cannonballs, yipe! I lifted my party cannon above my head and started to run with it, the cannonballs fell again and littered the thoroughly cratered surroundings. I heard another odd slurping noise as I ran around dodging the falling metal spheres of doom and my cannon suddenly pulled me to the ground weighing a lot more than it did a second ago. I almost had a cannonball take my head off right then and there thanks to that! I could feel the passage of that particular cannonball ruffling my braided feathers at the back of my neck and slammed into the ground on my left. That… was probably the luckiest near miss I’ve ever had. Glaring at the Cannon Cascade as I turned my party cannon to it, I pulled the string hoping for the best and that a cannonball did just in fact land in my party cannon while I was hauling it around above my head. A cannonball blasted out of my cannon and hit the twenty arcing cannons with devastating accuracy and did heavy amounts of damage to them. In fact, I had destroyed them all in a single shot. I just blinked. I blinked again, but no, I was still seeing the same thing afterwards. Did I just seriously disable all those cannons with a single cannon shot… from a party cannon no less?! To say I was in shock was an understatement. I’ve never been this lucky before! To think I was only mildly battered by all the cannonball impacts that had been going on all around me for these past ten or so minutes. I just managed to destroy a major portion of that machine by myself, with one shot! I thought I would have been more seriously injured than this by now. Cannonade growled angrily in her seat as she wasn’t going to be firing another volley after that direct hit. Unlike Whip Slash, these two hadn’t said a word, kind of liked that better honestly. Wait… where was the bat Acro dropped? I quickly ducked while swinging my cannon safely behind my back, right into the mysterious storage space where I usually kept it. I almost took the bat to the back of my head and was currently stumbling forward, I got my legs under me and turned to see Acro had gotten behind me. He swung his bat for me again and I hopped backwards avoiding it, while pulling my bow out again. Using the spotlight Snide generously provided above this area, I fired a blast of light straight into Acro’s sensitive eyes. He reared back and screamed clutching at his head with his hooves, while still holding onto the bat at the same time. I started backing away from him and towards the Cannon Cascade, something was up with him. He looked up at me with sorrow in his eyes. “Help… us…nghh… please… stop aghh… don’t want to hurt!” Yeah, that was horrifying to hear, what Acro’s voice did there by warping and distorting like that. Soon his hooves released his head and the red glow was back in full force. Right, back on to being Snide’s puppet I guess. I had thankfully backed far enough away from him that he couldn’t strike out at me with the bat immediately. Hearing a cannon blast from behind, I immediately crouched down expecting the two remaining bungie cannons to have fired at me. Instead a large black ball went flying over me, which could have only come from the main cannon on the front of the vehicle. Acro struck the large ball with the bat as I stood up, I attempted to dodge to the right and successfully managed to avoid the main mass of it. That didn’t mean I avoided injury entirely, as I was screaming in agony a second later. Not because the ball hit me, but because something just dug a large nasty gash into my left side. Clutching at the sudden exceedingly painful wound in my side with my left hand, I looked behind me to see the black ball going up into the funnel. Shortly after Cannonade popped up in the middle of the vehicle on her seat, revealing that she had fired herself from the cannon. Her glowing horn was covered in a large amount of blood, most likely mine, and the machine turned towards me and started to roll forward. It was really quite slow, I could understand why it wasn’t being used in a more mobile fashion. I quickly leaned away from Acro swinging the bat for my face and I started to stumble away. He swung back and I intercepted it with my backwards held bow again and he went sliding off to the side a good distance away because he had a tighter grip on his bat this time. I grunted and started to quickly stumble back towards Arizona, Maries and Velvet trying to call for help and my vision was going a bit spotty. It didn’t help that I was slowed down by my wound and that was what was allowing the slow Cannon Cascade to keep up with me. I heard a blasting noise and let myself fall limp to the ground. Cannonade flew overhead struck the ground, bounced up and uncurled she landed on her front hooves and shoved off sending a flying buck for my face. I rolled to my left and watched as she flipped several times landing on a different hoof each time and then flipped her way back into the machine. Snide said this was an acrobatic act didn’t he? I watched as Cannonade sunk into the machine and started to pick up my pace, when several clown ponies started to come into my path to block me off from escaping. I couldn’t fight while constantly holding my side like this! “Help...” I croaked out, the pain in my side was becoming unbearable and tears started to spill from my eyes. I heard the cannon blast behind me and then felt myself get lifted off my feet. It wasn’t because I was hit, it was because I was saved. I looked down as Cannonade passed harmlessly underneath me and I managed to shoulder my bow again while coming to terms with what just happened. I was now laying across a bouncing balloon unicorn with the pony that just made a timely rescue. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you!” The friendly clown, Ponyacci, saved me and we were bouncing towards the entrance of the tent. “Incoming injured! Which one is the doctor again?” “The diamond dog.” I pointed out Dr. Bones and he angled us towards her. “Boy that is literally ruff!” Ponyacci made me giggle. “They say laughter is the best medicine, so how are you feeling?” “I have a large rip in my side that was made by a unicorn’s horn slashing through me that needs to be immediately stitched up, how do you suppose I’m feeling?!” I was nearly knocked off the balloon unicorn as it suddenly veered sharply to the side, away from Acro swinging his spiked bat at it threatening to pop it out from under us. We then suddenly bounced backwards as Cannonade came rolling towards us, where she lunged out of it to swipe wildly at us with her armored hooves. Ponyacci evaded with a low sideways bounce, then a high and long distance forward bounce. Cannonade bounced and twisted after us barely keeping up with Ponyacci as he seemingly urged his balloon animal on faster. Acro and Cannonade had apparently abandoned the devastated Cannon Cascade, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t dangerous enough to keep up with us. “Whoa, these are some nasty customers, it’s a good thing I don’t own a shop!” Why did Ponyacci have to insist on making me laugh? Laughing hurts right now! I gave him a squawk of complete misery. “Hold on, we’re almost there!”