Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 34 Apotheosis

Apotheosis

Naudia clung to the ceiling, shivering, huddled behind a grand arch in the tower she had woken up in. She was a part of all this. She was one of two ponies responsible for all of this. Whatever this new Canterlot was she didn’t notice it, couldn’t register it.

The sky was burning, space was burning, the mechanical hellscape was burning inside her mind. It was like a loop, she just kept coming back to it, it kept coming back to her.

I did that.

Sinking further Naudia didn’t know what had happened to Twilight. Maybe she’d never know what happened to Twilight.

“Hey.”

She was injured, a dull distant pain like the sky that was burning overhead. Naudia averted her eyes from the windows and into a darker corner of the room.

“HEY!”

Shivering she started to calm down a bit, force herself to calm down a bit, stop putting it off and take a look at the injury on her leg.

Quite frankly it was the cleanest looking injury Naudia had ever seen, barely any blood, the wound already closing up in a strange and unique manner. A manner that showed her exactly how deep the wound was. The wound itself was like if somebody had taken the sharpest knife ever made, carved it into a tooth and stabbed her with it, the wound was almost perfect in precisely illustrating the biting monster’s mess of teeth.

It didn’t hurt exactly, she knew she was hurt and she wasn’t going to be able to walk on that anytime soon. But it didn’t hurt like injuries had hurt before.

“HEY NAUDIA QUIT MOPING AND GET DOWN HERE!”

The voice snapped her awake, like it had come from inside her head. She turned her face to look down at The First Administrator

Her head uncoiling from her hunched over posture on the ceiling like a snake Naudia was making disturbingly insect-like movements. Her wings buzzed in an angry tone, and her head never stopped tracking the First Administrator.

He gave her a flat look as she made her way down the wall in the most threatening bug-like manner. He let out a sigh when she looked like she might try and pounce on him.

“Do you really… REALLY? Think that is going to work?”

Naudia stopped, she remembered the last time she saw somebody try and attack him. When Twilight had to have her leg…

“If I was that easy to kill somebody would have done it a long time ago. We both know what you’re thinking about doing isn’t worth it. Think about where you are. You have bigger problems right now.”

“Where am I then?” Naudia hissed at him.

“You are inside of a nerteln night terror. Doctor Willow will be undergoing apotheosis soon.”

That explained little to Naudia, so she looked around to find Canterlot all around her. Dead Canterlot.

There were ponies walking around inside Canterlot, but they were white noise. Canterlot normally had an air about it. She didn’t quite like it at first, but over subsequent visits Canterlot’s emotional taste was almost comforting at times. On one Canterlot date with Twilight she had ended up just sitting on a park bench with Twilight, eyes closed swaying with the emotional tides, wings buzzing in tune with the city. It was nice to be reminded there were all these ponies around, it made a nice break from Ponyville.

This Canterlot was like a ghost of the real one. A vast ebbing and flowing sea of emotional flatness.

She felt herself immediately drawn to the window to look out at it. Looking down from the tower she was in she saw a gathering of artists. They were all artists here, they stood out from the white marble and the black dots on the white marble. They were all lined up, almost shoulder to shoulder, as close as you could pack them in. Some of them even had smaller easels, or were pressed up against walls with little more than a clipboard.

Naudia squinted her eyes at the figures three stories down. They weren’t painting, they were drawing with lumps of charcoal, not like a pencil or other art tool, it was like they had picked up a piece of half burnt firewood and decided to draw with that. And then the chimney caught her eye.

Following the black smoke of the chimney down she was just in time to see an artist with a finished charcoal painting open up a slot into the firebox. The slot was conveniently set up so that the artist could dump their finished canvas directly into the fire, pick up a new canvas and mechanically return to their spot without so much as a backward glance.

Another one did the exact same thing, picking up whatever new easel was closest. Looking back at the crowd she was pretty sure one of the ponies down there was actually dead, but nopony noticed. They didn’t care, they didn’t care when one of them died, they didn’t care when their painting was burned, they were like emotional ghosts. The only time they did care was when they were painting, that feeling burned with a poisonous passion, not of somebody driven, or passionate, but of somebody who had been set on fire. It was like Naudia was watching ponies burn themselves to ash alongside those paintings.

“What are they doing?” She asked aloud.

“Generating experiences, chewing cud like good nerteln victuals. They think, they breathe, they exist for him.”

“What IS this place?”

“You are inside of a nerteln night terror, the last of Doctor Willow’s self is burning off and he sees around him, creates around him a little world of what he wants to see, what flavor of little nerteln tyrant we’re going to get.”

Naudia looked down on the poor souls below.

“Are they real, is this place real?”

“Yes and no. This is a nerteln vision. If you’re asking if those are real ponies down there, well some of them might be based on real ponies, but they aren’t the real ponies. If you’re asking if they’re real enough to kill you, oh absolutely.”

“And what about the horrible tear in the sky, why isn’t it here?”

“This is a vision. Besides the tear in the sky was a fake. It’s all the underside of an orbital ring. It’s there to convince ponies they need to leave the planet.”

“Because of that Vatermorder thing?”

It took Naudia a long moment for the monumentous ideas to finally touch together in her head.

“That, all that, cities that stretch above Equestria to the horizon, a lightshow across the entire sky. To convince ponies on some no-name planet to leave?”

“We would prefer to have positive relations with ponies, however if there is even the slightest chance that somebody would try and wake up the Vatermorder early...”

“What can he even do? What is so scary about him?”

“How well do you know your cosmology, particularly around the beginning of the universe?”

“Decently well as anypony does, a couple extremely short and hard to study epochs at the very start, stuff like that.” Naudia waved her hoof vaguely with the air of somebody who had been drug through a mile of current cosmology textbooks.

“During the first instant the universe came into being, somewhere between the grand unification epoch and before the inflationary epoch the Vatermorder arrived in our universe.”

“Wait, that’s less than a quectosecond after the universe came into being.”

“Yes, your cosmology is ahead of where I thought it would be, good job.” The First Administrator seemed genuinely surprised at that. “Anyway, at that time there was some creature already forming in the newborn universe analogous to fate. The Vatermorder disposed of it, which caused the inflationary epoch.”

Naudia stared at the First Administrator.

“He’s going to wake up eventually whatever we do, so I would prefer to lie about why you ponies need to leave rather than have any risk that somebody might get him up early.”

-------------------

“What even is the Vatermorder like anyways?” Twilight said tearing off a chunk of a fruit based “smoothie bar” that had been in her saddlebags.

“Lazy, jaded, alone, his power is limited only by his ability to think and understand. People always want something from him, try and be friends with him for that. He’s a slow burning furnace inside a barrel of gunpowder.”

“Why would he be so touchy about that if he’s all powerful?”

“Imagine you had a friend that only wanted to be your friend because you’re a princess. Frustrating right? Imagine that happens a thousand times, that’s a tiny fragment of what he’s been through. The Vatermorder has outlived many universes before this one.”

“Shouldn’t some kind of all powerful being like that be more…” Twilight chewed on the dried strawberry bar but couldn’t quite find the word to say.

“As best we can tell before all of this he was just some guy, and he’s just never stopped being some guy inside his head. Chained to the obelisk in the valley of death, something broke in him, and he broke the universe.”

From outside there came an unearthly howling, rising and falling it echoed off of the sky. Whatever it was, it was bad.

“What the hay is that?!” Twilight shouted over the sound.

“Keep your shields up Twilight. That’s just a warning siren.”

The siren stopped for a second and an announcery voice spoke, very loud before the siren came back on, it said:

"This is not a drill, First light in T minus thirty seconds."

“A warning siren for what! First light?” Twilight was starting to get worried and it showed in her voice.

“Your vision will darken a bit if you have your shield up, that’s your shielding’s natural protection against bright lights.” The First Administrator looked bored, but he finally picked up on Twilight’s agitation. "The First Administration is obligated to announce when we are nuking a city, technically"

“Nuking?”

Just then rockets shot into the air from the other side of Canterlot, a good number of them that burned an angry red, they flew around like a swarm of bees. It took Twilight a second to realize that they were coming towards Canterlot Castle.

“We won’t be inside the-”

Twilight was cut off as the first rocket hit Canterlot proper and detonated. The world dimmed down except for the massive pure white light over Canterlot Castle. The castle wasn’t even visible, just a stark white light that burned itself into the floor, and then another, then two more, a constant stream of sun white fusion light.

The first shockwave hit, all of the glass blasted away, the curtains evaporated, the stone cracked around her. Another shockwave and the stone buckled and began to melt and burn, the fires a dim haze under the tremendous light around from the explosions above the castle.

The world was oddly quiet around her as a pillar thrown by the blast and half melted smashed itself in half against her head and flew on by. Melted chunks of stone were pressed against her shielding, before they evaporated under the sheer pressure and heat from the ongoing explosion to where Canterlot Castle used to be.

Eventually the heat and pressure fell off, it felt like ages before it did, and Twilight could see around her, technically. There was a massive dust cloud in the shape of a mushroom that blocked out the sun, glowing an angry red and dimming down, and all around here was dust and smoke from what the castle grounds used to be.

She turned around and saw her shadow physically burned into the ground behind her. Blinking her eyes in shock she realized that this had to be a dream, she hadn’t felt almost anything from that, she hadn’t heard anything from that.

“Maybe I died.” Twilight said deliriously looking around at the ruins of Canterlot city. “Maybe I died and I’m a ghost now.”

“If something like that could kill a yunguaq, or for that matter a nerteln, I’d have to ban some of our cheapest signaling lasers.”

Twilight’s head turned in the cloud of dust to the First Administrator, her mouth agape, the glowing specs of dust stuck to her shielding over her eyes gave him an otherworldly look. He stood there, untouched by the chaos and destruction around them, sparkling with the flames stuck to her eyes.

“But… so much destruction… so much, why? Why would you do that?”

"Well if you want to get somebody's attention, a couple pounds of hydrogen isn't that big a cost now is it?”

Twilight felt a foul wind upon her, and became aware of a clicking sound around her, like small rocks were clicking apart.

“What’s that… sound? It sounds like rocks… Is that the ground cooling after the explosion?”

“No, that’s your simusound at work again, it works as a Geiger counter. It means this area is irradiated so keep your shields up, it’s nothing that would kill a yunguaq, but it’s nothing that would even effect a yunguaq with shields up.”

Twilight’s eyes were drawn to the mushroom cloud reaching the maximum height for the pocket of reality they were in, she turned just in time to see the cloud swept away into nothing as if by some great hoof… or horn. From the epicenter came a great voice, amplified a thousand times by the forbidden magic that gave it’s caster life.

“YOU DARE TO INTRUDE UPON MY PERFECT WORLD?!” Doctor Willow raged like an angry god. Twilight could feel his gaze sweep over them, drinking them in as if they were prey, delectable targets to a predator. And then the gaze swept out of the city to where the rockets had come.

The next words he said were incomprehensible and spoke of a creature so paralyzed with fury at the lesser beings that dared. THAT DARED. DARED to EXIST in such a way, DARED to do so without his permission.

His rage split in two directions so effectively Doctor Willow had to make a choice. And then with a wave of his hoof Doctor Willow returned the city to a livable temperature for pony habitation. The clicking in Twilight’s ears went away, the ground flawlessly cooled down to a normal temperature without so much as cracking. As it was ordered to, the radioactive wreck of a city became a place where you couldn’t burn an egg on the smoldering concrete, or fry your lungs with the air around you.

“Looks like Doctor Willow has made his decision, we’d better meet up with Naudia.”

Tumbling down from the remains of a tower Naudia dropped in.

“Damn it, you get a grip on a concrete wall the consistency of jelly and then it cools down to a brittle husk.” Naudia brushed the glass-like chunks of concrete off the sole of her shielding. Then she looked up to meet AN’s gaze. “Hey, weren’t you just.” Naudia looked back up at the tower and then back at him, and decided not to press the issue.

She didn’t have time to press the issue because Twilight ran over and abruptly stopped right in front of her, dancing on her tippy-hooves, bending down in an uncomfortable way so as to not bowl Naudia and her wounded leg over. All of her built up almost military stoic-ness broke upon seeing the dried blood on Naudia’s leg.

“Are you all right?” Twilight asked Naudia, and then she instantly turned to the First Administrator. “Is she all right, is she going to need a replacement leg? How about blood loss, do we need to feed her some of those smoothie bars? Would that fall have hurt her, did that fall hurt you Naudia?”

It took a while to calm Twilight down from fussing over Naudia. While Naudia wasn’t exactly fine, she wasn’t in any kind of dire straits. Not in any shape to get into a fight though.

“Oh thank Celestia.” Twilight said. “I wouldn’t want her to have to get a replacement leg like this.” Twilight wiggled the snapped prosthetic leg dangling from her arm stump.

“Why did that break so easily?” Naudia asked. “Shouldn’t you guys have some kind of super materials for this?”

“To be frank most yunguaq don’t have… you know hooves. So while we were able to make something that acted enough like your real leg minus the slime stuff. However making it as quickly as we had to the priority was on combat effectiveness and not acting like a gymnastics leg.”

“But it snapped during combat.” Twilight pointed out.

“No, it snapped during a martial trance. It should have been fine for normal combat, but a martial trance is well beyond what anybody was expecting from you Twilight. There is a reason yunguaq tend to call them ‘death trances’.”

“Death trances?” Naudia asked concerned.

“They tend to show up when the need is greatest, they give people astonishing martial combat prowess. The problem is that with how yunguaq fight ‘when the need is greatest’ tends to be in situations where a martial trance just doesn’t give you enough. Yunguaq tend to perform their last stands under such a martial trances like that.”

Twilight remembered how things turned out in that fight. She could see what he meant.

As they chewed over that something caught their eyes, a bright glow just out of their vision. Twilight and Naudia got on top of a rock to see what it was.

Off in the distance Canterlot was coming back to life.

As in it was literally coming back from being a smoldering radioactive wrecked mess.

They watched as buildings glowing with a brownish green light sprang up out of nothing. Popping into existence in such a way that made Twilight and Naudia shiver even from this distance. They couldn’t quite explain it.

Maybe it was how dead the buildings still looked as if nobody would ever live there, maybe it was the empty ponies standing motionless as if waiting for orders, maybe it was the absolute lack of light from the windows.

Most likely though it was the lingering glow of soul magic. The glow died down until only the ponies’ eyes remained glowing a faint foul light.

The ponies turned as if they had received their orders and began to march towards the First Administration forces.

“What are those?” Twilight asked pointing at the strange box-like contraptions that were leaving a static glowing trail as they flew through the sky.

“Oh those, farming equipment, farmers use tracked propulsion drones to monitor their crops from inside their tractor tanks.”

“Tractor tank? Why would your forces be using some ad-hoc shambled together concept like a tractor tank?”

The First Administrator looked at her as if he just didn’t understand what she was saying. Twilight looked at the drones as those strange static trails of light zipping down directly into the nerteln forces where they exploded.

“Why are you using, on the front lines, farming equipment adapted for war?” Twilight clarified. “Shouldn’t you have an actual military for all this?”

“Essentially all of our civilian jobs have military purposes. Every one of them.”

“Yeah, what is the civilian purpose of my combat class then? What use is a lichen werewolf skirmisher?”

“The specific type of lichen is called ‘wolf lichen’ it’s used in manufacturing dyes.” He responded as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Lichenthropes are mostly involved in the dye industry.”

“Naudia’s class then.”

“Cheese making.” The First Administrator responded instantly.

Twilight decided to approach this from another angle.

“Okay then stock investors, do they have a combat role?”

Once again the First Administrator looked at her as if she’d grown a second head.

“Of course they have a combat role, they’re the ONLY combat class I can think of without a civilian role.”

Twilight decided not to get into that.

“Fast food workers?”

“Boilerplates are used in heating up cheap food and are very useful as a phased array beam weapon.” The First Administrator explained. “Very popular, means you’ve got this sci-fi looking flat plate on the end of a gun that can aim itself. Technology invented before pre-sliced bread, but it still tends to impress people today.”

“How about Roshin then, what civilian role does his flock of radioactive chickens have?”

“He’s a chicken farmer Twilight, that’s just what chicken farmers do.”

The whole situation felt alien, more alien than anything she’d seen from these yunguaq before.

“Why did you even give me a class related to cheese making of all things?” Asked Naudia.

“Because it’s a werewolf.” The First Administrator answered.

Twilight was very tempted to ask if that was because they were going to infiltrate a werewolf settlement, or if the First Administrator just really liked werewolves. Thinking upon herself and the people she’d met recently, she was guessing it might actually be the latter.

“Anyway, you two should be resting up and preparing for combat. Try and eat another smoothie bar if you can, especially you Naudia.”

“I thought all of Doctor Willow’s forces were heading down to fight your forces, over… off over there.” Naudia waved her hoof vaguely in the distance. “You know, your city destroying distraction worked and hopefully they’ll take him out.”

“While that did divert basically all his forces to fight ours that’s not enough. I’m expecting him to send Pomo after you directly.”

“We have to fight… that thing again?” Naudia irked. “We’re in no shape to do that.”

“No, YOU’RE in no shape to do that. Twilight is already rested up, her shielding never broke, just her fake leg. You’re thinking in mortal terms, your shield is your life.” He turned to Twilight. “Do you think you’re up for fighting Pomo again, should just be Pomo this time though.”

“How do you know this?”

“I’ve been fighting nerteln for a very long time Twilight. Are you prepared?”

Twilight looked over at her strange rat buddies that she had summoned in, like pets they came over inside of their shielding like pets, like she’d had several dogs. Several very strange dogs.

“I think so.”

“Good, now I need you to practice with your pets, we’re going to be having you gang up on Pomo.”

“Why didn’t we just do this in the first place? If I can summon all of these extra rats to help me, why not start with this?”

“Because we already started with this, all those partisan weapons you passed out. Doctor Willow was supposed to show up a couple stages behind where he actually was and get blasted in the face by a firing squad.”

“No, I mean why not have me just summon in these guys to fight for me from the start, why did I have to go in there and fight?”

“You could feel it right Twilight? The class you’re working with isn’t designed to fight with summons, fighting with summons requires more skill, more skill requires more time. Every one of those summons you have now makes you weaker.”

He pointed at the goat sized rat poison slime rat, glowing with a poisonous mohawk along it’s back, and presumably eyes glowing with white rat magic.

“So long as that slime rat is out he’s leeching away your magical strength directly.” He pointed at the middle rat with the trash bag and ruby red eyes. “The laser trash rat is sapping away your own afterburn.” He pointed at the last rat, the one that encased it’s transparent glass-like form in a feathery-foamy armor. “The Rhoallim ghost rat steals away your ability to critically strike.”

“And the bagrat?” Twilight looked over at the bagrat which was imitating her own lichenthrope magic.

“The most dangerous to you out of all of them.” Camna said gravely. “That rat is supposed to be your lifeline, when your shields go down, his shields are supposed to be how you surrender, or run away. It’s there as a safety net to prevent the worst from happening.”

“So how am I even supposed to fight Pomo with all this pulling me down?”

“In your current state you’re getting more out of being the support here than the rats are pulling you down. I wouldn’t normally recommend this, giving the enemy more targets generally just means area of effect attacks are more effective, but you and Naudia aren’t even a full group.”

Far off there was another explosion, and then the First Administrator talked into his ear for a second.

“Oh HELL, he’s coming this way.”

“Who?”

“Doctor Willow. You did a good job pissing him off, he sent Pomo off to fight my forces, he’s coming here because he wants blood.”

Twilight looked down at her stump and dangling broken prosthetic arm, over at Naudia who wasn’t bleeding, but wasn’t exactly ready to run on that leg.

“So should we fly out of here?”

“He has a limited knowledge of the future, nerteln are strong enough to break through yunguaq immunity to time travel to a degree. You need to fight.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The reason he’s coming here is because he knows he’s got you backed into a corner, to watch you squirm. If you run he’s going to blast Naudia out of the air. He’s seen the future, to an extent, he knows my forces are well tied up right now, you aren’t getting reinforcements. That’s why he’s here, to make you squirm, and he sees himself being able to get away afterwards.”

The First Administrator turned to face Twilight.

“He sees the you that broke your limb out there and thinks he can kill you.”