FFMS003
As the days marched on, and the witches' section fled around the circuit, the militia got better and faster at chasing our tails. They started to learn our individual tricks - how Gibblets left animate tanglevines to trip up charging ponies, how Obscured Blade's phantasms were full of hidden, floating staves that would clout the unwary that tried to treat them as empty air.
But they didn't learn how to deal with Bad Apple's tricks, because they weren't tricks. She was absolutely crap at glamouring, and barely could maintain a set of phantasms, let alone ones that moved convincingly. But she made up for it with her little airbursts overhead of the unwary, and the actual flaming traps that she used to make the militia-ponies respect her 'illusions'. She sent more than one donkey or earth-pony to the mobile infirmary that Sawbones and his people kept rolling just behind the training-cavalcade.
Rye Daughter told me one night that the ambulances weren't really full of burnt and scorched ponies, but there were a significant number that had to pass through their open-air examination stations for burn salves and the doctor-alchemist's special potions.
Sawbones claims to have no magic, but there's certainly something in those impossible concoctions of his. I've seen him heal third-degree burns inside of two days. That can't be natural.
By the sixth day of maneuvers, the militia had lost most of their fear of our phantasmic raiders, and were becoming nicely aggressive. Even Otonashi's mind-melting horrors, which were larded heavily with imaginary ghouls, revenants, and barrowgasts firing off very real 'cold-blasts', weren't keeping the ponies and donkeys of the IV Hydromel from getting proper stuck in whenever we showed our 'companies' to contest their advance.
So we fell back at a dead run, and found the open field prepared for us by the aerials and the construction corps, a single long march from Great Dame, towards which we had bent back towards the night before last. The seniors, Bad Apple, and I formed up our little illusionary army in that field, and dressed ranks as if it were a raiding formation brought to bay by the victorious militia.
By now we'd established the uniform colours and equipment of our respective 'commands', and I reached over on both sides to take 'control' of Bad Apple's and the Crow's 'troops'. Others in the witches' section are better than I when it comes to knocking heads, burning stuff, and blowing things up, but nopony has a patch on my capacity for controlling illusions. I've even eclipsed the ever-silent Otonashi, who, before I had found my talents, had been the Company's premiere illusionist. She still controlled a great roiling horde of terrors on the right flank of our 'army', but I held most of the left. Gibblets and Obscured Blade controlled the centre, where you could find our fearsome-looking 'general', based loosely on the late, unlamented Stump.
The militia-regiment's vanguard came bounding down the farm-lane we had been using as an axis of escape, and came into sight of the poles and construction of the day's 'camp', in our army's rear. Their skirmishers shook out into a shaggy line on either side of the lane, and began a cautious advance to cover the main body as it debouched from a choke point created by a copse of trees to the left, which the local farmponies had chosen to avoid by letting the lane bend around in a lazy curve to the right. A farmhouse full of curious locals peering out of every window watched the spectacle, wide-eyed.
We advanced our phantom-army to threaten the skirmishers, and they fell back, fighting. It was a respectable performance, no panic, no scrambling. But the retreat did disorder the militia's main deployment as the skirmishers crowded the main body, and their files were not exactly manual-approved by the time the skirmishers fell back onto the main line. They let their formation become confused by the failure to pass ranks, and we pushed the phantasms forward to give them a little heck.
Didn't last, of course. Real flesh-and-blood ponies will beat back glamours and phantasms in the merciless light of a cool spring day, even when the footing underhoof was muddy as all heck, and the skies looked like maybe we'd be getting rain by evening. We threw in some imaginary gore to get the militia's blood up, and started falling the 'enemy army' back on its original line of advance.
They took the bit in their teeth, and let us have it. Our 'retreat' began to look more and more like a rout. Of course they loved it!
And nopony on their side seemed to look at anything but the backs of their retreating enemy. Well, nopony in the main body – their Company minders were approaching the field at that point along with the militia rear-guard, which the aggressive 'enemy' engagement of the main body had left still on the march when the festivities began.
So the militia's main body was in proper tunnel-vision mode when the surprise 'enemy' flanking force appeared from behind the copse to the left, and attacked their open flank. Bad Apple and the Crow's 'troops' charged the militia in their right rear, and it wasn't a merely imaginary assault. BA's fireballs and airbursts played merry havoc with the surprised northerners, and more than a few ponies and donkeys acquired fresh burns for Sawbones' triage-tables.
The militia formation, suddenly flanked and still engaged by the main body of our raider 'army', began to fall to pieces, as more than a few on their right just ran for it, trying to avoid Bad Apple's par-boiling assault. The officers of the Hydromel regiment performed… acceptably as they left their corporals to hold the existing line in the centre and left together, and led their sergeants to restore order on their right. But they would have been beaten by boggarts, will-o-th'-wisps and creatures of the air, if the rear guard hadn't charged to the rescue, backed by a heavy column of Company observers.
I'm told it almost looked like a real battle for a moment there.
The Company observers blew their whistles, and called the exercise to an end before the militia rear guard and the scattered militia right flank collided and trampled each other. Sawbones and Rye Daughter and the militia surgeons were busy enough taking care of the usual road injuries and burn cases, we didn't need a fresh influx of gorings, stabbings and tramplings to crowd the mobile infirmary.
We witches celebrated the end of maneuvers by 'marching' our troops into glamoured portals, opened in the naked air beside the edges of the now-muddied field. I threw in some distant white-and-gold-and-purple towers upon a mountain-side visible in the distance beyond my 'portal' as a bit of a fillip, using Cup Cake's stories of mythic Canterlot as a basis. Then with a mighty 'gong!' we closed our phantom portals, and our performance was at an end.
The only thing standing in the muck and mud were the militia, their Company minders, and we, ourselves, the witches' section, the coven.
We gave them a bow.
And then we scampered before a hail of mud-balls and righteous fury. The battered militia weren't in a mood to applaud, I guess.
Tomorrow, the next regiment was due in port, and we would head out and repeat the entire performance for a new crowd. Hopefully they'd be more appreciative than this first batch of philistines.
That'll do, donkey, that'll do. - Sawbones.