//------------------------------// // Chapter Sixty Four, Bad Bastion Battle: Gravely Under-estimated. // Story: Airship Mauled // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// -Entrance at the top of the pyramid, Baast- “You’re mortal are quite amusing and powerful, too bad they seem to be in a bit of a pickle.” I grinned. “You know could use a pickle for your sandwich, you can even use that pickle to bridge two sandwiches together and try to figure out which sandwich gets more of the pickle.” “Again, please stop making veiled commentary about my livelihood Bastet.” My sister was being a sour war kitty. “Shouldn’t you go to help them?” That large device was definitely giving them trouble. “They’ll be fine, you’ll see soon enough.” Sekhmet seemed so sure of this. “Besides, wasn’t it you who learned from a mortal that it was sometimes okay to just have faith that things could work out?” “Yes, but to be clear on one point, said mortal was thought to be clearly insane at the time they made such a comment to me and that’s them knowing I was a goddess when they said it.” I received a mirth filled smile from my sister. “You know, you could get some honey from the beehive if you just asked.” “Faith doesn’t exactly require divinity to work you know.” Sekhet just turned back to watch the fight with this ‘airship’, things were not going well. “I wouldn’t make for a very good beekeeper and bees aren’t that easy sister, just one wrong jolt and you become covered in stingers. Aside from that I still don’t want to incidentally hit one of Perun’s followers and give him a reason to start something with me.” “Yes, that could go badly.” I silently admitted that Perun was one of the easiest war gods to get into a fight with. -Destroyed base, Kuril- “No one is being able to get inside, therefore we are having big problem on hoof.” Fortitude certainly seemed to know a thing or two about this airship. Apparently the last time he saw it, it was causing problems in Huoshan. “If Skelly can’t get inside, then no one can.” The airship had various lights on it lighting up the area and we were camped out behind another instant wall with Fortitude protecting it. Arizona was being held off the ground by her hind legs. The tentacle holding her was making sure she absolutely couldn’t find any leverage to attack it. Both Flamberge and Tianhuo were working together to try and get Arizona free while the others attacked the six mammoth size legs that were in continual motion, every time they stomped down they knocked someone away with a blast of air. I could throw an instant wall potion at one of the airships legs to slow it down, but what good would that do though? The six cannons were still giving us problems and I considered using a banned magical alchemy substance to deal with them. We were attacking the ship with almost everything we had at our disposal, the most damage we could do was to the tentacles and even then that wasn’t much. There was a suggestion by Skelly who held up the ‘Sieve Precarious’, the same thing that sucked up an entire restaurant into the chaos dimension previously. That was immediately vetoed by almost everyone present. The alpaca, Paprika, was still out of her mind and Velvet was holding an ice pack to her delirious head. “Is it seriously so hard to find good minions these days?” Teatime’s commentary was coming out of various loudspeakers along the structure of the mechanical monstrosity. “I swear the Perun Paladins and both Shock and Jock have failed where I’m still proceeding ever forward! Though I will admit they lasted far longer than most of my golems did and can continue to fight once they recover from their injuries, but they’ll never quite compare to my magnificent airship. I have ammunition for days and there’s not much you can do to break into my walking fortress as I’ve sealed off all the entrances. If by some chance you do get in, then you will find out how hard it is to deal with me personally.” As he was saying this, I watched as one of the tentacle snapped around Flamberge and started waving him around wildly. “Why is it always being things with tentacles that attack us?” Fortitude muttered under his breath as he block another six rounds with his shield. I stared at the shield for a moment with an idea percolating in my head. “I don’t know what to tell you Fortitude, just keep the wall covered for a moment.” I turned to Sweetcakes glaring at the machine, Fluttershy was keeping her head down and Blade wasn’t even trying to attack the airship. Skelly seemed to be making a valiant effort, but the skeletons axe wasn’t cutting through the metal. Apparently she had boarded the airship before and Teatime had prepared for such an eventuality happening again, she was swept off the ship by a tentacle, but she was surprisingly light and the fall didn’t damage her bones. “Since none of you are going to be able to deal with me, how about I test fire my cannon since I’ve recently fixed it after ‘someone’ split my entire ship in half.” Teatime slowly turned his airship our way and a circular mechanical iris opened up to begin filling with a building mass of energy. “For the life of me I still can’t remember her name despite her being a constant thorn in my side and destroying my airship repeatedly. Unfortunately for you I heard that she went down fighting the Storm King.” “That thing?!” Tianhuo didn’t look happy with this situation or what Teatime had just announced. “The one thing the shadow monsters were actually good for was making sure he didn’t use that on the imperial family and the fortress palace in Huoshan!” “I am Fortitude the Fantastically Fragrant, and I can take it!” I actually believe Fortitude, he did stop a Narwhalker’s tooth beam with a less impressive looking shield. “Sure you can big guy, but let me help you with that when we have to deal with it.” Fizzle had been sending small blasts of energy at the metal. Didn’t honestly know what my daughter was testing, but the resilience of the metal was quite obvious as her magic wasn’t proving to be very useful here. “Oh I hope everyone in Ponyville is doing better than we are.” I calmly rubbed the back of Fluttershy’s ears with a paw. -Ponyville, Rainbow Dash- “Hey, where’s Fluttershy?” I haven’t seen her in the last day or so, I always make time to see one of my best friends. “She’s been called away on mission by the cutie map with Tempest Shadow or Fizzlepop Berrytwist depending on what you wish to go by with her. I think she’s turned around a lot, though her friend Glitter Drops wishes she was easier to keep in contact with.” Is it me or did Twilight seem less high-strung than she usually was? She seemed far calmer these days and we haven’t had a Twilight-ing accident in a while, we were quite frankly due for one right about now. “Did you need anything else Rainbow Dash?” “Yeah, have you been feeling okay lately?” Subtlety was not something I was great at. “Well I'm certainly feeling fine. I’m more worried that Starlight has been a bit off about becoming the principle of the friendship school, she’s only been looking slightly happier since hiring Sunburst on as staff, I think she’ll do great personally.” A bright light shot into the sky a great distance away. “Huh, I wonder what that was.” “Eh, it’s probably Daring Do doing something at a temple or some other such thing, that we can even see something happening at this distance is amazing.” I read a lot of Daring Do and I know for a fact that temples always do the bright light to the sky thing fairly often with her, I wondered if it would be in her next book? I couldn’t wait to find out what this ‘End of Immortality’ thing was and I had some sweet bit parts in her books already, so I wondered how she was going to end the series out? She wasn’t running out of adventures as far as I could tell, she was just that awesome at finding them. “I mean she has to be miles away and given the angle of that skyward beam, it’s not even pointed straight up and is in fact angled to at least seventy five degrees for us to be even seeing it at this distance over the horizon.” “Why can’t you use your brain like that more often?” Rolling my eyes at Twilight, I answered her honestly. “Because it’s usually busy with other things.” Flight performances, high speed tricks, my friends, Applejack, my rivalry with Applejack, being a Wonder Bolt and getting apple cider from Applejack, plus a lot of other things like my continued distaste for pie… except for maybe the ones Applejack makes. “All those things are totally and completely important!” I don’t know why Twilight was giving me such a flat look. -Destroyed base, Fizzle- “Well he can’t do that again for a while.” I will have to give it to Fortitude, he was fantastic in more ways than just being the worst smelling yak in existence. “The pressure just exerted on Fortitude, even if he had been reflecting that beam of energy completely, would have to have been quite phenomenal.” I wondered, where did he get a magic reflecting shield like that from? It looks to be made of the same stuff that the Storm Creatures used in their equipment, only it obviously wasn’t made by Storm Creatures. So when could he have gone to a black market to get a deal on something like that? That stuff is kind of rare and costly. It took me a moment to remember that he and Flamberge had been all over the world and at some point probably ran into some people who could get something like that for him. They were friends with a skeleton and I wasn’t too worried about the details of that. At this point you’d think I would question things like a living skeleton, but no, I’m just going to ignore it because she was obviously friends with Flamberge and Fortitude. I think I’ve seen weirder things, but hopefully Blanks wouldn’t be one them as Skelly was close enough as it was. “This battle hasn’t exactly been going in our favor has it?” I turned to mom and sighed. “No it hasn’t, it’s just gotten worse too.” Because most of our friends, minus the lambkin and her companions, were now being held by tentacles. We were the last ones left that could do anything and the guy still had at least ten more free flailing metallic airship tentacles that could grab the rest of us. “Do you give up yet?” Teatime said as he finally showed himself. He was inside a large mechanical pony suit that dropped out of the airship and sauntered forward as if he owned the place, which he probably did given he likely had a hoof in building the totaled base. He was driving that thing from the chest and it did not bode well when Fortitude frowned at it. Sweetcakes, the kitsune who’s been quite supportive up to this point, was clearly angry to see it. “There is little you can do to face my might and you have nothing left, magic will not help you, force will not help you and if you believe in luck, then things are all going my way at the moment.” “Yeah, but we still have hope.” Mom said with a grin on her face as she looked towards the ground. She was still using the sustained mirror to see and I wondered what she was seeing right now that made her smile like that. “Hope, what good is hope going to do for you? I have all of your best fighters tangled up in tentacles, I have you on the ropes and you have nothing that can stop me from winning this fight.” Teatime seemed quite certain of that and I was almost willing to believe him, almost. He was containing Arizona pretty well, Velvet was close to getting a nasty fever and was also in a tentacle. That Paprika was still attempting to sing something that sounded close to being show tunes while hanging from a tentacle and playing the banjo one hoofed upside down while waving a sparkler around in the other one. The lambkin couldn’t face the machine Teatime was driving personally as it was as armored as his airship was. Their longma was also trapped in a tentacle and I didn’t know where the unicorn with what was obviously a dark magic book was, but she certainly wasn’t here at the moment. Maggie, the only one to successfully take out seven tentacles permanently and was protectively clutching at a satchel of explosives. As you can guess she was dangling from a tentacle, the ones she blown up with my mother’s two part safe explosions had been quickly replaced. Arizona’s group was out. Fortitude wasn’t big on the offensive, he could continue to protect us, but he wasn’t going to be able to deal with that machine Teatime was piloting. Flamberge was caught in a tentacle, enough said there. Skelly was also caught in a tentacle that was going through her in what looks to be an uncomfortable manner. Sweetcakes could use fire and wind, both were not conducive to break heavy metal that is specifically heat resistant. Fortitude’s group was out. There’s our group, but my magic wasn’t going to do much here. Mom’s potions weren’t going to do much, but she might be able to cast away Teatime’s machine if she could get a paw on parts of it. Blade wasn’t going to pierce the armor on Teatime’s personal machine as she didn’t have the holy powers that the Perun Paladins did while wielding one of their weapons. To no one’s surprise, Daring and a separated Maries were trapped. This left Blade, mom, Fluttershy, Sweetcakes, the lambkin, her companions and me that were free. We just didn’t have the firepower, so... “What hope could there possibly be at this juncture?” After Teatime said this, mom just propped her elbows up on the wall and smiled towards him. “There’s nothing coming in the sky, there’s nothing coming from the jungle and you are all out of cards to play! I could even squeeze all your friends to death if I wanted to, what could you possibly have to deal with me?” There was a loud rumbling noise, as if a localized earth quake was happening in the given region. Within seconds something erupted from the ground underneath the middle of Teatime’s airship. It was a fairly large green drill, it punctured through the armored underside of the airship like it was made paper. The large object proceeded straight up through it into the air where it eventually tilted forward and landed on its treads. Teatime’s airship split apart outwards. Everyone captured by the tentacles suddenly fell to the ground in various states of injury. “I think we might have hit something again captain!” We heard a youngish voice yell. “Gee, really, I couldn’t tell over the sound of all that metal being grinded up by the drill!” I was quite relieved to hear Jacky’s sarcastic tone. "That." Mom stated blithely.