//------------------------------//
// Extermination. (Stemming the Tide, Part 7.) 
// Story: Meta Gamer in Equestria: Champion's Folly 
// by reflective vagrant 
//------------------------------//

Tempest and Speaks with Talons did their best to keep up with him to slash at him, but with his constant teleporting, they found it difficult.  Ultimately,  They decided they couldn't keep up with his teleporting and stood in the center.  Tempest started pulling her enchanted rocks out of her pack and Speaks with Talons did his best to keep throwing bolts.  When a rock wasn't busted open or a bolt was still intact, Scraps scooped them up and did his best to fling them himself with the paw not holding his short sword.  Occasionally he'd throw one of his bottles instead when he couldn't find any regular ammunition.
All their efforts were for naught, however.  He seemed to be able to dodge, deflect or outright block virtually everything we threw at him.
I, meanwhile, didn't really have much of a ranged option in my bear form, and ultimately had to revert out of it.
Almost immediately upon reverting, I found myself having to reflexively pull up my shield spell to counteract his seven darted magic missile spell, with every one of the darts that never miss their target pointed at me.	With all of them barely being put through the shield's nullifying barrier as they came up, making them harmlessly splash off of me, I could hear it.
I could hear is laughter.  His constant, annoying, "I'm not touching you" while pointing right at your face, mocking laughter.  Had I not gotten that barrier up, that one spell would have ruined my day and we both knew this.


With a flare of her horn, Tempest upped her game and did her best to cast her witch bolt spell.
It missed horribly.  When Dalock saw this, he stopped his laughing and moved his lips with a spell I couldn't make out.  Suddenly, there were four of him standing so close that their forms overlapped each other.
After that, he stood still with a taunting gesture.  In response, Speaks with Talons charged, swiping at one of the forms, only to have it fade into nothing again when his Talons made contact.
Finally, he moved back out of Speaks with Talon's reach, but not in a manner that left his guard up.  The griffin took full advantage of this, but only landed his talons on that shield again.
As he moved out of reach, him and his two remaining mirror images shifted around to where I couldn't track which one was the real one, basically putting the guessing game back to square one.
With this, he lowered his staff at us, and threw out a lightning bolt more brilliant than I normally would have my wand cast.  It scorched through the team, hitting us hard.
I was relatively unharmed at this point and managed to get out of the way.  So I stayed up, but was about out of breath in the process.
Speaks with Talons threw his forelimbs out and uttered an incomprehensible word through the thunder, negating what he could with his absorb elements spell.  Even so, he still took the brunt of it and looked in pretty bad shape at this point.
Scraps tapped into his version of the same spell he learned to pull off once a day, while also dodging out of the way and managing to get only singed.  His sword now charged with the energy he absorbed from the bolt.
Tempest, however, didn't have that spell in her arsenal, not even as a one off like with Scraps.  To top it off, she was in the center of the blast and couldn't get out of the way.
She stood there for a moment, unresponsive, but then fell over, unconscious, severely hurt and out of the fight.
I tried to heal her, calling out to Archimedes, but then Dalock pulled his ace out of his sleeve.
"Help!"  I called out, only for his staff to spin around mockingly, making the magic die in my throat, spell slot still wasted.  Of all the spells he could have, he had to have counter-spell.  He could counteract my healing spell for spell, and he had lots more slots to burn through than I did.
In short, my ability as a healer was completely nullified in this fight.
With my plan of attack already cemented in my mind and my adrenaline keeping that thought from sinking in fully, I pulled out my rose stem and threw a thorn whip at him, only to have it wrap around one of the two remaining mirror images of him and poof it too.
I was even useless in an offensive standpoint.  As I saw Speaks with Talons throw another three bolts at him, only for the first to take out the last illusion and the other two two bounce off the real one yet again, I saw the true depth between our power levels.  We hadn't even laid so much as a scratch on him yet and he already took out our strongest team member and put significant damage on the rest of us.
I dropped to my knees.  My wild-shape was useless with his constant teleporting around, my portent good luck charm was spent, and he was purposely holding back to make sure he could counteract any healing I tried to give my team.
With that same "I win" smirk on his face, he turned and looked at our fallen teammate.

While my despair settled in, Scraps got back up off the ground and saw Tempest unconscious, with Daclock approaching her.  His response was quite different from mine.
With a burst, he ran up to our opponent, screaming "Nicknack!" at the top of his lungs.  His face looked determined, yet something about his eyes seemed to indicate a part of his mind wasn't here, but somewhere else.
As he did so, Dalock gave pause, turning with to face the diamond dog attacking him as if it where nothing more than a chore.
Scraps reached his target easily, and appeared to swing his sword wildly.  It was almost slow motion as I saw Dalock's shield raise to parry, only to have Scraps pull his sword back in his feinting technique, and mutter the word ""Fomes dissilio!" making the sword burst into green flame alongside the lightning already charging it.
With a quick twist of his entire body, Scraps turned, pulled his short sword back around, and away from the side the shield had been presented on.  With a quick, precision jab from the other side, he stabbed upward right through the cracks in the plate armor and into the tender flesh underneath with the sickening singeing and popping sounds coming from the elf's wound.
The room went back to speed, but was silent.  Only a mere second of silence passed as Scraps twisted his blade as best he could, but that wasn't what caught my eye.
His face.  Scrap's normally happy go lucky, playful face was hellbent on killing Dalock.  This wasn't the restrained anger and pain I had seen him hold in check in his fight with the alpha.
His teeth were barred.  The fur on the back of his neck disappearing into his leather jerkin was raised the highest I'd ever seen it, his eyes were like that of a wild beast, giving a death glare at the elf's face mere inches away from it.  No.  This was that pain brought full force to the surface.
Then the moment broke as Dalock winced in immense pain.  The purple light illuminating the room flickered at the same moment.  Upon seeing the lights flicker, Dalock looked up and called out "NO!  Not now!  The new clone isn't ready yet!"
Dalock turned his gaze down to the small diamond dog that just stabbed him, he called out "You little son of a-" as he blasted Scraps across the room with multiple repelling blasts of force.  With a loud thud, he landed on the ground.
I could only scream "No!" as I saw him follow up the first attack with a spell of magic missiles, all seven of them striking Scrap's already limp form.  Such a barrage of missiles could easily kill an already downed target.
With Scraps presumed dead, I futilely gave another attempt at healing Tempest.  As if on cue, I found the injured Dalock once again swirling his staff to counter spell my healing word.
"No.  You will pay for this victory dearly."
Speaks with Talons backtracked towards Tempest and brought forth with his dominant talon doing a brief gesture.
With a quick "Sano!" and a placement of his talon on her knee, a jolt of energy seemed to transfer between the two warriors.  With a brief spasm, Tempest took a breath and quickly assessed her surroundings while Speaks with Talons collapsed beside her, weak with the exhaustion.
Dalock, already backing up and dropping his staff in defeat, rolled his eyes up and cursed.  "Of bloody course your team has a second healer."
He looked over at his imp that was still successfully pinning Archimedes.  "A healer I was oddly not told about!"
The imp started calling out in a mocking tone.
"Oh, master.  Did I not hear you give the order to do a tactical summary when I spied on them today?  I didn't feel prudent to remind you.  I also didn't find it prudent to add the detail that that orb doesn't just inflict all the summoned diseases on the controller if they lose control, it does it within moments."
With a loud laughter for a creature that size, he called out again "Enjoy your last few breaths, master!"
Dalock looked at his familiar with anger as his skin started looking gangly, and his voice began to crack with the onset of a sore throat.   After a moment of looking defeated, he smirked.  "Then with those breaths, I give one final order."
The imp looked at him unfazed and waited.
"Snap your own neck.  Do not let them capture you."
The imp paused for only a moment, but then smiled.  With a quick nod, he called out "I'd say it's been a pleasure, but you've ordered me never to lie to you.  Thank you for the release."
His hands went from pinning Archimedes down to his own head.  A quick snap was heard and his head twisted grotesquely.  Then the entire imp puffed into smoke.
At this point, Tempest had gotten up, took a single deep breath to steady herself and started back towards Dalock.
With a raised hand, he waved her off.  "Oh don't bother, I'm as good as dead already.  You've won."
He looked at the orb that was making him look sicker and sicker by the second, then back at me.  After strong hacking fit, he gave me that same snarky grin.  "Today, at least."
Before I could react, he scooped up his staff, placed it to the orb and called out,  "I wish for the prize Bane promised me!"
A strong billowing of wind burst through the cave as the orb glowed brilliantly.  The winds grew stronger as they reached Dalock, slowly ripping his flesh where it stood off of him, and crumbling his bones, drawing in his armor and shield and striping his robes off of him.  The bits of his flesh, bone and clothing were swept into the orb bit by bit almost like a black hole until nothing but his equipment and my wand clattering to the ground.  All that was left was his staff remaining in mid air, fixed to the orb were it had made contact.
After a moment, even the staff finally clattered to the ground alongside the rest.


With the threat gone, Tempest and I hurried to Scraps.
At first I thought he was dead, but Tempest just poked at him.  "I see your shallow breathing.  How long are you going to play possum, Scraps?"
With this, Scraps stirred, got up and tried to lick tempest's face.  When she stopped him, he turned his attention to licking his wounds from the blast instead.  The wounds that closely resembled the wounds on the pup from the village.
"How...  How did he survive?"  I asked, baffled.
Tempest smirked.  "Cat's out of the bag now, but I suppose it doesn't really matter anymore.  Show him, Scraps."
Scraps pulled out his eagle headed brooch, then took great care to remove the outer covering, revealing a more militaristic design underneath.
"Apparently Scraps' first protector didn't just have an eye for nice things, but also for magical items.  After Scraps looked into your spellbook back when, he recognized his keepsake of his late big brother Nicknack was also magical.  After investigating it, we realized it was able to protect against your missile spell much like the foreign version of the shield spell your books showed Starlight. We decided to keep it a secret from you as a safety measure should you ever turn against us."
"That not all!"  Scraps chimed in.  "After Scraps learn magic, Scraps study even more.  Scraps now on verge of learning how to use any object holding magic.  Not quite cracked code yet, but almost there!"
Tempest rolled her eyes upward into their sockets.  "A day that I know is inevitable given his ingenuity, but I'm not looking forward to it."
"Tempest,  Beast-kin," we heard Speaks with Talons call weakly.
He rolled over with great effort.  It looked like it was going to take him even longer to recover from using a healing spell the second time in a single day.  "We need to take that orb back and have it analyzed by the pony mages.  I fear it may be what the Crystal Sister was so terrified of that she summoned us here."
Tempest nodded and took out her bag of holding.  "Lets grab everything here just in case there's something else important."