It had taken a little longer than Rainbow Dash wished for them to get the crate full of weapons but now at least they could take it out and up to the third warehouse. Only bad thing was that she had to go back inside Larkon’s robe while the two mammoths hefted the crate around. They both carried it between them with their trunks and tusks giving them the hold on it they needed as they walked up to the platforms that went up to the top level of the basement.
Thankfully no words needed to be spoken. The mammoth operating the platforms saw them again and lowered one down for them to ride on.
“At least we can put this down on one of the carts when we get up there,” Abalun said.
“We’ll have to ditch the cart once we leave the warehouse anyways though,” Larkon said. “There’s no way it’ll travel well over muddy, snowy, dirt roads.”
Their conversation had to stop when they came back up on the level. Silently they carried their heavy crate full of weapons over to the ramps leading up to the ground floor of the warehouse. Regardless of what they had to do in the future, a cart would still help right now, so they put the crate down on one of the unattended carts left for stuff like this and began wheeling it up the ramp closest to the wall with the doors and connecting tunnel that would lead to the third warehouse. It gave them a momentary breather too, much easier than carrying something heavy like that around.
Abalun pushed the cart while Larkon stood in front of it walking backwards to keep a steady trunk on the crate. Getting up the ramp was easy and it was only a short distance to the doors and then the third warehouse beyond. They were all rather nervous at this point but trying not to show it. It was too important to fail, their hearts were pounding inside their chests. The fact that they were so close to succeeding just made it even more tense for them.
The wheels just rolled and rolled until they stopped at the doors to the tunnel. Larkon pulled them open and held them that way so Abalun could push the cart all the way through and once the doors closed they finally had a little privacy again. Still, Dash had to wait until they were actually inside the third warehouse and had made sure there were no other mammoths in there. But she really wanted to get back out of Larkon’s robes as quickly as possible. So for now the three still silently pedaled the cart through this small room and into what would normally be the final destination for a crate full of weapons.
When Larkon opened up the next set of doors they emerged into the third warehouse, he and Abalun taking a look around. It was much the same as that first warehouse with huge boxes piled up everywhere, except this warehouse was totally flat and didn’t have a depressed area in the floor. It was all one big jungle of boxes on the ground level.
“I don’t see anyone else in here,” Larkon said.
“Great!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed and slid right out of her hiding spot. “I was getting really tired of that.”
“Larkon, help me wheel the cart over to the backdoor and we can get out of here,” Abalun said.
“Right,” Larkon nodded.
The two mammoths began to maneuver their cart around the many pillars of boxes while Rainbow Dash stretched as she flew overhead. She was feeling really cramped up now after everything.
“When we get outside I’m just gonna fly above you guys, not just saying that cause I don’t want to go back into hiding out on Larkon’s back, I really think it’ll be better to keep watch from above,” she told them.
“Sounds fine to me,” Larkon said.
While moving the cart they accidentally knocked it into one of the stacks of boxes, the three held their breath as the stack wobbled and looked like it was about to tip over… before it settled down and stayed up. All three of them let out a big sigh of relief at the nearly avoided accident. Some of these were stacked pretty tentatively, they couldn’t afford to hit another one. Larkon pulled the cart away and stood in front of it to make sure he could guide it better.
“Let’s try to avoid doing that again, it could end up pretty bad for us,” Larkon said.
“Yeah,” Abalun nodded.
“Everyone, stop what you’re doing and follow me! We have intruders!” The foreman yelled to the mammoths working down below with him. “We need to get back up there right now!”
“What do you mean, sir?” The mammoth working on the tusk caps said to him.
“What do you think, you idiot?” The foreman slapped him over the head with his trunk. “Those mammoths that were just down here that tried to go into the mines aren’t with Karkona! They must be spies sent from the city to find out what Karkona’s doing! Get your lazy butt up now!”
He and the other workers scrambled to get up from their tables as the foreman’s words seeped in. They hadn’t imagined anything like this happening but they were all loyal underlings of Karkona, if the warehouses needed to be protected from some rats they were more than willing to do that. Each mammoth grasped their hammer, or wrench, or whatever other tool they were using, in their trunks and narrowed their eyes as they looked back up the stairs. Naturally these weren’t just your average “worker”, they were all dangerous thugs that had been picked up from all over the slums.
The foreman grinned maliciously as the others got ready and he stomped down the rock floor to the stairs. “Come on! We’re not letting them get out of here.”
The workers followed him, the thrown together gang totaling close to thirty armed and angry mammoths. They all charged up the metal stairs together with enough force that it shook the bolts. An angry mob of mammoths yelling and lifting their improvised weapons over their heads to deal with the interlopers as soon as they were found. No one who went against Karkona would be forgiven by them.
The foreman trumpeted with his trunk as he ran up the spiral metal stairs, he’d tell the guards once he had the rats cornered and beaten up. And then Karkona would hear about it and who knew what kind of reward he would get. Even if it was just praise or respect he’d wear it proudly. But these warehouses and what they were used for were so important, they had to be protected, the secret couldn’t get out yet! And he was one of the mammoths that had been entrusted to make things run smoothly in the first place and get all the weapons Karkona needed. No way was some fogey from the city going to ruin this for him and Karkona!
“Break them to pieces!” Another mammoth yelled from behind him and the others cheered.
“Yes!” The foreman responded. “Show them what happens to anyone who crosses Karkona!”
They emerged from the stairs into the lower basement, the mammoth who operated the platforms already looking down at them in surprise and confusion after hearing them pounding up the stairs.
“Dathon!” The foreman yelled at him. “Where are those two mammoths who came up here earlier? Are they still in the sorting room?”
Dathon shook his head. “N-No, they just recently came out and took a box to the weapons storage warehouse. Why?”
“Argh!” The foreman growled. “Just throw the platforms down for us! Those two were enemies!”
Dathon did as asked and lowered both the platforms. Not every mammoth could fit onto them at once but the foreman and a number of others were still in the first batch to go up. They could barely wait until they had made it to the top, weapons waving around in the air, shouting angrily. They were making quite the racket. And once the first group actually got the top it got even worse with them howling in rage as they ran to the ramps.
“We’re coming for you, you scumbags!” The foreman yelled with his party behind him.
“I think we may have a problem.”
“I think you’re right.”
Larkon and Rainbow Dash both said as they looked at the chain and padlock that securely locked the backdoor of the third warehouse. After the other two it was not something they expected to see and it created a huge issue for them.
“What do we do now? We cant take it out the back anymore,” Rainbow Dash asked.
“I don’t know,” Larkon said. The historian grasped the lock and chain with his trunk but even for a mammoth he didn’t have the strength to break it. Worry creased his brow as he looked back across the faces of his friends.
“Could we take it out the front?” Abalun suggested. “I know the guards will see us but maybe we can act casual on our way out and they’ll think we have a special job.”
“That’s insanely risky...” Larkon bit his lip.
“I think we might still have to do it,” Rainbow Dash said. “It’s better than nothing and it’s all we have right now.”
Larkon angrily knocked the lock against the metal door. “Curses! Why does this have to be locked?”
“I’d say Karkona doesn’t want any second chances with what’s inside of here,” Abalun said. “Just an extra precaution.”
The three stood there by the backdoor mulling things over. This was bad, the certainty of secretly getting these weapons out was gone now. But they probably didn’t have much time to waste thinking about it. Rainbow Dash and Abalun were right, they needed to take the cart back to the front door and hope for the best. It would be a pain maneuvering around all these stacks again but there was nothing they could do about that.
“Alright, let’s get moving,” Larkon sighed. They moved the cart around and he walked in front of it again to guide it.
But then, some unfortunate noises came to their ears.
The angry shouts and yelling from the foreman and all the other mammoth workers started reverberating through the warehouses. Rainbow, Larkon, and Abalun could hear them charging up from the basement and running right towards the doors that would take them into the weapons warehouse. They were loud and agitated, so much so that it sounded like a stampede was coming right of them.
Larkon gulped. “I think we’ve run out of time.”
“Hurry! Take it to the front door!” Rainbow told them.
Abalun nodded and began pushing the cart faster through the warehouse, no longer taking as much care to avoid the precarious stacks of boxes, all the while they listened to the sounds of angry mammoths coming for them. Doors were slammed open and the heavy plodding of footsteps through the hallway became overwhelming, they were almost upon them. Larkon was so busy pulling the cart along and trying to not crash into anything that he wasn’t paying attention to his own feet and he ended up tripping over himself. The historian collided with a stack of boxes that teetered about like it was about to fall over from the hit. But thankfully they stayed balanced. Abalun stopped the cart and Rainbow Dash went to help Larkon up right after but once he got back to his feet the doors from the hallway leading to the third warehouse were swung open.
Rainbow Dash, Abalun, and Larkon looked to see the foreman and ten or more mammoths behind him all angrily glaring at them. Most brandishing their tools as weapons too. From what they could hear there were a bunch of yelling mammoths also still coming on the way. They were already horribly outnumbered and it was about to get worse.
When the foreman saw them and looked in their direction, Abalun looked away and kept his head down while Larkon and Rainbow Dash stared right back at him.
“Well, well, well,” the foreman evilly grinned at the intruders. “If it isn’t the pony and...” He regarded Larkon for a moment. “Ah, Larkon. I recognize you. Karkona talks about you a lot, you know?”
“I’m flattered,” Larkon glared at him and pulled his hood back all the way to let his head out. Rainbow Dash came floating around right by his head and also glared at the mammoths confronting them.
“I don’t know how you got inside here but it doesn’t matter, you aren’t leaving. Heh, Karkona won’t believe this. Not just the historian but the pony outsider he despises too. And whoever your friend is,” the foreman said as he briefly glanced at the shying Abalun before his eyes flickered to Rainbow Dash. “He was right on you being a nuisance, pony.”
“And Larkon was right on him being evil,” Dash pointed at the foreman.
The foreman angrily snorted and narrowed his eyes at them. “You should’ve stayed out of our business, it doesn’t concern non-mammoths like you.”
Rainbow narrowed her eyes right back at him. “It concerns my friends. And that’s more than good enough.”
The two different groups were still for a moment. Rainbow Dash, Larkon, and Abalun were close to the front door with only a few scattered stacks of boxes between them and it. But there was absolutely no way they could take the crate they had filled up with them and outrun these guys. Even making it to the door before getting attacked would’ve been impossible, and then there were still the guards outside and the fact they’d have to run all the way to the other side of the river while carrying it. It was incredibly annoying for Rainbow Dash to realize, but they’d have to leave the crate full of weapons here.
“I hope you’re not thinking of trying to escape. There’s nowhere for you to run, even more of us are coming up and the guards are right outside,” the foreman said as he noticed Dash’s contemplative look. “We’ll chase you down.”
He was right. While there was no chance of Rainbow Dash being captured the same couldn’t be said about Larkon and Abalun. Neither of them were the most athletic of mammoths in the first place, getting past the guards would be tough enough, much less outrunning them and all these angry workers for the rest of the night. They still weren’t going to take this lying down though—and surprisingly enough, Rainbow Dash had a plan.
She smugly grinned at the foreman and the mob behind him. “You know I bet you wish we would escape, cause you’re probably just a bunch of cowards that are afraid to fight me, aren’t you? Scared of the big bad pony?”
Larkon and Abalun looked at her like she was mad but Rainbow Dash just winked at them.
The foreman’s face flushed red with anger. “How dare you, you stupid pony! I’ll show you scared!” He looked back at his forces. “Charge them! And break her wings so she can’t fly away!”
The mob yelled and the dozens of mammoth thugs ran from the open doorway to attack the interlopers, all led by the foreman. And that’s exactly what Dash wanted. As a hothead herself, she knew how badly things could go when you lost your cool. Abalun and Larkon both stepped back in fear but Dash only watched as the stream of mammoths had to run around stacks and stacks of precariously placed boxes, some of them knocking into them in their haste and making them wobble.
They were making this too easy.
“Larkon! Abalun! Knock some of the towers over!” Rainbow Dash yelled and flew up to the top of the stack that Larkon had hit earlier. She rammed her body into the highest box and flapped her wings as hard as she could to knock the heavy box over.
Seeing what she was doing, the other two’s eyes widened and they sprung into action. Larkon helped her push the one tower over while Abalun reared up on his hindlegs and threw his weight into another. The swaying towers soon fell down thanks to their efforts… but not to the ground.
They crashed into yet other towers.
It was a domino effect, towers hit towers that hit more towers, soon it seemed like the entire warehouse was going to come crashing down. And the foreman and his horde were all trapped in the middle of it. Caught between falling towers themselves and making it worse in their panic they couldn’t even retreat out of the third warehouse while Dash, Larkon, and Abalun were safe close to the front door.
“Ahhh!” The foreman and other mammoths yelled as the heavy crates fell, some of them breaking to pieces and scattering their contents all over. Mostly they just fell with a loud crash and buried the mammoths. It was practically like hearing an explosion with the hundreds of crates all clattering to the floor of the warehouse.
Rainbow Dash, Larkon, and Abalun were flush against the front wall of the warehouse as they watched, silent.
Pained groans and weak movements came from the mass of buried mammoths, the entire group was taken out of commission. It would be a while before they could even dig themselves out of this mess.
Rainbow Dash finally drifted away from the wall and floated on her buzzing wings. She wiped her brow in relief. “Whew.”
“We should go immediately,” Abalun said, nervously. “Others would have heard that, as well as the guards outside.”
In fact they could already hear the guards right outside the warehouse’s front door. The mammoths who had been stalwartly guarding out front were running over to it, it was now or never. Rainbow Dash wanted so desperately to at least grab one weapon off the ground. But that desire had to be quenched. Larkon, who looked fairly queasy after dropping those crates in the heat of the moment, threw open the front door to the warehouse and ran out with Abalun and Rainbow Dash right behind him.
“Inside! There’s been an accident, they need your help!” Larkon yelled at the mammoth guards and ran past them out into the night before the guards could even really think twice.
And Rainbow Dash had no idea if Larkon was saying that genuinely or if he was acting. He probably felt incredibly bad for doing something like that even if it was self-defense, even if they had to and he was just doing it on reflex. It went against everything about him to hurt another like that.
Meanwhile the guards looked on in befuddlement as another mammoth with his head down ran past them and the blue pony Karkona had told them about also flew off with them. They did a double-take at that last one, but the groans coming from inside the warehouse got their attention and they ended up rushing inside to see just what had happened.
“Hahahahaha!” Rainbow Dash laughed in victory as she flew beside Larkon and Abalun. “We did it!”
“And I hope-” Larkon panted. “We never have to do something like that again.”
“We didn’t get any weapons though,” Abalun said.
Larkon shook his head. “It’s fine, we know what Karkona is doing now and tomorrow Rainbow Dash and I will go speak to the senate.”
“Yeah, Karkona won’t know what’s coming to him!” Rainbow Dash stated.
“Considering he’s going to hear about this I think he will actually,” Abalun grinned at her. His expression then became more serious. “I just hope none of them recognized me, otherwise I won’t be able to stay in the slums.”
“You’re not going to come with us?” Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow at him.
“No,” Abalun shook his head. “I’m going to remain here and keep spying as best I can on Karkona and his forces. I need to be your eyes and ears in the slums.”
Larkon patted him on the shoulder with his trunk. “Good luck, friend.”
“Thank you, friend,” Abalun smiled back at him.
Rainbow Dash couldn’t help but smile at them too as they all sailed through the snowy ground of the slums. More snow falling around them in this dark night, it was surprisingly peaceful, the cold feeling like a pleasant winter evening. And tomorrow would be the apex of Rainbow Dash’s visit to the mammoth city, where they would take down Karkona after working together. The excitement was boiling in her as her latest adventure came to a head.