Chapter 24: Flight
Chapter 24: Flight
A burst of blue light came out of the hole the two pegasi and one unicorn were staying in, followed by three ponies that took of in the sky.
Slate was first, sword in mouth, clearing a path for the other two. Closeby was Cory, her mismatched wings did not slow her down one bit. After them, more shambling than flying was Starry, the joints of his wings were glowing blue, as was his horn.
“Hurry up!” Slate yelled at him as he took down a bat.
“Hey cut me some slack, this the first time I did anything more than hover!” Every word he spoke made him wobble.
“Great plan! Luna will be half way across Equestria by the time you learn how to use those things!” Another bat fell from Slate’s blade, and one from Cory’s.
“He’s right!” she told Starry.
“Just give me a moment!” he replied as he fought to get a rhythm down.
A bat flew towards him and was about to grab the winged unicorn when a dagger came flying by his head, striking the bat in the chest and taking him down.
“Thanks Cory!” Starry said without even looking how threw the dagger.
He knew how wings worked, he even had hours of practice hovering when he was alone in the armory, and it only took him a couple of minutes to get used to actually flying. Cory and Slate defending him all that time.
Surprisingly enough most of the bats completely ignored them, some even flying by only inches away and just moving on.
The ponies on the ground were not as fortunate. After the bats took care of the remaining soldiers from the tunnels they focused their attention towards the rest of the city’s populace. The ponies that were running in the streets were the easiest to kill, without any armor, and no combat training they were nothing more that loud, moving prey for the bats. Among the three pony tribes there in nothing more helpless than a unicorn whose mind is clouded by terror.
No pony was safe nowhere. If they could the bats tore the roofs of houses, if not they would break through the windows, screams would be heard coming from the inside, followed by silence, and then the bat would exit the home, a little redder than it was before he went in.
And the ones that even showed the smallest sign of aggression towards any of the three ponies were quickly dealt with by Cory and Slate.
After Starry finally fly at least as fast as he could run, they were off to save the princess. While captor had almost an hour head start on them, they knew that the unicorns were traveling on hoof, and they were also carrying quite the heavy load, although nopony would ever tell that to the princess. They should have caught up to them in about an hour.
Slate carved a path for them, striking down every every single bat that was within hoofreach, but none of them even seemed to notice them.
“There!” Cory yelled out as she spotted the princesses distinctive ethereal mane.
“We see them,” Slate and Starry acknowledged and all of them dove onto the three unicorn guards that were lugging the unconscious alicorn down an alleyway.
They had the element of surprise on their side, and they knew how to use it. Only Slate knew how to attack from above, but all of them knew how to kill an unsuspecting enemy from behind. Slate and Cory went for the slice their necks, while Starry aimed to stab the pony in its side, gutting him.
They attacked and the enemy did not even noticed as the blades ran across their necks or was thrusted in his side. Starry moved from behind the unicorn and when he was close enough, and with a though the sword headed for the pony’s exposed side, the tip of the blade touched the pony’s skin and broke in half. At the very same time Cory’s and Slade’s blades slipped harmlessly across the other two unicorns necks.
They dropped the princess, turned, hissed and fired magical green bolts at the pegasi. Luckily their armor took the brunt of the blast and the two were knocked to the ground, and suffered light burns across their chest, neck and forelegs. Starry’s unicorn just bucked the wind out of him.
The Royal Guard unicorn turned and fired, but Starry let out a burst of light, blinding his opponent and causing his attack to be fired wildly into the sky, incinerating a few bats along its way.
With a flap of his wings Starry picked himself up, and fired a beam of his own. It was thin and concentrated and it went straight through the pony’s head, killing it in an instant. He caught a glimpse of green blood flowing from its head, as he turned towards the other two. He cast the same spell, creating the same thin beam of ethereal magic, and with a flick of his head, he swiped it like one would a blade and beheaded on of the unicorns while cutting the other’s head in half. Both their corpses fell to the ground.
First he checked on his friends to see if they were alive, then he went over to the princess. She had no injuries anywhere on her body, and any spell the unicorns might have placed on her should have vanished when they were killed, and yet she was still unconscious.
“There has to be a reason why...” Starry started saying but was interrupted when Cory told him to take a look at something. Starry let go of the still unconscious body of princess Luna and went to see why they called out to him, her head hitting the hard cobblestone street with a loud thud.
She and Slate were looking at the dead bodies, searching for anything they might have had on them when they found a few strange things.
“Their skin, is hard, like armor...” Cory pointed out as she ran her hoof on one of the dead stallion’s coat.
“And their armor, it’s like it is attached to their body.” Slate added when he tried to lift the armor, but ended up lifting the entire corpse.
“And their...” Cory breakfast was trying to come back.
“Their brains, I am no expert, but this in not how a pony’s brain should look like.”
The normal two-lobed, pear-shaped, pink brain, of a pony that should have been covered in red blood vessels was nowhere to be found, instead all they could see inside the pony’s, if it really was a pony, opened head were a bunch of ganglions connected by thin tissue, all bathed in a gel like, green goo, that had long since spilled on the street.
“I don’t think that’s a pony,” Cory said trying to keep her lunch in.
“I think so too,” Slate agreed.
“Me too,” Starry also.
“As do I.”
The three turned to see the princess starting to come to her senses and get up.
“Princess!” the three of them yelled, overjoyed to see the alicorn feeling better.
“Wretched thing.” Luna raised her hoof and forced it down onto the the blue orchid squashing it under her hoof, and smashing part of the street as she did so.
Luna’s horn glew and she picked up the severed unicorn head. After levitating it closer to her, she lifted their eyelids and saw nothing but a empty teal eyes, no iris, no nothing, just an endless teal.
“Ghouls,” she told the three as she discarded the head.
“Ghouls?” the other three asked, never hearing the words before.
“The undead. I meat a group of them a couple of years back in the area you now call the Badlands. They are formidable foes, much stronger and tougher than when they were alive. They are abominations that killed hundreds and...” She was interrupted by a lonely bat that thought it had what it took to make a meal out of an alicorn.
Luna broke his spine with a swipe of the hoof.
“What has happened here?” she asked the three soldiers, who were still trying to wrap their head against the notion that they were fighting against the undead.