After conferring briefly, Nightmare Moon and Reconnoiter agreed on a plan. “Hero” alone would harry the troggle raiding party and slow their retreat to the castle. Meanwhile, the pegasus scouts would return to the main resistance force and guide them in a rapid advance to overtake the troggles.
They began to retrace their flight path, flying in formation for a short distance, but soon Nightmare Moon caught a glimpse of the troggle column, and she broke off from the others. She circled high above the enemy, briefly considering how best to delay them.
Not an attack from above, not this time. An ambush! She closed her eyes and gathered her dark powers, and she vanished into a swirling black cloud. The black mist filtered downward and settled into the grass by the trailside where the troggles’ column was approaching.
The sky darkened, not to the dark of midnight, but to an ominous gloom that felt like a storm approaching. The troggles instinctively moved faster, scurrying toward the safety of their fortress. A red moon hung low over the horizon and watched their movements with passive disdain.
Then the storm broke; explosions erupted on all sides. Dazzling flashes of light and blasts of sound rang their ears and thumped through their chests, and the troggles screamed and dived for whatever cover they could find on the open plain: squeezing under their carts full of plunder, eating dirt between tufts of grass, or scrambling in confusion to hide behind one another.
A few of them managed to fire their staff-weapons, sending bolts of magic outward in random directions toward imagined foes. The rate of fire soon increased, with troggles laying upon their backs, holding up their staves at arm’s length and chanting the command word, repeatedly discharging the spells without even a token attempt at aiming. The vast majority of bolts fired either dissipated harmlessly into the dark sky or impacted the ground nearby and exploded into a cyan-blue fireball, adding to the chaos.
Inevitably, by chance, one of the spell bolts hit a patch of black mist. The mist recoiled, stung, and the sound and fury of battle lapsed for a few moments. Nightmare Moon was unable to voice her pain in this form, but the sudden strike had broken her concentration on the spell. Her mist form was immune to most physical attacks, but magic could still strike her.
She gritted her teeth — figuratively, at least — and resumed her shock-and-awe assault on the senses of the troggles. However, one of their officers had taken the opportunity to begin issuing orders to his troops, urging them to advance. He shouted in the guttural language of trolls: “GET UP AND ROXOR TEH PONES!!!11”
Cowering, a troggle yelled back, “SCREW U I QUYTI”
“SHUT PU!! U WANKER ASS UR SCARED OF FIREWORSK” He grabbed one by the arm and dragged him out from under the wagon and pushed him forward. “MOVE!! GRUMBAD MOVE U ASS! WOITOG SKUMSOG GO ROXXOR TEH PONEFAGS!!!1”
The fact that none of them were injured was beginning to sink in, and a few of them began to pick up their weapons and trudge forward. Eerily lit by flashes of magical lightning, they hunched forward as if marching into a blowing rain.
Nightmare Moon retreated slowly, her black mist flowing on the ground, and she tried dazzling those in the lead with blasts of light and sound almost in their piggy faces. It gave them pause, but the troggles were tough if nothing else. They started firing into the pool of mist on the ground, forcing it to retreat rapidly while the bombardment of magical thunder and lightning ceased.
A safe distance away, the mist gathered and coalesced into the form of Nightmare Moon. She stumbled, gasping in pain, while a couple of feathers fell from her disheveled wings. Any one of those spells would have laid a normal pony out flat, and even she had difficulty withstanding multiple hits from them. She had delayed the advance of the troggles, but not enough. She needed to stall them much longer. A new strategy was called for.
She shook her wings, getting them into better order, then strode forward toward the troggles. As soon as they caught a glimpse, they began firing their staff-weapons. Many of them missed (they were still lousy shots, even when they could see their target) but even those few bolts which were well-aimed merely impacted on a flickering magical shield. Nightmare advanced calmly, displaying her disdain for the hostile magic.
She couldn’t cast offensive spells of her own while her shield was up — but the troggles didn’t need to know that, did they? Intimidated, they began backing up again, and they stopped shooting when they saw it was having no effect.
They were joined by the same officer who’d been shouting orders before. “WTF NOOBS??/ U GOTTA GET PSAT HER GO GO GO!!!11”
Nightmare Moon spread out her wings and called back, “None shall pass!” She lowered her head, pointing her horn at them threateningly, and stepped forward. Her shield increased in power, becoming visible as a translucent bubble of midnight blue magic.
The troggle officer stood and stared at her and stewed for a few moments, turning over his options in his mind until he had formulated a cunning plan. He turned his head and shouted over his shoulder: “GO GO GO!! CHARGE AT HER!!!”
“RAAAAHHH!!!” yelled the troggles as the charged forward with spears clutched tightly in their hands.
Nightmare Moon snorted and pawed at the ground, tossing her head. “We said, NONE SHALL PASS!” The sonic force of her shout pushed the troggles back for an instant. They rallied, but then they ran into her shield, which was much like running into a brick wall.
“FUXOR!!!” yelled the troggles.
Nightmare Moon could be many things: sometimes subtle and deceptive, other times terrifying. Now she pulled another trick out of her sleeve: brute strength. Her hooves sunk into the earth with each step as her muscles flexed. Her shield combined with the physical power of the strongest earth pony to form a gigantic bulldozer, slowly but inexorably pushing the mass of troggles back in the direction they’d come from.
The officer struggled with his back against the shield, trying to slow its advance to no effect whatsoever. He yelled, “GET AROUDN FLANK HER!!!”
Behind the advance guard, the rest of the column had continued to advance, and more and more troggles streamed into the area Nightmare Moon was facing. They began working their way around on both sides. She widened her shield, but in the open plain there was nothing to keep her foes from surrounding her.
Without warning she dropped the shield and leapt into the sky, and, without missing a beat, grabbed the troggle captain with her magic. She lifted him up with her as she ascended. He squealed and flailed his limbs, trying in vain to fight her telekinetic grip. “LEMME GO LEMME GO!” he yelled.
“Let thee go? Art thou sure?” A poorly-aimed spell bolt flashed past.
The troggle looked down. “AAAAAAHHHH DONT LTE GO!!!!111”
“Oh, why can they never make up their tiny minds?” Nightmare released her aura, and the troggle fell, shrieking. His strangled cry was cut short by a sickening thump upon the ground.
She wheeled on pinioned wings and swooped down through the ranks of the troggles. A blast of wind, almost a shock wave, tinted blue with her magical aura, knocked troggles off their feet and even hurled many of them through the air. After she’d passed through, she turned to admire the chaos in her wake, and giggled.
She flapped, picking up altitude again. A stun bolt from the ground flashed past, close enough to sting, but she disregarded it. She turned slowly, eyes scanning the horizon. The castle was near enough that she could see more troggles boiling out from the front drawbridge, coming to aid their comrades. In the opposite direction were the trailing elements of the troggle column; some carts full of plunder were abandoned and left behind, though most of the troggles clung stubbornly to their ill-gotten bags and bundles.
There was something else moving on the horizon, though, silhouetted against the gloomy sky. The shadow yelled out a battle cry: “HARUNA!”
Nightmare Moon grinned and used her magic to lighten the sky. The battle was truly on now, and the pony forces would need to be able to see. Dominus Tusk swung his mace left and right, knocking troggles bodily through the air — and those it connected with rarely got up to fight again. Ponies charged into battle alongside him, almost like colorful puppies scurrying around the feet of the huge minotaur.
Each of the three pony races had their own battle tactics. The pegasi had foregone their traditional lances, used for aerial battles against one another. Facing a purely earthbound foe, they preferred to pick up heavy objects and drop them upon the heads of the enemy. Against the troggles, this tactic quickly revealed its limitations. The grassy plain offered few stones to use as ammunition, so that most of what they carried aloft was detritus the troggles themselves had discarded as they rushed toward their citadel. Swooping in low was risky, exposing them to fire from the magical staff-weapons. A pegasus at higher altitude was harder to hit, but this made accurate aiming difficult for the pegasus as well — and any unlucky enough to be stunned by a spell when flying at higher altitudes risked a nasty fall. Seeking a compromise, most of their bombing formations flew into the battle between 30 and 50 yards above the ground.
The unicorns were lightly armored, dodging and depending on distance and shield spells to protect themselves as they fired various magical effects toward the enemy. The basic military spells were shields, telekinesis and healing. Beyond these, each unicorn had spells aligned with his special talent, but the applicability of these to the battlefield varied wildly. The resulting unpredictability of their spell effects spread confusion in the enemy ranks. Troggles found themselves trying to stand on slippery ground, or uncontrollably dancing a jig, or dazzled by illusions.
Even so, earth ponies carried the brunt of the attack. Their armor was the heaviest, and their sturdy helms served as both protection and their primary weapons. All the helms were horned, but these were not the purely decorative horns of troggle helmets. These were strong, sharp horns that could be used as weapons to hook and jab, to toss, or even to gore the enemy. Some had horns like rams, others like bulls, and some had a single horn affixed like that of a unicorn. A charging earth pony was nearly unstoppable, and once having entered into the fray they became dangerous at both ends, fighting equally with their horned helms and powerful kicks.
Based solely on their reputation, Nightmare Moon had expected the troggles to be little more than a mob: dangerous to civilians but undisciplined and unskilled in martial arts. This expectation had been shattered. They knew how to form a defensive line, and their retreat toward the castle was orderly. Moreover, their staff-weapons were effective to forty or fifty yards, with each blast capable of stunning a pony — or even two if they were close enough together. The spell itself did no permanent harm, but any stunned pony who was overrun and claimed by the troggles faced a dire fate.
The troggles fought, and they gave ground, but Dominus Tusk was soon in trouble. His size, which made him so intimidating on the battlefield, also made him an easy target for the staff-weapons. A single blast wasn’t enough to drop him, but multiple hits soon took their toll, and he was forced to rest on bended knee while the pony troops pushed past him. A unicorn medic stopped to cast healing spells and try to get him back into the fight.
Nightmare Moon hit the troggles with more low-level attack runs, swooping so low that she clonked some of their helmets with her hooves as she passed over. It was the blast of wind from her wings that bowled over most of the troggles, though, breaking up their lines and formations. Once… twice… thrice… Her speed made her a difficult target, but then a lucky shot from a staff-weapon detonated upon her left wing and sent her tumbling to the ground.
Her back thudded hard when she bounced off a large clump of basket grass, and wiry blades of the tough grass lashed at her as she skidded to a stop. She tried to move, but then panic… She couldn’t breathe! She heaved, her mouth gulping like a fish for air, but none came. All she could do was lie on her back and struggle. After what seemed like minutes — but was surely much less — she began to get shallow, rapid breaths. Weakly she rolled upright, her disabled wing flopping useless at her side, only to find several troggles cautiously closing in. Their caution proved their undoing, as it had given Nightmare Moon the precious moments she needed to recover from her tumble. Bolts of lightning flared out from her horn and knocked the troggles flat, then she clambered to her feet and began stumbling and fighting her way back toward her allies.
The surge of fresh troops from the citadel turned the tide. They advanced past the flanks of their retreating comrades, then closed up ranks behind them and defended while the rest of the raiding party carried their booty, and their wounded, to the castle.
Nightmare Moon made her way back to Dominus Tusk. “Our opportunity is slipping away,” she observed. “Can you get up and fight?”
“I think so, thanks to these healers,” he said, and used his mace as support while rising heavily to his feet.
She nodded and then looked around and called out loudly, “Chevalier, are you here? Let us rally for another assault to break them!”
Chevalier made his presence known with a loud whinny, rearing up and pawing the air dramatically. Ponies all around disengaged from the enemy and pulled back long enough to reform their ranks, and then they charged. Not trusting her still-numb wing enough to fly, Nightmare Moon charged along with them, and Dominus Tusk was close by.
By this time, though, the raiders were already hauling their loot up the gangplank at the front of the castle, while the fresher troops stood ready to defend. It seemed this clash of arms would happen in the very shadow of the castle ramparts.
Before their lines met, however, a sharp-eyed pegasus yelled out: “ARROWS! TAKE COVER!”
A glance upward was all the confirmation the ponies needed, when they saw a dark cloud of arrows arcing over from the castle’s ramparts. The charge skidded to a halt as unicorns — along with Nightmare Moon — cast shields overhead. All along the line arrows clattered like hail upon magical force shields, but not every pony had been covered, and there were squeals and neighs of shock and pain.
The troggles on the ground fired a final volley of spells, then rapidly embarked up the gangplank into the castle while another barrage of arrows kept the ponies pinned under their shields.
Chevalier gnashed his teeth in frustration and then yelled: “RETREAT! RETREAT!” Under cover of their shields, the pony force pulled back.
Dominus Tusk snorted and shook a mighty fist at the castle. “Dominus Tusk knows not the meaning of retreat!”
From somewhere Derpy fluttered over and grabbed his arm with her forelegs, and tugged. “It means run away!” she explained helpfully.
The giant minotaur grumbled. “Dominus Tusk likes that even less, but it seems I have no choice.” Reluctantly he followed, the last to leave the field of battle, pursued only by the cheers, jeers and laughter of the troggles.