After Rarity’s dragons regenerated, the party returned to the keep, where Skyflash was happy to pay out the 50 gold for closing the small portal. He was disappointed that it had taken the party over an hour to return. “The big portal’s only getting worse, the longer we let it sit.”
“It’s going to have to sit overnight,” Twilight said. “Our healer’s tapped out after the ‘small’ portal.”
“Yeah, what gives?” Rainbow Dash asked. “There were eight of those stupid naga monks, and five mephits that you didn’t mention were freaking bards! How is that only worth 50 gold?”
“Huh,” he said, looking at the angry adventurers. “And here I thought you girls were good at this sort of thing. You seriously had trouble with the monks and the mephits?” He frowned, and looked at his map. “Maybe you aren’t up to this after all. Who else can I get…”
“We can handle it!” Rainbow Dash said, pushing Skyflash away from his map.
“Tomorrow,” Twilight said, dragging Rainbow Dash back. “We can handle it tomorrow. You’re not going to get us to run off half-cocked with reverse psychology.”
Skyflash grimaced. “Look. Those things you fought – those are the weakest of the enemy forces. Those are the ones we can take out with conventional troops and tactics. This…” he pointed to a large red mark blotting out a half-mile square of city territory. “This is worse. It’ll have those, and worse. Spellcasters. Smoke elementals. Even those sun-forsaken Smoke Birds.”
“Smoke birds?” Pinkie Pie asked. “What kind of smoke birds?”
Skyflash continued to frown. “Never saw them before. Aren’t in any of our books. Look sort of like big blurry bird-men made out of smoke. They spit out Stinking Cloud, Cloudkill, bursts of fire over a wide area. Impossible to see from a distance, in the smoke. Just being near them can kill you. They’re the real problem with a conventional assault.”
“We can take them!” Pinkie Pie said. When the others looked at her, she explained. “That’s all poison and fire. Rarity’s still got her resist spell for the fire, and I’ve still got my delay poison for the poison! It’ll be cake.”
“I suppose…” Twilight said. “If we had some way of drawing them out.”
Skyflash slowly began to smile. “That I can help with.”
The large portal was concealed by a bubble of smoke almost a half mile on a side. Skyflash and his troops set up in hidden positions near the edge of the smoke, ready to attack as soon as the party confirmed that the Smoke Birds were down.
They were going in with a punishment troop – 20 prisoners arrested for unspecified crimes, who’d agreed to work off their sentence faster by enlisting in the army. These were recent ‘recruits’, and had no training to speak of. They certainly were not proficient with the heavy plate armor and tower shields they’d been given to wield.
“This is not a suicide mission,” Skyflash said to them. “Your job is to march into the smoke and stand fast, no matter what happens. You are not required to kill the enemy. You are covered in so much metal that the enemy won’t find anywhere to hit. Protect yourselves, but do not run. Any of you that runs out of the smoke will be executed for cowardice. Do you understand?”
The conscripts gumbled, but many of the grumbles sounded vaguely like ‘yes sir’.
“Forward… march!”
KA-CHUNK. KA-CHUNK. KA-CHUNK. Struggling under the weight of their armor and the ridiculous, unwieldy shields, the conscripts headed into the smoke.
Disguised by Pinkie’s infusions, aside from Twilight and Macintosh, who were disguised by painting their armor gray, the party went with them, taking up the rear. Sparky II and Garble flew quietly overhead, shrouded in invisibility. The smoke was dense, but not as dense as magic fog – they could still see about 20 feet without much difficulty, and vague shadows further than that.
And then, above them, on the flat rooftop of one of the dark buildings looming to their left, they heard frenzied, nonsensical chanting, and the scritch-scratch of claws on stone.
Fluttershy immediately began casting a spell of her own, the party hanging back from the conscript troop which continued to advance into the mist.
Applejack cringed. “This is gonna hurt.”
“It’ll be over before you know it,” Twilight said, in a low tone of voice.
With gentle puff of fresh air, an air elemental appeared. Rarity snapped instructions to it quickly in Auran, and the world vanished in a swirl of air, as it turned into a whirlwind and swept them up onto the roof, to face the chanting figures. They were disgorged a dozen feet away, and five feet in the air. Twilight and Rarity managed to keep their feet this time, but Macintosh stumbled and splayed out on the ground, ruining his chance to charge at them while they were unprepared.
Fluttershy and Applejack immediately threw tanglefoot bags at the three dancing, blurry figures, but while their aim was true, the packets of sticky goo flew right through their targets, as if they were illusions.
“They’re displaced!” Pinkie Pie said, nailing one with a force bomb, knocking it off its feet. Their dance ruined, the other two turned and snarled.
“Grapple them!” Rarity said, as she blasted the creatures with Glitterdust. “Don’t let them get away!”
Her invisible skeletal dragons attempted to comply, appearing out of nowhere to wrap themselves around their targets, but while one managed to curl up around a smoke bird, the other passed right through the image, missing entirely – to Rarity’s disappointment, the Glittering dust only outlined the image of the creature.
Twilight ran up and attempted to slam the slippery creature with her hammer, but was also led astray by the displacement.
Rainbow Dash (in eagle form, but disguised as a pony in armor) charged at the third, slamming her beak painfully into a wing joint, dislocating it. The smoky limb hung uselessly at the creature’s side.
The grappled smoke bird fought back fiercely against the skeleton wrapped around it, clawing with its arms and legs and biting, but Sparky II was resilient – sharp claws and teeth did little against bones.
The blinded smoke bird let out a loud screech, and Twilight and Applejack staggered back, dropping their weapons as they cringed and covered their ears – the others fared better, however.
The crippled smoke bird unleashed a cloud of stinking poison gas at the party, which enveloped everyone who hadn’t charged up into melee – and had no apparent effect, as they were temporarily protected from poison.
All three of them released a cloud of black spores, which spattered over anyone nearby, spreading into a network of black tendrils that tore at their flesh and constricted painfully.
Fluttershy’s elemental swept past, trying to capture the smoke birds in its whirlwind, but while it managed to clear away a bit of the smoke, it wasn’t able to lift any of them. Fluttershy tried another tanglefoot bag, with similar results as her first.
Macintosh, however, was on his hooves and able to charge – only for his lance to scrape off the creature’s body, which was tough and armored despite its ephemeral appearance… but another of Pinkie Pie’s force bombs arced over his head, and knocked it off its feet. At which point the skeletal dragon that had tried to grapple it before simply attacked, biting and clawing at it while it lay there on its back.
Rarity shot at the smoke bird facing off against Rainbow Dash with a pale grey beam, but it passed harmlessly through the creature’s image. Rainbow Dash did manage to peg it with a pair of strong blows from her wings, however. It lunged forwards to retaliate, but she managed to dodge everything but its beak, which landed a glancing blow.
Then the smoke bird lying prone at Twilight and Garble’s feet suddenly vanished.
“They can teleport?!” Twilight cried.
“He didn’t go far!” Fluttershy said, turning and pointing to the glowing form, still clearly visible through the smoke. She flew towards it and tossed another tanglefoot bag, which splattered over the creature. Unfortunately, the bird managed to avoid being glued to the roof. Macintosh charged across the rooftop at it, but again his lance failed to penetrate. The air elemental, back in non-whirlwind form, swooped around behind it to attack it as well, but the displacement ruined its attack.
“What’s the point of tangling them if they can just blink away?” Applejack asked, grabbing her rapier and swinging around to flank with Rainbow Dash. Her rapier sank flawlessly into the creature’s image, accomplishing nothing. “Oh, hay, this is just –“
Pinkie Pie used her next bomb against the two smoke birds who were still next to each other – but missed her target, and the uncontrolled splash managed to do more damage to her friends than to the enemies.
“Pinkie!” Applejack shouted, as she hopped back out of the splash. “Watch yer fire!”
“It’s not fire, it’s force!”
“I’m sorry, Sparky,” Rarity said, as she positioned herself to catch two of the birds in a Diamond Spray. They were sliced up a bit by the razor shards, but Sparky II, as Rarity had predicted, was torn to bits again. Garble leapt at it as it struggled to free itself from the pile of bones, and sank claws and teeth deep into its flesh… and with a mournful shriek, its smoky aspect evaporated from its form, and it fell to the ground as an all too solid and fleshy bird-man, unmoving and bleeding from a dozen horrible wounds.
Rainbow Dash and Twilight tried to finish off the other, which was looking awfully shaky after the diamond spray, but all their attacks went straight through it, and for all their efforts they couldn’t find where the real creature was standing.
That was their last chance. Both remaining smoke birds vanished, not staying close this time, or even in line of sight.
After a minute or so, the black tendrils stopped trying to kill Twilight and Rainbow Dash, and crumbled to dust. The smoke birds did not return. After making a few more attempts to draw them out with the conscripts, the party had to retreat, as their protective spells were starting to fade.
Skyflash was not amused to hear of their failure. “They can teleport?”
“And they’re displaced,” Twilight said. “Blurry, invisible in smoke, and displaced.”
“And they can teleport,” Rainbow Dash added.
“We hurt them pretty badly,” Twilight said. “If they don’t have clerical support, you might be able to hit the portal while they’re still afraid to face us. They didn’t come back and harass the conscripts while we marched them around the block.”
“They have bards,” Skyflash said. “Bards can heal.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Twilight said. “We’re completely tapped out. Maybe if we march in with your army we can bluff them?”
“I’m not risking my soldiers on a bluff,” Skyflash said. He was quiet for a few seconds, as if trying to think of some solution to the dilemma. Finally, he shook his head. “Nightmare’s teeth, I’m going to have to call in a strike.”
“A what now?” Applejack asked.
The orcish army set up a perimeter around the great bubble of smoke, hundreds of troops stretched out for more than a mile to keep a watch on the perimeter. Once they were in place, one of their wizards sent up a dancing light, which blinked in a sequence of shapes and colors. Thirty seconds later, the rain began to fall.
Somewhere in the military district was an entire Empire’s worth of siege engines, and all of them were trained on this one section of city. Lightning flashed, acid splattered, bursts of freezing mist billowed from the cloud. The buildings visible from the edge of the smoke crumbled. After a minute or two, mephits and naga from inside the kill zone started trying to flee – in disorganized groups, ones and twos, easily cut to pieces by the army.
After five minutes, the smoke started to clear. Whatever portal had once been in that sector of the city had been destroyed by the barrage – but there was nothing left of the city itself, just block after block of smoking ruins, with even the streets collapsed into the sewers.
Applejack stared at the destruction in horror. “I’m not paying for that.”