At the back of the barn, past a few more patrols of pacing cows, was a thick, heavy door. Spike grabbed onto the handle with both claws, and managed to slide it to the side. It wasn’t stuck – on the contrary, it seemed to be on a well-oiled track – but it was very heavy.
A chill wind emerged from the room beyond, along with a rolling fog. In the depths of the fog, past rows of slowly swaying pony-sized lumps hanging on chains from the ceiling, was a dim flicker of flame. As the fog started to clear, a dark figure slowly came into view, shrouded in flames – a great red bull, standing on his hind legs. His eyes were like black pits, and he let out a mournful ‘moo’ that shivered its way through the party’s bowels and made them squirm in fear.
“Are those –” Spike asked, staring at the swaying lumps as the mist cleared enough to get a good look at them.
“I think that’s what’s left when you skin an evil cow,” Derpy said. “But why are they hanging here? You think they’d bury them, or put them in a compost heap or something.”
“Where are the heads?” Moondancer asked, taking a step back.
“Moooo,” said the demonic bull, again. Spike doubled over, holding his stomach, as the reverberating tones made his guts churn.
“Close the door,” Bon Bon hissed. Spike reached weakly towards the handle, but Moondancer’s magic was faster. With a rumble, it slid closed and clanked into place. Bon Bon let out her breath. “Okay. That must be Baalzebull.”
“The evilest of all evil cows,” Derpy said in a soft voice.
“And we’re supposed to fight that thing?” Spike asked.
Bon Bon frowned. “Did we miss any side passages? Or large areas outside?” Nopony could think of any. “Then I guess it’s time we stop dodging these cows, and start leveling up.”
“Can we level up?” Spike asked. “I mean, what do ‘experience points’ even mean when we’re actually in the game?”
“It’d be easy enough to simulate increases in strength and toughness, or even agility,” Moondancer said. “But I’m a wizard, so I’m going to be boosting my intelligence stat. Does that mean I’ll actually get smarter?”
“There’s no point theory-crafting,” Bon Bon said. “Let’s find one of these cows that’s patrolling on its own, and take it down. If they’re not too difficult to fight, then we can grind on cows until we level up, or give up trying.”
===
The only lone cow was the one that had been guarding the farm equipment. Bon Bon arranged the party in an ambush formation, and they waited for her to finish walking to the far wall and head back their way. “Remember,” she said. “If this goes really badly, I’ll run off and hide while you guys run interference. I’ll sneak back to retrieve your bodies, and bring you back to life with candy.”
“I don’t like this plan,” Moondancer said.
Bon Bon rolled her eyes. “Would you rather have us all die, and hope that someone drags us to a priest to revive us?”
“Yes,” said Spike and Derpy together.
Moondancer nodded. “If I’m going to get beaten to death, it’s going to be over all of your dead bodies.”
“Probably just Spike’s,” Derpy said. “Bon Bon is really sneaky, and I’ve got the hat!”
Moondancer’s aura lit up around the straw hat from the scarecrow, but Derpy’s hooves were too fast and held it in place on her head. She glowered out of her unpatched eye until Moondancer gave a heavy sigh and gave up trying to steal it. “Fine. Let’s do this.”
“Moo,” agreed the cow, bumping into Spike, who was standing directly in her path, to trigger the ambush. She looked confused for a second, then her eyes narrowed in anger. “The fools who stand before me shall be trampled beneath my hooves!”
Spike frantically raised his shield to block as she reared up and stomped down on top of him, but the cow’s weight was too much for him, and he fell onto his back with a grunt.
“Dark Eidous!”
Moondancer’s lightning arced down from the ceiling, and Bon Bon’s ladle smashed into the cow’s rear leg, but she barely acknowledged the attacks, instead lowering her horns and hooking them beneath Spike’s shield, flinging it to the side with a toss of her head and then rearing up to stomp on the dragon’s belly.
Spike stabbed up at the cow, but his sword only made a small cut in her shoulder as her hooves slammed into his armor, stealing his breath. A muffin appeared in his gasping jaws in a ray of heavenly light, and he tried to eat it, but before he could finish the cow rammed her horns into his side, and flipped him end over end, until he slammed into a hay bale. Lightning crashed through her, each strike eliciting another, angrier ‘moo’, as she charged towards the downed dragon to finish him off.
But Derpy was faster, flying down past the charging cattle and shoving another muffin into Spike’s mouth with her outstretched hoof. “Eat, damn you. Eat!” she said desperately, working his jaws.
Moondancer pointed her staff. “Big Bee’s Bubble!” The wobbling barrier briefly appeared between Spike and the cow, only to pop instantly as the cow crashed into it. It broke the momentum of the charge, at least, and before the cow could build up any more steam, Bon Bon’s continuous attacks on its legs finally bore fruit. There was a sickening crack, and the cow sat down heavily, one of her hind legs shattered.
The remaining hind leg lashed out, as the cow thrashed about in agony and rolled onto her side, and the blind kick caught Bon Bon right in the face. She screamed, and dropped her ladle, staggering around with a hoof to her bleeding muzzle.
With a thwack, Moondancer’s scythe stabbed into the cow’s side, point-first. The cow struggled to stand, but the wizard dragged her blade through its guts until it hooked on her ribs, then wrenched the handle forwards, driving the blade deep into her chest. The cow gave one last shudder, and collapsed.
As Spike slowly got back to his feet, one claw on the hay bale for balance, Derpy flew over to tend to Bon Bon.
“Yeah,” Moondancer said. “They’re pretty strong.”
“Too strong,” Derpy said, as she waved a muffin in Bon Bon’s face. “She was hurting us faster than I could heal!”
Bon Bon tried to talk, only to give a pained cry as her broken jaw moved. “Fffffff!”
“Come on, open up!” Derpy said. “It won’t get better until you eat!”
Bon Bon held up a hoof, eyes wide and nostrils flaring, and tried to wave Derpy off, but the muffin pirate was relentless. She wedged her hoof between her friend’s jaws and pried them open, then stuffed the muffin inside. Bon Bon shrieked in agony, but as the sugary snack softened in her mouth and she was able to swallow bits of it, the cries slowly softened to mere whimpers as the bones healed.
“See?” Derpy said, smiling. “All better now!”
“Okay, new rule,” Bon Bon said, slowly and carefully. “Don’t let anypony kick you in the face.”
“How are we supposed to fight more than one of these things?” Spike asked. “They’ve got one heck of a kick.”
Bon Bon furrowed her brow. “Moondancer can bubble one of them, and let us fight them one at a time.”
“In case you didn’t notice, she popped my bubble like it was made out of soap,” Moondancer said.
“Only once she was angry,” Bon Bon said. “She couldn’t do it earlier. They must enrage as we hit them. So if we bubble a fresh cow, she’ll be trapped.”
“What if there’s three?” Spike asked.
“Then she can bubble two of them,” Bon Bon said.
“I can only do one real spell at a time,” Moondancer said. “It would need to be a more advanced spell to bubble two cows, and I only studied the basics.”
Bon Bon frowned, then turned to Derpy. “Do you still have that lasso?”
Derpy tilted her head. “Yeah, but I don’t see how tying myself up is going to help.”
“Give it to me, I know how to use it,” Bon Bon said.
“Really?” Spike asked. “I didn’t know you were a rodeo pony.”
Bon Bon smirked. “There’s a lot of things about me you don’t know.”
===
“Okay, everypony ready?” Bon Bon asked. “Got your candy?”
Spike opened his mouth, showing the piece of hard candy resting on his tongue. “Theck.”
“I’ve got all the muffins,” Derpy said, her arms wrapped around the bundle of healing treats, pre-summoned from the aether.
“Ready with the bubble on cow three,” Moondancer said.
Bon Bon tied the lasso to her tail, and started it spinning. “Then let’s do this thing.”
They leapt out in front of the cow patrol, and the three bovines lowered their heads to charge. One of them quickly bounced off the bubble surrounding it, and a second was dragged off course by the lasso looped around its neck. Bon Bon tugged it to the ground and forced it to roll over, then ran in circles, wrapping the rope around its legs and tugging them together to leave it helpless.
The third slammed into Spike, but he was braced and ready, and while his claws left furrows in the wooden floor as he was pushed back, he wasn’t really hurt. As the cow tensed to toss his shield aside, he stabbed his sword into its neck, weakening the blow, and managed to windmill his arms and keep his balance, and get his shield back into place to block the hooves as they came down on him.
“Careful,” Bon Bon said, as she held her cow tied up tight. “She’s going to get stronger. Make every hit count!”
Derpy drew her cutlass in her mouth, and as Spike hacked at the cow’s face, only leaving a shallow gash across her cheek since most of the blow was deflected by her horn, she and Moondancer rushed in on either side. The cow flinched away from the scythe, keeping the awkward blade from hitting anything important, but the cutlass dug in deep, spraying blood across Derpy’s face as she wrenched it free.
“I can’t see!” she cried, flying back. Moondancer’s aura lit up around Derpy’s eyepatch, and switched it to her other eye. The pegasus gasped. “It’s a miracle!”
Meanwhile, Spike was slowly withering under the cow’s increasingly deadly blows, his shield taking a few dents and his sword barely able to reach anything vulnerable.
“Start dodging!” Bon Bon shouted as she noticed that the cow was nearly blind, with blood from several blows to its forehead and scalp running down its face. “It can barely see!”
Spike backed off a way, letting the cow kick and gore at nothing, while Derpy fed him muffins until he felt better. He popped the candy back in his mouth, and gave a loud roar to get the cow’s attention. It turned towards him and charged, and he stepped to the side, hacking his sword at its neck as it passed. The cow slammed into a wall, splintering the board, and Spike and Derpy stabbed deeply into its side while it was stunned. With a last low groan, the cow collapsed.
“Right. Round two,” Spike said, facing the cow in the bubble.
“I’m not going to go down as easily as Maribell,” the cow said, slamming its horns against the wobbly barrier again, then scraped its hoof against the floor.
“Yeah, yeah,” Spike said, motioning with his shield. “Bring it.”
Moondancer dropped the spell, and the cow charged.
The second fight was actually a little easier, since Spike had figured out how to blind a cow on purpose, and Moondancer didn’t need to maintain a bubble.
On the other hoof, she wasn’t sure what to do to help. “I don’t want to use Dark Eidous in case –” Bon Bon cried out as lightning arced down to strike the cow she was holding, the electricity crackling through her body as well. “Right, that. And the scythe isn’t a very good weapon against cows.” She swung at the cow again, trying to hook the blade into it like she had the lone cow earlier, but with the cow up and moving around the thing was just too awkward. “Why is the sharp part on the inside?”
“It’s fine,” Spike said, as he stabbed the blindly flailing cow in the neck. “We’ve got this.”
Soon enough, the second cow was down, and they advanced on the third, hogtied and helpless in Bon Bon’s lasso.
“Let her up?” Spike suggested, after eating a few more muffins to make sure he was at a hundred percent.
“Don’t bother,” Moondancer said, hooking the blade of her scythe around the cow’s neck.
“Hey,” the cow said, trying to wiggle away from the blade, but unable to move far enough. “That’s not fair!”
Moondancer wrenched the scythe up, cutting deep into the cow’s throat. It twitched a few times, then went still. “At least it’s good against helpless targets,” she said. “I think I’ll call that ‘Reaper’s Strike’.”
===
After a few minutes rest from the hard-fought battle, and an abortive attempt to skin the evil cows during which they discovered that skinning animals was a lot harder than it looked, they looked around at the barn, still full of at least a dozen more cows, not to mention all the ones outside in the fields.
“This is going to take a while,” Moondancer said. “How many cows does it take to level up, anyway?”
“Maybe we already did?” Bon Bon suggested. “You and Spike have new powers. Reaper’s Strike for you, and Spike’s blinding attack.”
“I don’t think Reaper’s Strike is a new spell,” Moondancer said. “It’s more of a special property of the scythe.”
“So maybe I’m the only one that levelled up,” Spike said. “I did feel like it was getting easier.”
“We should keep fighting these cows until we all level,” Bon Bon said. “Or until we get really tired of fighting cows, anyway.”
“I’m already kind of sick of it,” Derpy said, still wiping off her face with some hay. Hay wasn’t really very good for wiping up blood, but there wasn’t much else available. “It’s so messy. And stinky.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Spike said, wrinkling his nose as he glanced at the bodies. “I thought they smelled bad on the outside!”
“Do you really think we’re ready to fight Baalzebull?” Bon Bon asked.
The two quieted down.
Moondancer groaned, and climbed to her hooves. “Let’s go kill some more cows.”