Pathfinder Ponies

by terrycloth

Assault on the Mine... Again

While the party was too large for Rarity to teleport them all directly to the mine, they had enough flight and carrying capacity between them that it made more sense to attack from the forest, instead of threading the gauntlet of diamond gnoll checkpoints in Ghastly Gorge. As such, after finishing up their business in town – chiefly, getting the second Restoration spell for Twilight since it had finally been a week since she was Raised – they headed southeast, trying to avoid the cult-ridden towns as much as possible.

Unfortunately, their efforts to evade the cult did not meet with complete success. While travelling along a dry stream-bed that Pinkie Pie was ‘pretty sure’ would lead them all the way to the Gorge, Applejack spotted a shadowy humanoid figure wearing the distinctive blue metal armor, up on the bank. They were several hundred feet away, but she could tell that they’d been seen.

Rarity was the first to react, and cast a haste spell to help her companions close the distance, while ordering her dragons to charge. Only two of them could do a proper charge, although the others kept pace, surrounding the enemy. Applejack and Rainbow Dash ran all out to try to keep up. Pinkie and Twilight followed a bit more slowly, lagging behind by about sixty feet, while Macintosh, more encumbered by his heavy armor, only made it about halfway. Fluttershy clung to his back and tried to cast a spell, but wasn’t able to concentrate while being jostled around so much.

Applejack and Rainbow stopped short at the edge of the bank, just as they crested the slope. Applejack threw herself to the ground in a clumsy roll, the camouflage effect from her ring helping her vanish into the dust cloud kicked up.

“There’s a whole army of them!” Rainbow Dash shouted, “City guards!”

As she spoke, a volley of flaming arrows arced towards her and Applejack, and while only one found the stealthy rogue, Rainbow Dash was skewered by half a dozen – including one that struck right in her chest – and collapsed to the ground. More arrows peppered the dragons, shattering Sparky and heavily damaging Opal, just before a fireball exploded on the cluster, finishing off Opal and badly burning the remaining two. The scout that they’d surrounded was gone, vanishing after drinking a potion and scurrying off just ahead of the fireball.

Applejack crept over to Rainbow Dash and quickly fed her a potion, hoping that she hadn’t been actually killed. To her relief, the wounded griffon took a ragged breath as the magic flowed through her, only for Applejack to cover her mouth, and whisper, “Stay down. Leastwise until Fluttershy gets here to heal ya.”

Fortunately for them, the archers were distracted by the remaining skeletal sky dragons charging directly at their ranks. Pinkie Pie took cover behind the bank and added one of her bombs, engulfing five of the archers in flame and poisonous green smoke.

…but then a volley of flaming arrows from a few of the archers who hadn’t been distracted peppered the pink pegasus, and neither the bank nor her ablative barrier was enough to save her. Her unconscious body rolled down the hill, leaving a trail of blood.

Twilight grimaced and lit her horn brightly – she grabbed Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash in her aura, and flung them into the forest on the far side of the stream, where they crashed through branches and underbrush, and landed roughly. She was right behind them, trying to put as much forest as possible between herself and the archers. “We need to run! It’s too much for us!”

Macintosh and Fluttershy angled to join her, Fluttershy casting an area healing spell around where Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash had landed. Applejack followed soon after, cursing up a storm at the glittering green sparkles the enemy’s sorcerer had covered her with.

Rainbow Dash, wobbly but somehow still conscious, snatched up Pinkie Pie’s limp body, and joined the general retreat.

The archers sent volley after volley of flaming arrows into the forest after the party, but it was more of a deterrent against a counterattack than a real attempt to hit the targets that they could no longer see. The flames set the forest on fire behind them, and the flames and smoke only aided in their escape. After running for a mile or two, they were confident that the guards hadn’t even tried to follow. Fluttershy found a good place for them to hide and regroup, and they went to work healing their wounds.

“What just happened?” Rainbow Dash asked, as Fluttershy repeatedly poked at her injuries with the healing wand. “There were only twenty of them and they totally kicked our tails. We just fought off two hundred a few days ago!”

“They must have been better,” Twilight said. “And we weren’t as well prepared. We didn’t have many of our defensive spells up, which made us easy targets.”

“Speaking of missin’ magic – anypony have any idea what happened to Rarity?” Applejack asked.

“She didn’t charge at the enemies, so she wasn’t with us when we started to run,” Fluttershy said. “I’m sure she’ll be okay – she can just burrow underground if they get close.”

“But how is she going to find us?” Pinkie Pie asked. “It’s still a party with only six of us, but she had one of the Fly spells we were going to use to get down into the Gorge.”

“I don’t think we’re going to make it today,” Twilight said. “It’s almost dusk and we’ve still got a long way to go.”

“I’ll ask the songbirds to keep an eye out for her,” Fluttershy said. “She’ll probably be heading in the same direction.”

Twilight nodded. “If nothing else, we can meet up at the mine.”

Meanwhile, Rarity watched from her burrow as the detachment of Bright Valley guards discussed what to do with her skeletons. It was the second burrow she’d tried to watch from. The first had been a little more obvious than she’d planned – it was hard to judge that sort of thing from below the surface – and she’d had to quickly abandon it before the archer that spotted her put an arrow in her face.

But this burrow was well hidden, and the enemies hadn’t seen it yet.

There was an explosion of lightning as the enemy mage tried to destroy the slowly-regenerating skeletons with an elementally-substituted fireball, but just like the previous try when he’d used fire, there was no effect. Physical force seemed equally useless.

“Does anyone here know how to permanently end these bloody skeletons?” he asked, but most of the other guards just shrugged.

“We could take them back to the city, and toss them to the creeps in the Temple District,” one of them suggested. “They know how to handle undead.”

“Except that they’re going to finish regenerating before we get there, and I don’t feel like getting my head bitten off on the road,” the sorcerer said.

“Just bury them, then. I hear that’s what the rebels are doing,” one of the other guards suggested.

“Right. Fine. Anyone got a shovel?” There was silence in response. “Fine, I’ll get one from the wagon team.”

There was only the one shovel, so it took more than an hour to dig a pit deep enough to bury even a single skeletal sky dragon. The sorcerer kept a close watch on the progress of the skeletons’ regeneration, and when there were only a few minutes left, he ordered everyone to retreat to the wagons and just leave them. Soon, all four of Rarity’s dragons were hovering in place, doing nothing because they lacked targets and orders.

Rarity waited for another hour with the tireless patience of the undead. In that time, she saw no sign that any of the guards had stayed behind to watch the skeletons, so she quickly ordered them to fly two miles east, then burrowed underground and tried to go meet them.

She was a bit off on her orienteering. It took her two hours to eventually track down her minions, but luckily nothing in the forest was stupid enough to bother a quartet of powerful skeletons. She climbed into Sparky’s ribcage, and affectionately stroked the slimy substance coating his bones.

“Ahh, my darlings, I’m so glad to have you back,” she said. “Now let’s fly! I saw the others run off, but it shouldn’t be hard to catch up.”

Unfortunately, once the sun set it was all Rarity could do to keep heading in vaguely the right direction. While both she and the skeletons could see in the dark, none of them had any skill at tracking. She spent the night crisscrossing the forest at high speed, and getting very, very lost. Eventually she decided to cut her losses and head for the gorge, where she waited near the edge of the forest. Surely she’d be able to spot her companions when they finally arrived.

In the morning, her spell preparations were interrupted by the urgent chirping of a flock of songbirds, who flew uncharacteristically close to the five dangerous undead, and circled while squeaking and squawking as if they wanted to tell her something.

“Are you trying to tell me something?” Rarity asked, in sylvan.

The songbirds’ volume doubled for a few seconds, and they flew off into the woods. Rarity climbed back into Sparky’s rib cage, and followed.

After half an hour of flight, the songbirds led Rarity to the hidden camp where the rest of the party was making breakfast. They circled around Fluttershy, who took out some bird seed and offered it to them in thanks, then dispersed back into the woods.

“I can’t believe that actually worked,” Rainbow Dash said, staring after the birds. “Hey, Rarity. Where ya been?”

“I stayed behind to collect my expensive and apparently irreplaceable minions,” she replied. “Next time I’ll have to take into account that my living companions are cowards who’ll run at the first sign of danger.”

“I’m pretty sure the first sign of danger was when Rainbow Dash went down,” Pinkie Pie said. “Twilight didn’t tell everypony to run until after I went down, which was the third or fourth sign of danger, depending on if you count the fireballs separately from the way your skeletons were totally smashed to pieces in seconds.”

“And yet she rescued you two, and abandoned them to the whim of our enemies,” Rarity hissed.

“There’s a weight limit,” Twilight said. “It was Sparky or Rainbow Dash.”

“I’m not blaming you,” Rarity said, giving a fang-filled smile. “I’m simply revising my future plans to take your past actions into account. Now that you’ve made your priorities clear, I have to decide on how that affects my own.”

“Uh huh,” Rainbow said. “Because you totally didn’t know that we’d abandon your skeletons at the drop of the hat from day one.”

“To be fair, she was dead the first time we did that,” Pinkie Pie said.

Reunited and refreshed, the party continued on to Ghastly Gorge. It wasn’t hard to find the mine – not with the pair of armored flame drakes orbiting in the air overhead. Getting to the mine without being seen was a trickier proposition: there were several hundred feet of bare, increasingly rocky terrain between the edge of the forest and the edge of the Gorge, and then a two-hundred foot drop to the mine entrance below.

“I have an idea,” Pinkie Pie said, bouncing up and down a bit in midair. “Rarity, you still memorize Obscuring Mist, right?”

“Ah don’t think a patch o’ mist creeping along the ground is gonna be any less suspicious than the pack of us doing the same,” Applejack said.

“Well, yeah,” Pinkie Pie said. “But a harmless fluffy cloud? Who would suspect that?”

After casting their various defensive spells, an Obscuring Mist, and Fly spells for Twilight and Macintosh (Rarity was already flying using a longer-duration flight spell that she could only cast on herself), the party hid inside the mist and kept pace with Pinkie Pie as she pushed it towards the gorge.

“Just fly casual,” she whispered. “Nothing to see here, just an innocent fluffy cloud…”

Unfortunately, there were very few clouds that flew as low as Pinkie’s, and the pair of drakes peeled off to investigate immediately.

“They’re not buyin’ it,” Applejack said, peeking out of the front of the cloud, her magic ring helping her blend in with the white mist. “They’re moseyin’ on over our way… and now they’re blurred. Ain’t that just perfect.”

Fluttershy settled onto Macintosh’s back, and started casting a summoning spell. Before she could finish it, one of the drakes got close enough to use its fire breath, and flames exploded over the party, doing no damage whatsoever to any of them, since they were all protected from fire, but burning away the mist instantly.

A second later, a pair of large birds made out of lightning appeared between the party and the attackers, and like bolts of lightning shot towards the flame drakes and raked at them with electric claws. Fluttershy followed up with a flaming crossbow bolt that stuck in the shoulder of one of the riders, fluttering up off Macintosh’s back as he flew towards the enemy.

The rider who’d been hit pointed his good arm in the air, and shot off a volley of fireworks. The other shot magic missiles at Macintosh. Their mounts dueled with the lightning elementals, the drakes getting the worst of the exchange as their metal barding left them especially vulnerable to the electric attacks.

Then the skeletal dragons attacked, the rest of the party left behind in their wake, struggling to keep up. Most of the skeletons’ attacks were wasted due to the drakes’ blurriness, but Crackle got in a solid hit. Rarity, riding in Sparky’s rib cage, managed to lay a hoof on the drake he was fighting, sending terrifying chills through its body.

The other drake was overwhelmed by the lightning elemental it was fighting, and plummeted from the sky. They weren’t flying high enough for the fall to be instantly fatal, and its rider unhooked himself from the saddle, and screamed in anger as he shot magic missiles at one of the skeletons. Fluttershy shot a crossbow bolt at him, but it deflected off an invisible shield.

The shield failed to deflect Macintosh’s gravity-fueled charge, which pinned the twitching body of the rider to the corpse of his drake.

Rainbow Dash swooped up above the other half of the melee, and shrieked a lightning-filled shout at the remaining drake and rider. As they reeled from that, the skeletal dragons closed in around them and tore the drake to pieces, letting the rider fall to his death.

“Well…” Applejack said, as they landed to quickly strip the easily portable valuables from the enemies. “I think they know we’re comin’.”

“I’ll call up some more mist regardless,” Rarity said. “No sense giving their archers targets.”

Pinkie Pie pushed the mist over the edge of the canyon, and Applejack, on scouting duty again, was able to see the massive array of diamond gnoll archery assembled against them – at least a hundred archers, on roofs, makeshift walls, and some sort of stadium seating, all aimed at the entrance to the mine. It was obvious that they knew they were coming, and had for some time.

Seeing the cloud, they fired… but the cloud was much larger than any of the ponies in it, and most of the arrows never even came close. Out of the three volleys they had time to fire before the party reached the mine entrance, only two arrows found a mark, and Rainbow Dash and Macintosh weren’t even scratched as the Stoneskin spell absorbed the damage.

There were more gnolls waiting in the mine, of course – a solid phalanx of canine muscle, armored in blue metal and wielding longspears and javelins, under a low enough overhang that the party wouldn’t be able to just fly past, even if they were willing to get stabbed. The cloud still blocked the archers’ view, but the party would have to fight their way through while arrows rained down on their backs.

Applejack stayed hidden inside the mist, and flung her returning dagger at one of the gnolls blocking their way, the blade sinking into a weak spot in the armor and drawing a slight grunt. She threw it again as it flew back to her, slitting his throat, and a cascade of blood poured down the front of his armor – but that only seemed to make him angrier.

Twilight stepped out of the cloud and slammed her lucerne hammer into the chest of the gnoll next to Applejack’s victim… once, twice, three times, rocking him back and leaving huge dents in the armor, but failing to drop him, either. “These guys are pretty tough.”

Macintosh stepped up beside her and slammed his lance into one of the dents, piercing the breastplate and impaling the gnoll… but his eyes burned with rage and he still didn’t go down.

“All of you, stop!” Fluttershy ordered the gnolls, and most of them suddenly stood stock still.

Another volley of blindly-fired arrows rained down on the party, one of them bouncing off the back of Fluttershy’s head, slightly chipping the Stoneskin. “Oh, I wish they would stop too!”

“I think that can be arranged,” Rarity said, and turned, tossing a hooffull of powder in a ragged line behind them. Although most of them couldn’t see, thanks to the mist, they could tell that it had just gotten much darker, as her wall of stone blocked off most of the mine entrance behind them, stretching to reach the overhang since the entrance was wider and higher-ceilinged farther out. “That wouldn’t hold these brutes, but it should stop the arrows.”

“Then we’ll just have to make sure we take them all out!” Rainbow Dash said, hovering over Twilight’s back and letting out a loud screech. Lightning crackled from her beak in a wide cone, engulfing most of the gnolls trying to block them. Pinkie Pie followed up with a fire-bomb, which exploded in the usual poisonous green smoke.

There were screams of rage from inside the cloud, but only from the two gnolls who hadn’t fallen prey to Fluttershy’s command. None of them emerged on the party’s side of the poisonous mist – not that there was room – or attacked anypony at all.

“For pony’s sake, Pinkie!” Applejack complained as she stared at the thick green mist. “I can’t fight worth beans if you give the varmints their own cloud to hide in!”

Twilight couldn’t see her targets either, but all her practice blindfolded meant that she could still hear where they were. In particular, she could hear the one Applejack had wounded struggling to stand up in the grease patch Pinkie’s bomb had left, while gagging on the noxious mist, and pounded him until he stopped moving. Macintosh followed her lead, stabbing his lance at a different gnoll, and was rewarded with a grunt of pain.

“Once again, it’s up to me,” Rarity said, and tossed a fireball into the cloud to clear the air with a massive explosion of flame, leaving the gnolls visible once more. Three were dead, one had slipped and was sitting on his tail, one was retching, his grip on his spear loose, and one was both prone and nauseous. One had apparently backed out of the cloud of poison mist, and was the only one not standing in the patch of fire where Pinkie Pie’s grease had just been set alight.

Rainbow Dash gave another lightning-filled screech, washing over most of the survivors, and Pinkie Pie threw a bomb that engulfed a pair of them in flames, but only in flames this time. Fluttershy swept her gaze across the gnolls who were still moving and not retching up their guts, and one of them collapsed, unconscious… but since he was on fire, he would probably never wake.

Applejack leapt into the air, soared over the flaming grease patch, and skewered the gnoll who’d backed off in the gut, slipping her rapier under his breastplate and opening his belly, coils of intestines starting to leak out the bottom of his armor. That only made him angry, and he took a vicious bite at her wing with his fangs, then stepped back and stabbed at her twice with his longspear – but she was too slippery for him to hit, and easily dodged the attacks.

Only one of the other gnolls was in any shape to fight. He roared ‘for the Smooze!’ and stepped forwards over the battered bodies of two of his comrades to stab at Twilight. She couldn’t get her shield around in time, and grunted as the powerful strike broke through the Stoneskin and sank into her chest.

“Is that the best you can do?” Twilight asked, wrenching herself off his weapon and swinging her own to take him under the chin. As he staggered back, she swung it around to crunch into his crotch with bone-shattering force… and as he collapsed at her hooves, finished him off with a third blow to the back of his neck.

Applejack vanished, reappearing behind the gnoll she was fighting and stabbing him in the back of his neck. As he sank to the ground, Macintosh and Rainbow Dash finished off the last two gnolls, who were still too sick to resist.

While the gnolls’ armor was made out of the blue metal and therefore useless to the party, the rest of their equipment – including their flaming longspears – was made out of conventional materials, and would be safe to sell or use.

Behind the spot where the gnolls had tried to block the party’s passage, the mine continued on as a twenty-foot wide, low-ceilinged passage, with rails for the mine carts they’d seen on their previous visit. There was a solidly built wooden wall blocking off the entrance, with a gate that was shut and barred.

Fluttershy flew over and touched the stone next to the wall, and cast a spell to shape away the anchor points holding it up. Macintosh gave it a solid push, and it collapsed to the floor, gate and all.

The mine continued on as far as the party could see in the faint ambient light from the cracks where Rarity’s wall of stone hadn’t quite blocked off the entire entrance. There were doors to either side, where rooms had been carved into the stone, but the main route into the mine was clear – if nothing else, they could follow the tracks, which didn’t appear to branch, yet.

“Let’s go, there’s no time to waste,” Twilight said, lighting the tip of her horn and trotting along the tracks. “Some of our spells only have a few minutes left, and that wall won’t hold the gnolls out forever. We need to find the source of this blue mud and close the portal, once and for all.”

“Hopefully it’s not a natural portal, or it won’t have anchor points for us to smash like the others,” Rarity said. “Still, collapsing the roof onto it with the Earthquake scroll should keep anypony from using it, at least for a while.”

“And the dynamite?” Pinkie Pie asked.

“We’ll use it on the tunnel behind us on our way out,” Twilight said. “It should break up the stone and make it suicidal to try to re-open the existing mine – they’ll have to dig a new one. Even for diamond gnolls, that’ll take some time. They can’t burrow through solid rock.”

Comments

[albedoequals1]

Wow, those gnolls behaved like they were using drugs or something. Maybe synthetic adrenaline.

[terrycloth]

6041244 Barbarian class levels.

Not even once.

[Booster Spice]

This is the bit I dislike about scaling games. they never let you actually trade grind for enjoying the game by leveling up to where you can actually survive a dungeon drive without careful micromanagement and tactical positioning.

Look, I want to roleplay, not repeat my dailygrind over and over again.

Lets see someone use combat hedgehog.

Im saving hornet bear for the boss.

[terrycloth]

6041328 Well, the difficulty level is usually informally negotiated between the GM and the players. Often by whining about OP PCs/monsters on both sides.

If you want easy fights where you don't have to use tactics, don't use tactics. Most GMs will lighten up instead of killing you over and over again.

[FanOfMostEverything]

There's always a bigger fish. Hope no one tries to summon it.

Still, the party's gotten the enmity of entire armies! They've really hit the big time, and the big time is hitting back. The mine assault is going... fairly well. We'll see how many mud elementals and other associated nasties might be waiting for them. Perhaps even a coherent extension of the Smooze itself...

[terrycloth]

6048521 Summon Nature's Ally VII. Because there are so many situations where what you really need is a gargantuan Dire Shark.

[Housecarl of Clan Drops]

6048585

I was thinking of the actual spell Summon Bigger Fish.

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