Airship Mauled

by Darkonshadows

Chapter One, To Canterlot and Back: A triangle is never so pointy.

There were legends of chimera being fire breathers like dragons, but on a small scale. Concerning the fact that they live in a place called Flame Geyser Swamp, I wouldn’t put it past them to be the fire breathers. There were also legends of Manticores breathing fire, but I didn’t see it as being the truth and I was someone that liked mythology.

At a guess, I would think it to be the male chimera that breaths fire and the lion head could be confused for a manticore.

I would have preferred facing down a manticore. For one a manticore has only one head, two it was a beast that could be easily distracted and three, while it might have been powerful I would have been able to outmaneuver it.

This was a chimera though and female from the looks of it. It had a feminine saber toothed tiger head with rather beautiful green eyes, a goat head growing out its back that could either be on the right or left side of the Chimera. The goat head was on the left side that had… where those earrings? How does a being like this find a place to get its ears pierced? What kind of society did they lead where they were technologically capable of making earrings at all? Those yellow bar pupils of the goat head made me a bit uneasy.

The tail ended with a stretchy snake head with scary red sclera that had nearly bit me when I tackled it to get its attention off of the fillies, said snake could reach any part of its body for swift retaliation and possibly poisoning.

A chimera was intelligent, far more so than a manticore, which was my major problem here. The front two heads were dangerous for different reasons, but the snake head was especially problematic as it could keep track of its surroundings while the front two heads are busy attacking prey.

A chimera was dangerous, it’s front half consisting of a tiger body with big claws, big toothy tiger jaws and the goat’s serrated horns. This means that you certainly didn’t want to face a chimera head on and the tail is the only reason why you can’t get it from behind or the side without retaliation as that head had the fastest reaction time.

A chimera was fast, the powerful rear legs were that of a goats just adding onto its burst movement potential, with a few harmless reptilian spines thrown in on the butt leading into the snake headed tail. The legs gave them the power to do damaging lunge attacks with their goat horns or take a bite out of me with the saber toothed head. The legs were good for jumping or running, but they weren’t good at taking hits and thus the snake head was there to make up for that weakness.

Nature in this world was scary, I didn’t have any method of disabling the snake head effectively and the front two heads were definitely focusing my way.

-

“Is Jade really going to be okay Fluttershy?” Poor little Pinkie thought that traveling with the two would be all fun and games until that monster dropped in on them. She would certainly take her Pinkie Sense more seriously now.

“I don’t know Pinkie.” Fluttershy looked back and nibbled at her bottom lip, wondering with gnawing worry when Jade would catch up to them like she promised. Maybe Jade just promised to get them moving, she silently pleaded that it wasn’t the case.

-

“Look, before we do a thing, can we talk about this?” If I could avoid this confrontation, then all the better. I wasn’t exactly as strong as a chimera, even one that was possibly half starved. I held my knife at the ready and if I was separated from it, then I’d lose my heightened ability to dodge. The strength of the magical alchemy sustain probably had a maximum plateau for how much it could improve my natural abilities for when I wasn’t using it. I haven’t exactly hit that plateau yet, but given a few more years of using this knife and I’d be like a real rogue I wanted to class as. Right now I was a scrawny teenage humanoid cat. “If you want some food, I have plenty of fish jerky you can eat. Besides wouldn’t eating me be one third cannibalism? Can’t I just give you some food and then we can go our separate ways?”

I now knew for a fact that Sekhet was only joking about eating us. She would have certainly slaughtered us of course, but she at least wouldn’t have eaten us. If Sekhet were feeling nice, then she might have even given us a proper burial. This chimera was a bit lower on the scale of friendliness compared to the goddess, what is my life coming to?

“How about…” The tiger head started, nice voice.

“We kill you…” The goat head intoned, it had a standard warbling effect.

“Then eat you and your food!” I saw the attack coming as the silkily speaking snake head spoke and backpedaled sideways, backpedaling straight would have gotten me a claw to the chest and would have put me on my back.

“I would say so be it, but chatting while something is going for your throat is… ugh…” I did the most unexpected thing of me and lunged forward underneath them as they kicked off for me. They sailed over my prone form and I rolled to the side as soon as I was behind them to avoid the snake tail snapping at where I was. “Beyond the pale!”

I quickly stood up and slashed at the snake head with the knife to make it back off from committing to a second strike and backed away. You do not turn your back on something faster than you at a straight run. The chimera turned and started to circle me while growling, in stereo.

I stood at the ready with my knife and kept myself facing towards them, hopefully the fillies were far away from here. They may have been my age, but they certainly weren’t in my weight class when it came to defending themselves and they really shouldn’t witness the level of violence that the four of us were about to perpetrate against one another.

We were both just testing the waters for the moment, but sooner or later this was going to get messy and I needed to avoid permanent injury or mom would never let me out of her sight again if I survived this.

I just needed to remind myself that I wasn’t a warrior and should not get caught up in defeating or ending the chimera’s life, I was just an Abyssinian teenager in over her head and if I could disable them without doing further harm then that was good a good thing. I didn’t want to kill an intelligent being before I was an adult and I was going to actively avoid putting them down.

The chimera charged, raised its left paw and reared up on to its hind legs and swung. I stepped into the hit and took it sharply across the face, leaving three bleeding marks flowing from most of my right cheek and large portion of my head. I was agile enough to avoid losing an eye, I just clenched my teeth and reacted quickly to get the better end of the exchange. If I had stepped away I would have been far worse off.

I definitely had the last laugh, though the paw hit me and it was really quite painful, they had just impaled their front left leg on my tightly held knife. I had held my knife so that their own momentum would put it deeply in their wrist halting their movement to swing the other paw.

Three voices screamed in agonizing pain as having a knife digging deeply into their tendons would do that, I followed stabbing them through the wrist by gripping the leg tightly with my meager by comparison claws and then kicked them in the belly with my left leg as hard as I could.

They were unbalanced by standing on their goat hooves to claw at me, so I was easily capable of flipping them on to their back with my kick and my knife pulled free when they fell.

I followed this up by slapping the goat head across the face with my right hand set of claws making smaller but still defining claw marks across the left side of the goats face.

The tail came up between their hind legs, but I had already danced out of the snake heads range. It was only thanks to the leverage and the spasm from the hobbling blow to their paw that kept them from getting up as fast as they could.

“You’ll pay for hurting my sister!” Growled the tiger head and I probably would too, I wasn’t going to go down that easily though.

“Hey, excuse me, but you’re the ones who want to kill and eat me!” Don’t blame me for your aggressive tendencies. I did know where the leg would be after it hit me and acted accordingly to claw your abdomen with my toes and to get that revenge swipe in because I’m quite a petty kitty. She was one third cat, so what cat like being aside from me would have such a distaste for fish jerky? “After I so kindly offered you some filling food that you might have actually liked too!”

“We are strong, we don’t need your pittance!” All three voices said and they all grimaced as they put weight on the stabbed paw. They kicked off the ground with the goat head leading the charge in an attempt to gore me.

I tried to dodge the sudden burst of speed they put out with that jump, I didn’t make it. The left horn of the goat head dug deeply into my left shoulder and it caused me to reflexively send my knife flying from my claws as spun and fell onto my chest. I growled at the painful gash in my shoulder, I had lost my knife’s sustain and hurriedly switched to my fish scale necklace as my current sustain.

If it really came down to it I can still burn my sheath in a cast, but I was going to be stubborn to the last! Oh darn it, I hope I’m not being infected with the mom and Sphinx rhymes. Why that alone would just lead to me causing many crimes!

What’s worse than a bleeding wound? A bleeding wet wound getting caked in mud of course! I didn’t know if my fish scale water blasts were sanitary. Did their species even have medical practices? Yeah, this might incidentally kill them down the line indirectly, but they lived in a swamp on top of being a hardy and strong sapient being.

I fumbled my way onto my back as my agility was lost and I had to roll to the right to avoid getting several claws to the chest from another pounce. The Chimera seemed confused for a moment by my less than agile floundering, but I wasn't about to give them a chance to realize that something had drastically changed about me.

I had enough time to prop myself up into a crouch and inhale through my nose sharply and covered my mouth with my right palm, I also made sure to keep my nose tightly bound between my thumb and pointer finger as well. This always hurt whenever I did it, but it was for a good cause as the chimera lunged for me again.

I released two tight powerful jets of water… from my ears. Yes, you heard me right, I fired two powerful blasts of water from my ears and it really hurts a lot! My poor eardrums were going to need minutes to recover after this as it was quite disorienting, it wasn’t nearly as bad as what happened to my sinuses if I had used my nose for this.

I might have water breathing, but that doesn’t help my nose after using it for water projection. My mouth was definitely the safest orifice to project water from and the less said about using the other unmentioned orifices the better.

The look on the front two faces of the chimera had been quite comical from my perspective. The force of the blast not only sent the chimera sprawling onto their back bashing their front two heads against the ground after getting smashed by my spiraling water blasts, but it had also knocked me flat on mine.

My mouth was suddenly quite dry, I sat up and pulled out my canteen. I popped it open and took several quick drags of it to recover my lost bodily fluids. I stood up and started searching the grass for my knife while the chimera was still disoriented.

The snake head was glaring at me and trying to get the body standing, apparently the force of the blows to both the front heads had knocked them both out. Go me! I also learned that one head can operate the entire body on its own as it was standing shakily and starting to slowly approach me, apparently the snake head didn’t have practice with the main body and why would it when it was the literal rearguard?

I finally saw my knife sticking halfway out of a large tree, oh come on! Though that did tell me that my increased agility had an affect on things that I could throw, I’d definitely look into that later. I still had one third of a chimera still on my butt.

“Look, do we really have to keep going? You’re worse off than I and I’m magically gifted.” I put on some bravado as I started backing towards the tree with my knife in it, I grabbed it and tugged. Yeah, it was quite unfortunate for my knife to be stuck the way it was. I would need both my hands to pull it free, which would mean turning my back on the chimera. Something I wasn't going to do. “I still have some tricks up my sleeve and I’m wearing a shirt here.”

“Yes~ I do believe we have to.” The snake said while making the body with the unconscious heads slowly stalk towards me.

“Your sister’s funerals then.” I threatened while grabbing a raven feather from an easily accessed pouch on my pack and looked for a large enough object to use it on. The snake head noticed my gaze searching the surroundings, it made her pause and consider her sisters two heads.

The snake head could control the body, but she couldn’t control the front two heads or protect them very well if she assaulted me like this. She was quite awkward with the staggering walk she had going on and had been noticeably wincing with every limp.

“Maybe we can come to an agreement.” The snake head hissed after a moment of contemplation, in a less than threatening amiable tone too.

“I’m listening.” I wasn’t about to trust the snake head. If I could end this peaceably without crushing the chimera with a tree or boulder, then I would certainly take it.

I would regret this later, but not for the reasons you'd think.

Comments

[ThatBadGuy]

Purr-etty intense cat fight. All it needs is ball of yarn.

[Shadowshame]

This is a cat fight In two ways

[Dashie04]

If it really came down to it I can still burn my sheath in a cast, but I was going to be stubborn to the last! Oh darn it, I hope I’m not being infected with the mom and Sphinx rhymes.

Sort of like Chuggaaconroy during Super Paper Mario.