Meta Gamer in Equestria: The Blight of Bane.

by reflective vagrant

The Boiling Point (Chapter 8, The First Mission, Part 6)

Scraps, Speaks with Talons and Tempest were perfectly fine after the fight. They had each seen their fair share of fighting and gore in the past. While the Speaker hadn't, he was managing like a champ for a person that had just been ran through. But Fluttershy an myself were utterly unnerved.

I took first watch along with Scraps, mostly because I couldn't sleep right away after seeing someone get run through. Tempest took second watch and I dried to lean back on the area of a large tree where the roots met the trunk at an angle above ground, but I had trouble getting to sleep.

Fluttershy did too apparently, because she came and quietly curled up next me, laying her head on my lap. Whether she came to me more to calm her own nerves or to help me get to sleep, I don't really know. I know some of the humans I used to hang out with would think this was a sign of her having less than platonic feelings towards me, but I could only roll my eyes at the idea. We were close and I had fallen in love with her much like every animal she cared for did, but I had absolutely zero interest in her romantically and I was pretty sure she felt the same.

I gently stroked her main to help calm her nerves. I was still awake a good deal into the second watch, but I managed to finally get to sleep at some point.

When I woke in the morning, I could feel her completely my lap with her head laying up on my belly and a softly breathing. I was a little perplexed. My hand moved to gently wake her only for me to find a much rougher fir meeting my palm than I expected.

My eyes burst open to see Scraps' mug looking back at me.

"Aahhhh!" I screamed while shoving him off me and scrambling to get away.

"Oh, good. You're up," Fluttershy called out as she finished petting a pair of foxes. The foxes left as Fluttershy moved towards me. "The rest of us are just about ready to go."

---

With a brisk march, we found ourselves at a vantage point to where we could see the enemy below us at the bottom of a small dirt ridge, but they couldn't see us at the top. That was great, because we needed to assess how to approach, but there was a problem. There were about a dozen of the undead below us, tied up together so as to not get separated.

"Tied together? They're learning. Or, whatever is driving them is learning," I whispered to Speaks with Talons beside me.

"four on four is risky enough as it is..." he mumbled as we crawled away from the edge and back towards the rest of the party. "We can't take them on like this. We need to find a way to separate them."

Tempest met us as we stood up a safe distance away from the ledge. "We can't keep playing games with them. The more we encounter the enemy, the smarter they will become. We need to find a way to finish this now, their numbers be damned."

Speaks with Talons got huffy and got into her face. "This isn't a battlefield with expendable soldiers. We are all the Fey have for defense. we can't afford to risk any losses."

It was clear by his aggressive stance that he wasn't just talking in terms of strategy at this point. That was just the excuse that lit the fuse.

Tempest met him glare for glare. "For your information, I never consider soldiers expendable. But there is always a risk, and right now its a bigger risk in the long run is if we try to play it-"

Tempest cut herself off just in time to twist and have the griffin's talons glance off her helmet instead of across her face.

He followed up with another swipe that narrowly missed the undercarriage of her armor as she flipped back out of his immediate reach. "I'm not going to risk this mission on some half baked logic pulled from some aristocratic book by a half baked mage!"

Fluttershy managed to speak up, but only I heard her. "Come on every creature, calm down. We're on the same side."

Tempest's horn flared up with sparks as she backed off and reset herself for a conflict, her fuse now lit too. "I learned my skills from a lot more than just books. But if you want to do this the hard way then I'm game, crow."

His eyes became blood shot just as he barreled at her. Sparks flew, scorching the feathers of the griffin, and the unicorn got a couple solid cuts as they went back and forth, taking shots at each other.

At one point one of them landed right next to Fluttershy, who had only barely managed to roll just out of the way enough to not get crushed under the body landing full force next to her. She still got stopped in mid dodge roll, however, as the one tossed landed right on the medicine bag side of the saddle bags strapped to her, keeping her from rolling further away until they got up.

They continued for a few moments more before I noticed a red liquid coming from Fluttershy's bag. When I brought it to her attention, she gave a whimpered "Oh no..." as she checked the bag.

She pulled out the broken remains of what was the vial that housed our last healing potion, both to my relief and dismay.

Furious myself now, I carefully took the top of the vial from her, pressed on my amulet and turned to the two that were fighting.

"Hey! Sparkles! Thinks with Dick!" I called out in a demanding, but not yelling voice. Somehow despite the tempers, we all still managed to stay fairly quiet.

They both stopped in their tracks at the names I had called them, then turned their heads just enough to give me their attention without dropping their guard.

I showed them the broken vial. "If the two of you are quite done with your pissing contest, then for the love of all things sacred: Can you get your heads out of your asses, back into the god damn mission and kill each other when we're finished!?"

They looked at the vial, then back at me and finally to each other with a nod.

"Gods be damned indeed," Tempest responded with a resolute face.

"I have no love for mages, but if it means defending Equis from the plight of the gods' return, I can set aside my hatred for unicorns and their archaic ways long enough for that."

I pulled back, not expecting them to calm down so quickly. I realized I had only hit jackpot due to a misunderstanding with my use of the words "god damn." Part of me wanted to consider myself lucky... but it just reminded me of the looming risk I had of what would happen when they learned that I was a follower of a god, just not the one that sent me here.

The awkward silence was broken when Tempest piped up, "Where's Scraps?"

We all looked around for a moment, before discovering a burrowing hole in the ground. With the tunnel leading towards the ridge, we all went to the edge.

We all were shocked when we saw Scraps popping out of a hole, biting the head of the last enemy clean off at the neck from behind. The little guy had used the ropes against them by pulling the farthest ones under and using them as an anchor to keep the others in place while he pulled them down and took them out one by one from underneath.

"I forgot diamond dogs could do that..." Was all Tempest could say as he jumped out of the ground and came up to us.

"Scraps fix numbers problem! Scraps do good?"

She nodded with a slight dumbfounded look, "But don't wander off on your own like that without talking to me about it first, even if it was for something we needed. We're a team."

He went submissive in recognition of what he did wrong, but was smiling at a job well done. The way his face had changed from cold blooded killer back to the happy go lucky, cheerful oddball I had come to know was scary. He was a total goof, but he could be dangerously smart if given the chance.

---

A short rest was taken to tend our wounds, mostly self inflicted, and then we got back to tracking what remained of the enemy. From what the Fey reported through the Speaker, only about half a dozen of the enemy were left thanks to Scraps' actions.

Unfortunately, while the enemy numbers were dwindling, they seemed to be getting smarter too. The Fey said their misdirection was having only a nominal effect on the enemy now. About the only spots they could keep them away from were the nodes in the web like the place we rested the day before and the village. To make matters worse, the reports showed that they were traveling in what Tempest recognized as war maneuvers instead of simply a search pattern. They were on to us and readying for a fight.

Tempest took the lead, making us maneuver in unusual ways. We wouldn't move through one area, but another seemed just fine despite looking the same to me. It slowed our pace, but she said it was vital for keeping the tactical advantage.

"OK, the Speaker says there's a node up ahead that blocks a passage to what is a good tactical position. The enemy were stopped by it and were starting to take the long way around according to the last report. We're going to take this shortcut and set up an ambush for them on the other side when they finish going around." She told us, satisfied on a final battlefield.

We went through a passage made of dirt and roots to a small area with high ridges behind it, but a solid path that I recognized as the same path we took to the Fey village two days ago.

"They're going after the Fey," Speaks with Talons spoke coldly. "They know the village is on this path. They would have no other goal finding the path. But how would they deduce that?"

Regardless, Speaks with Talons pulled out darts from his supplies and started embedding them into the ground immediately outside the passage while everybody else, save the Speaker, went out to find good places for the ambush. Fluttershy stayed near me, ready to do her part as a medic.

Scraps found his hiding spot right away, as he could just dig through the dirt and keep the enemy off balance from below, but the rest of us took a bit more time.

"There, those should give us an initial advantage when they go off." Speaks with Talons said as he finished setting up his trap with his last bundle of darts.

Just as Speaks with Talons jumped into the air to hide in the trees, the Speaker let go of the root he was listening to and ran to the edge of the root passage, screaming "Run! It's a trap!"

Before we could react, I heard a voice scream from above the ridge containing the dirt and root passage yell, "Kill the yellow healer first!"

I barely had time to register the thick accent translation my amulet performed before I saw several animated corpses atop the ridge, shambling to draw arrows from their quivers and setting their sights on Fluttershy.

Comments

[DerpTape]

Apparently they don't follow International Humanitarian Law in regards to medics having non-combatant status.