Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 19 Lichenthrope

Lichenthrope

The problem it turned out was that while Twilight had started to practice her lichenthrope spells, Naudia was way ahead of her in terms of the basics of both the combat spells and combat in general. Naudia could split up and Twilight couldn’t. As such Twilight had to practice while Naudia demonstrated what she knew to Gwynn.

Gwynn had set up a target for them to attack, a log with a doily looking talisman attached to it made out of spiderweb, that gave it a shield and held it in place.

Naudia covered herself in a furry looking gel-like material, pulled out a sling and flung a chunk of it at the log. She missed in a very deliberate way, but the chunk course corrected and landed exactly where she wanted to with its cilia.

Then the chunk began to pulse where it was stuck like it was sucking something out of the shield, it was joined by two others that Naudia tossed out. Finally Naudia made a move.

She looked like some sort of gel-wolf, you couldn’t actually see her inside there, and the cilia of the oversized bacteria coating she had moved on it’s own. Twilight noticed something else now that Naudia was showing off moving towards the target.

Naudia was moving very strangely, in an otherworldly way, turning quicker than she should be able to. It was like her feet barely needed to touch the ground. Naudia capped off the showy approach with some kind of mid-air spinning attack that burst the sling thrown bacteria with her claws and left deep gashes in the zoetic shield around the log. The gashes bled blue but closed up and appeared to grow even more bacteria inside them like the shield was infected now.

The giant bacteria that Naudia slashed burst into a bunch of buzzing microbes that resembled an acorn with two cilia rings on them. They moved erratically and very fast, they were hard to track with your eyes as they kept juking in strange directions. Some of them stuck around Naudia’s head and over half of them slammed back into the log with their acorn nozzle things to leech more from it.

Naudia turned back to Gwynn, this was clearly the end of the demonstration.

“Good, you’ve got the basics down with bagrat assistance, now I want you to practice them, that log’s shields will recover and I want you to specifically attack it, but without targeting it with your spells. Once with the bagrat, once without, then start staggering it out, until you no longer need the bagrat to assist you with the spells at all.”

Naudia’s skillset as a protolycaon were strange to Twilight. They made sense but it was like looking into another world of her version of a werewolf. Naudia still used a sling to throw projectiles, there wasn’t anything super special about the sling other than being good at channeling magic and being made of some strong material.

“Okay Twilight, since you aren’t as experienced with your spells we’re going to be training you on them next.” Gwynn looked over Twilight’s combat ready form and asked a bit of an awkward question. “Where is your shield?”

“I have it on” Twilight said, the Zoetic Shield was very easy to maintain.

“No I mean your Scutum, you know rectangular, convex, made of water magic?”

Twilight looked blankly at Gwynn.

Gwynn growing frustrated pulled out one of those bug phone things which she poked at for a bit and finally turned it to Twilight.

“Like this.”

On the bug phone’s belly was a picture of an ancient shield design clearly made out of some kind of water magic as you could see right through it. It was convex, tall, rectangular, and Twilight didn’t know it’s proper name, only that ponies stopped using that kind of shield a long time ago.

“Oh one of those ancient sorta shields.”

“Yeah, convey to your bagrat the idea of ‘Scutum Shield’ and it should come up, it’s an important part of your kit.”

Twilight managed to summon in the strange watery shield, it felt VERY solid and clearly wasn’t ice, and of course she could see directly through it. The surface of the shield ripped like the top of a still pond.

“The reason it’s made of water is so you can aim your sling without exposing yourself. See if you focus on a part of the shield, the distortions will clear up and you can look through basically perfectly.”

Twilight did just that and sure enough the ripples cleared up from that spot, the world was tinted but she could clearly see everything while still behind the shield. It even had some kind of targeting interface for whatever reason, presumably to help her with her sling aim.

“Naudia’s protolycaon is more of an agile class, she’s going to try and run directly up to the enemy dodging attacks and such. Your Lichenthrope class is more of a straightforward class, your job is more to hide behind the shield and either tank, blocking attacks for the rest of your party, or make a shielded approach on a target slinging lichen at them, then tear them up in melee.”

“Oh yeah and you can use the shield to make water attacks to help your lichen out.”

“Whoa whoa whoa, hold up a second.” Naudia interrupted making a T with her hooves. “How would a ‘water magic’ attack effect something like the shields we got? Aren’t they made out of magmatter? What the hay kinds of pressures are we going to be using here, and what is the minimum safe distance and how do you survive being inside of it?”

Gwynn stared at Naudia for a second, it wasn’t that she didn’t hear what Naudia said, Gwynn was looking at Naudia like none of those questions registered at all. Like Naudia had asked a boatload of safety questions about operating a nailgun as if it was some kind of weapon of mass destruction.

“I’m just going to demonstrate the spell and then Twilight can practice it a couple times on the stump.” Gwynn said.

Before Naudia could stop her Gwynn summoned in a scutum shield like Twilight’s and used it’s offensive attack on the shielded stump. There was a spike of water, a pop sound and the shield around the stump had a neat little hole in it with liquid around it that was dissolving some of the shield.

Naudia, after a couple long seconds of nothing happening opened one eye and peeked out from behind her hooves. The hole in the log’s shield sizzled a bit and nothing much else happened.

“That isn’t water, I don’t know of any water that does that.” Twilight said.

“Nope, it’s called water magic to make it easy, it’s easier than calling it all the things it does. I mean it can be an acid, heal zoetic shields, a base, carry other spells in liquid forms, sublime into gaseous forms, act as a feeder for other spells, too much to list.”

“Wait so that’s all magmatter too?” Naudia asked.

“Those are mostly chemistry terms.” Twilight pointed out.

“I don’t know all the details but the way magmatter works is similar to normal matter so a lot of what we do is just chemistry, but with magmatter. But yes, anything we summon in is magmatter and generally most magics are part of some kind of elemental standard to make them easier to understand and categorize. Then once they’re done they dissipate.”

“If you can just summon in the stuff anywhere I suppose that makes more sense than trying to do things the normal way.” Naudia said.

“wouldn't that release HUGE amounts of energy” Twilight asked.

“It does, but since we did this by modifying physics, the stuff we summon in goes back into quintessence and the difference is too small to even notice.” Gwynn said. “To be honest with you I’m glad you’re asking these kinds of questions, I’ve had to cram on this sorta stuff because we’re pretty sure it would help keep you motivated, it’s nice to know that the effort isn’t going to waste.

“Anyway, now the chemistry lesson is over, it’s time for you to do combat drills.”

-------------------

The problem Twilight ran into was that she had a hard time turning her brain off for these combat drills. She kept hesitating, stumbling over her own hooves and none of what she was doing felt natural. A small part of her took comfort in knowing that these combat styles were almost as alien to Naudia, and her practice hadn’t put her very far ahead of Twilight.

The hardest thing to get used to was the difference in thinking. Previously combat meant that you wanted to dodge most everything, getting hit was bad, as even an arrow could be deadly. Things change a lot when your base assumption is that you are absolutely going to be hit.

For example Twilight was expected to just get used to really dangerous things slamming into her transparent watery shield, inches away from her face. A shield that Twilight could push her hoof through if she wanted to because it was made of water, which was an unfortunate thing to discover when you can’t turn your brain off thinking about it. Naudia had it even worse as she needed to get used to seeing blue zoetic shield blood, and lumps of bacteria get hit and fall off. Even worse than that for both of them, the feeling of those parts of the shield getting hit and falling off, as that was how you knew where to repair the shield.

It wore on Twilight, it wore even harder on Naudia who had gone through a lot more combat training, and for that matter actual combat. When Twilight was done she needed to sit down, when Naudia was done she flopped down putting her head up against Twilight.

“I never thought I would be bleeding for combat training again.” Naudia said. “One of the upsides to defecting to Equestria is that you don’t do that.”

“Was it really that bad with Chrysalis?”

“It had to be, you had to use every trick in the book to conserve love, otherwise we would have died of attrition hundreds of years ago instead of lasting as long as we did.” Naudia looked up at Twilight and said. “I shouldn’t have said that last bit.”

“You never talk about the hive to me Naudia.” Twilight said reproachfully.

“I don’t like talking about it to you, it makes you sad.” Naudia could feel the stir in the air, the emotions were turning sour.

“So what, I’m just a meal ticket then?”

“You aren’t just a meal ticket to me Twilight, when you’re sad I can feel it, directly. I don’t like that, it… hurts to feel that from you when it came from me. I don’t mean that in a ‘hurts my feelings’ sorta way, it’s a negative influence I have to try and block out from a source I’m open to.”

“I’m sorry.” Twilight said. “But we’ve had arguments before, should I be worrying about those?”

Twilight’s tone indicated that she really needed to know this.

“Changelings are well designed enough that gets blocked off basically automatically, it’s when I open myself up to you and then put you in a bad emotional state that is the problem.”

“But that’s going to be less and less of a problem as time goes on then because we’ve been changed right?”

Naudia opened her eyes and stared up at Twilight mouth agape.

“I… hadn’t thought about that.”

“I hadn’t either not until just now.” Twilight said.

“I guess we’re going to have to learn about how we’ve changed.”

“Together.” Twilight placed a hoof on Naudia’s

“Yes.”

-------------------

“Normally I would say you should be practicing on logs for at least another week, minimum, but we’re putting you two on the fast track.” Gwynn said when their break was over. “That means we’re going to be doing live combat exercises.”

Twilight and Naudia instantly replied with something along the lines of “isn’t that really dangerous?”

“Without the right equipment it could be deadly. You will be wearing these regulators.” Gwynn held out a set of neck and wrist strap things. “These will regulate your offensive magic to a safe level. NOW, this does not mean ‘to a level that isn’t deadly without a zoetic shield’.” Gwynn barked. “Your magic when targeted correctly is a deadly weapon, and will always be a deadly weapon. If I see one of you even hinting at screwing around there. will. be. consequences.

“Now, these training bands have a set of lights on them, they go from green, to yellow, to red. When they reach red that means you lost, in a real combat situation you would likely be dead. This also means that when you and your opponent know those lights are red you STOP COMBAT. This is a restricted live fire training exercise and continuing to attack when the lights are red will land you in deep shit. IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?”

Twilight and Naudia nodded, neither of them were at all convinced this sounded safe.

At that point Gwynn demonstrated to them something completely unique to Yunguaq magic, targeting. To put it simply Yunguaq magic only worked inside of an area that you were targeting and taking partial control over. Without a target it would do nothing, demonstrated by Gwynn shooting out some magical fire that failed to even touch a dry stick. Twilight actually got to pick up the magical flame, the fragile gassy substance looked exactly like flames but since it wasn’t targeted to burn anything, wasn’t burning, wasn’t even warm, it felt like a wisp of cotton on her hoof.

“This is our greatest advantage, this allows us to engage in unrestricted usage of all of our most powerful magic in a group without having to worry about collateral damage or friendly fire.”

Twilight found herself in a live combat situation facing off against a Yunguaq who looked vaguely familiar, in a kinda “might have seen them once at an event for work” sorta way. He wore a bandeau and silk sleeves and pants in red and gold.

Then Twilight remembered who he was, even if she didn’t remember his name. He was the first yunguaq she met with a giant spider, and he was the one who let the spider hang around on his back, like a backpack.

“OH I remember you, you had that giant spider!”

Just as she said that it crawled around from his back and waved at her.

Twilight knew what the spider was, and knew it was very friendly, but while her conscious mind could process that, something deeper down was screaming “beach ball sized hairy spider!!!” at the top of it’s lungs.

“I’ll be honest I didn’t expect you to remember my name.”

Twilight tried to think past the giant spider.

“Kopiak?” She hazarded.

“Nope, sorry it’s Kuiguk, but I could see how you’d get that confused, that is what I am though.”

“So how do we do this?”

“Well Gwynn gave you the run down already so I think we should just square off and fight so I can give you some pointers afterwards. We start when I say ‘go’ and we end when either your collar beeps red or I say ‘stop’.”

Twilight squared off against Kuiguk whose collar and wristbands turned green, the spider busily working on his back to spin threads that could be attached to his sleeves. Twilight summoned in her shield and put on her lichen wolf pelt.

Kuiguk seemed pretty happy where he was so Twilight realized that she would have to make the first move. Twilight made her approach from behind her shield slowly and slung a piece of lichen targeted at him. He dodged it and responded by shooting out some of those long spider silk strands which where hard to see but easy to dodge because she could feel him targeting her. The threads of spider silk each as long as his forearm where shot off in rapid succession, at least ten at a time like arrows.

Twilight, quick to catch on, waited til the last instant to target her spell on the lichen and came a lot closer to hitting Kuiguk this time. However he did have to move because of the cloud of spores gathering behind him from her missed lichen, this brought him closer to Twilight which was what she wanted.

They repeated that same sequence a couple times Twilight creeping closer from behind her shield. Then Kuiguk forced things out of control and Twilight realized that she had made a mistake. Kuiguk had his own tricks at work against her.

Kuiguk shot at her feet forcing her to dodge backwards, and then Twilight realized something. Those threads that had been missing this entire time weren’t aimed at just her and her shield, which hadn’t even been hit once so far. They were also aimed at the ground so they could be used to set up this trap for her.

She backed into an explosion of even more spiderwebs that latched onto her, seriously limiting how she could move, and gluing her in place with thousands of threads of spider silk. From the smile on Kuiguk’s face he knew this was coming, and Twilight knew she couldn’t dodge his next attack.

Desperately Twilight tried to think of a way out of this until she came up with something that sounded a bit crazy. She summoned in a larger clump of lichen and dumped it at her feet doing her best to target the strands of spider silk that held her there. This was exhausting as it was not only a very specific spell but a LARGE spell.

That was enough to maneuver her shield to block Kuiguk from shooting her from the side, the strands of spider silk sticking out of her shield. But she was trapped now, there was only one option available to her now. She needed to advance so he couldn’t control the flow of combat.

As she was advancing the strands of silk embedded in her shield exploded. They left a cloud that blinded her and did a lot more damage to her shields than when they had landed. She swore that she saw a brief bolt of electricity before they exploded.

When the cloud cleared Kuiguk was standing smugly still, like he had already won, which was a mistake on his side of things, because it caused Twilight to actually look before charging in. All along the ground between him and her were little bundles of spider silk, all ready and waiting to end this match in devious ways.

“Damn it, I bet tonight’s karaoke that you’d fall for that.” Kuiguk said. “Well then, as a melee combatant I suppose you should learn how these work and once you’re done with that we’ll call the match over and we can discuss things.”

Kuiguk made a “come on” gesture with his hands.

Twilight decided to go all in, since this was just practice, and charged Kuiguk.

The first bundle detonated on her shield breaking it, Twilight activated her lichenthrope form to lope along at Kuiguk even faster.

The second bundle didn’t detonate at all, it did nothing.

So, Twilight thought, he’s playing mind games with me.

Twilight snarled and passed over the third bundle of spider silk threads, slashing at it as she went.

This turned out to be a mistake. The thread exploded into thousands of inch long threads of hardened spider silk that impaled her shielding. She could feel them pumping something into her shields, that was slowing her down, by a LOT.

“Okay. Stop” Kuiguk said.

“But I can still fight!” Twilight protested.

“Yeah, but the next attack I was going to make would have ended things.”

It didn’t feel right but Twilight had to just go with what her instructor said, and settle down from the fight.

“Okay so, you did a lot better than I expected you to Twilight.”

“I have fought before you know.” Twilight said.

“Yeah, but this sorta yunguaq fighting is a lateral change in thinking. Dropping your lichen on your own feet is a great example of that, do that with normal fire and you’ll just burn yourself to death, do that with yunguaq magic and you can burn away your bonds without touching yourself.”

Somebody brought over a tablet and Twilight was able to watch what happened from multiple angles. It was a lot more clear what Kuiguk was doing behind her, it was also clear to her that she was making the right moves initially approaching him and not hanging back. Looking at it Twilight thought Kuiguk might have expected her to try and retreat away or dodge backwards, and when that didn’t work he forced it.

“I’m really impressed with how well you’ve instinctively adapted to this style of fighting. You get a passing grade.”

Twilight perked up a bit a that.

“For a start though, now here is what you did wrong.”

Then Kuiguk started grilling Twilight as to how she could improve in the very short term for combat.