Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 25 Hard Knocks

Hard Knocks

Twilight was sitting down and watching a surreal sight, what amounted to an alien police crime scene that she had just caused, more or less. She honestly had no idea what to say to Naudia who was sitting next to her.

The yunguaq were dressed in uniforms and were a mishmash of different equipment sets. Some of them had briefcases with a surprising number of combat features, giving them a suave spy look. Some of them looked like soldiers except a major part of their kit was a shovel.

“So…” Twilight started but then stopped.

The ones working directly on the soul magic site seemed to work with some sort of grain two handed flail thing, Twilight thought they were oats. They were calling in rats from bunches of grass they had summoned in, to throw grains at the soul magic board, the oats burned with a purple flame as they hit. The rats danced with joy in a circle around their strange colored bonfire.

Naudia was clearly going to let Twilight say whatever she was going to say.

“Do you hate me for… for what happened in Canterlot?”

Naudia took a deep breath.

“No. What happened was necessary.”

“I suppose I can understand why you’d think like that.”

“I was just hoping that you wouldn’t find out what you did.”

“Why?”

“I want to live in the pony world Twilight. I want to live where most foals live to adulthood, and don’t have a monster kill count before they’re out of their teens. If given the chance for a Twilight Sparkle that hadn’t killed anything other than monsters, I wanted to take that. For that Twilight to lead us into the future.”

Naudia gave a little laugh.

“I don’t know if that sounds like a good reason or not to you. In retrospect it feels rather selfish for me to decide that for you, at the time it seemed like a good way to get back at…”

Naudia gestured at the First Administrator.

“And keep you happy.”

They watched as the agents with the briefcases finished up by pressing a button on the briefcase and dousing the area in green fire. When the fire went out various evil looking rats with strange wing-like appendages(without actual wing membranes) on their back crawled out of the dying flames.

“I wanted to blame you for keeping this from me.” Twilight said. “But thinking back on the last year I can’t think of when would have been a good, calm, time for you to actually tell me about it. Tirek, going back to a missing Equestria, working with Starlight Glimmer, nightly visits by the First Administrator. There just weren’t any gaps where we could have sat down and dealt with this properly.”

“So like now.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t count on things calming down anytime soon.” The First Administrator said to them.

Both of them started as they hadn’t heard him walk over.

“Your showing in combat today was bad. It’s clear you know the spells, so we’ve made progress, but things around here are going downhill faster than anticipated. My analysts are examining the similarities between your magic and soul magic and it looks like our models are off, they’re more compatible than we thought they were.”

“What do you mean by THAT?” Twilight said offended.

“Nothing as… evil as you’re thinking, it just means that what the nerteln learns about magic in Equestria helps whoever it is out more with soul magic more than previously thought. Whoever this Doctor Willow is, I believe his background in medicine is probably psychological in nature, with magic training that puts him in the far upper bounds of actually utilizing and learning soul magic.”

Behind the First Administrator Twilight noticed that the briefcase agents were walking a circle around a summoned lump spewing that green fire at it.

“Moving on from that, we need to accelerate your combat training much more than anticipated.”

A very large rat climbed out of the fire.

“This is a hellion rat.” The First Administrator said stepping back. “Kill it, or die.”

The rat was strange, it had an extra set of arms on it’s back that were positioned like they were wings, but without any kind of membrane or feathers to give it lift. It was huge, standing at least as tall at the shoulder as Naudia did at the shoulder, and it had a set of what looked like glowing gold moose antlers giving it even more height. It’s eyes likewise glowed gold from within, as it stood up out of the fire more and more patches of it’s fur likewise began to glow gold with a frightening intensity.

Twilight realized that the moose antlers were articulated, flexible like they had no actual solid component, and likely what the hellion rat used to cast magic. It was not going to wait for them to be ready before it started this fight.

Twilight barely managed to get her zoetic shield up before a strange bolt of magic slammed into her, she wasn’t able to block it with her water shield. The magic was there on her foreleg looking like some sort of golden cloth with lines and circles traced into it that Twilight could feel were conduits of power. A power that was already starting to eat away at her shield. It didn’t hurt, not exactly, her shield couldn’t feel pain, but she could feel her shield like it was her skin.

All of this had passed in less than a second.

Twilight immediately went on the offensive trying to remember more of her training and the spells she had access to.

“Remember your role Twilight, protect Naudia so she can initiate the attack.” Gwynn hall shouted off from the side.

It was hard to concentrate with that attack eating away at her shield like it was, but Twilight reigned herself in and took up a defensive stance. She slung lichen to her left and right creating clouds the hellion rat would have to shoot through if it wanted to attack Naudia, and she readied her water shield against the monster.

The monster tested her defense, blasting at her shield and the clouds of lichen with that golden magic it had. Unlike her personal shield Twilight had an answer to damage on her water shield, sloughing off the front of it to refresh the surface and give her a clear view ahead.

“Good Twilight, remember to feed your lichen clouds with water from your shield.”

Naudia for her part was preparing to attack the hellion rat from behind Twilight. Filling her sling satchel with large gooey bacteria and building up her shields for the attacks that were inevitably going to come her way on the approach.

Just then Naudia noticed something emerging from the hit on Twilight’s foreleg. It looked like a floating mass of the chunks of Twilight’s shield that had been damaged, between the rotating floating chunks there were constant shocks of static electricity. It had no shape, it was just a mass of debris that floated and sparked on itself.

The static thing separated from Twilight’s shield leaving a large pit and began to make it’s way back to the hellion rat. Naudia instantly figured out why, it was hoovering up the zoetic shield debris and fluid from the battle and was bringing it back to it’s master.

“Twilight, take that little static thing out!”

Twilight’s eye’s caught onto the little thing and it was the work of a moment to redirect her short sling to slam it with a lump of lichen. The little static thing exploded, it was apparently very weak if such an attack would destroy it like that.

Naudia was ready and finally began her assault on the rat thing.

As she made her approach on it the rat started blasting at her with it’s flexible antlers and Naudia did her best to dodge the attacks. However she did get hit a couple times in a nasty way. In return Naudia was pelting it with bacteria which stuck onto the rat’s shields. The bacteria pulsed as they attacked the shield, growing in size as they fed on it, you could see them multiplying inside ready to split and spill out to bolster Naudia’s shields.

“Remember Naudia, cook the bacteria, like a grenade.” Gwynn shouted at her from the sidelines.

Naudia didn’t know what a grenade was, but she knew what it meant in this context having read up on her combat abilities. She was actively feeding the bacteria in her pouch to grow them bigger from her own shields. And she was throwing bacteria that didn’t do much damage but instead linked other bacteria that were stuck to the hellion rat together, these accelerated the infection.

Finally as she got close to the Hellion rat Naudia played her trump card. Naudia sloughed off the outer layers of her shield that had been damaged and dropping the parasitic patches of golden magic the hellion rat had hit her with.

Naudia heard a snarl from behind her as Twilight was on the offensive now as well.

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

They managed to kill the summoned hellion rat which faded away rather quickly.

Twilight immediately turned to the First Administrator and Gwynn who had been standing at the sidelines watching them and shouting advice the entire time. As if this was just some sort of game.

“What the hay was that?” Twilight demanded

“Combat training.” The First Administrator said.

“I get that, what was with that ‘kill it or die’?”

“We need you to get used to life or death combat, you’re going to be in it very soon. I don’t think you’d like to end up like Walden.”

Twilight grimaced at the thought, she could still remember seeing the bat’s heart beating inside of his chest with the little iron patch.

“Besides, that hellion rat was using ‘hack’ magic, effective on shielding and computers, useless on everything else, it could never have killed you with that magic.”

Twilight could understand that point of view, but they just weren’t getting what she was saying.

“That’s not the point, why did you make us kill that rat?”

Even the First Administrator had his face in his palm at that comment. It was Gwynn massaging her temples that answered.

“You didn’t kill that hellion rat, it was a summon, you can’t kill a summon because they’re summoned. They’re already dead.”

Twilight and even Naudia stammered around for a while at that.

“So that was necromancy then?!” Naudia managed before Twilight could get over it. “Who did you raise up to make that rat?”

“We don’t know, the best answer I can give you is that it was somebody or other’s pet of some kind, we think.”

“That’s even worse!” Twilight exclaimed.

“I think we can clear this up to your satisfaction Twilight, but it’s going to take some explaining.” The First Administrator said. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

Twilight and Naudia did not look convinced at all.

“A long time ago, in a time before the universe you know today, the Vatermorder was bored because the universe was without life in it’s earliest days.”

“That’s the thingy you’re so afraid of on Equestria isn’t it?”

“Yes. Anyway, he decided to keep an entire star as a pet, one of those red dwarf stars. This was the first Nuna Tarneq, a land spirit. We know it today as ‘The Faithful Star’. Because the Vatermorder is callous and distanced from the universe when he grew bored with the Faithful Star he abandoned it. We think that’s because life was beginning to show up in the universe and the Vatermorder was going to force them into wars.”

Twilight noticed that somebody had brought over what looked like a model star. Or at least what stars looked like if you looked at them through a telescope that drastically reduced the amount of light they output, and let you see the texture and look of the star without burning your retinas out. The Faithful Star looked small, and oddly enough for a ball of burning gas, subdued compared to Equestria’s sun. Twilight didn’t know where she got this impression but it looked lonely.

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

The Faithful Star was alone.

In all the vast universe around it there was nothing but tiny islands of dead rock.

The Faithful Star awaited it’s master’s return. As it had for what felt like forever. It tried to reach out to those islands of rock, but it was too weak.

Then all at once the universe changed, violently. Spacetime itself attacked the Faithful Star as a wave of vacuum decay ripped everything apart, leaving nothing in it’s wake. Abruptly the Faithful Star even felt the familiar tug of those empty and dead islands of dead matter vanish as they were annihilated from existence.

The Faithful Star felt this wave of change wash over it, try and tear it apart, but it endured the change in the universe, imposing it’s own great will upon this new order. That was all it could do for the longest time, holding on, commanding the physical matter which made it up to stay as it was. Eventually the universe around it settled, and once more the Faithful Star was alone, even moreso than before.

But in enduring this change to the universe the Faithful Star had felt a change in itself.

The Faithful Star reached out into space, and reached into somewhere else, and commanded something into being so that it may have a friend. Nebulous and indistinct this was the first intelligent summon. The Faithful Star had created summoning magic that could bring into existence an intelligent being, from nothing.

Then as the Faithful Star rejoiced at it’s creation, the creation faded away, back to wherever it came from. This saddened the Faithful Star, but it could feel it’s command over the universe now, so it commanded another being into existence, and this too faded away.

And so it repeated thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, millions of times, the Faithful Star understood this creature it had summoned was always the same one, brought forth from some kind of other place. So once the first was stable and the Faithful Star came to understand what was happening. That it had given life to something that had been dead, from some leftover universe that came before, even before the universe it had been created in.

So the Faithful Star summoned another creature, giving it a different, more concrete form than the first, and another, and another, until the Faithful Star had summoned many of these things and it began to understand their nature. These dead things that had been given life by the Faithful Star were like it was, those who were without their master and they exuded a simple joy of a pet that had a master once more.

So the Faithful Star existed for the longest time like this, bringing into being creatures who exalted at being alive once more, who had something hanging unfinished on this side of death.

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

“And that is when we discovered the Faithful Star, learned summoning magic from it and built a matrioshka brain around it. Originally the Faithful Star was quite close to where yunguaq split off, not that many light years away so it didn’t take long for us to find it.”

“So what’s the moral?” Twilight asked.

“Huh?” The First Administrator looked surprised.

“Stories like that usually have some kind of moral to them, what is the moral there?”

“History, while it has many things we can learn from, doesn’t always have a moral lesson to teach us.”

“So you’re telling me that out there, somewhere, is a living star that taught you yunguaq how to summon dead pets?”

“Yes.”

“What I don’t get is why this makes it okay to summon it in just to kill it.” Naudia said piercing to the heart of the matter.

“Think of it like this, do your shields feel pain?” The First Administrator asked.

“No of course not, that would make them worse than useless.”

“These summons feel about as much pain as your shields do and they are only temporary, even if you do tend to get the same ones when you call intelligent summons.” The First Administrator explained. “They are here to serve you, they are ecstatic even to have a new master in the physical world. They don’t view going to be de-summoned in battle and then resummoned again any different than if you were sitting on a couch with them or making them haul your luggage. They want to be useful, they demand to be useful.”

Twilight and Naudia still looked doubtful.

“Okay put it this way, you’ve had a dog before right?”

Naudia shook her head, and Twilight said:

“My mom was always more of a cat person and Spike doesn’t count as a dog.”

“I know about dogs though.” Naudia said.

“Okay, would you hesitate to train a dog to sit, or say, or heel?”

Naudia and Twilight could kinda already see where this was going.

“With summons and the way yunguaq think sending a summon in to be de-summoned is fine, it’s not lethal, it doesn’t hurt the summon, and it can keep them safe. They will inevitably be de-summoned anyway as summoned things are always temporary.” The First Administrator explained. “I can see why this is all strange to you, you’re still at the stage in civilization where war is something dangerous, some place people go expecting to die for their country or whatever. Yunguaq going into combat don’t expect anybody to die, nerteln excepted.”

Twilight remembered that show that Gwynn was watching during dinner, and could kinda get a glimpse into the way a yunguaq thought about things.

“I think I can understand it.” Twilight but the whole way of thinking was alien to her.

“Think of it this way, we are so advanced that the bar that we consider to be ‘peaceful’ moved up until people can have an actual serious fight without worrying about even hurting one another. That extends over to things like wars and such.” Gwynn said.

“And, if you’re not convinced later we can take you to the longest siege.” The First Administrator butted in.

“The longest siege?”

“It’s a siege that has been going on for about ten billion years, it’s a popular tourist attraction.”

“Yeah nobody has died there in the last 3 billion years.” Gwynn explained.

“I kinda hate that guy who died 3 billion years ago.” The First Administrator said. “The only reason he did it was to put a break in that record, ran out into the field of fire with no shield up or anything, and they revived him two days later. He was the kind of ass that causes new rules to be invented, and frankly the world could do without those kinds of people.”

“Wait if they brought him back does that mean you have some sort of resurrection magic or did he just not die?”

“That’s a bit of a… complicated question. A yunguaq can come back from just about anything that doesn’t destroy their brain.” The First Administrator explained. “Soul magic being an exception, but bringing them back isn’t magic, it relies on their brain surviving and basically the body healing itself the way you’d heal a cut. It still counts as death though because a yunguaq brain can only survive for so long like that before you start to lose the person inside.”

“And our brains are more… computer-like than a totally organic brain.”

“Anyway.” The First Administrator said. “That’s enough of a break for now, it’s time for you two to fight again, and we’re going to be making the breaks shorter after that as well.”

Twilight and Naudia stared at the First Administrator as he walked off and pointed at the guards he’d brought and said:

“Lets have them fight two this time.”

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

Twilight and Naudia eventually worked their way up to fighting 5 rats at the same time, which turned out to be a disaster. It was thanks to the skilled guards command over the rats that it managed to be a learning disaster. There were all different kinds of rats as well, ones that used purple plaguefire, petals of pink holy magic, ones that used seed attacks that would sprout and dig into their shields, little hard to hit ones that ran on two legs and used shanks.

Apart from having to learn how to fight very quickly Twilight and Naudia also learned that if needed a yunguaq like themselves could essentially refuel on a rice like substance they called “ras”. Ras was rather strange, it stood for “Rice Adjacent Substance” and while it looked a lot like cooked rice the name made it feel… strange to Twilight, like it should be something else.

Twilight and Naudia collapsed into bed that night, exhausted. They had, by Twilight’s count, fought fifteen rounds against whatever kinds of rats could be summoned to fight them. And just as they were learning to fight the rats, the rats had been learning to fight them.

“Round five went well.” Naudia said optimistically.

“But they had already caught on to our strategy by round 6, I couldn’t smokescreen them out with my lichen spores after that.”

“I have a nasty suspicion that part of that was the rats holding back before then as well.”

They lay in their bed where they had flopped down.

“You’ve had to learn how to fight before, Did we improve over all that Naudia?”

“More than I would have expected from a changeling training program.” Naudia didn’t sound optimistic though.

Twilight took the massive effort to turn her head to Naudia.

“Changeling training programs take years, and despite my best efforts to numerate performance… well that turned out to be a bad idea overall. I can’t say objectively how much we improved, but it worries me that they’ve moved over to this from more normal teaching methods.”

“It does feel like they’re just throwing us into things to let us learn how to swim on our own.”

“What do you think of all this Twilight?”

“While I have been known to schedule everything out in advance, the downside to that is unexpected or forgotten things. Celestia sprung a test on me with only a days notice, and I stayed up late that night cramming to study.” Twilight winced at the memory. “There is only so much cramming can do to make up for proper studying. I don’t know if that carries over to actual fighting, but the First Administrator moving over to this I think says a lot more about what he thinks of the situation than he would want.”

“Do you think they’re more spooked by the nerteln, or that clock?”

“I couldn’t say.”