Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 29 Partisan Weapons

Partisan Weapons

The Werewolf Queen Expat Eclipse was having a tiring day. He was both a werewolf and a pony so a lot of days could be tiring, he wanted to be a werewolf, werewolves were cool. But he was also a pony and that caused problems, ponies couldn’t digest meat in any great capacity, I mean sure salmon tasted great, and once you got them open crab was also great. It was extremely important to keep his diet working around specific things.

The few rumors he’d heard about werewolves overseas were that Griffons didn’t suffer from these same problems at all. Their problems were more related to going from beaks to no beaks.

Ah well, he mentally sighed, The grass was always greener.

Moving back to the problem at hand he was fulfilling his duty as a cabbage farmer, trying to pull in an early harvest to help out the poor souls who had staggered in from Knicknik. Eclipse would have never even dreamed of asking them to do anything right now, even the ones who looked like they were functioning were just barely managing to keep it together.

He was however, looking forward to later when he could act as an emotional support werewolf.

It was when he was loading up cabbages from the basket, a very nice grass basket that he made himself, into the wagon when he noticed something up in the sky. It wasn’t a pegasus, and at first he couldn’t make out what it was, once the two objects got closer he had an idea but it was still strange.

It was Twilight and Naudia floating over on a pair of folding camp chairs each carrying a large wooden box behind them. It was the strangest thing he had seen all day, which wasn’t saying much because Eclipse was wrapping up an invigorating day inspecting and harvesting cabbages.

Naudia landed gracefully, her chair and box gently settling to the ground with ease. Twilight attempted to do a pegasus walking landing, which ended up with her tumbling end over end, thankfully the box she was carrying simply thudded to the ground and scraped to a halt. Eclipse could feel it hit the dirt from where he was standing, it probably could have hurt Twilight. Thinking about what she had done the other day though, maybe not.

Hastily he helped Twilight get up and clear the mud off her face. Unfortunately she had the poor timing of crashing into the cabbage field post watering.

Sputtering and spitting dirt Twilight said: “First learning how to fly as a pegasus, and now this, I wish I had more time to learn, or that anything I learned carried over.”

“I don’t know what to say Twilight, it’s just easy for me to fly these broomsticks.” Naudia quipped.

“That’s because they fly like an insect does, hovering, tricks, not like a normal pegasus does.”

Then Twilight did something strange, the air around her shimmered for a second lifting all of the mud off her skin. Then in an orderly fashion all of the dirt and mud flowed around her to the ground as if carried by a stream of water.

“I don’t suppose you could teach any of the unicorns here how to do that spell, could you Twilight?” Eclipse said gesturing with a dirt splattered hoof. “it would make working in these fields so much more pleasant.”

“Sorry, not right now, we came here on business.” Twilight said, not looking happy about that.

“Doctor Willow is heading this way.” Naudia said grimly. “And he’s bringing an army with him.”

“Oh,” Expat Eclipse said. “Oh buck.” As he felt his heart sink into his hooves.

Looking at the two, he glanced over at the two large wooden boxes they brought over.

“I suppose those are some kind of way to help us escape, like more of those… uh flying chairs?”

“We aren’t going to be running. Doctor Willow dies here.” Twilight said in such an easy matter of fact way that it gave Eclipse chills.

“Where did he even get an army? Did some big group from down south come in?” Expat Eclipse asked.

“He managed to figure out one of my spells, so he spent a lot of time summoning monsters made out of lichen.” Twilight frowned as she said that.

“That’s why we have to kill him here. The powerbase he already has is too large, so to aid in that we brought you guys some... partisan weapons.” Naudia cracked the lid on one of the wooden crates and pulled out something that looked like two wands with a rifle grip. “Ever fired a gun before?”

“Yeah, we got timberwolves up here,” Eclipse said. “They stay away, most of the time, but just past the fall storms they start to try and come after us. Lots of branches get knocked off trees, see, so that means lots more stick wolves.”

Naudia tossed Eclipse the “partisan weapon”, instantly he could tell a lot about it. It was designed after a double barrel, over under, break action. Fiddling with at it with his hooves he got it to open up revealing an empty box where presumably the… ammo? Went, it was a “gun” with wands instead of barrels so he had no idea how that would work.

Looking at the outside of the wand-gun thing it had a kinda boxy-straight line filled filigree in some sort of amber gemstone. The wood was fine though, probably the cleanest woodwork he had ever seen, like the whole thing was made from a single piece of wood, not even carved, like somebody had found some kind of naturally shotgun-shaped wood suitable for making this magic wand-shotgun.

Looking over the crate was full of these things all folded up, tied together with strange coiled up living vines and what were obviously leather ammo pouches, but only two cube shaped ammo things per gun. There were also other things in the box buried beneath the strange shotguns.

“We don’t have a whole lot of time, you need to get anybody who can hold a staff or a gun up here so we can get them ready for Doctor Willow’s arrival.”

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Twilight was surprised by how many ponies were here to fight from Knicknik. They looked scuffed, beaten, hungry, but there was a fire in their eyes. These were frontier ponies who lived in a place that didn’t have anything as big or as scary as a hydra or a star beast, but she realized it made up for that with and abundance of things like spruce timberwolves, cast off windigo fragments, and the lantern scorpions luring cold travelers to their doom.

There were also more weapons in the crates than just the shotgun, but they were more familiar to ponies, well familiar-ish. The first was the “resistance pistol” it was a “pistol” built as simply as possible, didn’t even have a barrel, the “bullets” were little flying rings like it was a toy, and you fired it by pulling on a string at the back of the gun which spun up the rings. It was cheap, slow to fire, but when it hit it ignited in a green flame which summoned a little rat to attack the target. A space efficient emergency weapon for ponies on the backline.

The last weapon in there was the staff, it was a similar ring rod setup as the shotgun, but the staff looked ceremonial. The paper cartridges were instead two long bundles of ribbon-like paper strands attached to the head of the staff. The head of the staff had a gemstone that had a strange blown glass like look to it, but when it was activated it left a trail in the air. Looking into it tended to make ponies turn back to find that there was nothing behind them. The staff itself was wrapped in fireweed and had a set of locking dials on them.

Twilight didn’t like those dials.

Sure there was an explanation and whatnot for them, a history of yunguaq children forced to be send off into space, raised by a couple animals, an AI, and importantly an atusaaq rabbit.

Twilight still didn’t like that the staff summoned in a shield around the user in the shape of a rabbit in a maid outfit. That was what those dials were for, adjusting the summoned in… well maid rabbit shell, anything from a halloween costume to something that actually looked like a work garment. Basically, she was told, what an atusaaq rabbit would wear. And the one with shorts instead of skirt, in her opinion, ruined the whole look too.

Twilight had not yet been able to get Naudia to dress up like one of the Canterlot Castle maids. She just couldn’t get Rarity to make a second-

Anyway, the staff was the most complicated to use, and it was fortunate that it came with an inbuilt tutorial on how to use it. It was surprising how many of the werewolves, mares and stallions gravitated towards the staves once they knew what they did.

“They’re werewolves Twilight, they like change.” Eclipse told her. “I’m sure you noticed that not all of their transformations match their pony forms.”

“What? No I haven’t.”

“The werewolf form you’re given doesn’t always match the sex of the pony underneath.”

“But… then why aren’t you guys looking for a cure?” Naudia said puzzled.

“Every werewolf here is here because they want to be a werewolf. Those that don’t head down to Canterlot or Manehatten to get cured.”

“Then why the hay was Doctor Willow looking for a cure?!” Twilight exclaimed.

“The cure works with harmony magic. It only works on a werewolf who WANTS to be cured.”

Eclipse spat onto the ground.

“Doctor Willow was looking for a way around that.”

Twilight and Naudia cringed back in horror.

“How was that even allowed?”

“Small town, thick walls, maybe you show up one day with some scratches and say a werewolf attacked you, completely out of control. Enchant a garden hoof rake and leave some claw marks on the wall, show ponies that door where you’ve got a really angry werewolf and in the right light, to the right ponies word spreads. Turns out he was behind all that cultist business right?”

Twilight and Naudia nodded.

“Well then it turned out it was very easy to get us to stop talking to one another once that started up. That’s how things got so bad out here.” Eclipse’s gaze dropped to the ground. “We never did find out what he was doing until it was too late. Thought Miss Pear just lost it for some reason.”

There wasn’t really much more to say after that. They turned back to watch the ponies and werewolves practicing with their yunguaq provided equipment.

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

Doctor Willow looked out at his army and smiled. These lichen wolves were perfect servants, cheaper to maintain than one of his fake pony guards, cheaper to create, and they seemed stronger to boot.

He had spent all of yesterday and last night creating enchanted discs that would create them. each ramshackle enchanted wagon wheel “disc” had been working since he had finished them, and they were working now still growing the numbers for his army.

The werewolves, they would feed his research, they would help him understand the limits of this new magic. Creation, destruction, the fabric of the universe itself was at his command. There was nobody else that deserved this power, this honor, this responsibility to reshape ponykind.

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“This is chandelier actual, bandit burner you are cleared for immediate launch. I say again, this is chandelier actual, bandit burner you are cleared for immediate launch.”

“Copy that.”

Gwynn Hall felt the acceleration of the small craft push back on her as they lifted off from the cloaked chandelier city hanging down from space. She didn’t even blink as they blasted through the launch bay which seemed to instantly close behind them.

Their ship’s cilia thrusters were specifically positioned for atmospheric flight, working with the shape of the hull to destructively cancel out any noise. It cut through the air unseen and silent, like a ghost.

Gripping onto the ceiling handholds Gwyn turned around, she was in her full combat werewolf form, she looked the part of the high ranking assassin that she was. Coming back into the main compartment of the ship to the three elite military squads sitting anxiously.

This wasn’t your typical special forces mission, this was against a nerteln. The only people who wouldn’t be nervous about that would be too stupid to make it into a group like this.

“ALL RIGHT.” Gwynn barked. “When we touch down there shouldn’t be anything out there but vegetables and tenders. Redback squad, I want every tender dead within five minutes of touchdown. Centimus squad I want you right behind them planting charges. Mark down any location we will have to use a Rod Cavitation Warhead on.”

Gwynn turned to the other side of the room.

“Unglu squad, I want you to do a flyover around and outside of the town, find any remnants we might have missed, we do NOT want to come back down here. Tractor Tanks, I want you between us and the enemy. They come back and you WILL hold the line until we are ready for evac.”

As they touched down in Knicknik Gwynn got a taste of the air here, it was technically clean air, no smoke, no pollution. But there was something much more foul that she could feel, it made her hair stand on end. Everybody getting out of the transport felt it too, they were all in attack mode as soon as they left that door.

You never got used to it. People who got used to it either quit, or they died.

The blanket of stress on the group caused all of them to lower their voices, they were somewhere they should not be. In whispered tones they began to carry out their tasks with one eye over their shoulders.

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Twilight was watching the atuusaq rabbits at work, well the werewolves with the atuusaq rabbit shaped shielding. There was a wide display of different ones out on the field, but they all had a few things in common, their ears were wreathed in pink flames that resembled, fireweed stalks, similar to the pink flames coming out of the top of the staves.

They also all had a gathering of 8 similarly dressed little rabbits that they summoned in. The little rabbits all held one of those pink fireweed flower flames in their hands like a candle. All of the rabbits were shawled in a ghostly aura that dangled off them like cloth, with colors like blown glass. It seemed to not just drift behind them, but to lag behind them as if multiple things in the same place were catching up to reality.

And then there was how they fought. Twilight was wondering why she and Naudia weren’t given such staves at first because these inexperienced ponies very quickly figured out how to use them. They had a rotation of attacks down flawlessly sending pink flames at their targets as well as other attacks with that ghostly aura within minutes.

The rabbits were commanded to attack in one of two ways, spraying that pink fireweed magic at a target, which resembled a snake of fireweed flowers in pink fire. That spell tended to leave a stalk standing out which went to seed and blew cotton spores onto another target. The other spell seemed to take advantage of that weakness to send a ghostly slash at that damaged point which caused many more ghostly cuts to happen.

Most of what they were doing in the background was making sure that the rabbits could keep doing this, granting them plantlike wings, stoking the pink flames they had, and occasionally granting them MUCH stronger attacks.

That was when Twilight realized what was wrong, and why she and Naudia had been taught what they had been taught. These ponies with staves and their tutorials were not only weaker than Naudia and Twilight, they were inflexible. In five minutes these ponies had gone from the skill floor to the exact skill ceiling of how to use these partisan weapons.

And that worried Twilight. She knew that right now she was a big fish in a small pond, the scale of how strong she was compared to any antagonist she had ever faced at this moment was incomprehensible. Chrysalis wouldn’t be able to so much as touch her mind, Discord’s magic would be utterly ineffectual, Tierek could blow away a mountain, but even if every ounce of force he had was concentrated into a single spot on her shielding it wouldn’t even leave a scratch. She had command over space itself, time magic could not effect her.

And there was a monster coming this way lineaged from a type of magic so powerful, that a single planet worth of them brought a multi-galactic empire to the brink of extinction.

A monster who, presumably on examining fragments of her lichen wolf torn off in the city, had created an army of them. No, more than that, he had enchanted some old wagon wheels to constantly spew out more and more of them.

Caught between that monster Doctor Willow and an incomprehensible eldritch god sleeping below Equestria, she was working off of a plan she didn’t entirely trust.

“Drop this glyph onto the ground, put some magic into it, and protect it until it fully charges up.”

Twilight looked down at the folded up, printed shiny cardboard, glyph. And she frowned at it.

It wasn’t even anything cool, it was just a white square with a bunch of square black dots on it. It didn’t mean anything as far as she knew, the black dots didn’t have any pattern, and if you considered it the other way around there wasn’t any pattern in the white spaces either.

She was trusting Naudia’s, all the werewolves, and her life, on this enchanted square of printed cardboard as some kind of gambit to get her out from in between the strongest monster she’d likely ever face, and something below that had dreamed Equestria into existence known only as “The Godbreaker”.

Oh yeah and they would know if this was a failure if a heavenly pantheon of dead gods descended from the sky to herald a war upon the entire universe.

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

Naudia was watching the recruits a lot more closely than Twilight, she was in charge of placing them around. She was far more concerned about how to actually use these ponies. This was almost exactly like that time she and a squad of wounded changelings had gotten stuck inside a cave with antlion-bears burrowing in.

There was only so far that she could trust these ponies to work and they had to protect on two fronts, below in the colony, and up above here in an open field.

Down below it was the nightmare of protecting unarmed ponies from something snaking it’s way through the rats nest of tunnels down there. It was obvious how to use the tools they had but it still was just as stressful as always to lay them out.

Naudia would be keeping the bulk of the ring rod shotguns down below, they seemed particularly well set up to create choke-points and loopholes to fire out of. The whole situation down there would have to manage itself, as Twilight and Naudia would have to remain up here to face down the nerteln directly.

She was going to place them down in the main hall. It was a bad spot to defend as it was two stories high and it had many small entrances as well as a few large ones they could not block off. She was going to collapse those smaller tunnels, and then plant the extra ivy barricades that came with the shotguns there. Then she was going to turn those larger entrances into funnels filled with shotgun loopholes and firing squads of those pistols.

Unfortunately this meant that the important defenders, the ponies with staves, would have to cover two doorways at the same time, they had the summons to do that, but it was far from an ideal situation.

That was the nightmare down below, the nightmare up above was worse.

This was where the bulk of their ponies were and there were no non-combatants unless you counted cabbages. That was the only upside she could think of for their situation up here.

Defending these open fields of vegetables was going to be an utter nightmare. Down below you could create these nasty chokepoints full of intersecting firing lines. Up here? It wasn’t just that this was a wide flat field, it was a wide flat field going up against opponents who might be able to fly. And it NEEDED to be in this wide flat field for the glyph to work.

The thing about being up here was that the shotguns, were going to be great. They had a decently tight spread and they were loaded with some sort of magic that summons in these disposable little electric-y orbiting clouds of debris, her broadcast system called them static demons. They sucked a bit, but they would all be attempting to either distract the enemy or bring back battlefield debris to re-fuel the shotguns.

Plus as it was very evident the shotguns had more than one shot in them, there were 5 shots loaded onto the wands and more in the magazine? It was made of a stack of enchanted paper so she called it a magazine.

“Hey Twilight.” Naudia said.

“Hmmm?” Twilight said distracted.

“When all this is over, lets get married.”

“I always thought you didn’t really want to do a formal wedding.”

“We were always just too busy, but after this I want to take a break and have a wedding, a big wedding.”

“I thought you wanted a break.”

“Organizing a wedding doesn’t count.”

Naudia stared out at the ponies practicing in the field, trying to decide when it would be a good time to have them stop.

“And the First Administrator is going to pay for the wedding.”

Twilight chuckled.

“A big wedding right? A REALLY big wedding.”

“The largest and most lavish changeling wedding ever held, there will be a fountain of liquified joy, punch bowls filled with emotions.” Naudia blue skied.

“The wedding cake will have to have seven tiers.”

“Every other tier will be geled emotions, topped with strawberries.”

“And the other tiers will have candied roses.”

“Do you think that they could have some of those… what were they called?” Naudia rubbed her hoof on her chin. “Those hamburgers, like we had at that one restaurant.”

Just then their computer tablets beeped at them, pulling them out the message said that Doctor Willow’s forces were on the way.

It was time to set up for the final battle.