Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 30 Thralls

Thralls

Rolled Oats gripped onto the staff he was holding, was that sound just a bit of rock settling? Was it one of his fellow ponies nervously settling in. He scanned the cavern from the vantage point of being a tall two legged rabbit creature. Well controlling some sort of magic construct from inside, it felt so natural he had forgotten, probably because he was used to being a werewolf.

He was honestly not sure if he was happy or not that he was the one that found Princess Twilight first. It was getting him noticed in ways he wasn’t exactly happy with.

Like right now where he was one of only a few ponies in charge of guarding the scared refugees and nervous ponies huddled in the main hall. There were two walls in front of the two tunnel entrances he was guarding and they were both set up to funnel whoever would be coming out through there directly at him.

And he was standing there as an “atusaaq rabbit”, some bipedal rabbit thing wearing a maid outfit with 8 rabbits and a staff with less than 15 minutes training and he was expected to fight. The maid outfit was honestly fine, he was able to customize it enough so that it was fine, it just didn’t feel that… safe.

The ponies around him who were also expected to fight were all behind those conjured walls with loopholes in them to fire out of. That felt safe, that looked safe, you only had to take one look at the glowing transparent wall to think “That looks a lot safer than standing around as a rabbit in a maid outfit waiting for something to come tear your throat out.”

The absolute worst part about all this was that he knew that just after 15 minutes of practice, after never ever seeing it before in his life, he was already essentially capped out as to how effective he could be with this strange weapon setup. There really was nothing more to learn about how to use the staff.

He should have known from the very start. There never could have been a good reason for a Princess of all things to come out here, even if she was a werewolf like them.

That was when the first of Doctor Willow’s monsters shambled out of the darkened tunnel and into the cavern. All anypony could do was stare at it. They had all seen Twilight’s werewolf form, and Twilight’s other werewolf form, the one made out of lichen.

This was clearly something trying to imitate that second one, but it was wrong.

Staggering forward the thing had seven thighs, three feet, five shins, four hips, an unknown number of heads, and maybe three tails? The whole thing looked like somepony understood vaguely how to put together a wolf made of green lichen and then they had been the manager for 12 ponies who didn’t. The things made no sound other than their shambling scraping footsteps as it tripped and flopped into the cavern.

Rolled Oats honestly could not tell if the thing had a head or not, or if it did, how many heads it had, or how many faces. There were things that looked like heads, things that at the right angle could have been faces, they had the shapes of those things but it was hard to tell. There was nothing you could say definitively “that is a snout” without somebody else coming in and calling it an ear, or maybe it was supposed to be fluff on the side of their faces.

That was how the monster was put together, but all over, it’s entire body was like that. The only recognizable thing about it was that there was a dead branch stuck through it’s torso.

After what felt like an eternity staring in horror, trying to make sense of the monster it made eye contact? Mouth contact? It met Rolled Oat’s gaze, stiffened up and then let out a disgusting mockery of a howl, as if it’s mossy insides were as confused as it’s outsides.

Then somepony blasted it in the face with one of the shotguns.

An angry red infinity symbol shaped loop exploded into it’s face and shattered, the red shards glowed as they shredded into the hollow lichen creature. It’s mossy hide falling apart as if those glass-like shards had sliced through the connecting seams holding it’s empty plant-like body together.

That was when another one of the monsters shambled in out of the darkened tunnel, and then another. Judging by what he could hear Rolled Oats was pretty sure they were coming out of the other open tunnels as well.

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“Operation dreamshaper is a go.”

There was a massive flurry of activity inside the chandelier city hanging down from the orbital ring. The whole thing was cloaked from the ground by coating the underside in tens of thousands of miles of screens, and they were going to take advantage of that now.

“Bandit Burner has completed their mission, no sign of any forces called back to Knicknik.”

The First Administrator frowned at that. Either Doctor Willow was dumber than expected, less developed in his soul magic, or he knew something was up. Either situation had significant problems for his plan.

“Are the redback squadrons ready?”

“Yes, all redbacks are prepped and awaiting your orders.”

“How about the number 3 infinity mirror burner? I know we were having problems with that one.”

The aide didn’t know the answer to that and instantly turned to their display to start questioning maintenance crews. The First Administrator turned to another Aide.

“Is the glyph in place where it should be?”

Looking at the screen he could see the cardboard glyph in place exactly where it should be. Of course it was all theatrics, but that was the entire point. They were there to take the focus of the godbreaker away from the peaceful ponies, put him in a deeper sleep for as long as possible with visions of a universe filled with endless wars.

He glared down at the screen that showed the approaching Doctor Willow and his shambled together army of half-assed lichenthropes.

Regardless of the consequences, he was going to find a way to get back at this “Vatermorder” for this. Forcing him to choose between the stability of the universe and lettering a nerteln exist. Even if it took until the end of time.

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

There was a delay between Doctor Willow sending the wolves to clear through the crevasse entrance to the werewolf compound and realizing that something was going on up on the surface that required his direct attention. Naudia was happy about that because it let the glyph charge up more.

The first horrible mockery of Twilight’s lichenthrope form stumbled out from a willow thicket and had only the time to get it’s bearings for a moment before it’s head exploded into a cloud of lichen. Twilight had nailed it with her sling from her place all the way out in the middle of the cabbage field.

Naudia took a sidelong glance at Twilight who was staring off into the treeline to see if she could catch any more of the creatures. Her expression was intense, she was wearing that lichen wolf pelt on her head, and her body was in full werewolf mode, her wolfen face twisted into a snarl. She looked angry, she felt angry to Naudia, and she had already summoned in another projectile into her short sling.

Naudia pulled out her own sling, and slotted in one of her bacteria, it struck her for a moment that a highly advanced spacefaring civilization was having her fight with a sling, as a weird bacteria based werewolf. But they were just strange overall.

“Huh,” Naudia said as another lichen monster shambled out of the forest. “I guess they’re just kinda bad at navigating.”

This lichen monster was far to the left of the previous one, like way far, not far enough to escape the wrath of Twilight’s sling, but still a full cabbage field away. While they were focused on that Naudia caught movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to see one coming out almost the same distance to the right. Naudia had this one.

After nailing that one and watching it shrivel away being sucked dry by Naudia’s bacteria, which began to lazily cilia it’s away through the air back to her. It became apparent why they were showing up on such a wide angle from each other.

That’s just how many there were, the lichen monsters crowded out of the forest across a huge part of the cabbage fields. There were just so many that they had to spread out across that huge distance. They were clumsy things, inelegant thrown together monsters.

The ponies behind the barricades could only stare at the malformed abominations.

Sure Twilight and Naudia took one down each time they hit one, an easy feat as the dull creatures did not bother to dodge, but there were hundreds. Naudia estimated there likely would be thousands.

Then it was like a switch was flipped inside the monsters heads, as if the barricade of ponies with shotguns, ponies inside of summoned rabbit bodies, and the two strange werewolf ponies finally came into view for the thralls. The monsters closest to the front pulled back their heads and let forth some sort of gurgling antithesis to coherent speech, like somebody was trying to strangle a drowning wolf.

And then they charged.

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

Rolled Oats realized something about these monsters, despite their malformed looks, and how easily they fell apart when hit by these partisan weapons, they were essentially invincible to conventional attacks. One pony threw a rock the size of a watermelon into the group and it bounced off the wolf like it was made of paper mache.

They made up for their twisted bodies with sheer strength to push themselves forward faster than they should have been able to move, digging furrows into the dirt as inefficient legs scrabbled them along like bugs. Unable to even stand fully upright they were uncontrollably weaving back and forth at the mercy of their own malformed legs.

Rolled Oats cast another spell with his staff, it flared to life with pink flames which passed itself along to the atusaaq rabbits under his command. It arced onto their rabbit ears and breathed new life into the fireweed shaped flames they held in their hands. Their leaf-like wings thrummed with power.

The rabbits took advantage of this buff which seemed to accelerate them. They pumped their arms back and forth punching rapid fire snakes of burning fireweed flower stalks at the approaching wolves. Each stalk as soon as it landed burrowed and burned into a lichenthrope like a blast of fire. The end of the stalk would remain there seeming to make the fires burn brighter.

With 8 rabbits firing off at the same time he had a bit of a realization. Despite everything he was a lot safer here than the ponies behind the barricades were. The ponies with the shotguns and the ripcord pistol-ish things, they were gap fillers, a wall that was expected to shoot occasionally. HE was the main force, the ponies lined up with those strange shotguns were depending on HIM to hold the enemy back so they didn’t get overwhelmed.

Deciding to take a more proactive role Rolled Oats pressed one of his other buttons that was green, he liked this button, he’d only had that button for less than an hour, but it was already his favorite. He really wished he could use it more often.

The staff he was holding flared to life, the twin bundles of paper ribbons glowed as the spell charged up, all of his summoned rabbits ducked down. The monsters used this opening to shuffle closer, panicking the ponies behind the barricades started blasting away with their shotguns, and he could see even a couple of the pistol shots whirr out and set the monsters alight in green fire.

Now though his staff flaring to life with pink flames Rolled Oats swept it across the monsters as it billowed out a jet of pink flames. He could feel the heat of the flames from where he was standing as the monsters crackled and writhed, falling apart as they burned.

Rolled Oats smiled as these stolen mockeries of Twilight’s werewolf form smoldered, they had lost quite a bit of ground just from that one attack he had made. But then he stopped for a second puzzled.

One of the monsters in the back was dragging off the fallen remains of one of the monsters that has been blasted apart by a shotgun. He wasn’t quite sure what the hay was going on until he saw some of the other monsters coming out of the tunnels which bore unmistakable scorch marks.

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“They’re putting themselves back together!” Roared Twilight, her anger showing through as she was in full werewolf form.

They had stolen her spell, badly, these monsters were trampling on proper spellwork and learning. Oh yes, she could see it back there almost hidden in the shadows off to the left, her eyes snapped to it like a hawk as only a glimpse of it peeked out between the shadowy treeline. Those horrible, shoddy, wagon wheels that birthed these monsters. Before she didn’t think she could get angrier at Doctor Willow, but this new anger seemed to pull a snarl from her very being.

Collecting herself for a moment, Twilight decided that she was going to show these artless monsters true spellwork. Something they would NOT be coming back from.

Twilight’s watery shield rippled and stabbed forward at one of the monsters that was making a clumsy slash at her. The monster fell apart, but Twilight wasn’t done, she slammed it with a summoned ball of lichen which burst into a cloud of spores. The spores began to eat into the monster’s empty plant-like husk fueled by the remains of Twilight’s watery attack.

The feeling of being inside the spore cloud was strange, Twilight wasn’t experiencing it herself personally, she was experiencing it through the lichenthrope pelt she wore on her head. But it was like breathing in a calm winter forest, she could feel herself leeching power from the remains of the monster, banking up for something BIG.

Another monster down and it was feeding into her lichenthrope pelt. Another monster tried to interfere, but it too was cut down. She could feel it, it was ready.

Twilight shifted into lichenthrope form, raised her head to the sky and howled. After a second she was not howling alone, three more lichenthropes had summoned in from the husks she had infected. Putting on a wolfish grin with her werewolf form inside the lichenthrope shell Twilight charged forward into the crowd of monsters.

Loping along on two legs Twilight shredded through the mockeries of her lichenthrope form. The difference in power between her spellwork and these monsters was readily apparent. Twilight could feel how easy it was to just tear one in half with her claws, it was like she was hitting pinatas with her claws as they burst into clouds of her spores.

These spores would drift together and create lesser lichenthropes, they didn’t have nearly the power that the ones she had created at the start did. But compared to what she was fighting now it was almost impossible to tell the difference.

It felt like only seconds had passed for Twilight, but looking back she had cut a wide swath in the monsters that was slowly widening thanks to her own summoned monsters.

As she got further to the back she realized two things.

The first was that the magical muscle she had used to pull that stunt was tired now, she was going to have to wait before even thinking about doing that again.

The second is that as she got closer and closer to the back the monsters were becoming more coherent.

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

Pete was accustomed to holding a shotgun, that was his big hangup about this shotgun. A break action that has a sizable magazine, it just went against all of his instincts with a shotgun. He had to physically stop himself from reloading after every two shots, something he was, to be frank, quite the expert at.

Apart from this shotgun this whole situation was exceedingly familiar, the only thing missing was the smell of fall leaves. And well the smell of cordite, timberwolves for what they were didn’t smell all that much, wasn’t that they didn’t smell at all, they just didn’t smell at woodwolfshot range.

He poked his weird gem filigree shotgun out of the loophole and blasted five of the lichen monsters. The problem was that despite blasting them in the face, or knocking off a leg or two, these things had started to keep going. He thought it might have something to do with how their extraneous limbs seemed to be more organized now.

The thing it reminded him of the most though was about ten years back when the big storm rolled in after the army bark beetle infestation. The year he and the rest of the townsfolk had to sail out of Knicknik entirely on a luckily timed supply boat and rebuild most of the town next year. That was back when the werewolves had a tunnel over to Knicknik for the winter.

He turned to Calva who was behind the barricade next to him and asked:

“Calva, is this,” He poked his gun out and started blasting. “Starting to remind you of back in ‘93, what with the beetles?”

Calva peeked over the barricade at the seemingly endless crowd of monstrous plant wolves.

“Which part.” Calva shouted back over the din.

“Well, when all this started, these things,” Pete shot one for emphasis sending it’s mutated front leg skittering across the floor, “Fell apart like a paper nightmare night costume when you hit them.”

Calva grimaced.

“They aren’t getting up as well as those ones did, see that one?” Calva gestured at a hollow monster who seemed to be half fiery fireweed stalks, and then blew it apart for emphasis.

“Yeah, but something that far gone shouldn’t be able to get back up again, even in the state it was in.”

As Calva leaned behind the barricade to swap out the magazines for his ring rod shotgun he heard something scraping on the barricade. Hastily finishing his reload he found one of the monsters had managed to reach the barricade in that brief window of time, and it was already clawing away at it.

Fast as he could Calva unloaded into the monster, he fired so many shots that monsters behind it started to fall from just the shrapnel leftover from his shotgun blasts.

Eventually his shotgun blasts burrowed past the thing’s plant-like head, into it’s body where the hollow creature was shredded to bits from the inside out. Flakes of magic from Calva’s shotgun embedding themselves into the dirt and nearby monsters, he could even hear one or two ping off of the barrier he was sitting behind.

There was a frozen moment in time where his eyes focused on one of the shrapnel shards that had made it’s way back to him and landed directly on top of his muzzle. To be more accurate on top of the shielding from the “bagrat” as Twilight had called it, that encased his muzzle.

He had felt something actually hit his eye during all of that, well the shield over his eye, it didn’t hurt so he had assumed it was a piece of dirt. He could only stare at the shard for a moment before he remembered something, then Calva started to laugh.

Calva threw back his head and laughed hard and long.

“What?” Pete seemed nervous.

“You remember what they said about this ‘sovereign magic’, you know ‘it will only damage the things it’s targeting’ and all that.”

“Yeah, I remember that load of horse apples.”

“Well Pete, considering how one of those shrapnel shards just hit me in the eye, I think that might actually be right.”

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

Naudia didn’t like these more advanced lichenthrope thralls. They were tougher, they weren’t much smarter, but most importantly there weren’t any less of them. It was disturbing to see the quick change from shambling mutated monsters into stronger and stronger monsters.

That was when she saw him.

Walking inside a formation of those not-pony guards, Doctor Willow was there.

Instantly it felt like an icy hand reached around her heart.

Doctor Willow with his bark brown fur and fading cutie mark of strips of willow bark. His gaze was locked onto Twilight with a frightening intensity. You could feel where he was looking as his eyes swept across the battlefield.

Naudia didn’t notice it but she was already breathing hard.

He was walking alongside two of the guards who were holding up a shoddy broken wagon wheel. Naudia could see his magic at work on the wagon wheel which pulsed and glowed with a pattern of light. His magic felt sickly, gross, unpleasant, like a rotten smell even from this distance.

Her mouth dropped open when she found out what the wagon wheel was for.

The wheel glowed abruptly and a thrall popped out of the top and dropped out of the bottom at the same time. These thralls were exactly like the first ones that had attacked them, malformed. And then after they had rolled limply to a stop they began to abruptly snap and pop back into a more normal form, shedding extra limbs, heads, tails, even a second torso, all dropped limply to the ground.

And then another, and then another.

Naudia looked over at Twilight, mere moments had passed since Doctor Willow had walked into the battlefield. As she met Twilight’s eyes she felt a new feeling growing within herself like a thorny vine.

Hatred.

She understood what Doctor Willow had done, and she hated him. The feeling stabbed into her heart like a fire, demanding action, demanding justice.

Instantly she knew what she had to do here.

Pulling from her list of spells she summoned in a bacteria that absorbed the leftover spell debris that her bacteria had been bringing back. And she plopped it onto Twilight’s back.

“Naudia!” Twilight shrieked. “What the hay?!”

“It’s there to reduce the cooldown on that big ability you just used, it’s apparently one of the things healers do.”

“Wait, your weird bacteria-wolf thingy can be set up for healing?” Twilight questioned in-between spiking a thrall dead with her shield. “The one that shreds things apart with claws, while draining them dry with giant bacteria?”

“Yeah, it revolves around basically slapping people with those same bacteria and slicing off the enemy’s spells.” Naudia said while clawing at the legs of a thrall and muzzling it’s face with one of her oversized bacteria.

“These yunguaq creatures are weird.”

“What gave you that impression? Was it when you woke up as a puddle of slime on the bed, or when you went to Ratburger?”

“Harr harr.” Twilight said back sarcastically.

Naudia checked back on the cardboard glyph, the pulsing lines of red magic were nowhere near the center. It looked like it was going to be quite a while before the spell was actually ready. She hoped it would be something significant, they would need something really significant if things kept going the way they were going now.

There was already a wave of these new and improved thralls approaching, overtaking the slower and dumber monsters. They were also much better at pulling back the shredded thralls for recycling.

It reminded her of the time she and a squad of changelings were ambushed by corrupted changelings out in the desert. But then a clump of lichen flew past her vision into the crowd of monsters. She had Twilight with her now, no matter the odds she would stand up tall against these abominations.