Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 31 The Fire Knew

The Fire Knew

Things underground were getting kind of bad.

It wasn’t that their weapons were ineffective, Rolled Oats’ rabbits were extremely effective, and the strange shotguns were also effective. The problem was that these more organized thralls were steadily becoming more and more effective as time went on.

Case in point: It did nothing good for morale to discover that these barricades were made out of something that could bleed a sort of blue blood-like substance.

Rolled Oats could still see the gash in Pete’s shield where one of the thralls had clawed a larger hole into the barricade and slashed him over his right eye. It wasn’t a real wound, Pete himself wasn’t hurt in any way, but he was covered in the strange blood-stuff and the slash over his eye had started growing lichen.

It was just so easy to think of these shields as part of yourself, Rolled Oats could feel through it, he could feel when it was hurt even though it didn’t hurt. His mind had adapted to this extra set of senses, he had to mentally stop himself from thinking like Pete had actually got a cut across his eye.

The lichenthropes had started crawling their way up the walls of the cave to try and hit them from new angles. It wasn’t that the shotguns couldn’t hit them from that angle, it was that they were smart enough at this point to realize who the real threat in the room was.

They scrabbled along the walls perfectly adapted to each of their uniquely mismatched sets of limbs, heads, eyes, mouths, claws, teeth, Rolled Oats could swear he saw one with either a tusk or a horn made of lichen before it was blasted off the wall. He himself scorched the fallen monsters with pink flames growing little sprigs of glowing magical fireweed from their corpses. When he did this he couldn’t help but smile, because he could tell when he was doing a good job, the thralls didn’t even try to pick up those corpses and gave them a wide berth.

They knew.

It was actually quite unfortunate that the thralls knew… for them. because seeing them try and avoid the clumps of fireweed actually reminded Rolled Oats what he should actually be doing with those.

He placed his staff on the floor and began casting a spell.

Instantly all the atusaaq rabbits surrounding him fell to their knees holding up their little fires of fireweed in supplication. The twin bundles of ribbon-like paper on his staff began to glow, and suddenly, before the lichen thralls could even react the spell was complete.

The ponies around him didn’t even have time to react to the rabbits collapsing to the floor before they were instantly jerked back to the battle at hand. The sprigs of fireweed that Rolled Oats had been casting began to erupt, spraying gouts of pink flames at the thralls.

It was like the fire knew.

Not a single ember even landed on the floor, they all floated down and landed on the thralls like bright glowing flower petals. They burned brightly, brighter than the lights in the cavern Rolled Oats was guarding.

There were thralls on fire everywhere, they dropped from the ceiling like flies, and the fires caught onto the thralls below. They rolled on the floor, gurgling and howling, but the fire stuck to them. They tried to scoop up dirt and smother the fire, but the fire needed no air, and the fire knew. Eventually they tried to use these flames against the barricades themselves, trying to rub up against them and catch them on fire too.

But the fire knew it’s true enemy.

By the time Rolled Oats was done not a single inch of the cavern was so much as scorched, but an entire wave of thralls were nothing but burned lumps. They didn’t even smoke, they let off no heat at all, the fire destroyed these monsters as it was created to do.

“Celestia’s beard.” Pete said staring down at his shotgun. “Where the hay did Twilight get these weapons?”

“I’ve never seen anything like that before.” Calva said. “That’s the kind of magic I’m not even sure if it should exist.”

Rolled Oats looked out at the gap in the enemy lines that he’d created, piles of scorched bodies of thralls, then back down at the staff he was carrying. That wasn’t him, he didn’t cast this magic, it was this staff and the strange base station embedded in the ground behind him. Then it struck him, Twilight had brought multiple staves like this, these were manufactured weapons. He could feel the texture of the staff with the rabbit-shaped shielding it had given him, these were worse than even that, they were mass-manufactured weapons.

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For Twilight and Naudia things were beginning to take a turn for the worse. Twilight would use an ability, then they could feel Doctor Willow’s gaze fall upon them, and then a nearby thrall would copy that ability. They were bad at it, at first, the thralls had no inherent knowledge of these abilities and they seemed to need to learn how to use them. Usually a couple times when they first used an ability they just wouldn’t get it, if they figured it out in the first place.

Like with the ability that shielded Twilight from ranged attacks, the thralls attempted to use it offensively, spraying a gout of spores at her. It obviously did nothing, but now periodically there would be puffs of defensive spores that could catch and dampen(but not fully block) incoming spells. Or Twilight’s ability to accelerate an infection of lichen on a target, make it nastier and more damaging, they didn’t seem to be able to actually get that one.

The one that Twilight had regretted using the most though was one related to her water shield.

She had used her water shield to shear off a lump of thrall lichen that had leeched onto Naudia’s strange bacteria shielding. It physically removed the damaging clump and pasted over the wound in the shielding with water that was absorbed, healing Naudia’s zoetic shield.

They learned about this one VERY quickly, it wasn’t useful on the attack, but the thralls were now working against their ranged attacks. Some of them were even staying back to effectively end the duo’s ranged attacks for good. This obviously didn’t help that much with the magical shotguns blasting at them from the barricades, but the true threat, the real damage dealers here were Twilight and Naudia, it wasn’t even close.

But Twilight picked up on something first, faster than Doctor Willow did. These thralls, they were weak, and while they were learning skills they weren’t getting any tougher, or anymore energy. Whatever skills these things had, they were disposable, limited. Which gave Twilight an idea.

Mentally marking a slower thrall Twilight started focusing on it, pelting it with triple slings of lichen, small cloudbursts of spores, and small explosive spikes of water.

Sure enough the thralls focused on keeping that one alive, expertly slicing off and healing every wound Twilight carved into the mossy monster.

With her gaze she followed one of the monsters that had used up it’s healing spells and then charged it’s away after her snarling and holding up a copy of her water shield.

There was a sharp explosive sound as Twilight caved it’s head in, straight through the shield with a spike of water from her own liquid shield. This was so much easier, their weakened shields broke like paper, and the hollow monsters snapped like dry twigs.

“Naudia!” Twilight shouted.

Naudia couldn’t turn away from her battle but Twilight saw one of her ears flag up. Naudia was currently shredding a thrall with her werewolf claws, the thrall covered in her giant bacteria that was visibly sucking it dry. As the battle went on Naudia had gathered a larger and larger swarm of bacteria around her.

“These thralls have a very limited amount of magic in them, we need to fight them by working around that. It takes a lot for them to cut one of our damaging spells off them, try and use the most efficient spells you have that stick around.”

There was a slow grin that grew on Naudia’s face, and Twilight soon realized why.

These bacteria she was attacking with didn’t just fall to the ground like Twilight’s lichen clumps, they flew back to Naudia on their own. And she could refresh them and use them again.

“Twilight!” Naudia shouted back, “How is the summoning glyph or whatever doing?”

Twilight used a spell that caused her lichenthrope pelt to start attacking on it’s own, a fairly expensive spell, one she couldn’t use that often. The kind of spell where she could physically feel the part of her that cast it tire out. But she needed to know how the glyph was doing.

The strange square glyph was lighting up, there was no doubt of that, but there was no pillar of light coming from it. The lights that moved through patterns on it had started to move, albeit slowly, but they didn’t look nearly as dim as they did when the glyph was first activated.

She was told that the final activation would be rather abrupt, but this didn’t look like it was going to activate anytime soon.

As she turned back to the battle at hand her voice caught in her throat for a moment, just a moment, it was so short nobody else even noticed, but that moment was etched into her mind, captured like a photograph of carnage.

Naudia stood there inside of her bacteria based werewolf form, visible as if floating inside of some kind of giant transparent microbe edged in cilia. Twilight could see the determination on Naudia’s face through the splatter of transparent glowing blue liquid that the zoetic shields bled. Naudia was slinging a large bacteria with her short sling.

Around her floated a flock of semi-transparent bacteria, there were tons of them floating around waiting their turn for another go round. A lot of them didn’t even go through the sling and were swarming any thrall that got too close sucking the monster dry, and lifting them off the ground to thrash them about like a pack of wild dogs.

The real terrifying ones though were the ones that were supercharged by Naudia's sling, you could watch any of those that didn’t get removed visibly suck the life out of these fragile thralls. Great patches of the lichen simply draining of life and color as the hollow monsters were fed upon by these wolf-like protozoa.

Anything that got too close to her was slashed down by her claws. The scene of Naudia fighting was almost enough for Twilight to forget the numerous withered clumps of lichen that she had been hit with. Naudia showed no signs of slowing, yet, but her shielding was pockmarked by blue bleeding holes.

Standing next to Naudia on the pile of dead thralls was Twilight’s shadow, a well groomed and complete lichenthrope standing above the frail and malformed copies in all of it’s wolfen glory. It’s teeth were shredding apart a thrall while periodically it’s shield would spike outwards to take off the head of a nearby thrall. Occasionally it would use one of it’s free paws to infect a thrall with a spray of lichen that was trying something further away.

It too was bleeding from many small wounds both fresh and old like Naudia, seemingly unstoppable it ignored them. Some of the shriveled up pieces of lichen were already falling out, revealing fresh zoetic shielding underneath.

This battlefield was burned into her mind, this was what she and Naudia were to an outsider. Unstoppable forces of nature that commanded terrifying and new magic standing atop a growing mound of fallen monsters with no signs of slowing.

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Expact Eclipse, queen of the werewolves felt small. He wasn’t used to feeling small being the local mayor and religious leader rolled into one. He was used to people looking up to him as an example. He had to watch himself, he had to be careful as to what he was saying because he was the bridge between this farming settlement of werewolves and the rest of ponykind.

He wasn’t sure he liked Twilight and Naudia right now, he could never say it to anybody, or anything like that. But he was jealous and scared out of his mind of them at the same time.

Yeah he was carrying this staff thing, yeah he felt pretty strong slinging spells with it and powering up his little gang of rabbits. He had his own respectable little pile of those strange hollow thralls around.

All of this paled in comparison to what Twilight and Naudia could do to those thralls.

He could have trouble with the thralls, he could have trouble hitting them, he could have to use more than a couple spells to take one down. He couldn’t tear their throats out with a single swipe of his hand.

These spells he had were incredibly powerful, nothing but a direct attack from one of the thralls could so much as touch him. The thralls had tried throwing a boulder at him when he was distracted and it couldn’t even bend his rabbit ears. The problem was that the thralls were the same way, they were both on a level with each other in that respect, and it was disturbing to think that he was far closer to these thralls in power than to Twilight or Naudia, strange and fearsome werewolves that they were.

The thralls were even starting to catch onto that too.

This whole situation left a pit in Eclipse’s stomach. These forces were sitting there trading advantages and new techniques, and Twilight and Naudia were VERY strong. It’s just that these thralls never seemed to let up, and they had some method to talk to each other, to learn from the thralls that had already died. He didn’t think that his side of things would be able to keep up in this little information trade.

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Up in the chandelier military base hanging down from from the great orbital ring central command was in a frenzy processing data and organizing forces.

“Subject’s learning rate is on par with nerteln leverets encountered in the past, elevating threat level.”

“Thrall production speed is above expected amount, get bandit burner to investigate.”

“Defense team’s performance is operating at above expected combat strength.”

“Unexpected movements of local star and moon, please advise.”

“Thralls have less total energy than expected, they seem to be spread a bit thin.”

“Militia combat units holding up as well as can be expected, no casualties.”

In the middle of all this chaos was the First Administrator, as he stalked about the room he was coordinating people. Connecting seemingly unrelated pieces of information together with the practiced eye of somebody who had coordinated attacks like this for billions of years. The chaos in the room in his eyes was actually a finely controlled thing that he plucked on like a guitar string.

Perhaps that’s why he had been complacent with a nerteln. Made assumptions about a nerteln.

Perhaps it was that damn Vatermorder, unconsciously he glanced up at the indicator clock on the wall. It had moved backwards by a second or two.

Just then his ears picked up on a report from bandit burner squad.

“Chandelier actual come in, this is bandit burner, we have a situation down here.” Came Gwynn Hall’s voice over the radio. “We’ve been unable to find the initial thrall, I repeat we can find no sign of Pomology Pear.”

It was like the world had suddenly turned cold. Every one of the First Administrator in the room stopped dead, and they were all looking at the same spot. Nobody could see more than one of him at a time but a huge portion of the amphitheater sized command room stopped what they were doing as well.

Just like that the First Administrator was behind the panicked radio operator shouting into his microphone. Abruptly people got back to work even more frantically.

“Bandit burner this is the First Administrator get your ass up here immediately, we could be dealing with a prime ghoul. I repeat possible prime ghoul return to base immediately.”

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

Doctor Willow had figured something out, Twilight could occasionally feel him looking out here at them, his gaze sweeping across them like a cold wind.

Twilight had noticed something as well, the wagon wheel summoning devices had gone quiet, coming towards them in the next wave of thralls was a gap, the first such gap she had seen in this entire battle. The nerteln had stopped summoning in more thralls.

And then all the thralls on the battlefield were dead.

Twilight and Naudia stood trying to catch their breath.

Expat Eclipse came up behind them and asked.

“Is it over?”

“It’s not going to be over until Willow is dead.” Twilight stated. “He’s got something else planned here.”

“What do you think he’s going to try next?”

“I have no idea.”

There were about eight wagon wheels and they looked to be in worse condition than they should have been. Some parts of them were obviously scorched, and whatever the summoning circle was had started to look a bit fuzzy, indistinct. It was pretty clear that these wave tactics the nerteln had been trying weren’t going to work for much longer without starting to break the circles.

Naudia went back to her saddle bags and came back with two food bars that looked dense, chewy, the kinda thing somebody would sell you to try and replace breakfast with.

“Here, eat one of these.” She hooved it over to Twilight. “Gwynn said we should eat them if there is ever a gap in the battle.”

“Why?” Twilight asked. “I mean I get that it’s food and all, but is there like some kind of special reason?”

Naudia chuckled.

“Yeah there is, you know Spike plays O&O right? They have those magic potions and whatnot.”

Twilight could almost see where this was going.

“These food bars are roughly the yunguaq equivalent of like a mana or stamina potion, they’re basically the same thing because everything relies on magic, cast from us.”

Twilight took a big bite of the peanut butter flavored food bar. She did feel better afterwards.

“I’ve been told there are liquid variants of it, but those are mostly based on how fast you can chug.”

Naudia turned to Expat Eclipse.

“By the way, if any of your shields start to turn red or glow red whoever that is need to retreat from the battle immediately.”

“I know that, you told us during training.”

“And I’m mentioning it again because you should understand these shield things better now. If your shields break, you are dead.”

“Naudia, why aren’t we attacking Doctor Willow right now?”

“Up here we’re stalling for reinforcements.” Naudia glanced meaningfully at the glyph. “We’re fighting him up here, so that he doesn’t focus his attacks down where all your people are.”

The glyph in question was glowing significantly brighter and there was a column of light growing out of it, but it was small, not even half a foot high yet.

“I’ve accepted that we’ll get reinforcements because I trust you, but seeing how this battle has been going… We are going to get them right?”

“Yes. Once that thing goes off the battle is over, and there isn’t anything Doctor Willow will be able to do about it.”

Both of them cringed backwards, they could feel the icy gaze of Doctor Willow settle upon them. Turning back to the battlefield Naudia and Eclipse saw that nine thralls coming there way. They looked healthy, they flexed their extraneous limbs with a practiced air of a monster that knew how to use them.

And inside the ninth thrall, at the head of the party they could see the thousand mile empty stare of Pomology Pear. She smiled like everything was going to be all right, everything was already all right, and the confidence that she could do the same for you, even as she tested out her lichen werewolf claws dragging deep gouges into the ground.