Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 33 Nerteln Night Terror

Nerteln Night Terror

Staring up at the mechanical chaos that filled the entire sky Twilight was shocked. That was what the spell did?

That.

To add fresh horror things were pouring through the hole in the sky, uncountable numbers of things. Little dots that were flying down towards Equestria from the infected mechanical wound in the sky.

I did that. Twilight thought.

I… did that.

There was no way to look away from the sky encompassing tear in her mind. It’s glow had replaced the sun. It’s cold fury had blotted out the entire sky.

Twilight tried to follow one of the little dots as it swooped closer, but she was distracted by the gigantic swirling pillar of wind and fire that was falling down towards them like a great stone of destiny. Moving impossibly fast the conflagration of hellfire stopped above them, swirling with hateful fire.

And then it opened up, inside the swirling hellfire was an endless tunnel of fire that seemed to go on for infinity, beyond the sky and into some other place.

From that lesser portal four enormous flying rats began to slowly fly downwards, each holding a rope connected to a throne. Upon that throne, unmistakable even at this distance sat the First Administrator.

She couldn’t meet his eyes. She was a part of all this. Her gaze turned to the side to see the nerteln, Doctor Willow, staring up at the sky along with all of his abomination progeny stunned.

Vulnerable.

His throat exposed as he looked upwards, unbeknownst to his coming doom.

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

Naudia was staring up at the sky awestruck at what she had taken part in. There was no event in history she could reference that was as terrible as what she had just done.

She had been staring far too long when there was a bright flash of light from where Twilight had been knocked down by the nerteln. She jerked her head to look over at it and Twilight wasn’t there anymore.

Doctor Willow wasn’t there anymore either. Niether were his ghouls.

Instead was a bubble of reality that looked a little bit like Canterlot. A miniature Canterlot.

She felt a gravitational pull towards the bubble, and while the ponies around her were able to brace themselves on their barricades Naudia and her injured leg were not fast enough.

Naudia fell into the strange bubble of reality.

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

Expat Eclipse stopped holding onto the barrier for dear life, the pull stopped and the building sized evil canterlot snowglobe seemed to stabilize. You could see tiny little ponies going about their day inside of it.

He didn’t have much time to focus on that because in front of him the throne carried by the giant rats had finally touched down and he could see the… thing sitting on that throne. It was obviously a throne but just barely qualified, if you chopped off the bottom half and added a set of wheels it could have easily passed for an office chair.

But the thing that sat on that throne. Eclipse almost felt like he should defend himself from it, like it wanted into his head, like it was already inside.

It stood up and was flanked by those giant rats, Eclipse instantly knew that they were called “Redback Behemoths” he had no idea how he knew though. They weren’t exactly rats, they were obviously rodents, but they had squareish muzzles, a gait like a kangaroo walking on all fours, bottlebrush tails, obviously a strip of red down the back of their golden retriever-ish coats, the patch glowed with an angry red light. Looked something between a kangaroo and a rodent.

The thing that made them stand out was their wings, the wings weren’t wings, it was an extra set of arms and where the fingers would be on bat wings to hold the skin steady were small prehensile claw-things. The actual membrane of the wing was wispy, barely even there, a spiderweb thin membrane to catch the air for these rodents that were easily the size of a covered wagon, if not bigger.

The thing at the head of the procession of rats spoke.

“Where is Twilight? Or Naudia?”

Nobody wanted to speak up against that thing. The way those rats moved, they moved like apex predators, absolutely confident, and it was a certainty they were trained for war.

Eclipse caught the mirrored glasses of the monster, and was unable to look away.

“They… They fell into that globe over there.” Eclipse stuttered pointing at the miniature world.

The thing’s face scrunched up like he had tasted something particularly foul.

“Great, Naudia is injured and Twilight’s prosthetic leg snapped, and now they’re inside a night terror.”

“What are you?” Eclipse asked.

“I am the First Administrator. I’m the benefactor that gave you those weapons, I set things up so that you could defend yourself from the nerteln.”

Eclipse had a hard time believing that for even a second. It probably showed on his face because the First Administrator responded.

“There are powers here beyond your knowledge, had I not intervened the nerteln would be using you as either a meal or cannon fodder.”

“I can… maybe believe that.” Eclipse’s eyes were drawn towards the snowglobe canterlot, which brought him back to reality, and the tear in reality above him.

“Why are you even here? Why do you care about any of this, when you can…” Eclipse gestured up at the sky.

“My hatred for nerteln has burned for billions of years. It will burn long after the stars have gone out. I thought I had stamped them out once and I will NEVER make that mistake again.”

What Eclipse had said had clearly set this strange thing off because the First Administrator started rambling a bit.

“Take that night terror that just formed there, that’s an indication that Doctor Willow is further along than we thought, a lot further along. He shouldn’t be able to do this, just like they were supposed to hang back with you guys in a defensive battle against those flimsy thralls.

“But now we’ve got a night terror to deal with, which we can deal with this, but Twilight and Naudia have made everything so much more complicated.” Once again he veered off topic. “You can see it can’t you? The megalomania inside that sphere, that isn’t the Canterlot you know is it? Look closely, the layout is different, ugh, he’s got the castle repainted in his coat colors, yellow and brown. If you know what to look for these are always the same.”

“So this is some kind of peek inside his mind? He never seemed this… ambitious when I knew him.” Eclipse said walking a bit closer to the sphere.

“Nerteln are all the same, the magic pools inside their brain where it processes relationships, eats away at it. No matter what reason they start out doing soul magic the parts of their brain that anchor them to their naklekun rots away.”

“Naklekun?”

“It means compassion, I suppose you’d say… Equineinity? Something like that. But you can crack a nerteln’s skull open and start to find parasitic lifeforms growing inside the cavities adapted to feed on their contaminated blood. Soul magic will keep you alive even through that, but it won’t let you keep your naklekun.”

Eclipse grimaced at the implications there, trying not to imagine it.

“If this night terror is supposed to be a look inside Doctor Willow’s mind, wouldn’t you want to see what is going on there? Get to know your enemy?”

"Rest assured my pony friend there is nothing new inside that mind, nothing to learn. It's a stagnant and dead pool of memories. Whatever fragments are left of Doctor Willow is in the process of being burned off.”

“Shouldn’t you be going in there anyways though, to rescue Twilight and Naudia.”

The thing gave Eclipse a strange look.

“I’m already in there, I’ve been in there this entire time.”

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

Twilight looked around her. And then again.

This was Canterlot, but it was not Canterlot.

She knew this spot, it was “prime reading spot #45, Canterlot Castle grounds” one of the castle outbuildings. It was inside of a kind of “barrier building” that separated the castle grounds from the main concourse of Canterlot itself. Great place to read, nice statue with a sturdy block base to lean up against, big windows that caught the sun in the right way, calming muffled sound of ponies walking about outside, thought provoking view of Canterlot itself. Bring a pillow and a book and nobody will ever bother you here.

The whole place was wrong.

The sounds coming from outside were wrong, rhythmic, hoofsteps in sync, voices in inaudible whispers. A crowd of ponies walking step by step choreographed in sync in random directions. They stared straight ahead ramrod straight and moved like ants to and fro to their predestined destinations.

The sun was wrong, like somebody had put a filter over the sun, it’s color was wrong, the very light it gave off made her feel uncomfortable. The moon was up as well, and they were both fixed where they were, lifeless. Twilight could see the rays of light faded directly into the wood.

The statue was wrong, there was some pony there, obviously some kind of doctor. Now there were plenty of doctor statues in Canterlot, she remembered one of a kindly old looking pony dedicated to curing some disease hundreds of years ago. This one the heroically proportioned doctor was holding up a syringe like a holy object with twisted wolf-like entities at his hooves.

“Quite the contrast isn’t it?” Came a malignant voice from behind the statue.

The First Administrator, Camna stepped out from behind the statue, as if he had never been there.

“Nobody forgets their first visit to a nerteln night terror, especially since it’s usually some place they’re familiar with.”

“Is this some kind of personalized vision then, made just for me?” Twilight asked. “Is this the afterlife you go to after opening up that giant tear in the sky.”

“Don’t worry about the tear in the sky Twilight.” The First Administrator said.

Twilight gave him a withering look. He returned it with a calculating gaze.

“We’ve established that Equestria is going to become uninhabitable in the near future right?”

“When the hay did we establish THAT?!”

“When we made a deal that you’d work with me and we can get your entire population off planet otherwise you’d only get to pick 5000 of them to live.”

“That feels… like so long ago now…”

“Vatermorder is going to be waking up soon. Depending on how he’s feeling when he wakes up we might have to glass the entire planet with him on it to get him feeling better.”

“Glass?” Twilight asked, it didn’t sound good but she had to know.

“Burn the entire surface so that it turns to glass. Anyway, since you’re working with me on this plan you need to be able to keep secrets, can you?”

“I suppose?” Twilight could already tell she wasn’t going to like this secret.

“Are you at all familiar with the phrase ‘smoke and mirrors’?” The First Administrator asked.

Twilight REALLY could tell she wasn’t going to like this secret.

“Good, the entire portal in the sky up there is the underside of an orbital ring that we’ve put a bunch of screens on to make it look like it’s a portal. There is no portal, there is no danger from the portal, or anything that could be going wrong from it.”

Twilight’s first thought was anger, she remembered seeing the orbital ring going up, the endless city hovering above Equestria. That quickly transitioned into fear, and awe, and terror as the impossibility of the scale of it all finally sank in, or rather failed to sink in because it was impossible to comprehend something that large.

“You built that, all of that,” Twilight pointed out at the sky which did not have any portal or orbital ring in it. “ALL OF THAT, up there above Equestria, to fake a magic trick?!?”

“Well yes, and if I do say so myself it is a very economic use of resources too.”

Twilight’s disgusted expression said a lot.

“You and I both need to evacuate everbody on Equestria. EVERYBODY. You know why we need to do this, the Vatermorder, keep his ‘dream’ entertaining and he won’t wake up. But we can’t exactly go spreading that around because somebody might decide to go try and wake him up early. Somebody wakes him up early and he’s in a bad mood I’m legally required to burn the surface of this planet down to bedrock as a pre-emptive attack to cheer him up.

“SO, we build an orbital ring in the sky and pretend there is a giant portal that’s endangering Equestria so we can evacuate everybody BEFORE he wakes up. Orbital ring lifts up cities and towns wholesale into space. You get to keep ALL of your cities plopped down inside rotating habitats. We ship them off and start converting all you ponies into yunguaq, you all get immortality and all the benefits of being a yunguaq, you get your own dyson sphere to live in with all it’s rotating habitats.”

He pointed a finger at Twilight directly.

“And you don’t have to choose which parts of Equestria we have to scurry off with before burning every trace of your civilization to ash to appease some petty monster who might wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and start causing interuniversal wars.”

He seemed to calm down a bit from his rant.

“Ever wonder why I had you stab Chrysalis in the back?”

“Yes, because I only found out about that just recently.”

“I’ve known this was coming for a long time now. I’ve been preparing for it for a long time now, plans upon plans upon plans. Prefabricated orbital rings, landing vehicles that weren’t surplus from tour agencies, advanced materials for lifting cities. And then what happens? A civilization killer shows up, a god damn soul eating nerteln shows up.” The First Administrator tries to punch a wall but it leaves no impact and makes no sound. “And I know him, I was watching that clock, he hates nerteln almost as much as I do.”

There was a moment of silence while Twilight had to mull over what the First Administrator was telling her.

“What are we going to do now? I mean.” Twilight lifted up her snapped prosthetic leg.

The First Administrator let out a very heavy sigh.

“I’m going to have to teach you some new types of magic, but first we need to get you on two legs.”

Twilight’s ears perked up at that, surely there was some kind of advanced emergency healing magic.

The First Administrator gave her a withered look.

“I’m not a very good teacher Twilight, I’ve never used yunguaq magic. So you’re going to have to bear with me while I conference with people outside. Tell me, have you ever tried to troubleshoot something over the phone?”

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

The First Administrator was not a very good teacher. It was like he had twenty people shouting in his ear at all times telling him different things to do.

“Okay so you should stand up, er no, focus on having only two legs? Or is this the 1.2.1 revision, perhaps you should try reaching for something with one of your forelegs.”

Twilight had a very strong urge to facehoof, she couldn’t but she was tempted to go so far as to conjure a magical hoof with which to facehoof with. In the end she waved her broken artificial limb at him for emphasis.

“Yeah something like that, I think?”

Eventually after another minute of contrary instruction and things like “patch 1.3.1r” Twilight was able to transform into a werewolf and stand on two legs. She wasn’t exactly tottering about like she expected to be, but she wasn’t going to be running a marathon either, not unless she wanted to experience the wonders of a marble floor directly with her face.

“No, no, that won’t do, nope.” The First Administrator said looking at her. “Tear down one of these curtains and drape it over yourself to make a toga or something. Your… everything is hanging out.”

Twilight looked down and there was significantly more sticking out than would be on a mare or a pony. She finally understood what Gwynn meant when Gwynn said she was “flat”.

“No, don’t poke those, you need to get dressed pretty quickly, we’re already losing time here. We aren’t in danger YET, nerteln hasn’t fully awoken so he’s still in some kind of slumber, but that’s not going to last very long for what we need to do.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll get dressed. Jeez, you’re as bad as Rarity in the dressing room.” Twilight grumbled.

One bent nail, a curtain, and a re-adjustment to cover her whole chest later Twilight was wearing an expensive gold trim toga.

“Now we need to get you ready to rescue Naudia. First we have to…” He deflated a bit and spoke aloud as if to somebody else. “Nobody trained her on simusound?”

He rubbed his temples and waved his hands, as if telling an invisible audience to be quiet.

“Sorry Twilight, I’m talking to a great deal of people outside of this pocket universe, could you grab your bagrat for me real quick? You know the emergency rat on the back of your neck there?”

Twilight had honestly forgotten about the little guy, only just remembering he was there as a kinda “reserve shield” in case she got injured or something like that.

“Okay Twilight, we’re going to have to have you learn some stuff on the fly here, and this is the most important one. It’s a technology in your shielding called ‘simusound’. Bagrat enable simusound training module one.”

The rat jumped off her outstretched paw and scurried off behind her.

“What is simusound?”

“Simusound is a tech that lets your shield look around for you, a basic AI inside it will look for specific things and project a sound so you can hear them. Say somebody is sneaking up on you, or you’re in the vacuum of space, with simusound can hear an explosion or somebody behind you readying a knife.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Try and listen for an enemy behind you. Oh yeah and make sure your zoetic shield is up, doesn’t work without that.”

“So I’m listening for a rat scurrying around?” Twilight asked.

“No, you’re listening specifically for an enemy trying to sneak up on you, keep that in your head, enemy sneak attack.”

Twilight tried to focus on that, but it was too vague, so she imagined some pony mugger walking up behind her with a knife. She wasn’t quite sure what this would accomplish, but then she heard it, like somebody was walking up behind her drawing a long knife, firm audible footsteps, and a distinctive knife draw that she could pinpoint exactly.

She spun around and there was nobody there, the sounds were obviously coming from the bagrat holding one of the nails that held the curtain rod in.

“What?”

“That’s simusound, your shield watches out for you and plays a distinctive sound that you can listen for and pinpoint exactly. It was originally designed for hearing inside of space, the sensors could see things you couldn’t like air leaks, or see behind you. It’s been hacked and modified and changed so often that you can have it watch for almost anything or play any sound.” The First Administrator gave a sour face. “For kids learning it too many of those sounds are fart noises, but what matters is that they learn how to use it.”

“How do I change the sound?”

“We’re going to have somebody actually train you how to do that later. For now all you need to know is that the sound changes based on the context. Somebody with a gun would have maybe a charging sound or a click, somebody running up to you faster might play some sort of alarm sound.”

“Why wasn’t I trained on this before, this seems extremely useful!”

“The intention was that you would be fighting those weak thralls in a formation. Nothing could sneak up behind you, and in a defensive battle there wasn’t anything that could really threaten you in such a way.” The First Administrator sighed. “Unfortunately things didn’t work out that way, Doctor Willow is better at learning soul magic than he really should be, he wasn’t supposed to have anything as strong as Pomo.”

“So what, you made me walk on two legs, put on a toga and hear things behind me and you’re just going to send me out to sneak around this city looking for Naudia?”

“No. First we’re going to summon you some backup, you’re going to be fighting in a group.”

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

Twilight was following behind the bagrat, who was inside of a summoned form to act as a tank, and there were four “slime rats” as the First Administrator had called them. They didn’t look like they were made of slime, but Twilight didn’t look like she could fill up half a kiddy pool and slosh around inside of it.

The three slime rats were all different sizes, and the First administrator had applied different labels to them.

The big one was the size of a goat, used rat poison magic, not specifically rat poison, rat magic and poison magic. It was supposed to try and get more spell per spell with something called “afterspell”. It was there to infiltrate the enemy formation and sabotage their efforts. It had patches of fur that glowed with white light as well as a kind of poisonous looking mohawk of fur down it’s back. Somehow the rat came with it’s own little mage staff and walked on two legs.

The middle rat was using laser trash magic, again lasers and trash, as elemental magic. Somehow this was to help it set up traps so it could nail targets with large but inaccurate attacks that had nasty secondary effects. It was summoned in with a trash bag it carried around and it had alert looking satellite ears colored a laser ruby red.

And the small rat was using rhoallim and ghost magic, some sort of specific buffing paladin magic and ethereal magic that hits multiple times respectively. It was banking on getting large critical strikes against the enemy from range buffed up by those support magics. It resembled a hollow suit of armor meant for a rat, but the armor was made out of a paladin white soap sudsy feather substance, and inside was a ghostly blown glass shape that played tricks on your eyes.

Her bagrat had taken on a lichenthrope look, Twilight could see it there floating in a glass-like shield, a hunched over rat made of glass imitating her lichenthrope magic with a rat at it’s heart, as it’s heart.

Twilight was there to heal and support them, her spells could be used that way, but it felt very strange to her that the spells used to heal were essentially the exact same spells she used to infect thralls. The difference seemed to be the targeting profile and the spell’s effect was shifted around towards more working over time.

Effectively Twilight had a small group of rats summoned up out of nowhere to fight. She didn’t wonder why they hadn’t done this from the start though. The bagrat had sapped her shields and her magic felt noticeably weaker, and she felt the potency of her magic’s secondary effects burn away with each of the slime rats. She could just tell that those larger hits that had given her an advantage during the last fight would be happening dramatically less often while these slime rats were around.

Looking down at her artificial stump with the dangling pony hoof though Twilight realized she was going to have to stick to the backlines anyway. She was networked in with the bagrats with her magic so that she would know when one of them needed support. The interface for this was strange though, the indication that somebody badly needed healing was obviously red, nothing strange there. However the indication somebody was at full health was violet, the interface moving up through the color spectrum to indicate their health.

The whole situation felt very ramshakle, enhanced by how she felt weaker than she normally did with a broken arm and those rats actively sapping her magical strength for their own. This made Twilight almost paranoid, she was constantly looking around at the twisted version of the Canterlot castle grounds.

Hiding behind another statue Twilight looked up at it, and the statue seemed to… fade into existence as she looked at it. She couldn’t tell what it was commemorating, it was another heroic statue of Doctor Willow, this time she noticed that it was entirely lacking a cutie mark of any kind. She had to hand it to the artist though, it had got the slow infection of the ugly brown-green soul magic in his eyes spot on.

She suspected that apart from the heroic looking resculpt of his body the artist in question lacked any kind of artistic drive. She could imagine many of these same metal statues being melted down until the listless artist reached an acceptable level of out of place heroic musculature on the otherwise average looking pony doctor.

“What is this statue even for?” She asked aloud.

“Look at the plaque.”

She looked at the plaque and it faded into existence in the same way as the details on the statue, like it had always been there, like it had never been there. The plaque read “Doctor Willow eradicates rinderpest”.

“What? Rinderpest? That was eradicated a long time ago now, and I KNOW he didn’t have any part in that.”

“How do you know that?” The First Administrator asked, mostly out of curiosity.

“I did a research project on it, interviewed the ponies responsible for the vaccine.”

“That’s the nature of a nerteln. They will poach the achievements of others. If he had any chance of surviving today, he would likely try and catch those ponies, and brainwash them into giving him credit as the real brains behind it.”

Twilight gave off a picturesque look of absolute disgust.

“He would do that? But he’s a doctor, other doctors would know.” Twilight protested.

“The chaff victuals that exist in a society governed by a Nerteln wouldn’t care. They would exist only for him.” The First Administrator looked ahead at the group of ponies walking down the hall. “We don’t have to be stealthy around these, just act casual. These victuals won’t kick up a fuss.”

Twilight looked at the ponies walking down the hall. She recognized one of them, it was Expat Eclipse the queen of the werewolves, he looked wrong. They all looked wrong. It was hard to recognize them but these were all werewolves she’d at least seen around Knicknik.

Their eyes were unfocused, glazed over, his mane was shaved, and so was his face. This was so that a steady stream of greenish-brown unpleasant looking liquid could drip down from the corners of his eyes and from his listless open mouth. The cut of his shaved fur diverted the liquid down to his chin where he kept his head tilted just so it that would drip into a bowl mounted around his neck.

“I would say it’s likely these are all ex-werewolves going to give thanks to the statue commemorating Willow’s extermination of lycanthropy.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“The way nerteln work in their governing structure is very predictable. Such victuals would never be allowed to meet with him directly. So they would be instructed to drag themselves over to the relevant statue and give thanks to their god-ruler. Unless you’ve heard about one of these ponies having rinderpest that’s the only place they’d likely to be going.”

“But is that really Eclipse over there? Did he fall into this place as well?”

“No, this is rather like a dream from a powerful creature, it’s what the nerteln WANTS the world to look like, not what the world is. That’s why it fades into existence when you look closely at the details. It’s not really real, but it’s very much real enough to kill somepony.”

“Why aren’t you going to help fight then?”

"You don't believe I could help you fight, and neither does anybody else. I don't know what tips people off to that but everybody gravitates to that same conclusion. I think they can feel the presence of the shard."

"What does that even MEAN?" Twilight said exhasperated.

"That deep down you believe the second combat starts I'm going to step behind a pillar or something and vanish until the dirty work is done."

"And will you?"

"You know what I am Twilight, you've known it since the very first moment we met. Your primal unconscious mind raged at the intrusion, you filled up that figure with things you recognized, and things you hated, and here I am. Did you ever wonder why I had the face of a pony? Did you ever ask Naudia what I was? Whose face do you think Gwynn sees when she looks at me?"

Reality rang like a bell.

During the vibration everything seemed to become more concrete, more fixed and real. The gold trim on the windows organized itself, the curtains grew a layer of velvet. The ponies outside had clothes vanish into existance, as well as things like carts. The world grew more alive like it had ever been alive in the first place.

Every change highlighted the stark deadness of this faux world.

The decorations seemed random, as if somepony didn’t understand what they were putting up, the clothes seemed like ponies had dressed themselves in the dark. Even the curtains were draped wrong on their rods.

"This is the first time this damn nerteln has been behind schedule to our advantage." The First Administrator said.

“What? What’s going on? Is this reality settling in or something?” Twilight had been particularly unnerved by the sudden, and unpleasantly organic looking, sprouting of velvet on the curtains.

“No, Doctor Willow just woke up.”