Evergreen Falls

by Meep the Changeling

24 - The Battle of Evergreen Falls II

Raven Inkwell - 19th of Harvestide (Nightmare Night), 4 EoH
Young Moon’s Hunting Lodge - Hackamore Valley

Raven stared back and forth between Source's illusion and two of her display units. She had formed two squads of battle mages, and one full STF unit by dropping several other squads to skeleton crew status.

“The first group of reinforcements will arrive soon,” Raven said out loud, mostly for Source’s sake. “How much time is left on your illusion?”

“I do not believe I have to refresh it, ma’am. It seems stable.” The wizard reported.

“Right. Luna’s old runeworks… We should ask her how to do that. I heard they’re a lost art.” Raven noted.

“Indeed they are,” Source commented gently. “Ponies often forget many useful things. Yourself included, ma’am.”

Raven turned to face the wizard, arching an eyebrow as if to say ‘go on’.

Source raised a hoof to his muzzle and coughed gently. “Well, if I may speak freely: You’ve been acting as the Administrator of CARE, and seemingly forgotten your other ranks, titles, and duties. Understandable, given the situation, but—”

Rave facehooved and turned to look over the military communications equipment. “You are absolutely right.”

Raven’s eyes flicked across the array of displays, relays, and talismans until they found the Field Phone. The red one.

Raven picked up the phone and looked Source in the eyes. “Turn around.”

The wizard complied. Raven punched in a 38 digit number and set the phone down not on its cradle, but on the phone input of one of the display systems.

“You can look now,” Raven said as the display’s scry tracking winked out, replaced almost instantly with a simple black and amber text display for the military communications system EquisNet.

Source turned back in time to see Raven begin to type a message. “What exactly are you doing?” he asked, more curious than anything else.

“The Venture D is off the coast of Vanhoofer with its carrier group for a training exercise. I’m asking for a little help,” Raven answered as she hit send. “And then I’m emailing Celestia to ask her if she informed Luna that our navy has an air force. Because I can’t see any other reason why Luna wouldn’t have deployed them if she knew.”

Source squinted at the message, frowning ever so slightly as he attempted to interpret the last line. “Ma’am, I believe the odds of your request being understood are low. Perhaps you should clarify without using Renaissance era High Equish?”

“You need to have more faith in our armed forces, Source.” Raven commented. “I’m tired of losing good people.”

⁜ ⁜ ⁜

COMMO Smooth Jazz - 19th of Harvestide (Nightmare Night), 4 EoH
EQS Venture-D - 88km off the Coast of Vanhoofer

Jazz squinted at her monitor, doing her best to interpret the order which had come in. The authorization codes checked out, but the poor mare was certain the Regent had used some sort of code to double encrypt the message. It had to be fully deciphered before the Venture could relay the order to its carrier group.

Emergency support request. Priority Black. Authorization Solar via Regent Raven Inkwell.

Immediate military and medical aid required at 44.8184797°N 118.2046633°W. Classified Strategic Resources under immediate threat from hostile entity. Strategic Value absolute.

Princesses Luna and Cadence engaged in combat. Civilian contractors under fire. Wounded mounting. Casualties high. Projected losses high. Princesses at risk of immediate grievous harm or death. Immediate assistance required in addition to primary strike force.

Paramedics requested. Air support requested. Fleet bombardment not approved.

Execute request order Miratio Fulmen Periclitor.

Jazz looked up from the red codebook, having ripped two pages from it frantically flipping back and forth. “What the buck is ‘request order Miratio Fulmen Periclitor’?”

Captain Gracious Lantern, one of those nerds who think dead languages are cooler than hoofball practice, leaned over to peer at Jazz’s monitor.

“It’s old Canterlot court language, lieutenant,” he said calmly, then used Jazz’s keyboard to quickly type out a quick reply for the Regent. [Deploying the Wonderbolts.]

The Captain deployed his manipulator gauntlet and picked up the fleet radio. “Attention all hooves: Exercise is hereby suspended. We are responding to a priority black distress call from our Regent. Wonderbolt squadrons 2, 3, and 5. Cease war game routes and proceed at top speed to 44.8 north by 118.2 west. Expect hostiles and casualties. Report situation on arrival. All other forces, ready alpha strike, launch ASAP. Support vessels: Ready artillery but do not fire without my command.”

⁜ ⁜ ⁜

Princess Luna - 19th of Harvestide (Nightmare Night), 4 EoH
Blackstone Quarry - Hackamore Valley

Luna growled, her legs trembled and twitched as she struggled against the inky beast before her. She had managed to grab the not-deer’s hooves with her own, thereby turning their melee into a wrestling match. Her muscles bulged and ached. The not-deer’s strength matched her own, but like all of the shadowy entity’s conjured minions, it lacked endurance.

A beam of blue-white light sliced Luna’s foe in half. It collapsed into an oily sludge like the rest of its fallen kin. Luna looked up, nodding to Cadence in thanks for the beam.

“Cover me!” Luna demanded more than requested.

Cadence stretched her wings, flapped hard, and began to hover, rotating to blast any creatures which got too close to Luna. Which were most of them.

Luna fished down her bandoliers, searching for her next mana potion. If our foe has any strategy, it must be to deplete our reserves. I should not have burned through six times my pool during this battle. It must be draining our power somehow… Yet I cannot detect any signs of such magic.

Her left hoof found the magically hardened vile. Luna ripped off the stopper and slugged the potion down in one fluid gulp.

“Cadence,” Luna called over the general roar of laser fire, creatures bellowing, and the maddening echoes from the pit’s walls. “I have one more potion.”

“I’m out,” Cadene reported. “It’s got to be draining us, somehow.”

“Perhaps we should fall back and bombard?” Luna asked, her veins starting to tingle as mana flooded them once more.

“I sent some of Raven’s ponies to get us more pots,” Cadence said, simply informing Luna of the stop gap. “Can you figure out how it’s draining us?”

“No,” Luna answered. “Bombardment, yes or no?”

“Maybe,” Cadence replied, taking a moment to flash-freeze a group of monsters.

Luna jumped to her left to dodge a tentacle as it slammed into the ground. Her dodge brought Enox’s downed mech back into view.

There’s time enough to see this objective through, regardless of what comes next, Luna decided.

The Princess snapped open her wings and took off, flying just above her walking height to dodge the enemy’s flailing appendages. She alighted on the mech’s hull with a thud, lit her horn, and ripped the canopy free from the cockpit.

Enox’s still and limp form lay within. The quills which had pierced her chest, shoulder, and left eye had melted with the rest of the monster, but the holes remained.

Luna closed her eyes for an instant, as close to a moment of silence as a warrior can afford on the battlefield. Luna cut Enox’s harness free with a precise burst of spellbolts, grabbed the tiny alien’s body with her magic and flew upwards, arcing through the air around the flailing tentacles to alight on the edge of the pit next to Fluttershy, who was tending to the wounded they had been able to extract from the pit along with everypony else who knew even a lick of first aid.

Fluttershy gasped. “No! She can’t—”

“See if she breathes. I know not if her species would be slain by such a blow. A changeling would survive this,” Luna grunted as she set Enox down.

“P— Pinkie! I don’t know how to handle this!” Fluttershy shouted across the triage zone.

The Pink mare looked up from putting a bandage on a zebra’s ribs. “Tag!”

Fluttershy nodded and ran towards the Zebra, Pinkie moved for Enox. Luna turned her attention back to the battle.

We’ve kept it in the quarry… She mused, assessing the situation through the eyes of a trained commander. That, or it’s chosen to remain within—

The flailing mass of tentacles surged upwards, seemingly lengthening only to slam down on the edges of the basalt pit and pull. The SkyTech crew screamed, falling back from the edge of the pit in a panic. The two STF squads remained slightly more calm, simply shifting their fire. Luna took to the air, meeting up with Cadence as the two mares stared downwards.

“This would be where our energy went,” Cadence said as Luna arrived at her side.

Luna nodded, watching as a great mass of black tinged with the rainbow sheen of an oil slick began to pry itself up from the depths of the world. Ah. It was using us to gain the last portion of what it needed to escape. We’ll have to remedy this. We can injure it, presumably a large enough strike to its center would put an end to this endurance test of a melee.

“If it wants our magic badly enough to steal it, perhaps a gift is in order,” Luna said, then fired a crackling beam of pulsating plasma into the entity’s center.

It screeched and recoiled. Peeling its tentacles from the sides of the pit, the entity moved several to shield itself while swatting at Luna with the others. Luna dodged its flailing limbs, continuing to burn through her refreshed mana as well as its slimy hide. Cadence joined in, lobbing volleys of small blue bolts that exploded into ice as they struck the monster, freezing it solid, then shattering to blast holes into the beast.

Sensing their loosely coordinated assault, Limited Perfection shifted its projection’s attention to supporting their efforts. It fired into the gaps Cadence’s ice bursts carved into the entity’s flesh. It finished cuts Luna started, slicing the tips from some of the creature’s tentacles, cutting others in half.

A ray of gold light lanced one of the tentacles, causing it to pop with a gout of steam and boiling sludge. Luna’s ears snapped flat as a thunderous crack shook the pit a split second after the beam. She traced her eyes back across the pit, taking note of Sky sitting behind a rocky outcrop.

The pegasi wielded a shoulder fired weapon Luna did not recognise. It consisted of a pair of saddle-bag-like battery banks and a generator, cable conduit, and what looked like an old bazooka case stuffed full of electronic components.

Sky made eye contact with Luna and tapped the side of his head, miming gesturing for a radio. She flew into shouting range, firing several barrages of spell bolts over her shoulder and under her wings along the way.

“I had thought you retreated,” Luna shouted down to Sky.

He laughed. “Tactically withdrew to fetch a big gun. Keep me covered! I get one shot a minute. I can pop the ones closest to you two!”

Luna nodded, and turned back to the battle at hoof. The ponies combined assault continued for several long minutes, which passed without progress for either side. The shadow remained at the bottom of a pit, its center mass stuck between worlds like a noxious flower’s bulb emerging from the soil.

Luna growled and stopped firing as she felt her mana beginning to fade again. Cadence stopped alongside her, looking more energized, but also done with the entity’s shit.

“Nothing kills this thing, we’ve hit it with everything we’ve got!” Cadence spat, her left eye twitching irritably.

Luna quickly replayed the battle in her mind. Yes. We’ve tried everything we can do at the spur of the moment in the field… Except…

“Not everything, Cadence. Dusk’s Grace,” Luna said firmly, understanding the idea but not gravity of Cadence’s spell. “I can cover you for the three minutes necessary for you to—”

Cadence’s eyes widened in horror. “Are you mad?!” she snapped. “You want me to blow up the town in order to kill it!?”

Luna blinked. “What? The blast can’t be that big, can it?”

“The blast radius is yes meters!” Cadence explained, looking Luna dead in her eyes. “Didn’t Celestia tell you? It will hit everything in the range of any of my senses! The Applewood Great Lake used to be a town called Applewood!”

Luna winced and let out a long hissing breath. “Oh. Let’s… Try to freeze all of it at once then?”

Cadence shrugged. “No idea how we’d do that, but it’s a better idea than Dusk’s Grace.”

“I’ve never been all that good with cryothermic matrices,” Luna murmured out loud, doing her best to start approaching the dire puzzle.

The moonlight began to dim. Luna remained focused on the entity below them. It had returned to its pulling against the quarry’s rim. Cadence looked up, checking to see if more flying monsters had spawned from the eldritch horror’s fallen tentacles.

A blanket of thick black clouds had formed and drawn itself across the moon. Cadence frowned. “Luna, are you conjuring a storm?”

“No,” Luna answered. “I… I could. Do you think it would help?”

Cadence turned Luna’s head so she could see the fresh storm clouds. “Who did that? Somepony’s doing that. You can feel the pegasus magic.”

“We don’t have any weather ponies fielded,” Luna noted.

A bolt of lightning on par with anything nature itself could muster blazed from the storm clouds, slicing through the air neatly around the two Princesses, then cut back underneath them to strike the shadowy monster directly in its core. It shrieked, its oily flesh crackling and arcing with residual electric charge while steam billowed up from the large crater blasted into its undulating bulk. Its tentacles retreated from the ledge, coiling to shield itself like a serpent retreating to its nest.

A thunderclap boomed from the cloud bank.

“Well buck,” Luna said with an approving nod. “That pony’s getting a medal.”

A white and gold pegasus wearing the blue and gold jumpsuit of a Wonderbolt and a pair of welding goggles dropped from the high-altitude cloud bank in a perfect Immelman dive, pulling back up and entering a hover at the Princess’s eyes levels, and snapped into a salute.

“Major Wild, 108th Wonderbolts, reporting in, ma’ams,” he shout-said in the rapidfire voice of a soldier who would rather not use protocol during the middle of a battle but also didn’t want to get court-martialed for pissing off their Commander in Chief. “We’re readying another bolt. Is the saucer-craft hostile?”

“No,” Cadence said, pointing down. “Cook that slime and nothing else. If you have medics, we have wounded up top, and… Some of the bodies in the pit might not be dead. All of them are friendly, the enemy melts.”

The Major nodded once and turned to fly back up to relay the firing orders.

“Wait,” Luna demanded. “Where did you come from? Nopony is fast enough to make it from Canterlot in half an hour.”

“Rainbow Dash could,” the Major said as a reflexive correction. “We’re from the Venture. She’s just off shore. Raven called us. Seven minute flight for ponies in our wing-power class, and we were already patrolling over the coast for a training exercise, ma’am.”

Luna’s face scrunched in confusion. “Our navy has an air force? We can launch air assets from the— Hold on a moment, the Wonderbolts do things other than rally the public’s spirits?”

The Major’s ears drooped back. “Um… Yes?”

Luna’s confused face burned into anger. “I am going to have words with Celestia after this… Fire at will, Major.”

“Aye, ma’am!”

The Major stretched their wings and shot up into the air, racing to relay the firing orders and direct rescue teams.

Let’s hope the lightning remains as effective as it was on the first hit. Luna thought to herself. Cadence and I are low on energy once more. We’ll be relying on the Wonderbolts to keep the bulk of it pinned for—

“Look!” Cadence said with the largest smile Luna remembered seeing on the pink alicorn all day.

Luna turned to follow the line from Cadence’s hoof and spotted twenty small airships on the horizon. She focused, drawing on alicron magic to boost her pegasus vision. They were all equestrian airships. Troop transports from the look of them. Three of which bore the red cross of air rescue.

“Is that an entire army in transit?” Luna demanded. “We can do that?! From a ship? WHY WAS I NOT INFORMED!?”

Cadence shrugged her wings. “Buck if I know. But they’ll have all the mana pots we could want.”

“Well… At least this will make holding out for, and then retrieving, our special strike team easier,” Luna said after a few moment’s thought.

“Want me to go with you to yell at Celestia for the bad briefings?” Cadence asked, giving Luna a sympathetic look.

“Yes…” Luna grumbled. A thousand years later, and she’s still… Her.