Homefield Game
Homefield Game
Duke and Frost ran down the street into town, weapons at the ready as the defense force shot out ahead. Ponies run faster than humans, and even if the men had the advantage of being able to run longer, speed was still critical.
The men were only seconds behind all the stallions, but before they even made it to the fight, they could already hear metal scraping against metal as the warfighters stabbed and hacked and slashed at each other. Grunts and battle cries dominated every sound in between the bouts of scraping steel, reminding the men of just how much they appreciated their firearms.
When the men came up seconds later, the battle was intense. Fighters were already bruised and bloodied, with half a dozen combatants already sprawled out on the ground. Most were gryphons, but two of them were stallions Duke and Frost had just been fighting alongside.
“Frost, two o’clock!” Duke shouted, pointing at one of the downed stallions. He was still moving, albeit slowly and clearly in excruciating pain.
The men ran forward, eyes on the sky and around them, and grabbed the stallion, dragging him away from the fight. Once they were safely at the side of a building, Frost provided cover while Duke bandaged some of the cuts and scrapes on the stallion’s legs and abdomen. His armor had taken a beating, but he himself was in survivable condition.
“I’m good,” the stallion said, trying to get back up. One of the cuts on his legs was too deep, however, and he couldn’t quite stand. It was possible he would never stand on his own again.
“No, you get inside,” Duke said. Frost locked eyes with Duke and nodded, then went to the door of the building they were next to and kicked it in. After clearing it and making sure no one was there, he ran back out and gave Duke the clear to bring the stallion inside.
“I can fight!” the stallion shouted angrily.
“The Hell you can!” Duke responded, grabbing the stallion and throwing him over his shoulder to carry him inside. Duke and Frost ignored his protests at being taken from battle and left him in the building, shutting the door and running back to the others.
More stallions had fallen by the time they got back, but few were dead, thankfully. Duke and Frost closed on the fight and tackled two gryphons, knocking them to the ground, and then shot them. When the roar of the guns pulsed through the air, the other gryphons realized what was coming and fell back.
There were several injured soldiers in the group, but with the attack no doubt about to recommence in a few moments, the men had little time to provide aid. They got on it in a heartbeat, administering painkillers and bandages to the injured and instructing the remaining, mostly alright soldiers to take the injured into the house they dropped the other stallion in. That would have to be their makeshift infirmary for the time being.
“Use the furniture inside to provide places to rest the wounded,” Duke instructed. “If there are no bandages and you need more, rip up clothes or curtains or anything.” As much as he didn’t want to have that done, these were stallions’ lives at stake. Plus, if they didn’t win, the house would be burned to the ground anyhow.
Duke and Frost provided cover while the squad of soldiers took their wounded into the house. A few would have to stay behind to protect them and take care of them, but some of the remaining soldiers would be heading back into the fight. Ideally, only the least injured soldiers would go into battle.
When three of the guards exited the house, the men took them and moved into town to set up a defensive area around Rarity’s Boutique at the lead stallion’s recommendation. It was a very high value target, and if word got out that it, and all its inhabitants, were destroyed, Equestrian morale would plummet to unreachable depths.
The gryphons were unseen along the way to the boutique, but it was easy to hear them and the rest of the fight around town. Screams and clashing steel reigned supreme on this day.
As they approached the boutique, the men looked around; houses were destroyed, carts overturned, and fires burned in a couple of places. They couldn’t do much about the flames, but they didn’t look too bad as it was. The priority was in setting up the defensive perimeter around the boutique.
When the boutique came into view, it didn’t look good; the gryphons were already there, engaging the guards who had been stationed on defense. Bodies were all over the place, primarily of gryphons, but there were ponies around, mainly pegasi. It looked like most of the roving patrols in the sky made their way here at the start of the battle.
Duke spotted a pegasus mare trying to crawl away quite a distance from the building, bleeding badly from a wound to her abdomen, when a gryphon landed not too far behind her and went for the kill. Before it could get there, Duke put three bullets right around the gryphon’s center of mass, and it fell to the ground. The shots garnered some attention, but here, the focus on the fight was so strong, that most didn’t notice.
“Stallions, protect the building! Frost, on me!” Duke commanded.
The stallions rushed to aid their comrades in front of the boutique while Duke and Frost made their way to the pegasus mare crawling away. She was quickly slowing down and the blood trail under her was seemingly getting darker, so they double-timed it to her position.
When the men reached her, two gryphons spotted them putting their attention on her and tried to swoop down and take them by surprise. But the men always had one eye on the fight, and Frost quickly turned around and dispatched the oncoming gryphons with several rapid shots from his rifle. When he confirmed that the gryphons were down, and that none of the others were looking their way, he moved closer to the injured guard and Duke.
Duke had her underneath him, and he was checking her already-exposed body for any serious injuries. Besides a few bruises, there was nothing of major concern. He went to turn her over and check her belly, as she was having trouble responding and could not do so herself. Just as he started, he saw a gryphon ahead and above them coming down.
The gryphon was clearly gunning for him, so he side-stepped away from the guard and tried to bring up his MP7, but the gryphon was on him already. It grasped his shoulders, sinking its talons into his left shoulder, and threw him to the ground. When it landed on its feet over him, it started dragging him off and away from the guard.
“Watch her!” Duke shouted to Frost.
Frost brought up his rifle to shoot the gryphon, but it picked Duke up and he couldn’t get a clear shot. Frost knew Duke would be able to handle himself, so, he kept his attention on the guard and keeping her safe. The pool of blood under her was starting to grow in size, and her movements were extremely small and slow, so he moved to provide medical aid.
He slung his rifle over his shoulder and pulled out his handgun in case he needed it and turned the guard over to assess the damage. When he had her on her side, it didn’t look good; there was a gash on her belly that went pretty deep, and it looked like it may have cut into her rib cage a little. With one eye on the sky and one on his patient, Frost pulled out gauze pads and medical tape and started to patch up the pegasus.
In the distance, Duke was fighting it out hand to hand with the gryphon. Before he could grab his MP7 from its sling, the gryphon pulled out its knife and went to slash him. Duke parried it out of the way, but the knife went right through his sling and sent the MP7 flying in a random direction.
With the gryphons knife-wielding talons now to his side, Duke countered by grabbing its other claw with one hand and punching it across the beak with his other. The gryphon was stunned for a moment, and instinctively put its claw to its beak for protection of its only way of eating. Duke took advantage of the moment of weakness and grabbed the gryphon by its throat for an over-the-shoulder throw.
Once on the ground, the gryphon started to scramble to regain its upward position on Duke, but the man was to have no part of it. He dropped his full weight onto the gryphon’s throat in an elbow strike, crushing its windpipe and causing asphyxiation over time. While it wasn’t dead yet, it certainly wasn’t going to be fighting.
Once that was done, Duke drew his handgun and located his MP7 to retrieve it. Once it was back in his hands, he rushed back to Frost and the mare to find Frost dragging her with his left arm and shooting with his right at several gryphons who were taking cover behind a fully laden apple cart.
Duke slid in on his knees and took a firing position, then opened up at the cart. The amount of cargo prevented his bullets from hitting the intended target, but it did keep the gryphons down as suppressive fire. Once there was cover fire, Frost moved the mare to his shoulder and carried her as Duke moved along behind him, keeping them safe.
Frost aimed his pistol forward at the coming crowd of gryphons and ponies, ready to fire in case he needed to. Luckily, he was able to move through the battle practically unseen, as everyone was focused on their current opponents. Duke refrained from shooting inside the crowd to avoid drawing unwanted attention. The men made it to the door of the boutique and knocked on the door hard.
“It’s Frost, let us in!” Frost shouted.
He turned around to see Duke aiming at a trio of gryphons who were trying to corner the men against the building. Frost quickly trained his pistol on the right-most fighter and dispatched him with a shot to the gut, while Duke shot the other two gryphons three times each, two to take them to the ground, then one while they were there to finish each of them. After all was said and done, Frost holstered his sidearm and carried the mare with both arms.
When the shots rang out, the door burst open, and Frost rushed inside, followed quickly by Duke, who shut the door and went to the windows. Most were boarded up, but one of them had sustained serious damage, and had an open view outside. Duke aimed outside and started taking careful shots at incoming gryphons, letting the stallions focus more on their current fight and make the coming fight easier for them.
Frost rushed the pegasus mare over to the raised stage and set her down, uncaring of the large crowd that was watching. As soon as she was down, he got to work making an IV to get fluids into her body. A couple of ponies started getting close, nearly in the way.
“Give me space!” Frost demanded, scaring the ponies back.
Amel was a little taken aback by the harshness in his voice, but knew from talking with him before that this was him in job-mode. She stepped back like he asked, as he could certainly not have known it was she who was behind him. From a safe distance, she watched him get to work.
“If there’s any blood in the house, I need it now!” Frost said.
“We don’t have that here!” a voice replied.
“Dammit!” Frost cursed through clenched teeth.
He pulled out a small plastic baggie with a cap on it and tore the cap away. Under it was a needle, which he carefully administered into one of the mare’s bulging veins in her rump, While her body looked limp, she did show some signs of tension that immediately went away with whatever Frost administered with the needle.
He put his hand to her neck.
“No, no, no, stay here!” Frost shouted in vain at the guard.
He frantically started going through a mental checklist of everything he could do. The wounds were gashes, not cuts, so he couldn’t sew them closed. The broken bones were all ribs, so he couldn’t set them. He took away the pain, and an infection was likely and would have to be fought later. But the blood loss was still too much.
“Come on stay with me!” Frost said.
“Frost!” Duke called. “We go a big group of bad guys coming in!”
Frost put his hands on the mare’s bandages and pressed down. Pressure was the only tool he had left to save this mare’s life, and it wasn’t even a permanent solution. After a few seconds, he looked at her face and knew that it was too late.
Slowly, he stood up, blood on his hands, and shook his head. He clenched his fist and then grabbed his rifle.
“FUCK!” he shouted, starling everypony in the room. Amel blinked at the extraordinary foulness of his chosen words.
“Outside, now!” Duke said. As if breaching a room, Duke opened the door and rushed outside, followed immediately by Frost, and they rushed back into the fray.
Outside, the battle raged, and the men moved quickly to make it to the front where they would be the most useful. With their guns, they could thin out the herd as it came to assault their location. With gryphons coming from the sky and along the ground, every shot counted.
The battle behind them was starting to calm down, as the gryphons were falling and the guards clearly had the advantage with armor and weapons. The gryphons appeared to have numbers, though, as they somehow just kept on coming.
A group of five came running down the street, swords brandished, screaming and in a complete frenzy. The men aimed in their direction and started firing and didn’t stop until they had all fallen to the ground. While they were distracted with that, though, more of them were coming from up high.
The men stopped shooting, and right away, they heard several gryphons land behind them by only yards. With a quick turn, the men trained their weapons on what turned out to be a massive group of ten and opened fire. They were only able to knock down four of them before three were upon them and three were moving toward the guards.
One of the gryphons brought a scimitar down at Frost’s shoulder, which Frost blocked with the plastic hand-guard of his rifle. He followed it up with a strike from the butt of his gun, dazing the gryphon and sending it staggering back a few steps. Frost went to shoot, but when he pulled the trigger, nothing came out. He knew he hadn’t fired all of the shots from his current magazine yet, which meant that he had a serious problem on his hands.
Instead, he rushed forward and shoved the rifle barrel into the gryphon’s large eye, eliciting a blood-curdling scream, and yanked it down to the ground by its eye socket. Once down, Frost took his foot and stomped on its neck, breaking the spine within. Clear of his opponent, he pulled his handgun and slung his rifle over his shoulder, ready to continue fighting.
Before he moved, though, he noticed something odd. The gryphon appeared to be crumbling away and blowing away as if it were simply dust in the wind. He didn’t have much time to think on it now, though, as the war raged on around him.
Duke had to deal with two enemies. While Frost was fighting the other one, he worked on keeping one gryphon between himself and the other gryphon, forcing them to fight him one on one. He couldn’t get a shot off because the gryphon in front of him was constantly slashing at him, at one point cutting into his already hurting shoulder.
When it went for another strike, though, it did something Duke hadn’t seen coming; it went to peck at his face. Duke just moved his head out of the way, but unfortunately, that meant that his neck and arteries were exposed to the gryphon’s sharp beak. He realized, though, that the same was true of the gryphon, and without thinking too much about what he was doing, he went to bite the gryphon in the neck.
His teeth sank in with all his might and the gryphon screamed, trying to pull back. Duke kept his bite force on hard, and though his teeth didn’t get too far in, the gryphon reeled back and gave him room, allowing him to pull up his MP7 and fire on fully automatic, tearing through the bird in front of him and hitting the gryphon behind. As he felt the bullets riddle his enemy, he let his bite grip go and watched the gryphon fall.
“I always knew you were a bunch of chickens,” Duke said, wiping the blood from his mouth. He spat more out, which may have been a combination of his and the gryphon’s, and continued on.
When he and Frost reunited, Frost noticed the blood on Duke’s face and asked if he was okay. When Duke responded positively, the men continued into the fight, going for the three gryphons who had opted to battle the guards behind them.
One was already dead, one injured, and one cornered. Duke went to the injured one, which had its back to him, and put one bullet into the back of its head. The guards facing it flinched at the sudden explosion of feathers and more before them, and when Duke saw no more gryphons except for Frost’s, he started checking for injuries.
Frost holstered his pistol, as he wanted to save ammo, and pulled his FE9 to finish off the gryphon from behind. The gryphon heard him, though, and suddenly swung around, talons out. Frost just managed to dodge, earning a razor cut on his cheek, and then lunged forward and put the knife in the gryphon’s throat. When the gryphon fell, it, like the one before, faded into dust and blew away. With the sounds of battle far away now, and no gryphons in sight, Frost pondered on it.
“What is that?” he asked to no one in particular.
“Mirror pool,” a guard said.
“What?” Frost asked.
“The mirror pool,” the guard repeated. “They must have found it in the forest. It lets you make infinite copies of yourself”
“So there could just be a gryphon in the forest multiplying himself right now?” Frost asked incredulously.
“Not for long,” another guard said. “Word from the Captain, several groups went out to take care of the pool permanently. Probably gonna destroy it, collapse the cave.”
“Well, at least that’s done, then,” Frost said. “You alright, Duke?”
“Yeah,” Duke replied. “You? Looks like he caught you in the face.”
“I’ll live,” Frost said, wiping away blood. “Come on. Let’s check on who’s still with us.”
With that, the men began the gruesome task of seeing who was still alive on the field and who was KIA. The main portion of the battle was over, and though bitter and bloody and destructive, they had survived. However, how much of them had survived had yet to be seen.
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6250354
Just ask the Chinese Communist Party in the South and East China seas.
Unlimited balloon griffins?
Get the pie trays sharpened up girls, its time to play Saw Frisbee.
Hopefully with the Mirror Pool shut down, they can get a little break. But, the fact that they was fighting mostly clones, that means there was a lot less real Griffins killed than it seems. And now that one of the advantage the Griffins have is gone, I'm got a bad feeling they are going to use their next advantage soon.
C&Cs:
Frost knew Duke would be able to handle himself, so, he kept his attention on the guard and keeping her safe.
> Remove the comma after ‘so’.
“We go a big group of bad guys coming in!”
> Correction: ‘got’.
It lets you make infinite copies of yourself
> Missing an ending mark.
I made this mistake, too, but you don't need to specify what was damaged, as we, the reader can infer what broke if you took a more cienematic tone, like this:
Keep it up, though.
Can someone make artwork of Amel and the other characters?
6365135
The two gasses are different chemical make-ups. Chlorine Gas is just straight chlorine, while Mustard Gas is actually a classification (see wikipedia for complicated details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_mustard ). Both suck to be around, though.
6365528
I would love for someone to do that. I would just want to talk to them to give them a general idea of what the characters look like (colors, shapes, etc.). I have yet to be contacted about anything of that sort, though.
Basically, Amel is a brown earth pony with a brown mane that has a blonde streak through it. Mane style can change, as it does in the story, and she has several scars around her torso and one on her neck.
Frost is taller than Duke, and both have medium builds. They usually wear visors on missions with their helmets and other gear ( http://www.baseops.net/basictraining/usaf_cct_lrg1-c400.jpg ). Overall, it isn't too complex, as I like readers to imagine for themselves with a general agreement on certain features.
6368224 thanks for the distinction for the gases, but onto the point of this comment.
Camel is Brown, huh, I envisioned her as a light gray, mane being a slightly darker shade of grey (not the book) than her coat.
I have No artistic ability, that's why I asked.
6368224 ah, I have no artistic ability so I decided to ask.
...Amel is Brown? I envisioned her as a light grey earth pony, her mane being a shade or two darker than her coat with a dark grey stripe running though it. Well, that was a drastic difference.
6368317
I was envisioning a sort of gritty, sandy look. Which is weird since she is a regular earth pony, nothing special, but it just came to me. And it's too bad you don't do art :( all the people who have asked me about it haven't been artists.
6369441 I have long since accepted my inability to do art, i leave that to my sister.
what don't do in drawing, i make up for in other things, writeing, for example. but still I see where you were going with the color scheme, an i wish you the best of luck!
Still don't know how the gryphins made it into the country, and made an attack next to the capital