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Post by Javelin Razorwing on Sept 21, 2015 0:56:46 GMT -5
Slash, slash. Weave to the side to avoid the warrior’s sword. Javelin jabbed at the dog’s left knee with her foreleg, felt steel knee guard impact with her horseshoe, the dog did not stumble as planned. She felt the dog slam his sword onto her back, felt it split her mail open. Javelin struck out with her wings, sweeping the dog’s sword to the side and launching herself at him. The warrior stumbled back from the body slam. Javelin followed up with a flurry of blows, the dog deflecting all but two that drew blood on his sword arm.
The two combatants shuffled about, dog and pony watching each other for a weakness in the other’s defense, weapons bared before them. Suddenly, the dog’s attention was momentarily pulled away by something, his head turning slightly, perhaps to listen to something only he could hear. That’s when Javelin struck, right wing, left wing, she swung low and then high. Her wing blade raked across the dog’s cuirass, he was pushed backward by the slash.
Selenia came into view, sliding past Javelin and delivering a powerful apple buck, ramming her hind legs into the dog’s torso and sending him rolling backwards, head over heels. Javelin looked to her comrade, awestruck by her flawless execution and timing. The dog was on his legs again in a few seconds time. Selenia had closed in for the kill but her lunge for the warrior’s neck skidded off his pauldron and he batted her aside. Before Javelin could further engage the dog, he had leapt back into one of the holes. It would be futile to go after him.
It was at this point that the pegasus noticed that all of the dogs who could had escaped back into the tunnels below. She touched Selenia’s shoulder with a hoof asking “Are you alright?” Javelin looked around for the other half of her team, spotting Retort standing over a corpse. She ran over to him. She shrieked in horror when she recognized Blink’s corpse, little more than a puddle remained within her pile of equipment. Javelin gaped at Retort silently demanding him to tell her what had happened. His face was unfathomable, she couldn’t tell if the alchemist was going to cry or scream in anguish.
Then the war horn blared again, and this time the ponies could hear it. Javelin tore her eyes away from her comrade to gaze upon a most peculiar sight. Emerging from the treeline was a bank of fog. It spread out across a half mile at least and moved against the wind, much too fast for a normal cloud bank. Just within the mist, Javelin spotted a battalion of heavily armed Diamond Dog warriors clad in silver armor. They moved in perfect formation as they advanced up the field, the mist enshrouding all but the first two rows of warriors, who were little more than hulking silhouettes, yet they all seemed unhindered by the obscuring wall of fog.
“Selenia! Get over here!”, the pegasus mare cried out. “Diamond Dog reinforcements. They must be using the fog to hide their numbers. We won’t be able to hit them easily with ranged weapons,” she told her companions. As the silver soldiers passed by the fallen Diamond Dogs near the treeline, Javelin was shocked to see them impaled with the pikes of the marching troops. Why would they kill their own wounded? Was it some kind of warrior pride thing, those who can no longer fight are useless? No, Dogs might abandon their wounded to save their own skin, but they wouldn’t wantonly murder their own fallen.
What could be the cause then? Why had the Diamond Dogs run away? Unless, the battalion wasn’t part of the Diamond dog contingent. The silver armor, the unnatural fog, the sounding horn as they marched… All of those things sounded familiar, but Javelin couldn’t put her hoof on what it was. “I remember reading something about silver armored Diamond Dogs, but I can’t remember…” Then it struck her. In her military academy, during her history classes, she had read up on military units of note, and there were no Dog units more decorated than the Silver Core, the Diamond Dog force that had almost singlehandedly turned the tide of the Dragon War. According to some theorists, they had been struck with tragedy, cursed by the powerful blood magic of their former dragon masters to never find peace, forced to make war for eternity. Whether that was true or not held little significance at the moment. What mattered was that the Core Hounds were marching towards Strike Team Hydra intent on slaying them as easily as they had the fallen Diamond Dogs.
Revelation had brought a name and substance to her fear. “We need to retreat. There is nothing more we can do here. Those are Core Hounds!” Javelin’s utterance was full of terror. Gone was the reckless courage, the fierce determination to stand up to the foes of her people. "Unless you think we can slow them down?" The pegasus mare looked to her unicorn comrades, who could tell from her expression that what little hope she had was dangerously close to disappearing.
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Post by Selenia on Sept 22, 2015 15:50:45 GMT -5
Selenia barely heard a loud call from one of the remaining dogs before her hind legs pistoned into her target dog. The blow was satisfyingly meaty and she felt the poor mutt careen away from her hooves. She recovered and whipped around as he was starting to get up, aiming for another hoof to finish him off, but he juked like a boxer- which now made perfect sense now that she got a closer look at his face- at just the right time, making her sharpened hoof glance off his bevor and letting her own momentum do the work of driving his bony elbow into her forehead, clotheslining her down hard. Selenia fought to shake the blurriness in her vision and prepared to roll away from a follow up strike, but it was Javelin who loomed over her instead. The dog had scampered away, presumably into a hole.
"Thanks..." Selenia managed as she took Javelin's hoof to stand back up and blinked rapidly to clear the disorientation. That hit was gonna leave one heck of a bump, at least he didn't have the sense to aim for her horn. "Did we win?" She said aloud, scanning the field. A shriek from Javelin drew her attention, and she turned around to find her beside Retort, who was still kneeled on the ground near where Blink had fallen. With the few seconds of respite granted by the retreating dogs, they could gather their bearings and prepare for the next wave. She got up and made her way over to her two remaining comrades, but skidded to a halt at what they were facing. A corpse that could be recovered for family and buried properly was one thing, but this was just a collection of meat and sinew that only shared Blink's coat color. Something must have gone terribly wrong with Retort's efforts, that much was clear, judging by his stone-faced expression. She gulped once, her throat dry, before walking up to Retort and placing a hoof on his shoulder. "It doesn't get any easier. Let's make sure her death wasn't in vain."
Selenia let go and turned around to Javelin, who was now eyeing a fog bank that had appeared at he treeline. Her brow furrowed and she squinted into the fog. A moving shadow here, a glint there, then all of a sudden, countless rank and file lines of heavily armored dogs marched out. Clad in shining armor, they looked more like walking tanks than soldiers, if not for the glint of burning malice inside their helmets. Their armor really got Selenia's attention, gleaming and almost whitish-silver, as if it had a layer of iridescent crystal on top of the metal. She wracked her brain trying to think of where she had heard of that description before, but Javelin shortened her thought process by giving her the one and only answer.
"Core Hounds... Of Silverback's Silver Core..." Selenia practically whispered. Red had told her some stories of the Silver Core, and the following evening she had promptly procrastinated on her spellwork to read even more about the legendary force of diamond dogs. Led by the mighty Silverback who wielded Warhound- the earth shattering sword, they were comprised of members of all the diamond dog packs that Silverback had united in a time of crisis. They made their first battlefield appearance at the Battle of the Red Plains, an age and a half ago during the Dragon Wars, where the combined griffin and pony forces were at the breaking point. Spearheading the attack, Silverback and his Silver Core had not only turned the tide of the battle, but continued in alliance with the ponies and griffins to end the war by killing the dragon matriarch. Not a single defeat was to follow the Silver Core's entrance into the war.
Red had said that after the war, they were cursed, forced to continue to exist as wraiths, with naught but their arms, armor, and comrades to accompany them- forced into an existence of war with no end, torn between planes of existence. Centuries had turned their honored name to legend. But why were they here, and why now? Had Celestia found some way, in all her deific power, to harness such an implacable force, and turn its unquenchable thirst for war on Equestria? She fought down that train of thought and focused on the present. This was an army, centuries old and far outside of their small strike team's level. They had only one option.
"Retreat." Selenia said, nodding in agreement with Javelin. Being a hero wasn't Selenia's schtick, especially when it would end up with their entire team as tragic heroes at that. "We need to get out of here now. Call for backup, warn the rest of our force, make sure it gets up to command even if we have to run there ourselves. If we stay, we die, and word won't reach command until it's too late."
She grabbed Retort by the shoulder, the force not abiding any argument. "This is no longer a small incursion force that we can handle as three exceptional ponies, this is a large scale assault by one of the planet's most dangerous militaries, plus they're pretty much unkillable ghosts, so there's that." She shrugged. "Retort, we need a smokescreen now. Hoof it over and I'll send it off with a kinetic bomb to spread the contents faster and give us more cover. Prime anything you've got in the meantime. Mines, explosives, poison gas, anything- set it to blow and leave it so we can get out of here. Even if it might not work, remember your supplies can be replaced but the lives of our soldiers can't. We can't stop them but we may well slow them as Javelin suggested, give our command more time to formulate a proper response." She stopped to prepare a warning flare before turning around again, "Oh, and if you hear a war horn, run as unpredictably as possible." She turned to Javelin pointedly, "Their archers are trained to shoot down dragons with arrows that can pierce scale."
A soldier's job was to follow orders. Their orders were to hold this treeline against any and all enemy presence, and good soldiers follow orders. But this? This was surely suicide, both for the team but also the military they were trying to protect if they didn't warn somepony else. Selenia fired the magical flare and faced the advancing dogs again, preparing to launch whatever Retort provided and then hightail it out of there, keeping her eyes and ears keen to any changes in their line, and most definitely paying attention to the ground in case diggers felt like they could take this chance. She silently prayed to Luna that this decision wouldn't cost Equestria the war.
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Post by Mortar Retort on Sept 24, 2015 0:32:42 GMT -5
As Retort watched in absolute, cold stunned, horror as Blink’s body fizzled away, his mind wrapped by the how – it was concentrated but, nothing like this. He glanced to the vial he had used, when it realization of what he had just done struck him like anvil to the head. Somehow, he didn’t know how, he had mixed the two. In the confusion of the battle had he made such a critical error? Like that awful night years ago, he failed once more and possibly cost another pony their life. No, he pondered, he could still fix this – alchemy can fix it all. He hooves tried to push around the slop of Blick, put the goo back to way it once was, ”I can fix this, it’s not too bad…” He rambled to himself, oblivious now to the new threat which loomed.
He poured through his wooden case in a desperate search for something that wasn’t there. A miracle cure for something far past the point of death, as if believing he could reconstruct a pony from the very base elements he had just inadvertently rendered Blink into. Completely caught up in his foalish attempts to reconstruct Blink soup, if not for Selenia’s rouse, he would have stayed in that spot till arrows or Core Hounds had gotten him, whichever happened first. Stirred back to the situation at hoof, he glanced around before he jumped to his hooves.
”Right,” He muttered as he gave the corpse puddle one last regretful look as he hoisted up his materials to his back, ”Say it’s about time we took our leave.” He said as he followed quickly behind, preparing what had been requested of him. He had something in backup, just for this scenario, a rather nasty combo – non-lethal but perfect for a quick retreat. With his magic, he tossed Selenia a series of paper-wrapped grenades, something he worked up in his shop before it was leveled in the Canterlot attack to counter Diamond Dogs. It was s simple concoction, by alchemy standards. Mostly just a catalyst, explosive powder, and irritant agent balled up into a convenient package – nothing has grandiose as his earlier attacks and one that couldn’t backfire against ponies. The base irritant contents contained a mixture of citrus oil extract, ammonia, and chili powder, among other enhancing agents and oils to generate a proper smoke plume, which, when breathed by a Diamond Dog should incapacitate them temporarily, and with any luck induce an anaphylaxis shock on more unfortunate canines. Not that it would work against Core Hounds, Retort had no knowledge of them, but it should provide a rather thick and prolonged smoke screen. Oils had a tendency to linger when bound with smoke particles.
Once those were tossed over, Retort went to work on the remainder of contents in his case. He’d had to sacrifice a fair amount of hard earned. His only option, at this point, with low supplies, was to create a bomb of what was left. He prepped a explosive catalyst , using a combination of chemical reagents and powder igniters with a simple fuse. He had no idea what this could create when mixed with the remains of his wooden case and the few chemicals he combined together, only which needed a reactive catalyst or heat to create the desired deadly effect. There was enough leftover reagents to create a rather toxic cloud of caustic, fiery death, or a rather spectacular fireworks show, or at the very worst, a fizzled experiment resulting in what would best be described as a firecracker soot snake. Unlikely, as there were some rather dangerous chemicals in his back, and the fact it was now coated with a very flammable substance made it all the more volatile, something should happen, and hopefully it as big.
Retort used his magic to toss off the wooden pack and set it down on the ground behind him, which left him just one saddlebag of essential supplies, such as medical and other a few small offensive items. ”I primed everything I had in there, no clue what could result but we should put as much distance and cover between it, the hounds, and us as possible. A shield would be desirable too when it goes off!” Retort explained as the continued with the others towards the relative safety of the forest's trees.
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Post by King Tidal Wave on Sept 30, 2015 16:17:51 GMT -5
With the core hounds fast approaching as Retort finished up his concoction, Selenia had little time before she could propel Retort's saddlebag while remaining at a safe distance from the blast and noxious fumes. The unicorn launched the bag right into the center of the core hounds, a perfect shot, just as another blare of a war hound sounded. This was was longer, drawn out and followed by several shorter drones. Accompanying it came the sound of numerous bowstrings, pulled back in unison in the near distance. The arrows flew forwards as the three began their retreat.
Retort's saddlebag caused a several of the marching dogs to falter as they became enveloped in Retort's smoke. Looking back, they might see several core hounds with seared flesh, gruesomely regenerating as they continued marching forward. The bomb had bought them moments at best, but smoke nor grenade would stop these ghoulish dogs' unending march.
The three ponies escaped the volley of arrows with their lives, but for one of them only barely. Javelin had taken an arrow right into her back, close to her spine. The projectile pierced right through her armor, locking up her muscles and sending her crashing into the ground. Selenia, with an arrow painfully stuck into her fleshy rear but otherwise remained mobile, and Retort, who had avoided getting hit altogether, helped her up and away on their feet. Crippled though they were, the three had escaped with their lives.
Now they could only hope that Colonel Bitter had seen Selenia's flare. Otherwise, the Equestrian Military would have a new problem to deal with.
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