Guards and Monsters

“You may be relieved to know that I spoke with Celestia, and have resolved the situation with the Diamond Dogs,” Luna began, once we were all indoors in a nondescript crystal building on the outskirts of the city. “I was able to show her proof that the Diamond Dogs attacked first. Running down and executing the dogs who attempted to flee was justifiable, since their magic would have returned in short order, and allowed them to stage another sneak attack. Likewise, the dogs encountered in the kitchen may have only been pretending to surrender. As such, I was given leave to punish you as I see fit, rather than having any formal charges filed.”

“And the puppies?” I asked.

“There were no puppies,” Luna replied. “All the physical evidence collected by the guard will show that there were never any under aged Diamond Dogs present in the cave. Rumors of murdered puppies will be written off as an exaggeration that crept into the tale through repeated telling.”

She paused. “In the future, we will be required to cover our own tracks, or I expect I will be in for another humiliating session with my sister. I would prefer the former to the latter.”

“So we’re okay,” I said. “We got away with it.”

“Unfortunately, there is one last consideration,” Luna said, scowling. “The Diamond Dog nation is unhappy that their rogue tribe of pony-eating savages were dealt with so harshly. As an apology, they have requested our services ridding them of an infestation of vermin in the Unicorn Range.”

“It’s not changelings, is it?” Bon Bon asked. “I don’t know if I’d feel right exterminating a changeling nest. They’re almost ponies.”

“Ah, take heart, Candy Pony,” Luna said. “This is not a task with any particular moral dimension. The vermin they speak of are merely an extremely overgrown variety of spider – they neither speak, nor think.” Luna scowled. “Which makes them poor sport, and normally beneath our notice. But since our hooves are tied, we must make the best of it. Perhaps with the proper handicap, we can make this an enjoyable hunt.”

===

Since we still kind of sucked at the whole fighting deal, the proper handicap for us was ‘no invulnerable force field’. She also didn’t give us back our magic weapons. We still had the actual armor, which was pretty tough except for a few unfortunate vulnerable spots, and all the non-magical weapons we wanted, summoned out of thin air. Spike also had his own nearly-invulnerable scales under his armor, and his fire breath, since he had even less training than the rest of us.

For her own part, Luna proclaimed that she would use no magic, no weapons, and no armor. She would squish the bugs with her bare hooves.

There was still no question that we were going to win; our ‘home base’ for the operation – where we’d activate our armor, setting the point where we’d reappear when we died – was Luna’s chariot, resting on a cloud high in the sky, far from the reach of any conceivable spider counterattack. However, “If this becomes a farce like the fight with the Dogs, I will consider the game a loss,” Luna informed us. “We will continue on to exterminate the foe, but it will be but a tedious chore.

“Do not disappoint me – remember that I have yet to decide on your punishment.”

We suited up. We transformed. We strapped on hoof-claws and wing-blades and swords, and took hold of our spears. Luna stood before us, majestic in the moonlight, and spread her feathered wings – then leapt off the chariot, diving towards the forested mountains below. We all followed, in a ragged line, since formation flying wasn’t one of our normal drills and none of us had had wings before last week.

The first casualty was Bon Bon, who managed to go into a spin trying to pull out of the dive and splattered herself against a bunch of pine trees. I pulled up into a loop-the-loop – almost on purpose, I was trying to air-brake – and headed down to the crash site to make sure she was dead.

“Bonnie?” I called out, following the trail of broken branches. “Bon Bon? Are you there?”

There was a groan below me, and I landed next to a pile of branches and pine needles with a bat pony’s hind leg and fake tail protruding out. I dragged her into the open, and looked her over. She actually looked just fine – it’s hard for pegasi to hurt themselves falling or crashing, and bat ponies apparently had the same magic, or luck, or whatever it was.

“Ow. Ow ow ow,” she muttered, clambering to three legs. Her left front leg didn’t look broken, but she couldn’t put any weight on it. “Oh, ponyfeathers. That was embarrassing.”

“We can still catch up,” I said. “I think I saw the cave Luna was leading us towards. Or do you want me to kill you? Are you in a lot of pain?”

“I’ll be fine,” Bon Bon said. “Or at least I’ll be dead soon enough once we actually find the enemy.”

We arrived at the cave before too long, and found it completely covered with spider webs – it was definitely the right cave. There was the sound of fighting inside, so I stabbed at the webs with my spear and jerked it left and right until there was a big enough hole for us to fly in through. Bon Bon gave me her spear once we were inside, since she couldn’t really use it with a sprained foreleg, and mine was stuck – the webs were sticky, and really, really tough.

There was a rustle above us, and we dove to the sides as a giant spider dropped down from above. Bon Bon folded her wings and dropped right down on top of it in turn, her spiked hooves smashing into its back and cracking its chitin. It let out a long, keening shriek as it died, its legs spasming randomly as green goop oozed from its smashed abdomen – and then I realized that the shriek was from Bon Bon, who’d forgotten that one of her legs was busted.

“You sure you don’t want me to kill you?” I asked, helping her into the air. I grabbed some of the less sticky webs and tied her leg to her side to keep her from using it again accidentally. She was in too much pain to talk, but she shook her head.

The webs were everywhere, but they weren’t generally blocking the passages – just splattered across every surface so that the spiders had something to cling to as they climbed. The next few spiders we came across were trying to lurk in the darkness, but our night vision was apparently better than theirs since we could see them plainly, and they thought they were hidden. Bon Bon flew in front, since she did kind of want to die, and I played wingmare, skewering the spiders that tried to get the drop on her before they could actually touch her. The spiders we found in the tunnels weren’t very big, or very tough – about as big as a medium-sized dog – and we went through half a dozen of them before we ran into any serious resistance.

“I think we went the wrong way,” I said, as the sounds of fighting that we’d been trying to follow faded to nothing. “I don’t know where we went wrong, but there were so many turns I’m not even sure which way out is.”

Bon Bon grunted, and kept up her steady pace through the dark, sticky tunnels.

“I guess I shouldn’t really worry about it,” I said. “It’s not like we weren’t planning to wander around down here for the rest of our lives. Hee!”

She grunted again, and hovered to a stop, as the tunnel opened into a large, lit chamber full of glowing mushrooms.

Wait, that’s not a very accurate description. It was a humongous chamber, hundreds of feet across, lit by frequent clusters of glowing mushrooms, in all colors of the rainbow. At the bottom was a still, shallow pond, with pulsating cocoons half-submerged. What the chamber was full of, was spiders. Dog sized ones, pony sized ones… larger ones. Smaller ones, too. They were standing around on the floor, crawling on the walls and the ceiling, or hanging in midair from strands of web. Several of them were looking right at us.

There was a flicker of green flame from the far corner of the room, and the faint sound of Spike shouting a battlecry. Bon Bon spread her wings, setting her wing-blades in place, and dove into the swarm. I was right behind her.

We stuck to the open air, because while it wasn’t free of enemies, they were on constrained and predictable paths. They could drop straight down, or climb back up their lines, or if you saw one scuttling across the ceiling, you knew it was going to swing down on the reciprocal path in an arc. Wing blades worked really well for slicing through the lines and sending the spiders plummeting to the ground, but I wasn’t sure the fall was actually hurting them , so I made a point of impaling any that I could get a good bead on.

It was scary – even after the spear was stuck in their bodies, they’d reach forwards and pull themselves along it, like they were climbing one of their web lines, until the tip got stuck in something – in one case, the chitin on the far side of their abdominal cavity – and then they’d stretch forwards with their horrible spiky fang things and try to bite me. It’s a good thing I was wearing a helmet – it was open-faced, but I was able to turn my head to deflect the fangs. And then they’d reach the end of their rope and get yanked off the spear, and spray ichor across their brethren below who’d chitter and wave their limbs helplessly, or try to jump at me and fall far short.

It was exhausting, and disgusting – I was covered in spider goo – but it was also exhilarating. I was winning!

Then we got to the far end of the cavern, and playtime was over. In the middle of a circle of a dozen or more dead spiders, Princess Luna struggled to free herself from a sticky web pinning her wings and her two left legs. Next to her, Pipsqueak and Diamond Tiara were completely ensnared, although DeeTee had her head free and was fending off a pair of dog-sized spiders with her sword. They’d clearly come up through a hole in the floor, right into an ambush, and only Spike’s fire had kept them alive this long.

I picked the biggest spider, and dove right at it, planting my spear right in its back, just behind its eyes. I kicked off from what I hoped was its corpse and cut the legs off another spider with my wing blades, and then there was something on my back, spraying sticky crap all over my hind legs, and I rolled over to try to crush it and only managed to brush it off, at the cost of sticking my back to the webs coating the floor.

Remember how I mentioned that our armor had vulnerable spots? Well, there was one big one, right on our bellies, and mine was completely exposed.

The first two spiders to try to take advantage of that were dog-sized, and got kicked in the face. Between a pony’s natural bucking strength and the hard spiky hoof-coverings we were wearing, they didn’t get back up. The next hundred thousand spiders to try to take advantage of it were about the size of my hoof, and all I could do was stare at them in horror screaming “No no no no no!” as they swarmed over me and sunk in their fangs. I tried flailing at them with my forehooves, but they were so fast, they just leapt aside, or leapt onto my hooves, and then they were biting my legs too, and my wings, and one of them crawled onto my face.

I started to go numb, and had the presence of mind to fold my wing in against my neck, and drag the wing blade through the gap between the helmet and breastplate. It wasn’t a good cut. I was already weakening, and to tell the truth suicide was harder than killing somepony else, especially when it hurt so much – after slicing through dozens of spider webs, the blades were no longer razor-sharp. So I hesitated instead of cutting deeply, and had to lie there choking on my own blood until I finally drowned in it.

Still better than being eaten by spiders.

For the record, there is nothing sexy about being eaten by spiders. I curled up in Luna’s chariot, shivering, until Pipsqueak and Diamond Tiara appeared next to me and reminded me that there was still a fight going on.

“Nice work with the suicide,” Pipsqueak said, finding his armor where it had teleported back into the chest, and starting to put it back on. “I’m not sure we would have thought of it.”

“You’re welcome,” Diamond Tiara scoffed. “I’m the one who had to actually kill you.”

“I know. It was awesome. She cut my head clean off!” Pipsqueak said.

“Nice. Wish I’d been there to see it,” I said, getting my own armor on.

There was no privacy, but we were in a hurry, and if Pipsqueak snuck a peek, well, it wasn’t anything he couldn’t see just by looking between his own legs when he was transformed. Helping each other dress just made it all go a lot faster. So did putting the breastplate on second, after the overcoat, and transforming as soon as possible so that the rest of it actually fit. We’d been getting into this armor all week, so we pretty much had it down.

Nopony else showed up back in the carriage by the time we finished dressing. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign or a bad one. “We’d better not wait,” I said.

“Why would we wait?” Pipsqueak asked.

I let the two of them take the lead, since they knew the entrance that Luna had actually taken. The path was marked by Spike’s fire, and from all the bodies we passed, it looked like they’d met much heavier resistance than Bon Bon and I. Soon enough, we got to the large chamber, and found ourselves surrounded by hundreds of spiders – but Luna and the others were nowhere to be seen.

“Well,” Pipsqueak said. “This is unfortunate.”

“Stick to the air!” I said, leaping up off the ground as quickly as I could. “It’s a lot easier to fight in the air!”

It was a close thing – Diamond Tiara had to cut Pipsqueak’s leg loose after one of the spiders ran in and webbed him – but we got off the ground, and I showed them how to swoop around and mess with the spiders who tried to drop down on us. I didn’t have my spear – it was still stuck in the body of a giant spider on the floor below, and Luna hadn’t been there in the carriage to make a replacement – but cutting open the spiders with a sword or wingblades was only a little riskier, and was much faster.

And even though it wasn’t working for them, the spiders just kept coming. I was starting to see why Luna didn’t consider fighting dumb animals to be very sporting.

Then the three of us flew face-first into a giant web. They hadn’t been stupidly attacking us because they didn’t know what else to do – they’d sacrificed dozens of their fellows to keep us busy, while they prepared a trap.

Luckily for us, to keep the web hidden they hadn’t been able to have any spiders waiting on it, so we had a few seconds to try to cut ourselves free. I slashed my wingblades over my head, and used the sword in my mouth to cut away at the webs clinging to my forelegs, and then squeaked as I toppled over backwards, ending up splayed out upside down, with my whole backside stuck to the web and my rear legs wrapped up in it. It was pretty hopeless.

But that put my head near Diamond Tiara, who’d been a bit smarter and started cutting herself loose from the bottom first, so I helped get her loose, instead.

She was the only one to get away. I heard her trying to save Pipsqueak, but most of my attention was on the really big spider looming over me. I tried to kick it in the face, and it was like kicking a wall. It chittered at me, and then bit me in the thigh. The armored overcoat kept the fang from piercing my cutie mark, but the inner thigh was one of those exposed spots, and the fang just sank right into the muscle. At least it didn’t hurt for long – there was a stabbing pain, then a fiery pain, and then it was just cold and numb. I tried to kick it again, but my leg didn’t respond. The chill numbness started to flow down my body, and the spider advanced over me so that all I could see was its hairy underside, as its spinnerets started to wrap me up in a cocoon.

That did put its head in reach of my sword, but when I tried to swing it the spider just smacked it out of my grip with its forelegs – almost breaking my jaw. Then the poison reached my chest, and I stopped being able to breathe. Everything went fuzzy, and dark –

And I was back on the carriage, with Pipsqueak, who’d presumably gotten the same treatment.

“The good news is, the poison is fatal,” I said.

“The bad news is, it’s down to the two of us,” he replied.

“Yeah, this isn’t going well. Maybe we should wait for somepony else to die.”

Pipsqueak was having none of that, and scrambled to start putting on his armor. “No way – we can’t leave Diamond Tiara in there all on her own!”

“How are we even going to find her?” I asked, putting on my armor anyway. “She’s not going to be waiting in the main cavern. She’ll sneak off into one of the side passages, like Luna must have.”

“Then we’ll sneak around until we find her. This place can’t be that big.”

I stopped dressing and stared at him. “It’s a Celestia-forsaken mountain, Pip. We’re going to have to be smart about this.”