Lineage

The boost in power Luna gave me was a phenomenal experience, to say the least. I was able to dance and hack through several of the undead creatures, dismembering them to the point of disability before they could even raise their weapons. I could see Luna using several different forms of magic to burn, crush, and vaporise the shambling dead men as she danced about the battlefield, Twilight giving the sky raining magic as she cast spell after spell to freeze large groups of the dead in place to allow Celestia and Cadance to cut them down.

Each fighter worked in unison with each other, myself being back to back with the insanely capable and even more insanely agile Karra, brandishing two steel warpicks in the hands that she used to hook and dismember several undead in a matter of seconds, her gorgeous skin soaked and her hair matted with blood at that bandit blood lust she had shone brightly on her face, giggling and laughing as she carved, impaled, and bludgeoned the undead.

I’d called for Grael a while ago but he’d yet to arrive nearby. I imagined he was stuck elsewhere in the crowd, if the distant snarls and howl were anything to judge by. The other students in the Academy had joined in on the scuffle, helping us thin the numbers of the undead rather quickly, as the lack of the curse allowed them to die, though I was curious as to what kept them going right now. I caught a glance of my mother hacking through several limbs and necks of the undead with trained grace, her sword enchanted with some kind of magic as a bright blue aura shone from the blade.

“Eyes forward!” Karra barked in a much gruffer tone, her usual ditz replaced with a head that was on straight as an arrow and a much more intelligent manner. “If we let one of them slip past our guard, we’re gonna be in trouble. Keep your eyes trained on your half of our little circle and let your partner handle theirs.”

“Sure thing, boss!” I nodded, taking the legs of one of the undead before dragging my sword straight up and cleaving through his decomposing body. I liked Battle-Mode Karra, she seemed like a fun time, despite her passion for brutal murder of innocents. We were able to handle our quadrant more than efficiently, despite the fact that the others were burning through bodies faster than we could even attempt to match, Celestia wasting no effort with a sword and firing off blasts of plasma that vaporised entire lines of the undead, leaving nothing more than a scorched gouge in the earth where the beam travelled.

Their numbers were falling further and further, each one of us catching a glance of the stitched demon corpse merely watching from afar. I turned my eye to him, quickly snatching a knife off of Karra’s belt and launching it at him, the blade piercing through his eye and causing him to rock back slightly, but due to his status of “Technically dead”, it did nothing but get his attention.

“I’m hoping that these fuckers work on a hivemind,” I growled as the demon-puppet began to rush towards us. “And that once the big brain is dead, they all die with it.”

“That’d be a great thing,” Karra growled, slashing a wrist off an attacking undead before literally punching his face off. “That things stitched together from a dead demon, right?”

“Yeah?” I asked, looking over my shoulder as I grabbed a pike off a corpse and launched it through several of the undead, their bodies being as dense as stretched paper.

“So if the Mother-thing can resurrect corpses, stitch them back together and keep them fighting,” Karra said, clearing out the last few undead in our quadrant it a few mighty kicks to some half-missing heads. “Why are these fuckers not getting back up?”

“I’m so glad you asked,” the demon giggled in a female voice, raising his hand into the air and casting a purple wave of magic, only to have his hand be blasted clean off by a pink bolt, followed by receiving an armoured boot to the face, as Cadance made her presence known.

“Sorry, hun,” she said to the demon as she slammed her boot down onto his face, crushing his skull and splattering its contents onto the snow-covered ground. “We’re not dealing with your second wind. But if you’re still listening out there, Dear Mother, we’re coming to deal with you soon enough. So sit tight, hun.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I nodded, smiling gratefully at her as she looked at the both of us.

“How are you handling yourself?” she asked.

“We’re doing good,” I said, looking back at the other Alicorn finishing off the rest of the undead in their sector of the battlefield. “You handle yourself pretty well.”

“Thank you,” she nodded. “I’m nowhere near as good as Luna or Celestia, but I know how to use a sword well enough to take care of a couple of corpses.”

With that sentence, she turned around to see the rest of the group cleaving through the last of the undeads, leaving the battlefield a mess of body parts and strewn weapons, all of us cleaning our weapons and returning them to their rightful places before grouping up again.

“So we’ve got a march on an impregnable fortress guarded by the most powerful beings on the planet by a worthless army, and an incompetent leader,” Luna said, crossing her arms and looking at Celestia. “We’ve seen that before many a time.”

“Indeed we have,” Celestia nodded. “Desperation, pure and simple. She’s scared of us coming down there and is now throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.”

“Agreed,” Karra nodded in a rough tone. “She’s flailing around to try and put a plan together, but even from how bad this idea was, great generals and commanders at least put some thought into something they know is going to fail. There were no back lines, no formations, no long-range units, and no planning put into who should group up with who for maximum defense. There was no archer line at the back to thin out numbers, heavily-armoured pikeman at the front to pick them off further, and no swordsman ready and waiting to cut down those that broke through. There was no strategy to this, at all.”

“She’s right,” Luna nodded. “This Mother of ours seems to be a complete novice when it comes to any kind of strategy or planning. I’m willing to wager the reason for that is because she’s had no training in anything.”

“She’s been locked up for thousands of years,” Cadance nodded. “She’ll be lucky if she even knows how to use that goddess power of hers… still, it’ll make our job much easier.”

“Eh, I don’t like fights that aren’t a challenge,” Luna sighed in a disappointed manner. “There’s no way to test yourself against them to see what you need to improve on. If they just keel over in one hit, you don’t learn anything.”

“I’d normally agree,” Celestia nodded, fidgeting with the pommel of her sword. “But I’d rather this goddess go down without much of a struggle instead of having her escape and become a problem that the rest of the world can’t solve… ugh, it makes me miss the days when we could warn other Alicorn to keep their sectors safe from this like this in case another family failed to solve their respective problem.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask about that,” I spoke up. “What exactly killed off the world’s most powerful species?”

“War, disease, assassination,” Luna shrugged.

“But our species was supposed to be all-powerful?” I asked. “Who the hell could stand up to our entire race… enough to wipe them all out?”

“I’ll tell you in a second,” Luna said before looking at one of the bodies in the snow and sighing. “But first, go over there and grab one of the pieces of the bodies, doesn’t matter which.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I need to test it for magic residue to see if I can trace it to any specific magic to help devise a counter-spell,” she answered. “Just do it.”

I rolled my eyes, turning around to go and pick one of the rapidly-freezing pieces up only to have Luna wrap her arm around my neck and place the flat of her palm against my back, directly behind my heart.

“There,” she said in my ear. “That’s one alicorn dead without a struggle.”

She let go of me and allowed me to turn around, a look of understanding on my face.

“Does that help answer your question?” she asked. “Sometimes you don’t get a chance to fight back, no matter how powerful you are. You can be ambushed, drugged, killed in your sleep, or cut down before you even see it coming. Don’t ever believe you’re invincible, Richter. That’s when it becomes easier to make a mistake. Normally Alicorn are trained to make sure that doesn’t happen, which is what we’re going to do with you. Isn’t that right, Cadance?”

“You already proved I was wrong,” Cadance said in a dour tone, looking at the ground for a long moment before meeting eyes with Luna again. “You just do what you need to do.”

“Wait… you guys already talked about this?” I asked.

“Yes, we talked about it while you were gone,” Celestia nodded. “It turned into a pretty heated argument, but eventually Cadance conceded that she was doing more harm than good by refusing to let Luna train you.”

“And I said she was allowed to train you for the required amount of time the training regime usually last for,” Cadance added on before looking at Luna. “And not a day more.”

“I understand,” Luna nodded. “Not a day more.”

“Right… so how long are we gonna be in Falketurm for?” I asked.

“Well… if I cut out all of the horseback combat training, style training for anything besides longsword, all of the magic training, and just stick to longsword training, close-quarters-combat, unarmed and armed, alchemy, advanced tracking, and survival training, it should only take about… five years?”

“Five years?!” I exclaimed. “Are you serious?”

“Richter, what does time mean to you?” Luna asked.

“I… well…”

“You’re immortal,” Luna stated. “You’ll probably stop aging at around twenty five, thirty if you’re unlucky, and forty if you’re cursed, like Grandma over there.”

“Fuck you,” Celestia chimed in.

“You’ll be, what, ass-end of twenty-three by the time we finish?” she asked. “Literally the start of your prime immortal life?”

“But-”

“But nothing,” Luna said. “You’re coming with me Falketurm for your training, and that’s that. Are we clear?”

“Ugh, yes, Aunt Luna,” I sighed, nodding my head in defeat.

“Does that mean I don’t have a job anymore?” Karra asked.

“No, I’m sure we can absolve you of your crimes and give you a position in the Equestrian Army, if you want?” Celestia offered. “You’re a very skilled fighter.”

“You don’t have a separate army for non-humans?” Karra asked.

“The only thing we segregate is skill level,” Celestia answered. “You’ll be somewhere in the upper mid-tier of our fighters from what I’ve seen today.”

“Eh. I’ll take it,” Karra shrugged. “I like killing things for money and I don’t ask a lot of questions.”

“Ah, the perfect soldier,” Celestia nodded. “We’ll get you sorted out when we’re finished here.”

“Awesome,” she grinned.

“Now, back to business then?” Celestia asked, clapping her hands together. “We have a brief respite, a few hours of rest, gear up and then set out to finish this?”

“Uh, wouldn’t it be better to finish it now?” I asked. “Strike while the iron is hot, and all?”

“Richter, honey, our Mother has no more forces to send out after us,” Celestia chuckled. “All she can do is wait for us to come and put the final nail in her coffin. And I’m in no rush to end her life.”

“Alright then,” I shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

“Indeed,” she smiled. “Now, if you excuse me, I need to go wash the blood and grime out of my hair. I’ll be in the western bedroom’s shower if anyone needs me.”

After dropping that obvious hint, Celestia made her way back to the Academy to prepare for whatever treatment she had in mind for me, leaving me eagerly awaiting whatever it could be.