Shame

Ruiz had maybe thirty seconds, assuming the best case scenario, before the gryphons began bashing down the door after him. There was no time to lose.

He grabbed the sheriff and pushed him down the stairs, following after and dragging the body over to Maria. "He must have the key on him," he noted, picking up the pry bar he had used to pull her from the wall. "They're all coming in now."

He turned back to the stairs, not fast enough to miss the look of sheer terror on her face, but fast enough to see that a gryphon had already made it downstairs. Taking a page from Jed's book, he swung the rail across the gryphon's face, clubbing him with the bent metal rod. He had planned to barricade the door with it, but first, he would have to reach the upper level again.

Ruiz poked his head into the stairwell just long enough to see two gryphons at the top. As one descended, Ruiz dropped the rod and pulled out his slingshot. He's never dropped the nails, and fired two into the first gryphon. He fired his sixth at the other, but it wasn't enough. As he was fishing for a reload from the box, the gryphon charged.

A loud ringing sound was heard. Maria had freed her back legs, and in her front hooves was the metal rod Ruiz had dropped. The very moment she was sure that she'd caved in the gryphon's skull, she dropped the rod to the floor and went back to trying to open her locks.

As much as Ruiz wanted to help, he had a hoofful of spiral shanks, and an army of gryphons that outnumbered the amount of ammunition he had remaining. Right now, his best hope was to fortify the chokepoint, but now, he couldn't. The rod he was going to use had been the only weapon Maria could access as that moment, and she would need it if he failed.

Four more gryphons were waiting at the top of the stairs, with more coming in. He shot one in the throat, then ducked back down. They were too many, too close. They could file in one by one down the stairs, where he could strike them one at a time, but that couldn't work forever. There were already too many bodies down here, and it was filling up quickly.

That's when the gryphons began bringing armor and weapons. Armor came in the form of meat shields, and weapons mainly by way of spears. There was no shortage of bodies for them to hold up as they came forward, as each one that came before them collapsed on the ground as partial cover, or better if they picked them up. The sheriff alone had half a dozen nails drilled into him by the time the lower level cleared up enough for Ruiz to release his tunnel vision.

He'd not been working alone, as he suddenly found out. He'd been so focused on clearing the gryphons at the door that he'd lost his situational awareness. He'd completely missed Maria and Meteor aiding him amidst the bedlam. Maria, much like her father, was keen to using the metal pole as some kind of club, and Meteor had collected a gryphon's spear. She wasn't a strong fighter, but simply being less threatening and knowing where the pointy end was supposed to go was enough to make her formidable.

He took a moment, in the brief calm, to check his box. Four nails remained, and it was unlikely that the sheriff would have kept a spare box just lying around, especially down here.

"I think that's all of them," sighed Meteor, dropping back to unlock the final mare. "Come on."

"Not even close," replied Ruiz. "If I'm being generous, this looks like half." Another gryphon clambered down the stairs and was promptly shot in the ear.

With a silent nod, Maria bolted up the stairs. Worried, Ruiz ran after her, watching her batter a few more gryphons before being slashed across the chest by a gryphon's claw and knocked aside. Seeing her bloodied sparked a rage in Ruiz, and with his knife drawn, he leaped forward, slashing open the Gryphon's throat and kicking it out the front door.

He slammed the door shut, just as another gryphon was trying to plow his way through. In his rage, he slammed the door several more times, shattering the beast's skull before the door closed properly. He was about to pick up the bar and shove it into the latch, but Maria was already back on her hooves, and pushed it right through without Ruiz even indicating that he had planned to do exactly that.

"Oh, fuck me," whimpered Meteor, looking out the window. Several dozen gryphons still remained outside, and a few of them were already trying to batter the door down. Others, noting that the door was not opening, began clawing at the windows.

"There has to be something," huffed the yet-unnamed mare, ripping through the sheriff's desk, looking for anything she could use. She made it through the first drawer and was about to open the second when a rock launched from a slingshot outside, driving itself into her eye. She collapsed to the ground and did not move.

If the gryphons were going to fight through the windows, then Ruiz was going to employ the same tactic. As a rock pelted Meteor in the neck, he fired one of his last remaining nails out the window, into the eye socket of the bastard that thought himself a marksman. One more went into an archer, and the final nail pinned the claw of a gryphon who had reached through the window to grab Meteor's tail.

They were out of ammunition. Ruiz grabbed a spear and began stabbing through the window bars, hoping that the mass of flesh he was stabbing into was being damaged, and not just slipping out of the way. Maria did much the same, until the door finally ripped from its hinges and several gryphons poured in, maybe a dozen. Ruiz managed to take one down with the spear, and two more with his knife, before he felt the claws of a gryphon ripping into his gut.

The intense pain that shot though him at that moment was too much for him to recover from, and he fell to the ground, stunned and unable to move. He could see his blood pooling on the floor, or was that just a bit of everypony? He couldn't tell anymore, and didn't have the energy to check. He thought back to the first time he'd met Maria, here in town, as well as his encounter with her on the road. He would never have guessed that these events would have foreshadowed his demise.