6 - Operation Firestarter 3

C6 Operation Firestarter 3

By N00813

  Gilda leapt out of the bush, her target already in her sights.  His patrol pattern had taken him just in front of her when the ‘go’ had been received.  Poor bastard never stood a chance.

  She re-holstered the crossbow and unsheathed the machete strapped to her chest.  The glinting blade slid out with a quiet metallic scrape, but the sound was covered by the building drumbeats of her heart as she crept closer and closer to her target.

  She leapt forwards and upwards.

  The machete blade was a one-and-a-half foot long piece of magically-hardened steel, shaped like a combat knife with a weighted middle.  Against the dog’s leather barding, there was no contest.

  She felt the resistance against the blade lessen, as the dog stumbled forwards with Gilda latched onto his back as her claws dug into his hide.  No matter.  She slid a forearm around his throat and wrenched backwards, whilst shoving the blade further in.  The squelch of puncturing organs sounded out from beneath her, and a warm wave of fluid spilled out to splash against her chest feathers and fur.

  Well, that would be a bitch to clean.

  The other dogs had noticed.  Come on, how blind would they have to be to not notice?  Tricks and Rolk would help for that, though.

  Spots of coiling light rose from the ground, before exploding into dense clouds of grey smoke.  Tricks’ magic show.  The shafts of light streaming in through the sickeningly cheerful Equestrian sky were blotted out in an instant, dispersed by the rolling miasma.  Gilda kept low, yanking the machete from her previous victim with a grunt and the wet sound of ripping flesh.

  A gun report rang out over the chaos, overpowering even the panicked howls of the remaining dogs.

  Meanwhile, Rolk looked down the sights of his rifle and curled his beak into a snarl.  A puff of gunpowder smoke drifted upwards from the muzzle, mushrooming into the air before dissipating.

  He yanked the bolt back.  A small bronze cylinder popped out, still smoking from an open tip as it tumbled to earth.

  He could only spot one ranged attacker when he’d pulled the trigger.  There usually were more.

  He shoved the bolt forwards, feeling the slight resistance as a bullet was worked from the magazine and into the chamber.

  The image of the guards in all of their positions was burned into his mind.  With luck, the dogs wouldn’t have moved far.  People didn’t tend to move when they couldn’t see where the hell they were going – it was a natural instinct.  It would also prove to be their downfall.

  The wooden stock was smoothed and sanded by many years of use.  Like a child being cradled by its mother, he let his cheek rest against it as he looked down the iron sights.  He didn’t need a scope – griffon eyes weren’t too different from eagle ones, so he could still see every curl of smoke from Tricks’ smokescreens rising into the air.

  He shifted the weapon down a little and to the left.  There was another guard just there, before the flowers of smoke had blossomed into a full fog.

  He breathed out until only about half of the air remained in his lungs, waited for the emptiness in between the double thumps of his heart, and then pulled the trigger.

  The gun bucked backwards, slamming into his shoulder.  The gun’s report bounced off the nearby trees, scattering the few remaining birds.  Smoke coiled out of the muzzle, like a trained snake.  He ignored the stinging pain, reworking the bolt to push another bullet into the chamber.

Tricks still wasn’t sighting – was something off?

  “Tricks, come in,” he muttered, shifting his head just a whisker to the side.

  “Heh heh, sorry about that,” Tricks’ voice came in through the earpiece.  “I, uh… Just helping Dust out.”

  “Come again?”

  There was a silence that dragged on and on, until –

  “There. Done.  I gave her the dog’s armour to wear, jury-rigged it.  She should hold up better, at least.”

  Rolk hissed as another dark shape, warped and twisted by the roiling magical smoke, materialized.  He shifted the rifle until the sights came to rest on the target.

  He held off from firing, though.  Friendly fire was a big mess that deserved to stay in the past.

  The shape shrank into a cylinder that tumbled backwards for a little, before snapping open in a pair of wings.  Gilda, then.  What she was doing also meant the presence of some other enemy, though, and that was bad.

  He gripped the wooden forestock in his left claw, feeling the chill soaking in through the yellow scaling.  It was comforting.  Just him and his rifle, and the targets in front of him lining up for new oles in their heads.  He didn’t have to plan, to think about the future, to worry about Spring…

  He sighed.

  Another shape tumbled out into one of the patches of clear air developing over the clearing.  Wind was blowing in from the east, going back out to sea to rest for the night.  Gilda’s white feathers, striated with mud until she looked like some feathered, clawed zebra, popped out of the smoke as well.  She was right next to the slave pen.

  Rolk didn’t even hesitate as he lifted the rifle’s sights, waited for his body to settle and then pulled the trigger.

  Even at this distance, he could see the dog’s head explode into a spray of red as the bullet redistributed the hound’s brain matter all over the walls and sandy ground.

  Gilda’s voice crackled in his ear.  Rolk could hear her panting, and the tiny droplets of sweat and blood that beaded her face and neck glistened like little diamonds and rubies in the light.  “Nice shot, dude.”

  He merely hummed in reply, gaze searching the battleground once more.

  Gilda reworked her grip on her machete as she glanced at the door.  The pen was a temporary construction – long, thin rods of lumber were stuck into the ground at regular intervals, like fence-posts, close enough to one another to prevent escape.  She could still see through the gaps in the logs, but the darkness and the smoke prevented her from seeing any more detail than an obvious shape standing just in front of the door.

  Her claws went for the ruby-red flash bomb hanging off her sash.  The spell inscribed on it was Tricks’ design, carved into the gemstone by an Equestrian spellscribe in Canterlot’s mage markets.  The griffon hen herself couldn’t care less how the gem was made, only that it did its job.

  She sidled over to the ‘door’, some sort of empty hole where the walls should have been.  It was covered by a fluttering curtain instead, stained with all sorts of fluids.  The predominant colours were all shades of brown.

  Gilda felt for the trigger, a little piece of quartz stuck to the gemstone, before squeezing it.  The clear crystal lit up with a faint white light.  She tossed it through the curtain.

  A brilliant flash of white, like a solar flare, burst out of any and all gaps in the walling.  This wasn’t the first time Gilda had used, or seen Tricks use something like this – the unicorn was very proud of her magical skillset, after all – but at this range and in such a sorry structure, her vision was consumed with white-hot, blinding pain.

  Just as quickly, the intense white turned into the darkest blacks.  Gilda blinked – she could feel the eyelids moving – but nothing happened.  Hissing, she spread her legs out into a crouch, recalling her rough position around the door.  If she was like this, her opponent would be just as bad –

  The blurriest of colours and images spread out from the darkness like water on a page.  Good enough for her.  She felt the handle of her machete inside the grip of her right claw, comforting with its presence like an old friend.  The hard, unyielding wooden grip had been worn down over the years, but was still serviceable.

  She hurled herself through the curtain.  Time slowed to a crawl.  The tempo of her heart increased, until it was like her chest was a drum, and her heart the musician.

  Blackness consumed her vision for the tiniest of times, but the pupils of her eagle-eyes dilated until she came face to face with a stumbling dog.  His mouth was opening and closing, multiple times, but whatever sound he wanted to make was drowned out by the drums of battle.

  Gilda assessed her target in the blink of an eye.

  He was big for a rock hound.  The fibres of his muscles, from years of manual labour, stood out in his hind legs and around the shoulders.  His claws were massive but well-kept.  From what Gilda could see around the block of meat that was his arm, his face wasn’t especially strange or different.  Sharp teeth hung from the cave of his mouth as he raised his lips in an unconscious snarl, whilst his eyes were slitted.

  She hopped to the side as the dog’s.  His instinctual flailing left curls of smoke hanging in the air, coiling around the two combatants like ghosts.

  Coarse sand flew outwards from her landing.  The dog didn’t notice, continuing to flail, his claws glimmering in the dim sunlight that had managed to pierce the walls of smoke and wood.

  She leapt towards his neck.

  It was bad practice, she knew – leaping meant that you were in the air, with no control other than your wings, which sometimes couldn’t do the job fast enough to stop you from crashing into a waiting blade.  This time, however, she guessed right.

  The dog fell backwards and to the side.  He had a target now, however, and he knew it, swinging the arm closest to Gilda towards the feathery lump on his side.

  She kicked, leaping off him as if he was a springboard.  The two of them went in opposite directions.  He smashed into a wall, leaning against it before shoving himself off whilst shaking his head.

  Gilda was much lighter.  She went flying towards the opposite wall, her wings flaring open instinctively.  They strained and screamed against her bones, but that was much better than the crunching pain of smacking into the wall.

  She darted in for another attack, folding her vulnerable wings in as she neared her target.  The dog’s vision was returning, it seemed – the swipe aimed at her head was way too close for her comfort.

  The machete blade sunk into the dog’s neck with token resistance.  She felt warm liquid squirt onto her claws, like hot water from a shower nozzle.  She tore it out with a wrench of her arm, and the squirt turned into a veritable waterfall.

  To his credit, the dog didn’t succumb instantly.  Even as Gilda leapt backwards, he turned around, swinging his fists.  Blood poured out of the space where his throat used to be, to explode into brilliant red blossoms on his dirty leather torso and the floor.

  He took a step forwards.  Then he crumpled, landing face-down in the dirt.

  Gilda walked over, before slamming the blade in between the dog’s two vertebrae, eliciting another spray of blood.  The little jets of it running between the blade and the skin increased to a trickle when she yanked the machete out.

  She looked around, to make sure that nothing had changed.  The building was still a rough construct, breaking about fifteen building ordinances and now covered in someone else’s gore.

  “Got a problem,” she muttered, kneeling down and opening the first pocket on the dog’s armour.  “The slaves aren’t here.”