Lateral Movement

by Alzrius

660 - Bring It Inn

Lex had finally hit the breaking point.

Two minutes. They had been in this village for a grand total of two minutes, and already things were going wrong. Lex had no idea why the earth mare with the blue mane and tail was accosting Thermal Draft, but at that moment he didn’t care.

First it had been Dark Streak’s attempt on his life. Then it had been finding himself stranded on Everglow. Again. Then he’d lost Thermal Draft, requiring him to fight an insane winter wolf who’d sold his soul for power just to find out where she was. At which point he’d been forced to slay the soul-taking devil who’d beguiled her into signing her afterlife away, something he’d only accomplished because he’d somehow made a horribly intimate and frighteningly powerful bond with a winter wolf he barely knew.

And then he’d found out that Thermal Draft’s soul was forfeit anyway, something that she’d made worse when she’d voided her contract because she was sure he’d be able to do something about it, despite his having no idea what to do! After which his one chance to find out if Sonata and Aria and the others were alive or dead had been foiled because his staff was unconscionably stupid! All on top of the fact that he had yet to make any progress in finding a way home!

Now, immediately after they’d managed to find some semblance of actual civilization – having been drawn to this hamlet’s tiny inn by the bright red light shining like a beacon from the stunted steeple that protruded from the building’s second story – the local ponies were threatening them. Or rather, threatening Thermal Draft, for whom irrevocable nonexistence awaited if something killed her. It was as if these ponies – no, as if this entire misbegotten world – was actively trying to find ways to vex him even further, menacing the one person whom he absolutely had to protect!

Lex had long prided himself on his ability to endure hardship, to withstand an onslaught of setbacks and resolve even the most difficult of problems. But in the face of such persistent adversity, of disaster after disaster that seemed intent on mocking his ideals, undoing his accomplishments, endangering his companions, and ending his life, there was only so much he could take. And now, having heard Thermal Draft yell, causing him to hurry back in time to see the unknown mare pressing the pegasus’ face to the floor, Lex felt the last shred of his restraint give way.

“GET AWAY FROM HER!!!”

Leaping from the top of the stairs, Lex gave the blue-haired earth mare no time to obey his command as he brought his hoof down, slamming it against her face – the force behind his punch augmented by the magic in his amulet and his robe – with every ounce of strength that he had.

The blow sent Thermal Draft’s attacker reeling, stumbling back as she spat out a mouthful of blood, along with a couple of teeth.

But she didn’t fall.

“VALOR!” The name – Lex vaguely registering it as such as he hit the ground, rolled, and came up on his hooves between Thermal Draft and the others – came from the lips of Valor’s companions as she got her legs back under her.

But the mare herself didn’t pay any attention to them. Instead, she kept her eyes on him as she worked her jaw experimentally. Then, finding it wasn’t broken, she smirked. “Alright, you spooky bastard. If you want me to mop the floor with your face instead of your girlfriend’s” – reaching into the pack tied to her flank, she withdrew a small shield and slipped it over her foreleg – “that’s fine by me.”

Then pandemonium descended as the fight began in earnest.

---

“Both of you, stop! STOP!”

But no one listened to Mystaria’s command, leaving her to watch, horrified, as Lex and Valor charged at each other. The latter roared a battle cry as she rushed forward, but although Lex didn’t answer it with one of his own, the look of wild hatred etched on his features – his eyes glowing so brightly they were almost hard to look at – made it clear that he had no intention of backing down while Valor was still standing.

“You guys, we have to stop-, WHOA!” Mystaria barely avoided a blow to the head as the table they’d been gathered around suddenly flipped through the air, knocked askew by a huge spike of black crystal – just one of several – that had erupted from the ground.

“We’re going to have to put that guy down!” yelled Spinner, bringing her lute around, something that Mystaria knew she needed to use to invoke her magic. “We can apologize afterward, but right now we need to stop him by force!”

“But-”

“She’s right,” murmured Woodheart, releasing Littleknight before rising up onto all fours and – with one quick flick of her hoof – undoing her robe, leaving her completely naked save for her boots and the few accessories she wore as it slid to the ground. “Besides, I’m worried about what Valor will do to that guy if she gets serious. It’s better if we end this fast.”

Shadow Star didn’t voice her agreement, having vanished from view, but Mystaria had been friends with the masked mare long enough to know that she apparently thought the same way as the other two. After all, attacking from concealment was Shadow’s usual modus operandi, which meant she was already moving into position to strike.

But even though she knew her friends were almost certainly right, Mystaria couldn’t bring herself to abandon a peaceful resolution so easily. Instead, she brought a hoof up to her amulet, taking a deep breath as she murmured a soft prayer to Luminace that this would work. Her pacification spell had a low chance of success once hostilities had already broken out, but if there was any hope that it would end this senseless fighting, she had to try it.

Raising a hoof, she made the necessary gestures as she called out the requisite liturgy to Luminace, asking for Her to quell unruly passions and let cooler heads prevail. Instantly, she felt the magic radiate out from the holy symbol she wore, spreading out in calming waves that banished her unease as she felt her emotions recede in the light of Luminace’s blessed calm.

But when the magic reached Lex and Valor a moment later, her hopes were dashed. Neither seemed to even notice the pulse of magic, not slowing in the slightest as they continued to clash. Even as Mystaria watched, Valor caught a heavy right hook from Lex on her shield. Although the wooden disk – engraved with an image of a snarling bear’s head on the front – was only a foot wide, Valor had no trouble placing it in the path of the incoming punch, absorbing the force of the blow before she smacked his hoof away, bringing her own hoof back around to smash the flat of her shield against Lex’s jaw.

She didn’t stop there, changing the angle of her shield-bearing foreleg in the split-second that Lex faltered from the blow, trying to smash the edge of her shield against his horn. But Lex saw the attack coming, bending at the knees to duck under the blow, using that to spring forward as he brought his left hoof around, the motion so fast that it caused the sleeve of his robe to bunch halfway up his foreleg as he hit Valor hard in the sternum, earning a pained grunt from her.

It was just enough to let Mystaria see the barbed wire coiled around his foreleg, recognizing it as the holy symbol of the Night Mare.

Her eyes widened, but she didn’t have a chance to say anything before Spinner strummed a fast tune on her lute. “Against a foe with evil eyes, our Valor stood so true! Experienced and battle-wise, she knew what he would do! Each punch she blocked, each kick she dodged, she saw how it would go! And in the end, she won the day, and laid the villain low!”

She wasn’t the only one casting. Although her chant was far less musical than Spinner’s, Woodheart’s incantation had a notable pitch all its own, spoken in the sylvan language of the fey as she performed a series of wide, sweeping gestures. Having seen that particular spell before, Mystaria knew that it was designed to siphon an enemy’s strength, sapping the vigor from their muscles and transferring it to someone else – in this case, to Valor – letting them use their enemy’s own strength against them.

Having grown up studying magic at Luminace’s temple in Viljatown, Mystaria could almost see her friends’ spells speeding through the air toward the battling duo. This particular combination was one that they’d used many times before – typically in conjunction with her invoking Luminace’s protection on Valor, placing a ward around her friend so that her natural ability to absorb damage was augmented even further, to the point where she was nigh-impossible to bring down – and from her vantage point, Mystaria caught a glimpse of the warrior mare smirking, knowing what was about to happen.

Or maybe it was because she’d caught sight of Shadow Star, somehow having gotten onto the rafters hanging overhead without having drawn any attention to herself, preparing to leap down at Lex from above.

Everything seemed to happen all at once. Crouching down to avoid a jab from Lex, Valor sprang upward, the rim of her shield poised to catch him under his chin in an uppercut, one that wouldn’t miss thanks to Spinner’s magic, and would strike with devastating force thanks to Woodheart’s. That was the same moment that Shadow Star leapt down from the rafters, a baton with a leather-clad knob at the end clutched in her teeth, ready to bring it down on top of Lex’s head right as Valor hit him from below.

Then the magic, Valor, and Shadow Star all struck their targets, and Mystaria squeezed her eyes shut as she heard that pegasus mare – Thermal Draft – cry out Lex’s name, hating how they’d gotten into such a pointless conflict with another worshiper of the pony pantheon. I’ll heal him myself after everyone’s calmed down, she decided. Once Valor apologizes, I’m sure we can-

“What?!”

“Are you kidding me?!”

Her eyes snapping open at the sound of Woodheart and Spinner’s raised voices, Mystaria’s jaw dropped at the sight that was waiting for her.

Lex was still standing.

Judging from the way they were moving – Shadow Star tumbling across the floor to put some distance between herself and the unicorn, while Valor had reared up onto her hind legs, her shield-bearing foreleg still upraised – they’d somehow both missed their target. But that was unthinkable; the spells Spinner and Woodheart had cast should have made it almost impossible for Valor to miss, and Lex had given no indication that he was aware of Shadow Star’s position. So how…?

“My spell didn’t reach him,” muttered Woodheart, sounding stunned by the admission.

She wasn’t the only one, Mystaria’s eyebrows rising. “He has spell resistance?” If that was the case, it would be all kinds of bad.

But Woodheart shook her head. “He didn’t resist it. It just…couldn’t find him. Like he wasn’t there at all.”

“What does that…”

Spinner’s question died on her lips as Lex moved.

Slowly, he reached one foreleg back to his saddlebag, and everything about the motion was somehow wrong. What should have been a simple, smooth gesture was inexplicably stilted, as though his hoof was moving between different points in space – each one closer to his pack – without actually crossing the distance between them.

It reminded Mystaria of a kineograph one of the clerics at the temple of Luminace had showed her when she was a filly. Flipping the pages, she’d been delighted by how the drawings had seemed to come to life, moving in a simple optical illusion that had nevertheless delighted her. Flipping the pages as fast as she could had become a game, trying to make the figures move in a way that real ponies would have.

Eventually, she’d figured out that the game was unwinnable. Since the flip book only had so many pages, some motion would invariably be lost between one drawing and the next, meaning that the figures would always seem to move in a way that was robotic and unnatural; the intervening motions simply weren’t there.

And that’s what’s happening with Lex right now, realized Mystaria, a chill running down her spine. Woodheart’s spell couldn’t target him for the same reason that Valor and Shadow Star weren’t able to hit him. He’s somehow shifting back and forth between being physically present and not.

Which meant that the enraged unicorn had just become a whole new level of dangerous.

But Mystaria realized that she’d come to that conclusion too soon as Lex retrieved what he’d been reaching for.

“That was an impressive display of tactics,” he remarked coldly as he withdrew a skull-shaped mask from his saddlebag. When he placed it on his face a moment later, Mystaria wasn’t the only one who took an involuntary step back; between his unnatural movement and the way his eyes glowed beneath the death’s head visage he now wore, Lex suddenly seemed far more fearsome than he had been only a moment ago.

“Now, it’s my turn.”

---

Shivering uncontrollably, the proprietor of the inn stumbled away from the building, wanting to put as much distance as he could between himself and the crazed ponies inside.

But it wasn’t the cold that made the old stallion shiver, heading for his neighbor’s house to get out of the storm. Nor was it the thought of what damage those feuding adventurers – for what else could they be, to cause so much trouble? – would do to his inn.

Rather, what sent shudders of terror through him was the red light shining from the building’s steeple, despite his having been the one to put it there only a few hours earlier.

He hadn’t wanted to, of course. No pony of sound mind and good conscience would. But he had no choice in the matter, knowing what would happen if he didn’t obey the instructions he’d been given. He felt bad for those adventurers, of course; they might be a violent and rowdy bunch, but they didn’t seem like bad people. But if it was them or the ponies of his town – his kin, friends, and neighbors, whom he’d known all his life – then, gods forgive him, it wasn’t a hard choice to make.

Originally, he’d planned to simply cower in the back of the inn with his head under his pillow, letting those poor ponies be taken in their sleep. But now that they were awake, they wouldn’t be caught by surprise, which meant that they’d probably try to fight back. That meant turning a horrible fate into something even more horrible, and the old stallion had no intention of getting caught up in that. Even if his neighbors, who knew what the red light meant, refused to let him inside, it was better to die out in the cold than to be caught up in what was about to happen.

They would be here soon, the creatures that had shown up shortly after the unnatural winter had arrived. And once they came, they wouldn’t leave until they had what they wanted.

Fighting back a sob of fear and shame, the old stallion could only pray that this would be the last time.

Author's Note:

It's Lex versus the mares of Fail Forward, with neither side backing down!

With the conflict looking certain to intensify before it comes to a conclusion, something far worse seems to be on the horizon. Are Lex and the others depleting themselves right when they're going to need their strength?

Comments

[Not so New Brony]

Well, things just escalated rather quickly and I don't just mean the fight. Still, having Lex use up some of his restored magic in what is pretty much a pointless fight just before whatever caused the red lightning. Lex will be even more furious if he encounters a situation that could have been solved with a spell that he had used up in the fight later on.

Then again, he's already pretty livid if he's willing to use the phase shifting magic as well as using the mask.

Still, like Lex said, Fail Forward's teamwork was pretty impressive, which goes to show how long they've worked together though I am surprised that they almost immediately jumped to aid Valor in combat instead of trying harder to stop Valor. Then again, given their words and actions, this probably isn't the first time Valor got them into trouble and they likely learned to just roll with it and say sorry after.

Which I admit sounds like a fun dynamic from a player perspective, especially if it becomes a running gag that involves the party losing most if not all their gold to pay off whatever trouble they got themselves into...wonder if that's the reason for this party's name.

[Booster Spice]

Sonata would insist on calling Valour, Leroy?

The inns name should be The Blood Harvet?

[Firefoxino]

Best way to make friends in a town inn, a BRAWL!

[harts fire]

well i was hopping for a good old ass kicking ,, but i see were this is going. totally pare shaped.

[Alzrius]

11064940 As a note, Lex hasn't resorted to using his thaumaturgical spellcasting yet. Rather, what he started doing at the end of this chapter was the same rapid-shifting between his physical form and his shadow-form that he used against Starlight Glimmer back in chapter 491. That does require him to strain his body, since ordinarily his dark magic can't be utilized to achieve such a quick series of micro-transformations, but at this point it doesn't look like it's putting too much strain on him. Moreover, he's keeping his spellcasting in reserve.

Of course, the fact that he's going that far to win a fight, plus using his mask, is – as you noted – a testament to just how upset he is. But then, with how things seem to keep going consistently wrong, that's not too surprising. From his point of view, he's been repeatedly kicked while he's down, and he's now reached his limit. Valor menacing Drafty was the last straw, so now he's committed to kicking their asses.

That said, Fail Forward is an adventuring party, and given that they don't seem to be complete neophytes, and haven't been slaughtered yet, they're obviously pretty good at what they do. So it's not like they're going to go down without a fight. Of course, Mystaria knows that this doesn't need to be a fight, but there's not much that can be done about that now. Especially since the rest of the team seems to have decided that they're already committed.

Then again, it sounds like something far worse is headed everypony's way very shortly, so I expect that in short order they'll all have bigger problems to worry about than disagreeable ponies.

[Alzrius]

11064973 Well, at least Valor seems to be picking a fight for a good cause...or at least, what she thinks is a good cause. Though for someone concerned about wasting food, she seems to be biting off more than she can chew.

[Alzrius]

11066370 The irony is that, while that's probably the case for 99% of adventurers, Lex is the sort of person who can't appreciate the unspoken dynamic of "you're an asshole, but you gave as good as you got, so I respect you." My guess is that, however this turns out, he's put Valor and her friends into the "enemy" column, and won't easily remove them from there.

[Alzrius]

11066373 As tempting as it was to have Lex run roughshod over the ladies of Fail Forward, their game stats just don't support that narrative. These might not be the most experienced group of adventurers, but they're far from being total newbies, and they know how to work together.

Which is probably a good thing, considering what's coming.