Chapter 22: Victory

Jack’s vision was completely dark for a long moment. The pain in his head was killing him. The magical thread connecting his soul to Dusty was gone, violently snapped by the bandit’s heavy iron axe in the Great Hall.

He wanted to close his eyes and simply let the darkness take him. The weakness in his body was overwhelming.

But a shrieking noise was in the air.

It was the Wind Mage’s localized blizzard. The magical wind was still raging down in the courtyard. A violent vortex of white snow, dirt, and flying wooden splinters was in the center of the castle grounds. A loud, frantic rattling was on the wooden roof tiles of the nearby armory and the stables. If the older mage was allowed to keep channeling his magic, the wind would tear the roofs right off the outbuildings and freeze the militia to death.

“I am not done,” Jack whispered.

He forced his eyes open. His arms were shaking violently as he pushed himself up from the stone. He grabbed the railing of the balcony, pulling his frail body up until he was on his knees.

He looked down into the courtyard. Visibility was still almost zero. A thick, impenetrable wall of swirling white snow was over the breached gates.

Jack closed his eyes, ignoring the throbbing agony in his skull, and reached inward.

Two magical threads were still anchored in his chest. They belonged to Bones and Rusty. The threads were vibrating wildly, caught in the severe wind magic. Every vibration was a pulse of pain in Jack’s mind. But he tightened his mental grip on them anyway. He poured every ounce of his remaining willpower into those two connections.

“Walk,” Jack commanded mentally. “Walk straight through the wind.”

Down in the courtyard, inside the blinding whiteout of the storm, the two armored skeletons received the order.

The wind was like a howling beast. It was strong enough to lift a full-grown man completely off his feet and toss him through the air. A living human warrior, even in heavy armor, would have to bend low, brace their legs, and fight desperately against the swirling wind just to remain standing. A human had flesh, wide shoulders, and loose clothing that acted like a sail, catching the violent wind and pushing them backward.

But skeletons were different.

Rusty and Bones did not have flesh. They did not have lungs that could be suffocated by the flying debris. The tabards over their armor were already torn and burned away from the earlier fire blast. All that remained was their bones and incredibly heavy iron.

The chainmail hauberks and the iron bucket-helms weighed nearly eighty pounds. The skeletons themselves have quite some weight.

When the magical wind slammed into them, it simply passed right through the empty spaces in their iron-ringed chainmail and hollow ribcages. There was no resistance. The wind could not find purchase on their frames.

The iron boots of the skeletons struck the frozen earth.

They did not brace. They did not slow down. They simply marched forward like unyielding iron statues, their steps perfectly steady in the middle of the raging storm.

Near the broken timber barricades at the main gates, the Wind Mage was standing with his wooden staff.

The older man was sweating profusely despite the freezing weather. His Grey Core was almost entirely empty. He was pouring a continuous stream of his remaining mana into the staff to keep the blizzard alive.

He stared into the swirling white wall of snow in front of him.

His plan was simple. The blizzard was meant to blind the defenders, disrupt the battlefield, and buy his men time to slaughter the peasants. He expected the two terrifying golems to be blown backward by the wind, or at least stalled long enough for the bandits to secure the castle.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

But as he watched the whiteout, a deep knot of dread formed in his stomach.

A dark shadow was in the swirling snow. Then, a second shadow.

The Wind Mage squinted, his hands trembling around his staff. “No… that is impossible. The wind is strong enough to snap even a tree!”

The shadows grew larger and larger in his vision.

Rusty and Bones stepped out of the whiteout, completely unfazed. Their helms were fixed directly on the older mage. They were not leaning forward against the wind. They were simply walking, their strides eating up the distance between them and the gates.

“They aren’t stopping!” the Wind Mage shrieked in panic.

He slammed the bottom of his staff against the frozen earth again, pushing the very last drops of his life-force into the spell. The wind shrieked louder, a desperate, final burst of elemental fury. Sharp shards of ice and dirt pelted against the chainmail of the two giants, sparking harmlessly against the iron.

The magic did absolutely nothing to slow them down.

The Wind Mage realized, with sudden and terrifying clarity, that his decades of survival and experience were entirely useless. He was not fighting living men. He was not even fighting traditional golems, which usually possessed a core that could be disrupted by opposing elements. He was fighting something entirely outside the natural laws of magic.