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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 198
🕑 Added 2025-02-24 17:52:53 +0000 UTCI lay limp on the roof next to this unknown warrior as the sounds of battle raged further in the distance. Using the last dregs of strength I could squeeze out of my muscles, I rotated myself and sat up to face the onboarding battle at the back gate. Just in time, I saw the other three men in mismatched armor jump back over the wall, each clutching something.
I do not know what they took, but I am grateful that such formidable opponents did not stay to fight. As for the enemies that were still inside the walls, they were getting their asses handed to them with the help of my golem, who I sensed its time was nearly up. The only thing I could do was watch on as the soldiers did their jobs.
Within half an hour, the enemies within our walls had either surrendered or died, and the walls were successfully defended against any climbers. As for the golem I summoned, the last leaf from its head had fallen when the enemy was almost cleared up and became still, a few seconds later, it started rooting itself to the ground and growing into an actual tree, if a little humanoid looking.
Shortly after the inside of the fort had been secured and what was left of the enemy outside the walls shrank back into the darkness of night, one of Dad’s knights, whose left arm was dangling from a strip of meat, landed on the roof where I was. “Young Master, it's good to see you are alive and well.” he said as he looked between me and the unknown warrior I had killed.
“I can only agree with the alive part, Sir Hammel. The well part, not so much. I have not the strength to move, much less stand. And I doubt you are in any position to help me at the moment.” I said as I jerked my head at his almost severed arm. “Go have that arm looked at before you really lose it. Just call someone to come and pick me up. I don’t mind lying here for a while.”
Sir Hammel just huffed and walked towards me, “Young Master, what do you take me for? Some kind of soft-handed lady, tis but a flesh wound, and besides, I have another arm.” He then single-handedly picked me up like a sack of potatoes and brought me back to the keep, where Dad was shouting orders and shouting some more to request the latest updates.
But he was interrupted by Sir Hammel, who knocked on the door with his foot. “My Lord, I found him.”
The moment Dad heard that, he pushed a few of the commanders out of the way and ran to me, “Son? Are you hurt anywhere?” he said as he patted me down to check for injuries and found the hole punched through my armor.
“I got stabbed through my chest, but I got that healed. Other than that, I am just too tired to move. And weren't we keeping our identity secret?” I asked, but Dad only gave me the side eye.
“You revealed your identity when you called me Dad in front of the mages. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the fort knows by now,” Dad replied. “But we can talk about that later. The place is still in chaos, and we don’t know the situation outside. Sir Hammel, please take my son to his room to rest.”
Just as Sir Hammel turned around to take me to my room, I said, “Dad, when all those knights with the glowing swords died, some unknown warriors came and took something from the corpses of those knights, and I managed to kill one. What were they after? I saw them take something, but I was too far away to see what it was.”
Dad turned to me and said, “They took the glowing swords off the dead knights. We even captured one of the knights who used the glowing swords. It was the one you fought on the wall… but he isn’t responding to anything. He just sits like a puppet with its strings cut.”
I just nodded, and Sir Hammel brought me to my room and helped me out of my armor. The moment my head hit the pillow, I was out.
***
~Alden Ironcrest POV~
Alden was glad that his son was fine, but he still had a fort to command, and his current objective was to secure the fort. Besides the dead and captured, he could not rule out saboteurs who slipped in during the fighting.
He had every commander take account of their men and make sure everyone was who they said they were, at this point, Alden did not think the enemy was above wearing a fallen soldier’s armor in order to slip into his ranks. To combat this, he gave out the command to hold anyone who nobody recognized.
The next big thing on the list he needed to address was the breach points, namely the front and back gates. They had man-sized holes punched through them, and said damage had also damaged the enchantments and arrays protecting the gates. Seeing that the physical and magical repairs would be time-consuming, he decided on the fast and dirty method of securing the gate by piling rubble from broken buildings behind the gates, at least for the night, while he had the engineers rope down from the walls to repair the holes, or to be more accurate, hole.
Turns out, from what he heard, his son’s golem used its plant magic to grow vines to plug the hole and fuse the gate shut. The engineer who was going to un-fuse the gate was going to do a lot of sawing.
Next was the thing that was really plaguing him: a major lack of intel. All Alden knew before he was attacked was that the sister-forts on both sides of him were under attack. And now that he survived a surprise attack from a relatively small force, was there a bigger force coming to finish the job? Alden did not know, and he wanted to find out, but he knew that doing so was sending his scouts to their certain deaths due to the enemy forces that retreated back into the darkness of the night. So he did what he could and simply tripled the guard on the walls.
Hours later, after all the security measures he could think of were implemented, the morning sun peeked over the horizon. Alden was still awake, and so were most of the command staff. One of the commanders came up to Alden’s desk and handed him a report. “Here is the causality report, My Lord.”
This was the part of any conflict that Alden hated when he was in command, win or lose. What he saw was numbers on parchment, but he knew that it was more than that. It was husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers who would not be coming to see their loved ones. What made it worse was that among the dead were almost half of the knights he had brought with him.
Those men were his friends and brothers-in-arms from his previous knight order who chose to uproot their lives and follow him. And now, if he survived whatever was going on out there, he was going to go home to face the family of his dead brothers-in-arms and give them the news.
Knowing that he had lost so many of his close friends, Alden had half a mind to torture and kill the captured soldiers. Especially the knight who was the wielder of one of the glowing swords that they had captured. But seeing that he was in a vegetative state, Alden did not think he would even register anything.
It took a few seconds of fuming with his dark thoughts before Alden snapped out of it. Now was not the time to linger with his dark thoughts. The living still depended on his command, and he would not let down the living.
