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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 196
🕑 Added 2025-02-19 13:18:12 +0000 UTCI had my arms draped over two soldiers as they helped me back behind friendly lines, all while hearing the booms of the wooden golem I summoned swinging and trashing the bastard who backstabbed me by his legs.
I had already cast enough healing magic to close up my wounds and make sure my blood stayed inside my body, but that was all just surface-level. Just beyond my skin, I was still suffering from severed muscles and a fucking punctured lung that had blood constantly flowing inside of it.
I was soon brought to a tent and was quickly attended to by an apothecary who tried to push me down on a cot, only for me to resist and wheeze out, “No… lung… big hole… I heal.”
Now that I am out of danger and not being dragged and jostled around to get here, I can finally concentrate my way through the pain and drowning sensation I am currently experiencing. It was only after the glow of healing magic appeared in my hand that the apothecary left me to my business.
First things first, I brought the healing light to the right side of my chest and willed the magic to ignore my cut-up muscles and go directly to the puncture wounds in my right lung. As the spell took effect, I felt like ants were inside my lung and crawling all over the wound, biting on the edges of the holes in my lung. It made me want to reach through the wound in my chest and scratch, but that would defeat the purpose, so I just had to put up with squirming on my cot.
A few minutes later, I felt the wound in my lung heal, but that did not take care of the blood sloshing around in my lung. To do that, I had to make another hole in my lung. Counterintuitive, I know, but that is the only way I know how to drain my lung short of hanging me up by my legs and hoping the blood flows out of my mouth.
I grabbed an apothecary who was walking by and said, “Help… armor… off. Bring thin blade… and small tube… and strong spirits.”
The apothecary nodded and started undoing the straps for my armor and helping me out of my chainmail and gambeson. Which was a bitch of an experience with my right chest and back muscles cut up.
The moment I was bare-chested, the apothecary rushed off to get the stuff I requested. When he came back with what I asked for, I got the apothecary to assist me in stabbing myself in the bottom of my lung in order to shove a small tube up into it. But not before dousing the strong spirit on the area I was going to get stabbed, along with whatever was going into my body. And just for good luck, I took a big swig of whatever this spirit was and told the apothecary to get on with it.
Without hesitation, the apothecary cut into me with a practiced motion and shoved the tube into my lung, almost like he had done this before. The moment I felt the tube pop into the bottom of my lung, I adjusted the mouth of the tube to be near flush with my lung before I used a healing spell to heal my lung around the mouth of the tube, making a nice seal, allowing all the blood pooled in my lung to flow out.
This gave near-instant relief to my breathing, but there was still the faint feeling of drowning. I guess that is something that would eventually go away.
Now that I had my breathing more or less back, I concentrated on the rest of my wounds.
As I was spending a shit load of my mana making sure that my muscle fibers healed back correctly, I have been getting general mental feedback on how the wooden golem was doing. The bastard who stabbed me was flung so hard that his body snapped and tore in two at his waist, and now the golem was following my latest instruction to kill the last of the glowing sword knights.
The only problem was that the knight I instructed the golem to kill was actively avoiding the golem as he dashed around, killing more of our soldiers. So, instead of running after the knight, I was going to make the knight come to the golem.
With a mental command, the golem stopped chasing after the knight and instead started making its way to the breach in the back gate. At first, the knight ignored the golem and continued slaughtering our men, but what really got his attention was when the golem reached the gate and reached out with its vine-like arms and started pulling the gate close.
As the gate was slowly being closed, the enemy soldiers did all they could to try and push it open and attack the golem in an effort to stop it. But the golem was rooted to the ground, literally, providing a good anchor to exert its supernatural strength to close the gate, and while the gate was being closed, the wood golem’s vine arms started creeping along the gate, seeping into and infesting the wood.
When the gate finally boomed close, there was still a man-sized hole that was hacked into it, but when the creeping vines got to the hole, the gap was soon filled, and vines from both sides of the door crept and overlapped, effectively sealing the gates shut.
Just as the gates were shut, I felt a phantom pressure at my waist and soon realized that the sensation was coming from my connection with the golem. As the golem looked down, it realized that it was cut in half at the waist, and in a flash, the was another two phantom pressures at my arms, most likely meaning that the golem’s arms were cut off too.
But from the impression I got from the golem, this was not a serious injury at all, as within the next second, tendrils came out of the cut-off sections and brought the cut-off parts back together.
The golem rotated its head 180° to see the knight, glowing sword held high, ready to split the golem in half down the middle, only for the golem to bend backward and headbutt the knight, sending him flying, allowing the golem time to uproot itself and detach its arms from the gate and regrow them.
By the time the golem lumbered its way to the knight, it just headbutted, the knight was stumbling around like he had drunk a whole bar shelf while tugging at his dented helmet. The golem simply used its hand and slapped the knight down into the ground like a bug and kept slapping until there was no more reaction.
***
Outside the wall at the back gate, five men in mismatched armor were each holding an amulet in their hands, but out of the five, only one remained inert.
A few moments later, the last amulet lit up with a floating holographic arrow pointing inside the fort’s walls.
“The last wielder of the Divine Armaments has fallen. Begin retrieval mission.” one of the men said.
But as they looked at the gate that had been resealed by vines of some sort, another of the men asked, “But how are we to get inside? Run to the front gate and hope they are still open?”
After a few seconds of contemplation, one of them said, “I have an idea, but this idea means only four of you can get in, and those four will need to make their own way out.”
A few minutes later, four men were fifty meters away from the wall, while the last of the five was just at the base of the wall in a squatting position with his hands low to the ground, fingers interlocked, and palms up.
When he was given the ready signal, the man at the base of the fort’s wall flared his aura, and the other four men followed suit with their aura and started running at the man at the wall one after the other within a few seconds of each other.
When the first of the four runners reached the man at the wall, he stepped into his open palms and pushed off as the squatting man heaved with all his might, tossing the first runner up in the air and over the wall. After doing so, the man at the base of the wall squatted and repeated this three more times.
