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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 195
🕑 Added 2025-02-17 15:17:37 +0000 UTC~Alden Ironcrest POV~
“Luke! Get back here!” Alden shouted at Luke as he dashed out of the keep in a violet blur. But Luke did not seem to listen and was gone from his sight as he jumped from the wall towards the back gate.
But despite his son running headlong into danger, the only thing Alden could do was grit his teeth and trust that his son was strong enough to keep himself alive and chase after the wooden golem that was just about to exit the keep.
When he got out of the keep, Alden looked at both gates. He saw his son running along the roofs towards the back gate, and seeing that he had demonstrated that Luke was powerful enough to stand up to these knights with glowing swords, he needed to stop thinking like a father and start thinking more like a commander and act according to the bigger picture.
So Alden turned to the front gate, and it was easy to spot the three knights with glowing swords. Not just because of their glowing swords but mainly because of the bodies of his men that they were leaving in their wake.
Alden looked at the wood golem beside him, which was waiting for instructions. He pointed and mentally envisioned the three glowing sword-wielders and simply said, “Kill.”
Hearing the command, the wooden golem, who looked like it had already shed a tenth of the leaves on its head, stepped off the wall and crashed through the roof of a building. From there, the golem walked through wall after wall like they were made of styrofoam bricks without any glue holding them together.
As the golem made its way to the battle, most of the larger buildings were lucky to be still standing with a huge hole in them, while smaller buildings stood no chance as they got bulldozed by a walking wrecking ball.
When the golem burst through the final wall and came face to face with the back line of the defending force, who almost shit themselves thinking they were getting backstabbed. Alden gave the mental instruction to not harm the friendly forces.
To comply with Alden’s command, while the friendly troops were throwing ineffectual stabs at the wood golem with their spears, the golem used its long arms to slowly and gently push aside the soldiers as if they were toddlers.
Soon enough, one of the commanders on site saw that the golem was not aggressive and was making its way toward the enemy. Catching on quickly, he shouted for his men to make a hole.
When the wooden golem made its way to its first target, it reached out with one huge hand to crush a knight wielding a glowing sword. But with unnatural swiftness and strength, the knight swung his sword and severed the golem’s outstretched arm. But as the knight was confidently bringing his sword up on the reverse swing to fell the golem, the golem decked the knight with its other huge hand, sending the knight into the ground, making a small man-sized crater.
The golem looked at the knight it had just punched. He was stumbling in the crater created by the impact of his body hitting the ground as the sword he was holding glowed brighter, making the limbs that were bent the wrong way from the impact start snapping back into their correct position.
The golem did not wait for the knight to recover and started stomping the knight flat, armor and all. After three stomps, all that was left of the knight was a flattened suit of armor surrounded by meat paste and a glowing sword that was weakly pulsing and soon winked out.
The surrounding soldiers who witnessed this one-sided beatdown stared in awe or fear, depending on which side they were on. But the golem did not care for their reaction. It turned its head and locked on its next target.
Seeing that there were many bodies between itself and the next knight with a glowing sword, the golem started walking toward its next target as it regrew its severed arm. But instead of stopping at regrowing its arm, both arms started morphing from the brutish facsimile of hands into vine tendrils as thick as a man’s waist and longer than the golem was tall.
With these thick vine arms, the golem started sweeping away the normal enemy knights and their rank-and-file soldiers.
This act of so easily killing one of their elite units and sending men flying did not go unnoticed by the remaining two wielders of glowing swords, and with but a simple nod between each other, they dropped what they were currently doing and jumped toward the wooden golem, with their aura and whatever power was emanating from their swords.
Unlike their departed comrade, these two remaining knights saw the golem for the threat it was and attacked conservatively. When the golem reached for them with its vine arms, they either avoided or cut it off.
After avoiding a few attacks, the two knights started acting more aggressively, probing the golem’s defenses and reaction speed. Once they were done probing, the two knights started attacking the golem with coordination that belied years of teamwork and training, as they darted in and out of range, trying to draw agro away from each other as the other attacked.
Eventually, the two knights found a successful pattern of attack as they started successfully taking chunks out of the golem before they ducked out of range or defended an attack for one another.
As the two knights circled the golem once again, they gave each other a subtle nod before they both dashed in at the same time, feinted to the side as the golem launched a vine arm at each of them, and rushed into a blind spot that they had found. They were going in for the kill.
What they did not know was that despite successfully entering the golem’s blind spot, there was another pair of eyes watching them from the keep’s walls. Seeing that the golem did not have the speed to catch these opponents unless they underestimated it, Alden used his connection to the golem to instruct it to ignore attacks from its ‘blind spot’ to lure them in.
When Alden saw the two knights commit to a finishing attack, he gave the golem the mental signal. Receiving the signal from Alden, the golem turned its whole body, and the thick vine arms split into smaller vines, effectively forming two nets that used rotation to snare the two knights that were too close and moving too fast to back off.
The webs of vines crashed into the knights and started wrapping around them. At first, the knights, with their swords close to their bodies, managed to cut their way out of the web of vines, but from the cut ends of the web of vines, more vines grew, wrapping around the swords and arms of the knights. This rapid growth of vines cocooned them in green.
The vine cocoons wriggled and trembled as the encased knights struggled to break free, but as they struggled, they felt small vines wiggling up their faces. Those small vines started trying to invade their mouths, and as much as they tried, the vines pried their lips apart as it started invading their mouths, so they ripped and tore at the small vines with their teeth, but that did not stop the advance of the other small vines.
The other small vines started crawling up the rest of their faces and started invading other holes. Their nose, eyes, and ears, the small vines, started making their way into the knights’ bodies as they cried and choked to death, only being kept alive by the swords in their hands until the sword could heal them no more.
When the golem felt the life and mana leave two knights, it detached the cocoons from its arms and turned to loom over the terrified enemy soldiers, who had just watched their elite knights die in a way they could not and did not want to fathom.
Satisfied with the results and knowing that there was not much time left for the golem, Alden ordered the golem to kill as many enemies as it could. But just as the golem grew another pair of long vine arms, Alden noticed five men who did not wear the colors of his army or the Valorhelm Dominion, running in through the broken gates, using the Valorhelm Dominion soldiers as stepping stones, and even from his distance atop the keep walls, Alden could tell that these five men were all masters from how tight and uniform their auras formed around their bodies.
Two of the new arrivals attacked the golem while the other three rushed and slaughtered their way to where the knights with the glowing swords were. When they arrived at the corpses, they reached down and took only the sword, or in the case of the two cocooned knights, the whole cocoon, and rushed back the way they came.
The last two newcomers who were engaging the golem broke off back behind some of the enemy soldiers.
Alden concentrated on them as they took out some kind of device. One of them looked in Alden’s direction, while the other looked at the place on the roof where one of his men had sacrificed himself to take down the enemy knight. The moment they locked on their targets, they started making a beeline to where they were looking.
Alden knew that whatever they were trying to retrieve was important, and he had already lost too much to let whatever these people were doing do what they wanted. He grabbed the mage next to him and said while pointing at the two newcomers, “Tell all mage squads to bombard those two!”
