The burning skies overhead were clear of any demonkin, which was a welcome surprise. The only remnants of the last that’d found Jormun were their twisted bodies on the hills behind him, and the smell of blood still stuck to his body. Fortunately, they’d only been imps under a gargoyle’s command, simple enough foes for the grizzled Weaponmaster. Perhaps a Knight would have struggled, but they didn’t pose much of a threat to a man with five decades of fighting a losing war behind him.
With a sigh, he looked down at his hands and saw that his worn gloves were tearing at the seams, and his disappointment surged. Years ago, humanity’s final bastion against the demonic incursion had fallen, and most of the intelligent races with it. Jormun survived, as he always had, and decided to take the battle against the bloodthirsty beasts that’d destroyed everything he’d ever loved.
He’d set out with the last remaining Saint, Aramais the Sword Saint, an old friend. In fact, Jormun had trained the little whelp, but that was decades ago, and he’d long since been surpassed.
“Just become a Saint already, I know you can,” was the last conversation they’d had. “You’ve been able to ascend for decades now! The only known Weaponmaster could become the strongest Saint ever seen, and your people deserve it from you.”
“Yes, Aramais,” Jormun replied, the answer an old and tired part of the frequently repeated conversation, “I could become a Polearm Saint, a Sword Saint, a Spear Saint, or even an Axe Saint. My bowmanship, armor mastery, and shieldmanship still are lacking, though, and every other Saint of every discipline has fallen. Perhaps a Weapons Saint as has never been seen could destroy the demons once and for all instead of merely allowing us a scant few more days living in this broken land.”
“But our followers are dying now, Jormun,” Aramais answered. “What use is the future if there’s no present? If you’re the only one left?”
Jormun smiled, grabbed the distinguished commander of their small force by the shoulder, and shook him without a word in answer. For all his stubbornness and strength, Aramais knew what the answer to his insistence would always be, and he dropped it from that day. While Jormun was out gathering supplies that night, though, a contingent of behemoths and juggernauts under the command of a demonic noble found the encampment. From kilometers away, he’d heard the echoes of the battle and he hurried to those few hundred remaining survivors' defense, but he arrived too late.
Where organized columns of tents once stood, only smoldering canvas and rivers of blood remained. At least a dozen behemoths lay dead, their blood flowing from bone-deep slices cut in their armored flesh. Each of those attacks must have been reinforced with hefty amounts of aura to make any headway through the monsters’ defenses. As quadrupeds that stood five meters tall at the shoulder, each of the demons was covered in thick skin that didn’t even bleed until it’d been pierced through for half a meter.
Despite the tragedy of seeing every last one of his friends’ twisted bodies spread through the ruined encampment, Jormun felt a faint hint of pride as he identified each cut made by the men and women under his instruction. Some of the behemoth’s wounds were cauterized by flame, others frozen, and others corroded. Each of his trainees’ internal world differed from the next, and the results from their aura similarly shifted from one to the next.
He continued on his path until he arrived at the frontlines. There, Aramais’s body was, despite his overwhelming aura’s strength, cut to ribbons. The culprit was unsurprising: corrosive magic, a telltale sign of a demonic noble, colored his chest and shoulder a deep almost black green. Demonic magic was the natural born enemy of all powers native to this world, magical, aura, or otherwise. And this noble was strong enough to, with the help of three juggernauts that’d been cut down in a series of clinical, cold cuts, sneak up on Aramais.
His domain would have faltered at that, Jormun knew. He’d seen it dozens of times as the demonic invasion had grown with each nation that fell. With the fall of a Saint’s domain, the rest of the battle line was doomed, and Jormun allowed himself a tear as he looked at his friend’s cold, broken face.
Some people described the faces of the dead as peaceful, but Jormun had seen too many die to agree. Death came violently, and Aramais was no exception. Blood, his own scarlet and the demons’ thick and black, covered his face, and his fist remained clenched on his sword. His lips remained curled back from his teeth, and many of those same teeth had been shattered along with the other forces of humanity.
Jormun shook his head, and with it, the memories of the last time he saw another person. He’d thought about giving up before those losses, but he wouldn’t allow these monsters to think of themselves as the undisputed masters of this world. They’d come as conquerors and were largely successful, but for as long as Jormun the Weaponmaster remained breathing, their conquest was incomplete.
His days bled together, and sometimes literally. Only three things concerned him: training his mastery of each weapon, finding enough to eat to sustain himself, and killing every demon he could. Occasionally, his path took him near a demonic noble’s territory that he couldn’t face and he forced himself to retreat, but largely, there was no monster that could face him.
Within his internal world dwelled dozens of weapons of every kind, every kind that he’d become a master of was there. Unfortunately, that meant that his training with the bow struggled, as finding a bow that could survive his strength and dense aura was nearly impossible these days. Regardless, he had his goal, and he pursued it.
Three years, by his reckoning of the change of season from fiery to smoky to freezing and back to fiery again, after the destruction of Aramais and the rest of humanity’s survivors, Jormun’s own death came on the day that his last bow broke while he was channeling his aura into it while trying to touch the border to become a Bowmaster.
A small contingent of imps found him, but instead of throwing themselves mindlessly at him as the low-tier demons always did, they retreated to provide this information to another. They flew high overhead, and while his spear’s aura could reach most of them, they were too spread out to be all killed in one attack, and lashing out to kill seven of the ten would exhaust too much of his own reserves before this inevitable fight.
“Fuck,” he cursed to himself as he watched their retreat. There was only one thing that could mean, and there wasn’t anything he could do to escape their master’s attention now. And, of course, he’d just broken his bow.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
In reality, Jormun knew this was the end. He’d made it this far because he’d stayed out of fights that he couldn’t win, whether by luck or intelligence. This was a fight that was going to find him, and though he knew his blood would be the last spilled today, he’d take plenty of the horned bastards with him.
With that in mind, the first weapon he pulled out of his inner world was his longest, largest halberd. After the sword, the polearm was the second he’d ascended to be a Master with, and against the numbers that were going to overwhelm him, familiarity and deadly force were going to be necessary. It’d been decades since he ascended to become a Master, and his internal world was larger and more substantial than several Saints’. He could maintain his aura shroud for hours, strengthening every one of his attacks, but his usual method of holding himself back to outlast the besieging demons wasn’t going to work now.
Jormun Weaponmaster, the one closest to being the first Weapon Saint in history, wouldn’t hold back on the day of his death.
His mind slipped into his internal world, where he saw the world as he willed it. Steel walls bordering wide, straight streets where children played made the heart of his internal world, though it stretched much beyond that. Instead of drawing on an element, Jormun’s internal world was a weapon itself, and the children who played there slipped into the nearest home as Jormun’s aura roared into the external world.
The halberd he wielded, long since integrated into his internal world, grew to four meters long as the first demons crested the nearest hill. Their scaled flesh glinted in the burning light of the smoke-choked skies, and Jormun scoffed. This demonic noble was sending chained ones as his vanguard? They couldn’t even compare to an Adept with aura. Idiot.
They rushed like so many wild dogs over the crest of the hill, each of the chained ones a creature that once was a mundane inhabitant of this world. Wolves, elk, humans, elves, and dwarves all sprinted towards him, the only sound filling the air except their thundering footsteps that of the chains that bound them to undead service to the demonic noble. It took only an idle swing of his halberd to reduce the entire front ranks to mist. A curving blade of glinting silver aura sliced them to pieces, the chains that grew from their shoulders and serving as armor becoming shrapnel that tore into the ranks behind them. Swooping above came an entire cadre of gargoyles. Each could be considered as strong as a weaker Knight, but another swing of the halberd reduced their numbers from a dozen to eight. Rubble fell towards him as he drew deeper on his reserves for his second strike.
Three parallel blades flew from his halberd’s blade towards the gargoyles, and though they strengthened the stone that made their bodies, each was slain in his second attack.
“When was the last time I let myself go?” Jormun wondered to himself as the remains of the demons fell uselessly against his aura shroud. His voice rasped from disuse, and he smiled widely as the rest of the demons came forward, surrounding him.
Hundreds more chained ones remained charging forward, but now redcaps, barghests, erinyes, hell beasts of every kind, nalfeshnees, and more rushed onward towards him. Behind them, the behemoths and juggernauts followed, and Jormun stopped holding his ground. He reared back with his halberd, pushing three times as much aura into the strike as he had to strike down the eight gargoyles, and another scything blade of aura cut mercilessly through hundreds of demons.
“Farewell, my friend,” he muttered to the halberd as he overloaded it with his aura. The weapon had long since been integrated into his internal world, and there was a faint cracking sound within him as he consciously made the weapon explosive. Then, without waiting further, Jormun turned on his heel and threw the halberd into a pack of hell tigers that threw themselves at him. The weapon struck their leader before it burst into a silver rain of aura and steel that shredded the dozens of demons into nothing but gore and mist.
Even before the halberd had left his hands, two axes had taken its place. The same steely aura covered them as Jormun changed his bearing. These weren’t weapons that kept the enemy at length. No, he needed to feel their blood burning on his face as he shredded every one of these beasts that had destroyed his world.
The blades sang with joy as they were unleashed for the last time. They seemed to know that never again would they be used to purge these lands of evil, and they made every attack count. Flesh shredded, whether it be the thick hides of the nalfeshnee or the steel armor on the erinyes. Every blockade was sundered before his strikes, but after a too-short three minutes of shredding everything that came close, Jormun bid these old partners of his farewell and overloaded them with his aura as well.
One flew into another flying contingent with a corrupted dragon leading them, where it buried itself in its skull and blew it apart. The other found a behemoth’s flank, where it managed to shred that hind leg to uselessness.
Even as he found himself in the thick press of innumerable bodies, Jormun knew what he wanted to make the last moments of his final stand with, so he drew his spear.
A spear’s strength wasn’t found in close quarters like this, but it could be used. A quick twist of the haft around him created a small cyclone of aura that forced all but the largest, heaviest demons back. With that space, the spear could be used to accurately pierce that behemoth’s eyes, that nalfeshnee’s belly, and that rakshasa’s throat. The spear’s time came to an end too quickly, though. Jormun was flagging, and the numbers continued rallying further and stronger, and he needed to make his final change of the weapon.
“I’m too damn old for this shit,” he laughed to himself. The first laugh he’d had in years, he knew, and it felt good.
The spear began fracturing in his hands as his aura overwhelmed it, and he threw it towards the blinded behemoth. It lodged in its wounded eye and pierced through to its brain. The spear shattered as the hulking mass fell and Jormun, gasping, pulled out his final weapon.
His sword that he drew had been with him for decades. A gift from his original master when Jormun ascended to become a Knight, the blade was a remnant from an ancient time, by his own estimation. That was fifty years ago, and it had served him faithfully since. Before he could throw himself towards the juggernauts that’d avoided him so far with it, though, icy pain burst from the bottom of his spine.
“You… should have been a Saint,” the demonic noble said. His face was like a handsome man's, though his skin burned red with ram’s horns sprouting from within his black hair. Black tattoos crawled up his neck, glittering with an internal light as he danced away from Jormun. With demonic magic crawling through his body, Jormun’s access to his aura faded, and he immediately faltered.
Staying on his feet, Jormun sneered at the bastard that’d helped destroy his world.
“Not the first fucker to say it,” he replied, “but let’s see what this Weaponmaster can still do.”
“I think not,” the noble replied, snapping his fingers and sending a wave of darkness that blinded Jormun. His half hour of fighting and exhausting himself also served to cripple his connection to his internal world, and the magic ate away at his vision.
“Was hoping to bury this in your chest,” Jormun grunted as he pushed everything that he was, everything that he ever had been, into the sword. Even through the evil magic that obscured his vision, Jormun could see the glow of silver light as his aura flooded the weapon. “Still, this should ruin your day.”
Then, holding the blade aloft over his head, Jormun detonated his oldest companion and oblivion greeted him as his own aura shredded his body to bits. Hopefully, he got that demonic bastard with that same attack.
***
And that’s the last thing I remember, kid, the voice said in Ezra’s head. Now, do you want to be a Weaponmaster? Or, even a Weapon Saint? Cause if you do, I’m your guy.