Jackboots of the Damned

 

The storm sat low and heavy, like someone had dropped a mountain onto the sky and left it there to rot. Lightning crawled around inside the clouds and never found a way out. The field below was a slurry of blood and rain. Banners dragged their own colors through the mud, torn to strips that stuck to spear hafts and corpses. The smell was copper and smoke and the sweet rot of men who’d been dead just long enough to be a problem.

 

Boots moved under the mud when the wind shifted. Not walking—just the weight of old battles shifting with the water. Swords jutted like snapped ribs. A helmet turned up a jawless skull as the ground slid.

 

Then the sound started. Not thunder. Not drums. A steady, measured pounding that didn’t speed up or slow down. One man’s step wouldn’t carry in that wind; a hundred would. The ground absorbed it, then decided to share.

 

Thoryn Bloodbane came up over the skull-hill the way a bad memory rises once you’ve run out of distractions. Broad shoulders. Scars that didn’t repeat themselves. Shaved scalp gone to gray stubble except for a thick braid trailing down his back and soaked with rain. His nose had been broken more than once and never put back where it belonged. Pale eyes that made it hard to tell if he was looking at you or past you to your grave.

 

A wolf-pelt cloak hung off one shoulder in strips. Leather straps crossed his chest; a rusted iron pauldron clung to the other shoulder like a stubborn relic. His hands were cut up and callused. The right one carried Thornfang, a jagged greatsword with runes chiseled along the fuller like someone had tried to curse the steel and the steel had cursed back.

 

An idol lay on its side at the top of the hill—human face hammered into gold, eyes set with stones thieves would die for. Thoryn put his boot on the idol’s crown and pressed. The gems cracked with a sharp chirp, then powdered. Gold bent. He ground his heel until the face flattened and the eye sockets filled with grit.

 

He tilted his head toward the sky. “Come down,” he said. The wind tore the words away, but they weren’t for anyone with ears.

  

The pounding drew closer. The ground kept count.

 

 

 

Shackles still hung from some ankles. Chains clinked like teeth in a cold mouth. Some carried tools that could pass for weapons if you squinted. Some carried nothing. A few had swords stolen from the dead and knew enough to hold the edge away from their own legs.

 

Thoryn walked down into them and they opened just enough to let him pass. He didn’t smile. He didn’t try to win them.

 

He went to the toppled altar nearby, a slab slick with old blood and priestly polish. He drew Thornfang across his forearm. The blade chewed. Fresh blood hit the stone and steamed in the cold air.

 

“Witness,” he said. It didn’t matter to who.

 

He turned. “Stand.”

 

The word wasn’t loud. It didn’t have to be. A few men straightened on instinct. A few because defiance travels faster than common sense. The rest because they were tired of kneeling and this was another option.

 

Shackles broke in twos and threes. Some men had keys and hands that still remembered how to use them. Some just twisted until iron screamed and gave up. A big man with a torn lip lifted his cuffed wrists and another smashed them against a rock. The cuffs split. Skin split with them. He didn’t complain.

 

Thoryn stamped his boot. It wasn’t a speech. It was a beat. The heel hit stone; stone answered. He did it again. The men closest to him copied it. Then another ring. Then another. Until the whole ruined field pounded in time.

 

The storm finally let one bolt out. It lit the clouds red and died before it touched the ground.

 

A skinny man with a rope scar around his neck laughed once, short and ugly. “Jackboots,” he said, like he’d found a word he’d dropped years ago.

 

“Jackboots of the Damned,” Thoryn said, and the name stuck to them like mud and wouldn’t wash off.

 

He looked at the nearest gate—big, banded oak plated in gold leaf by people who cared more about shine than weather. “We move,” he said.

 

 No one asked where.

  

The gate didn’t fall to heroics; it fell to simple attention. A team of men shoved burning timbers under its belly while others hacked at the hinges with stolen axes. Smoke crawled across the ground and got into noses and eyes. The first priest to look over the parapet took an arrow through his mouth and toppled like wet laundry. The second decided prayers worked better from behind stone.

 

The wood took. The gold leaf bubbled, looked sick, and sloughed. A seam bled light as the bars inside warmed and expanded. The Jackboots shoved together, backs and shoulders and the kind of swears you invent when your spine hurts. The gate groaned the way old trees do when they know it’s over.

 

Thoryn’s warhorse came out of the smoke black and angry. Tall through the chest, scar down its flank, ears chewed, eyes bright. Things had tried to break it and failed. It stamped at the fire and didn’t care who noticed.

 

Thoryn mounted. His boots found the stirrups and bit down. He set Thornfang upright and the runes answered the nearby heat with a dull red glow like meat on a spit. “Ride,” he said.

 

The gate’s crossbeam cracked. The hinges parted. The whole thing sagged and folded inward. Fire crawled up the inside and turned the passage into a mouth lined with flame.

They went through. Not cavalry—there weren’t enough horses. A flood of men who had decided they were done with permission. The noise in the tunnel was all breath and leather and boots scraping and the faint tink of iron that wasn’t supposed to bend.

 

The first god came fast. A human shape only because that was the easiest way to be seen. Light made flesh, too bright to look at directly. Heat rolled off him and every shadow ran away. Priests screamed on the walls, not in terror—joy. It sounded worse.

 

The Sun-God dropped into the wide square beyond the gate and the air cracked like a forge struck cold. His sword was a line too clean for any eye to track. When he moved it, the world had to catch up. Stone scorched where he walked.

 

Thoryn put his heels into the horse and met him. The first strike took Thornfang high and tore sparks like claws across the steel. The shock snapped up Thoryn’s arms and rattled teeth. He shoved back. The horse took the brunt of it and didn’t shy; it only screamed and bit the god’s shoulder because that’s what it knew.

 

Thornfang’s edge found meat. Not much, but enough. Golden blood spilled and spattered and burned holes in whatever it kissed. A Jackboot’s sleeve went up. He tore it off and kept swinging.

 

“Bleed,” Thoryn said, more to himself than to the god.

The Sun-God’s blade bit a column and opened it like fruit. A statue collapsed and pulped a handful of men. The Jackboots closed the gap without thinking. Three drove spears toward the bright chest and two died. The third lodged iron deep enough to make the god snarl.

 

The god’s laugh faltered. It came back bigger, angrier. His next cut shaved Thoryn’s scalp and flayed a line across the wolf-pelt. Thoryn leaned into the burn and brought Thornfang down at the wrist. The runes flared, screaming a language no one sane uses. Steel met light and made a sound like stone breaking underwater.

 

The Sun-God retreated three steps in one blink. Light folded around him like a cocoon. He shot upward and the square dropped ten degrees immediately, like a fever broken. The priests on the wall stopped cheering. One started crying without knowing why.

 

Thoryn’s hands shook. He ignored them. “Push,” he said.

They pushed.

 

 

The second god came on the ground. You could hear him before you saw him—heavy, steady, like a siege tower rolling without wheels. He wasn’t a man in armor; he was armor pretending it knew how to move. Joints the size of millstones. Plates bolted over plates until there wasn’t any place left to be human.

 

The Iron One swung his mace. It hit three Jackboots at once and turned them into meat under metal. No one ran. The men behind stepped into the gaps because that’s how walls work.

 

“Breakers!” Thoryn shouted. Six men with hammers and wedges moved. They’d been smiths or at least near a forge.

 

They didn’t step back when the mace swept by again; they stepped under. One took it on a shield, the shield folded, his arm went with it. He bit his tongue in half and stayed on his feet long enough to jam a wedge into a knee seam.

 

Hammers fell in rhythm. Not pretty. Effective. Iron learned to hate leverage. The Iron One brought the mace down vertical; a Jackboot shoved a spear haft under the head and the impact snapped the shaft but robbed the swing of its throat. Thornfang came down along the spine, biting plate. Runes went white-hot. Steel popped. Rivets shot out like hornets.

 

The Iron One staggered. Thoryn climbed the back like a ladder. He put the point under the helmet lip and drove. The blade chewed through padding and into whatever the god used for a neck. When he yanked Thornfang free, black steam hissed out and smelled like coins after a fire.

 

The Iron One went down on one knee. The ground shook. He stayed there. Not dead. Not getting up soon.

 

“Move,” Thoryn barked.

 

They moved.

By then the Serpent had noticed. It uncoiled from the clouds and filled the street with itself. Scales slid over one another with the sound of stone walls grinding. The head dipped, mouth opening onto a red room lined with knives.

“Spears!” Thoryn didn’t have to say it twice.

 

They threw. Most clanged uselessly. A few stuck. Then a lot stuck. Men stopped throwing at the shiny places and started aiming for the seams where one scale overlapped the next. Blood came out thick and black and sticky. It glued hands to shafts and feet to cobbles.

 

The Serpent lunged. It took a man at the waist and bit through. The Jackboots didn’t fall back; they climbed. Up rubble. Up rope. Up the Serpent itself, boot points biting into scale edges, hands on embedded spears as rungs.

 

Thoryn went for the tongue. He met it in mid-air and hacked. Thornfang took three feet off the tip. The Serpent recoiled, smashed a building trying to get away from its own pain, and finally threw itself up and out of the street and into the clouds like a rope hauled in too fast. It didn’t come back.

 

Thoryn’s horse was bleeding from a dozen small cuts. He put his hand on its neck and kept it moving. If it stopped, it would lie down and die, and he needed it mean and stupid for a while longer.

 

He looked at the men around him—faces wet with rain and blood, eyes bright and flat with the high that comes when fear runs out of room. “Next,” he said.

 

They answered without words. Boots pounded. The city listened.

 

 

 

The temple of the Maiden stood like a jewel box cracked open, spilling fire instead of light. Its walls were white marble once, now blackened with soot and lined with corpses that had tried to keep it holy.

 

The Maiden of Ash wasn’t a child, though her face wore youth like a mask. Her eyes were hollow pits, glowing faintly red. Her hair writhed like cinders caught in a draft.

 

Every step she took left ash in the air, settling over the men like snowfall. When it touched skin, it burned.

 

She sang when she fought. Not words. A sound halfway between a lullaby and a scream, carrying through the marrow. Men dropped spears to claw their ears bloody. One fell to his knees and sobbed until the Maiden brushed his cheek with a pale hand. His flesh powdered instantly, collapsing him into a pile of ash and teeth.

 

Thoryn spurred forward. The horse balked at her song but carried him close enough for Thornfang to swing. The blade cut her side—no resistance, no blood. She simply split into dust, re-formed a step away, and laughed.

 

“Not flesh,” Thoryn snarled. “Fire.”

 

He dropped from the saddle, tore a torch from a ruined brazier, and jammed it into her throat the next time she coalesced. She shrieked—not in pain, but in rage at being defiled with her own element. Jackboots swarmed, carrying firebrands from the temple’s wreckage. They pressed them into her arms, her back, her face.

 

Her song cracked, faltered, then cut out. She dispersed one last time—this time without re-forming. The ash drifted high, caught by the storm wind, and was gone.

 

The Jackboots stamped their boots once, hard, to mark it. Then they moved on.

  

 

The city shook as the sky finally split. The Storm-God wasn’t a figure so much as a mass of lightning wrapped in armor of cloud and rain. He towered above the spires, a walking tempest with eyes like burning silver.

 

When he swung, the air itself cracked. Lightning seared trenches through streets, turning cobblestones into molten glass. Men caught in it burned where they stood, bodies rigid, mouths open in silent screams.

 

The Jackboots scattered. Thoryn didn’t. He shoved Thornfang into the ground and raised both hands. The blade’s runes bled white light, drawing the storm down like a beacon. The Storm-God obliged, sending a bolt thick as a tree into the sword. It should have killed Thoryn. Instead, the steel split the charge, hurling it sideways into ruined buildings.

 

“NOW!” Thoryn bellowed.

 

Dozens of ropes, hooks, and chains flew upward. They latched onto the storm-form like anchors biting into flesh.

 

Men pulled with everything left in them, dragging the god down inch by inch. It didn’t stop the lightning, but it slowed it.

 

Thoryn leapt, boots skidding across wet stone, and brought Thornfang down in an arc. The blade sank into the god’s chest. Light spilled out like liquid silver, blinding and hot.

 

Thoryn held on, teeth bared, until the blade reached bone—if gods have such things.

 

The Storm-God howled and ripped himself free of the chains, retreating back into the clouds. His body left a scar in the air, a streak of light across the storm. The thunder that followed shook men to their knees.

 

But the Jackboots stood back up. Always.

  

 

At the city’s heart was no temple, no idol. Just a void.

The Jackboots stopped there, uncertain. The ground was wrong, sloping inward like a mouth waiting to swallow. Shadows pooled unnaturally, bending light toward themselves.

 

Then it moved. The Unknown didn’t have a face. Or a body. It was shape without definition, claws where claws were needed, mouths where hunger wanted them. Men stabbed and cut at the dark and found nothing solid, nothing to kill.

 

One Jackboot vanished screaming, dragged into the shadow. Another fell with half his chest missing, the edges of the wound crawling with black worms.

 

“Hold!” Thoryn roared. His voice was the only thing that carried.

 

They drove spears into the ground, forming a ring. Boots stamped, hard, over and over, the rhythm cutting through the madness. The Unknown recoiled at the sound, as if each strike was a hammer against its skin.

 

Thoryn stepped into the circle. Thornfang blazed white, its runes cutting light into the dark. He swung in wide arcs, every strike tearing at the edges of the void. The shadows screamed—not sound, but a vibration that made bones ache.

When the blade finally bit deep, the Unknown shuddered, splitting into a thousand fragments that slithered back into the cracks of the earth. The void sealed behind them.

Silence. Only the rain, only the pounding of boots.

 

Thoryn looked at his men. Too many missing. Too many left as pieces.

 

But the line still stood. The Jackboots still marched.

 

“Next,” Thoryn said, voice raw.

 

And they obeyed.

  

 

They found him in the graveyard outside the walls. Statues of angels stood broken-necked, their wings hacked off and piled like firewood. Graves split open not from time, but from hunger. Corpses dangled from the trees, stripped clean to bone.

 

The Carrion Father crawled among them, taller than the tallest spire, body nothing but ribs wrapped in parchment skin, his gut swollen and crawling with movement. His beard writhed with maggots. When he opened his mouth, a tide of black crows vomited out, blotting the rain from the sky.

 

The Jackboots covered their heads as claws and beaks tore into them. Eyes went first, then tongues, then the soft parts of throats. Men swung blindly, cutting down birds by the dozen, but for every one that fell, ten more came screaming.

 

Thoryn lit the field with fire. Torches, oil, corpses that still had fat enough to burn. The crows hated flame. The Carrion Father roared as his flock screamed into smoke.

 

Then the gut split. Something pressed outward from inside. Hands. Faces. The dead he had swallowed wanted out.

 

The Jackboots slammed spears into the opening. Thoryn climbed the ribcage like a siege ladder and hacked down.

 

Thornfang split the gut, spilling a river of the half-eaten dead. They poured across the mud, clawing at the Father’s bones, dragging him down into the graves he had emptied.

 

When it was over, only bones and silence remained.

 

 

The Jackboots stamped once. Not for victory—just for survival.

  

 

Beyond the graveyard, a palace of bronze loomed. Its gates opened not from force, but from welcome. Inside waited the War-Mother, bare-armed, scarred, her crown welded from broken helmets. Her children lined the walls—legions of armored giants, each the size of ten men. Their eyes glowed like forge-fires.

 

The War-Mother smiled, teeth black with blood. “My sons are hungry.”

 

The giants charged. The ground cracked beneath them. Each swing of their axes felled five men. Jackboots shattered like clay dolls, crushed under fists and boots too large to belong to anything born of flesh.

 

Thoryn met the first giant at the knees, hamstringing him with a single stroke. The brute fell screaming, and the Jackboots swarmed him like ants, stabbing until his throat ran red. The next took three of them in one sweep and threw their halves at the others.

 

It wasn’t battle. It was slaughter.

 

“Bring her down!” Thoryn roared, pointing Thornfang at the Mother herself.

 

The Jackboots obeyed, hurling grappling hooks, climbing the throne she sat upon. She laughed as she tore them apart, one by one, snapping spines like twigs. But still they climbed. One made it to her shoulder, then another, then five more, stabbing into her face, her eyes, her mouth.

 

She finally screamed—not rage, but something like surprise. She ripped free of her throne, staggering backward. Her giants faltered, uncertain without her voice. Thoryn rammed Thornfang up into her gut and twisted.

 

The War-Mother fell to her knees. Not dead—but hurt. Enough that her children dragged her back into the palace and barred the gates with their own bodies.

 

 

The Jackboots didn’t cheer. They just counted who was left.

 

Too few. Always too few.

  

 

Rain became tide. Streets turned into rivers. The drowned city rose from beneath, black spires cutting through the storm. And with it came the Sea-Wolf.

 

It was no beast of flesh. Its body was the ocean itself, shaped into jaws and claws by rage. Water howled through the alleys, carrying corpses like driftwood.

 

The Jackboots drowned by the dozen, dragged under before they could scream. Horses vanished in whirlpools. Shields splintered against waves harder than stone.

 

Thoryn lashed himself to a broken column, Thornfang clutched in one hand. The Sea-Wolf lunged, a tidal wave with fangs. He drove the blade into its jaw as it came down.

 

The runes flared, splitting the wave into two walls of water that collapsed on either side.

 

The Jackboots clung to wreckage, stabbing into the water as if it were flesh. Somehow, it worked. Black ichor bled into the tide. The Sea-Wolf reeled back, howling with the voice of a hurricane.

 

It didn’t die. It simply pulled itself back into the storm, leaving the streets flooded with its blood. The water stank of rot and salt.

 

When the tide receded, the Jackboots stood ankle-deep in corpses and wreckage.

 

 

Thoryn spat seawater. His voice was gravel.

“Next.”

  

 

They came in silence—two gods, alike in every way except the weapons they carried. One had a cleaver big enough to split a horse in one swing, the other a saw-toothed blade meant for slow work. Their faces were covered with leather masks, stitched through the eyes and mouths.

 

The Twin Butchers moved as one. When one cut, the other followed, finishing the stroke. When one parried, the other countered. It was less battle and more rhythm—an execution line, practiced for eternity.

 

The Jackboots broke under them. Cleaver cut men in half; saw carved them to screaming scraps. Blood sprayed in arcs so wide it painted the walls like murals.

 

Thoryn didn’t wait for them to come. He charged, Thornfang screaming through the rain. His strike met both their blades at once, steel shrieking loud enough to pierce the storm. Sparks lit their masks in hellish flashes.

 

He ducked low, rammed his shoulder into the cleaver’s gut, and shoved him back three steps. The saw came down, chewing into his pauldron. Leather burned. Skin split.

 

Thoryn ripped free and swung at the same time—catching the saw-bearer across the chest.

 

The mask split. Beneath it wasn’t a face—just teeth. Rows and rows, grinding and grinning.

 

“Ugly,” Thoryn spat, and hacked again.

 

The Jackboots swarmed, hurling nets, chains, anything to break the rhythm of the twins’ dance. It worked, barely. The gods staggered, separated. Once apart, they bled like anything else. The cleaver’s arm was hacked off at the elbow; the saw-bearer’s teeth shattered under a hammer blow.

 

Still, they didn’t fall. They just retreated into the dark, dragging their butcher’s tools, promising the work wasn’t done.

 

 

The ground was red when they left. Too red.

  

 

He came on four legs first—a beast the size of a cathedral, fur bristling like spears. His head wore a crown of iron thorns that sank into his skull, blood dripping into his eyes.

 

When he shifted, the wolf stretched into a man, then back again, body cracking as if bones had never decided on one shape.

 

The Wolf-Crowned howled, and the sound broke shields. Men fell to their knees, ears leaking blood. Horses bolted into the flood.

 

Thoryn held. His horse didn’t—it threw him, bolting into the night. He hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up with Thornfang already moving.

 

The Wolf lunged. Thoryn rammed the blade upward, catching the beast under the jaw. Blood rained black and hot. But the god only twisted, shifting midair, landing as a man with wolf’s jaws splitting his face. He punched with claws like scythes, raking three lines down Thoryn’s ribs.

 

Jackboots piled on him, stabbing, screaming, hacking at the crown. The Wolf-Crowned tore them apart by the handful, but each time he shifted, his defenses slipped. A spear went deep in the wolf’s belly. An axe split the man’s back.

 

Thoryn climbed onto him in the chaos, yanking at the crown. The thorns pierced his palms, tore flesh from bone, but he pulled until the iron bent. The Wolf shrieked like a dying star, staggering back.

 

He fled into the storm, crown broken, blood trailing behind.

 

 

Thoryn dropped to the mud, his hands ruined, fingers curled into claws of torn flesh. He wrapped them around Thornfang anyway.

  

 

Her throne was carved from bones. Not human, not animal—something older. Something that made men’s eyes water to look at.

 

The Hollow Queen sat draped in silk so black it seemed to drink the torchlight. Her face was perfect, untouched, lips curved in a smile that promised everything. When she rose, the silk fell away, and the hollowness showed. Her chest was open, a cavern where a heart should be. Inside, shadows moved like worms in meat.

 

“Lay down,” she whispered. Half the Jackboots did. Not from fear, but from longing. They crawled toward her like dogs, reaching for her hand. When she touched them, they withered, shriveled, collapsed into husks.

 

Thoryn shouted until his voice bled. He cut down his own men just to spare them her touch. Rage steadied him where reason broke. He charged the throne, swinging Thornfang in a wide arc.

 

She caught the blade with one hand. Bones cracked, but she held it. Her hollow chest bent forward, shadows spilling outward, wrapping around Thoryn’s arms, his throat, his mind. For a moment he saw peace. His wife’s face. His son’s laugh. A home that never burned.

 

He roared and tore free, blood running from his nose and eyes. Thornfang flared white, brighter than the shadows, and bit into her wrist. The Queen recoiled, silk burning away, revealing nothing but a screaming hollow.

 

She fled into her throne, vanishing with the shadows that birthed her.

 

The throne cracked. Bones fell apart. The chamber emptied of its poison.

 

The Jackboots left standing were fewer still. But they were standing.

 

 

“Next,” Thoryn rasped. His throat bled when he said it.

 

 

The storm had no end. Streets filled with rivers of blood. Every step stuck to the ground with a sucking sound, as if the earth itself wanted to keep them there.

 

At the center of the ruined quarter stood a tower of skulls, stacked so high it vanished into the clouds. The skulls weren’t human. Some had too many eyes. Some were carved with runes that shifted when stared at too long.

 

On its peak stood a god draped in cloaks made of flayed skin, a crown of fire hissing above his brow. His voice carried like a hammer on an anvil:

 

“Bow.”

 

The Crowned One stretched out his hands. Jackboots collapsed under the weight, forced to their knees as though gravity itself had turned against them. Men coughed blood, spines popping under the strain.

 

Thoryn stayed standing. His knees bent, his body shook, but he stayed upright. His boot sank into the mud, and he forced it forward. Another step. Another. Thornfang dragged, glowing hotter with each pace.

 

The Crowned One snarled, power rippling, skulls shaking loose from the tower. Thoryn raised the blade two-handed, even as the weight tried to crush him flat.

 

He hurled it.

 

Thornfang spun end over end, screaming against the air, and smashed the fire crown from the god’s head. The force broke the spell. The Jackboots rose in unison, howling like wolves freed from chains.

 

The Crowned One staggered, bleeding light from his brow. He vanished into the collapsing skull tower, retreating before he could be finished.

 

 

Thoryn retrieved Thornfang from the rubble. His men stamped their boots. Once. Loud enough to shake heaven.

 

They entered a courtyard where the air itself was heavy. Chains hung from every wall, every archway, some rusted, some new, all humming like taut strings.

 

At the center stood the God of Chains—a massive figure, his body hidden beneath loops of iron. Shackles wrapped his wrists and ankles, not binding but empowering, feeding strength into each movement. His face was masked by a slab of steel, only his eyes visible—two burning coals.

 

He didn’t swing a weapon. He threw the chains. They moved like serpents, wrapping around men’s throats, arms, legs. Jackboots were yanked into the air, crushed, or torn apart. Bones snapped like twigs under the tension.

 

Thoryn was caught too—three chains wrapping around his torso, lifting him off the ground. Ribs cracked. His vision went black at the edges.

 

He bit down until his teeth bled, raised Thornfang against the links, and roared. The runes lit, not white, but blood-red. The blade sheared through the chains like they were thread. He dropped to the stones hard enough to jar teeth loose.

“Break them!” he screamed.

 

The Jackboots obeyed. Hammers smashed links. Axes chopped through iron. Every chain that fell shrieked like it was alive, the noise rattling skulls.

 

The God of Chains reeled back, suddenly smaller without his web. He staggered into the shadows, leaving broken links thrashing on the ground like dying snakes.

 

 

The Jackboots stood among the wreckage, bleeding and limping, but free.

 

They reached the temple square, and the ground itself rose to meet them. Cobblestones tore free, shaping themselves into a towering form—the Stone Colossus. Its face was blank, its body made of every road and wall they had passed.

 

It didn’t roar. It didn’t speak. It simply moved forward, each step an earthquake. Every punch turned men to paste. Every time its foot fell, Jackboots disappeared under rubble.

The men faltered. Even Thoryn’s voice couldn’t pull them forward.

 

So he did the only thing left—he climbed it.

 

Thornfang bit into stone as he scaled the giant, every strike sending cracks spidering through the Colossus’ body. Rocks rained down, crushing men beneath, but still they shouted his name. Still they stamped their boots in rhythm, marking every cut.

 

At the crown of its head, Thoryn raised the blade high and drove it down. Thornfang split stone. The Colossus shuddered, fractured, then collapsed in a roar of rubble that buried half the square.

 

When the dust cleared, Thoryn stood atop the ruins, bleeding from a dozen wounds, armor shattered, cloak burned to rags. The Jackboots that remained were few.

 

Maybe fifty. Maybe less.

 

 

But they stamped their boots anyway. Louder than the fall of the god.

 

---

 

The temple was shattered long before they reached it. Its spires were broken, its altars overturned. But something still waited inside.

 

A figure descended on wings of steel—the Seraph of Blades. No feathers, only swords, hundreds of them, fanning outward like a halo. Each beat of its wings sent shards slicing the air, cutting men to ribbons before they could lift their shields.

 

The Jackboots screamed as they were shredded, arms and legs scattered into the mud. Even the storm couldn’t wash the blood away fast enough.

 

Thoryn charged through the storm of blades, Thornfang held high. Each strike from the Seraph clashed against him like rain on stone, carving new scars across his chest and arms.

 

He barely held the sword, but still he swung.

 

He struck the wing once, twice, a third time. Blades shattered free, clattering into the mud like broken rain. The Seraph shrieked, its voice both divine and inhuman, a thousand echoes at once.

 

The Jackboots hurled hooks, chains, anything that could catch. They dragged one wing down. Thoryn leapt, boots pounding into the god’s chest, and drove Thornfang into the core of its body. Light screamed out of the wound, burning his face raw.

 

The Seraph tore free, wings collapsing inward, and fled into the storm. It left behind the broken swords, each one melted useless.

 

 

The Jackboots left behind weren’t men anymore—they were scarred shadows in the rain.

 

---

 

---

 

The storm itself split apart. Above the ruined city, gods clashed with one another—giant forms, wings, claws, spears of fire and rivers of blood. It wasn’t just Thoryn’s war anymore; it was heaven devouring itself.

 

The Jackboots marched into the chaos anyway.

 

One god hurled another through a tower, the wreckage flattening ten men in an instant. A spear of lightning carved a trench through the ranks. Still they advanced, stepping over corpses, boots pounding, never breaking rhythm.

 

Thoryn mounted a half-dead horse, its eyes white, flanks bleeding. He rode into the heart of the battle, Thornfang raised high. Gods struck at him, but each blow met steel and fury. He cut tendons thick as tree trunks, severed hands that glowed like suns, carved into wings that blotted the sky.

 

He didn’t kill them. Not yet. But he made them bleed. He made them notice.

 

By the end, the battlefield was nothing but ruin—no temples, no walls, no ground unsoaked by blood. The Jackboots who remained stood in silence, their boots sinking into mud made from flesh and rain.

 

Thoryn lifted Thornfang to the sky. His voice was a snarl torn from the gut:

 

 

“Next.”

 

---

The earth split beneath them, a wound that gaped wider with every step. From it clawed the Beast of the Rift—a thing too large to measure, its body all jagged horns and shifting eyes. Every time you looked at it, it was different: wolf, bull, serpent, man, all sewn into one screaming body.

 

Its roar flattened buildings. Its breath melted steel.

 

Jackboots turned to liquid where it touched them, bones bubbling through their flesh.

 

Still they fought.

 

Hooks dug into its hide. Spears stabbed between its shifting forms. Men were swallowed whole and hacked their way out again, screaming with mouths full of black blood.

 

Thoryn climbed the monster like he’d done the Colossus, Thornfang chewing handholds into its body. The beast twisted, throwing him high into the air. He came down screaming, blade-first, and drove the sword into its skull.

 

The runes exploded with light, carving fire through the beast’s head. It convulsed, shrieking so loud it split eardrums. Then, impossibly, it staggered back and retreated into the rift, sealing it shut behind.

 

The Jackboots stood in the silence, barely a dozen now. Skin melted, armor gone, but their boots still struck the ground.

 

---

The storm broke, and the city lay in ruin. No temples. No altars. Just ash and bone.

 

From the silence stepped the last of them—no monstrous form, no wings, no crown. Just a man in plain robes, face calm, eyes endless.

 

The Last God.

 

He carried no weapon. He raised no hand. He simply spoke:

 

“You cannot win.”

 

The words hit like hammers. Men dropped dead without wounds. Others staggered, coughing blood, their hearts giving out under the weight of his voice.

 

Thoryn spat in the mud. “Then why are you here?”

 

The god’s smile faltered. Just a hair.

 

That was enough.

 

Thoryn charged. Thornfang screamed in his hands, runes white as the sun. The Last God stood, arms open, unflinching. The Jackboots followed, the last of them, boots pounding louder than thunder.

 

The clash was not seen. It was felt. Light swallowed the square, brighter than any flame, blacker than any shadow. Screams, steel, the pounding of boots—then silence.

 

When the light cleared, only ash remained. No god. No men. No Thoryn.

 

But in the mud, half-buried, one boot still stood upright.

 

 

And when the storm wind passed, it sounded like stamping.