The Grey Wind Saves the World

Arch-Mage Nias blasts through the triple-frozen double doors of Lord Elsano’s palace of ice. Neither of them are prepared for this- their final day on Earth and their greatest duel.

“Well well well,” Elsano coos with a pretentious sneer, his ridiculously long and pointy nose curling upward to reveal his crooked teeth. “It appears as though my guards weren’t quite frosty enough to prevent even a weak intruder such as yourself,” he adds with an uppity squeal.

Nias shakes his arm to put out the magic fire clinging to it. His profane, pulsing crimson tattoos inscribed across his body slowly sizzle out to a common black ink in appearance. “Weak? Your burns are weak, sir. This is your end,” he says, also putting emphasis on his stupid pun as he scrapes his right foot across the icy floor to enter a fighting stance.

Elsano snickers, sniggers, snorts and even honks in laughter. “Me?! Wow, you really need to chill out!”

Nias smirks as he raises his fists to conjure up another divine explosion. “Say what you will. Things are about to heat up in here, and it won’t just be me!”

“Whoa, that’s a cold shoulder,” the Ice Lord says with an exaggerated shudder.

“You must mean the cold smolder!”

“Your weak puns make it obvious that you’re not the frozen one of legend!”

“I’m about to kick your ash!”

“Ice think not!”

“I thi-”

“Holy shit,” comes a voice from the side.

The two swing around to see an unassuming, shockingly-quiet knight in full armor, cloaked over and folded over each plate to muffle the sound of his metal.

“Ice to meet you!” Elsano says with a raised, white brow.

“You already used that one!” Nias snaps at his frozen foe. He turns back to the knight. “Look, kid, it’s about to be a holocaust up in here, so-”

“Wow,” Elsano interrupts.

“Yeah dude, holy shit,” the knight adds.

Nias flinches and throws up his hands. “That’s a fire word, guys! I’m not talking about the actual Holocaust! Dammit!”

“Yeah, sure,” Elsano peeps with a curling smirk.

“Even so- you knew that, man. Kinda insensitive,” the knight notes.

“Wh- you can’t just repurpose a word exclusively,” Nias argues. “Language is fluid, you can’t just-”

“Oh boy,” the knight starts, “I’m feeling pretty gay today.” He lifts his visor just a notch to shoot an insinuative glare at Nias, who groans immediately.

“Ugh… I guess, but it’s like, that’s different! Holocaust wasn’t a proper noun for an event at first, but gay is still being used as an adjective.”

“Sure,” the knight admits, “But even then you can understand the context it’s being used. Gay’s implications is like way, way less extreme than Holocaust’s. I think maybe you could probably get away with using it when describing an actual fire, but to just throw up a pun like that is sorta uncool, not gonna lie.”

“Yeah,” Elsano notes. “My grandad’s Jewish.”

Nias grins crassly. “Guess that’s where the nose comes from, hu-”

The knight gasps as sirens flare in the ice castle’s windows. “You didn’t fucking just say what I think you sai-”

The beautiful stained-ice windows of the keep shatter brilliantly to reveal Armus, master wind-mage and a powerful social justice warrior.

“The fuck did you just say, shitlord?” Armus screeches, flying in with his magic while furiously typing up a reply to this short in the comments below- though he ultimately won’t post it because he’s afraid it might hurt his cred as a “supportive” blogger.

“Dude, puns,” Elsano notes.

Even Armus isn’t so deluded by his self-righteous pseudo-intellectual Nat-Soc outlook on life that he would dare disrespect the ways of the pun. “Uh-” he mutters. “Right, I’m going to blow you away… you racist, homophobic, drumpf-supporting shitbag!”

Nias holds up a hand as if to halt the insults. “It’s just a facial feature, dude. Chill out. Noses are just noses.”

“But you used it in a derogatory way, man,” the knight explains. “It’s true that everyone’s different and that may look aesthetically dumb or whatever to you, but you can’t just go tearing people up about how they look. They can’t change that stuff.”

“Just like how a person can’t change their gender after birth!” Elsano says- just trying to be helpful, but oh, he was wrong.

Armus drops to the floor, heaving his all-kale breakfast onto its surface. “Did you…” Armus takes a deep breath after coughing up another pile of green. “DID YOU JUST FUCKING SAY PEOPLE CAN’T BE FREE TO CHOO-”

“What a shocker!” A voice clears out from the wonderful skylight.

Elasno gasps. “N-not the skylig-”

At that same moment the beautiful, 80,000 Euro skylight crashes in with a bolt-fast man, his hair like conduits of leaping electricity.

The knight sighs. Not another one.

“Isroy!” Elsano yells with a furious stamp of the foot.

“Shocked?” Isroy asks with a grin. “I came here to take the elemental throne for myself!”

“Yeah?” Elsano scoffs. “Well you can’t have it.”

“Hope you’re ready for to restorm yourselves!” a still-heaving Armus says as he charges his wind magic.

There’s a silence while Elsano squints. “Like…. Re… reform?”

Armus looks about at the four others awkwardly. “Y-yeah… b-but at least I have puns!” He doesn’t point because it would be rude, but he sort of gestures over at the knight. “I don’t even know what element you are!”

Nias laughs, heating up his flames. “Yeah!” he starts. “You all are going right into the oven, but you’ll be the first, knight. I bet you don’t even have an element!”

Everyone just decided to let that other probable holocaust reference slide, but Armus is totally accusing Nias of being a white supremacist after this fight; even though Nias is Latino, it’s obviously white enough for Armus to victimize.

“Yeah you… cur,” Elsano says with pursed lips and a disgusted look. “I’m going to have to let it go on you if you don’t identify yourself!” he says, gaining an awed chorus from the others.

“Hey, that wasn’t half bad,” Nias said.

“Yeah,” Armus agrees, “I fucking LOVE that movie.”

The knight just shakes his head. “The Grey Wind,” he says simply, laxly drawing his broadsword, dulled exceptionally with mundane runes.

All of the wizards exchange confused glances. “Yeah, and?” Isroy asks, arcing energy between his fingers as if he were juggling raw power.

The knight’s set back by their demeanor. “Well, I sort of thought you guys would be trying to escape.”

Armus scoffs. “Well why would we? You think you can scare me with your heteronormative gender representation?”

“Well I am that knight that’s been running around killing mages for a few months now. Pretty sure it’s been all over social media,” the knight says, clicking on his phone for just a second to display the numerous @thegreywind retweets he has in the latest auto-alert. In just the past ten minutes over seven thousand people loved his most recent tweet: “Bout 2 go fukkup sum moar sparkles. Wish me luck, magic h8erz!! #fuckmagic #wizardssuck”

Everyone flinches and scrambles the second he activates his sword’s mundane managraphy, approximately ten-folding the blade’s cutting power against those who have well-used magical veins, which in this case is all of them.

“W-why would you ever want to kill mages?!” Nias screetches the moment The Grey Wind enters his stance.

“Because you assholes do shit like this all the time,” he says.

And then the knight killed them all, took a monster shit on the elemental throne, and posted it to his Instagram. Other Twitter influencers didn’t stand a chance the day magic was wrought and scattered from the Earth out into the black ether of the cosmos. Humanity was saved, and finally the demonic force of “the element-themed bossfight pun” was banished from the realm.

-The End-