Tyrosh, The Purple Palace, Outer Bastion
"Help! Save us!" Boom! Squelch! "Monster! It's a monster!" "Three-Headed God, have mercy!"
Deep within the vaulted corridors of the outer fortress, Jon Snow moved like a force of nature. He held Dark Sister in its massive two-handed greatsword form, the Valyrian steel wreathed in roaring orange flames. Having funneled his accumulated Soul Energy into his physical attributes, Jon's strength, speed, and reflexes had reached a terrifying threshold of 40—surpassing the limits of any mortal knight.
He was a streak of black lightning. Every horizontal sweep of the flaming blade created a vacuum of air that pulled in the heat, ending in a thunderous shockwave that tore through bronze and bone alike.
Three Tyroshi regulars, desperate and cornered, leveled their pikes and charged. Their discipline was admirable, but against Jon, it was a joke. They didn't even see him move. To their eyes, the air simply blurred; a heartbeat later, their vision spun as their severed heads left their shoulders. They were dead before they realized their pikes had struck nothing but air.
Jon had never felt this level of power before. With his attributes peaked, the world seemed to move in slow motion. The flaming Dark Sister felt weightless in his hands, an extension of his own predatory will. He was no longer just a king; he was the Lightbringer of myth, a reaper harvesting a crop of men who had the misfortune of standing in his path.
The Tyroshi defenders were outmatched in every metric—morale, equipment, and raw power. Jon moved through them like a gale through dry grass. Even when the soldiers tried to jam the narrow hallways with heavy cheval de frise barricades, Dark Sister sheared through the iron-spiked timber as if it were parchment. Behind him, the Giant Poison Spiders scuttled over the walls, their mandibles snapping shut on the stragglers, ensuring no one survived to report the breach.
Halt!
Jon skidded to a stop at the threshold of a wide gallery. His eyes narrowed. At the end of the long hallway, a massive triple-shot scorpion was mounted on a swivel base, its three iron-shod bolts leveled directly at the door.
Jon was powerful, but he was not invincible. He knew the limits of his flesh; until his defense attribute reached 50, a direct hit from a Myrish heavy siege engine would still kill him. The craftsmanship of Myr was the gold standard of Essos, and Jon had no intention of testing his ribs against a bolt meant to sink ships.
He ducked back into the shadow of a room just as the first massive shaft whistled past, shattering the stone doorframe with the force of a falling hammer.
Safe behind the masonry, Jon opened the System Mall in his mind. He selected two specific spells and shifted Dark Sister back into its scepter form.
"Is he gone? Did we hit him?" "I don't see him! Bring the Fire Oil! Burn the hallway!"
The Tyroshi officers were frantic. They had seen their brothers decapitated in their sleep or trampled in the panic of the initial breach. The sight of Jon retreating gave them a momentary, desperate surge of courage.
"We have to—"
FLASH—!
A blinding, high-intensity sphere of light erupted from the tip of Jon's scepter at the edge of the hallway. It was the Light Magic spell "Flash."
"Gah! My eyes!" "I'm blind! I can't see!" "Fire! Fire the bolts anyway!"
The Tyroshi soldiers screamed as the magical brilliance scorched their retinas. Blinded and panicked, the operators yanked the firing levers. The scorpion roared, its bolts slamming into the empty stone walls of the gallery. The sound of steel on stone was deafening, but Jon was already moving.
Rumble...
Jon unleashed a Dark Magic spell: "Molten Flow." It was a slow-moving but unstoppable wave of superheated sludge that oozed from the ground beneath the scorpion. The operators, still clawing at their blinded eyes, felt the floor liquefy beneath them.
Sizzle—BOOM!
The heat ignited the ammunition and the grease of the scorpion's gears. The heavy engine exploded, sending shards of wood and iron into the blinded guards.
"What's happening? Rear guard, move up!" "Keep firing! Don't let it through!"
The officers tried to maintain order, but their vision was a blur of white spots and pain. They didn't realize that Jon was already among them.
Jon stepped over the smoking wreckage of the scorpion, his eyes cold and predatory. He didn't use magic now; he used steel. He lunged into the heart of the gallery, Dark Sister singing as it carved through the chaos. One officer tried to shout an order; Jon's blade silenced him mid-sentence, the Valyrian steel severing his throat before he could draw breath.
The slaughter was systematic. Jon moved with a fluidity that made the Tyroshi attacks look like they were being performed underwater. He parried, riposted, and struck with a lethal accuracy that left the floor carpeted in purple cloaks and cooling blood.
The soldiers began to break. The "invincibility" of the Purple Palace was a lie. The "monsters" their commanders had dismissed were real, and the man leading them was the most terrifying of all. As Jon stood at the end of the gallery, his black armor slick with gore and his blade dripping fire, the remaining Tyroshi defenders did the only thing their survival instinct allowed.
They turned and ran. And Jon, the humanoid dragon, followed.