Chapter 422: A Narrow Escape and Dragonsteel Proves Its Worth
The two rings of fire encircling the walls had indeed hindered the advance of the sea of corpses. However, from the mass of wights halted outside the inferno, a wight mammoth and a wight giant suddenly teamed up and lunged from the host, charging straight for the main gates.
Transformed into undead puppets, these two behemoths were no longer limited by the physiological constraints of their massive size—such as maximum heart output, respiratory caps, or lack of stamina. Their speed and endurance were significantly higher than they had been in life. They thundered toward the fortress, trampling over stakes and trenches that had already been leveled, weathering the rain of arrows from the defenders' active defense, and slammed heavily into the gates of the Shadow Tower.
In truth, both the top of the Wall and the fortress walls were equipped with heavy machinery like scorpions and catapults designed to deal with such large enemies. However, it was the middle of the night, and the cloud cover had thickened and darkened since sunset. Despite the illumination from the fires and the contrast of the snow, the wight army outside appeared as a solid mass of black, making it impossible to distinguish individual targets. When the two behemoths emerged from the cover of the host and charged, crossing the flaming isolation zone and reaching the walls in less than ten seconds, it happened in a heartbeat. No heavy equipment had time to pivot and aim at them.
The thick-skinned wight mammoth completely ignored the threat of ordinary dragonglass arrows, while the wight giant was clad in a suit of armor—whether he had it in life or the Night King had prepared it for him in death—and carried a massive wooden trunk as a club. dragonglass arrowheads shattered into glass shards against them with a rhythmic clatter. Before the eyes of the onlookers, the mountain-like mammoth, trailing various tongues of flame, slammed into the gates of the Shadow Tower with a thunderous boom.
The gates buckled inward at the moment of impact. In the wake of that muffled roar, thousands of hearts skipped a beat simultaneously. Fortunately, the newly rebuilt Shadow Tower was no shoddy construction; the heavy gates remained firmly in the center of the gateway after the noise subsided, though the craftsmen who had been surrounding it to block it with stone blocks were sent scattering in terror.
If this had been a living mammoth, such a full-force collision would have left it with a shattered skull and splattered brains, or at least a severe concussion. The problem, however, was that it was dead.
Wildfire climbed up the mammoth's massive feet and spread across its limbs and fur, but the beast showed no hesitation or panic. It took a few steps back and, alongside the wight giant, launched a second assault on the gate.
Only then did the first bomb thrown by the panicked defenders on the wall arc down and land at their feet.
Two more thunderous roars followed: one from the bomb's explosion, the second from the two behemoths striking the gate again. The shockwave from the bomb made both the mammoth and the giant stagger, but the spray of dragonglass shards—sufficient to kill dozens of unarmored humanoid wights—was inadequate against these two. Most of the fragments buried themselves in the mammoth's thick fur and the giant's armor. Only a few successfully bypassed their defenses, and because they were too small and lacked sufficient fire-aspected magic, they failed to cause a fatal effect.
...
"Hey, old man! Get away from the gate! I don't want to take your job this early!" Qhorin Halfhand shouted from the battlements nearby, warning Denys to move away from the danger zone.
But the commander of the Shadow Tower did not move. Instead, he barked out orders, summoning the fortress's reserves to gather around the gateway.
The third collision arrived without pause. The heavy wooden doors and the massive crossbars were sturdy enough, but the hinges connecting the panels to the walls and the iron bolts began to deform and loosen under the repeated application of titanic force. After this thirty-second buffer, two heavy scorpions whose field of fire could cover the gate finally creaked as they pivoted. Two dragonglass spears were launched with twin thuds; one missed and buried itself in the snow, while the other struck the mammoth squarely in the belly and burrowed into its gut, finally felling it as it struck the gate for the fourth time.
As they watched the fallen mammoth slowly turn into a bonfire under the wildfire's embrace, scattered cheers broke out. However, the mammoth's mission was complete. The gate, made precarious after four impacts, finally collapsed inward under a final, furious kick from the wight giant, leaving the gateway wide open.
His lower half wreathed in yellow-green flames, the wight giant strode through the gates. He scanned the interior of the gateway with eyes glowing with blue light, swung his long wooden club to sweep aside the obstacles piled inside, and stumbled over the debris toward Denys Mallister and the guards surrounding him.
The semi-fixed scorpions on the walls were frantically being repositioned to aim inside the gate, but more wights were already following in the giant's footsteps, surging toward the newly opened breach.
"Sworn brothers, stand with me and stop it!" The battle had begun less than ten minutes ago, and the Shadow Tower was already facing an immediate crisis of falling! Denys drew his longsword with eyes wide and roared at the charging wight giant.
"My Lord Commander, please leave at once!"
Countless soldiers wielding dragonglass spears swarmed forward, trying to kill the giant. However, the enemy was clad in a mixture of leather and iron—shabby but sturdy armor—and the club he held was far longer than any melee weapon used by humans. The dragonglass tips were too brittle to pierce his armor, and while iron arrows could pierce it, they dealt no damage to a wight. Amidst cries of agony, brave but unlucky soldiers were batted away, spraying blood. Denys's guards were forced to pull the old man back to prevent a disaster that would leave the garrison leaderless.
The breach of the gate itself was not terrifying; it was a scenario considered in the defense protocols. The tragedy was that the defenders could not stop the first enemy to enter the fortress!
Just as the wight giant knocked over the first barricade amidst the flames, poised to tear through the internal defense line and wreak havoc, an arrow glowing with a faint, almost imperceptible golden light flew over the heads of the crowd at a speed no one could track. It pierced the heavy leather armor on the giant's chest as if it were parchment and buried itself deep in his heart. This unremarkable shot, hidden among a flurry of arrows, brought a completely different result: the twelve-foot-tall giant pitched forward with a heavy thud as if tripped. His weapon slipped from his hand, and without so much as a whimper, he fell into an eternal sleep, never to stir again.
The crowd looked in confusion toward the source of the arrow. They saw Qhorin Halfhand holding a longbow of yew, jumping from the battlements to the roof of the nearest building, then down to the ground, rushing toward the fallen giant.
As the second-in-command of the Shadow Tower and one of its best fighters, Qhorin had inevitably been made the carrier and distributor of the fortress's two Lightbringers. These weapons, like the bombs, were trump cards specifically prepared for the White Walkers, but the giant's intrusion was a crisis that demanded flexibility over protocol.
The full set of Lightbringers was publicly claimed to consist of seventy-seven arrows, though several were fakes. However, Egger naturally dared not joke with the lives of the soldiers on the front lines. Though the number of dragonsteel arrows he sent to each castle was small, they were all genuine articles melted down from Dark Sister. In this moment of crisis, a single arrow drawn at random had indeed proven its worth.
"That lad... cough, the Lord Commander didn't bluff us! This 'Lightbringer' isn't just for show!" Qhorin shouted as he ran. "A few of you, help me flip this thing over. This arrow is packed so beautifully, it ought to be reusable. Those of you with nothing to do, get to the gate and find a way to plug it! Denys, tell the men on the walls—use the bombs when you need to, don't worry about the White Walkers!"
With the wight giant killed in a single shot, the morale of the defenders, which had been in their throats moments ago, surged. But all Qhorin Halfhand could think of was: Such a divine artifact cannot be used as a consumable!
Having killed his target, he reached the fallen giant, showing no fear of the beast rising again. With the help of several soldiers, he flipped the body over and spent considerable effort hacking and sawing before finally prying the dragonsteel arrow from the giant's sternum—just before the flames on its lower body reached its chest.
A breach had been forced through the barricades at the gate, but fortunately, the logistical personnel quickly piled junk back into the gap. The open gate had become a glaring weakness in the once-sturdy wall. Taking one look at that dark, gaping hole, Denys Mallister felt a sinking sensation. "Pass the word: let the brothers on the walls use bombs and wildfire at any cost to buy us time to reclaim the gate!"
The first wave of burning humanoid wights had already begun to pour through the gateway, stepping over the carcass of the mammoth. Every available combatant in the fortress charged to meet them with whatever weapons they could find. Amidst the snarling of wights and the furious roars of Night's Watchmen, a continuous string of explosions began to ring out on the outer side of the gate—the loud ones were bombs, the quieter ones wildfire. These powerful consumables, meant to be used sparingly, were now being poured into the host outside the gate like water. At any cost, they used gunpowder and flame to create an invisible wall—a death zone acting as a meat grinder for wights within ten meters of the entrance. This cut off the flow of enemies and provided the craftsmen inside with precious time to work.
Under the protection of a one-to-one ratio of soldiers, the craftsmen managed to build a two-meter-high stone wall within the gateway while under threat from the occasional lunging wight. They piled layers of barricades in a scale-like pattern around the entrance, shifting the focus of the defense entirely to this point.
...
"Bring two scorpions down from the wall and place them directly facing the gate. Aim only at the gateway. If more mammoths or giants come in, don't let them take a single step past the threshold!" Denys looked at the littered courtyard and the burning corpse of the giant, his heart sinking to the depths. "Let the children and the elderly who cannot hold a weapon begin moving to the top of the Wall via the stairs!"
The combination of the giant and the mammoth that had broken the gate just before the craftsmen could seal it made the commander of the Shadow Tower realize something he had long overlooked: the enemy were not just mindless monsters, but magical beings with intelligence on par with humans. This was not something that could be settled simply by following a defense protocol to the letter. If there were only wights outside, he could hold until the ashes of the burned dead were piled as high as the battlements and his supplies ran out. But would the enemy give him that chance to be a hero?
Beyond mammoths and giants, the White Walkers surely had other means they had yet to reveal. And with the gates destroyed and the fortress's defensibility greatly reduced, by the time he discovered those means, it would likely be the moment the Shadow Tower fell.
"My lord, the reinforcements and supplies from Sentinel Stand have arrived. Your orders!"
"Send the wildfire and bombs up the wall to where they are needed most. Bring all the soldiers here to the gate, fully armed."
"Yes, my lord."
"Qhorin, over here!" Denys called out to his second-in-command, the Halfhand, who was wiping Lightbringer No. 65 as if it were a precious treasure. With a grave expression, he gave him a new mission. "Give that arrow to another soldier. I want you to take a squad of reliable brothers and go to the fifth level of the stairs. Hold that position. If the White Walkers break the Shadow Tower, I want you to ensure the stairs are destroyed. Don't let the fall of the Shadow Tower become the fall of the Wall."
"What?" Shock and disbelief flashed across Qhorin's face, his grey eyes wide. "But we are in the middle of—"
"We have stabilized the line, and the situation looks good. I'm not blind! It is as you say for now, but will it last forever?" Denys interrupted. "If the brothers hold the keep, then mark me down as an old fool suffering from paranoia. But if we fail, I promise you, the world will not turn from defeat to victory just because of one more ranger on the ground! The fall of the Shadow Tower is secondary; what matters is that someone who experienced the entire battle and can explain the cause and effect goes to tell the Lord Commander and the brothers in the other castles: what troop types our enemy used, how many methods and tactics they employed—especially how we eventually fell. We cannot let the brothers behind us continue to fight a blind and muddled war!"
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MistaQuartz
On Patreon, you can explore Extra Chapters in advance!