Chapter 429: Choice in a Dilemma
The Night King had chosen the Great Gorge as his primary axis of attack for more than just the necessity of destroying the weirwood groves to open a breach for the infiltration of cold magic. There was a secondary consideration: the Nightfort, the midpoint between the eastern and western coasts, was closest to the western end of the Wall.
A surprise assault from the Great Gorge toward the Nightfort required passing only eight castles, and only half of them—Westwatch by the Bridge, the Shadow Tower, Sentinel Stand, and Greyguard—were garrisoned. The other four, lacking stairs to the summit or defensive walls, served only as residences for the New Gift settlers during peacetime. As soon as the alarms sounded, all inhabitants had been immediately evacuated to the nearest fortified strongholds.
While the wight army was not fast, it possessed the advantage of never needing rest. In a single night, they had shattered the Great Gorge defense line, Westwatch, the Shadow Tower, and Sentinel Stand... This lightning offensive, moving with the force of a splitting bamboo, seemingly treated the Night's Watch's meticulously crafted Defense Protocol as nothing more than scrap paper. The speed of it left every living commander cold with shock, their skin crawling in terror.
However, the Night King was not satisfied.
...
On the surface, his army of the dead had seized the absolute upper hand in this final duel of ice and fire from the very first move. But in secret, he felt as though he was losing the war.
To humans, losing defense lines and strongholds in rapid succession despite careful preparation was a crushing defeat. But to the Night King, not one of these battles could be counted as a victory.
Victory or defeat was not judged by the gain or loss of outposts, but by whether tactical and strategic objectives were achieved.
The Cold God did not want these hard, frozen, useless fortresses; He wanted the victory secured before the dragons returned! The Wall was over a thousand kilometers from King's Landing, but for a flying dragon, that was a matter of a dozen hours. Even with an optimistic estimate, two to three days was the absolute limit for the dragons' absence from the battlefield. According to the Night King's original plan, the army would capture an intact or mostly intact staircase after taking the Shadow Tower, occupy the summit, and then launch a simultaneous pincer attack from above and below, advancing toward the midpoint of the Wall to take the Nightfort before dawn—thereby breaking the magic woven into the Wall.
After lifting the suppression of the Priests of the Cold God and restoring their ability to regenerate magic, they would strike south immediately to destroy all resistance in the Gift and the North before those three dragons could return... ensuring those great flying lizards, despite their inexhaustible flames, would no longer be able to block the army's path.
And the reality?
The preparations made by the living for this war far exceeded the Night King's predictions.
Taking the Great Gorge cost the army over an hour and ten thousand wights—and that was with the defense line failing to operate at full capacity. Subsequent tasks like uprooting Westwatch and clearing trees for paths took another two to three hours. Up to that point, things were relatively normal. But everything thereafter deviated from the script.
Upon launching the assault on the Wall, the army expended nearly ten thousand wights and over an hour at the first gate, the Shadow Tower... Yet, after paying such a heavy price, far beyond what was planned, the objective of seizing the stairs was not realized!
A failure in the first battle might have been a coincidence. The army moved without pause to the next station—Sentinel Stand—which should have been bypassable. After receiving word from Shadow Tower survivors, this fortress had already sealed its gates. By slightly adjusting tactics and decisively using magic to assist the assault, the Night King successfully reduced the cost in troops and time. But to his horror, the garrison destroyed the stairs the very instant the walls were breached!
After these two consecutive battles, the fact that the number of Night's Watchmen killed and raised was far below the rate of consumption was only a minor, expected problem. What truly caused the Night King to feel a sense of despair was the realization that the destruction of the stairs was not the impulsive decision of an individual commander, but a predetermined plan already laid out by the enemy!
Worse still, the eastern column—which was supposed to serve as a reserve and had been deliberately split off to handle such desperate situations—suddenly lost contact. The two leading priests had been completely annihilated in a matter of seconds.
Mankind had apparently equipped its defenders with a mysterious weapon capable of one-hitting the Priests of the Cold God. Heaven only knew how many of them there were!
...
Leaving the third fortress behind as a scorched ruin, the Night King led his army forward with a heavy heart. As they arrived at Greyguard—the final checkpoint before the Nightfort—the sky began to turn grey with dawn.
The plan for a lightning strike to secure victory in a single night was dead. Now, a difficult choice lay before the Night King: Should he attack this human fortress, also heavily defended, and gamble on the hope that its garrison might forget to destroy the stairs... or bypass it entirely and attempt a forced assault on the Nightfort with only ground forces?
The first option was rejected immediately; gambling on luck did not suit the cautious and calculating mindset of the Cold God's servants.
As for bypassing it and heading straight for the Nightfort? The combined eastern and western armies had started with one hundred and ten thousand wights. Now, after losing some here and a squad there along the way, they were confusedly down to fewer than seventy thousand. The wight army did not fear being flanked, but the same problem remained: the closer they got to the center of the Wall, the more obvious the suppression of the Cold God's priests became, and the slower their magic regenerated. By the time they stood beneath the Nightfort, the suppression field might be so strong that no priest would be able to cast a fire-extinguishing spell.
If they relied solely on the wights attacking with their physical bodies, how many would have to burn before the keep fell? And if only a fraction of the army remained after a vicious battle, even with their full powers restored, could the priests handle the frantic encirclement of the alerted human military?
The initiative was lost. Holding a string of meaningless victories, the Night King felt himself caught in a dilemma—the Wall, it seemed, truly could drive anyone who wished to destroy it into a dead end.
...
While he was lost in solemn thought, another priest beside him spoke in the Old Tongue, offering a third path.
Since the plan for a blitzkrieg to take the Wall in one go had failed, why not admit defeat? There was still at least a day and a half before the dragons returned. Though the Wall's magic was strong, it did not cover the Gift. The army had plenty of time to first eliminate the living souls in the Gift who were far from the protection of the Wall. By picking them off one by one, they could destroy the forces the enemy might use for a counterattack. Once the wight army had grown in strength again, they could move north at their leisure and concentrate their power on the difficult nut that was the Nightfort.
As soon as the idea took hold, the Night King began to sense for dense concentrations of humanity. A moment later, he discovered with pleasant surprise that not far to the southeast, there was a massive, dense aura of life. It was so intense that it could only be produced by a gathering of at least five figures of living humans.
Humans thought that huddling together for warmth made them safer, but little did they know: in the eyes of the Cold God's priests, such a dense cluster was far easier to deal with than those small, sturdy outposts along the Wall, garrisoned by a thousand or two, which were not worth the cost of taking. It was, quite simply, a piece of fat delivered right to their mouths.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MistaQuartz
On Patreon, you can explore Extra Chapters in advance!