Chapter 434: An Incomplete Victory
Thanks to the glowing Lightbringer still pinned to the shoulder blade of a certain wight, the Night King—possessed of formidable night vision—clearly saw the two bombs flying through the air. Having been wary of such a trick, he spared them only a contemptuous glance. He diverted a portion of his mana to reinforce the ice armor already formed on his body and ignored them further. Instead, he continued to command the wight army to cross the sea of fire while contacting the eight... no, damn it, seven subordinates already trapped within the town, ordering them to find a way to break out while he drew the humans' attention.
Simultaneously, he gripped a second stone. Even if he couldn't achieve a precise kill, he could at least intimidate those two key figures on the living side and distract them.
...
Bound by the limitations of the era and technology, the hope of using visual aiming via a catapult and controlling fuse length to make a bomb explode exactly above the Night King's head was destined to be a beautiful fantasy. One bomb, thrown with slightly less force, fell into the wight swarm, bounced once on the frozen earth, and exploded a hundred feet away from the Night King. The other was slightly off, soaring high over the Night King's head and exploding a fraction of a second late.
It was an imperfect bombardment. However, the hundreds of multi-shaped shards—recast from twenty dragonsteel arrowheads, including Lightbringer #31 through #50—fully utilized their numerical advantage under the propulsion of the gunpowder blast. Like a scattering of celestial flowers, they blanketed two spherical zones thirty meters in diameter. Despite the poor accuracy, a small portion of the fragments still whistled toward the Night King's position.
Amidst the rain of dragonsteel shards falling scattered and wide, followed by a crisp, cracking sound, the Night King suddenly lost contact with yet another subordinate priest.
He initially assumed one of the seven priests still in the town had been sniped by a counter-artifact, but in the next instant, he realized the priest who had suddenly gone offline was standing directly behind him... and should have manifested ice armor to block any dragonglass fragments.
Before he could process the sense of dread, a small, sharp object pierced through the hardened shell of his back, just left of the center, and entered his body. Then, it seemingly exploded.
Dragonsteel shards did not, of course, possess the magical function of a secondary explosion. The explosion the Night King felt within him was actually the intense reaction caused by high-density, high-purity fire-attribute mana within the dragonsteel annihilating upon contact with equivalent cold mana. In the wake of this violent magical conflict and neutralization, the massive amount of mana that had been flowing methodically through his body instantly sent a fierce shockwave outward from the point of injury.
One moment, the Night King had been strategizing, controlling tens of thousands of wights to cross the firewall in a diversionary general offensive against Queenscrown; the next, he had reached the end of his life.
Just as one must consider the dosage when discussing the toxicity of a substance in the human world, the lethality of magic-bearing weapons like dragonglass and dragonsteel against wights and White Walkers cannot be discussed without dosage.
Because their bodies are entirely physical, various forms of attack work on wights. However, only by dispersing or neutralizing all—or at least the vast majority—of the cold mana within them can one achieve the effect of instantaneously turning them back into corpses. Fortunately, because the cold mana in a wight is but a thread-thin wisp, all of a wisp is still just a wisp. Humans in combat often find that any size of dragonglass or dragonsteel weapon kills them easily. The reason is simple: even the smallest dragonglass arrowhead contains more fire mana than the cold mana held within an ordinary wight.
White Walkers are different. Because their bodies are almost entirely condensed from mana, with the physical part being only a thin outer shell, they possess a high immunity to magic but a very poor resistance to mana-penetration damage. If fire-attribute mana equivalent to even a few percent of their total mana reserves invades their frame, the functions of the entire icy body will be completely disrupted and destroyed. Without outside help, they face an irreversible death.
And even in death, as the dosage of fire mana increases beyond the lethal threshold, the physical manifestation of their destruction becomes progressively more violent. When the intensity of the attack breaks a threshold of roughly one-tenth of their total mana, a White Walker might be killed instantly; at even higher levels, it can evolve into spectacular scenes of shattering or instantaneous vaporization.
Years ago, if the obsidian dagger Egger held had been a bit smaller or of poorer quality, he might not have killed that Other. Conversely, a White Walker struck by a dragonsteel arrow faces a death that is certain and gruesome beyond doubt.
Dragonsteel is naturally very light. Each bomb's fragments were forged from ten arrowheads; a hundred-odd grams of dragonsteel divided into two or three hundred shards meant that each fragment was, on average, smaller and thinner than the head of a thumbtack. It was precisely because the lethality had been reduced to its limit by this miniaturization that the struck Night King did not vanish into the air with a poof like those hit by a Lightbringer.
Yet, even so, the situation was far from optimistic. As a signature weapon of the Targaryens, one of the Dragonlord families, the high-specification dragonsteel used was so brimming with energy that even a tiny fragment the size of a pinky nail contained mana exceeding the kill threshold.
With a shriek like the sound of a shattering glacier, the Night King—the central host—instantly severed contact with all wights under his direct control. Struggling to maintain the link with his other priests, he dropped the second stone he had been preparing to throw. His right hand formed a blade-like cone and stabbed savagely into his own left chest. With immense willpower and instinct, he physically tore the dragonsteel shard from his back and hurled it to the ground!
Through this act of self-mutilation, he successfully averted the crisis of melting away in the next second. However, the gaping hole carved from his shoulder blade to the center of his chest hissed as it vented purified, vaporizing cold mana. The ice armor covering his body instantly spider-webbed with countless cracks, and the stability of his entire physical existence became precarious.
For a magical body, a hole is usually nothing to fear: with enough mana, it can be plugged and regrown in minutes. But the problem the Night King now faced was that the tiny shard of dragonsteel had done more than force him to open a hole in himself; the massive energy released during its brief stay in his body had simultaneously disrupted the magical flow of his entire upper torso, completely stripping away his otherwise peerless self-healing ability!
Of the five priests watching the battle with the Night King, another had been killed, its body ruthlessly torn apart by a shard. The remaining four immediately clustered around to support the Night King, who was swaying as if to collapse, desperately channeling mana in an attempt to save their leader.
As the center of the radial magical network of the Cold God's priests, if the Night King died, the others would hardly survive!
Theoretically, as long as a magical being is not killed instantly, they can be kept alive through a massive infusion of mana until their condition stabilizes and self-healing can begin. Unfortunately, this was not a good time to be outside the Wall, bathed in the power of the Cold God. The priests with surplus mana had all been sent into Queenscrown on combat missions; the few remaining here were in a weakened state, having exhausted their mana during the sieges of the Shadow Tower or the Sentinel Stand. How could they suddenly produce enough mana to sustain the Night King until he healed?
However, the sacrifice of the comrade beside them, who had already vaporized into primordial mana, gave them an inspiration: although they had little free, surplus mana left, the mana composing their very bodies was still substantial.
If one or two priests were willing to give up their lives, voluntarily deconstructing and dissolving their bodies to provide mana, there was still a chance to turn the tide!
Just as the four priests began to discuss the order in which they should trade their lives, the Night King grabbed the arm of one and shook his head, rejecting the plan.
He knew how severe his injuries were, and the efficiency of transferring mana by dissolving a body could never be one hundred percent. The lives of one or two priests could hardly restore him to health. Since that was the case, it was better to use these final moments to transfer the leadership and control of the entire Cold God network to another priest—creating a new High Priest to ensure they didn't all perish with him!
A surging, torrential flow of mana and information passed through his bone-pale hand into the body of the strongest priest present. The Night King's body hissed with steam, shrinking and melting bit by bit until, with a soft sound like a gas leak, nearly half the strength and all the knowledge, memories, and authority of the previous High Priest were passed to the next.
And the first command issued by the next Night King after completing his transformation was to completely abandon the assault on Queenscrown, leading the remaining wight army in a swift retreat into the darkness of the Gift's wilderness.
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