"Ha…"
The Night King lay on an oak shield. The confusion in his eyes vanished as he let out a long breath.
The anti-fire domain activated once more, and his right hand raised the ice sword horizontally across his chest, blocking the wound where the red sword had pierced him.
The Dragon Queen's lightning-fast thrust was now less than twenty centimeters from the ice sword, and the flames along her blade had already gone out.
Everyone expected the next sound to be a sharp clang of colliding weapons, the white sword's tip striking the ice blade.
"Chi!"
Like a sudden breeze causing a drifting willow leaf to shift direction naturally yet abruptly, the white sword glided lightly forward by thirty-five centimeters. Faster and more urgent, it plunged into the Night King's left eye.
The cold, blue-glowing eyeball burst like a small lightbulb. The blade continued downward as the Dragon Queen pressed with both hands, determined to pierce through his skull cavity.
"Good!" Jaime cried out excitedly, dazzled, shouting before the white blade fully entered the eye socket.
"Ao~~~~~~"
The Night King howled miserably. The ice sword held across his chest suddenly swept sideways toward Dany's left leg.
As if foreseeing his movement, Dany stamped her iron boot against the ground and performed a light one-hundred-eighty-degree forward somersault.
Throughout the entire motion, her right hand never left the hilt. She even transferred the full force of her descending body onto the tip of the white sword.
When she landed, she was directly above the Night King's head. Before he could retrieve his sword for another strike, the toe of her iron boot crashed into his sword-wielding right arm like a locomotive.
Had it been an ordinary knight, that single kick would have shattered the arm into fragments. Yet the crystalline ice armor on his arm did not even crack.
Earlier, Stannis Baratheon had wielded his red sword and exchanged injury for injury, easily breaking through the ice armor as though slicing through thin leather with an iron blade.
"Ao~~~~~~~"
The Night King shrieked sharply. The freezing wind, the snow, and the surrounding darkness seemed like countless strands of living filaments. At their king's command, they surged toward him at great speed.
Crack—crack crack—
The white sword met resistance. Ice erupted from within the Night King's eye socket, freezing the blade's tip in place so it could advance no further.
Pale blue frost slithered along the blade like a black mamba. In moments, it froze the Dragon Queen's iron gauntlet to the hilt.
"Shit!" Dany's face darkened.
She could clearly sense that her white sword was losing a certain unique property.
To put it more directly, Valyrian steel was physically indestructible and magically capable of destroying evil because it was infused with high-energy earthfire.
Now, the power of ice was offsetting the earthfire within the blade.
Ordinary fire. Wildfire. Dragonflame. Earthfire. The sun. The primordial embers at the planet's core. The First Flame at the dawn of creation.
Seven levels of flame, each rising in energy.
The earthfire within Valyrian steel was the fourth tier of fire magic. Yet it was still being neutralized by the Night King's ice power.
His ice power surpassed earthfire in energy level.
Then something astonishing happened.
The Dragon Queen gripped the hilt with her right hand and shook it violently, the blade grinding inside the Night King's eye socket with an unsettling scraping sound. Meanwhile, she lifted her left foot and brought the heel of her tall iron boot down hard on his nose, mouth, cheek, and right eye.
Bang, bang, bang.
His nasal bones shattered, teeth broke loose, and pale blue icy fluid seeped from his tightly shut right eye.
"Ao ao ao~~~~"
The Night King wailed in agony as a layer of ice crystal began covering his entire body.
Everyone stared in stunned disbelief.
The shield-bearers near the Dragon Queen snapped out of it and swung their dragon-tooth blades, chopping at the ice crystal armor on the Night King as if dicing vegetables. They left small soybean-sized dents across its surface.
Suddenly, the Dragon Queen lifted her head and looked toward the dim land in the distance. Her expression changed drastically.
"Quick, retreat! The White Walker army has mobilized! Fall back to the city gate!"
"We're not afraid, Dragon Queen! Let's fight those bastards to the death!" the wildling Tormund shouted.
Dany snatched a Valyrian steel shield from an Unsullied soldier and barked sharply, "Idiot! How did you become a commander of a thousand? I said retreat, so retreat now!"
"Fall back! Retreat into the gate immediately!"
Old Barristan, Clinton, Jaime, and the others suddenly remembered the battle plan. They stopped insisting and quickly called everyone to withdraw.
Dany remained where she was, continuing to stomp on the Night King's face, crushing his pale, shriveled, patterned features into something like a plate of dumpling filling spilling pale juices everywhere.
It was impossible to distinguish nose, eyes, or mouth.
Yet the Night King was still howling.
A layer of frost crept up her tall iron boots, but the Dragon Queen circulated her divine power and immediately dispersed the chill.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—
Seven or eight five-foot-long ice swords shot toward her like lightning, so fast they were almost invisible.
The Dragon Queen lowered her body, hiding most of herself behind the steel shield.
Thud, thud, thud—
One ice sword after another struck the shield. The force felt like blocking rockets with a raised shield, tearing the muscles in Dany's left arm with pain.
In fact, her left arm muscles had already torn.
Even so, Dany let out a long breath of relief. The ice swords of ordinary White Walkers were powerful and bone-chilling, freezing a layer of frost onto the surface of Valyrian steel. But they caused no real damage to the steel itself.
More directly put, even with the Long Night descending, the ice power of ordinary White Walkers remained below the earthfire within Valyrian steel.
Crack crack crack—bang—
Amid the sound of shattering ice crystals, Dany suddenly felt her right hand lighten.
She looked down. The tip of the white sword had already shattered, as if it were an ordinary iron blade broken by a White Walker's ice sword.
The three-foot blade was now half an inch shorter.
Freed from the white sword pinning him in place, the Night King immediately howled. Slapping both hands against the ground and flexing his waist and abdomen, he sprang up like a carp flipping from water.
"You deserve to die!" he roared at the Dragon Queen.
Behind him, hundreds of ordinary White Walkers had already arrived, driving undead horses and ice spiders to rescue their king.
The Dragon Queen was surrounded.
"Hahaha, let's all take a hot bath together!" she laughed fearlessly, raising her head.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—
Not even the howling northern wind could drown out the shrill cries descending from the sky.
The wyvern legion's wildfire bombs had arrived.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Green flames surged wildly, and shockwaves spread outward with overwhelming force.
Entering the Song of Wind state, the Dragon Queen could discern the trajectory of every fire-oil bomb falling from the sky. She moved like a flea, darting side to side, riding the waves of force.
She avoided being struck directly on the head.
Within the steel-tearing currents, she moved with the wind.
Let him be strong as he may; the gentle breeze brushes over the graveyard mound.
A tornado can destroy skyscrapers, yet a slip of paper falling into its eye remains intact.
Amid the shockwaves, the Dragon Queen did her best to become that small scrap of paper within the tornado.
"Did the Dragon Queen drag the Night King down to die together?"
Inside the gate tunnel, Jaime raised his hand to shield himself from the raging heatwave, his shock beyond words.
Aside from Old Barristan, the Great Bear, and the other wyvern riders who remained below the city walls, a total of thirty-four wyverns carried out the bombing mission, dropping twenty tons of wildfire in a single strike.
From fifty meters east of the city gate to a hundred meters out, an area with a radius of one hundred meters was engulfed in eerie green flames.
The fire rose ten feet into the air, heatwaves rolling outward. Even spectators fifty meters away atop the city walls could not help but step back.
Not even their boiling excitement could make them ignore the searing heat biting at their skin.
"They are all too great. Stannis traded his life for his enemy's, and the Dragon Queen even 'threw herself at me as a bomb.' The Long Night is perilous, mankind stands on the brink of destruction, and in the end heroes step forward to sacrifice themselves and save the world. They are all legendary heroes like Azor Ahai, all deserving to be recorded in history. The spirit of heroes shall live on forever!"
The old professor with the red nose had tears welling in his eyes. Gazing at that ocean-like lake of fire, he shed two streams of tears, moved to weeping by the legendary heroes' great spirit of sacrifice.
"The Night King is dead, so the Long Night is over? Is it really ending just like this? Stannis and Daenerys are both dead?" Sansa felt a deep sense of loss.
Having lost her two greatest rivals, she found herself unable to feel happy for some reason.
"They are true monarchs, great heroes who sacrificed themselves for the people of the Seven Kingdoms," Arianne said excitedly.
"What nonsense are you talking about?" the plump, short Jhogo widened his almond-shaped eyes and said disdainfully. "With just this bit of fire, you think you can burn Khaleesi to death? Haven't you ever heard the title 'Unburnt'?"
"She truly cannot burn? Truly fireproof?" Obara, the eldest Sand Snake, asked skeptically.
"That's wildfire! It's not the same as ordinary wood," Arianne said. She had vaguely heard the legend of the Dragon Queen being unburnt, but she did not believe that being unburnt meant immunity to wildfire.
Across the generations of Targaryens, were there not many who had burned to death in wildfire?
It was not entirely their fault for being ignorant. This Daenerys was different from the former one who loved to hang countless titles upon herself.
The former often proclaimed the title "Unburnt," whereas Daenerys wished everyone would believe that she could, in fact, be burned by fire.
"Wildfire is merely Khaleesi's special bathwater, nothing more," Jhogo said firmly.
Boom!
Just as they were about to say more, a loud explosion sounded from within the green sea of flames ahead. Then a dark figure shot out from the eerie green fire.
It slid seven or eight meters across the ground, its entire body shrouded in gray-white frost mist.
The crowd was horrified, and some of the onlooking soldiers wailed in despair.
"Ah! The Night King isn't dead? Even that couldn't burn it to death?"
"Seven hells! Earlier, Stannis perished together with it and already pierced its heart with the red sword. It didn't die. The Dragon Queen's Valyrian steel sword is so wide, it pierced through its skull. It still didn't die. It was trampled underfoot, hacked at by warriors, bathed in wildfire. Is it truly impossible to kill?"
"Look! There's someone in the fire. Someone is coming out of the flames!" Suddenly, a sharp-eyed knight spotted a black figure slowly walking out from the green fire.
"It's the Dragon Queen. She truly is unburnt?"
"The Queen is, of course, unburnt. She is the Unburnt."
"But that's wildfire!"
With shield in her left hand and sword in her right, the Dragon Queen stepped out of the wildfire step by step, the bewitching green flames swirling around her like a demon of fire, advancing toward the Night King who was scrambling to his feet.
As soon as the Night King stood up and raised his sword in a defensive stance, everyone's vision blurred, and the Dragon Queen suddenly vanished from sight.
It was simply that she moved too quickly, as if riding the wind beneath her feet, darting several steps to reach the Night King in an instant.
The steel shield was clearly massive. If stood upright on the ground, it would be nearly 1.2 meters tall. Yet in the Dragon Queen's hand, the great shield seemed reduced to a tenth of its size, nimbly avoiding the Night King's ice sword.
She crouched low and struck upward with her shield, smashing it directly into its lower abdomen.
Bang!
A muffled thunderclap-like explosion sounded again, exactly the same as before.
Throughout the entire process, the Night King appeared unusually clumsy, like a practice dummy used for demonstrating shield strikes in a training yard, offering no resistance as it was sent flying seven or eight meters away.
Then, bang! A third time.
Bang! A fourth time.
By now, all the knights understood. It was not that the Night King was weak, but that the Dragon Queen's shield technique was too formidable.
"By the Seven, her swordsmanship already surely surpasses Arthur Dayne's. Even her use of the shield is divine. Is she possessed by the Warrior himself?" Jaime stared at the Night King landing before him, feeling as if in a dream.
"Hold it down and chop it to pieces!" the Dragon Queen's voice rang out from afar.
(P.S. In an interview, the original author Martin was once asked why dragons were burned to death in the Doom of Valyria.
Martin answered as follows: There are five types of fire, in order of increasing temperature and magical intensity: ordinary fire lit by wood, wildfire, dragonflame, earthfire, and the sun.
In this book, the embers of the First Flame and the First Flame itself have been added.
Using these seven types of fire as a standard for classification, it becomes easy to understand the relative strength of various weapons.
For example, an iron sword forged in ordinary fire can be burned away by wildfire and shattered by a White Walker's ice sword.
Thus, we can rank the White Walkers' icy power as "second-tier wildfire." Therefore, both wildfire and dragonflame can kill White Walkers.
But the Night King is second only to the God of Cold.
What is the energy level of the God of Cold?
The God of Cold is a true god, at least on the same level as the sun, namely level five.
The Night King, being second only to the God of Cold, counts as level four. Valyrian steel swords are also level four.
R'hllor and the red sword forged by Him are both level five.
Dragonflame is level three, and divine dragonflame is level three and a half, after all, even demigod dragons can die in earthfire.
Thus, one can understand that dragonflame cannot kill the Night King because its level is insufficient.
Valyrian steel can kill the Night King. Likewise, the Night King can also shatter Valyrian steel. Both are level four and equal in rank.
If the Night King is empowered by the God of Cold, it might even reach level 4.5. At that time, Valyrian steel would be unable to inflict a fatal wound.
As for Stannis's red sword, being level five, it can crush and kill the Night King under any circumstances.
The above constitutes the basis for determining victory and defeat in the battles of this book.)
(End of Chapter)
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