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Seven thousand northern cavalry, filled with fury, launched a massed charge straight ahead. Their unstoppable momentum brought enormous pressure down on Lord Garrison's riders.
From the woods on both sides of the river road, more than a dozen heavy scorpion bolts and a great many arrows flew low toward the northern cavalry.
The northern cavalry were charging in a block formation. Robb had arranged this deliberately, to reduce the surface exposed to attacks from the woods.
Because the Westerlands enemies had chosen to hide among trees, their archers could not fire high in covering volleys. They could only loose on a low, direct line.
"Shields!" Gendry, temporarily commanding the cavalry, shouted the moment he heard the sound.
The riders on the left and right of the formation quickly pulled shields bearing the direwolf sigil from their backs and tried to cover their bodies.
Against the heavy bolts fired by scorpions, shields made little difference. Anyone struck was almost certainly dead. More than a dozen northern riders on the flanks fell at once.
The arrows arrived just after the bolts. Some struck the shields like rain and were blocked. Others drove straight into the flesh of the horses on both sides.
A few horses hit in vital spots went down with their riders. Most were only wounded, but the sharp pain sent them out of control.
That single ranged attack cost each flank of the northern cavalry more than a hundred fighting men.
"Something is coming fast on the right!"
The commander of the ambush force in the right woods was shouting for the scorpions to reload and the second line of archers to keep firing when he heard his men cry out.
He turned right and saw a white giant more than ten feet tall weaving through the woods with unnatural agility.
When it passed beneath thick branches, it did not dodge at all. It smashed them apart and kept moving.
"Enemy! Attack! That is the man-eating giant wolf raised by the northern savages!"
Remembering what Lord Daven had told him, the ambush commander panicked and gave the order.
The second line of archers, originally facing the river road, turned their arrows toward the white shape and loosed a covering volley.
The white giant did not avoid the arrows. It charged straight ahead. The arrows struck its body and rang with a crisp, pleasant chiming sound.
"It is coming! Careful!"
The white shape was too fast. The archers managed only one shot before it reached them. The scorpions were still being turned.
One archer standing directly in its path finally saw the truth at close range and went deathly pale, waiting for death.
But the giant white wolf, wrapped in ice-crystal armor, leapt high over the archers' heads.
It crashed down onto a scorpion. The force of the fall and the beast's weight smashed the weapon into pieces.
The Westerlands soldier operating the scorpion was pinned beneath the enormous wolf paw, coughing blood.
A greatsword with a blade like black smoke shot from above the white wolf's head and pierced another scorpion directly ahead.
With tremendous force behind it, the greatsword drove into the middle of the scorpion's frame and split it in two.
As the sword flew, a dark figure leapt down after it. His left foot stepped on the greatsword's hilt for leverage, and his right foot slammed into the scorpion operator.
Bone cracked.
The Westerlands soldier's neck broke instantly, twisted by the force into a right angle against his shoulder.
Robb landed steadily. At the same time, icy mist gathered in both hands and condensed into two crystal swords, which he threw toward the operators of another scorpion.
The operator reacted quickly enough to dodge both blades. Robb pulled Ice from the ruined scorpion behind him and charged forward.
Bloodwind, whom Robb had already warned about the priority targets, raced toward the remaining scorpions.
It took longer to describe than to happen. Robb and Bloodwind attacked like lightning. They had destroyed three scorpions before the ambush commander truly reacted.
"They want to destroy the scorpions!" he screamed at the stunned soldiers. "Everyone focus on them! Kill the man first, then the monster!"
More than a thousand Westerlands soldiers were hidden in the right woods. At the commander's shout, they finally recovered from their shock and raised their weapons toward Robb and Bloodwind.
Bloodwind continued his devastating attack on the scorpions. When he struck with his claws, the claws of his front paws extended outward like blades sliding from sheaths.
Those sword-sharp claws passed through the scorpion frames and cut them apart as easily as soft wood.
This was Bloodwind using Control to increase the length and hardness of his claws, another way of developing his own body.
Before the terrifying Bloodwind and Robb, who had become increasingly skilled at fighting with three blades, the eight scorpions in the woods were destroyed in a short time.
Only after the scorpions were gone did the dense mass of Westerlands soldiers surge up and surround them.
Arrows shot from every side. Longswords and axes chopped down. All of it struck ice-crystal armor that could defend against both physical and magical attacks.
Before such unequal supernatural power, Robb and Bloodwind already stood undefeated.
With the scorpions destroyed, what happened next in the right woods was only a question of whether Robb and Bloodwind would slaughter all of them first, or whether the soldiers would break and flee first.
During the fight, Robb still found moments to glance at Bloodwind's blood pact status. Whenever the points passed fifty, he immediately added them to Bloodwind's Magic attribute.
The Westerlands ambush force in the left woods fared even worse.
After the first arrow volley, Wyl led thirteen Wolfguard, along with Nymeria and Lady, through the trees and closed in with frightening agility.
When they approached before the Westerlands archers could react, Wyl and the others threw thirteen explosive fruits shining with blue light.
Explosions burst one after another through the Westerlands archers.
These explosive fruits were different from the grenades Robb remembered from his previous life. They contained no metal shards or steel balls. Their lethality came purely from the magic blast and the orange-red heat.
Anyone caught by an explosive fruit was either torn into pieces by the blast or burned into charcoal by the instant heat.
Like Robb, Wyl chose to destroy the scorpions first while the enemy was still stunned by the explosive fruits they had never seen.
Once that ambush force lost its scorpions, its arrows posed far less danger to the Wolfguard in their steel wolf armor.
Under Wyl's control, the pack of fifteen ice direwolves became more intelligent and more efficient, turning the woods into a slaughterhouse.
On the river road, the northern cavalry block, having lost two or three hundred men, was drawing closer and closer to the thousand-plus Westerlands riders.
A long horn sounded.
Lord Garrison, who had been forcing himself to remain calm before the terrifying northern charge, let out a deep breath and shouted, "Retreat! Full retreat!"
From fighting Smalljon's four hundred riders, Lord Garrison's force already understood how strong northern cavalry were.
Their morale had never been high. Once they heard the order, they turned in disorder and fled toward the hills behind them, looking as if they had truly broken.
Smalljon and the thirty men who had been used as bait collapsed one after another once the Westerlands cavalry retreated. They had truly fought to exhaustion.
"Shields! Scatter and follow the plan! The five squads at the rear save the wounded. Everyone else forms hundred-man units and charges!"
Gendry, who had been ambushed here once already, gave the order the moment he saw the Westerlands cavalry retreating.
The fewer than seven thousand remaining northern riders drew the one-handed shields from their backs to protect their vital spots. At the same time, the formation spread outward from a massed block into more than sixty small charging squares of one hundred riders each.
As Gendry had expected, the moment they raised shields and scattered, heavy stones and sharp arrows came from the hill ahead.
Because the northern cavalry had already dispersed, most of the stones crashed into the ground. Very few struck riders.
The arrow volley was much harder to block. With only one-handed shields guarding their bodies, the northern riders could not protect their horses.
Many horses struck by arrows fell with their riders. For a time, men and horses toppled everywhere, and screams and neighs filled the battlefield.
"Form ranks!"
When Gendry led the northern cavalry close to the fleeing Westerlands riders, dense figures emerged from the hill ahead, their footsteps chaotic but loud.
At the same time, countless figures appeared from the woods on both sides of the hill, clearly intending to surround Gendry's men and take them all at once.
'Bad. His Grace said there was an ambush here, but none of us expected this many enemies.'
'What now? Fall back? Or charge through in one push?'
Gendry looked at the tens of thousands of enemies closing in from three directions, and panic tangled his thoughts.
It was the hesitation of a man commanding in battle for the first time. He lacked the experience to make clean judgments in the moment.
"Retreat. Protect Commander Jon first!"
Robb's order echoed in his mind, and he remembered Smalljon staying behind so he could escape and bring help. Gendry bit his lower lip hard and ordered the men to protect Smalljon's group while pulling back.
'I heard explosions from the front. What happened to those two ambush forces?'
Daven Lannister, in Lannister armor, rode his horse to the top of the river road hill. From above, he looked toward the two ambush sites, where explosions had sounded at first and then fallen strangely quiet.
Then he watched the northern cavalry begin to turn back and shook his head.
"Hmph. We finally lured them here, and they still want to run? Send the order. Pull up the wooden stakes behind them and begin the encirclement."
Two long horn calls sounded.
Behind Smalljon's group, and in front of the woods on both sides where Robb and the Wolfguard had been slaughtering the ambushers, thick ropes buried beneath the ground were pulled tight.
Rows of heavy wooden stakes rose from the earth, angled toward Smalljon and Gendry's northern riders, cutting off the retreat they were preparing to take.
"Stop!"
Gendry reached Smalljon, who had been bandaged roughly and helped onto a horse, and waved the riders behind him to a halt.
Seeing the rows of sharp stakes that could not be forced through, he looked anxiously toward the woods on both sides, hoping His Grace would come out and tell him what to do next.
"Charge back... They cannot stop us. Strike at their commander. Take the head."
Smalljon, exhausted and badly wounded but still conscious, saw Gendry's confusion and gave his battlefield judgment in broken breaths.
"As you command!"
The words steadied Gendry. He ordered the entire force to turn and prepare to charge.
Only when the northern riders turned their horses did he realize that the tens of thousands of Westerlands infantry from the other three directions had already closed in and were steadily crushing the space available to the cavalry.
Even if they charged now, they could no longer gather the speed or momentum they had possessed when they first chased the Westerlands cavalry.
Gendry was filled with regret. If he had not hesitated and turned back just now, a single charge might already have broken through the enemy's encirclement and captured their commander.
Just as he hesitated and prepared to launch a desperate charge, a huge white shape burst from the right woods.
It raced around the encircling infantry moving on foot and struck the force directly in front of Gendry.
The moment the white giant slammed into the formation of several thousand men, a vast circular sheet of ice spread from its center at terrible speed, covering hundreds of soldiers in an instant.
When the circular ice field stopped expanding, countless crystal spikes of different lengths erupted from it in a chaotic, interlocking pattern.
The soldiers caught inside the circle were pierced like meat on skewers.
Most died instantly. A few who were unlucky enough to survive screamed with all the strength in their throats.
Robb stood atop Bloodwind, majestic and terrible. After adding the flood of blood pact points to Magic at once, he grinned and shouted to Gendry.
"Do giant wolves fear being surrounded by ants? Gendry, charge with me. Trample these ants flat!"
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