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"No, Robb. I will not leave."
Only when Robb spoke to him did Jon recover from his shock. He shook his head at Robb, then turned to Mance, whose face was just as stunned.
"Mance, the free folk listen to you more than anyone. Take them aboard as quickly as you can.
"Leave this place to me and my brother."
"Aye. Thank you for your help, Your Grace."
Hearing Jon, Mance thanked Robb with real feeling and ran toward the bay.
"Robb, how did Bloodwind become so enormous? He is many times larger than Ghost. No, forget it. We can talk later. This is not the time.
"Be careful. This dead army knows neither pain nor weariness, and its numbers are like the sea. No one knows how many there are."
Jon looked at Bloodwind, whom he could no longer recognize, and began with a scattered remark before turning to the wights.
"Heh. Jon, you have changed quite a bit too. I like this you better than the old one.
"Do not worry. I know something about them. I learned a good deal about the Others and the wights from a maester of the Citadel."
Robb smiled as he answered. Then, hearing the orderly footsteps behind him, he continued.
"Besides, we are not fighting alone."
Jon followed his words and looked around.
Beyond Jory's Winterfell soldiers and the large number of free folk fighters Mance had left behind, lines of elite infantry carrying direwolf banners had arrived behind them, led by a vanguard of more than a dozen huge direwolves.
While Robb and Jon spoke, Hardhome's wavering wooden wall changed again.
At the top, some wights climbed over piles of other wights heaped outside the wall and began jumping into Hardhome.
Below, the thinner skeletal wights, no longer burdened by flesh, clawed through sections of hard frozen ground and forced their way in.
At the same time, holes began opening in the once-solid wooden wall. Hands of bone and rotten flesh reached through, widening the gaps.
"Lord Rickard, take our soldiers and defend the wall. Follow the battle plan I gave you.
"Keep your formation, and keep some distance from the wall."
Seeing the danger at the wall, Robb immediately gave Lord Rickard his order.
Robb had already revealed part of what he knew about the Others to the whole army before coming, but seeing the dead with their own eyes shook the men far more than any explanation could. Lord Rickard's face had gone pale.
"Yes, Your Grace."
Hearing Robb's order, he forced himself steady, nodded, and commanded his elite soldiers, whose faces were much the same, to move toward the wall.
Lord Rickard's infantry had only advanced a short distance when the wights that had jumped or crawled into Hardhome rushed at them.
The mindless wights slammed hard into the kite shields held by the front rank. Behind the shields, a row of strong infantry wielding long-handled warhammers crushed the blocked wights' skulls with ease.
Robb knew they would be fighting wights. He would never have his soldiers carry longswords and spears, weapons better suited for killing living men.
So he had chosen strong elite soldiers and armed them either with long-handled warhammers or heavy axes.
The point was to destroy the corpses so thoroughly that the Others could not use them again.
After today, however, the mining of obsidian on Dragonstone had to be brought forward as quickly as possible.
"Robb, what are we doing? They cannot hold back the dead army by themselves!"
Jon watched Lord Rickard's men advance easily to the wall and form a tight defensive line. Seeing that Robb still had not given him a task, he asked anxiously.
"Jon, be patient. These wights are numerous, yes, but they are not as dangerous as the more troublesome ones.
"And of course I will not leave Lord Rickard and his men to hold alone."
Robb answered in an even voice, wearing the calm of a man who had everything in hand.
"More troublesome ones?"
Jon caught the meaning in Robb's words, but before he could ask, Bloodwind raised his head and gave a short howl.
At the sound, a catapult aboard the Queen of the Arbor launched from the bay. A huge specially made wooden cask rose high, whistling as it arced toward the outside of Hardhome's wall.
Robb, already standing on Bloodwind's back, formed a round mass of ice crystal in his right hand. With his left, he took a small cloth pouch, scattered green powder over the ice, and hurled it toward the falling cask.
"Leaf. Fireflies!"
Robb trusted his judgment of the flight and did not worry whether he would strike true. He turned to Leaf, who stood cloaked beside him, and shouted.
Hearing him, Leaf immediately began chanting a True Tongue spell, using the Fireflies magic Robb had once treated as little more than fireworks.
As Leaf's chant ended, sparks burst across the surface of the flying ice sphere. A few seconds later, the fire-wrapped ice struck the falling cask in midair with perfect accuracy.
A violent explosion tore through the sky outside Hardhome's wall. Green flame bloomed in the air. In that instant, the heat was so fierce that even the great flakes of snow falling from the gray clouds seemed to stop.
Then clumps of green fire rained down like tiny meteors into the army of wights outside the wall.
Great swaths of wights were bathed in that fire and instantly became corpses burning with green flame.
Two more huge casks were thrown in succession from the catapults aboard the Queen of the Arbor. Robb and Leaf worked together again, bringing two more showers of green fire down upon the dead outside the wall.
Outside Hardhome, a few wights still clawed desperately inward. Behind them, a vast stretch of green flame burned fiercely on the bodies of countless wights.
On the far side of the green fire, the endless army of the dead stood beyond the flames, staring with icy blue eyes and waiting for them to die down.
Jon, who had grown up in resource-poor Winterfell and had never seen wildfire, looked at the wall no longer shaking and listened to the wights' cries outside fade away.
Excited, he asked Robb, "Robb, what was that? It was incredible. If there were enough of it, even an army of dead that large could be wiped out."
"It is called wildfire. It is difficult to make, and that was all I could find in King's Landing.
"And as I said, the wights are not the true danger. The troublesome ones are there."
"What are those?"
Jon had been regretting the limited amount of wildfire. Then he saw Robb raise his hand and point upward. Jon looked up and cried out in shock.
On the high cliffs beside Hardhome, several mounted figures had appeared at some unknown moment.
Snow filled the air, and Jon could not see them clearly. But they simply watched from above, and the sight made the hair rise along his arms.
Jon could not make them out, but Robb's eyes were far sharper. He saw the figures on the cliff clearly.
The Other commanders on either side had withered pale skin and long white hair, their forms much the same.
At the center stood the Night King, dressed in refined dark armor, his exposed skin like patterned ice crystal, an ice crown rising from his head as he looked down at them.
In that instant, the Night King's eyes, blue and colder than any wight's, met Robb's bright yellow gaze.
Both of them felt the same powerful certainty: the one before them was a mortal enemy.
The Night King did not speak.
The Other commanders beside him understood his will. They drew the ice weapons on their backs and gave a piercing cry.
The sound of bones striking together came from far away and rushed nearer. A mass of wights sprinted past the Night King and the Other commanders and flung themselves from the cliffs.
From a distance, it looked as if a white waterfall of the dead had appeared on the cliff.
A few skeleton wights shattered when they fell from such a height, but most of the corpses with rotten flesh to cushion them landed with twisted limbs.
Then, driven by the power controlling them, they rose again and charged toward Robb and the others in awkward, broken ways.
"Leaf, you do not need to fight anymore. Have Vine and Thorn take you back to the ship.
"Jon, you and Jory form a defensive line with the others. Will, take the Wolfguard and move around the edges. Support the attack."
Looking at the mass of wights ahead, Robb gave his orders without delay.
Everyone moved at once. They quickly formed ranks to meet the enemy of all living things, while Robb and Bloodwind had already charged in first.
Bloodwind's lower body was covered in a layer of ice armor. He slammed into the wights and instantly sent a crowd of them flying or broke them apart completely.
At the same time, his four ice-wrapped claws stamped down again and again. Under the immense force of his massive body, the wights were crushed beneath those crystal talons.
Around the edges, the Wolfguard threw explosive fruits at the right moments, blasting open empty spaces within the tightly packed dead.
After Bloodwind and the Wolfguard struck, the few surviving wights scattered toward Jon and the larger group of defenders, only to be dealt with easily by dragonglass weapons.
On the cliff, the Night King saw that the army of wights could not truly endanger Bloodwind.
He extended his strangely beautiful ice-crystal right hand.
An Other commander understood at once. He took from his dead horse a crystal javelin, sharp at both ends, and respectfully placed it in the Night King's right hand.
The Night King's icy blue eyes waited until Bloodwind stopped moving. Then he hurled the crystal javelin toward Robb, who stood atop Bloodwind's head and was not looking up at him.
Robb was indeed observing the battlefield around him, but Bloodwind had kept most of his attention on the Night King above.
So when the Night King threw the crystal javelin as expected, Robb drew Ice at once and cut toward the weapon flashing through the air.
After the transformation brought by the Ice Lotus, Robb's sight could follow even the fastest movement. To his eyes, the incoming javelin was not impossibly fast. Ice struck the crystal spear with perfect accuracy, ringing loudly on impact.
'It did not vanish when it touched Valyrian steel. So it is not a magical spear.'
'Then it is a true crystal javelin with some magical effect attached?'
'Forget it. I have already obtained material for Moroya's research. I can wait for her report.'
Watching the crystal javelin he had deflected bury itself deep in the frozen ground, several thoughts flashed through Robb's mind.
Most of Robb's knowledge of the Night King was secondhand, but stories and reality were very different. He wanted more intelligence and more material related to the Night King so that the research-mad Moroya could study it.
Old sayings had a point: a blow deserved an answer.
Robb was deeply unhappy at being struck at by the Night King's javelin. He stretched out his free left hand, white ice mist swiftly condensed into a crystal spear, and he hurled it back at the Night King.
The Night King watched Robb block his javelin and then answer in kind. On his dead horse, his face remained expressionless as he lifted his right hand before him.
The crystal spear screamed toward him. The moment it touched his right hand, it shattered into countless small fragments of ice.
'Breaking magic? No. My spear shattered. It did not disappear from nothing.'
'Then what was that? Why did the magic inside the spear vanish the instant it touched him?'
'This Night King is more troublesome than I thought.'
Seeing the Night King dissolve his ice spear with such ease, Robb frowned slightly.
Robb was not the only one who found the other difficult. On the cliff, the Night King saw that Robb not only had a massive direwolf but also possessed magic and a body clearly beyond ordinary men. He judged Robb troublesome as well.
Several Other commanders received the Night King's will and rode their dead horses straight down from the cliff.
At the same time, the Night King spread both hands and raised them. From the caves scattered across the cliffs of Hardhome came a series of sounds.
Skeletons of seals and walruses dropped from the caves and joined the charging army of wights.
Beneath the frozen ground, human bones that had slept for unknown ages woke and struggled to rise. But the frozen earth was too hard, and for a time they could not crawl free.
Rain began to fall.
The Night King's assault did not stop there. The gray clouds over Hardhome no longer dropped great flakes of snow. Instead, they began shedding rain, and the rain visibly strengthened from light to heavy.
The green flames still burning outside Hardhome's wall were not afraid of water, but the unending rain left them with too little fuel. The wildfire gradually shrank.
Then a great amount of rainwater gathered and forced a passable path through the weakened green flames.
Wight after wight, long waiting, began rushing along that path toward Hardhome's wooden wall.
Lord Rickard's men had nearly cleared the wights that had come through the wall, but now more wights started crawling inside and charging at them again.
The heavy rain made the living see poorly, while the dead were not affected at all and kept attacking.
The pressure on Jon's line clearly grew. Losses began to mount. Their formation already showed signs of breaking.
Bloodwind howled in pain.
Robb had just nodded to himself after Will successfully retrieved the crystal javelin from the frozen ground at his direction, and was preparing to order the whole army to retreat. Then he heard Bloodwind's cry.
Through Bloodwind's lowered gaze, Robb saw an Other commander near Bloodwind's left forepaw. The Other held a great crystal blade and wore long white hair. At some point, he had hidden among the wights and come close.
He had likely used the crystal blade to shatter the ice armor and leave a deep wound in Bloodwind's left forepaw.
Once he had the enemy's position, Robb did not hesitate. He gripped Ice with both hands and leapt from Bloodwind's head toward the Other commander.
The tall Other commander blocked Robb's strike with his crystal greatsword. Under Robb's great force from above, the Other was forced down to one knee, but it still held the blow.
Robb suddenly released the hilt of Ice with his left hand. White mist condensed into a crystal sword, and he thrust it toward the kneeling Other's head.
The Other commander reacted quickly. A strange blue light appeared in his pale right palm, and he reached for the crystal sword.
Robb's crystal sword shattered into countless small fragments, just like the spear before it. The Other's right hand, still shining blue, continued reaching toward him.
While the Other split his attention to attack, Ice in Robb's right hand suddenly swept hard to the right, cutting the fingers that gripped the crystal greatsword into shards of ice.
The unsupported crystal blade fell to the ground. Robb's Ice immediately came back from right to left, and the stunned Other commander was cut into countless fine grains of ice.
Blood pact essence +1
'Blood pact essence?'
Robb had already discovered that Bloodwind gained no blood pact points from killing wights. Now, after killing an Other commander, an unfamiliar notification had appeared.
"Robb, Mance just sent word. The last free folk have started boarding.
"Captain Jory has Lord Rickard withdrawing as well. We should retreat."
Robb was still studying the new prompt when Jon, Longclaw in hand, cut down several wights and ran to his side.
"Good. Prepare to withdraw.
"Jon, help me carry this ice blade. I will cover the rear."
As Robb and Jon spoke, Hardhome's wooden wall, now crawling with wights, collapsed with a thunderous crash. Countless dead surged toward Lord Rickard's withdrawing troops and Robb's men.
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