Game of Thrones: Bastard? I’m the Damn Heir!

Chapter 342 342: A Captured Other

"What a pity…"

"And that's it?"

This Other had not exchanged many blows with Kal; instead, it had died with a faint sense of grievance lingering about it.

Fortunately, this Other was not the only one among the wight host that had infiltrated with the blizzard. Before Kal slew this one, another Other had already joined it in attacking him from both sides.

So the Others that had come in this assault were certainly more than one.

And Kal needed only one.

Within the raging snowstorm, direction was lost to all.

As Kal's blade sheared off this Other's head, the wights around him fell like wheat cut down in the fields, collapsing in swathes as though drones whose power had been severed.

JJ marked the position again, and Kal followed his gaze.

The next instant, Kal—who had shone like a lamp from his enchantments—flickered, and he stripped off all his equipment.

His white bearskin cloak gave a shake. His figure shifted, and his face began to change.

His blue eyes grew brighter still; his short black hair turned pale as ice crystal and lengthened.

His full flesh withered; the healthy hue of his skin drained to pallor.

An ice-blue figure, outwardly little different from the Other of moments before, now stood within the storm.

…

On the other side, at the Fist of the First Men, Erevi remained at ease, watching the spectacle before her. She had even reclined sideways upon a great stone, propping her chin as she observed the battle.

She wore little beneath, and as the bearskin cloak slipped from her shoulders, a glimpse of what lay beneath was revealed—an alluring sight indeed.

Yet not a single gaze among those present lingered upon the dark elf witch behind them.

The wights surged forward in ever greater numbers. Their arms ached from swinging their swords, yet the army of the dead still seemed without end.

"Rotate!"

"Rotate!"

Benjen kept his eyes fixed upon the field. When he saw the rhythm of his comrades' swings begin to falter, he shouted at once.

The relief line, long prepared, responded instantly. At the order, they tapped the shoulders of the men before them in warning, and on the third beat dragged their weary comrades back and took their places without a seam.

Yet in that critical instant, as his attention rested upon the gap between rotations, Benjen failed to notice a faint, half-veiled figure within the snowstorm, emerging amid the wight host—

And slowly drawing nearer to the front where blades clashed.

Reclining upon her stone, Erevi's dusky violet lips curved slightly, as though the play had reached its most stirring moment.

…

"Woof, woof!"

Clang!

Disguised in the form of an Other, Kal moved quietly with the wight host, creeping toward the direction from which the barking had come.

With a vampire draught and night-bloom perfume, he concealed the scent of living warmth upon him, and found the effect most useful.

The Others could not discern that the one beside them was, in truth, a living man.

Thus, like a spectator, he arrived at the place where battle raged before him.

Seeing that his master had already slain one Other, JJ no longer relied upon the power of his invisibility collar to hide. He sprang out directly and barred the foe before him, who was preparing to flee.

Its fangs were exceedingly sharp; in the system panel's notes, they were even classified directly as equipment.

Thus, the Other it had intercepted could not harm it at all.

It was swift—flashing past like a phantom. Even though this Other's swordsmanship was superb, he could not, for a time, do anything against this golden-haired hound that had sprung from nowhere.

The Other was equally swift. It moved lightly even upon the snow, to the point that scarcely any trace could be found along the path it had taken.

Yet even so, after discovering that his companion had already been slain, this Other still found himself with no way to turn and escape.

"*/+%...&（%）"

The Other looked enraged, a shrill sound like ice cracking issuing from his throat.

Though he could not understand it, JJ knew the damned thing was cursing foully.

Bar­ing his teeth, he kicked off the ground and lunged again. His sharp claws raked toward the Other's chest, while his jaws aimed straight for the Other's throat.

Having suffered once already, the Other dared not be careless.

With a lift of his hand, he hurled an icicle. At the same time, he swung up the longsword in his grasp—emitting a strange blue glow, as though forged from thin shards of crystal—and cut toward JJ's neck as well.

Yet this time JJ's attack was unlike before.

He knocked aside the incoming icicle with a single swipe of his paw.

His fangs, which had been aimed at the Other's throat, dipped slightly. In midair he clamped down upon the ice-crystal blade in a single bite, and the instant he landed he rolled upon the ground.

Thus was executed a dog's reverse joint-wrench.

Caught wholly unprepared—and never having faced an opponent like JJ—the Other had no inkling of such a strange technique.

The ice sword, which had seemed welded fast in his grip, was wrenched free just like that—disarmed by a dog.

Yet as anger surged within him and he meant to act, he suddenly felt something drawing close from behind.

Before he could react, his vision went black and a pain flared at his neck.

The next moment, he fell upon the snow and lost all consciousness.

Lifting the bearskin cloak that covered the Other's head, Kal drew from his neck a syringe as thick as an arm. His gaze held a trace of disbelief as he looked at the Other lying upon the ground, blue eyes open yet emptied of awareness.

"What, is this sedative really that effective?"

"And with less than thirty percent—not even a one-third chance—it dropped him in a single shot."

"Even trolls can't endure this stuff, but I never thought it would work on an Other as well."

Kal glanced from the fallen Other to the syringe in his hand.

He had merely tried it on a whim and had never expected it truly to work.

Yet since it had, he could only attribute it to the potency of these items born of the game world.

Drawing out a hemp rope likewise produced from the game world, Kal bound the Other tightly in a matter of moments.

After driving two more needles into his neck, he took the golden-haired hound JJ and departed from the wight host—now fallen in heaps with the loss of this Other's consciousness—making for the Fist of the First Men.

He had won a great victory here, though he did not know how matters fared on the other side.

…

"Hold fast! The enemy is thinning—the moment of victory lies before us!"

The warriors, divided into three rotations to take turns at the front, felt their spirits surge.

They had seen what Benjen had pointed out.

After all, those ranks of enemies collapsing one after another had been held back by their own blades.

To wage war against foes of legend was something none present had ever imagined in their lives.

Of the Age of Heroes, of the Long Night and the Others, some among them had never even heard the tales.

Yet at this very moment, it felt as though they stood beside the heroes of old.

And most important of all, few had died in this battle. The handful who were wounded were scarcely dragged to the rear before the witch leaning upon the stone raised her hand and restored them whole.

The next instant they returned to the fray, vigorous as before.

To fight with divine weapons in hand and an invincible support at one's back—such a battle was intoxicating.

Yet just as the crowd still cheered, Robb had only just felled a wight. Before he could do anything more, he suddenly noticed that the next wight behind it seemed somewhat different from the others.

It hunched low, crouched among the wight host, using them as cover as it slowly edged toward the front.

When the wights before it were cut down, this one, having already drawn near, ceased bothering with concealment.

Its tall frame rose upright, standing at least a shoulder's height above the surrounding wights.

The great ice-crystal sword dragging along the ground in its hand stirred slightly—then swept upward, slashing toward Robb's groin.

Still caught in that brief moment of surprise, not yet having fully grasped that the foe before him was no mere wight, Robb shrank instinctively from the blue-purple arc.

His hand moved faster than his mind. He lifted his sword to guard beneath him.

The glowing iron blade met the ice-crystal greatsword without flourish.

The enchantment's light flickered faintly, yet the ordinary steel beneath it could endure no more.

The Other's ice blade was not a weapon—it was sorcery.

Ice met steel; the glow of enchantment still clung on, but the cold was not something iron could withstand.

With but a brief pause, the steel longsword shattered outright, bursting into fragments.

The immense force followed, irresistible, crashing heavily into Robb Stark's groin and hurling him bodily into the air.

At the same time, a streak of crimson traced an arc through the sky.

Yet just before Robb was about to crash heavily upon the ground, a hand—its skin a dim bluish-violet gray, yet full and shapely—caught him before he fell.

Lifting the torn cloth at his groin to look, it was plain that Robb's entire groin and even his pelvis had been split into two by that stroke. The pitiful few ounces of flesh there had borne the brunt of it.

At the same time, a biting cold began to spread upward.

"Oh~ poor little thing."

With but one hand she had caught the fully armed Robb as he fell from midair. Erevi withdrew the hand with which she had examined his wound, covering her mouth as she let out a soft click of sympathy.

The Other who had just flung Robb aside with a single upward slash seemed not to have expected that the blow would fail to cleave the human in two—and that a woman who had appeared from nowhere would save him instead.

More importantly, he sensed a threat from this woman. The flames that had earlier torn through the blizzard also seemed connected to her.

The Other thought swiftly and reacted swiftly.

Yet before he could make any move, a fireball the size of a washbasin suddenly appeared before his face.

The next instant—

Boom!!!

The fireball's detonation struck like a bomb. The knights and lords from across the realm, who had not yet recovered from the shock of seeing Robb Stark cut flying with a single stroke, were likewise blasted to the ground.

Yet they were fortunate. As the flames dispersed, the Other who had been about to act against Erevi was reduced to nothing more than two legs of ice standing upon the snow of the Fist of the First Men.

Benjen had stood near Robb as well. When Robb was struck away, he too was thrown down by the fireball.

Before he could recover from the daze of the blast, streaks of starlight once more appeared in the air and fell like rain.

Those unlucky enough to have suffered more from their ally's strike than from fighting the Other were healed again by the very one who had caused it, and lay upon the snow still somewhat bewildered.

Erevi could not be bothered with such mortals.

Had they not been Kal's people, she would not have restrained the force of that blow.

As for the little one in her arms—seeing his recovery slow, Erevi simply took out a vial of healing potion and poured it down his throat.

Under such terrifying restorative power, little Robb was restored.

"Uh… what happened here?"

At that moment, Kal returned, a shape wrapped in a bearskin cloak slung over his shoulder, its nature indistinguishable.

He looked toward the mountainside of the Fist of the First Men, where a circular crater some three to four meters across had formed. Within it, something was rapidly melting away, leaving only two pale, milk-glass bones faintly gleaming.

Kal found his mind somewhat unable to turn.

Though he could roughly tell that an Other had been slain here, what was the meaning of the twenty or thirty people lying all over the ground?

"It's nothing. Just a small accident."

Erevi lifted her head toward Kal with a radiant smile, and with a casual motion flipped up Robb's trousers, which were in the midst of mending.

Kal's mouth twitched. He more or less understood what had happened.

…

"So that's how it is. What you see before you now is the legendary Other."

Within the ancient ring-shaped castle atop the Fist of the First Men, more than two hundred people had gathered. One by one they stared wide-eyed at the legendary Other before them, bound layer upon layer, and wrapped yet again in the King's bearskin cloak.

"Why does he look like… he's asleep?"

Robb, whose trousers had been ruined, sat in the front row, closest of all to the Other.

He stared at the being before him—slightly different from the tales told to him by his nurse—at the blue eyes that remained wide open, at the stone stuffed into its mouth and the several layers of coarse cloth binding it shut.

For a moment, he found it hard to accept such a reality.

When he had first met that Other, all he had felt was the tremor and terror born of life itself.

Yet the one before him now looked as though even if one stepped up and slapped him twice across the face, there would be no response.

Was this the difference between one man and another?

Tightening the wolfskin wrapped about him like a makeshift skirt, Robb turned his wide eyes toward the King beside him, who held an ice-crystal longsword in his hand and was speaking with the witch.

No—this was the difference between man and god.

Seeing the two of them, Robb felt certain.

"This is indeed a magical construct. It resembles the energy weapon you use yourself, yet the logic behind it is wholly different."

"Yours is pure magic; once formed, it dissipates swiftly."

"But this ice blade is not the same…"

"It combines real elements with magic, using the element's natural affinity for magical power as a foundation. Magic is housed within it, the two coexisting. The approach is rather interesting—I believe it merits further study."

After her examination, Erevi gave Kal this affirmative answer.

Kal nodded in satisfaction.

"Then take your time studying it. You may even examine the Other as well. We still have some time ahead—so long as the Night King does not suddenly appear to reclaim him, or simply kill him outright."

"Who is the Night King?" Erevi asked, hearing the name for the first time, curiosity in her tone.

Kal shrugged. "Who knows? Perhaps merely a character who can be taken out with a casual stab."

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