Seventh Moon of 269
The Hour of the Gate (9 P.M.)
Steffon turned to Alaric and stared at him with wide eyes, as if he had just been insulted.
"I didn't know you were retarded, boy. You fooled me well."
Alaric didn't care about the comment. "What is dead may never die… but it can be crippled."
Steffon looked at him like he was crazy, so Alaric got straight to the point. "Look at their wounds. They don't heal; they remain."
Looking at the Ironborn again, Steffon noticed the detail: the first ironman he saw, for example, who had pulled an arrow from his neck, still had the hole caused by the shaft despite the lack of bleeding.
"Wounds may not kill them, but they can paralyze them. We just need to cut their arms or legs off," Alaric finished.
Steffon didn't answer for a while, weighing the proposal. 'Shit. With these monsters in front and among us, it's impossible for me to order a retreat. Dozens of ships will have to be left behind. Basically sacrifices so the rest of us manage to escape.'
Unable to spend the night ruminating, he made his decision.
"Damn, boy. The Vulture was right; you really are crazy… but I don't see another choice."
With his mind made up, Steffon returned to his position beside the helm and gave new orders.
"Attention! Change of plans!" His shouts made several heads turn, though not all. "Lower your bows and crossbows and let them climb! If arrows won't stop these possessed bastards, our swords will!"
The men who hadn't turned before now looked back, giving him the same look of disbelief he had given Alaric seconds prior.
"And when they set foot on this deck," he stomped hard on the floor, the sound echoing across the wood, "I want you to cut them into little pieces. I don't want to see fingers connected to hands, hands to arms, or arms to shoulders. Damn, I don't even want to see legs connected to your butts!"
The disbelief shifted into something else: a strange kind of faith. A faith that their leader had truly gone mad.
"If they think this immortality was a gift from their god, we will show them it was actually a curse!"
…
Nothing. For two seconds—which seemed to last an eternity—no one spoke or moved. Among these silent men, only two seemed to have an idea of where Steffon Baratheon had gotten such an idea. Looking over Steffon's shoulder, both Andrey and Arryk looked at Alaric, assuming he was the catalyst for the shift.
"What are you waiting for? NOW!!"
Jolted out of their trance, the men lowered their bows and stepped away from the railing, moving out of the line of sight of the Ironborn archers. Seeing his orders followed, Steffon turned back to Alaric.
"I hope this works, boy."
"I do too, my lord. I do too."
"Put that spear of yours away; it will be useless. Go to the storage and get something better, like a sword or an axe. Be quick."
"Yes, sir."
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When Alaric returned from storage holding his new weapon of choice—a halberd—he found the deck already in chaos. Seeing how his allies were struggling to take down the Drowned, who attacked without any concern for their own "lives," Alaric wasted no time. Having already performed two Enhance Ability spells to increase his Dexterity and Strength by 2, he charged.
Pushing people aside, Alaric stepped in front of a Drowned. Without hesitation, he brought the halberd down on its shoulder, refusing to give the monster time to react. The Drowned tried to move its sword into a guard, but the halberd was faster.
However, it wasn't the blade that hit; it was the wooden shaft. Thinking Alaric had missed, the Drowned smiled. In the next instant, Alaric took a step back and yanked the halberd down, allowing the blade to hook and penetrate the back of the creature's shoulder, slamming it face-down onto the deck.
Before the Drowned could recover, Alaric brought the halberd down like an executioner's axe onto its sword arm, leaving the limb connected only by a thin ribbon of flesh. Feeling no pain, the Drowned tried to rise again using its remaining arm. As it reached its knees—the stump of its right arm swinging with the movement of the ship—it looked up to find the culprit.
The first thing it saw was the blade of the halberd flying toward its neck.
Alaric was testing a theory: Would cutting off the head kill them? He knew destroying the brain wasn't enough; the man with an arrow through his eye proved that. But if the head was separated, could it still control the body?
He let the monster rise just enough to get the perfect angle and swung. Again, he lacked the raw force for a clean decapitation, leaving the head lolling by a small piece of skin. To his surprise, it didn't matter. The body collapsed and stopped moving, showing no further desire to fight.
Initially, Alaric thought he had killed it, but the talking head quickly proved him wrong.
"What the shit? What did you do? Why don't I—"
A heavy attack from the surrounding crowd crushed the head into the deck, silencing it forever. Alaric's brain worked at lightning speed, connecting the dots.
"The nape!" he screamed. "Cut their napes! It's their weak point!"
'Even dead, even magical, the spine is still what transmits information. Cut it, and the body shuts down.'
Amidst the screaming and the clash of steel, his shout was just one of many, lost to most—but not to all.
A voice behind him responded to his revelation.
"The nape is everyone's weak point, little cub. That doesn't help much."
Alaric turned to Andrey, finding him still holding a spear. "Our spears are useless here. Get a halberd like me and meet me here again."
Andrey shrugged as if he didn't care about the situation, but Alaric, analyzing him through Insight, noticed the tension and fear hidden in those shoulders. While Andrey went to change weapons, Alaric remained on the deck and applied the same technique to two other Drowned. Driving his halberd into their backs and pulling them to the ground, the two Drowned had their heads reduced to a red mass before they could recover.
After the third Drowned had its head reduced to pulp, Alaric had a realization: 'Why didn't I receive any experience?'
It was then the truth hit—even with their heads reduced to nothing, unable to move, they still weren't truly dead. Seeing their HP at 56 / 56 through his GM EYES, he confirmed it. When Andrey returned, Alaric set this discovery aside and began explaining the tactic.
"It's not like they're going to get back up," he told himself.
With Andrey back by his side, the two began to work together. Slowly, the section of the deck they held began to be covered with bodies featuring crushed heads. The scene caught the attention of others, who switched to halberds and mirrored the technique.
The Continental forces weren't the only ones to notice. The Ironborn—turned Drowned—were shocked to see their kin immobile. But they can't be dead, right? they thought in denial. Yet, the sight of their brothers "slain" broke the vision of god-given immortality. What is dead may never die. That was their saying. But it seemed that in these craziest of days, even the dead could die.
With their belief in invincibility shattered, their momentum began to wither.
And so, The Hour of the Gate (9 P.M.) passed, giving way to The Hour of the Bat (10 P.M.). The struggle raged on, showing signs of waning as the drowneds were gradually thinned out—until another galley slammed into the dromond, unleashing dozens more to take the place of the fallen.
Again, another hour passed, consisting of nothing but more blood and bone. To the perception of the exhausted humans, the passage of The Hour of the Bat felt slower than the last; then The Hour of the Eel (11 P.M.) arrived.
During The Hour of the Eel, the deck became so cluttered with corpses that they began to hinder the fighting. Steffon, still battling with his infinite vigor, ordered the bodies thrown into the sea, leaving only the pulped masses of flesh that were once heads scattered across the floor. Men began to slip on that red slush, prompting Steffon to order those remains tossed overboard as well.
Now far more exhausted than they were during the previous hour, the passage of The Hour of the Eel felt agonizingly slow. To make matters worse, another ship collided with them as the hour drew to a close.
This forced Steffon to utilize his numerical superiority differently. Starting at The Hour of Ghosts (12 P.M.), the combat was fought in shifts. Dividing the men into two groups, one would rest while the other held the line.
Resting in the center of the deck, Alaric imagined how horrific the battle must be on the other ships. Being a dromond, this war machine carried a crew of over four hundred, granting them a numerical advantage the smaller vessels lacked.
While the dromond was the primary target, the others were certainly not having an easy time. Looking at the group currently fighting, Alaric witnessed an unsettling sight. One of the Drowned was fighting far more fervently than the others, lunging with his sword without any self-preservation. With every strike, he screamed insults, repeating words of vengeance, adoration for the Drowned God, and the mantra that "What is dead may never die"—all with a grin plastered on his face.
Those words left Alaric deeply uneasy. How could he keep saying that? The bodies with crushed heads were right there. It wasn't ignorance; it was something more. Staring at the Drowned's smile, Alaric felt he had seen it before.
'Déjà vu?'
He tried to rationalize it, but as the creature's expression shifted from a grin to terror while parrying a halberd, a switch flipped in Alaric's mind.
'No… it's not possible.'
There was no mistaking it. That Drowned was the very same one whose neck he had sliced—the same one whose head had been hacked into pulp by the mob afterward. And now, there it was, standing and fighting with even greater fervor.
'How? He was completely immobile. Can these Drowned regenerate? I didn't see anything happening before we started throwing them into—'
'Into the sea…'
The realization struck him like a physical blow. The Drowned, "blessed" by their god who dwelt in the deep, regenerated when placed back into the water. Back with their god.
Alaric stood up with a jump, startling Andrey. Ignoring his friend's questions, Alaric scanned the faces of every Drowned on deck. To his horror, he found more familiar features.
'All of this was for nothing…'
He ran toward Steffon, grabbing him by the shoulder and spinning him around, disregarding all protocol.
"What is it this time, boy?" Steffon asked, irritated.
"They aren't dying," Alaric whispered, wanting to avoid a panic.
"They look plenty dead to me." Steffon kicked a Drowned with a crushed head lying on the deck.
"For now. When we threw them into the sea, they healed and returned to the ship."
"And how do you know this?" Steffon was skeptical. Even a monster shouldn't come back from a pulped skull.
"I've recognized several of them. Monsters I helped take down myself. If you don't believe me, look for yourself. Look at every face and tell me you don't recognize at least one."
Steffon turned his back and began to analyze the faces. Alaric watched as the disbelief drained away, replaced by a grim, furious realization.
"By the Seven…" he muttered.
"We can't keep going like this," Alaric said.
"Three hours… so many dead… for nothing." Despite the words, fire grew in the eyes of the Lord of Storm's End. He made the difficult choice.
"Sound the horn and hoist the sails!" he bellowed.
'I didn't want to resort to this, but staying will only cause more casualties.' Steffon thought of the ships they would have to leave behind. Eight? Eighteen? Twenty-five? It was impossible to know.
As the men hoisted the sails, a hoarse sound reached them from the distance.
OOOHHHH!
It was a horn. The same type as his, but not his own. The other dromond, carrying King Aerys and Tywin, had signaled the retreat. In the next instant, Steffon's own horn sounded in response.
OOOHHHH!
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