Chapter 9: The Lucky White Walker Killer
The ice sword struck the human, but instead of the expected smooth sensation of cutting through flesh, it shattered into countless fragments with a clear, crisp sound of "ping". At the same time, a warm sensation emanated from below the White Walker's chest, as a small, warm object broke through the ice armor from the lower abdomen, stubbornly squeezed into its actually useless internal organs, and in the next second became scorching hot, as if burning its soul!
What was happening?
As a weapon maintained by magic, how could it just shatter like that? Even in a collision with the best steel sword in the world, it shouldn't have a single crack or chip. As for the object that had pierced its body, being born in the land of eternal winter with surging magic within, it shouldn't feel any pain even if it were doused with boiling lava, unless...
As the magic sustaining its existence was disturbed and dissolved, the White Walker could no longer think. It dropped the ice sword, which was now just a hilt, and futilely covered its lower abdomen, as if trying to hold back the magic that was continuously leaking out. Pale blue blood spurted from the wound, hissing with steam around the dagger. It reached out with its skeletal, pale hands to pull out the dagger, but the moment its fingers touched the obsidian, they began to smoke and dissolve. In the end, unable to do anything about the foreign object inside its body, it let out an unwilling shriek and knelt down powerlessly, no longer moving.
Aeg sat paralyzed in the snow, staring blankly at the rapidly shrinking body of the White Walker. The first to crack and fall off was the layer of armor of unknown material covering it, followed by the exposed pale flesh, which began to blur and become viscous, as if melting like a snowman in the sun. After a few dozen seconds, the White Walker was reduced to a milky white, glass-like skeleton, transparent and shimmering like a jade carving, reflecting clear light. But even this last evidence of the White Walker's existence slowly melted away. In the end, only the obsidian dagger remained, surrounded by steam. It seemed to be undergoing some miraculous change, with water vapor condensing into layers of frost on its now extremely cold surface. The originally dark, short weapon quickly turned snow-white, blending in with the snow on the ground, making it almost impossible to find without careful observation.
It wasn't until half a minute later that Aeg was surprised to find that he was still alive.
His sword-wielding hand was both painful and numb, with the flesh of his tiger's mouth split and bleeding. The enemy's strength was so terrifying that even if the steel sword hadn't broken, he wouldn't have been able to hold it after one strike. He touched the place on his shoulder where the White Walker had struck him with his other hand. The outer fur coat was slashed, but the clothes underneath were undamaged, not to mention the expected gruesome wound or gushing blood. He pondered in confusion for a moment, and a strong sense of relief suddenly filled his chest.
He survived purely by luck.
In that moment of life-and-death confrontation with the White Walker, he had resolved to perish together with it. No matter how one looked at it, his obsidian dagger and the White Walker's ice crystal sword would have struck each other simultaneously. Given the White Walker's immense strength, capable of piercing trees with thrown swords, he might have lost his entire upper body. But he won, winning because his dagger struck the opponent a fraction of a second earlier, perhaps just a hundredth of a second.
This slight lead led to the final result: the White Walker's ice sword turned into an ordinary object the moment it sliced through the outer coat, about to kill him. It became a true "ice" sword. Thus, the moment it struck him and experienced stress, it shattered like an ordinary piece of thin ice, turning into fragments on the ground.
If he had been a split second slower, he would now be slowly waiting to die from blood loss; if the White Walker had known he was holding an obsidian dagger and had been more cautious, he might have been cut into several pieces. But there are no "ifs" about what has already happened. He won, winning through a series of coincidences, winning because of the opponent's carelessness.
The fear of nearly losing his life arrived late, with a nearly incontinent feeling from his crotch. If he hadn't emptied his bladder earlier, Aeg suspected he would have wet his pants. His legs felt weak and powerless, and for a moment, he couldn't even get up.
Over there, Gared, who was lying on the ground, let out a brief sound resembling a moan. Aeg was startled and shuddered, scrambling to pick up the obsidian dagger, now covered in a layer of frost, and grasping the broken steel sword. These should be enough to deal with wights without magic.
"Gared," he ventured, originally wanting to ask if he was dead, but feeling stupid at the last moment, he changed his words: "Are you still alive?"
The fallen man moaned again, although the words were indistinct, it was clearly a short sentence with intonation. Aeg let out a sigh of relief and sat back down on the ground.
With the threat to life gone, his ability to think returned. He remembered: in the original plot, after Jon Snow killed a White Walker, all the wights converted by that White Walker instantly collapsed into rotten bones. Since this White Walker was now dead, the people it killed couldn't become wights anymore, right?
He looked around and another thing confirmed his guess: the wight horse ridden by the White Walker had also fallen and reverted to a dead horse. Now that he thought about it, this change probably happened at the same time as the White Walker's weapon lost its magical enhancement, the moment the obsidian dagger struck the White Walker. He just hadn't noticed it immediately because he was in a state of high concentration and desperation.
With great effort, he stood up again. His intuition told him there wouldn't be a second White Walker nearby, but his rationality told him that intuition was the most unreliable. He decided to leave as soon as possible. Aeg, holding the broken sword in one hand and the dagger in the other, cautiously approached Gared.
The old soldier's face was pale, and his lips were frozen purple, but there was still a spark in his eyes, indicating he was still alive.
"Cold..."
Aeg looked around. His horse had run off, but fortunately, when Gared had prepared to kill the horse, he had unloaded all the luggage and equipment. The blankets and clothes hadn't been taken away. He quickly set up a simple bed to keep his teammate warm.
Fortunately, after inspecting the wound, Aeg discovered that because the White Walker's weapon was exceptionally sharp and he had rescued Gared in time, preventing the White Walker from delivering a finishing blow, the wound on Gared's chest was not serious. The area of the wound was very small, and its location was far from the heart, not causing irreversible heavy bleeding. Even more miraculously, the bleeding on the surface of the wound had already clotted, and the surrounding skin showed clear signs of frostbite...
The low temperature brought by the ice magic of the White Walker's weapon had temporarily kept Gared out of immediate danger, but it would seriously affect his healing and recovery later on. He needed to receive proper treatment as soon as possible.
Aeg looked up at the distant Wall, whose gray-blue outline was now vaguely visible, knowing that this time, escape was probably out of the question.