GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 388 - Attack on Yunkai
He looked up at Lynn on the dragon's back, lips moving, and forced out three words.
"I will."
Barely a whisper. His voice, cracked with fear. But it hit the silence like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples spread fast.
"I will too!"
An old man covered in scars threw down the broken stick in his hand and hauled himself up off the ground.
"Fight for freedom!"
"We will!"
"All of us!"
The roar that had been choked down for years tore loose at last, rolling outward until it shook the sky.
The dark mass of kneeling slaves rose to their feet.
They stared at the man standing on the dragon's back, and on those hollow, broken faces, something ignited that had never burned there before.
Hope.
On the dragon's back, Tyrion and Jorah Mormont watched the transformation in stunned silence. Lambs one moment. Wolves the next. Neither of them remembered to breathe.
This was the army they had needed.
An army forged from hatred and the hunger for freedom.
Lynn said nothing.
He simply turned toward the blue ocean of corpses and raised one hand in a slow, quiet gesture.
Tens of thousands of blue-eyed Wights peeled apart in unison, opening a path straight to the center of the battlefield.
"Go."
His voice was calm.
"Take back what was always yours."
The freed slaves blinked. Then it landed.
They charged with red eyes and open throats, screaming as they tore through the field of fallen slavers' soldiers. They ripped the crude leather armor off the dead. They grabbed the spears, grabbed the scimitars, and kept moving.
One hour. That was all it took.
An army of tens of thousands of avengers built itself out of a mountain of corpses and a river of blood. Their equipment was mismatched. Their formations were ragged.
But the killing intent in their eyes was more terrifying than anything any trained army had ever put on a field.
Lynn looked down at them and nodded.
He turned to Daenerys.
Her violet eyes were alight with something he rarely saw there , wonder. She knew what this meant. She could feel the storm already gathering over Slaver's Bay.
And the man who had called it up was standing right beside her.
He had done it. He had freed them.
Lynn did not linger. He gave Winter's neck a quiet pat.
The dragon rumbled low in its chest, spread its wings, and turned toward Yunkai.
On the ground below, Grey Worm lifted the Flame spear high.
"Entire army — advance!"
Three armies, each unlike the others and each radiating something that made the air itself feel dangerous, merged into a single black tide and rolled toward the golden city.
---
Yunkai.
The slavers left on the walls stared at the horizon. The dark line was getting closer.
They couldn't accept what the soldiers who had fled back were telling them.
The front lines. Two hundred thousand troops. The entire force that had stood between them and everything they stood to lose.
Gone?
"No," one of the younger Wise Masters breathed, sinking to the stone. "No. Impossible." His voice had gone to nothing. "It's an illusion. Some trick of the demon's."
But when they finally saw the full shape of the approaching army, even that last refuge collapsed.
They saw the slave soldiers who had been sent to the front as cannon fodder, now marching armed and upright in the dragon's shadow.
And they saw something worse.
They saw the dead.
The corpses that should have been rotting in the dust, moving. Stiff-legged. Unstoppable. Charging at the front of the advance.
"Demon," someone whispered. Then louder: "He crawled up from the seven hells!"
Panic cracked across the wall like fire jumping through dry grass.
"Hold the wall! Hold it! Everyone hold the wall!"
An older Wise Master drew his scimitar and turned to face his men. "We still have the inner guard. We hold this wall, we survive. We still have a chance!"
The words weren't even finished.
Lynn was already in the sky above Yunkai.
He didn't speak. Not to the slavers. There was nothing to say to them , not even a judgment felt worth the breath.
He looked down at the blue-eyed Wights and gave a single, flat command.
"Pile up."
The Wight army moved.
They screamed as one, not from pain or fury, just the mindless sound of dead things in motion, and crashed against the city wall like a black wave. The guards scrambled back.
"Arrows! Fire the arrows!"
"Pour the oil! Now!"
The arrows fell. The burning oil came after, sheeting down the stone.
It meant nothing.
The Wights did not feel pain. They did not stop. They climbed over their own, stepping on fallen bodies, climbing through fire and steel and shafts bristling from every inch of them. One took so many arrows it couldn't hold its shape , and collapsed. Ten more used its body as a step and kept going.
One caught fire. Kept climbing. Burned until there was nothing left but char.
Below the wall, something was growing. A writhing, rising mass of bodies and flesh, piling higher with every second, taking shape at a speed that should not have been possible.
Every soldier on the wall who had ever claimed to be hardened by war turned and vomited.
The human ladder reached the top of the wall.
Lynn looked down at the newly armed slave soldiers.
"Your enemies are right behind that wall."
"Go."
"Wash away what was done to you. Take what comes next."
The first youth who had spoken — who had started it all — stood in an ill-fitting breastplate, a blood-smeared scimitar in his hand. He stared at the road of corpses that led up and over.
He was the first to scream.
"KILL!"
He ran.
Tens of thousands followed.
They went up the bodies of strangers. They went up the faces of people they had known. They didn't slow down. They didn't look away.
"Stop them! Stop them now!"
The guards on the wall stabbed and slashed and pushed. It didn't hold.
They were not fighting soldiers. They were fighting people with nothing left to protect and nowhere left to lose. One slave took a spear through the gut and spent his last breath latched onto a guard's leg, teeth sunk into the man's arm, refusing to let go even as he died.
The youth hit the top of the wall first.
He didn't see the guard's face. He didn't need to. He brought the scimitar down with everything he had.
THUNK.
Warm blood hit his face in a rush.
He didn't flinch. He didn't feel sick.
He felt free.
He turned and looked at the city inside , gleaming gold and carved stone, built on the bones of people like him , and behind him, more of his people were cresting the wall. And more after them.
The line broke.
On the dragon's back, Lynn watched. His face gave nothing away.
He looked down at the whole of Yunkai. The pyramids. The slavers scrambling inside them, scattering for exits that wouldn't save them.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet.
"Yunkai."
"Leave no one."
➤ Next: The Conquest of Yunkai