GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 423 - Euron's Countermove — Clash

That grip.

Barely anything.

Not a display of force. Not even close.

More like swatting a fly out of the air. Casual. Unbothered.

No thunderclap. No blinding light.

But Euron Greyjoy felt it anyway , an invisible fist closing around his heart, then wrenching it downward.

Not a figure of speech.

An actual, physical pull.

Beneath his feet, his pride and joy, the Silence, built from black weirwood and unknown bones, a ship that could laugh at any storm, let out a low, tortured groan.

The hull was going down.

No. Not down.

The ice. Meters thick, solid as bedrock. It was caving in, with the Silence at the center, the surface bending like soft rubber under a force that simply refused to be argued with, forming a massive funnel around the ship.

The Silence was wedged dead in the middle. Hull against ice. That awful grinding shriek of wood on frozen water set teeth on edge all across the bay.

Lynn was pulling them under. Trying to drown them alive.

"Haul it up! Haul the ship up!"

The Ironborn captains around Euron finally shook themselves out of their stupor. They screamed orders, scrambled for grappling hooks, tried to anchor the hull to anything solid.

Useless.

Every last bit of it. That force answered to one man on one cliff, and no amount of rope or iron was going to change that.

"Haha... hahahahahaha!"

The humiliation broke something in Euron Greyjoy. Shattered it completely. He tipped over the edge into something that looked a lot like madness, and the laugh that tore out of him was hoarse and shrill and wrong.

"Good! Very good!"

"The power of ice?"

"King in the North, you haven't disappointed me one bit!"

Still laughing, he raised one hand and slowly peeled the black leather eyepatch from his left eye.

No eyeball beneath it.

Just a black vortex with no bottom. Inside it, warped shadows churned and screamed, as though the socket connected to some other place entirely , somewhere built entirely out of suffering.

It wasn't an eye.

It was a door to hell.

"I have traveled the Shadow Lands of Asshai," Euron said, his voice dropping into something low and rhythmic and wrong, a chanting undertone that raised the hair on the back of the neck. "I have seen the secrets of the House of the Undying."

"There, I gave up one of my eyes. And in return, I received... the power of a god."

"You think ice and fire are all this world has to offer?"

"Ignorant northerner."

That black void snapped up to find Lynn.

"Let me show you what real darkness looks like."

On the deck of the Silence, the shadows cast by the dying sun stirred.

They twisted. Stretched. Tore themselves free from the flat surface, from two dimensions into three, standing upright with a kind of awful, straining effort.

One. Two. Ten.

In moments, the deck was full of them , figures made entirely of shadow, featureless, no face, no substance, just human-shaped voids holding blades condensed from the same darkness they were made of.

They made no sound at all. They were the silence the ship was named for.

Shadow assassins.

The same thing Melisandre made?

Up on the cliff, Lynn's eyebrow lifted.

Huh. Interesting.

"Go," Euron said, pointing toward the cliff.

"Kill him."

They didn't jump. Didn't run.

They simply sank into the shadows of the Silence and disappeared.

One breath later, the battlefield below erupted. Fallen bodies, discarded shields, the shadows beneath soldiers mid-fight , black figures tore out of all of them at once, everywhere, no warning.

They moved between shadows the way other things moved through air. One second they were a hundred meters out, the next they were at the base of the cliff, clawing upward along the shadow-filled crevices in the rock face, defying gravity like it was an inconvenience, climbing straight for Lynn.

Robb saw it. Maege Mormont saw it.

"Archers! Loose!"

Arrows filled the air.

Every one of them passed straight through.

The shadows didn't even react. The shafts hit the rock wall and stuck there. Nothing.

Lynn watched them coming and waved one hand. A wall of ice erupted from the cliff face, solid and thick and bitterly cold.

The shadow assassins walked through it.

A flicker of surprise crossed his eyes.

He hit them with fire next , a scorching river of flame that swept down the cliff.

It rolled over them. Through them. Left them completely untouched.

They existed outside whatever rules fire and ice followed. Immune to physical force. Immune to elemental attacks. Like beings from a different layer of reality entirely.

"Hahahaha! Useless! Useless!"

Euron's laughter had gone fully unhinged. "Before shadows, your ice and fire are parlor tricks for children!"

"Kill you, and your dragon is mine. Your kingdom is mine. Your women, everything you have — all of it mine!"

The shadow assassins were nearly at the top. Blades raised.

The expression on Lynn's face finally shifted.

Not panic. Not fear.

Something more like sudden clarity.

Oh. Right.

The best counter to magic is magic. That was obvious enough.

And the best counter to shadows...

In his mind, a flash of memory: Melisandre in the original story, bringing a shadow assassin into the world. That creature, born from king's blood and the power of the Lord of Light.

He understood how it worked.

He understood it thoroughly, in fact , because Melisandre had given him everything, held nothing back. And on those late nights they'd spent together, he'd asked her about shadow magic, gone deeper than surface theory. She'd taught him the mechanics, the layers beneath the ritual.

He'd just never thought it was worth pursuing seriously. The cost in life force, the specific rituals required , poor value compared to ice and fire, which had always been his preference. He'd filed it away and left it there.

Now, standing here with shadow blades about to punch through his chest, it turned out the filing system needed an update.

"System."

He called it up silently.

"Check remaining experience points."

[Ding! Host's current remaining experience points: 21,350.]

All of it earned in Slaver's Bay. Every slave freed, every slaver put in the ground. He'd been saving it for Everlasting Youth, planning to upgrade it so his women could stay by his side indefinitely.

Better use for it now.

His intention locked in, clean and hard.

"Upgrade 'Shadow Magic' to Legendary."

[Ding! Confirmed — consuming 20,000 experience points... Skill upgrading...]

BOOM!

A flood of information hit him like a physical impact, staggering in its scope, pouring into his mind all at once.

What is shadow, at its core?

The back face of light?

The hollowness inside matter?

The seam between dimensions?

All of it. In that single instant, he had all of it.

He even saw , clearly, completely , how Euron's eye actually worked.

There was no sacrifice. Not really.

In Asshai, Euron had been parasitized. Some shadow creature, older and stronger, had taken up residence in that empty socket. The so-called divine power wasn't his. He was borrowing from whatever lived inside him.

A fool with someone else's bank card, convinced he owns the bank.

Every bit of this happened in a fraction of a second.

The first shadow assassin reached the top. Blade screaming down toward Lynn's heart.

Lynn moved.

He didn't dodge.

He just looked down at his own shadow on the ground.

Then his shadow moved.

The dark shape stretched long by the evening light shifted like living ink, surging up from the ground, rising.

It was larger than Lynn. Broader. It wore his face, but the darkness radiating off it was something older and purer than anything Euron's creatures carried , older than whatever parasite lived in that empty socket.

It extended a hand.

A hand built from the deepest dark there was.

PFFT!

One soft sound.

The lead assassin was caught. Just like that. Like Lynn's shadow had plucked a mosquito out of the air.

Then it squeezed.

That blade-wielding, attack-immune, untouchable shadow assassin was simply... absorbed. Pulled into the hand and gone.

Then the second.

Then the third.

Lynn's shadow moved like a harvester that didn't know the meaning of tired. Dozens of black tentacles lashed out, snatching every shadow assassin that had made it up the cliff and folding them in, one after another. Each one consumed added to the shadow's mass, swelled its presence, darkened its aura.

Down on the ice, Euron's laughter stopped.

Mid-sound. Gone.

His face locked in place.

He felt it.

His pets were being eaten. One by one, the mental threads connecting him to each of them were getting severed , not fraying, not fading, cut, like someone was working through them with shears.

Impossible.

Absolutely impossible.

He was the master of shadows. That was the whole point. That was what he had given his eye for.

What gave Lynn the right?

"Come back!" Euron's voice cracked. "All of you — come back!"

He threw everything he had into the recall. Every scrap of that borrowed power, forced into a single command.

Silence answered him.

On the cliff, Lynn's shadow finished with the last one. By now it loomed enormous, a dark titan standing at Lynn's back, something between a colossus and a god , silent, still, and absolute.

Lynn turned to face the ice below.

Euron Greyjoy's face was bloodless. Every trace of color gone.

Lynn smiled.

"Your show's over."

"Now I've got a question for you."

He gestured at the shadow towering behind him.

"My shadow — how does it stack up against those little pets of yours?"

➤ Next: Another Duel? — The Fight Begins