Chapter 34: Zombie Watch pt. 4, Ending the Threat

In the morning it seemed that we received the Wildling’s answer.

It wasn’t what we had been hoping for, and came in the form of a raid on Castle Black just after dawn. Of course the ravens had spotted it, and it was thus no surprise. The troops were prepared. And atop the Wall I waited with Jon, Robb, Brynden and Marsh, Togo and Ghost at our sides.

The Wildling wave was fifteen thousand strong, significantly outnumbering the defenders. Of the three hundred Night’s Watchmen, five thousand Northmen, and three thousand Valemen, a little under half, some four thousand men, were on duty that morning.

Still, given the advantages of fortification, training and equipment, and the lack of Wildling siege engines, those four thousand could have easily held against ten times as many Wildlings. But I doubted our men would be necessary at all.

As the Wildlings left the edge of the treeline some five-hundred meters distant, they gathered then began to run at an extreme archery range of four hundred meters, shields upraised around those carrying logs to use as battering rams at the gate.

They were no risk. I was tired of holding back, and defending the realm against Wildlings and White Walkers was certainly the best time from a public relations perspective to reveal the full extent of my magics.

I raised my hand for dramatic effect and intoned three words. “Continuous Chain Lightning.”

With a mighty *CRACK* a think bolt of lightning jumped out from my hand, smashing into a group of better dressed free folk. I dumped twenty mana a second into that spell, the majority of my regeneration dedicated to destruction, and watched in disgusted awe as the so called Lord of Bones and his entourage jerked and charred as I swept them with my lightning.

The men on the Wall were staring at me in shock as I singlehandedly broke the Wildling attack. Men dropped their weapons in their haste to make the sign of the seven pointed star, or simply forgot to keep hold in their awe.

The Wildlings, meanwhile, at least those closer to the impact, had dropped their weapons for an entirely different reason; they were fleeing as fast as they could.

A minute later and the Wildlings were in full rout, running as quickly as they could for the trees while my lightning played over them. As the began to enter the tree-line, slowing in the belief that I was finished, I sent out the finale.

I had been casting with twenty mana a second, and still had a full half of my mana pool when they ran.

In a fit of theatricality, I threw my arms wide. “Firestorm!” I called out. A hundred fireballs of wildfire, each with ten mana added to give it force and explosive heat formed and shot forwards, impacting through the tree-line, starting a fire and causing a great slaughter to those caught in the area of effect.

I looked out on that field of the dead and dying, the screams of the terrified and injured ringing in my ears. It was awesome and awful, terrific and terrible. It was the raw and naked exercise of power. My magic’s power over reality. My power over the Wildlings.

With that single move, a truth was made evident to all the men there, guardians of the Wall and Wildling alike.

The Wall would not fall. The Wildling attack was over, but for discussing the terms of their surrender.

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This time Mu found a much less energetic and optimistic group in Mance’s tent. Mu glided in and settled into place on the table. The bone-dressed man was absent, dead in yesterday’s assault, and the squat woman who smelled of blood was gone as well, whether dead or simply absent I didn’t know. The people that were there looked at Mu as if he might be a bomb.

“Here to accept our surrender?” Mance asked somewhat bitterly.

Mu cawed in laughter. “What, no thank you? After all, didn’t I just do what you wanted?” I asked.

The men in the tent looked at Mu with narrowed eyes and questioning faces.

“What do you mean?” Tormund rumbled.

“Please. Mance knew all along that there was no chance you could take the Wall,” I explained, “not with it actually defended. Ten to one, with equal quality of warriors and siege engines. That’s what you need to take even a normal castle, let alone one so impressive as the Wall. And your men are hardly as dangerous as the men the North has gathered. You never stood a chance.

“But some of your people were too savage and violent to understand that; they had to be taught the hardest lesson, so that the rest of your people might learn the futility of struggle. Of course, he was hoping they’d cause more damage first, improve your negotiating stance a bit.”

The bald man frowned. “Rattler was not of my people,” he emphasized.

“Nonetheless. The point remains,” I replied.

Mance’s lips were pursed. “And now our negotiating stance is even weaker,” he sort-of agreed, then sighed. “Very well. I assume you can take our surrender?”

“I can. Though those from the attack will not be allowed south of the Wall,” I replied.

“What!” Rayder shouted, rising from his seat. “You can’t just leave them for the Walkers!”

Mu shook his head in a strange parody of my own gesture. “And why not? I offered peace, and they spat on it. Such actions cannot be rewarded.”

“There will be others who refuse to enter if such a circumstance comes to pass,” he warned. “Perhaps as many as forty or fifty thousand, a full third of my host is related to or allied with groups that were part of that attack.”

“Then they too may choose to die. You seem to misunderstand a simple fact, Rayder. I do not fear the Walkers, but I lack the patience to hunt down tens of thousands of rapists, murderers and other ne’er do wells throughout the North. I care not if your people see me as the very devil himself; those that enter the Seven Kingdoms will be peaceful.”

Mu moved forward a bit, fixing him with unblinking eyes. “I would rather all your people dead and burned than have a single northern girl raped, a single northern farm raided,” I said coldly. “I owe your people none of the protections and services I do to the Starks, and by extension the Starks’ people. Your people have lived by the power of their arms, have killed and stolen by it, and have no right to complain when they die by it in turn. Those prepared to kill must be prepared to be killed.

“The only reason I am treating with you at all is that Lord Stark is far kinder, and wanted your people offered shelter, and convinced King Robert to agree with his plan,” I said. I couldn’t have them think of the Starks poorly, after all. “That, and the possibility I might not be able to burn all of your corpses and thus strengthen the Walkers’ forces. But to be honest, I doubt a few thousand extra corpses here or there will make such a great difference compared to how many corpses the Walkers will raise against us.”

Mance had been losing energy throughout my speech, sinking deeper and deeper into himself, cradling his head in his hands. “Is there nothing we can do to convince you?” he pleaded.

“What do you have that I could want?” I asked rhetorically.

The blonde woman grimaced and spoke up. “If you would forgive them, I would give you myself,” she offered unexpectedly. With other people it might have worked; she was very pretty, and had that whole badass warrior-woman barbarian princess vibe going on. I could have dyed her hair and called her Xena; that might actually have been pretty fun, come to think of it. But I was not there to make friends, or gain a paramour.

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Mu burst out into cawing laughter. “I have no interest in those who are with me out of anything but desire. But beyond that, I am lord to some four hundred thousand people. I am one of the richest and most powerful in Westeros, only arguably below the Lords Paramount, and have the ear of the King at court. I am a handsome and powerful young man, with numerous heroic deeds to my name. Do you honestly think, for a single second, that having one girl is such a prize?”

It was cruel, and her face showed it hurt. But I needed to be domineering; the free-folk were like vicious, wild animals. Worse, even. Give them an inch and they’d take a mile, then come back in the night, slit your throat, steal your boots and eat your corpse.

“Now, Mance Rayder, King-beyond-the-Wall, what is your answer?”

“We will swear our peace and surrender,” he sighed. “And I will do what I can to convince people to leave behind wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, and pass through the Wall.”

Back at Castle Black I grimaced at the reminder of what I was dooming people to, but they were truly the human equivalent of hyenas, vicious opportunistic predators. I had no desire to fill the North with mad dogs who thought to assault such a fortification as the Wall with so few people. It spoke to an inherent aggressiveness and lack of understanding of consequences that was unacceptable.

Hopefully those wise enough not to charge to their doom would be wise enough to keep my peace.

If not, my hounds would turn them to shit.

Literally.

But only after eating them alive.

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A month later and the majority of Wildlings had finally finished trickling through the wall. I had had to be present for a dozen arguments and disagreements, my very presence serving to quell tempers and remind the no-longer-free folk what mercy they had been shown. I took hundreds of oaths in Robert’s place, as did Robb in place of his father, and the Gift’s population increased a hundredfold.

I had called for more and more of my burgeoning Hound population to come north. Eventually a full ten battalions, four thousand eight hundred hounds were there, helping ensure that the Wildlings didn’t leave their reservations without approval. Ten companies of ravens supported them. Poe, the eldest of the Guard Ravens, was placed in overall command, while Fritz supported him.

I inverted their coloring from their ears and neck back, their coats a flat Night’s Watch black and their markings, including my horse-archer sigil, in whites and light greys. They looked somewhat like giant Australian shepherds in their coloring afterwards. On their right shoulders they bore the words of their unit: “Watch-Force North.” They were detached for semi-permanent support of the Night’s Watch and peacekeeping with the free-folk immigrants, so I thought it would be appropriate that they bore the colors. That said, I wasn’t giving the animals to the Watch, they were a loan.

Unfortunately none of the mammoths had had babies recently, and the giant’s weren’t willing to just give me some of their adults. Nor was I feeling cruel enough to just take them. In the end, we came to an agreement. I gave the mammoths and giants a few fixes to ensure that their genetics wouldn’t deteriorate due to inbreeding from the small population that was all they had left, extended their lifespans to help repopulation, and ensured that the giants would get extra support from the Starks and Night’s Watch getting established. In return they promised me some of the more genetically disparate calves once they were born. It might take a while though; mammoth pregnancies could last as long as two years.

As for the giants, they didn’t have much magic; it was more that their biology was radically different, adapted for size and strength, sort of like a gorilla’s as opposed to a man’s. Nor were the mammoth’s magical. All in all it was quite the disappointment.

I spent most of my spare time in February fruitlessly pursuing teleportation. Then in March I got sick of it, and decided since I lacked any idea of what to do with regards to teleportation, I may as well improve my mana cultivation and personal upgrades. I had more than enough mana to do so, with about a full order of magnitude more than I had had when I last upgraded myself.

Similar to last time, I found that my increased ability to manipulate and condense mana as well as spell structures meant I could improve both the efficiency, concept and sheer power behind my effects.

In Blue I once again improved my mana senses, thought acceleration, and then each again. Truly those were some of the most important enhancements, allowing me to manipulate mana more finely and quickly to create more complex and effective patterns, whether for enchantment or a more temporary spell.

Then I improved my precognitive ability, seeing a wider band of possibilities a longer distance into the future. I was getting more and more control of it, able to use my precognition to further speed up my thinking and problem solving by finding the answer that I would have found had I spent seconds to minutes thinking about it. I could anticipate in the future being able to keep multiple parallel mental processes by simultaneously being precognitively aware of different mental states that I could be having. What was even better was that the gains I made by clever application of precognition were multiplicative onto gains I made with spells.

I had been using the Mental Ward spell long enough, playing with ways to break through, that I was able to fix many of those issues for both subtle and overt attacks. I also took the time to really work out a variable form enchantment with the communications link; now it was effectively an integrated telephone capable of contacting individuals or groups, while preserving prior functionality. I still had to act as the relay, however, which wasn’t optimal; I wanted my hounds and ravens to be able to contact each other without my being involved, but couldn’t quite get that part of the enchantment working.

For my Green effects, I grew massively stronger physically, now able to quite easily bend and tear sheets of metal with my bear hands. My oakflesh went past being like bronze into being like iron then steel, making me incredibly hard to harm. The strength of the regeneration was powerful enough that it was like looking at the wound being re-round in time. Still not the perfect regeneration of someone like Wolverine, capable of healing literally anything, but it was getting there slowly. Even my transformed dragon-based bones improved, becoming more magically powerful and conductive, while being naturally more difficult to damage even before the oakflesh effect was added on top.

In fact, the combination of subtle optimizations I had been doing, and the straight-up biological upgrades I had experienced pushed my natural state, without any magics, over the edge of the utmost human performance. I was, in short, Captain America even without any magic at all; with it, I was far more powerful and tough, and healed much, much faster.

Within Red I continued to push on my speed, the idea that I was free of the usual constraints of time, that I could move as fast as I wished. It was reaching the point that when I really pushed my speed I could break the speed of sound with my fastest punch. The increased impact effect on top of that meant that a full speed and power punch that I stopped about a centimeter into a tree would cause the trunk to shatter and splinter, sometimes even enough to bring down the entire tree. I also managed to upgrade the fireproof effect, bringing the allowable temperature up to two thousand degrees C and making it slightly resistant to magical fire.

My defensive effects got a big boost with White. The stored healing energy was significant, enough to stave off most every life-threatening injury that didn’t kill you all at once. The strength of the conceptual armor had gone from similar to being in a suit of plate armor to being inside a lightly armored vehicle. On top of that, the projectile shield would need to be hit by extended bursts of high caliber machinegun fire, or successive light cannon rounds or something similar to break through. I was a big fan of survivability, and glad that mine was increasing. Furthermore, I figured out how to make the Anti-Undead Aura a good bit stronger and larger; I suspected that wights would only be barely effective against large concentrations of my troops when I upgraded them with it.

From Black, the anti-disease and toxin effects got stronger, as did my ability to derive benefit from consuming things. I still couldn’t consume objects that didn’t qualify as food. However, where before I got all the nutritional value, chemical energy, and a very small amount of essence from my food, I was now getting a significant amount of essence and an as-yet negligible rate of adaptation based on whatever natural advantages my food had over me.

That last was extremely exciting, as it meant my natural physique could improve a lot more in the future, providing a better baseline for my magical effects to build off of. I was generally wary of doing too many biological experiments to myself or my friends, for fear of harming them, which meant that a slow but steady and most of all automatic improvement would be a god-send.

Green did make some natural as well as supernatural improvements too, but that was more extremely sped up evolution than adoption of others’ mechanisms. There was even synergy between the two; when my adaptation rate got better, I could evolve creatures with Green to improve their own natural state, then consume them to get those advantages myself.

To be honest, my mana was increasing faster than my skill at that point; had I spent more time practicing and pushing the envelope on my magic, I might have eked out another level of performance when doing my upgrades. Still, I was growing so fast, and so much in advance of any threats that I faced, that I wasn’t overly worried.

With that sorted out, I applied similar upgrades to Jon, Togo, Aethon, Ghost, Shadowfax, Nevermore, Hue and Mu.

That took long enough that the Wildlings were pretty much processed. More would arrive over time, fleeing ahead of the White Walkers, but my presence at the Wall became unnecessary. Now any of my Guard-tier animals that needed to could contact me, so if and when the White Walkers and their zombie armies arrived I would hear about it and be back with plenty of time to spare. I didn’t even need to leave Hue or Mu behind for communications. It was awesome.

I left for Harrenhal with Jon at my side and peace in my wake.