The next day.
The sky showed no sign of clearing. If anything, it had grown even darker.
The blizzard intensified, slashing visibility down to almost nothing.
Against this ever-heavier gloom, the shrill enemy horn sounded once more, tearing through the silence.
Lo Quen and the others climbed the ramparts again and looked north.
When the wind and snow thinned for a moment, revealing the shape of the Others' army, even those who had survived yesterday's bloody fighting felt a fresh wave of cold creep into their bones.
The number of wights had clearly increased.
More alarming still was what stood out among the ranks of the Others' knights.
Their eyes burned with the same blue fire, their bodies just as decayed, yet they wore garments that were far more ornate and ancient. Some even bore crowns upon their heads, corroded by rust, but still unmistakable in shape.
Lord Wyman stared, his eyes wide, his voice trembling as he cried out, "Those… those are the kings who sleep beneath the North! Even their rest has been disturbed!"
Beside him, Mance Rayder let out a cold laugh. "Looks like you southerners will need to rethink your customs. You've been supplying our 'guests' with a steady stream of elite troops."
There was nothing amusing in the wildling chieftain's words. They earned him furious glares from the knights of House Manderly.
Yet they knew he was right. The dead buried in barrows and castle crypts had now risen as their most dangerous enemies.
Mounted on their horrific steeds, the Others' knights swept their icy blue gazes across the frozen ground.
Yesterday's battle had left the field in ruins, littered with the corpses of human soldiers.
At the sight of them, the Others let out savage laughter, a piercing sound like ice shards grinding against one another.
One Other, astride a skeletal mount, slowly raised an arm.
Within several dozen feet, the fallen human bodies began to convulse violently.
One by one, corpses that should have long since gone cold shuddered and dragged themselves back to their feet.
"Crack… crack…"
The other Others joined in, their laughter just as shrill, like ice grinding hard against ice.
It echoed across the deathly silent battlefield, heavy with contempt and mockery toward humanity.
They were laughing at the defenders' "foolishness" for failing to burn or properly deal with their fallen comrades. To them, it was a lavish gift, allowing their army to swell endlessly, rolling larger with every battle like a gathering snowball.
Yet when the Others turned their mocking gazes toward the walls of Moat Cailin, ready to savor the terror and despair on the faces of the human defenders, what they saw made those crystalline faces falter in shock for the first time.
On the ramparts, neither King Lo Quen nor the nobles and commanders beside him, not even the common soldiers, showed the panic the Others expected. Instead, their expressions carried a hint of ridicule, as though it was these harbingers of death who had stepped into a trap.
While one Other was still reeling from this unnatural reaction, a spear struck silently from behind.
The one holding it was the very "wight" it had just "converted," a human corpse clad in torn, battered armor.
"Thud!"
The towering Other knight went rigid.
It lowered its head in disbelief, seeing a pitch-black spearhead thrust through a crack in its icy breastplate.
There was no frost clinging to the tip. Instead, it radiated a faint presence that scorched even its soul.
"Wraaah!!!"
A scream of unbearable agony burst from its mouth.
Its star-bright blue pupils shrank violently, reflecting the deadly black spearhead.
It tried to turn, to see what had betrayed it, but its body was already coming apart.
Crack… crack crack…
From the point where the spear had pierced it, countless fine fractures spread in an instant, webbing across its entire frozen form.
Blue light poured wildly from the cracks.
In the next heartbeat, with a deafening roar like collapsing ice, the powerful Other exploded into countless shards of blue-glimmering ice crystals, scattering in every direction.
In the final instant before its consciousness vanished completely, a frigid thought flashed through what little awareness remained.
These… aren't corpses!
They're… disguised!
At the same time, incredulous shrieks erupted all across the battlefield.
"Aah—!"
"Screeee—!"
The "wights" the Others had painstakingly "converted" and raised only moments before suddenly turned on them.
What they held were not ordinary steel weapons, but pitch-black, glassy spearheads.
They were weapons made of Dragonglass.
These "wights" moved with blinding speed, utterly lacking the stiffness and sluggishness of ordinary undead, driving their spears straight into the chests of the Others.
One Other was still savoring the satisfaction of gaining dozens of new underlings when, in the very next heartbeat, a nearby "wight" plunged an obsidian spear clean through its neck.
Another Other, riding an ice spider, was struck from below as a "wight" suddenly burst up from the ground. The Dragonglass spear pierced through the spider's abdomen and, in the same thrust, impaled the rider's lower body as well.
Ambush after ambush unfolded within the Others' formation.
These "wights" were the trap Lo Quen had prepared with great care. They were Dragon Soul Guards, transformed from the bodies of fallen warriors, yet bound completely to his will.
They had been ordered to masquerade as true corpses, lying among the ruins of the battlefield, their hands tightly gripping Dragonglass weapons capable of killing the Others.
Lo Quen had gambled on the Others' carelessness when they converted corpses to swell their ranks.
Clearly, he had won.
In the span of just a few breaths, more than thirty Others knights were caught off guard and killed by their own "allies."
As each of them fell, the wights under their direct control collapsed like puppets with their strings cut. The blue light in their eyes went out instantly, and they clattered to the ground, reverting to lifeless bones.
The once-dense tide of corpses was torn open by several vast gaps.
In the distance, the Others who had been spared because they lay beyond the range of the "conversion" effect were struck by shock and fury.
At last, they understood. Those "corpses" on the ground were nothing more than wolves in sheep's clothing.
The Others roared in rage, their icy killing intent nearly freezing the air itself.
Seeing this, the Dragon Soul Guards who had successfully carried out their assassinations did not linger. They turned at once and withdrew at high speed toward the walls of Moat Cailin, moving far faster than ordinary wights ever could.
"Roooar—!"
The surviving Others were completely enraged.
The humiliation of being deceived and grievously wounded drove them to the brink of madness.
They immediately issued the most ferocious orders of attack to the remaining wights.
In an instant, the rest of the wight horde surged forward like a black tidal wave, their howls growing ever more frenzied as they charged toward the retreating Dragon Soul Guards and the walls of Moat Cailin. The assault was fiercer than any that had come before.