A World of Death || ASOIAF Gamer Fic

That was when the iron ring tore out of the wall.

It came free with a sound like a bone breaking and the rope whipped up off the battlement las the dragon’s pull yanked it free.

Arthur did not think, and he wasn’t quite sure what was possessing him in that moment, but his hand simply went out and closed around the rope as it whipped past him, and he was pulled off the battlement of Dragonstone and into the sky.

One moment there was stone under his feet and the next there was nothing, only air and the rope in his hands and the dragon above him climbing higher and higher.

“SEVEN FUCKING HELLS!!!!!!” Arthur screamed as he was whipped and thrown around as the dragon moved erratically.

He clutched on for dear life and closed his eyes wanting nothing more than to just hold tight and wait for the dragon to land.

But the fire in his chest that was his courage burned brightly and he opened his eyes. The dragon still needed to be brought down and now only he was capable of doing it.

He loosened his grip on the rope and started to climb. He pulled himself up one arm’s length at a time with his boots wrapped around the rope below him. The dragon was perhaps eighty feet above him which meant that there was eighty of rope.

He could do eighty feet.

The dragon dove.

“FUUUUUUUUCK!!!”

The rope went slack and then taut and then slack again, and Arthur’s stomach dropped into his boots as the dragon folded its wings and dropped toward the harbour with him trailing behind it like a stone on a string. He was no longer hanging below the dragon but behind it, streaming out horizontally in its wake, and the burning ships were rushing up toward him.

He twisted and swung his body sideways on the rope avoiding a mast that passed six inches from his shoulder.

Another mast.

He twisted the other way.

The dragon banked and the rope swung wide and Arthur was flung sideways across the harbour like the end of a whip, and the water was directly below him, close, very close, and he had just enough time to take a breath before he hit it.

The impact was brutal.

He hit the surface at speed and at an angle rhat made the water as hard as stone for the first instant before it gave way and swallowed him. He almost let go, but he forced himself to hang on and eventually he broke the surface, and was in the air again.

He coughed and spat out water before he kept climbing until he reached the dragon.

The bolt was buried in the leg joint and Arthur grabbed the shaft of the bolt with one hand and hauled himself up onto the dragon’s hindquarter.

The dragon’s back stretched away above him. A long slope of black scales rising toward the shoulders, the base of the wings, the neck. And there at the base of the neck along the spine, straddling the ridge just behind the wings with a saddle of leather and chains beneath him, was the rider.

The man was enormous.

Even against the scale of the dragon he was riding, the rider was enormous. His shoulders were wider than any man’s shoulders Arthur had ever seen. His back was a mass of muscle beneath a coat of black plate. His head was covered by a helm shaped like a dragon’s skull and his arms, resting on the saddle chains, were thicker than Arthur’s thighs.

Arthur began to crawl slowly along the dragons back. moving with every ounce of balance that [Acrobatics] could give him. The wings beat on either side of him, so close that the downdraft pressed him flat against the scales. The dragon banked and he slid sideways but caught himself and kept going.

He reached the saddle and luckily the rider had not turned. The man was leaning forward over the dragon’s neck, one hand on the chains and the other raised in a fist, and he was screaming something at the sky that the wind tore away before Arthur could hear it.

Arthur rose to a crouch behind him.

He drew back his left arm. The hidden blade slid from its housing with a click before he lunged.

The blade was aimed for the base of his neck exactly where the neck met the shoulder, but it did not go into the neck.

Arthur felt it immediately there was something wrong. The blade had punched through something strange. Like it had gone into meat. Into a mass of flesh that sat on the rider’s right shoulder like a growth.

Arthur looked down.

Beneath the hidden blade, half-hidden by the edge of the helm, a second head jutted from the rider’s shoulder and Arthur’s blade was buried in the top of its skull.

Maelys.

Maelys the Monstrous.

The rider didn’t turn at being attacked instead he drew his head forward before he headbutted him.

The dragon helm came backward with the full force of a neck as thick as a tree trunk behind it, and the steel brow of the helm hit Arthur square in the face. He felt his nose break, the cartilage crunching, the bone splitting, blood exploding from both nostrils before he fell back.

He then slid down the dragon’s flank toward the edge and the open air beyond it, but he threw out his left arm and drove the hidden blade into the dragon’s side with every ounce of strength he had.

The blade went between two scales and bit into the flesh beneath.

The dragon roared and bucked.

Arthur hung from the blade with his boots kicking at empty air and the harbour spinning beneath him and blood pouring from his ruined nose into his mouth, and he pulled. He pulled himself up until his other hand could reach the scales, and he hauled himself back onto the dragon’s back.

Maelys was waiting for him.

The giant had drawn Blackfyre and was holding it in one hand as though it weighed nothing at all. “You,” Maelys said as his voice cut through the wind. “Who are you to dare climb on my beast!”

Arthur drew Sunset. “The man who will kill you and end your pathetic rebellion.”

Maelys growled and rushed forward.

The sword swept down in an overhead cut that would have split a horse in half, Arthur did not try to block it. He stepped sideways along the dragon’s spine and the blade passed through the space he had occupied and bit into the dragon’s scales, and the dragon screamed and rolled making both men stagger.

It did give Arthur and opening however and he stepped forward and thrusted.

Sunset went in at Maelys’s left side, below the ribs, finding the gap between the plates of his armour, and the meteoric steel bit through mail and leather and skin.

Maelys grunted.

Sunset went in three inches before the giant’s hand closed on Arthur’s wrist and stopped it.

The grip was like a vice.

Maelys twisted. Arthur’s wrist bent in the wrong direction and felt the bones grinding and he let go of Sunset before the wrist could snap. Maelys yanked him forward by the arm and the dragon helm came down again, but this time Arthur was ready. He ducked. The helm brushed the top of his head. He drove his knee up into Maelys’s groin with everything he had.

Yet the giant did not even flinch.

Maelys laughed and he threw Arthur backward down the dragon’s spine with a flick of one arm.

Arthur hit the scales and rolled and came up on one knee with the hidden blade extended. Sunset was lying on the dragon’s back between them, six feet away, jammed between two scales.

Maelys stepped forward.

[The World]

Time stopped.

Arthur crossed the six feet and grabbed Sunset and set himself and time resumed and the Blackfyre was coming down. He parried. The impact drove him to one knee and sent a shock up his arms that numbed them to the shoulder.

Maelys swung again. And again. Each blow was a hammer strike and Arthur soon found that he could not block them, only deflect them. Blockinh took too much energy out of him, especially with how strong Maelys was.

Arrhur truly was in awe of how strong the man was, he now knew the rumours of him killing a horse with a single blow were not exaggerated.

But Arthur was a warrior and a skilled swordsman, so despite being the weak of the two he gave as good as he got. He cut at the giant’s arms, at the joints of his armour and sent a slash across the back of Maelys’s right hand and a deeper cut on the inside of the left elbow. He drove the hidden blade into the giant’s thigh and it went in to the hilt but Maelys simply stepped forward with the blade still in him and backhanded Arthur across the face with a fist the size of a ham.

Arthur’s cheekbone cracked as he was sent flying. He went down on the scales and rolled. Maelys followed and his boot came down where his head had been.

[The World]

Arthur crawled sideways across the dragon’s back, positioned himself behind the giant, and rose to his feet with Sunset raised.

Time resumed.

He brought the sword down on the back of Maelys’s neck with both hands and the blade hit the neck guard of the dragon helm and rang like a bell and did not cut through. Maelys spun and blackfyre came around in an arc and Arthur got Sunset up in time to catch it but the impact threw him backward across the dragon’s spine and he lost his footing and slid off the edge.

His hand caught a scale and he hung from the dragon’s flank with the harbour a thousand feet below and his hand slipping. He reached for Hamon and the golden energy surged into his fingers and locked them onto the scale like iron, and he hauled himself back up.

Maelys was standing over him.

The giant reached down and grabbed Arthur by the throat and lifted him off the dragon’s back one-handed. Arthur’s feet dangled which was something he didn’t expect to happen at his height. His hands went to Maelys’s wrist and pulled but the wrist did not move.

Maelys drew him close.

“You are strong,” the giant said. His breath stank of wine and rotting meat. “But I am the blood of the dragon, boy, and there is nothing in you that can match what is in me.”

[Demon Back]

The muscles across his shoulders and spine locked into alignment and his strength exploded past its limits and he pulled at Maelys’s wrist with both hands and it gave. An inch. Two. Until the grip on his throat loosened enough for him to breathe.

Maelys laughed and he brought his other hand up and closed it around Arthur’s throat as well and squeezed with both. Honestly the strength in those hands was beyond anything Arthur had ever felt, and soon Arthur’s vision began to go dark at the edges.

In a last ditch effort he drove his knee into the wound in Maelys’s thigh where the hidden blade was had been buried.

The giant grunted and his grip loosened for a fraction of a second and Arthur twisted free and dropped onto the dragon’s back and rolled and came up with Sunset in his hands.

Maelys looked at the wound and the blood pouring from it and he looked at Arthur and he smiled, a wide terrible smile full of yellow teeth.

“I am going to enjoy this.”

He came again with blackfyre swinging at his neck but Arthur deflected it and the blade skidded down Blackfyres edge and bit into Marlys shoulder.

Maelys swung again.

Arthur parried but Maelys shifted his sword and brought it in for another swing while throwing his hand forward in a shove that almost threw Arthur off his feet. Arthur blocked the next strike but Maelys kicked him and he fell across the dragon’s spine with Sunset held across his body. Maelys standing over him with the bastard sword raised in both hands for the killing stroke.

But Arthur got Sunset up and caught it even though the impact drove the crossguard into his chest and the breath out of his lungs. The giant leaned into it and the blade edged closer to Arthur’s throat.

Maelys put one massive knee on Arthur’s chest and leaned his full weight onto the sword and the meteoric steel of Sunset was the only thing between the edge and Arthur’s neck and it was moving down, inch by inch, as Arthur’s strength failed.

“I am going to open your throat,” Maelys said, conversationall, “and I am going to drink what comes out. That is what my father did to the men he defeated and it is what I do. And then I am going whatever place you call home and I am going to burn it.”

The blade touched Arthur’s throat.

“And your children I’m sure you have some… if there are any girls I’ll pass them around my camp like common whores, and I’ll make your sons fight in my pits—”

“RAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!” Arrhur screamed as every last part of his hamon exploded out of him, gathered into a single point beneath his sternum and released outward all at once in a burst that lit his entire body from the inside like a lantern.

It hit Maelys like a physical blow, the energy slamming into the giant’s chest and face and throwing him backward off Arthur with a shout of surprise and pain. Maelys landed on the dragon’s back six feet away with smoke rising from his armour and his face contorted, though he was quick to get up.

Arthur was on his feet before the giant started moving again. “I won’t let you anywhere near my family even if it means we die here!” He spat before he drew in a breath.

He drew in a breath.

FUS

The word came out of him like a cannon firing but before he did it he stabbed sunset into the dragons back to hold on.

This wasn’t just a gust of wind, it was the concept of force itself and it was aimed directly at the dragon beneath them.

Needless to say the dragon dropped out of the sky. The creatures great black body pitched forward and down in a spiral that Arthur felt in every bone as the world spun around him and the sea rushed up.

He held on as much as he could, his hands were locked around Sunset’s hilt and his boots were braced against the scales as the dragon tumbled through the air, but eventually dragon’s wings caught air.

Though it wasn’t enough.

The dragon had lost too much height and too much momentum and the wings were still flailing, the beast managed to level out for a single heartbeat before it rolled sideways hit an island just off dragonstone.

The dragon hit the beach belly first with a sound like a boulder falling from a cliff, a crash that sent up a wall of black sand and white spray fifty feet high, and it skidded across the beach with its wings spread and its claws gouging furrows in the sand and its screaming filling the world.

Arthur tried to hang on but sunset slipped out of the dragons scales and he was thrown from its back. He flew through the air with the sword still in his hands and the sky and the beach and the sea wheeling around him, before he hit the sand shoulder-first and rolled and rolled and came to a stop face-down in a drift of black grit with the taste of sand and blood in his mouth.

He lay there for a moment wondering if this was rule.

He was alive.

He did not understand how.

Every part of him hurt.

His nose was broken.

His cheekbone was broken.

But he was alive.

He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and reached for Hamon, for the last thin trickle of it that remained after the burst, and sent it through his body trying to jumpstart the healing.

The dragon lay forty yards away, on its side in the sand, its wings spread and torn and its chest heaving. Blood ran from the bolt wound in its leg and from the two other bolts still buried in its flank and tail. Its amethyst eyes were open and its jaw was opening weakly and the sounds coming out of it were not shrieks anymore.

They were whimpers.

Suddenly a hand closed around Arthur’s collar and it lifted him off the ground.

Maelys held him at arm’s length, the giant’s face a mask of blood and rage. The dragon helm was gone. The silver hair was matted with blood. “You,” Maelys said. His voice shook. “You. You did that. You did that to my dragon. You brought her down, how dare you, HOW DARE YOU!!!””

His other hand closed around Arthur’s throat.

“I am going to tear you apart. I am going to tear you into pieces so small that the crabs will not find enough of you to eat. I am going to pull your arms off and beat you to death with them. I am going to—”

He was squeezing very hard and Arthur could not breathe. The world was going dark again and this time there was no ability he could use that was not already exhausted.

His left arm hung loose at his side, trying one last trick he brought it up and drove his hidden blade into Maelys elbow.

It went in above the forearm, through the muscle, between the two bones, and out the other side. Maelys roared wnd the grip on Arthur’s throat opened. Arthur kicked off the giant’s chest with both feet, twisted free and landed on his back in the sand and rolled coming up on his knees gasping.

Maelys grabbed at his wound and then roared again like an animal. “I am the TRUE KING.” he roared. “I am the blood of the dragon undiluted. My father was a Blackfyre and my mother was a Blackfyre and every drop of blood in my body comes from the line of Aegon the Conqueror without one drop of anything else. I am what they were supposed to be. I am what the Targaryens forgot how to be.”

He drew Blackfyre.

“The High Priest told me so. He said I would be the first Blackfyre king and the last, that I would sit the Iron Throne and rule for a thousand years and the flames would keep me young and strong and no man would ever stand against me. R’hllor has chosen me. And I will burn every Targaryen and every Targaryen loyalist and every lord and every peasant who ever bent the knee to them, I will burn the Seven Kingdoms to the ground and rebuild them in my image and the Lord of Light will smile upon me and—”

He stopped as a look of realisation came upon his face.

“He said there was one….”

“One who would stand in my way… A man of unusual gifts.” The giant’s mouth spread into a grin that showed all his teeth. “It must be you… yes now it all make sense!”

Arthur’s eyes moved across the sand.

Sunset.

The blade was lying twenty feet away, half-buried in the black sand where it had fallen when Arthur was thrown from the dragon’s back, the hilt sticking up at an angle.

He ran for it.

Maelys ran too. The giant was slower but his stride was longer and he reached the sword at the same moment Arthur did. Arthur grabbed the hilt and rolled sideways as Blackfyre came down and buried itself in the sand where his head had been.

Arthur came up on his feet with Sunset in his hands.

Maelys pulled Blackfyre out of the sand and they began to circled each other.

Arthur moved on the balls of his feet with Sunset in a low guard with his eyes on the giant’s centre of mass.

Maelys brought Blackfyre around in a horizontal cut at chest height and Arthur ducked beneath it and thrust. Sunset went in at the giant’s side and it bit deep before Maelys twisted away and the blade came out with a fresh spray of blood.

Maelys did not slow. He came again with an overhead cut this time. Arthur sidestepped and slashed at the giant’s arm as it came down and Sunset opened a gash from elbow to wrist that laid the muscle bare. Blackfyre hit the sand. Maelys bellowed and backhanded Arthur with his free arm, the blow caught him on the side of the head and sent him staggering.

The giant then picked up blackfyre and swung it in short brutal arcs that had no finesse, no technique, just the raw application of overwhelming force. Arthur parried and deflected and gave ground as every parry cost him strength he did not have. His arms were like lead and his legs were like water. The cuts on his shoulder and chest had reopened and were bleeding freely and the sand beneath his feet was red with it.

While deflecting a thrust he caught Maelys across the face with a slash that opened a hole in his cheek which made his teeth show through the wound.

Maelys laughed through it. “Is that all. Is that ALL you have. I have taken worse from my own sons at the dinner table.”

He grabbed Arthur’s sword arm and the giant pulled. Arthur came off his feet. Maelys swung him like a club and slammed him into the sand and Arthur felt something crack in his side and Sunset flew from his grip.

Maelys stood over him.

Arthur rolled as Blackfyre hit the sand where he had been. He came up on his knees and Maelys kicked him in the chest and he flew backward and landed on his back with the wind knocked out of him and the sky spinning.

Sunset was ten feet away.

Too far.

Maelys walked toward him.

The giant was bleeding from a dozen wounds, his left arm hung at a strange angle and his face was a mask of blood, yet none of that seemed to stop him.

Arthur got to his feet.

Though he did not know how.

He raised both fists.

Maelys stopped in front of him with blackfyre held in his grip.

Arthur needed to get close and to do that… it meant he might need to break his promise.

He looked at Arthur standing there with his bare hands raised and something changed in the giant’s face.

“It is a shame the gods never blessed you to be one of my sons… you would’ve been the best amongst them.”

“The gods were kind enough to give me a life of meaning… can you say the same?”

Maelys didn’t reply and instead just brought blackfyre backwards before he thrust it into his stomach.

The Valyrian steel punched through his gambeson, through his skin and through the muscle wall and into the organs beneath. Arthur’s mouth opened but no sound came out because there was no air in him to make one.

He was very close to Maelys now.

Close enough that his left hand was only inches away from the man before him.

“It’s a shame you had to serve the false king… rest no warrior,” Maelys said as he got ready to skewer his insides.

Arthur triggered his hidden blade and drove it into Maelys’s throat.It went into the side of the neck below the jaw and the giant’s eyes went wide.

Arthur pulled it out and drove it in again. And again and again and again and again and again and again. Each hole spraying blood across Arthur’s face, Maelys’s hands came up to stop him but could not as the giant was choking on his own blood and his fingers had lost their strength.

Arthur kept stabbing.

More

More

More

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MORE

He stabbed until the throat was not a throat anymore, until the windpipe was severed and the arteries were open and the great vessels of the neck had been torn to shreds. He stabbed until Maelys’s head lolled sideways and almost fell off entirely.

He stopped when there was nothing left to stab and Maelys fell.

The giant went to his knees first, slowly, his violet eyes still open and fixed on Arthur’s face with an expression that was not rage and was not pain but was simply confusion, as if he never thought he could ever lose.

Then he pitched forward onto the sand and lay still, and his head, held to his body by a strip of skin and muscle no wider than a man’s finger, twisted at an angle that made the violet eyes stare up at the grey sky.

Arthur stood over him with Blackfyre was still in his stomach.

He looked down at it, the legendary sword of house Targaryen, one that was wielded by the Conqueror himself.

In any other circumstances he would’ve been giddy to see such a thing.

But now he knew it would be one of the last things he ever saw.

He wrapped one hand around the hilt to hold it still and he began to walk.

He didn’t know where he was going.

His vision had gotten darker throughout the fight and now he could barely see at all, he just knew he had to keep moving otherwise he might never get up again.

Then his foot caught on something in the sand and he went down, he did not have the strength to catch himself, but luckily fell forward onto something that was not sand.

It was warm.

It was warm and it was moving, rising and falling in what seemed like shuddering breaths.

The dragon.

He had fallen onto the dragon.

It was still alive, he could feel its heartbeat through the scales, and could hear the whimpers still coming from its throat,

He had done this.

He was responsible for hurting such a majestic creature.

One that had no choice in attacking today.

From afar he watching it spit fire it had been the most terrifying thing that he had ever seen.

But up close right now it was the most beautiful.

He put his hand on its scales.

They were hot and smooth and they pulsed with the creature’s heartbeat, and beneath them he could feel the pain.

The dragon’s eye watched him.

He couldn’t save himself… maybe he could save this beautiful beast.

Arthur reached for Hamon.

There was almost nothing left.

Barely a whisper.

But he used it regardless and allowed his Hamon to flow into the dragon. Hoping to take away some of its pain, and it seemed to work as the whimpering stopped.

The great beast shuddered and then went still as it seemed to relax, no longer being in as much pain.

Arthur’s hand slid off the scales and he fell onto his back.

Blood was pooling beneath him. He could feel it soaking into the black sand.

Everything was dark.

But despite that I still saw the system notification perfectly.

────────────────────

[QUEST COMPLETED]

────────────────────

THE BLACK DRAGON

────────────────────

Objectives:

✓ Slay the enemy commander

✗ Slay the dragon

Optional Objective:

✓ Tame the dragon

────────────────────

Rewards:

• Otherworld Token (Legendary)

Optional Reward:

• Fragment of Excalibur

────────────────────

Arthur read the words yet didn’t understand them.

The notification soon went away and the last spark of Arthur’s consciousness thought only to one thing.

Mira.

Cassie.

Rhaella

“I’ll find you…” he whispered before he fell into darkness.

(AN: So the battle of dragonstone is finished and Arthur is dead. Anyway what do you think about the rewards? Hope you enjoyed.)

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