The twelve thousand Westerlands infantry led by Addam Marbrand were advancing through The Crownlands with unusual ease.
Harrenhal was empty.
The various castles and keeps in the surrounding area were also empty.
They had captured several strongholds in succession with almost no meaningful resistance.
The cheers of the Soldiers grew louder and louder, and morale was high.
Yet, as Addam rode on horseback, his brow furrowed deeper and deeper, and the doubt in his heart grew like a snowball.
It was too smooth.
It was unnaturally smooth.
The military prowess of Aegon Targaryen's army, which had taken King's Landing and destroyed Stannis, was plain for all to see.
It was impossible for them to leave such a vast void in The Crownlands.
This smooth journey did not feel like an advance; it felt more like they were being led.
There was likely something deadly lurking behind it.
He gripped the hilt of his sword, his palms sweating.
But orders were orders, and the plan was set.
He could only suppress his unease and urge his troops to continue along the Kingsroad toward the next target... Rosby.
The walls of Rosby were high, casting long shadows in the afternoon sun.
The city gates were tightly shut, not a soul could be seen on the battlements, and the entire city was as quiet as a giant tomb made of stone.
Addam reined in his horse outside the city.
He stared at the closed gate, the tension in his heart stretched to the limit.
It was too quiet, quiet enough to make one's skin crawl.
He raised his hand, about to send scouts forward to investigate and gauge the situation inside before making further plans...
A chaotic, stumbling, and hurried commotion came from behind him to the side.
Addam turned his head sharply.
A routed Soldier, covered in blood and armor shattered, barely recognizable, struggled from the wild and rushed over, collapsing directly in front of his horse and kicking up a cloud of dust.
The man's face was smeared with blood, but his eyes were wide open, filled with the terror and despair of someone on the brink of death.
"My lord! It's bad!" The routed Soldier's voice was hoarse, like a broken bellows, "Jaime... is in an ambush at Starkworth Castle! Surrounded by the enemy... he's... he's not going to make it...!"
This sentence struck Addam like a bolt of lightning.
Jaime was ambushed and in mortal danger.
Jaime was the backbone of this army, its banner.
If he were gone, these twelve thousand men, this detachment from the Westerlands, would completely fall apart.
Addam's face changed drastically, his color draining away in an instant.
The whip in his hand dropped to the ground with a "snap."
He didn't even have time to think, no time to weigh the pros and cons; instinct had taken over everything.
"All troops—!" Addam drew his sword sharply, pointing the tip in the direction they had come, his voice cracking from extreme shock, anger, and urgency. "Abandon Rosby! Change direction at full speed, rush to reinforce Castle Stokeworth! Quickly! We must save Jaime!"
The order, wrapped in panic, instantly spread throughout the army.
The twelve thousand Westerlands infantrymen paused for a moment, then, under the roars and urging of their officers, turned around in a panic.
They could no longer care about formations or caution.
Everyone had only one thought in their minds: faster, even faster, rush over and save him before everything became irreversible!
The troops began to sprint back along the same path toward Starkworth Castle.
The sound of footsteps was chaotic and heavy, kicking up clouds of dust.
Just as they rushed into a relatively open plain, the ground beneath their feet began to tremble without warning.
It was not the vibration of marching; it was a duller, denser roar, as if countless heavy hammers were pounding the ground at once!
It made the soles of their feet numb and their eardrums buzz; even the warhorses neighed uneasily and reared up.
Addam's heart sank, as if a piece of ice had fallen into it.
He looked up almost subconsciously toward the direction the tremors were coming from, at the other end of the plain, on the horizon.
With just one glance, the blood in his entire body seemed to freeze instantly.
At the end of the horizon, a blinding torrent of blood-red was tearing through the dust and sweeping toward them!
It was hooves, armor, and lances raised like a dense forest of steel!
Sunlight shone on that blood-red mass, reflecting a cold, biting murderous intent.
Three thousand heavy cavalry.
Both man and horse were armored; from knight to warhorse, all were wrapped in thick, blood-red plate armor, like moving steel fortresses.
The lance tips were like a forest, pointing to the sky, then slowly lowering, aiming at the panicked and disorganized Westerlands infantry.
The Bloodsworn, the most elite force under Aegon Targaryen.
Only at this moment, seeing this iron cavalry torrent that crushed everything, did Addam understand the gap between the two sides with absolute clarity and absolute despair.
He knew the norm of Westeros armies better than anyone.
When ordinary lords went on campaigns, they merely brought their own armored guards and temporarily rounded up farmers from their lands to make up the numbers.
For those conscripts, having a coarse cloth surcoat, a rusty short sword, and a wooden shield was considered good; armor was a luxury.
Only the top, wealthiest lords, like the Lannister family, could afford organized, well-equipped standing armies.
The twelve thousand men under his command were elites piled up with the gold of the Westerlands.
Nearly seven or eight thousand were fully armored, a rate of armoring that was unrivaled in the Seven Kingdoms.
In any conventional war, they were a force capable of crushing their opponents.
But now, facing these three thousand heavy cavalrymen composed purely of heavily armored knights—impervious to blades, charging like a landslide—his pride, the Westerlands elite, were as thin as paper and as fragile as sun-dried mud bricks.
"Form ranks—! Shield wall! Quickly, form a shield wall—!"
Addam's hoarse, desperate roar was so weak it was almost inaudible against the tsunami-like roar unleashed by the Bloodsworn's charge.
In the blink of an eye, the blood-red torrent of steel slammed into the hastily formed, loose defensive line of the Westerlands infantry.
The heavy armor ignored the slashing longswords and shattered the hastily raised iron-bound wooden shields.
Lances easily pierced leather and chainmail, lifting and tearing bodies apart.
Hooves trampled over fallen bodies, the dull sound of shattering bones drowned out by the deafening sound of the charge and screams.
The already chaotic infantry formation was instantly torn open by countless gaps, like porcelain smashed by a heavy hammer, falling apart.
Soldiers fell in swathes, like harvested wheat.
"Don't panic! Rally! Stop them—!"
Addam's eyes turned red, and leading the center army that had not yet fallen into chaos, he charged fiercely into the flank of the Bloodsworn's charge.
He did not ask to repel them, only to delay them slightly, to buy a little time for the collapsing Soldiers behind to regroup, even if only for an instant.
But this resistance, like a mantis trying to stop a chariot, was meaningless in the face of absolute power.
A cold lance, wrapped in the immense force of the charge, pierced his chest precisely from the side.
The iron armor was pierced like paper.
The huge impact threw him from his horse, sending him tumbling several paces through the air before he slammed heavily into the muddy, blood-stained ground.
"Ugh..."
Addam opened his mouth, and only hot, bloody froth poured out.
His vision blurred and went dark rapidly.
He struggled to move his eyes, looking around.
Everywhere were fleeing figures, fallen bodies, and broken banners.
The fully armored heavy cavalry, like red-hot plowshares, repeatedly rolled over the routed Westerlands infantry, leaving a mess of flesh and blood behind.
It's over.
He thought vaguely at the end, his lips seeming to twitch, but he couldn't even manage that simple action.
A silent sigh dissipated into the wind, which smelled heavily of rust, and then, darkness swallowed everything completely.
The commander was killed in action, and the twelve thousand Westerlands infantry completely collapsed.
The defeat was like a landslide.
The routed Soldiers threw away their armor and weapons, fleeing across the hills and fields, but they could never outrun the mounted heavy cavalry.
The pursuit lasted for a long time, until no standing Westerlands Soldiers could be seen on the plain, only a mess of corpses and broken weapons, soaked in dark red mud.
The Westerlands reinforcements were completely wiped out.
Before Starkworth Castle, it was already a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood.
Jaime's eight thousand cavalry were tightly compressed into a small area in front of the castle by the Ash Company and the Golden Company.
The warhorses lost the space to charge, and the cavalrymen were forced to dismount, standing back to back, making their final stand on foot amidst the mountains of their fallen comrades and enemies.
The corpses of men and horses were piled layer upon layer, blood soaking every inch of ground, converging into a nauseating, dark red mire.
Jaime stood on a small hill made of corpses.
He was covered in blood, his exquisite Lannister lion armor shattered, with his blood-soaked tunic showing through in many places.
His right forearm had been severed, the wound a bloody mess, blood still bubbling out, streaming down his tattered armor and body, dripping onto the corpse of someone unknown at his feet.
Yet his remaining left hand still gripped the longsword, which was stained with dried blood clots.
He was still swinging his sword; his movements were slow and stiff from blood loss and exhaustion, but every swing still carried a desperate ferocity.
His gaze, time and again, stared fixedly to the west, toward the direction where Addam's reinforcements might arrive.
He could still fight.
He could still wait.
Just as he struck down a Golden Company Soldier trying to climb the pile of corpses, a familiar, thunderous sound came from the distance again.
The sound of hooves.
Many horses, horses clad in heavy armor.
Jaime's blood-stained eyelashes lifted sharply, and within the almost extinguished ashes in his eyes, a faint yet intense light suddenly burst forth...
Reinforcements? Addam's reinforcements had arrived?!
The next second, that light, like a spark extinguished by cold water, vanished with a "poof," leaving only cold, dead ashes.
What appeared on the horizon was that blinding blood-red.
Three thousand armored iron cavalry in scarlet heavy armor galloped in from the western plains, treading through dust and the sunset glow.
Both man and horse were armored, lances like a forest, silent as a mountain.
The flags flying in the wind had a black background, embroidered with a scarlet three-headed dragon.
The Targaryen army.
It was the Bloodsworn that had just crushed the Westerlands reinforcements.
The black Ash Company, the golden Golden Company, the scarlet Bloodsworn.
Three great armies, three vast, distinct, and equally boundless seas of death, surrounded Jaime and the small mountain of corpses beneath his feet from three directions, trapping them completely in the center.
Surrounded tightly.
No gaps, no retreat, not even the slightest possibility of breathing.
Jaime's movements stopped.
He slowly, extremely slowly, raised his head.
His gaze crossed the layers of enemy troops, a forest of blades and spears, looking toward the nearby Starkworth Castle.
The highest part of the castle's main tower remained only as a dark silhouette in the twilight.
Fighting until now, from dawn till dusk, through mountains of corpses and seas of blood, he had exhausted all the cavalry he brought, bled dry, lost an arm... in the end, he could not cross these last few hundred meters.
In the end, he could not see her one last time.
In the end, he still could not protect her.
He lowered his head, looking at his empty right arm.
The excruciating pain from his severed arm seemed to have been extracted; his nerves were so numb that not even a trace of pain could get through.
Does it hurt?
Perhaps it did, but compared to the despair of failing to save Cersei, this pain was not worth mentioning.
The next moment, all the confusion, all the unwillingness, all the burning hatred and regret receded from his eyes like a tide.
Only an ice-cold, bone-chilling calm remained, and the resolve buried deep beneath that calm.
Jaime was silent, slowly raising his head.
His remaining left arm slowly raised, gripping that tattered longsword, the tip pointing straight ahead.
No reinforcements, no hope, no way out.
Then let us fight until the last moment.
He was Jaime Lannister.
A lion can die in battle, but its spine will not bend.
That "three-colored ocean" formed by the black cloaks of the Ash Company, the golden armor of the Golden Company, and the blood-red heavy armor of the Bloodsworn was slowly closing in; the black-backed flags with the scarlet three-headed dragon snapped in the wind, and every Targaryen crest on every flag seemed to be grinning at him.
In his eyes, there was no longer a shred of confusion, only a bone-chilling resolve.
The longsword was raised, reflecting the sky full of blood-red light and the crimson of the red dragon flags, freezing into a scene of despair and tragedy.
Then, darkness swallowed him completely.
Ãdvåñçé çhàptêr àvàilàble óñ pàtreøn luffy1898