[160] The Price of Defiance
Chapter 160: The Price of Defiance
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The world bent around her brother.
She'd seen Viserys command rooms, bend lords to his will, make queens of commoners and corpses of kings. But this? This was something else entirely. This was divinity wearing flesh, and the flesh was struggling to contain it.
He stood ten feet tall, muscles rippling with power that made the air itself recoil. His eyes – gods, his eyes burned like the heart of Valyria must have burned in its final moments. The Faceless Men, those legendary dealers of death, looked like children playing with sticks before him.
"KNEEL."
The word wasn't spoken. It was imposed on reality. Three assassins closest to him simply dropped, blood streaming from every orifice as their bodies forgot how to resist. Others staggered, faces flickering between identities like a deck of cards being shuffled by a madman.
This is my brother, she thought, feeling her own wounds knitting closed with the power he'd gifted her. This is what we’ve become.
The survivors regrouped with inhuman speed. They seemed far superior than normal humans, it seemed. Twenty of them, moving in perfect synchronization, faces settling into grim masks of determination. They'd accepted death. Now they sought to make it mutual.
They came at him like a wave of knives and shadow.
The first to reach him learned why that was a mistake. Viserys didn't even draw steel. His neck flexed forward, and from his throat erupted... nothing. Not fire, not lightning. Just pure, absolute nothing. A cone of un-being that made her eyes water to look at.
Five assassins ceased.
Not died nor simply ‘burned,’ but ceased to exist. The space they'd occupied was simply empty, as if they'd never existed at all. The cobblestones beneath where they'd stood were unmarked. Even their shadows were gone.
"What in the seven hells–" she started to say, but three more were already on him.
These were smarter. They came from different angles, blades seeking the soft spots that every human had. Throat, armpit, groin. Places where even dragon-strengthened muscle couldn't fully protect. Given the assassins’ supernatural strength, these were real weak points.
Viserys moved like water. No, like something water aspired to be.
His fist caught the first assassin in the chest. The man's – woman's? – ribcage simply caved in, organs rupturing from the impact. Before the body hit the ground, Viserys had spun, catching the second's blade between his palms. The steel shattered like sugar glass.
The third got close. Too close. Her blade actually touched his throat before his hand clamped on her wrist. There was a sound like kindling snapping, and her arm bent in three new places. He pulled her close and bit out her throat.
Her brother had just torn out someone's throat with his teeth. And he was smiling.
"Dany!" His voice boomed, still carrying those inhuman harmonics. "Try to keep up!"
Keep up? She was already moving, her own transformation singing in her blood. Her nails had become claws, her teeth sharper than any blade. A Faceless Man tried to flank her, and she introduced his spine to the outside world.
But they learned. Gods damn them, they learned fast.
"The female!" one called out, voice shifting between three different timbres. "She's mortal still! Kill the sister!"
They swarmed toward her.
Mistake.
She heard Viserys roar – not a human sound, not even a dragon sound. Something older. Angrier. The ground cracked beneath his feet as he moved, and suddenly he was between her and them, a wall of scale and fury.
"That’s my sister you’re eyeing," he snarled, and the word carried weight. Divine weight. Possessive, protective weight.
What followed wasn't a fight. It was artistry painted in blood and screams.
He caught one by the head, fingers sinking into the skull like it was soft cheese. Another tried to backstab him; Viserys simply flexed his wings, and the assassin found himself impaled on bone spurs she hadn't even noticed growing there.
A woman with a child's face tried to hamstring him. He stomped down, and her leg became paste from knee to ankle. When she screamed, he filled her mouth with dragonfire – not the annihilation breath, just good old-fashioned burning.
"Too easy," he growled, grabbing two more. He slammed them together with such force that they merged for a moment before falling apart into pieces. "I expected more from the servants of death."
One tried to run. Dany was surprised these assassins feared life at all. Viserys's hand shot out, that terrible un-fire erupting again. The assassin made it three steps before the annihilation caught him. He went from sprinting to simply not being there, mid-stride.
Sixty seconds, she counted in her head. His new power has a cooldown? As if reading her thoughts, more assassins tried to rush him during the gap. They'd been counting too.
Viserys laughed. "Clever. But not clever enough."
He'd been holding back.
His wings spread fully, each one thirty feet of midnight and malice. The membrane between the bones wasn't leather anymore; it was sunlight given form, edges sharp enough to cut light itself. He spun, and seven assassins discovered what it meant to be bisected by darkness.
"Brother!" she called out, seeing more shapes on the rooftops. "Above!"
Crossbow bolts rained down, each one glowing with the same oily sheen as the scorpion bolts. Poison. Magic. Death distilled into metal.
Viserys raised one wing as a shield. The bolts struck and shattered, unable to pierce what was no longer purely physical. That shouldn’t be possible to block, it’d even penetrated the dragons. Is that the new magic he was talking about? With his other hand, he grabbed a chunk of rubble – half a wall – and hurled it skyward.
The rooftop exploded. Bodies and parts of bodies rained down.
"How many of you are there?" he asked the air, almost conversationally. A Faceless Man tried to capitalize on his distraction, coming in low with twin daggers. Viserys caught him by the throat without looking. "I'm talking. Don't interrupt."
The squeeze that followed separated the assassin's head from his shoulders. Literally. The body dropped, still twitching, while Viserys held the head up like a lantern.
"Well?" he asked it. The face was still shifting, cycling through a dozen identities even in death. "How many?"
When it didn't answer, well, couldn't answer, he sighed and punted it into the canal.
More came. They always came. Wave after wave, like the city itself was vomiting them up. But something had changed. The fear in their shifting features was growing. These weren't mindless automatons. They were people who'd trained their entire lives to be death incarnate.
And they were being butchered by something that made death look tame.
"Fifty-seven," Viserys announced suddenly. "I've killed fifty-seven of your order in… what, five minutes? Six? Dany, are you keeping track?"
"Bit busy!" she called back, her sword – taken from a dead assassin – removing another head. The blood that splattered her sizzled against her skin. Another gift from her brother. She was becoming something more than human too.
"Fair enough." He caught an assassin mid-leap, holding the man up by his ankle. "You know what your problem is? You've forgotten what it means to face dragons. True Blood Dragons. Not the broken remnants the world was left with, but the blood of Old Valyria at its peak."
He swung the assassin like a club, using him to beat three others to death before the improvised weapon fell apart.
"We conquered the world, I’m sure you remember, slaves," he continued, stepping over the corpses. "Not through politics or gold or even magic. Through being the apex predator. Through being what even death feared."
A brave one tried to garrote him from behind. The wire bit into his neck, drawing blood. For a moment, just a moment, she thought–
Viserys reached back, grabbed the assassin, and pulled him over his shoulder. The wire snapped. So did most of the assassin's bones when he hit the ground. Viserys's neck was already healing, the deep cut sealing like it had never been.
"Nice try," he said, then stomped. The wet crunch echoed off the buildings. "Anyone else?"
They came in one final wave. All of them. Every Faceless Man left in the district, moving as one organism. Thirty bodies flowing like water, faces a blur of constant change. It was beautiful, in a horrifying way. The culmination of centuries of training and mysticism.
Viserys's grin was worse than any snarl. "Finally. Some effort."
They hit him from every angle. Blades, poisons, garrottes, even what looked like magical fire. For a moment, he disappeared under the swarm.
Then the annihilation breath erupted. Not from his mouth this time. From his eyes, like some sort of deity’s glare. His gaze became a nexus of un-being. He spun on his heels, shooting the eye beam in a circle, and anything it touched simply wasn't alive anymore. Twenty assassins became ten. Ten became five. Five became memories.
When the beam stopped, Viserys stood alone in a perfect circle of untouched ground with a proud smile. Everything else – bodies, blood, even the cobblestones – had been erased in a thirty-foot radius.
"Brother," she said. "What are you, truly?"
He turned to her, and for a moment she saw something ancient looking out through his eyes. Something that had eaten cities and shit out empires. Then he blinked, and it was just Viserys again. Mostly.
"I'm exactly what they feared I'd become," he said. "Now come. I don’t think that was the last batch of assassins; that’s only the last batch who thought they could win against me in a head-on battle. We have some architects of stupidity to visit."
While Dany processed this fight in her head, relaxing just a little to recover, Viserys took a note of the notifications flashing before his eyes.
[You’ve reached Level 115]
He stared. In twenty minutes of slaughter, he'd gained what he knew would need years to achieve in the future. These superhuman Faceless Men were truly a feast.
"Dany." His voice was gentler now, seeing her expression. "You did well."
"I killed maybe a dozen. You killed..."
"Hundreds, by the end of this day." He looked up at where their dragons circled, unable to help in the narrow streets. "But that was just the opening act. Now we remind Braavos why dragons ruled the world."
The way he said it, casual as discussing the weather, sent shivers down her spine.
Her brother had become something beyond kings or conquerors.
He'd become inevitable.
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