Alright, first of all, welcome, and thank you all so much!
❤️
I honestly didn’t expect this much enthusiasm after only four chapters.
It’s really… wow.
I truly appreciate all your comments and suggestions as well.
I read every single reply, and I’ll definitely consider and implement any suggestion or request that I think fits the story.
And if a suggestion gets enough likes, that definitely gets my attention too.
Now, I have a little game and challenge for all of you.
As you know, Webnovel resets the rankings tomorrow, Sunday, or early Monday depending on your time zone.
So here’s the challenge:
Let’s reach the Top 20.
Your opinions genuinely matter to me, and I want to know what you like, what you don’t like, and what I can improve.
I have an crazier question for you:
Can we actually make this the #1 novel?
Just imagine seeing a novel with fewer than 10 chapters sitting at the very top of the rankings.
😂
That would honestly be insane.
Yeah, maybe it won’t happen.
Or maybe it will.
Who knows?
👀
Let’s find out.
The game will officially start as soon as Chapter 6 is published.
Bonus chapters will be released as soon as each goal is reached, so I’ll basically be sitting in front of my screen all day watching your progress.
Don’t make me wait too long.
😊
Oh, and one more thing!
Here’s the chapter.
🔥
……….
When Onyxia, the Broodmother, unfolded her hill-sized body in front of the three bandits, all three of them pissed themselves on the spot.
A dragon.
A dragon out of legend.
A beast the world had called extinct for better than a hundred years, standing there alive and breathing in front of them.
Maybe it was because Erwin’s character had cut her down again and again in the game, her severed head hung up on a wall in Stormwind’s own square for everyone to see.
Maybe it was simple fury at being made into someone’s mount, at having her freedom taken from her without so much as being asked.
Whatever the reason, the moment Onyxia arrived, she threw back her head and loosed a roar straight at the three men.
The sound alone hit them like a wave off the sea, and none of the three could stay on their feet through it.
Deep in that terrible mouth, fire was already building at the back of her throat, magic-fed and hungry, looking ready to pour out and burn all three of them down to ash in the next breath.
The bandits went down where they stood, pissing and fouling themselves, crawling and sobbing for their mothers.
Whatever strength fear hadn’t already stolen from their legs, it finished off now.
None of them could so much as rise to run.
Even Erwin, faced with something that size, felt the shock of it in his own chest.
But he knew where she’d come from.
His own mount slot.
His own mount.
And by every rule the game had ever taught him, a mount could never turn on the man who summoned it.
So even with something cold and ancient crawling up from the bottom of his own soul, Erwin didn’t waste the moment worrying over Onyxia.
He drove his longsword, the one he’d earned as Grand Marshal, straight into the chest of a bandit still trying to drag himself upright.
Then he ran down the second, who’d made it a few yards crawling, and finished him just as easily.
Pushing down the sickness of a first kill, he walked up to the last man standing, put enough fear into him, and got what he wanted to know out of him without much trouble.
The world wasn’t Azeroth after all, not the one he’d first guessed at.
This was the one from George R.
R.
Martin’s own story, the game of thrones.
And right now, he was standing somewhere in the kingswood, in the southeast reaches of Westeros.
Anyone who’d read the books or watched the show knew what kind of world this was, sprawling and grim and impossible to look away from.
Erwin had only ever seen the show, but that was enough to make him a fan same as anyone.
For all its pull, though, the story never let anyone forget what kind of place it was.
Lies and betrayal ran through every page of it.
Kings, lords, knights, sellswords, farmers, it didn’t matter who you were, death could find you in the one way you never saw coming.
A man could be standing at the height of his power one moment and gone the next, cut down by a lie or a knife in the back before he even understood what had happened.
There was a line the red priestess liked to repeat, about how long the night ran and how much waited in it hungry for blood.
Living in this world felt exactly like that.
Something could come tearing out of the dark at any moment, from any direction, and rip you apart before you had the chance to understand why.
If a man wanted to keep breathing, the safest course was simple.
Cut down every threat before it had the chance to become one.
There was a line the queen was fond of too, one that summed the whole business up better than anything else could: win, or die.
Nothing in between worth naming.
So once Erwin had his answers and understood exactly where he stood, he didn’t hesitate.
He ran his sword through the last bandit where he knelt, pleading and soaked in his own filth.
There was no room in this world for mercy.
Every man who’d ever shown his enemies an ounce of it had paid for the kindness in the end.
Ned Stark, for one.
There was another reason behind it too, one that had nothing to do with survival.
When he’d killed the first bandit, the words +100 XP had drifted up in front of his eyes.
He’d taken it for a trick of the light at first, until the second bandit dropped and the same hundred points floated up again.
While he was putting the fear of the gods into the third man, he’d opened the panel in his head just to check, and found the bar under his character sheet now read two hundred out of three.
One hundred more, and he’d level.
So once he had the answer he needed, he wasn’t about to let that hundred points walk away.
Sure enough, the moment the third bandit died, he leveled.
Level two now.
Strength up by two-tenths of a point.
Heavy Strike bumped up to level two as well.
And the exhaustion that had been dragging at every part of him since the fight started vanished in an instant, replaced with something that felt like a full tank of strength all at once.
That left Onyxia.
Just as he’d guessed, she hadn’t made a single move against him the whole time, only watched, fierce and unblinking, while he finished the three men off.
As far as Erwin was concerned, owning a dragon like her meant he could walk through this world without much fear of anything in it.
He’d already learned the timeline he’d landed in, roughly ten years since Robert had taken the Iron Throne.
Dragons had been dead in this world for over a century by now.
With Onyxia at his side, he could do what the future Dragon Queen herself would one day manage, build an army from nothing and take the Iron Throne for his own.
Unite both continents under one crown, even, if it came to that.
For now, though, the smart play was to keep his head down.
Until he had land and men of his own to call on, he couldn’t afford to let anyone learn he had a dragon.
The moment that got out, every crown and every sellsword in Westeros would come looking for him at once.
Best to sit quiet a few years and wait for the War of the Five Kings to break out.
By then, with coin, land, and men behind him, and a dragon on top of it all, he could carve his way to the Iron Throne without much trouble at all.
That was the plan, at least.
Reality had other ideas.
The moment he tried to climb onto Onyxia’s back, her roar knocked him flat before he got within ten feet of her.
Then she spoke.
Cursed him up and down, in fact, and told him plainly she’d sooner die than serve as any man’s mount.
Two reasons, as it turned out.
First, dragon pride ran too deep in her to ever suffer a human on her back.
Second, and this was the one that mattered more, she hadn’t forgotten a single one of the times he’d hunted her down in that game of his, hung her skull up on display in Stormwind’s square for the whole city to gawk at.
Whatever hatred she carried for him, no words could do it justice.
Erwin stood there utterly floored.
It had never once crossed his mind that anything he’d done back in that game could follow him here and matter.
But that was just normal farming.
How else was a man supposed to earn a mount like her, if not by grinding her down again and again until she finally dropped what he wanted?
And it was starting to look like Onyxia wasn’t some ordinary mount at all.
This was the dragon herself.
Her mind had come across with her body, whole and unbroken.
A dragon that could talk.
Which meant, if she could speak, she likely had more than fire behind those teeth.
Whatever magic dragons carried in this world, she probably carried it too.
Only problem was, no matter how he tried explaining himself, no matter how many times he apologized, Onyxia’s hatred never so much as flickered.
She wouldn’t take an order from him if her life depended on it.
Nothing for it.
Erwin dismissed her for the time being.
She wasn’t the only dragon sitting in his collection, though, so he ran through the rest of them, hoping one might answer his call instead.
No luck.
Onyxia turned out to be the only dragon he could summon at all.
Worse, anything with even a hint of magic to it refused to come through, same for anything mechanical.
That left him with ordinary warhorses and the plainer sort of beast, elephants, goats, dire wolves, and the like.
So much for building an army of dragons to carve up Westeros.
That plan was dead before it started.
He settled for a mount of his own kind instead, a fast white horse, and dropped the transmog on his gear in favor of a full set of Seventh Legion plate.
Better to look like a man not worth crossing.
Following the direction the third bandit had given him with his last breath, Erwin found the Kingsroad, and followed it until it brought him to the inn on the banks of the Wendwater.
From here, it seemed, he’d have to build everything from nothing.