"Heh... Hah!"
Aro wrenched his cutlass back, kicking a Chainbreaker soldier in the chest. As the man stumbled, Aro lunged for the kill, but before his blade could find throat, the fallen soldier was yanked back into the ranks by his comrades. In his place, a flurry of spear-tips erupted from the gap. Aro scrambled backward, his heart hammering against his ribs.
"Dammit! These bastards are like sea turtles! We can't get in!"
The curse echoed among his fellow pirates. Aro gritted his teeth in reluctant agreement. The defenders on the Sea Fox had transformed the quarterdeck and the stairs leading to the helm into a literal wall of bronze and wood.
Through months of grueling, repetitive training, the Chainbreakers had been forged into a machine. They didn't think; they reacted to whistles and shouts. Even in the chaos of a boarding action, they moved in unison—Thrust. Recover. Thrust. Recover.
Had Cutthroat Isle possessed a proper armory, the pirates would have been slaughtered within minutes. Instead, many of the defenders wielded nothing more than fire-hardened wooden poles or crude spears forged in haste by Craster and the island's few smiths. Their arrows were spent, their stones exhausted, yet the line held.
If we had real steel, these dogs wouldn't even be breathing my air, Garo cursed silently from the rear of the formation. He was a novice commander, a "green" officer leading a "green" army, but Jon's brutal drills—the midnight alarms, the forced marches to meals—were finally bearing fruit. The Chainbreakers were no longer men; they were a phalanx.
"I don't know why you're still holding on!" Aro shouted, shifting to psychological warfare. "My brothers are already at your fortress! Those pretty little things you left behind... they're going to be very well 'comforted' by the time we're through, hahaha!"
A ripple of hesitation went through the Chainbreaker line.
"Have you forgotten the Lord's words?" Garo's voice boomed over the din of battle. "If these fools truly dare to go looking for Lord Jon, the only thing they'll find is their own graves!"
"Long live Lord Jon! Long live the Chainbreakers!"
The roar that went up from the defenders was deafening, fueled by a fanaticism that made Aro's blood run cold. They didn't look like soldiers; they looked like zealots of R'hllor, possessed by a terrifying, singular purpose.
"Who the hell is this 'Lord Jon'?" Aro muttered to himself, watching the defenders' eyes glow with renewed madness.
Meanwhile, on the docks of Cutthroat Isle, the secondary invasion force crept forward. Letho "Blackfox" had split his thousand men into three prongs, sending a contingent of three hundred to storm the Pirate Fortress.
Because the occupation was still fresh, Jon had not reinforced the harbor or the outlying streets. He had focused every resource on the fortress itself and the men within it. To the approaching pirates, the empty streets and quiet market felt like a trap, yet greed pushed them onward.
The Pirate Fortress was built in a jagged "7" shape, rising from the sea like a stone ziggurat. Under Jon's direction, the outer walls had been smoothed into steep, slick inclines. Climbing them was a death sentence—a slow crawl under a rain of stones with no purchase for a hook.
"Boss Kamos!" a pirate called out, pointing his sword at the fortress's main entrance. "The whole place is buttoned up. Do we really have to go up the front stairs?"
Kamos, a massive man with a heavy ox-horn helm and a glinting brass ring through his nose, scowled. He had lost his sword-hand years ago, replacing it with a curved iron blade bolted to a leather bracer that reached his elbow. He looked more like a Minotaur than a man.
"The merchants said there's barely a hundred men in there," Kamos growled. "Look at the bay—the fleet is winning. If we take the tower, their hearts will break. Then the slaughter begins in earnest."
He pointed his iron arm at the fortress. "Send fifty men to scale the sides with hooks. The rest of you, follow me up the stairs!"
The fortress's main staircase was a grand, five-meter-wide stone ascent. To its sides were smooth, paved slopes that Kamos assumed were for drainage or aesthetics. He was wrong. They were runways.
Inside the fortress gates, a massive, cylindrical object—thick as a man is tall—was being winched into position behind a temporary wooden barrier.
It was a barbed roller, a nightmare of engineering Jon had adapted from half-remembered stories of the East. It was constructed from the massive trunks of coconut palms, studded with three-sided iron spikes and weighted with lead. To ensure it didn't catch on the stone, the axles had been slathered in clam grease and coconut oil. It looked like a titan's barbell, designed to grind whatever lay in its path into a red paste.
"Lord Narsas! Can we let it go?" a lookout whispered, his voice trembling with a mix of fear and excitement. The pirates were halfway up the stairs, crowded together in a dense, shouting mass.
Narsas watched the lead pirate—the one in the ox-horn helm—step onto the killing floor.
"Not yet..." Narsas breathed. Then, as the pirates surged into the narrowest part of the ascent, he dropped his hand. "Now! Pull the pins! Push!"
"One, two... HEAVE!"
The wooden barrier was yanked away. The massive, spiked cylinder groaned as it began to rotate, picking up speed as it hit the grease-slicked stone of the incline.