Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 144: A Wolf Before the Throne
The stench reached them before the walls of King’s Landing did.
Half a million people packed together without any meaningful sewer planning produced a smell thick enough to cling to the air itself.
Calling it a biological weapon would have been excessive. Lannor could distinguish every layer of the odor with painful clarity, but whether Witcher or Space Marine, both were human combat modifications designed for war.
Witchers routinely fought monsters that nested in refuse pits and cesspools, while Space Marines could breathe most toxic atmospheres in the void without issue.
The smell could sour their mood.
Affect their physiology?
Not remotely.
“King’s Landing has smelled like this since shortly after it was built, but there’s no need for concern. We’ll be living in the Red Keep. It stands high on Aegon’s Hill, the stink doesn’t drift that far upward. In King’s Landing, if you want a tolerable life, you buy property at higher elevation.”
Lannor now rode beside Eddard Stark while the Lord of Winterfell explained the capital to him.
For a man who looked carved from frozen stone, Eddard was surprisingly approachable.
“You have my thanks.”
Lannor finally lifted his gaze from the book and inclined his head politely toward him.
Eddard parted his lips slightly as he watched that smooth waterfall of silver hair slide along the young man’s sharply cut profile.
The innate ritualistic bearing inherited from the Emperor’s Children made even a simple nod from Lannor seem refined beyond reason.
Is he really not a Targaryen?
For a fleeting instant, Eddard found himself doubting his own judgment.
Then Lannor lowered his eyes back to the book, and Eddard shook the thought away.
House Targaryen was finished.
Even if descendants remained, they were only those two children hiding across the Narrow Sea. Exiles with neither kingdom nor proper royal upbringing.
How could they possibly produce someone like this?
The procession entered King’s Landing and gradually climbed toward the palace complex atop the city’s highest hill.
The Red Keep.
White stone walls crowned with sprawling red roofs.
Most people in the royal caravan visibly relaxed once the capital came into sight.
Arya and her sister were excited simply because they had arrived somewhere new.
The Northerners of the Stark guard, meanwhile, grew visibly more tense the deeper they entered the city.
Crowds were every guard captain’s nightmare.
Lannor quietly maneuvered his horse from the edge of the procession toward the safer middle ranks.
Moments earlier he had watched someone dump a chamber pot directly from a second-story window.
Yellow-green liquid and chunks had exploded across the street, splattering horse legs and the cloaks of passing knights.
“Knock knock, Arya.”
Lannor rapped against the carriage window shared by the Stark sisters.
The wooden shutter swung open immediately, revealing two flushed faces.
Arya’s cheeks were red from excitement.
Beside her, the beautiful red-haired girl with carefully arranged curls, Sansa Stark, was red for an entirely different reason.
“Keep an eye on Nymeria and Lady. I doubt you want those two running through the streets and then jumping all over you afterward.”
“And if they jump on you, I’m not letting you within six feet of me for the rest of the day.”
Lannor delivered the warning with complete seriousness.
Arya instantly rolled her eyes in annoyance.
“I know already!”
Outside the Hand’s Tower within the Red Keep, the household of the new Hand of the King had begun unloading baggage and settling in.
Lannor had not exactly carried his massive stash of Orens across worlds with him. At present he only possessed a dozen or so coins on his person.
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