(3rd Person POV)
Neither the city lord, Oswin Steir, nor the Mage Guardian Profellie had expected a surprise visit from the first princess.
"Raise your heads."
The princess — Ilseveir Kaltstein — spoke with a voice far more pleasant than her expression warranted. Her face betrayed nothing: no warmth, no curiosity, only the cool indifference of someone accustomed to authority.
Profellie and Oswin lifted their gazes, the others in the line rising with them.
Ilsevere approached the two most important figures in the city, her knights falling into step beside her, gauntleted hands resting on pommels. The cobblestones seemed to quiet beneath their boots.
"What can I do for you, Your Highness?" Oswin kept his tone measured, though her gaze settling on him made the back of his neck prickle.
Ilseveir did not answer immediately. Instead, she let her eyes drift — past the kneeling guards, across the rooftops beyond the gate, over the sprawl of Eisen City stretching beneath a sky still darkened by her dragon's shadow. When she finally spoke, a thin edge of amusement laced her words.
"I've been hearing quite a lot about this city, Magistrate Oswin. As its lord, I trust you can bring me up to pace on recent developments."
Oswin and Profellie exchanged the briefest of glances. No words were needed. They both knew this had to be about that certain individual — Arthur Pendragon and his Hellfire Company.
"Your Highness," Oswin began carefully, "could it be you're referring to the film that has been the subject of much discussion, even in the capital?"
Ilseveir's lips curved — not quite a smile, but close enough to unsettle.
"I have heard about some new form of theatre gaining popularity, yes. But no." She raised a finger, silencing any further guessing. "I'm referring to those strange handheld devices — and the tower that supposedly powers them. Word has reached me that someone in this city has invented a new class of magical artifact entirely."
Oswin's stomach tightened. Profellie's expression remained carefully neutral beside him.
'She's interested in Arthur directly.'
"Merchants from the capital won't stop talking about it," Ilseveire continued, clasping her hands behind her back as she paced slowly before them. "Eisen City — the city of stars in the night, they call it now. Cheap magical artifacts that blow wind continuously without a soul to power them, all sustained by a single tower." Her red eyes found Oswin's again, sharp and glinting. "I've come to see these things for myself."
A quiet dread settled over Oswin. He could feel Profellie thinking the same thing beside him.
Arthur Pendragon's peaceful days in Eisen City had just come to an end.
Of all the attention the man could have drawn, it had to be hers. The First Princess of the Nordsturn Kingdom — Ilseveire Kaltstein, renowned as a magical prodigy since childhood and blessed by the Goddess of Night herself.
And, more dangerously, a contender for the throne.
Princess, not prince. It mattered little. She commanded the support of powerful noble houses, and few questioned her competence. If anyone could claw her way to the crown and rule as queen, it was her.
And considering the nature of this visit, Oswin had no doubt she intended to pull Arthur Pendragon into her politics — whether the man wished it or not.
---
At the Eisenturm Academy, the students had already noticed the dragon in the sky — and the royal crest blazing on its forehead. After a brief stir of excitement and murmured speculation, most returned to their studies. Royal affairs were royal affairs. Academy life carried on.
Deep beneath the main hall, in the chamber Saza had sealed off weeks ago, the «Temporal Confluence Array» was nearly complete.
Arthur stood with Firfel, Sylwen, and Apollonia along the far wall, watching Saza work the final strokes. Thanokai's blood had been painted across the floor in precise, spiraling patterns — lines that pulsed faintly with each pass of her hand, the deep crimson brightening as the array neared activation.
"And done."
Saza stepped back from the center. The array ignited.
Bright red light flooded the chamber, casting long shadows against the stone walls. The air shifted — not with heat, but with something older and stranger. A pressure that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the fabric of time itself bending under deliberate force.
Whispers filled the room. Not voices — phenomena. The faint crackling of moments folding over one another, the hum of spatial boundaries thinning. Apollonia pressed closer to Firfel without realizing it.
Then the mana came.
It surged from nowhere — vast, formless, pouring into the chamber like water breaking through a dam. The space-time element carried with it an energy so dense that the walls groaned under the strain.
Saza gritted her teeth and braced herself, arms outstretched, pulling the excess mana into her own body to stabilize the array before it could spiral out of control.
But before she could absorb more than a fraction, the current shifted.
The mana changed direction — drawn sharply, hungrily, toward Arthur's hand. Toward the ring on his finger.
Saza's concentration broke. She stared.
'What the—'
The Devourer was devouring the space-time energy without hesitation, pulling it in with a force that dwarfed her own absorption rate. It didn't slow. It didn't discriminate. It simply consumed — steadily, endlessly, like a hole in the world that nothing could fill.
Arthur stood perfectly still, watching the ring work. He didn't need to channel his own power. He didn't need to do anything at all. The ring operated independently, its hunger entirely its own, and since it wasn't divine energy flowing through him, the Origin of this world had no reason to stir.
'Convenient.'
Saza's gaze locked on the ring with an intensity that bordered on alarm. She had known Arthur possessed powerful artifacts, but this was something else. The sheer volume of space-time mana it was pulling in should have destabilized anything short of a god-forged vessel.
Then Arthur's eyes widened.
A notification surfaced in his mind — the Entertainment System registering a change in one of its host's bound artifacts.
[The Devourer Ring has consumed a significant volume of space-time energy. New ability developed: Time Manipulation.]
[Time Manipulation: You can stop time for five minutes, travel three minutes into the past, and three minutes into the future. This ability can grow depending on how deeply the Devourer Ring comprehends the law of space-time.]
He turned the ring slowly on his finger, reading the details again.
'It can even learn space-time law?'
He stared at it with an expression caught between envy and fascination. His own time-related abilities were imitations at best — he could revert an object's state, return a broken ship to its former condition, but that was restoration, not true temporal control.
The ring had just leapfrogged him in a single feeding.
He had always known the Devourer Ring possessed awareness. A dim, alien sentience that guided its hunger. But learning?
Developing new capabilities from what it devoured? That was something he hadn't accounted for.
After two minutes, the surge subsided. The mana settled. The array's light dimmed to a steady, stable glow — still active, still potent, but no longer threatening to tear the chamber apart.
Saza exhaled slowly and rolled her shoulders, then turned to face Arthur with the particular expression of someone who had just watched a house cat swallow a river.
She said nothing about it.
Instead, she knelt beside the array and placed both palms flat against its surface, closing her eyes. The red light pulsed once beneath her hands, responding to her touch.
"The array is stable," she said after a moment. "I can calibrate the time flow between both worlds now." She opened her eyes and looked up at Arthur. "How do you want it configured?"
Arthur crossed his arms. "What are the limits?"
"The natural ratio between our worlds is roughly one-to-four — one week in your world for every month here," Saza said. "Right now, time in this world moves far faster than yours. The array can correct that, slow this world's flow relative to yours, or even reverse the ratio entirely." She paused. "At maximum capacity, I can push it so that twelve days pass in your world for every single day here."
Arthur glanced at the blood-painted lines still glowing beneath their feet. "How long did this take you? Three days?"
"Roughly."
"And the only rare material was Thanokai's blood."
Saza caught where he was going. "You have an unlimited supply of that."
"I do." Arthur looked down at the ring on his finger.
The Time Manipulation ability it had just developed was still fresh. Five minutes of stopped time. Three minutes in either direction. But the notification had been clear: the ability could grow the more the ring comprehended space-time law. And what better way to feed that comprehension than letting it gorge on the same energy every time the array was rebuilt?
'If the array degrades, I rebuild it. Saza gets her calibration, and the ring gets another meal.'
"Push it to the maximum," Arthur said. "Twelve-to-one."
Saza raised an eyebrow. "You're certain? The array won't last long at that ratio."
"Then we rebuild it." He said it the way someone discusses replacing a lightbulb. "Thanokai isn't going anywhere, and you can inscribe the array in your sleep by now. If it breaks, it breaks."
That meant he could spend nearly two weeks back home and return to find barely a day had passed in Eisen City. His obligations here wouldn't pile up. His business wouldn't stall. Nothing would slip through the cracks while he was away.
"And when we reconstruct it," Arthur added, almost as an afterthought, "the activation will release another surge of space-time energy. Same as just now."
Saza glanced at him. "Why would that matter?"
"The ring absorbed the energy from the first activation. I want it to do it again."
Her brow creased slightly. She looked at the ring, then back at him. "What did it gain from absorbing it?"
"Something useful."
The non-answer hung in the air. Saza studied him for a moment longer, clearly wanting to press — a two-thousand-year-old scholar watching a mysterious artifact devour space-time energy and develop unknown capabilities was not the sort of thing she could set aside easily. But Arthur's expression made it plain the conversation was over.
"Fine." She turned back to the array and began the calibration, her fingers moving through precise gestures above the glowing lines. "I'll need more of his blood when the time comes. Make sure your Hexathyr knows."
"He'll cooperate."
"I imagine he will." Her tone suggested she'd already seen enough of Thanokai's relationship with Arthur to draw her own conclusions. "Give me a few minutes."