William slapped his open palm twice against the cold, slightly rough gray surface rising out of the frozen mud, feeling the solid vibration travel all the way up his forearm.
There was no give, no crumbling mortar, and no hollow echo. It felt like hitting the side of a mountain.
Around him, the rhythmic, industrial symphony of construction had completely replaced the old, dead silence of Border Town. From the base of the cliff all the way down to the riverbank, the air was filled with the non-stop scraping of iron shovels, the heavy, synchronized thudding of wooden tamping poles, and the hoarse shouts of foremen directing cartloads of gravel.
After more than two weeks of backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk labor, Prince Roland's "impossible" defense line was no longer a daydream on a piece of parchment.
Nearly one hundred meters of the perimeter wall now stood upright in the autumn chill — a thick, imposing spine of dark-gray concrete cutting straight across the muddy clearing between the jagged rocks of the North Slope and the churning, lead-colored waters of the Redwater River.
Walking parallel to the structure, his heavy leather boots crunching over scattered limestone chips, William watched with the critical eye of a veteran gamer seeing a high-level base take shape in real life.
Fifty paces ahead, atop a wooden scaffolding platform, the master mason overseeing the site was shouting instructions to a line of sweating workers as they tilted a heavy wooden trough, pouring a fresh batch of "liquid stone" — that gray mixture of finely ground clinker burned by Anna's fire, river sand, crushed gravel, and gypsum — straight into the timber formwork.
Within forty-eight hours of curing, that wet mud would harden into an unbreakable barrier capable of stopping a charging warhorse cold.
Yet, as William strolled along the shadow of the wall, his attention wasn't entirely on the masonry.
Deep inside his chest, a familiar, restless buzzing was vibrating through his bloodstream — the flow of his Magic Power running along his nerves like a live low-voltage wire.
Every single night for the past fourteen days, locked inside the dark guest room with Arthur, William had dutifully drained his magic pool to zero by jumping back and forth between the beds until his stomach heaved. By now, the initial vertigo and nausea had almost completely vanished, and he could feel that the "tank" beneath his ribs had grown noticeably deeper.
Looking down the long, straight stretch of the hundred-meter wall, the temptation to test his new limits hit him like a physical itch.
Just one quick blink, William thought, his fingers twitching at his sides as he eyed the distant riverbank at the end of the concrete line. Nobody down in the trench is even looking this way. I just want to see if I can clear the full hundred meters in a single jump now, and feel how the System handles the long-range spatial fold...
Before he could even focus his mind on the distant shadow by the river, however, Arthur's voice echoed inside his skull with irritating, crystal-clear sharpness.
Late the previous night, right after finishing his telekinesis drills with a stack of silver coins, Arthur had pulled William aside by the window and given him a warning that was dead serious:
— "Listen to me very carefully, Will. Starting tomorrow morning, you do not use your magic anywhere inside the town limits. Not in the courtyard, not in the hallways, and not in the woods. Not even for half a second."
The reason behind Arthur's paranoia was simple, logical, and genuinely terrifying: Nightingale.
Just thinking her name made a strange, electric mix of adrenaline and butterflies twist in the pit of William's stomach.
Thanks to his memories of the story, William knew very well that the elite killer and scout of the Witch Cooperation Association was already creeping closer to Border Town — in fact, she might have already slipped past the outer guards to investigate rumors of Anna's survival.
To William, Nightingale wasn't just another strong piece on the board; back when he used to read the story on Earth, the blonde assassin in the white cloak had easily been his absolute favorite character. There was something magnetic about her — that blend of lethal efficiency, quiet melancholy, and unshakeable, ride-or-die loyalty once someone earned her trust.
The problem was that right now, she didn't trust them at all.
At this very second, Nightingale could be standing less than two paces away from William's left shoulder, watching his every breath through the monochromatic, black-and-white distortion of her Mist World. In that pocket dimension of hers, she was completely invisible to human eyes, completely silent, and holding a silver-plated dagger inches from their throats.
If she saw a grown man suddenly fold space and teleport across the construction site — wielding a power that, according to every law of this world, belonged exclusively to women "corrupted" by demonic energy — she wouldn't stop to ask polite questions. Either she would report them as monstrous anomalies to the Witch Cooperation Association, or their entire cover story as harmless scholars from the Reino da Aurora would collapse before Roland even finished assembling his first steam engine.
Letting out a long, slow breath of white vapor through his nose, William clenched his fists once and forced the restless current of mana back down into the bottom of his chest.
Not today, he told himself, turning his back on the river. If I can't burn off this energy with magic, I'll burn it off the old-fashioned way.
Pivoting on his heel, William marched back up the muddy hill toward the improvised military training grounds cleared out beside the castle barracks.
Even before he crossed the wooden fence of the yard, he could hear the deep, gravelly bark of Iron Axe's voice echoing over the rhythmic tramping of boots.
Over the past two weeks, the initial batch of eighty militia recruits — a rough collection of broad-shouldered miners, young farmers, and desperate slums dwellers drawn in by Roland's promise of two hot meals of meat a day and steady copper wages — had already learned two unforgettable lessons.
The first lesson had happened on day one, when three loudmouthed miners in the front row had refused to take orders from a "filthy sand dog" and spat in the dirt near Iron Axe's boots.
William hadn't given a speech about equality; he had simply stepped forward, invited all three men to attack him at once with wooden staffs, and put all three of them flat on their backs in the mud in less than four seconds using basic Krav Maga takedowns. Since that afternoon, not a single recruit in the First Army dared to look at Deputy Commander Iron Axe with anything less than absolute, terrified obedience.
As William strode onto the packed dirt of the training field, Iron Axe was standing at the head of four neat columns of men, his massive two-meter frame bronzed by the pale autumn sun and his heavy leather tunic spotless.
Currently, the recruits were practicing traditional spear thrusts against wooden straw dummies — lunging forward with heavy, awkward swings that relied entirely on their tired arm muscles.
Seeing that Roland had entrusted him with modernizing Graycastle's military from the ground up, William decided it was time to stop acting like a visiting observer and start acting like a real twenty-first-century drill instructor.
Throwing his shoulders back, lifting his chin, and projecting every ounce of his commanding presence, William walked straight into the center of the yard.
— "Halt the line!" — William's voice boomed across the courtyard like a cannon shot, instantly freezing eighty wooden spears in midair.
Turning toward the giant Mojin warrior, William crossed his arms over his chest:
— "Deputy Commander Iron Axe! Brute arm strength and a heavy swing are great for breaking chairs in a tavern brawl, my friend, but they are not going to save this city from a winter horde of Demonic Beasts!" — William called out loud enough for every recruit in the back row to hear.
Iron Axe lowered his practice shaft and turned to face William, his dark, sharp eyes studying the younger man with silent, calculating intensity. He didn't argue a single word, yet the slight raise of his tattooed brow clearly asked for a demonstration.
William didn't hesitate for a second.
— "Drop the wooden sticks on the ground! All of you!" — William barked at the platoon, stepping out in front of the formation. — "In the Prince's army, you do not fight as eighty individual brawlers swinging wildly in the dark! You fight, move, and breathe as a single machine! And a machine doesn't work if its lungs give out after three minutes of running!"
Planting his feet shoulder-width apart on the cold dirt, William launched straight into a punishing, high-intensity physical conditioning circuit that no medieval knight or peasant in Graycastle had ever seen in their lives.
He started them off with fifty synchronized four-count jumping jacks to get their freezing joints warm, followed immediately by deep bodyweight squats and the true nightmare of every modern military boot camp: burpees.
— "Chest to the mud! Push up! Snap your feet in and jump! If the man next to you falls out of rhythm, the entire row starts over from one!" — William shouted, performing every single repetition right alongside them at the front of the yard without even breaking his breathing rhythm.
Unlike the traditional training of Graycastle's knights — which focused heavily on lifting heavy stones to build slow, bulky muscle mass for swinging broadswords — William's regimen targeted explosive cardiovascular stamina, core stability, and muscle endurance.
Once the recruits were gasping for air, their tunics soaked in sweat despite the autumn wind, William transitioned straight into modern close-order drill and formation tactics.
He taught them how to lock their spacing by resting a hand on the shoulder of the man beside them, how to pivot ninety degrees as a solid block without breaking ranks, and how the front line could drop to one knee in unison after "firing" so the second row could aim right over their heads.
Standing on the sidelines with his arms crossed, Iron Axe watched every movement with a fierce, unblinking gaze.
At first, the Mojin warrior's brow had furrowed slightly at the strange, almost comical-looking jumping exercises. Yet, within twenty minutes, a veteran fighter like Iron Axe could clearly see the terrifying efficiency behind the method. By forcing eighty men to jump, drop, and count out loud in the exact same rhythm, William wasn't just building their lungs — he was erasing their individual panic and wiring their brains to obey commands automatically under extreme physical exhaustion.
More than that, Iron Axe watched William's own body as he demonstrated the drills.
Every time William dropped into a burpee or pivoted his hips, his balance was so impossibly clean, fluid, and explosive that he looked less like a human and more like a coiled panther. Remembering the secret of "Pure Arcane Magic" that William had revealed in the Prince's study two weeks ago, Iron Axe felt a surge of deep, genuine awe in his chest.
By the time the pale orange sun finally dipped behind the jagged western hills, leaving sixty grown men groaning on their hands and knees in the dirt, the look in Iron Axe's eyes as he saluted William was one of absolute, unshakeable respect.
.
.
.
When night fell over the fortress, dinner inside the castle's main hall was the only hour of relative peace in an otherwise frantic twenty-four-hour schedule — though a quiet current of tension always simmered just beneath the surface.
Around the head of the long oak table sat the core quartet driving Border Town's transformation: Prince Roland at the head, Arthur and William on his right, and Anna sitting quietly on his left.
Following a strict new protocol suggested by Arthur and enforced by Roland, all four of them at the high table were dressed in clean, proper attire worthy of the lord's inner circle.
The warm, golden glow of dozens of tallow and beeswax candles reflected off the polished pewter and silver goblets, casting soft shadows across the stone walls and creating the brief illusion of a peaceful, aristocratic banquet.
Anna, however, was behaving nothing like a noble lady at a feast.
Even with a plate of warm roasted fowl and buttered wheat bread sitting right in front of her, the seventeen-year-old witch had barely taken three bites. Her entire mind was locked onto a series of large parchment sheets spread out beside her elbow — technical charcoal diagrams that Roland had stayed up past midnight drawing the night before.
Between sips of warm soup, Roland was tapping his finger against the drawings, quietly explaining the chemical and structural differences between brittle cast "pig iron," soft wrought iron, and the high-carbon steel they desperately needed to forge without cracking.
Across the table, having just finished demolishing two full plates of roast meat after his grueling afternoon in the training yard, William leaned back in his chair and watched the two of them.
Seeing the candle flames reflect off Anna's bright orange-red hair and the intense, serious focus in her blue eyes, William felt a brief, familiar twitch of his old habits — the urge to lean across the oak wood, flash his practiced "hero smile," and drop a teasing line about how a pretty girl shouldn't spend dinner staring at furnace chimneys.
Right next to him, reading his friend's posture like an open book, Arthur didn't even turn his head; he simply raised his wine goblet to his lips and shot William a sharp, sideways warning glare that clearly said: Don't you dare embarrass yourself a third time, idiot.
William smirked faintly to himself, remembering Anna's brutally honest speech beside the brick kiln two weeks ago.
Instead of putting on a cheesy playboy act, William leaned his forearms on the table, looked directly at the charcoal blueprint under Anna's hand, and spoke in the clear, direct tone of the First Army's Commander-in-Chief:
— "Hey, Anna. Looking at that cross-section diagram of the new furnace... how soon do you think you and the Prince can get the carbon levels stable enough for heavy castings?" — William asked, pointing a finger toward the sketch of a thick, tapered metal cylinder at the bottom of the page.
At the head of the table, Roland paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth, while Arthur raised an eyebrow in pleasant surprise.
Anna stopped tracing the charcoal line and slowly lifted her head, fixing her deep blue eyes on William.
She had fully braced herself to brush off another round of empty compliments about her eyes or her hair. Realizing that the tall instructor was actually asking a serious question about her metallurgy work, the guarded frost in her expression melted away immediately.
— "The small clay crucibles we used last week can melt raw ore, Mr. William, but they cannot remove the sulfur and phosphorus impurities evenly on a large scale," — Anna answered, her voice clear, crisp, and completely engaged as she turned the parchment slightly so he could see the air-blast vents. — "When there is too much carbon and sulfur trapped in the iron, the metal cools too hard and brittle. It works fine for castle gates or heavy weights, where the metal only sits still. But for the weapon barrels you need..."
— "If the metal is brittle, the barrel cracks or blows up in my soldiers' faces after ten shots," — William completed the thought, nodding seriously. — "Iron Axe and I had one of the early musket barrels develop a hairline fracture near the breech during target practice yesterday. If we're going to line up eighty men shoulder-to-shoulder against a wave of armor-plated boars, I need iron that won't turn into a fragmentation grenade when it gets hot."
— "That is exactly what this taller shaft furnace is designed to fix," — Anna said, a small spark of genuine pride lighting up her blue eyes as she tapped Roland's drawing. — "His Highness showed me how to use limestone flux inside the molten bath to bind with the impurities and float them to the top as slag, while I use my fire to control the oxidation rate of the carbon directly. Once the bricklayers finish the outer shell of this furnace tomorrow afternoon, I will be able to give you homogeneous wrought iron and mild steel. Your barrels will not crack again."
William looked from the diagram up to Anna's determined face, then gave her a firm, two-finger salute from the edge of the table.
— "Music to my ears, Miss Metallurgist," — William said with a clean, genuine grin that carried zero sleaziness and a hundred percent respect. — "Give me barrels that can handle a double powder charge without splitting, and I guarantee you the First Army will keep every single monster at least a hundred paces away from your workshops this winter."
Anna blinked once, then gave him a polite, surprisingly warm nod before turning her eyes back to the technical notes.
Beside William, Arthur let out a quiet, muffled chuckle behind his pewter goblet, leaning in just enough for only his friend to hear:
— "Well, well... look who finally learned how to speak the local language without stepping on a landmine," — Arthur whispered dryly, taking a sip of his watered-down wine.
— "Shut up and eat your turnips, Art," — William muttered back out of the corner of his mouth, though he kept an unbothered grin on his face as he reached for another piece of bread. — "A good commander adapts to the terrain, okay?"
At the head of the table, watching the interaction between his three most important people, Roland shook his head slightly, a tired but genuinely fond smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as he massaged his aching temples.
After weeks of crushing administrative headaches, endless arguments with Barov, and the looming terror of the winter horde, the young prince found himself oddly comforted by the strange dynamic at his table — the relentless, devotion-driven precision of his young witch, the cold, ten-steps-ahead calculation of his chief strategist, and the fearless, battle-hungry energy of his military commander.
Outside the narrow stone windows, the autumn wind howled louder against the battlements, carrying the unmistakable bite of incoming snow.
And somewhere in the unseen shadows of that dining hall — perhaps watching them from the monochrome silence of the Mist World — Nightingale could very well be listening to every word they spoke.
Yet none of them slowed down. Brick by brick, barrel by barrel, and drill by drill, the industrial revolution of Border Town was marching forward to meet the winter head-on.