There was no warning footstep, no rustle of cloth, and none of the bright thermal flash that accompanied Anna's fire.
Three feet in front of the stone window, the empty air simply tore open like an invisible curtain of silk being ripped down the middle. For a fraction of a millisecond, the vibrant colors of the sunlit study collided with a pocket of monochrome gray void—and between one heartbeat and the next, a slender, hooded silhouette materialized less than a meter behind William's back.
Before William could even uncross his arms from the backrest of the wooden chair he was straddling, the cold, relentless edge of forged steel pressed flat against the skin of his throat.
Nightingale's silver-plated dagger gleamed darkly under the pale morning light filtering through the cloudy window glass. The razor-sharp tip rested bare millimeters from the pulsing wall of William's right carotid artery, held steady by the unwavering hand of a veteran assassin who had reaped enough lives in the dark to never hesitate once.
In that instant, every trace of the playful, curious observer who lounged on Roland's furniture and stole dried fish from the castle kitchen vanished without a trace. Standing behind William's chair was an apex predator defending her territory with lethal intent.
Beneath the deep shadow of her hood, Nightingale's blue eyes burned with a cutting, murderous suspicion that completely froze the air in the room.
Over the past week of stalking the castle corridors inside the Mist World, she had overheard more than enough bizarre conversations between these two foreigners to know they were walking anomalies. Yet hearing this loudmouthed stranger casually toss out her true name in broad daylight crossed a line that could not be ignored.
— "How do you know that name?" — Nightingale's voice was an icy whisper right behind William's ear, vibrating with a primal threat that would have made Graycastle's most decorated veteran knight break out in a cold sweat. — "Veronica died a long time ago. She was buried beneath the ashes and charred beams of a ruined manor in Silver City. Not a single soul outside the direct bloodline of my former family carries that memory. Who are you two, really, and which noble bastard in the capital do you work for? Princess Garcia? Or Timothy?"
William's breath hitched halfway up his chest.
A single drop of freezing sweat rolled down the back of his neck, tracing a slow, icy line along his spine.
Despite the terrifying proximity of five inches of silver steel resting against his windpipe, the nerves forged by thousands of hours of heavy sparring, combined with the enhanced physical attributes granted by the System, kept his body from jerking in panic. By sheer willpower, William forced his neck and shoulder muscles to remain completely loose and relaxed, even as his heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped piston.
Inside his mind, however, William's finger was hovering half an inch above the mental trigger of his newly awakened power.
He knew the math of close-quarters combat. With his Speed 11, Agility 9, and his Level 3 Teleportation, if he triggered a spatial jump right now, he could vanish out from under the blade in zero seconds, reappear behind her back by the bookshelf, and lock her arms before a normal human brain could even process that he had moved.
Yet right before he pulled that mental trigger, the stern, ice-cold warning Arthur had given him in the muddy training yard yesterday afternoon echoed inside his skull like a gunshot:
— "If an extremely suspicious assassin like Nightingale, who is initially loyal only to witches and her own instincts, sees a man using magic before we're powerful enough to stand against the entire world... our usefulness ends right there. She will see us as an unknown monster and a threat to Roland and her sisters."
If he teleported right now, he would survive the knife—only to blow their entire cover story to smithereens and turn the deadliest scout in Graycastle into their permanent enemy.
William swallowed hard, feeling the needle-sharp tip of the silver dagger prick the outer layer of his skin as his Adam's apple moved. Refusing to let the moment break his posture, the stubborn, arrogant "protagonist" inside him fought to keep a calm, crooked smile on his lips.
— "Easy now... Nightingale, if you prefer the codename from the Witch Cooperation Association," — William said, keeping his voice low and steady as he slowly raised both hands off the back of the chair, holding his empty palms open at shoulder height in the universal gesture of peace. — "Take a breath. Neither Arthur nor I are agents of the royal court. We don't work for Roland's brothers, we don't answer to Garcia, and we sure as hell aren't inquisitors from the Church."
Nightingale didn't lower the blade; instead, she pressed the silver edge half a millimeter deeper against his skin.
A single bead of bright crimson blood welled up on the side of William's neck, staining the white linen collar of his shirt.
Behind him, Nightingale drew in a slow, deep breath through her nose, expanding her subtle magic perception to its absolute limit.
In addition to walking inside the Mist World, decades of surviving among backstabbing nobles and Church informants had honed a secondary, passive instinct within Nightingale's perception: she could read the physiological and energetic truth of a human being from two feet away. Whenever a person told a deliberate lie under the pressure of death, their heart rate spiked in an erratic rhythm, the heat of their blood fluctuated, and the ambient static around their body gave off the sour, unmistakable stench of deceit.
Right now, the energy signature around William's muscular frame felt bizarrely dense and static—unlike any ordinary human she had ever touched—yet as his words hung in the air, there was not a single trace of falsehood in his pulse.
— "If you lie to me—if I sense the slightest tremor of a lie in the pitch of your voice or the heat of your blood—His Highness will be scrubbing your brains off this carpet before breakfast," — Nightingale hissed softly into his ear. — "Answer the question, foreigner: how do two outsiders possess information that belongs neither to wandering commoners nor to ordinary scholars?"
Over by the closed mahogany double doors, ten paces away, Arthur had remained completely motionless since the instant the air rippled.
Now, slowly and deliberately, the strategist pivoted on his heels to face the center of the room.
Arthur didn't widen his eyes in shock, he didn't reach for a weapon, and he didn't take a single aggressive step toward the assassin. As the heavy dark-gray wool of his tunic rustled softly, he simply kept his hands clasped calmly behind his back, assuming a composed, almost clinical posture.
His dark eyes scanned the silver blade at his best friend's throat with the detached coolness of a grandmaster who had already simulated this exact confrontation ten moves ago.
In truth, Arthur had known from day one that their inexplicable metaknowledge—combined with William's inability to resist showing off—would eventually trigger Nightingale's lethal protective instincts. Turning that hostility into trust without revealing the Dimensional System was the real test.
— "Lower your weapon, Miss Nightingale," — Arthur said, his voice ringing out like an anchor of pure, unshakeable logic in the middle of the storm. — "Think through the timeline for two seconds. If William and I were Timothy's spies or Garcia's hired killers, we would have exposed both your presence and Anna's existence to the Church of Hermes the very first week we arrived in Border Town. Instead, I was the one who proposed the fake execution in the dungeons to hide Anna from the priests, and I was the one who sent William to bring her to His Highness's bedroom two nights ago so you wouldn't have to fight the guards. We are here to ensure that witches never again have to live like rats fleeing from the fire."
Behind the massive mahogany desk, Prince Roland—who had frozen like a statue with his charcoal pencil suspended in midair the second Nightingale materialized—finally pushed his chair back and stood up.
Inside Cheng Yan's head, the skeptical pragmatism of a twenty-first-century engineer was fighting a desperate battle to keep up with the lethal fantasy spy drama unfolding three feet from his inkwell.
He stared from Nightingale's gleaming dagger to his two "foreign consultants," his mind reeling as he wondered how in the name of heaven two guys who clearly carried modern Earth science in their heads also possessed a classified personal dossier on a fugitive witch assassin he himself had only met forty-eight hours ago!
Wait... during the banquet, Arthur said the first book they found in that glowing cavern detailed the secret history and future fate of everyone on this continent, Roland thought, his mental gears spinning furiously to fit this new anomaly into the alibi he had accepted three weeks ago. The book of the Fjord Islands! Did that chronicle not only record my father's secret decree and my industrial rise, but also the real names and pasts of the witches who would gather around me?!
Seeing that a single twitch could cost him his military commander, Roland stepped around the edge of his desk and forced every ounce of the Fourth Prince's royal authority into his voice, overriding his own internal panic:
— "Nightingale, that is enough. Take the blade away from William's neck," — Roland commanded firmly. — "I will not pretend to understand half of how their minds work. The two of them can be exasperating, eccentric, and endlessly fond of speaking in maddening riddles. However, Arthur is the man who handed me the exact chemical formula for hydraulic cement on his first day here, and William is the one breaking his back to build an army that can stop the demonic tide. They are the reason the southern wall stands today, and they are the reason Anna and Nana are safe. If they claim to know your past through their... peculiar methods of historical study and prophecy... I vouch for them with my own life. They are not our enemies."
Nightingale hesitated.
Her sharp, predatory eyes flickered rapidly between Prince Roland's earnest face, Arthur's terrifyingly calm, analytical gaze by the door, and William's borderline suicidal confidence sitting right under her blade.
Once again, she expanded her sensory magic to the limit, drawing in a slow breath through her nostrils as she searched the room for the unmistakable scent of a noble trap or a rehearsed lie.
There was none.
Neither the Prince, nor the quiet strategist, nor the muscular fighter smelled of courtly treachery. Instead, radiating off all three men was an overwhelming, rock-solid, and terrifyingly calm sincerity.
For three long seconds, the only sound in the study was the crackle of the hearth.
Then, slowly—with the fluid, guarded reluctance of a hunting leopard releasing its prey—Nightingale pulled the silver-plated dagger half an inch away from William's skin and lowered the point toward the floor.
However, she did not retreat back into the invisible safety of the Mist World.
Stepping two paces back toward the sunlit window, she remained completely physical and visible in the room. As she moved, the edge of her dark hood slipped slightly backward, allowing a few stray locks of wavy, silvery-blonde hair to catch the pale morning light—forming a striking, almost melancholic contrast with the cold lethality in her eyes.
— "You two walk through the dark carrying very dangerous torches, stranger," — Nightingale said to William, casually wiping the tiny smear of his red blood off the tip of her silver blade against the dark leather cuff of her sleeve before sliding the weapon into her belt. — "I have listened to your talks for a week. I know you claim to come from a distant land, and I know you carry memories of 'ancient books' and absurd construction methods inside your heads. But make no mistake: the Witch Cooperation Association and our search for the Holy Mountain are not an academic puzzle for foreign scholars to dissect in a warm library. They are the last hope of survival for my sisters. I stayed in this castle to evaluate Prince Roland's heart—and if I ever suspect that the three of you intend to use Anna and Nana merely as convenient tools until the Church marches here to burn us all, I will take them away in the dead of night, and no wall will stop me."
Feeling the cold bite of the steel finally leave his carotid artery, William raised two fingers to touch the tiny, stinging scratch on his neck, letting out a slow breath that masked his genuine relief.
Completely ignoring the fact that Nightingale's gloved right hand was still resting casually on the hilt of her sheathed dagger, William swung his leg off the wooden chair, stood up to his full six-foot-one height, and took a deliberate step toward her.
Now that the knife was away from his windpipe, the unshakeable protagonist inside him flatly refused to back down from a debate.
— "The world out there is a lot smaller—and a hell of a lot more brutal—than you realize, Nightingale," — William said, his dark eyes locking squarely onto hers without a trace of fear. — "The knowledge Arthur and I carry in our heads wasn't given to us just so we could sit in a tower and watch the continent burn. We know all about your sisters in the Witch Cooperation Association. We know the torture of the Demonic Bite at eighteen. And more importantly... we know for a fact that right now, your entire caravan is marching blindly into the northern peaks toward a 'paradise' that is nothing more than a freezing, snow-covered grave."
Nightingale let out a short, sharp laugh dripping with bitter scorn, her blue eyes narrowing in contained fury at his arrogance.
— "An icy grave?" — Nightingale repeated coldly, raising a gloved hand and pointing a sharp finger straight at the frosted glass of the study window. — "And what in the world do two pampered men who rode into this decaying frontier three weeks ago know about the fate of hunted witches? Open your eyes and look outside that window, Commander! This castle is damp and drafty, the town shacks are made of rotting mud and straw, and two thousand peasants barely have two copper coins to rub together! In a matter of days, the Months of Demons are going to turn this entire valley into a frozen slaughterhouse covered in black blood—and you have the audacity to stand here and call our sanctuary in the mountains a grave?!"
Before William could fire back a heated reply about the demons waiting in the north, Arthur stepped smoothly forward from the door.
Moving with the measured, unhurried grace of a seasoned diplomat, Arthur angled his body slightly between William and the window, naturally drawing the assassin's line of sight onto himself to lower the temperature in the room.
— "We call your northern march a grave, Miss Nightingale, not out of disrespect for your sisters, but because mathematics and logistics do not lie," — Arthur said, his voice stripped of all poetic emotion, delivering pure, relentless logic. — "The Holy Mountain you seek in the Impassable Mountain Range is an ancient, unproven legend that is currently forcing dozens of exhausted, half-starved young women to march straight into sub-zero blizzards without winter rations, without coal, and without shelter—where they will die of hypothermia or demonic claws long before spring arrives. You are gambling your sisters' lives on a miracle from a fairy tale... while His Highness, Roland Wimbledon, is building an undeniable physical reality right here in the mud."
Arthur walked over to the edge of Roland's mahogany desk and tapped his knuckles firmly against the wide territorial blueprints of Border Town:
— "In this castle, we do not offer you vague legends or false paradises," — Arthur stated, meeting Nightingale's eyes without blinking. — "We offer twelve-foot walls of solid hydraulic concrete that no beast can claw through. We offer high-temperature brick furnaces, warm housing heated by coal pipes, and—very soon—mass-produced, long-range firearms and artillery capable of tearing a charging Demonic Beast in half before it ever comes within a hundred paces of our line."
Arthur gestured toward the courtyard below, where the rhythmic chugging of the prototype steam engine from the day before was already being prepared for its second test run:
— "With His Highness's industrial machines, my supply lines, William's army, and the witches' abilities focused on creation and production rather than endless running," — Arthur concluded calmly, — "Border Town is going to become the most impenetrable fortress on this continent. If you try to spirit Anna and Nana away into those frozen peaks, you will be trading a warm, fortified bastion for a desperate death march in the snow."
Standing beside the desk, listening to his chief strategist lay out the grand vision of his industrial empire with such surgical conviction, Roland felt a surge of pride in his chest. Crossing his arms over his dark wool tunic, the young prince straightened his shoulders, projecting the full weight of the ruler he intended to become.
— "Arthur and William are still a walking mystery to me in many ways, Nightingale—I will admit that to your face freely," — Roland declared, looking directly into the assassin's deep blue eyes. — "I don't know every detail of how those 'books' they read in the south showed them your past. But the tangible value they have brought to my table in three weeks is undeniable. Just like me, the moment they saw Anna's fire and Nana's healing light, they didn't see the touch of the devil—they saw nature's most extraordinary, priceless gift. None of the three of us judge your sisters, Nightingale; we respect and value them. Give Border Town this one winter to prove itself. Let us show you that this valley can become the true sanctuary your Association has been bleeding four hundred years to find."
A deep, heavy silence settled over the study as Roland's words echoed off the stone walls.
Standing by the window, Nightingale didn't speak for ten full seconds.
Her sharp gaze moved slowly from Roland's determined gray eyes, to Arthur's calm, unyielding composure, and finally to William's fearless stance. Everything she had witnessed over the past seven days—the twelve-foot concrete wall rising out of the mud, the thunderous firearms, the gentle way they taught thirteen-year-old Nana, the spinning iron steam engine in the shed, and Anna's fierce refusal to leave—weighed heavily on the scales inside her mind.
Finally, Nightingale let out a quiet breath, the razor-sharp, murderous edge in her posture subsiding by an inch.
— "I will stay," — Nightingale whispered, her voice firm and cold, yet stripped of its earlier hostility as she raised both gloved hands and pulled her dark hood back up over her golden curls, plunging her features back into shadow. — "As I told His Highness two nights ago, I will remain inside these walls as an unseen shadow through the winter, and I will watch every move the three of you make."
She took half a step backward toward the corner of the window, her voice dropping into a solemn vow:
— "But hear me well, prophets of the Kingdom of Dawn: if your grand promises and your thunder-weapons fail when the snow falls," — Nightingale warned, — "if that gray wall crumbles under the beasts' claws, or if the Prince turns his back on the very first witch who suffers the agony of the Demonic Bite... I will take Anna and Nana out of this castle before their blood can stain the snow, and you will never see us again. And as for you..."
Nightingale tilted her hooded head slightly to the right, locking her glowing blue eyes straight onto William as the air around her physical body began to hum and vibrate, dissolving into the gray fringes of the Mist World:
— "...Try to show off by speaking the dead name of my past out loud one more time, Commander, and I promise you that the next morning you wake up in your bed, you will be missing the reckless tongue inside your mouth."
Shhhk.
With a faint rustle of displaced air and a brief ripple of monochrome light, the dimensional tear sealed itself shut.
In less than a blink, Nightingale's oppressive, lethal presence vanished completely from the corner by the window, returning the Prince's study to its quiet, chilly morning atmosphere.
For three seconds after the air stopped shimmering, nobody in the room moved.
Then, standing beside the reversed wooden chair, William let out a long, shuddering breath that seemed to deflate his chest by two inches, breaking the extreme isometric tension he had been holding in his muscles.
As the normal color slowly returned to his face and the tiny drop of blood dried on his neck, that familiar, irrepressible, and utterly shameless grin crept right back onto William's face—even under the simultaneous, withering glares of both Prince Roland and Arthur.
— "Well..." — William murmured, clearing his throat and letting out a short, nasal laugh as he rubbed the back of his neck. — "Considering how creative that threat of vocal castration was, I'm pretty sure she really liked me, guys. The ice has officially been broken!"
Over by the door, Arthur rolled his eyes so hard he actually felt a sharp twinge behind his forehead.
Refusing to dignify William's reckless bravado with a response in front of the Prince, Arthur smoothed down the front of his wool tunic, walked over to Roland's desk, and leaned over the territorial defense maps once again to wrap up the morning's logistics.
Thanks to quick thinking, cold logic, and Roland's backing, their very first direct, blade-to-throat collision with the deadliest operative of the Witch Cooperation Association had been defused without exposing the System. They had officially earned a temporary truce—and the benefit of the doubt—from Nightingale.
Yet, as a sudden, violent gust of northern wind rattled the cloudy glass panes of the study window, carrying the unmistakable, freezing bite of the upper peaks, Arthur knew that clever diplomacy and prophetic alibis wouldn't mean a thing in the weeks ahead. Pretty words couldn't stop the jaws of three hundred mutated monsters.
After spending another twenty minutes reviewing the final supply distribution with a still-shaken Roland, Arthur and William finally bowed their heads, stepped out of the Prince's study, and pulled the heavy mahogany double doors shut behind them.
And as they started walking down the dim, torch-lit stone corridor away from the office, Arthur had no idea that William was about to drop an even bigger headache right into his lap.