Outside the keep, the northern blizzard had intensified to the point where drawing a simple breath made an ordinary man's lungs burn like hot coals, yet as William strode down the stone staircase of the castle, he felt virtually untouchable.
After dumping a staggering one hundred and sixty System credits straight into his Endurance attribute ten minutes ago, his body had undergone a profound, invisible metamorphosis. Beneath his newly buttoned navy-blue wool doublet and heavy leather belt, his skeletal frame felt as though it had been cast from solid iron bars. His muscle fibers had densified into impenetrable plates, his tendons felt like braided steel cables, and the sub-zero draft howling through the ground-floor corridors registered against his skin as nothing more than a refreshing autumn breeze.
With Strength: 16 and Endurance: 14, he was, for all practical purposes, a walking human tank.
Crossing the center of the main entrance hall, William spotted one of the younger castle maids kneeling on the flagstones beside the great hearth, hurriedly sweeping cold gray soot into a wooden bucket.
— "Excuse me!" — William called out, keeping his deep voice steady and controlled as he stopped five paces away.
The teenage servant girl jumped half a foot in the air, nearly dropping her horsehair brush as she spun around and gave a hasty, clumsy bow. Ever since the kitchen staff had seen the blood-soaked tunnel survivors carried into the dining hall two nights ago—and heard the guards whispering that the tall foreign scholar had torn eight armored traitors apart with his bare hands—the servants looked at William with a mixture of wide-eyed awe and sheer, trembling intimidation.
— "Y-Yes, My Lord Commander! What do you wish?" — the girl stammered, keeping her eyes glued to the toes of his leather boots.
— "Leave the ashes for a minute and run down to the armory, or find Sir Carter Lannis near the inner gate," — William instructed calmly. — "Tell the armorer that Commander William requires the heaviest, thickest tempered-steel infantry shield in the castle stores. While you're at it, grab the thickest coil of braided hemp climbing rope we have in the warehouse, and bring both items directly to the central stairs of the eastern wall sector. Can you handle that for me?"
— "R-Right away, My Lord! I'll run the whole way!" — the maid nodded frantically, hiking up her wool skirts and practically sprinting toward the courtyard doors.
Rolling his shoulders until his neck gave a satisfying pop, William adjusted the leather straps over his chest and pushed open the heavy oak doors leading out to the southern defensive perimeter.
The moment he climbed the wooden steps onto the walkway of Border Town's twelve-foot concrete wall, the full force of the frontier storm hit him square in the face.
The landscape ahead was bleak and suffocating. Five hundred yards to the south and east, the dark treeline of the Concealing Forest was half-swallowed by a swirling, unnatural bank of gray-green mist that crept across the fresh snowdrifts like living smoke.
Along the wide concrete parapet, eighty militiamen and castle patrolmen stood at their assigned posts. Dressed in boiled-leather jerkins and thick wool cloaks dusted with white frost, the former miners and farmers gripped their fifteen-foot iron-tipped pikes and loaded crossbows with white-knuckled intensity. Further down the central bastion, Van'er and the first squad of riflemen stood behind covered wooden ammunition boxes, keeping the locks of their flintlock muskets wrapped in oiled leather rags to protect the priming powder from the blowing snow.
Walking briskly toward the center of the eastern sector—where the forward scouts had reported the pack of mutated foxes approaching—William spotted his newly sworn shield-bearer standing like a pillar of granite against the crenelations.
It was Trevor.
True to his Endurance: 12 constitution, the scarred thirty-two-year-old veteran stood motionless in the howling gale, snow piling up across the broad shoulders of his leather armor without making him blink once.
Standing directly to Trevor's left, however, were three young militiamen in their late teens who looked considerably less steady. Though all three recruits were trying their best to keep their backs straight and their pikes angled over the parapet, their knees were visibly knocking together, and the loud clack-clack-clack of their chattering teeth carried over the whistling wind.
As William approached the group, he blinked once out of pure tactical habit, bringing up [BIOMETRIC STATUS INSPECTION] over the three trembling soldiers.
[Target: Rick] — Strength: 8 | Speed: 7 | Endurance: 7 | Agility: 6 | Intelligence: 5
[Target: Saldon] — Strength: 7 | Speed: 9 | Endurance: 7 | Agility: 8 | Intelligence: 6
[Target: Zuler] — Strength: 8 | Speed: 6 | Endurance: 8 | Agility: 6 | Intelligence: 4
Damn, this scanner really is the ultimate cheat code for a commanding officer, William thought with an inward smile as he read their floating headers.
Over the past two days, he had discovered only one minor limitation to the sub-function: whenever he tried to scan Anna, Nana, or Nightingale, the blue text box simply flickered with unreadable, garbled static—as if the high density of a witch's native Magic Core jammed the System's biometric sensor. For reading the physical limits and names of ordinary mortal men, however, the interface was completely infallible.
Stepping up beside Trevor on the snow-covered concrete walkway, William rested a gloved hand on the battlement and looked straight at the three shivering youths.
— "Morning, Trevor," — William greeted his right-hand man with a firm nod before turning his dark eyes onto the three recruits and calling them out by name without checking a single roster: — "Rick. Saldon. Zuler. How's the visibility down your lane? Are your hands steady enough to drive those spear tips home when the mist clears?"
All three young men froze as if they had been struck by lightning, nearly dropping their fifteen-foot pikes onto the concrete.
Their wide, terrified eyes snapped away from the ominous forest treeline and locked onto William's face—their bone-deep fear of the winter monsters momentarily completely eclipsed by sheer, stunned disbelief.
— "D-Does... does the Lord Commander actually know our names?!" — Rick stammered in a cracked whisper, nudging Saldon's ribs with his elbow.
— "He remembered me..." — Zuler breathed, his eyes shining as his narrow chest puffed out by two inches beneath his leather jerkin and his chin came up. — "I'm just a mud-digger from the southern quarry sector, and the Lord from the Kingdom of Dawn knows my name!"
To serfs and miners who had spent their entire lives being treated as nameless cattle and disposable tax numbers by the aristocrats of Graycastle and Longsong Stronghold, having the supreme military commander of Border Town—the terrifying warrior who sat at Prince Roland's right hand—walk up and address each of them like brothers-in-arms ignited an instant, roaring fire in their chests.
Suddenly, the freezing wind didn't feel nearly as cold. All three boys re-gripped the ash shafts of their pikes until their knuckles turned white, planting their boots firmly in the frost.
— "Our line of sight is clear all the way to the outer trench stakes, Lord William!" — Saldon shouted back, his voice snapping into a crisp, steady military cadence as he saluted with his free hand. — "Our hands are warm, sir! Not a single beast is getting over this stone while we draw breath!"
— "That's what I like to hear, boys," — William grinned, flashing them a confident thumbs-up that made the three recruits look ready to charge a dragon with butter knives.
At that exact moment, the rapid, heavy pattering of footsteps echoed up the wooden access ramp behind the bastion.
The young castle maid arrived at the top of the wall, her cheeks flushed bright red and her breath coming in ragged clouds of steam as she dragged a thick, fifty-foot coil of braided hemp rope in one hand and lugged a massive, battle-scarred heater shield in the other.
Forged from a quarter-inch plate of high-carbon steel bolted over seasoned oak and shaped like an inverted teardrop three feet tall, the heavy infantry shield weighed nearly twenty kilograms—designed to stop the direct impact of a charging warhorse's lance or a two-handed battleaxe.
— "I-I brought what you asked for, My Lord!" — the girl gasped, setting the heavy steel rim down on the concrete with a loud clank.
— "Good speed. Go get yourself a cup of hot broth by the kitchen stove," — William said warmly, picking up both the coil of rope and the twenty-kilogram steel shield.
In the hands of an ordinary soldier, carrying that shield for an hour was an exhausting chore. As William slid his left forearm through the thick leather arm-straps and gripped the iron handle, however, the forty-pound slab of steel felt as light and effortless as a cardboard dinner plate.
Before Trevor could even ask why the Commander had ordered a heavy infantry shield without a spear or a sword to pair with it, a low, eerie sound drifted out of the swirling white mist at the edge of the Concealing Forest.
Grrrrr—yap-YAP!
The eighty men along the rampart went dead silent.
Out of the dense fog three hundred yards away emerged five sleek, fast-moving silhouettes.
At first glance, they resembled the common red and gray forest foxes that hunted rabbits in the autumn brush—except the winter miasma had warped their biology into something straight out of a nightmare. Each fox had swollen to the size and bulk of a full-grown timber wolf, easily weighing over eighty kilograms. Their winter coats were matted and patchy, turning a sickly, charcoal gray along their spines, while their eyes glowed like twin coals of madness. Thick, ropes of black, tar-like saliva dripped from their elongated jaws, sizzling faintly wherever the corrupted fluid hit the virgin snow.
It was the forward scouting pack Roland had warned them about.
Down the line, leather creaked as thirty militiamen swallowed hard and tightened their grip on their pikes. Twenty paces to the left, Van'er and three marksmen immediately stepped up to the firing slits, cocking the hammers of their flintlocks and leveling their heavy barrels toward the eastern trench approach.
— "Eastern sector, steady your pikes!" — Trevor barked automatically, his veteran instincts taking over as he raised his own musket to his shoulder. — "Marksmen, wait until they cross the hundred-pace stake line! Aim for the—"
— "Hold your fire!" — William's deep voice cut across the parapet like the crack of a whip, halting the entire sector in a single heartbeat. — "Van'er, tell your shooters to lower their rifles! Spearmen, keep your pikes upright! Do not waste a single grain of His Highness's gunpowder or a single iron bolt on five scouting dogs! These five are mine!"
Without waiting for a single reply, William uncoiled the thick hemp climbing rope, tossed one end straight into Trevor's free hand, and whipped the other end twice around his own waist, tying a rock-solid bowline knot against his belt in two seconds flat.
Standing beside him, Trevor stared down at the rough rope in his palm, then up at William putting one boot on top of the concrete crenelation—his scarred face twisting in a mixture of utter bewilderment and sheer horror.
— "My Lord?!" — Trevor choked out, taking a frantic step forward and grabbing the top edge of William's steel shield with his free hand. — "What in the name of the seven hells do you think you are doing?! Those are five mutated winter beasts! You can't jump off the wall into open snow by yourself! That's suicide! If you insist on fighting them down in the dirt, then let me climb down with you! I swore an oath to be your shield thirty minutes ago, remember?!"
William paused with one boot resting on the four-foot-wide stone battlement, looking back over his shoulder at his horrified bodyguard with a calm, razor-sharp grin.
— "And you are going to honor that oath right now by anchoring that rope on top of this wall, Shield-Bearer," — William said, tapping the heavy steel plate strapped to his left forearm. — "Arthur gave me a lecture this morning about testing the structural tolerances of my new bones before the big monsters show up. Consider this a live calibration. Wrap that line around the stone merlon and brace your boots, Trevor. With your Endurance 12 and my weight, the rope won't snap!"
— "Lord William, wait—!" — Trevor growled, hastily looping the thick hemp twice around his own leather-clad forearms and dropping into a deep, wide horse stance against the concrete parapet.
William didn't wait.
Pivoting over the edge of the rampart, the Commander of the First Army kicked off the stone and rappelled down the sheer twelve-foot vertical face of the concrete wall in two explosive bounds, releasing the guide-line at the bottom as his leather boots hit the snow-covered dirt outside the fortress with a soft thump.
Up on the parapet, Rick, Saldon, Zuler, and Van'er rushed to the edge, craning their necks over the stone battlements with their jaws hanging open as they stared down at the lone figure in the navy-blue coat standing in the open field.
Down at the base of the wall, as the freezing mist swirled around his shins, William felt his heart beat faster—the intoxicating rush of his superhuman attributes blending with the hilarious, lingering survival instincts of a twenty-two-year-old guy from Earth.
Alright, Will, breathe in, breathe out. Keep your guard high and don't get cocky, William coached himself silently under his breath, planting his boots shoulder-width apart in the six-inch snow as he locked his eyes onto the five red-eyed abominations loping across the field toward him. You've got Strength 16, Speed 11, and Endurance 14. Compared to the time Mrs. Maria's three rabid, caramel-colored street mutts chased you six blocks down the asphalt on your bicycle back in São Paulo, five oversized winter foxes ain't nothing! They're just big, ugly dogs with bad breath!
Up close, the stench rolling off the pack was genuinely nauseating—a wave of rotten carrion, sulfur, and ozone that would have made an ordinary recruit retch. Yet just as Arthur had predicted in the corridor, William's newly upgraded Endurance: 14 filtered out the dizzying effect of the miasma effortlessly, keeping his head crystal clear and his core furnace-hot.
Fifty yards out, just before the outer line of Roland's V-shaped spike trenches, the five demonic foxes spotted the lone human standing completely isolated in front of the gray wall.
To creatures whose brains had been boiled by miasma into pure predatory hunger, a single man standing outside his pack was an irresistible invitation to a slaughter.
Letting out a chorus of shrill, rasping snarls that sounded like tearing metal, the five beasts fanned out across the snow and accelerated into a dead sprint.
The alpha of the pack—a massive, scarred gray fox nearly five feet long at the spine—led the charge straight down the center lane. Thirty feet from the base of the wall, the beast bunched its mutated hind legs, kicking up a geyser of white powder as it launched itself into a terrifying, flat trajectory through the air—covering the gap in less than a blink of an eye, its blackened claws extended and its jaws wide open to rip William's face off.
Fast! William's eyes widened a fraction of an inch—the beast's burst speed easily hovered around 10 or 11—yet William's honed Krav Maga reflexes and Speed: 11 nervous system reacted faster than thought.
He didn't try to dodge the airborne missile.
Bending his knees to drop his center of gravity into the frozen dirt beneath the snow, William locked his left shoulder and raised the quarter-inch steel heater shield directly in front of his chest like an angled rampart.
CLANG—THUD!
The impact of eighty kilograms of mutated muscle and bone colliding with tempered steel at forty miles per hour sounded like two speeding cars crashing head-on in an intersection.
Razor-sharp claws screeched violently across the face of the shield, sending a shower of bright orange sparks flying into the snow as black saliva splattered across the upper rim.
The kinetic transfer of a blow that heavy would have bowled an ordinary spearman clean off his feet and snapped his shield-arm like a twig.
William's boots didn't slide backward a single millimeter in the mud.
Anchored by his Endurance: 14 bone structure and his Strength: 16 core, his left arm absorbed the full fury of the collision like a granite pillar planted into the earth.
Before gravity could even pull the stunned fox down from the face of the shield, William pivoted his hips, dropped his left arm three inches to clear a firing lane over the top rim of the steel, and threw a textbook, short-range right cross straight into the center of the beast's snarling snout.
He didn't hold back a single ounce of his sixteen points of Strength.
CRACK—BOOM!
There was no dull thud of leather hitting fur. The sound that echoed up the twelve-foot concrete wall was the sickening, explosive crunch of calcified skull and jawbone being pulverized into dust at point-blank range.
And inside William's right glove, his newly densified metacarpals and wrist bones didn't even ache—holding together like solid titanium as the full, unmitigated force of his muscle density discharged into the target.
The alpha fox didn't just fall backward. The sheer kinetic shockwave of the punch caved its entire snout three inches inward into its braincase, lifting the eighty-kilogram monster backward through the air like a kicked football. Its body spun end-over-end before slamming into the snow fifteen feet away, skidding across the ice in a spray of steaming black blood—stone dead before it ever touched the ground.
Up on the concrete parapet twelve feet overhead, the silence was absolute.
Rick, Saldon, and Zuler leaned over the crenelations with their mouths hanging open in perfect 'O's, their eyes wide enough to pop out of their skulls. In the entire history of Graycastle's northern frontier, no mortal man had ever stood in the snow and killed a charging winter beast in midair with a single barehanded punch.
Down in the snow, however, the fight wasn't over.
Driven into a blind frenzy by the smell of their pack leader's spilled black blood, a second mutated fox didn't charge head-on. Displaying the sinister, pack-hunting cunning that made forest predators so lethal in the snow, the beast darted low around the corpse of the first fox like a gray blur, cutting sharply to William's right in an attempt to flank his unshielded side while his right arm was still extended from the punch.
Ten feet away, the beast sprang off the snowbank, aiming its fangs straight for the exposed gap beneath William's right armpit.
— "Lord William! On your right flank!" — Trevor roared from the top of the wall, his scarred hands straining against the hemp rope.
William didn't even need to turn his head; his Agility: 9 spatial awareness and his combat instincts had already tracked the crunch of the snow to his side.
Instead of trying to pull his right fist back to guard, William used the momentum of his previous stance to pivot sharply ninety degrees clockwise on his heels.
Swinging his left arm across his body like a swinging iron gate, he brought the bottom steel edge of the twenty-kilogram heater shield down in a savage, two-handed guillotine chop—intercepting the second fox in mid-leap and driving the pointed steel tip of the shield straight down onto the crown of its skull.
SPLAT—CRUNCH!
Driven by sixteen points of superhuman strength, the steel rim of the shield slammed the eighty-kilogram predator straight down into the earth with the force of an industrial pile-driver.
The fox's skull shattered against the frozen mud beneath the snow, its four legs kicking once in a brief, pathetic spasm before going completely limp in a widening pool of black blood.
Two attacks. Two seconds. Two instant kills.
Straightening up to his full height in the trampled snow, William flicked a splatter of warm, corrosive black blood off his leather gauntlet before it could soak through the hide, and slowly turned his dark, predatory gaze onto the three remaining foxes twenty paces away.
The three beasts skidded to a sudden, frantic halt at the edge of the outer trench, kicking up sprays of white powder.
Every priest and veteran in Graycastle preached that once a forest animal was corrupted by winter miasma, all sense of fear was burned out of its brain until it died.
Today, William proved that theory wrong.
As the three mutated foxes stared at the tall, two-legged apex monster standing over the crushed carcasses of their alphas—feeling the terrifying, suffocating aura of pure physical dominance radiating off his frame—a million years of deep, cellular survival instinct briefly overpowered the madness of the miasma.
Letting out low, trembling whimpers in the back of their throats, all three demonic foxes tucked their matted tails between their hind legs, spun around in the snow, and bolted back into the swirling gray fog of the Concealing Forest as fast as their paws could carry them.
For five full seconds, the clearing in front of the eastern wall returned to dead, freezing silence.
Standing alone in the snow between the two steaming black corpses, William let out a long breath of white vapor, flexed his completely uninjured right fingers inside his glove, and turned back toward the twelve-foot concrete rampart with a wide, triumphant grin.
Raising his free hand in a casual thumbs-up, he gave two sharp tugs on the hemp rope tied around his waist.
— "Structural calibration complete, Trevor! Haul me up—breakfast is getting cold!" — William shouted, his voice booming with effortless, infectious charisma across the silent defenses.
Up on the parapet, a fierce, ear-to-ear grin split across Trevor's scarred face.
Bracing his boots against the crenelation and hauling the thick rope hand-over-hand with his Endurance: 12 muscles as William walked effortlessly up the vertical concrete face, Trevor turned his head and barked at the eighty slack-jawed militiamen staring down the wall:
— "Did you see that, you lazy dogs?! I told you!" — Trevor roared, his voice vibrating with borderline religious pride as William vaulted smoothly over the top of the stone merlon and landed on the walkway beside him. — "Look at our Commander! He just punched a winter demon's head clean off its shoulders with his bare hand! If the monsters from those mountains want to touch a single roof in Border Town this winter, they have to walk over a living god first!"
— "LONG LIVE LORD WILLIAM! LONG LIVE HIS HIGHNESS!" —
Started by Rick, Saldon, and Zuler right beside him, a deafening, thunderous cheer erupted from eighty throats at once, echoing down the concrete ramparts and completely drowning out the howl of the northern blizzard. Every trace of shivering fear that had hung over the peasant recruits ten minutes ago had vanished into thin air, replaced by a ferocious, unbreakable morale.
Unknotting the hemp rope from his waist and handing the blood-stained steel shield back to a wide-eyed Saldon to be wiped down, William stomped the fresh snow off his boots and looked out toward the dark, mist-shrouded treeline of the forest.
His pulse was already settling back down to a calm, steady sixty beats per minute. His wrists were whole, his bones felt like solid steel, and the comical memories of running away from stray street dogs back on Earth were officially buried beneath black-blooded frontier glory.
The first skirmish of the winter belonged to him—and as the Guardian of Border Town looked into the rising storm, he couldn't wait for the real monsters to come out and play.