Stepping off the eastern access ramp and striding up onto the wide central walkway of the main concrete rampart, William felt a wave of grim, electric satisfaction wash through his chest.
Along the entire length of the twelve-foot fortification, all eighty men of the First Army had already climbed the wooden stairs and locked into their assigned combat stations. Raised in neat, disciplined rows against the lead-colored winter sky, a dense forest of fifteen-foot iron-tipped pikes gleamed darkly through the falling snow.
Three weeks ago, these exact same men had been a rabble of starving quarrymen, stooped farmers, and hollow-eyed serfs who couldn't even stand in a straight line without shoving each other over a crust of black bread. Seeing them now—standing shoulder-to-shoulder in boiled leather jerkins, their jaws set and their weapon shafts angled seamlessly over the crenelations—gave William the absolute certainty that all those grueling afternoons of burpees, wooden-staff beatdowns, and hoarse shouting in the mud had been worth every drop of sweat.
Still carrying the heavy, twenty-kilogram steel heater shield strapped to his left forearm from his live test against the mutated foxes ten minutes earlier, William walked to the dead center of the defensive line.
The freezing northern gale whipped the dark navy-blue folds of his wool cloak behind him like a banner. As Commander-in-Chief of Border Town's military, the weight of every single breathing soul between this wall and the castle keep rested squarely on his shoulders.
Turning his face toward the howling white wasteland to the northwest, William narrowed his dark eyes.
Backed by his enhanced physical parameters, his vision pierced straight through the swirling curtains of snow and gray-green miasma hanging three hundred yards out near the edge of the Concealing Forest.
Right at the border of the dark treeline, the shadows themselves seemed to detach from the pines and surge forward.
It wasn't a small five-animal scouting pack this time. Tearing across the virgin snowfield at a terrifying, ground-eating sprint came a jagged black mass of mutated muscle, matted fur, and bared fangs—more than twenty-five full-grown demonic beasts charging straight toward the central sector of the wall.
Down on the right flank of the parapet, Deputy Commander Iron Axe spotted the emerging wave at the exact same second. Leaving his supervisory post beside the reserve pike racks, the two-meter Mojin warrior trotted swiftly down the concrete walkway, stopping two paces from William and striking his calloused right fist against his leather breastplate in a crisp salute.
As the desert veteran turned his yellow-brown eyes back toward the charging horde, his heavy brow furrowed deeply, a rare trace of genuine unease tightening his stoic features.
— "Commander William," — Iron Axe began, his gravelly voice low enough that only the officers at the center could hear him over the wind. — "Look closely at the formation of that pack marching against us... their movement pattern is completely unnatural. If those were ordinary forest wolves driven mad by the first frost, they would still run in a loose pack hierarchy. Yet out there in the snow, I am looking at timber wolves running flank-to-flank with solitary black bears, mountain boars, and horned bison. In nature, those species would tear each other's throats out on sight—yet they are sprinting side by side as if marching under a single banner."
William didn't blink, his eyes tracking the leading beasts as a cold, knowing smile curved the corner of his mouth.
— "Your hunter's eyes are as sharp as ever, Iron Axe, but starting today, you need to throw the rules of normal forest ecology straight out the window," — William replied, his deep voice calm and loaded with unshakeable authority. — "I know exactly what they're doing. The winter miasma rolling down from those peaks doesn't just swell their muscles and turn their blood black; it completely scrubs out their territorial instincts and their sense of self-preservation."
William rested his right hand on the pommel of the broadsword hanging at his hip, pointing his chin toward the massive horned silhouettes thundering down the center of the pack.
— "During the Months of the Demons, wolves and bison aren't predators and prey anymore," — William continued flatly. — "They become light infantry and heavy shock cavalry operating in sync. They aren't running toward us because their stomachs are empty, big guy. They are biological missiles sent down from the mountains with a single tactical directive: smash down our wall and wipe out every human scent in this valley."
Iron Axe turned his head slightly, studying the young foreign commander with a mixture of quiet surprise and profound respect. Even among the oldest tribal elders who had hunted the northern border for forty winters, very few understood the sinister, military-like coordination of the miasma hordes with such chilling clarity. Without another word, the giant from the Sand Nation gave a single firm nod and tightened both hands around his loaded flintlock musket, ready for the bloodbath his commander had already foreseen.
Two hundred yards out, the charging pack hit the outer perimeter of Prince Roland's field fortifications.
Just as Cheng Yan had calculated on his blueprints the morning before, the staggered V-shaped trenches filled with sharpened iron stakes and Anna's twisted tangle-wire did their job to perfection. Forced to swerve away from the rows of gleaming iron spikes jutting out of the snowdrifts, the twenty-five scattered monsters instinctively funneled themselves inward—compressing their ranks into a dense, stampeding wedge that barreled straight down the central dirt corridor.
And waiting right at the mouth of that central Kill Zone stood the first company of the militia, led by Van'er.
Four paces to William's left, Van'er stood behind the stone crenelation with his flintlock musket slung across his back for close-defense and a heavy fifteen-foot ash pike gripped in both hands.
Despite the biting sub-zero wind, the former North Slope miner felt a bead of icy sweat trickle down the center of his spine beneath his quilted wool tunic. Inside his heavy leather mittens, his palms had grown so clammy that the thick wooden shaft of his pike felt dangerously slick. Stealing half a second while the men beside him were staring out at the snow, Van'er quickly wiped one damp palm and then the other against the rough wool of his trousers before re-gripping the ash wood.
Breathe in for four counts, hold for two, exhale through the nose, Van'er repeated the drill instructions frantically inside his head, trying to slow the wild, hammering drumbeat of his heart against his ribs.
Having lived in the slums of Border Town for over ten years, Van'er had grown up listening to the old town guards whisper campfire horrors about the winter beasts that tore wooden palisades apart. After three weeks of William's brutal physical training and yesterday's explosive demonstration in the mountain ravine, the former miner had genuinely begun to feel like a real soldier. Yet standing here on the cold stone and watching a literal wall of black fur, dripping jaws, and curved horns charge straight at his chest at thirty miles per hour made the muscles in his thighs tremble almost uncontrollably.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, Van'er saw the tall, unmoving silhouette of Commander William standing just four paces away—the man who had pulled an illiterate pickaxe miner out of the mud and trusted him to lead the central line.
Swallowing the lump of terror in his dry throat, Van'er locked his knees, planted his rear boot hard against the concrete curb, and leveled his iron spearpoint over the stone lip.
Fifty paces out, the leading monster of the wedge broke through the swirling ground mist, big enough to make the men on the wall suck in a collective breath.
It was a mutated demonic bison.
Swollen by miasma to nearly a ton and a half of pure, corrupted mass, the beast looked like a living battering ram. Its broad, lowered skull boasted two curved, blackened horns as thick around as a blacksmith's thighs, while the matted hide across its humped shoulders had calcified with frozen mud and clotted black blood into an armor plate thicker than a knight's cuirass.
As its four cloven hooves pounded across the frozen dirt thirty paces from the wall, then twenty, then ten, Van'er could literally feel the twelve-foot block of solid hydraulic concrete vibrating beneath the soles of his boots.
Part of the former miner's brain desperately prayed that the giant bull would see the sheer gray cliff of artificial stone in front of its eyes and veer aside at the last second.
It didn't slow down by a single fraction of an inch.
And beside him, having read the opening siege chapters of the story back on Earth, William already knew the exact, suicidal tactic the beast was executing.
— "CENTER LINE, BRACE FOR IMPACT! LOCK YOUR BOOTS!" — William's preemptive roar thundered down the walkway.
One second later, a colossal collision of calcified bone and solid concrete shook the entire southern clearing.
BOOOM—CRACK!
Driven by blind, miasma-fueled frenzy, the ton-and-a-half demonic bison didn't try to stop; it lowered its massive horned skull and hurled its entire body weight headfirst into the base of the concrete rampart at full gallop.
Against an old-fashioned medieval palisade of pine logs, that impact would have splintered the timber and blown a ten-foot breach straight into the town. Against Master Karl and Anna's twelve-foot wall of solid hydraulic concrete anchored into the bedrock, however, the stone didn't even chip.
Instead, the horrific kinetic energy of the crash folded straight back into the monster's own skeleton. The bison's thick neck crumpled like an accordion, snapping its cervical spine with a gunshot-like crack that echoed all the way to the barracks as gallons of steaming black blood sprayed across the gray cement.
The giant beast died on the spot in a grotesque act of tactical suicide—yet as its massive, barrel-shaped carcass slumped against the bottom of the wall, its five-foot-high back formed a natural, sloped ramp of flesh and bone leaning directly against the concrete face.
Up on the parapet, Van'er barely had half a heartbeat to process the madness of an animal killing itself just to become a stepping stone.
Right behind the dying bison, two massive demonic wolves that had been drafting in its wake didn't break stride. Digging their rear claws straight into the dead bull's armored spine like a springboard, both eighty-kilogram predators launched themselves upward with explosive force—soaring straight toward the top of the twelve-foot walkway with their jaws wide open.
— "PIKES! THRUST!" — William barked, his right hand flashing across his waist to draw his heavy iron broadsword in a single fluid arc.
At the sound of his voice, Van'er and the twelve militiamen in the central bay shoved their fifteen-foot pikes forward in a blind, adrenaline-fueled reflex.
Because it was the recruits' very first live melee against airborne monsters, the execution was far from clean. Three men on the left thrust half a second too early, jabbing their iron tips into empty air; two others froze up for a fatal fraction of a second as the stench of black saliva hit their faces.
Even so, the sheer density of the pike formation paid off. The first leaping wolf impaled itself mid-flight onto three separate iron spearheads—including Van'er's—that punched deep into its chest cavity, stopping its forward momentum dead and dropping it howling back down into the snow at the base of the wall.
The second wolf, however, twisted its agile torso past the wavering spear shafts on the left, cleared the stone crenelation completely, and slammed down onto the concrete walkway right in the middle of the first platoon, its claws scrabbling against the frost as it let out a deafening snarl.
— "Hold your front! Keep your pikes over the wall—this one is mine!" — Deputy Commander Iron Axe roared.
Moving with the terrifying, fluid grace that gave him Agility: 10 and Strength: 12, the giant Mojin warrior didn't waste time trying to aim his long musket in close quarters. Stepping straight into the wolf's face, Iron Axe swung the heavy, iron-plated oak buttstock of his rifle like a war club—smashing it squarely into the predator's ribs with a loud thwack that knocked the beast sideways across the stone.
Corrupted winter beasts, however, felt almost zero pain.
Before its back even slid into the inner curb, the wolf whipped its head around, scrambled onto its paws in the blink of an eye, and lunged straight toward the throat of the nearest militiaman.
At that exact same instant, a third demonic wolf bounded up the bison's carcass outside, slipped through the gap created while the recruits on the left were recoiling from the first breach, and landed heavily on the parapet ten feet further down the line.
Directly in front of the newly landed monster stood a nineteen-year-old former farmhand named Dergus.
Caught in the middle of pulling his long pike back, the boy froze in sheer, paralyzing terror. Looking straight into a pair of glowing red eyes and six-inch fangs dripping black slime less than four feet from his chest, Dergus's knees locked up, his hands trembling so badly he couldn't even drop his fifteen-foot pole to draw his belt knife as the wolf bunched its hind legs to rip his stomach open.
The beast didn't even get to leave the ground.
Before Iron Axe could finish off the first wolf, and before Dergus could even close his eyes to die, a sudden cannon-blast of displaced air swept down the walkway accompanied by a dark-blue blur.
Driven by his Speed: 11 nervous system and Strength: 16 leg muscles, William covered the fifteen-foot gap down the parapet in a single, explosive bound that cracked the frost beneath his boots.
— "Not on my watch, you ugly mutt!" — William's voice thundered across the stone, cold and absolute.
Stepping directly between the paralyzed recruit and the lunging predator, William didn't even swing the broadsword in his right hand.
Instead, raising his left forearm high overhead, he brought the bottom steel wedge of his twenty-kilogram heater shield down with his full bodyweight and all sixteen points of his superhuman strength—slamming the rim straight down onto the crown of the wolf's skull like a falling guillotine.
CRACK—SQUELCH!
The sound was a sickening combination of wet meat and pulverized stone.
The terrifying downward force didn't just stop the wolf's leap; it flattened the beast's entire skull straight against the gray concrete walkway, while the downward shockwave ricocheted through its shoulders and snapped both of its front legs in half like dry kindling. Killed in less than a millisecond without letting out a single whimper, the eighty-kilogram monster collapsed into a motionless puddle of steaming black blood right at Dergus's boots.
At the exact instant the wolf's heartbeat flatlined, a crisp golden chime rang inside William's skull, and a small translucent banner flashed at the upper corner of his vision without blocking his sightline:
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: TIMELINE ANOMALY DETECTED]
Evaluation:Minor localized timeline shift. Direct outcome: Salvation of a First Army militiaman who was slated to suffer crippling abdominal lacerations in the opening skirmish (Dergus).
[REWARD: +40 Credits]
[CURRENT BALANCE: 50 Credits]
For a tenth of a second, William blinked in pleasant surprise.
Dergus? William glanced sideways at the pale, freckle-faced teenager, who was currently staring up at William's broad back with trembling lips as if the God of War himself had just descended from the clouds to shield him. Man, I don't even remember this kid's name from the webnovel or the anime! I just smashed that dog so it wouldn't break my pike rank, and the System hands me forty free credits?!
A sharp, cynical grin flashed across William's face as Iron Axe finished crushing the other wolf's windpipe ten feet away. Unintentional passive income right on the front line—now that's what I call a return on investment!
Around the central sector, several recruits gasped at the sheer brutality of the Commander's shield-slam, taking a half-step back from the splatter of corrosive black blood.
Yet despite two wolves briefly touching the parapet, the defensive line didn't buckle into chaos—and the reason had nothing to do with luck.
Three afternoons ago, right after unlocking [BIOMETRIC STATUS INSPECTION], William hadn't rested for an hour. He had walked up and down every single platoon in the barracks, scanning the hidden physical numbers of all eighty men and completely reorganizing the wall rosters with cold, mathematical precision.
Wherever he had found a nervous teenager like Dergus with Strength: 6 and a shaky Endurance: 6, William had intentionally flanked that boy on both sides with hardened quarrymen possessing Strength: 8 and Endurance: 9—men like Zuler, Krag, and Saldon. The First Army wasn't just a line of men holding sticks; it was an interlocking tactical mesh engineered by a commander who could literally read the invisible stats of his troops.
Planting the sole of his heavy leather boot against the dead wolf's ribs, William kicked the eighty-kilogram carcass effortlessly back over the parapet edge to clear the walkway, then reached out and tapped the flat of his steel shield lightly against Van'er's shoulder.
— "Your spacing held up fine, Van'er! Don't let the boys drop their spear tips—the rest of the pack is going to try scrambling up that dead bison's back!" — William barked, his voice snapping the former miner right out of his tunnel vision. — "Iron Axe, take command of the center and have the riflemen pick off anything heavy in the trench! I'm sweeping the left flank!"
Without waiting for a salute, William spun on his heel and sprinted down the snow-dusted concrete toward the western sector.
He wasn't acting like an aristocrat giving orders from a tent in the rear; he was operating as Border Town's own mobile heavy artillery.
Fifty paces down the left flank, where the trench funnel narrowed near the rocky base of the North Slope cliff, a cluster of four agile demonic wolves had bypassed the iron stakes and were using each other's backs like a living ladder to scramble up the twelve-foot vertical stone.
Right at the lip of the wall above them, a wide-eyed young recruit shoved his fifteen-foot pike desperately down at the leading beast's shoulder. However, with the boy's arms trembling from cold and adrenaline, the iron spearhead lacked the kinetic force to punch through the wolf's matted, frost-hardened winter hide—glancing off the shoulder blade as three pairs of snapping jaws crested the stone parapet at once.
Skrrrrt!
William arrived like a runaway locomotive, his boots sliding four feet across the icy cement as he came to a halt right beside the panicking youth.
— "I'll borrow this for a second, kid!" — William said smoothly.
Reaching out with his free right hand, William plucked the thick, two-inch-wide ash shaft of the fifteen-foot pike straight out of the recruit's numb fingers as if it weighed no more than a chopstick.
He didn't bother pulling the pole back to stab with the iron tip.
Instead, gripping the rear end of the fifteen-foot timber shaft with his right hand while bracing his forearm against his hip, William rotated his torso and swung the entire three-meter wooden pole horizontally across the top of the crenelation like a giant swinging a tree trunk as a baseball bat.
Every single ounce of his Strength: 16 poured straight into the arc of the ash wood.
WHAM—CRACK!
The thick wooden pike shaft was never designed by medieval carpenters to withstand the lateral torque of a human siege engine.
The seasoned ash wood shattered completely in half upon impact, sending a shower of long white splinters flying into the snow—yet the catastrophic kinetic energy transferred into the three airborne wolves simultaneously was nothing short of apocalyptic.
Caught dead-on in mid-leap by the sweeping timber beam, the skulls of the first two wolves caved inward with twin wet crunches, killing them instantly before their paws could touch the walkway. The third wolf took the tail end of the swing squarely across its ribcage, launching the beast backward off the wall in a spinning arc that dropped it twelve feet straight onto the sharpened iron stakes of the trench below.
All three monsters were dead before the broken front half of the spear even clattered into the snow at the base of the rampart.
Standing beside William, the young recruit's jaw dropped so low he nearly bit his tongue, staring in utter disbelief at the jagged, smoking splinter of two-inch ash wood still gripped in the Commander's right hand.
Tossing the broken wooden stub casually over his shoulder, William unstrapped the heavy twenty-kilogram steel shield from his left arm, pressed it into the astonished boy's chest, and clapped him firmly on the helmet.
— "Hold onto my shield until I get back, soldier! Keep your boots planted and don't hesitate when you thrust—remember that every person we care about is sitting behind this stone!" — William flashed the kid a fierce, predatory grin before pivoting and sprinting toward the next point of contact.
For the next twenty-seven minutes, the hundred-meter concrete rampart of Border Town ceased to be a desperate defensive siege and turned into William's personal proving ground.
Wherever the howl of the wind drowned out the officers' voices, or whenever a pack of mutated boars and wolves managed to dodge Van'er's disciplined musket volleys and leap toward the pike line, the tall figure in the navy-blue cloak appeared in the breach like a phantom of pure violence.
He didn't touch his Teleportation magic once. With his Strength: 16, Speed: 11, and newly forged Endurance: 14 working in seamless harmony, he didn't need to.
A three-hundred-kilogram demonic boar that tried to gore its way up the central bison ramp had its tusks snapped off at the roots by a two-handed overhead smash from William's iron broadsword before a brutal front kick sent its carcass tumbling back down onto the pack behind it. Wolves that cleared the parapet were snatched out of midair by their scruffs and slammed into the stone merlons with the force of forging hammers.
Not a single breach lasted longer than three seconds. Not a single militiaman was dragged off the wall. In fact, by the time the twenty-seventh minute ticked by on Arthur's watch back in the castle, not a single recruit in the First Army had suffered so much as a scratch on his skin—because their Commander had personally erased every mistake in the line before the beasts' teeth could close.
When the final mutated wolf took a lead musket ball from Trevor's rifle straight through its left eye and collapsed twitching into the snowdrifts, the eerie, suffocating silence of the northern blizzard reclaimed the valley.
The opening wave of the Months of the Demons had been completely annihilated.
Down at the base of the twelve-foot wall and inside the central trench funnel, more than two dozen steaming black carcasses lay piled in the crimson-and-black stained snow. Up on the concrete walkway, however, the gray stone was completely free of human blood.
Leaning his back heavily against the inner parapet wall, Van'er let out a long, shuddering breath that turned to white mist, feeling the tension drain out of his aching calves. All down the line, eighty former miners and farmers lowered their bloodied pikes and turned their heads to stare at the tall young man standing at the center of the rampart.
They didn't look at William merely as a noble commander anymore. In the eyes of every man on that wall, he was an Invincible Guardian—a living war god who made death itself bounce off the stone.
Shaking a splatter of freezing black blood off his leather gauntlets, William rolled his shoulders and let out a quiet breath, satisfied with the performance of his upgraded frame. His second live test of the morning had gone off with zero casualties, and he had fifty credits sitting back in the bank.
Yet as William looked out into the thickening fog toward the Concealing Forest, the veteran gamer instinct in the back of his head told him not to put his sword away just yet.
In any siege, the trash mobs were only the curtain-raiser.
Suddenly, from thirty feet up on the wooden observation platform built behind the central bastion, the lookout's voice cracked through the freezing air in a high-pitched scream of pure terror:
— "C-COMMANDER WILLIAM! BY THE GODS... LOOK AT THE TREELINE! WHAT IN THE SEVEN HELLS IS THAT?!"
Down on the walkway, William and Iron Axe snapped their heads toward the northwest in the exact same heartbeat.
Three hundred yards away, where the dense pine trunks met the open snowfield, the swirling gray-green miasma seemed to part with an eerie, almost reverent slowness.
THUD... THUD... THUD...
Before the creature even stepped fully out of the mist, every man standing on top of the twelve-foot concrete wall felt the rhythmic, seismic tremors traveling straight up through the bedrock and rattling the iron tips of their grounded pikes.
When the monstrosity finally emerged from the fog into the pale light of the snowfield, the cheering breath died in eighty throats at once.
Even from three hundred yards away, its silhouette was a grotesque insult to biology and physics. Towering nearly four meters high at the crest of its back and stretching seven meters long from front to back, it looked like a moving mountain of blackened, fungal-encrusted stone and rotting muscle—a colossal, six-legged Hybrid Beast carrying an ancient, obsidian-like turtle carapace across its spine with two lolling, oversized wolf heads protruding from the front.
Four paces to William's left, Van'er's face turned as gray as the cement beneath his boots; the former miner's lips moved silently in a forgotten childhood prayer as he realized that ten full-grown draft oxen stacked together wouldn't match half the mass of that armored abomination.
Beside William, even a fearless veteran like Deputy Commander Iron Axe swallowed hard against a dry throat, his knuckles turning white around the stock of his musket.
— "Commander William..." — Iron Axe whispered, his deep voice tight as his eyes locked onto the six rhino-thick legs crushing the snowdrifts. — "That... that is a fully matured Hybrid Species. In all my years on the border, I have never seen a specimen of that scale march out of the deep peaks on the very first day of the snow."
William's jaw clenched hard, his dark eyes narrowing into slits as he sized up the approaching titan.
He wasn't an idiot blinded by his own stats. With Strength: 16 and Endurance: 14, he could cave in the skulls of eighty-kilogram wolves and snap wood like toothpicks all day long. However, standing in front of twenty tons of calcified shell and six-legged momentum without heavy explosives was a completely different equation. While he could probably dodge its feet and survive a clash, bringing down a walking fortress required the full industrial teeth Cheng Yan and Arthur had prepared.
Spinning sharply on his heel without a trace of hesitation, William locked eyes with nineteen-year-old Saldon, who had just finished hauling up a fresh crate of reserve pikes near the stairs.
— "Saldon!" — William's voice boomed across the silent parapet, cutting straight through the creeping paralysis of the recruits.
— "Sir! Yes, My Lord!" — the young militiaman snapped to attention instantly, his chest heaving as he looked at William with wide, fanatical eyes.
— "Drop those spears and run down the ramp right now!" — William ordered, pointing an armored finger back toward the castle keep. — "Sprint all the way to the main hall and find Sir Carter, Count Arthur, and Prince Roland! Tell them the warm-up skirmish is officially over! We have a cataclysmic-class Hybrid Beast marching dead-center toward our wall, and tell His Highness I said to bring up the heavy black-powder barrels and the demolition charges immediately! Move!"
— "Right away, Lord Commander!" —
Saldon didn't waste a breath; spinning on his heel, the speed-gifted recruit bolted down the wooden steps two at a time like a bolt of lightning.
Turning back toward the crenelations, William planted his boots wide, resting both gloved hands on the freezing concrete lip as he drew in a deep lungful of icy air to steady his racing adrenaline and let his muscles recover for the collision to come.
It was right in that brief, quiet heartbeat between the wind gusts that he felt it.
Directly behind his right shoulder, the sub-zero air shifted by a fraction of an inch—carrying an almost imperceptible ripple of static and the faint, familiar scent of winter ozone and sweet dried fish.
Before William could even turn his head, a soft, velvety feminine voice brushed right against the shell of his ear—so close, tender, and quiet that not even Iron Axe standing three feet away could hear a single syllable:
— "Good job out there, Commander."
William froze completely.
For a full second, the unexpected whisper paralyzed his nervous system far more effectively than the sight of the seven-meter Hybrid Beast marching across the plain.
He knew that voice instantly. It was Nightingale.
Even as his brain automatically locked up for a millisecond trying to process what she was doing standing on the front wall, the full weight of her presence hit him straight in the chest.
William knew Nightingale's strict priorities inside Border Town better than anyone. First and foremost, she was Prince Roland's unseen shadow—the lethal bodyguard who never let the young ruler step out of her reach, because if Roland died, the only true sanctuary for witches on this continent died with him. And whenever Roland was safely locked inside his study with Carter's guards, Nightingale spent her days near the backyard kilns watching over Anna and little Nana.
By every logical rule, she should have been warm and dry inside the castle keep right now—either guarding the Prince, checking on the girls, or perhaps keeping a suspicious eye on Arthur after their heated clash over Baron Pine the day before.
Yet she wasn't in the castle.
She had walked all the way out here into the howling blizzard, standing invisible in the middle of the flying black blood and the stench of demonic beasts on the front rampart—for no other reason than to watch William's back and make sure he didn't get himself killed doing something reckless.
For a brief, intense moment, the roar of the snowstorm, the distant trembling of the frozen earth, and the nervous breathing of the eighty militiamen around him faded into muffled background noise.
Inside William's chest, something warm, heavy, and fiercely electric flared to life.
It wasn't a golden [TIMELINE ANOMALY] banner, and it wasn't forty attribute points added to his screen. It was a complex, overwhelming surge of pride, surprise, and a feeling far deeper than a simple joke in a hallway—an anchor that made his right hand tighten around the leather hilt of his broadsword until the iron guard hummed.
He opened his mouth and turned his head half an inch to the right, wanting to see if her silver-blonde hair was still shimmering behind the veil of the Mist World.
Nothing was there except the falling snow swirling across the cold gray stone.
— "Commander William! The beast has crossed the two-hundred-pace mark!" — Iron Axe's harsh voice called out beside him, snapping the brief spell in half as reality crashed back in.
William swallowed the lump in his throat and turned his dark eyes squarely back toward the approaching mountain of black flesh and calcified shell.
His heart was hammering against his ribs again—not from dread of the abomination shaking the snowfield, but from the lingering warmth of that two-word whisper against his ear.
Behind his eyes, the fighter's brain was already calculating trajectories, angles, and impact force, itching to discover what happened when a seven-meter nightmare of the old world collided head-on with a man who now had a whole new reason refused to take a single step back.