A sharp, metallic gust of northern wind tore Prince Roland's command straight from his lips and carried it down the entire length of the twelve-foot concrete rampart, setting the final gears of Border Town's defense into motion.
Under the harsh, barking orders of the veteran squad leaders, twelve militiamen who had spent their youth hunting deer and mountain goats along the crags of the North Slope scrambled up the narrow wooden ladders into the flanking watchtowers—the highest and most secure vantage points along the southern perimeter.
Bracing their hips against the frost-covered timber parapets twenty feet above the snowfield, the archers and heavy arbalest crews fought to steady their trembling, cold-stiffened fingers as they hauled back on taut hemp bowstrings and ratcheted the iron windlasses of their crossbows.
— "Archers, nock and draw! Wait for the wind to lull!" — shouted the tower squad leader, squinting through the swirling white flakes at the twenty-ton monstrosity lumbering past the eighty-pace mark below. — "Aim for the front skulls and the throat! Loose at will!"
Twang-thwack-TWANG!
A dark cloud of steel-tipped hunting arrows and heavy, armor-piercing iron crossbow bolts whistled out from the towers in a high, steeper parabola, attempting to drop straight down onto the monster from above.
Once again, however, the relentless sub-zero gale pouring down from the Impassable Mountain Range acted like an invisible shield wall in the sky.
The vicious crosswind caught the fletching of the lighter wooden arrows at the apex of their flight, twisting their trajectories sideways and robbing them of half their momentum before dumping them harmlessly into the churned snowdrifts around the creature's six pillar-like legs.
The few shafts that actually stayed on target struck the dark brown, algae-encrusted dome of the Hybrid Beast's carapace with a series of hollow, pathetic toc-toc-toc clatters—bouncing off the calcified plates without leaving so much as a white scratch on the shell. Even the four heavy windlass bolts, fired with enough poundage to punch cleanly through a royal knight's steel breastplate at fifty paces, ricocheted violently off the sloped, thickened foreheads of the two swaying wolf heads, tumbling into the frozen mud like snapped toothpicks.
Against an abomination of this weight class, medieval bowstrings might as well have been children's toys.
Down on the main concrete walkway, the frustration along the pike line was thick enough to choke on.
Standing beside Prince Roland, Chief Knight Carter Lannis ground his back teeth together until his jaw ached, watching the last of the iron bolts bounce off the monster's snout sixty paces out.
— "Bows and windlasses are completely useless against hide that thick!" — Carter shouted over the howling wind, taking the heavy flintlock musket back from Erik's hands and checking the priming pan in one practiced motion. — "Front rank, clear a firing lane at the parapet!"
Stepping right up to the snow-dusted stone crenelations, Carter Lannis, Deputy Commander Iron Axe, and William's sworn shield-bearer Trevor planted their boots shoulder-width apart in a tight three-man triangle. Along the bay to their left, Van'er and the first squad of marksmen mirrored their stance.
As the three most seasoned combat veterans in Border Town raised the heavy six-kilogram iron rifles and tucked the oiled oak buttstocks firmly into the pockets of their shoulders, every ounce of hesitation vanished from their eyes.
Fifty paces out, the seven-meter colossus crushed its way past the outer trench stakes, the seismic thud-thud of its six rhino-thick legs making the loose powder grains dance inside the ammunition boxes.
— "Steady your barrels!" — Iron Axe commanded, his cold hunter's eye sighting straight down the top of the iron tube toward the upper junction where the creature's twin necks met the rim of the shell. — "Aim for the front center of mass! FIRE!"
KRA-KRA-KOOOOOOOM!
Three nearly simultaneous explosions ripped through the freezing gale, followed half a second later by the ragged volley of Van'er's marksmen down the line.
Spouts of blinding orange fire and a dense, suffocating bank of gray-white sulfur smoke erupted across the front of the parapet, temporarily blinding the pikemen standing behind them as the deafening thunderclap rolled all the way back to the cliffs of the North Slope. Propelled by the violent gas expansion of Arthur and Roland's corned black powder, the heavy lead spheres screamed across the fifty-pace gap at over three hundred meters per second—slamming dead-on into the front arch of the monstrous turtle's shell and the thick collar of black flesh beneath it.
When the northern wind tore the bitter cloud of acidic smoke away two seconds later, a collective, hollow gasp of despair rippled down the ranks of the First Army.
Unlike the crossbow bolts, the high-velocity lead balls had certainly left their mark. Where the bullets had struck the front lip of the dark brown carapace, chunks of frozen black swamp algae and glowing purple fungi had been blasted into powder, opening half a dozen shallow, whitish craters the size of silver coins in the outermost calcified layer of the shell. Two shots that had hit the thick black hide between the wolf necks had torn ragged flesh wounds that oozed thick, tar-like black blood.
Yet that was all.
Against twenty tons of dense, mutated biomass, the soft lead spheres had flattened and mushroomed upon impact, their kinetic energy completely spent before they could penetrate deep enough to sever a major cervical artery or pierce the foot-thick bone protecting its vitals.
The Hybrid Beast didn't stumble. It didn't slow its four-mile-per-hour march by a single fraction of an inch, nor did it let out a roar of pain. Its two dead-eyed, foam-flecked wolf heads simply continued to sway left and right like pendulums on a clock, utterly indifferent to the thunderous modern weapons that had shattered knightly armor like wet paper.
Three paces behind the shooters, standing in his protected position beside William, Prince Roland swallowed hard against a suddenly dry throat.
Behind his wide gray eyes, Cheng Yan's mechanical engineering brain was working at frantic speed, processing the grim ballistic data he had just witnessed.
The kinetic transfer of soft lead spheres at fifty paces was completely dissipated by the outer lamina, Roland analyzed, a bead of cold sweat trickling down his temple despite the sub-zero wind. That shell isn't ordinary calcium carbonate or bone. Judging by the way the shockwave dispersed radially without fracturing the plate, the miasma mutation has woven an organic matrix with a tensile hardness and impact-absorption profile approaching carbon-fiber composites or layered ceramic armor! With round lead balls fired from smoothbore barrels, not even ten continuous volleys will punch through to its heart before it rams the base of the wall!
Right beside the Prince, however, William stood locked in an agonizing, silent war of his own.
On the outside, the Commander of the First Army looked as unshakeable as the concrete beneath his boots, his broad shoulders squared and his hand resting calmly on his sword hilt. Inside his skull, however, his thoughts were spinning like an over-pressurized waterwheel threatening to tear itself off its axle.
For the first time since waking up in Graycastle, William found himself trapped in a brutal, no-win tactical vise created by the very secrets that kept him and Arthur alive.
William knew, with absolute, bone-deep certainty, that he possessed the personal firepower to end this Hybrid Beast in less than five seconds.
In fact, he had two different ways to do it.
The fastest, cleanest method was sitting right inside his chest: Magic Power: 3 [Teleportation].
All he had to do was unholster the heavy, high-caliber flintlock pistol Roland had gifted him, mentally pull the spatial trigger in his ribcage, and fold space across the forty-yard gap. He could materialize in midair three inches in front of those blind, swaying wolf heads, jam the muzzle of his pistol straight through an eyeball into the brain stem to blow its skull open from the inside—or drive his sixteen-Strength fist straight down its open gullet—and then immediately burn his second Teleportation charge to blink right back onto the top of the parapet before the twenty-ton carcass even hit the snow.
It would be effortless, zero-risk, and straight out of an action movie.
And it would instantly blow our entire cover story to kingdom come, William cursed inwardly, his jaw clenching so hard his molars creaked.
Without moving his head, William let his eyes sweep down the crowded walkway of the southern rampart.
There were over eighty men packed shoulder-to-shoulder along the concrete, plus the twenty archers up in the wooden watchtowers, Carter's six royal guards, and Prince Roland himself. Every single pair of eyes on this wall was locked straight onto the open, snow-covered killing field in front of them. There were no dark cellar walls here, no thick forest trees, and no smoke screens to hide behind.
If the Commander of the First Army literally vanished into thin air with an audible pop of displaced atmosphere and materialized forty yards out in the middle of an empty white field, nobody on earth would buy that "Pure Arcane Magic" breathing-exercise bullshit he had fed Iron Axe and Roland three weeks ago. Even an illiterate quarryman would recognize instantaneous spatial folding for what it was: undeniable, supernatural witchcraft.
And William remembered Arthur's icy warning from the training yard all too well.
Right now, the eighty recruits cheering his name looked up to him like a god—yet human nature in a feudal world was never a monolith. In any crowd of nearly a hundred poor men whose families had been brainwashed by the priests for four centuries, there was always a statistical chance of a Judas. All it took was one superstitious archer, or one greedy militiaman who realized that the High Church of Hermes in King's City would pay a chest of solid gold royals to hear that the Fourth Prince was employing a "male witch"—an unprecedented abomination straight from the devil—to command his army.
The moment word of a male magic user reached the Cathedral in the capital, the Church wouldn't wait for spring or political pretexts; they would declare an immediate holy crusade against the western frontier and march a legion of stitched-together God's Punishment Warriors straight down their throats while they still only had thirty muskets to their name.
Alright, scratch Teleportation, William thought, a cold bead of sweat rolling down between his shoulder blades beneath his wool doublet as the six-legged colossus crushed the thirty-pace stake line. What if I leave the magic locked up and go pure brute force?
He had Strength: 16, Endurance: 14, and Speed: 11. He could grab the hemp rope, jump back down into the snow like he had done against the foxes, sprint underneath those two swaying wolf heads, and try to cave in the monster's throat and leg tendons in a classic one-on-one melee.
Yet as William stared at the millstone-sized feet crushing the frozen earth into powder twenty-five paces away, the cold martial artist inside his head calculated the terrifying odds of that gamble.
First, the physics were wildly stacked against him. Sixteen points of Strength made him hit like a battering ram compared to a ninety-kilogram human, yet that six-legged monstrosity weighed nearly twenty tons. If his boots slipped by half an inch on the blood-slicked ice down there while dodging, and one of those multi-ton rhino legs came down on his back—or if the twenty-ton shell simply dropped flat to crush him—not even Endurance: 14 would keep his spine from snapping in half, which would force him to burn his Teleportation in plain sight anyway just to avoid getting squashed into meat paste.
Second, even if he pulled off a miracle and beat a house-sized Hybrid Beast to death in the open snow with his bare hands and a twenty-kilogram shield, the political fallout was almost as lethal as teleporting!
Punching the skull off an eighty-kilogram fox could still be written off by frontier soldiers as the peak of ancestral martial arts. Standing toe-to-toe with a seven-meter Hybrid titan and dismantling it by hand, however, was a feat that only one type of creature on this continent could perform physically: the Church's own God's Punishment Army.
If Duke Ryan's remaining spies in town reported to the capital that Prince Roland possessed a commander with the exact physical profile of a Church super-soldier, the Pope in Hermes wouldn't think "male witch"—he would conclude that the Fourth Prince had somehow stolen the Church's most sacred, top-secret alchemical creation formula! And that accusation was ten times more believable—and ten times more guaranteed to bring the entire military might of the Church crashing down on Border Town before mid-winter—than any rumor of magic!
Dammit! If I use my magic, we're screwed. If I jump down there and solo a twenty-ton kaiju with my fists, we're screwed! William's teeth ground together as his hand tightened around his sword hilt until the leather creaked. What is my third option?! Stand back, order the men to evacuate the central bay, let the bastard ram the concrete wall until Van'er can drop the black-powder barrels under its belly like in the original novel?!
Even that canonical play felt like Russian roulette right now.
In the original story, the Hybrid Beast had slammed into the wall, and when the gunpowder barrels failed to completely kill it, Anna had arrived at the last second after evolving her fire during the Day of Awakening to slice it open with a black laser-flame. Here, because of the butterfly effect, the Hybrid had shown up weeks early—before Anna had even gone through her eighteenth-birthday awakening!
If William ordered a retreat from the parapet and the black powder barrels failed to flip that twenty-ton shell in the mud, the thirty wolves and bears marching behind the hybrid would pour straight over the breach and butcher his men while he stood there holding back his power like a coward!
ROOOOOOOOAAAAAR!
Down in the trampled snow, less than fifteen paces from the base of the concrete rampart, both of the Hybrid Beast's foam-flecked wolf heads suddenly jerked upward at the exact same instant, letting out a guttural, cavernous roar that vibrated like an earthquake inside the defenders' ribcages as its six massive legs bunched to ram the wall head-on.
Ten paces.
Nine paces.
Beside Roland, Carter Lannis dropped his empty musket onto the ammo crate and ripped his steel longsword from its scabbard, his face pale but set like stone. To William's right, Iron Axe slung his rifle over his back and drew his heavy curved hunting blade, preparing to sell his life at the lip of the parapet.
Just as William's finger twitched over his sword guard—half a heartbeat away from saying "To hell with the Pope" and jumping over the wall himself—the ambient temperature on top of the central walkway shifted violently.
The biting sub-zero wind didn't stop, yet the air five feet to William's left suddenly warped and shimmered with a wave of dry, contained, furnace-like heat that melted the falling snowflakes into steam before they could touch the concrete.
Every man in the command group turned his head at once.
Rising smoothly up past the inner edge of the concrete walkway was a small, slender silhouette wrapped in a gray wool winter cloak.
It was Anna.
Except the seventeen-year-old girl wasn't climbing the wooden access stairs, and she wasn't running down the frosty stones on her boots.
Defying every law of gravity and mortal physics that the men on that wall had ever known, Anna was floating effortlessly through the empty air—hovering two meters above the concrete walkway as if standing on an invisible marble pedestal, her orange-red hair whipping in the hot thermal updraft radiating from her skin.
Gone was the quiet, soot-smudged girl who politely handed out brick calculations in the courtyard. As she drifted to a halt in midair directly above the front crenelation, her crystal-clear blue eyes shone with the cold, merciless focus of an avenging war goddess looking down at an insect.
Even more astonishing than the fact that she was flying, however, was what orbited around her cloak.
She hadn't summoned a roaring wall of orange-green fire. Instead, spinning silently around her levitating figure like deadly silver satellites in a tighter, mathematical orbit were three dozen solid, high-carbon steel needles.
Each individual steel shaft measured fifty centimeters long and as thick as a carpenter's chisel—forged, drawn out, and sharpened to a microscopic point by Anna's precision heat in the backyard shed, and currently glowing at their tips with a faint, searing white-orange incandescence.
Down on the walkway two meters below her boots, William blinked twice, his jaw dropping half an inch as the gears of his webnovel meta-knowledge completely short-circuited inside his head.
Wait a damn second... SINCE WHEN CAN ANNA FLY?! William stared up at the hovering fire witch in utter, slack-jawed bewilderment. That was 100% not in the manhwa or the novel! Anna controls fire and heat—she's not Magneto, and she doesn't have wind magic like Wendy or Tilly's flight stones! Did our timeline butterfly effect somehow mutate her Magic Core into giving her levitation before her eighteenth birthday?!
Beside him, Prince Roland was equally stunned, taking a hasty step forward with his hand raised against the snow:
— "Anna?! What are you doing out of the workshop—and how are you in the air?! Get down behind the stone merlon right now, it's too close!" — Roland shouted urgently.
Hovering two meters above the parapet, Anna didn't speak a single word.
She couldn't risk breaking her razor-thin concentration on the superheated steel shafts, and she didn't need to speak.
Locking her unblinking blue eyes down onto the seven-meter Hybrid Beast—which was now less than seven meters from the base of the concrete wall, lowering its twin wolf skulls for the final, wall-shattering impact—Anna raised her right arm and made a single, sharp, downward-slashing gesture with two fingers.
In that exact microsecond, the air above the rampart seemed to detonate without gunpowder.
ZING—ZING—ZING—SHHHHK!
All thirty-six fifty-centimeter steel needles launched forward from their orbit simultaneously.
They weren't thrown by a human arm, nor were they pushed by a simple gust of wind. Superheated at their tips by Anna's concentrated fire to slash aerodynamic drag and propelled forward by an invisible, catastrophic surge of pure kinetic acceleration, the heavy steel spikes broke the two-hundred-and-forty-meter-per-second mark in a heartbeat—crossing the seven-meter gap between the parapet and the monster as thirty-six streaks of silver-white light that were practically invisible to the naked eye.
The sound that followed wasn't the dull toc of arrows or the flat thud of soft lead balls mushrooming against armor.
It was the clinical, terrifying hiss of superheated, high-density tool steel punching through flesh and bone like hot needles through butter.
The colossal Hybrid Beast—whose foot-thick carapace had just shrugged off windlass bolts and fifty-caliber musket fire—stood zero chance against fifty-centimeter steel penetrators concentrating immense kinetic energy and extreme thermal heat onto a surface area the size of a pinhead.
Twelve silver needles struck the two swaying wolf heads dead-on, piercing straight through all four milky, dead eyes and the nasal cavities as if they were made of water—driving half a meter of white-hot steel straight through the back of their skulls and boiling the monster's dual brain stems into soup.
At the exact same instant, the remaining twenty-four steel spikes plunged with surgical, geometric precision straight into the narrow, unarmored articulation joints where the creature's six rhino-thick legs met the lower rim of its muddy carapace—severing its femoral arteries, slicing its primary motor tendons in half, and pinning deep into the massive internal organs hidden beneath its shell.
The twenty-ton titan froze dead in mid-stride, less than fifteen feet from the gray concrete.
It didn't roar. It didn't thrash, and it didn't take a single step further.
With its nervous system severed in thirty-six places at once, all six of its colossal, pillar-like legs simply gave out beneath its belly at the exact same millisecond—and the seven-meter mountain of corrupted flesh collapsed straight down into the snow like an imploded stone watchtower.
BOOOOOOOOM!
The impact of twenty tons of dead bone and carapace slamming flat into the frozen earth sent a blinding geyser of white snow shooting twenty feet up the face of the wall, accompanied by a seismic shudder that rattled the concrete walkway hard enough to make half the militiamen grab onto their pikes and the stone crenelations to keep from losing their footing.
And then, as the cloud of displaced snow settled slowly over the motionless, pincushioned mountain of brown shell below... a silence deeper and heavier than the winter storm dropped over the entire southern battlefield.
The cataclysmic Hybrid Beast—an apex nightmare that would have wiped out any normal frontier garrison in Graycastle—had been executed in less than a tenth of a second.
Up above the parapet, the shimmering heat haze around Anna's cloak faded away as the seventeen-year-old girl descended smoothly through the air, the soles of her small leather boots touching down onto the frosty concrete walkway without a sound.
For five full seconds, nobody on top of the wall moved a muscle.
Commander William, Chief Knight Carter Lannis, the stoic Iron Axe, Trevor, Van'er, and eighty commoner recruits stood frozen like ice sculptures in the pale glare of the snow—their mouths hanging open and their smoking muskets forgotten in their hands as they stared in utter, dumbfounded shock at the quiet orange-haired girl smoothing down the front of her wool cloak.
The true architect of that "miracle," however, had drafted the blueprint forty-eight hours earlier in the quiet gloom of the castle keep.
Two evenings ago, right at the ninety-degree bend of the ground-floor corridor outside the western stairwell, Arthur had just finished revealing the existence of his Telekinesis to Anna after catching her falling notebooks in midair.
When the seventeen-year-old witch had warned him with an amused glint in her blue eyes to be careful flying above the roofs at midnight so Nightingale wouldn't throw a dagger at him out of reflex, Arthur hadn't stepped back.
Instead, the black-haired strategist had taken one slow, deliberate step closer, bending down until his lips were barely two inches from Anna's soot-dusted ear.
— "Within the next forty-eight hours, Anna, the opening surge of the Months of the Demons is going to drive a cataclysmic Hybrid Beast straight toward our southern wall," — Arthur had whispered, his voice a barely audible murmur that dissolved before it could ever reach the stone walls, yet carrying an absolute, chilling certainty. — "It will be a six-legged monstrosity the size of a cottage, armored in a shell thick enough to bounce our smoothbore musket balls. I don't have the exact hour on my watch, yet its arrival is a mathematical certainty—and I need your partnership to erase it without causing a political disaster."
Anna's blue eyes had widened slightly at his sudden proximity, a brief, instinctive flush of teenage shyness coloring her cheeks before her sharp, pragmatic mind locked straight onto the gravity of his words.
— "Both William and I already possess the personal capability to kill a beast of that scale with the powers we brought into this world," — Arthur had continued, choosing every syllable with surgical care. — "However, neither of us can expose our magic in front of eighty soldiers in broad daylight. You know how the Church of Hermes operates: if word leaks to King's City that 'male witches' or unexplainable anomalies are fighting for His Highness, the Church won't just send spies—they will use it to rally the entire kingdom's nobility and the God's Punishment Army to crush Border Town before our factories are even built."
Arthur had pulled back just enough to look straight into her crystal-clear blue eyes.
— "To protect Prince Roland and this sanctuary, we need a visual shield, Anna," — Arthur had explained softly. — "When that Hybrid Beast reaches the wall, the men of Border Town cannot see a foreign man breaking the laws of nature; they need to see His Highness's lead witch saving every single one of their lives. Tomorrow in the forge, I want you to quietly draw out thirty-six fifty-centimeter rods of our hardest high-carbon steel and sharpen them to needle points. When the horn sounds for the Hybrid Beast, walk out to the base of the wall. I will remain completely hidden in the rear watchtower, and I will use my Level 10 Telekinesis to lift you into the air and fire those superheated steel needles through the monster's vitals at supersonic speed. All you have to do is surround yourself and the needles with your flame, raise your hand, and point at the target. You will be the public executioner in the sky; I will be the invisible gear turning behind the curtain. Will you do this with me?"
Understanding the immense strategic weight—and the absolute life-or-death trust—that the guarded strategist had just placed in her hands, Anna had held Arthur's dark gaze without blinking and given a single, solemn nod of agreement before disappearing down the hall.
As Arthur had straightened up in that empty corridor two nights ago, his right hand had slipped back into the deep inner pocket of his dark wool overcoat—his gloved fingers brushing against a cold, smooth, hexagonal crystal medallion hanging from a silver chain.
It was a God's Stone of Retaliation—the exact piece of sacred anti-magic mineral he had quietly coerced Assistant Minister Barov into handing over during a private "audit" in the archives a few days earlier.
Arthur never left a single security variable to chance.
He knew that Nightingale spent half her life walking invisible through the castle corridors inside her Mist World, and that her passive magic automatically detected lies whenever she stood within five meters of a speaker. By keeping a God's Stone of Retaliation concealed inside his coat pocket at all times, Arthur projected a continuous, five-meter anti-magic "dead zone" around his own body. If Nightingale ever tried to sneak within five meters of him inside the Mist, the Stone's aura would violently tear her dimensional veil apart and dump her straight out into the physical room—forcing the assassin to maintain a minimum five-meter distance where she could neither hear a quiet whisper in Anna's ear nor use her truth-sense on him!
And because Arthur's Telekinesis originated from the interdimensional System rather than a native witch's Magic Core, the God's Stone sitting in his own pocket had zero effect on his powers.
Back in the freezing present on top of the southern rampart, the stunned, breathless silence that had followed the twenty-ton monster's collapse finally broke.
For the first half-second after seeing Anna float into the sky and annihilate the invincible titan with a flick of her fingers, a wave of primal, superstitious awe had made several of the raw recruits flinch back—four hundred years of Church sermons screaming in their heads about the terrifying power of witches.
Yet that fear evaporated in the very next heartbeat as the eighty men looked down at the dead, motionless mountain of brown shell lying seven meters from their boots.
That "cursed power" hadn't burned their homes; it had just saved every single man on that wall from being crushed into bloody paste. Across the entire hundred-meter parapet, the tension in eighty chests broke into a roaring, spontaneous tide of pure relief, wonder, and bone-deep gratitude toward the seventeen-year-old girl standing in the snow.
Prince Roland's heart was hammering against his ribs as he hurried ten paces down the frosty walkway toward Anna, completely ignoring royal protocol as he reached out and gripped her small shoulders with both gloved hands to check her balance.
Having watched her pass out from magical exhaustion in the backyard shed during her first week of cement tests, Roland fully expected the astronomical energy required to levitate her own body and fire thirty-six steel rods at rifle velocity to leave her on the verge of collapse.
— "Anna! Are you alright?! Can you stand?!" — Roland asked, his voice thick with genuine concern as he searched her face.
Looking up at the Prince, Anna's cheeks weren't pale at all; in fact, her breathing was completely steady, and her bright blue eyes were clear and alert.
— "I am completely fine, Your Highness," — Anna replied softly, her calm voice carrying a faint, almost imperceptible note of rehearsal as her eyes flicked for a fraction of a second toward the wooden watchtower behind the barracks before returning to Roland's face. — "Heating and shaping the needles didn't consume nearly as much of my Magic Power as it looked like from the wall... Though if Your Highness permits, I would prefer to explain the exact mechanics of the test inside the castle, out of the wind."
Four paces away, William let out a long breath, shaking a clump of snow off his steel pauldron as his signature, razor-sharp grin returned to his face in full force.
Even if he still had zero clue how the hell Anna had just pulled a Dragon Ball levitation trick out of her hat, the suffocating political dilemma that had nearly forced him to expose his Teleportation was officially dead and buried in the snow.
— "You heard the little lady, Boss! The main attraction of the circus is already dead meat!" — William called out, slapping the flat of his heavy steel shield with his gauntlet in a relaxed, booming rhythm. — "Take Anna and Sir Carter back inside the keep and get some hot tea in you! With their field general turned into a giant pincushion, those thirty wolves and bears in the back have lost their coordination—Iron Axe, Trevor, and I will mop up the stragglers in ten minutes!"
Roland looked from the steaming carcass below the wall to his confident Commander-in-Chief, gave William a firm nod of gratitude, and turned with Carter Lannis to escort Anna down the wooden ramp toward the castle.
And as the royal party descended the steps, a pair of calm, dark eyes watched their every step from fifty yards behind the line.
Arthur wasn't sitting in the castle keep anymore, nor had he stepped out onto the exposed concrete walkway where the wind blew.
Standing quietly inside the covered, timber-framed observation box of the secondary reserve watchtower—located eighty-five paces behind the central bastion and four meters above the roofs of the militia barracks huts—the twenty-four-year-old strategist slowly lowered a small pair of polished brass-and-glass field binoculars from his eyes.
At Magic Power: 10 [Telekinesis], his hundred-pace invisible sensory sphere had easily encompassed both the wooden ramp where Anna had waited and the seven-meter kill zone in front of the wall.
Without a single soldier on the rampart ever looking back at the darkened slit of the reserve tower, Arthur had cradled Anna in an invisible telekinetic harness, lifted her two meters above the walkway, arranged her thirty-six pre-heated steel needles in a spinning ring, and then dumped the full, devastating horsepower of his Level 10 psychic engine straight into accelerating those thirty-six spikes at two hundred and forty meters per second into the Hybrid's brain and leg joints.
It had been a flawless, synchronized symphony of modern ballistics and theatrical misdirection.
Turning away from the narrow observation slit, Arthur looked at the lone eighteen-year-old sentry stationed at the top of the tower ladder.
The boy—a skinny former tanner's apprentice whose hands were still shaking around his spear shaft from watching the giant monster collapse in the distance—was staring out the front window in a complete daze, utterly oblivious to the fact that the quiet, dark-coated scholar standing three feet behind him had just killed that titan with his mind.
Because "Count Arthur" was universally known across Border Town as Prince Roland's chief administrator and William's partner, no sentry would ever question why the strategist had climbed a rear watchtower with a pair of binoculars to observe the battle trajectories.
Reaching into the inner pocket of his black overcoat—right beside the cold hexagon of the God's Stone of Retaliation—Arthur pulled out eleven gleaming silver royals and pressed them into the young sentry's trembling, mittened hand.
— "For a round of hot mulled wine at the barracks tonight, soldier," — Arthur said, his baritone voice polite, smooth, and unreadable as a faint smile touched his lips. — "Consider it a toast to Miss Anna's marksmanship, and to our first victory of the winter."
Leaving the speechless recruit clutching a small fortune in silver on the tower landing, Arthur descended the wooden steps at an unhurried pace, stepped out into the six-inch snow of the inner yard, and turned his fur-lined boots back toward the main castle keep.
Flipping the high wool collar of his overcoat up against the biting gale and wrapping his dark scarf neatly over his mouth, he slipped both gloved hands back into his warm pockets.
Two seconds later, the crisp, familiar golden chime rang inside his head, and the translucent blue interface flared to life in his peripheral vision:
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: TIMELINE ANOMALY DETECTED]
Evaluation:Major localized timeline alteration achieved through covert host intervention. Direct outcome: Zero structural damage sustained by Border Town's primary fortification, zero militia casualties during the first Hybrid assault, and complete prevention of magical depletion coma in key personnel (Anna).
[REWARD: +170 Credits]
[CURRENT BALANCE: 170 Credits]
Beneath the folds of his wool scarf, Arthur's dark eyes narrowed with a cold, sovereign satisfaction that coursed through his veins like aged wine.
One hundred and seventy credits, Arthur noted clinically. Not only did we preserve the structural integrity of the wall and keep William from doing something suicidally flashy in front of eighty witnesses, but the System just paid me a king's ransom for orchestrating the kill from behind the curtain.
Yet Arthur wasn't the only one analyzing the aftermath of that battle.
Less than thirty yards to his left, perched atop the snow-covered, slanted timber roof of one of the militia equipment sheds inside a monochromatic world of shifting grays, whites, and black outlines, a pair of sharp blue eyes tracked every step of Arthur's black overcoat through the snow.
It was Nightingale.
Inside the parallel dimension of the Mist World, everything was normally rendered in quiet, continuous ripples of gray light. Around the tall figure of Count Arthur walking across the yard below her, however, there was a glaring, spherical distortion—a five-meter bubble of absolute, pitch-black vacuum centered right on his coat pocket that violently repelled the fabric of her Mist.
It was the unmistakable signature of a God's Stone of Retaliation.
Standing on the snowy roof with her white cloak whipping around her boots, Nightingale pressed a gloved hand against her temple, feeling a genuine headache throbbing behind her eyes as her assassin's instincts warred with complete logical impossibility.
She had been standing on the front wall right behind William's shoulder when Anna floated up onto the parapet.
Nightingale knew witches' powers better than anyone in Border Town. The searing heat radiating off those thirty-six steel needles had unquestionably come from Anna's Magic Core—yet the rock-steady, frictionless levitation that had held Anna two meters in the air, and the terrifying, invisible catapult that had hurled thirty-six steel rods at rifle speed without a single burst of fire propulsion behind them, had carried zero trace of Anna's magical signature!
And as Nightingale stared down at Arthur's solitary back disappearing into the castle doors, her sharp mind immediately flashed back to what she had witnessed from the end of the western hallway two nights ago: Anna bumping into Arthur on the stairs, and two heavy leather notebooks hanging frozen in empty air at waist height between them!
It wasn't Anna flying out there on the wall today... it was him, Nightingale thought, a cold shiver of sheer bewilderment running down her spine. Arthur was holding her in the air!
Yet the moment she formulated that hypothesis, it crashed headfirst into three brick walls that shattered every fundamental law of magic she had known since birth:
First: how in the name of the seven hells can a man possess magic without a Magic Core?!Second: when Anna floated over the parapet, Arthur was eighty-five paces away inside the rear watchtower! Even an Extraordinary witch can barely manipulate objects ten paces from her body with pinpoint precision!And third—the most impossible contradiction of all—how can anyone use magic to lift a girl and fire thirty-six steel spikes while carrying a God's Stone of Retaliation directly inside his own coat pocket?!
Letting out a long, frustrated breath that turned to gray mist inside her hidden realm, Nightingale shook her head, feeling a bizarre mixture of irritation, wariness, and morbid fascination toward the black-haired strategist. Accepting that Arthur was behind today's miracle meant accepting that these two foreigners operated on rules that didn't even belong to this world.
Meanwhile, back out on the blood-stained concrete walkway of the southern rampart, the cleanup of the opening battle was already entering its final, explosive act.
Just as William had predicted to Roland, the instant the two-headed Hybrid Beast collapsed dead at the base of the wall, the invisible pheromonal leash holding the thirty trailing wolves, boars, and bears together snapped completely.
Stripped of their mobile "general," the remaining common beasts reverted immediately to blind, disorganized pack savagery—howling wildly as they charged straight into the iron-spiked trench funnels without rhyme or rhythm.
Against eighty high-morale militiamen standing safely atop a twelve-foot concrete wall with pikes and thirty reloaded flintlocks, an uncoordinated charge was nothing more than a slaughterhouse. Pacing up and down the walkway with his blood-crusty heater shield on his left arm and his broadsword in his right, William directed the rotating musket volleys like a veteran orchestra conductor, dropping mutated boars and wolves in the snowdrifts by the dozen.
Only on the far right flank of the eastern trench funnel did a dense, chaotic cluster of fourteen demonic wolves and two black bears manage to jam themselves together tight enough to threaten the outer stake barrier through sheer piled mass.
Seeing the cluster forming thirty paces out, Van'er and two artillerymen came panting down the walkway, dragging a heavy, iron-hooped wooden crate between them—a compacted, twenty-kilogram demolition box packed with twenty pounds of corned black powder and scrap iron that Roland had originally designed as a last-resort charge to drop under the Hybrid Beast's belly.
Now that Anna's silver needles had made the anti-hybrid charge redundant, the crate had found a brand-new customer.
— "Commander William! Fourteen of them are bottlenecked right against the eastern spike pit—too thick for the rifles to clear in one volley!" — Van'er shouted, striking his flint steel and touching the spark to the thick, lard-soaked hemp fuse protruding from the top of the reinforced crate.
Fssssss—!
Bright orange sparks hissed violently as the waterproof fuse began burning down toward the main powder chamber.
Originally, the twenty-kilogram box was meant to be slid down a wooden chute right at the base of the wall because no ordinary soldier could throw a forty-pound crate thirty yards out into the field.
— "Clear the rail, Van'er! Step back!" — William roared, jogging over and sheathing his broadsword in one fluid motion.
Bending his knees slightly, William reached down with his right hand, grabbed the iron side-handle of the twenty-kilogram explosive crate as effortlessly as if he were picking up an empty lunchbox, and hoisted it straight up onto his right shoulder like a shot-putter.
Standing at the edge of the parapet with his muscles coiled like steel springs, William watched the hissing orange spark burn down the cord—timing the fuse velocity with cold, battlefield precision until the flame was less than two inches from the wooden plug.
— "Catch this, you ugly bastards!" —
With a fierce, booming shout of martial strength, William pivoted his hips, planted his front boot against the stone merlon, and hurled the forty-pound crate of high explosives one-handed high out into the gray winter sky.
Propelled by sixteen points of superhuman Strength, the heavy timber box traced a long, thirty-yard parabola over the snowfield and landed squarely in the dead center of the snarling pile of wolves and bears at the exact millisecond the spark vanished inside the box.
KRA-BOOOOOOOOM!
The resulting detonation looked as though a meteor had struck the eastern trench.
A blinding dome of white-orange fire, boiling black smoke, and pulverized frozen dirt erupted forty feet into the air, followed a fraction of a second later by a deafening, chest-rattling shockwave that blew the loose snow straight off the top of the concrete rampart and made every militiaman's ears ring like church bells. Shredded timber stakes, jagged iron shrapnel, and chunks of mangled demonic carcasses rained down across fifty yards of snow.
When the howling wind finally cleared the black smoke away from the eastern funnel, the entire pack of sixteen monsters had simply ceased to exist—leaving only a wide, steaming black crater in the frozen mud.
Up on the concrete walkway, William casually dusted grey soot off his leather gauntlets, looking out over the silent, monster-free snowfield with a massive, ear-to-ear grin.
— "Alright, boys! Looks like the morning shift is officially wrapped up!" — William called out over the ringing in their ears. — "Leave a ten-man lookout rotation on the towers and get down to the mess hall for hot stew!"
Another thunderous, euphoric roar of victory went up from eighty throats as the soldiers of the First Army pounded the butts of their pikes against the unblemished concrete wall.
Fifteen minutes later, far removed from the smell of burnt sulfur and steaming black blood on the southern perimeter, the third-floor office of the main castle keep was wrapped in the quiet, crackling warmth of the stone fireplace.
Sitting behind his heavy oak desk with his fingers steepled beneath his chin, Prince Roland stared intently across the room at Anna.
The seventeen-year-old girl sat in the padded armchair across from him, holding a warm ceramic cup of boiled water between both palms to chase away the chill of the rampart.
Before Cheng Yan could unleash the dozen urgent scientific and ballistic questions burning on the tip of his tongue—about how she had forged high-carbon steel needles in midair, how she had propelled them at rifle velocity, and above all else, how a fire witch had suddenly defied gravity—Anna carefully lowered her ceramic cup onto the edge of the desk.
Without looking at Roland first, her calm blue eyes slowly swept the four shadowy corners of the stone study, lingering near the dark gap beside the bookshelves.
— "Your Highness," — Anna began, her voice soft, steady, and completely direct. — "Before I answer your questions about what happened out there on the wall, and the real reason I walked out to face that creature... I need to know if Miss Nightingale is currently standing in this room."
Roland blinked, his gray eyebrows drawing together in genuine surprise at the unexpected request, before he turned his head toward the empty corner beside the map cabinet.
— "Nightingale?" — the Prince called out quietly.
Two seconds later, the warm air beside the bookshelf rippled into monochrome static, and Nightingale stepped smoothly out of the Mist World, her white-and-gold trimmed cloak settling around her boots as she crossed her gloved arms over her chest. Her sharp blue eyes shifted from Roland to Anna, brimming with intense, undisguised curiosity.
— "I am here, Your Highness," — the assassin replied.
Turning in her chair to face the older witch directly, Anna offered Nightingale a small, polite nod that carried both genuine apology and immovable resolve.
— "Miss Nightingale, if you are here, I must ask you to excuse us and step outside the study," — Anna said without a trace of hesitation. — "What I have to tell His Highness right now cannot be spoken while you are listening—neither in this room, nor from inside your Mist behind the wall."
Nightingale's eyebrows shot up, a flash of wounded pride and sharp offense crossing her pale features at being explicitly shut out by a seventeen-year-old sister she had risked her life to protect for three weeks. She opened her mouth to protest, looking toward the desk—only to catch Prince Roland's quiet, authoritative gaze and a single, slow nod of his head ordering her to comply.
Letting out a sharp, audible breath of displeasure through her nose, Nightingale turned on her heel, dissolved back into the gray veil of the Mist, and passed straight through the heavy oak door into the outer corridor, her footsteps fading down the stone stairs toward the second floor.
Waiting five full seconds until the silence of the third-floor tower was absolute, Anna took a slow, steadying breath, preparing to walk the razor-thin tightrope sitting in front of her.
During her private conversation with Arthur in the corridor two nights ago, the strategist had told her that Roland already knew he and William came from Earth and possessed an evolutionary "budget"—yet Arthur had carefully omitted the fact that Roland still believed William's enhancement was purely physical and had zero idea that Arthur possessed Level 10 Telekinesis or an interdimensional System interface!
Sitting across from the man who had saved her from the hangman's noose and given her a reason to live, Anna hated the very thought of uttering a falsehood to Prince Roland.
Therefore, she decided she wouldn't lie to him by a single word. She would tell him the exact truth of her own fire—and protect the sacred promise she had made to Arthur through unbreakable silence.