Dusk descended over the valley of Border Town like a heavy wool curtain dyed in dried blood and coal soot.
High above the western horizon, the late afternoon sun remained buried behind a dense, suffocating ceiling of storm clouds, casting only a few oblique, dying rays of bruised-orange light across the snow-covered plain. Where thevirgin snow had gleamed white that morning, the hundred-yard killing field in front of the southern rampart was now a churned, steaming wasteland of frozen mud and black-stained craters.
Leaning his broad chest against the frost-crusted concrete merlon of the eastern sector, Deputy Commander Iron Axe kept his yellow-brown hunter's eyes fixed unblinkingly on the white expanse below.
The sub-zero gale howling down from the Impassable Mountain Range lashed mercilessly against his weathered, dark-bronze skin, dusting his thick eyebrows with ice crystals, yet the giant warrior from the Sand Nation didn't so much as shiver. Every ounce of his battlefield focus was captured by the brutal, one-sided spectacle unfolding fifty paces beyond the safety of the wall.
Down there, standing completely alone in the middle of the black-splattered snowdrifts, was Commander William.
Once again, the tall foreign lord had climbed over the battlements and rappelled down into the open field, tethered only by the thick, fifty-foot coil of braided naval hemp rope that Trevor and two burly quarrymen held anchored at the top of the parapet.
On paper, the official tactical pretext William had given for going back down into the snow was "clearing out the remaining stragglers of the afternoon packs before nightfall" so the beasts wouldn't gnaw on the trench stakes in the dark. Up on the walkway, however, Iron Axe, Trevor, and every single militiaman in the First Army knew the real truth: their restless Commander was using the monsters of the northern abyss as whetstones to test his own limits.
Over the past five hours of this grueling opening day, William hadn't sat down to rest for five minutes.
After the colossal, six-legged Hybrid Beast had been felled at noon and the main morning wave was blown apart, three smaller, erratic packs of mutated forest predators had emerged from the Concealing Forest at two-hour intervals, probing the eastern and western flanks of the wall.
Throughout every single clash, while Van'er's marksmen and Iron Axe's pikemen held the concrete line, William had sprinted up and down the hundred-meter walkway like a tireless hound. Whenever a crosswind spoiled a musket volley, or whenever a leaping wolf or horned boar slipped past a recruit's wavering spear tip, William was right there in the breach—snatching jaws out of midair, kicking three-hundred-kilogram carcasses off the stone, and shielding clumsy teenagers from fatal maulings that no standard drill manual could have prevented.
And every single time his gauntleted fists intercepted a tragedy that would have cost a nameless soldier his life or a limb in the canonical history of Border Town, the invisible ledger inside William's head had rung like a casino slot machine.
Unseen by any mortal eye on the ramparts, golden notifications had flashed across his retinas all afternoon long: rewards of +20, +30, and +40 Credits at a time for derailing minor, uncatalogued deaths along the defensive line.
By the time the late afternoon shadows began to lengthen across the snow, William had farmed a staggering 220 new Credits from the afternoon skirmishes alone—which, added to the 50 Credits he had been holding after saving young Dergus earlier, brought his total balance to a massive 270 Credits!
Unlike Arthur, who liked to sit in a quiet room with a cup of tea before planning an upgrade, William believed in reinvesting his profits right on the factory floor.
Ten minutes ago, right before tying the hemp rope around his waist and jumping down into the eastern field to greet the final pack of the day, William had mentally opened his attribute shop, grabbed 200 Credits out of his 270-credit pile, and slammed five full attribute points straight into Speed—leaving a neat 70 Credits in his pocket while rocketing his Speed parameter from 11 to a blistering 16!
With Strength: 16, Endurance: 14, and Speed: 16 now operating in terrifying equilibrium inside his twenty-two-year-old frame, William had evolved into something entirely new.
He was no longer merely an unbreakable human tank that absorbed impacts and hit like a wrecking ball; he was an armored battle tank wired with the explosive, twitch-reflex acceleration of an apex jungle feline.
Up on the concrete parapet, Deputy Commander Iron Axe narrowed his eyes as he watched the young man adjust his footing in the snow below.
To a master hunter who had spent his entire life studying the biomechanics of predators, the transformation in William's movement over the past few hours was both breathtaking and deeply unsettling. During the morning fight, William had moved with the heavy, grounded power of a mountain bear; now, as the sun sank lower, the Commander glided across the knee-deep snow with an eerie, weightless fluidity—as though every drop of demonic blood spilled on that field were feeding him the blessing of an ancient war god.
Watching the wind whip William's dark hair down in the clearing, a vivid memory from three weeks ago flashed across Iron Axe's mind.
He remembered the cold afternoon when William had walked alone into the clearing beside the old graveyard at the edge of the western slums, listening to the sound of Iron Axe splitting oak logs. And he remembered their first war council in Prince Roland's study an hour later, when the foundation of this concrete wall was still just a muddy ditch and Iron Axe had bared his chest to show the horrific, diagonal scar left by a winged Hybrid Beast.
When Iron Axe had warned them that day about the blood-freezing terror of the Months of the Demons, William hadn't turned pale like a normal nobleman; the young foreigner had simply leaned back in his oak chair, let out a loud, booming laugh that rattled the windows, and claimed that crossing paths with a Hybrid Beast back in his homeland was "a light morning warm-up before breakfast".
At the time, Iron Axe had quietly concluded that William was either a lunatic aristocrat drunk on his own arrogance, or a clever commander bluffing to keep his prince's spirits from collapsing.
Now, watching William stand fifty paces outside the wall in the fading light without a shield or a drawn sword—waiting for the last monsters of the day with his bare, leather-gauntleted hands hanging loosely at his sides—the veteran warrior from the Sand Nation finally understood the truth behind that laugh.
William hadn't been bluffing in that study. If anything, the man had been holding back.
All along the eastern walkway around Iron Axe, thirty militiamen leaned half their torsos over the stone crenelations, the bone-deep terror they had felt at sunrise completely replaced by the raucous, bloodthirsty euphoria of spectators in a gladiatorial arena:
— "Goooo, Lord William! Tear the horns off that big bastard!" — bellowed Zuler, pumping his fifteen-foot iron-tipped pike up and down in the freezing air with both hands.
— "Show those forest mutts who owns this valley, Commander! Crush 'em without mercy!" — shouted nineteen-year-old Rick right beside him, his wind-chapped face flushed bright red and his eyes shining with borderline religious adoration.
Down at the edge of the swirling gray mist two hundred yards out, the final residual cluster of the afternoon wave spotted the lone human standing in the open snow and broke away from the dark pine trunks of the Concealing Forest.
There were three beasts left in the pack, and each one was a nightmare that would have required a ten-man squad of normal town guards to bring down.
Leading the charge down the center was a colossal, mutated forest buffalo—nearly a ton of black, matted muscle and frozen mud, sporting a pair of curved, sweeping horns as thick and sharp as iron harvesting scythes. Loping silently on the buffalo's left flank was a heavy, eighty-kilogram demonic gray wolf with frost-bristling fur along its spine, while bounding on the right came a grotesque mutated woodland stag, whose towering rack of bone antlers had twisted and calcified under the miasma into a crown of twelve jagged, blood-stained spear points.
Driven by the dying fury of the afternoon surge, the one-ton demonic buffalo attacked first.
Lowering its massive, bone-plated skull until its scythe-like horns skimmed two feet above the snowdrifts, the beast thundered across the clearing like a runaway steam locomotive, its cloven hooves punching deep craters into the frozen earth and making the crusted ice tremble beneath William's boots.
Fifty paces. Thirty. Ten.
Seven hours ago, during his morning test against the mutated foxes, William would have planted his rear heel into the dirt, locked his Endurance: 14 frame, and taken that one-ton charge straight on the face of a steel shield just to feel the kinetic transfer.
Now, as the buffalo's gleaming black horns closed to within less than two meters of impaling his stomach at thirty-five miles per hour, the world inside William's retinas seemed to slow down to a crawl.
With Speed: 16 coursing through his central nervous system and fast-twitch muscle fibers, the charging beast looked as though it were wading through thick molasses.
William didn't brace for the hit, and he didn't touch a single drop of his Teleportation magic.
Right at the final millisecond—when the tips of the buffalo's horns were barely six inches from tearing through his navy-blue wool doublet—William simply pushed off the ball of his right foot.
Whoosh!
Moving with the terrifying, explosive lateral acceleration of a striking panther, William blurred three feet to his left in a fraction of a heartbeat, kicking up a sharp spray of white powder behind his heel as the one-ton juggernaut hurtled past through empty air.
Before the buffalo's momentum could even carry its hind legs past him, William sank his boots into the frozen dirt directly beside the monster's exposed right flank, rotated his hips like a whipping steel spring, and drove a textbook, compact right hook with his leather-and-iron gauntlet straight into the center of the beast's passing ribcage.
KRA-KABOOOOOM!
The sound wasn't like a fist hitting hide; it sounded like a three-pound iron cannonball striking the hull of a ship at point-blank range.
Combining the forward velocity of his Speed: 16 pivot with the full, unmitigated weight of his Strength: 16 musculature, the kinetic shockwave didn't just crack the buffalo's ribs—the entire right side of the monster's chest cavity literally imploded four inches inward!
Lifted sideways off all four hooves by the sheer lateral force of the single punch, the one-ton beast was violently derailed from its charge. It tumbled end-over-end across the snowfield like an empty wooden ale barrel, ploughing a twenty-foot trench through the red-stained ice before collapsing motionless on its side—stone dead, with six of its own shattered rib bones driven straight through its ruptured heart and lungs.
William didn't even bother looking at the rolling carcass.
Because right as his right arm extended into the buffalo's ribs, the eighty-kilogram demonic gray wolf that had been drafting behind the bull's left shoulder seized the opening with sinister pack cunning.
Kicking off the trampled snow ten feet behind William's back, the wolf launched itself silently through the air straight toward the blind spot of his neck, its jaws stretched wide to clamp down on his cervical spine while its throat dripped black, corrosive saliva.
Against any knight in Graycastle—even Carter Lannis or Iron Axe—a blind-spot leap timed to the exact instant a fighter committed to a heavy blow would have meant a torn jugular.
With Speed: 16, however, William was no longer bound by normal human recovery frames.
The instant his knuckles crushed the buffalo's ribs, William dropped his torso six inches downward and spun a hundred and eighty degrees on his heels.
As the airborne wolf sailed harmlessly over the crown of his ducked head like a slow-motion target, William's left arm shot straight up into the air like a piston—snatching the eighty-kilogram predator clean out of mid-flight by the thick tendon of its left hind leg!
Yelp—!
Before the stunned beast could even twist its spine in the air to bite at his wrist, William used the wolf's own forward momentum to pivot in a full, devastating circle, swinging the thrashing monster around his shoulders like a medieval hammer-thrower before whipping its body down with all sixteen points of his Strength straight against the frozen stone foundation of the rampart ten feet away!
CRACK—THUD!
The sickening snap of the wolf's vertebral column breaking in half against the concrete echoed across the twilight snowfield like a dry musket shot, killing the beast on impact before a single whimper could leave its jaws.
Two beasts down in less than three heartbeats.
Slowly straightening his back at the base of the wall, William turned his dark, glowing eyes onto the third and final member of the pack fifteen paces away: the mutated woodland stag.
The giant deer skidded to a sudden, jarring halt in the snow, its four hooves throwing up twin fans of ice.
For two full seconds, as the stag stared at the steaming, broken carcasses of the one-ton buffalo and the wolf—and then at the two-legged monster standing between them without a single drop of sweat on his brow—the primal, herbivorous terror of a prey animal briefly overpowered the boiling madness of the winter miasma in its brain.
The stag hesitated, its front knees trembling as it debated whether to charge or bolt.
And on William's battlefield, half a second of hesitation was a signed death warrant.
Leaning his chest forward, William kicked off the frozen earth.
BOOM!
With Speed: 16 firing every muscle fiber in his thighs at once, the snow beneath his boots literally exploded backward in a white cloud as he crossed the ten-meter gap in the blink of an eye—appearing right in front of the stag's chest like a dark-blue phantom.
Panicking as the human materialized in its face, the mutated deer violently dropped its head, thrusting its twelve spear-sharp, calcified antlers forward to impale William's torso in a desperate gore.
William didn't dodge the antlers.
Shooting both hands forward inside the lethal cage of bone points, he clamped his fingers directly around the thick, gnarled base of the stag's main antler beams right above its brow.
Planting his boots wide in the snow, William halted the five-hundred-pound animal's forward thrust dead in its tracks without giving up an inch of ground—and then, with a savage, full-body wrench of his shoulders and core, he twisted the giant rack ninety degrees sideways with the torque of a hydraulic vise!
CRUNCH-SNAP!
With a nauseating crack of sheared bone and torn ligaments that made even the veterans up on the parapet wince, the stag's entire skull and upper cervical spine were wrenched violently off their axis.
The light vanished from the beast's bloodshot eyes instantly. Releasing his grip on the antlers, William stepped back as the massive deer folded onto its front knees and collapsed sideways into the snowdrifts, steaming black blood pooling beneath its twisted neck.
For two seconds, the only sound in the twilight clearing was the lonely whistle of the northern wind sweeping over the three fresh corpses.
Then, the eastern parapet erupted into absolute pandemonium.
— "OOOOOOOHHHHH!" —
Hysterical, deafening roars of victory tore from thirty throats at once as the militiamen hammered the wooden shafts of their pikes against the concrete crenelations, cheering until their voices went hoarse.
Down in the trampled snow, William let out a single, long exhale that billowed into a thick cloud of white vapor in the twilight air.
His heart wasn't even racing. Thanks to the tireless biological engine of Endurance: 14 and the effortless efficiency of Speed: 16, slaughtering three mutated monsters in ten seconds hadn't even made him breathe hard. He felt like a finely tuned, unstoppable war machine.
Bending down to scoop up a handful of clean white snow, William briskly scrubbed the sticky black blood off his leather gauntlets, turned back toward the twelve-foot concrete wall, and gave two sharp, firm tugs on the hemp rope tied around his waist:
— "Haul away, Trevor! The yard is officially swept clean!" — William's deep voice boomed up the wall, ringing with effortless, infectious swagger. — "Another shift in the books, boys! First round of hot stew is on me!"
Up on the stone walkway, a wide, fierce grin split across Trevor's scarred face as he braced his boots against the merlon and hauled his master smoothly up the vertical concrete face with the enthusiastic help of Rick and Zuler.
Against all odds, Border Town had survived the opening storm of the Months of the Demons without losing a single drop of human blood.
Two hours later, after the night watch torches had been lit along the ramparts and the freezing howl of the outer wall was left behind for the warm, stuffy air of the main castle keep, the mood on the second floor of the eastern wing was considerably less festive.
Marching down the quiet, flagstone corridor with heavy, purposeful strides, William had wiped every trace of his playful battlefield grin off his face.
In its place sat a simmering, tight-jawed annoyance that had been building at the back of his mind ever since he woke up that morning.
Between the bombshell Nightingale had dropped on him in his bedroom the evening before—revealing that Arthur had been secretly carrying a Church anti-magic stone in his coat pocket for days—and the urgent crimson Main Quest notification that had flashed across their interfaces at dawn, William knew it was past time to have a heart-to-heart with his strategist.
Reaching the end of the eastern gallery, William stopped outside the heavy oak door of Arthur's private quarters, noticing that the door had been left cracked open by half an inch.
Without bothering to knock, William pushed the oak door open, stepped inside, and kicked it shut behind his heel with a dull thud, letting out a long, pointed sigh through his nose as he leaned his back against the stone wall and crossed his arms over his clean black tunic.
Across the warm, candle-lit room, Arthur was standing beside his wide writing desk.
Dressed in his spotless, tailored dark-gray wool suit, the twenty-four-year-old strategist had a large parchment map of the western region and the Impassable Mountain Range spread out flat under brass paperweights, studying the terrain elevations as calmly as if the bloody war outside the castle walls were nothing more than a minor fluctuation on a stock ticker.
— "We need to have a serious talk, 'Mr. Cold and Calculating'," — William announced, his deep voice cutting straight through the quiet of the chamber, his tone carrying more genuine frustration than anger.
Standing over the desk, Arthur didn't even raise his dark eyes from the map.
— "Good evening to you too, William," — Arthur replied in a smooth, mild baritone as he traced a mountain pass with the tip of his gloved index finger. — "Judging by that overly dramatic sigh at my door, I take it the afternoon adrenaline of beating mutated wildlife to death with your bare hands has finally worn off and left you with a philosophical dilemma?"
— "The dilemma isn't mine, bro; it's yours," — William shot back, uncrossing his arms and walking four heavy steps across the flagstones until he was standing directly across the oak desk from his best friend. — "Nightingale paid a visit to my room yesterday evening after you and Anna pulled that flying-needle stunt on the wall. And during our chat, she told me something really damn interesting."
William planted both knuckles on the edge of the desk, leaning in slightly as he locked his gaze onto Arthur's bowed head:
— "Care to explain to me why the hell you've been walking around this castle for half a week with a God's Stone of Retaliation hidden inside your coat pocket?" — William demanded. — "Look, Art, I know you, and I trust you with my life. I know you always have ten different contingency plans spinning inside that head of yours. However, what kind of game are you playing here?! Everything we've built in Border Town over the past month rests on the trust we've earned from Roland and those witches! Walking around with the Church's number-one tool for hunting and torturing girls like Anna and Nightingale makes us look like two-faced backstabbers! What are you plotting behind my back?!"
Behind his calm, unblinking mask, Arthur let out a silent, internal sigh of pure exhaustion.
How genuinely tiresome, Arthur thought, feeling a familiar wave of intellectual boredom as he listened to his friend's indignation. The single most draining part of operating around emotional human beings is the constant demand to justify every logical, meticulously calculated security measure. Even William, who has known my pragmatic nature since university and trusts me completely, still lets sentimentality cloud his view of the chessboard.
And judging by the fact that Nightingale had gone running to both Roland and William about the stone, Arthur deduced that the Prince himself would probably bring the subject up over breakfast tomorrow too.
Slowly, Arthur raised his head from the map, meeting William's frustrated glare with dark eyes as still and cold as a winter lake.
— "I wasn't 'plotting' anything against your precious witches, William. I carried the stone as an elementary tactical firewall against invisible eavesdroppers who don't know how to knock on doors," — Arthur replied with unshakeable calmness. — "In a world where a single overheard conversation about Earth or the System could get us executed, do I really need a more complex reason than basic operational security?"
Without breaking eye contact, Arthur slipped his right hand into the side pocket of his dark wool overcoat hanging over the chair beside him, pulled out the hexagonal crystal medallion of the God's Stone of Retaliation by its silver chain, and held it up flat in his open, gloved palm between them.
— "However, now that our capabilities have evolved past the point where an assassin in the dark is a threat—and since the mere existence of this rock in my pocket seems to be causing a tragic crisis for your public relations campaign—there is a very simple way to resolve the issue," — Arthur said in a flat, monotone voice.
Lowering his gaze to the sacred, magic-devouring crystal resting in the center of his palm, Arthur didn't throw it out the window as he had offered to Anna that morning.
Instead, narrowing his dark eyes by a fraction of an inch, Arthur focused the immense, concentrated weight of his newly upgraded Telekinesis directly onto the six-sided mineral in his hand—weaving a microscopic, omnidirectional vise of pure atmospheric and kinetic pressure around the crystal lattice.
To any native witch in the Four Kingdoms, channeling magic directly into a God's Stone of Retaliation was like pouring water into a bottomless desert; the stone would simply swallow the energy whole.
Arthur's Telekinesis, however, did not originate from the winter miasma or a biological Magic Core. It was a higher-dimensional physical vector enforced by the Dimensional System—an external law of physics that the primitive, magic-nullifying mineral couldn't even recognize, much less block.
Arthur squeezed his mental fist.
Creeeak—SNAP!
Right in front of William's widening eyes, a web of white structural fractures spiderwebbed across the smooth face of the priceless Church artifact. Half a second later, with a dry, sharp crack that sounded like a wineglass being crushed under an iron boot, the God's Stone of Retaliation imploded in Arthur's open palm—shattering into a handful of dull, lifeless gray pebbles and fine crystal dust that trickled harmlessly between his gloved fingers and pattered onto the stone floor.
Brushing the pale dust off his immaculate leather palms with two casual pats, Arthur looked back up at his stunned friend.
— "There. Domestic harmony in the castle is officially restored," — Arthur stated dryly, turning his gaze back down to the map of the northern mountain range. — "And now that we have put that triviality in the grave where it belongs, we have a much more pressing operational matter to discuss. I assume that somewhere between punching buffaloes and showing off for the recruits this afternoon, you read the System's morning directive?"
Watching the priceless Church relic crumble into worthless sand on the flagstones took half the wind right out of William's sails.
Letting out a rough sigh and running a hand through his dark hair, William allowed his protective annoyance to subside, though he pointed a warning finger across the desk:
— "I am still going to interrogate you for an hour later about how you cooked up that secret needle plan with Anna without telling me—and how the hell you just crushed a Stone of Retaliation like a dry walnut," — William warned, before his posture straightened and his expression turned dead serious. — "Regarding the System, though... yeah. That crimson banner woke me up before I even put my boots on this morning. [THE TURNING POINT II]: Prevent the winter slaughter of the Witch Cooperation Association in the Impassable Mountain Range, and unlock our [Magical Evolution] sub-system."
— "Precisely," — Arthur confirmed with a slight nod.
Stepping closer to the edge of the desk, William thumped his right fist firmly against the center of his broad chest, the heroic fire that drove his soul roaring back to the surface:
— "Before you run your mouth about cost-benefit math, Art, let me make one thing crystal clear right now," — William declared, his voice steady and unyielding. — "With or without that Magical Evolution reward, I was already planning to pack a bag and head up into those peaks the second the front wall stabilized. Nightingale told me there are over forty witches out there in that caravan—girls like Scroll, Wendy, and Leaf—huddled inside freezing rock caves without proper winter rations, surrounded by mutated packs and marching straight into the jaws of real Demons. I promised Veronica I wouldn't let her sisters die up there."
As he finished speaking, however, the stern tension in William's shoulders relaxed, and a wide, expectant grin broke across his face as he looked at his best friend across the candle-lit desk.
— "Still, I have to admit—the System's timing couldn't be more clutch!" — William chuckled, leaning over the map with shining eyes. — "Because four days ago in the hallway, you told me going into the mountains was a suicidal waste of resources—yet now the System just put Magical Evolution and a massive credit bounty right on the table! With my Strength and Speed both sitting at 16, and your Telekinesis upgraded to that monstrous level you used on the Hybrid Beast yesterday... you're coming up that mountain with me tomorrow, aren't you, Art?! The two of us fighting side by side will wipe those northern Demon vanguards off the map in thirty seconds flat!"
Behind the oak desk, Arthur didn't return the smile.
Keeping his dark eyes fixed on the charcoal lines of the Impassable Mountain Range, the strategist calmly slipped both gloved hands back into the pockets of his dark suit.
For three full seconds, the silence inside the warm bedroom was absolute.
— "I will not go," — Arthur said.
His response was short, dry, and stripped of every trace of human emotion.
Across the desk, William's wide grin vanished as if he had been slapped across the face. He blinked twice, tilting his head slightly as if convinced his ears were still ringing from the afternoon's gunpowder explosions.
— "Come again?" — William asked slowly, shaking his head in complete bewilderment. — "What the hell do you mean, 'I will not go'?! Did you not read the reward line, Arthur?! It's the Evolution of our Magic! It's the single biggest power upgrade the System has ever offered us, plus a credit bounty for every witch we save—and over forty innocent girls are about to get butchered in the snow! Why on earth wouldn't you come with me?!"
Slowly, Arthur turned his head to face him, wearing the impenetrable, icy mask of a grandmaster who had already calculated ten moves ahead—and who had deliberately decided to hide his own solo expedition from his loudmouthed friend so he could manipulate the northern chessboard without interference.
— "Because marching up into those peaks with you on a rescue crusade is an exercise in complete futility," — Arthur stated, every syllable dropping into the quiet room like a block of glacier ice. — "The System reward is lucrative, yes, I won't deny that. However, charging in to save that camp from a demon ambush won't solve a single thing about the root cause of their destruction. Have you forgotten who leads the Witch Cooperation Association, William? Cara is not a rational commander; she is an unhinged, dogmatic fanatic."
Arthur gestured coldly toward the uncharted white peaks drawn at the top of the parchment map.
— "Cara has spent decades brainwashing herself and those girls into believing that a mythical 'Holy Mountain' without the Demonic Bite exists in the northern wasteland," — Arthur continued mercilessly. — "Her pride and her hatred of mortal nobility are absolute. She would literally rather watch every single one of her sisters freeze to death or burst into black mist in the snow than admit her life's work was a lie and bow her head to Prince Roland. If you and I march up there tomorrow and slaughter the Demon vanguards blocking their path, what do you think Cara will do? She won't turn around and follow you back to Border Town! She will point to the dead demons, declare that the heavens sent a miracle to bless their pilgrimage, and drive those forty starving girls even deeper into the sub-zero abyss the very next morning! You cannot save fanatics from their own stupidity, William, and I refuse to waste my winter hiking through blizzards for people who are actively fighting to jump into their own graves."
Standing on the other side of the desk, William's jaw dropped open, pure incredulity plastered across his wind-burned face.
He couldn't believe what he was hearing.
Even though Arthur's breakdown of Cara's psychology was laced with brutal, undeniable tactical logic, to a man who had just held a weeping Veronica in his arms the night before—and who had sworn with his own blood to be the shield of this valley—Arthur's argument sounded like the coldest, most cowardly pretext imaginable.
He's seriously just going to cross his arms by the fireplace and write off forty teenage girls as dead weight just because their teacher is stubborn?!
For a split second, the hot blood inside William's veins boiled so fiercely that his fists clenched at his sides—yet this time, unlike their shouting match in the corridor four days ago, William didn't explode.
Looking across the desk at the composed, pale-faced strategist in his immaculate dark suit, William suddenly realized that screaming about empathy or heroism at a man who still viewed the human beings of this world as defective algorithms on a screen was a complete waste of breath.
Arthur had his cold view of the world from the top of the watchtower; William had his own view, forged down in the freezing mud and blood of the front line.
Taking a slow, deliberate step backward away from the desk, William looked at his lifelong friend with dark eyes that blazed with a furious, unbreakable resolve.
— "You know what, Art? You can stay locked up in this warm room trying to roleplay as Kiyotaka Ayanokoji in front of your fireplace all winter long if that's what makes you feel superior," — William said, his deep baritone dropping to a quiet, razor-sharp edge that cut through the room like cold steel. — "If you want to wash your hands of forty girls and let them get torn apart in the dark just because a cranky old mentor has a big ego... that's your problem. Not mine. Because as long as I have sixteen points of Strength in these hands and breath in my lungs, I am not letting them die out there."
Turning his back squarely on the strategist, William walked to the heavy oak door and gripped the iron latch without looking back over his shoulder:
— "I am going up into that mountain range with Nightingale," — William declared flatly. — "And I'm going to drag every single one of those witches back to this castle alive—with or without you."
SLAM!
Pulling the heavy door open and striding out into the dim corridor, William shut the oak panels firmly behind him, his heavy bootsteps echoing down the stone stairs toward the ground floor.
Left completely alone inside the silent, candle-lit chamber, Arthur didn't flinch at the sound of the closing door.
Standing motionless beside the map table with the crushed, glittering dust of the God's Stone of Retaliation scattered across the flagstones at his feet, the Shadow Architect simply looked back down at the northern mountain passes—his calm, dark eyes holding the blueprint of a solo hunt that not even William would see coming.