Black-and-white geometric lines snapped like stretched glass, dropping Nightingale and William out of the silent pocket dimension and straight back into the roaring teeth of the physical world.
The change hit their senses like a bucket of ice water.
The instant their boots cleared the narrow rock ledge outside the cliff fissure and touched the snow-packed slope of the gorge, the mountain blizzard slammed into them full force. Howling winds shrieked down from the upper peaks like a pack of starving wolves, whipping thousands of tiny, razor-sharp ice needles across their cheeks.
Nightingale let go of her magic completely.
As the Mist vanished, the sudden physical shock of having her power sealed by a God's Stone, yanked back open within seconds, and immediately burned at full throttle to drag two people through solid granite caught up with her all at once. Her knees buckled for a fraction of a heartbeat, her boots sliding a few inches in the deep drift as she braced a gloved hand against her thigh.
Despite the freezing gale biting at her skin, she tilted her head back and let out a long, trembling breath of white vapor.
Only sixty seconds ago, the scorching heat of a white-hot iron poker had been three inches from her eyes, singing her eyelashes while sixty of her own sisters stood by the fire and watched. Now, the cold wind cooling her forehead felt like the sweetest thing on earth.
She was alive. She was free.
Straightening her spine, Nightingale turned her head to look at the tall man standing beside her in the swirling snow—the warrior who had stormed an entire camp of sixty witches alone and crushed a dreaded Church artifact in his bare palm just to keep his promise to her.
She parted her lips, the words of gratitude already rising in her throat.
She didn't even get the first word out.
Before a single sound could leave her mouth, William took one long stride forward through the snowdrift, reached out with both arms, and pulled her straight against his chest in a fierce, crushing embrace.
There was nothing polite, rehearsed, or careful about it.
Every ounce of the suffocating dread, impatience, and raw terror that had eaten William alive while he crouched outside that dark tunnel for over an hour poured into the grip of his arms. He wrapped one heavy arm across her shoulders and the other around the small of her back, pulling her tight against the front of his wool coat to shield her from the freezing gale while burying his chin against the top of her white hood.
— "Thank God..." — William breathed out, his voice rough, hoarse, and muffled against the damp fabric of her cloak as a violent shudder of released tension ran through his broad frame. — "Thank God I wasn't too late, Veronica..."
For a full second, Nightingale froze, her blue eyes widening in sheer surprise at the sudden closeness.
Even in her youth as a noble lady, and certainly during her years as an untouchable assassin in the shadows, nobody had ever held her like this—as if losing her were the single worst catastrophe that could happen in the world.
The shock melted away almost instantly, replaced by a wave of warmth that spread straight from the center of her chest out to her freezing fingertips, hotter than any campfire she had ever sat beside.
Letting her defensive guard drop completely, Nightingale closed her eyes, raised both arms to wrap them firmly around William's broad back, and rested her cheek against the solid muscle of his chest, matching the tight grip of his hold.
Underneath the thick wool of his doublet, she could feel his heart hammering against his ribs at a frantic pace, beating in exact rhythm with her own. For three quiet seconds in the middle of the howling white wasteland, the storm, the mountain, and the war waiting in the valley ceased to exist.
However, three seconds was all the luxury a battlefield allowed.
Feeling the sharp sting of the wind blowing down the gorge from the cave mouth less than fifty yards behind them, William sucked a deep breath of icy air into his lungs to steady his pulse and pulled back just enough to look down into her face, keeping both hands resting firmly on her shoulders.
The shaken relief in his dark eyes hardened back into the sharp focus of a field commander.
— "We can't stay right outside the front door for long," — William said, raising his voice slightly to cut over the roar of the wind. — "Scroll and the combat witches are panicked right now, which buys us a window, only once they realize we aren't an inquisitor army, Windseeker or the others might check the gorge. Still, don't start heading down the ridge just yet. Give it two or three minutes—Lightning should be coming out of that tunnel any second now to join us."
Nightingale blinked, brushing a flake of snow off her eyelashes as her brow furrowed in genuine confusion.
— "Wait a few minutes for who?" — she asked, tilting her head. — "Who is Lightning?"
William's hands froze on her shoulders.
For two seconds, he stared at her as if she had just spoken to him in a foreign language. Slowly, he let his arms drop to his sides and took half a step backward, his eyes widening as he looked at the blank, honest confusion on Nightingale's face.
Wait a second. What did she just say? William thought, his mind spinning into overdrive. How in the hell does Nightingale not know who Lightning is?!
In the original story he and Arthur had read back on Earth, Lightning—the lively young blonde girl with the leather aviator cap who could fly faster than an eagle—was one of the absolute cornerstones of the Witch Cooperation Association! She was supposed to be best friends with Nightingale and Wendy, and one of the very first scouts to map out the Impassable Mountain Range!
Then again, as William forced his racing brain to think about how Nightingale actually lived before coming to Border Town, a cold piece of logic clicked into place.
Unlike Wendy or Scroll, who stayed inside the mountain camp twenty-four hours a day taking care of the younger girls, Nightingale was the Association's deep-cover field operative. She spent months at a time traveling alone through the eastern cities, sleeping in noble attics, robbing corrupt merchants for supplies, and hunting for newly awakened witches before the Church could grab them.
That's right... she only knew the older members who have been with Cara from the start, William realized, rubbing his gloved fingers against his temple. Lightning must have joined the camp in Silver City or the northern towns during the months Veronica was away heading toward Graycastle! Or did our showing up in Border Town and changing the timeline shift when certain girls arrived at the cave?!
He shook his head sharply, forcing the metaknowledge spiral out of his head. Standing in a blizzard debating timeline theories wasn't going to keep them warm.
Before William could open his mouth to explain what Lightning looked like, a sharp, breathless voice shouted out from the dark mouth of the gorge thirty paces uphill:
— "HEY! WAIT UP! DON'T LEAVE WITHOUT US!"
Nightingale reacted in less than a tenth of a second.
Every trace of softness vanished from her posture as her assassin's instincts took over. Stepping smoothly half a pace to the left to clear William's line of sight, she dropped her center of gravity, her right hand sliding beneath her cloak to wrap around the hilt of her silver-plated dagger as her blue eyes locked onto the gloom of the cliff ledge.
Scrambling out of the fissure into the swirling snow came two figures.
Leading the way was a small, energetic teenage girl with short blonde hair sticking out from beneath a leather cap, hovering three inches off the deep snowdrifts so her boots wouldn't sink into the ice. Half-leaning against her shoulder, panting heavily and clutching a worn wool shawl around her neck as she stumbled through the knee-deep powder, was a tall, slender woman in her twenties with refined features and messy hair.
Nightingale leaned slightly toward William's shoulder without taking her eyes off the pair.
— "Is that the girl you were talking about?" — Nightingale whispered, her voice low and taut.
William squinted through the driving white flakes, letting out a brief breath of relief when he recognized the short blonde hair and the patched aviator jacket from the manhua illustrations. Then, however, his eyes shifted to the older woman clinging to Lightning's arm, and his brow creased into a deep frown.
— "The short blonde floating over the snow is definitely Lightning," — William muttered out of the corner of his mouth. — "As for the older woman she's hauling along... I don't recognize her at all. Stay sharp."
As the two newcomers stumbled closer through the wind, Nightingale narrowed her eyes, studying the older woman's face carefully until a memory from the camp's winter roster clicked in her head.
— "I know the older one. Her name is Diana Argus," — Nightingale murmured quietly to William. — "She's a fallen baron's daughter who joined us last autumn. Her magic has zero combat power—all she can do is turn cloth or leather different shades of blue by touching it."
Turn cloth blue? William repeated silently inside his head, his eyes widening slightly as he searched every corner of his memory from the novel and the webcomic.
Nothing came up.
In the original story, when Wendy and the surviving witches of the Association finally limped out of the mountains into Border Town after being slaughtered by demonic beasts and demons, there had never been a noblewoman named Diana Argus who dyed fabric blue.
The grim truth hit William in the gut like a lead weight.
Diana hadn't appeared in the original story because she hadn't survived the mountain. She had been one of the dozens of nameless non-combat witches who either froze to death on Cara's forced march or got torn to pieces in the snow before ever reaching Border Town's walls.
Because he had charged into that cave tonight and broken Cara's iron grip over the hall, a woman who was supposed to be a forgotten corpse in an unmarked snowdrift was standing ten feet in front of him, breathing and alive.
Even so, after watching Cara use a poison snake on Nightingale's ankle from behind, William wasn't about to blindly trust anyone walking out of that cavern.
Taking one firm step forward, William planted his broad frame directly in front of Nightingale, his dark eyes locking onto Diana and Lightning as his voice cut sharply through the howling gale:
— "Stop right there! Ten paces is close enough!" — William barked, keeping his right hand resting near his belt. — "You two want to walk down this mountain with us? Fine! First, tell me how I know Cara didn't send you out here to mark our trail in the snow so her combat witches can ambush us on the ridge!"
As he spoke, William cut his eyes sideways toward Nightingale for half a second.
Nightingale didn't need a single word of explanation; after three days of traveling together, the two of them worked like a pair of veterans who had fought side by side for years.
Without making a sound, Nightingale blinked once and slipped her vision briefly into the monochrome veil of the Mist World, looking straight at the pulsing life force and emotional ripples inside Lightning's and Diana's chests.
Ten paces away in the snow, Diana dropped heavily to her knees from sheer exhaustion, holding both freezing, chapped hands out in front of her to show she was completely unarmed.
— "Please, sir... Commander William!" — Diana gasped, her voice trembling violently from the cold, yet her honey-colored eyes burned with absolute, desperate sincerity as she looked up at him. — "I swear to you on my life, nobody sent us! Back inside the cave, before Cara burned that parchment you brought, I saw the drawing of the steam engine! My father taught me mechanical drafting when I was a girl—I know a machine like that cannot be faked by the Church or anyone else! I don't want to die in that dark hole chasing a lie! Please, let me come to Border Town and see that machine with my own eyes!"
Right beside her, Lightning kept one hand holding Diana's collar to keep the older woman from tipping over into the drift, while planting her other fist on her hip and puffing out her cheeks indignantly at William.
— "Sent by Cara?! Are you kidding me, mister?!" — Lightning shouted back over the wind, almost spitting a snowflake off her lip in sheer offense. — "That crazy old snake woman was still lying in the dirt choking on her own blood when the two of us sneaked out the tunnel! If she knew we were leaving, she would have shoved that red-hot poker through my head next! Look, I don't care about politics—I just want to get out of that creepy prison, eat real meat, and see the cool inventions Nightingale talked about! You can bet on it!"
Beside William's elbow, Nightingale let the Mist fade from her eyes and gave his arm a single, firm tap.
— "Neither of them is lying, William," — Nightingale confirmed quietly, her posture relaxing an inch. — "Their colors are completely clean. There's no malice—only fear of the cave behind them and genuine hope."
Hearing Nightingale's verification, William let out a slow breath through his nose and nodded once.
At least they hadn't walked away from this disaster empty-handed. Nightingale was safe, an extra life had been saved from the snow, and having Lightning's aerial scouting power in Border Town before the spring war against Duke Ryan started was a massive tactical win.
For half a second, William felt a small flicker of relief.
Then he looked past Lightning and Diana toward the dark, empty ledge of the cliff fissure behind them.
Nobody else was coming out of the tunnel.
There were only the two of them.
The small spark of relief in William's chest died instantly, replaced by a cold, suffocating weight that slammed down onto his shoulders like a falling mountain.
Wait... that's it? Just Lightning and Diana? William stared at the empty black mouth of the gorge, the blood turning to ice in his veins. Where is Wendy?! Where are Scroll, Leaf, and the others?!
His heart, which had been racing from the adrenaline of the escape a moment ago, suddenly dropped into his stomach, beating with a heavy, sickening thud that made his ribs ache.
Now that the immediate life-or-death fight was over, the ruthless, analytical part of his brain kicked back in—and what it showed him made him want to throw up in the snow.
I panicked, William realized, a cold tremor starting in his hands inside his leather gloves. I couldn't take the pressure of waiting outside in the dark, and I lost my head.
Back inside that hall, he hadn't used diplomacy, he hadn't waited to see how the argument was playing out, and he hadn't trusted Nightingale's plan. The second he heard Cara scream, he had charged in like a mindless wrecking ball, slammed the founder of the Association into a rock wall at superhuman speed, crushed their sacred artifact in front of sixty terrified girls, and yanked Nightingale out into the night without saying a single word!
To him, it had been a rescue mission.
To the sixty traumatized witches inside that cave, however, what had it looked like?
A giant, terrifying mortal man had burst out of the dark, nearly murdered their Mentor with one blow of his bare hands, and vanished like a demon!
Wendy isn't out here, a cold, merciless voice whispered inside William's skull, his knees suddenly feeling weaker than they had after seventy-two hours of climbing. And it's my fault.
What if Wendy had been standing right in front of Cara trying to talk her down when he attacked? What if just thirty seconds more of Cara raving with that hot iron would have disgusted Wendy and the moderate witches enough to make half the camp abandon Cara on the spot and walk out with Nightingale peacefully?
He hadn't waited those thirty seconds.
Because of his impatient, hot-blooded arrogance—the exact flaw Arthur had screamed at him about in the castle hallway before he left—he had kicked the chessboard over in the middle of the game.
And what was going to happen inside that cave tomorrow morning when Cara woke up with a cracked skull and bruised ribs?
Cara would go completely insane. She would blame Wendy for defending Nightingale, or she would drag the entire camp out into the uncharted northern blizzards immediately to run away from Border Town's "assassins"!
In the original story, Wendy, Scroll, Leaf, and dozens of other witches were supposed to survive the winter and build a happy life in Border Town. What if every single one of those innocent girls—girls who had never hurt anyone—ended up freezing to death in a ravine or getting eaten alive by demons next month solely because William had charged in five minutes too early and ruined the timeline?!
What if I turn around and go back inside right now? William thought wildly, his breathing turning ragged and shallow as his vision blurred at the edges. I still have stamina left! I can run back down that tunnel, knock out anyone who tries to stop me, grab Wendy over my shoulder, and drag her out here by force!
The thought died the second it formed.
If he went back in there and beat up seventeen-year-old girls to kidnap Wendy like a bandit, Wendy would hate them until the day she died—and Nightingale, who loved Wendy like a sister, would never forgive him either.
He couldn't go back, and he couldn't undo what he had just done.
For the first time since waking up in this medieval world, the crushing, unbearable weight of playing god with real people's lives—people who bled real blood and died real deaths when a plan went wrong—slammed down on William's chest and stole the air right out of his lungs.
Despite the sub-zero blizzard howling around them, cold sweat broke out across his forehead, soaking into his hairline. His stomach heaved with self-loathing, his broad shoulders hunched forward, and inside his gloves, he clenched his fists so hard that his fingernails bit straight through the skin of his palms.
He wasn't some cool, invincible action hero from a story. He was just a reckless idiot who had probably just signed the death warrant of fifty innocent women.
— "William?"
A quiet voice spoke right beside his left elbow, barely audible over the wind.
William didn't answer; he didn't even hear it. The roaring sound of his own pulse pounding in his ears and the image of Cara's body flying across the hall drowned out everything else as his chest rose and fell in short, erratic gasps.
— "William, look at me."
The voice came louder this time, sharp and urgent.
— "WILLIAM!"
Stepping straight in front of him, Nightingale didn't care about the freezing wind or the two witches watching ten paces away; she yanked the leather glove off her right hand with her teeth, reached up, and pressed her warm, bare palm firmly against the side of William's ice-cold cheek.
The sudden touch of bare skin against his jaw jolted William's nervous system like an electric shock.
He blinked hard, his head jerking up as a ragged, shallow breath tore out of his throat.
Standing only inches in front of him in the swirling snow, Nightingale stared up into his dark eyes, a deep crease of genuine worry etched between her brows. Even without activating her Mist vision, an experienced fighter like her knew the signs of severe shock and hyperventilation at a glance: his skin was burning with a feverish sweat under the snow, his pupils were dilated, and his chest was heaving as if he couldn't get oxygen into his lungs.
Sliding her other gloved hand up to grip his chin, she gently forced him to keep his eyes locked on hers in the middle of the storm.
— "Hey... breathe with me. Look right at me, William," — Nightingale said, keeping her voice low, steady, and unshakably firm. — "What's wrong? Did one of Cara's snakes bite you in the hall? We're out of the cave—we're safe now."
William opened his mouth to answer.
He wanted to tell her everything right there in the snow. He wanted to confess that nothing was safe, that he had panicked outside the tunnel, that Wendy had been left behind in that lunatic's hands because of his impatience, and that he had probably ruined the future of everyone she cared about.
Yet when he looked down at the raw rope burns still red around Nightingale's wrists and saw the fierce, protective worry in the eyes of the woman who had almost had a white-hot iron driven through her face two minutes ago, the words locked up tight in his throat.
Up here on an exposed mountain peak in the middle of a deadly blizzard, with two exhausted runaway witches shivering behind them and a camp full of hostiles fifty yards up the gorge, breaking down would get all four of them killed.
Clenching his jaw until his teeth creaked, William closed his eyes for two seconds, swallowed the bitter lump of bile in his throat, and gave a single, stiff shake of his head.
— "I'm fine... Not bitten," — he rasped out, his voice rough as gravel. — "Just the cold and the adrenaline crashing."
Nightingale studied his face for a second longer. She knew for a fact that a man who could shatter a God's Stone with one hand wasn't shaking because of a little cold wind—yet she was smart enough to know that the middle of an escape wasn't the place to pry open a man's heart.
Dropping her bare hand from his cheek ONLY far enough to slip her glove back on, she turned her head briefly toward the two newcomers waiting up the slope.
— "Lightning, Diana—get over here right now!" — Nightingale ordered in a crisp, no-nonsense tone that brooked zero hesitation. — "Stay right behind our heels and step directly into the boot prints we leave in the drifts. The wind is covering the trail fast, and if you fall ten paces behind in this whiteout, we won't be able to see you."
As Lightning quickly nodded and helped Diana stumble forward to close the gap, Nightingale turned back to William.
Instead of taking his hand the way she had on the climb up, she stepped right up against his left side, pulled his heavy arm over her shoulders so his weight rested against her frame, and wrapped her own arm tightly around his waist to steady him.
Ten minutes ago inside that dark hall, he had been the unbreakable shield standing between her and death. Out here in the blinding snow, while whatever dark storm was raging inside his head threatened to pull him under, she was going to be the anchor that kept him on his feet.
— "Lean on me and keep moving, Commander," — Nightingale whispered right beside his ear, her warm breath brushing his cold jaw. — "Let's go home. Border Town is waiting for us."
With the mountain gale screaming behind their backs and the black mouth of the cavern vanishing into the swirling wall of white, the four of them turned down the freezing slope and began the long march back toward the valley.