The relentless storm raging across the Impassable Mountain Range seemed to have taken on a cruel life of its own, howling like a wounded beast through the narrow ravines of black stone.
With every step the small group took away from the cave of the Witches' Cooperation Association, the thick snow and freezing gale tried to drive them back toward the abyss. Visibility was almost nonexistent, reduced to a swirling white veil that swallowed the horizon, erased the outlines of the cliffs, and chilled them to the bone.
For William, however, the biting cold battering the mountainside was nothing compared to the icy pit that had opened in the depths of his stomach.
The commander trudged forward with heavy, mechanical steps, his boots sinking into the snow as his breath came in shaky, irregular gasps. The brutal adrenaline rush that had fueled his invasion just minutes earlier was finally beginning to fade, leaving behind a deep nausea and an overwhelming weight pressing against his chest.
The image of Wendy—the gentle, motherly figure he had left behind in the darkness of that cave—kept pounding relentlessly through his mind.
Guilt gnawed at him like pure acid. William felt physically sick, his vision blurred not only by the ice crystals clinging to his eyelashes but also by the dizzying realization that he had just played God with those women's lives.
I panicked, he thought, gritting his teeth beneath the high collar of his wool coat as the wind lashed at his face. I lost my head out there in the darkness, rushed in like an idiot, and now the witch who's always taken in all the others is the one who'll pay the price for my impatient cowardice.
Walking close against his left side, Nightingale could clearly feel the involuntary tremors running through William's sturdy body beneath the thick fabric of his overcoat.
Even so, the assassin said nothing at first. She knew this was no time for speeches in the middle of a blizzard. She simply matched her pace to his, keeping one arm firmly around his waist like a living anchor, preventing him from collapsing into the deep snow.
Farther behind them, struggling with all their strength to keep up on the arduous mountainside, came Lightning and Diana Argus.
The two young women huddled inside their worn rags, their teeth chattering incessantly as they hunched their shoulders against the fury of the wind. Unlike William, whose physical attributes surpassed those of any ordinary human, or Nightingale, whose body had grown accustomed to years of surviving in extreme conditions, Diana was a former noblewoman already weakened by months of starvation in the mountains.
"We... we have to stop..." Diana's voice sounded weak and muffled, almost inaudible beneath the deafening roar of the blizzard.
On her next step, the toe of her worn boot caught on a pine root hidden beneath the white crust. She fell to her knees in the snow, plunging her freezing hands into the ice.
"I... I can't feel my feet anymore."
Lightning, who until that moment had been floating a few inches above the ground to avoid sinking her boots into the heavy snow, immediately descended beside the older woman and grabbed her by the shoulders, pulling her up.
Seeing that Diana's legs were trembling like green reeds and could no longer support her own weight, the young aviator cupped a hand around her mouth and shouted against the wind:
"Nightingale! Wait!" Lightning called at the top of her lungs. "Diana won't survive if we keep walking all night through this storm! If we don't find shelter right now, the cold will kill her long before we even catch sight of that so-called Border Town!"
At the front of the group, William blinked hard and stopped halfway down the slope.
The blonde girl's desperate shout jolted his foggy mind, forcing him to push his nausea and remorse into the back of his thoughts.
Wake up, William, he scolded himself silently, drawing in a lungful of freezing air that burned his lungs. Crying over what you left behind in that cave won't help Wendy. And if you keep dragging your feet like a walking corpse, you'll end up killing the two women who were brave enough to come with us.
His survival instinct and his responsibility to protect those three women had to outweigh the paralyzing guilt. Carefully removing his heavy arm from Nightingale's shoulders, William straightened his back with a monumental effort and turned around.
"Lightning is right," William said, his voice hoarse from the wind but finally regaining the firmness of a true field commander. "If we keep blindly marching down the slope through the night, we'll all die of hypothermia before dawn."
He turned his focused gaze toward the little witch wearing a leather cap.
"Lightning, do you still have enough magical energy to fly up a few meters and scout the rocky slope?" he asked directly. "Look for any recess in the rock. A deep overhang, a crevice, a shallow cave... Anything that can get us out of the direct path of this wind."
The young aviator nodded immediately without asking any questions.
With a light push of her heels, her small body defied gravity and the force of the storm, rising several meters into the dark sky. Stabilizing her flight against the crosswinds, Lightning narrowed her blue eyes and scanned the steep mountain walls surrounding them.
Less than two minutes later, she descended beside the group and pointed toward the right side of the ravine.
"Down there!" she called, wiping the snow from her face. "There's a pile of rock formations about two hundred paces from here, near the base of the cliff. It looks like a small natural cave!"
"Good work. Let's move," William ordered, taking half a step forward to help Nightingale support Diana by her other arm.
Without wasting another second, the four of them headed in the direction their scout had indicated.
When they finally rounded the rocky outcrop, they discovered that the shelter was little more than a deep fissure beneath the base of a cliff, formed by colossal granite boulders that had tumbled down the mountain centuries earlier. Even so, under their current circumstances, that hole in the rock was worth its weight in gold.
Inside, the thick stone walls blocked out almost all the wind's piercing howl. The sloping floor at the back was free of snow, covered only with dry gravel, dead leaves, and a few old pine logs that had dried out under the shelter of the rock.
As soon as they crossed the entrance to the crevice, Diana slid down the rock wall until her back hit the ground. She hugged her knees against her chest in a desperate attempt to preserve what little warmth remained in her body.
William glanced at the former noblewoman's purple lips, then at the dry logs lying in a corner of the cave, and took two steps forward.
Extending his right hand into empty space, he mentally activated the System interface.
Without a sound or flash of light, a heavy woodcutter's axe, its blade forged from iron and its handle made of oak, suddenly materialized in his palm, emerging from nowhere.
Leaning against the wall, Diana's eyes widened and her eyebrows shot up in utter shock.
Beside her, Lightning immediately stopped rubbing her frozen arms and stared open-mouthed at the heavy tool that hadn't been there a second earlier.
William completely ignored the two newcomers' astonishment. Walking over to the dry logs in the corner of the crevice, he raised the axe and delivered a series of brutal, precise blows to the dead wood.
Thwack! Crack! Thwack!
With his Strength at 16, splitting thick, frozen pine logs was as easy as cutting through warm butter. Within seconds, he had reduced the wood to perfectly sized firewood. He gathered the pieces in his arms, carefully stacked them in the center of the gravel floor, and made the axe disappear back into his invisible inventory with a simple thought.
Next, he reached into the inner pocket of his thick coat and pulled out a small, rectangular metal object he had brought from Earth.
A brushed-steel Zippo lighter.
With a quick flick of his thumb, he flipped open the lid and spun the flint wheel. The sharp metallic click echoed off the narrow cave walls, immediately followed by the appearance of a steady yellow flame dancing above the metal casing.
Kneeling beside the pile of firewood, William held the flame to a handful of thin twigs and dry moss, blowing gently at the base until the fire caught on the larger pieces of wood.
In less than a minute, living warmth began to radiate through the rocky crevice, driving away the mountain winter's lethal claws.
The relief on Diana's pale face was immediate. The young woman let out a long, shaky sigh and dragged herself closer to the flames, stretching her numb hands toward the fire.
Lightning's explosive curiosity, however, could not be contained for another second.
"Incredible... How did you just do that?!" Lightning exclaimed, pointing frantically first at the empty hand where the axe had been and then at the fire that had sprung from a little metal box. "That enormous axe just appeared out of thin air! And the fire... I was watching your hands! You didn't strike flint or rub sticks together! How do you keep fire inside your pocket?! And there's more—"
Before answering, William noticed a thicker pine branch that had rolled away from the pile and come to rest about ten feet from the fire, near the entrance to the crevice.
To spare his exhausted legs the effort after three days of climbing—and perhaps still somewhat numb from the emotional exhaustion weighing on his mind—the soldier acted without giving it a second thought.
He fixed his gaze on the piece of wood ten feet away and activated his power.
Fzzzt.
William's silhouette blurred for a fraction of a second. The space around him warped subtly, much like the shimmering air above a furnace. In a single millisecond, he simply ceased to exist beside the fire and instantly reappeared in a crouch next to the fallen branch.
He picked up the firewood with one hand and calmly walked back to the fire.
The little cave fell into stunned, absolute silence.
For five long seconds, the only sound inside was the cheerful crackling of resin burning in the wood.
Lightning let out a sharp gasp, bringing both hands to her mouth to stifle a scream.
Beside her, Diana Argus backed away until her shoulders struck the cold granite wall, feeling her rational mind short-circuit completely.
Until that exact moment, the former baron's daughter had tried to find a logical explanation for everything she had witnessed over the past twenty minutes. She had tried to convince herself that the commander had been carrying the axe hidden in a sheath beneath his oversized overcoat, and that the little firebox was nothing more than some exotic alchemical artifact purchased in the capital.
But what had just happened before her eyes, barely three paces away, defied every law of nature she knew.
"You... you disappeared!" Lightning finally burst out, jumping to her feet and completely forgetting how exhausted she was from their escape.
Excitement radiated from every pore of the young aviator. She rushed over to William and began poking his muscular arm and coat sleeve with her finger, as though trying to uncover some illusionist's trick or invisible wires.
"How did you do that?! You crossed the entire cave without taking a single step on the ground!" the blonde girl exclaimed, her blue eyes shining like two sapphires in the moonlight. "Wait a second... are you a witch too, by any chance?!"
Despite all the torment still weighing on his heart, William couldn't suppress a faint, crooked smile. Lightning's energetic, uncomplicated innocence was genuinely contagious.
"I can assure you that I'm not a witch, little one," William replied, tossing the thick branch into the middle of the embers.
"But you have magic! Real magic!" the young flyer insisted, bouncing on the toes of her boots in front of him. "I felt the distortion in the air! I can fly through the sky, but I can't disappear from one place and appear in another! If you're not a witch, then what are you?!"
William sat on a flat rock near the warmth of the fire and rested his elbows on his knees, taking his time to choose his words.
"Let's just say I have a different kind of ability," he said, introducing the term slowly. "You could call me a 'warlock.'"
"A... warlock?" Diana repeated softly, testing the unfamiliar word on her tongue as she leaned forward, intellectual fascination quickly replacing the fear on her face.
The orange glow of the fire reflected in her honey-colored eyes as she studied the man sitting before her.
"This is the first time in my entire life that I've ever heard of such a designation," Diana murmured thoughtfully. "There has never been any mention, in any historical record of the Four Kingdoms or even in the Church's own archives, of Magical Power manifesting in a man. For four centuries, the clergy have preached incessantly that magic is an exclusive byproduct of impure female blood and demonic temptation. The mere existence of a 'man with magic' destroys every ecclesiastical dogma all at once."
"The Church of Hermes is made up of a bunch of blind hypocritical old men who use fabricated dogma to control what they don't understand," William replied matter-of-factly, warming his palms beside the flames. "The world out there is far bigger than the lies they tell in the Holy City. As for how I do this... it has nothing to do with demons. It's simply a matter of space and visual perception. As long as I can clearly visualize the place I want to go, and that spot is within my field of vision and no more than about four meters away, I can bend space and move there instantly."
"Four meters without moving a muscle?!" Lightning murmured, marveling at how useful that would be in combat. "It's like a tiger's leap in the blink of an eye!"
Standing beside the cave wall, Nightingale let out a proud smile.
After spending the previous night tied to a post while her former sisters questioned every word she said about Border Town, finally having something extraordinary to boast about in front of two witches from the Association felt wonderful. And the fact that it concerned the man who had just risked his neck to save her made it all the better.
"Oh, and teleportation is far from the only impressive thing about him," Nightingale interjected, walking over to the fire to warm her hands with the unmistakable air of someone showing off a rare trophy. "That axe you saw earlier? He pulled it out of an invisible space. William has a kind of untouchable pocket dimension that follows him everywhere, which he calls his 'inventory.' He can store almost any object in it and pull it out whenever he needs it. On top of that, his physical strength is far beyond that of any ordinary knight."
To prove Nightingale's point, William once again extended both hands, palms up, over his lap.
A subtle shimmer passed through the air before him, and four generous portions of salted, smoked pork appeared in quick succession, along with two round wheat loaves he had stored in his inventory before leaving Border Town.
At that very moment, Diana's and Lightning's stomachs growled loudly, almost in perfect unison.
For two girls who had spent the past several weeks surviving on watery porridge made from stale grains and bitter roots dug out of the ice, watching real food appear from nowhere and smelling the rich aroma of smoked meat was a greater miracle than any combat spell.
Picking up a few thinner, clean branches, William skewered the thick slices of meat on their ends and handed one to each girl so they could roast them directly over the fire.
"This is... truly extraordinary," Diana remarked, carefully holding her skewer over the flames as she looked at William with a mixture of deep admiration and respectful apprehension. "That spatial ability, combined with such physical strength, perfectly explains what we witnessed up there in the cave. I saw it with my own eyes, Sir William. You crossed the entire main hall like a black bolt of lightning, knocked Mentor Cara down without even drawing a sword, and crushed a Divine Retribution Stone with your bare hand."
At the mention of the Association's leader, the faint smile on William's face disappeared.
He slowly turned his piece of meat over the embers, his gaze fixed silently on the red glow of the coals for several seconds.
"Cara..." he began, his voice dropping several octaves into a tense, grave tone. "How is she? What condition was she in when the two of you left?"
Sitting beside him, Nightingale immediately turned her head, noticing the dramatic change in the commander's demeanor.
"I never intended to seriously hurt her," William continued, frustration evident in every word as he set his skewer down on a rock and pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. "When I heard the scream outside and rushed through the tunnel, I saw that red-hot iron just inches from Nightingale's face. I needed to neutralize the threat immediately and get her out of the way so I could destroy the God Stone. But... I held back. I swear I did."
He squeezed his eyes shut and released a heavy sigh.
"The problem is that, when you combine the speed coming out of teleportation with the momentum of my own body... I couldn't calculate the exact force of the impact in that split second," he admitted bitterly. "The blow from my hands to her back was far more brutal than I'd intended."
Behind his closed eyelids, the image of Cara flying through the air like a broken rag doll remained seared into his retinas. It was followed immediately by the horrifying realization that if he had killed her in front of the camp, Wendy and the other witches would never trust them again for the rest of their lives.
Seeing the soldier's grim expression, Lightning—who already had her mouth half full of undercooked meat—hurriedly swallowed her bite and waved a hand in the air to reassure him.
"Take it easy, Warlock! Cara didn't die!" the blonde girl assured him immediately. "At least, she was very much alive when we made our escape through the tunnel!"
William's eyes flew open, and he turned toward her.
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely," Diana confirmed with a calm nod, chewing on a small piece of warmed bread. "The impact against the wall left a nasty gash on her forehead and knocked her unconscious, but she was breathing. When Lightning and I slipped out through the shadow of the entrance, Herb—our plant-based healer—was already kneeling beside her, applying a concentrated medicinal paste to stop the bleeding and treat her lungs."
At those words, the crushing weight of feeling like an accidental murderer lifted considerably from William's shoulders.
He released a long, shaky sigh of relief, feeling the tense muscles in his back relax for the first time since leaving the cave. This meant that, although chaos had erupted inside and Wendy had been left behind, at least he hadn't fatally wounded the Association's founder and destroyed any chance of reconciliation forever.
"Thank God..." William murmured, running a hand over his face.
Across the small campfire, Diana watched him silently and attentively.
For a woman who had grown up in the noble halls of Graycastle, surrounded by calculating lords and arrogant knights who boasted in taverns about the number of enemies they had slaughtered, seeing a warrior wielding such monstrous destructive power show such genuine, vulnerable relief at not having killed the woman who had tried to torture his companion was fascinating.
There was a compassionate humanity in the young commander that completely contradicted the terrifying ferocity of his fists.
"You have a good heart, Sir William," Diana said softly, a small, sincere smile illuminating her tired face. "Not every warrior would storm a den of beasts alone to rescue their prey, only to worry about the health of the wolf they had to drive away moments later."
Beside him, Nightingale smiled tenderly and nodded in agreement.
"He really does, Diana," the blonde-haired assassin said, looking at William's profile in the firelight. "Prince Roland is the same way, and Arthur, in his own way, too... You'll understand once we get down there. In Border Town, none of us has to fight over scraps of moldy bread or hide in the shadows, afraid of our own sisters or the Church's bonfires."
Shifting a little closer on the stone slab, Nightingale allowed her shoulder to rest gently against William's broad one.
Outside, beyond the narrow opening of the crevice, the cold of the Impassable Mountain Range continued to howl through the darkness, and the dangers of the long descent home were far from over. Yet the quiet warmth of Nightingale's presence beside him, along with the certainty that Cara had not died, allowed the young soldier, for the first time during that seemingly endless night, to feel that perhaps things had unfolded in the only way they could have.
Lifting his eyes from the embers to the curtain of snow falling through the night outside, William took a deep breath, preparing his mind and body to guide the three witches safely home.