Black, frost-split pine trunks rose out of the deep drifts along the wild border of the Hidden Forest like the bars of an endless iron cage.
For the ten witches trudging south through that untouched wilderness, the march was no longer just a journey; it had become a silent, grueling test of how much punishment flesh and sanity could take before snapping. Howling gales poured down from the upper peaks of the Impassable Mountain Range, whistling through the tangled canopy overhead and hurling thousands of tiny, razor-sharp ice needles against the pale, windburned faces of the isolated column.
Barely four hours had passed since Mentor Cara had turned her back on them in the clearing and led the main body of the Witch Cooperation Association northwest.
Yet out here in the swirling whiteout, where the wind filled in their ragged boot prints less than two minutes after they passed, those four hours already felt like a lifetime. Separated from the safety of fifty sisters and the familiar stone walls of their cavern, every crunch of snow carried the crushing weight of isolation and the constant, suffocating dread that something hungry was watching them from the trees.
Walking at the very tip of the ten-witch formation, measuring every single step down to the millimeter, was Ellen.
The young scout kept her eyelids half-shut against the blinding white glare of the snowfield, her chin tucked low into her worn wool scarf. Her real vision—the only sense keeping the nine women behind her alive right now—didn't rely on the pale winter sunlight filtering through the branches at all.
Every time the thin leather sole of Ellen's boot pressed down into the frozen crust, she sent a steady thread of Magical Power flowing downward into the earth.
Spreading out beneath the snowpack, infiltrating the frozen soil, the tangled tree roots, and the solid granite bedrock below, her magic acted like a continuous, ultra-sensitive web of touch. Ellen possessed the rare ability to read solid ground vibrations, allowing her to feel the heavy heartbeat or shifting weight of any land-bound demonic beast hiding under the drifts or stalking behind the rocks.
Like almost every young witch in the camp, however, her gift came with a cruel, terrifyingly short leash.
Her sensory net stopped dead at an exact radius of five meters.
For a small group marching on foot through virgin hunting grounds crawling with one-ton mutated predators that could cover fifteen feet in a single bound, a five-meter warning zone was practically point-blank range. It was a razor-thin line between having half a second to dodge and being torn in half before anyone could scream.
Sorting through the chaotic noise of the forest required excruciating mental focus. Through the soles of her boots, Ellen had to constantly filter out the creak of dead pine roots shifting under the frost, the soft hiss of heavy snow settling into ravines, and the uneven, stumbling footsteps of her sisters right behind her back.
— "Keep the pace tight and step directly into my boot prints," — Ellen called back over her shoulder, her tense whisper nearly ripped away by a gust of wind.
Despite the biting cold numbing her toes and the strain throbbing behind her temples, a quiet, stubborn spark of pride warmed Ellen's chest.
Ever since the day the Association had pulled her out of the unforgiving slums of her hometown, Ellen had been an exceptionally obedient follower, clinging to every word Mentor Cara spoke as if it were gospel law. In Ellen's mind—shaped by years of Cara's harsh camp rules—the world of witches was divided neatly into two kinds of people: useful shields, and dead-weight burdens.
Because of that indoctrination, Ellen hadn't viewed her name on Cara's list that morning as an abandonment.
Instead, she fervently believed that the Mentor had handpicked her for this southern vanguard for one undeniable reason: out of all the younger girls in the group, she was the only one with a genuine reconnaissance power. She might not be able to crush monsters like Violetta or throw stones with Attraction Magic like Fringe, yet without her vibration radar leading the way, this entire squad would be walking blind through hell.
Right behind Ellen's heels, fighting against the freezing headwind with a frail, violently shivering frame, walked seventeen-year-old Feather.
At a glance, her movement looked almost magical compared to the misery of the girls behind her.
While the others had to lift their knees high and drag their heavy boots out of two feet of packed powder with every single step, Feather seemed to glide effortlessly right across the top of the snow. Her small boots barely left a quarter-inch dent in the icy crust.
That enviable grace only happened because she was keeping her power active every second of the march, letting a slow, continuous trickle of magic drain from her chest. By decreasing the effective density and weight of her own body until she was as light as the bird feather that gave her her nickname, she cut the physical strain on her thin legs down to almost nothing.
Yet walking on top of the snow didn't lighten the black weight crushing her mind by a single ounce.
Painfully timid by nature, Feather shrank deep inside her threadbare wool cloak, keeping her shoulders hunched inward and glancing back every few seconds to make sure Violetta's tall, wolf-fur-draped figure was still close by. Whenever her eyes dropped to her own pale, frost-reddened hands, a dark, suffocating wave of bitterness and envy tightened around her throat until she could barely swallow.
She couldn't stop thinking about Hummingbird—another witch of the same age who was currently marching north alongside Cara and the main camp.
On the surface, their powers sounded almost identical, yet the difference in how the camp treated them was night and day. While Feather was trapped behind the cruel limitation of only being able to lighten her own body—a lonely, selfish trick only good for running away—Hummingbird could touch heavy crates of iron pots, sacks of grain, or wounded sisters and strip away their weight for hours at a time.
Because of that, Hummingbird was praised by Cara, protected by the fighters, and valued as an irreplaceable pillar of the supply line.
Feather, meanwhile, had been thrown out into the blizzard with the other unwanted mouths.
— "I can't even lighten a single bag for the others... I can't help anyone except myself," — Feather whispered miserably into her collar, hot tears of shame and frustration spilling over her lashes to freeze against the blown snow on her cheeks.
And beneath that corrosive self-hatred lurked a terror ten times worse—one that grew sharper with every mile they walked toward the unknown valley of Border Town:
Her Day of Awakening.
Even now, as she glided over the drifts, Feather could feel an unnatural, sickening chill creeping up the marrow of her spine. Every few minutes, a sharp twinge stabbed through her wrist bones, accompanied by the skin-crawling sensation that hundreds of tiny, freezing insects were wriggling through the veins beneath her skin.
Just as Wendy had realized back at the clearing, her body was already entering the early stages of the eighteen-year transition.
Remembering the horrific way Airy and Abby had died choking on their own boiled blood less than a week ago, Feather drifted half a step closer to Violetta's flank, praying silently that standing near the strongest warrior in the group might somehow keep the Demonic Bite from tearing her chest open before nightfall.
— "Ah—!"
Three paces back, right in the middle of the staggered line, a small, startled cry cut through the whistling wind.
Mystery Moon—whose boots didn't have Feather's weightless grace—had caught her toe underneath a gnarled, frozen pine root hidden beneath the powder that Ellen had stepped over a moment earlier. Throwing both arms wildly into the air as her balance gave out, the violet-haired girl pitched forward toward the ice, only to be caught roughly under the armpits by Cherry and Selena and hauled back onto her feet before her face hit the crust.
If Feather was shy, Mystery Moon was the living picture of paralyzing insecurity.
Even after being steadied on her boots, the small girl trembled like a trapped rabbit, her cheeks burning crimson against the winter pallor of her skin as she dropped her chin flat against her collarbone. Half the time in camp, she stuttered and apologized just for breathing the same air or sitting too close to the senior combat witches by the fire.
— "I—I'm so sorry! Please forgive me, I'm so clumsy..." — Mystery Moon stammered at the ground, her voice barely audible as she tried to shrink inside her oversized hood. — "I didn't see the root under the snow, I'll look at my feet better, I promise..."
Ironically, buried inside that timid, apologetic frame lay a complex, formidable well of Magical Power that could have rivaled half the vanguard fighters—yet Mystery Moon refused to touch even a single spark of it.
Her power governed invisible fields of magnetic attraction and violent metallic repulsion—a raw, chaotic force of nature that she had never been taught to understand or control. Every time she thought about reaching for her magic, Mentor Cara's cold, humiliating reprimands from the previous autumn echoed inside her skull.
After an early practice session where Moon had panicked and accidentally yanked three iron cooking pots and a loaded steel crossbow straight through the air toward her own sisters' heads, Cara had publicly branded her power a defective, useless hazard more likely to kill her allies than a beast.
Those harsh words had locked a permanent mental chain around the girl's heart.
Now, rather than risk activating her magic in the snow and triggering some bizarre magnetic accident that might pull Cherry's knife or Violetta's gear out of place, Mystery Moon chose to walk through the blizzard relying purely on her own weak, unenhanced muscles. Even with her thighs cramping in agony and her lungs burning like fire, she kept her hands clamped tight inside her sleeves, convinced she was nothing more than a walking disaster dragged along on this march out of pity.
Right beside Moon's elbow, sixteen-year-old Cherry let go of her friend's arm and immediately shoved her bare, frost-cracked hands up in front of her mouth, blowing warm puffs of breath across her stiff, purple knuckles to keep the skin from splitting open.
Grrrrr-clunk.
A loud, hollow groan echoed from the bottom of Cherry's stomach, cutting right through the sound of their crunching boots.
For Cherry, that gnawing cramp in her belly wasn't anything new; hunger had followed her around like an ugly stray dog since the day she was born in the slums. Out here in sub-zero temperatures, however, where wading through heavy snow burned through every scrap of body fat twice as fast, the empty ache was already making black spots dance at the corners of her vision.
The cruelest joke of all was that Cherry's own magic was entirely about food.
By touching a ration and focusing her mind, she could completely rewrite the flavor of whatever someone put in their mouth—turning a bowl of bitter, muddy pine-bark soup or a strip of rotten, worm-eaten jerky into something that slid down the throat without making a girl gag. In a peaceful town, a power like that might have been laughed off as a cheap kitchen trick; up here in a starving wasteland, it was the only thing keeping the younger girls from vomiting up their meals.
Still, her early-stage magic had two heartbreaking limits.
First, her internal magic pool was so small that she could only alter the flavor of three wooden bowls a day before a splitting headache stopped her cold—meaning that in a group of ten starving witches, someone always had to swallow the bitter mud raw.
Second, and far more tragic, a witch could only recreate flavors she had actually tasted in her own life.
Cherry had spent her childhood scraping out an existence alongside Red Pepper and Leaf in the filthiest, most merciless dockside alleys of Port of Clearwater—fighting wharf rats the size of dogs for moldy scraps tossed into the drainage ditches behind noblemen's taverns.
She had never once tasted a slice of tender, butter-roasted beef. She didn't know what rare southern spices, thick cream soups, or honeyed fruit pastries tasted like, which meant her mind had no blueprint to project them.
In Cherry's entire sixteen years of life, the absolute pinnacle of luxury—the finest banquet her memory could conjure when she poured her magic into her sisters' bowls—was the simple, nostalgic taste of a warm crust of plain rye bread fresh out of a baker's oven, or, on a very special day, a slightly bruised apple picked up off the dirt behind a market cart.
Looking sideways at Mystery Moon's pale, defeated face, Cherry forced her chapped lips into a crooked, street-rat grin, trying to take both their minds off the knives twisting in their stomachs.
— "Hey, Moon, keep your chin up," — Cherry rasped out, nudging the timid girl's shoulder lightly. — "I'm telling you right now, if the ten of us make it down to this Border Town in one piece, the very first thing I'm doing is breaking into that stuck-up prince's castle kitchen and eating until they have to roll me out the front gate in a wheelbarrow."
Mystery Moon offered a tiny, nervous nod, though as Cherry turned her head back toward the trees ahead, the playful spark in the street girl's eyes vanished instantly, replaced by the quiet, cold dread that they might not even live to see the sun go down.
And walking two paces outside the central file—acting as the iron wall between those frightened teenagers and the teeth of the forest—was the true anchor of the expedition.
Violetta marched through the deep drifts with the rigid, uncomplaining stride of a veteran soldier heading toward her final battlefield.
Tall, broad-shouldered, and draped in her heavy white wolf-fur mantle, the purple-haired warrior didn't waste a single breath on small talk. Her hard, angular features might have been carved out of mountain granite, and her dark purple eyes never stopped moving—sweeping from the snowbanks on their left to the dark tree boughs overhead with piercing, methodical coldness.
Back in the cavern, most of the younger girls like Feather and Selena had always been slightly terrified of Violetta, mistaking her unbroken silence around the campfires for simmering bad temper.
Only the older veterans like Wendy and Scroll knew the truth beneath that stone mask: Violetta didn't talk because she saved every ounce of her breath and focus for keeping her sisters alive.
In close-quarters combat, Violetta's magic was one of the deadliest, most versatile weapons in the entire Witch Cooperation Association.
At a single mental command, she could project and condense her Magical Power outside her skin into Violet Matter—a luminous, high-density purple substance that was solid as forged steel yet responded to her thoughts with the fluid speed of a cracking whip. Within half a heartbeat, she could mold that matter into an impenetrable tower shield, a sweeping scythe blade, or a volley of armor-piercing javelins.
Yet just like Roland had analyzed in his study two nights earlier, even a top-tier combatant like Violetta was chained to the iron law of range.
The instant her Violet Matter stretched more than seven meters away from her body, the condensed energy lost its cohesion and evaporated into harmless purple smoke.
Because of that seven-meter ceiling, Violetta could never fight from safety in the back; every time a monster attacked, she had to throw her own flesh and bone straight into the creature's jaws to act as the anvil for the weaker girls.
Keeping both hands out of her cloak pockets despite the biting frost so her fingers were ready to react in a millisecond, Violetta noticed the white mist between the pine trunks thickening as the afternoon wore on.
— "Close up the gaps in the middle," — Violetta's deep, gravelly voice rumbled across the line like low thunder, cutting straight through the quiet whimpering of the younger witches. — "I want your shoulders practically touching the girl in front of you. This fog is rolling down from the upper ravines. If anyone wanders three paces off the trail in this visibility, the forest will swallow her whole before I can turn around."
Hearing the harsh certainty in the warrior's tone, Selena, Library, and Mystery Moon immediately hurried their steps, pressing close against the backpacks ahead of them.
For another ten minutes, the only sound in the clearing was the rhythmic crunch-squelch of twenty boots breaking the ice crust and the mournful whistle of the wind in the branches.
Then, without a single warning sound from the trees, the march came to a dead, violent halt.
Up at the very point of the column, Ellen froze mid-stride as if she had been turned into a pillar of salt.
Every drop of color drained from the scout's face. Her eyes flew wide open in sheer, unadulterated panic, and her right hand shot straight up into the air with the palm spread wide—the Association's silent emergency signal for an ambush already inside the perimeter!
Behind her, nine witches locked their boots in place, their breath catching in their throats.
Before Violetta could even take a step toward the front, a violent tremor slammed straight up through the soles of Ellen's boots, so fast and close that staying quiet was useless.
— "UNDERNEATH US! IT'S DIGGING THROUGH THE FROZEN DIRT!" — Ellen screamed at the top of her lungs, pointing a trembling finger toward the right side of the line. — "FOUR METERS DOWN AND RISING FAST! SCATTER!"
There was zero time to scatter in waist-deep snow.
The predator had burrowed through the unfrozen subsoil beneath the frost line, entering Ellen's five-meter radar dome only at the exact second it launched its vertical strike!
KRA-KOOOOOM!!
Less than four feet to the right of Mystery Moon's boots, the solid crust of ice and packed snow exploded upward like a detonated landmine!
A blinding geyser of frozen black dirt, jagged slabs of river ice, and snapped pine roots blasted ten feet into the air, accompanied by a wet, ear-splitting roar of pure bestial fury that made the girls' eardrums burn.
Out of that crater lunged an enormous, nightmarish abomination.
Originally a mountain wild boar before the winter miasma warped its flesh, the creature had mutated into a one-ton battering ram of bone and corrupted muscle. Instead of coarse bristles, thick plates of overlapping, pustulant gray scales covered its humped back and shoulders like riveted iron armor. Its sunken eyes blazed a sickly, rabid blood-red, and curling out from its foaming snout were two curved ivory tusks as long, thick, and sharp as steel broadswords.
True to a predator's instinct, the monster locked straight onto the smallest, most terrified target in front of its snout: Mystery Moon.
— "Eeeek—!"
Blinded by the spray of frozen mud, Mystery Moon stumbled backward, her heel catching in the drift as she fell flat on her back in the snow. Paralyzed by absolute, mind-numbing terror, the timid girl couldn't even remember her magnetic power, nor could her frozen fingers reach the light crossbow strapped across her pack as one ton of scaled death lowered its broadsword tusks to impale her chest!
Beside her, Feather shrieked and threw both hands over her eyes, while sixteen-year-old Cherry—acting on pure gutter reflex even though her knees were shaking—yanked a six-inch skinning knife from her belt that wouldn't have scratched the monster's hide.
In that fraction of a heartbeat where Mystery Moon's death looked certain, a white blur tore across the flank.
Violetta didn't hesitate.
Moving with the explosive, predatory power of a snow wolf, the tall warrior covered the twelve feet between the rear flank and the crater in two massive bounds, throwing her own body squarely between the fallen girl on the ground and the charging snout of the boar!
Planting her boots wide in the snow, Violetta slammed both forearms together in an X-shape across her chest and unleashed her Magical Power at full throttle.
WHOOSH!
A blinding torrent of deep, luminous purple energy erupted from her shoulders against the gray winter mist. In less than the blink of an eye, the Violet Matter expanded and compressed in the freezing air six inches in front of her crossed arms, hardening into a thick, angled, cone-shaped tower shield right as the boar hit her at full gallop!
CLANG—THUUUUD!!
The collision of a two-thousand-pound mutant beast slamming headfirst into the condensed magical barrier rang out through the silent forest like a giant blacksmith's sledgehammer striking an iron anvil.
A violent ring of displaced air and blown snow blasted outward from Violetta's boots, knocking Cherry and Feather flat onto their backs in the drifts.
Under the monstrous kinetic force of the charge, Violetta wasn't knocked off her feet, though the heels of her leather boots plowed two deep, smoking furrows half a meter backward through the frozen dirt and ice!
SCREEEEE-CRACK!
The boar's massive ivory tusks ground viciously against the sloped face of the Violet Matter shield, showering bright purple sparks into the snow and filling the clearing with a high-pitched screech like metal tearing on stone—yet the barrier didn't crack by a hair.
— "ELLEN! CHERRY! DRAG THE GIRLS BACK FROM THE CRATER! NOW!" — Violetta roared through clenched teeth, the thick veins in her neck and temples bulging against her pale skin as she held back a ton of thrashing, rabid muscle through sheer mental willpower.
As Ellen and Selena scrambled forward on their hands and knees to grab Mystery Moon by the collar of her cloak and drag her backward out of reach, Violetta's combat mind made an instant calculation.
Holding a solid shield against a beast this heavy burned through her Magical Power reserve at a terrifying rate. If she tried to play defense for another thirty seconds, her magic pool would bottom out, the shield would vanish, and the boar would trample all ten of them into the mud.
She had to kill it right now.
Waiting until the mutant boar dug its hind hooves into the crater lip and threw all its weight forward for a second heave against the barrier, Violetta deliberately dissolved the right half of her purple shield into thin air!
Whoosh!
Expecting solid resistance, the one-ton beast lurched violently forward into the sudden empty space, its massive scaled head dipping downward as its front right leg stumbled into the trench Violetta's boots had carved.
In that exact half-second window while the monster was off-balance, Violetta didn't step back.
Pivoting hard on her left heel and throwing the full torque of her hips and broad shoulders into the swing, she instantly reshaped the condensed Violet Matter from her dissolved shield into a six-foot, crescent-shaped war scythe that gleamed like dark amethyst!
SHHHHHK—CRACK!!
Swinging down in a savage diagonal arc, the razor-sharp purple blade bypassed the thick scales on the boar's back and struck squarely into the softer, unprotected joint where the beast's front right leg met its shoulder!
The condensed magical blade sheared straight through three inches of corrupted black muscle, severed the main tendons, and shattered the thick leg bone in a spray of foul-smelling dark blood!
SQUEEEEEAAAAAL!!
An ear-splitting shriek of agony tore from the boar's foaming jaws as its severed front leg folded underneath its chest, sending its massive, armored bulk crashing crookedly sideways into the red-stained snow.
Even crippled, the rabid monster thrashed wildly in the drift, snapping its broadsword tusks toward Violetta's boots as it tried to haul itself back up on three legs.
Violetta didn't give it a second breath.
Stepping back two paces to clear the snapping jaws, she released the scythe blade and flicked both wrists upward, splitting the airborne Violet Matter into eight five-foot, needle-pointed purple stakes that hovered in a semicircle above her shoulders.
With a sharp, merciless chop of both hands downward, she fired the stakes at point-blank range.
THUD-THUD-THUD-CRACK!
Driven like heavy ballista bolts, all eight purple spears punched straight through the side of the boar's skull, eye socket, and upper spine, nailing the one-ton monster three feet deep into the frozen earth beneath it.
The beast jerked twice, its hind hooves kicking up a weak spray of red snow, before its massive frame went completely limp and the sickly blood-red glow faded from its eyes.
Silence dropped back over the forest clearing like a heavy curtain—broken only by the whistle of the wind in the pines and the ragged, terrified gasps of the young witches sprawled in the drifts.
Violetta didn't drop her guard right away.
Keeping her knees bent and her hands raised in a combat stance, the tall warrior stood motionless over the steaming black carcass for ten full, agonizing seconds, her dark purple eyes sweeping the surrounding tree line and listening to Ellen's breathing to make sure a second boar wasn't burrowing behind the first.
Only when the ground remained completely still did Violetta let out a long, steaming breath of white vapor, allowing the eight purple stakes pinned through the corpse to dissolve into harmless violet mist.
Lowering her arms to her sides, she felt a deep, unmistakable tremor of fatigue run through her triceps and a hollow dip in the magic reserve behind her ribs. Blocking a one-ton charge head-on and firing an eight-stake finisher had burned nearly a third of her tank in less than twenty seconds.
Wiping a trickle of cold sweat off her forehead with the back of her leather cuff, Violetta turned slowly around to check the squad.
Ten feet away, Mystery Moon was still sitting in the snow, shaking so violently she couldn't stand while Cherry held her shoulders with hands that were trembling almost as badly. Beside them, Feather had both hands pressed over her face, weeping quietly as the sheer fragility of their lives in this white hell hit home.
They had survived their first brush with death without losing a girl.
Yet as Violetta looked down at the dead boar's scales, her stern brow creased deeper. A burrowing boar hunting alone was just a stray scavenger—nothing compared to the coordinated packs of demonic wolves or the winged hybrids that prowled the deeper valleys between here and Border Town.
And then, as Violetta's sharp purple eyes swept past the crying teenagers toward the rear of the formation, her jaw tightened into solid iron.
Standing fifteen paces back near a snow-covered pine trunk—her beige winter dress completely untouched by mud, her breathing calm, and her hands tucked neatly inside her lace cuffs—stood Fringe.
Throughout the entire twenty-second life-or-death ambush, the silver-haired former noblewoman hadn't stepped forward once to help shield Mystery Moon, and she hadn't spent a single drop of her Attraction Magic to pull the boar off balance.
Remembering Cara's whispered warning before dawn, Violetta stared coldly at her fellow vanguard across the blood-stained snow as the gray afternoon light began to fade toward a long, treacherous night.