An hour before Cecilia Selda slipped her stolen poison into Violetta's wooden bowl, the freezing hell of the Hidden Forest was being watched from a vantage point no creature on the mountain could reach.
One hundred and fifty meters above the jagged pine canopy and the wind-scoured granite shelves, Arthur's telekinetic dome hung completely motionless in the gray sky.
Out beyond the invisible walls of the barrier, the late-afternoon blizzard was tearing across the slopes with murderous force, driving horizontal sheets of sleet and ice shards that would have blinded an ordinary scout in three seconds flat. Inside the teardrop-shaped pocket of controlled force, however, not a single breath of wind stirred.
Floating with his hands tucked casually into the pockets of his long, leather-reinforced winter coat, Arthur stared straight down through the swirling white haze at the ten tiny dark silhouettes trudging along the narrow mountain trail below.
Behind his calm, unblinking dark eyes, his Intelligence 14 mind was working on three tracks at once—maintaining the altitude of the dome against the crosswinds while dissecting every single detail of the column beneath his boots.
Even from five hundred feet in the air, the body language of the group told him everything he needed to know.
Up at the front and middle of the ragged line, eight smaller figures were pressed almost shoulder to shoulder, stumbling every few yards in the knee-deep drifts as they tried to share whatever scraps of body heat they had left. And four paces behind the main cluster, walking with the unmistakable spacing and alert posture of armed guards, were two taller women who clearly served as the squad's escorts.
— "Ten of them..." — Arthur murmured to himself, his quiet voice sounding strangely loud inside the acoustically sealed silence of the barrier. — "They split the camp."
Folding his arms slowly over his chest, the strategist frowned slightly, a rare crease of genuine surprise forming between his brows.
Having read the original novel from cover to cover back on Earth, Arthur carried a detailed mental roadmap of how the Witch Cooperation Association's winter migration was supposed to happen. He knew Cara's psychological profile inside and out: the woman was a control freak and a fanatic who viewed the numbers of her flock as the proof of her own righteousness.
In the original story, Cara had never—under any circumstances—broken off a group of ten witches and sent them marching south toward human territory in the middle of the Months of Demons. Separating eight helpless non-combatants from the main body in a sub-zero blizzard went against every rule Cara had ever preached.
What pushed a rigid tyrant like her into making a move this drastic? Arthur wondered, the logical gears inside his head spinning until the missing piece of the puzzle clicked into place with cold certainty.
The butterfly effect.
Arthur let out a quiet, humorless sigh through his nose.
Four nights ago, when William had refused to wait outside in the snow and charged into that cavern to save Nightingale from Cara's hot iron, his best friend hadn't just skipped a scene from the book—he had dropped a ten-ton boulder straight into the middle of a still pond.
Now, the ripples of that raid were reshaping the entire mountain board right in front of Arthur's eyes.
Having a magicless mortal man smash through her hall, knock her unconscious in one hit, and crush a God's Stone of Retaliation in his bare hand had clearly shattered Cara's sense of untouchability. Either the old snake was panicking over her dwindling food supplies after losing four days in a coma, or—far more likely for a cunning survivor like her—she had secretly begun to doubt whether the Holy Mountain was real, and was using these eight non-combatant girls as disposable canaries to test whether Prince Roland's Border Town was a sanctuary or a slaughterhouse!
From this afternoon on, the chronological timeline from the webnovel is dead, Arthur noted, filing the realization away with clinical calm. I can still use my memory of the book for character personalities, magical rules, and geography, yet the script itself has been torn up. We are walking on uncharted snow now.
— "Arthur! Look, look!"
Beside his right elbow, Lightning's sharp, impatient voice cut straight through his analysis.
The short-haired blonde girl was pressed right up against the front curve of the invisible barrier, her brass-rimmed goggles pushed down over her eyes and her small boots kicking excitedly in midair as she pointed a gloved finger down toward the ravine.
— "It's really them! I recognize Violetta's white wolf-fur cloak and Fringe's silver hair from up here!" — Lightning said breathlessly, her bright blue eyes shining with a mixture of relief for her friends and eagerness for action. — "We found them way faster than I thought we would! What's the plan, Boss? Are we diving down there to grab them right now?! Let me fly down and tell them we come in peace so they don't have to freeze anymore!"
Arthur turned his head away from the snowfield below, looking at the eager teenager with a calm, unyielding expression.
He understood why her heart was racing—those were her sisters freezing down in that gully—yet on a rescue operation, emotional haste was the fastest way to get people killed.
— "We are going to do nothing of the sort right now, Lightning," — Arthur replied, his voice level yet carrying an iron authority that left zero room for debate.
All the wind went out of Lightning's sails at once, her wide grin collapsing into a look of pure, baffled frustration.
— "What do you mean, do nothing?!" — she protested, waving both hands toward the ground. — "Arthur, look at how slow they're walking! Feather and Mystery Moon can barely lift their feet out of the drifts! If we leave them marching in that wind without help, they're going to collapse before it even gets dark!"
— "They are exhausted, half-frozen, and terrified out of their minds—which is the exact reason we cannot drop out of the clouds in front of them right now," — Arthur explained patiently, dissecting the tactical reality so the young scout could see the danger. — "Put yourself in their boots for five seconds, Lightning. Those girls have spent the last four days listening to Cara tell them that Border Town is a royal trap, and they probably just fought off demonic beasts in the trees an hour ago."
Arthur pointed a gloved finger down at the narrow, icy goat path the ten witches were following along the lip of a steep granite drop-off.
— "If a strange man and a defector suddenly fall out of the sky in the middle of a blinding snowstorm ten paces in front of them, their survival instincts won't wait for a polite speech—they will scream ambush," — Arthur said coldly. — "The eight younger girls will panic and scatter along that narrow cliff edge, where one bad slip means falling two hundred feet onto the rocks. At the same time, Violetta and Fringe will immediately attack me with lethal force to protect their flock, forcing me to slam them into the dirt to defend myself—which will only prove every lie Cara told them about us."
Lightning bit her lower lip, her brow furrowing as she looked back down at the perilous cliff path below.
— "We wait," — Arthur concluded firmly. — "We shadow them quietly from the clouds until dusk forces them to find an enclosed rock shelter for the night. Once they are stationary, boxed inside three walls with nowhere to fall, and separated from any stray forest monsters, we walk in through the front door on my terms. Panic happens in the open; control happens in a closed room."
Even though it tore at Lightning's kind heart to watch her friends shiver in the drifts for another hour, she couldn't argue against Arthur's ice-cold logic. Letting out a small sigh, the young flyer nodded her head in obedience and glued her goggled eyes back onto the ten tiny figures crawling down the mountain.
For the next sixty minutes, the invisible dome drifted silently through the darkening sky like a ghost ship, matching the agonizingly slow pace of the march below.
Slowly, the pale winter sun sank behind the jagged white teeth of the western peaks, draining the last warmth from the air and plunging the granite gorges into a bleak, bruised twilight.
Five minutes later, Arthur's patience paid off.
Down at the base of a sheer granite cliff face, Violetta called a halt and pointed toward a deep, wedge-shaped half-cave formed by three enormous slabs of fallen rock. One by one, the ten witches hurried off the exposed trail and disappeared into the dark shadow of the stone shelter.
— "They're stopping for the night!" — Lightning whispered, her face lighting up with relief. — "They're all inside the rocks!"
— "Good," — Arthur said.
Tilting his wrists slightly, Arthur guided the telekinetic bubble downward in a silent, curving glide—not toward the mouth of the witches' cave, but toward a small, recessed rock ledge carved into the cliff face roughly twenty meters above and to the right of their shelter.
The instant the soles of Arthur's leather boots touched the snow-dusted granite of the upper ledge and Lightning hovered safely inside the overhang beside him, Arthur released his mental hold on the aerodynamic barrier.
WHOOOOSH!
The transition back to the real world hit them like a physical slap across the face.
The deafening, banshee shriek of the mountain blizzard—which had been completely muted inside the vacuum dome for the past two hours—slammed back into their ears at full volume, accompanied by a blast of sub-zero air so cold it felt like inhaling crushed glass.
Arthur took half a step backward, his heel scraping against the frozen stone as he braced one broad shoulder against the rock wall behind him.
Squeezing his eyes shut, he let out a long, slow breath that turned instantly into a thick cloud of white fog in the twilight. Deep behind his temples and right at the base of his skull, a sharp, throbbing migraine was pulsing in time with his heartbeat—like a white-hot needle poking into his optic nerves.
Even with his upgraded Magical Power pool and his Intelligence 14 mind, maintaining a dual-body inertial dampener and a supersonic airflow deflection cone for two straight hours while simultaneously processing three-dimensional mountain terrain had taxed his central nervous system heavily.
— "Arthur?! Hey, are you okay?!" — Lightning gasped, zipping quickly over to his side with her blue eyes wide with worry as she noticed the sudden pallor on his face and the hand he raised to pinch the bridge of his nose.
— "I'm fine. Just give me a minute," — Arthur replied, his voice slightly hoarse from the cold air as he massaged his temples with two gloved fingers. — "Holding a precision field like that at two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour without a single break isn't a matter of muscle—it's two hours of non-stop mental calculus. My brain needs thirty or forty minutes to cool down and let my magic pool top off before I walk down into a fight."
Lightning nodded rapidly, floating right over to the outer lip of the rock cavity where she could peer down through a gap in the boulders at the faint orange flicker of the campfire being lit inside the half-cave below.
— "You sit down and rest your head, Boss!" — Lightning whispered fiercely, tapping the small flintlock pistol Carter had taught her how to shoot at her belt. — "I'll keep my eyes glued to that entrance. Not a single mouse is walking out of that cave without me seeing it!"
Giving her a brief nod, Arthur lowered himself smoothly onto a dry flat rock at the back of the niche, crossed his legs, and rested his hands on his knees, closing his eyes to enter a slow, rhythmic breathing cycle.
He blocked out the howl of the wind, forcing his pulse to drop and letting the cool current of Magical Power inside his chest wash away the neural fatigue.
He needed to be at 100% for the next ten minutes. First impressions with a group of traumatized, cornered fugitives determined everything: he had to project enough overwhelming power to crush any thought of violent resistance on the spot, while remaining calm and measured enough that they didn't jump off a cliff in terror.
Minute by minute, the darkness outside deepened into pitch-black night.
Forty-three minutes later, the sharp throbbing behind Arthur's forehead faded away completely, leaving his mind as clear, cold, and sharp as a freshly honed scalpel.
Opening his dark eyes in the gloom, Arthur stood up in a single fluid motion and adjusted his coat cuffs.
— "My break is over, Lightning," — Arthur said quietly. — "Let's go down and say hello."
At the lip of the ledge, Lightning grinned, adjusted the goggles on her forehead, and drifted back to his side. Without another word, Arthur wrapped a thin, silent layer of telekinetic force around both of their bodies—just enough to negate gravity and muffle the crunch of their boots—and the two of them glided down the dark, snowy slope like two phantoms descending from the clouds.
Twenty paces below the entrance of the witches' shelter, right atop the wind-scoured crest of the lower granite ridge, Arthur let the soles of his boots sink softly into the untouched snow and dropped the muffling veil so he could announce their presence.
Fate, however, had a dark sense of humor when it came to polite introductions.
At the exact second Arthur planted his feet on the ridge, a lone figure came bolting full-tilt out of the dark shadows down the slope from the half-cave!
It was a witch—and she wasn't strolling out to get fresh snow for the pot.
It was Cecilia Selda.
Having just stepped over Violetta's poisoned, groaning body at the mouth of the shelter four minutes earlier, the former noblewoman was sprinting down the ridge with the desperate, high-speed urgency of a prisoner breaking out of a dungeon. With her head ducked low against the gale and her focus entirely locked on using her Attraction Magic to sweep the drifts ahead of her boots, she was so blinded by the adrenaline of her own desertion that she didn't even notice the two figures standing motionless in the whiteout until she was less than three meters away from crashing straight into Arthur's chest!
Arthur didn't have three seconds to pull out Diana's booklet and ask polite questions.
In the middle of a night blizzard, a combat witch was charging straight at him from the blind spot of the cave. He didn't know if she was leading an ambush, running from a subterranean monster that had broken into the shelter, or about to scream at the top of her lungs and alert the entire camp—and on Arthur's chessboard, uncontrolled variables were locked down first and questioned second.
Before Cecilia's silver eye could even widen in shock—before she could raise her hands to cast her directional Attraction Magic, and before a single breath of air could reach her vocal cords to scream—Arthur's right hand rose two inches.
THOOM.
Cecilia Selda's entire world stopped dead.
Literally.
An invisible wall of force—dense, immovable, and heavy as a mountain of solid iron—slammed down over every single square inch of her body and the surrounding thirty feet of ridge at once.
The howling sixty-mile-per-hour gale vanished into dead silence. The loose snow kicked up by her running boots froze suspended in midair like white pebbles glued to glass. Even the fluttering beige hem of her winter cloak stiffened until it felt like a sheet of hammered steel.
An irresistible telekinetic vise wrapped around her torso, pinning her arms flat against her ribs, locking her knees in mid-stride, and lifting the soles of her boots one centimeter off the ice crust.
Worst of all—what plunged the composed former aristocrat into the deepest pit of primal, animal terror she had ever felt in her life—was the invasion of her own skin.
Arthur's precision telekinesis didn't just hold her coat; it gripped her chin and her lower jaw with microscopic rigidity, clamping her teeth together so firmly that she couldn't part her lips by a single millimeter to draw a breath.
Turned into a living statue hanging an inch above the snow, Cecilia could only roll her single exposed silver eye wildly in its socket, staring in suffocating horror at the tall man in the dark coat who had just ended her escape plan with a twitch of his fingers.
Keeping his right hand raised slightly at chest height, Arthur didn't even blink, his pale, sharp face as calm as a winter grave.
— "Lightning," — Arthur said, his level voice cutting through the eerie silence inside his barrier without taking his dark eyes off the paralyzed prisoner. — "Take a look at her face. Is she one of the senior witches from your camp?"
Floating smoothly forward two paces, Lightning peered closely at the pale, terrified woman suspended in front of them, her eyes widening in instant recognition.
— "Yeah! I know her!" — Lightning said, pointing a gloved finger at the silver-white bangs. — "That's Fringe! Her real name is Cecilia. She's one of the six strongest fighters in the camp, just like I told you on the flight up here! She was always super nice to me when she ladled out the soup at dinner!"
Fringe—Cecilia Selda, Arthur's mind immediately pulled up page four of Diana Argus's dossier. Second daughter of Count Valencia. Directional Attraction Magic. Assigned by Cara as one of the two vanguard escorts for this group.
That confirmation locked the final piece of logic together in Arthur's head. If she was one of the two combat guards responsible for protecting the eight girls in that cave, then her sprinting down the mountain alone in the middle of the night with a full travel pack on her back meant only one thing: she wasn't scouting.
She was deserting.
— "I see," — Arthur murmured.
Taking two slow, measured steps forward through the snow until he was standing less than a foot from Cecilia's frozen face, Arthur looked down into her wide, bloodshot silver eye with clinical detachment.
— "Listen to me very carefully, Miss Fringe," — Arthur said, his voice soft, polite, and cold enough to freeze mercury. — "I am going to ask you two simple questions, and for the sake of your own health, I strongly suggest you answer them with the plain truth. In two seconds, I will release the lock on your jaw so you can breathe and speak. However, if you try to scream for help, if you twitch a finger to cast your magic, or if you lie to me... I will pinch the carotid artery inside your neck shut before the first syllable leaves your lips. Blink once if you understand the rules."
Trapped in midair with her lungs burning for oxygen, Cecilia blinked her left eye twice in frantic, desperate agreement.
With a subtle mental adjustment, Arthur released the telekinetic clamp on her mandible by two inches while keeping the rest of her frame locked from the neck down.
— "Gasp—khhk!"
Cecilia sucked a huge, ragged lungful of freezing air into her chest, coughing hard once before her wide, terrified gaze darted from Arthur's face to the small blonde girl floating effortlessly in midair right beside his shoulder.
— "Light... Lightning...?" — Cecilia croaked out, her voice trembling with utter disbelief at seeing the runaway flyer here.
— "Hey there, Fringe!" — Lightning waved a mittened hand with cheerful innocence, looking ridiculously out of place next to Arthur's lethal pressure.
Arthur ignored the greeting; he needed the tactical layout of the cave thirty yards up the slope before anyone else came out.
— "Why did Cara split your group of ten off from the main camp?" — Arthur asked with the dry precision of an auditor. — "And why are you running down this ridge alone in the middle of a blizzard while leaving your squad behind?"
Drowning in the shock of having her escape crushed in half a second and staring at Lightning hovering beside this terrifying man in strange, tailored winter clothes, Cecilia's racing mind didn't even register his questions—instead, she connected the dots in the most terrifying way possible.
Her single pupil dilated until the silver iris was almost gone, her chest heaving against the invisible bands holding her ribs.
— "Nightingale vanished... then Lightning and Diana vanished... and now Lightning is flying right next to you..." — Cecilia whispered hysterically, raising her trembling gaze to meet Arthur's bottomless dark eyes. — "It's you... Gods above, you're him! You are the monster who broke into our cavern four nights ago, crushed the God's Stone in your hand, and knocked Mentor Cara across the hall! You came back to finish us off, didn't you?!"
For half a second, Arthur paused, processing the logical jump the noblewoman had just made.
Because she had only seen a dark blur in the smoky hall four nights ago, and because Arthur had just frozen the very storm around them without chanting a word, Cecilia assumed that Arthur and William were the exact same person!
In the intricate web of Arthur's strategic mind, the immense psychological value of that mistake registered instantly.
Stopping to explain that there were actually two different men from Border Town—one with superhuman physical strength and teleportation, and another with high-level telekinesis—would only waste time and give away intelligence on their numbers. Letting the witches believe that a single, godlike entity could both shatter Church artifacts with his bare hands and freeze an entire mountain ridge with his mind would cement absolute, unquestioned obedience through sheer awe.
Why throw away a ready-made legend?
Reaching up with one gloved hand, Arthur smoothly adjusted the lapel of his long coat and looked down at her without a flicker of hesitation.
— "Yes, I am," — Arthur lied, the words slipping off his tongue with a naturalness so polished and cold it could have frozen fire. — "And since you saw firsthand what happened to your Mentor when she tested my patience four nights ago, I suggest you stop wasting my time and answer my question—"
Crunch... scrape... thud.
Arthur stopped speaking mid-sentence, his dark eyes shifting twenty yards up the snowy incline toward the mouth of the granite shelter.
Against the faint, dying orange glow of the small campfire inside the cleft, two uneven, struggling silhouettes stumbled out of the rocks into the snow.
Leading the way was Violetta.
The squad's iron shield looked as though she were walking out of a torture chamber. Her normally hard, stoic face was paler than bone and drenched in a thick sheen of clammy, freezing sweat that plastered strands of long purple hair across her forehead.
Inside her stomach, the massive, undiluted dose of Herb's bitter-root purgative and nerve-numbing soporific was tearing her apart with violent cramps and dragging her central nervous system down into a black chemical pit. Any ordinary woman would have been lying unconscious in the dirt ten minutes ago; only Violetta's sheer, iron-willed refusal to abandon the eight girls in her care had allowed her to bite through her own lip and drag her leaden boots to the entrance—leaning half of her heavy weight onto the small, violently trembling shoulder of sixteen-year-old Cherry, who had woken up to the warrior's groans and rushed to help her stand.
Even half-blind from the drug, Violetta's right hand was still clamped around the hilt of her weapon so hard her knuckles were white.
Squinting through her blurry, swimming vision down the slope, Violetta spotted the beige winter cloak at the crest of the ridge first.
— "What... what did you put in that bowl, Cecilia...?" — Violetta's voice came out as a low, ragged growl, thick with agonizing cramps, betrayal, and disbelief. — "You poisoned my soup... Why would you betray your own—"
The bitter accusation died halfway out of Violetta's throat.
Blinking the cold sweat out of her eyes, the veteran warrior finally looked past Cecilia's rigid back and took in the entire scene unfolding ten paces down the ridge.
For a second, Violetta thought the poison was making her hallucinate.
Cecilia wasn't standing on the snow—she was hanging suspended a centimeter in the air like a pinned butterfly, completely paralyzed from head to toe.
Hovering effortlessly beside her in the dark was Lightning—the runaway flyer Cara had branded a brainwashed traitor four mornings ago.
And standing directly in front of them, untouched by the howling blizzard that had gone dead silent around his boots, was a tall man in a dark coat who radiated an invisible, suffocating pressure heavier and more terrifying than any mutated beast Violetta had ever faced in the wildlands.
With a single raised hand, he was holding a senior vanguard combatant of the Association frozen in midair as easily as a child holds a toy doll.
Violetta's dark purple eyes widened in bottomless dread, a chill far colder than the mountain ice striking straight into her soul.
Through the crushing fog of the sedative numbing her nerves, only one horrifying thought echoed inside the warrior's skull as she tried desperately to summon her Violet Matter:
Cara was right... It wasn't a sanctuary. The mortal monster from the cave tracked us down in the snow to slaughter us all.