Wind continued to howl across the exposed spine of the mountain ridge, Whipping curtains of loose white powder into the dark gorge below, yet on the churned snow outside the half-cave, the newly ended battle had left behind the silence of a graveyard.
Arthur's effortless, overwhelming display of telekinetic dominance hadn't just defeated Violetta; it had drained the last drop of fight out of every witch watching from the rocks.
Ten feet in front of Arthur's boots, sixteen-year-old Cherry was kneeling in the red-and-white drift, sobbing raggedly as she hooked both thin arms underneath Violetta's armpits and tried with all her might to haul the unconscious warrior up the incline toward the shelter.
It was a hopeless effort.
Violetta was a tall, solidly built vanguard combatant draped in heavy wet wool and thick wolf fur, while Cherry was a malnourished gutter girl whose own legs were shaking like dry reeds from hunger and the biting sub-zero freeze. Every time Cherry heaved backward, her worn boot heels slipped on the ice crust, barely budging Violetta's limp weight by an inch.
Then, a small shadow drifted smoothly across the snow beside them.
Floating three inches above the untouched powder, Lightning glided up to Cherry's side, her usual wild grin replaced by a soft, gentle expression as she looked down at her crying sister.
— "Here, let me give you a hand with her, Cherry," — Lightning said quietly, dropping to her knees in the drift and sliding her gloved hands under Violetta's left shoulder. — "She's way too heavy, and the snow on this slope is too deep for you to drag her inside by yourself."
Cherry flinched at first when the defector touched Violetta's cloak, her tear-filled eyes darting fearfully toward Arthur; yet when Lightning channeled a subtle thread of her flight magic into her own grip to take two-thirds of the warrior's dead weight off the ground, Cherry swallowed her panic and held onto Violetta's right arm.
Working together, the two teenage girls lifted the unconscious guardian out of the snow and half-carried, half-dragged her up the rocky path into the dim, flickering warmth of the granite half-cave.
Down on the crest of the ridge, Arthur watched them go without saying a word, both gloved hands still resting comfortably inside the pockets of his long winter coat.
He knew how the fight had ended, yet he still didn't have the full picture of what had happened inside that rock cleft ten minutes before he and Lightning glided down from the upper ledge. He had only seen Fringe bolt out into the storm alone, followed four minutes later by a violently ill Violetta stumbling out to accuse her.
Slowly, Arthur turned his head forty-five degrees to his left.
Three paces away, standing on the snow where Arthur had just released the telekinetic vise holding her in midair, was Cecilia Selda.
The former count's daughter was paler than the frost on her beige cloak, her chest heaving in shallow, trembling gasps as she rubbed her bruised throat and jaw with one shaking hand.
— "Right before the purple-haired warrior lost consciousness, she looked straight at your back," — Arthur said, his level, icy voice cutting cleanly through the whistle of the wind as he locked his dark eyes onto Fringe. — "She asked what you had put in her bowl, and she said you poisoned her. Explain to me what happened inside that cave, Miss Fringe."
Cecilia's throat bobbed as she swallowed hard against the dry terror still gripping her windpipe.
She felt as though she were standing two feet away from a coiled dragon that could snap her spine with a blink; even so, twenty years of aristocratic breeding refused to let her grovel in the dirt. Drawing a slow breath through her nose to steady her voice, she lowered her hand from her neck and met Arthur's gaze.
— "The night storm is worsening by the minute, my lord, and the smell of blood from that boar carcass up the trail will draw more scavengers if we remain standing out here in the open valley," — Cecilia replied, keeping her tone as smooth and rational as her trembling lungs allowed. — "Since my actions involve everyone in this squad, it would be far more practical for me to give you a full accounting inside the shelter, out of the wind."
Arthur narrowed his eyes by a fraction of a millimeter, reading the calculated composure of the woman in front of him, before giving a single, brief nod and motioning with his chin toward the dark mouth of the rocks up the slope.
— "Walk ahead of me. Slowly."
The instant the tall silhouette of Arthur's dark coat crossed the narrow threshold between the granite boulders and stepped into the low ceiling of the half-cave, the temperature inside the shelter seemed to plummet twenty degrees.
Raw, suffocating terror radiated off the back rock wall.
Near the dying orange embers of the small twig fire, Cherry and Lightning had just finished laying Violetta down on a dry patch of gravel and pulling her white wolf-fur mantle tight around her chin.
Five paces behind the fire, where the rock roof sloped down into a cramped rear corner, five of the younger non-combatant girls—Mystery Moon, Feather, Library, Eyesight, and Selena—were pressed tightly together against the granite wall like a flock of cornered sheep.
Standing directly in front of those five girls, however, were Ellen and Soraya Zoen.
Neither of the two teenagers had a single drop of combat magic in her veins. Ellen could only feel ground vibrations five meters away, and Soraya could only conjure an illusory brush to paint colors on stone. Both of them were shivering so violently from fear and cold that their knees knocked together beneath their ragged skirts, and both of them knew that against the monster who had just swatted Violetta unconscious without taking his hands out of his pockets, they wouldn't last half a heartbeat.
Yet without a word passing between them, Ellen and Soraya had stepped forward side by side, linking their freezing fingers together and spreading their arms wide to form a pathetic, fragile human wall between the man at the entrance and their younger sisters huddled in the dark.
Walking into the cave two steps ahead of Arthur, Fringe didn't spare a single glance for Ellen and Soraya's desperate bravery.
Stepping past the small fire pit until she stood in the center of the gravel floor, the silver-haired noblewoman turned smoothly around on her heel to face Arthur—who stopped squarely in the mouth of the cleft, his broad frame completely sealing the only exit out to the mountain.
— "Speak," — Arthur ordered quietly.
Cecilia folded her lace-cuffed hands in front of her beige winter dress and spoke without a single stutter, excuse, or drop of remorse in her voice:
— "Thirty minutes ago, while serving the evening broth, I emptied a packet of concentrated bitter-root powder—a medicinal herb with violent purgative and nerve-sedating properties that I stole from our camp healer four days ago—directly into Violetta's wooden bowl."
The cold, clinical confession dropped into the quiet cave like a boulder thrown through thin ice.
For two seconds, nobody in the back corner breathed.
Then, kneeling beside Violetta's pale head near the wall, sixteen-year-old Cherry let out a shrill, ear-splitting scream of pure fury:
— "WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?!" — Cherry shrieked, scrambling up off her knees so fast she nearly tripped over her own hem, her bloodshot eyes blazing with raw, murderous hatred as she glared at the silver-haired woman across the fire. — "You filthy, two-faced traitor!! You told me to go to the back with the little ones so you could ladle the soup! You poisoned Violetta on purpose?!"
Fringe didn't flinch away from the street girl's rage; her single visible silver eye remained as flat and cold as winter glass.
— "Yes, Cherry. I incapacitated her deliberately," — Cecilia answered, her voice surgical and unbothered. — "Before we left the cavern at dawn, Cara privately ordered Violetta to watch my back and execute me if I stepped out of line. I had zero intention of marching back up this mountain to die in a blizzard with a lunatic like Cara, and I had even less intention of getting torn to pieces by demonic beasts while trying to drag eight helpless non-combatants down a twenty-mile ridge."
Gasps of horror echoed from Eyesight and Feather in the back corner as Cecilia laid her cards bare.
— "The only reason I volunteered in the council tent last night to lead this vanguard was to get out of that cave with Cara's permission," — Cecilia continued coldly. — "And that is the exact reason I didn't spend a single drop of my Attraction Magic during the march today, or lift a finger when that mutant boar attacked Mystery Moon. I needed my magical reserves at 100% so that once Violetta was drugged and the rest of you were asleep, I could cross the remaining foothills alone tonight and reach Border Town by myself."
The sheer, unapologetic selfishness of that admission left the eight younger witches in a state of mute, suffocating shock.
Less than twelve hours ago, Wendy had cried on Cecilia's hands in the tent, thanking her from the bottom of her heart for being a shield for the little ones—and the entire time, Cecilia had been waiting for dark so she could poison their only protector and leave eight teenagers to freeze or get eaten alive in their sleep!
— "I'll kill you... I swear on my life I'll scratch your eyes out right now, you noble bitch!" — Cherry snarled, clenching her frost-cracked hands into claws as she tensed her legs to lunge across the fire pit at Cecilia's throat.
Before Cherry's boot could take half a step forward, Arthur shifted his weight by an inch at the cave mouth.
He didn't even raise his hand; the mere memory of what his invisible force had just done outside froze Cherry's feet to the gravel before she could cross the fire.
Standing in the shadow of the entrance boulder, Arthur kept his face completely unreadable, though behind his calm dark eyes, his brain was working at breakneck speed to process the sheer, unscripted chaos of the board in front of him.
The original storyline hasn't just bent—it's been blown to smithereens, Arthur thought, looking from Violetta's unconscious form on the rocks to Cecilia's icy posture by the embers.
In the novel he had read back on Earth, none of this had ever happened. Cara had never held a midnight vote to purge the weak; ten witches had never been marched south as human canaries; and a highborn count's daughter named Cecilia Selda had never poisoned a powerhouse like Violetta to desert in the middle of a blizzard.
Every single piece of this grim, cutthroat drama was a direct shockwave from the night William had charged into that cavern to save Nightingale.
By breaking Cara's nose and destroying her God's Stone four days early, William's Butterfly Effect had turned the Witch Cooperation Association into a pressure cooker of paranoia—forcing hidden survival instincts out into the open that the original story had simply buried under the snow.
And while Arthur was silently calculating the cleanest way to take control of this fractured room without triggering another panic, a silent war was taking place at the very back of the half-cave.
Huddled behind Ellen and Soraya's linked arms, Selena was shaking from head to foot.
Part of her—the loyal, soft-hearted sister who loved the camp—wanted to drop to her knees beside Cherry, weep over Violetta's betrayal, and scream at Fringe.
Yet a much deeper survival instinct was screaming inside Selena's chest that Fringe wasn't the one who held their lives in his hands right now.
The tall man blocking the cave mouth was.
Up until this moment, Selena had kept her head down and squeezed her eyes shut whenever she looked near the entrance—terrified of breaking Mentor Cara's iron rule and even more terrified of what her Emotion Magic would show her if she looked directly at the mortal monster who had crushed Violetta.
For five years, Cara had drilled into their heads that every powerful human man—especially any lord or advisor tied to a royal court—possessed a soul that burned with the blackened, slimy crimson of sadism, greed, lust, and murderous hatred toward witches.
If he came here to drag us back to Border Town in chains or kill us all, I have to know before he raises his hand! Selena told herself desperately, biting her lip until it bled as she raised her chin over Ellen's shoulder.
Opening her magical sight wide, Selena looked straight through the dim orange firelight and locked her eyes onto Arthur's silhouette at the entrance.
She braced her heart for a blinding wall of blood-red hatred.
Instead, what flooded into Selena's vision made her breath catch completely in her throat, her eyes flying wide open in stunned disbelief.
There wasn't a single thread of toxic red hatred anywhere around the man in the dark coat.
There was none of the oily, pitch-black filth of cruelty that she had seen on town guards and parish priests back home; there was none of the thorny, suffocating purple paranoia that had choked Violetta during the march; and there was none of the dead, bone-white detachment sitting around Fringe.
Arthur's emotional aura was vast—denser and deeper than any human mind Selena had ever looked at in her life—yet its color was breathtaking.
Surrounding his entire frame was a deep, tranquil, crystalline expanse of cyan blue, as calm, structured, and unfathomably deep as a winter ocean under glass, reflecting a mind of absolute, unshakeable self-control.
And right at the center of that cool, rational sea—beating steadily behind the breastbone of his coat—burned a solid, unwavering core of warm sunlight gold.
Selena knew that golden color by heart. She had only ever seen small sparks of it around Wendy when Wendy was ladling out hot soup to the little ones. It was the color of a builder—the unmistakable signature of a person who had zero desire to torture, destroy, or humiliate, and whose entire will was focused on constructing a shelter and protecting the people brought under his roof!
Thump.
All the terror that had kept Selena's muscles locked since the fight started vanished in a single heartbeat, causing her knees to give out beneath her as she sank onto the gravel floor.
Hot tears spilled down her soot-streaked cheeks—not from fear, and not from grief, but from the purest, most overwhelming wave of relief she had ever experienced in her life.
— "Stop... Ellen, Soraya, put your arms down!" — Selena gasped out, her choked, tearful voice cutting straight across the tense cave.
Every girl in the shelter whipped her head around to stare at Selena in shock.
— "He isn't our enemy!" — Selena cried out, pointing a trembling hand toward Arthur as she looked urgently at Ellen, Cherry, and Library. — "I'm using my magic eyes on him right now! Look at me—I swear to you on my life, there isn't a single drop of malice, greed, or noble cruelty inside him! He doesn't want to hurt any of us! His colors are completely calm and protective—he didn't come up this mountain to kill us!"
Those words hit the indoctrinated minds of the eight young witches like a lightning bolt.
In the sleeping quarters, every girl knew that Selena's emotional sight couldn't be fooled by polite words or clever acting—that was the exact reason Cara had banned her from using it!
If Selena, the gentlest soul in their group, was crying with relief and swearing on her magic that the terrifying man at the door meant them no harm, then the entire mountain of paranoid lies Cara had built about Border Town was crumbling into dust right in front of their eyes.
Slowly, hesitantly, Ellen and Soraya unlinked their fingers and lowered their trembling arms to their sides, the frantic terror on their faces giving way to wide-eyed confusion.
Standing at the entrance, Arthur recognized the psychological turning point the instant it happened.
Selena's unexpected emotional reading had just done ten minutes of hard diplomatic work for him in five seconds flat. Now was the exact moment to trade the role of the untouchable battlefield monster for that of the benevolent ruler's emissary—turning their reverential fear into lasting loyalty.
Letting the last trace of telekinetic pressure fade from the air, Arthur took two slow, unhurried steps into the warm glow of the firelight. Reaching up, he unbuttoned the top clasp of his heavy leather-reinforced coat, pulled off his right glove, and held both hands slightly open at his sides in a relaxed, non-threatening posture.
— "Your friend has a very impressive gift, and her reading of my intentions is 100% accurate," — Arthur said, pitching his voice into a warm, conversational register that filled the small stone shelter with calm authority. — "Allow me to introduce myself properly. My name is Count Arthur, and I stand here tonight on behalf of His Highness Prince Roland Wimbledon, the Lord of Border Town."
Reaching smoothly into the inner breast pocket of his coat, Arthur pulled out the small, brown-ribboned parchment booklet Diana Argus had written for him that morning.
— "Before the night cold does any permanent damage to your hands and feet, let's bring some order to this room," — Arthur continued evenly, untying the ribbon and flipping the booklet open in one palm while pulling a small charcoal pencil from his vest with the other. — "Thanks to your sisters who arrived in Border Town ahead of you, I already have a complete roster of who is in this cave, though I prefer to confirm everyone face to face."
Under the wide, incredulous stares of the nine conscious witches—who couldn't fathom how a royal advisor from the valley already held a written book of their names and secrets—Arthur looked down at the first page and pointed his charcoal stick toward the girl kneeling beside Violetta.
— "Cherry, I presume? Sixteen years old, originally from Port of Clearwater. Magic: altering the perceived flavor of food."
Cherry's jaw dropped slightly; forgetting her anger at Fringe for a second in sheer shock, she gave a weak, automatic nod.
Scritch.
Arthur drew a neat check mark beside her name and shifted his gaze to the tall, sharp-eyed blonde girl in the back corner.
— "Library. Seventeen. Instantaneous duplication of written text and maps by touch."
Library blinked twice, her merchant brain spinning at how accurate the file was, before inclining her head. Another check mark.
— "Feather—self-weight reduction. Ellen—five-meter ground vibration radar. Soraya Zoen—magical paint projection. Eyesight—four-meter shared visual link. Selena—emotional aura perception. And Lady Cecilia Selda, whom you call Fringe—directional attraction," — Arthur read down the pages smoothly, ticking off each name as the girls stared at him as if he were a prophet reading straight out of the book of fate.
Then, as Arthur turned to the final page of the squad list and raised his eyes toward the deepest shadow at the back of the cave to confirm the girl with magnetic magic, the strategist suddenly paused mid-motion.
For half a second, his charcoal pencil stopped poised above the parchment, and a flicker of genuine surprise crossed his composed face.
Back on Earth, whenever Arthur had looked at the webcomic illustrations of Release That Witch, the character of Mystery Moon had always been drawn as plain comic relief—a short, round-faced, almost childishly simple-looking girl with a blank stare who existed mostly to get scolded for магнитные accidents.
The real human being huddled against the granite wall in front of him looked nothing like a cartoon joke.
Even dressed in travel-stained rags and shrinking timidly behind Eyesight's shoulder, the young woman possessed a quiet, striking, almost otherworldly beauty. Long waves of deep, midnight-violet hair framed a delicate, oval face with pale skin, and looking out from beneath her dark lashes were a pair of extraordinary bicolor eyes—one iris glowing a warm, liquid amber-gold in the firelight while the other shone a deep, mysterious violet.
Far from looking like a clumsy simpleton, she looked like an exiled sorceress straight out of an ancient painting.
— "And you... are Mystery Moon?" — Arthur asked, raising one dark eyebrow slightly.
Finding the terrifyingly powerful nobleman staring directly at her face, Mystery Moon turned bright red from the base of her neck to the tips of her ears, hurriedly pulling the frayed edge of her cloak across her nose as she gave three tiny, frantic nods.
Another reminder that we aren't living inside two-dimensional drawings anymore, Arthur thought, letting out a quiet breath as he checked her name off and closed Diana's booklet, leaving only unconscious Violetta unmarked.
Tucking the dossier back into his coat pocket, Arthur stepped up beside the dying fire pit and took full command of the shelter.
— "Listen to me carefully, ladies, because I am only going to say this once," — Arthur said, his clear, steady voice echoing off the granite walls. — "Every single word that Nightingale spoke in your cavern four nights ago—and every word Lightning can tell you tonight—is the verifiable truth. Nightingale wasn't drugged, she wasn't brainwashed, and Border Town is not a trap set by the Church or the crown."
In the back corner, Feather and Eyesight held their breath, clinging to every syllable.
— "Right now, under the rule of Prince Roland Wimbledon, Border Town is the safest, warmest, and wealthiest sanctuary for witches on this entire continent," — Arthur stated flatly. — "Anna, Nana, Nightingale, Diana Argus, and Lightning are already living under our roof as free, salaried citizens—and as for the Demonic Bite that Miss Feather is currently trembling over, we solved that medical problem weeks ago. Nobody dies on her eighteenth birthday in Border Town."
Feather let out a tiny, choked gasp, her hands flying to her chest as fresh tears of desperate hope sprang into her eyes.
— "Of course, I am a practical man, and I know that after years of being hunted, words alone don't warm freezing feet or fill empty stomachs," — Arthur continued smoothly, raising his ungloved right hand into the empty air above the gravel floor. — "So let's start with something concrete."
Without chanting a spell or moving a muscle, Arthur mentally accessed the ten non-stacking slots of his Dimensional System's [Inventory].
Shhhk.
Right before the wide, unblinking eyes of the nine conscious witches, the air in the center of the half-cave rippled like disturbed water.
First, four heavy, tightly rolled bundles of thick, freshly woven pure sheep's wool blankets materialized out of nothingness and dropped onto the dry stones with a soft thump.
A second later, three large covered wicker baskets and two heavy leather waterskins appeared right beside the blankets.
The instant the woven lids shifted on the baskets, a rich, mouthwatering wave of warmth rolled across the freezing cave—banishing the foul stench of boiled leather-root and filling the shelter with the unmistakable, heavenly aroma of freshly baked white wheat loaves brushed with melted butter, thick slabs of honey-cured roast ham, and spiced hot cider!
Thud.
Sixteen-year-old Cherry dropped straight onto her knees in front of the nearest wicker basket.
Her frost-reddened hands hovered an inch above a golden-crusted loaf of still-warm white bread, trembling so violently she was terrified to touch it—half-convinced that her starving brain had finally snapped and cast one of her flavor illusions on a rock.
— "It isn't an illusion, Cherry. Go ahead and eat, all of you, and wrap those wool blankets around your shoulders," — Arthur said, his voice softening by a fraction as he stepped back toward the entrance boulder to give the frightened girls space. — "The starvation march is over. You are under Border Town's protection now."
That single permission broke the last wall of hesitation in the room.
Within ten seconds, the terror that had gripped the half-cave was replaced by the tearful, frantic sounds of nine starving girls wrapping themselves in thick, clean castle wool and biting into real buttered bread and cured meat with tears of pure joy running down their cheeks. Even Fringe—whom Cherry glared at like a hawk while keeping a protective blanket tucked around sleeping Violetta—quietly took a single crust of bread from the edge of the basket and sat by the wall in humbled silence.
Giving them ten full minutes to get warm food into their stomachs and stop shivering, Arthur waited until the first edge of their hunger had passed before walking back to the mouth of the cleft, where Lightning floated down beside his shoulder.
— "While you finish eating, pay close attention to our schedule for tomorrow," — Arthur announced, making sure every eye in the shelter was on him. — "At first light tomorrow morning, once the night gale dies down, Lightning will take command of this group. She will guide the nine of you down the southern foothills directly to Border Town. She knows the safe road, she can spot any stray beasts from the clouds long before they get near you, and our First Army patrols will meet you at the base of the slope."
In the back corner, holding half a slice of buttered wheat bread in one hand with a heavy wool blanket draped over her head, seventeen-year-old Library paused mid-chew.
Her sharp, merchant-trained brain immediately caught the arithmetic discrepancy in his sentence.
— "Pardon me, Lord Arthur..." — Library spoke up, raising her hand slightly as her calm blue eyes shifted from the nine girls eating around the fire to the sleeping figure under the white wolf fur by the wall. — "You just said Lightning will guide the nine of us to Border Town tomorrow. However, counting Violetta and Fringe, there are ten witches in this shelter."
Arthur didn't look at Library; instead, he lowered his gaze to the unconscious purple-haired warrior breathing deeply beneath the wool blanket Cherry had tucked around her.
As he looked at Violetta, the warm, polite expression of the royal emissary vanished from Arthur's face, replaced by the cold, razor-sharp glint of the grandmaster who still had a larger board to clear.
— "You counted correctly, Miss Library," — Arthur replied evenly, turning his head halfway back toward the howling pitch-black storm outside the rocks. — "Miss Fringe will march down to Border Town under Lightning's watch alongside the eight of you. I, however, will wait here until Miss Violetta wakes up from that sleeping herb tomorrow morning."
A hush fell over the girls around the baskets.
— "Once she is back on her feet, Miss Violetta and I won't be heading south toward the valley," — Arthur said, his quiet voice ringing like cold iron against the granite walls. — "The two of us are going to turn around and follow the northern trail into the high peaks—because I still have a very serious, unavoidable piece of business to settle with Mentor Cara and the rest of your family."