Twenty-four brutal, uninterrupted hours had passed since Arthur and Violetta turned their backs on the lower granite shelter where Lightning had taken command of the nine exiled witches.
Up here on the jagged, wind-scoured spine of the Impassable Mountain Range, climbing on foot was no longer a simple hike; it had become a grueling war of attrition against gravity and sub-zero cold.
Every breath of air tasted like shaved ice, stinging the back of the throat and threatening to freeze the moisture inside their lungs before they could exhale. All around them, towering walls of black slate and ancient glacier ice vanished into a swirling ceiling of lead-gray clouds.
Throughout the long ascent, Arthur had deliberately kept his Telekinesis on a tight, conservative leash.
Instead of wrapping Violetta inside a zero-gravity aerodynamic cone and blasting through the upper sky at two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour the way he had flown up from Border Town with Lightning, he was saving his core reserves—using brief, surgical pulses of telekinetic lift only when the mountain left them no other choice. Whenever a bottomless ice crevasse split the trail, whenever a frozen alpine river groaned and threatened to crack under their weight, or whenever an avalanche chute of soft, waist-deep powder blocked a steep ridge, Arthur would lightly levitate both of their bodies three inches off the surface until their boots touched solid rock again.
There were two cold, practical reasons for that restraint.
First, carrying a tall, heavy-set combat warrior like Violetta at supersonic speeds through turbulent high-altitude canyon winds would have drained his mental focus twice as fast as carrying tiny Lightning—and Arthur had zero intention of walking into a confrontation with fifty witches or a pack of northern monsters while suffering from a splitting migraine and a half-empty magic pool.
Second, and far more basic, Violetta had assured him back at the half-cave that they wouldn't need to fly to catch the main column.
Before the camp had split in two at the edge of the Hidden Forest, Mentor Cara had stood in front of Wendy, Scroll, and the entire Association and sworn that the main body would march at a slow, conservative crawl so Violetta and Fringe could easily catch up once the eight younger girls reached the foot of the mountain.
Yet the unforgiving reality carved into the snow under their boots told a completely different story.
The Association's marching speed hadn't dropped by a single mile per hour.
Cara had lied straight to her sisters' faces.
Instead of waiting along the lower passes, the wounded founder was driving forty-seven women upward into the lethal peaks like a runaway locomotive, forcing Arthur and Violetta to push forward hour after hour along a half-buried ribbon of boot prints that the howling blizzard worked tirelessly to erase.
Walking two paces behind Arthur's right shoulder as they squeezed through a narrow, shadowy corridor between two sheer walls of black granite, Violetta stared down at the trampled snow between her feet, her jaw clenched so hard beneath her white wolf-fur hood that her teeth ached.
— "There was no night camp in this gorge either," — Violetta said, her deep, gravelly voice tight with a mixture of disbelief and simmering anger as she pointed a gloved hand at a messy circle of flattened snow where the witches had clearly stopped for less than twenty minutes to boil water before moving on. — "They didn't sleep here. Stone flattened the dirt for a fire, they melted snow, and Cara forced them right back out into the storm. At this pace, the non-combatants in the middle of the line must be walking in their sleep."
Arthur paused beside a frost-covered boulder, his dark eyes scanning the narrow rock cleft ahead of them.
— "She isn't marching to a schedule, Miss Violetta. She is fleeing," — Arthur replied calmly, brushing a layer of blown rime off the shoulder of his long leather-reinforced coat. — "And someone who is running away from a ghost behind her back doesn't stop to check if her followers are still breathing."
Violetta looked away, her purple eyes darkening as she remembered how close she had come to executing Fringe in the dark for a leader who had already written both of them off as dead weight.
As they stepped out of the narrow granite crevice onto the lip of a higher, wind-swept plateau, however, a far more disturbing detail was occupying the front of Arthur's Intelligence 14 mind.
Throughout this entire day of relentless climbing through the heart of the Impassable Mountain Range, they had not crossed paths with a single living demonic beast.
Not one.
During the height of the winter Months of Demons, these upper gorges should have been crawling with starving, miasma-corrupted predators. Yet for the past twelve hours, there had been no packs of demonic wolves stalking their flanks through the mist, no armor-plated boars burrowing under the snowcrust, and none of the massive, mutated hybrid bears that normally ruled the high timberline as apex predators.
During the morning climb, Arthur had chalked that eerie quiet up to simple battlefield math.
With forty-seven witches trudging noisily through the drifts a few miles ahead of them—leaking dense signatures of Magical Power and radiating the scent of warm blood—Cara's column was acting as a giant, moving lightning rod, drawing every hungry monster in the sector out of its lair and slaughtering it before Arthur and Violetta even arrived.
Over the last four hours, however, that logical explanation had stopped adding up.
Along the lower slopes yesterday, they had passed three separate patches of blood-stained snow and butchered carcasses where Windseeker, Catherine, and Red Pepper had clearly fought off ambushes.
Up here on the high northern shelves, there wasn't a single drop of beast blood in the snow. There were no dead wolves, no scorched fur, and not a single raven circling the crags. Even the wild animals that had survived for years in these peaks seemed to have abandoned this valley completely—leaving behind a dead, suffocating emptiness that made the hair on the back of Arthur's neck stand up.
Crunch... crunch...
As his heavy leather boots broke through the fresh crust of powder, Arthur's brow furrowed deeply, a cold shadow of foreboding settling into his chest.
The Butterfly Effect is a relentless bastard, Arthur lamented silently, staring out into the swirling white wall of the storm.
Six nights ago, when William had lost his patience outside that cavern tunnel and charged inside ten seconds early to save Nightingale from Cara's hot poker, his best friend had meant well. Yet by knocking Cara unconscious in front of her whole camp and shattering her God's Stone before the original breaking point with Wendy could play out, William had knocked the entire chronological train of this world off its tracks.
In the webnovel Arthur remembered from Earth, the Witch Cooperation Association's northern trek had followed a very specific, tragic timetable.
Originally, after Nightingale escaped down the mountain with a poisoned Wendy on her back, Cara had taken several days to pack the camp in an orderly fashion, marching all sixty witches north together at a slow pace until they stumbled onto the outer perimeter of the ancient Ruins of Taquila—where they saw the mirage of the stone towers in the mist and were immediately ambushed by a hunting pack of intelligent Mad Demons.
Here, everything was warped out of shape.
Cara had lost four full days lying in a coma—and then, driven by unhinged paranoia that Border Town's "monster" was coming back with an army, she had amputated eight slow non-combatants from the group and whipped the remaining forty-seven witches up the mountain at double speed without stopping to sleep!
And the total absence of wild demonic beasts in this high valley meant only one thing: they had already crossed the invisible border into the hunting grounds of the true Demons, where not even mutated wolves dared to tread.
What if we're already too late?
The thought tightened around Arthur's ribs like an iron band, making his jaw lock inside his coat collar.
What if Cara's blind, suicidal rush pushed the column into the Taquila sector three hours ago, and the Demons have already slaughtered them in the snow? Arthur thought, a rare wave of genuine frustration and dread spiking his pulse. Inside that column are women whose abilities are the backbone of everything Roland and I plan to build over the next five years! Stone's earth manipulation for laying foundations and paving roads; Leaf's plant magic for hybrid agriculture and medicine; Scroll's perfect memory for mass education; Red Pepper's and Shino's thermal transfer for metallurgy; Wendy's wind turbines...
If Cara had marched those forty-seven priceless specialists straight onto the iron spears of an armored Demon patrol while Arthur was still hiking up the trail behind them—if the core of the Association was already lying butchered and frozen in a ravine ahead—then his entire strategy in coming up this mountain would be gutted before he even fired a shot.
I didn't fly out into this frozen wasteland just to bury corpses, Arthur thought grimly. I need those women alive!
Just as the crushing weight of that possibility threatened to cloud his focus, a sharp, ragged sound cut through the monotonous whistle of the wind.
— "Gasp—!"
Right beside his elbow, Violetta came to a dead halt on the icy crest of a high granite ridge.
With her long dark-purple hair whipping wildly across her pale cheeks in the gale, the tall warrior leaned forward over the rocky drop, her violet eyes narrowed to razor slits as she stared hard through a momentary break in the swirling whiteout. Beneath her white wolf-fur mantle, her chest was heaving as her heart hammered with a violent collision of disbelief and overwhelming relief.
— "Lord Arthur... Look!" — Violetta breathed, raising a gloved hand that trembled slightly with raw emotion as she pointed down into the chasm beyond the ridge. — "Down there! It's them—they're right there!"
Arthur stopped mid-stride, a flash of genuine surprise breaking across his usually frigid, unreadable expression.
Stepping quickly to the lip of the granite outcrop beside the warrior, he focused his vision along the line of her pointing finger, peering down through the drifting curtains of snow.
Three hundred yards below their boots, stretched out along the bottom of a long, bleak, gray-walled valley, a ragged line of tiny black dots was inching forward through the deep drifts.
Even from this height, it looked less like a marching column and more like a line of half-dead shipwreck survivors dragging themselves across an endless desert of salt—stumbling, pausing every three steps, and leaning on one another just to stay upright.
— "Hah..."
A long, heavy sigh of pure, unadulterated relief escaped Arthur's lips, steaming white in the freezing air as the iron tension locking his shoulders evaporated on the spot.
They weren't dead.
The main core of the Witch Cooperation Association was still breathing, and he had caught up to them before the trap at the end of the valley snapped shut!
That rush of relief, however, didn't dull Arthur's battlefield instincts by a single millisecond.
Right beside him, seeing her beloved sisters alive and struggling in the snow after two days of thinking they were separated forever overwhelmed Violetta's iron discipline. Opening her mouth to shout Wendy's name down the gorge, the tall warrior took a wide, heavy step forward over the lip of the ridge, ready to slide straight down the slope and run to them.
Arthur moved at the speed of thought.
Before Violetta's boot could clear the rock ledge, Arthur's gloved hand shot out, clamped like a steel vise around her upper arm, and yanked her backward—forcing the startled warrior down onto one knee behind the cover of a snow-draped granite boulder.
— "Get down! Keep your head below the rock line and don't make a sound," — Arthur ordered in a sharp, commanding whisper that cut off her breath.
Kneeling in the drift behind the boulder, Violetta whipped her head around to stare at him, her dark brows pulling together in complete bewilderment.
— "What are you doing?! Why are we hiding behind a rock?!" — Violetta whispered back fiercely, gesturing toward the valley floor below. — "We just climbed across half the mountain range without sleeping to catch up to them, Lord Arthur! Look at how they're stumbling down there! If I don't walk down that slope and show Wendy and Scroll that I'm alive right now, Cara is going to keep whipping them forward until the weakest girls drop dead in their tracks!"
— "And precisely because it is Cara standing at the head of that line, walking down an open slope waving our hands is the stupidest thing we could possibly do," — Arthur hissed back, keeping his dark eyes fixed through a gap in the rocks on the distant column.
He pointed a gloved finger toward the middle of the ragged black line below.
— "Use your tactical head, Miss Violetta. If the two of us march down into that valley unannounced, we won't even get within shouting distance before Scroll picks us up," — Arthur explained with icy clarity. — "According to Diana's dossier, Scroll's secondary magic perception allows her to sense foreign flows of Magical Power across a wide radius. The second she feels my energy signature—alongside yours, when Cara just told the whole camp you deserted—Scroll will shout a warning before they even see our faces in the fog."
Violetta froze, her eyes widening slightly as she realized he was right.
— "If Cara hears that an unknown magic user is approaching their flank in a blizzard while she is already half-mad with paranoia, she won't stop the column to have a polite debate with you," — Arthur continued evenly. — "She will scream that Border Town's ambush has arrived, use the panic to rally Wendy and the undecided fighters around her, and order forty witches to open fire at once. We don't walk down there until I have the terrain to contain her."
For two seconds, Violetta bit her lower lip, her soldier's heart tearing between the urge to run to her family and the cold logic of his words.
To a loyal vanguard fighter, spotting her sisters in the wilderness was supposed to mean the danger was over—not the start of a stealth operation. Yet the humbling lesson she had learned outside the half-cave the night before was still fresh in her bones: the man kneeling beside her saw five moves further ahead on the board than she did.
Swallowing her impatience, Violetta gave a single, silent nod and lowered her torso closer to the snow-covered granite.
— "Good. Stay two paces behind my heels and follow my exact footing," — Arthur murmured.
Staying high along the lateral ridgeline where the jagged boulders and swirling mist hid their silhouettes from the valley floor below, the two of them began to shadow the column northward at a surgical distance.
Whenever the howling gale died down for a few seconds and threatened to let the crunch of their boots carry down into the canyon, Arthur projected a thin, localized cushion of telekinetic force around their ankles—deadening every sound they made against the ice crust and keeping his own Magical Power locked tight inside his chest so Scroll's radar wouldn't feel a ripple.
Yet as they crept from crag to crag above the struggling witches, less than half of Arthur's attention was actually on Cara's column.
His sharp, dark eyes were constantly lifting away from the valley floor to sweep the northern horizon and the churning gray sky ahead of the canyon.
From his memory of the book, he knew the geography of this sector all too well.
They were no longer in the outer foothills; they had crossed deep into the forbidden northern spine where the ancient empire of Taquila had fallen four centuries ago—and where the advancing front line of the Demons built their forward outposts during the winter months. He was watching for the landmarks that heralded the end of the witches' dream and the beginning of the nightmare.
A little over an hour passed in that silent, nerve-stretching pursuit as the pale afternoon light began to bleed away into the bruised, freezing purple of dusk.
And then, right as the column below rounded a wide bend in the glacier valley, the entire atmosphere of the mountain changed between one breath and the next.
The natural white blizzard that had been lashing their faces all afternoon suddenly thinned out and died away—not because the storm had cleared, but because the clean mountain air was being pushed back and swallowed whole by something heavy, greasy, and suffocating.
A foul, metallic stench rolled down the canyon on the breeze, smelling like a mixture of rusted iron, stagnant swamp water, and an old slaughterhouse floor.
High up on the lateral ridge, Arthur stopped dead in his tracks, the blood in his veins turning to ice water as he looked up at the northern sky.
Half a mile ahead of the witches, tearing straight up through the low gray cloud cover like the jagged, broken claws of a buried titan, rose three colossal structures of dark-gray stone.
They were giant, obelisk-like towers hundreds of feet tall, carved with twisted, angular geometry and grotesque reliefs that defied every law of human architecture and sanity.
Yet what turned the twilight valley into a scene straight out of hell wasn't the ancient dark stone of the towers—it was what was pouring out of their summits.
Billowing continuously from the high vents of those bizarre obelisks was a dense, writhing, macabre curtain of Red Mist. Heavier than air, the blood-colored fog spilled down the sides of the dark towers and pooled across the valley floor ahead, mixing with the falling snow until the entire northern horizon looked as though it had been soaked in freshly spilled, coagulated blood.
It was the lethal breathing gas of the Demons.
Crouched behind the rocks on the high ridge, Arthur and Violetta stared out at that horrifying crimson wasteland in frozen silence. Even Violetta, who had never heard the word Taquila or Mad Demon in her life, felt every survival instinct in her warrior's body scream that those red-shrouded towers were a place of absolute death.
And at that exact same second, carried upward on the foul, rust-scented wind from the bottom of the valley below them, came a sound that nearly broke Violetta's heart in two.
It wasn't a scream of terror.
It was the sound of forty-seven starving, half-frozen women bursting into ragged laughter, weeping with joy, and shouting at the top of their raw, bleeding throats in pure, shrill euphoria!
Down in the deep drifts of the canyon floor, pushed to the absolute brink of human madness by starvation, frostbite, and five years of running from the pyre, the witches of the Cooperation Association had finally looked up through the twilight fog and seen colossal stone monuments built by non-human hands rising out of the peaks.
Completely ignorant of the monstrous civilization that actually ruled the northern ice wastes, those exhausted girls looked upon the lethal obelisks of the Demons and saw only one thing: the glorious, long-promised proof that every tear they had shed and every sister they had buried along the trail had been worth the price!
— "Sisters, look up! Look at the sky! It's the Holy Mountain! We finally found it!!" — a young witch's high-pitched voice, choked with tears of overwhelming happiness, echoed faintly up the granite walls of the gorge. — "We made it! Mentor Cara was right all along! The Holy Mountain is real!!"