Sitting on the edge of his narrow wooden bed, Arthur stared down at the pale, ink-stained knuckles of his own hands, listening to the slow, heavy beat of his heart in the quiet room.
Outside his window in the castle's western wing, the late afternoon sun had nearly vanished behind the mountains, painting the sky above Border Town in deep, bruised shades of burnt orange and metallic gray. Dressed in his tailored dark-gray wool tunic—a medieval garment that had already begun to feel like a second skin—Arthur looked every bit the composed, untouchable scholar of the court.
Yet the stark, rustic beauty of the twilight outside couldn't dissolve the cold, tight knot twisting in the pit of his stomach.
Inside his head, the bitter, heated shouting match he had had with William in the corridor hours ago was still echoing off the walls of his skull.
Coward. Pragmatist. Extras.
Those three words bounced back and forth in his mind, leaving a sour taste in his mouth.
Arthur wasn't a cold-blooded monster, and he certainly didn't want the girls of the Witch Cooperation Association to freeze to death in the northern blizzards. However, the hyper-analytical, logical side of his brain—the part hardened by corporate risk-management and thousands of hours of strategy games—screamed that intervening personally in a winter wilderness war was a suicidal gamble.
Flexing his fingers slowly, Arthur reflected on the bizarre psychological dissonance of their new reality.
Back home in the twenty-first century, sitting on a leather couch in front of a glowing seventy-inch television screen, watching fictional characters bleed and die had been a completely safe, detached experience. If a side character got torn apart by a monster in an anime, you could pause the video, grab a slice of pepperoni pizza from the box, and analyze how that tragic sacrifice served as a great "character development point" to motivate the hero.
Here, however, there was no pause button.
The air smelled of damp woodsmoke and horse manure. The autumn draft bit into his skin with real, physical pain. And if someone made a tactical miscalculation out there in the mud, the consequence wasn't a bad review or a reload screen—it was six feet of frozen dirt and eternal silence.
Think with your head, not your emotions, Arthur told himself, building a mental wall to justify his stance. Roland is the true protagonist of this world. With the industrial blueprints we are feeding him, plus the abilities of Anna and Nana—and eventually powerhouses like Wendy and Lightning when the caravan arrives—Roland will manage to stabilize the border on his own. Furthermore, my detailed memory of the webnovel's plot goes all the way to the ancient ruins of Taquila. From a macro-historical perspective, the tragic losses suffered by the Witch Cooperation Association in the mountains were just an early winter hurdle before the real war against the Demons and the Church even began. Why should William and I stick our necks onto the chopping block for a minor early-game event?
— "It isn't cowardice," — Arthur whispered aloud to the darkening stone walls, though even to his own ears, his voice sounded remarkably thin and unconvincing. — "It is basic survival and resource management. Two men cannot save everyone in this world."
Before the echo of his whisper could even fade into the shadows—
BAM! BAM! BAM!
A sudden, urgent, iron-fisted pounding rattled the heavy oak door of his quarters, shattering his thoughts and making his heart skip a beat.
Standing up abruptly from the mattress, Arthur crossed the stone floor in three strides and pulled the door open.
Standing in the torch-lit corridor outside was Chief Knight Carter Lannis.
Normally, the veteran swordsman's face was a mask of stoic, unshakeable military discipline. Tonight, however, Carter's jaw was clenched tight, a deep crease marked his brow, and his steel-gloved left hand was gripping the pommel of his longsword with white-knuckled tension while the smell of fresh blood and damp tunnel mud hung faintly on his cloak.
— "Lord Arthur, your presence is required downstairs immediately," — Carter announced, his deep voice tight with urgency. — "Twenty minutes ago, we uncovered an armed rebellion among the outer patrol guards. Duke Ryan had deep-cover traitors planted right inside our castle ranks."
Arthur froze on the threshold, a sudden, jarring jolt of recognition striking his Intelligence 14 mind like a bolt of lightning.
The granary sabotage!, the buried memories of the novel's early chapters surged violently to the surface of Arthur's brain.
How had he forgotten the timing of this?! In the original story, right after the diplomatic envoy from Longsong Stronghold was humiliated and sent packing, Duke Ryan's sleeper agents inside the town guard had staged a desperate plot—using a forgotten smuggler's tunnel beneath the castle walls to assassinate Patrol Captain Greyhound and burn Border Town's winter grain supply to ashes before the first snow fell!
Because Arthur had spent the entire week obsessing over high-level macro-economics, Bessemer steel converters, and steam engine piston seals, he had completely overlooked a ground-level assassination plot happening right under his boots! His vaunted "meta-knowledge" had just failed him at the most critical moment!
— "The winter granaries?!" — Arthur asked sharply, stepping out into the hallway as cold dread gripped his chest. — "Did they set fire to the wheat?!"
— "His Highness is waiting for you in the great hall to assess the aftermath," — Carter replied, gesturing for Arthur to follow him at a brisk march down the corridor. — "And no, the grain is untouched. Thanks to Lord William's... extraordinary personal intervention down in the tunnels, the rebels were intercepted and crushed before a single torch could be thrown."
Arthur stopped dead in the middle of the stone staircase, his brow furrowing in total confusion.
— "William?" — Arthur repeated, staring at the Chief Knight's back. — "What exactly did William do? How did he even know they were down there?"
Carter Lannis paused two steps below him and turned his head slightly. When the proud knight spoke, there was a rare, reluctant, and almost bewildered note of genuine awe in his voice—a tone Carter had never once used when speaking of the two foreigners:
— "He dismantled the entire traitor squad practically single-handed, Lord Arthur," — Carter said quietly. — "I arrived with the backup guards just as it ended. Your friend moved through that dark tunnel with a speed and raw physical strength that defied every law of combat I know. He struck like a siege engine in human form, saving the lives of Captain Greyhound and young Brian seconds before the rebels' blades could finish them off. Without Lord William, our entire winter food supply would be a pile of ash right now, and Border Town would be facing starvation before the snow even hits."
A physical chill—far colder than the mountain draft blowing through the stairwell—ran straight down Arthur's spine.
In a split second, Arthur realized just how drastically the timeline had just been rewritten.
In the original plot of Release That Witch, Patrol Captain Greyhound and several loyal guards were supposed to die in that dark tunnel ambush. Their deaths were supposed to be a bitter, bloody tragedy that hardened Prince Roland's resolve, with Nightingale arriving only at the very end to slaughter the surviving traitors and salvage the situation.
Yet Greyhound and Brian were alive.
And the only reason they were still breathing... was because William had refused to sit in his room and treat them like "expendable extras"!
.
.
.
Wait—how had that miracle actually happened down in the dark?
Just two hours earlier, long before the cold flagstones of the castle were stained with the blood of traitors, the afternoon sun had still been hanging low and pale over the courtyard.
Down on the muddy training ground, after finishing his test swings with the thirty-five-kilogram iron greatsword, William had been walking back toward the stables with a terrifying new weight in every step.
His body no longer felt entirely human. Every muscle fiber across his back, chest, and legs—now supercharged by the seven points of Strength he had bought from the System—felt like braided steel suspension cables humming under extreme tension. Whenever he clenched his right fist, the air itself felt weirdly thin and fragile, as if he were a giant walking through a house made of paper.
Yet even with Strength 16 coursing through his veins, his physical godhood couldn't fill the missing pages in his memory.
Stopping in the narrow alley beside the castle stables, where the smell of damp hay and horse sweat hung thick in the chill air, William had scratched the back of his neck with a frustrated grimace.
— "Damn it... think, Will, think!" — William had muttered under his breath, his dark eyes scanning the chaotic maze of gray stone walls, wooden sheds, and drainage grates that made up the lower castle. — "I know for a fact that good guys are supposed to die in a traitor ambush right after the Longsong envoy leaves! In the manhwa, it happened on the exact same day Roland found out about the poisoned maid, Tyre! Which means those bastards are gearing up to strike the granary today!"
He had slammed his fist lightly against the wooden stable post, leaving a half-inch dent in the oak:
— "Where the hell is the entrance to that secret underground passage?!" — he had cursed. — "Reading a panel that says 'they used a secret tunnel' is one thing; actually finding a hidden trapdoor inside a poorly planned medieval fortress is like looking for a needle in a haystack!"
He knew he couldn't go ask Arthur for the exact location.
After the brutal things they had shouted at each other in the third-floor corridor, Arthur's wounded pride and ice-cold survival logic were locked behind a bolted door. If William knocked on his room to ask about saving a minor character like Captain Greyhound, Arthur would probably tell him not to interfere with the timeline.
William didn't need a corporate strategist right now. He needed a scout who didn't care about "timelines" or "meta-strategies"—someone who lived in the unseen margins of the castle.
Making up his mind on the spot, William had walked away from the stables and turned into a narrow, deserted alleyway squeezed between two massive stone grain warehouses, where the mountain wind whistled through the eaves with a low, hollow sound.
Stopping dead center in the deep gloom between the walls, William had stared straight into the empty air three paces in front of him and spoken in a steady, commanding voice that brooked zero argument:
— "Vero—uh, Nightingale. I know you're patrolling near the granaries. I can feel the air getting colder around the corner. Drop the veil for a second—I need your help right now, and lives are on the line."
For five long seconds, the only sound in the dark alley had been the distant clang of a blacksmith's hammer from the outer yard.
Then, right in front of William's boots, the empty air had begun to ripple and part like wet gray silk.
Stepping out of the monochromatic distortion of the Mist World, Nightingale's slender, hooded figure had materialized three feet away, her piercing blue eyes shining from beneath her hood with a volatile mixture of profound shock and razor-sharp caution.
— "How did you know I was walking through this alley?" — Nightingale had asked, her husky, melodic voice dropping low as her gloved hand rested near the silver hilt at her waist. — "Even with that bizarre 'Pure Arcane' training or whatever 'System' you and Arthur whisper about in the dark, it is fundamentally impossible for an ordinary human to detect my presence inside the Mist."
William had let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, his broad shoulders relaxing as a wry, genuine smile tugged at his lips.
— "Truth? I was bluffing. I didn't sense a damn thing," — William had admitted with shameless honesty, tapping his temple. — "After the bombshells Art and I dropped in Roland's office this morning, there was zero chance a pro like you would let me wander around the castle's main supply warehouses alone without keeping an invisible leash on me. I just walked into the shadings spot I could find, threw a rock into the bush, and waited to see if you'd answer."
Beneath the shadow of her hood, Nightingale's eyes had narrowed slightly, genuinely impressed—and slightly exasperated—by the sheer audacity of the man.
— "You really are a dangerous anomaly, Commander William," — she had said coolly. — "This morning you treat my past like a riddle, you lie straight to your Prince's face with a smile, and now you call me out in an alley to ask for a favor. Speak quickly: what is so urgent that you are willing to risk my blade a second time today?"
William had taken half a step closer, all playfulness vanishing from his face as his new, overwhelming physical presence radiated a quiet, unshakeable sincerity:
— "I want to stop good men from dying in the dark today, Nightingale," — William had said, looking straight into her blue eyes. — "Listen to me: Tyre wasn't the only traitor inside these walls. Duke Ryan bought off a squad of veteran guards inside our town patrol. Right now, they are gathering in a secret underground passage beneath the castle to assassinate Patrol Captain Greyhound and his loyal boys, and then they're going to come up through the floor to burn our central winter granary to the ground. If that grain burns today, two thousand people starve before the first blizzard even ends. If the town starves, Roland's rule collapses—and if Roland falls, your witch sisters lose the only safe haven they will ever have."
Nightingale's gloved fingers had tightened instinctively around the grip of her dagger.
— "Traitors in a tunnel beneath the granary?" — she had asked sharply, her eyes searching his face. — "How can you possibly know the exact hour of an ambush? Is this another one of those 'prophecies' from your vanished book?"
— "Does it matter how I know if the blood on the floor is real?!" — William had shot back intensely. — "Use that truth-sense of yours on me right now, Veronica! Look at my pulse and tell me if I'm lying to you!"
For three heartbeats, Nightingale had stood completely still, her passive magic working overtime as she scanned his heartbeat, his breathing, and the static around his skin.
Just like in the morning, she found not a single shred of deception—only the raw, burning urgency of a warrior who desperately wanted to save men he barely even knew.
— "If you are telling the truth, we will drag these rats out of the dark and slit their throats before they reach the grain," — Nightingale had said, her voice turning as cold as northern ice as she extended a gloved hand toward his forearm. — "Grab my wrist and step into the Mist with me. My dimensional vision can see structural cavities and body heat through solid stone. We'll find your tunnel in two minutes."
The instant Nightingale's cool fingers closed around William's wrist, the physical world around him had shattered and reformed.
All the natural autumn colors of the alleyway—the brown mud, the red brick, the gray sky—had vanished, replaced by a silent, monochromatic landscape of shifting whites, grays, and glowing, iridescent outlines. Inside the Mist World, the solid stone walls of the warehouses became semi-translucent, revealing the hidden structural foundations and the warm, pulsing signatures of living blood.
Moving like two ghosts made of smoke, Nightingale had pulled him straight through the locked warehouse walls and down into the ancient cellar foundations beneath the castle yard.
It had taken them less than three minutes.
Stopping inside a dusty, abandoned tool cellar behind the main granary, Nightingale had pointed a gloved finger downward at an irregular seam in the stone slabs beneath a pile of rotten barrels.
— "There," — she had whispered in the monochrome silence. — "A camouflaged smuggler's hatch leading into an old drainage tunnel. And look further down the passage... I see twelve heat signatures down there in the dark. Four men are backed up against the wall bleeding, and eight armed men have them cornered with torches. They are moving in for the kill right now."
Pulling her hand off William's arm so they dropped back into the real, physical world with a soft ripple of air, Nightingale had drawn her silver-plated dagger in one fluid motion, her blue eyes flashing with lethal challenge as she kicked the rotten barrels aside and yanked the heavy iron ring of the hidden trapdoor open:
— "After you, Commander," — Nightingale had whispered, her tone cutting like a razor. — "Show me right now if that 'Strength' you and Arthur screamed at each other about in the hallway is actually good for anything besides winning an argument."
That single remark had hit William like a thunderbolt.
She heard us. She was standing invisible in the third-floor corridor when Art and I argued about 'extras' and 'characters'!
Before William could even process that realization, however, the wet, sickening sound of a sword blade slicing into flesh—followed by young Brian's muffled cry of agony—had echoed straight up through the open trapdoor from the torch-lit tunnel twenty feet below!
There was zero time for philosophical crises; down in that dirt tunnel, real men were bleeding real blood!
William hadn't bothered using the iron ladder.
He had simply stepped into the open hole and dropped twenty feet straight down into the torch-lit passage like a falling boulder!
BOOM!
Landing on the balls of his boots on the damp stone floor between the rebels and the cornered patrol guards, the impact of his heavy frame had cracked the flagstones beneath his heels!
Down in the narrow, claustrophobic tunnel, Patrol Captain Greyhound, young Brian, and two loyal guards named Erik and Trevor were slumped against the wet stone wall, their leather armor slashed open and blood pouring from deep sword wounds as eight heavily armed traitors closed in to finish them off and light the oil-soaked torches.
William hadn't even drawn the iron broadsword at his waist.
With Strength 16 and Speed 11, drawing a piece of medieval iron would have only slowed him down.
As the lead rebel—a burly veteran sergeant bribed by Duke Ryan—whipped his head around in shock and raised his iron buckler to block the intruder, William had launched himself forward like a human cannonball!
William's bare right fist had slammed straight into the center of the rebel's iron-bossed wooden shield.
CRACK—KRA-KOOM!
The wooden shield hadn't blocked the punch; it had exploded into flying splinters as William's knuckles punched clean through the oak and caved the traitor's sternum three inches deep into his chest! The sickening crunch of shattering ribs had echoed down the stone tunnel like a musket shot, and the two-hundred-pound mercenary had been launched backward through the air like a ragdoll, slamming into the tunnel wall fifteen feet away with enough force to crack the masonry before sliding into a lifeless heap!
And right beside William, Nightingale had become a phantom of surgical death.
Phasing in and out of the gray veil of the Mist World between heartbeats, the blonde assassin had materialized behind the blinded, panicked mercenaries, her silver-plated dagger opening their throats from ear to ear before their brains could even register her shadow on the wall.
To William and Nightingale, the thirty-second clash had been a brutally efficient dance of violence.
To Captain Greyhound, Brian, Erik, and Trevor—who had already closed their eyes and accepted death—watching the Fourth Prince's "foreign scholar" shatter steel armor and crush grown men's ribs with his bare fists while an invisible angel of death reaped the rear guard had looked like a terrifying, divine miracle straight out of legend.
And throughout the entire thirty-second bloodbath, even as she wiped a splatter of traitor blood from her pale cheek, Nightingale had never taken her eyes off William.
She had indeed stood in the third-floor corridor that morning and heard Arthur call the people of this world "extras". Yet down here in the dark, smelly mud of the tunnel, watching William throw his own body in front of a poisoned blade to shield a common nineteen-year-old guard named Brian and shatter a mercenary's collarbone with a backhand, she saw nothing fake about him. He was fighting for those "extras" with a ferocity that was one hundred percent real.
.
.
.
Now, returning to the present moment, Chief Knight Carter Lannis pushed open the heavy oak double doors of the great dining hall on the ground floor, gesturing for Arthur to step inside.
The scene inside the hall was one of grim, controlled chaos.
The smell of copper, sweat, and wet mud overpowered the usual aroma of the hearth. Near the entrance, three castle maids were on their knees scrubbing dark red boot-prints and dripping blood off the stone flagstones with buckets of soapy water.
Over by the warmth of the main fireplace, Prince Roland was standing beside a makeshift wooden cot made from two pushed-together benches, speaking in low, urgent tones to thirteen-year-old Nana Pine.
The tiny healing witch was sitting on a stool beside the cot, her small face pale with exhaustion and the hem of her wool dress stained with bright red blood as a steady, milky-green glow of cellular magic flowed from her small palms.
Lying flat on his back on the benches was the young patrol guard, Brian.
He was stripped to the waist, his chest wrapped in blood-soaked linen bandages where a traitor's spear had punctured his lung down in the tunnel. Without Nana's miraculous power knitting his internal vessels back together in real time, the boy would have drowned in his own blood ten minutes ago; now, under her small hands, his ragged breathing was finally stabilizing.
Nearby, sitting on chairs with their own minor cuts already healed by Nana, were Patrol Captain Greyhound and the two other loyal guards, Erik and Trevor, staring toward the far corner of the hall as if they were looking at a living god.
Seeing Arthur step into the hall, Roland walked over immediately, his gray eyes dark with fatigue and lingering shock.
— "Arthur. Duke Ryan's rats tried to gut us from the inside out before the first snowfall," — Roland said in a low, hard voice, gesturing toward the wounded men by the fire. — "Eight veterans in the outer patrol took Longsong silver to open an old drainage tunnel under the granary. Captain Greyhound and young Brian here discovered the meeting by chance and fought like lions to hold the tunnel mouth and warn us, taking four blades to the chest rather than stepping back. As soon as the Months of Demons are over—if we survive—Brian is going to be the very first commoner I knight in my new army. We owe those four men everything."
Arthur barely heard the prince's words; his dark eyes had drifted past the fireplace toward the far, shadowy corner of the dining hall.
There, leaning his broad back quietly against a heavy stone support pillar away from the crowd, stood William.
The Commander of the First Army wasn't wearing his trademark cocky grin, and he wasn't striking a heroic pose for the surviving guards. His navy-blue doublet was torn at the shoulder from a deflected spear tip, and he was slowly, methodically wiping thick, dark red traitor blood off his swollen knuckles with a torn strip of linen.
Sensing Arthur's stare across the room, William stopped wiping his hands and raised his head.
Across thirty feet of candlelit stone, the two best friends locked eyes.
William didn't say "I told you so," and he didn't smirk. He simply looked straight at Arthur, then glanced briefly over at nineteen-year-old Brian—who was still whimpering softly in his sleep under little Nana's healing hands—and finally looked back down at his own bloodstained fists.
Fists that now carried a superhuman Strength of 16—the exact "useless, sub-optimal" investment that Arthur had mocked and screamed at him for making just four hours ago.
Had William listened to Arthur's cold corporate math this morning and saved those 280 credits in the bank to buy a chemistry manual next week, William wouldn't have been able to shatter those shields in thirty seconds. Captain Greyhound and Brian would be cold corpses on the stone floor right now, the winter granaries would be burning to the ground, and every single strategic spreadsheet Arthur had drawn for the past month would have gone up in smoke!
The silence stretching between the two friends across the hall felt heavier than the castle walls, loaded with every bitter word they had thrown at each other in the third-floor corridor.
Arthur looked down at the bucket of bloody water on the flagstones, then at the young guard breathing steadily by the fire because William had chosen to act while Arthur had chosen to sit on his bed and "rationalize" their deaths as part of the plot.
For the first time in his life, Arthur's Intelligence 14 brain tried to find a clever logical pivot—some way to frame this as a statistical anomaly—and came up completely empty.
Letting out a long, shaky breath that seemed to drain the arrogance right out of his chest, Arthur bowed his head slightly toward his friend across the room. When his voice finally came out, it was low, quiet, and sober:
— "I see..." — Arthur whispered to himself.
The industrial revolution of guns, steel, and steam engines was still coming, without a doubt. Yet tonight, the brutal reality of this world had taught the strategist a lesson no book could ever teach: before you can build a grand future on paper, someone has to be strong enough to bleed for the present.