The heavy mahogany double doors of the Prince's study closed firmly behind them, sealing Prince Roland inside with his maps and his invisible bodyguard.
As they started walking down the dimly lit stone corridor of the third floor, the contrast between the two advisors could not have been sharper.
On the left, Arthur walked with his trademark measured, unhurried stride, his hands clasped neatly behind the back of his dark-gray wool tunic. His brow was slightly furrowed as his Intelligence 14 mind processed the logistical nightmare of managing a wildcard assassin like Nightingale as a "watched ally" inside the castle walls.
Beside him, however, William was practically vibrating.
Despite having had a silver-plated dagger pressed against his carotid artery less than twenty minutes ago, the Commander of the First Army looked as if he were about to burst out of his skin with contained, manic excitement, his dark eyes locked onto an invisible point in the empty air two feet in front of his nose.
Waiting until they had descended the main staircase and turned into the quiet, deserted gallery connecting the central keep to the eastern wing, William suddenly grabbed Arthur's sleeve and leaned in close, a grin threatening to split his face in half.
— "Art... bro, you are going to freak out," — William whispered, his voice trembling with pure adrenaline. — "I just did it while Roland was wrapping up the supply notes. I spent the 280 credits."
Arthur stopped dead in the middle of the stone corridor.
For a full second, he didn't even turn his head. Then, very slowly, Arthur pivoted toward his best friend, his forehead creasing in a look of total, horrified incomprehension.
Ever since the [DIMENSIONAL SHOP] had unlocked during Roland's public speech in the square, each of them had received an initial balance of 300 personal credits. Arthur had already spent the entire afternoon and half the night mentally allocating their combined 600-credit budget down to the last point—calculating the exact order in which they would unlock the tabs under [CATEGORY: KNOWLEDGE] to accelerate the metallurgy and precision machining required for the Steam Engine Mark II and rifled artillery.
— "Spent?" — Arthur repeated, his voice dropping to a low, icy pitch heavy with growing suspicion. — "What exactly do you mean, spent, Will? We agreed yesterday that we wouldn't touch a single credit until we finished the cost-benefit analysis for unlocking 'Applied Basic Chemistry' and 'Engineering Principles.' Please tell me this is one of your terrible jokes."
— "Dude, forget the textbooks and just listen to me!" — William whispered back, gesturing frantically in the air with both hands as if tracing a hidden window. — "While we were standing in Roland's office waiting for him to sign the grain requisitions, I was messing around with the [SHOP] screen in my head. And guess what? If you mentally hold and drag the credit balance icon over to your main Status window, a secret submenu pops open! You can buy raw physical attributes directly!"
Arthur's eyes narrowed sharply.
— "Raw attributes?"
— "Yes! It costs exactly 40 credits for a permanent +1 increase to any stat on the board!" — William declared, puffing out his chest with triumphant pride. — "I didn't even hesitate for a second, man! I dumped 280 of my 300 credits straight into the submenu! I just bought seven full points of raw Strength!"
Silence dropped over the cold stone hallway like a guillotine blade.
Arthur stood completely paralyzed for three full seconds, his dark eyes fixed on the empty air between them as his hyper-analytical brain tried—and failed—to process the sheer, monumental stupidity of the sentence he had just heard.
With his base Strength already sitting at 9, adding seven points meant William had just pushed his physical Strength stat to an absurd 16.
And to do it, he had just burned nearly half of their entire strategic starting capital into ashes in five seconds!
— "Are you... are you actually mentally deranged?!" — Arthur finally hissed through clenched teeth.
He didn't shout—he was still smart enough not to echo their secrets down the castle halls—yet the sheer, blistering intensity in his whisper made even a six-foot-one fighter like William flinch half a step back.
— "You burned almost all of your strategic credit reserves without consulting me?! And out of every possible option in the universe, you invested them into raw Strength?!" — Arthur pressed on, his pale face flushing slightly at the temples as a sharp migraine pulsed behind his eyes. — "I cannot believe I am standing in this freezing hallway listening to this! For what sensible, rational purpose on God's earth would you do something that idiotic, William?!"
Recovering from his initial flinch, William actually let out a loud, booming laugh that bounced off the narrow stone walls, finding genuine boyish amusement in seeing the always-composed corporate genius lose his cool.
— "Relax, bro! Why are you acting like the sky is falling? It's called a front-loaded combat investment!" — William grinned, slapping a hand against his own rock-hard bicep. — "How the hell am I supposed to carry this team on my back when things go south if I have the physical stats of a normal human? Besides, have you ever watched an anime in your life, Art? Every single strength-build character is an unstoppable monster! I'm building a frontline 'Juggernaut' class!"
— "We are building an industrial civilization, William, not a party for a dungeon raid!" — Arthur snapped back, raising a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose as a wave of profound mental exhaustion washed over him. — "Open your eyes and look at what we are crafting in the courtyard! Within two months, we are going to have mass-produced rifled muskets, revolving carbines, nitroglycerin, and twelve-pounder field cannons!"
Arthur dropped his hand and pointed a sharp finger straight at William's chest:
— "In an era of smokeless powder, chemical engineering, and high-velocity lead, personal muscle 'Strength' is quite literally the most obsolete, useless attribute on that entire screen!" — Arthur argued with ruthless logic. — "Or have you already forgotten the plot of the story we are standing inside? When the Church sends its elite Transcendent witch, Ashes, to Border Town—a literal superhuman who can cleave a stone tower in half with a greatsword—who defeats her? Chief Knight Carter Lannis! An ordinary human being with zero magic, using nothing more than a six-shot revolver and marksmanship!"
Arthur took a breath, trying to force his cold rationality back into his friend's skull:
— "Furthermore, neither you nor I are supposed to be meat-shields wrestling monsters in the mud!" — Arthur continued coldly. — "Our role in this castle is to act as the architects behind the curtain—to provide the technical blueprints, secure the supply chains, and give Roland the intelligence he needs so the Witch Cooperation Association doesn't march to their deaths in the mountains!"
At the mention of the Witch Cooperation Association, the playful grin vanished from William's face in an instant.
His dark eyes hardened, his jaw set like iron, and his entire posture shifted from carefree amusement to a heavy, defiant seriousness.
— "And do you honestly think Cara is just going to sit down in the snow and politely listen to a corporate PowerPoint presentation from us, Art?" — William countered, his voice dropping an octave as he brought up the fanatical, human-hating mentor leading the Witch Cooperation Association.
Arthur paused, frowning slightly as William took a step forward:
— "Think about who we are dealing with out there," — William said, his voice dead serious. — "Those girls in the Association have been hunted like rabid dogs, betrayed by their own families, tortured in dungeons, and burned at the stake by 'ordinary men' for four hundred years. You really think a hardened extremist like Cara is going to turn her caravan around and march into a human prince's castle just because two guys in nice wool tunics promise them 'warm brick houses' and 'factory jobs'?"
William shook his head firmly:
— "Cornered survivors don't trust pretty speeches, Art—they respect raw, undeniable power!" — William stated. — "When the winter horde hits, or when we intercept their caravan, if I can't step out in front of the line and crush a Hybrid beast's skull with my bare hands right in front of their eyes, they'll think we're just another bunch of weak, scheming mortals trying to trick them into cages before the Church arrives! This Strength isn't for my ego—it is the physical proof those girls need to see that we can actually protect them when the monsters come!"
Arthur stared at his friend for two seconds, then slowly shook his head, his pragmatic coldness resurfacing over his features like winter frost.
— "You really have lost your mind since we fell into that alley," — Arthur said, his voice flat and devoid of warmth. — "Wake up, William. This is not a video game on your seventy-inch television, and it is not a shonen manga where the hero saves everyone with 'burning willpower' and 'big muscles'. One slip-up out there in the snow means permanent death. I am not going to bankrupt our technological advantage or risk our necks on the front line just to play hero for a bunch of side characters and expendable extras. Our job is to warn Roland, hand over the data, and stay safely behind the concrete wall while the artillery does the work."
— "Extras?"
The single word detonated between them.
Before Arthur could blink, William took a massive stride forward, completely invading the strategist's personal space and towering over him by three inches, his dark eyes burning with a genuine, righteous fury that Arthur had rarely ever seen in their years of friendship.
— "Is that really all they are to you inside that cold computer brain of yours, Art?! Just extras on a screen?!" — William growled low in his throat, his fists clenching at his sides. — "When you look at Anna burning her hands raw at the furnace, do you just see a 'production unit'? When you pat thirteen-year-old Nana on the head in the dining hall, is she nothing more than a convenient 'healing item' to keep your numbers green? And what about Iron Axe, or the recruits down in the mud, or the witches freezing to death in those mountains right now?!"
William leaned down until his face was inches from Arthur's cold stare:
— "Look around you, man! They aren't pixels and they aren't lines of text in a webnovel anymore!" — William hissed passionately. — "They are living, breathing people! They bleed red blood, they shiver in the cold, they feel terrified of dying, and they cry when no one is looking! If this System gave me the power to stand in front of them and stop good people from getting torn apart in the snow, then I am going to use every single drop of it—and I don't give a damn what your 'optimal meta-strategy' says about the odds!"
The air in the stone corridor reached a suffocating boiling point, the two longtime friends glaring into each other's eyes across an ideological chasm that neither of them was willing to cross.
Then—
Clink. Clack. Clink.
The heavy, unmistakable sound of steel sabatons striking flagstones echoed from the intersecting hallway just ten paces ahead.
Rounding the stone corner came Chief Knight Carter Lannis, making his morning inspection rounds of the upper keep with his left hand resting, as always, on the pommel of his longsword.
The instant Carter turned into the gallery, the veteran knight slowed his pace, his sharp eyes narrowing as he felt the palpable, almost violent wave of hostility radiating between the Fourth Prince's two most trusted advisors.
Stopping five paces away under the flickering wall torch, Carter looked from William's flushed, furious face to Arthur's icy, rigid posture.
— "Is there a problem here, gentlemen?" — Carter asked, his deep voice calm but guarded as his gaze darted between the two foreigners. — "The stone walls of this keep carry sound quite far, and the two of you appear... unusually agitated this morning."
Neither Arthur nor William answered the knight right away.
Slowly, Arthur took a single step backward, putting distance between himself and William as he smoothed down the silver-embroidered cuffs of his dark-gray wool tunic. When Arthur spoke, his voice was quiet, polished, and colder than the northern ice—marking the first true fracture in their brotherhood since arriving in Graycastle:
— "There is no problem at all, Chief Knight. Just a minor disagreement regarding resource allocation," — Arthur said without looking at Carter, keeping his dark eyes fixed squarely on William. — "Do whatever you want to satisfy that 'protagonist syndrome' of yours, William. Go play the invincible hero on the front lines. Just remember one thing: when your precious brute 'Strength' fails against a demon's spear or a winged Hybrid, and you realize too late that those credits could have bought the scientific knowledge to build a stronger defense... do not come knocking on my door expecting me to fix your mess."
William didn't flinch; the anger in his eyes cooled into a hard, quiet contempt of his own.
— "Honestly? I should have expected this kind of cold-blooded cowardice from a guy who only looks at the world through a spreadsheet, Art," — William replied evenly. — "Don't worry your pretty little head about the front lines. I'll handle the heavy lifting out in the mud and blood. You can go lock yourself inside the library, where it's nice, warm, and safe."
Without another word, the two men turned sharply on their heels and marched away in completely opposite directions—William striding toward the stairs leading down to the snowy courtyard, and Arthur walking deeper into the dim shadows of the eastern residential wing.
Left alone at the intersection under the sputtering wall torch, Chief Knight Carter Lannis stood still for several seconds, watching their backs disappear into the gloom.
Carter hadn't understood the context of their whispered argument about "credits" or "resource allocation," yet any man who had lived forty years in the world knew the unmistakable look of two sworn brothers who had just become strangers.
Letting out a heavy sigh that condensed into a small cloud of white mist in the frigid hallway air, Carter shook his head slowly. As the Chief Knight of a royal prince, he was trained to deal with noble plots, border skirmishes, and poisoned wine in the dark—but the bizarre, volatile dynamic between these two mysterious men from the "Kingdom of Dawn," whom Prince Roland had placed at the very center of his government, was a riddle that no steel sword could ever cut through.
Adjusting his belt, the knight resumed his solitary patrol down the cold stone hall.
.
.
.
Three minutes later, down at the far edge of the castle's inner training ground, William came to a halt.
During the past hour since dawn, the heavy gray clouds overhead had begun dusting the frozen mud of the yard with a thin, powdery layer of early frost and snow. The biting mountain wind whipped across William's cheeks, yet he didn't feel the cold at all; his blood was practically boiling with residual anger and a strange, terrifying new pressure humming beneath his skin.
He couldn't wait until tonight. He needed to know right now. He needed to physically feel with his own two hands what jumping from Strength 9 to Strength 16 had actually done to his mortal body.
Looking around to make sure the morning militia platoons were still eating breakfast inside the mess hall and the courtyard was empty, William marched with heavy, determined strides over to the reinforced oak weapon rack beside the barracks wall.
He walked right past the light wooden practice staffs, past the standard one-handed iron arming swords, and stopped at the very end of the rack.
Resting on double iron hooks was a massive, unsharpened training greatsword.
It wasn't a balanced weapon meant for combat; it was a brutal, six-foot slab of solid, low-grade pig iron over two inches thick, forged specifically by the old castle master-at-arms for punishing endurance drills. Weighing well over thirty-five kilograms—more than twice the weight of a real two-handed claymore—it was a piece of metal that even a monster like Iron Axe had to grip with both hands, plant his feet wide, and brace his lower back just to swing slowly.
Yesterday morning, even with his peak-human Strength 9, lifting that iron slab with one arm would have strained every tendon in William's wrist and rotator cuff.
Stepping up to the rack, William didn't use both hands.
He reached out with his right hand alone, wrapped his fingers around the thick, worn leather grip, took a single deep breath, and lifted.
Whoosh.
The thirty-five-kilogram slab of solid iron rose off the hooks as effortlessly as if it were whittled out of dry pine wood!
William's dark eyes flew wide open, his heart slamming against his ribs in a sudden rush of primal shock and exhilaration.
The strangest part wasn't that the sword felt weightless—he could still feel the full, crushing mass of the iron pressing down through the soles of his leather boots into the frozen dirt. Rather, the density of his muscle fibers, the tensile strength of his tendons, and the leverage of his bones had multiplied to such an absurd degree that thirty-five kilograms simply registered as zero resistance to his nervous system!
Stepping three paces back into the open snow of the yard, William twisted his right wrist and whipped the massive iron greatsword across his body in a single, one-handed horizontal slash.
VROOOOSH—CRACK!
The blunt two-inch iron bar tore through the freezing air so fast it created a miniature sonic vacuum, producing a sharp, terrifying whistle that echoed off the stone barracks walls, accompanied by the loud pop of William's own shoulder socket adjusting to the explosive kinetic output!
The air pressure alone from the stopped swing blew a five-foot arc of fresh frost clean off the dirt in front of his boots!
William stood there breathing heavily, staring down at the trembling iron slab held out horizontally in his single outstretched hand.
Arthur was right about one thing: William didn't possess Carter Lannis's thirty years of classical swordsmanship, nor did he have the centuries-old combat technique of an Extraordinary witch like Ashes.
Yet as William felt the terrifying, inhuman power coiled inside his right arm, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he swung this thirty-five-kilogram bar of iron into the side of an armor-plated demonic boar—or across the chest of a charging Hybrid—the sheer kinetic transfer would snap its spine in half like a dry twig.
— "Extras, huh...?" — William whispered out into the cold morning wind, his grip tightening on the leather hilt until the wood beneath the wrap creaked in protest as flashes of the Witch Cooperation Association dying in the northern blizzards crossed his mind. — "I won't let them die out there."
Arthur could sit in his room and call him a brainless idiot from now until spring, for all William cared. Cold mathematical logic was great for balancing ledgers, but when the monsters came over the wall in the dark, somebody had to stand in the gap and bleed.
.
.
.
Meanwhile, three floors up in the quiet eastern wing of the castle, the heavy oak door of Arthur's guest room slammed shut with enough force to shake a thin trickle of dry mortar dust down from the stone lintel.
Inside the chilly room, Arthur didn't even bother lighting the fireplace.
His jaw was still clenched tight, a dull, angry throb pulsing steadily against both of his temples as he walked with rigid, mechanical strides over to his modest oak writing desk.
Striking a flint with a sharp flick of his wrist, he lit the small brass oil lamp and waved a hand through the dim air to summon his personal [DIMENSIONAL SYSTEM] interface.
In the upper right corner of his [SHOP] screen, his own personal balance still read 300 credits.
Right underneath it, however, in the linked party log showing recent transactions, flashed the record of William's purchase—and the pathetic, insulting "20 credits" remaining in his partner's account.
Just looking at that number "20" made a fresh wave of cold fury rise in Arthur's throat.
— "Brute force..." — Arthur muttered aloud to the empty stone room, his voice dripping with pure venom as he glared at the floating blue log. — "Seven points of muscle in a world where mutated beasts fly across the sky, spit acid, and weigh as much as armored carriages. Stupid. Reckless, short-sighted, and completely stupid."
With a sharp, disgusted wave of his hand, Arthur dismissed the glowing blue window without spending a single credit of his own 300-point reserve.
Because unlocking the high-tier industrial blueprints in the Knowledge tab had required pooling both of their credit balances together, William's impulsive binge had effectively killed Arthur's shortcut. If the System Shop wasn't going to hand them instant industrial diagrams today, then Arthur would simply have to wring every last drop of university chemistry, physics, and metallurgy out of his own Intelligence 14 brain the hard way.
Sitting down on the hard wooden chair, Arthur pulled a wide roll of blank parchment across the desk, uncorked a bottle of black carbon ink, and dipped his goose quill in.
Scritch-scratch-scritch.
Moving his hand at a blistering pace, Arthur began drafting from pure memory—laying down the complex internal cross-sections of a Bessemer-style converter blast furnace on one sheet, and the lead-chamber chemical synthesis equations for sulfuric and nitric acid on the next.
His strokes were so sharp and aggressive that the nib of the quill nearly tore straight through the rough sheepskin parchment, splattering tiny black droplets of ink across his pale knuckles.
William wanted to play the shining knight in armor and save the witches by jumping into the snow to fistfight monsters?
Fine. Let him try.
Arthur would save this town—and eventually conquer this entire backward continent—by building an inexorable, merciless, steam-powered industrial meat grinder. He would build a mechanized war machine so overwhelming that Demonic Beasts, Hybrid abominations, Duke Ryan's knights, and the fanatics of the Church of Hermes alike would be shredded into red mist by standardized artillery before they ever saw a human face.
A true architect didn't need heroic speeches, emotional attachment, or bulging biceps. He needed coal, high-grade iron ore, nitric acid, and math.
Outside the narrow stone window, the pale, freezing light of morning advanced mercilessly across the roofs of Border Town—sheltering under the exact same castle roof two twenty-first-century worldviews that had just collided and split down the middle.
And while the two estranged best friends locked themselves into their separate paths of iron and blood, neither of them realized that Duke Ryan's daggers were already moving inside the town walls—and that within hours, their theories would be put to a brutal, bloody test.