A vault of heavy, lead-colored clouds pressed down over the valley of Border Town, hanging so low above the jagged peaks of the Impassable Mountain Range that the sky looked ready to crack and bury the thatched roofs below.
Relentless gusts of northern wind swept down from the upper passes, carrying a damp, bone-piercing chill that bit straight through wool cloaks and boiled leather. Across the muddy lanes of the town, the last of the civilian laborers were hurrying indoors to seal their shutters, yet inside the vast training courtyard behind the castle's southern rampart, the freezing temperature was completely ignored. Here, the air pulsed with a feverish concentration and a thick, metallic tension.
Standing at the center of the frost-hardened yard with his arms crossed over his navy-blue doublet, William looked every inch the wartime general inspecting his vanguard.
Lined up two paces in front of him stood four men who, despite having nothing in common by birth or blood, now represented the absolute backbone of Prince Roland's new defense.
On the far left stood Chief Knight Carter Lannis, his blond hair whipped by the wind, his posture rigid and his severe gaze fixed straight ahead. Next to him stood Deputy Commander Iron Axe, the two-meter Mojin hunter from the southern desert, silent and motionless as a bronze statue. Third in line was Trevor, the scarred veteran patrolman with a constitution like mountain bedrock, who had sworn his life as William's personal shadow less than an hour ago. And on the far right stood Van'er, the broad-shouldered former pickaxe miner whose sharp, analytical mind and high agility had pulled him out of the North Slope mud to lead the artillery crews.
An aristocratic paladin, a despised southern exile, a rough alley brawler, and an illiterate quarryman. In any other fiefdom in Graycastle, Carter wouldn't have allowed the other three within ten paces of his horse.
Directly between William and the four men sat a long, rustic oak trestle table covered in a thick linen cloth.
Arranged neatly across the fabric were the deadly marvels that Anna and the castle blacksmiths had worked day and night to finish: the first four fully standardized, production-model flintlock muskets. Their long, heavy barrels of high-temperature forged iron gleamed darkly under the dull winter sky, while their carved oak stocks carried the sharp, fresh scent of linseed oil and black powder.
The four men stared down at the weapons with a complicated mixture of reverence, sharp curiosity, and lingering suspicion.
— "Listen well and pay close attention," — William began, his deep voice cutting cleanly over the howl of the mountain wind and carrying an unquestionable authority that blended his natural swagger with the dead seriousness of a soldier who knew the apocalypse was marching toward their gates. — "Starting right now, I want all four of you to erase from your heads everything you were ever taught about the honor of a knight's duel. Forget the complex footwork of traditional swordsmanship, and forget the tavern songs about glory in hand-to-hand combat."
William uncrossed his arms and pointed a finger straight down at the four oiled rifles on the table.
— "These tools do not care about the size of your biceps, how many decades you spent swinging a broadsword, or whether the blood running through your veins is noble or common," — William stated coldly. — "They do not feel fear, they do not get tired, and they do not take a step back when a monster roars. They obey only one law: physics. The violent, instantaneous expansion of superheated gas inside a sealed iron tube, and the terminal velocity of a lead ball punching through bone."
A heavy silence settled over the yard, broken only by the flapping of their winter cloaks in the wind.
Standing third in line, Trevor narrowed his scarred eyes as his bodyguard's gaze swept over the linen cloth. Noticing an obvious mathematical problem on the table, the veteran cleared his throat, breaking strict field protocol to speak up.
— "Forgive the interruption, Lord William," — Trevor's gravelly voice echoed as he gestured toward the oak table. — "There are five of us standing at this post, My Lord, yet I only count four rifles on the cloth."
William looked at his newly appointed shield-bearer, a calm, dangerously confident smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.
— "Your eyes work just fine, Trevor. There are only four muskets here, and they belong to the four of you," — William replied, striking his bandaged right knuckles against his left palm with a sharp crack that sounded like two stones colliding. — "Somebody in the command group has to go without a rifle today, and that somebody is me. I have zero intention of using one of these."
On the left end of the line, Chief Knight Carter Lannis immediately took half a step forward, his brow furrowing with a mixture of confusion and genuine alarm.
— "Lord William, this is madness!" — Carter protested, his gloved hand dropping toward the pommel of his sword. — "You just finished lecturing me two days ago in the dining hall about how three-hundred-meter-per-second lead renders plate armor obsolete! Now you tell us these weapons dictate the survival of Border Town, yet you intend to stand on top of the rampart and face the winter horde empty-handed?! As His Highness's Chief Knight, I cannot allow our military commander to commit tactical suicide!"
A short, booming laugh rumbled out of William's chest—a sound backed by the sheer, inhuman weight of his sixteen Strength and the hundred and seventy System credits waiting in his reserve.
— "Hahahaha! Don't misunderstand the division of labor, my dear Carter," — William grinned, taking two slow steps around the table until he was looking the blond knight dead in the eyes. — "I'm not skipping the musket because I'm looking for a glorious death. I'm skipping it because, frankly, I don't need one."
William tapped his own broad chest with his thumb.
— "The four of you—along with the thirty marksmen we pull from the platoons this afternoon—are the lethal artillery of the First Army," — William explained, his voice dropping into a hard, metallic cadence. — "Your job is to rain death from a hundred paces away and turn those trench funnels into a slaughterhouse. My job is to be the anchor on the wall. If a pack of demonic wolves moves too fast for your reload cycle, or if a two-ton Hybrid Beast shrugs off a volley of lead and scrambles up the concrete... it doesn't get to chew on my riflemen. It has to go through me in close quarters. I am the final shock resort on that parapet, Carter, and I promise you that my fists and whatever iron bar I swing will hit just as hard as His Highness's gunpowder."
Stepping back behind the oak table, William let his words hang in the freezing air.
There was no room for argument in his tone. More importantly, his confidence was utterly contagious. Two weeks ago, Carter might have dismissed such a claim as the arrogant boasting of a foreign noble; yet after seeing the six-inch punch that had numbed his own steel-armored arm in the dining hall—and hearing Nightingale and Trevor describe how William had torn eight armored traitors apart in the granary tunnel with his bare hands—neither Carter nor Trevor doubted for a single second that the man standing before them could trade blows with a monster.
Reaching down to the linen cloth with one hand, William picked up the first flintlock musket.
Even though the thick-barreled iron rifle weighed nearly six kilograms, William lifted it by the balance point as effortlessly as if it were a dry reed—a subtle, casual display of his superhuman muscle density that made Iron Axe's eyes glint with quiet respect.
Turning toward the left end of the line, William extended the rifle stock-first toward the Chief Knight.
— "Sir Carter," — William said, his tone turning serious and respectful. — "I know your knightly soul aches for the balanced weight of a crucible-steel broadsword and the shine of family plate armor. However, out there in the snow, a decorated paladin is just an expensive can of meat waiting to be crushed if he has to let a beast get within three feet to cut it. This weapon in my hand spits a wrath that punches through steel breastplates and three-inch oak shields as if they were wet paper. Take it."
Carter stared at the oiled wooden stock inches from his chest, hesitating for a fraction of a second as thirty years of feudal upbringing warred with cold reality inside his head.
Finally, the Chief Knight raised both leather-gloved hands and took the heavy firearm, feeling its awkward, front-heavy balance settle into his palms.
— "It is a cold, undignified way to wage war, Lord William," — Carter muttered quietly, running his thumb along the curved steel of the frizzen and the sharp piece of gray flint clamped in the jaws. — "There is little honor in killing an enemy before you can see the color of his eyes. Even so... I am not a blind fool. I stood in this yard when you pierced a knight's cuirass at twenty-five paces, and I stood in the North Slope ravine yesterday when His Highness erased a four-foot ironwood stump with a clay pot. If Prince Roland decrees that this 'hand thunder' is the shield that will keep Border Town alive, then I will master it to my last breath."
William nodded in genuine approval, watching the proudest knight in the castle set his ego aside for the survival of the territory.
Picking up the second musket from the table, William turned toward the towering warrior standing beside Carter.
— "Big guy," — William said, holding the rifle out to Iron Axe. — "You survived the scorching sands of the southern desert, and you've hunted mutated monsters in the winter timberlands with nothing but a recurve bow and poisoned arrows. What do your hunter's eyes make of this piece of iron?"
The giant from the Sand Nation reached out and took the musket with immediate, practiced dexterity.
Unlike Carter, Iron Axe didn't look conflicted for a microsecond. His dark, observant eyes traced the seamless iron barrel forged by Anna's fire and the crisp mechanical lock with a fierce, predatory fascination—viewing the firearm not as an insult to tradition, but as the pure distillation of lethal efficiency.
— "Death has no religion, no code of chivalry, and no ballroom etiquette, Commander," — Iron Axe replied, his deep, gravelly voice harsh and completely devoid of romantic illusion as he tested the weight of the barrel in his calloused hands. — "In the forest, a hunter who cares about looking noble becomes wolf dung before sunset. If this weapon of the gods can crack the skull of a charging boar or pierce the hide of a Hybrid Beast before its claws reach our men... then it is the greatest hunting tool ever forged by gods or mortals. My people care only about the final count: who stands on the dirt, and who bleeds under it. The method does not matter."
God, I love working with pragmatists, William thought, flashing the Mojin a sharp grin before picking up the third musket and stepping in front of Trevor.
The scarred patrolman didn't show Carter's aristocratic discomfort, nor did he share Iron Axe's quasi-religious awe. Taking the heavy rifle with both hands, Trevor kept his broad shoulders squared—supported by the natural Endurance: 12 that William had just scanned—and immediately tucked the wooden buttplate firmly into the pocket of his right shoulder, sighting down the iron barrel toward the distant mountain peaks.
— "My Lord," — Trevor said flatly, his scarred cheek resting against the cold oak stock without taking his dark eyes off the northern horizon. — "I don't care whether a weapon is fit for a lord or a beggar. You just tell me which lane to watch. You said you're going to stand out front as our final wall—and I believe you. Just know that as long as I have powder in my horn and a finger on this trigger, any damned beast that tries to lay a claw on your coat is going to earn a smoking hole through the center of its chest before it takes a second step."
— "I'm counting on it, Shield-Bearer," — William said warmly, giving Trevor's dense shoulder a firm slap before lifting the fourth and final musket off the linen cloth.
Stepping to the right end of the line, William looked at the most unusual member of the elite quartet: Van'er.
Compared to a royal knight, a desert chieftain's warrior, and a hardened castle guard, the former North Slope miner looked painfully ordinary in his newly issued boiled-leather jerkin. Yet as William looked at the floating parameters above the man's head—Agility: 9 | Intelligence: 7—he knew Van'er was the linchpin of their massed fire.
— "Van'er," — William said, placing the heavy firearm into the miner's calloused hands. — "Starting today, you are my man of numbers, patience, and cold calculation on that parapet. As an underground miner, you know better than anyone here what happens when someone gets sloppy under pressure in a dark shaft. Our volley timing, our powder rationing, and our interlocking fields of fire in the Kill Zones are going to rest on that sharp head of yours."
Van'er gripped the musket tightly, his knuckles whitening for a moment before he exhaled and settled the weapon across his chest with steady, deliberate control.
— "Down in the deep ore seams, Commander, if you miscalculate the angle of a timber support beam by a single centimeter, fifty tons of shale come down and bury your whole crew alive," — Van'er said, his hoarse voice quiet but ringing with iron resolve. — "Up on His Highness's concrete wall, it is the exact same cruel math. A centimeter of deviation at the muzzle, or half a spoon too little powder in the charge, and the beast doesn't drop—and the man standing beside me dies. I stayed up by the barracks fire last night calculating the firing angles for all three trench funnels, My Lord. I will not miss my mark."
With all four weapons distributed, the philosophical talk ended, and the true torment of modern military drill began.
For the next three hours, the biting sub-zero wind of the courtyard was completely forgotten, drowned out by an excruciating, relentless routine of mechanical repetition.
William knew from both history and Roland's engineering notes that a muzzle-loading flintlock musket was a clumsy club in the hands of an untrained shooter. In the middle of a blizzard, with three hundred red-eyed wolves howling fifty yards away and black blood spraying across the snow, a soldier's conscious brain would freeze in panic. The only way a rifleman survived was if his hands could execute the complex twelve-step loading sequence completely blindfolded, operating on pure, spinal-cord muscle memory.
Pacing up and down behind the four men like a caged predator, William stripped the process down to a harsh, industrial rhythm—correcting sloppy elbows with sharp shoves and barking out every step until his throat felt raw.
— "Reloading stance! Feet shoulder-width apart!" — William roared over the wind. — "Step one: pull the hammer to half-cock! Listen for that first metallic click! That locks the sear so you don't accidentally set the gun off while your hands are over the muzzle and blow your own chin into the river!"
Click-clack-click-click.
Four hammers snapped back in ragged sequence.
— "Step two: uncap your priming horn! Pour fine powder into the flash pan!" — William barked, leaning over Carter's shoulder like a hawk. — "Just enough to cover the touchhole! Do not overfill the pan, or the flash will burn your eyebrows off and blind you before the main charge even ignites!"
Beside Iron Axe, Carter Lannis's gloved fingers—stiff from the freezing wind and accustomed to the thick leather grip of a sword hilt rather than delicate powder flasks—twitched slightly. A pinch of fine black priming powder missed the iron pan and scattered across the frost at his boots.
— "Damn it..." — Carter muttered under his breath.
William was on him in half a second, smacking the flat of his hand against the back of the Chief Knight's steel pauldron.
— "Spilled powder on the mud doesn't kill demonic beasts, Carter!" — William snapped without an ounce of noble deference. — "Take off those thick riding gloves if you can't feel the horn nozzle! Your fingers can freeze after the enemy is dead! Eyes on the pan!"
Carter's jaw tightened, yet instead of bristling at the reprimand, the veteran knight yanked off his heavy right leather gauntlet with his teeth, tucked it into his belt, and steadied his bare hand against the cold iron.
— "Step three: snap the steel frizzen shut over the pan! Ground the butt of the rifle between your boots!" — William continued, moving down the line as he watched Iron Axe's fluid, rhythmic movements—the Mojin warrior already treating the reload sequence like an ancestral hunting dance—and Van'er's meticulous, clockwork precision. — "Step four: pour the main pre-measured paper charge straight down the barrel!"
Four sets of hands moved in unison, pouring the coarse, corned gunpowder Arthur and Roland had formulated down the dark iron muzzles.
— "Step five: linen patch and lead ball into the bore! Step six: draw your iron ramrods!" — William shouted.
Shhhk-clack! Shhhk-clack!
The heavy steel rods slid out of their stock pipes and plunged down into the barrels, scraping loudly against the iron walls as the four men tamped the charges home.
— "Ram that lead all the way down until the rod bounces!" — William warned, his eyes narrowing as he checked their posture. — "If you leave an air gap between the powder and the bullet in the heat of battle, the pressure spike will split the barrel open like a peeled banana and take your left hand off at the wrist!"
After two hours of dry-firing with wooden flints and dummy charges until their thumbs were raw and blistered from fighting the heavy mainsprings, William finally called for live ammunition.
— "Return your ramrods! If you fire with the rod still in the barrel, you just threw away your ability to load a second shot!" — William ordered, stepping two paces back behind the center of the four-man line as a surge of pure, electric pride coursed through his veins.
Looking at the four backs in front of him, William knew he was witnessing the birth of the force that would conquer this continent.
— "Pull the hammer all the way back to full cock! Raise your weapons!" — William commanded.
Four six-kilogram iron rifles rose smoothly to shoulder height, leveling out toward a row of reinforced, three-inch-thick oak target boards erected eighty paces away at the far end of the courtyard.
— "Tuck that wooden stock tight into the meat of your shoulder!" — William's voice roared across the silent yard, echoing off the twelve-foot concrete rampart and the high towers of the castle keep. — "If you hold it loose like a crossbow, the kick will dislocate your collarbone! Sight down the top of the barrel! Exhale halfway, do not flinch at the flash in the pan, and do not fear the smoke!"
William raised his right arm high into the freezing air.
— "The thunder that is about to deafen you is not the wrath of the gods!" — William bellowed, his eyes blazing. — "It is the official funeral bell for the age of knights and shiny swords! At your targets... FIRE AT WILL!"
Four calloused fingers squeezed four heavy iron triggers at the exact same instant.
Clack-kchhh!
Four sharp gray flints snapped forward under the tension of Anna's high-carbon steel springs, scraping violently down the curved face of the frizzens and showering white-hot sparks straight into the open priming pans.
For a hundredth of a second, there was a terrifying, suspended heartbeat of hissing white flare as the priming powder burned through the touchholes—the dreaded flintlock ignition delay.
And then, the courtyard exploded.
KRA-KRA-KRA-KOOOOOOOM!
Four deafening cracks tore through the winter sky of Border Town simultaneously, sounding as though four bolts of lightning had struck the flagstones side by side.
Spouts of blinding orange flame lanced two feet out of the iron muzzles, instantly swallowed by a dense, boiling bank of gray-white smoke that reeked of burnt sulfur and saltpeter. The savage kinetic recoil of the heavy charges slammed straight back into the shooters' shoulders—forcing Carter Lannis to stagger half a boot-step backward to keep his balance, while Trevor merely locked his thick neck and absorbed the mule-kick straight into his spine without budging a millimeter.
As the biting wind slowly tore the suffocating curtain of sulfur smoke apart, all five men squinted downrange.
Eighty paces away—a distance where a medieval longbow lost half its punch and a heavy sword was completely useless—the three-inch-thick reinforced oak target board looked as if a giant had struck it with an invisible wrecking ball.
Four jagged holes the size of silver royals were punched cleanly through the center of the seasoned timber, with foot-long splinters of raw oak blown out the back and scattered across the frozen mud behind the posts.
For three seconds, none of the four shooters moved.
Slowly lowering the smoking muzzles of their rifles, Carter, Iron Axe, Trevor, and Van'er looked down at the blackened iron tubes in their hands, their faces smudged with dark powder residue and their eyes wide with the grim, intoxicating revelation of the power they now commanded.
— "Not bad for a first volley! Eighty paces, four dead-center kills!" — William grinned, stepping forward and opening his mouth to bark the order to swab the fouled barrels. — "Now, before the fouling cools, grab your—"
William's voice died abruptly in the middle of his sentence.
Right as he took a breath, the scarce midday light filtering through the cloud cover darkened drastically—as though an enormous, pitch-black velvet curtain were being pulled across the roof of the world.
At the exact same moment, the howling gale that had been whipping across the courtyard all morning stopped dead.
The sudden silence was unnatural and suffocating. The air pressure dropped so sharply that William felt his eardrums pop, leaving the atmosphere around the wall eerie, static, and heavy as wet lead.
Then, creeping over the sharp, familiar smell of burnt gunpowder hanging around the oak table, a completely different odor rolled down from the northern cliffs.
Standing beside William, Trevor stiffened, the short hairs on the back of the veteran's scarred neck standing straight up on end.
It was a freezing, putrid, metallic stench—like a mixture of rotting slaughterhouse blood, crushed iron ore, and stagnant swamp gas.
It was the winter miasma descending from the Impassable Mountain Range.
Breaking off his words, William slowly tilted his head back and stared up into the darkened, bruised-purple sky.
Drifting down through the dead, windless air came a single white flake.
Large, intricate, and silent as the feather of a dying bird, it twirled lazily downward between the castle towers before landing squarely on the scorching-hot iron barrel of Trevor's smoking musket—vanishing instantly with a faint, sharp tssssk of steam.
Two seconds later, a second heavy flake settled onto the dark-blue wool of William's sleeve.
Then ten more landed on the linen cloth of the reloading table. And a thousand more behind them.
A funereal silence dropped over the courtyard, instantly extinguishing the fierce martial high of the live-fire test.
Beside Carter, Deputy Commander Iron Axe slowly raised his chin toward the northern mountain peaks. The giant Mojin hunter's yellow-brown eyes narrowed into slits, his jaw clenching so hard the muscles in his cheeks bunched like knots of wood as an ancient, bone-deep dread flickered across his stoic face. Neither he, nor Trevor, nor Van'er needed a scholar to explain what that sudden stillness and that metallic smell meant; every man and woman who had survived a winter on Graycastle's frontier knew that sign better than the lines on their own palms.
— "It has begun," — William murmured, his voice quiet and steady in the sudden hush.
Every trace of playful arrogance and boyish humor vanished from William's face as if wiped clean by a blade, replaced by the cold, unyielding iron of a commander stepping onto a live battlefield.
Within less than sixty seconds, the scattered white flakes transformed into a dense, merciless curtain of driving snow, falling so thick and fast that the distant treeline of the Concealing Forest was swallowed in a blinding sheet of white.
Up on the high slopes of the Impassable Mountain Range, the corrupting miasma was no longer trapped in the upper valleys; it was pouring down the ravines like an invisible flood, soaking into the dark timberlands and driving an endless, starving legion of black-blooded abominations straight toward the warmth of human flesh.
The four flintlock muskets had sounded the opening bell, yet nature itself had dictated the start of the war.
The Months of the Demons had officially arrived in Border Town—and whether the fledgling spark of human industry survived to see the spring now rested squarely on the shoulders of the men standing in the snow.