The heat of Prince Roland's office was a welcome, almost aggressive contrast to the deadly cold beginning to devour Border Town. The stone fireplace blazed with thick pine logs, casting an orange glow over the endless piles of parchments covering the solid oak desk.
Roland slumped into his chair with a heavy sigh, the leather creaking under the weight of a man carrying the future of a civilization on his shoulders. He massaged his shoulders, his eyes marked by dark circles.
— "Coal consumption at the forges has increased thirty percent since last night, Arthur," — Roland said, pointing to a report with the tip of a worn quill. — "And with the blizzard blocking the secondary roads, the logistics of transporting firewood and iron ore from the North Slope is going to become a nightmare. We need to ration, or the town will freeze before the second month is over." —
Arthur, standing on the other side of the desk, maintained an upright and impeccable posture. He took the report, his eyes scanning the numbers and characters with a speed bordering on inhuman by the standards of that era. Thanks to his years working with accounting and ledgers, complex calculations that would take Cheng Yan a few minutes to solve with a pencil, Arthur processed in seconds.
— "There is no need for drastic rationing, Your Highness," — Arthur replied calmly, pushing another parchment toward the Prince. — "I have already restructured the delivery routes this morning. If we divert twenty percent of the civilian workforce that was building the masonry houses to the continuous maintenance of the mine trails, the flow of ore and coal will remain constant. The houses can wait; the artillery and the heat cannot." —
Roland took the paper, his eyes sweeping over the efficiency equations and the redesigned route maps by Arthur. A faint smile of relief broke the Prince's mask of fatigue.
— "Your mind works in a frightening way, Arthur. It is as if you have a whole computer inside your skull," — Roland commented, signing the document with a quick flourish. — "With you handling the infrastructure and William leading the shock line with that absurd strength, I feel we might actually have a real chance of surviving this winter." —
— "There is nothing to worry about, Your Highness. The demonic beasts, and even the hybrid ones, despite being strong against a human being, are still made of flesh and bone," — Arthur retorted, adjusting the shirt collar. He glanced at the large wristwatch on his arm, which he had adjusted to be as close as possible to the time running in this world. The bronze hands indicated that noon was approaching.
The morning shift at the North Slope Mine was about to end.
Arthur stored the finalized documents in a leather folder.
— "If the consumption reports were the only urgency, Your Highness, I ask for permission to take my leave. There is a technical inspection I must personally conduct at the mines before the snow accumulates too much." —
— "Go ahead," — Roland waved his hand, already pulling another stack of papers. — "Just be careful with the frost. And see if the steam engine is operating within pressure limits." —
Arthur gave a brief bow and left the office, closing the thick door behind him. As he walked through the stone corridors of the castle, his neutral expression gave way to a cold, calculating focus. He wasn't going to the mine to do a simple pressure inspection. He was going to alter destiny, steal a raw moment from history, and profit from it.
As he put on his heavy wool overcoat and slipped into his fur-lined boots, the conversation he had had earlier with William echoed in his mind. The brutish warrior had dumped one hundred and sixty System credits into Endurance, points earned purely for saving the lives of extras during the attack in the tunnels. The System, it seemed, generously rewarded direct interventions that altered the fatal flow of events.
Arthur opened the castle door and was met by a gust of freezing wind that felt laden with tiny ice blades. The snow fell heavily, painting the world in an oppressive white. He lowered his head, hiding his face in his thick scarf, and began the long walk toward the North Slope.
While his boots crushed the fresh snow, his mind worked like a perfectly lubricated gear. He accessed the meta-knowledge of his past life, the crystalline memories of the novel that now dictated his reality.
He knew exactly what was about to happen at the mine's entrance.
An extra miner whose name he didn't remember, who was in charge of operating the first steam engine installed by Roland, would commit a gross act of negligence. Intoxicated by the ease of his new job and the arrogance of no longer having to carry rocks on his back, the extra would forget the most basic safety instruction: to warn his colleagues before releasing the boiler's pressure. The result would be catastrophic. Another, older extra who ironically always looked out for this more incompetent extra, would be hit head-on by the jet of boiling, high-pressure steam.
In the original timeline, this extra would have his face completely melted, his eyes boiled in their sockets, turned into a mass of raw flesh and agonizing pain. It would be a horrendous tragedy, but a tragedy with a narrative purpose. The accident would force the intervention of Nana, the young healer witch. By miraculously healing the irrelevant miner's mortal wounds in front of about three guards and the other miners, Nana would break the first major barrier of prejudice against witches in Border Town. The extras in the future would come to revere her as an angel, accelerating public acceptance.
It was a crucial event for Roland's political development.
— "But Roland's political development does not increase my attributes," — Arthur muttered to himself, his voice muffled by the scarf and carried away by the biting wind.
Arthur was an absolute pragmatist. He looked at his own gloved hand, opening and closing his fingers. His Magic Power focused on Telekinesis was at level eight. It was strong, enough to deflect heavy arrows and snap an enemy's neck from a distance. But it was not the extraordinary level he aimed for. He needed credits to reach level nine, ten, eleven, twelve... up to level fifteen and so on. If winter brought colossal hybrid beasts, politics and public acceptance wouldn't save his life if his telekinetic barriers couldn't withstand the impact of a ton of brute force. Even in the original, Anna had to intervene directly after the wall was breached.
If he intervened and saved those mediocre extras from the boiling steam, he would earn System credits, just as William had. The immediate consequence, however, would be clear: Nana would not have her moment of public glory at the same time as the original story. The commoners' acceptance of the witches would suffer a strategic delay.
— "I don't care," — Arthur decreed in his thoughts, his cold, fixed gaze focused on the dark silhouette of the mountain ahead. — "Prejudice can be shaped, fought with decrees and time. A disfigured human life is permanent. And the credits I receive for saving that life will make me a much more useful piece on the board. Nana's reputation can wait. My evolution cannot." —
The climb to the mine was arduous, the thin, freezing air burning his lungs. Arthur's Endurance of eight, while not extraordinary like that of the town's most powerful soldiers—William, Carter and Iron Axe—was still enough to keep him moving forward without extreme fatigue. When he finally spotted the entrance to the monumental cave, the deafening noise hit him.
It was the roar of progress. The steam engine, the iron giant, hummed and vibrated with a contained fury. A marvel of rustic engineering, exhaling black smoke and white steam, devouring coal and converting heat into raw work. The winch turned relentlessly, pulling heavy baskets of iron ore from the dark depths of the earth with an ease that made the manual labor of twenty men look like a child's joke.
Arthur stopped in the shadows of a tool storage hut, his dark overcoat camouflaging him perfectly in the gloom. He observed the scene.
There was the operator extra. The young miner was standing on the small wooden platform next to the iron monster. He looked exhausted by the noise and constant attention, but there was an undeniable air of superiority in his posture. He wasn't holding a pickaxe; he controlled the metal god that spat fire. Arthur noticed the operator's hands resting casually near the two vital levers: the silver one, for intake, and the brown one, for exhaust.
The bronze bell rang high above the mine entrance, the sharp sound cutting through the hiss of the steam. End of the shift.
The miners began to emerge from the depths, hunched figures covered in black dust and frozen sweat, dragging their exhausted feet toward the payment area and the makeshift barracks. Arthur narrowed his eyes, searching for his mission's target among the dirty crowd.
It didn't take long to find him. Titus was a broad-shouldered man, his dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. He carried an unlit lantern and walked with slow steps, rubbing a sore shoulder. The path he chose to leave the mine led him directly in front of the steam engine, exactly where the main exhaust pipe, as wide as a man's leg, pointed toward the stone ground.
High up on the platform, Nils felt his own hands trembling with fatigue. The strenuous routine of attention had taken its toll. The operator saw that most of the miners had already passed to the other side of the camp. Exhaustion blinded his judgment and erased the senior knight's repetitive warning from his juvenile mind.
Why scream until his throat was raw if there didn't seem to be anyone close enough to care?
Nils grabbed the brown lever with both hands. It was stiff and jammed, requiring force. He gritted his teeth, closed his eyes to gather strength, and in a sudden movement, pulled it back with all his weight.
In that exact millisecond, Titus stepped directly into the kill zone, head down, totally oblivious to the metallic sound of the valve opening over the general roar of the engine. The boiler, boiling under extreme pressure for hours, found its escape route.
In the shadows, Arthur did not hesitate. He didn't shout, because the speed of sound would be useless against the speed of the superheated gas. He used his mind.
His Magic Power, focused and trained through the System's relentless statistics, activated. Arthur felt the familiar, deep pull in his consciousness, a cold pressure at the base of his skull. His eyes locked onto Titus's back. He didn't need theatrical hand gestures; level eight Telekinesis was a pure extension of his will.
He visualized an invisible, gigantic hand made of pure conceptual steel, grabbing Titus by his heavy shoulders and the collar of his coal-stained tunic.
PULL.
The world around him seemed to slow down to Arthur's perception.
With a piercing roar that sounded like the scream of an enraged metallic dragon, the superheated steam exploded from the exhaust pipe. A dense white cloud, carrying enough temperature to instantly cook human flesh to the bone, shot out in a straight line, striking the exact spot in the air where Titus's face had been a fraction of a second ago.
But Titus was no longer there.
Under the invisible force of Arthur's mind, the heavy body of the grizzled miner was violently yanked from the ground. Titus was thrown backward, flying through the air with the brutality of someone run over by a galloping horse. He flew three meters and landed with a dull thud on his back in the semi-frozen mud, the air knocked from his lungs in a dry groan.
The blast of deadly steam hit the stone floor and ricocheted, instantly melting the accumulated ice and turning the area into an infernal sauna for a few seconds. The residual heat swept over Titus's fallen body, hot enough to singe the hairs on his arms, but causing no real damage.
Up on the platform, Nils opened his eyes after pulling the lever and froze. His heart stopped. The color drained from his face, leaving him as white as a corpse. Through the dissipating curtain of white steam, he saw the scene: the area in front of the pipe bathed in scalding heat and, further back, Titus thrown in the mud, groaning in pain from the fall, but with his face completely intact.
Nils let go of the lever, his legs giving way under the pure terror of realization. He knew what he had just done. He had almost boiled the man who protected him alive. Horror locked his throat.
Titus sat up slowly in the mud, coughing. He looked at the steaming metal pipe, felt the oppressive heat still lingering in the air just inches away, and, in a lapse of retrospective horror, realized he had come within a hair's breadth of death and eternal disfigurement. He began to tremble uncontrollably, his eyes wide in shock.
The other miners began to yell, running toward Titus, confused as to what had thrown him away with such sudden force, but clearly seeing the danger of the boiling smoke.
It was then that Arthur stepped out of the shadows, his footsteps silent and firm against the snow. He parted the gathered miners with the sheer force of his presence. The strategist's cold, cutting gaze fell upon the trembling operator on the platform.
— "You closed your eyes," — Arthur's voice was not a shout, but it cut through the noise of the machine and the commotion of the miners like an ice razor. He stopped next to Titus, looking up at Nils. — "The main rule, the only damned safety rule that differentiates this machine from a bomb about to explode, is the warning before the exhaust. And you pulled the lethal valve with your eyes closed and in absolute silence." —
Nils swallowed hard, tears of mixed panic and relief streaming down his soot-stained face. He tried to speak, stammering, but no words came out.
— "Get up, extra," — Arthur ordered, extending his gloved hand to Titus, the older miner.
Titus, still in shock, accepted the well-dressed man's hand and was pulled to his feet. He looked at Arthur with frightened reverence, not understanding how he had been saved, feeling only that a divine force had pulled him away from the mouth of hell.
— "Thank the gods, or sheer luck, Titus," — Arthur said, methodically brushing the dirt off the miner's shoulder. He then turned back to Nils, pointing his index finger with military precision. — "And you, boy. If I hadn't been inspecting this area just now, this man's blood and melted skin would be on your hands, and His Royal Highness would make sure you rotted in the dungeons. Your negligence is unacceptable. When the machine cools down, get off there. You are suspended from operating the machinery until further notice." —
Nils nodded frantically, falling to his knees on the wooden platform, muttering incoherent thanks and pleas for forgiveness. The crowd of miners watched Arthur with a mix of awe and profound respect, recognizing the cold authority emanating from him, an immediate justice that saved one of their own and punished the mistake without shedding blood.
Arthur turned his back on the chaotic scene and began walking back the way he came, moving away from the noise of the mine. He shoved his hands into his overcoat pockets.
Suddenly, the sound he had been waiting for echoed softly in the back of his mind, a crystalline chime that masked the howl of the blizzard. The translucent blue interface blinked before his eyes, superimposed over the white landscape.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: TIMELINE ANOMALY DETECTED]
The direction of the original story has shifted for the better. Outcome: Salvation from collateral damage to a tertiary character (Titus) and respect as an authority in Border Town (from the miners).
[REWARD: +60 Credits]
[CURRENT BALANCE: 80 Credits]
A thin smile, sharp as the point of a dagger, formed on Arthur's lips behind his wool scarf.
Seventy credits. A formidable harvest for a few seconds of mental effort. With this, he could already raise his Telekinesis from level eight to level ten. He felt the power growing in his veins, the ability to distort the material world expanding with every life he manipulated in the web of that universe.
Nana didn't get her chance to heal the unhealable today. The legend of Border Town's 'little angel' witch would have to wait. The commoners around the mine shaft were whispering not about healing magic, but about the invisible miracle and the icy authority of the Prince's advisor.
— "I'm sorry, little healer," — Arthur whispered to the lonely snow, feeling the magic power humming alive in his brain, preparing him for the real monsters that would soon knock on the gates. — "But in this world, invisible strength is worth far more than miracles of blood." —
.
.
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[DIMENSIONAL SYSTEM]
User: [Arthur]
Location: North Slope, Kingdom of Graycastle.
[Attributes]
Strength: 6
Speed: 7
Endurance: 8
Agility: 8
Intelligence: 14
Magic Power: 10 [Telekinesis]