A rough oak stool groaned loudly as William dropped his heavy frame onto it, kicking his boots out in front of him and crossing his arms over his black shirt with a predatory grin.
What had begun an hour ago as a quiet recruitment mission in the muddy alleys of the western slums had rapidly transformed into the very first high-level war council of Graycastle's new era.
Behind the massive oak desk, Roland Wimbledon leaned forward, resting his chin on his laced fingers like a commander studying a chessboard right before the opening bloodbath. Over by the stone fireplace, Arthur stood quietly in the warm glow, a quill and a sheet of blank parchment held ready on a wooden clipboard as his analytical mind tracked every variable in the room.
And standing dead center on the carpet — contrasting sharply with William's relaxed, modern posture — was Iron Axe.
Even after being named Deputy Commander of the new militia, the giant warrior from the Sand Nation refused to sit down in the presence of royalty, standing as straight and unmoving as an ancient desert oak that had weathered a hundred sandstorms.
— "You have survived for years hunting alone in that southern forest and tracking game along the lower ridges of the Impassable Mountain Range, Iron Axe," — Roland began, his voice grave and focused as it commanded the quiet study. — "If you and William are going to turn two hundred starving miners and farmers into a firing line that won't break and run at the first roar, I need hard intelligence on what we are facing. Military tactics are useless without knowing the enemy's biology. Tell me everything you know about the Demonic Beasts. How do they behave when the snow starts falling?"
Iron Axe blinked his dark, deep-set eyes once, letting out a slow breath as the bitter memories of past winters surfaced behind his gaze.
— "On the walk up to the castle, Your Highness, Instructor William asked me if I had ever killed one of those monsters with my own hands," — Iron Axe said, his deep voice carrying the rough, rolling accent of the southern sands. — "The answer is yes. Every winter, when the north wind freezes the upper peaks, dozens of them pour down the slopes toward the warmer valleys. Among the hunters of the frontier, we classify them primarily by the original animal species they mutated from. The two most common waves that hit Border Town are the demonic boars and the demonic wolves."
— "Original species?" — Roland frowned slightly, his modern engineer's brain immediately trying to categorize the phenomenon through biology and genetics. — "What exactly do you mean by that? Is it a forced evolutionary jump? Or a continuous physical mutation triggered by an external source?"
— "Species is simply the hunter's word for the base animal before the demonic change takes hold, Your Highness. It acts like a dark curse that multiplies both their savagery and their physical mass," — Iron Axe explained, stepping forward and resting one of his huge, scar-covered hands flat on the edge of the map table. — "The rule of the mountain is simple and brutal: the more lethal or resilient a normal beast is during the summer, the more monstrous its mutated form becomes during the Months of Demons. Whatever demonic miasma rolls down from the northern peaks, it pushes their natural advantages to an unnatural extreme. Take the wild boar, for instance."
Iron Axe paused for a second, his dark eyes staring at a blank spot on the stone wall as if watching an old hunt play out in front of him.
— "Even in autumn, a full-grown woodland boar is a walking battering ram of muscle, tusks, and foul temper," — the Mojin continued somberly. — "When the demonic transformation hits them, the coarse bristles along their spine and shoulders mat together, fusing with frozen mud, pine resin, and their own clotted blood until it hardens into a solid carapace along their backs and flanks. It becomes tougher than forged iron chainmail."
Iron Axe tapped his thick knuckles against the wooden stock of the prototype musket resting on the corner of the desk:
— "Before seeing Your Highness's thunder-weapon today, even if I positioned an elite marksman with a heavy military crossbow at fifty paces, an iron-tipped bolt fired straight at a demonic boar's shoulder would simply shatter or ricochet off its hide," — Iron Axe stated grimly. — "To bring a single boar down with a bow, you need superhuman calm to wait until it charges within ten paces, and put an arrow straight through its eye socket or up into the soft flesh of its throat — all while three hundred kilograms of bone and tusk are trying to trample you into paste."
Over by the fireplace, Arthur's quill scratched rapidly across the parchment, dutifully recording the armor-penetration estimates and weak spots for the future training manual, even though he already knew the general lore from the novel.
— "And the wolves?" — Roland asked, leaning closer.
— "The wolf species undergoes a far more insidious change," — Iron Axe continued, a barely noticeable shudder running across his broad shoulders. — "Unlike the boar, a demonic wolf's black fur offers only moderate protection against sharp steel. What makes them a nightmare is their speed and their pack intelligence. In the middle of a blinding snowstorm, they move like black ghosts across the ice; the eyes of an ordinary town guard cannot even track them."
The giant hunter traced three fingers across the map of Border Town, showing a classic pincer movement:
— "Worse still, they do not charge blindly in a single mob," — Iron Axe warned. — "They hunt in coordinated packs. Two or three of the largest wolves will feint at the front of a wooden palisade to draw the defenders' spears and torches, while the rest of the pack circles silently through the snowdrifts to rip open the flanks. To kill a full-grown demonic wolf with traps and bows, you cannot simply react in the moment; you must read the wind, predict their flanking path hours in advance, and lure them into spiked pits."
Roland nodded slowly, the pragmatic project manager inside his head immediately breaking the biological data down into engineering problems and mechanical solutions.
— "So the strong beasts grow natural armor plates, and the fast beasts gain higher speed and pack tactics," — Roland summarized, tapping his charcoal pencil against the desk. — "Facing them in the open woods with spears and bows would be suicide, I agree. However, at the end of the day, they are still bound by flesh and bone. They follow survival instincts, they feel pain, and they bleed. A solid wall of reinforced cement four meters high will completely neutralize the wolves' flanking speed, and concentrated volleys of lead bullets and cannon canister shot will tear right through the boars' mud armor."
Instead of looking relieved by the prince's logical breakdown, Iron Axe's expression darkened considerably.
The giant warrior swallowed hard, his throat dry, and the temperature inside the sunlit study seemed to drop several degrees.
— "The boars and the wolves are still bound by the rules of beasts, yes," — Iron Axe agreed quietly, his deep voice dropping to a heavy, haunted tone. — "And forgive my bluntness, Your Highness, but if the boars and wolves were the only things coming down from the peaks, Longsong Stronghold wouldn't lose veteran knights every single winter. They are merely the vanguard. They are nothing compared to the worst enemy our men might face at that wall."
Roland's fingers stopped twirling the charcoal pencil.
— "What could be worse than an armor-plated boar or a coordinated pack of wolves?" — Roland asked, frowning.
— "The worst, Your Highness... are the Hybrids," — Iron Axe whispered.
A silence as heavy as lead dropped over the office, so sudden that even the crackling of the logs in the fireplace seemed to quiet down.
— "Those things are not mutated animals; they are demons wearing flesh, spat straight out of the deepest pits of hell," — Iron Axe said, his dark eyes narrowing with genuine hatred and dread. — "Only the foulest corruption in the northern wastes could stitch together abominations like that. Three winters ago, deep in the southern timberlands, I encountered a Hybrid face-to-face. I survived only by a miracle."
Iron Axe described the memory with slow, chilling precision:
— "It had the massive, bone-crushing torso and claws of a cave bear, standing twice as tall as a man on its hind legs," — the Mojin said. — "Yet sprouting from its shoulder blades were a pair of leathery, bat-like wings spanning four paces across. It could not fly high into the clouds like an eagle, no... but with a single beat of those wings, it could leap over thirty paces of snowdrifts or clear a fortress palisade in a single bound to drop straight onto the heads of the archers behind it."
Slowly, ignoring royal etiquette entirely, Iron Axe reached up with both hands, untied the leather laces at the collar of his rough tunic, and pulled the heavy fabric down off his left shoulder.
Behind the desk, Roland's gray eyes widened slightly, and even Arthur lowered his clipboard an inch.
Cutting diagonally across the giant warrior's bronze chest — starting just below his left collarbone and carving all the way down past his ribs toward his stomach — was a horrific, jagged scar of raised silver-white tissue. The four parallel grooves were so deep and wide it looked as though Iron Axe had been raked by the iron anchor of a warship.
— "And the most terrifying thing about the Hybrid was not its claws or its wings, Your Highness... it was its mind," — Iron Axe continued quietly, pulling his tunic back up with fingers that trembled by a fraction of a millimeter. — "That creature possessed a cruel, calculating intelligence. No matter how I shifted with the wind, no matter how deep I buried myself in the freezing mud to mask my scent, or how long I held my breath in the brush, it knew I was there. It could sense my life force like a beacon in the dark."
Iron Axe's jaw clenched hard:
— "It wasn't hunting me because it was starving," — he whispered. — "It was bored. It toyed with me for two hours in the snow, cutting off my escape routes and slashing my chest open just to watch me bleed before delivering the final blow. I only survived because I threw myself off a cliff into the half-frozen rapids of the Redwater River. Once the icy water carried me miles downstream out of its hunting territory, it didn't bother chasing me."
Behind the oak desk, Roland felt a bead of cold sweat trickle down the back of his neck.
Reading about monsters in a dusty report was one thing; seeing a two-meter apex warrior like Iron Axe show a scar that had nearly cut him in half was a sobering reality check.
A four-meter cement wall and thirty flintlock muskets would easily shred ground-based boars and wolves. But if a two-ton bear-monster with leathery wings could track human body heat like a thermal radar and glide right over the wall into the middle of the reload line, their "impenetrable defense" would turn into a slaughterhouse in sixty seconds.
— "These Hybrid abominations..." — Roland swallowed, keeping his voice steady by sheer willpower. — "They are extremely rare during the winter waves, correct?"
— "Thankfully, yes, Your Highness," — Iron Axe nodded solemnly. — "During the four Months of Demons, usually only two or three mixed-species Hybrids appear across the entire western border. If they came in packs like the wolves, even the high stone walls of Longsong Stronghold would have fallen decades ago."
The heavy, grim atmosphere in the study hung like a funeral shroud.
For two seconds, nobody spoke.
And then—
— "Pffft... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
Out of nowhere, a loud, booming burst of completely genuine laughter erupted from the oak stool in the center of the room, shattering the dark tension like a brick thrown through a church window.
William threw his head back, slapping his palm hard against his knee as his laughter echoed off the stone walls, laughing so hard he practically had to wipe an imaginary tear from the corner of his eye.
Standing two paces away, Iron Axe froze, staring down at the laughing young man with a mixture of stunned disbelief and rising, murderous fury.
— "Oh, man... I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" — William wheezed, waving a hand in the air as he finally caught his breath and grinned up at the giant hunter. — "Are you being serious right now, Deputy Commander? You're telling that story like the world is about to end! A winged bear with an attitude problem scratched your chest three years ago and you guys talk about it like it's the apocalypse? Man, the hunters in this kingdom are way too dramatic!"
A thick vein bulged violently against the side of Iron Axe's tattooed neck.
He was a proud warrior of the Mojin clans and the deadliest survivor on the frontier; having his near-death experience mocked to his face pushed his temper straight to the boiling point.
— "Dramatic?" — Iron Axe took a heavy, menacing step toward the stool, his deep voice dropping to a low growl that vibrated in the floorboards. — "Watch your mouth, Instructor. I do not care if you have the Prince's favor. If you think facing a winged demon that can tear an armored warhorse in half with a single swipe is a joke, perhaps you should stay locked inside this warm castle when the snow falls and let the real men hold the wall!"
— "Locked inside the castle? Listen to yourself, big guy," — William's playful grin twisted into pure, arrogant swagger as he stood up from the wooden stool in one fluid, explosive motion.
Rolling his broad shoulders until his neck bones popped loudly, William stepped right into Iron Axe's personal space, looking up into the giant's furious eyes without a shred of fear. What Iron Axe didn't know was that William's natural talent for trash-talking was about to join forces with Arthur's master plan.
— "Back in the land where Arthur and I came from, crossing paths with a pathetic two-species Hybrid like that is what we call a light morning warm-up before breakfast," — William lied with the smooth, unblinking confidence of a man discussing yesterday's weather. — "We've put down dozens of mixed demonic beasts, triple-mutated freaks, and things way uglier than a bear with bat wings. You want to know the truth about Hybrids? Once you stop shaking in your boots, they're just big, dumb targets with predictable attack patterns."
Iron Axe looked two seconds away from drawing his hunting knife right in front of the prince.
The sheer, shameless audacity of the claim insulted everything the hunter knew about the world. He glanced sharply toward the oak desk, half-expecting Prince Roland to scold his advisor for spouting tavern lies during a war council — only to see Roland leaning forward with a strangely intense, curious gleam in his gray eyes.
— "You... actually expect me to believe that an unarmored man of flesh and bone killed a Hybrid?" — Iron Axe rasped, his voice dripping with disbelief as he looked William up and down. — "With your bare hands? Alone?"
— "It was a black-maned lion fused with the stone scales of a basilisk lizard, about the size of a carriage," — William elaborated smoothly, raising his large hands to mimic the grapple as if he had lived every second of it. — "The ugly bastard dove straight at my head from a cliff. I didn't run. I sidestepped the claws, used its own falling momentum against it, locked a rear-naked choke around its windpipe while we hit the ground, and drove my knee straight through the weak spot behind its skull until its neck snapped. Took me less than thirty seconds. Turned the thing into a nice living room rug."
Dead silence fell over the room once again, only this time it was the silence of pure, stunned absurdity.
Iron Axe stared at William with a completely blank expression, his brain caught between two equally impossible conclusions: either this modern giant was the greatest god of war to ever walk the earth, or he was a complete lunatic who was going to die in the first five minutes of winter.
Behind the oak desk, however, Roland recognized the golden opportunity sitting right in front of him.
Cheng Yan knew William had a loud mouth, sure, but he also knew that Arthur would never let William spout a story this wild without a cold, calculated reason behind it. More importantly, it was the perfect opening for Roland himself to test a question that had been nagging at him for days: why did these two scholars move with physical coordination and confidence that far exceeded normal humans?
— "William," — Roland's voice rang out, calm, imperial, and cutting through the tension as he leaned both elbows on the desk. — "Your hunting stories from the Reino da Aurora are always fascinating to hear. However, Deputy Commander Iron Axe raises a perfectly valid biological question. You are clearly a strong man, yes, and your martial arts are refined. Yet the skeletal structure and muscle fibers of a normal human body simply cannot withstand the kinetic impact of a two-ton predator diving from the sky. If you and Arthur truly fought beasts of that caliber without the heavy artillery we are building here, there must be a logical method behind it that we can understand."
Over in the quiet shadow by the fireplace, the corners of Arthur's mouth curved upward by a single millimeter.
And there it is. The fish just bit the second hook, Arthur thought with pure strategic satisfaction.
Catching Arthur's subtle nod out of the corner of his eye, William shifted gears like a professional stage actor.
In a single breath, the loud, arrogant smirk vanished from William's face, replaced by a solemn, guarded, and deeply mysterious expression. He glanced slowly toward the closed oak door and the balcony window, acting as if he were checking for Church spies hiding under the floorboards.
— "Your Highness asks the exact right question," — William began, dropping his voice to a low, conspiratorial tone that immediately hooked the superstitious warrior instinct of Iron Axe. — "Normally, Arthur and I are forbidden by oath from speaking of this to outsiders, as it is the highest combat secret of our order."
Crossing his arms behind his back, William paced slowly across the carpet like an ancient grandmaster deciding whether to pass down a forbidden scroll.
— "Obviously, I cannot teach you the internal breathing formulas today, Axe," — William said, stopping and looking the Mojin dead in the eye. — "We were not born with dragon scales, nor were we blessed by the Church's gods. The reason a human body can match a monster lies in a forgotten branch of physical science. When Arthur and I were trapped in that glowing cavern down in the Fjord Islands, the second encyclopedia we studied didn't just contain recipes for cement and iron. It contained a physical conditioning method from the era before the collapse."
Iron Axe's dark eyes widened slightly.
To a warrior of the southern clans — where oral legends of ancient desert kings and lost ruins were revered like gospel — the words "era before the collapse" hit a deep cultural nerve.
— "By combining strict anatomical study with the rhythmic breathing techniques written on those white pages," — William continued, effortlessly blending every martial arts movie and cultivation manhwa cliché he had ever read on Earth into a masterpiece of a lie, — "a practitioner can manually open the dormant energy channels inside the human nervous system. It removes the natural mental limiters on muscle contraction and bone density, allowing a disciplined warrior to project bursts of speed, strength, and spatial awareness far beyond common men. In our order, we call this discipline Pure Arcane Magic — the science of honing the mortal vessel to its absolute peak."
When William finished speaking, it looked as though someone had struck Iron Axe across the chest with an invisible warhammer.
The Mojin warrior's mind was spinning.
Men who could push their mortal bodies past human limits and strangle a Hybrid beast without needing the Church's holy blessings or a witch's demonic bloodline, purely by unlocking ancient knowledge from the Fjord ruins?
Suddenly, everything about William made total sense to Iron Axe.
It explained why this foreigner had walked alone into the forest clearing with zero fear of a two-handed axe; it explained his flawless center of gravity, his strange clothes, and the unshakable confidence in his eyes. Iron Axe no longer felt like he had been recruited by a desperate, exiled prince about to get slaughtered by the winter snow — he felt as though he had just been invited into the inner circle of two legendary masters who held the lost combat secrets of the ancient world!
Standing by the fireplace, Arthur smoothly lowered his eyes to his clipboard to hide his grin.
The seed of "Pure Arcane Magic" had just been planted in fertile soil, right in front of both Iron Axe and Roland.
It was the ultimate preventative vaccine against future suspicion. Later on, during the heat of battle against the demonic beasts or the Church, if William ever had to move at Speed 11, punch through a shield with Strength 9, or even use a short-range Teleportation jump in the middle of gunpowder smoke — or if Arthur used his Telekinesis to deflect an arrow — nobody would scream "male witch!" Both Iron Axe and Roland himself would simply nod and attribute any superhuman feat to the "ancient physical training techniques" they had memorized from the vanished book!
As the tension in the room settled into a heavy, respectful awe, Arthur studied the tall warrior from the Sand Nation, his memory pulling up the background lore of the Mojin clan.
In the history of this continent, the Mojin of the far south were a proud, tragic people who believed themselves to be the descendants of ancient stone giants, forged by the merciless expansion of the desert sands. Driven north by famine and southern wars, Iron Axe hadn't even kept his birth name among the people of Graycastle, accepting the blunt, utilitarian nickname the miners had given him for his weapon of choice. You could see in the man's eyes that he carried a bloody, painful past buried under the desert sand — a past he desperately wanted to leave behind by finding a new home worth dying for.
And for a pragmatic ruler like Prince Roland, a man's tragic past didn't matter; inside the industrial machine they were building, every skilled outcast was a priceless gear waiting to be locked into place.
— "No matter how terrifying the Hybrids or the winter blizzards may be," — Roland said, his voice ringing with calm, magnetic authority as he pulled open the top drawer of his oak desk, — "under my banner, anyone who sweats, bleeds, and fights for this wall is an honored citizen of Border Town."
Reaching into the drawer, Roland pulled out a heavy, bulging pouch of stitched leather and tossed it across the desk.
Clink-chink!
Even before Iron Axe caught the leather pouch out of the air by pure reflex, the unmistakable, heavy chime of precious metal echoed through the study.
When the giant hunter loosened the drawstring and looked inside, his breath caught in his throat: resting in his palm were ten gleaming silver royals and a handful of freshly minted copper coins — a small fortune for an exile who had spent the morning skinning squirrels for pennies.
— "I did not summon you to my castle merely to tell me campfire stories about monsters, Iron Axe," — Roland declared, standing up behind his desk and looking straight at the warrior. — "That pouch is your signing advance. Starting from this exact hour, Lord William is officially the Commander-in-Chief of the First Army of Graycastle that we will forge here on the frontier. And you, by virtue of your battlefield experience and marksmanship, are appointed Deputy Commander with the rank of Knight-Captain. Your job is to drill discipline into our recruits, master the flintlock musket, organize the trench logistics, and ensure that when Commander William gives the order to fire, not a single man takes a step back."
Iron Axe closed his huge fingers around the leather pouch so tightly that the veins on his tattooed forearm bulged like ropes.
Years of spitting peasants, slamming doors, and freezing nights next to the graveyard seemed to evaporate in the warmth of that study. Today, he had been given an officer's rank, silver in his pocket, a weapon that spat thunder, and a place beside men who didn't look down on his blood.
Stepping back half a pace, Iron Axe dropped his right knee to the stone floor once again — only this time, he brought his clenched right fist straight across his heart and bowed his head until his brow nearly touched his knee, performing the sacred blood-oath of the Mojin clan warriors.
— "My life, my bow, and my axe belong to Your Highness," — Iron Axe swore, his deep voice vibrating with unbreakable conviction. — "And my loyalty belongs to Border Town and Commander William. Thank you for placing your trust in this dog of the sands. The men of the First Army will march wherever the Commander points... and I swear on my ancestors' bones that no boar, wolf, or Hybrid will breach our wall while I still draw breath!"