Dawn broke over Border Town on the second morning of the winter campaign with a pale, brittle clarity, the weak rays of the rising sun struggling to pierce the heavy gray cloud cover and reflecting off the vast expanse of blood-stained snow.
Throughout the winding streets of the commoners' quarter and along the barracks yard, the entire town let out a collective breath of relief. Lulled into a comforting sense of security by the monumental, frost-covered carcass of the twenty-ton Hybrid Beast lying dead seven meters in front of the unbroken concrete rampart, the miners and bricklayers went about their morning shifts believing the worst of the storm had already broken against Prince Roland's wall.
Up on the second floor of the main castle keep, however, inside the quiet administrative annex connected to the royal study, the atmosphere was one of dense, calculating silence.
Behind a broad oak desk buried under stacks of tax rolls, grain receipts, and coal ledgers sat Assistant Minister Barov Mons.
Normally, the aging bureaucrat lived and breathed for the columns of numbers on his parchments. This morning, however, Barov's quill hadn't moved in ten minutes. His watery, tired eyes kept darting furtively across the stone room toward the tall figure lounging comfortably in a padded velvet armchair beside the hearth.
It was Count Arthur.
Dressed in his immaculate, tailored dark-gray wool suit, the twenty-four-year-old strategist sat with one leg crossed smoothly over the other, taking an unhurried sip from a porcelain cup of steaming black tea as he turned the pages of a thick, leather-bound tome detailing the historical geography and noble bloodlines of the neighboring Kingdom of Wolfheart.
Every time Barov looked at the calm, pale-faced young scholar across the room, the old minister felt his stomach twist into a cold knot—a bitter mixture of professional jealousy and bone-deep, instinctive fear.
Staring at the back of the leather book in Arthur's hands, Barov's mind drifted involuntarily back to a late, gloomy afternoon in this exact room four days earlier—a five-minute confrontation that had permanently shattered the old man's authority.
That afternoon, right before the first snow had fallen, Barov had stayed late in the annex after the clerks left.
For three weeks, the former apprentice to the royal Marquis of the Treasury had watched in growing resentment as this twenty-something foreigner from the "Kingdom of Dawn" systematically dismantled thirty years of traditional feudal administration. Without consulting Barov once, Arthur had redesigned the wage scales, bypassed Longsong Stronghold's merchant guild, reorganized the North Slope mining shifts, and gained Prince Roland's absolute, unquestioning ear.
Convinced that the young upstart was maneuvering to strip him of his post as Assistant Minister, Barov had waited until they were alone by the fireplace to play the one trump card he had been secretly nursing since the day the two foreigners arrived.
— "Count Arthur," — Barov had begun, puffing out his chest and infusing his voice with the haughty weight of a veteran official who had served twenty years in the Ministry of Finance in King's City. — "Before I lock the ledgers for the evening, there is a small matter of curiosity that has been nagging at me. In my decades at the royal court, I have spoken extensively with envoys, spice merchants, and highborn lords from all Four Kingdoms. You and Commander William claim to hail from an aristocratic house in the Kingdom of Dawn. Yet... your accents. The clipped rhythm of your sentences, and the way the two of you roll certain consonants when you speak quickly. That is not the courtly dialect of Dawn, nor is it from any province in Graycastle. It is something else entirely."
Sitting in the velvet armchair by the fire, Arthur hadn't flinched, nor had his dark eyes widened by a fraction of a millimeter.
Slowly, the strategist had closed the ledger in his lap, resting his clasped hands atop the leather cover as a cold, polite smile curved his lips without ever reaching his eyes.
— "Your ear for phonetics is remarkably sharp, Minister Barov. Worthy of a man who survived the vipers of King Wimbledon III's court," — Arthur had replied without missing a beat. — "The explanation, however, is entirely mundane. While William and I were born to a noble estate in Dawn, we spent the vast majority of our youth and adult years managing maritime shipping ventures out in the Fjord Islands. As you know, the Fjords are a chaotic melting pot of a dozen seafaring cultures. When you spend ten years negotiating contracts every day with captains from across the outer seas, your native mainland accent inevitably erodes and blends into an isolated island dialect."
On the surface, the excuse was seamless—every merchant in Graycastle knew the Kingdom of Dawn dominated the Fjord trade routes.
Yet Barov hadn't bought it. As the old bureaucrat had stared into Arthur's unblinking dark eyes in the dim firelight, a far darker, more superstitious terror had crept into his mind.
Ever since the morning of Anna's execution, Prince Roland has acted like a completely different human being! Barov had thought, a bead of cold sweat trickling down the back of his wrinkled neck. And the very same hour the Prince changed, these two mysterious men in bizarre clothes walked through the castle gates and started feeding him insane ideas about mud walls and employing witches! What if they aren't scholars from Dawn at all?! What if they are male servants of the Devil—heretics in disguise who used dark witchcraft to possess His Highness's mind and now want to get rid of me so they can control the treasury?!
— "I know the exact words running through your head right now, Barov," — Arthur's voice had cut through the quiet room like a surgical scalpel, making the old minister jump violently in his chair.
Uncrossing his legs, Arthur had stood up from the armchair and walked slowly across the stone floor until he was standing directly in front of Barov's desk. Leaning forward slightly, the tall strategist planted both gloved palms flat against the oak wood, looking down at the bureaucrat with a gaze as heavy and suffocating as winter ice.
— "You are sitting there wondering if William and I are servants of the abyss," — Arthur had said softly, his voice dropping to a low, clinical murmur. — "You are wondering if we used some foul witchcraft to bewitch the Fourth Prince, and you view me as a political predator who intends to have you thrown out into the snow because you recognize—however grudgingly—that my administrative math renders your old ledgers obsolete."
Barov's jaw had dropped open, the color draining completely from his jowls.
— "However, you can put your superstitious Church paranoia to bed, Minister," — Arthur had continued, tilting his head a fraction of an inch as his dark eyes locked onto the high, buttoned collar of Barov's velvet doublet. — "Using witchcraft to cloud your mind or the Prince's mind in this room would be physically impossible. After all... you have been wearing a God's Stone of Retaliation on a silver chain beneath your undershirt every single day since you arrived in Border Town. Haven't you?"
Barov had frozen as if turned to salt, his liver-spotted hands trembling so violently against the desk that his inkwell rattled.
How could he know that?! Barov had literally thought those exact words about the Devil five seconds ago, and he had never once shown his personal family Stone of Retaliation to a single soul in Border Town!
— "H-How...?" — Barov had stammered, shrinking back against the wood of his chair in sheer terror. — "How in the name of the gods do you know what I was thinking—and how do you know what is under my shirt?!"
— "Relax your heart rate, old man. It isn't sorcery, and I don't need magic to read an ordinary bureaucrat," — Arthur had replied, a trace of cold disdain flickering across his features. — "Pupil dilation, the micro-expressions around your mouth whenever I mention the witches, the change in your breathing rhythm, and the hexagonal imprint pressing against your linen shirt whenever you lean over the desk to hide your notes from me... To an analyst trained to read human behavior at my level, your skull might as well be made of clear glass."
Straightening his back, Arthur had clasped his hands behind his dark suit, his tone shifting seamlessly from a lethal threat to a corporate negotiation:
— "Now, listen to me very carefully, because I will only say this once," — Arthur had stated. — "I have zero interest in stealing your title as Assistant Minister. Counting tax coppers, weighing sacks of barley, and arguing with pig farmers in the town hall is clerical drudgery; I am more than happy to leave the day-to-day bureaucracy of this town in your hands. However... in exchange for me not advising His Highness tomorrow morning to retire you to a quiet cottage and replace you with a younger clerk who asks fewer questions about my accent... you are going to do me a small, quiet favor."
Swallowing hard against a bone-dry throat, completely crushed by the young man's suffocating presence, Barov had nodded weakly: — "W-What favor, My Lord?"
— "I want a God's Stone of Retaliation," — Arthur had ordered coldly. — "Keep the family heirloom around your own neck; I don't want yours. As head of the local treasury, I know your office holds three confiscated Church medallions in the strongbox from tax seizures last autumn. Bring one of them to this study tomorrow morning, drop it into my hand, and erase its entry from the inventory ledger. Do that, and you and I will never have a conversation about accents or the Kingdom of Dawn again. Do we have an understanding?"
Blinking his watery eyes, Assistant Minister Barov snapped back to the present morning, shivering slightly as he watched Arthur calmly turn another page of the Wolfheart history book across the room.
Barov had delivered that hexagonal Stone of Retaliation at dawn the very next day without a single squeak of protest. With magic or without magic, the old minister knew a predator when he was locked in a cage with one—and he knew that not even ten Stones of Retaliation around his neck could protect his career from Count Arthur's mind.
Across the room in the velvet armchair, however, Arthur wasn't paying a single shred of attention to Barov's nervous glances, nor was he actually absorbing the text of the Wolfheart book in his hands.
Focused ten inches in front of his dark eyes—completely invisible to the old bureaucrat across the room—hovered a translucent blue interface bordered by a pulsing, urgent crimson-and-gold frame that had woken Arthur up at sunrise.
Since the afternoon a month ago when the System had triggered [THE TURNING POINT] to ensure Anna wasn't hanged in the town square, the interface had operated purely as a passive sandbox—never issuing mandatory orders, and simply paying out credit bonuses whenever Arthur or William went out of their way to derail a tragedy in the canonical timeline.
This morning, however, the System had issued its second formal directive:
[MAIN QUEST TRIGGERED: THE TURNING POINT II]
Objective:Prevent the winter massacre of the Witch Cooperation Association caravan in the Impassable Mountain Range and secure the surviving members.
Reward:Complete Unlocking of the Host's [Magical Evolution] Sub-System + Credit Bounty Scaled to Survival Count.
When Arthur had first read that notification over his morning tea an hour ago, his initial reaction had been a sharp frown.
Just four days ago in the third-floor corridor, right before the granary ambush, he and William had screamed at each other over this exact topic. From a purely macro-strategic standpoint, Arthur had despised the idea of abandoning the warm, fortified safety of Border Town to trek into the sub-zero, miasma-choked deathtrap of the Impassable Mountain Range while William played the reckless hero.
Yet as Arthur lowered his eyes to his black-gloved right hand resting on the arm of the chair, his perspective had undergone a complete one-eighty.
Four days ago, he had been sitting at Magic Power: 1—a physically ordinary strategist whose only weapon was his brain.
Today, after harvesting sixty credits at the North Slope steam engine and another 170 credits from orchestrating the execution of the Hybrid Beast yesterday afternoon, his Telekinesis sat at a terrifying Level 10—with nearly enough reserve credits sitting in his bank to push it to Level 14!
Yesterday, from eighty-five paces away inside a closed watchtower, he had effortlessly lifted a human being into the sky while accelerating thirty-six steel rods past seven hundred miles per hour to punch through a twenty-ton monster's skull.
With that kind of omnidirectional kinetic dominance at his fingertips, Arthur was no longer a fragile mortal who needed to cower behind concrete walls. He knew with absolute, mathematical certainty that if he walked into the northern mountain passes right now, he wouldn't just survive—he could run into not merely one or two scouting Demons, but an entire ten-demon vanguard squad, and snap every single one of their necks from a hundred paces away without getting a speck of snow on his dark overcoat!
And look at the reward sitting on the table: [Magical Evolution].
Rescuing the Witch Cooperation Association was no longer a suicidal charity mission for "extras"; it was a high-yield corporate acquisition that would hand Border Town dozens of combat and production witches while unlocking the next tier of Arthur's own godhood.
Click-creak.
The soft sound of the brass doorknob turning broke the quiet of the study.
The heavy oak door opened a few inches, and seventeen-year-old Anna peeked inside. Completely ignoring Assistant Minister Barov at his desk, her bright blue eyes locked straight onto Arthur in the corner.
Slipping quietly across the flagstones, Anna stopped beside the arm of Arthur's velvet chair and leaned down slightly, speaking in a whisper barely loud enough to reach his ear:
— "Sir Arthur... do you have a moment to speak with me in private?"
— "Of course, Miss Anna," — Arthur replied smoothly, closing the thick Wolfheart tome with a soft thump and setting it neatly on the side table.
Rising from his chair, he escorted the young witch out into the hallway and pulled the study door shut behind them, leaving Barov alone with his sweating paranoia.
Walking side by side down the cold, deserted stone gallery of the second floor—well out of earshot of Carter's stairwell sentries—Anna kept her hands tucked inside her wool cloak and looked straight ahead.
— "I did exactly as you asked yesterday afternoon," — Anna reported quietly, her voice calm and earnest. — "When His Highness questioned me in his office—and after I asked Miss Nightingale to leave the room—I told him only about how I forged and heated the steel needles. I did not reveal to either of them that you were the one holding me in the air from the watchtower, nor did I breathe a word about your Telekinesis or our talk in the corridor. Your secret is safe."
Arthur stopped walking in the middle of the sunlit stone passage and turned to face her.
Looking down at the seventeen-year-old girl who had stood firm under the direct questioning of the Prince she adored just to honor her word to him, Arthur raised his gloved right hand and gently patted the top of Anna's orange-red head twice.
It was a brief, chaste gesture that carried the warm, composed authority of a proud older brother or a mentor rewarding a star pupil.
— "Thank you, Anna. You handled a difficult situation brilliantly," — Arthur said, his baritone voice soft, warm, and deeply convincing. — "You have proven yourself to be the most reliable partner I could ask for in this castle. I know I can count on you."
Having the tall, normally untouchable strategist pat her head and praise her so openly made Anna's breath catch slightly; a warm, rosy blush crept up her cheeks as she looked up at him, though the burning scientific question Roland had planted in her mind the evening before quickly resurfaced.
— "Since we are speaking openly, Sir Arthur... may I ask you one question?" — Anna asked, biting her lower lip slightly in hesitation. — "Yesterday evening in the study, His Highness mentioned that Miss Nightingale cannot get within five meters of you inside her Mist because you carry a God's Stone of Retaliation in your pocket. Is that true? And if it is... how are you able to use Telekinesis while touching it, and why do you carry one at all? Though if it is another secret you cannot share, I won't press."
Arthur lowered his hand from her hair and rested his palm lightly against the right exterior pocket of his dark wool overcoat—directly over the cold hexagon of the stone.
— "With you, Anna, there is no reason to hide the logic," — Arthur replied, his expression shifting into serious, confiding candor. — "As for why the stone doesn't cancel my Telekinesis: as I told you two nights ago, my power comes from my mind and the system of our home world, which operates on a completely different wavelength than a witch's Magic Core. As for why I carry it in my pocket... the answer is simple: self-preservation."
Anna frowned slightly, tilting her head in genuine confusion. — "Self-preservation? Sir Arthur, yesterday you lifted me into the sky from eighty paces away and killed a seven-meter Hybrid Beast in a blink of an eye. Who in this castle could possibly threaten you?"
— "Against physical threats—the broadsword of a traitor, a crossbow bolt fired from an alley, or the claws of a twenty-ton monster—my Telekinesis is an impenetrable shield," — Arthur explained patiently, his dark eyes holding hers. — "However, my mental radar is designed to track physical mass and kinetic movement. Against the ethereal, non-physical abilities of unknown witches, even my mind has blind spots. Do you remember what I told His Highness in the hallway outside the dungeon on the morning we first met you? 'Witches are, first and foremost, ordinary human beings.'"
Anna nodded slowly, remembering every word of the speech that had defended her in front of Carter Lannis.
— "And because witches are human beings, Anna, that carries a brutal statistical corollary," — Arthur continued softly. — "Just as there are selfless, extraordinarily brave women like you and little Nana, there are also witches out in the world who have been twisted into selfish, unstable, or ruthless killers. An unseen, non-physical magic—an odorless compulsion, a curse carried on the air, or an invisible blade reaching out from another dimension—could sever my carotid artery before my conscious mind even registered an attack. Carrying a God's Stone of Retaliation ensures that no hostile native magic can ever come within five meters of my body."
He paused for a beat, letting that ironclad survival logic sink into her pragmatic mind before adding a second, more personal truth:
— "Beyond physical security, there is also a matter of basic human dignity," — Arthur said, his eyes narrowing a fraction of an inch. — "I value my privacy, Anna. Miss Nightingale possesses a passive magical field that automatically scrutinizes the heartbeat and words of everyone around her to detect whether they are lying. Having an invisible stranger follow me through the halls every day to audit my thoughts and my conversations feels like a constant violation of my free will."
Anna's blue eyes widened in genuine surprise. — "Miss Nightingale's magic can sense lies?"
— "Yes, and because it is passive, she doesn't turn it off," — Arthur confirmed calmly before slipping his gloved hand inside his coat pocket and pulling the silver chain halfway out so the dark crystal caught the morning light. — "Still... I know that to every witch in Graycastle, this stone is a symbol of the Church's gallows and torture cells. If knowing that I carry a Stone of Retaliation makes you uncomfortable around me, Anna, say the word and I will open this window and throw it into the river right now. Your trust is worth far more to me than a piece of rock."
— "No! Please, put it back in your pocket!" — Anna said immediately, shaking her head and reaching out half an inch as if to stop him from throwing it away.
To a girl as logical and unsentimental as Anna, Arthur's explanation made complete sense. He had no armor, he didn't have William's monstrous body, and keeping a five-meter shield against invisible threats while protecting his privacy wasn't an insult to her—it was simple common sense.
— "It doesn't offend me at all, Sir Arthur," — Anna said firmly, looking up at him with complete, unshakeable trust shining in her blue eyes. — "You are right to protect yourself. Please keep it with you at all times."
Tucking the stone smoothly back into his pocket, Arthur walked with her down the gallery until they reached the stone intersection leading toward the courtyard stairs.
Stopping at the corner, Arthur lowered his voice once more, fixing her with an intense, solemn look.
— "I am going to my quarters now to pack for an urgent expedition I will be making into the northern mountains very soon," — Arthur informed her quietly. — "Before I leave Border Town, however, I need to give you one critical warning about your own body. Because the timeline of this winter has accelerated since the Hybrid Beast's appearance, your Day of Awakening—your eighteenth birthday and the final surge of the Demonic Bite—is going to arrive much sooner than four months from now. In fact, it could happen within the next few nights."
Anna's breath caught slightly, remembering Nightingale's horrifying description of witches boiling from the inside out on their eighteenth birthday.
— "Do not be afraid. You are not going to die, and you won't even suffer," — Arthur assured her, his calm baritone carrying the absolute weight of prophecy. — "As William and I told Roland at the beginning, the Demonic Bite is simply an overflow of excess magical pressure inside a maturing vessel. From today until the night it strikes, I want you to treat your Magic Core like a bucket that must be kept completely empty. Every single evening before you get into bed, use your fire to heat the workshop bricks until you don't have a single drop of Magic Power left in your chest. If your vessel is at zero when the awakening surge hits at midnight, the new power will expand smoothly into the empty space without tearing a single nerve. And when you open your eyes the next morning, your flame will have evolved into a completely new state—an emerald-green fire capable of locking its temperature at will."
By now, Anna no longer questioned how Arthur knew the exact color and properties of a power she hadn't even awakened yet. To her, the tall strategist in the dark coat was a man who held the blueprint of the universe in his hands.
— "I will empty every drop of my power before sleep tonight, Sir Arthur. I promise," — Anna said, giving him a deep, grateful nod before turning down the stairs toward her workshop.
Five minutes later, Arthur stepped inside his private second-floor chamber at the end of the eastern wing, closed the heavy oak door behind him, and turned the iron key in the lock with a sharp clack.
The instant the bolt slid home, the warm, brotherly smile he had worn in the corridor vanished from his face as if wiped off a chalkboard.
Walking calmly across the flagstones to the tall lancet window overlooking the snow-covered roofs of Border Town, Arthur tucked both hands into the pockets of his overcoat and stared out at the gray sky—a thin, restrained smile of pure cynicism and intellectual disappointment curving his lips.
It really is almost pathetic how easy that was, Arthur thought, his Intelligence: 14 mind dissecting the ten-minute interaction in the hallway without a shred of romantic illusion.
Everything had played out with the exact, predictable simplicity of a mediocre webnovel.
Standing by the frosted glass, Arthur allowed his critical mind to run a ruthless psychological autopsy on the three main heroines of Release That Witch—the exact trio that readers on the internet back on Earth used to write thousands of comments arguing over.
To a cold realist like Arthur, all three of the story's primary female leads were painfully one-dimensional, artificially constructed archetypes designed to flatter a male protagonist's ego.
Take Anna, the girl he had just spoken to outside.
On paper, she possessed the most terrifyingly destructive offensive power in the castle and a brain that soaked up physics like a sponge. Yet psychologically? She had zero spine or independent ambition of her own to anchor that power. She was the textbook "rescue heroine" archetype—a girl so starved for basic human decency that the very first man who pulled her off the gallows and gave her a warm meal became the absolute center of her universe.
And Arthur had just proven how fragile that programming was in less than forty-eight hours! All it had taken was showing her a glimpse of his Telekinesis, telling her a sentimental story about how he had been ready to save her at the gallows, patting her head like a good girl, and pretending he was willing to throw his Stone of Retaliation out a window for her—and within two days, Prince Roland's most loyal devotee was looking up at Arthur with shining, dependent eyes and actively hiding critical intelligence from both Roland and Nightingale at his command! She wasn't a complex person; she was a blank canvas waiting for a smarter man to paint whatever directives he wanted onto her.
Then there was Nightingale.
Beneath her edgy assassin's cloak, her silver daggers, and her sarcastic banter, Veronica was cut from the exact same cloth of desperate emotional dependency. In the original novel, all it had taken for Roland to win her undying, self-sacrificing devotion after Cara's betrayal was a warm room, four hot meals a day, and a basket of dried fish. And in this timeline, because William had jumped into a tunnel, validation-bombed her trauma, and flashed his teeth at her, the deadliest killer in the Association was already melting into putty in his friend's hands. It was the oldest cliché in fiction: the abused stray cat that blindly worships the first hand that feeds it without kicking it.
And worst of all, in Arthur's estimation, was Wendy—the gentle wind witch currently marching with the Association caravan in the northern peaks.
Whenever Arthur thought of Wendy's characterization in the original work, he didn't even feel disdain; he felt a critic's irritation at a glaring flaw in basic human psychology.
Look at Wendy's biography: abandoned by her noble parents like unwanted trash at the doors of a strict Church convent as a child; raised in cold isolation; and the moment her magic awakened, the very same "holy" priests and nuns who had raised her conspired to drug her and sell her body into the disgusting hands of corrupt aristocrats to be used as a toy. After barely escaping that hell and enduring months of starvation, frostbite, and terror fleeing the Holy City of Hermes across the kingdom... how did Wendy behave?
She acted like an immaculate, ever-smiling saint who baked cookies, mothered everyone around her, and didn't harbor a single drop of venom or distrust in her soul!
To anyone who has ever studied real human trauma, that makes zero psychological sense, Arthur scoffed silently, watching the snow swirl against the windowpane. A girl who survives parental abandonment and an attempted betrayal into slavery by the Church doesn't come out the other side acting like a puritan nun. Real human psychology dictates that she would either develop the vicious, paranoid, acid-tongued defensive shell of a girl like young Lily—or she would despise mortal society altogether and turn into an unhinged, man-hating zealot like Cara! Wendy's unbreakable, saintly sweetness wasn't depth; it was lazy writing designed to give the protagonist a docile housewife to manage the Witch Union.
Arthur knew perfectly well why the fandom back on Earth had eaten those three up. Readers loved Anna because she was a compliant genius who solved every industrial problem without ever arguing or asking for power; they loved Nightingale because men have a narcissistic weakness for the tragic, devoted beauty who pines for the hero from the shadows; and as for Wendy, ninety percent of her popularity came down to her gentle smile and the author's constant emphasis on her generous figure.
In this entire world of overly emotional damsels and validation-starved warriors, there was only one witch in the entire narrative who had ever genuinely piqued Arthur's intellectual interest:
Leaf.
As the name crossed his mind, the cynical curve of Arthur's mouth shifted into a look of genuine, calculating appreciation.
To a strategist like Arthur, the forest witch Leaf was the only woman in the Witch Cooperation Association who actually behaved like a sane, battle-hardened survivor in a medieval death world.
First, Leaf possessed a healthy, razor-sharp paranoia. In the original novel, later in the winter when Nightingale returned to the starving survivors of the Association to tell them about the warm castle, delicious food, and "benevolent Prince" waiting for them in Border Town, all the other freezing witches had been eager to pack their bags and follow the fairy tale. Leaf alone had slammed on the brakes. Even after initially agreeing, she had let her deep, rational suspicion of human nobility override her hunger—refusing to blindly march her sisters into a royal lord's fortress until she knew for a fact it wasn't a velvet trap set by the Church or a greedy aristocrat. She operated on cold risk assessment, not fairy tales.
Second, when the chips were down, Leaf was ruthlessly decisive and lethal. When the Association's camp in the Impassable Mountain Range was ambushed by real Demons—terrifying, intelligent warriors that made grown knights wet themselves in terror—Leaf didn't scream, freeze up, or wait for a man to save her. She ordered her weaker sisters to retreat down the pass, planted her boots in the frozen earth to act as the rear guard alone, weaponized the entire forest canopy around her, and actually managed to outmaneuver and solo-kill an armored Demon warrior in one-on-one combat before escaping!
And third, she kept her dignity to herself. Unlike half the witches in the story who spilled their tragic backstories at the first sign of a warm handkerchief to garner sympathy, Leaf's past was never once exposed in the entire novel. She carried her scars in complete silence, minded her own business, and didn't throw her heart at a man's feet just because he gave her a hot bowl of soup.
Yet because the original author didn't know what to do with an independent, pragmatic woman who didn't fawn over the prince, Leaf had been criminally sidelined for the rest of the book—demoted to a background forester growing trees in the Misty Forest while simpler characters took center stage.
— "What a waste of high-grade potential," — Arthur murmured aloud, his warm breath fogging the cold glass of his bedroom window as he looked past the town roofs toward the towering, snow-choked peaks of the Impassable Mountain Range in the far north. — "Fortunately for you, Miss Leaf... the script is under new management now."
Before he went up that mountain, however, he had one small piece of business to settle.
With the 170 Credits from yesterday's Hybrid Beast kill added to the 60 Credits from the North Slope steam pipe—Wait: he had already spent the sixty plus twenty yesterday to reach Level 10, which meant right now his current balance from the Hybrid Beast stood at a crisp 170 Credits.
Mentally opening his attribute submenu right there beside the window, Arthur didn't save a single point for the shop. He grabbed 160 Credits out of the 170-credit balance and poured all four full attribute points straight into Magic Power [Telekinesis]—leaving ten credits in reserve and pushing his psychic core from Level 10 to a monstrous Level 14 to match his Intelligence: 14!
[TRANSACTION CONFIRMED: -160 CREDITS][MAGIC POWER: 10 -> 14]
A silent, breathtaking wave of golden density surged through his cerebral cortex, expanding his invisible dominion out to a massive hundred-and-fifty-pace radius and locking his mind and power into an absolute equilibrium of fourteen.
Turning away from the window, Arthur looked at the heavy black wool winter overcoat hanging on the wooden stand beside his door.
William could have his tearful reunions and his heroic speeches. Arthur was going up into the freezing hell of the Impassable Mountain Range to claim his evolution—and to ensure that the deadliest witch in the forest wasn't left in the background ever again.