Frost clung to the battlements of Border Town like pulverized glass, biting straight through wool cloaks and boiled leather as the late autumn sun struggled to pierce the heavy gray clouds hanging over the northern peaks.
Down along the southern clearing between the North Slope and the churning waters of the Redwater River, the newly erected perimeter wall stood like a jagged spine of dark-gray stone. Cured from Anna's high-temperature clinker and Master Karl van Bate's tireless engineering, the twelve-foot concrete rampart was no longer a sketch on Prince Roland's desk; it was an immovable monolith waiting for the first wave of winter monsters.
In the packed-dirt training yard directly behind the central bastion, the rhythmic, synchronized thud of eighty pairs of heavy leather boots echoed like a giant heartbeat.
Standing on the wooden firing step overlooking the ranks, William let out a slow breath that turned into a thick plume of white vapor in the freezing air. His right shoulder still pulled slightly beneath its fresh linen bandage from the granary tunnel ambush the night before, yet with his Strength sitting at 16, the biting wind barely registered against his skin.
Instead of barking drills right away, William narrowed his eyes and let his newly unlocked System sub-function—[BIOMETRIC STATUS INSPECTION]—sweep across the four neat columns of recruits standing at attention below him.
Instantly, dozens of semi-transparent blue text windows flickered to life in the cold air just above the militiamen's heads, glowing with a soft light that only William could see.
Most of the numbers hovering over the former serfs, dockworkers, and mud-masons were painfully average: Strength: 6 | Speed: 6 | Endurance: 7 | Agility: 6 | Intelligence: 4.
A lifetime of eating watery gruel and hauling ore baskets in the dark doesn't exactly build Olympic athletes, William thought, his eyes scanning down the front line as he cross-referenced their physical parameters. Still, three weeks of hot meat stew, daily calisthenics, and Iron Axe's spear drills are already pushing their Endurance up. Nobody is slouching anymore.
Then, as William's gaze reached the third column on the left, one floating window stood out with a sharper, greenish-blue tint around its border.
It hovered above Van'er—a broad-shouldered former pickaxe miner from the North Slope whose calloused hands gripped his wooden practice pike like an iron vise.
[Target: Van'er]Strength: 7 | Speed: 8 | Endurance: 9 | Agility: 9 | Intelligence: 7
Agility 9 and Intelligence 7 on a guy who grew up in the slums? William raised an eyebrow, genuinely impressed as he studied the miner's steady posture and sharp, observant eyes. No wonder he picked up the reload cadence faster than anyone else in the yard yesterday. In a modern army, a guy with that kind of spatial coordination and calm head belongs in charge of a heavy weapons crew.
Just as William dismissed the floating windows, the crunch of gravel sounded from the rear ramp.
Prince Roland stepped onto the wooden platform alongside Chief Knight Carter Lannis and Deputy Commander Iron Axe, carrying a rolled bundle of charcoal blueprints under his arm.
Seeing the Prince arrive, the eighty recruits snapped their pikes upright against their shoulders with a single, sharp clack.
— "At ease, men," — Roland called out, his voice carrying clearly across the frosty yard as he unrolled his defensive sketches across a wooden supply crate.
Down in the front row of the third column, Van'er hesitated for half a heartbeat before taking a crisp, disciplined step forward, keeping his chin raised exactly as William had drilled into them.
— "Your Royal Highness! Commander William!" — Van'er spoke up, his voice hoarse from the cold morning air but steady. — "Permission to ask a question, sirs!"
Roland looked down from the parapet, a small, encouraging smile touching the corners of his mouth. Unlike the arrogant nobles of King's City who whipped commoners for speaking out of turn, Cheng Yan welcomed feedback from the men who actually had to hold the line.
— "Speak freely, Van'er," — Roland said.
The former miner turned his head slightly, gesturing with his chin toward the hundred-meter stretch of gray concrete spanning the gap between the cliff face and the Redwater River.
— "This new stone wall is a marvel, Your Highness. I hit it with a sledgehammer myself when we took the timber molds off, and it's harder than the bedrock in the North Slope," — Van'er said honestly. — "But the wall is long, My Lord. Even with all eighty of us standing shoulder-to-shoulder on this parapet, we are stretched thin. If five hundred demonic wolves and boars rush the full length of the wall at once—or if they pile their own dead bodies high enough to scramble over the top in two places at the same time—our spear line won't be able to pivot fast enough to plug the breach. We aren't afraid to bleed for you, Your Highness, but eighty men can't be everywhere at once."
A quiet murmur of agreement rippled through the ranks behind him. Several of the older quarrymen nodded grimly, remembering past winters when packs of mutated beasts had simply overwhelmed wooden palisades through sheer, suffocating numbers.
Stepping up beside Roland's map table, William crossed his arms over his navy-blue doublet and looked down at the sketches.
— "Van'er's math is spot-on, Roland," — William observed in a low voice. — "The concrete won't break, and our first batch of thirty flintlock muskets will punch through armor plates, but our troop density per square meter is dangerously low. While the riflemen are ramming powder down their barrels for a second volley, a fast pack of wolves can cover fifty yards."
— "Which is precisely why I have zero intention of spreading eighty men across a hundred meters of flat wall," — Roland replied calmly, tapping his charcoal pencil against the blueprint.
Raising his voice so that Van'er and the entire militia platoon could hear him, the Prince pointed out toward the open, muddy field in front of the wall.
— "Listen closely, all of you," — Roland announced. — "Old-fashioned medieval warfare treats a wall like a shield—you line men up along the top and trade blows with whatever climbs up. Modern defensive warfare is not about being a shield; it is about building a funnel."
Roland traced three interlocking triangles drawn in thick black lines across the map of the southern approach.
— "Starting this afternoon, Master Karl's masons and your own engineering squads are going to dig staggered, V-shaped trenches fifty paces in front of the main wall," — Roland explained, his gray eyes gleaming with the cold precision of an engineer. — "We will fill the outer ditches with sharpened iron-tipped stakes and tangle-wire forged by Anna, leaving only three narrow, winding dirt corridors open toward the center of the wall."
Down in the yard, Van'er's eyes widened slightly as his mind—sharper than that of an average laborer—immediately visualized the geometry of the dirt field.
— "Demonic beasts are driven by bloodlust and simple pack instincts," — Roland continued smoothly. — "When a charging boar or wolf hits a trench full of iron spikes, it won't stop to dismantle the obstacle; it will naturally swerve into the open corridor beside it. By manipulating the terrain in front of the rampart, we force five hundred scattered monsters to squeeze themselves into three narrow choke points—what Commander William and I call Kill Zones."
William let out a slow, predatory grin, resting his bandaged right hand on the wooden railing.
— "They'll think they found a gap in our defenses," — William added, his deep voice booming across the quiet recruits. — "And the second they pack themselves into those three dirt lanes, they walk straight into the crossfire of every single musket, heavy crossbow, and spear we have. Engineering does the heavy lifting that our headcount can't."
Down in the front row, the anxious tension in Van'er's broad shoulders vanished, replaced by a fierce, understanding nod as he struck his fist against his chest.
— "Understood, Your Highness! Commander!" — Van'er barked, stepping back into formation with his head held high.
Roland rolled up the parchment, though he didn't head back toward the castle keep. Instead, he turned toward Iron Axe, Carter Lannis, and William, gesturing toward two heavy wooden crates sitting beside a waiting mule cart near the North Slope road.
— "Speaking of crossfire," — Roland said, a small, mysterious smile tugging at his lips. — "Before we start digging the trenches, I want you three—along with Van'er and ten of your steadier recruits—to walk up to the dry gulch below the North Slope with me. Count Arthur and I finished assembling the secondary surprise for those Kill Zones last night."
Twenty minutes later, the small group stood in a desolate, wind-scoured ravine half a mile up the mountain trail, far away from the castle's masonry and the town's thatched roofs.
The freezing wind howled between the jagged limestone cliffs, whipping loose snow and gray shale dust across their boots.
Fifty paces out in the center of the rocky clearing stood a massive, dead ironwood stump—four feet thick, gnarled as twisted iron, and wedged deep into the frozen earth.
While Carter Lannis, William, and the ten selected militiamen waited near a natural outcropping of granite boulders, Roland walked out to the stump accompanied only by Iron Axe.
Carefully lifting a round, dark-gray ceramic pot the size of a winter melon out of a straw-lined basket, the Prince wedged it tightly into a hollow between the stump's thickest roots.
Standing two paces behind the Prince, Iron Axe stared down at the clay jar. The giant Mojin warrior was a man who respected any tool that killed efficiently, yet his dark brow was furrowed with the instinctive wariness of a southern hunter looking at unknown alchemy.
— "Is this more of the black powder from the rifles, Your Highness?" — Iron Axe asked, his gravelly voice low against the whistling wind. — "A clay pot cannot withstand the pressure of that fire. If you light it inside pottery, the vessel will simply shatter."
— "That is the entire point, Iron Axe," — Roland replied, his fingers stained dark with charcoal and sulfur as he checked the braided, wax-coated slow-match cord protruding from a wooden plug at the top of the jar. — "Inside this ceramic shell are four pounds of corned black powder packed tightly around two hundred jagged scraps of cast-iron slag from Anna's forge. Everyone, get behind the granite ridge. Now."
Once Iron Axe and Roland jogged back behind the chest-high shelf of solid mountain rock, Roland signaled to the recruits to duck their heads, struck a steel flint against his tinderbox, and touched the spark to the long fuse cord.
Fssssss—!
A bright orange spark hissed furiously, racing along the waxed cord toward the base of the ironwood stump as Roland ducked down beside William and Carter.
For five long seconds, the only sound in the mountain ravine was the lonely howl of the northern wind and the frantic, spitting sizzle of the burning fuse.
Carter Lannis kept his head slightly raised above the boulder, squinting skeptically at the clay pot fifty paces away. Having already witnessed the flintlock musket punch through a knight's breastplate two weeks ago, the Chief Knight understood that the powder propelled lead balls down an iron tube—but a clay jar sitting in the open air looked utterly harmless compared to a charging warhorse.
Then, the spark vanished inside the wooden plug.
KRA-KOOOOOOOM!
The detonation wasn't merely a noise; it was a physical, invisible hammer that slammed directly into every man's chest.
A blinding flash of white-orange fire erupted at the base of the stump, instantly swallowed by a deafening, earth-shaking roar that bounced off the surrounding limestone cliffs like a hundred thunderbolts striking at once. The shockwave rippled through the frozen ground beneath their boots, sending a shower of loose pebbles rattling down the ravine walls.
A dense, boiling mushroom cloud of black sulfur smoke and pulverized dirt shot thirty feet into the air, while two hundred jagged iron fragments screamed outward in every direction with a lethal, high-pitched whine—whizz-thwack-clang!—chewing deep gouges into the surrounding rocks and snapping pine saplings in half twenty yards away.
Behind the granite boulder, Van'er and the nine other recruits dropped flat onto their stomachs in the dirt, their hands clamped tightly over their helmets as their ears rang like struck church bells.
Slowly, as the biting gray smoke was torn apart by the mountain gale, Chief Knight Carter Lannis stood up behind the rock.
His gloved right hand rested automatically on the pommel of his steel longsword—the noble weapon he had dedicated his life to mastering since the age of seven.
Fifty paces away, the four-foot-thick ironwood stump didn't have a hole in it.
It was gone.
In its place was a smoking, blackened crater three feet deep in the frozen mud, surrounded by a circle of shredded wood fibers and stone pockmarked by iron shrapnel.
By the gods... Carter stared at the crater, a cold, hollow sensation settling in the pit of his stomach. A single knight could train for twenty years to master footwork, parry angles, and plate armor. Yet one peasant tossing a clay pot from the top of a wall could tear an entire squad of armored paladins into bloody ribbons before they even drew their blades.
Beside Carter, however, Deputy Commander Iron Axe didn't look dismayed in the slightest.
The two-meter Mojin warrior rose to his full height, his dark eyes narrowing with a fierce, calculating intensity as he studied the radius of the shrapnel marks on the rocks. Having nearly been cut in half by a winged Hybrid beast in the southern forests three winters ago, Iron Axe didn't care a single copper coin about knightly pageantry. He saw a tool that could blow the legs off a two-ton monster inside Roland's trench funnels.
— "Magnificent," — William grinned, standing up and casually brushing grey granite dust off his navy-blue coat as he looked at the smoking hole with deep satisfaction. — "Put Van'er and a five-man demolition crew above each Kill Zone with crates of those ceramic grenades, and the winter horde won't even make it to the base of the concrete. The beasts have claws and thick hide—we have the fury of the sun bottled up in clay."
Looking over at Van'er—who was slowly rising to his knees with his eyes wide and his chest heaving with awestruck adrenaline—Roland nodded in approval.
The recruits who had walked up this mountain trail twenty minutes ago were no longer frightened serfs praying to survive the winter. Baptized in the thunder of high explosives, the true artillery corps of the First Army had just been born.
While the echoes of the explosion were still fading across the North Slope, a very different kind of explosion was taking place inside the ground-floor entrance hall of the castle keep.
— "Unhand me, you brutes! I am a Baron of Graycastle! I demand to see my daughter this instant!"
Up on the second floor, inside the quiet, stone-walled administrative study, Arthur paused with his goose quill hovering half an inch above a winter coal-rationing ledger.
For the past three hours, the twenty-four-year-old strategist had been completely immersed in the silent world of numbers—balancing the caloric intake of two thousand civilians against the daily iron output of the North Slope mines. To a mind shaped by high-level corporate crisis management and an Intelligence attribute of 14, human panic was simply friction in the gears of a machine.
When a second frantic shout echoed up the stone stairwell, followed by the metallic clatter of castle guards crossing their halberds, Arthur set his quill neatly into its brass inkwell.
Standing up from his desk, he smoothed the front of his dark-gray wool tunic and walked down the stone stairs with measured, unhurried steps, his face settling into a mask of clinical neutrality.
Down in the drafty entrance hall, four castle guards were struggling to hold back a middle-aged minor nobleman in a fur-trimmed coat stained with road mud.
It was Baron Pine—the father of thirteen-year-old Nana.
The man looked as though he hadn't slept in forty-eight hours. His graying hair was wild, his face was flushed a mottled, apoplectic red, and tears of sheer terror and paternal desperation were cutting tracks down his wrinkled cheeks as he tried to shove past the guards' spear shafts.
— "Let me through!" — Baron Pine shouted, his voice cracking with hysteria. — "I heard the rumors at the eastern gate! The Longsong envoy left in a fury, the town gates are being sealed for the winter, and the priests in Longsong say the Fourth Prince is harboring witches inside this castle! Give me back my little girl! We are packing our wagons and leaving before the Church burns us all alive!"
— "Lord Pine," — Arthur's voice cut through the echoing hall.
He didn't shout, nor did he raise his tone above a conversational volume, yet the sheer, icy composure of his delivery made both the guards and the panicking Baron freeze.
Walking down the final three stone steps with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, Arthur stopped four paces in front of the trembling nobleman, looking at him with dark, unblinking eyes that held the warmth of a winter glacier.
— "Your lack of composure right now is the single greatest threat to your daughter's life in this territory," — Arthur said flatly, gesturing with two fingers for the guards to lower their halberds and step back. — "If you wish to have a productive conversation about Miss Nana's future, I suggest you lower your voice before every servant in the courtyard hears what you are screaming about."
Baron Pine's chest heaved as he glared at the young black-haired advisor, his hands shaking between outrage and bone-deep fear.
— "Listen here, you foreign scholar!" — Pine choked out, stepping forward and pointing a trembling finger at Arthur's chest. — "When Master Karl brought my Nana here two weeks ago, His Highness promised she was only coming for daily lessons to control her... her affliction! Now your soldiers at the gate tell me the roads are closed and Nana is to be quartered inside the castle barracks for the entire winter! My daughter is not a demon, and she is not a soldier! She is a thirteen-year-old child!"
— "Let us set aside the emotional theatrics and look at the reality on the ground, Lord Pine," — Arthur interrupted smoothly, stepping over to a small oak reception table by the hearth and pulling out a wooden chair without sitting down.
Resting his fingertips lightly on the back of the chair, Arthur dissected the man's panic like a surgeon opening a cadaver.
— "First, nobody within these walls views your daughter as a demon," — Arthur stated, his tone clinical and precise. — "What the Church of Hermes superstitiously labels a 'curse,' His Highness and I classify as a rare genetic anomaly with extraordinary cellular regeneration capabilities. Last night, while you were sleeping in your manor, Miss Nana closed a fatal, punctured lung wound on a nineteen-year-old patrolman in less than three minutes. From a purely strategic standpoint, your daughter is the single most valuable medical asset in Border Town."
Baron Pine blinked, momentarily thrown off balance by the cold, foreign terminology and the complete absence of religious disgust in the scholar's voice.
— "Medical asset...? I don't care about your army's lungs!" — Pine rasped, his voice dropping to a terrified whisper as he glanced toward the heavy front doors. — "If Duke Ryan or the Church inquisitors in Longsong Stronghold discover that a daughter of the Pine family is using magic for the Prince, they will put my entire household on the gallows! I have two wagons loaded with grain and silver at my estate right now. I am taking Nana across the southern river to my brother's farm in the interior before the snow locks us in!"
Arthur tilted his head a fraction of an inch, his expression utterly devoid of sympathy.
— "To hell with what the Church says, and to hell with your wagons," — Arthur replied with the calm certainty of a man reading a weather forecast. — "Use your head, Baron. Ambassador Petrov already left Border Town two days ago, and Duke Ryan's scouts are watching every road and river crossing between here and Willow Town. If you put a thirteen-year-old witch into a wooden cart today and drive her out of our concrete walls, how long do you think you can hide a girl who instinctively heals dying animals whenever she sees blood?"
Baron Pine's mouth opened, but no sound came out.
— "I have calculated the probabilities for you," — Arthur continued, leaning slightly forward across the back of the chair, his dark eyes pinning the older man to the floor. — "If you leave Border Town with Nana today, your chances of passing Longsong's river checkpoints or surviving the winter bandits in the south without her power being exposed are less than four percent. Within a fortnight, your wagons will be seized, you will be hanged for harboring a fugitive, and Nana will be dragged into a Church dungeon in chains to be tortured before she is burned at the stake. Logic dictates that your 'paternal protection' is a guaranteed death sentence."
Every word struck Baron Pine like an iron hammer, stripping away the frantic illusions he had built in his head all morning. The blood drained from the nobleman's face, leaving him pale and swaying on his boots.
— "Conversely," — Arthur said, straightening up and folding his hands behind his back once more, — "if you remain inside Border Town and move your household into the castle's inner security perimeter for the winter, the equation changes completely. You retain your noble title, your estate lands, and the thirty silver royals a month His Highness pays Nana as chief medical officer. Between your daughter and any inquisitor from the Church stands a twelve-foot concrete wall, high explosives, flintlock rifles, and His Highness's personal guard."
Arthur paused, letting the silence of the stone hall press down on the father's shoulders.
— "The choice before you is strictly binary, Lord Pine. There is no middle ground," — Arthur concluded coldly. — "Do you choose to treat your daughter as a strategic asset under royal protection so she lives to see eighty, or do you drag her out into the snow to die as a sacrifice to your own panic?"
Before Baron Pine's trembling lips could form an answer, the side door leading from the inner courtyard kitchen swung open.
Stepping into the warm light of the hall was Anna, wearing her work dress and holding the hand of thirteen-year-old Nana Pine.
Nana wasn't in chains, and she wasn't crying. Dressed in a thick, warm wool dress Roland had ordered for her, with her cheeks rosy from the kitchen hearth and a half-eaten sweet roll in her left hand, the little girl blinked in surprise at the sight of her father standing in the middle of the hall.
— "Father?!" — Nana gasped, her bright eyes lighting up as she let go of Anna's hand and ran across the flagstones to wrap her arms tightly around Baron Pine's waist. — "Father, what are you doing here? Did you see the little brown puppy I healed by the stables this morning? Prince Roland and Lord Arthur said I helped save a soldier's life last night too!"
Looking down at his daughter—warm, well-fed, completely unafraid, and proud of the gift that had terrified him for weeks—the last shred of Baron Pine's furious resistance shattered into pieces.
His knees buckled beneath him. Dropping down onto the cold flagstones—not out of fear of the guards, but under the crushing weight ofArthur's undeniable logic—the middle-aged Baron buried his face in his daughter's shoulder and wept openly in relief and exhaustion.
— "I... I understand, Count Arthur," — Baron Pine whispered in a broken voice, clutching Nana tightly against his coat. — "We will stay. I will bring the rest of the family inside the walls before sunset... just please, keep my little girl safe."
— "That is already factored into our winter defense plan, Lord Pine," — Arthur replied without a flicker of emotion.
Watching the guards escort the tearful Baron and his daughters toward the eastern guest wing to arrange their rooms, Arthur felt no triumphant satisfaction—only the quiet, methodical relief of a corporate auditor who had just balanced an erratic column on a spreadsheet. The "Pine variable" had been stabilized without delaying gunpowder production by a single hour.
Turning on his heel, Arthur walked back up the stone stairs and stepped into his second-floor study, pulling the heavy oak door shut behind him with a soft click.
The instant the latch caught, the temperature inside the room dropped by ten degrees.
Right beside the corner of his desk, the dim afternoon light rippled into black-and-white static.
Nightingale stepped abruptly out of the Mist World, her dark cloak swirling around her boots as she ripped her hood back, her deep blue eyes blazing with a cold, furious indignation that she didn't even try to hide.
She had followed Anna and Nana from the kitchen ten minutes ago, and she had stood invisible in the lower hall through every single word of Arthur's speech.
— "You talk like a high inquisitor dissecting a corpse on a stone slab!" — Nightingale hissed, taking a sharp step toward the desk, her gloved hands clenched into tight fists at her sides. — "Nana is a thirteen-year-old child, and that man downstairs was a terrified father trying to save his daughter from the gallows! Yet you stood there and called her a 'genetic anomaly' and a 'strategic asset,' as if she were one of those iron steam pipes in the yard!"
Walking calmly behind his desk, Arthur didn't flinch, nor did he reach for a weapon. He simply picked up a stack of coal transport manifests and tapped the edges against the wood to align the parchment.
— "Yesterday in the hallway, I heard you call my sisters and the soldiers of this town 'extras,'" — Nightingale pressed on, her voice trembling slightly with genuine revulsion as her fingers brushed the hilt of her silver dagger. — "At least when Commander William spoke to me this morning, he had blood in his veins! When I look at you, Arthur... I honestly wonder if there is anything human left inside that skull of yours."
Arthur set the aligned papers down on the blotter and finally raised his dark, composed eyes to meet the assassin's glare.
— "Baron Pine's paternal hysteria was an unstable variable that threatened to remove our only healer on the eve of a four-month siege, Miss Nightingale," — Arthur replied, his voice chillingly calm and level. — "A panicking man who believes his house is on fire does not need a warm hug or a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. If I had offered him gentle compassion downstairs, it would have validated his fear and given him the illusion that fleeing south was a viable option."
Arthur picked up his goose quill, dipping the nib into the black ink.
— "Had he taken Nana onto the river road today, Duke Ryan's patrols or the winter blizzards would have killed them both within ten days," — Arthur stated flatly. — "By stripping away his hope of escape with hard math, I forced him to choose the only path where his daughter survives. It took less than four minutes, nobody bled, and Nana is currently eating sweet rolls by the fire with her father. The emotional comfort of my vocabulary is completely irrelevant; only the survival outcome matters."
Nightingale stared at him, a cold shiver running down her spine.
She was a veteran killer of the Witch Cooperation Association. She had slit the throats of sadistic church priests and greedy nobles who took twisted pleasure in hurting the weak. Yet standing in front of Arthur disturbed her on a far deeper level—because as she observed his heartbeat and breathing from the edge of the Mist, she realized there wasn't a single drop of malice, cruelty, or anger inside him.
He wasn't evil; he was pure, terrifying efficiency wrapped in human skin.
Before Nightingale could snap a reply, the heavy oak door of the study swung open again.
Prince Roland stepped across the threshold, his wool cloak dusted with gray smoke and his hair windswept from the North Slope ravine.
Taking one look at Nightingale's bristling posture and Arthur's glacial expression, the former project manager let out a long, tired breath and closed the door behind him.
— "Enough, both of you," — Roland intervened, walking over to the fireplace to warm his chilled hands. — "Carter told me at the stairs that Baron Pine just agreed to move his household into the inner ward. Arthur... while I am grateful that you stopped the man from dragging Nana out into a death trap without causing a diplomatic riot, try to remember that we are building a human civilization here, not just an industrial factory. A little warmth and empathy act as necessary lubricant when dealing with frightened people."
Arthur inclined his head a fraction of an inch, though his expression remained unchanged. — "I will take Your Highness's feedback under advisement for future negotiations."
Turning his head toward the blonde witch, Roland softened his voice.
— "And Nightingale, try not to judge Arthur solely by the temperature of his words," — Roland said quietly. — "Last night, William broke his own knuckles in a dark tunnel to keep our guards alive, and this morning Arthur used his tongue like a scalpel to make sure little Nana stays behind these walls where she belongs. We all have different tools, and right now, Border Town needs every single one of them."
Walking past the desk toward the tall lancet window overlooking the courtyard, Roland stopped and rested one hand against the cold stone frame.
Outside, drifting down from the heavy, lead-colored clouds above the Impassable Mountain Range, the first pale, silent snowflakes of the season were beginning to settle onto the dark-gray concrete of the southern wall.
— "The first snow has arrived," — Roland murmured, his gray eyes reflecting the swirling white flakes outside. — "We have trenches to dig, thirty rifles and fifty crates of ceramic grenades to finish, and a four-month horde of monsters marching down from the peaks to wipe us off the map. We don't have the luxury of debating our bedside manner right now. First, we survive this winter together. We can argue about the state of our souls when the sun shines in the spring."
Standing by the desk, Nightingale looked out at the falling snow for a long moment.
Finally, she let out a sharp, audible sigh of frustration through her nose, shot Arthur one last wary glare from beneath her lashes, and stepped backward—dissolving effortlessly into the monochrome silence of the Mist World until the corner of the study was empty once again.
Behind the oak desk, Arthur didn't bother looking at the spot where the assassin had vanished.
Adjusting the silver-embroidered cuff of his dark-gray tunic, the strategist calmly lowered his eyes back to the winter coal ledger, and within two seconds, the steady, rhythmic scratching of his quill against parchment was the only sound in the room.