After spending another hour finalizing the coal allocations for the militia's defensive sectors and trading quiet memories of Earth across the oak desk, Arthur finally wished Prince Roland a good night and stepped out of the third-floor study.
He walked alone down the dimly lit stone corridors of the castle keep, where iron wall sconces held flickering tallow torches that cast long, dancing shadows against the cold masonry. Outside the narrow lancet windows, the first snowfall of the season had stopped, leaving a thin, ghostly crust of white over the courtyard flagstones under a clearing midnight sky.
Following the purge of Duke Ryan's sleepers the night before and the arrival of Baron Pine's household that afternoon, the sleeping arrangements in the castle had been reorganized. With William spending his evenings down at the outer barracks to personally oversee the new night-watch rotations alongside Iron Axe, Roland had assigned Arthur a private second-floor chamber at the quiet end of the eastern wing.
Pushing open the heavy oak door, Arthur stepped inside and slid the iron bolt shut.
The room was bathed in a comfortable, albeit primitive, gloom. A single tallow candle flickered on the crooked wooden nightstand, its small yellow flame dancing in the cold draft seeping through the window shutters.
Walking across the stone floor, Arthur sat down on the edge of the wide four-poster bed, the dry straw stuffed inside the mattress ticking crackling softly beneath his weight.
For the first time since opening his eyes that morning, there were no ledgers to balance, no panicking noblemen to dissect, and no tactical maps to draw. Yet as the silence of the stone room closed around him, a restless, gnawing unease that he had been repressing all day began to seep into his mind like a cold mist.
I've checked every single box on the strategic schedule, Arthur thought, staring down at his ink-stained fingers in the dim candlelight.
Over the past sixteen hours, he had fulfilled every administrative obligation required of Border Town's chief strategist. He had audited Assistant Minister Barov's tax and grain records for discrepancies, adjusted the daily limestone and gravel logistics with Master Karl van Bate, neutralized Baron Pine's attempt to pull little Nana out of the territory, and thoroughly briefed Roland on the multi-ton Hybrid Beasts that would soon march out of the northern peaks.
The industrial machine of Border Town was officially built, oiled, and set in motion.
Yet sitting alone in the dark, Arthur felt an uncomfortable sensation that a control freak like him despised above all else: he felt like a passive passenger in time, sitting in the back seat and waiting for the plot to unfold around him.
His mind drifted back to a brief conversation he had shared with William down by the courtyard well earlier that afternoon, right before the snow had started to fall.
William had walked over between musket drills with a massive, insufferable grin on his face, pulling Arthur aside to brag—and rightly so—about the golden notification he had woken up to that morning. By jumping into that dark drainage tunnel and altering the fate of the granary and its four guards, William hadn't just cemented his reputation as the invincible war god of the First Army; the System had rewarded him with 150 fresh credits and unlocked a sub-function that allowed him to read the exact physical parameters of every soldier in the yard.
Letting out a slow sigh through his nose, Arthur raised his right hand and waved his fingers lightly through the chilly air.
Instantly, his own translucent blue interface materialized a foot in front of his face, casting a soft, clinical glow across his sharp features.
[DIMENSIONAL SYSTEM]
User: [Arthur] Location: Border Town, Kingdom of Graycastle
[Attributes]
Strength: 6 Speed: 7 Endurance: 8 Agility: 8 Intelligence: 14 Magic Power: 1 [Telekinesis]
[CURRENT BALANCE: 300 Credits]
The three hundred credits stared back at him—untouched, silent, and heavy with unused potential.
Ever since the [SHOP] tab had unlocked two days ago, Arthur had guarded his half of their initial starting balance like a dragon hoarding gold. His original corporate instinct had been to save every single credit for the [KNOWLEDGE] category—planning to buy Applied Basic Chemistry and Principles of Construction and Engineering so he could hand Roland pre-packaged industrial blueprints.
Yet his long conversation with Cheng Yan an hour ago had completely changed that calculus.
Roland wasn't a helpless medieval prince who needed a System textbook to explain how a blast furnace or a nitric acid chamber worked; he was a late-nineties mechanical engineer who already carried the foundational math of the industrial revolution inside his own head. Between Roland's practical engineering memory and Arthur's Intelligence 14, spending three hundred irreplaceable System credits on basic chemistry manuals was completely redundant.
More importantly, last night's granary ambush had exposed a glaring vulnerability in Arthur's own position.
Arthur knew very well that he wasn't wired like William. He didn't possess a single drop of that reckless "Protagonist Syndrome" that drove his best friend to charge headfirst into a dark tunnel with bare fists and a war cry. Arthur was a creature of systems, cold probabilities, and ruthless logic. The mere thought of standing in the freezing mud of the front line, inhaling the fetid stench of boiling demonic blood while trading blows with mutated monsters, filled him with a profound, rational distaste. He wasn't a martial artist; he was the architect holding the chessboard.
Even so, a strategist who relies entirely on bodyguards to keep breathing is one stray arrow away from a coffin, Arthur thought, his dark eyes narrowing as his pulse began to quicken. Yesterday, Nightingale held a silver blade to William's neck before Roland stepped in. Next month, six-legged Hybrid Beasts and flying monsters will be diving over the ramparts. And later on, when the Church of Hermes sends its God's Punishment Warriors or the ancient Demons march south in the Battle of Divine Will, hiding in an office behind a wooden desk won't save me.
He leaned forward on the creaking mattress, his gaze locking onto the bottom line of his status window.
If I have no intention of swinging a broadsword in the mud, then I need an ace up my sleeve that operates on my own terms, he reasoned, a cold, calculating excitement rising in his chest. If I cannot be a front-line warrior, I will become a mage who controls the battlefield from a distance.
He analyzed his awakened capability: Telekinesis.
At Level 1, his raw capacity was frankly pathetic—little more than a parlor trick. Over the past three weeks, despite draining his tiny pool every night to practice lifting iron inkwells and copper coins, lifting a two-hundred-gram tin mug for five seconds still left him with a throbbing migraine behind his eyeballs. Aside from plucking a microscopic iron burr out of a flintlock pistol tumbler or turning pages without using his fingers, Level 1 Telekinesis was completely useless in real combat.
What happens, however, if I abandon the textbook budget and dump my entire reserve straight into Magic Power?
Arthur's Intelligence 14 brain immediately began running the projections, and the sheer scale of the possibilities sent an electric shiver down his spine.
In the world of Release That Witch, magic wasn't mystical nonsense; it was a direct physical force governed by the user's reserve and their scientific understanding of natural laws. Right now, his mind was a supercomputer hooked up to a watch battery. If he replaced that tiny battery with a high-voltage nuclear reactor, his telekinesis wouldn't just rattle spoons on a table.
With enough raw output directed by a modern understanding of vector physics, leverage, and human anatomy, he could erect invisible kinetic walls to stop crossbow bolts in midair. He could reach across a battlefield and pinch the carotid arteries or snap the cervical vertebrae of charging hybrids from thirty paces away without lifting a finger. He could even manipulate gravity around his own mass to lift himself into the sky.
He wouldn't need a musket. He would become a silent, invisible artillery battery.
Pure, electrifying ambition washed over him, stripping away the last trace of his boredom.
Mentally tapping the [SHOP] icon, Arthur followed the exact steps William had babbled about in the corridor the day before—holding his credit balance with his mind and dragging it straight over his primary status frame.
Ding.
A secondary, crimson-bordered submenu unfolded in the dim air, listing the raw price of evolution: 40 Credits per +1 Attribute Point.
Arthur didn't hesitate for a millisecond. Unlike a regular soldier, he had zero interest in spreading his points across a balanced physical build. He didn't need thicker biceps or faster footwork when his mind was the weapon. He wanted the absolute apex of psychic dominance.
Selecting Magic Power [Telekinesis], Arthur invested 280 Credits in a single, decisive swipe—applying seven full points directly into his core while leaving twenty credits in reserve.
[TRANSACTION CONFIRMED: -280 CREDITS][MAGIC POWER: 1 -> 8]
The exact microsecond the confirmation flashed, the translucent blue screen vanished, replaced by a blinding, silent pulse of golden light that erupted directly behind Arthur's retinas.
— "Ghh—!" —
Arthur's breath caught in his throat, his back arching violently off the straw mattress as a torrent of pure, concentrated energy detonated from his solar plexus and surged straight up his spinal cord into the base of his skull.
It wasn't physical pain, yet the sheer intensity of the overhaul was overwhelming—like standing in the center of a hurricane while lightning rewired every nerve ending in his body.
Whereas William's strength upgrade had braided his muscle fibers and densified his tendons, Arthur's seven-point leap occurred entirely within his central nervous system and the mysterious magic core inside his chest. He could literally feel millions of dormant neural pathways snapping open at once, his brain reconfiguring its spatial processing speed as his "mental muscle" expanded by an order of magnitude.
For ten seconds, Arthur sat frozen on the edge of the bed, his hands gripping the rough wool blanket as sweat beaded lightly along his temples.
Then, the golden storm subsided, settling into a deep, bottomless ocean of cool, crystalline power inside his chest.
Arthur slowly opened his eyes.
The dark, stone-walled bedroom looked completely different.
His physical vision had sharpened to a razor's edge, yet what truly took his breath away was the new, sixth sense radiating outward from his mind in a three-百-sixty-degree sphere.
The air around him was no longer empty space; it was a dense, richly textured canvas brimming with mass, tension, and kinetic potential. The flickering yellow flame of the tallow candle in the corner suddenly felt like a tangible, vibrating physical object he could reach out and pinch with his thoughts. He could feel the exact barometric pressure of the draft leaking through the shutters, the subtle tremor of the night wind pressing against the exterior castle walls, and the heavy, structural load of the stone arches above his head.
Every single object inside the room—from the cold iron poker leaning beside the unlit fireplace to the stack of leather-bound ledgers on his writing table—felt as though it were connected directly to his cerebral cortex by invisible, diaphanous threads. He didn't just see the furniture anymore; he automatically perceived each item's exact weight, its structural weak points, its center of gravity, and the precise vector of psychic force required to move or crush it.
Previously, at Level 1, his telekinesis had felt like trying to lift a boulder with a single strand of wet spaghetti.
Now, those invisible threads felt like braided steel suspension cables anchored straight into his will.
Turning his head slightly, Arthur looked across the room at a heavy, solid oak armchair sitting near the cold hearth—the exact same type of fifty-pound medieval chair that had triggered a size-limit error when he had tried to put it into his [Inventory] two weeks ago.
Arthur didn't raise his hand, and he didn't squint. He simply tugged on the mental cable attached to the chair's center of mass.
Without a single scrape against the flagstones, the heavy oak armchair lifted smoothly into the air. It rose a meter and a half off the floor and stopped dead, hovering in the dim candlelight as steadily as if it had been bolted into the stone wall.
Arthur monitored his internal pulse.
There was zero trembling in the wood. There was no throbbing vein on his temple, no sharp stab behind his eyes, and not even a fraction of a percent of mental strain. Judging by the effortless feedback in his chest, he could have ripped ten of those oak chairs off the floor at the exact same time and juggled them without breaking a sweat.
Looking down at his own pale hands, which trembled slightly from the sheer, intoxicating rush of power humming beneath his skin, Arthur let out a low, quiet breath.
He was no longer just a fragile corporate consultant hiding behind Prince Roland's guards, nor was he merely the "sidekick writing instruction manuals" while William hogged the spotlight on the battlefield.
Without ever picking up a sword, Arthur had just leveled the playing field—turning himself into an apex variable that the history of this medieval world had never foreseen.
As the last of the golden afterglow faded from his dark eyes, a sharp, wicked smile curved across Arthur's lips.
Slowly lowering his hands to his lap, Arthur kept the heavy oak armchair suspended in midair behind him while he closed his eyes, turning his analytical mind inward to examine the profound shift that had occurred in his soul since arriving in Graycastle.
Why Telekinesis? he asked himself silently.
When the Dimensional System had first scanned his psyche in that muddy alley four weeks ago to assign his innate magical affinity, it hadn't given him the raw, explosive pyromancy that so many fantasy readers daydreamed about. It hadn't given him lightning, elemental control over water, or the spatial teleportation that suited a restless brawler like William.
It had given him the pure, unadorned power of the mind over matter.
Allowing himself a rare moment of quiet nostalgia in the dark, Arthur dived deep into the memories of his past life back on Earth—past the university lecture halls and corporate boardrooms, all the way back to the glowing handheld screens, strategy guides, and digital encyclopedias of his childhood.
Almost immediately, he realized where the System had drawn the blueprint for his soul's affinity. It stemmed from a deeply rooted childhood obsession that had shaped his love for strategy long before he ever studied business.
Behind his closed eyelids, Arthur's mind conjured two unmistakable images.
First came the majestic, awe-inspiring silhouette of a massive silver-white leviathan with dark blue plates along its back, hovering effortlessly above a raging, pitch-black ocean storm. With a single, silent sweep of its enormous wing-hands, it could tear hurricane clouds in half or flatten an entire island landscape with an invisible blast of compressed atmospheric pressure—Lugia, the Guardian of the Seas.
Then, shifting the mental projection, he visualized a sleek, enigmatic alien entity floating in the vacuum of space—a crystalline intelligence composed of twisted orange-and-blue double-helix structures with a glowing purple core in its chest, shifting its physical form at will to dismantle any threat with cold, mathematical perfection: Deoxys.
To a kid growing up in the twenty-first century, those two hadn't just been pixels in a Pokémon game; they had been his absolute favorite fictional creations.
Both were supreme, god-like entities defined by their Psychic typing. Neither of them relied on crude, animalistic muscle or teeth to dominate an opponent. They imposed their intellect directly upon reality itself. Lugia commanded the sky and crushed the three legendary elemental birds into submission through sheer, elegant psychic weight and aerodynamic pressure; Deoxys rewrote the rules of attack, defense, and speed on the fly, manipulating matter and gravity as naturally as breathing.
As a boy, Arthur had spent hundreds of hours analyzing their lore, base stats, and combat mechanics. He had always romanticized the concept of an invisible, omnidirectional force—a power that required absolute mental discipline and geometric precision rather than brute savagery.
When the transmigration fused the System with my consciousness, it read the deepest imprints of my psyche, Arthur realized, a deep sense of clarity settling over him. My obsession with those two Psychic-type legends essentially pre-programmed my magic core. I'm not just moving objects with willpower; I'm channeling the exact conceptual grace and surgical lethality I admired my entire life.
Opening his eyes in the dim candlelight, Arthur decided it was time to stop marveling and start stress-testing the exact combat parameters of Level 8.
He turned his head and locked his gaze onto the fifty-pound oak armchair still floating four feet off the stone floor.
With a flick of mental intent, he established a vertical rotational axis right through the center of the seat and spun it.
At first, the heavy chair rotated slowly, turning in a smooth, silent circle. Then, Arthur narrowed his eyes and poured mental pressure into the torque.
Whoooosh—!
Within two seconds, the solid oak armchair accelerated into a localized, blurred tornado of dark wood and shadow, spinning so violently in midair that the displaced wind whistled like a whip across the stone walls and made the candle flame on the nightstand flatten sideways.
Then, with a single, sharp mental snap, Arthur clamped down on the rotational vectors.
The chair stopped at dead zero.
There was no creak of momentum, no wobble, and zero follow-through inertia. One millisecond it was spinning at forty miles per hour; the next, it hung frozen in space as if trapped in solid amber, mocking Newton's laws of motion through pure psychic dominance.
Vector control and kinetic braking are instantaneous, Arthur noted clinically, lowering the chair gently back onto the flagstones without a sound. However, inanimate furniture doesn't fight back. Wood and iron are static; living flesh, bone, and muscle tension are dynamic variables.
Standing up from the edge of the mattress, Arthur stepped into the open center of the room and closed his eyes.
Inside his head, he constructed a realistic combat simulation: a fully grown, battle-hardened veteran guard—eighty kilograms of muscle, bone, boiled leather, and steel chainmail—charging straight at his chest with a drawn broadsword at full sprint.
Opening his eyes, Arthur locked his gaze onto the massive, immovable four-poster oak canopy bed taking up the corner of the chamber.
Each of the four vertical corner posts was carved from seasoned timber as thick as a man's thigh, supporting a heavy timber frame that easily weighed over three hundred kilograms.
Instead of trying to lift the bed off the floor, Arthur treated the four thick wooden pillars as the limbs and spine of a charging attacker. Extending his mind, he wrapped four separate, multidirectional bands of telekinetic pressure around the oak posts—visualizing the exact anatomical mechanics required to crush a man's sword wrist, lock both kneecaps in place, and clamp the lumbar spine in an unbreakable vise.
He squeezed.
Creeeeeak—CRACK!
A loud, tortured groan of compressed timber echoed through the quiet bedroom as all four seasoned oak pillars began to bow inward and splinter under the invisible, crushing grip. Shavings of dry wood flaked off the posts as deep structural fissures ran up the grain.
Arthur released the pressure immediately before he collapsed his own bed and woke the servants downstairs.
A chilling wave of realization washed over him. With the sheer density of Magic Power now humming in his chest, immobilizing a single human body was child's play. In fact, judging by the four-way split of his focus just now, he could simultaneously lock three or four grown men in mid-stride.
If an elite knight like Carter Lannis lunged at him with a sword, Arthur wouldn't even need to step aside. By freezing the man's joints in midair while his body was traveling at full speed, the attacker's own forward momentum would snap his bones like dry twigs.
— "Lugia's atmospheric pressure," — Arthur murmured aloud in the quiet gloom, a cold, satisfied smile touching his lips as he looked at the cracked bedposts. — "The power to halt life in its tracks without shedding a single drop of my own blood."
Still, immobilization and crushing force were stationary defenses. On a chaotic battlefield where hundreds of beasts were charging at once, a mage who stayed glued to the mud could still be overwhelmed from a blind spot.
Arthur needed three-dimensional mobility. He needed to know if Level 8 Telekinesis could grant him the ultimate dream of human physics: unassisted flight.
Taking a slow, steadying breath in the center of the flagstones, Arthur emptied his mind of all distractions.
Instead of projecting his telekinesis outward like invisible hands, he turned the force inward, weaving a dense, interlocking lattice of kinetic energy directly around his own body. He visualized a solid, flat platform of force forming directly beneath the leather soles of his boots, coupled with a rigid structural harness wrapping securely around his ribcage, spine, and pelvis.
Anchoring his awareness against the heavy stone floor beneath him, Arthur pushed downward with his mind while simultaneously lifting his own seventy-five-kilogram frame upward.
For a terrifying, breathtaking fraction of a second, a wave of intense spatial vertigo washed through his inner ear as his stomach churned and the fundamental law of gravity lost its grip on his weight.
His leather boots silently left the cold flagstones.
Fifteen centimeters.
Half a meter.
One full meter.
Instinctively, Arthur spread his arms out slightly from his sides to balance himself—before realizing with a quiet laugh that physical equilibrium was completely irrelevant. He wasn't balancing on a tightrope; his center of gravity was locked inside a mental gyroscope controlled entirely by his own brain.
Relaxing his arms back to his sides, Arthur propelled himself smoothly upward, rising in a silent, frictionless ascent toward the vaulted stone ceiling of his second-floor quarters. A profound, exhilarating wave of euphoria surged through his chest as he looked down at the top of his four-poster bed from above.
However, just as the crown of his dark hair rose past the timber cross-beams toward the highest arch of the ceiling, Arthur frowned.
The solid telekinetic platform beneath his boots suddenly began to feel "spongy," the invisible grip unraveling at the edges as if the air beneath him were turning to thin water.
Arthur halted his ascent immediately, his Intelligence 14 mind dissecting the feedback loop with clinical speed.
His internal pool of Magic Power wasn't depleting at all; rather, he had just brushed against the hard geometric boundary of his current Level 8 range.
My telekinesis doesn't allow me to pull myself up by my own hair in a vacuum, Arthur deduced, his eyes narrowing as he measured the exact distance between his boots, the stone floor below, and the exterior load-bearing walls. Action and reaction still apply. To suspend my mass in the air, my telekinetic field requires a solid structural anchor—the ground, a roof, or a heavy stone wall—to push against.
Through rapid mental triangulation, he pinned down the exact radius of his psychic tether: five meters.
As long as he remained within five meters of a solid, heavy surface, he possessed true, unrestricted three-dimensional flight. If he tried to rise higher than five meters into open, empty sky with nothing beneath or beside him to anchor the force, the telekinetic link would snap and gravity would reclaim him.
— "Five meters is more than enough," — Arthur reasoned softly, hovering in midair with his back comfortably near the stone arch of the ceiling as he looked down at his shadowed room. — "Five meters puts me completely out of reach of every sword, spear, and claw on this continent. It lets me glide over walls, ignore muddy terrain, and cross rooftops without leaving a footprint. On a medieval battlefield, five meters of altitude turns me into an untouchable ghost."
As he hung suspended in the dark, listening to the distant howl of the night wind outside, the four stone walls of his bedroom suddenly felt unbearably cramped.
Crushing oak bedposts and floating under a ceiling wasn't enough. A power of this magnitude demanded the open sky—and more than that, before the real war of the Months of the Demons began, he needed to test his lethal precision on living, moving targets in the wild.
Floating gently back down until his boots hovered two inches above the flagstones, Arthur turned toward the tall stone window on the eastern wall.
He didn't walk over to touch the frame. Keeping his hands clasped neatly behind the back of his dark-gray wool tunic, he sent a delicate, surgical wave of telekinetic force across the room.
Click.
The heavy iron latch lifted silently out of its bracket, and both thick wooden shutters swung outward into the night without a single creak of their hinges.
Instantly, the freezing midnight air of Border Town rushed into the chamber, carrying the crisp scent of fresh snow, pine smoke, and damp river mud.
Outside the window, the sleeping town was a vast patchwork of deep velvet shadows and silver moonlight. Aside from a few dying orange embers glowing inside the braziers along the new concrete wall to the south, the entire territory was dead quiet.
It was the perfect laboratory.
In the middle of a freezing medieval night, commoners stayed huddled beneath their blankets, and sentries kept their eyes glued to the ground in front of their torches. Even Nightingale, who spent her nights keeping watch near Anna's courtyard room or Roland's upper tower in the western keep, wouldn't be staring up at the empty eastern sky. In the fifteenth century, the night air belonged exclusively to owls and gods; the very concept of human aerial reconnaissance didn't exist.
Gliding silently across the room, Arthur stepped up onto the narrow stone windowsill.
Beneath the toes of his boots lay a sheer twelve-meter drop straight down to the frozen cobblestones of the outer courtyard—a fall that would easily shatter the legs and spine of an ordinary man.
Arthur didn't hesitate for a heartbeat.
Pulling his heavy wool cloak tight around his shoulders, he stepped straight out into the empty void.
Instead of plummeting toward the stones, his invisible telekinetic harness caught his weight instantly—anchoring against the vertical stone facade of the castle keep before sliding smoothly downward until he stabilized his altitude exactly five meters above the slanted, snow-dusted tile roofs of the lower annexes.
Hanging weightless in the silver moonlight with the whole of Border Town spread out beneath his boots like one of his parchment maps, Arthur felt his heart beat with a fierce, quiet exhilaration.
— "Let's ride the wind," — he whispered into the freezing night.
Leaning his torso slightly forward, Arthur shifted his telekinetic vectors from vertical suspension to horizontal thrust.
Whoosh.
He shot forward across the outer castle ramparts with breathtaking, frictionless speed. The biting midnight gale whipped through his dark hair and made his wool cloak billow behind him like a pair of dark wings, yet the rush of adrenaline in his veins kept the cold completely at bay.
He was actually flying.
Keeping a low, disciplined profile, Arthur glided smoothly across the airspace of Border Town, maintaining a steady five-meter cushion above the crooked, thatched roofs of the commoners' district.
Below him, the muddy, winding streets were completely deserted. Halfway toward the eastern edge of town, he passed directly over two militiamen from the night patrol who were walking down an alley with raised pitch torches, chatting quietly through chattering teeth about the hot meat stew they had eaten for supper.
Neither guard even glanced up. Wrapped in the dark shadows of the night sky and moving without a single sound of footsteps or rustling brush, Arthur passed five meters over the flames of their torches like a phantom from another dimension.
Within three minutes, the last of the dilapidated wooden shacks and the dark-gray silhouette of Roland's new concrete wall fell behind him.
Ahead of him, rising out of the snow-covered clearing under the pale light of the moon, stood the dense, ancient, and pitch-black canopy of the Concealing Forest.
Hovering at the edge of the treeline with his dark eyes gleaming in the moonlight, Arthur looked into the shadows where the wild creatures of the frontier lurked.
— "Now comes the real test," — Arthur murmured calmly, tilting his weight forward and diving silently into the dark beneath the trees.