The inner courtyard garden of Border Town's keep lay buried beneath a thick, untouched blanket of fresh powder—a blindingly white, silent carpet that normally drove every servant and clerk in the castle indoors during the freezing hours of the morning.
Weathered stone statues of past Wimbledon kings wore crooked crowns of icicles, and the rose bushes that had bloomed in late autumn were reduced to gnarled, frost-encrusted skeletons. Yet on this bitter winter morning, the secluded garden path was hosting a scene that spat directly in the face of natural gravity, medieval physics, and every dogma of the High Church.
Walking at an unhurried, measured pace down the snow-covered gravel lane between the frozen flowerbeds was Count Arthur. His fur-lined leather boots made a crisp, rhythmic crunch in the snow with each step, while both of his gloved hands remained tucked comfortably inside the deep side pockets of his knee-length black wool overcoat.
The sub-zero air was so cold that every word leaving his lips condensed into a small, dense puff of white vapor. Walking half a pace to his left, wrapped warmly in a thick gray wool winter cloak, was eighteen-year-old Anna—her crystal-clear blue eyes fixed on the strategist's profile with intense, unblinking concentration as she absorbed every syllable of his lecture as if he were reading from the blueprint of creation itself.
And drifting along two meters off the ground directly above the path beside them—floating through the freezing air as effortlessly as if the law of gravity were merely a polite suggestion—was thirteen-year-old Nana Pine.
The little healer was laughing softly to herself, her cheeks flushed bright pink from the winter chill and sheer exhilaration as Arthur's invisible telekinetic cradle supported her weight without the slightest wobble or tremor. To Nana, there were no ropes, no straps, and no hands holding her up; it felt as though she were lying on a warm, solid cushion of invisible clouds that glided smoothly along the garden path beside her friends.
Until this morning, the true nature of the two foreign advisors' powers had been a secret shared only among William, Nightingale, and Anna. Even Prince Roland—who knew they came from Earth and possessed an enhancement "budget"—still didn't know the visual mechanics of Arthur's telekinesis. Discovering ten minutes ago that the quiet, immaculate scholar she admired so much could also lift people into the sky with his mind had placed little Nana in a state of pure, wide-eyed euphoria.
— "To master the emerald flame you awakened two nights ago, Anna, you need to completely dismantle the archaic medieval notion that 'fire' is a mystical element or a living substance," — Arthur explained, his calm, professorial baritone cutting cleanly through the cold morning air. — "Even when witches use their Magic Cores, most of them still picture fire as a magical fluid they are pouring out of their hands. That mental limitation is a cage. In pure, fundamental physics, heat is not a substance at all. Heat is simply macroscopic molecular activity."
Beside him, Anna's eyebrows knitted together slightly as she immediately locked the new scientific term into her memory, testing the shape of the words on her tongue:
— "Molecular activity, Sir Arthur? What is the difference between the atoms His Highness drew for me and these... molecules?"
Arthur stopped walking in the middle of the snowy lane and turned to face her.
Without taking his left hand out of his coat pocket, he raised his gloved right hand slightly and gave a subtle flick of his mental focus. Instantly, a single, large, intricately branched white snowflake drifting down from the gray sky halted dead in midair—hanging suspended at eye level six inches between their faces as if pinned to an invisible pane of glass.
— "Think of atoms as the individual letters of the alphabet, and molecules as the words formed when those atoms bond together," — Arthur said, nodding toward the frozen crystal floating between them. — "Everything in this universe—the water locked inside this snowflake, the nitrogen and oxygen in the air we breathe, the granite blocks of that castle wall, the steel of William's broadsword, and the very flesh and bone of our bodies—is constructed from trillions of microscopic clusters of bonded atoms called molecules."
Anna leaned in half an inch, staring at the immobilized snowflake as her sharp mind visualized the invisible lattice holding the ice together.
— "When a piece of matter is cold and solid, like this ice crystal or the frozen dirt beneath our boots," — Arthur continued, his tone crisp and didactic, — "those microscopic molecules are locked into a rigid pattern, barely vibrating at all. However, when you project your Magic Power into a target, you are not 'creating fire out of nothing.' Your will is directly commanding those trillions of invisible particles to vibrate, collide, and agitate against one another at violent speeds. What human eyes perceive as orange or green flames, smoke, and light is merely the visual byproduct of that extreme kinetic friction. Heat is motion, Anna—nothing more, and nothing less."
As the final piece of the thermodynamic puzzle clicked into place alongside the lessons Prince Roland had given her in the dining hall, Anna's blue eyes widened in a silent, breathtaking epiphany.
The last veil of medieval mysticism was torn away from top to bottom.
— "That is why I can melt iron ore and bake limestone in His Highness's kilns so quickly..." — Anna whispered, speaking half to herself as she instinctively raised her right hand toward the floating snowflake.
A tiny, pinpoint bead of brilliant emerald-green fire bloomed at the very tip of her index finger. Before her skin even came within two inches of the suspended ice crystal, the snowflake vanished into a microscopic droplet of liquid water and evaporated with a faint tssssk of white steam.
— "When I melt stone or steel, I am not burning it," — Anna murmured, staring down at the green spark dancing on her fingertip with new eyes. — "I am simply accelerating the vibration of the solid particles until they move too fast to hold their rigid shape."
— "Precisely," — Arthur said, a rare, genuinely approving smile curving his lips. — "Once you internalize that law—once you stop training your mind to summon 'flames' like a dragon and instead train your mind to directly dictate the vibrational velocity of molecular bonds—you will transcend combustion entirely. You will be able to bring a block of crucible steel to its exact melting point without generating a single visible spark or losing a single degree of heat to the room. You will be able to slice or weld matter at the microscopic level. You won't just be a combat witch, Anna; you will be a walking industrial foundry."
Anna looked down at both of her small, calloused palms, feeling her perception of her own Magic Core expand far beyond the borders of Graycastle. The conceptual shortcut Arthur had just handed her was worth more than all the gold in King's City.
Right above their heads, however, the high-level physics lecture was interrupted by a soft, delighted giggle.
Floating two meters above the rose bushes, thirteen-year-old Nana did a slow, graceful somersault in midair—her wool skirt and brown hair swaying as Arthur's telekinetic cradle rotated her smoothly through a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree loop before righting her again.
— "Look at me, Anna! This is the most wonderful thing in the whole world!" — Nana called down, beaming from ear to ear as she spread her arms out like a sparrow gliding on the wind. — "Lord Arthur has magic too! For so long after my power woke up, I thought only girls were cursed—I mean, blessed—with gifts like this! Knowing that Lord Arthur can fly makes it feel like we aren't strange at all!"
— "The universe is much wider than the Four Kingdoms, Miss Nana, and it is full of statistical exceptions," — Arthur replied mildly, casting a sidelong glance up at the floating teenager without taking his hands out of his warm pockets. — "Though I assure you that compared to your gift, my capability is far less noble. Your white light rebuilds living cells and pulls men back from the grave; my mind merely pushes heavy objects from point A to point B."
Hearing him speak so casually out in the open, however, made Nana suddenly stop kicking her legs.
Biting her lip, the thirteen-year-old looked nervously over her shoulder toward the distant southern wall where the militiamen patrolled, and then back toward the high stone windows of the main castle keep. Years of hiding her power in her father's manor brought a sudden flicker of anxiety across her bright face.
— "Um... Lord Arthur, are you completely sure it is safe for you to lift me up this high in the middle of the courtyard during the daytime?" — Nana asked in a hushed, worried whisper, even though she was floating six feet off the ground. — "What if one of the castle maids or a soldier looks out a window right now and sees me in the air? If word gets out that you are a male witch... won't the Church inquisitors come after you too?"
— "You may breathe easy, Nana. We are completely hidden in plain sight," — Arthur replied, his voice so calm and unbothered that it bordered on amusement.
With his gloved right hand, he gestured lightly toward the eighteen-year-old girl standing beside him with the emerald spark still glowing on her finger.
— "If any servant, guard, or mason happens to glance out a window right now and sees you floating above the garden," — Arthur explained smoothly, — "their eyes will immediately look down at the ground directly beneath you—and they will see the famous Miss Anna walking beside you. Only forty-eight hours ago, eighty soldiers watched Anna float two meters into the sky above the rampart and slay a seven-meter Hybrid Beast. Human brains are wired to accept the simplest explanation within the rules they already believe. Anyone who sees you flying today will automatically assume that Anna is practicing her 'new flight magic' by lifting her little sister in the yard. My secret remains completely invisible, comfortably shaded beneath the giant shadow of Miss Anna's fame."
Nana blinked twice up in the air as she processed the sheer, devious brilliance of that alibi—using a public miracle Arthur himself had staged two days ago as a permanent smokescreen to use his own power in broad daylight!
Instantly, every trace of worry vanished from the thirteen-year-old's face, replaced by a wide, mischievous grin:
— "Wait—if everyone is just going to think Anna is doing it anyway... then lift me higher, Lord Arthur! Please!" — Nana pleaded excitedly, pointing up toward the top of the inner courtyard wall. — "Lift me up above the garden wall so I can see the boats on the Redwater River and the tents by the barracks! I want to see what the castle looks like from the sky like a bird!"
Without uttering a word, Arthur indulged the request.
Flexing a tiny fraction of his Magic Power: 14 [Telekinesis], he smoothly elevated the invisible platform beneath Nana's boots—lifting the lightweight thirteen-year-old from two meters up to seven meters in the air, well above the frost-covered stone crest of the inner garden wall, and guiding her in a wide, lazy circle through the cold morning sky as she flapped her arms like wings and laughed at the top of her lungs while describing the snow-covered roofs below.
Standing on the gravel path beside Arthur, Anna smiled up at her younger friend's joy for a moment—before her sharp, observant eyes caught a tiny detail that made her pause and look back down at Arthur in quiet astonishment.
Arthur wasn't looking up at the sky anymore.
In fact, the twenty-four-year-old strategist had lowered his chin completely, his dark eyes examining a patch of frozen moss on the stone border of the flowerbed at his feet while he casually nudged a loose pebble with the toe of his boot.
He wasn't looking at Nana, he wasn't gesturing with his hands, and he wasn't even facing the direction she was flying—yet seven meters above their heads, Nana was banking, turning, and gliding in a complex figure-eight path around the courtyard trees with absolute, rock-steady precision and zero turbulence!
— "Sir Arthur..." — Anna spoke up, taking half a step closer as her scientific mind latched onto the anomaly. — "How are you maintaining that telekinetic cradle and steering her around the tree branches seven meters in the air without even looking up to see where she is?"
Arthur kicked the small snow-covered pebble across the path, his tone as conversational as if they were discussing the breakfast menu:
— "Telekinesis at this level does not rely on the primitive mechanics of the human optic nerve, Anna," — Arthur explained, glancing sideways at her. — "Biological eyes can only perceive light reflecting off the surface of objects in a narrow forward cone. My capability operates as a three-dimensional vector field projected directly from my mind. Within my active radius, my awareness acts like an omnidirectional pressure radar. I don't need to look at Nana with my eyes because I can directly feel her exact mass, her center of gravity, the displacement of the air currents around her cloak, and the spatial coordinates of every tree branch within a hundred and fifty paces as naturally as I feel the position of my own fingers."
He tilted his head slightly toward the open courtyard around them.
— "To my mind, it is as if the entire volume of space within this castle yard were a deep, still ocean of water," — Arthur added softly, — "and I can feel every single ripple, weight, and heartbeat moving inside that water, whether my eyes are open, closed, or looking at the floor. Visual sight only confirms what my brain has already mapped."
Walking beside him in the snow, Anna absorbed that explanation in complete silence, a tiny, involuntary shiver of pure awe running down her spine.
What staggered her wasn't just the lack of visual targeting; it was the sheer, overwhelming scale and effortless efficiency of his dominion.
Even now, after awakening her evolved emerald flame and experiencing a massive leap in her Magic Core's capacity, Anna knew her own physical boundaries. If she projected her green fire more than five or six meters away from her own body in the freezing wind, the energy density would rapidly disperse into the atmosphere.
Arthur, on the other hand, was effortlessly carrying and maneuvering a living human being seven meters up in the sky while his effective radar and kinetic reach stretched out over a hundred paces in every direction—and he was doing it without breaking a sweat, without his heart rate rising by a single beat, while calmly delivering a university-level lecture on molecular physics with his hands in his pockets!
To the clerks in the town hall, he is a ruthless administrator; to His Highness, he is a brilliant strategist, Anna thought, looking up at the dark-coated young man beside her with a reverence that bordered on the religious. Yet in the realm of pure power... he is a god walking quietly among mortals.
Four hundred miles to the southeast of Border Town's snow-buried ramparts, at the warm, coastal tip of the Kingdom of Graycastle, the winter wind blowing off the southern sea was mild and carried the clean scent of salt rather than mountain ice.
In the sprawling, prosperous port metropolis of Silver City, the light morning frost didn't even manage to stick to the glazed dark-blue ceramic roof tiles of the upper noble district—yet the political winter that had just descended from the north was freezing the blood of the city's rulers far more effectively than any blizzard.
Inside the grand, sunlit top-floor study of the largest noble estate in Silver City—a mansion that had been politely "requisitioned" from the local count and redecorated with refined silk tapestries to accommodate royal authority—sat Princess Tilly Wimbledon.
The Fifth Princess of Graycastle, renowned throughout the capital's high society for her razor-sharp intellect, cold intuition, and striking, porcelain-like beauty that mirrored her fourth brother Roland's features, sat behind an immense desk of polished red mahogany. With a silver-nibbed goose quill moving swiftly in her slender hand, she was reviewing the weekly maritime customs ledgers, harbor tariffs, and city garrison rosters.
Ruling a wealthy southern port filled with two-faced merchant princes and entrenched Church informants was an exhausting balancing act, yet Tilly operated with the tireless precision of a clockwork machine.
Ten paces across the polished marble floor, leaning her broad shoulders against the carved frame of the closed oak double doors with her arms crossed over her light steel-and-leather armor, stood a tall, striking woman with long, straight black hair and sharp, golden-brown eyes like a hunting eagle's.
It was Ashes.
An Extraordinary witch—one of the rare, transcendent combat monsters who had survived the Demonic Bite and evolved past mortal limits—Ashes never let the hilt of the massive, five-foot iron greatsword strapped across her back stray more than an inch from her fingertips. To Tilly, Ashes was far more than a sworn bodyguard; she was an unbreakable sword, a confidante, and the person Tilly trusted above all others in this world.
— "The final headcount from the dawn harbor patrols just came in, Tilly," — Ashes spoke up, her deep, slightly raspy voice breaking the quiet scratching of the quill in the sunlit room. — "Our girls pulled six more out of the lower district this week."
Behind the mahogany desk, Tilly's silver quill stopped moving immediately.
Raising her head, the icy, inscrutable mask of the Fifth Princess melted away in an instant, replaced by a soft, breathtaking smile of pure maternal relief that lit up her gray eyes.
— "Six in a single week? That is wonderful news, Ashes," — Tilly said warmly, setting her pen down on the crystal rest. — "Are all six of them safely inside the inner compound? What is their physical condition?"
— "They're safe behind our walls now, though it was a close call," — Ashes uncrossed her arms, her calloused hands clenching into tight fists at her sides as a familiar, murderous anger flickered beneath her calm surface at the memory of the Church's handiwork. — "They were hiding in a flooded cellar beneath an abandoned tannery in the dock slums—half-starved, shivering in rags, and terrified out of their wits by the Cathedral's watchmen. The youngest one is barely twelve years old; all her magic can do is make a cup of water glow in the dark like a nightlight. I led the extraction team myself last night, broke the arms, jaws, and kneecaps of three lowlife bounty hunters who were trying to drag them to the Church for silver, and brought the girls through the smuggler tunnels under cover of darkness."
— "You did well, as always," — Tilly nodded, her expression turning serious once more as she dipped her quill back into the inkwell. — "Have the stewards give them hot baths, meat broth, clean wool blankets, and winter clothes immediately, and have the herbalist treat their frostbite. Still... six more awakened sisters in a week means the winter surge is accelerating. The larger our hidden family grows, the harder it becomes to keep our operations invisible in a city crawling with Cathedral priests and my brothers' spies. We cannot stay in Silver City much longer. We need to finalize the sea supply caches for Sleeping Island before spring."
Before Ashes could open her mouth to reply about the naval charter manifests they had been quietly assembling for months, three sharp, measured, and impeccably polite knocks echoed against the heavy oak panels of the study door.
Knock-knock-knock.
Instantly, the warm familiarity in the room vanished. Ashes went dead silent, her right hand rising automatically to rest on the leather-wrapped grip of the greatsword over her shoulder as her body shifted into a lethal, hair-trigger guard stance.
Behind the desk, Tilly's face smoothed back into the regal, untouchable porcelain mask of a royal princess.
— "Enter," — Tilly called out, her voice cool and authoritative.
The brass latch turned with a soft click, and the heavy door swung inward to reveal the thin, slightly stooped figure of Edgar Vance—the elderly, silver-haired chief butler of the mansion, an experienced civil administrator whom Tilly had personally vetted and retained when she took control of the city.
Keeping his eyes respectfully lowered to the polished marble floor, the old butler stepped inside carrying a gleaming silver salver in both white-gloved hands.
Curiously, however, the tray did not hold Tilly's usual mid-morning pot of hot chamomile tea or a plate of almond biscuits.
Resting alone in the dead center of the polished silver tray was a single, thick parchment envelope. The heavy paper was sealed with a massive, oppressive pool of dark-gray and black mourning wax—and stamped deeply into that wax was the unmistakable double emblem of the Royal Palace of King's City and the Tower of Hermes.
By the door, Ashes narrowed her golden-brown eyes dangerously. In her experience, letters arriving directly from the capital stamped in gray wax never once brought good news for anyone carrying Wimbledon blood.
Walking forward with slow, visibly trembling steps that betrayed his age, the old butler stopped at the required protocol distance in front of the mahogany desk and bowed so low his forehead nearly touched the silver tray, his ragged breathing raising the tension in the quiet room by ten degrees.
— "Y-Your Royal Highness..." — Edgar began, his aged voice cracking slightly as he openly betrayed that he knew the tragic meaning of a black-and-gray royal dispatch seal. — "An express royal courier, riding a lathered relay horse nonstop from the north, just collapsed at our front gates from the hands of the Palace Personal Guard. The grim contents of the decree he carries are already no longer a secret in the streets, Princess... it is sweeping through the docks and noble squares of the entire kingdom like a hurricane."
Setting the silver tray down on the edge of the desk, the old butler stepped back and wrung his gnarled, white-gloved hands together in front of his waistcoat, his watery eyes filling with genuine sorrow:
— "As your humble servant, I offer my deepest, most heartfelt condolences to Your Royal Highness Tilly, and to the entire House of Wimbledon."
By the door, every muscle in Ashes's tall frame tensed like drawn steel wire, her fingers gripping her sword hilt so tightly her knuckles turned white.
The word "condolences" rang through the sunlit study like a bronze funeral gong.
Behind the vast mahogany desk, Princess Tilly froze as completely as if she had been turned to marble.
Her breath stopped halfway up her throat. Without her even feeling it happen, her numb fingers loosened, and the silver goose quill slipped straight out of her hand—dropping onto the open customs ledger with a soft clack and spilling a thick, expanding blot of jet-black ink across the neat columns of numbers like a pool of dark blood.
Summoning every ounce of the iron royal discipline that had kept her alive in the palace since childhood, Tilly forced a terribly sad, composed nod onto her pale face—refusing to let a single crack show in front of a mortal servant.
— "Thank you, Edgar. Your loyalty is appreciated," — Tilly said, her voice remarkably steady and controlled, though it dropped into a hollow, quiet register that Ashes had never once heard leave her lips. — "Leave the dispatch on the desk and retire to the lower quarters for the afternoon. See to it that we are not disturbed by any visitors from the city council today."
— "As Your Highness commands. May the gods watch over you," — the old butler bowed deeply once more, backed silently across the marble floor, and pulled the heavy oak double doors shut behind him.
Click-thud.
To the two women inside the high-ceilinged room, the sound of the heavy brass lock catching in the doorjamb echoed like the stone slab of a royal tomb sliding shut.
The exact second they were completely alone and safe from the eyes of the world, the majestic, calculating, untouchable composure of the Fifth Princess of Graycastle crumbled into dust.
Raising a hand that trembled so violently it didn't look like it belonged to the brilliant "Intellectual Princess" of the capital, Tilly reached across the blotter and picked up the heavy parchment envelope. Tearing the gray mourning wax open without ceremony, she unfolded the thick paper, her wide gray eyes flying across the cold, mercilessly formal calligraphy of the royal court scribe:
The brutal assassination of King Wimbledon III in his bedchamber... the alleged regicide and immediate execution of First Prince Gerald... the ascension of Second Prince Timothy Wimbledon to the Regency of the Gray Iron Throne... and the mandatory royal ultimatum ordering all surviving royal children to abandon their fiefdoms and return to King's City immediately.
Every single word struck Tilly's chest like an iron warhammer.
The heavy parchment slipped from her bloodless fingers, fluttering back down onto the mahogany tabletop with a dry rustle that sounded deafening in the dead silence of the study.
Leaning forward over the desk, Tilly planted both elbows on the wood and buried her pale face completely inside both hands—and her small, slender shoulders, which had carried the lives and hopes of dozens of hunted witches without ever wavering once, began to shake uncontrollably.
By the door, Ashes—a warrior who had stared down charging battalions of mercenaries, demonic beasts, and Church inquisitors without her pulse ever rising—felt her own heart squeeze inside her ribcage with an excruciating, helpless ache. Leaving her post at the door, she crossed the wide marble room in three long, silent strides.
Behind the desk, Tilly could no longer hold back the dam.
Hot, silent tears broke through her fingers, spilling freely down her wrists and splashing onto the polished mahogany tabletop—staining the bottom corner of the decree right beside Timothy's signature.
To Prince Roland up in the freezing mud of Border Town, King Wimbledon III had been an indifferent stranger—a cold tyrant remembered only through bitter fragments of neglect and resentment. To Princess Garcia down in Clearwater Port, their father had been little more than a monumental political obstacle standing in the way of her burning ambition.
To Tilly, however... King Wimbledon III had been the only person in the palace who had ever truly seen her worth.
Even when she was just a quiet, bookish little girl ignored by the court because she was a female fifth child in a patriarchal kingdom that valued only martial brute force, her father had recognized her extraordinary mind. It was her father who had quietly handed her his private bronze key to the restricted archives of the royal library; it was her father who had hired the greatest scholars on the continent to tutor her in mathematics and strategy; and it was her father who had looked past her gender to give her an equal seat in the succession contest alongside her brothers.
He had been a ruthless, flawed, and terrifying monarch to the rest of the world—yet in the quiet, candle-lit corridors of the palace during her childhood, when she had sat on a stool beside his chair reading history scrolls while he worked late into the night, he had simply been her father.
Now, those warm, quiet memories collided inside her head with the sickening, grotesque image of her own second brother Timothy plunging a poisoned dagger into the old man's chest and chopping off Gerald's head to steal a crown.
— "He is gone, Ashes..." — Tilly sobbed aloud, her voice completely broken and muffled against her wet palms as the suffocating grief of the betrayal shattered her mask onto the floor. — "My father... Timothy killed him. My father is really gone."
Ashes didn't offer empty, useless platitudes.
A veteran of the battlefield knew better than anyone that polite words couldn't mend a torn heart or bring the dead back from the grave.
Instead, the tall, imposing Extraordinary warrior simply dropped to one knee on the hard marble floor directly beside the Princess's chair, completely ignoring the scrape of her steel greaves against the stone. Reaching out with a gentleness and reverence that stood in total contrast to her fearsome reputation, Ashes wrapped both strong arms around Tilly's trembling shoulders—pulling the weeping girl into a warm, protective, and completely silent embrace.
Resting her cheek lightly against Tilly's silver-gray hair, Ashes held her fast against her chest, serving as the unbreakable harbor and shield where the future leader of the witches could shed the last bitter, silver tears of her broken royal family before the war for the world began.
Looks like that wraps up the final chapter from this video! Whenever you're ready with the next video or the next chapter title, just send it over and we'll keep rolling!