Sheets of thin, glassy morning ice coated the flagstones of the castle's inner courtyard, mirroring the heavy, lead-colored sky that hung low over the ramparts and promised another merciless blizzard within the hour.
Every gust of wind sweeping down from the northern ridges carried a bite sharp enough to numb exposed skin in seconds. Yet the freezing weather didn't seem to bother the small group gathered near the massive wood-and-iron main gates in the slightest.
Standing in the center of the frost-covered yard, Arthur adjusted the thick, fleece-lined collar of his leather-reinforced winter coat. His dark, analytical eyes were tilted upward, calmly tracing invisible navigation lines, wind currents, and elevation vectors across the churning gray clouds above the castle walls.
Right beside his shoulder, Lightning hovered half a meter off the stone floor, practically glowing with impatience.
The short-haired blonde girl was swinging her booted legs back and forth through the empty air as if pedaling an invisible bicycle, the restless energy of her youth fighting a losing battle against the need to wait for the launch signal. Every few seconds, she reached up to tap the brass-rimmed wind goggles strapped across her forehead, grinning from ear to ear as she waited for the word to move.
Ten paces back, leaning one broad shoulder casually against a tall granite support column under the covered walkway, William watched the final preparations with his arms crossed over his chest.
A few feet to William's left stood Prince Roland Wimbledon. With both hands tucked deep inside the fur-lined sleeves of his heavy royal cloak to keep warm, Cheng Yan observed the pair in the yard with a quiet, focused expression. Even without drafting paper in front of him, the former mechanical engineer's mind was working continuously behind the scenes—weighing the martial risks, the supply math, and the brutal weather variables of the search-and-rescue mission about to unfold.
Finally, William pushed his shoulder off the stone pillar, breaking the quiet of the courtyard.
Sliding his broadsword smoothly back into its scabbard at his belt with a soft metallic click, the Commander of the First Army strolled across the frosted stones toward his longtime friend.
— "Are you 100% sure you don't want a lift to the edge of the Hidden Forest, Art?" — William asked, stopping three paces away as his breath puffed white in the cold air. — "My stamina is fully recovered from the trip down. I can hold onto both of you and chain continuous Teleportation jumps all the way to the lower foothills in a couple of hours. It'd save you from burning through your own reserves before you even pick up the Association's trail."
Arthur turned his head halfway toward William, a subtle, calm, and deeply confident smile touching the corner of his mouth as he finished pulling the leather buckles of his winter gloves tight around his wrists.
— "I appreciate the offer, Will, truly, yet save your legs for the town wall," — Arthur replied smoothly.
He spoke with the crisp, unhurried naturalness of a university professor explaining a basic formula on a chalkboard, completely aware of and in control of his high Intelligence capacity.
— "That brutal physical exhaustion we both hit during our first week in Border Town only happened because our internal reserves of Magical Power were still at their starting level," — Arthur explained evenly. — "Even now, the way your Teleportation works places a heavy tax on your muscles. Every time you fold space to jump four meters, your physical body has to compensate for the raw spatial shift and absorb the momentum at the other end."
William crossed his arms again, listening to his best friend dissect his combat build without losing the amused smirk on his face. He knew Arthur wasn't insulting him; the guy was simply stating cold, hard facts.
— "My Telekinesis, on the other hand, operates on a very different structural level now that I've expanded my core pool and mapped out the vector equations," — Arthur continued, raising his gloved right hand in front of his chest.
Almost immediately, the freezing air around his leather-clad fingers began to hum and blur with a faint, translucent spatial distortion.
— "Because my magic moves matter through continuous force rather than instantaneous spatial jumps, I won't suffer from that cellular fatigue in my muscles," — Arthur said. — "In fact, using the aerodynamic model I put together in the library last night, Lightning and I are going to cross the ridges and reach the target sector in just over an hour—without a single drop of physical wear and tear."
William raised his dark eyebrows slightly, genuinely impressed by the icy, unshakeable certainty in his friend's voice.
After years of knowing Arthur back on Earth and weeks of surviving this medieval world together, William knew the strategist's cautious profile inside and out. Arthur enjoyed playing chess with people's heads, sure, yet he never bluffed about technical numbers or magical limits right before walking into a live combat zone.
— "Alright then, Lord of Foolproof Plans," — William chuckled, taking a theatrical step backward and sweeping both muscular arms wide in a dramatic gesture of surrender as he retreated toward Roland's spot under the colonnade. — "I'll leave this rescue mission entirely in your hands. Just do me one huge favor: try not to give our future Border Town citizens a fatal heart attack when you literally drop out of the clouds on top of them."
Arthur merely gave his friend a single, silent nod before turning his full focus back to the open expanse of the courtyard and the churning gray sky overhead.
Letting out a slow breath that turned into a thin cloud of mist, Arthur closed his eyes for two seconds.
Inside his chest, he reached straight down into the vast, dense, and silent reservoir of invisible energy pulsing steadily beneath his ribs.
Unlike the wild, emotional way many witches viewed their abilities, the magic inside Arthur obeyed his cerebral command like a precision mathematical instrument—rigorously exact, controllable, and ready to be shaped down to the millimeter.
Step one: internal inertial dampening, Arthur calculated in the quiet darkness behind his eyelids, projecting a dense, multi-layered telekinetic matrix outward from the center of his torso.
On paper, the physics behind high-speed telekinetic flight was as elegant as it was deadly if an amateur got the math wrong.
If a normal person simply placed a flat wall of telekinetic force underneath his boots and launched himself into the sky like a cannonball, the sudden, violent G-force of acceleration would slam his internal organs against his ribcage, rupture his blood vessels, and snap his spine in half before he even cleared the castle towers.
To bypass that biological limit, Arthur didn't push his body from the outside.
Instead, establishing his center of mass right in the middle of his chest as the absolute reference point, he wove the propulsive telekinetic force uniformly through every single cell, every nerve fiber, every bone, and every drop of blood flowing through his veins.
By locking his entire anatomy inside the exact same matrix of directional force, every part of his body would accelerate at the exact same microsecond as if he were a single, solid, unbreakable piece of steel—reducing the internal compression of inertia to zero.
Step two: atmospheric drag, Arthur's mind moved seamlessly to the next equation.
Protecting his internal organs from G-force wasn't enough to sustain the blistering cruising speed he intended to hit up in the clouds. At two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, the dense, freezing winter air of the mountain range wouldn't feel like a breeze; it would slam into his face and chest like a solid wall of rough concrete, tearing his coat to shreds and freezing his skin solid in two minutes flat.
To solve that aerodynamic problem, Arthur expanded his secondary telekinetic field two meters outward from his body, molding the invisible space in front of and around him into a sharp, conical deflection barrier.
He drew the force lines in real space the exact way an aerospace engineer sketches an airflow diagram.
With that invisible wedge locked in front of his chest, the oncoming wall of freezing air would be forced to split and slide sharply to the sides and rear before a single molecule could touch his coat. By creating a partial vacuum pocket directly in front of and around his silhouette, air resistance and wind chill dropped to practically nothing.
Whirrrrrr.
Down around the soles of Arthur's heavy leather boots, the cold air and loose patches of powdered snow began to tremble, lift off the flagstones, and spin in a tight, silent centrifugal vortex as the primary gravitational field took hold in the courtyard.
Opening his eyes, Arthur called out in a firm, authoritative voice that seemed to vibrate with a faint, metallic spatial echo inside the dome:
— "Lightning, pay close attention to my orders right now," — Arthur instructed. — "Move in close and stay within half a foot of my right side from this second on. Once we lift off, do not try to steer on your own and do not activate your flying magic. Just relax your whole body and let my field carry your weight."
The young blonde witch widened her bright blue eyes at the strict, no-nonsense command, yet she didn't hesitate for half a heartbeat.
She trusted the strategist completely. Gliding smoothly across the short gap, Lightning tucked her small arms in tight against her ribs and hovered right beside Arthur's right shoulder, her leather cap barely reaching his chin.
With a single fluid thought, Arthur widened the geometric boundary of his primary telekinetic dome, wrapping Lightning's small frame completely inside the same protective pocket of zero gravity, zero inertia, and total aerodynamic isolation.
— "Hold onto your goggles and don't step outside the barrier line," — Arthur said calmly. — "We are accelerating now."
What happened in the next fraction of a millisecond defied every logical expectation of the three people watching from the courtyard.
There was no gradual buildup of speed. There was no bending of the knees, no running start, and no slow climb toward the roofs.
BOOM—CRACK!!
With a dry, deafening sonic report that sounded as though a heavy siege cannon had just detonated point-blank in the middle of the yard, Arthur and Lightning simply vanished from human sight—reduced to a faint, ascending blur that tore straight into the sky!
An instant later, the massive shockwave caused by the air rushing in to fill the sudden vacuum slammed outward across the courtyard in a brutal circular gale, kicking up a blinding white cloud of pulverized snow, gravel, and stone dust.
Under the stone colonnade, William had to plant a boot backward and throw both muscular forearms up across his face, squinting his eyes against the man-made hurricane whipping his coat.
Beside him, Prince Roland stood completely frozen like a statue carved out of river ice, his wide gray eyes following the faint trail of atmospheric distortion that had punched a clean round hole straight through the low gray clouds like a high-velocity artillery shell.
As an experienced and pragmatic former engineer from Earth, Cheng Yan understood in his bones the merciless laws of directional inertia, G-force, and air resistance.
To stand there and watch a flesh-and-blood human being not only ignore, but completely shatter all of those immutable physical laws at once—breaking past two hundred kilometers per hour from a dead standstill in a split second without being crushed into red mist—left his mind momentarily numb with a mixture of adrenaline and deep scientific awe.
— "...Is that even physically possible?" — Roland murmured under his breath, his lips barely moving as his ruler's mind began to calculate, terrified yet fascinated, the sheer destructive potential of that single man if unleashed on an open battlefield against the conventional armies of Timothy or the Church of Hermes.
Four paces away from the prince, the air beside the stone wall shimmered with twisting black-and-white ripples before dissolving completely, revealing Nightingale's slender figure in the pale morning light.
For once, the shadow assassin's classic mask of icy tranquility and untouchable composure had vanished without a trace.
Nightingale's deep blue eyes were wide open and locked onto the circular hole punched through the storm clouds overhead, her chest rising and falling noticeably faster than normal as her Mist-sensitive nerves registered the staggering density of Magical Power she had just witnessed.
Lowering his arms, William let out a loud chuckle that broke the stunned silence in the yard.
Carelessly brushing the blown snowflakes off the dark wool shoulders of his coat with one hand, the commander strolled over with confident strides to stand beside the golden-haired assassin.
— "Looks like our master strategist doesn't spend all his free time drawing maps on paper, reading dusty books, and playing polite politics in the dining hall, does he?" — William grinned broadly, nudging Nightingale's elbow lightly. — "And think about this: if Art can pull off a stunt on that scale just to commute from point A to point B in the morning... stop for a second and imagine what he's going to do when he actually wants to wipe an enemy fortress off the map."
Three thousand feet above the smoking chimneys of Border Town, high atop the thick gray blanket of winter storm clouds, the isolation was absolute—and strangely peaceful.
Out beyond the invisible walls of the aerodynamic cocoon sustained by Arthur's relentless mind, the freezing gales of the Impassable Mountain Range were howling with lethal fury; inside the dome, however, those violent air currents were nothing more than a harmless visual illusion sliding past outside.
Tilted forward along a razor-straight vector, Arthur was slicing through the upper sky at roughly two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, cutting through the dangerous mountain crosswinds like the blade of a surgical scalpel.
With raw mental discipline, he acted as the unshakeable conductor of the field, making sure the crushing pressure of natural physics never touched the two fragile bodies inside.
Far below the soles of their boots, the vast, treacherous terrain of the western frontier—jagged gorges, frozen rivers, and dense forests that killed ordinary travelers by the thousands—had blurred into a continuous, fast-moving tapestry of stark white snow and the dark moss-green canopy of the Hidden Forest, looking no larger than small brushstrokes on a canvas.
Floating passively half a foot to Arthur's right, Lightning had her mouth hanging wide open in an expression of pure, comical wonder.
She was flying faster than she had ever flown in her life, side by side with Arthur, without spending a single drop of her own Magical Power.
For a fearless, sky-loving girl who viewed the clouds as her personal backyard—and who knew all too well how bitterly the freezing wind stung her cheeks and tangled her short blonde hair whenever she dove fast—being carried along at this insane speed inside a warm, silent bubble without feeling a single breath of draft was a mind-blowing experience.
Looking down in fascination, she wiggled her fingers in front of her face, testing how her hands moved through the still air inside the dome with zero resistance.
Then, reaching out slowly, she ran her fingertips along the invisible inner curve of the barrier two feet in front of her chest—where the howling whiteout was being cleanly split and deflected away—before whipping her head around to stare at Arthur's calm, focused profile.
— "THIS IS HANDS DOWN THE CRAZIEST, COOLEST, MOST UNBELIEVABLE THING I HAVE EVER SEEN, FLOWN IN, OR HEARD OF IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!!" — Lightning screamed at the top of her small lungs, throwing both fists up in the air—even though inside the acoustically sealed telekinetic bubble, she didn't actually need to raise her voice above a whisper to be heard. — "Arthur, look down there! We are literally flying way faster than those giant demonic vultures I used to hunt and run away from back when I was with the Association!"
Arthur shifted his sharp, calculating gaze away from the distant northern horizon for two seconds to glance at the beaming teenager beside him, keeping his own posture inside his long coat completely straight, relaxed, and free of muscle tension.
Behind his calm eyes, the gears of his Intelligence 14 mind were running simultaneously on multiple independent tracks. While one part of his brain maintained the life-or-death balance of the inertial field around their bodies, the mathematical side was continuously mapping the mountain ridges below to plot their interception course and watch for aerial threats.
— "Hitting this top speed in a straight line isn't actually the hard part, Lightning; it's just the convenient byproduct of eliminating friction with the outside air," — Arthur replied in a calm, mildly professorial tone, extending his arms by half an inch to smoothly adjust their climb angle as they shot clear over the jagged crest of a snow-packed mountain peak. — "Because the nose of my invisible barrier splits the dense air ahead of us and forces it to slide around our sides, there is zero frontal drag or air pressure pushing back to slow us down. All I really have to do is keep our directional angle locked onto the path in my head and hold the compression barrier steady."
Beside him, Lightning simply blinked her long golden eyelashes four times in rapid succession.
For about half a second, she tried—without the slightest success or any real effort—to make sense of the torrent of fancy scholar words, advanced physics, and structural rules Arthur had just dropped on her.
Then she gave up completely. To a girl who lived by instinct and freedom, complicated rules about air molecules meant nothing compared to the thrill of the ride.
A colossal, dazzling grin stretched across her flushed cheeks as the raw adrenaline of mastering the winter sky raced through her veins.
— "I didn't understand half of those big words, Boss, yet I don't care!" — Lightning laughed, kicking her heels happily in the floating space. — "Hey, do you have enough magic in your body to fly like this all day long if we wanted to?! Because I swear on my boots, if we turned right and headed into the unexplored west at this speed, we could fly straight across the whole mysterious Endless Desert before the sun even goes down!"
The young witch's wild, infectious enthusiasm filled the tiny floating dome with a bright spark of warmth—a sharp, almost poignant contrast against the grim search-and-rescue mission waiting for them in the freezing valleys ahead.
— "Even though my internal reserve of Magical Power is fairly large now, holding this level of uninterrupted mental focus—where a single slip of concentration for half a second would let the air pressure and inertia smash our bodies into pieces in midair—drains my mind pretty heavily over long periods," — Arthur patiently explained his limits, keeping his sharp eyes locked onto the brutal, winding labyrinth of ice-choked gorges rising out of the mist ahead of them. — "More importantly, we didn't fly up here today to set a speed record across the desert. We are now entering the search zone where the trails from Cara's cave split."
Arthur dropped their altitude slightly, skimming just below the cloud base so the snowfields came into clear view.
— "From this point on, I need you at 100% focus, Lightning," — Arthur said, his voice shifting into crisp field command. — "Your natural gift for aerial spotting and your eyes are ten times sharper than mine when it comes to picking out small living movements or broken snow trails down in these white valleys. I need you to find your sisters for me."
The instant Lightning heard from Arthur's calm, measured words that she wasn't just along for the ride as a spectator—that she had a vital job only she could pull off on this rescue mission—her entire body posture transformed in a heartbeat.
The huge, childish grin vanished from her face, letting all the playful euphoria fade into the still air.
In its place settled the quiet seriousness, the technical coldness, and the laser-sharp focus of a seasoned combat scout and a true predator of the skies who understood exactly how many lives were riding on her eyes.
Bringing both flat, gloved hands cautiously forward until her palms rested against the humming, diagonal front wall of the invisible force field, the fearless young flyer leaned her chin and her narrow shoulder right against the translucent boundary.
Narrowing her bright blue eyes behind her goggles and focusing the incredible biological far-sight that came with her gift, Lightning began to methodically sweep every ravine, snowdrift, and tree line of the frozen mountain range rushing past below.