Down in the suffocating dark of the drainage tunnel beneath the central granary, there was no room for grand strategies or philosophical debates. There was only the stench of lamp oil, wet stone, and hot copper spilling from open wounds.
When William dropped twenty feet straight through the open cellar trapdoor, the stone flagstones beneath his boots cracked under the sheer kinetic impact of his landing.
— "Show me if this 'Strength' you and Arthur boasted so much about is good for anything besides winning an argument in the hallway," — Nightingale had whispered right before he jumped, her silver daggers gleaming like ice in the dim light.
Those words still echoed behind William's ears as his eyes adjusted to the flickering orange glow of the tunnel.
Fifteen paces ahead, where the low stone ceiling curved toward the main foundation timbers of the winter wheat stores, four loyal patrolmen were pinned against a dead-end wall. Patrol Captain Greyhound was down on one knee, his leather armor split across the ribs as he parried two heavy broadswords at once with a notched blade. Beside him, Erik and the scarred veteran Trevor were bleeding from deep slashes along their forearms, desperately trying to hold a shrinking perimeter around nineteen-year-old Brian, who lay slumped against the damp bricks with a broken spear shaft jutting just below his collarbone.
Closing in on them were eight hardened mercenaries from the outer patrol—men who had taken Duke Ryan's silver to butcher their own comrades and turn Border Town's food supply into a furnace. Two of the traitors in the back were already uncorking clay jugs of pitch and tipping their lit torches toward the dry timber supports.
— "Who the hell is that?!" — barked the rebel leader, a burly veteran sergeant with a heavy iron-bossed buckler strapped to his left forearm, spinning around as dust rained from the ceiling above William's head. — "Just one of the Prince's foreign scholars! Gut him and light the oil!"
William didn't reach for the iron broadsword hanging at his hip. He didn't dare touch the three charges of Teleportation sitting in his chest either, knowing Nightingale was watching every twitch of his muscles from the border of her unseen realm.
Instead, he simply exhaled, dropped his center of gravity, and pushed off the cracked stone floor.
With his Speed at 11 and his muscles supercharged to a monstrous Strength of 16, the cramped tunnel seemed to shrink to the size of a living room. Before the rebel sergeant could even bring his sword around to guard, William closed the fifteen-foot gap in a single, explosive stride.
The sergeant's eyes widened in panic. Acting on years of battlefield instinct, the man planted his boots and slammed his heavy oak-and-iron buckler forward to bash the charging foreigner's teeth in.
William didn't dodge the shield. He rotated his hips, drove his rear heel into the dirt, and threw a straight right cross directly into the iron boss at the center of the buckler.
CRACK—BOOM!
The sound wasn't like a fist hitting wood. It sounded like a small cannon going off inside an enclosed cellar.
Seasoned two-inch oak splintered into jagged shrapnel. The iron boss caved inward like cheap tin, and the terrifying kinetic force continued straight through the sergeant's forearm, snapping both bones before driving the man's own shattered shield deep into his sternum.
Lifted completely off his boots, the two-hundred-pound veteran flew backward down the narrow passage like a ragdoll. He crashed into the mercenary behind him, and both men slammed into the stone masonry hard enough to knock the mortar loose before collapsing into a motionless heap.
For half a heartbeat, nobody in the tunnel breathed.
A sharp, fiery jolt shot up William's right wrist as the skin over his knuckles split open from the impact. Arthur's warning from earlier echoed briefly in the back of his head—his muscles were hitting with the force of a battering ram, while his bones and tendons were still sitting at an Endurance of 10—but the flood of combat adrenaline drowned out the sting instantly.
— "What... what kind of monster is that?!" — one of the torch-bearers stammered, his hand shaking so violently that burning pitch sloshed onto his boots.
Beside William, the air rippled like grey smoke.
Nightingale didn't announce her presence. Phasing out of the monochromatic silence of the Mist World for a fraction of a second, she materialized directly behind the two arsonists holding the oil jugs. Her silver-plated daggers moved in twin crescents of cold light. Before the men could drop their torches or scream a warning, she opened their throats from ear to ear and vanished back into the unseen folds of space before the first drop of blood hit the dirt.
To the surviving traitors, it looked as if invisible ghosts were reaping their ranks from the shadows while a human siege engine tore through their front line.
— "Hold the line!" — Trevor roared from the back wall, the scarred patrolman finding a sudden surge of ferocious second wind as he used his shoulder to shove a stunned rebel off balance. — "Lord William is here! Don't let a single one of these rats run!"
Four mercenaries remained on their feet. Realizing that fleeing up the iron ladder meant turning their backs on a demon, the four men lunged in a desperate, coordinated frenzy. Two swung heavy iron cleavers straight at William's head, while the third—a wiry spearman with bloodshot eyes—ignored William completely and thrust a notched, grease-coated spear straight past Greyhound's exhausted guard, aiming to finish off young Brian on the floor.
William saw both attacks at once.
If he pivoted left to crush the two men swinging at his skull, the fight would be over in two seconds without a single scratch on his tunic. It was the clean, textbook tactical move Arthur would have calculated on paper.
Instead, William ignored the blades coming for his own neck and threw his entire body sideways into the spear's path.
SHHHK!
He caught the heavy ash shaft of the spear with his left hand inches before the iron tip could pierce Brian's throat, while the flat edge of a traitor's cleaver glanced across William's right shoulder, tearing through his navy-blue wool doublet and slicing a shallow, burning gash across his deltoid.
— "Lord William!" — Brian gasped, his pale face splattered with warm red drops as William planted a boot directly between the boy and the attackers.
— "Stay down, kid!" — William snarled, not even flinching at the cut on his shoulder.
Gripping the spear shaft in his left fist, William squeezed. The seasoned wood groaned and splintered in his palm like dry reeds. With a brutal yank, he pulled the panicked spearman off his feet, dragging the man straight into a rising knee strike that shattered his jaw and sent him crashing into the ceiling arch.
Without pausing for a breath, William spun on his heel into the two men who had just cut his coat.
He ducked under a wild horizontal slash, stepped inside the first man's guard, and drove a short, compact left hook straight into the side of the traitor's steel-reinforced leather ribs. The armor crumpled inward with a wet crunch. As the man folded in half, William grabbed the back of the second mercenary's collar with his bloodied right hand and slammed him face-first into the damp stone wall with enough force to leave a spiderweb of cracks in the rock.
Ten feet away, the eighth and final traitor dropped his sword, spun on his heels, and bolted blindly toward the darkness of the lower drainage grate.
He didn't make it three steps.
The grey mist rippled ahead of him. Nightingale stepped into the torchlight, caught the fleeing man's wrist in a textbook joint lock, kicked the back of his knee until it snapped, and drove the pommel of her dagger into his temple, dropping him unconscious into the mud so they would have at least one live tongue left for Prince Roland's dungeon.
Silence crashed back down over the tunnel, broken only by the hiss of a fallen torch dying in a puddle of bloody water and the ragged, wheezing gasps of the four surviving castle guards.
Leaning against the stone wall with his sword hanging loosely from numb fingers, Patrol Captain Greyhound stared at William in absolute, bone-deep shock. Beside him, Erik and Trevor looked as though they had just watched a god descend from the heavens to fight in the dirt.
They knew Commander William was a fierce instructor on the training yard, a man who had knocked down Krag and his quarry bullies with wooden staffs. Yet watching him tear through a squad of armored veterans in pitch darkness with nothing but his bare hands—taking a blade across his own shoulder just to keep a nineteen-year-old recruit from dying—rewrote every rule of loyalty those four men knew.
Across the narrow passage, half-concealed in the shadow of the cellar ladder, Nightingale slowly wiped a drop of blood from her pale cheek with the back of her gloved hand. Her blue eyes remained locked onto the torn, blood-soaked fabric on William's shoulder.
She had stood in the third-floor corridor that very morning. She had heard Arthur call the people of this world "extras" on a screen, and she had half-expected both foreigners to treat human lives like cheap wooden pieces on a board.
Yet the man breathing heavily in the center of the tunnel hadn't hesitated for a fraction of a second to bleed for a nameless patrolman. Whatever secret world William and Arthur had come from, the fury and conviction in William's fists were more real than anything Nightingale had ever seen in a noble's castle.
— "Don't just stare at me, boys," — William panted, shaking the stinging blood off his bruised right hand before bending down to slip both arms carefully under Brian's trembling shoulders. — "The kid's got a punctured lung, and the little healer upstairs doesn't stay awake past nine. Trevor, grab the torches. Greyhound, lean on Erik. We're moving up right now!"
Forty minutes later, after young Brian's chest had been sealed by Nana Pine's warm, milky-white glow in the ground-floor dining hall and Arthur had arrived at the doorway in stunned silence, the core leadership of Border Town moved upstairs.
Inside Prince Roland's third-floor office, the atmosphere was still thick with the smell of wet mud, woodsmoke, and the metallic tang of drying blood that clung to William's torn doublet.
Roland sat behind his heavy oak desk, his face pale with cold fury as he stared down at a small leather pouch spilled open across his maps. Shining in the candlelight were thirty newly minted silver royals bearing the mint mark of Longsong Stronghold, alongside a curved iron tinder-tube filled with military-grade pitch.
Standing in a tense semicircle in front of the desk were Chief Knight Carter Lannis, Arthur, and William, while Nightingale leaned quietly against the dark bookshelves in the corner, her hood pulled low over her silver-blonde hair.
Resting one hip against the edge of the mahogany desk, William methodically wrapped a clean strip of linen around his split, swollen knuckles. Every few seconds, he glanced sideways at Arthur.
Unlike the heated shouting match they had shared in the hallway that morning, Arthur wasn't glaring anymore. The strategist stood with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, his dark eyes remarkably quiet as he looked from the torn gash on William's shoulder to the Longsong silver on the table.
— "Well, to make a long story short, Roland," — William said, his voice still slightly raspy from the smoke and adrenaline as he tied off the bandage with his teeth. — "Ambassador Petrov didn't leave town empty-handed after all. Before he boarded his barge, Duke Ryan's agents activated eight sleepers inside our outer patrol. They used an old drainage culvert behind the stables to bypass the yard guards and tried to turn our central winter granary into a giant bonfire tonight."
Carter Lannis's jaw was clenched so tightly a muscle jumped beneath his cheek.
— "It is my failure, Your Highness," — Carter said, his voice dropping low with genuine shame as he bowed his head. — "I vetted the outer patrol rosters myself when we arrived from the capital. That eight veterans took Longsong silver right under my nose—and that Lord William had to intercept them before my own inner-gate guards even heard the clash—is inexcusable."
— "Save the self-flagellation for later, Carter," — Roland said, his gray eyes sharp and cold as he pushed the Longsong coins across the wood with one finger. — "Duke Ryan has had years to plant hooks in this border town while the previous administration rotted. What matters right now is that the wheat is dry and untouched."
From the shadowed corner by the bookshelf, Nightingale shifted her weight, stepping half a pace into the warm light of the fireplace.
— "He didn't just 'intercept' them, Your Highness," — Nightingale said, her voice unusually solemn as her blue eyes flicked toward William's bandaged hand. — "Those eight men were hardened killers in chainmail and boiled leather, fighting in a five-foot stone choke point with lit pitch. If not for Commander William's... stubborn insistence, and a level of physical strength I have frankly never witnessed in a mortal man, Captain Greyhound and his three patrolmen would be corpses right now. And this entire town would be a graveyard of frozen bodies before the first snow even fell."
Coming from a lethal assassin who rarely wasted a single breath praising men, the weight of those words hung heavily in the quiet study.
Roland looked up at William, the cold calculation in the Prince's eyes softening into deep, unmistakable gratitude. For a modern engineer trying to hold a fragile industrial dream together with twine and wet cement, the thought of losing their entire winter food supply in ten minutes of fire was enough to make his blood run cold.
— "Thank you, William. And you too, Nightingale," — Roland said quietly, rising from his chair and resting both hands on the edge of the desk. — "Without those granaries, all our cement walls, steam engines, and flintlock rifles wouldn't have kept our people alive past mid-winter. Border Town would have been nothing more than a footnote in Graycastle's history."
Roland let out a long breath, his gaze moving between his two foreign advisors. Even if he didn't know the exact details of their morning argument, a former project manager didn't need magic to read the stiff silence still lingering between the two friends.
— "You've done more than enough for one night, William," — the Prince ordered, his tone softening into a wry smile as he gestured toward William's shredded sleeve. — "You look like you've been dragged through an ore crusher. Go get that shoulder washed and get some sleep. Carter and I will interrogate the prisoner you left us and lock down the barracks before dawn. Arthur... go with him. Make sure your partner actually makes it into a bed tonight without punching through another stone wall."
— "As Your Highness commands," — Arthur replied quietly.
With a polite nod to the Prince and the Chief Knight, Arthur turned and pulled open the heavy oak door of the study. William offered Roland a casual two-finger salute, though as he walked past the corner of the bookshelf, he felt Nightingale's piercing blue gaze follow him all the way across the threshold.
She didn't draw her blade, and the hostility from that morning was gone—replaced by a deep, lingering curiosity that promised a much longer conversation when the sun came up.
Clack.
The study door clicked shut behind them, leaving Arthur and William alone in the dim, torch-lit corridor of the third floor.
It was the exact same hallway where, less than twelve hours ago, they had stood chest-to-chest, hurling the bitterest words of their lives at each other over 280 System credits.
For the first ten paces down the cold stone passage, neither of them said a word. The only sound was the soft, rhythmic thud of their boots and the distant wind whistling against the narrow lancet windows.
Finally, just as they reached the top of the stone staircase leading down to the eastern guest wing, William slowed his pace and rubbed the back of his neck with his uninjured left hand.
— "Look, Art, about this morning..." — William started, his voice dropping its usual cocky swagger as he stared down at the steps. — "I know blowing the whole credit reserve without telling you was a dick move. We had a plan for the chemistry manuals, and I tanked the budget on an impulse. My bad, bro."
Arthur stopped two steps below him.
Slowly, the twenty-four-year-old strategist turned around. In the flickering orange light of the wall sconce, the cold, detached mask of "Count Arthur" was completely gone, leaving only the tired, honest face of the guy who had shared a couch and a box of cold pizza with William back on Earth.
Arthur looked at the dried blood crusted across William's linen bandage, and then at the three-inch tear in his shoulder where a mercenary's cleaver had missed his collarbone by a hair.
— "Shut up, Will," — Arthur said softly, letting out a quiet, self-deprecating breath that fogged in the chilly air. — "If anyone owes an apology in this hallway, it isn't you."
William blinked, genuinely caught off guard. — "Wait... seriously?"
— "Seriously," — Arthur replied, leaning one shoulder lightly against the cold stone wall as he met his best friend's eyes. — "I spent the entire week locked inside an archive room staring at numbers, ledgers, and forty-year-old memories of a webnovel. Somewhere between calculating kiln output and lying to Longsong envoys, I let my head get so stuck in the macro-strategy that I started treating real, breathing human beings like spreadsheet variables."
Arthur looked down at his own pale, ink-stained fingers before looking back up at William.
— "If you had listened to me this morning—if we had saved those 280 credits to buy a textbook next week—that tunnel ambush would have succeeded tonight," — Arthur admitted, his voice steady and unsparing toward himself. — "Greyhound, Trevor, Erik, and that nineteen-year-old kid on the table would all be dead. The winter wheat would be ash, and every single blast furnace and steam engine I sketched on paper wouldn't have been worth a handful of mud."
William stared at his friend for three full seconds before a slow, genuine grin broke across his bruised face.
— "Man... are you feeling feverish, Art? Do I need to call little Nana back up here to check your head?" — William teased lightly, nudging Arthur's arm with his good elbow. — "Mr. Intelligence 14 just admitted I was right twice in the same month! I'm marking this date on the wall with a knife!"
— "Don't push your luck, idiot," — Arthur said, though the corner of his mouth twitched upward into the first real smile he had shown all day. — "Your resource management is still atrocious, and the fact that you nearly broke your own wrist punching an iron shield with a base 10 Endurance proves you skipped high school physics. Next time we get System credits, you're putting points into bone density before you blow your own hand off."
— "Deal," — William chuckled, his shoulders finally dropping two inches as the last knot of tension between them dissolved into the cold night air. — "You build the future on paper, Mr. Strategist. I'll make sure nobody burns the house down while the ink dries."
— "That sounds like a fair division of labor," — Arthur agreed quietly, turning to walk beside him down the final flight of stairs toward their quarters. — "Come on. Get some sleep before your adrenaline crashes. Tomorrow morning, Border Town wakes up to a purge, and winter isn't going to wait for us."