The relentless storm of the Impassable Mountain Range seemed to have taken on a life of its own, howling like a wounded beast through the gorges of black stone.
With every step the small group took away from the Witch Cooperation Association's cave, the thick snow and the gale tried to push them back. Visibility was minimal, reduced to a swirling white veil that swallowed the horizon and froze the bones.
For William, however, the biting cold outside was nothing compared to the icy abyss that had opened in his own stomach.
The soldier walked with mechanical steps, his breath coming out in trembling, irregular gasps. The adrenaline that had fueled his brutal invasion was beginning to dissipate, leaving in its wake a deep nausea and an unbearable weight on his chest.
The image of Wendy, the kind and maternal figure he had left behind in the darkness of the cave, hammered at his mind. The feeling of guilt still consumed him like acid. He felt physically sick, his vision blurring not only from the ice crystals clinging to his eyelashes but from the vertigo of knowing he had played god with those people's lives. He had panicked, rushed into action, and the price of his impatient cowardice would be paid by the witch who had always welcomed the others.
Nightingale walked beside him, keeping his left arm firmly supported over her shoulders. She felt the spasmodic tremors running through William's robust body, but she didn't say anything right away. She merely adjusted her pace, serving as a living anchor that kept him from collapsing into the deep snow.
Behind them, struggling to keep up with the grueling pace, followed Lightning and Diana Argus, both huddled inside their rags, chattering their teeth and hunched against the wind.
— "We need to stop..." — Diana's voice sounded weak, almost inaudible under the roar of the blizzard. She tripped over a snow-covered root and fell to her knees. — "I... I can't feel my feet anymore."
Lightning, who floated a few inches off the ground so as not to get hurt in the heavy snowfall, immediately landed next to the older woman, helping her to her feet.
— "Nightingale!" — Lightning shouted forward. — "Diana won't survive walking all night in this storm! If we don't find shelter, the cold will kill her before we even see this Border Town!"
William blinked, forcing the nausea to the back of his mind.
The survival instinct and the responsibility to protect them needed to speak louder than his paralyzing guilt. He pulled his arm from Nightingale's shoulders, straightening his posture with a monumental effort.
— "Lightning is right," — William said, his voice hoarse but regaining a leader's firmness. — "If we blindly keep going, we'll die of hypothermia. Lightning, can you use your magic to fly up a bit and look for some recess in the rocks? A slope, a shallow cave... Anything to block the wind."
The young aviator nodded promptly.
With a light thrust, she defied gravity and the storm, rising a few meters into the air.
She narrowed her eyes, scanning the rocky mountainside. Less than two minutes later, she descended, pointing to the right.
— "There! There's a formation of piled-up rocks about two hundred paces away. It looks like a small natural grotto!"
Without wasting time, the group marched in the indicated direction.
The shelter was nothing more than a deep crevice under the base of a cliff, formed by enormous blocks of stone that had collapsed centuries ago, but it was enough.
The wind inside was considerably weaker, and the floor was partially free of snow, covered in dry gravel.
Diana slid down the stones and leaned against the cold wall, hugging her knees in a desperate attempt to conserve heat. Lightning rubbed her arms vigorously.
— "Alright. Stay together," — William ordered, his military training taking over.
He walked to the entrance of the grotto, where there were some dead trees and dry branches that had been dragged by the wind throughout the winter. Before the curious gazes of the three women, William simply held out his empty hand. With an almost imperceptible flash, a tactical dark steel battle ax materialized in his palm out of nowhere.
Diana's eyebrows shot up.
Lightning stopped rubbing her arms, her blue eyes wide open.
William ignored their surprise. He raised the ax and delivered precise, brutal blows against the dry wood, splitting the dead trunks into manageable pieces in a matter of seconds. He gathered the firewood, piled it in the center of the shelter, and then stored the ax back into his invisible inventory. He then reached into the pocket of his thick coat and pulled out a small metallic object.
A Zippo lighter.
With a quick flick of his thumb, the sound of a dry click echoed through the small cave, immediately followed by the appearance of a steady yellow flame dancing happily under the metal. He brought it to a handful of dry twigs and dead moss, blowing gently until the fire caught on the larger wood.
Heat began to radiate through the crevice, pushing back the lethal claws of winter.
The relief on Diana's features was instantaneous, and she sighed, bringing her trembling hands closer to the fire.
But Lightning's curiosity could not be contained for long.
— "Unbelievable... How did you do that?" — Lightning asked, pointing frantically from the non-existent ax to the fire that had just been born from a metal box. — "That ax just appeared! And the fire... I didn't see you use stone or sticks! And there's more!"
Before he could answer, William turned to grab a branch that had rolled away from the campfire. To save the energy of his exhausted legs, and perhaps still a bit disoriented by emotional fatigue, he didn't even think before acting. He focused his gaze on the piece of wood about three meters away and activated his power.
Fzzzt.
William's image blurred. The space around him suffered a subtle distortion, like the shimmering air above a fire. In a millisecond, he simply ceased to exist where he was and reappeared instantly next to the branch, crouching. He picked up the wood and walked normally back to the fire.
The cave plunged into a stunned silence.
Only the crackle of the burning wood could be heard.
Lightning gasped, clapping both hands over her mouth.
Diana Argus backed against the stone wall, her mind going into a complete short circuit.
Until that moment, the fallen noble had been trying to rationalize everything. She tried to convince herself that he had hidden the ax under his coat, that the mysterious item was just an exotic alchemical artifact from the capital, but what had just happened defied the logic of everything she knew.
— "You... You vanished!" — Lightning finally exploded, jumping up, completely ignoring her exhaustion. Excitement radiated from every pore of her body. She ran over to William and started poking his arm and coat as if trying to uncover some smoke-and-mirrors trick. — "How did you do that?! You crossed the distance without walking! Are you... Are you a witch?!"
William couldn't help a slight smirk, despite all the internal torment. Lightning's enthusiastic innocence was contagious.
— "I am definitely not a witch," — William replied, tossing the branch into the fire.
— "But you have magic! Real magic!" — the young aviator insisted, bouncing on her toes. — "How did you do that? I can fly, but I can't disappear and appear somewhere else."
— "It's a different skill. You can call me a 'warlock'," — he said, slowly introducing the word.
— "Warlock?" — Diana repeated the term, testing how it sounded on her tongue. She leaned forward, fascination replacing fear. The firelight reflected in her honey-colored eyes. — "That is the first time I have heard such a designation in my entire life. Never, in the historical annals or the Church's records, has there been any mention that magic could manifest in men. The clergy exhaustively preaches that magic is a byproduct of impure female blood and the devil's temptation. A 'male witch' breaks all ecclesiastical dogmas at once."
— "The Church is composed of a bunch of blind fools who use dogmas to control what they don't understand," — William replied naturally, sitting on a flat stone near the heat. — "The world is much bigger than the lies they tell in the Holy City of Hermes. As for how I do this... It is a matter of space and perception. As long as I clearly visualize the area I want to go to, and it is within my field of vision and at a maximum distance of nearly four meters, I can bend space and instantly travel there."
— "Four meters? It's like taking a tiger's leap without even using muscles!" — Lightning murmured, amazed by the practical utility of that skill for adventures.
Nightingale, who until then had been leaning against the wall in silence, broke into a wide and incredibly proud smile. That was the first time in a long while that the blonde assassin had something to brag about in front of her old sisters, and the fact that it was about the man who had just saved her life only made it better.
— "Ah, and teleportation isn't the only impressive thing about him," — Nightingale began to speak, with the tone of someone showing off a rare trophy. She walked to the fire, warming her hands. — "That ax? He pulled it from an invisible space. William possesses a sort of untouchable pocket that accompanies him, an 'inventory'. He can store almost anything inside it and pull it out when needed; besides that, his physical capability is far beyond that of an ordinary man."
To prove Nightingale's point, William held out his hands again. A continuous glow appeared, and in quick succession, there were portions of salted and smoked meat, which he had stocked in his inventory before leaving Border Town.
Diana's and Lightning's stomachs rumbled almost in unison. Food, out of nowhere, was a bigger miracle than any spell. William skewered the meat onto thinner twigs and handed them to the girls to roast directly over the fire.
— "It truly is incredible," — commented Diana, holding her twig over the flames, looking at William with a mix of admiration and cautious apprehension. — "That physical and spatial power explains a lot about what we witnessed in the cave. I saw it with my own eyes, Mr. William. You managed to cross the entire camp like a dark bolt of lightning and defeat the mentor with a single clean blow. Cara didn't even have time to blink."
The mention of Cara's name wiped the smile off William's face, and a dark cloud hovered over his mind once again. Guilt, which had briefly receded, scratched at his chest again. He stopped rotating his own meat over the campfire and stared intently at the embers.
— "Cara..." — he began, his voice dropping a few octaves. — "Is she okay? How was she when you left?"
Nightingale looked at him, noticing the drastic shift in energy.
— "I had no intention of severely hurting her," — William continued, frustration evident in his words. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. — "I needed to disarm the threat before that hot iron marked Nightingale. My goal was just to push her away so I could break the God's Stone of Retaliation. But... I held back my strength; I swear I held back. It's just that, with the speed of teleportation and the weight of my body... I couldn't precisely measure the necessary force. The impact was much more brutal than I calculated."
He closed his eyes.
The image of Cara flying like a broken doll was etched into his retina, soon followed by the terrifying conclusion that he had ruined Wendy's chances of trusting them.
Lightning, with her mouth half full of undercooked meat, hurried to reassure him.
— "Relax, warlock! Cara didn't die. At least not when we sneaked away."
William opened his eyes, staring at her intently.
— "What do you mean?"
— "When you pushed her, she hit the cave wall really hard," — Lightning explained, swallowing her food. — "There was a lot of blood, not gonna lie. She cut her forehead, but as soon as you two disappeared into Nightingale's Mist, Leaves ran over there. You don't know, but Herb has the magic to multiply the effect of any healing root or plant. She shoved a green paste onto the mentor's face and the others started cleaning up the blood; Cara was just knocked out. Very unconscious and winded, but breathing."
The information hit William like a bucket of warm water amidst the blizzard. She was merely unconscious and breathing, being treated by the healer.
The crushing weight of feeling like an accidental murderer diminished considerably. He exhaled a long, trembling sigh of relief. This meant that, although chaos had been instilled and Wendy was left behind, he had not spilled the leader's blood to the point of killing the hope of future reconciliation.
— "Thank god..." — muttered William.
Diana, nibbling on a piece of warmed bread, watched him closely. For a woman raised among cunning nobles and knights who prided themselves on their body counts, seeing a man of such destructive power show genuine relief at not having murdered his opponent was fascinating. There was a compassionate humanity in that young man that contradicted his monstrous strength.
— "You have a good heart, Mr. William," — Diana said softly. — "It is not just anyone who invades a den of beasts, snatches the prey, and worries about the wolf's health afterward."
Nightingale smiled softly and affirmatively.
— "He does, Diana. Prince Roland is also like that, maybe even Arthur... You will see when we get there. In Border Town, we don't have to fight for scraps of bread, nor do we have to live in the shadows fearing our own sisters or the Church's pyres."
Nightingale's words warmed the grotto more than the actual fire William had improvised.
Exhaustion began to claim the two new fugitives, and after finishing their makeshift meal, Lightning and Diana huddled close to the fire, closing their eyes in a deep and necessary sleep, lulled by the crackling of the wood and the muffled howl of the storm outside.
William and Nightingale kept watch, sitting side by side. William's shoulder brushed against hers.
Although the cold still surrounded them and the dangers of the journey to the town were not fully overcome, Nightingale's comforting presence and the knowledge that Cara wasn't dead allowed the young man, for the first time that night, to feel that perhaps things had happened the way they were meant to.
He looked out into the snowy darkness, mentally preparing himself to guide the witches home.