The abundant and noisy banquet had finally come to a close.
The thermal shock of the blizzard outside had been replaced by the welcoming warmth of the large fireplaces, and the deadly tension of their escape had given way to absolute exhaustion.
Slowly, the nocturnal silence began to take over the castle's wide stone corridors, interrupted only by the rhythmic footsteps of the patrols on the walls and the distant howling of the wind in the towers.
In his private quarters, Arthur could not sleep.
The physical exhaustion of William's journey was evident, but Arthur's mind was wide awake, operating at breakneck speed. He lay on his back on the soft mattress, hands clasped behind his head, watching the shadows cast on the stone ceiling by the faint light of a single flickering candle.
His mind worked like the gears of a freshly lubricated steam engine, processing every new piece of information, every glance, and every word exchanged during dinner.
The focus of his thoughts, however, did not orbit around Cara's fanatical madness, nor did it fixate on Wendy's surprising absence.
All of his commercial and strategic attention was entirely focused on the adult woman William had brought with him.
Diana Argus!
At first glance, any brutish soldier, peasant, or even an ignorant noble might laugh at that woman's power. Changing the color of things to blue.
In a world plagued by demonic beasts, deadly cold, and knights in steel armor, the ability to dye a mug or a piece of fabric seemed like a frivolous parlor trick, useless magic meant only for children's entertainment or performances by wandering bards; but Arthur was not a man of that era. He brought with him the vast historical and economic knowledge of his past life, and he knew exactly how the gears of medieval commerce worked.
There, in that raw and primitive historical period, color was not a mere aesthetic detail; it was an absolute symbol of status, hierarchy, and financial power, and no color was more elitist, outrageously expensive, and laden with an almost sacred aura than blue.
Blue did not exist easily in nature.
For commoners and peasants, the world was made up of earthy tones, browns, grays, and the green of leaves.
Achieving blue fabric required a herculean effort. There was indigo pigment, extracted from plants through an exhausting, foul-smelling, and lengthy fermentation process that often required vats full of stale urine to fix the color. And at the very top of the absolute luxury chain, there was ultramarine blue.
In the history of his past life, ultramarine was made from crushed lapis lazuli—an exceptionally rare gemstone, mined in distant caves and imported through dangerous trade routes.
Producing a single ounce of ultramarine pigment literally cost more than the same amount of pure gold.
It was the shade of obscene wealth.
It was the color reserved exclusively for dyeing the velvets of high royalty, for painting the Virgin Mary's mantle in cathedrals, and for adorning emperors' palaces. Just looking at a deep blue fabric was enough to know that its owner possessed an army and land as far as the eye could see.
Arthur's smile widened in the gloom of the room, a smile that mixed disbelief and predatory anticipation.
Diana Argus bypassed this entire infernal production chain with a simple touch of her hands. She didn't need lapis lazuli mines, she didn't need trade routes, tolls, dyers' guilds, or months of fermentation. She could simply touch a roll of the cheapest, most rustic, and ordinary linen produced in Border Town, and, in the blink of an eye, transform it into a piece dyed with the purest, most radiant, and flawless blue that world had ever seen.
Diana wasn't just an artist or a harmless witch. She was, in practice, a small, walking, monopolistic luxury industry; she was a money-printing machine. Arthur could barely contain the excitement boiling in his veins.
With the utility of this new witch, he could flood the markets of the capital and neighboring cities with high-luxury fabrics at virtually zero production cost. They would drain the coffers of unsuspecting nobles, amassing a mountain of gold coins that Barov could never complain about.
With that money, they would finance the war, the purchase of iron, the production of rifles and gunpowder, and the construction of the walls. Diana Argus was the financial engine that Roland's revolution needed at the beginning of the story.
While Arthur plotted economic and monopolistic revolutions in the isolation of his quarters, on the other side of the castle, Roland zealously took up his responsibilities as ruler and host to those refugees.
.
.
.
After the meal ended, the Prince made a point of arranging the rooms for the two new members, and to the immense luck of Roland and his expansion plans, the feudal lords who had governed Border Town before him possessed an architectural vanity bordering on megalomania.
Although the small town had initially been conceived and built only as a modest mining camp and an initial security outpost to ward off creatures, the main castle did not reflect the poverty of its surroundings. It had been erected following the rigorous standards of a medium-sized city's fortress.
Thanks to this boundless pride from the past, Roland now had a colossal and luxurious structure in the middle of nowhere.
The castle boasted an impressive living area of nine hundred square meters, all paved with polished stone and fine wood, harmoniously distributed across three extensive floors. Not only was it large, but tactically well-defended, featuring robust watchtowers and arrow towers sculpted in the shape of imposing oriental pagodas at the four corners of the property.
Besides all this, the Prince also enjoyed his own ornate vestibule to receive petitions and a beautiful, expansive walled garden in the back, which, although currently buried under the winter snow, promised beauty in the spring.
There was plenty of space to hide, protect, and shelter dozens of witches without the population even noticing.
Walking down the corridors heated by corner braziers, Roland stopped on the second floor. He pointed to a heavy, impeccably polished oak door.
— This will be your room, Lightning — Roland announced with a friendly smile, watching the short-haired girl look in awe at the thick rugs on the floor.
He purposely chose that specific room because it was exactly across from Anna's quarters. He bet that proximity to a girl almost the same age would help the aviator settle in more quickly, creating a bond of friendship that would ease the traumas of the cave.
Right after, he walked a few steps and indicated the adjacent door to the older woman, who was still wringing her hands with a certain nervous shyness.
— And the room next door is reserved for you, Lady Diana. Please, make yourself at home. There is hot water in the basins, pure wool blankets on the bed, and firm locks on the doors. No one will enter without your permission. You are safe in my territory.
Seeing Diana's eyes well up with tears at this mundane kindness—something denied to them through a lifetime of persecution—Roland felt a tightness in his chest, but he bid her a polite goodnight to let her rest.
Back in the reclusive comfort of his office, the Prince let out a long sigh, loosening the collar of his tunic. He walked over to the small bar in the corner of the room and poured himself a generous mug of dark malt beer.
Sitting in his high-backed upholstered chair, Roland stared at the flickering fire in his private hearth.
An old military and strategic adage said that no plan is perfect and only survives until the first deviation or contact with the enemy. The irony of that phrase resonated bitterly in his mind tonight.
When Roland conceived the plan to send William along with Nightingale, his logical and optimistic mind had drawn up an ideal scenario. He thought that by offering safe shelter, plenty of food, and mutual respect, he would manage to rescue an entire group of new witches thirsty for salvation.
With this battalion of varied magics, he would propel science and technology forward by centuries, improve agriculture for infinite harvests, and fortify the city in weeks.
It was the perfect plan of civilization.
But never in his worst sociological nightmares had he imagined that the leader of the Witch Cooperation Association would be the great obstacle. He expected a wise and protective matriarch, but what he heard in the night's report revealed a woman broken by pain.
Cara displayed a sickly hostility not only towards the Church but also towards "common people." Blind fanaticism and a thirst for power had corrupted the witches' refuge, turning victims into oppressors of their own sisters.
The harsh reality hit him: lucid witches, open to dialogue and with unwavering moral compasses like Nightingale and Anna seemed to be, tragically, a minority.
The brutal oppression of the world hadn't purified all souls; in many cases, it had only generated more hatred.
After swallowing hard on this cruel realization, Roland took the first sip from his mug. He grimaced slightly, and immediately, poured himself a second.
The liquid went down his throat harshly.
The fermentation was rustic, the taste too bitter and cloudy, a far cry from the quality of the pure malt beers he knew in his past life, but, under those circumstances of diplomatic stress and imminent war, it was still much better than nothing.
The alcohol warmed his stomach and calmed the gears of his nerves.
He leaned his head back against the chair, reviewing the details he had stealthily extracted from the new residents during the meal.
During dinner, with a tone of casual curiosity, Roland had asked Lightning about the true extent of her abilities, as well as Diana Argus's.
The young aviator, with contagious enthusiasm and pieces of bread falling from her mouth, proudly described how she could simply ignore gravity, flying like a bird in the skies and gliding freely through the air currents without any physical effort.
Then, Diana, with the elegant posture of her lineage, detailed her magical ability to change the colors of any material to different and pure shades of blue.
Listening to those technical descriptions, Roland's exclusively engineering and industrial side suffered a momentary setback. He frowned, trying to fit those skills into his mental assembly line.
How could free-flying and fabric dyeing be used to tighten the screws of a steam engine? How could they operate the cranks of a milling machine or cast the iron barrels of rifles? In terms of direct technological improvement to the production line, he simply couldn't imagine a good use.
But Roland wasn't just an engineer. He was the Commander-in-Chief of a city threatened by tyrannical nobles; and from that perspective, their potential was not just great; it was invaluable.
For the imminent war against Duke Ryan and Longsong Stronghold, Lightning was the Holy Grail of military intelligence. She was the ultimate aerial scout; while the Duke's knights crawled through the mud with limited vision, Lightning could fly over the battlefield, map enemy positions, predict ambushes, and, if necessary, drop explosives from the skies where no arrow could reach.
And what about Diana? Well, Roland didn't need to talk to Arthur to reach the same financial conclusion as his advisor.
Wars required steel, food, gunpowder, and wages. All of that required coins. The monopoly on the color blue would bring the gold of the entire Kingdom of Graycastle straight into Border Town's coffers.
They represented, respectively, the army's eagle eyes and the backbone of his economy.
Roland took another long sip of beer, the gears of his mind shifting to a more dangerous topic: the rest of the witches.
He had prolonged his inquiry at the table, asking about the abilities of the other members hidden in the mountain camp.
What he discovered left him fascinated, but also slightly disturbed.
The abilities varied wildly and seemed to follow absolutely no evolutionary rules or patterns.
Some effects could be classified as basic physics or elemental manipulation, almost explainable by the pillars of modern science. Others, however, were absurd, devoid of structural logic, and completely bizarre, entering the realm of pure occultism.
The most glaring and lethal example of this bizarreness was Cara herself, known among her sisters as the Snake Witch and the merciless founder of the Witch Cooperation Association.
According to Lightning's chilling accounts, Cara didn't create frightening illusions or energy attacks. She could literally condense her own magic and transform it into living, scaly, hissing reptiles.
These magical snakes could be physically touched, had mass, slithered along the ground, and possessed the lethal autonomy to attack an enemy by sinking their fangs into flesh.
The different colors of those magical snakes were not merely aesthetic; they represented the different types of toxins and deadly poisons injected.
Lightning herself, with an evident shiver down her spine during the account, swore she had only seen her mentor use two types of snakes: the opaque ones, which caused petrification, and the dark blue ones, which generated a slow-acting toxin that caused immediate, unbearable pain, and if left untreated, would kill the victim once the toxin invaded their brain.
It was a power geared exclusively toward torture and rapid assassination.
But it was in the middle of that terrifying report about Cara's snakes that Roland's brilliant analytical intellect detected the loose thread in the web of magic.
A universal and mathematical weakness that shaped the tragic destiny of all those girls.
Roland discovered the Effective Range.
He realized that it wasn't just Anna who suffered from dimensional limitations.
Cara and absolutely every other witch in the camp could only materialize and control their magic within a painfully small radius.
He cross-referenced the data in his mind. When Anna's powerful Green Fire—hot enough to melt steel—moved more than five meters away from the girl's body, it simply snuffed out in the air, as if the oxygen source had been cut off.
Similarly, the terrifying snakes conjured by Cara were like dogs tied to invisible leashes; they couldn't slither hundreds of meters into the forest to hunt a distant target. If Cara retreated beyond the range, the snake dissolved into harmless mist.
Even for the lethal Nightingale, the operating distance was even shorter. When she wished to interact, stab, or physically influence an object or enemy in the real world, she was forced to abandon the absolute safety of her black-and-white mist, needing to materialize and become completely visible in the enemy line of fire to carry out the attack.
That was the key to understanding the terror under which the witches lived.
Magic wasn't heavy artillery or a long-range bombardment.
The magic of that world was, in its essence, a short-range melee weapon.
Because of this cruel rule of magical physics, the witches of the Association always slept and walked equipped with those heavy metal crossbows. If they had to face battalions of the Church's God's Punishment Army, marching in close formations with spears and axes, the disadvantage was already astronomical. But when the Church entered the battlefield carrying the infamous God's Stone of Retaliation, which created a magic-canceling field around it, the witches were doomed.
If a witch could only use magic at a distance of five meters, and the Church's stone nullified all magic within that same radius, it meant that the instant the witch got close enough to conjure her ability, her power would fail completely. She would be nothing more than a defenseless girl with a dagger in her hand facing trained soldiers in heavy armor.
Without the practical use of magic at long range, their magic in these confrontations was useless for an attack. Instead of fighting back, when faced with the Church, all that remained was for them to use their meager powers to flee in all directions, like rats running from a hunting dog.
If he wanted those women to stop being prey and become the masters of their own destiny, he needed to change the balance of that range. Roland needed to give them rifled metal barrels, high-quality gunpowder, and bullets that traveled faster than the speed of sound.
He was going to arm those girls.
Immersed in these armament and sociological calculations, the hours slipped by without his notice.
Roland continued to draw military schematics and write drafts of laws for the city until past midnight. By his side, the flames that had once roared in the fireplace had dwindled, turning into a mere pile of dying embers struggling against the darkness of the unforgiving winter in that castle.