Clack. Clack. Clack.
The heavy sound of boots striking rough stone steps echoed in a tense rhythm through the spiral staircase leading back to the castle's surface. At the front of the group, the guard's raised torch cast long, distorted shadows across the damp walls, illuminating the rusty iron brackets embedded in the stone blocks.
Climbing just behind Roland, Arthur felt no discomfort whatsoever in the dark, prison-like surroundings. On the contrary, his mind was wide awake, absorbing every detail with an almost ravenous fascination.
Until just a few hours ago, everything here—the Kingdom of Graycastle, Border Town, the Church, and the witches—had existed only as text on a computer screen or illustrations on digital pages. Now, every cold stone he touched, every smell of ancient mold and oxidized iron, was real, solid, and three-dimensional.
Arthur kept his eyes fixed on Roland Wimbledon's back as the prince climbed the steps two paces ahead of him.
It was fascinating to observe the prince up close. Roland's very gait betrayed the inner turmoil unfolding within that body. His shoulders tried to maintain the straight-backed, arrogant posture typical of Graycastle royalty, but his hurried steps and slightly forward-leaning head were pure Cheng Yan—a modern engineer in a rush to get back to his drafting table.
After studying the prince, Arthur briefly glanced behind him, where Carter Lannis brought up the rear like a guard dog.
The Chief Knight was the very definition of military discipline. Even while climbing a narrow, slippery staircase, his torso remained steady, his polished half-armor made barely a sound, and his calloused hand rested precisely on the pommel of his longsword, ready to draw and cut anyone in half in less than a second. Seeing those characters breathing just a couple of meters away made Arthur's heart beat faster.
But what truly sent his blood racing wasn't the presence of the prince or the knight.
It was what he had just witnessed in the last cell below.
In Arthur's memory, the image of that orange flame appearing out of nowhere in Anna's hand still seemed to burn across his retinas. He could almost feel the dry heat of that fire against his face.
There had been no firewood, no charcoal, no oil, and no initial spark. The flame had simply existed in empty air, sustained solely by the invisible Magical Power emanating from the girl. To Arthur, who had always regarded magic as something confined to books and games, witnessing the laws of physics being bent before his very eyes was a genuine epiphany.
One step below Arthur, William climbed with a much looser, more relaxed posture, though his fighter's eyes remained alert to every movement the guards made.
While Arthur's mind raced through the strategic and scientific possibilities of magic, William's thoughts operated in a far more direct and instinctive manner.
William glanced over his shoulder into the darkness below, thinking of the red-haired girl he had left in the cell, now wrapped in the prince's own heavy cloak.
— "Damn... What tchic," William murmured to himself, slowly exhaling through his nose as he felt his physical sharpening all his senses.
Even covered in soot, weakened by days of inadequate food in prison, and dressed in a condemned woman's rags, Anna's natural beauty was immediately striking. But to someone like William, whose eyes were trained to read a person's fighting spirit, the most impressive thing about her wasn't her pretty seventeen-year-old face.
In the modern world they had come from, any teenager her age would have been worrying about school exams, social media, or weekend parties. Anna, on the other hand, had just escaped the hangman's noose by three seconds. She bore the label of "demon" in the eyes of all humanity, yet her blue eyes remained so steady, deep, and determined that they put many veteran soldiers to shame.
William shook his head with a faint, silent smile. He knew that in the original story, Anna's heart belonged entirely to Roland. Still, being there in person, standing beside the witch who would soon become one of the most destructive forces in that world, sent his adrenaline surging.
This world was no game.
It was a real battlefield where the strong made the rules.
However, while Arthur and William climbed the staircase lost in their own thoughts, Roland Wimbledon's mind, just a few steps ahead of them, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Every step the prince took on the stone stairs struck like a hammer inside his head.
Maintaining the stern, composed expression of a royal so that Carter Lannis wouldn't suspect anything was taking an absurd amount of effort from Cheng Yan.
Under normal circumstances, confirming that Anna's magic was real should have been the highlight of his day. Watching a girl create fire from nothing seemed to shatter the First Law of Thermodynamics right in front of him, but it also opened up an infinite horizon of possibilities for a mechanical engineer. With that witch's controllable heat, he finally had the missing tool needed to smelt high-quality metals, fire clinker, and launch the industrial revolution he had always dreamed of. That discovery alone would have been enough to keep him awake with excitement for an entire week.
The problem was that a much bigger, more dangerous variable was walking right behind him.
Two anomalies that shouldn't exist in this world.
Even without looking back on the staircase, Roland couldn't get the image of Arthur and William's clothes out of his head.
Industrial double stitching, perfectly symmetrical. Combed cotton knit blended with elastic fibers—spandex or polyester—that fit the muscles in William's arms perfectly whenever he moved. No tailor or handloom in King's City, not even the artisans serving King Wimbledon III, possessed the technology to produce a single thread of that fabric.
And then there was that damned watch on Arthur's left wrist.
A brushed stainless-steel case, a bezel machined on a CNC lathe, sapphire crystal glass, and precise hands driven by either quartz or a high-end mechanical movement. It was an object that required centuries of advances in metallurgy, chemistry, and precision engineering to manufacture.
Who the hell are these two guys?! Roland screamed internally, feeling a bead of cold sweat trickle down the back of his neck beneath his royal collar.
That flimsy story about being "scholars from the Kingdom of Dawn" might fool Barov or the gate guards, but it didn't fool Cheng Yan for a second.
Neither their clothes, their watch, nor their manner of walking belonged to this filthy Middle Ages. They didn't bow their heads with the submissive fear of peasants, nor did they display the exaggerated etiquette of local nobles. They looked at a prince exactly as two modern executives might look at a company director in a conference room.
Roland blinked hard in the dim staircase, trying to control his breathing.
They knew the word "cement." They knew that limestone and clay had to be mixed together. They knew about the North Slope Mine, and they had even offered a logical explanation for the magical pressure inside witches' bodies before seeing Anna use her power.
Suddenly, a piece clicked into place in Cheng Yan's brain, and the thought struck him like an electric shock.
What if they were also...?
Roland nearly stumbled on the next step, holding his breath for two seconds.
The hypothesis seemed absurd at first, but pure logic made it the only explanation that added up. If he himself—a perfectly ordinary Chinese engineer who had died after working himself to exhaustion in front of a computer—had awakened inside the body of the Fourth Prince of Graycastle, who could guarantee he was the only one? Whatever phenomenon or cosmic entity was responsible for throwing modern souls into this medieval world could just as easily have brought others along!
They must have come from Earth, Roland reasoned, his heart pounding as he climbed the final flight of stairs. Maybe they suffered some accident back there, or perhaps they were transported directly, along with their own bodies and whatever clothes they happened to be wearing!
That mysterious story about "ancient books" Arthur had brought up in the dungeon now seemed unmistakably like code—a cover story invented on the spot to avoid discussing modern science in front of Carter Lannis.
On the one hand, finding two fellow countrymen from the twenty century in this backward corner of the world brought Cheng Yan an almost unbelievable sense of relief from his loneliness. On the other hand, the prince's survival instincts sounded every alarm imaginable.
Who were they back on Earth? Had they really come to help me, or were they opportunists hoping to take my place and use my title to rule this territory? Would they become my greatest allies... or my greatest threat?
Creeeak... Clank!
At the top of the staircase, the two guards on duty pulled the iron rings and opened the heavy reinforced door sealing off access to the dungeons.
The change in surroundings was immediate. The pale, cold morning light poured into the stone corridor on the castle's ground floor, driving away the darkness of the torches. The air upstairs was still chilly, but at least it was free of the suffocating smell of damp earth and rotting iron from below.
Roland crossed the threshold first, his boots striking the clean corridor flagstones with firm, decisive steps.
Under normal protocol, he should have continued straight down the main corridor to his office upstairs, where Minister Barov was probably biting his nails with anxiety as he waited for instructions.
But Roland didn't take even five steps.
In the middle of the empty corridor, the prince suddenly stopped. With a sharp, deliberate movement, he pivoted on his heels, his royal tunic flaring through the air as he turned to face the two visitors who had just emerged from the staircase.
At the prince's abrupt halt, Carter Lannis reacted on pure instinct. The Chief Knight took a long step to the side, placing half his body between Roland and the two strangers. His fingers tightened around his sword hilt, and his gaze locked onto William's chest, ready to act at the slightest sign of danger.
A heavy silence descended upon the corridor, broken only by the wind blowing through the gaps in the tall stone windows.
Roland stared at Arthur and William through narrowed eyes. At that moment, the mindset of an engineer accustomed to dealing with numbers and equations merged with the authority of a man who had armed guards at his command.
— "Don't you two find this whole situation a little too strange?"
Roland's voice cut through the corridor, calm on the surface but concealing a razor-sharp trap in every word.
— "I am the Fourth Prince of the Kingdom of Graycastle, the direct representative of the Wimbledon royal family on this frontier," Roland continued, taking a slow step toward them as he watched for every blink and twitch. — "For centuries, the Church has preached throughout the continent that witches are servants of the devil, cursed creatures who bring ruin. The law signed by my own father requires that any woman possessing such powers be handed over or executed on the spot."
Roland folded his arms across his chest and raised his chin slightly.
— "And yet, in less than twenty-four hours, I have not only postponed a public execution, but I have also gone down to the condemned woman's cell, watched her conjure fire right in front of me, placed my own cloak over her shoulders, and even accepted your advice to fake her death," the prince said, his voice dropping to an almost dangerous tone. — "Any ordinary citizen of the Four Kingdoms, any noble or scholar in their right mind who witnessed what I just did down there would be shaking in their boots. They would be screaming about heresy or assuming I had finally lost my mind."
Roland's gray eyes bored directly into Arthur's.
— "But you two... didn't take a single step back," Roland pointed out. — "You didn't stare in terror when the fire appeared, and you didn't show the slightest surprise at my decision to protect her. Tell me.. why?"
The question hung in the cold air of the corridor like a blade poised to fall.
Beside Arthur, William felt the muscles in his back tense instantly as he recognized the trap hidden in the prince's question.
If they answered in a way that sounded too modern, openly mocking the local religion in front of Carter Lannis, the knight might declare them dangerous heretics on the spot. But if they pretended to be frightened now, Roland would immediately recognize them as terrible liars. Without opening his mouth, William flicked his eyes toward Arthur in a quick sideways glance, leaving the entire matter in the hands of the brains of the duo.
Arthur didn't disappoint.
He had been preparing an answer to that very question ever since he watched Roland cover Anna with his cloak below. Keeping his back straight and his hands calmly clasped behind him, just like a university professor or a seasoned adviser, Arthur met the prince's gaze without wavering.
— "We don't find your actions strange simply because shock and terror exist only in the minds of those who don't understand how the world works, Your Highness," Arthur replied, his voice calm, clear, and filled with a confidence that stood in stark contrast to the superstitious fear of the era.
He paused for a brief second before laying out the first part of his bait.
— "As I mentioned at the gates, the ancient books preserved and studied by our order are what brought us here," Arthur continued, speaking in a way that carried a double meaning for Roland but sounded mystical to Carter. — "These records deal with more than chemistry and construction. They possess immeasurable value for predicting the course of history. Between the lines of those texts, it was already written that a leader of royal blood would rise in the frozen lands of the west. A prince who would see beyond the curtain of lies raised by the Church and usher in a new era. We weren't surprised down there because Your Highness acted exactly as the records predicted a truly wise king would: by using reason instead of blind fear."
Roland narrowed his eyes further, searching for a weakness in this talk of "historical predictions" that seemed to explain a little too much.
But Arthur didn't give the prince time to interrupt. He took half a step forward and lowered his voice slightly, as though sharing a secret between learned men, while making sure Carter Lannis, standing just behind them, could hear every word clearly.
— "Furthermore, the foundation of all scholarship in the Kingdom of Dawn requires us to observe nature through logic and practical evidence," Arthur said. — "We know the sermons the priests repeat in the town squares. But above all, through years of observation and study, we know that those girls are not horned demons emerging from the depths of hell."
Arthur raised his right hand and calmly pointed toward the torch still burning in its wall bracket.
— "Witches are nothing more than human women, Your Highness. Ordinary people of flesh, bone, and blood, daughters of peasants or lords, who have, through some quirk of natural evolution, awakened the ability to manipulate magic," Arthur explained, his firm voice echoing off the stone. — "Fearing that girl's fire simply because it can burn a man alive means ignoring the basic fact that the very same fire can warm a house in winter, cook food, and melt iron to forge tools. When Your Highness covered her shoulders and decided to employ her, you simply chose to harness the forces of nature instead of throwing water on the flames. Why would two men of science be shocked by such a brilliant and practical decision?"
When Arthur finished speaking, silence once again settled over the corridor for five long seconds.
Just behind the prince, Carter Lannis wore an expression of unmistakable shock and confusion. For a knight raised in the culture of Graycastle, hearing someone openly declare that witches were merely "ordinary women manipulating magic" bordered on outright heresy. Yet the comparison to fire that warmed homes and melted iron made so much logical sense that the soldier couldn't find an argument against it.
Roland, meanwhile, stood motionless, looking at Arthur in a new light.
The answer had been surgically precise.
Arthur had managed to combine the mystical excuse of "ancient books that predict the future"—enough to ease the medieval guards' suspicions about how they knew so much—with an explanation of energy and evolution that sounded as though it had come straight out of a twenty-first-century. That remark about harnessing nature instead of fearing it was exactly what Cheng Yan himself had thought five minutes earlier, standing in front of Anna's cell.
Gradually, the tension in Roland's shoulders eased, and the faintest, almost imperceptible smile appeared at the corner of the prince's mouth.
— "An exceedingly interesting perspective on the use of fire," Roland said, resuming his diplomatic, measured tone as a lord. — "I'm pleased to learn that the distant Kingdom of Dawn produces men with such... open and modern minds. Come with me to the dining hall. Minister Barov must be having a breakdown over his reports upstairs, convinced some disaster has befallen us in the dungeons. We can talk more over breakfast."
Roland pivoted on his heels once more and resumed walking down the illuminated corridor, the firm sound of his boots setting the pace.
Carter Lannis removed his hand from his sword pommel, though he cast the pair one final suspicious glance before making a curt gesture for Arthur and William to follow the prince.
As he walked ahead, however, out of sight of his two guests, Roland's polite smile vanished completely, replaced by a cold, and intensely serious expression.
The former engineer's mind was racing, cross-referencing every piece of information he had just gathered.
Arthur's performance in the corridor had been brilliant. There was no denying that. The man spoke well, thought quickly under pressure, and knew exactly what a modern man wanted to hear. But a smooth speech couldn't explain away the sapphire-crystal watch on his wrist, nor could it explain how two men dressed as though they had just walked out of a shopping mall knew the formula for cement and understood plans Roland hadn't even put down on paper yet.
Ancient books that tell the future of a king and speak of natural evolution... Roland thought, narrowing his eyes as he began climbing the main staircase toward the castle's dining hall.
To Roland, the presence of those two men inside his castle was a massive unknown in the equation of his survival. They were too intelligent, knew too much, and carried secrets from the world Cheng Yan had left behind.
No matter how well-rehearsed your answers are in front of my knight, no matter how convincingly you pretend to be calm, Roland vowed silently, clenching his fists inside the wide sleeves of his royal attire as he felt the need to maintain absolute control over his territory.
I'll dismiss the servants from the table, corner you both, and extract the whole truth about who you are and what you came to seek in my city. And I'll do it today, during the banquet.