The crackling warmth inside Prince Roland's third-floor office stood in sharp, defiant contrast to the freezing white hell swallowing Border Town outside.
Within the wide stone hearth, thick logs of resinous northern pine blazed furiously, casting a rich, dancing orange glow across the mountains of parchment scrolls, geological sketches, and supply manifests stacked from one end of the solid oak desk to the other. Outside the tall lancet windows, however, the morning sky had vanished behind a solid wall of driving snow that howled against the glass like a legion of starving ghosts.
Slumping back into his high-backed wooden chair, Roland Wimbledon let out a long, heavy sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the entire valley on his shoulders. The leather upholstery creaked softly beneath him as the young prince raised both ink-stained hands to massage his temples, his gray eyes rimmed by dark, bruised circles of chronic sleep deprivation.
— "Coal consumption at the backyard kilns and the blacksmith forges has jumped by thirty percent since yesterday evening, Arthur," — Roland said, his voice hoarse as he tapped the tip of a worn goose quill against the bottom column of a daily resource report. — "With this blizzard burying the secondary gravel roads faster than the mule carts can clear them, hauling timber from the eastern woods and iron ore down from the North Slope Mine is going to turn into a logistical nightmare by tomorrow morning. If we don't institute strict fuel rationing across the outer wards today, the civilian quarters will freeze solid before the second month of winter even begins."
Standing two paces across from the desk with his hands clasped neatly behind the back of his dark-gray wool tunic, Arthur maintained an upright, immaculate posture.
Reaching out with one gloved hand, the twenty-four-year-old strategist picked up the coal ledger Roland had just set down.
To an ordinary medieval clerk like Assistant Minister Barov, cross-referencing fuel burn rates against workforce caloric intake and road-clearing man-hours would have required half a day of scratching numbers on scrap paper. Even for a late-nineties mechanical engineer like Cheng Yan, balancing those three variables by hand took several minutes of focused calculation with a charcoal pencil.
Backed by his Intelligence: 14 and years of auditing complex corporate supply chains back on Earth, Arthur's dark eyes swept down the three columns of figures at a speed that bordered on the inhuman—processing the bottlenecks, thermal losses, and labor surpluses in less than four seconds.
— "Drastic rationing is unnecessary, Your Highness, and it would only trigger panic among the town hall clerks," — Arthur replied calmly, setting the ledger back down and sliding a fresh, pre-drafted deployment roster across the oak tabletop toward the Prince. — "The bottleneck isn't our coal reserve in the North Slope shafts; it is surface transport traction."
Arthur leaned forward slightly, tracing a clean line down the parchment with his index finger.
— "Now that the southern concrete rampart and the three primary trench funnels are fully cured, fifty percent of Master Karl's civilian masonry crews are currently assigned to building red-brick apartment blocks in the inner town," — Arthur explained smoothly. — "If we pull twenty percent of those bricklayers off residential construction starting at noon and organize them into continuous, rotating snow-shovel and gravel-spreading brigades along the half-mile trail between the castle and the North Slope Mine, the mule carts won't stall in the drifts. New houses can wait until spring; the blast furnaces, the ammunition workshops, and the barracks stoves cannot."
Roland picked up the deployment sheet, his gray eyes scanning the redesigned shift schedules and route maps Arthur had already laid out.
As the numbers clicked together in the engineer's head, the tight knot between Roland's eyebrows smoothed out, and a faint, genuine smile of relief broke through his mask of royal fatigue.
— "Sometimes, Arthur, the way your mind works is genuinely frightening," — Roland remarked, dipping his quill into the brass inkwell and signing the authorization decree at the bottom of the page with a quick, decisive flourish. — "It feels less like talking to a human advisor and more like having a twenty-first-century mainframe computer sitting across from my desk. Between you keeping our supply lines from collapsing on paper, and William out there on the parapet..."
Roland glanced toward the southern window, where, just twenty minutes ago, a messenger from the wall had run up the stairs wide-eyed and breathless to report that Commander William had rappelled down the concrete face alone and beaten two wolf-sized demonic foxes to death with a steel shield and his bare fists.
— "...With William leading the shock line with that absurd, monstrous strength of his," — Roland finished, shaking his head with a wry chuckle, — "I actually find myself believing we are going to walk through this winter without losing a single yard of dirt."
— "There is no reason to doubt our survival, Your Highness," — Arthur replied, reaching up with two fingers to adjust the stiff collar of his tunic. — "Regardless of how terrifying the Church's legends make the winter horde sound, demonic beasts—and even the multi-ton Hybrid Beasts behind them—are still governed by biological mechanics. Flesh bleeds, bone fractures under sufficient kinetic stress, and lungs require oxygen."
As he spoke, Arthur allowed his gaze to flick down for half a second toward his left wrist.
Peeking out from beneath the silver-embroidered cuff of his wool sleeve was the brushed stainless-steel bezel and sapphire crystal of his modern wristwatch—which he had carefully calibrated to match the solar noon of Graycastle.
The thin, precision-machined hands showed 11:35 AM.
Up on the freezing cliffs of the North Slope Mine, the morning extraction shift was less than twenty-five minutes away from ringing its closing bell.
— "If Your Highness has no further decrees requiring my immediate signature," — Arthur said smoothly, giving the Prince a polite bow of his head, — "I will walk down to the town hall to hand Master Karl the new road-clearing rosters myself, and then head up the North Slope trail to personally audit the morning iron ore tally before the shift changes."
— "In this blizzard?" — Roland raised an eyebrow in surprise. — "Send one of Carter's guards up the hill for the mine tally, Arthur. There's no need for my chief strategist to trudge half a mile through sub-zero snowdrifts just to count baskets of rock."
— "A physical audit keeps the foremen honest, Your Highness, and the cold air clears my head after a morning of coal math," — Arthur replied without missing a beat.
Leaving the warm study behind, Arthur walked down to the ground-floor cloakroom, buttoned his heavy, knee-length black wool overcoat up to his chin, stepped into a pair of thick, fur-lined riding boots, and wrapped a dark woolen scarf twice around the lower half of his face.
As he pushed open the heavy oak side door of the castle keep and stepped out into the blinding white fury of the courtyard, the howling northern gale hit him like a physical wall, stinging his exposed cheekbones with tiny needles of driven ice.
Lowering his chin against the wind and tucking his gloved hands deep into his pockets, Arthur bypassed the cheering militia barracks to the south and turned his boots straight toward the steep, winding mountain road leading up to the North Slope.
With every crunch of his boots through the fresh six-inch snow, the cold, analytical gears inside Arthur's head spun in absolute silence.
William earned a hundred and fifty credits for thirty seconds of violence in the granary tunnel, Arthur reflected, his dark eyes narrowing behind the fringe of frost gathering on his eyelashes. And this morning, that impulsive bastard dumped a hundred and sixty credits straight into Endurance, pushing his body even further beyond the mortal ceiling.
Arthur didn't begrudge his best friend the upgrade; in fact, Arthur had been the one to talk him into buying bone density so the idiot wouldn't shatter his own forearm against a monster's skull.
What fascinated Arthur was the underlying algorithm of the Dimensional System.
During their first three weeks in Border Town, despite designing cement kilns, formulating corned gunpowder, and outmaneuvering Longsong Stronghold's trade envoy, the System hadn't awarded them a single bonus credit after their initial synchronization at the gallows. Yet the exact moment William jumped into an underground culvert and prevented the deaths of four castle guards who were supposed to suffer casualties during Duke Ryan's sabotage, the System had immediately paid out a massive reward under the banner of a [TIMELINE ANOMALY].
The System does not reward passive economic development or following the broad strokes of the original story, Arthur deduced with surgical clarity as he climbed the snow-covered incline between the pine trees. It rewards direct, immediate host intervention that derails a fatal event in the local timeline.
And because Arthur had read the early chapters of Release That Witch far more carefully than William ever had, he knew for a mathematical certainty that a textbook fatal accident was scheduled to take place at the mouth of the North Slope Mine in less than fifteen minutes.
In the original timeline of the story, the first high-pressure steam engine that Prince Roland installed at the main mine shaft to haul up ore baskets was operated by a young, newly promoted miner who had grown arrogant and careless. Drunk on the pride of operating a roaring iron machine with a simple flick of his wrist instead of swinging an iron pickaxe in the dark like the older veterans, the boy had let his attention slip at the end of a shift—pulling the main exhaust release lever without checking the path in front of the discharge pipe.
An older, veteran miner walking past the machine at that exact second had taken a full, point-blank blast of superheated pressurized steam straight to the face.
In the novel, that horrific accident—which left the miner's skin boiled, blistered, and melting off his skull in agonizing torment—had served a crucial narrative purpose for Roland. By rushing thirteen-year-old Nana Pine to the scene and having her heal those terrifying, fatal burns in front of a crowd of weeping, horrified miners, Roland had shattered the commoners' religious prejudice against witches overnight, turning little Nana into the beloved "angel" of Border Town.
It was a touching, pivotal chapter in Roland's political campaign.
— "Roland's public relations campaign, however, does not increase my attribute numbers," — Arthur muttered aloud, his cold, quiet voice muffled by his wool scarf and instantly torn away by the shrieking mountain wind.
Inside his coat pocket, Arthur slowly clenched and unclenched his gloved right fist, feeling the deep, bottomless hum of Magic Power: 8 [Telekinesis] vibrating inside his chest.
After his three-hour nocturnal hunt through the Concealing Forest the night before, Arthur knew the exhilarating power of Level 8. He could fly five meters off the ground, crush the lungs of giant birds with atmospheric implosions, and snap the necks of forest predators without leaving a mark.
Yet Arthur wasn't satisfied.
Level 8 was more than enough to assassinate mortal noblemen or slaughter common wolves, yet what happened in two weeks when a twenty-ton Hybrid Beast with an obsidian carapace marched up to the rampart? What happened next year when the Church of Hermes unleashed its giant, stitched-together God's Punishment Warriors, or when the ancient, high-ranking Demons descended from the far north wielding magic that could level an entire city block?
Against monsters of that scale, Level 8 wouldn't be enough to guarantee absolute control.
Arthur didn't want to merely participate in the battles to come; he wanted his Telekinesis at Level 10, Level 12, Level 15, and beyond—until he could pluck an entire siege tower off the earth and fold it like tin foil with a single thought.
If he stepped in today and prevented that veteran miner from getting his face boiled off by the steam engine, Nana Pine would lose her dramatic, tear-jerking miracle in front of the mining shifts. The commoners' full emotional acceptance of witches in the outer town might be delayed by two or three weeks.
I don't care, Arthur decreed inside his mind, his dark gaze fixed like cold iron on the rocky silhouette of the North Slope looming through the blizzard ahead. Public prejudice is a social variable that can be engineered later through wage bonuses, newspaper propaganda, and battlefield results. A man's boiled face—and the System credits sitting on the table for saving his life—are immediate, tangible capital. Nana's reputation can wait. My evolution cannot.
The half-mile climb up the winding mountain trail was steep and punishing, with freezing gales funneling down the ravine and driving snow horizontally into his chest.
A month ago, when Arthur had first woken up in the mud with his original Endurance: 8 still unaccustomed to frontier labor, this hike would have left him wheezing and soaked in sweat. Now, after three weeks of nightly telekinetic conditioning and the permanent neural baseline left behind by his seven-point leap in Magic Power the night before, his body moved up the icy incline with steady, tireless precision.
Before he even crested the final ridge of the North Slope clearing, he heard it—and more than that, he felt the vibrations through his boots and his sixty-pace telekinetic radar.
CHUG-CLACK! CHUG-CLACK! HSSSSS—!
It was the unmistakable, mechanical heartbeat of the nineteenth century roaring in the middle of a medieval snowstorm.
Stepping past the outer timber palisade of the mine camp, Arthur looked toward the massive, yawning rock cavern of the primary extraction shaft.
Bolted onto a thick foundation of gray hydraulic concrete just outside the cave mouth stood the larger sibling of the prototype engine they had built in the castle shed: a towering, cast-iron high-pressure steam engine.
Black coal smoke billowed from its vertical brick chimney, mixing with clouds of white steam as its heavy iron piston rod drove a five-hundred-pound flywheel in a relentless, rhythmic circle. Connected to that spinning axle was a thick, braided hemp-and-iron cable winch that hauled fifty-kilogram baskets of raw iron ore straight up out of the pitch-black depths of the mountain—performing with effortless mechanical ease the backbreaking work that used to require twenty starving serfs crawling up wooden ladders on bleeding knees.
Instead of walking straight out into the center of the muddy, snow-churned yard where the shift foremen would spot him and bow, Arthur drifted quietly to his left.
Stopping beneath the low, overhanging timber eaves of an unlit tool-storage shed twenty paces from the boiler, he let the dark gray wool of his overcoat blend seamlessly into the deep shadows between the stacked timber beams.
From that vantage point, his dark eyes—and his invisible telekinetic net—had a completely unobstructed view of the elevated wooden operating platform bolted to the side of the steam engine.
Standing up on the wooden planks beside the hissing brass pressure gauges was the young operator: a nineteen-year-old former pickaxe boy named Nils.
Even from twenty paces away in the snow, Arthur's corporate eyes immediately spotted the recipe for an industrial workplace disaster.
Despite the deafening roar of the boiler and the heavy responsibility of controlling thirty atmospheres of superheated steam, Nils's posture was a study in lazy, sleep-deprived arrogance. Because he had been one of the few young miners quick enough to memorize Roland's color-coded gauge markings, he had been promoted off the freezing rock face and given a warm spot right next to the firebox.
Wrapped in a thick sheepskin vest with his chin tilted high whenever the older miners walked past with their heavy carts, the boy's gloved hands rested carelessly on the two primary iron control levers protruding from the valve box: the silver-painted lever on the left that regulated high-pressure steam intake to the winch cylinder, and the brown-painted lever on the right that vented excess boiler pressure straight out through the main exhaust pipe after a haul cycle.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
High above the timber arch of the mine entrance, the heavy bronze shift bell suddenly rang out three times, its deep metallic note cutting sharply through the roar of the flywheel and the howl of the wind.
It was twelve o'clock sharp. The morning shift was over.
Up on the wooden platform, Nils let out a wide, jaw-cracking yawn, disengaged the silver intake clutch as the final basket of iron ore locked onto the surface hook, and leaned his weight lazily against the wooden railing.
Down below, emerging from the dark, lantern-lit mouth of the main shaft like ants crawling out of an anthill, came forty exhausted miners.
Their hunched shoulders were coated in black coal dust and reddish-brown iron grit, their sweat-soaked linen tunics steaming violently as the sub-zero air hit their overheated bodies. Driven by the smell of hot barley-and-meat soup wafting from the camp kitchen huts across the clearing, the main group of workers shuffled past the right side of the timber yard, heading straight toward the tally tables to collect their daily copper tokens.
Standing motionless in the shadow of the tool shed, Arthur didn't watch the crowd.
His sharp eyes scanned the stragglers emerging from the shaft—until he locked onto his target.
Walking ten paces behind the main group was Titus, a broad-shouldered, forty-year-old veteran quarryman with thick dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and grime. Carrying an unlit oil lantern in his left hand, the older miner had his head down, wincing slightly as he used his right hand to massage a stiff, aching rotator cuff from four hours of swinging a heavy iron sledge against the rock seam.
Because he was looking down at his own boots and rubbing his sore shoulder, Titus didn't take the wider gravel path around the timber racks.
Instead, looking for the shortest line out of the freezing wind toward the warming huts, the veteran miner cut diagonally across the slushy mud directly alongside the lower brick housing of the steam engine.
That shortcut took him straight across the mouth of the main iron exhaust pipe—a thick, six-inch-wide cast-iron tube jutting out from the lower boiler assembly at chest height, angled slightly downward toward a drainage ditch to vent waste steam away from the winch cables.
Up on the wooden platform ten feet above him, Nils didn't look down.
Seeing the main cluster of forty miners already halfway across the yard toward the soup cauldrons, the exhausted nineteen-year-old assumed the side lane was completely clear. Letting his heavy eyelids droop completely shut for two seconds to rest his stinging eyes against the coal smoke, Nils gripped the brown-painted exhaust lever with both hands and yanked it all the way back with his full body weight to purge the boiler for the noon shutdown.
Down below, at that exact fraction of a second, Titus stepped directly in front of the iron nozzle—less than two feet from the pipe's mouth.
Clack-HSSSS—!
Deep inside the brass valve box, the heavy iron seal slid open.
Twenty paces away in the shadow of the tool shed, Arthur didn't waste a millisecond opening his mouth to shout.
His Intelligence: 14 brain knew the cold physics of the situation: in freezing air, the human voice traveled at roughly three hundred and三十 meters per second, and an exhausted forty-year-old miner's neurological reaction time was nearly half a second. Before the first syllable of a warning could even reach Titus's eardrums and register in his brain, a jet of three-hundred-degree pressurized steam would already have stripped the flesh off his skull.
Thought, however, traveled instantaneously.
Keeping both gloved hands buried calmly inside the pockets of his black overcoat, Arthur narrowed his dark eyes and unleashed the full, concentrated weight of Magic Power: 8 [Telekinesis].
Inside his chest, the bottomless psychic core pulsed like a cold star.
Bypassing the twenty paces of blowing snow between them in zero time, Arthur didn't bother with a delicate thread. He projected a broad, invisible construct of solid kinetic force—shaped like a massive, conceptual iron hand—and clamped it directly around Titus's broad shoulders, chest, and the thick wool collar of his coal-stained tunic.
PULL!
To Arthur's heightened perception, the world around the mine shaft seemed to drop into slow motion.
He didn't gently tug the man aside; to clear the wide conical blast zone of the expanding steam jet in less than a tenth of a second, Arthur yanked backward with nearly a thousand pounds of raw telekinetic traction.
To Titus, it felt as though an invisible warhorse had galloped past behind him and hooked an iron chain into the back of his coat.
Before the burly, two-hundred-pound miner could even plant his forward boot in the mud, his feet were ripped violently out from under him. Hurtling backward through the freezing air parallel to the ground, Titus flew three full meters in the blink of an eye before crashing flat onto his back in a bank of semi-frozen slush and snowdrifts beside the timber shed, the breath driven out of his lungs in a loud, bewildered "Oof—!"
One-tenth of a second after Titus's head cleared the space in front of the boiler, the steam arrived.
SHHHHHH-KRA-ROOOOOOAAAAR!
With a deafening, ear-splitting shriek that sounded like an enraged metallic dragon opening its jaws, a solid, blinding-white column of superheated, high-pressure steam erupted straight out of the six-inch iron pipe.
The scalding jet blasted in a dead-straight line through the exact cubic foot of air where Titus's face and neck had been a heartbeat earlier, before slamming violently into the frozen drainage ditch ten feet away. Instantly, the accumulated ice and packed snow in the ditch flash-melted and vaporized, turning the entire side of the engine house into a boiling, suffocating white sauna that smelled of wet iron and scorched mud.
Three meters away on the ground, a harmless wave of residual warm mist washed over Titus's boots—hot enough to melt the frost on his wool trousers, yet completely spent of its lethal pressure.
Up on the wooden operating platform, Nils's eyes snapped wide open at the sound of the man's grunt below him.
Looking down through the dissipating edge of the white steam cloud and spotting the unlit oil lantern lying shattered right in front of the boiling exhaust nozzle—and then seeing Titus sprawled on his back in the mud ten feet further back—every single drop of blood drained from the young operator's face.
Nils turned as white as the snow on the roof, his heart seizing in his chest as his hands froze on the brown lever.
As the roaring steam pressure finally vented down to a low hiss, Nils let go of the iron handle as if it had turned into a venomous snake. His knees gave out completely beneath him, dropping him onto the wooden planks of the platform in a heap of pure, suffocating terror as his brain processed what he had just done.
Down in the slush, Titus slowly propped himself up on his elbows, coughing as he spat a mouthful of dirty snow onto his chest.
Staring wide-eyed at the hissing, dripping iron pipe ten feet in front of him—where the frozen earth was literally bubbling like a soup pot and his dropped iron lantern had been warped by the heat—retrospective horror hit the forty-year-old veteran like a physical blow.
His rough, calloused hands began to tremble uncontrollably as he touched his own intact, unburned cheeks, realizing that he had just come within a fraction of a second of having the eyes boiled out of his sockets.
— "Titus! By the gods, what happened over there?!" —
— "The steam pipe! Who pulled him back from the vent?!" —
Across the yard, twenty miners who had turned around at the roar of the exhaust came running back through the snow, shouting in confusion as they looked between the steaming crater in front of the pipe and Titus lying ten feet away in the mud.
Before the panicked crowd could descend into chaos, Arthur stepped calmly out from the deep shadow beneath the tool-shed eaves.
His fur-lined boots made a firm, unhurried crunch against the frost as he walked straight between the startled miners and the steaming boiler. He didn't draw a weapon, and he didn't raise his voice, yet the sheer, icy gravity radiating off the black-coated strategist parted the dirty workers like water before the prow of an ironclad ship.
Unwrapping the dark wool scarf from the lower half of his face, Arthur didn't look at the crowd first.
He tilted his chin up ten degrees, locking his glacial, unblinking dark eyes straight onto the trembling nineteen-year-old boy kneeling on the wooden platform above.
— "You closed your eyes on the platform," — Arthur said.
It wasn't a shout, yet his calm, razor-sharp baritone cut cleanly through the residual hiss of the boiler and the muttering of forty men, freezing the entire yard in place.
Stepping over to where Titus was still sitting stunned in the slush, Arthur reached down and extended a steady, black-gloved hand to the veteran miner.
— "On your feet, Titus. You're in one piece," — Arthur ordered evenly.
Still in a daze, the burly forty-year-old quarryman reached up with a coal-blackened hand, gripped the foreign count's immaculate leather glove, and allowed himself to be pulled up onto his boots. Looking at Arthur standing right beside the tool shed—just steps from where he had been yanked backward—Titus's wide eyes filled with a mixture of bewildered awe and bone-deep gratitude, his rattled brain automatically assuming that the Prince's advisor had lunged out from behind the shed and yanked him out of the fire by his coat collar before jumping back from the steam.
— "M-My Lord Count..." — Titus rasped, his voice shaking as he bowed his head low over Arthur's glove. — "You... you saved my eyes, My Lord. You saved my life."
— "Thank your thick wool coat for giving a good grip, Titus, and go have the camp medic check your back for bruises," — Arthur replied smoothly, brushing a clump of slush off the older miner's shoulder to cement the physical illusion in front of the watching crowd before turning his cold gaze back up toward the platform.
Raising his right arm, Arthur pointed a single gloved index finger straight at Nils's pale face with the precision of a judge reading a death sentence.
— "And as for you, boy," — Arthur's voice dropped half an octave, turning colder than the mountain blizzard around them. — "Had I not been standing beside the timber shed conducting an unannounced safety inspection of this blind spot—and pulled that man backward the instant I saw your eyelids drop—Titus's boiled skin and blood would be coating your hands right now. And I promise you, His Royal Highness would have had you dragged down this mountain in chains to rot in the lowest cell of the dungeon."
Up on the planks, Nils flinched as if struck across the face with a whip.
— "His Highness gave you this post because he believed you possessed the discipline to handle modern machinery, not so you could nap by the fire while forty men walk past a high-pressure vent," — Arthur continued mercilessly. — "Gross negligence on an industrial site is treason against Border Town's survival. The moment that boiler pressure drops to zero, you are to climb down from that platform. You are officially stripped of your operator's badge, docked two weeks' wages, and reassigned to hauling gravel carts in the snow until you learn what the lives of your fellow workers weigh. Understood?"
— "Y-Yes, My Lord! Thank you for your mercy, My Lord! I'm sorry, Titus! I'm so sorry!" — Nils sobbed aloud, pressing his forehead flat against the snowy planks of the platform in a puddle of tears and relief that he wasn't heading for the gallows.
Around the clearing, the forty dirty, hardened miners looked from the weeping boy on the platform to the tall, composed figure in the black overcoat standing beside Titus.
In the old days under the previous governor, if a noble's machine had boiled a peasant alive, the lord would have whipped the corpse for getting blood on the iron. Yet here stood Count Arthur—the Prince's highest-ranking chief strategist—who had not only braved a sub-zero blizzard at noon to check their working conditions, but had personally thrown himself forward to yank an ordinary quarryman out of the jaws of death and immediately punished the careless operator without spilling a drop of blood.
Murmurs of deep, reverent respect rippled through the crowd of miners as every man in the yard bowed his head low as Arthur turned on his heel, wrapped his scarf back over his nose, and walked calmly out of the timber yard.
He didn't need to wait until he reached the castle to hear the chime.
The moment his boots crossed the outer palisade of the North Slope camp and started down the lonely, snow-swept mountain trail, a brilliant, familiar pulse of golden light flared across the translucent blue window inside his mind.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: TIMELINE ANOMALY DETECTED]
Evaluation:The trajectory of the local timeline has been altered through direct host intervention. Outcome: Complete prevention of catastrophic collateral injury to a tertiary worker (Titus) and establishment of absolute administrative authority among the industrial workforce.
[REWARD: +60 Credits]
[CURRENT BALANCE: 80 Credits]
Beneath the thick folds of his dark wool scarf, a thin smile—as sharp and cold as the edge of a surgical scalpel—curved across Arthur's lips.
Sixty credits for ten seconds of telekinetic traction, Arthur mused, his heart giving a steady, satisfied throb against his ribs as he looked at the 80 Credits gleaming at the bottom of his screen. Added to the twenty credits I left in reserve last night, that gives me eighty. Exactly two full attribute points.
He didn't wait until dinner, and he didn't save a single copper for the shop.
Right there on the deserted mountain road, with the blizzard howling through the pines around him, Arthur mentally dragged the entire 80-Credit balance across his status window and dropped both points straight into Magic Power [Telekinesis].
[TRANSACTION CONFIRMED: -80 CREDITS]
[MAGIC POWER: 8 -> 10]
Thump—ZZZZT!
Because his central nervous system had already survived the massive seven-point overhaul the night before, the transition from Level 8 to the double-digit threshold of Level 10 didn't make him stumble or arch his back.
Instead, as the golden wave surged from his chest into his cerebral cortex, Arthur felt the invisible sphere of his telekinetic dominion expand outward with breathtaking, crystal-clear authority.
His sixty-pace sensory radar instantly stretched out to nearly a hundred paces in every direction. His five-meter vertical flight tether from solid surfaces thickened and extended to eight meters, and the invisible cables of force at his command felt dense enough to seize a charging warhorse by the throat and snap its neck in mid-stride without a flicker of mental strain.
As the falling snowflakes drifted down toward his black wool shoulders, none of them actually touched the fabric—sliding smoothly off an invisible, millimeter-thin dome of atmospheric pressure hovering passively around his coat.
Down in the castle keep, thirteen-year-old Nana Pine had just lost her canonical debut as the miracle worker who healed a boiled face in front of the miners. The legend of Border Town's "Little Angel" would have to wait for the first battlefield casualties on the southern wall. Tonight in the taverns and barracks, the miners wouldn't be whispering about a witch's white light; they would be whispering about the terrifying, hawk-eyed vigilance and icy justice of Count Arthur.
— "My apologies for stealing your scene, little healer," — Arthur whispered softly into the lonely, swirling snow as he walked down the mountain with Level 10 power humming like a nuclear reactor inside his chest. — "You will have plenty of opportunities to shine before spring. In this world, however... invisible authority is worth far more than public miracles."
[DIMENSIONAL SYSTEM — UPDATED HOST PARAMETERS]
User: [Arthur]
Location: North Slope Trail, Kingdom of Graycastle
[Attributes]
Strength: 6
Speed: 7
Endurance: 8
Agility: 8
Intelligence: 14
Magic Power: 10 [Telekinesis]
[CURRENT BALANCE: 0 Credits]