The vast, frozen wilderness stretching between the outer timberlands of Border Town and the jagged spine of the Impassable Mountain Range was no place for ordinary mortals in the dead of winter.
Above the lower treeline, the northern blizzard raged in blinding, vertical curtains of white, and the wind howled down the rocky gorges like a chorus of lost souls, carrying a sub-zero chill capable of freezing the blood in a man's veins within minutes. Yet for the two travelers making their way up the steep mountain incline that afternoon, the journey was remarkably removed from the freezing, blood-soaked hell gripping the rest of the frontier.
After riding their two northern draft horses as far up the snow-choked forest trail as the beasts could manage and tethering them inside a sheltered rock overhang with plenty of dry fodder, William and Nightingale had left the physical world behind.
They were walking straight through the Mist World.
Inside Nightingale's parallel dimension, the blinding snowstorm and the treacherous mountain crags were stripped of all color and sound, rendered as a quiet, monochromatic landscape of shifting grays, stark whites, and softly vibrating black outlines. All around them in the physical forest outside the veil, the slopes were crawling with danger—packs of red-eyed demonic wolves prowling through the drifts, massive armored boars rooting under frozen pines, and even the occasional massive shadow of a winged, mutated eagle circling overhead.
Inside the Mist, however, those terrifying predators appeared as nothing more than silent, harmless gray silhouettes. Guided by Nightingale's razor-sharp assassin's instincts and her three-dimensional spatial awareness, the two of them wove effortlessly between the roaming packs—turning a trek that would have been a non-stop, exhausting bloodbath for a platoon of soldiers into a peaceful afternoon stroll through a realm of shadows.
Even more fascinating to Nightingale than their speed was the bizarre tactical experiment William had been running for the past hour.
Every few minutes, as they climbed a particularly steep shelf of rock inside the monochrome world, there would be a faint, almost inaudible hum in the gray air—and William's tall figure would simply vanish from beside her, materializing three meters higher up the slope in the exact same instant!
Thanks to the external rules of the Dimensional System, William had discovered that his Magic Power: 3 [Teleportation] worked even inside Nightingale's parallel pocket dimension. Even though he hadn't invested a single credit into upgrading his Magic Power above its initial baseline of 3—which kept his maximum single-jump distance capped at three meters—folding space inside another witch's dimensional spell was a feat that made Nightingale look at him in sheer disbelief every time he did it.
Of course, there was one strict rule governing their travel inside the Mist: to keep a second person inside her dimensional veil without being violently ejected back into the real snowstorm, Nightingale had to maintain continuous physical contact with her passenger.
And since William's short three-meter teleports only lasted a microsecond before he caught her hand again at the top of a ledge, from the moment they had dismounted at the forest shelter three hours ago, William's large, warm, calloused fingers had remained firmly intertwined with Nightingale's slender, ungloved hand.
Neither of them had complained about that requirement once.
By late afternoon, however, as the pale light filtering through the monochrome canopy began to dim into the long, stretched shadows of winter dusk, William felt a subtle tremor in the fingers holding his.
Carrying a ninety-kilogram man wrapped in winter gear inside her Mist World for four straight hours while climbing a forty-five-degree mountain grade was taking a heavy toll on Nightingale's Magic Core and physical stamina. Her breathing had grown noticeably shallower, and a fine sheen of cold sweat damped the silver-blonde hair at her temples.
Stopping on a flat plateau halfway up the pass, William gave her hand a gentle, firm squeeze.
— "Hold up a second, Veronica. Let's call it a day right here," — William said, his deep voice slightly muffled by the muffled acoustics of the Mist. — "You've already saved us a full day of marching and twenty fights by steering us past those packs. If we push any higher after dark while your stamina is dropping, we'll be asking for trouble. Let's drop the veil and set up camp before the sun goes down completely."
Exhausted and grateful that he had noticed her fatigue without forcing her to admit it, Nightingale gave a quiet nod and released the weave of her magic.
Whoooosh—!
The transition back into physical reality hit them like a bucket of ice water.
Instantly, color and sound crashed back over their senses: the blinding white glare of the snowbanks, the deep emerald green of the ancient mountain pines, the bruised purple of the twilight sky, and the deafening howl of the northern wind roaring across the high peaks.
Fortunately, Nightingale had chosen their stopping point with an experienced scout's eye. They were standing inside a small, recessed natural hollow near the base of a sheer granite cliff, surrounded on three sides by a dense ring of boulders and thick pine trunks that broke eighty percent of the freezing wind.
Letting go of her hand with a reluctance he didn't bother hiding, William rolled his broad shoulders and immediately shifted into practical field mode.
— "Sit down on that dry log and catch your breath—leave the camp setup to me," — William instructed warmly.
Wrapping her white cloak tighter around her shoulders and leaning back against a snow-free boulder, Nightingale expected him to walk over to the saddlebags they had carried or start gathering fallen branches out of the snow.
Instead, William simply stepped into the center of the small clearing, raised his right hand into the empty air in front of his chest, and flicked his fingers sideways as if sliding open an invisible latch.
To William's retinas, the familiar ten-slot grid of his [Inventory] materialized.
To Nightingale's wide blue eyes, however, what happened next looked like high-tier spatial sorcery straight out of an ancient legend.
Without a single chant or a flicker of a Magic Core, the freezing air in front of William's palm warped slightly—and a heavy, double-bitted steel woodcutter's axe with a three-foot hickory handle simply materialized out of absolute nothingness into his grip!
Walking three paces over to a thick, dead pine trunk that had frozen and dried standing up at the edge of the rocks, William planted his boots wide in the snow.
He didn't need fancy lumberjack technique. Backed by Strength: 16 and Speed: 16, he swung the heavy steel axe with the velocity of a whip and the impact of a siege cannon.
THWACK! CRACK—BOOM!
Two blindingly fast diagonal blows sheared straight through ten inches of frozen heartwood as if it were dry cheese, dropping the dead tree into the drift with a muffled crash. Moving in a blur of steel, William limbed the branches and split the trunk into a neat, waist-high stack of dry firewood logs in less than four minutes without even raising his heart rate.
Next, reaching back into the empty air to swap the axe back into its slot, William pulled out two heavy, dark-waxed canvas tarpaulins, a coil of paracord, and a deep cast-iron skillet. Moving with effortless agility between the boulders and the overhanging pine boughs, helashed the waxed tarps into a tight, A-frame lean-to shelter angled against the cliff face—completely sealing out the swirling snow and creating a dry, cozy pocket of calm air.
Even as he worked, however, William let out an annoyed huff and shook his head at the invisible blue screen in front of his face.
— "Ten lousy non-stacking slots..." — William grumbled aloud to himself, kicking snow over the bottom edge of the tarp to seal the draft. — "Every self-respecting RPG in history starts the player off with at least thirty inventory slots and weight-stacking! Because a single iron pan and a bundle of steaks each take up a whole box, I had to leave half my camping gear back at the castle!"
Reaching into the spatial pocket one more time, he pulled out the contents of three more slots: two thick, pre-seasoned slabs of prime beef ribeye and four boneless chicken thighs wrapped in butcher paper, which he had bought from the System shop before dawn.
Sitting on a dry pine log just inside the mouth of the canvas shelter, Nightingale stared at the raw meat in his hands, her jaw dropping slightly.
Despite having been stored for over ten hours while they climbed into a sub-zero blizzard, the beef and chicken weren't frozen solid like bricks—nor were they warm and spoiled. Because the System's [Inventory] held objects in complete temporal stasis, the meat was in the exact, fresh, cool state it had been the second he bought it!
As William arranged a ring of flat stones at the entrance of the lean-to and stacked a pyramid of dry pine kindling over them, Nightingale finally couldn't hold back her amazement any longer.
— "You stand there complaining about 'ten slots,' yet I have never in my life heard of a power as absurdly convenient as that," — Nightingale said, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees as she watched him. — "Storing heavy steel tools, canvas tents, and fresh meat inside an invisible pocket where time and frost cannot touch them... William, just how many different magical abilities are hidden inside that 'System' of yours?"
Crouching beside the unlit fire ring, William paused and rubbed his chin with his thumb, looking over at her with a thoughtful grin.
— "You know, back where Art and I come from, we just think of these things as standard user-interface features from a stingy game system," — William chuckled, sitting back on his heels across the stone ring from her. — "Though if we classify them by the rules of Graycastle's witches... yeah, I guess I'm walking around with several distinct abilities at once."
Raising his left hand, William began ticking them off on his gloved fingers with complete candor:
— "If we break them down one by one: my first active magic is Teleportation, which you saw in my bedroom last night. The second is Physical Enhancement—spending the System's credits to permanently evolve my muscle density, bone endurance, and nerve speed past mortal limits. The third is my Biometric Scanner, which lets me look at an ordinary soldier and read his exact physical numbers floating above his head. The fourth is this Spatial Inventory that holds up to ten separate items in frozen time; the fifth is our passive immunity to the God's Stone of Retaliation... and the sixth..."
William paused with his right thumb raised, glancing at the [CURRENT BALANCE: 31 Credits] sitting in the corner of his screen from the night before.
Letting out a quiet laugh, he mentally opened the [SHOP] tab, scrolled down to the miscellaneous utility tools, and spent 9 Credits on the spot—bringing his balance down to 22 Credits.
— "...And the sixth is the System Shop itself, which lets me trade credits to materialize tools from my home world out of thin air," — William finished smoothly.
As he spoke, the air above his open right palm rippled once, and a small, rectangular object made of brushed chrome steel materialized between his fingers: a classic, windproof Zippo-style fluid lighter.
Clink—shhhk!
With a casual flick of his thumb, the hinged metal lid snapped open, the flint wheel sparked, and a clean, steady, golden flame bloomed right at the top of the metal wick in the freezing air.
Leaning forward, William touched the lighter flame to the dry pine shavings at the base of the wood pyramid. Within seconds, the resinous kindling caught with a lively crackle, sending a wave of bright orange light and glorious, radiating heat washing into the canvas shelter while William snapped the lighter shut and vanished it back into an empty inventory slot.
Sitting on the log across from him, Nightingale stared at the spot where the little metal fire-box had vanished, then hugged her knees against her chest as she looked at the tall young man warming his hands over the flames.
In the Witch Cooperation Association, everyone looked up to Cara with awe because she could summon three or four different breeds of venomous snakes, and witches who awakened a secondary derivative ability after eighteen were treated like prodigies. Compared to William, however—who could fold space, shatter boulders with his fists, store equipment in frozen time, ignore Church stones, and pull miraculous tools out of nothingness—even the greatest witches in history looked like beginners.
— "If all 'male witches' from your world possess a fraction of what you and Arthur can do, you are centuries ahead of us," — Nightingale murmured, her husky voice tinged with genuine, humble admiration as the firelight danced in her blue eyes. — "Once the two of you reach full maturity, the High Church of Hermes wouldn't last a single afternoon if you decided to march on the Holy City."
— "Give us until next summer and a few hundred more credits, and we'll test that theory out," — William grinned, setting Anna's small steel grate over the stones and laying the thick beef steaks and chicken thighs across the hot iron.
Ssssssshhhhh—!
As the rich fat of the ribeye began to render and drip onto the pine coals below, filling the small, enclosed canvas shelter with the mouthwatering aroma of sizzling beef, a comfortable, heavy silence settled over the camp.
It wasn't an awkward silence; it was an atmosphere thick with a quiet, magnetic intimacy. Outside the waxed canvas walls, a lethal mountain blizzard was howling through the dark pines at thirty below zero—yet inside this tiny six-foot triangle of warmth carved out of the wilderness, there was only the crackle of the flames and the two of them sitting side by side.
Waiting for the meat to sear, William sat cross-legged on a spare tarp beside her log and rested his right hand palm-up on his knee.
Without even thinking about it—guided purely by the continuous physical habit of the last five hours of climbing through the Mist—Nightingale naturally reached her ungloved hand down from her lap and slid her slender fingers straight back between his, intertwining their palms once more.
William looked down at their joined hands resting in the orange glow of the fire; her pale skin was finally warm again, soft and smooth against his scarred knuckles.
— "You know, we've been holding hands non-stop since we left the horses at noon," — William teased softly, his deep baritone dropping to a low, slightly raspy murmur as a crooked smile curved his lips. — "At this rate, with how cold it gets up here at night, our fingers are going to end up freezing together permanently."
This time, Nightingale didn't pull her hand back, she didn't look down at the dirt, and she didn't hide behind a wall of sarcasm.
Instead, she raised her head and locked her striking blue eyes directly onto his dark ones—her gaze bright, steady, and intensely focused in the dancing firelight.
— "Maybe they will," — Nightingale whispered, her voice as smooth as velvet and carrying a quiet, unguarded boldness that made the air in the shelter feel ten degrees hotter. — "And honestly, William... I don't think that would be such a bad thing at all."
The playful smirk on William's face wavered, melting away into a deep, breathless seriousness.
Inside the small shelter, the air suddenly felt thin. All the clever banter, the jokes, and the wartime calculations dried up on their tongues—leaving only the undeniable, magnetic gravity that had been building between them through every shared battle on the wall, every late-night confession in the dark, and every tear she had shed against his chest.
Neither of them said another word.
Slowly, pulled together as if by an invisible tide stronger than Arthur's telekinesis, William leaned forward from the tarp at the exact same moment Nightingale leaned down from the log.
The outside world, the scheming princes of Graycastle, the packs of mutated monsters in the snow, and the ancient Demons waiting in the northern peaks simply ceased to exist.
When they were less than an inch apart, the tip of William's nose brushed lightly against hers. Nightingale's long, pale eyelashes fluttered shut, her fingers tightening around his hand as William tilted his head slightly and closed the final fraction of a millimeter between them.
Their lips met in the warm glow of the campfire.
It wasn't a rough or hurried kiss; it was soft, warm, and remarkably gentle—a quiet, unhurried promise sealed in the middle of a frozen wasteland that sent a jolt of pure electricity straight through both of their chests.
For five long, suspended heartbeats, the only thing in the universe was the softness of her lips and the quiet mingling of their breath.
When they finally parted by a few millimeters, resting their foreheads lightly against each other with their eyes still half-closed, Nightingale's cheeks were glowing a deeper, warmer crimson than the pine embers in the hearth—a small, slightly dazed, and deeply happy smile curving the corners of the lips that had just been kissed.
POP—SSSSSSSHHH!
Right beside their knees, a drop of rendering beef fat hit a white-hot pine knot in the fire, sending up a loud, sharp flare of sparks that snapped both of them out of their trance and reminded them that dinner was still on the grill.
Clearing his throat with a sudden, boyish cough as he blinked twice to get his brain working again, William pulled back half a foot—though his left hand refused to let go of her fingers—and reached into his doublet pocket with his free hand to pull out a small glass vial of salt and black pepper he had saved from the kitchen.
— "Ahem... Caught it right on time. Almost let the ribeye burn," — William mumbled, trying and failing miserably to hide the massive, ear-to-ear grin threatening to split his face in half as he flipped the steaks with one hand and seasoned the sizzling meat.
Ten minutes later, they ate their supper side by side inside the warm shelter, sharing the juicy, fire-charred beef and chicken off the iron skillet while trading quiet, sidelong glances and soft smiles that made a simple camp meal in a blizzard taste like a royal banquet.
Once the hot food settled in their stomachs and the fire was banked with thick logs for the night, however, the cumulative physical and mental toll of the past forty-eight hours finally caught up with the Commander of the First Army.
Even with Endurance: 14, William had fought on the wall for sixteen hours the day before, stayed up past midnight cooking in the kitchen and watching Anna's awakening, and then spent all afternoon hiking up a vertical mountain range while spamming short-range teleports inside a parallel dimension. Now that the adrenaline of the climb—and the racing heartbeat of their first kiss—had settled into a warm, contented peace, a wave of leaden exhaustion washed over his nervous system.
Sitting on the dry tarp with his back leaning against the pine log right beside Nightingale's knees, William stared into the hypnotic orange embers, his heavy eyelids drooping lower and lower.
Before he could even open his mouth to tell her that he was just going to rest his eyes for "five minutes" before taking the first watch, his breathing deepened into a slow, steady rhythm, his chin dipped toward his chest, and the Invincible Guardian of Border Town passed out cold sitting upright.
Beside him, Nightingale heard his breathing change immediately.
Looking down at the tall, broad-shouldered warrior who had fallen fast asleep with his fingers still loosely curled around hers, an expression of profound, unguarded tenderness softened the assassin's features.
Moving with the silent, weightless delicacy of a shadow, Nightingale slid down off the log onto the dry tarp right beside his hip. Reaching up gently with her free hand, she guided William's heavy, sleeping head sideways until his cheek rested comfortably against the soft wool of her left shoulder.
In his sleep, every trace of the fierce war god who shattered monsters with his bare hands was gone; his face looked peaceful, young, and completely unguarded.
Pulling the spare wool blanket up over both of their shoulders with one hand while keeping her other hand firmly intertwined with his warm palm in her lap, Graycastle's deadliest witch leaned her cheek lightly against his dark hair—keeping her sharp eyes fixed on the snow-lit entrance of the shelter as she stood guard over the sleep of the man she loved.