Coals of liquid fire seemed to be twisting inside Violetta's stomach, tearing at her gut with paralyzing cramps that made every muscle across her abdomen lock up in agony.
Outside the jagged mouth of the granite half-cave, the atmosphere was so thick and suffocating that it felt like trying to breathe at the bottom of a frozen lake.
Just twenty paces away, where the natural sixty-mile-per-hour gale should have been shrieking across the ridge, the night air had been forcibly silenced—pinned flat beneath an invisible wall of pressure radiating off the stranger in the dark coat.
For a brief, agonizing second, the Witch Cooperation Association's premier close-quarters warrior stood completely still in the snow, her tall frame swaying as her body fought a losing war against itself.
Normally, Violetta's physique was an unyielding combat machine forged by years of brutal wilderness survival. Tonight, however, after burning a massive chunk of her stamina and Magical Power slaughtering that one-ton mutant boar in the forest, she had swallowed three undiluted ounces of Herb's bitter-root purgative and nerve-numbing soporific straight down into an empty belly.
Cold, greasy sweat poured down her pale forehead, stinging her eyes as the heavy chemical stupor clawed at her central nervous system, begging her knees to buckle and her eyelids to slam shut.
Strands of her long, dark purple hair whipped erratically around her wolf-fur collar in the cold drafts spilling off the edges of the intruder's barrier, while her piercing violet eyes stared wide at the nightmare blocking the trail down the mountain.
Three feet in front of the stranger, Fringe—Cecilia Selda, the fellow vanguard who had just poisoned her soup—hung suspended a centimeter above the snowcrust, locked in midair like a bug pinned to a board.
Floating effortlessly beside the man's right shoulder was Lightning, the runaway flyer whom Mentor Cara had branded a brainwashed defector four mornings ago.
And right at the center of that eerie stillness stood the man himself.
Violetta bit down so hard on the inside of her cheek that warm blood flooded her tongue, using the sharp spike of pain to shock her drugged brain back into focus.
Fear was a natural biological instinct when standing in front of an unknown predator. Yet inside Violetta's chest, her loyalty to the younger sisters huddled in the dark behind her back was ten times stronger than any fear of dying.
She couldn't take a step back.
She couldn't allow herself to pass out in the snow.
With Fringe incapacitated—and clearly a traitor who had tried to abandon them—Violetta was the only shield left standing on this mountain. If she collapsed right now, the eight helpless, terrified teenagers shivering inside that rock cleft would either be butchered where they sat or dragged down the valley in chains to feed the fires of the Church of Hermes.
Just as Violetta's trembling fingers tightened around her weapon hilt, a dry, frantic cry tore through the darkness right behind her left shoulder:
— "Get away from her, you monster!"
The thin, cracking voice—choked with equal parts absolute terror and street-rat defiance—belonged to sixteen-year-old Cherry.
The girl who had spent her whole life fighting wharf rats for moldy bread crusts in the gutters of Port of Clearwater, and whose only magic was making boiled tree bark taste like warm rye bread, had just made the bravest move of her life.
Stepping half a pace out from behind Violetta's wolf-fur mantle, Cherry raised a light wooden hunting crossbow to her shoulder with red, frost-chapped hands that were shaking like leaves, aimed down the slope, and yanked the iron trigger out of pure, desperate reflex.
TWANG!
The taut hemp bowstring snapped forward through the freezing air, launching a heavy, iron-tipped quarrel in a flat, lethal line straight toward the center of Arthur's chest.
Down on the crest of the ridge, Arthur didn't blink.
He didn't shift his boots in the snow, he didn't reach for a weapon, and he didn't even bother tilting his torso half an inch out of the way. In less than a thousandth of a second, his Intelligence 14 mind registered the snap of the bowstring, calculated the parabolic trajectory of the primitive wooden projectile, and hardened a two-inch patch of air in front of his coat.
Whirrr—tink.
The crossbow bolt sliced through the swirling flakes of snow until its sharpened iron tip was precisely thirty centimeters away from the buttons of Arthur's leather-reinforced coat.
Right there in empty space, the bolt stopped dead.
There was no loud metallic clang, no flash of colored light, and no visible shield. It looked as though the arrow had simply slammed nose-first into an invisible wall of ten-inch-thick steel, its entire kinetic momentum erased between one heartbeat and the next.
For half a second, the wooden shaft hung motionless in midair; then natural gravity reclaimed it, and the bolt dropped straight down into the soft powder at Arthur's boots with a dull, pathetic thud.
Cherry gasped in horror, her fingers freezing on the empty stock of her crossbow.
Violetta, however, didn't waste the single tenth of a second that Cherry's hopeless shot had bought her.
Pushing the agonizing cramps in her stomach and the leaden weight on her eyelids into the back of her mind, the silent warrior exploded into motion.
Slamming both forearms together across her chest, she ripped open the floodgates of her Magical Power reserve. A blinding, luminous torrent of deep purple energy erupted from her shoulders, lighting up the dark granite walls of the gorge like a violet flare against the storm.
Yet Violetta was a seasoned veteran of a hundred wildland ambushes; she knew in her bones that charging straight down an open slope into the face of a man who could stop crossbow bolts in midair was suicide.
Instead of firing her purple energy directly at Arthur's chest, she whipped both hands downward and slammed two thick, whip-like tentacles of condensed Violet Matter straight into the frozen snowpack ten feet in front of her boots!
BOOM—SHHHHHK!
The brutal impact pulverized the ice crust and tore into the granite gravel underneath, blasting a colossal geyser of loose snow, powdered rock, and jagged ice shards twenty feet high into the air directly between them. Within half a heartbeat, a dense, blinding white smokescreen swallowed the narrow ridge, cutting off all line of sight.
— "Cherry, run! Get back inside and take the girls to the deepest corner of the cave!" — Violetta roared over her shoulder, her deep voice ringing with the ferocity of a cornered mother wolf as she launched herself straight into the center of the white cloud she had just kicked up.
As her boots left the ground inside the swirling curtain of snow, the luminous purple energy wrapping her forearms condensed and lengthened, shaping itself into two massive, three-foot-long scythe blades curved like the talons of a dragon, aimed to shear straight through the invader's collarbone!
Against any royal knight in Graycastle, or against any sight-hunting demonic beast in the forest, blinding the enemy with a snow wall before striking from the fog would have been a textbook killing blow.
Against a man whose spatial awareness didn't rely on his eyeballs, it was completely useless.
Standing on the other side of the roaring white cloud, Arthur let out a quiet, almost imperceptible sigh.
Inside his six-meter telekinetic perimeter, he could feel every single displaced snowflake and shifting air current brushing against his mental grid—including the two-hundred-pound mass of the warrior hurtling through the middle of the mist toward his throat.
Raising his gloved right hand from his side, Arthur made a single, lazy horizontal sweep through the air, as if brushing dust off a table.
WHOOOOM!
A silent, crushing wave of telekinetic air pressure slammed forward across the ridge.
The dense curtain of blown snow, gravel, and ice shards didn't settle back to the ground; it was violently blasted sideways off the cliff edge in a fraction of a second, stripping the battlefield bare and exposing Violetta suspended in mid-leap three meters away, her dual purple scythes already whistling downward toward Arthur's neck!
CLANG—DOOOOONG!!
Both colossal blades of condensed Violet Matter crashed down with everything Violetta had left in her body.
The collision echoed across the dark mountain gorge like the deafening toll of a bronze cathedral bell struck by a battering ram.
A shower of brilliant violet sparks exploded outward into the night, briefly illuminating the sharp, pale lines of Violetta's sweat-drenched face—and the completely unbothered expression of the man standing twelve inches in front of her blades.
The tips of her scythes hadn't advanced a single millimeter past his outer boundary.
Violetta's dark purple eyes widened in shock.
She knew the exact weight of her own strike. Earlier that afternoon, a single swing of that same purple blade had sheared clean through the armored leg bone of a one-ton mutant boar. The kinetic force she had just dropped from midair was more than enough to cave in the skull of a charging cave bear—yet the dark-haired man standing under her claws didn't even shift his weight from one boot to the other!
His shoulders didn't dip, his knees didn't bend, and his breath didn't hitch. It felt like swinging a wooden stick against the solid granite face of the Impassable Mountain Range itself.
Even so, Violetta didn't freeze up.
Through the dizzying haze of the poison churning in her belly, her veteran combat brain immediately analyzed the way her purple sparks had skittered and slid sideways off the point of impact.
The blades didn't bounce straight back—they slid off at a curved angle, Violetta deduced in a split second. It isn't a flat shield in front of his chest. He's standing inside a spherical dome!
In witch combat, maintaining a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spherical barrier required immense mental concentration; usually, a caster kept the front wall thick while leaving the flanks or the lower rim thinner to save energy. If she couldn't punch through the front, she had to move faster than his eyes could track, hammer his flanks from multiple angles at once, and find the weak seam in his armor!
Before her boots even touched the snow after the blocked leap, Violetta mentally reshaped the lower tendrils of her Violet Matter, slamming a solid purple pillar down against the frozen rock beneath her feet to act as an artificial springboard.
Thwack!
Using the rebound of her own magic to compensate for her drugged, trembling leg muscles, she launched herself sharply to Arthur's left flank at blistering speed.
Mid-flight, her right scythe dissolved and reformed into a seven-foot, needle-tipped purple cavalry lance that shot straight inward toward the side of Arthur's ribs!
CLANG!
Blocked.
Not a millimeter of give.
Without pausing for half a heartbeat to mourn the failed thrust, Violetta used the elastic recoil of the lance hitting his barrier to vault herself up and over his left shoulder, spinning through the freezing air behind his back as she shattered the lance into two dozen razor-sharp purple darts that rained down simultaneously toward the crown of his head and his spine!
Tink-tink-tink-tink-clang!
Blocked. Every single one.
What unfolded over the next twenty seconds atop that snow-covered granite ridge was a breathtaking masterpiece of close-quarters magical combat.
Half-blind from Herb's sedative and with her intestines twisting in knots, Violetta pushed her seven-meter range limit to its absolute perfection. She didn't touch the ground once with her own failing legs; instead, she danced around Arthur in a continuous, blurred whirlwind of glowing violet light—using solid pillars of purple matter to ricochet herself from left to right while her weapons morphed seamlessly mid-swing.
Heavy warhammers slammed against his upper dome; flexible purple whips lashed low around his ankles to test if the barrier touched the ground; crescent blades scythed at his neck from three blind spots in the span of two seconds.
Yet beneath the frantic, savage beauty of that assault, Violetta wasn't just flailing blindly at an unbreakable wall.
With every rebound and every flanking strike, she was deliberately shifting the angle of her attacks six inches further toward the downslope side of the ridge—trying to force the dark-coated man to pivot on his heels to face her.
She wanted him to turn his back squarely toward the mouth of the half-cave twenty yards up the hill.
And up at the entrance of the rock shelter, sixteen-year-old Cherry understood her protector's silent gamble without needing a single word.
Dropping to one knee in the snow so the boulder steadied her shaking elbows, the gutter girl from Clearwater ignored the freezing blood dripping from her fingers where the icy bowstring had sliced her skin raw, hooking a second heavy iron bolt onto the groove of her crossbow and locking her sights onto the back of the stranger's head.
Turn around, you bastard! Look at me and turn your back to the cave! Violetta screamed inside her skull, the veins in her neck standing out like cords as she swung two gigantic, pincer-like jaws of condensed purple matter inward from both sides to crush Arthur's left and right flanks at the exact same instant!
BOOM!!
Purple sparks lit up the night like fireworks.
And right in the center of that violet hurricane, Arthur stood completely motionless.
He hadn't pivoted his boots by a single degree. In fact, ten seconds into her assault, he had calmly lowered his right hand and slipped both gloved palms back into the warm pockets of his long coat.
He wasn't fighting her.
He was standing in the eye of the storm like an art collector in a quiet gallery, watching a rare, brilliant display of martial talent unfold inches from his nose with genuine, silent respect.
Her spatial awareness under pressure is extraordinary, Arthur thought, his dark eyes calmly tracking the shifting violet ribbons and glowing claws flashing around his dome. She doesn't waste a single drop of Magical Power on flashy movements. It took her one single clash to deduce from the spark angles that my barrier is a sphere rather than a flat wall. And even with her nervous system clearly poisoned by whatever Fringe slipped her, she's using the solid rebound of her own magic as mechanical crutches to keep moving at top speed—all while trying to herd me into a crossfire lane for a sixteen-year-old girl who can barely hold a crossbow straight.
That kind of battlefield instinct couldn't be taught in a classroom; it was pure predator genius honed by years of throwing her own body between her sisters and death.
As Arthur casually thickened a two-centimeter patch of his barrier behind his left ear to deflect a whistling purple spike without turning his head, a sudden, nagging question rose from the back of his Intelligence 14 memory—connecting this remote mountain ridge to the webnovel he had read back on Earth.
He knew all the top combat witches who had appeared in the original story of Release That Witch.
He knew Nightingale's untouchable, lethal assassination power inside the Mist World. He knew Ashes, the Extraordinary warrior serving Roland's sister Tilly, whose colossal greatsword and magic could cleave steel armor in half.
Both Nightingale and Ashes were monsters in their respective specialties, yet right here in front of him, Violetta was a terrifyingly balanced fusion of the two.
True, she didn't have Nightingale's invisibility or Ashes's immunity to God's Stones—yet within her seven-meter zone, the sheer versatility of her condensed Violet Matter made her the ultimate all-range vanguard. She could be an unbreakable tower shield for an infantry line one second, a mid-range spear thrower the next, and a whirling scythe in a melee right after, all while reading the tactical flow of a fight like a veteran captain!
How did a combat witch of this caliber leave zero trace in the original novel? Arthur asked himself, his brow furrowing slightly as he searched every chapter stored in his memory.
There had never been a tall, purple-haired warrior named Violetta who manipulated condensed matter in Border Town's Witch Union. In the book he knew, she hadn't existed at all.
It took Arthur less than two seconds of cold logic to realize why—and the answer hit him with a grim, sobering weight.
In the original timeline, because William had never raided the cave, Mentor Cara had never panicked and split these ten witches off toward the south. Instead, the entire Witch Cooperation Association had marched north together in one starving, freezing column toward the mythical "Holy Mountain".
On a suicidal death march like that, who always died first?
Not the selfish survivors who hid in the middle of the pack, and not the leaders at the front who hoarded the rations.
The ones who died first were the selfless shields.
In the original history, a fiercely loyal protector like Violetta would have burned her body and her magic pool down to the last drop day after day, throwing herself in front of every pack of demonic wolves and hybrid bears to keep girls like Feather and Mystery Moon alive until her heart gave out in the snow—or worse, when the column finally stumbled into the lethal Red Mist around the ruins of Taquila, she would have stood right at the front of the line and been impaled by the very first volley of spears thrown by the Mad Demons, using her last dying breath to hold up a purple shield so Wendy and the others could run!
History threw away a masterpiece of a soldier in an unmarked snowdrift, Arthur thought, looking at the sweat-drenched warrior spinning in the air before him, and Will's reckless Butterfly Effect just dug that treasure out of the grave and dropped her right into my lap.
TWANG!
Up by the cave mouth, Cherry's crossbow snapped a second time, launching another iron-tipped bolt straight at the center of Arthur's unguarded back.
Arthur didn't turn his head by an inch.
Diverting less than one percent of his focus to the rear boundary of his dome, he hardened the air six inches behind his shoulder blades.
CRACK!
Striking the invisible curve at full velocity, the wooden shaft of the crossbow bolt snapped cleanly in two from the sheer force of its own impact, the broken pieces tumbling pathetically through the snow to land right below Lightning's floating boots as the young flyer watched in wide-eyed silence.
At the exact same instant, high in the air above Arthur's head, Violetta poured the very last dregs of her fading consciousness and her depleted magic pool into one final, all-or-nothing gamble.
Fusing both of her sweeping purple scythes together above her head, she condensed every remaining cubic inch of her Violet Matter into a single, colossal, two-ton warhammer of solid purple energy—and brought it crashing straight down onto the top of Arthur's skull like the hammer of an angry god!
KRA-KOOOOOOM!!
The downward strike was titanic.
Transferred straight through the unyielding walls of the spherical telekinetic dome into the mountain ridge beneath Arthur's boots, the raw downward pressure shattered the frozen granite bedrock, spider-webbing the ice crust in a ten-foot circle and sinking the ground around Arthur's feet two inches lower into a shallow crater!
Yet the transparent dome itself didn't buckle, didn't crack, and didn't dip by a hair.
Thrown backward by the recoil, Violetta hit the snow ten feet away, her boots skidding across the ice as she dropped heavily onto one knee.
— "Huff... huff... khhk..."
Her chest heaved in ragged, painful spasms, every breath scraping like sandpaper in her throat. Around her trembling shoulders, the bright, luminous aura of Violet Matter began to gutter and flicker like a candle flame drowning in tallow.
The burst of pure combat adrenaline that had held Herb's poison back for the last sixty seconds had just burned out completely.
Now, amplified by her rapidly circulating blood, the sedative crashed through the last barrier in her brain. Her thighs quivered uncontrollably beneath her dark dress, black spots swallowed the outer edges of her vision, and the figures of the dark-haired man and floating Lightning blurred into double images against the snow.
Even so, biting her bleeding lip until her teeth clicked, Violetta tried to plant her fist in the drift and force her leaden legs to stand back up.
— "Stop! For the love of the gods, Violetta, stop fighting him!!"
The raw, tearful, agonizing scream didn't come from Cherry up by the cave.
It tore out of the throat of Fringe—who was still hanging pinned by the neck three paces to Arthur's left.
Watching the woman she had just poisoned half to death tear her own body to pieces trying to protect them from an untouchable monster had finally cracked Cecilia Selda's cold aristocratic mask wide open. Hot tears of shame and sheer terror spilled from her single visible silver eye, freezing against her pale cheek as she screamed at her comrade:
— "Stay down, you stubborn idiot! Are you blind?!" — Cecilia shrieked at the top of her lungs, her voice echoing past Cherry to where Eyesight, Mystery Moon, and Ellen had crept to the mouth of the half-cave, staring out with faces white with horror. — "Look at him! He hasn't even taken his hands out of his pockets! You can't scratch him! Stop throwing your life away trying to fight the impossible!"
Seeing the purple energy around Violetta's fists sputter out, Arthur let out a quiet breath and smoothly dissolved his spherical telekinetic shield.
The need for defense was over. The ridge belonged entirely to him.
Keeping a light telekinetic cushion beneath the soles of his leather boots so he didn't sink an inch into the churned powder, Arthur walked two calm, unhurried steps forward and stopped less than two feet in front of the kneeling warrior.
Looking down at the tall woman whose dark purple hair was plastered to her clammy, sweat-soaked forehead, Arthur spoke.
— "Your friend is entirely right. Stay down," — Arthur said, his clear, measured voice cutting through the wind with a quiet authority that made the shivering girls at the cave mouth shrink back.
There wasn't a drop of mockery or arrogance in his tone—only cold, unadorned fact.
— "Your close-quarters combat technique is genuinely remarkable," — Arthur continued, looking straight into Violetta's unfocused, bloodshot violet eyes. — "Your spatial control inside seven meters, your tactical awareness in trying to herd me into your friend's crossbow lane, and your refusal to abandon those girls even while poisoned would put ninety-nine percent of the royal knights in this kingdom to shame. You are a rare talent that the stupidity of this mountain almost wasted."
Arthur paused for a beat, letting the praise land before delivering the hammer.
— "However, talent does not change the math between our abilities," — Arthur stated flatly. — "Even if you hadn't swallowed a bowl full of sleeping herbs tonight—even if you were standing in front of me at 100% of your physical and magical peak—you and the girl with the crossbow have a zero percent chance of breaking my guard. Fighting me is pointless."
Hearing that calm, indisputable truth spoken right above her head sparked one last flicker of defiant pride inside Violetta's chest; she tried to jerk her chin up and summon a single purple spike in her right palm, yet her poisoned nervous system finally pulled the plug.
Her other knee gave out with a muffled thump against the frozen ground, leaving her slumped on both knees at his boots.
Leaning down just slightly, Arthur pitched his voice so that every syllable carried clearly up the slope into the ears of Cherry, Eyesight, and the terrified girls huddled at the mouth of the shelter:
— "Listen to me closely, and remember this when you wake up," — Arthur said softly. — "I could have snapped your neck the very first second you jumped out of that snow cloud. I could have crushed every bone in your body—and the bodies of every girl hiding in that cave—using the exact same invisible force that just snapped that crossbow bolt in half."
Violetta's heavy eyelids fluttered, barely staying open by a slit as his words sank into her fading consciousness.
— "The only reason this fight lasted sixty seconds is because I stood here and allowed you to empty your stamina and your magic against my shield," — Arthur finished calmly. — "I let you hit me until you had nothing left so that you—and every witch watching from those rocks—would understand two simple truths tonight: first, that raising a weapon against me is a waste of energy; and second, that if I had come up this mountain to kill you or put you in chains, all ten of you would already be dead."
Those cold, irrefutable words were the final sound Violetta registered before the dark swallowed her whole.
Inside her veins, Herb's concentrated soporific finally claimed total victory over her exhausted brain.
Tink—shhhk.
The last faint remnant of Violet Matter clinging to her right knuckles fractured like thin purple glass, dissolving into harmless violet mist that was swept away instantly by the night breeze.
Without another sound, the Association's strongest shield pitched forward, collapsing face-first into the soft snow just inches from the toes of Arthur's leather boots, her heavy white wolf-fur mantle spreading out over her motionless back like a winter shroud.
For two seconds, the silence on the ridge was absolute.
Then, up at the mouth of the granite shelter, the paralyzed terror on the younger girls' faces shattered into a raw, heartbreaking scream that echoed off the canyon walls:
— "VIOLETTA!!"
Sixteen-year-old Cherry didn't care about the blizzard anymore, she didn't care about strategy, and she forgot all about the terrifying, untouchable man standing twenty yards down the slope.
Dropping her heavy wooden crossbow onto the rocks with a clatter, the skinny girl from the Clearwater slums bolted straight out of the shelter and scrambled down the snowy incline, throwing herself onto her knees beside Violetta's unconscious body.
Grabbing the tall warrior by the broad shoulders of her fur mantle, Cherry used a burst of frantic strength she didn't even know her thin arms possessed, hauling Violetta's heavy upper torso up out of the drift and cradling the older woman's pale, sweat-sheened head in her lap.
— "Violetta! Wake up! Please open your eyes, don't leave us out here by ourselves! You promised!" — Cherry sobbed hysterically, hot tears pouring down her dirt-and-soot-streaked cheeks to drip onto the unconscious warrior's peaceful face as she shook her shoulders in vain.
Violetta didn't stir; sunk deep in the dreamless chemical sleep of Herb's medicine, her chest rose and fell in slow, shallow breaths, completely oblivious to the girl crying over her.
Receiving no answer, Cherry slowly raised her tear-wet face and glared straight up at Arthur standing two paces away.
Her freckled face was pale with cold, her lips were trembling violently, and her eyes burned with the cornered, feral hatred and utter helplessness of a stray pup waiting for the boot to come down.
Standing with his hands still resting inside his coat pockets, Arthur looked down at the weeping teenager and the unconscious warrior with the unreadable composure of a stone statue. He didn't take a step closer to crowd her, he didn't raise a hand to tell her to be quiet, and he didn't show a flicker of smugness over the one-sided victory he had just demonstrated.
The field test of his combat barrier—and the psychological demolition of the squad's resistance—had gone off without a single casualty.
First the shock of Fringe's instant capture, then the heroic stand of their strongest protector, and finally the realization that he had held back his lethal force the entire time: every step of the confrontation had walked these frightened girls down the exact mental path Arthur had mapped out in the clouds an hour ago.
With their vanguard shield asleep in the snow, their traitor exposed, and the futility of running or fighting proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, nobody was going to bolt off a cliff tonight.
They were finally ready to go inside and listen.