Six inches from the bridge of Scarlett's nose, the heavy, leather-wrapped shaft of black wood vibrated violently in midair.
Even the howling gale of the northern ice plain seemed to have been swallowed whole by the low, metallic hum of the invisible force field locking that lethal projectile in place.
Sprawled flat on her back in the snowdrift where the shockwave had thrown her, Scarlett gasped for freezing air, her golden-orange pupils dilated wide with shock and primal dread. Flooded with survival adrenaline, her brain struggled to process the sheer geometric impossibility of what she was looking at.
She didn't possess defensive shield magic.
And even among the senior combatants of the Witch Cooperation Association, not a single woman in this column—not Stone, not Catherine, and not even Wendy—possessed the inhuman reaction speed or the raw, immovable stopping power required to catch a supersonic bone javelin dead in its tracks from three hundred yards away.
Someone else stepped in, Scarlett realized, her heart hammering wildly against her ribs. Someone impossibly strong is out here with us.
The answer to her silent thought didn't come from the snowpack around them.
It came straight down from the dark sky overhead.
Descending smoothly through the swirling gray mist until he hovered ten meters above the frozen plain—the long, dark tails of his leather-reinforced winter coat snapping in the distorted gravitational currents around his boots—Arthur revealed himself to the forty-seven witches below.
His gloved right arm was extended casually toward Scarlett's position on the left flank, holding the invisible telekinetic wall that had just snatched her life back from the jaws of death.
Down in the drifts, forty-seven exhausted women stared up at the floating man in dead, petrified silence. To Wendy, Scroll, and Catherine, who had spent their entire lives believing magic belonged solely to women, seeing a mortal man hanging in the sky like an ancient god of war was enough to make their minds freeze over.
And right at that moment, out from the deep, bruised shadows where the mirage of the dark towers had vanished minutes earlier, the true owners of that bone spear stepped into view.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The frozen granite crust trembled rhythmically beneath their weight.
Emerging from the dark fog were two genuine Mad Demons—nightmarish, bipedal creatures of grotesque proportions that looked nothing like the mutated animals of the southern forests. Overdeveloped, cable-thick muscles bulged beneath Tough, leathery dark skin and jagged plates of natural bone carapace. Strapped across their chests were crude harnesses of black iron and hollow breathing tubes that vented puffs of foul red mist with every raspy breath they drew.
Letting out a low, guttural growl that vibrated straight through the soles of the witches' boots, the two monsters didn't even bother looking at the four dozen shivering women huddled on the snow.
Driven by centuries of brutal battlefield instinct, the two predators from the northern wastes instantly locked their cold, murderous eyes onto the single greatest threat in the valley:
The human floating ten meters in the air.
Up in the twilight sky, Arthur slowly lowered his right hand by an inch.
Released from the telekinetic vise, the heavy seven-foot bone spear lost its suspension and dropped harmlessly into the powder beside Scarlett's boots with a soft thump.
Looking down through the falling snow, Arthur's dark eyes were piercingly cold, dissecting the anatomy, armor seams, and breathing apparatus of the two monsters below with the detached, clinical indifference of a scientist studying two beetles pinned to a corkboard.
Even after reading every chapter of the book back on Earth, seeing them in the flesh is something else entirely, Arthur thought, his pulse staying completely flat inside his coat.
— "So this is what they actually look like up close..." — Arthur murmured to himself in the quiet pocket of his barrier.
Down on the ice, the two Demons didn't waste a single second on intimidation.
Moving with explosive, coordinated violence that defied their massive bulk, both creatures bent their thick hind legs and launched themselves forward at the exact same instant, shattering the ice crust beneath their claws!
The Demon on the rear flank reached behind its shoulder, yanked two more seven-foot bone javelins from its back harness, and hurled them upward in rapid succession—the jagged projectiles tearing through the dark air with a deafening sonic screech aimed straight at Arthur's heart and throat!
Simultaneously, the vanguard Demon used the monstrous momentum of its vertical leap to shoot thirty feet into the air like a living catapult stone, spreading its black, iron-hard claws wide to rip Arthur's head off his shoulders in midair before he could dodge the spears!
Down on the snow, Wendy and Red Pepper screamed a warning, their hands rising instinctively even though their magic pools were completely dry.
What unfolded in the sky above their heads lasted less than five seconds—yet the sheer, one-sided brutality of those five seconds would remain burned into the memory of every witch in that valley until the day she died.
Arthur didn't retreat by a single millimeter.
He didn't even blink.
As the two whistling bone spears closed to within six feet of his coat buttons, Arthur made a subtle, two-inch flick with the index and middle fingers of his gloved left hand.
CLANG—CLANG!
Struck from the side by two concentrated wedges of telekinetic force, both high-velocity spears were violently deflected off course in midair, ricocheting sideways across the gorge to bury themselves three feet deep into the solid granite cliff wall with a shower of stone sparks!
In that exact same fraction of a heartbeat, the leaping vanguard Demon closed the gap—its foul-smelling jaws gaping wide and its black claws less than ten inches away from tearing into Arthur's face.
Right as a guttural roar of triumph rumbled in the monster's throat, the cold mathematical gears inside Arthur's head clicked.
He didn't bother putting up a shield.
Instead, he grabbed the three-dimensional space surrounding the airborne Demon and violently inverted its downward gravitational vector.
BOOOOOOOM!!
An invisible telekinetic hammer equivalent to the dead weight of a ten-ton boulder slammed straight down onto the Demon's spine in mid-leap!
All of the monster's upward momentum was erased in a microsecond. Driven downward like a nail struck by a pile driver, the Demon shot straight toward the earth in a vertical blur and slammed belly-first into the frozen granite plain below!
KRA-CRACK!!
The catastrophic impact shook the entire valley floor, punching a six-foot crater into the permafrost and shattering the monster's spine, ribs, and all four limbs with a wet, sickening crunch that echoed off the canyon walls.
Pinned flat at the bottom of the crater beneath ten tons of unrelenting invisible pressure, the crippled Demon let out a gurgling, high-pitched shriek—choking on the thick black blood pouring from its crushed lungs, completely unable to twitch a single claw against the weight grinding it into the rock.
Thirty yards away, watching its heavily armored partner get swatted out of the sky and flattened like a bug without the human even touching it, the second Demon let out a furious, ear-splitting roar.
Lowering its horned shoulders, the surviving monster abandoned throwing spears and charged straight across the snowfield below Arthur's boots, kicking up a blinding white plume of powder as it prepared to leap from directly underneath his blind spot.
Floating ten meters above the charge, Arthur looked down at the rushing beast.
For a brief, calculating millisecond, the strategist genuinely considered shattering only the knee joints and arms of this second specimen.
If I keep this one alive in a telekinetic coma and drag it back to Border Town, Roland and Nana will have a live Mad Demon to dissect ahead of schedule, Arthur weighed the option rapidly inside his head. Studying their breathing tubes and carapace density right now would be worth gold for our research.
A split second later, however, cold battlefield pragmatism overruled the scholar's curiosity.
Keeping a half-ton, superhuman monster completely immobilized in a telekinetic prison across three days of mountain hiking would drain a continuous, unacceptable stream of his Magical Power—at the exact moment when he was about to be responsible for escorting forty-seven starving, injured, half-frozen witches out of an active enemy sector in the middle of a blizzard.
Furthermore, if the broader war in the north followed anything close to the history he knew, Border Town was going to have more dead and living Demons than they knew what to do with soon enough.
Right now, priority number one was getting his new flock down this mountain alive.
Dropping the idea of a prisoner, Arthur raised both gloved hands flat in front of his chest.
THOOM.
Down on the snowfield, the charging Demon's feet suddenly left the ground.
Snatched straight out of its full-speed sprint by an invisible collar of force, the monster was yanked three meters into the air, kicking and thrashing its massive legs uselessly against nothingness as a telekinetic vise clamped shut around its windpipe.
Looking at the thick, unnatural bulges beneath the skin of the creature's forearms—and the similar bulge in the crippled Demon gasping at the bottom of the crater—Arthur remembered the biological secret of the Taquila enemy.
— "If I remember the lore correctly, you possess a type of magical stone embedded in your arms that allows you to hurl spears far, aren't they?" — Arthur whispered, his voice quiet, controlled, and utterly merciless.
Holding the thrashing Demon suspended in front of him with his mental anchor, Arthur turned his palms outward and made a sharp, surgical pulling motion with both hands—shaping his telekinesis into microscopic, razor-edged scalpels.
SHHHHHK—RIP!!
At the exact same instant, both on the Demon hanging in midair and on the crushed Demon pinned inside the crater below, invisible blades of pure force sliced straight through tough carapace, black muscle, and thick tendons along their forearms!
Fountains of dark, foul-smelling blood sprayed across the white snow as Arthur ripped two glowing, blood-blue crystalline gems—the parasitic Magic Stones that powered the Demons' mutated bodies—straight out of their living flesh, floating the bloody crystals smoothly upward through the air until they hovered above his open left palm.
Stripped of their internal energy cores—and with a final, sharp pulse of telekinetic pressure snapping both of their cervical spines to be 100% certain—the two terrifying monsters of the northern wastes went completely limp, dropping onto the blood-stained ice like two sacks of dead meat.
From the first spear throw to the extraction of the stones, less than ten seconds had passed.
Across the dark glacier plain, absolute, suffocating silence reigned once more.
Nobody in the witches' column breathed. Nobody moved a muscle. Half of the younger girls were still sitting in the snow where they had fallen, staring up at the dark-coated man in the sky and the two butchered monstrosities on the ice with eyes so wide they looked ready to pop out of their skulls.
High up on the lip of the granite canyon three hundred yards behind them—where she had been crouching behind a boulder in strict obedience to Arthur's orders until he cleared the unknown threat—Violetta saw the two monsters drop dead and received his mental hand-wave.
She didn't wait another half-second.
Forgetting the residual ache in her limbs from Fringe's poison and ignoring the knee-deep drifts clinging to her boots, the tall warrior vaulted over the boulder and sprinted straight down the steep canyon slope, driven by a desperate need to reach her family.
Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!
When Violetta's tall, broad-shouldered silhouette—draped in her familiar white wolf-fur mantle with her long purple hair flying in the wind—came charging out of the swirling gray mist at the base of the slope, the entire Witch Cooperation Association seemed to suck in a single, collective breath of disbelief.
— "Sisters!! Catherine! Wendy!" — Violetta shouted at the top of her lungs, her deep, usually stoic voice cracking wide open with raw, uncontained emotion.
Down on the left flank, sitting in the snow beside Scarlett, little Lydia rubbed both eyes hard with her mittens, half-convinced that her freezing brain had finally snapped and conjured another cruel mirage out of the fog.
— "Violetta...?" — Lydia gasped in a tiny, trembling voice.
Beside her, Scarlett's fingers went completely slack, letting her loaded wooden crossbow drop into the snow with a dull thud as she stared at the woman Cara had sworn was a traitor four hours ago.
Twenty paces back in the center of the huddled ranks, Leaf—her face scratched by flying ice and her yellow cloak caked in frost—was the very first witch to break out of the shock.
— "Violetta! You...you're alive!!" — Leaf cried out, bursting into fresh tears as she stumbled forward at a dead run and threw both arms around the tall warrior's neck with everything she had.
One heartbeat later, Red Pepper and Wendy came sprinting through the snow right behind Leaf, slamming into Violetta from both sides in a tight, desperate tangle of dirty wool cloaks, ragged sobs of relief, and sheer, overwhelming joy.
Pulling back just far enough to see through her tears, Wendy reached up with both trembling, frost-chapped hands and cupped Violetta's pale cheeks, pressing her palms against the warrior's skin to make sure she was real flesh and blood and not a mountain ghost sent to torture them before they froze.
— "We thought we lost you... Cara told us you stayed behind! I was terrified that you and the little ones were all dead in the snow!" — Wendy sobbed openly, pulling the warrior back against her shoulder.
— "I'm right here, Wendy. I'm alive, and the eight girls are completely safe," — Violetta murmured, her own iron emotional armor cracking as she wrapped her strong arms around Wendy, Leaf, and Red Pepper, holding her sisters tight against her wolf-fur mantle.
Yet that warm, tearful reunion lasted less than ten seconds.
Raising her chin over Wendy's weeping shoulder, Violetta let her face harden back into cold mountain granite as she locked her piercing purple eyes straight onto the solitary figure standing at the front of the column.
Ten yards away, Mentor Cara stood frozen like a statue carved out of dirty ice.
Beneath the blood-stained linen bandages wrapping her forehead, the founder of the Witch Cooperation Association was staring at Violetta with sunken eyes stretched wide in absolute, suffocating horror.
She didn't even need Violetta to say a word.
Simply by standing there in the snow—breathing, whole, and having clearly marched through thirty miles of sub-zero hell without sleeping just to catch up to the column—Violetta's presence smashed the cruel web of lies Cara had spun over the past two days into a million pieces in front of forty-six witnesses!
Violetta hadn't deserted them for a soft bed.
Violetta had kept her word and climbed back into the blizzard to protect her sisters—while Cara had lied to the camp's face, forced the march at double speed, and deliberately tried to leave their most loyal guardian and eight helpless teenagers behind to die!
Under the crushing weight of forty-six pairs of eyes turning slowly from Violetta's fur mantle to Cara's bandaged back, the five-year reign of the Snake Witch shattered like thin glass struck by a hammer.
Slowly releasing their hold on Violetta, Wendy, Leaf, and a furiously trembling Red Pepper stepped sideways into the snow, turning their bodies to face their mentor as a dark, explosive wave of betrayal rose in their throats.
Before the first shout of mutiny could leave Red Pepper's or Violetta's lips, however, the soft, crisp crunch of leather boots touching down on the snowcrust between them drew every eye in the valley.
Dropping out of the dark sky without making a sound, Arthur landed squarely in the five-yard gap between Violetta and Cara.
Reaching into his coat with a clean linen handkerchief, he calmly wrapped the two bloody, glowing red Magic Stones he had just torn out of the Demons and tucked them into an inner pocket before looking up.
The sheer, suffocating weight of his presence—coming ten seconds after they had all watched him obliterate two nightmare monsters without dirtying his gloves—snuffed out the rising shouting match on the spot.
— "You ladies can settle your family arguments later, once you have a roof over your heads," — Arthur said, his cold, level, and utterly unquestionable commander's voice carrying clearly to every ear across the silent plain.
Turning half a step, he pointed a gloved finger at the two butchered, blue-blooded Demon carcasses steaming in the snow forty yards away.
— "Those two creatures were an advance scouting pair from the ruins ahead," — Arthur stated flatly. — "Between the heavy scent of their blood on the wind and their failure to report back to their nest, there is a very high probability that a larger hunting pack will come investigating this sector within the next twenty minutes. For all we know, their flyers or scouts are already watching this plain from the fog."
Sweeping his sharp, military gaze across the forty-seven exhausted, frostbitten witches—from stunned Scroll and weeping Wendy down to the terrified teenagers in the back—Arthur issued his orders without leaving a millimeter of room for debate:
— "Leave the heavy cauldrons and anything that slows your feet. Take only what you need to survive the next three hours," — Arthur commanded. — "We are turning around and retreating to the rocky crevices at the base of the southern mountain pass immediately. Form up and move out—now!"
Nobody asked who he was.
Nobody asked by what right a unknown was giving orders to the Witch Cooperation Association.
Between the godlike display of power that had just saved Scarlett's and everyone else's lives, and the sight of Violetta standing loyally at his right shoulder, no witch in that column had an ounce of objection left in her body. Even Cara—hollowed out by the collapse of her Holy Mountain mirage, the exposure of her lies, and sheer terror of the man standing five feet in front of her—kept her cracked lips clamped shut and lowered her bandaged head in mute obedience.
Driven by raw survival instinct and anchored by the unshakeable authority of the stranger in the dark coat and Violetta's purple blade, the forty-seven witches turned their backs forever on the empty horizon of their false paradise—falling into line behind Arthur as they began their desperate retreat back toward the rocks.