Clack-clack-clack.
The sharp, dry sound of buttons being hammered at an absurd speed dominated the living room. On the screen of the massive seventy-inch 4K television, a chaotic storm of magical swords and glittering particles exploded against the black armor of a final boss.
— "I'm telling you, homie," William grumbled, never blinking or taking his eyes off the monster's steadily dwindling health bar. — "The pacing in stories these days is always terrible."
Sitting on the edge of the couch, Arthur took a slow sip of soda, studying his friend with a calm, calculating gaze. Beside him, William was pure adrenaline: his fingers were white from gripping the controller so tightly, his shoulders were tense, and his thumbs moved with the precision of someone who had spent thousands of hours playing competitive games.
— "Terrible how?" Arthur asked, leaning back against the soft cushions. — "Because the protagonist doesn't solve everything in five minutes?"
— "Exactly!" William shot back, leaning forward as he dodged a fatal attack on the screen by a hair's breadth. — "If I were the protagonist of Solo Leveling, I wouldn't spend half the first season complaining about my life or getting beaten to a pulp in low-level dungeons. I'd level up ten times faster, optimize my entire skill tree, build a top-tier harem, and have all those S-Rank Hunters working for my guild before the first major Gate even opened for real."
Arthur let out a short, weary sigh and shook his head.
Years of corporate management experience, combined with his habit of analyzing every detail in art history, had trained his mind to automatically pick apart the flaws in his friend's enthusiastic logic. While William had always been fascinated by raw power and winning through sheer force, Arthur preferred to understand the how and why behind every move.
— "Jinwoo only survived because he was cautious, Will," Arthur replied in a blunt, matter-of-fact tone. — "He was cold and calculating. He approached every fight like a chess match where one mistake meant death."
Arthur nodded toward the television, where William's character had just lost half his health bar by charging in without defending himself.
— "If you were in there, with that two-second attention span of yours, you'd try to land a Krav Maga kick to an S-Rank boss's face in the first minute," Arthur continued, the corner of his mouth curling into a faint smirk. — "You'd be dead before the anime's opening theme finished playing, and your grand adventure would end with a very expensive funeral."
— "Hahahaha! Brutal as always, huh?" William laughed, finally landing the finishing combo that shattered the boss on the screen.
He threw himself back against the couch with a victorious grin, dropping the controller beside the open box of pepperoni pizza cooling on the coffee table.
— "But what about you, genie of the lamp?" William teased, folding his arms behind his head. — "What would you be in a world like that? A Level One bureaucrat locked in an office, drawing maps for the heroes? Or the guy filing the guild's tax returns?"
Arthur glanced at the pile of history and architecture books scattered near the television.
— "In a world that demands a superhuman physique and magical talent?" Arthur admitted with a shrug, showing no trace of vanity. — "I wouldn't last a week on the front lines either. I'd probably be the guy trying to save the books and archive whatever remained of civilization before a giant stepped on the building."
— "Fair enough. At least someone would be around to write my heroic biography..." William began.
But, he never finished the sentence.
Suddenly, the image on the television froze and began to glitch.
At first, it looked like a loose HDMI connection. A few green lines sliced down the screen, flickering relentlessly. But within less than two seconds, tiny, brilliant white dots appeared in all four corners of the display, spreading across the glass like some bizarre form of digital mold.
In the corner of the room, William's high-end computer, where the anime episode they'd been watching earlier remained paused, let out a deafening metallic shriek. It wasn't the sound of a jammed cooling fan. It sounded like a saw blade tearing through bone.
— "Wait, did this TV come defective?" William frowned, his smile vanishing instantly as he leaned over to check the outlets behind the entertainment stand. — "What the hell is that, dude? I just bought this screen!"
Arthur opened his mouth to tell his friend to unplug it, but the words caught in his throat.
The television's brightness increased to an absurd, impossible level.
It was no longer the light of an LED screen. It had become a solid beam of blinding white light that seemed to tear through the very fabric of the room, surging forward like a physical wave and swallowing the pizza boxes, the coffee table, the leather couch, and the controllers.
The apartment didn't gradually disappear. It was simply erased and rewritten.
Arthur instinctively clapped his hands over his ears, feeling agonizing pressure crush his eardrums, as though all the oxygen in the room had been sucked into a vacuum. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw William trying to push himself up from the floor, his mouth open in a scream that produced no sound.
The white light swallowed their vision, their hearing, and even their sense of gravity.
For one eternal second, there was nothing but an absolute, terrifying silence.
Then came the hard impact of hitting the ground.
.
.
.
When Arthur finally managed to open his eyes, the first thing his body registered wasn't the softness of the living room carpet, but a biting cold that seemed to penetrate his clothes.
He was lying facedown on a hard, uneven, extremely slippery surface. He dragged in a desperate breath, but instead of the familiar smell of air conditioning and pizza, his lungs filled with raw, frigid, heavy air saturated with the unbearable stench of horse manure, rotten cabbage, old mud, and damp wood smoke.
Arthur coughed violently, his throat burning as though he'd swallowed ashes. He planted his hands on the ground to push himself up and felt his fingers sink several inches into thick, gray sludge mixed with filthy remnants of ice.
The television's bluish glow was gone. Above him, between the crooked rooftops of old wooden buildings, stretched nothing but a heavy, lead-gray sky on a late autumn afternoon.
— "What the hell... Arthur? You in one piece?"
William's voice came from nearby, low and tense, charged with a violent surge of adrenaline.
When Arthur turned his head, he saw that his friend was already on his feet. Years of intensive combat training and Krav Maga reflexes had taken control of William's body before his brain could even begin to process what was happening. He held a low stance, fists clenched at chest height, his back protected by a damp wall as his wide eyes swept across the narrow, filthy alley, from the pile of garbage around them to the street exit.
Arthur didn't answer immediately.
His gaze was locked on something floating in midair less than a foot from his nose. It was a rectangular, translucent blue window glowing with a soft, clean light—a bizarre contrast to the medieval filth surrounding them.
[DIMENSIONAL SYSTEM]
User: [Arthur]
Location: Border Town, Kingdom of Graycastle.
[Attributes]
Strength: 6
Speed: 7
Stamina: 8
Agility: 8
Intelligence: 14
Magical Power: 0 (LOCKED — Requirement: Ensure a witch's safety to unlock the flow)
Arthur's heart pounded against his ribs.
That number beside Intelligence wasn't just decorative text on a screen. The moment he read the data, a cold wave swept through his brain, clearing away his panic and the dizziness from the fall. His mental clarity became almost absurd, nearly surgical, allowing every detail of his surroundings, every distant sound, and every memory of everything he'd ever read to click together like components in a perfectly engineered machine.
He turned to the side and saw William standing motionless, staring into empty space with his mouth slightly open. Judging by the direction of his eyes, William was reading his own status window—and his physical attributes were very different: Strength 9, Speed 11, Stamina 10, and Agility 9.
— "Border Town... Kingdom of Graycastle..." Arthur murmured as the realization hit him like a sledgehammer to the stomach.
He braced a hand against the cold stone wall, hauled himself out of the mud, and looked through the alley opening toward the jagged horizon to the north.
— "Will, look at that stone structure up there," Arthur said, pointing toward the rough, gray silhouette rising in the distance and the dark mountain slope behind it. — "Graycastle. And right over there is the North Slope Mine. We haven't fallen into just any fantasy world... We're inside Release That Witch."
William blinked twice, lowering his guard for a moment as he looked from the invisible window in the air to his friend's serious face.
— "You've got to be kidding me, Art," William blurted, his voice wavering between disbelief and nervous shock. — "That isekai about the engineer who reincarnates into the body of a prince with a weird little braid? The guy who builds steam engines, rifles, and heavy weapons using witches' powers?"
— "That's the one," Arthur confirmed, brushing at his pants and making a largely unsuccessful attempt to wipe a smear of gray mud off his modern blue T-shirt and designer hoodie.
Out of habit, he raised his left wrist. His brushed-steel watch with sapphire crystal was still working perfectly, marking the seconds with a precision that wouldn't exist for centuries in this world—a genuine relic from a future this place couldn't even dream of reaching.
— "And there's one more thing," Arthur added, his expression darkening. — "The System explicitly says our Magical Power will only be unlocked if we ensure a witch's safety. And look at the sky... We just landed in the mud on a gray autumn day."
Before William could ask what the weather had to do with anything, a muffled, animalistic roar cut through the wind.
The sound came from several streets ahead, in the direction of what appeared to be the town square. It wasn't the noise of an ordinary marketplace. It was the roar of thousands of voices screaming together, charged with hatred, fear, and a spine-chilling religious fanaticism.
Arthur felt his blood run cold, and this time it wasn't because of the autumn wind. According to the original timeline of the story he knew by heart, there was only one event in Border Town that could draw the entire population together like this in autumn.
— "It's today," Arthur said, his voice taking on the firm, rapid tone of someone managing a crisis under pressure. — "It has to be today. Right now, Cheng Yan's soul should have just awakened inside Prince Roland Wimbledon. But if the System gave us a mission to ensure a witch's survival... that means they're about to hang Anna in the square!"
A bead of cold sweat trickled down Arthur's temple.
— "What if our arrival has changed something?" he muttered, his thoughts racing. — "What if our transfer delayed Roland's awakening by five minutes or changed his reaction..."
William didn't need to hear the rest.
For a man of action like him, standing around thinking about a problem was the worst possible mistake. Without saying a word, he spun on his heels and took off toward the alley exit, his heavy boots splashing dirty water in every direction.
— "Wait!" Arthur lunged forward and grabbed William's forearm, stopping him in his tracks. — "Use your head for one second, Will! We can't just storm the square and start drop-kicking the guards!"
— "So what are we supposed to do, Art? Let the main girl in the story get hanged?!" William shot back in a tense whisper, the muscles in his arm rigid beneath the fabric of his hoodie.
— "Roland is the Fourth Prince of Graycastle," Arthur reminded him, looking directly into William's eyes in an attempt to cut through his adrenaline. — "Even if Cheng Yan is already in control of the body, he's surrounded by royal guards and men like Chief Knight Carter Lannis. The guy is the best swordsman in this entire region. If we charge in like a pair of lunatics before assessing the situation, Carter will cut us in half, thinking we're assassins, or we'll cause a commotion that ends with Roland himself dead."
William clenched his jaw and took a deep breath through his nose, but he nodded once.
— "We observe first," Arthur concluded, releasing his friend's arm. — "If things follow the usual script, great. If something goes wrong, we step in. Move quickly, but don't draw attention before we have to."
They left the narrow alley and hurried through the crooked, muddy streets of Border Town.
Being there in person was a brutal shock. The reality of the Middle Ages was infinitely dirtier, harsher, and more suffocating than anything a colorful manhwa panel or a web novel description could convey.
The surrounding houses were little more than crooked shacks made of rotting wood and cracked clay, with moldy thatched roofs that looked ready to collapse under the first snowfall. There was no paving beneath their feet, only a sea of dark mud mixed with waste, where they slipped with every step.
The few straggling peasants also rushing toward the square looked like walking ghosts. Their faces were gaunt from chronic hunger, their skin grimy with coal soot, and their bodies covered in rough, patched woolen rags.
As Arthur and William passed, some residents shot startled glances at the two tall, well-fed men dressed in flawless fabrics without a single visible seam—strange garments that looked like some kind of foreign silk in a mining village. But no one stopped to ask questions. The promise of blood and fire in the town square was too powerful a draw for these miserable people.
When the two finally turned the last corner and reached the edge of the town square, the brutality of the era hit them in full force.
Hundreds of people crowded into the open, muddy space. At its center stood a tall platform of rough timber—the gallows—whose planks creaked beneath the weight of an enormous man wearing a black leather hood: the executioner.
Standing beside him, her wrists bound behind her back and a thick hemp rope already looped around her slender neck, was a very young girl.
Even beneath the grime of the prison and the freezing wind, her short, vivid reddish-orange hair seemed to glow like a stubborn ember against the gray wood of the gallows. But what truly caught Arthur's attention were her eyes. Clear, bright blue, and incredibly calm, they showed neither the desperation of a teenager about to die nor hatred toward the crowd screaming for her blood. There was only a quiet, sorrowful emptiness—the resignation of someone who had always been treated like a monster and had already accepted that the world was beyond saving.
It was Anna.
A few yards from the gallows, protected by a line of guards armed with spears and shields, stood a small raised platform. Sitting in a heavy, ornately carved wooden chair was a young man with light gray hair tied into a short braid.
He wore royal robes of fine silk lined with expensive fur, but he looked completely out of place amid all that mud. His face was as white as paper, and his expression betrayed barely contained panic. He rubbed his temples with trembling fingers, blinking repeatedly as he looked between the gallows and the crowd with the expression of a man who had fallen asleep in his modern office and awakened in the middle of a medieval nightmare.
— "That's him. That's Roland," William whispered, narrowing his eyes as he folded his arms across his chest to conceal his clenched fists. — "Or rather, our Chinese protagonist. Judging by that terrified look on his face, his brain is still trying to figure out where the hell he's ended up."
Arthur didn't reply. His eyes swept across the platform like a radar.
Standing immediately behind the prince's chair, he recognized Assistant Minister Barov, an older man dressed like a bureaucrat who kept leaning down to whisper in Roland's ear, his face slick with sweat and strained with worry. On the other side of the chair stood Chief Knight Carter Lannis, as motionless as a statue carved from steel.
Carter's posture was nothing like that of the ordinary town guards. His armor was meticulously maintained, his center of gravity was perfect, and his gloved hand rested constantly on the pommel of the longsword at his waist. His cold eyes monitored every movement in the front rows of the crowd.
On the scaffold, the local judge finished reading the accusation scroll. The executioner took a heavy step to the side and extended his massive hand toward the iron lever that would open the trapdoor beneath Anna's feet.
At that very moment, the entire square erupted into a single, deafening chorus of fanaticism.
— "Death to the witch! Death to the witch! Send the demon back to hell!"
The voices crashed over the square like shock waves. Women raised their fists, men spat on the ground, and young people hurled small stones at the wooden platform. It was the result of centuries of brainwashing by the Church.
Suddenly, Arthur felt a powerful, icy vibration at the center of his chest. A new blue window, its borders glowing more brightly than before, appeared in front of both him and William at the same time.
[MISSION TRIGGERED: THE TURNING POINT]
Objective: Successfully stop Anna's execution.
Reward: Immediate unlocking of the Magical Power Flow.
— "I sincerely hope this won't be necessary..." Arthur muttered through clenched teeth, his Intelligence 14 calculating distances, the spearmen's lines of sight, and Carter Lannis's reaction time down to fractions of a second. — "But get ready, Will. If Roland freezes from shock or hesitates for three seconds too long, that trapdoor opens, and we lose everything."
Arthur lightly tapped William's elbow, indicating a gap between two peasants farther ahead.
— "If he doesn't say anything by the time the executioner pulls the lever, we move in," Arthur instructed, his voice low and lethally calm. — "With your Strength 9 and Speed 11, you can get up those stairs and take down the executioner before the lever goes all the way down. I'll take on the two guards at the foot of the stairs to cover you. We'll only get one shot."
William flashed a short, dangerous grin, his eyes gleaming with fierce excitement. The conversation they'd had on the couch half an hour earlier about acting like a protagonist had suddenly become a matter of life and death. He lowered his hips slightly, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet, his leg muscles tensed like springs ready to launch.
— "Leave it to me," William whispered without taking his eyes off the hooded executioner. — "If that prince doesn't open his mouth in the next five seconds, I'll dismantle this wooden platform with a kick."
Using their shoulders to push through the crowd without attracting the guards' attention, the two advanced until they reached the front row, just a few yards from the base of the gallows.
It was at that exact moment that Anna raised her head slightly.
For one brief, silent instant amid all the shouting, the young witch's blue eyes met Arthur's directly. There was no plea for help in her gaze, no fear. Only a flicker of pure curiosity—as though, in the final seconds of her life, she was wondering who these two strangely dressed, impeccably clean men were, silently watching her without demanding her blood like everyone else in town.
The executioner's thick fingers closed around the iron lever.
Five seconds.
Time seemed to slow and grow heavy for Arthur. He looked toward the royal platform.
Four seconds.
The executioner's shoulders tightened as he prepared to pull the release. William had already lifted his heel off the ground, ready to spring forward.
Three seconds.
In the ornate chair, Roland Wimbledon's pale hand moved, gripping the wooden armrest so tightly that his knuckles turned white. The modern engineer trapped inside that body had finally overcome the paralysis of shock.
Roland sprang to his feet, cutting Barov off mid-sentence, and filled his lungs.
— "STOP!"
The prince's shout sliced through the square like a whip crack, cutting through the crowd's roar from one end to the other.
The executioner froze with the lever halfway down. The silence that fell over the muddy square was so sudden that the only sound left was the wind howling through the castle banners.
Arthur released a long, deep breath, only then realizing he'd been holding it ever since leaving the alley. The pivotal event had occurred. The original timeline was still intact—at least for now.
Up on the platform, his voice still trembling but striving for authority, Roland ordered the guards to remove the rope from the girl's neck and take her back to the castle dungeons so he could interrogate her personally.
A confused, indignant murmur spread through the peasants, who felt cheated out of their spectacle. But as the guards untied Anna's hands, Arthur felt a chill run down the back of his neck.
On the royal platform, Carter Lannis's sharp, cold eyes swept across the front row of the crowd and stopped directly on Arthur and William. The Chief Knight made no sudden move, but his gaze lingered a full second longer than it should have on their modern clothes and their unnaturally calm demeanor before he turned back to protect the prince.
— "Phew... that useless prince actually managed to shout in time," William muttered, finally relaxing his shoulders and abandoning his combat stance.
— "Yeah, he saved her neck," Arthur replied quietly, watching Cheng Yan turn his back on the square and walk away with somewhat unsteady steps, followed by a Barov who looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown. — "But our real work starts right now."
Arthur glanced at the guards beginning to escort Anna away from the platform, then toward the gray castle walls in the distance.
— "The peasants are furious about his decision, the Church's spies are everywhere, Carter Lannis has already noticed us, and neither of us has a single drop of unlocked magic," Arthur continued, his mind already assembling the next stage of their plan. — "As soon as the mission registers as complete, we need to move fast. Our next objective is to get inside that castle before sunset."
The industrial revolution of Border Town had just taken its first step on that cold afternoon. And for Arthur and William, landing in that mud was only the beginning of a war they intended to win by combining the science of the future with the power they had just acquired.