[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 21 — Finals Eve, 09:00 AM
[Location]: Royal Rosas Club HQ · Tactical Briefing Room
The tactical hologram booted up, casting cold blue light over the mahogany table.
"Lee Alice Varro is injured."
Nino Lucent delivered it as an opening sentence, the sa way a demolitions expert might announce that the building is wired. Clinical. Precise.
Carrying the specific restraint of a woman who had composed herself three tis before entering the room to ensure her expression remained professionally appropriate, and had achieved exactly zero of those goals. The corners of her mouth had drifted upward by approximately three milliters and refused to co back.
"The cause remains unverified," Nino continued, adjusting her cuff. "Injury classification: Deep Soul Concussion paired with Mana Circuit Lacerations—anchored by a hostile, high-tier curse that is actively suppressing standard recovery chanics.
"Resurrection stones cycle her back with the curse still attached. Mandrake essence cannot purge it. Her dical team has been containing the situation under closed-door protocols for several days."
Nino paused, the smile deepening by another milliter.
"The information only leaked last night. She cannot fully clear it within a twenty-four-hour window. We must completely reassess tomorrow's deploynt matrix."
"A curse of karmic severance," Bella murmured. She was looking at the dossier open in her hands, the crimson glow of her unsealed eye casting its own light across the page—outshining the projector's blue entirely. "To anchor a Deep Soul Concussion so firmly that it rejects resurrection—that is not an assault. That is the signature of soone who reached across the divination link and crushed her threads with bare hands. The Abyss demands a toll."
Nino sighed. "Translating Bella's theatrics into operational terms: yes. A violent, long-range counter-hack. Spectacularly vicious."
A profound, highly unprofessional silence settled over the briefing room.
Alucard, sitting midway down the table, was already flipping through the Mare Bru dossier. Her grey eyes—which normally carried the flat, exhausted shine of soone who had read one municipal ordinance too many—were doing sothing they almost never did in professional settings.
Gleaming.
"I heard," Alucard said, her tone carrying the particular warmth of soone describing their favorite literary developnt, "that her extended intelligence operation finally prompted soone to decisively snap her annoying little cat paws—and attach sothing unpleasant to the wound."
She turned a page.
"An injury that even an Arch-Witch's passive regeneration and a vault of resurrection stones cannot imdiately resolve before a Grand Finals match. It appears she finally stepped on a genuine landmine, for once. A true tragedy for the literature world," she added, with no tragedy in her voice whatsoever.
At the head of the table, Tasia hadn't spoken.
She was cradling her teacup in both hands, those sa grey eyes—usually running a background process that processed twelve dinsions simultaneously—startlingly bright and present. She looked, Hathaway thought, exactly like soone who had just been inford that Christmas had been moved to today.
Sitting at the far end, Hathaway watched the three highest-tier Witches in the organization drop their professional masks in unison to gloat with absolutely zero restraint.
Her mouth twitched.
Just how much do you people hate that catgirl? At least perform sothing resembling plausible deniability!
But beneath the snark, Hathaway's heart perford a distinct, cold percussion beat that had nothing to do with schadenfreude.
Why now. Of all possible monts in the tournant calendar, why is she injured right now?
She knew exactly what Alice had been doing for the past two weeks. Back in the underground black market, when the chaos-seeking, ink-stained nace had been suffering from severe writer's block and asked what kind of doujinshi Hathaway wanted to read, Hathaway had helpfully pointed her directly at the Holheim bracket.
She had simply handed a starving predator the perfect, irresistible excuse to dig into the Wellington family's dirty laundry.
Was it Cecilia? No—the math didn't support it. Was it Evangeline, so reclusive Wellington ancestor with passive defenses calibrated to snap Arch-Witch threads like cheap string?
The more threads ran the calculation, the heavier the case against her beca.
...Or not. Alice's pen and her mouth had collectively offended half the high command of the Inner Sea of Stars over the past three decades. She could have walked into a completely unrelated assassination attempt. That's a statistically plausible event for soone with her publication history. It's fine. Ha. Haha.
Thump.
Rhode rapped her knuckles on the table—once, sharp, with the impatience of a woman whose literary reputation remained entirely uncompromised by Alice's fanfiction catalog.
"The nace got karma. Good." Rhode's dark lenses fixed on Nino. "Since their Ace is half-crippled, how exactly do we fight tomorrow?"
Nino wiped the smirk off her face, drew herself up, and assud command.
The hologram shifted, projecting the face of a human Witch with flowing golden hair and erald eyes.
She was smiling warmly at the cara, radiating the deeply accommodating aura of soone who had never once lost her patience with another living creature.
"Elysia. Vice-Ace of Mare Bru. Her structural role in their roster is identical to Alucard's in ours." Nino pulled up a cascade of match data. "Win rate: absolute. Average match duration: four minutes, twelve seconds. Throughout the entire qualifier bracket, she secured every victory using overwhelming fundantals and textbook, multi-school spell rotations. Zero tactical exposure. No anomalies."
Tasia set down her teacup.
"Round Seven," Tasia said, unhurried. "Third engagent. Elysia executed a lateral blink. The displacent was exactly three ters longer than necessary to clear the incoming artillery.
"She was pre-positioning for a specific geotric follow-up—a delayed composite array that the opponent's premature death to backdraft prevented her from completing." A faint, satisfied smile. "She has at least three high-tier chain combinations she hasn't shown yet."
Having delivered this observation with the calm of soone reading a weather report, Tasia picked her teacup back up. Her posture clearly communicated that she was now off the clock.
Nino logged the note without blinking. She swiped the projection.
"Which brings us to the Ace. Alice Varro."
The hologram went blank.
Zero footage.
"Active intelligence blackout," Nino stated. "One hundred percent. She adopted Tasia's strategy—never took the field, let substitutes carry the team to the Finals while leaking nothing.
"However, her public arsenal is thoroughly docunted, and the core of it is sufficiently catastrophic to analyze."
Nino's tone took on the specific gravity of a woman about to describe sothing she found genuinely, academically offensive.
Hathaway perked up.
"As a Phantom Rain Cat Witch, Alice's tail is hardcoded with a Tier-7 Divination-Alteration hybrid as an innate spell-like ability." Nino raised a finger. "This spell is called [Omniscient Rain].
"Because it is innate, she bypasses the impractically long casting ti that makes it a non-starter for any standard Witch in a duel, allowing her to trigger it instantaneously. At Arch-Witch-tier mana levels, the initial draw is routine expenditure—that is not the barrier.
"The barrier is sustained output. [Omniscient Rain] is not a spell you cast once; it is a domain you hold. Every second it runs, it pulls near-Legendary mana continuously. Witches of Alice's lineage can open it. They cannot maintain it long enough to matter." A pause weighted with sothing highly unwelco. "Alice, unfortunately, can sustain it for the full duration of a competitive series. There is a docunted record of her maintaining [Omniscient Rain] uninterrupted through a full KOF relay—five consecutive opponents. The rain never dropped once."
Alucard didn't look up from her notes. "That record predates the Domain Reset Provision."
Tasia stared at the ceiling with the expression of soone who had recently rembered an appointnt she'd forgotten to cancel. "Imagine stepping into the arena as the third opponent in a relay," she said, to no one in particular, "and the entire ground is already a Category Five hurricane."
"The Provision was enacted early in Irene's run," Alucard continued. "Weather ta had beco unplayable at the top level. Every KOF match now opens with a mandatory absolute dispel—the starting fireball isn't a ceremony. It's a hard reset. Any persistent domain, any lingering environntal effect, gone. The intent was to force weather Witches to rebuild from scratch each opponent."
A pause.
"It didn't work. On Irene."
Hathaway had shipped one ga in her previous life. When the God Gun ta broke the competitive scene, she wrote the patch. The community celebrated. Balance was restored. That was how it was supposed to work.
Nobody had ever just kept winning through the patch.
Irene had. The Witch Authority had written the nerf. Irene had looked at it, re-opened her domain every single match anyway, and kept winning for eleven years straight.
In ga design, that wasn't a balance problem. That was a player problem. The kind that only resolved by retirent.
"Alice faces the sa provision," Alucard said. "She must rebuild [Omniscient Rain] from zero each ti a new opponent steps in, at near-Legendary draw, within the KOF changeover window."
"Can she?" Rhode asked.
"She is Lee Alice Varro," Nino answered, her tone chillingly clinical as she reclaid control of the briefing. "Assu she will. And if you allow that weather to fully render, this is the payload you will be facing."
Nino tapped the console. The tactical hologram dissolved into a torrential, data-coded downpour.
"First function: absolute vision. Every raindrop acts as a sensory node. Stealth, spatial folding, invisibility fields—aningless. Within the domain, she has complete omni-directional awareness of the entire arena."
Nino swiped her hand across the projection. The storm split into three distinct, rotating environntal models.
"Second function: weather variants. Three configurations."
"[Sun Rain]. Frontal-assault form. Superheats the domain. Water-elentals mutate into boiling-water variants and go aggressive. Continuous passive healing for the caster. Physical stat buffs that stack over ti, and automatically accumulates stacking defensive rain-shields to absorb incoming damage.
"[Fog Rain]. Attrition form. Strips enemy body heat continuously, causing her ice-aspected spells to penetrate standard cold resistance entirely. Grants extre regeneration while passively accumulating offensive rain-spikes in the environnt for constant barrage attacks.
"[Solar Storm]. Ultimate form. Astronomical mana cost. This configuration introduces a highly aggressive parasitic chanic: it continuously strips the opponent's spell resistance and stamina, feeding them directly into Alice's own recovery. In this state, she can cast water-aspected spells as fire-aspected spells, generating high-temperature rain sufficient to lt bedrock. Her stamina and resistance values double outright."
Nino tapped the console one last ti. The three swirling weather models collapsed downward, flattening into a single, rippling pool of simulated water across the tactical table.
"Finally: the Puddle chanic. From any standing water generated by the rain, she may spend five tis standard mana cost to instantly duplicate a spell already cast. If she has summoned a Ghost Ship, she can burn twenty-five tis the mana cost to have six Ghost Ships simultaneously breach from puddles and converge."
The room sat with this for a mont.
Hathaway's brain had gone sowhere quiet and was composing a Steam review.
Tier-7. Near-Legendary mana draw. Pre-loaded with an all-seeing radar, three attribute-swap weather forms, and a pay-to-shadow-clone chanic. All of this installs in her tail at birth. She doesn't patch it. She doesn't unlock it. It cos from the factory with six-slotted endga equipnt already equipped.
Why do all these exotic Witches co out of the factory pre-loaded like this? Are human Witches just the Muggles of this civilization?
...Actually, no. Irene is a human Witch. Never mind. The ceiling is fine. The power gap is still unconscionable.
Then Nino dropped the second bomb.
"Furthermore." Nino's tone dropped by a full register. "We must account for her familiar."
A half-beat pause.
"The Alpha Storm Greater Lantern Cat."
The temperature in the room did sothing.
Every Witch at the table above a certain tier—which was everyone except Hathaway—exchanged a look that required no annotation.
The look of people watching the most universally despised player on the server walk around with the rarest, out-of-print, never-to-reprint Mythic mount in the ga, and feeling genuinely, personally wronged by the existence of this fact.
Hathaway didn't process the room's reaction. She'd already stopped breathing.
She— She actually has one. A real one.
The lore ca back fully ford—Victoria's lore-dump in the Lantern Cat Fog Warp, delivered with the statistical precision of soone who had morized the numbers on purpose.
Ten ters of luminous fur. The absolute refusal to retreat. The ability to generate electrical storms sufficient to disrupt a Pseudo-God's concentration. And the entire package wielded with the specific personality of sothing that had decided, long ago, that it did not need to be afraid of anything.
Lee Alice Varro. Smut novelist. Chaos vector. Person who had personally tornted half the KOF elite circuit with her prose. Owns a Storm Greater Cat.
Hathaway clamped both hands over her mouth. Her eyes, unfortunately, remained entirely visible, and they communicated approximately sixteen different flavors of primal, non-tactical, completely undignified joy.
"Hmph." Nino let out a sound vibrating with the deep, personal resentnt of a veteran cat devotee who had spent years and astronomical expedition budgets tracking elusive Greater Lantern Cats with absolutely zero success, only to be confronted with soone who had simply inherited the legendary Alpha by default.
"An ancestor of the Varro bloodline captured one of the original six during the Toyatros Incident. But the cat Alice uses is its direct offspring. Born on the exact sa day as Alice. They grew up together in the Varro estate. The arena fans just started calling it the 'Alpha' because of its absurd physical stats and how it treats standard heavy shields like wet paper."
"Wait," Hathaway managed. "If she summons that in the Finals—that's a monster with the [Unbreakable] trait. She can afford full Mythic kit for it. Wouldn't that give her a High-Witch-tier frontliner? And if she deploys [Omniscient Rain] simultaneously—doesn't that make it a 2v1?"
"It does," Alucard said dryly. "And if she were using it purely as a at-shield, we would simply kite it. A 2v1 is a conventional tactical problem. What Alice built was an execution chamber."
"Hathaway." Nino's tone was flat. "What is the Witch Authority's mandated mana sequester cost for a Legendary-class summon in a regulated duel?"
"Twenty percent of maximum capacity," Hathaway answered automatically.
Then she stopped.
Twenty percent.
Twenty percent of Alice's pool. The pool that sustained [Omniscient Rain] through a full KOF relay without dropping once. Twenty percent of that is—
Her ga-designer brain ran the conversion and imdiately wished it hadn't.
"...That's enough raw mana to brute-force multiple Legendary spells," Hathaway said, her voice going slightly hollow. "To lock away a nuclear arsenal just to put a single physical frontliner on the board... the math is fundantally unbalanced. It's an atrocious return on investnt."
"Which tells you the frontliner is rely packaging," Nino said, her tone clinical and grim. "It is a Storm variant. Its tail functions as a massive leyline capacitor—it doesn't just swing a greataxe. It can deploy its own Legendary spell: [Giant Lightning Domain]."
Rain. Omnipresent, bone-chilling mist. Standing puddles everywhere.
Oh my god.
"Water conducts," Hathaway whispered. "Sun Rain, Fog Rain, Solar Storm—every variant saturates the arena. If the cat detonates a Legendary electrical storm inside any of those..."
"The entire weather domain becos an inescapable, omni-directional electrocution chamber," Nino finished. "Alice has been abusing that exact synergy since her debut. The conductive domain bypasses evasion, ignores standard directional shields, and causes cascading circuit failures in her opponents."
"'If the Authority hasn't explicitly banned it, exploit it until they bleed,'" Alucard said, the corner of her mouth lifting slightly. "Irene played through the patch notes. Alice plays through the patch notes. The Authority has spent half a decade trying to balance her cat."
"Which brings us to the current iteration," Nino continued. "A strict twenty-five-second tournant embargo on summon casting abilities per KOF round. The cat enters the field effectively silenced."
"However," Nino added, "if she manages to drag the bout to second twenty-six... the embargo lifts. The tail discharges. You are no longer fighting a Witch with a cat; you are fighting a localized mythological disaster."
Rhode let out a sharp, mocking laugh.
"Twenty-five seconds," Rhode said, her tone carrying the contempt reserved for math she had already solved. "If she drops that furball against , I don't even let the tir finish. One Tier-7 [Banishnt]. Cat evicted. Tir reset. The mana returns eventually." Rhode's tone didn't warm. "The window doesn't."
"That embargo had collateral damage," Alucard added, rubbing the bridge of her nose with a profound sense of administrative exhaustion. "It applies categorically to all summons. In their desperation to suppress Alice, the Authority inadvertently nerfed standard Lantern Cats into absolute unplayability."
Nino sighed. "Without the ability to cast imdiate defensive buffs upon entry, a normal cat simply panics and flees the mont an aggressive spell is cast in its general direction."
"And the rulemakers, being Witches, were fundantally incapable of watching cats disappear from the competitive ta," Alucard finished dryly. "They panicked. Hence, this season's compensation patch: a flat [Summon Morale 5] upon field entry, extended exclusively to Lantern Cats." Alucard paused. "Their official rationale, submitted without apparent sha: no other summon type required it. Factually accurate. Completely transparent."
Rhode sneered. "A fundantally idiotic update. A normal cat still panics at a Tier-3 AoE and dives into a spatial rift. And for Alice's Storm variant—which possesses the [Unbreakable] trait and cannot feel fear—the buff is completely redundant."
The highest regulatory body in the Inner Sea had printed a global competitive patch purely because they felt guilty about bullying the kitties.
The tactical summary wrote itself.
"Known: if that rain goes up and holds, this match is over in her favor. Known: the rush ta exists precisely to deny the establishnt window. Known: the injury shortens her survivability threshold; the cat summon acts as a strict twenty-five-second enrage tir."
Rhode's dark lenses were cool and strategic.
"Counter-strategy is simple. Maximum aggression. We deny the rain window entirely. Every second without established weather is a second she bleeds spell differential. We do not let the clock reach twenty-five seconds. We push the pace until her injuries compound. Once she hits the threshold—" She pressed her palm flat on the table. "We win."
Rhode's eyes narrowed. "The only variable is exactly how long a wounded Lord of the Mist can hold her breath before she sinks."
Hathaway nodded.
Her ga-designer brain ran the two halves of Rhode's strategy together.
Alice's loadout was a horrific strategic Catch-22: a wounded opponent you should beat through safe attrition, protected by a twenty-five-second enrage tir that forced an absolute, suicidal rushdown. You had to outlast a raid boss, but you only had twenty-five seconds to do it before she wiped the party.
Rhode hadn't missed the contradiction. Rhode's answer was simply to bulldoze straight through it. We will win the war of attrition by executing it at a dead sprint.
Every single step of their analysis was mathematically flawless.
And that was exactly what sat wrong.
It wasn't a tactical read. She didn't have the data for a tactical read. It was the crawling discomfort of a veteran ga designer looking at a flawless speedrun guide—one that had been tested, optimized, and validated by people who understood the system infinitely better than she did.
She'd spent years building systems where the most catastrophic exploits weren't the ones that broke the rules. They were the ones that followed an obscure rule so precisely, in a context no one had thought to test, that the entire analysis had been correct about every single variable except the one that mattered.
She didn't know which variable it was. She didn't speak. She had nothing to support the feeling.
But as Hathaway stared at the cold blue light of the hologram, she couldn't shake the fundantal dread of soone who had once written a chanic into a ga as a joke—and then watched a speedrunner use it to break the final boss in half.
We think we've solved the equation, she thought. What if we're just missing a decimal place?
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