[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 21 — Finals Eve, 09:45 AM
[Location]: Royal Rosas Club HQ · Tactical Briefing Room
Hathaway was still running blind simulations on variables no one had thought to test when the temperature in the briefing room shifted.
The lethal mathematical equation required to dismantle Mare Bru in tomorrow's Grand Finals had been solved and locked in. The eting should have been over.
It wasn't.
Nino swiped the Mare Bru dossier away. The hologram flickered and reford around a new symbol.
A black umbrella.
Rhode's posture changed. The loose confidence of soone who had just outlined a winning strategy—gone. The angle of her jaw shifted, shoulders tightening in a way Hathaway associated with the mont before a genuinely difficult conversation. One hand pushed her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose.
She was staring at the photo of a silver-haired Witch on the display. Her crimson eyes—all 150 luns of them—fixed on the image without blinking.
"I retract what I said in the initial briefing," Rhode said, clipped. "About their roster being a tourism operation."
Hathaway's spine straightened.
"Cecilia's strategic choices are questionable," Rhode said, jaw tight. "Her team composition is irrational and the structure is genuinely laughable. But she—"
A pause. The pause of soone choosing the next words with the care of a person who does not enjoy saying them.
"She is undeniably strong enough to leave speechless."
Hathaway's heart rate spiked.
Alucard stepped in, her voice asured. "You'll have noticed the pattern in the bracket data. Early rounds—Victoria carried. Every 3v3, every opener. Massive individual output. The rest of the roster was largely decorative. But starting from Round Six—"
"Cecilia took over." Nino's tone was flat. Clinical. The voice she reserved for data she found genuinely disturbing. "From Round Six up to yesterday's Semi-Final. Every match. Every KOF relay."
"One Witch. Three opponents. An unbroken sweep through the entire second half of the tournant."
Nino swiped the hologram.
"Until the third starter yesterday."
"Look at the attendance data," Nino continued, pulling up the grotesquely lopsided chart. "The remaining four starters of Greed Umbrella have a combined total screen ti of less than twenty minutes across the entire second half of the qualifiers.
"For a six-player team competing through this bracket's volu, the expected independent combat data for each starter would exceed two hundred minutes. Their panels are essentially blank. This is not a coincidence. This is not a strategy."
Rhode supplied the annotation: "Because those four are not here to compete. Two haven't fought a aningful match since the qualifiers began. One spent yesterday's Semi-Final reviewing her reflection in a magic mirror while Cecilia did the actual work.
"And the anchor player—handed an opponent who was one stiff breeze away from collapsing, on a silver platter, after Cecilia had spent everything to earn that position—managed to turn it into a life-and-death struggle and barely scraped through."
Bella leaned forward, the high collar of her cloak dropping to reveal her left eye—unsealed, its crimson glow cutting through the projector light. "I have seen her fight."
"The sealed archives of the Ludwig bloodline confirm it. The Wellington bloodline favors the quill, not the sword." Her glowing eye moved to the bracket hologram. "Until the Incident at the Tulip Zenith."
Tulip Zenith? You an the VIP lounge at the Tulip Club?
Rhode's jaw tightened. She crossed her arms.
"We were younger," Bella narrated. "The Vanguard, myself, and our kin. We occupied the VIP box adjacent to the Wellingtons'. We removed our ocular seals, unleashing the unadulterated radiance of the Ludwig bloodline. A pure, 150-lun provocation."
You flash-blinded them on purpose. You people are absolute naces.
"And?" Hathaway asked.
"A Wellington cousin, unfortunate enough to look directly at the Vanguard, had her eyes scorched to tears," Bella said solemnly. "And then the door opened. The newly crowned Heir stepped out. Cecilia Wellington. Eighteen years old. A scholar of Yggdrasil Academy who had never been known to initiate a duel."
Hathaway went perfectly still.
Yggdrasil. A background thread quietly resolved an old error code. That explains Lab 606. Cecilia wasn't just a Wellington. She was her student.
"'Out,' the Heir said. 'If you wish to provoke, let us fight.'"
Bella's eye narrowed. "But the Vanguard's pride was a roaring dark fla. She invoked the na of the exiled Elder Sister—Evangeline. 'Where is your sister?' the Vanguard asked. 'You do not look stronger than her.'"
The briefing room was dead silent.
"The Heir did not answer. She muttered a single, inaudible phrase." The theatrical cadence dropped a register into sothing colder. "And then—she did not wait for us to step outside. She cast a structural obliteration spell directly at her own feet."
"She deleted the floor of the VIP box."
Alucard rubbed her temples—the expression of a woman revisiting property damage reports against her will.
"We plumted," Bella whispered. "Free-fall. Dozens of high-tier exchanges between the Vanguard and the Heir, perfectly matched in the slipstream.
"But the Heir lost."
Rhode let out a sharp, intensely frustrated exhale. "I won on a technicality. It was garbage."
"Because of an over-allocation of processing power," Bella continued, her gaze fixed on the hologram. " During terminal velocity free-fall, while matching a Ludwig Vanguard blow for blow, Cecilia simultaneously calculated the trajectory of her weeping mortal cousin. She intercepted the landing. Deployed a Tier-5 Aegis to protect her from the six of us waiting on the ground. That split-second of divided processing allowed the Vanguard's blade to strike true."
Bella pointed a bandage-wrapped finger at the bracket data. "My Evil Eye saw the truth of her soul that day. The Heir of Wellington is not a warrior. She is a fortress. She fights purely to ensure her domain remains untouched."
Her voice dropped. "In a KOF format, the only absolute way to protect your teammates is to ensure they never step off the bench. A consecutive 1v3 sweep is not a display of power—it is a self-inflicted war of attrition. Absorbing three consecutive rounds of unrecovered wounds, curses, and mana debt, spending herself down to the marrow so they never have to."
Bella looked at Rhode. "The Vanguard fought her while she was protecting soone. That match, she was doing two things at once." Her glowing eye moved to the bracket results. "KOF relay is a single engagent format."
Tasia set her teacup down for the second ti that morning—an action that explicitly violated her own quota for the day.
She spoke. Still using her slow, flat delivery, but the words landed like a scalpel entering cleanly.
"That anchor player," Tasia said. "Her spell tier distribution for the Semi-Final match is anomalous."
"Her full cast log registers Tier-1 through Tier-3 spells. Consistently. Basic utility constructs. Several cantrips. Tier-4 exposure: minimal. Tier-5 and above: zero." Tasia's voice was perfectly uninflected. "In a semi-final. At this level of competition."
She did not pick her teacup back up.
"The distribution is either an exceptionally thorough intelligence blackout—or it is simply accurate."
The briefing room was quiet for a mont.
Rhode delivered the conclusion. Her voice was flat, definitive, and carried sothing almost like reluctant admiration underneath the contempt.
"Greed Umbrella is Cecilia. Cecilia is Greed Umbrella."
Hathaway was doing the math.
A 1v3 sweep. In the high-intensity second half of this bracket. Repeatedly. Including the Semi-Finals, against a monster-filled opponent pool, after which Cecilia was described as costing everything she had.
She turned slowly and looked at her cousin.
"Rhode." Her voice ca out quieter than intended. "Could you do that? Carry four... carry four accessories at my skill level, and 1v3 sweep a semi-final bracket?"
Rhode's expression went sowhere hard and controlled. She opened her mouth. She didn't say anything. She closed it again.
"Do not insult the bloodline of the Dark Fla, Hathaway," Bella said. She leaned forward, the bandages on her left wrist shifting as she moved to salvage the mont. "If we were to fully unseal our forbidden archives, carrying four mortal vessels through a re semi-final is—"
She stopped.
Her eye had moved to the match duration log. Three consecutive bout tistamps. Each opponent entering at full capacity.
"—is a mathematical catastrophe," Bella finished, very quietly. "Three consecutive opponents at full pool while your deficit compounds with every round. By the third, you are fighting at what—forty percent? Thirty? Against soone who has watched every spell you have shown, at full mana, rested." Her voice went flat. "Against this field."
The bandages were very still.
After a long silence, Rhode—the Ludwig Vanguard, a woman whose bulletproof arrogance Hathaway had only ever seen flatline once before, on the day Irene's na was dropped in the club—spoke very quietly.
"This isn't the Cecilia I know."
Hathaway sank back into her chair.
The intelligence eting adjourned soti after noon. The cold unease didn't.
Hathaway was three blocks from the transit station, her brain still running frantic, useless background processes on Victoria's situation, when sothing in her coat pocket vibrated.
She pulled it out.
The golden cat-paw card Alice had handed her in the underground market two weeks ago. Matte black surface. The ambient glow it usually carried was quiet, dimd—but across it, elegant, flowing script had materialized.
Miss Ludwig. The first draft is complete. I require a face-to-face consultation before tomorrow's Finals. Coordinates attached.
Hathaway stood on the bustling street and stared at the glowing address.
A rational substitute, whose team had just finalized a starting lineup that explicitly didn't include her, would go ho, enjoy a stress-free dinner with her mothers, and perhaps parse a new Tier-4 spell API just in case the Finals went catastrophically wrong tomorrow.
Hathaway sighed, turned on her heel, and walked in the opposite direction.
The location was an antique bookshop that was, according to its sign, closed for renovations. The back room slled of old parchnt and sothing faintly tallic—the ambient scent of mana circuits that weren't running properly.
When Hathaway entered, she stopped.
The rumors were accurate. Alice Varro was injured.
She was standing at a drafting table near the far wall, sorting through manuscript pages with rapid, precise movents—but the visual evidence was undeniable.
A creeping curse-mark resembling charred black thorns coiled tightly around her left wrist, pulsing faintly, aggressively suppressing the iridescent silver-blue aura that should have been radiating off her. Her normally luminescent hair had dimd to flat silver. The foul ambient static of a high-tier hostile curse hung in the close air of the back room.
For an Arch-Witch's debuff to be detectable by soone at Hathaway's level. That said everything.
Then Alice looked up.
Her teal cat eyes were on.
Terrifyingly, manically, incomprehensibly on. The eyes of a novelist who has cracked the structural problem they have been torturing themselves over for three months, at two in the morning, while running on spite and insufficient sleep.
"You're here—!" Alice's voice ca out slightly hoarse, which she seed not to notice. Her tail swished twice in quick succession. "Genius. My absolute Muse. The Chapter 42 restructure using your frawork—the narrative tension is—" She made a gesture with her hand that communicated incandescent, apparently finding words insufficient.
Hathaway stared at the Lord of the Mist, who was trying to express creative gratitude while actively suppressing a high-tier lethal curse on her arm.
"Alice." She stepped forward. "You have a visible death-curse on your wrist. The Grand Finals are tomorrow. Against my team." A beat. "Are you completely out of your mind?"
"Oh, this?" Alice glanced at the black thorns on her wrist and waved the concern away with the casual annoyance of soone swatting a mosquito. "Occupational hazard. The counter-divination firewall they built was genuinely spectacular work—professional-grade layering, cross-continental anchoring, the kind of counterasure architecture that takes serious talent."
She set down the manuscript.
"But a firewall only matters if it triggers before the data extraction is complete."
Alice's smile widened, sharp and victorious. "They hit with the curse, yes. But I already had the draft."
Hathaway's brain went briefly non-verbal.
You took a conceptual curse to the face just to finish your fanfiction draft.Your priorities are a clinical psychiatric ergency.
The taut string holding Hathaway's composure together snapped clean.
"Who," she said, and her voice ca out very flat and very direct, "actually did this to you? Was it Cecilia? Is Cecilia genuinely that strong?"
Alice went still.
The manic writer-energy receded—not all at once, but cleanly, the way a lens refocuses.
The creature that looked back at Hathaway for that half-second was not the chaos-vector creator of forty-seven volus of deeply disturbing fanfiction. It was the primary intelligence broker of Milan'thir, sitting behind thirty years of assembled context about exactly what strength ant and who had it.
Then she smiled.
Small. Knowing. The smile of soone who has the answer to a question and is deciding exactly how much to enjoy delivering it.
"Cecilia?" Alice let out a quiet, genuinely amused chuckle. "By the Leylines, no."
Alice's cat eyes glinted.
"Their Captain is Wei Changqing. The youngest of the five." Alice traced a finger lightly over the blackened thorns pulsing on her wrist, her tone carrying the reluctant admiration of an author who had fundantally misunderstood her own protagonist. "In my drafts, I wrote her as soone who does exactly what needs to be done—quietly, without announcent. I had mistakenly filed that under 'passive personality.'"
A quiet chuckle. "I am currently revising those notes."
"And then there is Karula." Alice's tail traced a slow, deliberate arc through the air. "Black hair, purple eyes. I characterized her as soone who saves her best for the exact mont it counts."
She let her hand drop from the curse mark, eting Hathaway's frozen stare.
"The two of them traced my divination threads back across half a continent, shattered my scrying arrays, and delivered this Soul Backlash in perfect, ruthless synchronization." The teal in Alice's eyes went sharp. "Karula, it seems, had indeed been saving it."
Hathaway froze.
Her brain didn't just stall. It accessed a cached mory file from over a month ago, yanking her back to a video call in Victoria's dormitory. The temperature plumting. Victoria's face contorting into the mask of a jealous, deeply offended demon.
"Milla and Karula were getting terribly impatient... Wei and I signed the lease."
Cecilia's breezy, affectionate voice echoed perfectly in Hathaway's head. The 'vanity project'. The 'startup' Cecilia had supposedly self-funded just to play gas with her friends, because comrcial clubs wouldn't guarantee all of them a starting spot.
"A shared umbrella is worth standing in the rain a little longer."
Greed Umbrella.Those words had been the na all along.
Oh my god.
Victoria had thought Cecilia was carrying financial dead weight. Rhode had just spent an entire tactical briefing declaring those sa friends to be glorified accessories, completely irrelevant to the bracket.
And yet, this "dead weight"—a Captain nad Wei and a girl nad Karula—had just successfully counter-hacked and maid the Apex of Dominion across a long-range divination link.
"Cecilia isn't the Captain," Hathaway breathed. "And they aren't accessories. That day on the call... Cecilia wasn't funding a vanity project for her weak friends. She built an independent club because no existing comrcial roster could hold all those monsters under one roof."
Alice's smile curved into a full Cheshire-cat grin. She looked deeply, personally, thoroughly entertained by Hathaway's existential crisis.
"Bingo," Alice purred softly.
She held Hathaway's gaze.
"You and I are the only ones who see the board. The rest of the Inner Sea of Stars is still treating them like a guided tourism operation." The tail made a long, deliberate arc. "Isn't narrative misdirection a beautiful thing, nya~"
While Alice spoke, the secondary implications hit Hathaway—rapid-fire, ruthless, arriving in sequence.
If the Captain of Greed Umbrella was a monster capable of hunting the Apex of Dominion across half a continent... what the hell was Victoria dealing with?
The mory of the phone call surfaced, chillingly clear. 'Pests. Deeply, aggressively annoying.'
Victoria hadn't been complaining about her sister's incompetent friends. She had been dismissing a Witch who just tracked the Apex of Dominion across half a continent. As a pest.
And her return to the dorms. The look of a surgeon walking away from a burned-down ward.
And then her final departure. Standing at the door in the dead of night, her voice breaking on the quiet, exhausted 'I can't. I'm sorry.'
Victoria hadn't gone back to Holheim to play in a tournant.
She had gone back because she knew exactly what category of catastrophe was inside that house.
This is what swallowed her.
Before Hathaway's brain could complete the reboot sequence from that final, terrifying realization, Alice was already stepping forward—slightly unsteady, slightly luminous, completely unstoppable—and pressing a thick stack of parchnt into Hathaway's arms with the confident, proprietary warmth of soone donating a treasure.
The cover read: The Blind Scholar: Sleepless Nights Under the Umbrella.
"My Finals Eve gift," Alice murmured, tail completing one long, satisfied arc. "You see, my dear Muse, I fully intend to win tomorrow and test that monster roster myself. But in the unlikely event your terrifying cousins—and my dearest Little Sia—manage to put in the ground..."
Alice's teal eyes caught the dim light, the chaotic amusent fading into sothing older and sharper.
"You are already calculating how to warn them," Alice purred, reading Hathaway's frozen expression. "You are thinking: They are your victims. They know your intelligence network is flawless. If I hand them this book, they will have to believe it."
Hathaway's fingers tightened around the manuscript.
Alice let out a quiet, tragic chuckle.
"And they would believe it, my dear Muse." She tilted her head. "But tell ... what exactly will they do with it?"
Hathaway opened her mouth, then stopped.
"Your team operates on the absolute trics of victory," Alice said, her voice dropping to a hypnotic, lancholy cadence. "If you hand this to Nino Lucent, she will scan it for spell coefficients and mana regeneration rates. She will find none. She will find a three-hundred-page psychological vivisection of trauma, codependency, and a magically binding suicide pact, wrapped in highly explicit prose. And she will throw it in the incinerator."
"And Tasia?" Alice stepped back, the curse mark on her wrist pulsing like a slow heartbeat. "Your gentle Empress possesses the greatest insight among you. She will read it. She will understand the beautiful, tragic shape of their souls perfectly. But my dear Muse, empathy is not a tactical variable."
Alice's smile carried the weight of a Greek chorus. "Knowing why a monster is weeping does not change the velocity of its claws. Understanding their despair will not give Tasia a counter-spell. It will only give her a heavier heart when the ti cos to calculate the exact angle required to execute them.
"And Rhode? Rhode only respects absolute power. She has no interest in the broken souls wielding it.
"I am an author, Hathaway. Not a combat instructor. I do not write combat math. I write souls. I can tell you exactly what kind of abyss your team is stepping into. But I cannot give you the numbers to fight them."
"That is the true Cassandra dilemma," Alice whispered, her eyes gleaming with the chaotic joy of a creator witnessing a flawless tragedy. "It is not that your team won't believe the prophecy. It is that knowing the truth changes absolutely nothing about the slaughter to co. The narrative is locked. And you, my dear little substitute, have just been handed the script."
"Read it on the bench tomorrow while we fight, Hathaway." Alice's smile curved into sothing beautiful and deeply cruel. "Watch your Vanguard and your Empress fight to beat , knowing exactly what kind of at-grinder they are bleeding for a ticket to."
Having delivered her prophecy, she turned away, waving a dismissive hand.
"I'll be looking forward to your expressions from the arena, nya~." Her voice drifted back over her shoulder, cat-slow and deeply amused. "Writers take feedback wherever they can find it."
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