[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 22 — Grand Finals, 01:00 PM
[Location]: Open Sea · Grand Masters Regional Qualifier Venue · Six-Point Miniature Arena
The arena was shaking.
A violent high-tier composite array detonated against a Mare Bru elite's water curtain. The shockwave rattled the blast-proof glass of the Royal Rosas preparation zone.
Out there, Rhode, Bella, and Nino were busy executing a very particular kind of violence—clean, surgical, and frightening in how little they seed to be exerting themselves.
Hathaway didn't look up.
Her hands were cold. On her knees, a thick, parchnt-bound manuscript radiated a chill through her uniform that had nothing to do with the arena's climate control.
The Blind Scholar: Sleepless Nights Under the Umbrella.
She had opened it to the Prologue. Only the Prologue.
Alice was a top-tier novelist whose pen had been kissed by sothing considerably worse than a demon. Her bibliography spoke for itself. She wrote high-stakes, beautifully crafted, unapologetically toxic smut.
The Prologue contained no dialogue. It dropped the reader directly into a single, suffocatingly intimate scene.
"When the silver blindfold is tied tight, the world shrinks to the stifling canopy of the master suite.
"She cannot see the four pairs of eyes in the dark. She only feels them. A feverish cheek pressed against her inner thigh. The hot, territorial scrape of teeth against her nape. Four scholars who gladly burned their futures to ash, rotting inside her immaculate sanctuary just to drag her down with them.
"Sinking into the crest-embroidered silk, the Saint does not struggle. She simply tilts her neck, offering her pale skin to the permanent, overlapping bites. The bedroom is sealed airtight—a collar woven from a blood oath.
"And outside the heavy doors, in the freezing, pristine corridor of Wellington Manor...
"The flawless younger sister leans her back against the ancestral oak. She listens to the muffled, wet gasps echoing through her own ho, her nails biting into her palms.
"She will write the checks. She will clean up the sses. She will stand guard in the bitter chill so no one else can ever enter. Forever shivering beneath the painted eyes of their ancestors. Forever funding the magnificent, filthy ruination of the sister who will never belong to her."
Hathaway's finger rested on the edge of the page.
She closed her eyes for a full three seconds.
The master suite. Not a borrowed room. Not a hotel. The room that should have been Evangeline's.
I handed her a voyeuristic NTR frawork, Hathaway thought, a distinct vein throbbing in her forehead, and this absolute lunatic used it to encode a genuine, apocalyptic prophecy.
Alice's grand, theatrical Cassandra dilemma speech clicked into horrifying sense.
It was a flawlessly encrypted warning. Encrypted by weaponized degeneracy.
It was toe-curling. It was degenerate. It was exactly the kind of toxic, high-tension erotica that would sell out a convention booth in three minutes.
But underneath that thick, suffocating layer of smut...
Hathaway understood it. All of it.
Last night, after Alice had handed her this manuscript with those manic teal eyes and the smile of soone who had already decided the conversation was over, Hathaway had done the only thing her brain knew how to do when confronted with insufficient data: she had opened a search window and started typing nas.
One by one.
The Witch World Information Network was famously, almost aggressively transparent. You could find Grand Witch Heidi Lucent's birthday, her favorite tea brand, and her publicly disclosed weekly earnings if you looked.
Hathaway had verified her own entry once out of morbid curiosity: it had her family registry, the record of her mana awakening, her academy enrollnt, her monowheel patent, and her current position as Nino Lucent's lab assistant. Everything since transmigration, catalogued and available.
She had typed Cecilia Wellington. Academic papers, family registry as Wellington estate heir, honors from Minothnago Academy—a small, private institution on the border sea of Holheim, specializing in witch folklore and ruins archaeology. Mana data field: last updated four years ago.
Wei Changqing. Minothnago Academy, sa cohort. Folklore specialist. Mana data: last updated three years ago.
Karula. Maria. Flandmira. Sa. Sa. Sa.
Five graduates of an obscure folklore school. All last known mana levels from three-to-four years ago. All perfectly normal academic records. The kind of profiles that would make a talent scout close the tab without a second thought.
This was, in every asurable way, impossible.
In Witch society, there was no such thing as a hidden master. Potential was capital. If you had the talent to one day threaten soone like Alice, the system found you, funded you, and catapulted you into elite circles—because certain resources you needed to actually claim a seat at that table were strictly monopolized, and the people who held those resources were always watching for talent worth investing in.
This wasn't idealism. This was physics. Power announces itself was the truest law in the Inner Sea.
The cursed thorns on Alice's wrist were Legendary-tier work. Hathaway had confird that with Nino without fully explaining why she was asking.
Legendary-tier ant it touched causality, ti, the underlying architecture of reality itself. Soone had developed that curse from scratch. Which ant soone had first studied a vast library of existing legendary fraworks—because you could not invent at that level without a foundation.
It was the equivalent of a random civilian, with no ties to a national laboratory or a military dynasty, hand-building a functional nuclear warhead in her garage.
Where did they get it?
Not the Wellington family. Noble houses did not hand their foundational bedrock to outsiders. Hathaway's own branch of the Ludwig family guarded their single Legendary grimoire with their lives—and that was the outer ring.
If those four had been granted access to the Wellington archives, their public records would be deeply, structurally intertwined with the family's core assets. But they weren't. They were bound only to Cecilia.
Which ant there was a secret channel. A shadow patron. A behemoth operating behind them that Hathaway had no way to na.
Heidi, the 10th Seat, didn't have the administrative power—and if she had backed them, she would have announced it at brunch. Irene, the 5th Seat, theoretically had the resources, but it contradicted her entire modus operandi. Irene owned her own franchise and openly flaunted a nineteen-year-old prodigy with eighty thousand mana to the press. If Irene had backed them, they wouldn't be ghosts.
Soone, or sothing, with bottomless resources and absolute discretion had funded their isolation.
The math resolved into an ugly shape.
They hadn't just been "hanging out" in an ivory tower. The comrcial draft system didn't allow for cliques. No single club had the budget or roster space to draft five monsters capable of injuring an Arch-Witch simultaneously.
If they had shown their true trics, the system would have inevitably torn them apart, distributing them to different franchises across the Inner Sea.
So they didn't show them.
They actively evaded mana screenings. They refused to compete. They deliberately discarded the three to five most precious, golden years of a young Witch's rapid developnt cycle.
They stayed in the shadows, off the grid, acquiring restricted knowledge and apocalyptic power from an invisible patron, purely so they could eventually register an independent club where no one could ever separate them.
For Witches, whose very biology was wired for hyper-rationality and constant evolution, this level of romanticism wasn't just extre. It was a severe, systemic pathology.
They had starved themselves of the world just to eat each other.
And to finalize it, they had signed a Blood Pact. Not a vow of trust, but a dead-man's switch. A guillotine built for five.
Now Hathaway understood the hollow thousand-yard stare Victoria had worn that night. She understood why "Pests" was the only word available to her.
Victoria wasn't dealing with a sister who was making bad investnts.
Victoria was standing outside the door of a sealed room, watching her sister act as the passive, indulgent center of a nuclear-ard suicide cult. If the fragile, paranoid equilibrium of their collective obsession ever cracked, the pact's clauses would trigger a magical catastrophe at a scale Hathaway didn't have a fra of reference for.
And Victoria couldn't dismantle an oath sworn by monsters stronger than herself. She could only stand outside, unblinkingly, paying the rent to delay the explosion.
Hathaway's chest ached in a way she didn't have a gaming term for.
She looked up.
Through the blast-proof glass, Rhode was bleeding from a cut at her temple, dark fla roaring as she drove the Mare Bru elite into the final corner. Bella's unsealed eye burned with manic exertion. Nino calculated vectors in the background with the expression of soone who had briefly considered having emotions about this and decided against it.
They're fighting for a ticket, Hathaway thought. A ticket to walk into that cage.
The suffocating weight of the manuscript had almost made her forget the absolute, grounding reality of the arena.
Death here was just a respawn. And the Witches bleeding on the other side of that glass were not victims walking into a horror story. They made a living out of burning down insurmountable odds.
In the ruthless arithtic of competitive dueling, a perfectly sealed ecosystem of obsession wasn't a ghost story. It was a psychological profile.
With a sharp, definitive snap, Hathaway closed the book. She pressed her palms flat against the leather cover, burying the abyss beneath her hands.
Not yet. The crowd roar washed over her like water over stone. The horror story ends here.
It was no longer a prophecy. It was a scouting report.
She would break Alice's degenerate warnings down into raw data, and she would find the structural flaw in Victoria's nightmare. But first, Rosas had to win today.
She could wait.
"Royal Rosas secures the opening 3v3! Score: 1 to 0!"
The comntator's roar tore through the arena amplifiers. Beyond the glass, the terrain was resetting.
Rhode, Bella, and Nino rotated off the field—controlled breathing, sharp eyes, the specific expression of people who had executed exactly what they ca to do and were already thinking about the next problem.
Hathaway set the manuscript on the bench beside her. Because she had seen the silver-blue figure rise in the Mare Bru preparation zone.
[KOF Relay — Match One]
Royal Rosas: Rhode von Ludwig
vs.
Mare Bru: Lee Alice Varro
The crowd noise reached a register that was less "sound" and more "physical pressure."
Alice stepped onto the field.
She was dressed for war. A sleek tactical bodysuit beneath a dark, military-cut Witch's robe—functional, disciplined, completely overshadowed by the cursed thorns coiled around her left wrist, which were radiating a foul aura that made every nearby Witch's mana circulation feel slightly wrong.
Any Witch with decent perception could see the circuit damage from here. The soul was enduring constant tearing pressure. The clock on her was visible from thirty ters away.
Her teal cat eyes weren't looking at Rhode across the field.
They were tilted slightly upward, reflecting a landscape that didn't exist in this arena. So interior terrain of her own. Her tail traced a slow, dangerous arc through the air behind her, unhurried in the way of soone who had finished being afraid long before today.
She was smiling.
Not the smile of soone who had forgotten they were injured. The smile of soone who had decided the injury was entirely acceptable collateral damage for what ca next.
Across the field, Rhode removed her sunglasses.
Her genuine, unsealed crimson pupils ca into focus. There was no trash talk. No probing. In Rhode's tactical dictionary, there was exactly one entry for severely injured weather caster in a Rush-down ta: execute imdiately, execute completely.
[What Royal Rosas Knew]
Zero footage. No combat data.[Omniscient Rain] was near-Legendary drain—sustaining it on damaged circuits was, mathematically, dubious.Historical precedent: The Lantern Cat and weather synergy was historically catastrophic—but half a decade of targeted nerfs had theoretically regulated it to death. Attempting to survive a 25-second setup window against the current Rush-down ta, while severely injured, was mathematically suicidal.Conclusion: Elysia was the real threat. Alice would be managed with extre aggression, minimal resource spend, and the clock.
[What Hathaway Knew Beyond]
Alice's injury had been delivered across half a continent by Greed Umbrella's captain and Karula.Last night, Alice's energy had been manic to the point of unsettling—the specific mania of soone who has already decided to spend themselves down to zero and is looking forward to it.
Pain, for a creator, was a stimulant.
It stripped away the performative chaos she usually wallowed in and left behind sothing exact, economical, and frightening. Her sustain ti under these conditions should run longer than any model had accounted for.
The referee's voice echoed through the arena amplifiers.
"Match One — BEGIN!"
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