[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 24 — 12:50 PM
[Location]: White City · Royal Rosas Club · Dining Room
The dining room was peaceful.
Hathaway had safely deposited Rhode's mass-produced horror movie curse, Bella's abyssal stealth ring, and Alucard's pocket-sized tactical nuke into the deepest recesses of her spatial storage.
Her heart rate had finally stabilized. Having survived the first wave of the Royal Rosas gift exchange with her sanity intact, she turned her attention to the far side of the room.
Rina and Yenna were eating quietly.
Normal colleagues. Normal gifts. Hathaway ntally prepared herself to receive sothing comforting and deeply mundane.
Rina popped the cork on the spot, drank deeply, and let out a satisfied exhale. As a return gift, she pressed a heavy solid-gold commorative coin into Hathaway's hand without ceremony.
Hathaway accepted it with both hands and made a private vow to treat it as a family relic.
A coin personally handled by the living embodint of [Anomalous Probability]. The passive luck buff permanently attached to this tal is mathematically incalculable. This goes under my pillow tonight.
Yenna looked mildly surprised at the gift. Her fox ears twitched once. The expression on her face, usually maintained the serious, proper composure of soone whose brain was quietly operating on a bizarre alien wavelength, toward sothing that might have been called touched.
"Thank you," she said softly.
She reached back and placed a pair of headphones on the table.
Hathaway looked at them. Then at the top of Yenna's head. Then back at the headphones.
The shape. The color. The texture of the fur. The small white tuft at the tips.
They were identical. Identical to the living fox ears currently attached to Yenna's skull.
A premonition of deep, bone-level wrongness gripped Hathaway by the spine.
She swallowed. "Yenna." Her voice was very calm, trembling only slightly. "What material did you use to make these?"
Yenna blinked. The question didn't seem to compute.
"My ears."
Oh. Right, your ears. Of course. That makes complete—
WAIT. WHAT.
Hathaway's eyes went wide. Her mouth opened halfway, but her vocal cords declined to participate. She tried to organize her words, found nothing, and just sat there in stunned silence.
Yenna sighed, taking the silence for disappointnt.
"I originally wanted to use my mother's ears to make the first prototype..." Yenna said. "Unfortunately, she refused. So I had to use my own. After a few failed attempts, I worked out the technique."
...What did you just say?
Hathaway took a deep breath, placed a hand flat against her sternum, and asked with forced, unnatural calm:
"When you say the experints... failed. Does that an your ears were just... gone?"
Yenna gave her a weird look, answering with the patient expression of soone explaining that wet things are wet. "Of course they were gone. What else would happen?"
What else would happen?! What else my entire— Hathaway took a short, panicked breath, struggling to process this.
Before she could process it, Yenna added pragmatically:
"It's fine. They regenerate quickly with magic. It’s just that the cutting part is a bit intense, nerve-wise. You have to drink two pounds of high-proof liquor first to get through the bone."
Hathaway went numb.
What a ruthless maneuver. Witch biotechnology wasn't a taphor. It was literal. Biological. Technology. She was never going to be able to look at the word "headphones" the sa way for the rest of her life.
She did a rapid ntal inventory of every pair of headphones she had ever owned across two lifetis, confirming they were all made of plastic and tal, and breathed a private sigh of relief.
Thank God. My headphones were normal.
Yenna continued, noting that the headphones were not rely a curiosity.
Balance training. Fine mana control calibration. For young Witches in the three-to-five age range, the mana enlightennt window, they functioned as a first-contact sensing tool, to bypass the physical and touch the abstract directly.
Young Witches. Three to five.
The thought connected itself before Hathaway had finished processing it.
Rory was two months old.
When Rory turned three, these headphones, made at a cost Hathaway refused to calculate in detail, would be the first real piece of magical training equipnt in her life. Not a toy. Not a symbol. The actual thing.
Hathaway looked at Yenna for a long mont.
Yenna was already sipping her consommé, expression unchanged, offering no explanation.
Coincidence. Maybe. Probably. The word "coincidence" is doing a lot of work.
She put the headphones on.
The ambient noise of the dining room sharpened and clarified. Her mana began moving along unfamiliar circuits, steady and precise, calibrated by the native sensory mory built into the material.
Her balance refined itself. The audio quality was, frankly, extraordinary. The fur was so soft it constituted a mild hazard.
She took them off, stored them carefully, and made a firm decision never to ask which specific attempts had failed.
[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 24 — 01:45 PM
[Location]: Royal Rosas Club · Tactical Analysis Room
Hathaway asked Alucard where Nino was. Alucard pointed down the hall without looking up.
The tactical room door was heavy and soundproofed. When Hathaway pushed it open, the room beyond was dark except for the blue light of a massive holographic display.
On the screen: Golden Iris. Complete roster, formation charts, match footage fras.
Nino stood in front of it with her back to the door, hands moving across the virtual keyboard. Lines of mana analysis equations collapsed and rebuilt in real ti.
Hathaway stood at the threshold and made a quiet assessnt.
She genuinely could not determine whether Nino was conducting a rigorous, impartial tactical deconstruction of the most dangerous team they would face in the tournant.
Or whether she was staring at her younger sister's face in high definition, using the precision of a Chief Intelligence Officer to catalog every change in the last two months, while aggressively cataloguing mories she would deny having.
Considering this was Nino Lucent, the correct answer was almost certainly: simultaneously. Perfectly. Without any perceived contradiction.
Hathaway stepped forward and placed two gift sets side by side on the console.
"Professor," she said. "This one is for you. This one, if it's convenient, please pass it to Heidi for ." A beat. "She's your sister, so."
Nino's hands paused on the keyboard.
She turned her head, looked at Hathaway, looked at the two identical sets, and swept both into the secure area in front of her in one motion. Her voice stayed flat, chanical.
"Leave them there."
Beneath the flat chanical voice, sothing was operating at a slightly different frequency. Hathaway noted it and said nothing.
Nino reached under the console, removed a thick physical docunt wrapped in sealing enchantnts, and placed it in Hathaway's arms without comnt.
A tactical review file. Dedicated to Hathaway.
The first page opened on a numbered list. Not of achievents. The format was unambiguous: every decision point in every match, analyzed for efficiency, marked correct or incorrect, with deviations noted in decimal places.
[Match 2, Minute 14:] Defensive positioning error. A 0.5-second window on the enemy's left flank was available for Tier-4 Evocation suppression. You cast [Greater Mage Armor] instead. Mana waste: 15%.[Bad habit:] Pre-cast lean to the left before Evocation sequences. Correctable with targeted muscle mory drilling. Correction protocol: Appendix C.[Round 3:] You could have saved 35 M-Units on this rotation. At top-tier level, 35 M-Units is a reversal margin.
Every page was more of the sa. Clinical. rciless. Precise to the second decimal.
Hathaway's temples throbbed just reading the first sheet. But her fingers held the stack tightly, because she understood exactly what this docunt was:
Not the standard coordination analysis Nino wrote for Rhode or Bella, whose combat systems were calcified and unchallengeable at this point. This was a fra-by-fra personal dissection of her specifically: every drop of wasted mana, every habit to excise. Written for no one else.
Care expressed as a spreadsheet. Classic.
"Understood, Professor. I'll correct all of it." She prepared to excuse herself.
"Since you're already here," Nino said, eyes already on the screen. "Sit down. We'll review."
Hathaway sat down.
Not because she wanted to. Because when Nino Lucent entered lecture mode, the gravity in the imdiate vicinity approximately doubled, and the window for an orderly exit closed faster than she could reach it.
The lecture began. It was rapid, surgical, and without rcy.
Hathaway got through it by keeping her hands under the console, rhythmically petting the palm-sized Frost Lantern Cat curled in her lap like an ice-blue, vibrating stress ball.
Midway through, Nino reached out without looking and grabbed the bamboo tube from the console. Popped the cork. Drank.
About twenty minutes in, Hathaway noticed.
Nino's speech rhythm, tronomically exact under normal conditions, produced a 0.5-second lag on a technical term. Just once. Barely audible.
Hathaway checked the desk.
Nino's bamboo tube was empty.
Nino was still mid-sentence, voice fluid, posture perfect, absolutely certain she had consud a thirst-quenching beverage.
Oh no.
The lecture continued. Hathaway sat still and watched. At a certain point, Nino reached out again, without looking, and picked up the second bamboo tube. Heidi's portion.
She popped it and kept drinking while finishing her sentence.
The liquid level inside the bamboo tube was visibly growing shallower. Hathaway did the math in real ti and arrived at a conclusion that was approximately three steps ahead of her ability to do anything about it.
She pretended very hard to be paying attention to the tactical slides.
Nino finished explaining a defensive rotation. And then she simply... stopped.
Hathaway glanced at the progress bar at the bottom of the screen. Page forty-two of eighty-nine. According to the ironclad laws of Nino Lucent's work ethic, stopping halfway through an active tactical analysis was a physical impossibility.
Yet Nino did not move on to the next slide.
With the absolute, serene confidence of soone whose brain had just quietly terminated its main operating process to pursue a sudden, inexplicable new priority, she pulled out her phone. Dialed.
While the connection tone ran, she simply held the partially empty bamboo tube, eyes still fixed ahead, looking unaware that she had derailed her own schedule.
The call connected.
"Heidi." Flat, professional. "There's a gift here for you."
Heidi's voice ca through the speaker, background noise behind it, the sound of a large space, classical music, glass on glass. A banquet or function.
"Nino?" Surprise in her voice, genuine. "You're calling to tell about a gift?"
Nino's entire deanor changed in the space of a single syllable.
"Why didn't you call 'Sister'?"
Her voice went from cold precision to sothing that had no business existing in the vocabulary of a Chief Intelligence Officer: a rapid, unreasonable escalation that had more in common with a six-year-old whose sandwich was wrong. "Who is with you? Why is it this loud? I don't want to hear it—tell them to stop—"
A brief sound from the other end. Then the banquet noise cut off abruptly. Footsteps. A door.
Heidi had stepped out.
When she spoke again, her voice was alone and clear, carrying sothing that was too gentle to be patience and too steady to be concern, the specific register of a younger sister who had long since learned how to handle the rare, childish regressions of her brilliant sibling.
"Sister."
"Are you drunk?"
The mont the word arrived, Nino's expression shifted. The demand that had been coiled in her voice dissolved. Her chin lifted fractionally. She looked satisfied with sothing.
"No," Nino replied, enunciating every syllable with the care of soone filing a legal brief. "I have consud a minimal quantity. My alcohol intake is within rational operational paraters. My cognitive efficiency is at 98.7%."
Hathaway, two ters away, looked at the faintly reddening tips of Nino's ears and did not say anything.
On the other end, Heidi let out a breath. Not frustration. Not exasperation. Sothing considerably softer, and considerably more practiced.
"All right. You're not drunk. Could you pass the phone to whoever is sitting next to you right now? Please, Sister."
Please, Sister. Two words in the right sequence, and Nino's face did sothing it almost never did: it went visibly, privately pleased. The smug expression of a debate concluded.
She extended the phone toward Hathaway.
Hathaway looked at the screen. She strongly suspected she was not going to survive this interaction. She took it anyway.
"Lady Heidi—"
She stopped there, because she had run out of context-appropriate follow-up.
"Miss Ludwig," Heidi said. She'd recognized the voice instantly. "Thank you for the gift. It's a genuinely lovely surprise."
Her tone was warm. There was an audible smile in it, the kind you don't construct.
"Could you do a small favor?" A brief pause. "Take a few photos of Nino and send them to ."
Hathaway lowered the phone and looked across the console.
Nino, blissfully unaware that lifelong blackmail material was about to be generated, held the nearly empty bamboo tube to her lips, wearing the specific expression of a cat that had successfully knocked sothing off a shelf: unhurried, mildly self-satisfied, fundantally unapologetic.
Hathaway raised her phone.
The cara lens caught the light.
Nino stopped. She looked at the cara with her eyes slightly widened. The exact face of a cat discovering a flashlight aid at it. Wary. Alert. Evaluating.
"Sister." Heidi's voice drifted from the phone speaker. "Are you drinking my portion of the gift?"
Nino's chin went up. She looked directly into the lens and, with the deliberate precision of a person making a statent, finished the bamboo tube in one long, unhurried draft.
Hathaway locked her jaw, locked her expression, and mashed the shutter button fifteen tis in rapid succession.
When the tube was empty, Nino placed it upside down on the console with a clean, final thunk. She glanced at the cara once. Then her eyes moved back to the holographic screen, and she swiped to the next slide.
The call ended in the sound of Heidi's laughter.
The tactical room was very quiet.
Hathaway lowered her phone. Nino looked at Hathaway. Hathaway looked at Nino.
Very slowly, with great care, Hathaway began to push her chair back. She did not turn around. She maintained full eye contact, her expression radiating the profound innocence of soone who was definitely not attempting to leave.
Nino's eyes narrowed to a precise degree.
"Ludwig."
Her voice was half a beat slower than usual. Each word landed with the clarity of carved stone.
"That file has forty-seven pages left."
Hathaway's foot stopped.
She walked back to the chair. She sat down.
Nino turned to the holographic screen, swiped to the next page, and resud.
The lecture continued.
Her voice was the sa flat, chanical tone it always was. The pauses between sentences were fractionally longer. The redness at the tips of her ears remained.
Neither of them ever ntioned the photos. Neither of them was going to.
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