[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 36 — 12:06 PM
[Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Spirit Sea Venue · Eastern Courtyard
A synchronized barrage of highly illegal, catastrophically dangerous spells erupted toward Adeline from every direction. The sheer density of the arcane crossfire turned the air in the Eastern Courtyard into a blinding, ozone-scented kaleidoscope of lethal intent.
Adeline maintained her delicate, boneless posture throughout. Her expression did not change.
Standing alone against the focused firepower of over a dozen Arch-Witches, she began thodically dismantling the barrage with the calm, fluid composure of soone dealing with a minor administrative inconvenience.
Even accounting for the attackers' restraint in a crowded formal venue, the raw processing speed on display was deeply alarming.
But what truly enraged the assembled Witches was not her power. It was her foundational absence of civic decency.
Adeline deployed exclusively [Spell Deflection] and [Arcane Refraction].
Every spell aid at her ricocheted outward at random angles, forcing the attacking Witches to break their own offensive casts to intercept the deflected bolts before they vaporized the priceless Anser Empire artifacts lining the courtyard.
Furthermore, whenever a spell tracked too close to connecting, Adeline would drift casually near a sculpture and nonchalantly lob a minor destructive hex at the stonework.
"Have you no civic decency?!" a Witch from the organizing committee shrieked, diving desperately to cast a protective barrier over the marble. "That is a one-of-a-kind artifact, you utter savage! They don't make them anymore!"
The attackers were trapped: pressing the assault ant destroying the venue's national treasures. Within sixty seconds, the only Witches still capable of maintaining offensive pressure were those with both the raw power and the precision to simultaneously attack and manage collateral: a very small pool.
And then there was Paddy.
That rat had visibly, demonstrably distanced herself from Adeline. She was simply walking around. Hands clasped behind her back. Whistling.
But with uncanny, clockwork precision, every ti a Witch lined up a clean flanking angle on Adeline, Paddy would accidentally step into their sightline. Every ti a coordinated strike was seconds from landing, Paddy would happen to trip into soone's casting stance.
She was running a perfect griefing operation with complete plausible deniability.
And this is supposed to be a formal ceremony banquet, Hathaway thought, clutching the Moon Spring kitten like a lifeline as a stray arcane bolt split the air six feet to her left.
Rhode and Bella had closed into flanking positions the mont the chaos erupted, throwing up layered ward barriers around Hathaway. Her highest defensive spell was Tier-5. Operating solo in this crossfire was roughly equivalent to wandering into an endga raid at level ten.
From the safety of her shielded corner, Hathaway rapidly assessed the battlefield.
Marianne had smoothly evacuated to the sidelines and was calmly sipping tea.
Nearby, Marlena had completely abandoned the offensive to form an impenetrable wall in front of Blanche. Hathaway understood the math imdiately: Blanche possessed a mana pool so shallow it was practically a rounding error in a crossfire of this magnitude.
Furthermore, Marlena's ferocious, territorial glaring made it aggressively clear she would rather die than give Tabitha, who was hovering nearby, a single excuse to play the heroic protector.
A few steps away, Josephine Durant had been entirely incapacitated by feline logistics. She was still fiercely guarding the trembling Moon Spring Greater Cat. Because half the Witches had abandoned their newly distributed kittens to join the orbital bombardnt on Adeline, a glowing, panicked tide of smaller Lantern Cats had clustered around Josephine's skirts for safety. She was trapped in place, operating as a stationary, highly stressed cat-sanctuary.
That left the active strike team chasing Adeline: Camilla, Heidi, Famia Schüder, and Lin Zhaojun.
Hathaway's raid-leader instincts imdiately sounded a deafening alarm.
This party composition is a structural disaster, she thought, her heart sinking. Logically, Lin Zhaojun and Famia alone possessed enough raw DPS to subdue one Plud Dragon. But adding Camilla and Heidi to the mix didn't increase their combat effectiveness. It just introduced catastrophic friendly-fire variables.
Hathaway watched in mounting horror as Adeline effortlessly weaponized Camilla's morality.
Every ti Camilla lined up a clean shot, the Plud Dragon would deliberately drift near a weaker Witch or a priceless artifact. Camilla, being genuinely principled, would instinctively pull her own punches or throw up a barrier to mitigate the collateral.
Worse, Hathaway could see Camilla desperately trying to assist her secret crush, and in doing so, the panicked Seventh Seat kept physically stepping right into Famia's optimal firing lanes, aggressively body-blocking the Second Seat's cleanest attack angles.
She is literally peeling for the boss, Hathaway scread internally, clutching her glowing kitten.
But the true systemic failure was Heidi and Lin Zhaojun.
Never put two blood-feud rivals in the sa Vanguard squad! Hathaway watched Lin Zhaojun corner Adeline in a geotric containnt array: a perfect, raid-ending chanic, ready to fire. Then Heidi, attempting a flashy flanking maneuver, fired a spatial distortion that directly clipped the edge of Lin Zhaojun's array. The containnt shattered like cheap glass. Adeline calmly walked out.
Across the courtyard, Hathaway heard Lin Zhaojun's temper finally snap.
The Millennium Sovereign abandoned the target entirely, turning to deliver a blistering, extensively detailed, and highly sarcastic critique of Heidi's spatial mathematics. Hathaway watched Heidi's aristocratic pride detonate on contact.
Instead of pursuing Adeline, they imdiately entered a high-speed magical dogfight with each other, creating massive, unmissable exploitation windows that Adeline and Paddy slipped through with practiced, leisurely ease.
Then, Hathaway noticed Irene.
The Fifth Seat had been standing at the edge of the courtyard the entire ti. Still. Quiet. Watching. She hadn't cast a single spell.
Adeline executed a fluid [Blink] to evade a joint blast from Lin Zhaojun and Heidi, reappearing near the stone fountain.
Before Adeline finished materializing, Irene's mana flared.
Pure, warm sunlight. It condensed into chains, heavy, luminous, sun-gold, and snapped shut around the exact coordinates of Adeline's arrival point with timing so precise it looked as though Adeline had teleported directly into the waiting net.
The golden chains bound Adeline's wrists together.
Adeline looked down at her bound hands. Then she looked up at Irene, and smiled, soft, pitiful, utterly undefended.
She looks exactly like an extraordinarily expensive canary, Hathaway thought, staring at the tableau. Locked in a cage woven from sunlight. The faint flush crossing Adeline's face suggested she was entirely too comfortable with the aesthetic of her own imprisonnt.
The chase was over. The chaos settled.
Irene pulled the golden chains, drawing Adeline forward with an irresistible, unhurried force. Once Adeline was close, Irene dismissed the mana and efficiently secured the Plud Dragon's wrists with physical magic-suppressing rune bands.
Throughout the entire process, Adeline was remarkably, suspiciously cooperative.
Paddy stood ten feet away, her hands in her pockets, watching her partner-in-cri get bound with the serene detachnt of a bystander at a local festival.
The surrounding Witches closed in. Since Adeline was secured, the collective decision was unanimous: settle accounts now, deal with Paddy later. This particular opportunity was rare and precious.
"This is precisely why no one supports elevating Witches like Adeline," Nino announced, stepping out from behind ward barrier and smoothing her immaculate cuffs. "Plud Dragons are selfish, shaless, and are largely the lingering residue of archaic utilitarianism."
"Alright, alright, that's enough," Alucard sighed, reaching over and clamping both hands firmly over Nino's mouth.
Not out of any particular sympathy for Plud Dragons, purely because Nino was drifting into overt racial profiling territory and the political fallout was not a problem Alucard wanted to manage.
Adeline, her wrists bound and her dragon tail neatly folded and secured with a strap, regarded Nino with serene amusent.
"She is right. You should speak less, Nino," Adeline said, her voice the picture of tranquil beauty. "Your life has already reached its ceiling. Provoking another Arch-Witch at this stage is inadvisable."
Then, Adeline shifted her gaze upward to Irene. She tilted her head, leaning slightly into her bonds, and gave the Fifth Seat a soft, damp, impossibly provocative smile.
Hathaway stared at the bound Plud Dragon Witch, disgust settling in her stomach.
If Paddy and her grandmother are classic sugaki, Hathaway realized, her degenerate gar brain running a rapid topological analysis, Adeline belongs to an entirely different, significantly darker subgenre. Adeline radiated a very specific, infuriatingly vulnerable aura. The exact kind of aura that made people want to commission highly questionable, degradation-heavy mob doujinshi just to see her completely and utterly ruined. She was literally bound in chains, completely at their rcy, and she was still actively finding ways to sexually harass the Fifth Seat!
Irene kept her smile easy and unhurried. She didn't say a word. She simply took hold of Adeline's bound tail and squeezed. Firmly.
Hathaway watched, fully supporting the action. Yes! Defend yourself, Irene! You are a respectable lady being targeted by a shaless hooligan! Teach her a—
Adeline let out a soft, wet gasp.
Her face flushed an imdiate, scalding crimson. She bit her lower lip, her erald eyes watering as she turned to fix Irene with a scandalized, outrageously suggestive expression: the specific look of a woman who had just been aggressively groped on public transit.
Hathaway choked on her own saliva.
Did she just squeeze a biological critical-strike zone?!
Irene’s composure visibly cracked. The Fifth Seat's eyes widened a fraction in sheer alarm. She released the tail instantly, her hand snapping back as if she had just touched a high-voltage wire.
Poor Irene, Hathaway mourned internally, watching the most proper, upstanding woman in the Inner Sea try to process the fact that her attempt at physical intimidation had sohow just resulted in accidental public harassnt. She’s far too pure for this. She has no idea how to handle a professional degenerate.
Then Irene's trauma was no longer her primary concern.
The knuckle-cracking had resud. Wands were drawn. The assembled Witches were ready to settle years of accumulated grievances, only to be stopped by a sudden, profound logistical question. Wait. How do we decide who goes first?
Before a queue could be organized, the crowd parted.
A figure stepped into the clearing.
The ambient temperature didn't just drop. It died. An aura of pure, abyssal malice radiated outward: a bone-deep, oceanic cold carrying the visual sensation of pitch-black water and lightless depths. Evil. Concentrated, unfathomable, fundantal evil. The kind that made the air in the courtyard feel physically darker.
She was tiny, roughly Paddy's height. She wore a dark, ominous smile. Her hair was black, but the inner layers shifted with a deep, aquatic blue, like a deep-sea current seen from above. She wore a black dress. Around her silk-clad calves, thin tentacles like octopus arms wound upward with an unnatural, slow writhing. A pair of spiraling demonic horns rested on her head.
She looked severe, eerie, and acutely, specifically ill-oned.
Hathaway's internal database ran a match on the unique visual design. Abyssal aura. Tentacle calves. Spiral demonic horns.
phisto.
Hathaway watched her raise a finger and point directly at Adeline.
"You goddamned Plud Dragon! Last ti at the Apex Banquet, while I was taking a nap, you stacked a dessert tower between my horns and glued the base to my head!"
Hathaway's brain, entirely autonomously, generated the image: phisto, a face that could make the deep ocean reconsider its life choices, walking around a formal banquet with a tiered pastry stand wedged perfectly between her horns.
Adeline's proprietary magical adhesive, so lore-retrieval subroutine supplied helpfully. Notoriously durable. Docunted hold ti: three days minimum. phisto could have shaved her head, technically. But forcing an Arch-Witch to choose between wearing a dessert tower for three days minimum and voluntary baldness was a humiliation calibrated with almost academic precision.
The surrounding Witches gasped in collective recognition. That is a genuine blood feud. They took a respectful half-step back, ceding the floor.
Adeline looked at phisto. Her expression settled into deep, lancholy sorrow, the specific resignation of a young widow facing overwhelming power, projecting the aura of soone who would never compromise in the face of tyranny, while sohow simultaneously communicating an invitation to be treated roughly about it.
"Unfair," Adeline said softly.
"I only placed the first one..." She sighed. "Everyone else stacked the rest."
Hathaway stared. You placed the first one. You designed the structure and applied the adhesive. How do you have the nerve to invoke fairness?!
Irene stepped forward, positioning herself between them.
phisto's eyes narrowed into a glare of pure, incandescent fury. "Berenice, you bastard! Are you protecting her?! Damn it, I always knew your willpower was weak! You can never resist a blonde, erald-eyed beauty! Have you been seduced by her?! Are you siding with her over us?!"
Hathaway's head snapped toward phisto.
How does she dare talk to Irene that way?! Irene can stare directly at Blanche's face without a single change in expression! Accusing her of being seduced by beauty is slander!
Irene attempted reason. "That's not what this is. You can't attack her here, phi—"
Exactly! Hathaway nodded internally. As expected of the noble Fifth Seat. Maintaining grace and logic even now.
"Ha!" phisto yelled. "You're feeling guilty!"
Irene, you need to do sothing, or this is never going to end.
"Enough."
Irene didn't raise her voice. She stepped forward, placed both hands firmly on phisto's shoulders, and held her in place until the shouting subsided slightly.
Then she raised her left hand. With quiet precision, she cupped phisto's cheek. Her thumb brushed the curve beneath the other Witch's eye.
"Go take a shower first."
Her voice dropped into a register that was low, intimate, and devastatingly quiet.
"Be good."
"Uh..."
phisto's face went from pallor to pink in under two seconds. She stood frozen for three seconds, maybe five, before the pink escalated into a boiling, full-body crimson.
"I an! O—okay! Fine!"
She spun around, her entire abyssal-horror aura completely dismantled, and grabbed the sleeve of a nearby waiter in a muffled, urgent voice: "Where are the bathrooms?!"
"Second floor, Madam."
phisto had arrived like a thunderstorm of ancient grievance and departed like a furiously blushing student late for class. She didn't look back.
Hathaway stood perfectly still in her warded corner.
In the center of her ntal UI, she slowly, carefully typed a single, massive question mark.
……？
That’s not right. That’s not right at all!
Fifth Seat, did your character alignnt just glitch?! Are you OOC?! Hathaway scread internally, clutching her glowing kitten as her worldview experienced a seismic shift. Do not use your universally revered beautiful face to execute a maneuver like that! You are supposed to be a saint! You are the moral compass of the Inner Sea! You are not Marlena!
Hathaway stared at Irene's serene profile in sheer disbelief.
Why do you possess a crowd-control combo explicitly designed to make people weak at the knees?! Five minutes ago, I was mourning your innocence! I genuinely thought you were a pure, defenseless victim who had no idea how to handle professional degenerates! Why are you so proficient at this?!
Hathaway's eyes widened. Her gaze snapped from the retreating phisto, back to Irene, and finally settled on the bound, incredibly pleased-looking Adeline.
Hathaway swallowed hard, feeling a cold sweat break out. Was phisto actually telling the plain truth?! Are you legitimately, fundantally incapable of resisting blonde, erald-eyed beauties?!
To those who understood, the situation had been resolved. To those who didn't, the situation had been 'resolved.'
Irene let out a quiet breath.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Applause ca from behind her.
Irene turned around.
Adeline, that incorrigible nace, was standing free, rubbing her wrists. The specialized magic-suppressing rune bands lay on the marble floor, having dug a small crater upon impact. The floor had not survived the landing.
"How did you do that?" Irene asked.
"How I did it isn't important," Adeline said. Her erald eyes were bright with sothing that was not quite amusent. "What is important, darling, is that I need to learn that particular technique."
Hathaway watched as Adeline stepped back and began a deeply infuriating pantomi performance for the open air.
Adeline's left hand rose to gently cradle an imaginary cheek. Her right hand followed, holding the invisible face with both palms. Body inclining forward. Then the voice, dropping into a perfect, breathily intimate imitation of Irene's exact register.
"Shh," Adeline whispered to empty space. "Be good."
The surrounding Witches' faces underwent a collective, catastrophic internal struggle. The urge to laugh was enormous. The terror of visibly laughing at the Fifth Seat's expense was equally enormous. The two forces t and detonated silently behind tightly controlled expressions.
Hathaway stood in the corner, clutching her glowing Moon Spring kitten, her soul making a quiet, steady exit from her body.
No, she thought. Stop. Please stop. What did I just witness? What is Adeline demonstrating right now, and for whose benefit?
She looked at the rune bands on the floor. She looked at the crater. She looked at Adeline's hands, unhurt, unconstrained, calmly folded at her waist.
The events of this morning are sufficient content for my entire last will and testant.
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