[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 36 — 12:20 PM
[Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Spirit Sea Venue · Eastern Courtyard
Irene did not frown.
Her serene, gentle smile shifted. The comfortable, universally accommodating warmth bled out of it, replaced by sothing dense and heavy and gravitationally wrong, a profound, drowning allure that curled at the edges, like the event horizon of sothing that had been patient for a very long ti.
Hathaway, standing safely behind Rhode's shoulder, stared.
She was dazed, her breath catching in her throat as she witnessed an expression she had never seen on the Fifth Seat's face.
Irene had always been the embodint of calm, gentle sanctity. But as the saintly aura receded, a buried, terrifyingly vibrant structural truth about her features finally erged.
The underlying architecture of Irene's face wasn't saintly; it was intoxicating, dangerously sultry. The serene mask that usually held this lethal beauty in check had just dissolved, and in its place was a smile so profoundly alluring that the beauty mark at the corner of her eye visibly trembled.
Her threat-assessnt module struggled to maintain function, perford a rapid, panicked recalibration.
A bolt of pure existential dread shot through her dazed senses. Is Irene actually—is that a flirting face?! Did Adeline's sustained, industrial-grade degeneracy successfully unlock a romance route?! Is this how the moral compass of the Inner Sea falls? At a state banquet? At the hands of a Plud Dragon who just pantomid her in front of half the High Council?!
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she finally noticed the movent.
The Witches who actually knew Irene were taking slow, careful, milliter-precise steps backward. Hathaway watched Heidi, Vessar, and Phet, apex predators who had survived actual combat and catastrophic personal humiliation in the last fifteen minutes without breaking, all currently conducting a wordless, highly coordinated tactical withdrawal.
Ah.
That is not a flirt. That is the final, radiant glow of the solar corona right before the flare removes the planet from the orbital map.
Irene maintained that breathtaking, terrifying smile. She didn't draw her wand. She looked past Adeline, toward the edge of the crowd, and spoke.
"Miss Cable." A single asured pause. "I leave the rest to you."
She turned her back on Adeline and walked away, with the irrevocable finality of soone who was surgically cutting out a mont of her own uncharacteristic weakness.
A Witch stepped out from the crowd.
The na clicked imdiately. Lily Cable. The background process in Hathaway's brain finally finished loading, unlocking the file she had shelved when the orbital bombardnt started ten minutes ago.
A genuinely sweet face, the kind that made strangers instinctively want to offer her an umbrella in the rain. Jet-black hair cut to her chin, curling with the soft, unruly texture of lamb's wool. Clear, pale lavender eyes.
The 1996 Plagiarism Case wasn't just a legal tragedy. It was a professional PvP match that went nuclear. The academic circle called it the Ouroboros Paradox.
Joan Miller had already won the Milkra Prize, the pinnacle of runic academia, for her masterwork The Colossus. When Adeline published a suspiciously identical paper later that sa year, Joan opened with an airtight lawsuit. Over 3,000 identical runic nodes. Open-and-shut copyright infringent. Joan was practically holding Adeline's legal death warrant.
Then ca the counter-play.
Acting as Lily Cable's academic ntor, Adeline countersued Joan, claiming the award-winning paper actually plagiarized Lily’s 1987 foundational research. A surgical "poisoning the well" strategy, forcing a deadlock and buying a seventy-two-hour recess.
Those seventy-two hours were where Adeline exploited the server's unpatchable chanic: Physical Entity Priority. Theory was just lore. Actually crafting the item in the physical world was the spell code that bent reality.
Joan Miller was a 99-INT genius, but if she could have physically forged The Colossus, she would have done it at publication.
Yet during that three-day recess, without sleeping, Adeline worked from scratch. She dragged the purely theoretical Omnipotent rune out of the ether and stabilized it directly into physical reality.
It was raw, terrifying chanical skill: PKing a boss to bypass the level-grind. By the ti court reconvened, the plagiarism debate was legally moot. The object existed. Adeline made it. She won.
The final move, however, was pure toxicity.
Using her newly published, physically-backed paper, Adeline simultaneously sued Joan Miller and her own student, Lily Cable, for plagiarizing her.
PKing a soul-bound teammate just to claim the entire loot drop.
The High Court ruled in Adeline's favor, minting the defense attorney's golden rule: "Sufficiently shaless wins."
And it was the precise mont Lily Cable stepped up to deliver the most devastating public execution in academic history.
The archive footage was etched into Hathaway's brain. Sweet-faced, completely dead-eyed, Lily stood before the press corps. Her voice was as flat as still water when she delivered the line direct to the caras:
"She won the case. But to , my teacher is dead. Was it all worth it?"
On the surface, it sounded like profound, academic mourning.
But in Hathaway's eyes, it was a flawless Catch-22 bait. If Adeline defended herself, she would look desperately triggered, trying to justify the unjustifiable. If she stayed silent, she tacitly accepted the moral execution. It was an unwinnable dialogue tree.
It was the academic equivalent of dropping "Grats on the boss loot. Hope it was worth nuking your own guild to get it" into all-chat, right before permanently transferring servers.
Legally unassailable. Socially devastating. Terminally public.
Rumor confird that Adeline then spent the following month camped outside Lily's door, deploying thods that were almost certainly stripped of all personal dignity, until Lily finally relented.
But the academic scarring was permanent.
Taking full advantage of the inherently spite-fueled, chaotic free-for-all of Witch academic publishing, Lily weaponized her bibliography.
Because her papers were the foundational texts of modern runology, you literally could not bypass them. And from that day forward, every single title she submitted was a precision-guided missile of institutionalized spite:
Structural Collapse of Tier-4 Rune Circuits: A Mathematical Proof That Adeline Is Absolute Trash.
Jurisprudential Inheritance Post-ntor Casualty: An Inquiry Into Why Adeline Is Still Breathing.
The Ecological Necessity of Plud Dragon Extinction: Using Adeline as the Primary Control Subject.
Every ti Hathaway opened a standard runology spellbook, these exact titles were plastered throughout the mandatory reference notes.
Just the re thought of her future graduation requirents, imagining herself sitting at a desk, trying to write a serious thesis, and being academically obligated to earnestly cite 'As proven in A Mathematical Proof That Adeline Is Absolute Trash (Cable, 1997)', made Hathaway's soul shrivel up and die a thousand preemptive deaths.
The fact that these two were currently competing on the sa tournant roster was an HR departnt's extinction-level event.
Lily stepped forward.
On her sweet face resided the soul-deep, terminal numbness of an office worker who had just reached the subway station on a Friday evening, received a ssage from her boss requiring imdiate return for unscheduled overti, and simply turned around without speaking, because this was life.
She raised her right hand.
On her right ring finger sat a band of pure mithril, impossibly thin, minimalist in design, but the runic enchantnts carved into its surface had the quiet, precise luster of master-class workmanship.
Lily cast a spell directly through the tal.
Zero cast bar. Before the hard-coded biological floor of 0.023 seconds could even register, the spell was already over. A stream of lavender light shot from the ring, solidifying into a pair of glowing arcane handcuffs before it had even finished traveling. One cuff snapped shut around Adeline's left wrist. The other locked onto Lily's own right wrist. The chain between them was brutally short. Adeline's range of movent instantly compressed to zero.
Hathaway's threat-assessnt module crashed. She had studied the archive footage. The chanics of Lily Cable's combat system were already burned into her brain, but knowing the fra data and witnessing the exploit live were two entirely different things. Hathaway knew exactly what had just bypassed reality: a [Half-Spell].
In the overarching ta, Half-Spells were an aggressively toxic, duel-exclusive mutant tree. No Witch ever used them in actual open-world combat, because the base racial casting speed of a Witch already completely out-scaled everything else in the multiverse. Even in 1v1 arenas, it was a degenerate, hyper-niche build.
It sacrificed everything, slashing the spell's effect to one-third and its range to one-fourth, purely to halve the cast ti and steal the absolute first strike. The stat penalty was universally considered too crippling to be viable.
It was an engagent tactic so singularly obsessed with initiative that Lin Zhaojun had famously trashed the build in an interview: "If the opponent opens with a Half-Spell, they've already lost their mind over initiative. Why not let them have it?"
But it worked.
Hathaway's tactical overlay rebooted and caught the geotry.
Her internal logic engine ground to a complete, screeching halt.
Standard restraint protocol: shackle your non-dominant hand to the subject. Keep your primary casting hand free. Lily was right-handed. That ring was on her right hand. She had just shackled her own primary spellcasting hand to Adeline's left wrist.
Hathaway stared at the glowing chain. That is objectively the worst possible crowd-control geotry. You just locked down your own main DPS output, leaving the target's dominant hand completely free, while chaining yourself to the most infamously slippery Plud Dragon in the known universe. Why would you intentionally cripple your own combat effectiveness? What is the tactical advantage of—
The chain snapped taut. Lily gave her right wrist a brief, efficient flick, pulling Adeline forward.
"Behave, Teacher," Lily said calmly.
Teacher? You publicly executed her career, forced the entire academic world to formally cite your spite, and you still call her 'Teacher' in that tone?!
Because Lily was noticeably shorter than Adeline, and because the chain made distance a mathematical impossibility, she simply reached up with her free left hand, grabbed Adeline firmly by the collar, and pulled her down.
Lily leaned in, her lips a hair from Adeline's ear.
Hathaway had an excellent angle and deeply insufficient ignorance. She read the lips with pinpoint accuracy.
"You wouldn't want to wear these to the bathroom, would you?"
Hathaway took one step backward. Then another. Then a third, clutching her glowing Moon Spring kitten to her chest as a structural shield.
Degenerate. Irredeemable. This was dialogue from a very specific archive that required age verification at the door.
A terrifying realization slamd into her. The degradation-heavy doujinshi plot she had visualized just ten minutes ago wasn't a hypothetical. It was a live-action adaptation, currently broadcasting in the middle of a state banquet.
Adeline's reaction was instantaneous and deeply incriminating. A vivid flush climbed her neck.
She let out a single, soft, breathless laugh, and then, in a performance that would have made Blanche visibly emotional with pride, her legs lost all structural integrity. She stumbled forward, collapsing directly into Lily's arms.
Lily's reflexes betrayed her completely. She caught her forr ntor in one automatic motion.
The instant Adeline's weight settled against her shoulder, the expression that moved across Lily's face rivaled Camilla's god-tier micro-expression from earlier. It cycled rapidly through:
[I utterly despise this Plud Dragon.]
Layered heavily over: [Why is my muscle mory fundantally compromised.]
Collapsing finally into: [Sigh. Fucking Plud Dragons.]
Lily closed her eyes. Still holding her. Sweet face entirely, definitively blank.
A visceral shiver shot down Hathaway's spine.
Case closed, Hathaway thought, her grip on the glowing kitten tightening. Lily Cable is a terminal Stockholm patient who has successfully evolved into utilizing weaponized reverse-Stockholm to dosticate her own abuser.
You two absolute lunatics deserve each other. You're literally handcuffed together right now. Perfect. Stay that way. Throw the key into the Spirit Sea. If you haven't killed each other after eight years of academic warfare, your hatred is just a kink.
Above the Spirit Sea, the massive floral clock hanging in the mineral-vein canopy rotated its petals into the noon position.
In Witch society, apocalyptic social drama did not supersede the dining schedule. There were still delegates who hadn't arrived. That was their own problem. You could not expect this caliber of Witch to sit around starving while the stragglers worked out their itineraries.
The banquet officially comnced.
The plates were carved from a wood that swirled with deep crimson and cyan grain, capable of maintaining a constant, perfect ambient temperature. The volu and variety of dishes on the buffet tables was catastrophic for Hathaway's decision-making faculties.
Her eyes caught on a platter of what appeared to be translucent blue crystal. As the warm wood touched it, the crystalline surface slowly lted into tender, marbled strips of vivid red at, then re-solidified back into a blue glaze as the open air cooled it.
"Frost-Vein Tidal Dragon steak," said a voice beside her.
Lin Zhaojun stood next to Rhode with a plate, offering culinary comntary as casually as if she hadn't been trading lethal spell-fire with Heidi just twenty minutes ago.
"The deepest divers of any Tidal Dragon lineage," Lin said, transferring a precise cut onto her own plate. "And unequivocally the best-tasting at of the lot. It looks raw, like dium-rare beef suspended in ice crystal. But because of how their internal mana reacts to ambient heat, it tastes exactly like it was just roasted over an open fla." A brief pause. "There's nothing else like it."
Hathaway nodded with sincere professional respect and excavated enough steak to constitute a geological event.
She flanked it with clusters of bioluminescent mushrooms harvested from the Spirit Sea shallows, several of which were still faintly glowing, and concluded that this plate represented peak resource optimization for the available encounter.
Then she located the beverage station.
The crisis of the Moon Spring Greater Cat’s tears had been averted, and as a result, its legendary vintage was now flowing freely across the courtyard. An attendant filled Hathaway’s vessel to the brim.
It was a small, charming wooden mug, minimalist and rounded, looking like sothing one might use for a casual afternoon tea. But beneath its unassuming surface, the vessel humd with the precise, high-end spatial expansion charms common to the Inner Sea's elite.
Hathaway stared into the depths of the small cup, which currently held exactly one liter of liquid starlight.
This is a triumph of Witch aesthetics, Hathaway thought, holding the vessel with the solemnity appropriate to the occasion. The ability to maintain the delicate silhouette of a refined socialite while secretly clutching a literal bucket of alcohol. One liter of a natural immortality elixir. This is not a drink. This is a legendary-tier drop at a state banquet. I pulled this. I deserve this.
The vintage was called Frostad.
She took a careful, experintal sip.
First: ice. A hyper-focused, crystalline chill detonated on her tongue, snapping every running cognitive process into absolute clarity, like a hard system reboot.
Then, on the exhale: bloom. A rich, honeyed sweetness unfurled down her throat, warm, layered, carrying sothing that tasted like starlight had been left to age in an oak barrel for several centuries.
And then, a precise half-second later, the alcohol hit. It went thermonuclear: a blazing, ferocious warmth that radiated outward through her limbs and cleared every mana channel simultaneously, making her fingertips spark.
Incredible. I am not exaggerating when I say this is the best thing I have consud across two complete lifetis.
As the Witches settled at their respective tables, the ambient noise of the courtyard leveled into the civilized hum of high society. Silverware clicked against the hybrid wood plates. Conversation threaded through the warm air.
Soone three tables over was reassuring a colleague who was, by all indications, already three steps into a private feline trauma recovery protocol that the Moon Spring Greater Cat had not been permanently traumatized by the wine incident, rely temporarily distressed.
Hathaway watched Irene stand near the head of the main table.
The Fifth Seat raised her glass.
The Spirit Sea light caught the Frostad, turning it briefly into a prism that scattered soft colors across the ancient Anser marble. Hathaway noted that Irene's smile had perfectly rebooted to its baseline: that serene, universally accommodating warmth, as complete and undifferentiated as sunlight passing through a cloud.
She offered a quiet, immaculate toast to the success of the tournant and the health of all present.
Glasses rose across the courtyard in response. Hathaway raised her own deceptively small wooden mug.
But cursed with the hyper-vigilant tracking habits of a raid leader, Hathaway's eyes automatically followed the boss's sightline.
She noticed Irene's gaze didn't stop. It swept smoothly past Famia and Alisha. Past Heidi. Past Marianne, who returned the acknowledgnt with her permanently fortified smile.
Irene's eyes traveled to the absolute edge of the room, locking onto the far corner.
Hathaway's tactical overlay imdiately checked the target zone. It was a certified degeneracy containnt zone. Adeline was cheerfully eating off Lily Cable's plate, the lavender chain clinking at their wrists.
Beside her, Paddy held a piece of Frost-Vein Tidal Dragon in one hand and her grandmother's leash in the other, engaged in what appeared to be aggressive snack-ration negotiations with a loudly incandescent elder.
Irene held that corner for one quiet, absolute second.
Then, she did sothing that violently broke Hathaway's expected behavioral algorithms.
Still looking at that corner, the Fifth Seat tilted her head back and drank the entire glass of Frostad, a full liter of thermonuclear liquor, in a single, unbroken motion.
Hathaway instantly snapped her gaze back to the corner to check the aggro response.
What she saw made her breath catch.
For exactly one second, the Twin Hazards of the Plud Dragons simply... stopped.
It wasn't the sudden freeze of being caught, nor the tactical pause before a prank. All the chaos, the smirks, the degenerate noise. It all vanished.
Paddy and Adeline went completely, unnervingly still. It was an absolute, ringing silence, like a compass needle violently trembling before suddenly locking onto true north.
For that one, microscopic second, looking back at the Fifth Seat across the crowded courtyard, the two most disastrous Witches in the known universe looked profoundly, terrifyingly serious.
Then, the second passed.
The needle flicked away. Paddy resud loudly arguing with the fuming elder about at cuts. Adeline leaned in, her chained wrist shifting, to whisper sothing undoubtedly catastrophic into Lily's ear. The chaos resud as if it had never been paused.
Hathaway stood motionless, clutching her wooden mug.
She didn't have the lore. She didn't have the context.
But I saw that, her analyst brain recorded, filing the anomaly away into a secure, highly classified directory. Whatever this tournant is really about, the 'Sunshine Pals' are not here for a joke.
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