[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 36 — 12:45 PM
[Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Spirit Sea Venue · Eastern Courtyard
Hathaway was halfway through a rib of Frost-Vein Tidal Dragon when her knife hit the porcelain plate with a desperate clink.
The Greed Umbrella had just walked through the Anser bone archway.
They were entirely inconspicuous about it. No entrance. No announcent.
The apex predators of the Inner Sea were distracted by their food and their ongoing social disasters, and the dark horse team of the tournant slipped through the side of the room exactly as intended: invisibly, precisely forty-five minutes late.
The White City hotels were twenty minutes from the folded-space transit point. There was no traffic jam in the known multiverse that justified this tiline.
Deliberate, Hathaway noted, her analytical thread filing the tactical data away. Dark horse team, debut tournant. They didn't co early to navigate unestablished hierarchy. They ca mid-banquet, when everyone's busy eating. Lower ambient awareness. Softer social defenses. Cleaner integration window.
This was the first ti she was seeing the full roster assembled in physical reality.
But she was their most dedicated, obsessive, premier anti-fan in the known universe, and hatred produced infinitely superior reading comprehension than love ever could. She had morized Alice's entire manuscript. She could have drafted their character sheets blindfolded.
Her gaze swept across their right hands.
Stopped.
Sothing deep inside Hathaway's soul quietly died.
Every single mber of the Greed Umbrella wore a ring on their ring finger. Identical structural design. The specific, unmistakable silhouette of an engagent band.
Hathaway counted.
One.
The gemstone in Cecilia's ring was blue. But the cut was an act of controlled psychosis—it had completely abandoned standard lapidary craft.
Every microscopic facet was angled to capture different lighting conditions, as though whoever forged it had spent months studying exactly how light shifted across Cecilia's irises at dawn, at dusk, and under the cold glare of spell-fire. There was almost no supplentary ornantation.
The artist had clearly concluded that the subject was already perfection; anything additional would be an insult.
Two.
Wei Changqing's gem was a deep, seamless black, but as the Spirit Sea light hit it, a deeply warm, ambient brown bled through from inside—like dark wood glowing beside a fireplace. There was not a single sharp edge. The danger was kept entirely interior. You saw the warmth first. You had to survive long enough to see the depth.
Three.
Maria's stone was amber. The facets were cut specifically to scatter and fracture the light into an effervescent, champagne-bubble illusion. The setting was aggressively luxurious, but asymtrical—wildly decorated in a way that made it look like the creator had simply thrown a handful of diamonds at it as an afterthought.
Beautiful in spite of itself. Beautiful because of itself.
Four.
Karula wore fingerless gloves. On her middle finger, her signature athyst band with a stark black chain draped across her knuckles. On her ring finger, the syndicate ring—the deep purple gemstone cut with lethal, mathematical precision. Every edge was razor-sharp, every angle landing exactly on a terminal node of aggressive perfection.
Five.
Flandmira. Her gemstone was entirely colorless. A hyper-pure white diamond, cut to such an extre degree of reflectivity that it functioned as a mirror. Standing beside Cecilia, the diamond flashed blue. When she shifted toward Maria, it flared amber. It had no color of its own. Its entire existence was defined by its capacity to perfectly reflect the people around it.
And then, because Hathaway's developer brain was constitutionally incapable of leaving spatial geotry alone, she caught the final detail.
When Flandmira's hand leveled precisely with Cecilia's, the refracted light from the colorless diamond landed in the exact focal point of Cecilia's complex sapphire cut. A hidden resonance. A visual easter egg invisible from almost any other angle, caught only because Hathaway was staring with the clinical obsession of soone debugging a rendering engine.
Hathaway set down her knife.
She began a systematic visual sweep of the rest of the group. Looking for the sixth ring. Her eye found Victoria, standing at the edge of the formation. And stopped.
Victoria was wearing gloves.
White gloves. Formal. The specific, completely standard choice for a Wellington at a state banquet.
Across the courtyard, Victoria's gaze caught hers.
Victoria gave Hathaway a microscopic, perfectly asured nod of acknowledgnt.
Hathaway gave a stiff nod in return.
She looks exactly the sa.
Standing at the edge of that dense, insular formation, Victoria hadn't altered a single variable of her default state to match theirs.
Hathaway already knew about the ring under the glove. Looking at the five Witches radiating lethal, interdependent devotion, and the one pristine Wellington standing at the edge of their circle just existing without needing to prove anything... Hathaway's internal taxonomy engine crashed, rebooted, and returned a devastatingly accurate classification.
She's the cat.
Victoria wasn't a spouse. She wasn't an equal partner in whatever polyamorous blood-pact this was. She was the emotionally repressed, high-maintenance feline that Cecilia had brought into the relationship as her dowry.
That was why she had a ring: a luxury collar. And that was why she kept the white gloves on. She belonged there exactly as she was.
She was the sa person Hathaway had always known. And sohow, amidst all the mind-bending degeneracy of the courtyard, the fact that the Wellington was acting as the Greed Umbrella's emotional support pet was the hardest thing to process today.
Five visible, her internal arithtic confird. One dosticated.
She picked up her fork, put it back down, picked it up again, and abandoned the steak entirely.
This entire syndicate is a containnt breach of weaponized degeneracy. She had just survived Lily Cable and Adeline's docunted reverse-Stockholm masterclass. Now she was staring at a full roster brazenly attending a state function wearing a complete set of matching polyamorous engagent bands, and one additional entry whose status required a subcategory.
Are there no normal people left? Did Alice dump her rejected manuscripts directly into the Spirit Sea's water supply?! Has reality been fundantally rewritten by an R-18 rating?!
Hathaway snapped her gaze around the courtyard like a drowning woman scanning for driftwood.
Her eyes locked onto Sonia. The Eighth Seat.
The last ti they'd t, Sonia's robe had a loose thread at the hem. Today, she wore formal attire—still aggressively, inescapably funeral-chic, still radiating the specific ambient aura of catastrophic misfortune that caused all nearby feline lifeforms to experience an existential crisis—but Hathaway stared at the hem of Sonia's gown.
No loose threads.
For a Grand Witch who possessed the social endurance of a frightened hermit crab, this was a monuntal detail. She had forced her system to execute the full, high-resource "Formal State Banquet" protocol.
She had braced herself for the massive AOE social damage, trimd every stray thread, and stepped into the venue, because she was the Grand Witch of Holheim, and representing her region at the state banquet was a non-negotiable mandatory quest.
Hathaway's gaze dropped to Sonia's hands.
No ring.
A long, shuddering exhale left Hathaway's body.
In her rapidly degrading psychological state, her internal logic engine forcibly updated its operating paraters: No matching syndicate ring equals normal. Therefore, Sonia is normal. The walking funeral with a thirty-ter AOE catastrophe curse is objectively the most normal person in this room.
Hathaway locked onto that benchmark. It was the last surviving anchor of her sanity.
From several tables away, Hathaway tracked the developing social crisis.
Sonia was actively trying to introduce the Greed Umbrella to the gathering Grand Witches. It was genuinely touching: the famously reclusive Eighth Seat was clearly pushing her own limits. It was also a spectacular tactical overextension.
Hathaway’s threat-assessnt overlay practically flashed red as Sonia’s debuff stacked. The mont the ambient headcount breached three, Sonia's eyes began to lose focus. Her posture stiffened into wood.
Hathaway recognized the symptoms imdiately: it was the exact, chanical dissociation of an introvert whose RAM had fully maxed out and was desperately paging to disk to prevent a hard crash.
Then, Marianne Horton stepped in.
The social triage was so seamless Hathaway almost missed it. Marianne didn't make a show of the rescue.
She didn't offer a useless platitude, and crucially, she didn't ask an open-ended question like "How are you finding the venue?" which would have forced Sonia's overloaded processor to render original social dialogue from scratch.
Instead, Marianne glanced at the five engagent bands.
Of course the Matchmaker saw them instantly, Hathaway realized with a jolt. But instead of internally screaming about normalcy like Hathaway had, Marianne used them.
The Fourth Seat turned to Sonia, her permanent warm smile in place, and deployed a single, closed-ended question with one objective fact for an answer.
"Who made them?"
Hathaway watched Sonia's vacant eyes snap imdiately back into focus.
"Flandmira," Sonia answered softly.
Soul successfully re-grounded. Hathaway stared in awe as Sonia was pulled back from the ledge without ever knowing she had been falling.
She asked about the craft, not the relationship. The craft was a fact. Facts couldn't lie, couldn't deflect, couldn't perform.
And the fact of soone personally cutting and calibrating five distinct gemstones, each one painstakingly indexed to the emotional and physical signature of a different person, required a staggering investnt of ti, observation, and sothing much heavier than friendship.
That is not a matchmaker at work, Hathaway thought, watching the Fourth Seat turn to offer Flandmira a warm complint. The matchmaker sheathing her sword.
Flandmira received Marianne's complint with a precise, graceful nod. No false modesty. No performance.
"The cutting itself is not difficult," Flandmira said, her tone carrying the even, cool resonance of soone who had been accurate about their own skill for so long it no longer required emphasis. "The difficult part is understanding them completely first."
From across the tables, Hathaway could have sworn the smile in Marianne's eyes deepened a fraction.
Heidi Lucent walked over.
Sonia's social battery was initiating a critical secondary shutdown.
Before the Eighth Seat could completely crash, Cecilia moved.
She simply took a half-step forward and positioned herself slightly ahead and to Sonia's left, textbook tanking geotry.
Cecilia and Sonia ford a stable visual node. It gave Sonia a legitimate reason to remain in the circle without having to perform any social outputs, and it smoothly redirected the incoming Grand Witch aggro directly onto Cecilia's shield.
The silence that fell between the Tenth Seat and the Wellington heir carried the physical, almost suffocating weight of unsaid years.
"Doctor," Heidi said quietly.
Not "Ms. Wellington." Not "Cecilia." The academic title from Minothnago.
Cecilia was silent for one second.
"Professor," Cecilia replied.
Not "Tenth Seat." Not "Lady Heidi."
Heidi's gaze swept once across the rest of the Greed Umbrella, pausing for a fraction of a second on the formation Cecilia had built around herself, before returning.
"I read the dissertation committee's remarks," Heidi said.
Then, Heidi turned her gaze to Wei Changqing, a few steps to Cecilia's left. The assessnt was brief. The particular calm of soone who had already reviewed the relevant facts and needed only to verify the conclusion in person.
"Holheim suits you," Heidi said.
Wei Changqing's posture remained immaculate. Her hands were still peacefully at her sides.
"You honor , Lady Heidi."
The exchange closed. Heidi's attention moved to the next target in the formation.
"House Corvin." Heidi’s tone shifted into professional neutrality.
Corvin. A missing puzzle piece violently snapped into place in Hathaway's brain.
The White City Corvins, Hathaway realized, staring at the purple-eyed Witch. Old money. Ultra-traditional. No wonder they erased her mother.
"Your grandmother watched your qualifiers," Heidi continued smoothly. "She submitted a request through the regional office—she wanted to know if anyone from White City was attending, and if they could pass along a ssage."
Karula looked at her. The deep purple eyes were entirely unreadable.
"Is she well?" Karula asked.
The inflection was a masterclass in emotional distancing. The exact tone of soone asking about a neighbor they had lived near a decade ago. Warm enough to be polite. Level enough to indicate zero urgency.
"Very well," Heidi said. She held Karula's gaze for one beat. "She didn't give anything to relay. She only asked if I had seen you take the field."
"Then she knows," Karula said.
Heidi's gaze shifted one final ti. On Victoria.
"Miss Victoria," Heidi said.
Victoria's spine perford that familiar, microscopic lock-up. Her hands gave the faintest twitch inside their white gloves.
"Lady Heidi," Victoria replied.
Heidi's eyes flicked briefly to Cecilia, then returned to the freshman.
"You still have your eyes," Heidi said quietly.
Clear. Untainted. Not like the eldest.
Victoria looked back at her idol, standing in the formation her sister had built.
"I intend to keep them, Professor," Victoria said softly.
Heidi smiled.
"Good."
While the temperature of the Heidi exchange was still settling, Hathaway’s threat-assessnt overlay flashed red. A localized disaster was approaching from an entirely different vector.
Blanche had drifted over.
She was still heavily hooded. Marlena was currently twenty yards away, which ant the managent infrastructure required to contain this specific hazard was offline.
Hathaway watched in mounting horror as Blanche’s hidden gaze locked onto Maria, and her entire physical orientation shifted.
"You know," Blanche said. Her voice drifted through the hood fabric, carrying that sa reality-destabilizing acoustic quality—the cathedral resonance, the intimate husk—but it was now laced with the passionate sincerity of soone about to share a cherished craft mory. "In The Autumn Sonata, during the third act, the way I chose to interpret the character's internal grief—"
Hathaway braced herself. Blanche was initiating a live-action acting masterclass. It was an unmitigated AOE psychic attack.
Hathaway tracked the damage across the Greed Umbrella.
Thirty seconds passed.
Hathaway stared at Maria. The amber-eyed Witch’s smile was perfect. Radiant. Not a single milliter of displacent.
Maxed-out resistance stat, Hathaway realized with profound respect.
Growing up under the daily, suffocating crucible of two A-list actors who treated their own lives as an eternal Oscar campaign ant Maria had mastered total facial control before she could read. She was immune to the sheer force of theatrical delusion.
The smile held.
But with her hyper-vigilant gar vision, Hathaway caught the single fra drop. For exactly one microsecond, Maria’s amber eyes went entirely blank, staring into a void that existed sowhere past the folded-space barrier, before violently snapping back to the present.
It was, Hathaway deduced, the highest-cost smile of Maria's career.
The rest of the party was taking heavy collateral damage.
Hathaway watched Flandmira—a Witch raised in an artistic dynasty with deep convictions about aesthetic harmony—physically react.
The artisan’s expression didn't fracture, but she closed her eyes. It was a brief, tight blink, executed with the exact somatic posture of soone silently reciting a prayer for the dead. The aesthetic treason was, apparently, causing her actual physical pain.
Karula maintained her slow, dangerous composure until approximately the fifteen-second mark. Then, Hathaway watched the Corvin runaway rotate her head exactly ninety degrees to stare at a blank marble pillar. A flawless tactical evasion maneuver. She was physically protecting her retinas from irreversible aesthetic damage.
Wei Changqing's reaction was the most instinctive: Hathaway noted the captain smoothly step sideways, planting herself bodily between the ongoing disaster and Cecilia, attempting to body-block the cringe.
Logistically sound, but structurally futile.
She knew Cecilia was a psionic. A physical line-of-sight block ant nothing when the target was running a high-resolution ntal radar.
Hathaway watched Cecilia's hand, resting at her side, involuntarily curl into a rigid claw.
The Ace of the Greed Umbrella was receiving Blanche's acting lecture in uncompressed, multidinsional 360-degree clarity, and Hathaway was witnessing her experience genuine, structural regret for possessing a brain.
Finally, Marlena turned around.
Hathaway watched the handler assess the catastrophic scene: Maria's desperately expensive smile, Flandmira's silent prayer, Karula staring at a wall, Cecilia's clawed hand, and her own mother gesturing with the passionate earnestness of soone delivering the monologue of their career.
Marlena walked over.
She reached out, clamped her hand firmly over the lower half of Blanche's face through the dark fabric, and sealed the acoustic breach.
The reality-destabilizing monologue dropped to a muffled hum.
"Mother," Marlena said, her voice occupying the precise register of absolute vacuum. "Co have so water."
Lin Zhaojun drifted over next, a wine glass in hand.
Hathaway’s threat-assessnt overlay scread the instant she mapped the trajectory.
Lin had a legitimate social cover: Wei Changqing's Fusang origins made this a standard courtesy call. But the texture of the approach was nothing like Heidi's or Marianne's.
The Millennium Sovereign is doing a close-range, pre-match reconnaissance sweep under the cover of a polite toast.
Hathaway watched Lin's attention lock onto Wei Changqing, who was currently positioned as the team's outermost layer. It was the particular, razor-sharp focus of a world-class DPS reading a defensive formation for weak points.
Hathaway braced herself, waiting to see how Wei Changqing would parry the pressure.
But the clash never happened.
Wei Changqing returned the Sovereign’s gaze with warmth, and softness, and zero defensive edge.
From her observation post, Hathaway watched the Sovereign’s probing force hit water. No resistance. No parry to asure. No counter-pressure to calculate. Just total, frictionless absorption, the pressure nullified into a gentle ripple.
Then, Wei Changqing took a half-step sideways, smiling, and opened the sightline to the rest of her team behind her. The gesture was impeccably polite, but to Hathaway's gar brain, it translated into a clean, unreadable taunt: Here we are. Look all you want.
Hathaway watched Lin Zhaojun's sharp eyes narrow. The Millennium Sovereign lingered on Wei Changqing for one extra, rarely given second.
A cold realization washed over Hathaway's own tactical engine.
That is terrifying, Hathaway thought, finally understanding the true nature of the Greed Umbrella captain's build. She protects her backline fiercely, but she erases her own presence entirely to do it. If a tank gives you absolutely zero friction, you can't calculate their limits. She just handed the World Number One a completely null dataset.
Lin Zhaojun offered a polite nod and departed with the sa unhurried ease she had arrived, though Hathaway strongly suspected the Sovereign's internal threat matrix had just been significantly updated.
The courtyard had just begun to exhale.
Then, the crowd involuntarily parted. It was the physical displacent caused by soone walking in a perfectly straight line, completely ignoring the social geotry of the room.
Liandra Milan'thirskaya.
Hathaway braced herself. She had seen the youngest Milan'thirskaya lock eyes with her own sisters this morning, radiating the sharp, brittle hostility of a lone wolf baring its teeth. Hathaway's threat overlay instantly prepared for that sa freezing intensity to crash into the Holheim formation.
It never did.
Liandra walked right past the Royal Rosas table without turning her head. As she closed the distance to the Greed Umbrella, Hathaway's tactical processor stalled.
Liandra's shoulders were relaxed. Her hands were loose at her sides. The shattered-glass eyes were locked on Cecilia, but the lethal edge from this morning was completely absent. She was crossing the densest concentration of apex Witches in the Inner Sea with the undefended, casually direct gait of soone walking up to a familiar bar stool.
The Greed Umbrella, however, did not get the mo.
Maria's smile evaporated. Flandmira's eyes narrowed into slits of refined aristocratic cold. Wei Changqing's posture shifted from water to bedrock. Karula's fingers drifted, without urgency, toward the purple athyst ring on her middle finger.
They radiated the specific, concentrated aggression of a wolf pack that had spotted a threat approaching their den.
Hathaway's gaze, however, imdiately snapped to the edge of the formation.
Victoria wasn't participating in the polycule's synchronized territorial defense. Instead, Hathaway watched her suffer a complete, involuntary system halt.
Victoria's composure locked into the petrified, brittle rigidity of soone experiencing a violent cognitive flashback. Her white-gloved hands clenched at her sides with a sudden, devastating tension.
While the rest of the Greed Umbrella was reacting to a threat to their present, Victoria was staring at Liandra like a ghost from a very specific, very disastrous past.
Liandra walked straight into the overlapping killing intents without breaking stride. As she closed the final distance to Cecilia, her pale grey eyes flicked sideways for a microsecond—a silent, absolute acknowledgnt of the rigid Wellington standing at the edge—before dropping to the complex sapphire on Cecilia's ring finger.
"Long ti no see," Liandra said. The voice was quiet, carrying a bizarrely comfortable familiarity. "Looks like you're doing well."
On the Royal Rosas side of the courtyard, three things happened simultaneously.
Tasia and Alucard both closed their eyes. Alucard reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose, slowly, with the practiced pain of soone who had been doing this for a long ti.
Rhode and Bella, however, sat up sharply. The specific, bright-eyed, comprehensively entertained focus of veterans watching a premium drama they had been following since before the streaming service existed.
Nino, entirely indifferent to the social subtext, simply reached out and silently erected a maximum-density kinetic barrier over her dessert.
Her eyes were already darting toward the load-bearing pillars of the Anser bone archway. Hathaway recognized the researcher's specific, hyper-focused stare imdiately: Nino was actively calculating blast radii and structural failure points.
Hathaway stood between them and looked left. Looked right. The murderous Greed Umbrella on one side. The completely relaxed Liandra on the other. Her teammates arranged across a wildly divergent spectrum of catastrophe protocols behind her.
Hathaway stood perfectly still, clutching the deceptively small wooden mug that contained a full liter of Frostad.
What is happening, Hathaway scread at the inside of her skull. What is this?! What is this massive, foundational lore event that apparently every single Witch in the known universe has stored in their personal archives except ?! I read the forbidden manuscripts for this! Where are my patch notes?!
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