[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 36 — 2:00 PM
[Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Spirit Sea Venue · Eastern Courtyard
Hathaway filed the image of the Fifth Seat's thumb pressing silently into her own palm under [Critically Compromised Saint: Do Not Cross-Reference With 'Shh. Be Good.'] and forcibly redirected her attention.
Allison had arrived in front of the Sunshine Pals.
Paddy dropped to one knee with the blinding, high-voltage enthusiasm of a shonen protagonist greeting a legendary master. Flawless posture. Flawless delivery. Ceremonial air-kiss executed with textbook precision.
The visual composition, however, was fundantally grotesque.
Her left hand was still gripping the iron chain. The tiny elder attached to the other end was throwing herself backward with the full-body commitnt of a raccoon fighting a bath.
To maintain her kneeling posture and simultaneously prevent a prison break, Paddy had to physically yank the chain downward mid-oath, resulting in a tableau that looked considerably less like feudal devotion and considerably more like a cheerful goblin trying to drown a feral cat in a puddle.
Allison maintained a warm, unhurried smile. Undisturbed by the hostage situation occurring at her feet.
Paddy rose. The grandmother, still thrashing, was seized by the scruff and forced down onto the Anser marble in front of the Conqueror.
Allison's smile did not flicker. She turned toward Adeline.
Adeline's posture was elegant, her smile professionally maintained, radiating the unmistakable aura of a woman with zero intention of lowering herself to any floor, ever.
Beside her, Lily's expression was a void.
Lily dropped to one knee.
The chain snapped taut with a vicious clack. Adeline was violently jerked forward. To avoid introducing her face to the Anser marble, she had no viable option except to crash to her knees directly beside her forr student.
Lily did not look at her. Pale lavender eyes locked on Allison, unwavering, throughout. She executed the ceremonial air-kiss. She recited the vow. Her etiquette was immaculate.
Adeline remained on the marble. She did not speak the oath. She did not kiss the hand. She simply knelt beside Lily, chained, waiting for the animation lock to expire, exuding the stoic martyrdom of soone who had made several catastrophically poor decisions and was now living with the consequences.
Hathaway stood at a safe distance, jaw slowly descending.
Two people. Handcuffed together. Forced to kneel side-by-side in front of an absolute authority figure. One performing a vow of eternal loyalty while the other kneels in silence.
This is not a feudal oath of fealty. The visual framing is completely wrong. They are practically at the altar. I am watching a shotgun wedding officiated at actual gunpoint.
Allison looked down at the two of them. Her smile deepened into sothing rich and velvet.
"May what binds you," Allison murmured, "keep you."
Hathaway's pattern-recognition software unpacked the phrasing.
On the surface, it was pure wedding officiant energy: a magical variation of what is joined together, let no one put asunder.
Just beneath that, it functioned as a standard tournant blessing, a polite prayer that their teamwork would keep them alive in the arena.
But at its deepest, most literal level, it was a highly specific tactical endorsent: May that glowing lavender handcuff successfully prevent this woman from escaping into the general population.
Allison drifted away.
Lily's sweet, dead-eyed face gave a violent, involuntary twitch. The chain did not loosen by a single milliter.
Adeline rose from the marble. For one fraction of a second, the serene flirtation mask fractured: a crack, there and then quickly sealed, but Hathaway had been watching closely.
Allison was already walking toward the Greed Umbrella.
Hathaway held her breath.
The answer to how is the polycule going to handle this was instantaneous.
Wei Changqing, Cecilia, Karula, Maria, and Flandmira dropped to one knee. No verbal cue. No exchanged glances. They hit the marble at the exact sa millisecond.
Then, awareness set in. A collective, microscopic ripple of logistics-based awkwardness seeped through the formation.
Kissing the hand and delivering the oath was a one-on-one protocol.
Victoria, standing at the edge, was half a beat behind the hive-mind.
Hathaway watched the aristocratic processing lag play out in real-ti. Theoretically, she should remain standing and wait her turn. But her five teammates were already on the floor, and Victoria's own descent had already unconsciously begun.
Hathaway could practically see the lethal social math flashing behind Victoria’s widening eyes: My entire team just breached protocol en masse, and my knees are already bending. Aborting a half-finished motion to stand correctly above five kneeling teammates is mathematically catastrophic.
With no viable abort option available, Victoria gritted her teeth, smoothed her expression into perfect ice, and committed to the descent with the stiff, resigned dignity of an aristocrat completing a collective mistake she had already started.
Six Witches, kneeling in a loose semicircle.
Allison did not offer her hand to the first in line. She simply stood at the center of their formation and raised her hand, letting it hover lightly in the air above them. Universally received. She was acknowledging the thing they had already built.
Hathaway's grip on her wooden mug had gone white-knuckled.
She just officiated an unsolicited permanent magical bond: one party would describe it as a hostage situation; the other would describe it as a promising start. Hathaway's inner monologue was currently pacing rapidly around a burning room. She took exactly ten steps. Ten. And now a five-person synchronized polycule wearing custom-forged matching rings, plus one Wellington caught in the social AoE, just dropped to the floor, and she blessed them like a high priestess.
This is the opening ceremony for the highest-tier combat tournant in the known multiverse! It is not a civil registry! They literally just drafted the First Seat of the High Council as a third-party witness for their dostic dynamics!
Allison is about to put the Wishing Tree out of business. Want to lock down your relationship? Drag your partner in front of the Conqueror. Pledge fealty. Boom. Legally binding. She walked into this courtyard as the First Seat of the High Council, and she is leaving as the Inner Sea's highest-rated wedding officiant.
Before Hathaway's spiraling internal monologue could achieve full catastrophic velocity, a warm, ambient light crossed the edge of her vision.
Allison was approaching the Royal Rosas table.
Nino moved first. Zero hesitation. Zero theatricality. The kneel, the air-kiss, the vow: delivered with the crisp, optimized efficiency of soone who had assessed the correct protocol, executed it precisely, and was already back on their feet before the surrounding parties finished registering the motion.
Rhode went next.
The Ludwig Vanguard stepped forward and dropped to a single, sweeping knee. As the heir to a martial house, a direct vassal of the First Seat, she drew her wand, rested it flat across her knee, and offered the silence of a blade.
Bella followed, and several additional fras were needed.
The resident chuunibyou allocated ti to configure her velvet cape for optimal dynamism before committing to the descent.
What followed was a spectacular over-allocation of resources: the full recitation of the pledge with considerable vibrato, a sword-salute perford with her own wand, and a highly complex hand gesture involving her eyepatch that she had clearly invented in front of a mirror at so ungodly hour.
Technically, half of the ceremony was a flagrant breach of protocol. She executed it with such complete, life-or-death conviction that no one in the courtyard possessed the emotional bandwidth to intervene.
Then Tasia and Alucard stepped forward.
Rhode's grin closed. Bella went still.
They dropped to one knee simultaneously. The motion was heavy. The specific, crushing heaviness of an anchor being lowered into dark water.
Alucard took the air-kiss and spoke the vow in a low, hollow rasp, stripped of its usual corporate exhaustion, leaving behind only the raw, rusted iron of duty. Tasia's was a near-whisper, so quiet it barely disturbed the air.
They kept their eyes fixed on the Anser marble below them, refusing, with fixed, final determination, to raise their gaze.
Hathaway watched this, and without warning, found she could not breathe.
The weight in that two-person silence was enormous, and it pressed down on the courtyard air until breathing felt like a deliberate effort.
Allison accepted their vows in silence.
Then, her attention simply detached. She turned, her gaze drifting past the kneeling figures, bypassing Rhode and Bella entirely, moving toward the edge of the formation.
The background process running in a dedicated subroutine spiked into a high-priority alarm.
She's coming this way. Do I kneel? Hathaway scread internally. I am a substitute player. I am not a formal vassal. I am not an Arch-Witch. I am a modern citizen of a democratic society from Earth. I have twenty-eight years of democratic egalitarianism programd into my bones! I have never executed a vassal's bow across my combined two lifetis!
The starry eyes held her.
The crushing, inevitable gravity of a celestial body wrapping itself around a fragile, insignificant satellite.
Hathaway's cognitive OS blue-screened.
Every modern, democratic principle she possessed was violently uninstalled by her primal brainstem in under two seconds. Before a single coherent thought of protest could compile, her motor functions were seized by a biological override.
Her knee hit the Anser marble.
Her mind was a continuous dial-up tone of white noise. She stared at the hem of the starry-black dress, completely frozen.
The vow, "I fight for you", failed to load in her speech center. She didn't kiss the air. She just knelt there, mute, a comprehensive failure of both modern dignity and feudal etiquette.
The hem of the dress moved.
Allison was standing in front of her.
She didn't offer her hand. She simply stood there and looked down at Hathaway, for exactly one second, with the full, quiet weight of the Conqueror's attention resting entirely on her shoulders.
"Make good use of that 'Lights Out' feature."
Her voice was low. A warm, intimate hum that vibrated against Hathaway's eardrums, carrying the teasing ease of a secret shared between two people who already knew the punchline.
She turned and walked away.
To the rest of the courtyard, the sentence processed seamlessly. Hathaway's eyes harbored a unique ocular enchantnt; the tournant was beginning. Standard, personalized tactical advice from a Sovereign to a soldier.
For Hathaway, the fuse was three seconds.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
Her blood turned to ice.
'Lights Out feature.'
It was her own modern ga-developer slang. A phrase she had coined herself, existing in the vocabulary of exactly one living entity in the universe.
Her mind ripped itself backward through ti.
The Cloud Suite. The sunlight pouring through the window. The unfamiliar silver-haired girl in the mirror. On that very first morning, she had stared into her own irises through the quiet vertigo of transmigration. She had noticed their unnatural glow was gone. She had looked at the reflection of the girl whose body she had inherited, and made a promise.
"I'll make good use of this 'Lights Out' feature for you."
Hathaway's fingers curled against the marble.
That was the most private sentence I have ever spoken in two lifetis. The realization arrived with the quiet, absolute force of a structural collapse. I said it to a mirror. I said it to a girl who had already gone sowhere I couldn't follow. I said it in a language that doesn't belong to this world.
Then the secondary shockwave hit, driving the first one deeper.
Her eyes. [Cold Justice]. The signature spell of Ovelia.
There had been no miraculous RNG. No absurd good luck. Her causality had been entangled with the First Seat the very mont she woke up in the Cloud Suite, and the probability had simply collapsed under the weight of the Conqueror's shadow.
Hathaway's tactical processor, running on the sheer, hallucinogenic adrenaline of a terminal panic, suddenly retrieved a fragnt of obscure lore regarding the First Seat's primary Aspect.
[The Witch of the Unending Feast].
Slumber and Feast were conceptual antonyms. But kneeling on the Anser marble, staring at the empty space where Allison had just been, the cosmic, suffocating horror of that paradox finally snapped into focus.
The Feast was existence itself. The mont you breathed, or fought, or spoke a private promise to a mirror, you were already seated at her table.
Her body had surrendered simply because the Host had acknowledged her attendance.
The Banquet had been underway since her very first day in this world. And Hathaway realized, with absolute, paralyzing clarity, that she had never had the option to decline the invitation.
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