[Ti]: Day 57, Sunday, 21:00
[Location]: Royal Rosas Club · Private Alchemy Suite
The pay-to-win gaming experience had one fundantal advantage over its working-class equivalent: it was efficient.
Hathaway sat in a private alchemy suite on the top floor of the club, staring at the reinforced crystal vial on the table. The liquid inside looked exactly like boiling magma—too viscous to slosh, too volatile to hold still, spontaneously generating tiny, self-contained shockwave vortices just to pass the ti.
This was a custom-commissioned Mastercrafted Conflagration Potion, brewed by the club's Chief Potioneer at a cost that had given Thread 2 a minor existential episode.
A standard brew would simply engrave the spell into her circuits upon ingestion. Instant and effective. But the Mastercrafted edition was a tailored luxury. The Potioneer had analyzed her specific spell model, formulating precise adjuvants so the magic would integrate with her physiological circuitry like a phantom limb.
More importantly, this batch ca with a bundled perk: the permanent [Empower Spell] feat. Acquiring it directly through ingestion instantly bypassed weeks of grueling, repetitive grinding.
Two birds. One highly efficient premium transaction. Hathaway's gaze drifted to the vial with the focused reverence of a gar staring at an out-of-print item drop. And once I get my own Potion Master certification, I am going to corner this exact market and drain it of every Solar it has ever seen.
According to the instruction manual—which ca with a warning paragraph written in what appeared to be ergency red ink—the potion required pre-heating. Specifically: the digestive tract needed to be prid with a high-percentage ethanol solvent before ingestion. To prevent, as the manual put it, spontaneous structural compromise of the stomach lining.
Hathaway picked up the prepared tumbler. Eighty-proof distilled spirit. Four ounces, exactly as specified.
She knocked it back in one go.
The alcohol burned a hot, scratching trail from her throat to her stomach with the reliability of a controlled demolition. Before the burn could settle into anything comfortable, she uncorked the vial and threw the magma back in a single, committed gulp.
For two seconds—nothing. Then her internal temperature spiked to what she categorized as a localized stellar event.
Her vision dissolved into a scorching, hyper-saturated overlay. Her consciousness felt violently evicted, left floating above her head in a column of pressurized heat.
Her [Analytic Vision] HUD imdiately blue-screened, throwing a cascade of frantic error warnings under the catastrophic thermal influx.
But beneath the crashing software, her physical eyes—those dark, non-glowing crimson irises—snapped wide open.
The potion's biological payload hit her musculature, designed to fortify her Constitution. It never arrived.
Her eyes' greedy background macro hijacked the vitality surge instantly, slamming the entire payload sideways into her mana pool with the surgical efficiency of a mid-air heist.
The residual heat didn't fade; it condensed. Wildfire collapsed into geotry, resolving into a tightly woven arcane spiral directly above her heart. The custom adjuvants worked flawlessly—the spell didn't just engrave, it settled into her like a muscle she had simply forgotten how to flex.
When Hathaway finally blinked, gasped for actual air, and confird the walls had returned to being walls, her skin was flushed and radiating residual heat. Her eyes felt heavy with the specific satiety of a harvest that had significantly exceeded the projected yield.
She summoned a spark to her fingertip. The fla that appeared had a dense, super-heated white core that three months of standard conditioning had never managed to produce.
[Conflagration]: acquired.
[Empower Spell]: integrated.
Her exhale was long, and shaky, and exactly on schedule.
One feat to go. Artillery installation proceeding ahead of projected tiline. Everything is a matter of resource allocation and correct sequencing.
[Ti]: Day 60, Wednesday, 15:30
[Location]: Royal Rosas Club · Training Wing
Three days later, Hathaway walked past the training wing hugging her invention sketches to her chest, and received an imdiate, humbling reminder of exactly where she sat in the power hierarchy of this building.
These were nepotism babies. Absolutely.
They were also, without exception, suicidal lunatics.
Through the reinforced observation glass of Deck A, Rhode and Bella were running unrestricted PvP. The shockwaves hamring the specialized alloy walls at intervals suggested both of them had collectively decided that the concept of "warm-up" was for other people, in other sports, in a different civilization.
Through Deck B, Alucard was running high-intensity tactical simulations against a rotation of imported Arch-Witch sparring partners. The Archon's expression carried the quality of soone who had discovered a form of suffering that made budget review etings feel like leisure.
Past the glass pavilion of the indoor squash courts, Hathaway witnessed a deeply offensive violation of probability.
Yenna—the Fox Witch from Nino's lectures—was playing a hyper-kinetic match of Witch Squash. She was moving with terrifying, algorithm-perfect efficiency, her three golden tails acting as gyroscopic counterweights. Every kinetic strike she fired was a flawless geotric vector, perfectly calculating velocity and wall-rebound angles to target the microscopic 3-Point Zone.
Her opponent was Rina.
Rina was not calculating vectors. Rina was in her fluffy tracksuit, swinging her racket with the bright, brain-empty enthusiasm of soone playing casual beach volleyball. As Hathaway watched, Rina blindly swatted a Mach-2 return shot. The ball launched at a mathematically atrocious angle. It ricocheted off the ceiling, clipped a ventilation grate, bounced off the defensive half-ter wall, completely bypassed Yenna's defensive grid, and dropped dead-center into the 3-Point Zone.
"Wow! What a lucky bounce!" Rina cheered brightly, her ruby eyes sparkling with weaponized wholesoness as the scoreboard lit up.
Yenna stared at the ball, her golden ears pinned flat against her head, looking like she wanted to personally strangle the concept of probability itself.
Hathaway shuddered, aggressively picking up her pace to get away from the glass. There is no counterplay to the RNG Demon. None. Skill is irrelevant. You just have to survive the interaction and flee.
But as she walked past the Reflex Testing Chamber at the end of the hall, Hathaway rubbed her own shoulder, a phantom ache reminding her of her own session in that exact room yesterday.
As a pure Glass Cannon with zero real-world tournant experience, her survival relied on a single, ruthless tric: winning the initiative roll. A Glass Cannon that fired second was just shattered glass.
She didn't have the ti to manually grind out advanced cast-speed feats before the matches. Fortunately, she had the Ludwig genetics.
The family's signature inheritable trait, [Neural Overclock], passively boosted reflex nerves and casting speed by thirty percent. It was the biological cheat code that had made the Ludwigs a dynasty of martial aristocrats, setting the absolute baseline for top-tier duelists.
She had stepped into the chamber to test exactly how much of that cheat code she possessed. Tens of thousands of multi-colored magical projectiles at supersonic speeds. Buried inside the barrage, two percent of them exactly two shades lighter. She had to identify and neutralize them in real ti.
Her dynamic vision and reflex nerves weren't just functional; they sat comfortably above the already terrifying Ludwig average. She hadn't even needed to consciously focus on the lower tiers—her eyes naturally caught the slight discolorations, and her hands reacted before the thought fully ford.
She had only washed out when the machine shifted into its absolute Maximum Overdrive setting—the tier where only anomalies like Lin Zhaojun could comfortably stroll through. By the ti she hit that wall, her retinas were burning and her spell-casting circuits were completely overwheld.
My combat strategy is mathematically sound, she reminded herself, tucking her sketches tighter. I have the reflexes. I have the firepower.
It was just her academic life that was currently in shambles.
The heavy airlock doors of Deck C hissed open ahead of her.
Tasia von Milan'thirskaya stepped into the corridor.
Hathaway stopped.
The Second Princess of the White City had, according to the schedule board, just completed two hours of closed-door solo training.
Her spun-gold hair was perfectly draped, not a strand disturbed. Her silver dragon tail swept behind her in a lazy, rhythmic arc. Her breathing was slow and even. There was not—Hathaway checked, then checked again—a single microscopic bead of sweat on her porcelain forehead.
She looked precisely as rested as soone who had just stepped out of a premium high-altitude spa.
Wait. Her internal OS ran the numbers. Did she actually train? Or did she identify the blind spot in the targeting algorithm within the first six minutes, find the geotrically optimal position no turret could reach, and spend the remaining one hundred and fourteen minutes at rest?
Because if anyone in this building could locate that angle, it is the woman whose entire lineage is built on spatial architecture, who operates on a philosophy of maximum output for minimum invested effort. I cannot prove this. I also cannot disprove it.
Tasia paused in the corridor. Hathaway stood a few feet away. Neither moved.
The silence stretched into the specific zone where social convention suggested soone should say sothing. Hathaway's eyes dropped to her sketches—sa ones she had been staring at for four days, sa core problem still unsolved. The gap between what she needed to build and what she could actually generate into a viable blueprint remained as wide as it had been on Day 56.
Quiet calculations had been running in the background since the empty docunt mont. No solution. Just a slow, ticulous audit of her remaining days.
Nine days. Eight after tonight.
Tasia watched her.
One second. Two seconds.
The half-beat delay resolved. Tasia's grey eyes focused on Hathaway with the unhurried clarity of a system that had simply taken the ti it needed to complete the query.
"What problem are you trying to solve?"
Not how are you. Not what are you working on. The question bypassed the social interface entirely and went straight to the operating layer. It was the language of an engineer. The phrasing of soone who had already determined that the answer to "how are you" was not interesting information.
Hathaway answered honestly, which surprised her slightly. "I'm conceptually blocked. I need to generate a viable architectural blueprint from a functional description, but my knowledge base doesn't contain a logic bridge between describing what I need and producing a drafting-ready model."
Tasia listened.
One second. Two seconds—fractionally longer than felt normal, but not uncomfortable. The distinct, palpable quality of watching a supercomputer complete a query against a very large database.
"I have a [VII-2 Blueprint Designer]," Tasia said. Her tone was mild. Dostic, almost. "You may borrow it."
Just that.
Hathaway blinked. She knew what a VII-2 was. It was a common Wondrous Object—the specific classification of items in Witch society that operated purely on idealistic, it-works-because-I-said-so logic. You spoke your idea, and the doll drafted the schematic.
She hadn't bought one because they had a fatal, universally known catch: the Wondrous Object didn't invent things out of thin air. It was a conceptual mirror.
Its output was strictly bottlenecked by the owner's intellectual foundation. If Hathaway went out and bought a blank one, it would bind to her mind. And since her grasp of magical material science was effectively zero, the doll would process her revolutionary ideas and earnestly draft the equivalent of a crayon stick-figure house.
"You may borrow it."
Not go buy one. Borrow hers. Tethered to her mind. Drawing directly from the unfathomable depths of her conceptual understanding.
Hathaway’s breath caught. Her Earth-born logic processor suddenly began connecting data points it had previously ignored. The White City's spatial transit grid. The foundational network patents everyone casually attributed to the "Milan'thirskaya bloodline."
She had seen Alucard bleeding over municipal ledgers and imdiately assud Alucard did all the work. She had treated Tasia like a decorative mascot. But a VII-2 couldn't do the heavy lifting of invention. It rely manifested the truth the user already held in their head.
Tasia wasn't a freeloader who didn't understand work. She was the Senior System Architect who had already written the engine, compiled the universe, and was now just idly watching the program run. Alucard was the frantic CPU handling the daily operations. But Tasia was the operating system.
Tasia tilted her head slightly. The elegant, branching sweep of her stag-like horns caught the corridor light.
"People always underestimate the things that can be borrowed," Tasia murmured.
Hathaway stared at the Second Princess. This was why everyone called her the Empress.
"Thank you," Hathaway said, her voice dropping all casual pretense.
She's not an herbivore, Hathaway thought, watching the silver tail disappear around the corner. She's the apex predator of the technology tree. She just eats without leaving a ss.
[Ti]: Day 63, Saturday, 23:15
[Location]: Dormitory [Golden Bough] · First Floor
The dormitory was unnecessarily large.
Hathaway had been back for twenty minutes and had conducted her usual unconscious pass through the first floor before arriving at the conclusion she kept arriving at: the room was the sa dinsions it had always been, but Victoria had been gone for two weeks, and the mathematics of the space had shifted in a way that had nothing to do with square footage.
She stood in the center of the dimly lit living room holding a glass of water, staring with profound, homicidal exhaustion at the coffee table.
Sitting perfectly upright on a velvet cushion was the [VII-2 Blueprint Designer].
It did not look like a standard chanical tool. It was an exquisite, jointed doll dressed in an elaborate black gown. A mature, painted smile curved her porcelain lips. In one delicate hand, she held a long, unextinguishable smoking pipe that occasionally puffed out a ring of lavender smoke.
For the past seventy-two hours, Hathaway had been locked in a psychological war of attrition with it.
The Wondrous Object was essentially a magical generative model with a secondary function as a highly sensitive lie detector. But its primary personality trait was that it possessed the rhetorical toxicity of a veteran internet troll.
Every ti Hathaway's architectural prompts lacked absolute magical precision, the doll would generate a useless, abstract rendering and then use its handso, resonant zzo-soprano voice to deliver devastating, passive-aggressive critiques of Hathaway's intellectual lineage.
"A structurally impossible thermal exhaust," the doll had purred just twenty minutes ago, taking a drag from her pipe. "Did you conceptualize this while suffering a severe head trauma, or is this simply the aesthetic limit of your species? Tell , so I might adjust my expectations to the floor."
Hathaway fully understood why Tasia left this thing to gather dust in a vault. The Second Princess spoke too slowly to win an argunt; if Tasia had to use this Wondrous Object regularly, she would have dismantled it with her bare hands.
But finally, after aneurysm-inducing 'prompt engineering' and mutual verbal abuse, the final blueprint lay completed on the table.
Hathaway was just debating whether it was a violation of academic property to throw the doll out the window when her terminal vibrated against the console table.
Caller ID: Victoria Wellington.
Hathaway had the terminal to her ear before the second vibration completed. Victoria never initiated calls.
"Pests," Victoria said, the mont the line connected. No greeting. No preamble. The word landed like a verdict. "Deeply, aggressively annoying."
Hathaway's mind imdiately began constructing a narrative—the Wellington family situation, the eldest sister, whatever dark-fantasy political topology was currently making Victoria's life complicated enough to call at eleven at night.
"Are you—is everything alright?"
"It is manageable." The control was absolute. "They are rely... presumptuous. Aggressively unreasonable and entirely too comfortable overstepping their bounds. The situation is tedious."
Before Hathaway could follow up on any of this, Victoria's tone executed a clean pivot with the decisiveness of a spell redirect.
"Your final invention project. Status."
Hathaway's spine snapped straight. The reflex arc of a student caught behind on an assignnt fired imdiately.
"Significant progress!" she deployed at a volu slightly louder than necessary. "The primary automated drafting tool was secured three days ago, and after a grueling, seventy-two-hour hostage negotiation regarding its output paraters, the final blueprint has been successfully extracted!
"Fabrication begins tomorrow. The finished product will absolutely, categorically et Professor Nino's patent requirents—"
A brief, extrely quiet sound ca through the receiver. Sothing adjacent to a sigh, but with fractionally less exasperation in it than usual. The sound of soone who had montarily stepped out of a suffocating room to breathe normal air.
"Good." A beat of silence. "Do not let the pace drop, Ludwig."
"When are you coming back?"
"Once these matters are concluded." Victoria's voice had the dry, unhurried quality of soone who has decided there is no point in specifying a tiline. "Maintain the living room. And if you level the kitchen in my absence, sweep the debris before I return."
Click.
The line ended.
Hathaway lowered the terminal. The amber sconces continued their steady burn. The room was, she noticed, exactly the right temperature—Victoria had left the heating calibrated before she'd gone.
She tucked the terminal away and started up the stairs, ignoring the doll, who blew another mocking ring of lavender smoke.
The tools are acquired. The blueprint logic is solved. The roommate has registered her expectations from an undisclosed location.
Ti to build sothing.
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