[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 4, 10:30 AM
[Location]: Six-Point Miniature Arena
The King of Fighters singles relay operated on a single, brutal logic: winner stays in the ring.
Royal Rosas currently led 1:0. As the Vanguard, Hathaway was first up.
Team Iron Compass's situation required no analysis. Their Ace—the "Little Lin Zhaojun" who'd spent the 3v3 finale trading blows at 1v3—had overdrawn catastrophically. Resurrection Sickness compounded the mana debt. She wasn't stepping onto a field in that state.
Iron Compass was simply out of options. They had to send out their two freshest starters and their deepest bench substitute to hold the line, praying they could clear the board while the Ace stayed in the anchor position, squeezing every possible second of recovery ti out of the format.
"Competitors, take your marks."
The referee—a stoic High Witch hovering on a crystalline disk—raised her staff. A blinding orange sphere ignited at the tip.
Hathaway noticed the shift in protocol imdiately.
The 3v3 opener had started with the announcer’s roar—a synchronized sound wave necessary to coordinate a six-person battlefield. A macro-signal for team action.
But a 1v1 was different. It wasn’t a war; it was a duel.
In the Inner Sea of Stars, solo duels didn’t rely on the sluggish travel ti of a human voice. They used the [Initiative Fireball]. Because when the first strike is asured in nanoseconds, visual and magical impact are the only zero-ambiguity triggers. The mont the sphere touched the arena floor, the match began. She’d seen Rhode drop the standard Fastball like a teor in training.
But professional qualifiers added a crueler variant: the Slow Ball.
Enchanted with extre deceleration magic, it drifted toward the floor with the lazy, swaying pace of a falling leaf—ruthlessly testing whether a solo competitor could suppress her bloodthirsty instincts and not misfire a fraction of a second before contact. There was no team to cover for a false start.
The ones who couldn’t were disqualified before they cast a single spell.
FWOOSH—!!!
The referee's staff snapped down. The fireball plumted like an artillery round—a Fast Ball, dropping at full gravity.
The fireball touched the dirt. Hathaway's hand was already moving. She won the initiative.
Outco confird, said so cold, professional corner of her brain. Match already over.
No probing. No repositioning. She raised [Silver Star] and fired the opener she'd designed specifically for this contingency.
[Amora's Glitterdust].
A brilliant cloud of silver-white particulate detonated directly in the Iron Compass substitute's face.
The cognitive-disruption payload hit instantly. Whatever complex spell model the substitute had been actively structuring in her mind imdiately blue-screened, shattering into loose, chaotic mana.
The opponent flinched.
And in the 0.06 seconds her vision was gone, her body moved on pure muscle mory—exactly as Hathaway had predicted it would.
A massive, translucent Tier-5 kinetic barrier blood around the blinded Witch. I can't see. I turtle up. I buy ti. It was the correct response. Textbook. Under normal circumstances, it might even have worked.
Behind the shield, the substitute's mana flared. [Dispel Magic].
Executed cleanly in a fraction of a second. The blindness lifted. Her eyes snapped open.
She was greeted by the sight of a massive, fan-shaped eruption of [Widen]ed [Vodka Spray] slamming into her barrier, thoroughly drenching the exterior in high-proof arcane accelerant.
And right behind it—taking advantage of the brief window the substitute had spent cleansing her eyes—Hathaway finished constructing her nuke and fired: [Empowered · Penetrating · Conflagration].
The substitute didn't panic. Her PvP reflexes were sharp.
Seeing the lethal, armor-piercing fireball hurtling toward her, she drew upon her remaining montum and snapped out a [Counterspell], aid directly at the incoming Evocation.
It was a perfect intercept. The Tier-3 dispel struck the Tier-4 fireball mid-air.
The complex "penetrating" spell model violently unraveled, stripping away all of its lethal magical properties. The terrifying nuke devolved into a sloppy splash of mundane thermal sparks that scattered harmlessly against the barrier.
The substitute had successfully won the magical exchange. She had neutralized the Glass Cannon's output.
Even as the sparks splashed against the shield, Hathaway's detached, high-speed cognitive threads rendered the final verdict: Flawless decision tree. Wrong context.
The mundane sparks touched the magically enriched, hyper-flammable alcohol soaking the shield.
In the millisecond before ignition, the substitute went completely still.
If she'd dropped the soaked shield and tried to cast a fresh one, she might have survived—but you couldn't stack a new Tier-5 barrier while the old one was active.
If she'd aborted the counter-spell and tried to dodge, she'd have been running through a [Widen]ed cone of alcohol. There was no branch in the decision tree that didn't end here.
BOOOOM—!!!
The accelerant triggered. The Tier-5 shield, built to withstand a Tier-4 impact, now beca the core of a localized thermobaric detonation. The math broke. The threshold overflowed from the inside out.
Hathaway didn't stop casting.
As a ga designer with professional standards, she didn't treat probably dead as a closed tactical loop. A three-hit combo was a three-hit combo.
[Fla Shroud] coiled around the shieldless substitute like a living thing.
White light. The Resurrection Stone triggered. The score beca 2:0.
The substitute had been awake for the whole sequence—eyes open, knowing exactly why and how. That was far more dignified than simply being vaporized in a daze.
In her heart, Hathaway extended the courtesy of a professional nod. If the initiative roll had flipped, I'd be the one walking off the field.
"Round Two!"
The second Iron Compass starter stepped onto the field. Short aerodynamic wand. Low, completely unanchored stance. Deep-cyan combat robe.
The blood in Hathaway's veins was singing.
The adrenaline from the 3v3 and the clean sequence execution had spiked her into a state that her nervous system was calling more. Her Ludwig biology, delighted with the results, was helpfully suggesting she simply detonate everything in the imdiate vicinity.
The referee raised her hand. The fireball ignited.
Hathaway stared at it, calculating the drop arc, pre-loading her model, mana already flooding toward the wand tip—
The fireball left the referee's fingers.
But it didn't fall. It drifted.
A pale-cyan shimr on its surface. [Feather Fall]. The arena floor, which should have arrived in 0.5 seconds, was now approaching at the speed of a piece of paper falling through still air.
Slow Ball.
Her model was ninety-nine percent constructed. One breath and it fired. If it fired before the fireball touched the ground, she was disqualified before the fight began.
Hathaway violently severed her outputting mana circuits, slamming the internal floodgates shut.
The backlash hit her like a fist to the sternum. Her wrist went numb. Her brain blanked for one fatal, misfiring half-second.
The fireball touched the dirt. The Iron Compass Witch moved first.
A blinding cloud of silver-white particulate detonated in Hathaway's face.
[Glitterdust].
I got countered with my own trick.
The world went white. The cognitive disruption payload hit. Hathaway's brain went offline for a full second, which in a duel running at 0.023-second theoretical limits ant she had just been handed a fifty-count deficit to start.
She didn't wait to think. She had no [Dispel Magic].
Before the whiteout even registered fully, her body was already moving on pure, ingrained survival logic.
No line of sight. Auto-targeting. Her wand snapped up. [Magic Missile]—a low-tier basic, absolute zero cast ti for any professional Witch. She blind-fired instantly, letting the spell track the nearest hostile mana signature.
Nothing fired—the signature wasn't there.
The opponent's core advantage wasn't raw speed. It was lateral speed—high-frequency, irregular magical footwork that traced wide semicircles around Hathaway's blind spots, never moving forward, never presenting a stable target.
From the first second of the match, she had been everywhere and nowhere at once.
Whoosh—
A low-tier kinetic bolt clipped Hathaway's shoulder. Didn't hurt. But the hit-stun shattered her next gathering spell model before it could fire.
She pivoted toward the sound. Cast again.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
Ice shards, wind blades, arcane bolts. Cheap, fast, instant-cast. None of them were designed to deal damage.
Every ti Hathaway raised her hand to establish any kind of suppressive fire, a harassnt spell arrived at the exact millisecond of her cast animation, using the hit-stun to reset her progress back to zero.
Stagger. Reset. Cast. Stagger. Reset.
This specific, suffocating, deeply humiliating feeling of being completely outplayed by soone who wasn't overpowering her—who was just faster, and had better positioning, and was using her own casting windows against her—
It was textbook. She'd felt it before.
She'd felt it on day one of this world, in a training ground, being taken apart with surgical precision by a woman who made it look effortless.
Lin Zhaojun fard 0:13, her hyper-processing brain snarled even as she took another wind blade to the ribs, and now soone is running the exact sa script.
She was being kited to death.
Her entire mana pool, unreasonable in scale, was accumulating exactly zero spell completions. The opponent wasn't trying to beat her. She was just waiting for a hard gap.
The ambient temperature dropped.
A profound, catastrophic cold began gathering directly overhead. The mana signature was unmistakable.
She'd prepared this in advance. She was just waiting for a clean window.
Hathaway's response was instantaneous. [Anti-Spell Domain]. Burn triple mana cost for a Quickened, instant-cast deploynt.
But the opponent's timing was inhuman.
The Iron Compass Witch hadn't just fired randomly; she had perfectly tid her ultimate to land on the exact recovery fra of Hathaway's latest hit-stun.
Hathaway's mana circuits surged to output the triple cost, but her physical body was locked in a 0.1-second kinetic flinch from a preceding ice shard. The system rejected the input. She didn't have the fra.
[Quickened · Ice Storm].
A torrential blizzard of hailstones wrapped in a freezing gale swallowed her coordinates. [Greater Mage Armor] shattered under the first wave. What followed was a bone-deep, absolute cold that turned thought into ice crystals and movent into a mory.
White light.
Hathaway welcod her first death in this world.
GASP—
She snapped upright in the preparation zone's resurrection array, lungs seizing, hands slamming onto the cot.
The phantom sensation of being flash-frozen and shattered from the inside lingered in every nerve ending. She sat there, breathing, waiting for it to fade. Her hands were trembling slightly. Cold sweat on her palms.
She waited for the terror to arrive.
The Earth-born terror of having actually, physically died—of the existential weight of mortality pressing down, the panic attack, the despair that she'd expected to feel since day one in this world.
It didn't co.
Her heart was hamring so hard it was almost audible.
Her blood felt carbonated.
A wide, completely unhinged grin was spreading across her face and she didn't know when it had started.
I lost.
She replayed the sequence. The stagger. The kiting. The Quickened Ice Storm landing while she was mid-cast, unable to move. Being outplayed by soone with perhaps one-eighth her mana pool, who had simply executed better.
And she felt—high.
A mory surfaced from her first week in this world.
Victoria, standing right in the middle of the dormitory room, silver hair loose, eyes carrying that fanatical gleam that only appeared when she was talking about sothing she genuinely cared about.
"Invading worlds is boring. It is a chore. It is PvE... But fighting another Witch? Fighting an equal who understands high-level magical syntax? Who can counter your spells in real ti? That is Sport. That is the only ga worth playing."
Another mory surfaced, older and deeper. Her very first day at the Academy. The entrance duel.
She hadn't fought Victoria like a proud warrior that day. Pinned to the dirt and gasping for air, she had reacted with pure Earthling panic, relying on a ridiculous misunderstanding and a handful of extra-spicy ghost pepper powder to secure a gutter-tier, despicable technical victory just to survive.
And imdiately afterward, Dean Hecate had tossed her into a single dorm room with that exact sa murderous, violently furious anomaly.
"Oh, don't say that," Hecate had said, smiling with pure, unfathomable malice. "Isn't the defensive connection of us Witches built through this kind of 'life or death' bonding? She might be sharpening her knife inside right now."
Sitting on the cot, Hathaway finally understood.
Back then, standing in the hallway, she had thought Hecate was just a sadistic troll punishing her for a dirty trick. She thought she was boarding the Express Train to Hell.
It hadn't been a punishnt. It had been her actual initiation.
Only a fellow Witch could take your absolute, unrestrained desire to murder them, reflect it perfectly back into your face, freeze you to death, and then respawn to grab a drink with you afterward.
She was still grinning. She couldn't stop.
Rhode appeared from the tunnel entrance, arms crossed, expression sowhere between amused and professionally resigned.
"It's fine, pipsqueak." She tossed a towel over. "Every rookie pays tuition. Yours just cost you a trip to the resurrection array."
Hathaway caught the towel. "I had enough mana to level a city block."
"I know."
"I died with most of it unspent."
"I know."
Rhode gave her a look that said and this is why we train. "Your spell pool is too shallow for this format. Anyone with decent mobility and a harassnt kit can make your damage irrelevant. Thought Lin already taught you this. Guess you needed a live-fire reminder."
"Docunted," Hathaway said. Her brain had already finished compiling.
Ergency Patch Notes — Build v1.0:
Item One:[DISPEL MAGIC] — LEARN IMDIATELY. Tier-3. She had the book. She had not had ti last night. She would make ti. A duelist who couldn't cleanse her own blindness was playing the ga with one hand tied behind her back and the other one on fire.Item Two:[CHARGED SONIC BOOM] — ACQUIRE AND LEARN ASAP. Tier-5. Extre sonic detonation that bypassed armor and ruptured sensory organs. If she'd had this ten minutes ago, the opponent's entire lateral kiting strategy would have beco an academic question. One indiscriminate sonic blanket would have ended the positioning ga.Item Three:SLOW BALL STRESS TRAINING. She had pre-loaded into a false-start abort. She had paid for it with the initiative roll. She could never, under any circumstances, allow her own bloodlust to stagger her on the starting line again.
She folded the ntal docunt and set it aside.
One more thing.
She looked up toward the highest VIP box.
Margaret's 150-lun red-eye glare was still broadcasting at full power, visible from a hundred ters away. Anna was waving. Little Rory, tucked safely in the kinetic-barrier bassinet, had her tiny face turned toward the arena.
Hathaway slowly replayed the visual record of her own death.
[Quickened Ice Storm]. A massive, cinematically gorgeous AoE blizzard. She had been beautifully flash-frozen mid-cast, then dissolved into white teleportation light.
Clean. Instantaneous. No flying viscera. No prolonged screaming. No blood spatter. No decapitation, bifurcation, or any of the other death animations that were statistically common at this level of competition.
She let out a long breath of relief.
Thank God I got murdered in a PG-13 manner. She pressed a hand to her chest. Rory's pure soul remains untarnished. My dignity as the eldest sister remains intact. This was a highly aesthetic, age-appropriate, fully family-friendly sporting death.
She was still holding the towel. She had forgotten to wipe her face.
On the field, Yenna stood up from the bench.
The front-row scholar adjusted her grip on her specialized long-staff as she walked, her three golden fox tails neatly arranged behind her.
Her expression, facing an Iron Compass team that had just clawed back a point and was riding a sudden surge of montum, showed absolutely zero tension regarding Hathaway's defeat.
She planted her long-staff into the dirt. A faint, glowing holographic grid of spatial equations expanded outward from the base.
The next eight minutes—outside the barrier—established exactly what kind of authority a true mathematical disciple of causality wielded when she wasn't terrified of an audience.
Yenna never left her starting position. She didn't chase. She didn't react.
She simply calculated, with the dispassionate efficiency of soone who'd already run the match in her head and was now confirming results. Movent vectors. Probability distributions. Optimal intercept coordinates.
When Iron Compass's kinetic-kiting specialist reached her third predicted coordinate, she stepped into the path of a pre-cast [Spatial Confinent] that had been waiting for her.
It looked, from the outside, like she had voluntarily walked into a trap.
She had. She just hadn't known the trap existed yet when she started moving.
Iron Compass's next starter fared no better, walking into a similar geotric dead-end just three minutes later.
A flawless one-versus-two sweep. The match was over before their recovering Ace even had to stand up.
The scoreboard locked.
4:1.
Royal Rosas Club. Day One of the Group Stage. First-round match.
Done.
Hathaway watched Yenna walk back from the field, her long-staff humming faintly, already projecting a new set of glowing, completely unrelated differential equations in the air before her.
She solved the kiting problem in eight minutes, Hathaway observed, with sothing adjacent to profound respect. I couldn't solve it at all.
She looked back down at her ntal patch notes.
[Charged Sonic Boom].
Soon.
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