Chương 111: A Main-Character Cheat Code

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 23, 12: 45 PM [Location]: Royal Rosas Club · The Revolving Restaurant The holographic screens above the banquet table continued to scroll with a soft, golden light, casting faint shadows across the untouched gourmet food. Having just witnessed her cousin casually purchase a dead-mana planet to host a pay-per-view survival horror apocalypse, Hathaway desperately needed an immediate dose of normalcy to stabilize her transmigrator sanity.

She lifted her eyes to Nino across the table, seeking the solace of a known rational actor. Nino was checking off purchases with the efficient, unblinking focus of a researcher who had filed this task under necessary logistics and allocated it exactly the processing power it required. Her screen was dense with items. Hathaway discreetly angled for a view and felt something loosen in her chest. Tea saplings from an alternate Wood-Spirit dimension. High-grade enchanted topsoil. Rare mineral samples.

Botanical potion materials. Normal. Beautifully, movingly normal. A scholar's shopping cart. A retired geologist's wishlist. Proof that at least one person at this table had been raised by people who made good choices. Across from Nino, Bella closed her catalogue with a small, satisfied sound and the aura of a customer who had spent exactly what she intended and felt no regret about any of it.

Hathaway leaned slightly forward, pulling the socially acceptable equivalent of craning over a stranger's shoulder on public transit. The top of Bella's list stopped her immediately. [Witch Card: The Primordial Epoch · First Edition Crimson Legend Collector's Set]. Hathaway's internal card addict snapped to attention. She recognized this instantly.

It wasn't just long out of print, with a secondary-market price that had escalated into genuine financial crime territory; the story of its recent acquisition was already legendary on the Inner Sea's gaming forums.

The Milan'thirskaya family had recently been auditing their dimensional exploration logs from a few centuries ago when an archivist found a fascinating entry: roughly three hundred years prior, an expedition team had traded a mass-produced Witch Card starter deck to a primitive local False God in exchange for a mountain of divine gold. It was a classic, ruthless colonial scam—trading cheap glass beads to the natives for actual treasure. But False Gods were immortal, stagnant creatures who hoarded their trinkets.

While the Witch world's iteration speed was blistering, and that specific printing went permanently out of print within a century, the False God had simply kept the deck in pristine, mint condition inside its temple for over three hundred years. When the Milan'thirskaya realized the "glass beads" they traded away had passively appreciated into an invaluable, out-of-print Crimson Legend vintage set, their response was characteristically measured. They instantly launched an interstellar crusade.

They mobilized a vanguard fleet, invaded the dimension, violently dismantled the False God, and retrieved their vintage cards without bending a single foil corner. Having casually harvested the False God's divine core and subjugated the planet just to ensure the trip turned a profit, they tossed the reclaimed card set directly into the Royal Rosas prize pool.

The sheer, unhinged absurdity of initiating planetary bombardment to reclaim your own three-hundred-year-old scam collateral remained a legendary piece of TCG lore. She spent three full seconds staring at it with unmasked envy. Then she registered what was below the card set. A long, highly specific inventory of [Magical Accessories] with effects ranging from the practical to the genuinely hard to explain. The most prominent item: [Ironhead Master — Enchantment Decal].

Hathaway read the stat description and her eyebrows rose. [Ironhead Master: After absorbing a large amount of the wearer's mana, grants the Witch's head an effect of near-absolute physical resilience. Resistant to kinetic concussion, structural displacement, and sustained impact. Effect persists through standard high-caliber headshots without loss of casting alignment.] Every humanoid caster in the Inner Sea shared the same fundamental biological vulnerability: a sufficient headshot disrupted the concentration required to maintain active spell construction. Shields helped. They did not fully prevent the kinetic shockwave from rattling the brain inside the skull. This feat addressed that directly, and at an extremely high level of effectiveness. Practical. Combat-applicable. A serious PvP investment.

The custom appearance Bella had selected for the enchantment pattern: a dark Gothic rose cross, high contrast, designed to display across the cheekbone and jaw. Hathaway looked at Bella. Bella met her gaze with noble serenity. You bought a headshot-immunity S-tier feat and your primary selection criterion was how it would look on your face. The purchase was defensible. She had no evidence. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

The rest of Bella's cart confirmed the pattern without establishing legal culpability: accessories with various effects, unified by the fact that every single one was also extraordinarily beautiful, atmospheric, and capable of generating the specific aesthetic of a doom-touched dimension sovereign on a bad day. Burning footprints. Rose petals from the wand tip during spellcast. Faint shadow corona visible in direct sunlight.

Hathaway looked at her cousin, who had spent what was functionally a nation's military budget on glowing cosmetic tattoos and still wore the expression of someone making entirely reasonable financial decisions. I have no evidence. She shifted her gaze to Alucard at the far end of the table. The White City Archon's exchange list looked exactly as it should: the shopping cart of a mature, high-status aristocrat who entertained regularly and had strong opinions about interior decoration.

Several premium pepper varieties from an alternate dimension renowned for thermal extremes. Antique magical tapestries with traceable provenance. Exquisitely crafted otherworldly ceramics. A few enclosed landscape paintings in the style of dead civilizations. Tasteful. Specific. Domestically purposeful.

Hathaway had half-turned away when Alucard set down her catalogue, picked up her teacup, and said to Nino in a tone of genuine aesthetic appreciation:"I noticed the [Mill of Sighs] listed at the back of the restricted catalogue. The engineering on that piece is remarkable." She took a sip.

"The internal array runs the extracted soul through a precisely calibrated localized temporal loop—apparently it maintains the subject's full sensory capacity throughout the grinding process.

"The mechanism ensures the soul can't disperse before the cycle completes. The brass crank handle has original period detailing." Nino tapped her holographic screen, pausing her scrolling.

"I've reviewed the blueprints. The gear-mesh design integrates mechanical and necromantic principles at a level you don't typically see outside of serious institutional applications." A gleam passed through her eyes that had no business being in a conversation about desk accessories.

"If you need test material, I can provide a few high-quality specimens for calibration."

"That would be very helpful." Alucard smiled, setting down her cup.

"I plan to put it on my desk for stress relief during document review." Hathaway had not moved. Her teacup was still halfway to her mouth. She had not seen the Mill of Sighs on Alucard's screen at all. This was somehow the part that felt most significant. She slowly rotated her gaze. Rhode: excitedly designing a monster colosseum in a dead world. Bella: a cosmetics main who had accidentally also achieved maximum combat survivability.

The White City Archon and the Chief Intelligence Officer: discussing optimal soul-grinding settings as a lunchtime sidebar. Witches, fundamentally, are Witches. No matter how elegant their posture, how appropriate their small talk, how genuinely normal their shopping habits appeared from a comfortable distance. Beneath every single one of them: the manic, fully operational, apex-predator interior of a creature designed to be extremely good at winning and somewhat creative about the periphery.

And her, Hathaway von Ludwig, who had just spent her entire qualifier budget on legally adjacent perception techniques designed to steal other witches' spells. We are the same. She covered her eyes with one hand. I cannot claim the moral high ground. I am also in this ecosystem. I also belong here. This is my nest. ENOUGH. The [Villain] and [Raid Boss] tags on this team are stacked thicker than a balance sheet. We are going to become a public safety concern if we keep escalating. Could someone please buy a flower.

Across the table, Nino set down her silver fork with the quiet deliberateness that had, over three months, trained everyone in a twenty-meter radius to pay attention. She picked up her napkin, wiped the corner of her mouth, and looked directly at Hathaway.

"On the subject of the classified enemy intelligence you provided this morning," Nino said, in the precise tone she used when she intended to finish a sentence that the other party would find surprising.

"Your compensation." Hathaway blinked. The word landed and then didn't do anything useful for a full second.

"Compensation," she repeated.

"For the intel." Nino's expression crossed the narrow distance between professional patience and watching a functional entity briefly forget how cognition works. She set her elbows on the table and interlaced her fingers in the specific configuration she used when preparing to explain something for what she considered an unreasonable number of times.

"Hathaway." A beat.

"You genuinely believed the club was going to freeload strategically critical, match-deciding intelligence from a substitute member—and simply not pay her for it." Hathaway opened her mouth.

"Don't tell me you forgot. Tell me you understand the distinction." The distinction was this: she hadn't forgotten. She had never calculated it. When she'd stayed up cross-referencing Karula's aerial domain data and working out exactly how much of Alice's manuscript was primary research versus projection—the thing driving her had not been a point transaction.

It had been the image of Victoria dragging a suitcase out of their dormitory room at midnight, her back perfectly rigid, never turning around to look back even once. It had been the particular quality of the silence in Room 302 that night, which had felt less like quiet and more like the aftermath of something forcefully removed. She'd put that manuscript on the table this morning because the Greed Umbrella was the entity that had broken her roommate.

Hathaway didn't have a perfectly rational, step-by-step thesis on how defeating them in the arena would somehow "save" Victoria. She didn't care. In Hathaway's gamer-wired brain, the narrative logic was absolute: the Greed Umbrella had officially crossed the line into being the Ultimate Evil Syndicate. They had taken her friend away. Therefore, their team needed to be dismantled, their strategies mercilessly crushed, and their collective HP bar violently reduced to zero. That wasn't a business transaction.

It was a personal vendetta. The thought of billing the club for a crusade had genuinely not arrived. Hathaway looked at the table.

"I didn't think of it that way." Something in Nino's expression shifted by a fraction—sharp and clinical and briefly not either of those things—and then reassembled.

"Even if you had," she said, in a tone from which the lecture had carefully departed, "the club has its rules." She tapped her projector and transferred a file.

"Have you ever heard of an [Encounter]?" Rhode, who had been leaning back in deep post-purchase contentment, moved. The movement was instantaneous and involuntary—forward, upright, both hands on the table, her deep red eyes erupting with an unguarded brightness that looked nothing like her usual everything-is-fine-I-live-here expression.

"Hold on." Rhode didn't control her volume.

"The club is actually giving out an Encounter? When did the board get this generous?" Alucard turned her head. The look she gave Rhode was the specific variety of flat, precise displeasure that the Co-Ruler of the Milan'thirskaya deployed when correcting factual inaccuracies about their shared institution.

"A correction, Rhode. The Royal Rosas board has always been generous. This is not a new development." Hathaway sat very still. Rhode von Ludwig bought dead-mana wasteland plots for fun. Rhode ate two dragons for breakfast and considered it a light morning. Rhode held the undivided attention of every high-tier auction house in three districts because when she walked in with her geometric-output eyes and her flip-flops, she was about to spend enough to move the market.

For Rhode—the purest expression of someone who genuinely had everything and was perpetually unimpressed by more of it—to hear one word and snap forward like that, eyes open, voice unguarded— Hathaway's gamer radar ignited from zero to maximum in one step. An [Encounter]. That wasn't a point reward. That wasn't gear or currency or catalog access. That was a story event. The kind that bent trajectories. The kind that the system reserved for moments when the numbers alone couldn't describe what had changed.

The club wasn't paying her back. They were handing her a main-character cheat code, and they had been planning to do it all along.