Chương 130: Chapter 129: Weapons-Grade Cringe

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 36 — 10: 20 AM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Spirit Sea Venue · Eastern Courtyard Hathaway's threat-assessment scan paused on a figure cutting through the crowd with the chilling, hyper-precise momentum of a high-end killing machine. Marlena. The Sixth Seat of the High Council. Captain of [The Unscripted]. In the endless, violently petty jurisdictional wars between Holheim and Milan'thir over regional supremacy, Marlena was Holheim's tactical nuclear option.

Everyone in the Inner Sea knew she hailed from Marigold Bay. Everyone also knew she was adopted, that she possessed the unmistakable bone structure and pale gold hair of the Northern bloodlines, and that Holheim had been claiming her as an "Honorary Holheimian" since the very dawn of her fame. When Milan'thir Witches came online to brag about having two Grand Witches, the counter-argument was both immediate and furious: We have two as well. Honorary Holheim citizens are still Holheim citizens. Bloodlines don't lie.

Right now, the woman whose naming rights were being contested by two major districts was walking under the halo of the Spirit Sea with the cold, measuring eyes of someone built entirely out of glacier ice and personal discipline. What caught Hathaway's eye wasn't Marlena's chilling momentum. It was the absolute, flagrant absurdity happening to her personal space. The hooded figure clinging to her arm wasn't just leaning; she was restlessly handsy.

Hathaway watched in mild disbelief as the woman's fingers brazenly traced the lapel of Marlena's trench coat, slipping down to unabashedly poke and admire the notoriously aloof, ascetic Sixth Seat's exposed abs. It was the kind of boundary-obliterating physical harassment that would normally result in someone being vaporized on a sub-atomic level. Marlena just let it happen, striding forward with the dead-eyed, fathomless tranquility of a premium scratching post.

Marlena stopped a measured distance from Famia and Alisha. She offered a short, perfectly measured nod. Then she exhaled. It was barely perceptible, that breath. The calculated breath of someone bracing for impact.

"Famia." Her voice was crisp, controlled, deliberately neutral. She gestured slightly toward the hooded woman.

"This is my mother, Blanche. She is a fan of yours." Alisha's eyes lit up with the uncontrollable enthusiasm of a golden retriever spotting a tennis ball.

"Lady Blanche! It is an absolute honor." Her voice pitched up to carry genuine delight.

"I am a tremendous admirer of your work. The Shore at Marigold Bay is a masterpiece of maternal—" The corner of Marlena's mouth underwent a microscopic, involuntary seizure. It lasted less than half a second. The tip of her tongue darted out to press against her lip bead. The entire motion was the precise, instinctive tic of a combat veteran who had just heard a very specific artillery whistle. Blanche, Hathaway's database supplied. Marlena's adoptive mother. One of the most beautiful women in the known universe.

Also, universally, professionally, and historically acknowledged as the single worst actress to ever stand in front of a camera. The word fan hung in the air. The trigger had been pulled.

"Lady Famia..." Blanche's voice was the first thing. Every Witch within a ten-meter radius involuntarily leaned forward. It was an auditory experience that bypassed the auditory cortex entirely and addressed itself directly to the spine. It carried the impossible, vaulted resonance of a grand cathedral, breathtaking and ethereal, dropping over the crowd with a feeling of divine arrival. Yet it was finished with a lingering, intimate huskiness that didn't announce itself so much as simply wrap around your throat.

It was a sound too flawlessly beautiful for the physical world, making you feel the room had been poorly lit this entire time and was only now correcting itself. Hathaway involuntarily dedicated one hundred percent of her cognitive bandwidth strictly to listening. Then, as Blanche tilted her face upward to meet Famia's significantly greater height, the hood slipped back. Hathaway stopped breathing.

The immediate impression was a violent collision of aesthetics—a face that didn't negotiate with the nervous system, it simply overrode it. Features delicate to the point of impossibility, yet her large eyes carried a wild, untamed masculine edge that had no business coexisting with the rest of her face. Her high, sharp brows belonged to a cold warlord. Her jaw and lips radiated an agonizingly girlish grace. It was androgynous, weaponized beauty: the kind that didn't ask for your heart rate and simply took it.

Hathaway felt her pulse kick against her ribs. No shyness. No hesitation. Only the profound, absolute sense of rightness. To look upon such beauty without a racing heart, a person would have to be made of stone. To face such magnetism without a racing heart, a person would have to be something less than human. Three Witches at the next table lost their grip on their champagne flutes simultaneously. Even Famia Schüder was not immune.

The woman who had met Vessar's sustained killing intent with two seconds of polite blankness now had a genuine, uncharacteristically bright smile breaking across her normally composed face. The Second Seat had been caught in the current. And then, Blanche struck a pose. Hathaway's cognitive processors violently crashed. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

She watched, utterly paralyzed, as the most devastatingly beautiful face in existence deliberately contorted into a manufactured expression of tragic, melancholic yearning. It was an expression so fundamentally unnatural it actively offended the laws of physics. Blanche raised a delicate hand to her collarbone and let out a breathy, over-emoted sigh ripped straight from a bargain-bin daytime soap opera. The psychic damage hit Hathaway like a physical shockwave. It was a terrifying cognitive paradox.

The aesthetic perfection of Blanche's face commanded absolute biological attention, pinning Hathaway's eyes in place with gravitational authority. But the performance, the sheer, weapons-grade cringe radiating from every exaggerated syllable, was something else. Hathaway's stomach physically twisted. Her survival instincts screamed at her to look away, to run, to preserve her sanity, but her retinas absolutely refused to disengage.

It's like being served the finest Michelin-star cake in the universe, Hathaway's gamer brain misfired in desperate panic, and taking a massive bite only to find out the frosting is made of industrial spackle. She wasn't the only one suffocating in the AoE. Hathaway forced her gaze a few agonizing inches to the left. Famia's bright smile had petrified into a rictus of setting plaster.

The Second Seat's deep crimson eyes were perfectly round, projecting the silent, trapped horror of an apex predator that had just realized it was caught in an inescapable cringe-trap. Beside Famia, Alisha was faring worse. Hathaway watched the biographer's eyes blow wide with the raw existential terror of someone watching a rollercoaster leave the track. Alisha reached out blindly and clamped both hands onto Famia's arm, gripping the Second Seat like the last safety bar in a catastrophic failure.

Hathaway stood completely rigid, digging her own fingernails into her palms to ground herself. The three of them stood there—frozen, silent, united in their suffering—trapped in an unholy crossfire of divine beauty and Eldritch-level secondhand embarrassment. When Blanche finally stopped, her face returned to its resting state. The soap-opera performance evaporated. The overwhelming beauty crashed back in full force. She looked at Famia with warm, expectant joy. Hathaway finally remembered to exhale.

Very, very slowly, the Second Seat turned her head to look at Marlena. The look on Famia's face communicated several things without words: a silent accusation, a profound catatonia, and the specific hollow despair of someone who had just watched the Abyss perform a vaudeville routine. Marlena returned a look of dead-eyed serenity. The placid composure of a monk who had achieved nirvana through repeated, sustained psychological exposure to the same experience.

Without breaking eye contact with Famia, Marlena reached into her pocket, produced a strawberry pastry, and shoved it cleanly into Blanche's mouth. With her other hand, she smoothly grabbed the hood and pulled it firmly back into place. The AoE was instantly canceled. Alisha gasped for air. Her grip on Famia's arm released. Hathaway's eyes immediately dropped to Famia's wrist. There were distinct purple bruises in the shape of Alisha's fingers blooming on the Second Seat's skin.

The Witch's passive regeneration erased them within the second. The ambient terror evaporated. The atmosphere snapped back to a cheerful fan meeting with the immediacy of a switch being thrown. Every Witch in the vicinity raised their glasses and collectively agreed that the last forty-five seconds of reality had simply not occurred. A ripple moved through the crowd.

The kind of ripple that doesn't require an announcement: it propagates through peripheral awareness, the subtle shift in body language when a specific someone enters a room. Lin Zhaojun walked through. She wore a blue-grey Witch's hat set at an angle that suggested opinion rather than weather protection, a matching short-cape thrown casually over a crisp white vertically striped shirt. Her tailored trousers were tucked into polished riding boots.

She had cut her hair again into a sharp, effortless bob with a few stray strands across her forehead. It was an aesthetic that blended delicate beauty with rock-star precision and a conductor's authority into something that had no right to work as well as it did. Her signature baton-like wand hung at her waist. A sapphire ring on her right index finger. A razor-thin chain ring on her right pinky. She walked straight to Rhode.

"Yo." Lin lifted her chin.

"Haven't died in the training room yet?"

"Since you're still breathing," Rhode said, extending her fist, "how could I bear to leave you behind?" They bumped fists. Then Lin's gaze shifted to Hathaway, and a warm, precisely calibrated smile appeared on her face.

"You're looking considerably sharper. The mana control is much more respectable than last time." Hathaway raised her champagne flute and hid the lower half of her face behind it. Damn it, she thought. Even knowing she's a cheating, server-grilling, tentacle-peddling runaway host... she is still so frustratingly cool it makes me genuinely angry. Her inner fangirl was, somewhere, still waving glowsticks. Then Lin turned toward the far side of the courtyard. The ease in her expression closed like a shutter.

She raised her right hand, extended her thumb, and drew it slowly and deliberately across her own throat. Hathaway followed the trajectory. It landed on a woman standing near the main stage. Black hair, soft brown eyes. She possessed the gentle, approachable warmth of someone who made strangers feel immediately comfortable—currently shaking hands with Elsa Stern, President of the World Witch League, with the polite, deferential grace of a junior colleague who had memorized every book on professional courtesy.

Her eyes were slightly wet, slightly wide. The trusting, dewy eyes of a startled deer. What a lovely girl, Hathaway thought automatically.... This was her. Du Lingxuan. Du Lingxuan released the President's hand. She turned those gentle, innocent, deer-dark eyes toward Lin Zhaojun. She maintained a perfectly warm, supportive smile. And mouthed a sentence across the courtyard. Hathaway read the lips on pure instinct.

"A High Witch who failed the A3 is truly rare and formidable." Her brain processed the words and immediately hit a lore-accurate landmine. High Witch. Not Arch-Witch. Not Grand Witch candidate. The certification tier that explicitly required passing the A3 exam.

There was only one widely known historical precedent for holding that title after failing the test: Theresa, who had secured an [Honorary A3 Certificate] by stripping in a public plaza and threatening to sleep with the entire city until the Association caved. Hathaway remembered Rhode suggesting Lin use the exact same "sleep your way to the top" strategy. She also remembered Lin screaming in despair that her face wasn't"brain-melting" enough to successfully seduce Heidi.

The phantom translation assembled itself in Hathaway's head, weaponizing every piece of that humiliating context perfectly: Did you finally manage to sleep your way to that honorary certificate, Princess? Or was your face still not quite pretty enough for the casting couch? This was The Art of Conversation. This was a surgical strike deployed from behind a Bambi-like smile. Lin Zhaojun's jaw set. The easy confidence on her face went flat and cold.

Her right hand dropped to the baton at her waist and the temperature in the immediate vicinity dropped two degrees. Before the first spell of a diplomatic incident could be drawn, something else captured the courtyard's attention. Something at the edge of her peripheral vision went completely motionless. She turned. Alucard and Tasia, standing at her right, had gone rigid. A Witch had entered through the archway of Anser bones.

She had the unmistakable golden hair of the Milan'thirskaya bloodline—flowing, radiant, the specific shade that caught light and held it. But her silhouette was wrong. No horns. No tail. She had actively, deliberately suppressed her draconic traits, which among Dragon Witches was not merely unusual. It read as a statement of detachment. An informed choice to erase the lineage from the surface. Her eyes were grey. But not the grey of Tasia's eyes.

Tasia's eyes were the pale, clear color of a sky after rain, open and clean. Not the grey of Alucard's eyes. Alucard's grey was deep and dark, carrying the specific exhaustion of someone who had decided to be terminally tired a long time ago. This grey was sharp. Crystalline and piercingly translucent, like shattered glass held up to the sun. Eyes that missed nothing and gave nothing back. Liandra Milan'thirskaya.

Across the vast Anser marble courtyard, surrounded by the greatest Witches in the world, the three sisters found each other. Bathed in the shifting, iridescent light of the Spirit Sea, they stared at one another from across the room.