Chương 137: Interlude: The Coat That Has No Business Being White

[Time Span]: Year 1987 [Location]: Nation of Rangers, Caroshadel Caroshadel's air always tasted of pulverized concrete and old copper. It was the most fractured district in the entire Inner Sea of Stars: not a city but a perpetual, localized state of emergency, a graveyard of infrastructure where the concept of a stable border had been shot decades ago and left to rot in the street.

Its official designation was the Nation of Rangers, which meant that stepping onto its cobblestones constituted implicit legal consent to be challenged to a duel before you reached the bakery. Paddy crouched in the shadow of a sheared-off bell tower, chewing on a piece of dried sweetgrass, her heavy red-and-black tail wrapped loosely around her ankle. She was watching an anomaly.

The woman below wore a pristine white cloak, fastened at the shoulder with a single heavy gold clasp, its edges traced in a line of gold thread so fine it caught the daylight like spun glass. Beneath the cloak, a pitch-black combat suit clung to her frame without a millimeter of wasted fabric. Her boots were snow-white leather, trimmed along the edge in that same meticulous gold.

She was walking through the smoldering ruins of Caroshadel like a sunbeam passing through a smog bank, untouched, unbothered, and aggressively immaculate. Another gilded tourist, Paddy thought, working the sweetgrass to the corner of her mouth. Some pampered heiress slumming it in the warzone for a thrill. Give her a scratch, and she'll shriek for her household guard. But Paddy had been watching her for three blocks now, and the narrative refused to fit the frame.

The Nation of Rangers had one ironclad social contract: anyone walking these streets could be challenged, and the stronger you looked, the more you would be challenged. This woman, who had long since stopped projecting power and simply was it, had been stopped six times since she turned onto this street. She had accepted every single duel. She had won every single duel. And her clothes remained spotless. Paddy's eyes tracked the white boots. Step. Step. Step. The stride length was identical. Down to the millimeter.

A precisely calibrated, metronomic exactness: every step the same deliberate distance, regardless of the uneven, crater-pocked terrain beneath her feet. Paddy watched the woman move through a stretch of rubble-strewn cobblestone without a single adjustment in rhythm, each boot placement finding level ground with the mechanical patience of a compass settling on north. Revolting, Paddy thought. An absolute, clinical control freak. The collar buttoned to the hollow of her throat.

The coat that has no business being white. She was already weaving the spell. From the blind spot of a collapsed archway, she layered [Silent Cast] over [Concealed Fluctuation], executing a flawless, world-class stealth sequence. She aimed a [Stinking Cloud], a dense, rapidly expanding plume of concentrated, biological rot. You could parry a blade. You could shield against fire. But scent was a gas. It expanded. It coated. It did not care how immaculate your coat was.

The cloud blossomed in a wide, noxious arc directly at the woman's back. The woman stopped. She did not flinch. She did not gag. With a reaction speed that had no business belonging to a human body, the ambient air pressure inverted in a sphere no larger than a marble. The entire noxious cloud compressed, collapsed, and vanished into the ether before a single particle could touch the white fabric. Her expression hadn't changed by a single degree. Paddy dropped from the archway and landed in the open street.

The ambush had failed. In Caroshadel, that was just a particularly impolite way of issuing an invitation. The street laws of the Rangers demanded a duel, and a duel demanded introductions. The dead deserve a name, went the old saying. Paddy spat the sweetgrass onto the cobblestones.

"Paddy." Nothing else. Announcing'I am Paddy from the gutters of Caroshadel' would only make her sound like she was apologizing for existing. The woman turned. Silver hair. Eyes of warm, clear gold, the color of afternoon sunlight. And beneath the outer corner of one eye, a small, delicate beauty mark.

"Irene," she said. Caroshadel's hard cap: twenty-five hundred M-Units, Tier 4 ceiling, three clean strikes to determine the winner. They circled. Thirty paces. Twenty. The moment the gap closed to fifteen, Irene moved. The white cloak swept backward with a snap of her shoulder. The midnight combat suit beneath caught the light, close-fitted, stripped of every superfluous fold, the attire of a woman who had come to work. A flash of gold at her wrist. The sword was already drawn. Fast— Paddy threw her blade up.

A screaming cascade of sparks erupted between them. Irene's blade crashed against Paddy's guard in a fifteen-strike sequence that occupied the space of a single, breathless second. Paddy was a Plumed Dragon Witch. Her reaction speed was built for the meat-grinder. She caught the sequence, dug her heels in, braced— She never found the counter. Irene didn't fight with a sword alone. She fought with a localized restructuring of physical certainty. An [Illusion] planted a phantom blade striking high.

A [Transmutation] warped the density of the air around Paddy's wrists, turning the last fraction of her parry into a motion made through cold molasses. An [Enchantment] hijacked the acoustic frequency of clashing steel, feeding Paddy's auditory nerves a false rhythm a half-beat out of sync with reality. And a raw [Evocation] thruster detonated at Irene's shoulder blades, converting her forward momentum into something that had no business existing within a Tier 4 cap. The phantom blade clashed high.

The real blade slid seamlessly through every gap in the trap, visual, tactile, auditory, and pressed to a precise, lethal stop one millimeter from the center of Paddy's chest. Instant. Flawless. In the microsecond Paddy registered that all her senses were compromised and her death was inevitable, she abandoned the blade entirely. Paddy scooped a fistful of wet sludge from a ruptured drainage pipe at her feet and hurled it directly at the pristine white cloak. Irene's blade sheared through most of the trajectory.

The physics of liquid were not interested in being parried. A heavy, dark splatter of Caroshadel's finest street-filth landed squarely on the white fabric. Paddy collapsed backward onto the cobblestones. She stared up at the smog-choked sky and grinned a wide, feral, completely satisfied grin. I lose the duel. But I ruined the coat. Total victory. She waited for the aristocratic fury. The disgust. The screaming. Irene looked down at the mud staining her cloak.

Her golden eyes held something quiet and entirely unreadable, not anger, not disgust, but a still, almost melancholic contemplation, the expression of someone studying an unexpected answer to a question they hadn't thought to ask. She did not reach for a cleaning spell. She sheathed her sword. She stepped forward, looked down at the Plumed Dragon Witch lying in the dirt, and extended her hand. Paddy's tail curled. What is this reaction?

She feigned a grunt of pain, reached up toward the offered hand, and channeled a fast-curing magical adhesive across her palm in the same motion. Let's see how composed you are when we're permanently fused at the hand. With a movement so fluid it bypassed conscious decision entirely, Irene's hand drifted sideways, slapping Paddy's glued palm cleanly aside. Her fingers clamped around Paddy's wrist instead. She hauled the Dragon Witch upright with an unhurried, irresistible force. She released the wrist.

A single wave of her free hand, and the mud on her cloak vaporized into clean, scentless air. Irene met Paddy's eyes. Her gaze was calm and entirely without mockery. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"You are a true warrior, Miss Paddy," she said softly. She turned and walked away. The stride length was identical. Down to the millimeter. Paddy stood in the center of the ruined street. She did not follow. She watched the white cloak disappear into the smog, the grin gone from her face entirely. The Whale The ruined cathedral at the edge of the district had been temporarily repurposed into an academy. Adeline sat at a cracked wooden desk, her voice a low, melodic current of endless, generous patience.

She leaned forward slightly, just enough to project warmth, not intimacy, and guided the wide-eyed young Witch across from her through the same runic construct for the third time, finding a new way to make each explanation feel like the definitive one. Adeline was a Plumed Dragon Witch, but you would never know it by looking at her. She had learned to bury the scales and the wings and everything else that gave her away long before it was strictly necessary.

She was blonde, green-eyed, and constructed like a porcelain heiress. In professional terms, she ran the honey trap and the long con: played the helpless, oblivious debutante, lured the arrogant in close, and consumed their assets until nothing remained but the lesson. The cathedral's heavy doors groaned. Paddy strolled in, her boots tracking ash across the flagstones. Her diminutive stature allowed her to pass as a delinquent student without a second glance.

No one questioned a Plumed Dragon Witch walking with a particular kind of aggressive slouch; the entire room simply wanted her to leave. Paddy stopped a few paces away. She looked at Adeline. She looked at the student. Adeline offered the young Witch a warm, apologetic smile.

"Let us continue tomorrow, my dear. I have disciplinary matters to attend to." The student packed up, shot a venomous glare at Paddy for interrupting the sacred academic session, and scurried out. Paddy dropped into the vacated chair. The nurturing tutor persona evaporated the moment the door clicked shut. Adeline's emerald eyes sharpened, sweeping over Paddy's scuffed armor with the instant, calculating attention of a doctor triaging a patient.

"Who did this to you?" Paddy shook her head. Her voice dropped into its usual, gravelly baseline.

"Don't even mention it. Met a whale. Completely fumbled the bag." Adeline leaned back against the chalkboard, her interest piqued.

"How rich?" Paddy clicked her tongue.

"Very. Very, very rich." A particular silence settled over Adeline's features. She was already running the logistics.

"Don't," Paddy warned, kicking her boots onto the nearest desk.

"That fish is a leviathan. You've made enough this month. It's time to lay low." Adeline let out a soft, musical laugh.

"Ah. I suppose it is time for one last haul before the quarter ends." She tilted her head, her blonde hair catching the light through the shattered stained glass.

"Who is the mark?" Paddy's tail went still.

"Irene," Paddy finally said. Adeline waited for the rest of the intelligence file. Nothing came. Her smile faltered slightly.

"That's it?

'Irene' is the most common name in the Inner Sea. Give me something to work with." Paddy groaned, aggressively scratching her messy hair.

"Silver hair. Gold eyes. White cloak over black combat gear. Ridiculously strong. Unbelievably pretty. She has a beauty mark right under her eye..." Paddy looked at her hands, unable to articulate the rest of it: the stride, the four-layer trap, the mud landing, the wrist.

"Look," Paddy said.

"You'll understand when you see her. That Irene." Por Una Cabeza Adeline always researched the prey. The name attached to that specific profile wasn't as common as she'd implied. And the dossier contained a piece of history currently classified as a suppressed social catastrophe. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty, Irene had borne a different title: The Darkly Rakish Lady Berenice. It was a nickname earned through legendary, unapologetic debauchery.

She had poured champagne from the lips of her companions, ordered seven to her suite in a single night, and left the entire gathering exhausted and subdued by morning. And then, abruptly, with no explanation offered, Lady Berenice had simply ceased to exist. Irene went abstinent. She became driven. She aimed for the absolute summit of magic and began climbing. The sudden pivot hadn't just devastated the aristocratic circles she'd abandoned; it had utterly baffled them.

In Witch civilization, you couldn't find one in a thousand who actually practiced chastity, and that one was probably underage. What does abstinence have to do with ambition?! Josephine Durant is the reigning Grand Witch of the era, and she practically uses the pleasure houses as her administrative headquarters! You ordered seven of us to your suite, and now you're taking a vow of celibacy to get better at casting magic?!

And the crucial detail, the golden key in Adeline's dossier: all seven of the women Irene had chosen that final, legendary night had possessed golden-blonde hair and brilliant green eyes. Adeline looked at her own reflection. Blonde hair. Emerald eyes. Not a disguise. The honey trap is mathematically calibrated. I am exactly her type. Irene's undefeated streak through Caroshadel's dueling rings had earned her an invitation to the district's exclusive high-society banquet.

Adeline forged an invitation, adopted the persona of a sheltered, affluent debutante, and slipped inside. She found Irene near the balcony, wearing a tailored formal suit, the white cloak shed for the occasion. The silver hair and that unhurried gaze commanded the room's gravity without effort. If she asks for my name, the hook is set. Adeline glided forward. She curtsied gracefully and offered a hand, an enigmatic, silent invitation to the floor. That gaze swept over the blonde hair and the emerald eyes.

Irene accepted the hand. She did not ask for a name. A minor deviation, Adeline noted, maintaining her smile. Perhaps she simply doesn't care. As long as the face is right, any dance partner will do. The orchestra shifted. The sharp, staccato strings of a tango cut through the ambient murmur of the ballroom. Por Una Cabeza. Irene stepped into the frame. Her hand settled against Adeline's lower back, polite, gentle, and entirely immovable.

With two measured steps, she guided them backward into the open floor, and the rhythm dropped, and their bodies came together. Adeline had danced with hundreds of marks. She always controlled the rhythm from the follower's position, using subtle shifts in weight to guide the encounter exactly where she wanted it to go. By the third measure, she was controlling nothing. Irene moved like water finding its level, boneless, fluid, and carrying an underlying weight that had nothing to do with force.

She didn't dance with brazen, martial aggression or theatrical, manufactured sentimentality. It was an old-world aristocratic romance: unhurried and elegant during the slow measures, and then, at the sharp pivots of the violin, suddenly feather-light, the pressure on Adeline's spine dissolving at the exact moment it needed to force Adeline to yield completely to the invisible current of her fingertips.

Adeline felt like a fox that had rushed its makeup to attend a gala and found itself suspended in silk before it reached the door. Abort, her survival instincts screamed. The mark is not responding correctly. Break the contact. Extract. She couldn't. Unwillingness was the most dangerous emotion a grifter could experience. She refused to lose like this. She fought the tempo, trying to inject her own rhythm into the exchange.

Before the rebellion could manifest in her posture, Irene's hand tightened sharply against her waist, not a grip, but an absolute, quiet claim, and then, with a breathtaking surge of centrifugal force, released her entirely. The world dropped away. A moment of terrifying, glorious weightlessness as Adeline spun outward— Irene's hand caught her wrist and pulled. The tether snapped taut. Adeline was hauled, breathless, directly back into the warm, unyielding center of Irene's gravity. The final chord struck.

They stood perfectly still. Irene released her cleanly and took a half-step back. Adeline didn't walk away. She stood on the polished marble floor, her chest tight, the plan irretrievably dead. She didn't know what she was waiting for. Irene turned to face her. Those golden eyes were perfectly calm: the look of the most expensive, intoxicating champagne in the world, simultaneously promising warmth and concealing a drowning depth.

"Perhaps," Irene said softly, her voice the smooth, settled weight of something that had been patient for a very long time, "you are waiting for someone to ask your name, if you wouldn't mind?" Adeline laughed. It was a fractured, breathless sound, the laugh of a woman who had just watched her entire hand read back to her.

"Adeline," she breathed. Irene stepped back. She crossed one foot behind the other, placed both hands delicately over her abdomen, and executed a formal curtsy.

"Irene." Adeline returned the curtsy. Her hands were shaking. She couldn't speak. She turned and walked away. The walk turned into a hurried, frantic retreat, her heels clicking against the marble, then the cobblestones. She did not look back. She was terrified that if she did, she would never leave. The Empty Street The sky above Caroshadel was bleeding into the pale, bruised grey of pre-dawn when they met at the rendezvous point.

Adeline leaned heavily against a fractured stone pillar, her evening gown crumpled, her immaculate blonde hair slightly undone. She stared blankly at the cracked cobblestones. Paddy sat on a jutting slab of concrete nearby, her tail thumping a slow, rhythmic beat against the rubble.

"You look," Paddy observed, "like you picked the wrong mark." Adeline closed her eyes.

"Why didn't you tell me..." The words caught in her throat. She swallowed the rest of the sentence down. Paddy rested her elbows on her knees. She plucked absently at a patch of dry weeds growing through the cracks in the stone.

"I told you," Paddy said quietly.

"You'll understand when you see her. That Irene." Adeline slumped against the pillar, the cold stone biting through the silk of her dress. She tilted her head back, watching the last stars fade as the sky turned the color of a fish's underbelly. Neither of them spoke again. Let's Go to University The underground bar smelled of cheap tobacco, spilled ale, and the dense, stifling heat of two hundred Witches packed too close together in a room with no windows.

Every eye in the establishment was nailed to the glowing broadcast crystal suspended above the counter. The 1987 Global Witch Invitational. Finals. It was the night a twenty-seven-year-old woman became the world champion. The Witches in the bar didn't know it yet. They didn't know they were watching the inauguration of an eleven-year dynasty that would slowly, methodically choke the ambition out of an entire generation of combatants who kept trying to take it down and kept failing.

They only knew they were watching an untouchable sovereign standing alone at the summit of the world. Paddy sat at the sticky counter. Her knuckles were bone-white around her mug. She stared at Irene's profile on the glowing crystal, the silver hair, the precise, unhurried movements, her eyes fixed somewhere past the glass entirely. A few stools down, Adeline hadn't moved in minutes. She was staring at the screen.

Her teeth were sunk into her lower lip, biting and biting until a single drop of bright crimson welled up against the pale skin. When the final spell landed and the stadium on the broadcast erupted, the bar erupted with it. Glasses smashed. Chairs tipped. A roar of unrestrained awe shook the floorboards. Hours later, the bar threw them out. The cobblestone streets of Caroshadel were empty and freezing, wrapped in the unforgiving silence of early morning. Paddy stopped in the middle of the road.

She bent double, clutched her knees, and violently emptied the contents of her stomach onto the cobblestones. The cheap ale and the crushing, impossible weight of the gap between where she stood and the sun she had just watched on the screen purged itself onto the street. Adeline stood a few paces away, pressing the heels of her hands against her throbbing temples. She kept her gaze fixed on a distant gas lamp, carefully keeping her boots outside the splash zone. She waited in silence until the retching stopped.

Paddy spat. She wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve and stood up straight.

"Let's go to university," Paddy said to the empty street. Adeline lowered her hands.

"Which university?"

"Yggdrasil Academy." Adeline laughed. It was a soft, tired sound, entirely without its usual theatrical edge.

"Paddy," she said quietly, looking at the halo of the gas lamp above them.

"We are Plumed Dragon Witches. First year tuition at Yggdrasil is five hundred thousand gold. We've been running scams in this gutter for years and our combined stash isn't even half.

"Setting the money aside: who is going to write our letters of recommendation? Do you know anyone with enough standing to put their name behind two gutter-rats with dragon tails? And taking a thousand steps back—even if we conned our way inside. Then what?" Paddy stared straight down the long, dark road leading out of Caroshadel.

"We'll figure it out," Paddy said. Her voice had shed all the slurring of the alcohol, replaced by something hard and certain.

"We'll know when we get there." Adeline fell silent. She looked at Paddy's rigid back. She let out a long, slow breath into the freezing air.

"Alright," Adeline said softly.

"Let's go to university."