Chương 184: Interlude: When the Star Blinks

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 42 — 2: 10 PM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Grand Masters Main Arena · Fey Star Staging Pavilion The weapon diagnostic was not a maintenance necessity. It was a liturgy. In the quiet of the staging pavilion, Akkukataya's thumb dragged slowly along the dark-lacquered stock of her rifle-staff, reading the nano-carved runic engravings with the clinical, unhurried precision of a jeweler verifying a diamond's cut.

The weapon was a masterpiece of lethal silhouette: a single, unbroken branch of the World Tree, shaped into the unforgiving contours of a precision hunting rifle. Beneath her thumb, a microscopic lattice of kinetic accelerators and spatial-compression matrices sat flush and precisely sequenced beneath the polish. Across the pavilion, Allison lay perfectly still on the long velvet bench. One arm was draped casually over her eyes, shielding them from the overhead glare.

Her breathing was slow, even, and entirely unbothered by the fact that four hundred million people across the Inner Sea were currently holding their collective breath. Akkukataya did not speak. She did not allow even the ambient mana in her aura to fluctuate. She stood. She rested the rifle-staff against her right shoulder and walked toward the deployment tunnel. She had made it three paces when she paused. Involuntarily. Her chin turned back over her shoulder.

Her pentagram irises rested on the sleeping figure for exactly half a second. She turned back to the light, and stepped onto the field. Akkukataya stood on the outermost spire. Across the deep ravine, Famia Schüder was already waiting. Behind her flawlessly maintained aristocratic smile, an accounting firm was furiously running the numbers. The Otter Bay Group and the Ark Group had traded blow for apocalyptic blow all fiscal year. Three vaporized convoys each. Three shell companies liquidated each.

A severed eastern trade route answered by a string of catastrophic, untraceable "clerical errors" in the Abyssal supply chain. The ledger balanced, point for point. That was precisely the problem. Dogs, Akkukataya thought, her smile remaining perfectly, freezingly cold, are such shameless biological constructs. The dog is still standing. Still breathing. Still occupying space. Still looking at the ledger and calling it balanced. And she knew Ovelia before I did. I really despise dogs.

She opened with velvet and steel. Famia returned without retreat. The referee's sphere shattered. Abyssal domains expanded across the alpine stone, compressing gravity, turning every frame of movement into a grueling physical calculation. Akkukataya slipped through the collapsing field, and in the sheer, overwhelming familiarity of that black armor's crushing pressure, the telemetry slipped. One microsecond. An involuntary archival retrieval. The Defense of Casendiara. The sky, burning. Three against one.

Josephine Durant, the Unyielding Banner. Don Gil Ross, the Witch of Hubris. A fiercely young Ash, brilliant and desperate. In the true zenith of Witch warfare, being killed a dozen times was merely a preliminary exchange. Even the most long-dormant Arch-Witch, upon having her physical continuity shattered repeatedly, would eventually shed all biological limiters, returning to the field at her most terrifying, apocalyptic peak. Not one of the three ever killed Ovelia even once.

Instead, she systematically slaughtered them, driving all three down to the absolute, frayed precipice of true, permanent death. The siege only stalled because Ovelia did not actually want to erase such brilliant talents from the world. When they blindly charged her anyway, Ovelia stepped back. Six consecutive times. Ovelia had simply sighed, looked at her watch, and lost patience. She called the dog. Famia Schüder arrived on the battlefield like a collapsing star. The agonizing equilibrium shattered instantly.

Ovelia refused to cross the final threshold of murder, but capturing a combatant intent on suicidal martyrdom required a very specific, suffocating brutality. Famia supplied it. Josephine was dragged to the earth and held there, crushed and alive, denied even the dignity of dying on her own terms. Don Gil Ross turned back. Ash had pleaded with her to keep running—Casendiara was falling, but Milan'thir still had hope. Gil had refused. She returned to her own capital with weapon drawn. She never cast a spell.

The quietest sound in the world: a lock turning from the inside. The mutiny was instantaneous, total, and bloodless. The capital threw the gates wide and prepared the banquets for the conquering army. Don Gil Ross found herself powerless against the single force she had never learned to fight: the will of the people she was dying to protect. Her own cabinet raised suppression wards around her, and she did not break them. The image, seared: the massive reinforced gates of Casendiara standing open.

Ovelia strolling through the archway with the relaxed, unhurried gait of a woman taking an afternoon walk through her private rose garden. Josephine walking beside her. Unbound. Unchained. But pale as chalk, her eyes hollowed, her movements the mechanical articulation of a marionette whose strings had been cleanly severed. And in the shadows, she had been watching. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. She had been young then.

She had not possessed Famia's apocalyptic field-clearing power. But she was a Cat Witch, and Cat Witches were built for the shadows. She had spent weeks in the dark dismantling Casendiara's military infrastructure from the inside: poisoning logistics, whispering Ovelia's mercy into the ears of terrified generals, applying steady pressure to the fault lines until the structure collapsed on its own. The silent, bloodless decapitation that handed Ovelia the city was hers.

History recorded the Black Emperor's thunderous arrival. It did not record the invisible hand that had already opened the door. Shameless dog. If Ovelia hadn't cherished talented lives so infuriatingly, hadn't wanted to take Casendiara without a massacre, she wouldn't have needed Famia at all. Famia's abyssal blade filled her vision. The microsecond elapsed. Akkukataya violently severed the memory thread and kicked off the shattered stone, pulling the trigger. She had survived by a margin of exactly 0. 1 seconds.

She allowed herself three seconds. She replayed the exact, precise, microscopic widening of Famia Schüder's eyes in the final frame before her resurrection stone shattered. She archived the image with meticulous care, filing it directly into the mental directory labeled: Things That Allow Me To Wake Up In The Morning. It was a very small folder. This was a premium addition. The teleportation array flashed. She bowed, right hand over heart. The agony in her shoulder was suppressed entirely.

"I did not disgrace my mission, my Queen."

"My tea has gone cold." A shivering electric current snapped down her spine, raising the hairs at the back of her neck. She dropped her head lower, letting the curtain of her hair conceal the tremor running through her frame. The scent of orange luminescent minerals reached her before the memory did. 1936. She had been the undisputed pinnacle of her generation: breathtakingly beautiful, suffocatingly arrogant, dictatorial, brilliant, and entirely devoid of mercy.

She commanded a quiet empire of wealth and influence, and she looked upon the world with the bored, evaluating gaze of an adult supervising a playground. The invitation arrived. A newly ascended Grand Witch and Cat Lord. A curiosity, a former Dragon Witch who had recently, inexplicably, transitioned her fundamental nature. Akkukataya accepted it out of the cold curiosity of a sovereign. She intended to see what kind of creature dared to claim such a domain. Ovelia's Cat Island was anchored in the Astral Ruins.

Countless elegant bridges spanned the void, their edges overflowing with impossible greenery and blooming flowers. Beneath the arches, Lantern Cat homes clustered in cozy grottos beside a crystalline, meandering river. Apartment buildings with private gardens lined the inner curves of the spans. Commercial districts thrived above, and from somewhere in the clean astral air, the haunting, lilting sound of bagpipes drifted through the space, clear and melancholic, farther than the eye could see.

Akkukataya walked through it all with the cold, evaluating eye of a conqueror inspecting a new territory. She was led to the study. The room was vast. Massive bookshelves lined the walls, heavy with the accumulated knowledge of a Grand Witch. Enormous clusters of orange luminescent minerals cast a warm, fragrant glow across the space. Priceless bone china rested on delicately carved tables.

In the corners, uncut gemstones were piled carelessly like discarded gravel, dwarfed by the breathtaking, life-sized artistic masterpieces standing in the alcoves. The floor was a pristine, white fur carpet that swallowed her legs up to the knees. The mahogany desk at the far end of the room was empty. She stopped in the center of the rug. Then, the visual feed of her own eyes simply... hitched. There was no spatial distortion. No mana signature. No motion to track.

It was as if the transitional frames between one second and the next had been deleted from the universe's rendering engine. A figure was sitting behind the desk. The woman raised her eyes. A jolt of electricity violently seized Akkukataya's spine. She had met the supreme witches of past generations. She had stood before Mary Noeffler, the Head of the Grand Witches and the sitting Prime Minister of the global cabinet. She had exchanged pleasantries with the Imperial Princesses of the Milan'thirskaya bloodline.

She had even looked upon the 'Rex Mundi,' the World King herself. They were dust. The gaze rested upon her, impossibly heavy. It did not look at her. It looked through her, parsing her past, disassembling her present, cataloguing her future in a single, effortless sweep, with the complete indifference of a system scanning files it had no interest in retaining. Then the gaze shifted away. Without realizing she had moved, Akkukataya found her head lowering. The fierce, lifelong arrogance of her posture simply failed.

Her eyes fell to the white fur of the carpet, pinned there, physically incapable of bearing the weight required to look higher. But the pride of a woman who had never once been made to lower her gaze refused to simply stare at the floor. Her gaze crawled forward, inch by agonizing inch, fighting the oppressive gravity in the room. It traveled across the pristine white fur. It reached the edge of the mahogany desk. It stopped at the boots. From somewhere above her, the voice arrived. Careless.

An idle breeze disturbing a quiet room.

"What do you want?" Akkukataya's mind executed a total, catastrophic wipe. Words came from her mouth, bypassing her brain entirely, driven by an instinct she hadn't known she possessed:"Please take off your boots and step on my face." The instant the request left her lips, the universe shifted. When her consciousness rebooted, she was no longer standing. She was lying flat on her back on the white fur. She had no memory of falling. The room's air had misplaced itself entirely.

She stared directly upward into a pair of eyes the color of the starry void. The gravitational pull radiating from those black irises was not a metaphor. It was not a shift in ambient mana. It was a localized alteration to the concept of existence. Imagine floating in the freezing void of deep space, looking outward. With your naked eye, you see a star. You understand that a star is vast, distant, and indifferent. That understanding is safe. Now imagine the star blinks.

Something pulled back the veil of the warm study. A cosmic, indescribable horror revealed itself beneath the fabric of the room. Every biological alarm in her body began screaming. Run. Flee. Beg. Apologize for the disgusting, suicidal insolence. Do whatever it takes to survive the next ten seconds. And then, something else woke up. Something older, darker, and completely detached from the concept of survival. It reached out and coldly, ruthlessly smashed the panic button into silence. Akkukataya smiled.

The smile stretched across her face, tearing at the corners. Her pupils dilated until her irises were swallowed by black. Her chest heaved, pulling in frantic, shallow breaths despite the total absence of oxygen. The cosmic terror vanished. The starry void collapsed. The sensation of the white fur carpet rushed back against her spine. The warm, fragrant light of the orange minerals bathed the room. She was still lying on the carpet. She felt lighter than air. As if she were drifting on a cloud.

It was as if there had never been anyone in the study at all. Akkukataya pushed herself up. Her knees were entirely liquid. For the first time in her untouchable, pampered life, she had to plant her elbows into the floor just to drag her body into a kneeling position. A chick, living its entire existence inside an egg, knows only the claustrophobic white walls of its shell. Even as the light filters through the calcium, it does not know what light is. It only pecks at the boundaries, confused and confined.

And then, a strike of lightning hits the heart. The shell cracks. The universe pours in. She is my master, the thought resonated with absolute, terrifying clarity. I was born into this world solely to follow her. I have found a King. Akkukataya knelt in the white fur. Her hands pressed deep into the carpet. I will give everything to have her. The scent of orange minerals faded. The air-conditioned chill of the staging pavilion returned. Akkukataya remained bowed.

The blood from her arm dripped onto the tile, quiet and even. She did not need an explanation for the cold tea.

"Yes," Akkukataya said to the floor, the bow still not ending.

"I will do better next time." Next time would not be better. She already knew this. Ovelia never gave the same answer twice. The cold tea was this afternoon's incarnation of the cosmic void: a thing that existed beyond expectation, beyond prediction, beyond the possibility of being earned. To be a captive to that bewitching, irresistible charisma. To willingly lock a silver collar around her own neck, longing only for the other end of that fine silver chain to be fastened as an anklet around the foot of her King.