Chương 84: Dropping the Modder Tag

[Time]: Day 64–66 [Location]: Dormitory [Golden Bough] · First Floor The first crate arrived at 8: 00 AM on Day 64 via sky-island logistics: two heavy, multi-barrel rotary cannons wrapped in pristine pink packaging, resting in crushed velvet like they were jewelry. Printed across the side of the ammunition box in bubbly, cheerful cursive: [Alice in Wonderland: Punish Evil & Promote Good · Civilian Rotary Cannons]"The most reliable, most harmless firearm manufacturer in the Inner Sea!

Safe enough for childhood games of house! ♥" Hathaway checked the spec sheet twice. One hundred and fifty armor-piercing rounds per second. Sufficient to reduce a Palebone Dragon to an aerosolized mist in under four seconds. Safe enough for playing house. She stared at the pink heart at the end of the slogan for a very long time. What is the childhood development trajectory of this species. Then she picked up her mana-wrench and got to work.

For three days, the ground floor of Golden Bough sounded like a heavy industry shipyard. Hathaway didn't try to fold space. She didn't build a pocket dimension or reverse causality. She fell back on the oldest, most reliable logic of her previous life: If you want to make money, don't invent a luxury yacht for the top one percent. Invent something the ninety-nine percent desperately need and have never been given. In the Witch ecosystem, the ninety-nine percent weren't Witches. They were the land-dwellers.

The mortals who lived on the ground of the Inner Sea of Stars, who couldn't fly, couldn't cast, and were currently playing what amounted to a survival horror game every time they needed to travel between cities—while the apex predators in the sky cheerfully forgot they existed. They had money. They had purchasing power. What they did not have was a vehicle that wouldn't get flipped by a Plumed Dragon on a random Tuesday morning. So. We build them a tank.

By the evening of Day 66, the vehicle occupied a frankly unreasonable amount of the living room floor. It was a single, massive wheel—nearly three meters wide. The outer rim was forged from a continuous loop of transparent impact-resistant metal, surface-textured with aggressive tread-like grips for mountains, craters, and the crushed skulls of magical beasts.

Suspended within it was the inner chassis: matte-black specialized steel enclosed by reinforced ballistic glass, open-flanked with retractable meter-high armor plating. Dashboard: one heavy steering yoke, six control toggles, two weapons panels. Flanks: the Alice in Wonderland cannons, currently painted a cheerful pastel pink, each on a 190-degree independent traverse bracket. Combined fire coverage: 380 degrees. Even the 2. 6-meter blind spot directly in front of the wheel fell within the converging crossfire.

And under the steering column, hidden behind a small panel: the thing that had kept Hathaway up until 3: 00 AM for the last two nights. The mechanism she hadn't told anyone about. [Time]: Day 66, Late Evening [Location]: Dormitory [Golden Bough] · First Floor For three weeks, the amber sconces had been burning. Every night.

Steady and warm, casting their familiar glow across the Gothic living room with its heavy velvet drapes and expensive carpet—now partially covered by blast-proof sound-dampening mats and a truly impressive quantity of machine grease. Click. The front door opened. Victoria Wellington stepped into the entryway. Her spine was perfectly straight, her grey coat immaculate.

But her ice-blue unfocused eyes carried the specific, hollow thousand-yard stare of a surgeon walking off a seventy-two-hour emergency shift—not because the operation was a success, but because the ward had burned down, the triage had failed, and she was simply the last one to leave the ashes. She was currently running on aristocratic stubbornness and pure, concentrated spite alone. She crossed the threshold. She stopped.

Parked dead in the center of her living room, directly on the hand-woven rug, was a massive, aggressively industrial black monowheel radiating the combined scent of machine oil, hot metal, and pastel pink civilian armaments. The amber sconces were glowing. They had been left on. Every night, for the entire three weeks, someone had simply kept the lights burning. Hathaway's head popped up from behind the chassis.

She had two streaks of black grease across her cheek and a mana-wrench in one hand, and the moment she saw Victoria, she essentially turned into a golden retriever who had been home alone for three weeks and had just watched the front door open.

"You're back!" Victoria's gaze traveled from the sconces. To Hathaway. To the three-meter-wide war machine currently threatening the structural integrity of her imported rug.

"It looks," Victoria said, her aristocratic diction calibrated to the precise frequency of devastating understatement, "like exercise equipment designed for a particularly massive rodent."

"It is the geometric pinnacle of omnidirectional defense," Hathaway corrected, with the righteous dignity of someone whose genius had just been catastrophically misread. She slapped the transparent outer rim. It let out a deep, satisfying resonance.

"The spherical profile eliminates armor blind spots entirely. The tread pattern handles all terrain classifications. The dual cannon traverse covers three hundred and eighty degrees of—""Your project submission is tomorrow morning," Victoria said.

"Nine AM. I know."

"I trust you have prepared the patent documentation."

"It's on the table." Victoria stood in the warm amber light for a moment longer. Then she walked past the wheel—heels clicking precisely on the unmatted floorboard—and paused at the foot of the stairs. She did not look back.

"Good night, Hathaway." [Time]: Day 67, Wednesday, 09: 00 AM [Location]: Yggdrasil Academy · Magitech Testing Grounds The final project exhibition was, as expected, a localized violation of several natural laws. Nino Lucent sat behind the evaluator's podium, grading stylus spinning with the lazy menace of a loaded weapon. Her dead grey eyes tracked each presentation with the professional indifference of a demolitions expert watching someone else's controlled detonation.

At the front of the field, the blonde Human Witch—the Hentai Scholar—stood with her completed [Bio-Arcane Neural Weaver] wired directly into her spinal column. As she demonstrated, three massive Tier-3 Walls of Fire erupted across the testing ground in complete silence. No chant. No gesture. Zero-frame startup. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

She was also flushed a vivid crimson, breathing in sharp, involuntary bursts, and arching her spine with every cast due to the "mana feedback loop."

"The neural-link latency is sub-zero," Nino evaluated, clipboard raised.

"But your nerve-stimulation matrix will deep-fry the user's cerebral cortex if they lose focus mid-cast. [B+]. Next." The Purgatory Fortress Witch dropped a heavy bronze door covered in gravity-inversion runes onto the dirt, stepped backward into it, and physically disappeared into a 500-square-meter sub-basement suspended directly beneath her True Form, erasing her entire physical mass from the Academy's property scanners.

"Blatant tax evasion," Nino noted, ticking the box.

"Highly marketable. [B+]." Hathaway watched from the sidelines, comfortably wedged in her established micro-climate. On her left, Surtrina stood like a towering monument of polished obsidian, casually radiating a dry forty-five-degree heat. On her right, Spectra slouched in her black lace mourning dress, functioning as a localized, calorie-draining heat-sink. Both had already presented. Surtrina's thermal demonstration had rendered one entire section of the testing ground structurally non-recyclable.

Nino had sighed, pinched the bridge of her nose, and marked down a [B+]. Spectra, conversely, had presented a conceptual contraption that produced four seconds of a silence distinctly different from awe. Nino had written a grade without speaking. [A].

"Wellington." Victoria stepped forward. She didn't bring a bronze door or a screaming neural harness. She walked to the presentation zone with the unhurried certainty of someone who had already solved the problem and was merely performing the formality of explaining it to everyone else. From her coat pocket, she produced a single, densely-inscribed mithril plate and placed it onto the standardized two-ton iron carriage chassis provided by the Academy.

With a flick of her gloved finger, the two-ton iron block floated smoothly off the dirt—bobbing gently, weightlessly, like a cork in still water.

"The [Wellington-7 Aerostatic Mass-Reduction Matrix]." Victoria's voice was cool and perfectly modulated.

"The fundamental bottleneck in sky-island transit is not propulsion. It is weight. Standard levitation arrays suffer exponential mana decay under commercial loads, requiring teams of three to four griffins per carriage. The entire logistics chain—maintenance, feed, infrastructure—inflates accordingly." She gestured to the effortlessly floating chassis.

"My matrix restructures the baseline mana-flow architecture. Single-griffin operation for a full-sized commercial carriage is now viable." A low murmur moved through the crowd. Not applause—something more serious. The sound of students doing rapid mental arithmetic and arriving at the same staggering answer.

"Furthermore." Victoria produced a second projection.

"Ecological surveys of the Oasis Desert folded space recently catalogued the Sand-Strider avian. High burst capacity, notoriously poor endurance—previously dismissed as commercially useless. With this matrix, their stamina is no longer the limiting factor. They become the cost-optimal mount for intra-city transit." The testing ground went quiet with a specific quality—the silence of students watching an industry monopoly being born in real time. Beside Hathaway, the micro-climate stalled.

Surtrina's ambient temperature spiked by two degrees—the Balor equivalent of an apex predator recognizing a genuine, systemic threat entering the territory. On Hathaway's right, Spectra's pale fingers gripped the fabric of her lace dress, her movements going entirely still. The Ghost Witch stared at the floating chassis with the silent reverence of an audiophile witnessing a mathematically perfect soundwave. Nino's stylus stopped spinning.

"You haven't just invented a rune," Nino said. Her tone was the measured, almost reluctant precision of someone confirming math she had already checked twice.

"You have restructured the economic foundation of urban logistics. A paradigm shift. Pure structural optimization. Flawless execution." She made a single mark on her clipboard." [A]." Victoria offered a microscopic, perfectly executed curtsy, and stepped down. She optimized the sky. We really are the ultimate dev team, Hathaway thought, watching her roommate's retreating back.

"Ludwig." Nino's voice cut through the murmurs.

"You are up." Hathaway pressed the release mechanism on her spatial ring. BOOM — CLANG. A two-ton, purely mechanical, completely mana-less black steel monowheel slammed onto the presentation stage. No causality reversal. No spatial folding. No neural interface. Just an unapologetic, heavily armed industrial wheel gleaming under the morning light, with two pastel-pink civilian autocannons mounted on its flanks like accessories. The entire testing ground went dead silent.

It was the specific silence of watching someone bring a diesel tractor to a gathering of literal reality-benders. Nino looked at the wheel.

"Ludwig." Her voice was freezing.

"I believe I stated explicitly that I did not want to see children's toys." A pause.

"What is this. An oversized hamster wheel."

"The [All-Terrain Armored Monowheel]," Hathaway said, with total composure.

"Target demographic: land-dwellers." Several Witches in the front row leaned forward, tilting their heads in synchronized confusion.

"Mortals possess disposable income and require inter-city transportation," Hathaway continued, pulling up the topographical overlay.

"Current options—buses, griffin-carriages—are fixed-route or prohibitively expensive. When mortals travel independently, they are routinely killed by Level-1 drakes and wild beasts. That is the market gap." She slapped the outer rim.

"The spherical profile ignores all terrain. Falls into craters—rolls out. Rams into beasts—keeps spinning. Zero armor blind spots." She pressed a button. CLANK. Both autocannons deployed from the flanks simultaneously.

"Dual Alice in Wonderland civilian cannons," Hathaway introduced them with a completely straight face.

"One hundred and fifty rounds per second. One hundred and ninety-degree independent traverse each. Three hundred and eighty degrees of combined coverage. Sufficient to shred any Level-1 creature attempting highway robbery." The crowd stared at the"Safe enough for playing house" inscription on the ammo crate. From the sidelines, Surtrina's molten gold eyes tracked the traverse brackets. She completely ignored the pastel paint and the trivial caliber, her brain instantly mapping the ballistic geometry instead.

An inescapable, mathematically flawless 380-degree spherical kill-zone. Her expression didn't change, but the towering Balor Witch leaned forward, just a fraction of an inch. While the combat specialists silently appreciated the tactical carnage, the rest of the class was having a completely different revelation.

"Oh, that's why my mortal pen-pal started crying and hyperventilating when I mailed her my old rotary cannon for her birthday!" Yenna suddenly gasped from the front row. Her golden fox ears perked up with terrifyingly wholesome enlightenment"It's all about the packaging! You can't just hand them raw artillery—it's too intimidating! But if you bolt the guns to a fortified rolling bunker with a steering wheel, it stops being a terrifying threat and becomes a survival tool!

Give them a thick enough steel box to hide inside, and they won't just stop crying—they'll start demanding larger calibers! They'll finally understand the romance of overwhelming firepower!" It was a historic breakthrough in inter-species cultural assimilation.

"Wait," the Purgatory Fortress Witch interrupted. Her eyes narrowed as she did rapid, ruthless mental arithmetic.

"If we just bolt our literal nursery-school discards onto steel wheels... we can clear out centuries of industrial surplus and sell it to the land-dwellers at a premium as military-grade survival hardware?!" A unified murmur of deep, academic respect swept through the students. They looked at Hathaway with the reverence Witches usually reserved for a flawless commercial monopoly. She hadn't just built a vehicle.

She had simultaneously solved the cross-species socialization gap and opened a wildly lucrative pipeline for industrial surplus. Nino stared at the pink heart painted on the ammo crate. For a rare, fleeting second, the terrifying professor was actually struck silent by the cold commercial elegance of monetizing kindergarten defense systems for the mortal demographic.

"The terrain logic is sound," Nino finally said, her dead grey eyes shifting back to Hathaway.

"The firepower configuration is... adequate for its intended market." She made a mark on her clipboard.

"However. This is essentially an armored shell with existing firearms bolted to the flanks. There is no original technical contribution to arcane engineering. [C+]."

"That's not the invention, Professor." Hathaway pressed the hidden latch beneath the steering column. Click. The main steering yoke retracted. The primary brakes engaged. From the passenger console, a tiny palm-sized miniature steering wheel deployed—sized precisely for small paws—accompanied by a glowing red emergency beacon.

"The [Lantern Cat Emergency Protocol]." Nino's stylus stopped moving.

"If the mortal driver loses consciousness mid-transit—concussion, shockwave trauma, sudden incapacitation—the biometric sensors lock the main controls and transfer to the secondary console." Hathaway pointed to the miniature wheel.

"Every mortal traveler carries a Lantern Cat. Lantern Cats don't faint from kinetic impacts. The moment this deploys, the navigation auto-locks to the nearest sky-island medical outpost. The Lantern Cat holds the wheel. The vehicle drives itself to safety while broadcasting a continuous SOS." Silence. Dead, absolute silence. Nino stared at the tiny steering wheel. One full second passed. Why would anyone design a system for when the driver loses control? Witches possessed passive mana shielding.

A Level-1 dragon's shockwave was not a threat to any Witch. Therefore, in the history of Witch vehicle engineering, no one had ever designed around the premise that the driver might fail—because for the intended demographic, that variable did not exist.

"You designed a product," Nino said quietly, almost to herself, "that successfully operates when the consumer is physically incapable of operating it."

"Yes, Professor." On the sidelines, Spectra unconsciously pressed a pale hand flat against the center of her own chest. For the first time all morning, the corner of her pale lips curved upward by a millimeter. A few paces away, Victoria Wellington had gone completely still. Not the measured stillness of aristocratic composure. The kind of stillness that arrives when the next motion simply fails to come.

Her unfocused ice-blue eyes—which had no mechanism for registering non-magical objects—were pointed directly at the cat-sized steering wheel. Her white-gloved hand rested at her side. Hathaway didn't remember seeing it move there. The grading stylus descended. The [C+] was crossed out with a single, decisive stroke." [A+]." Nino set down the stylus.

"Collect the patent declaration forms from my office before end of day. You have just opened a revenue stream that will comfortably feed you for the rest of your natural life, Ludwig." Hathaway exhaled. Somewhere in her internal architecture, a single word quietly stopped applying. Modder. It slid off her like she'd already filed the paperwork.