Chương 102: The Prologue That Should Not Be Read Yet

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 22 — Grand Finals, 01: 00 PM [Location]: Open Sea · Grand Masters Regional Qualifier Venue · Six-Part Miniature Arena The arena was shaking. A violent high-tier composite array detonated against a Mare Brume elite's water curtain. The shockwave rattled the blast-proof glass of the Royal Rosas preparation zone. Out there, Rhode, Bella, and Nino were busy executing a very particular kind of violence—clean, surgical, and frightening in how little they seemed to be exerting themselves.

Hathaway didn't look up. Her hands were cold. On her knees, a thick, parchment-bound manuscript radiated a chill through her uniform that had nothing to do with the arena's climate control. The Blind Scholar: Sleepless Nights Under the Umbrella. She had opened it to the Prologue. Only the Prologue. Alice was a top-tier novelist whose pen had been kissed by something considerably worse than a demon. Her bibliography spoke for itself. She wrote high-stakes, beautifully crafted, unapologetically toxic smut.

The Prologue contained no dialogue. It dropped the reader directly into a single, suffocatingly intimate scene.

"When the silver blindfold is tied tight, the world shrinks to the stifling canopy of the master suite.

"She cannot see the four pairs of eyes in the dark. She only feels them. A feverish cheek pressed against her inner thigh. The hot, territorial scrape of teeth against her nape. Four scholars who gladly burned their futures to ash, rotting inside her immaculate sanctuary just to drag her down with them.

"Sinking into the crest-embroidered silk, the Saint does not struggle. She simply tilts her neck, offering her pale skin to the permanent, overlapping bites. The bedroom is sealed airtight—a collar woven from a blood pact.

"And outside the heavy doors, in the freezing, pristine corridor of Wellington Manor...

"The flawless younger sister presses her burning cheek against the ancestral oak. The heavy iron latch has been thrown from the inside, locking her out of the very abyss she had sworn to drown in.

"She listens to the sounds echoing through her own home. Her immaculate gloves twist into fists. She wants to tear the door down. She wants to crawl into that tangled silk and offer her own throat to the scholars' teeth, just to share a single drop of her sister's defilement. She would. Gladly.

"But she cannot.

"So she will stand guard in the bitter chill instead. She will write the checks. She will keep the hallway clear so no one else can ever enter. A pathetic, shivering voyeur listening to the symphony of their shared corruption. Forever funding the magnificent, filthy ruination she is expressly forbidden from touching." Hathaway's finger rested on the edge of the page. She closed her eyes for a full three seconds. The master suite. Not a borrowed room. Not a hotel. The room that should have been Evangeline's.

I handed her a voyeuristic NTR framework, Hathaway thought, a distinct vein throbbing in her forehead, and this absolute lunatic used it to encode a genuine, apocalyptic prophecy. Alice's grand, theatrical Cassandra dilemma speech clicked into horrifying sense. It was a flawlessly encrypted warning. Encrypted by weaponized degeneracy. It was toe-curling. It was degenerate. It was exactly the kind of toxic, high-tension erotica that would sell out a convention booth in three minutes.

But underneath that thick, suffocating layer of smut... Hathaway understood it. All of it. Last night, after Alice had handed her this manuscript with those manic teal eyes and the smile of someone who had already decided the conversation was over, Hathaway had done the only thing her brain knew how to do when confronted with insufficient data: she had opened a search window and started typing names. One by one. The Witch World Information Network was famously, almost aggressively transparent.

You could find Grand Witch Heidi Lucent's birthday, her favorite tea brand, and her publicly disclosed weekly earnings if you looked. Hathaway had verified her own entry once out of morbid curiosity: it had her family registry, the record of her mana awakening, her academy enrollment, her monowheel patent, and her current position as Nino Lucent's lab assistant. Everything since transmigration, catalogued and available. She had typed Cecilia Wellington.

Academic papers, family registry as Wellington estate heir, honors from Minothnago Academy—a small, private institution on the border sea of Holheim, specializing in witch folklore and ruins archaeology. Mana data field: last updated four years ago. Wei Changqing. Minothnago Academy, same cohort. Folklore specialist. Mana data: last updated three years ago. Karula. Maria. Flandmira. Same. Same. Same. Five graduates of an obscure folklore school. All last known mana levels from three-to-four years ago.

All perfectly normal academic records. The kind of profiles that would make a talent scout close the tab without a second thought. This was, in every measurable way, impossible. In Witch society, there was no such thing as a hidden master. Potential was capital.

If you had the talent to one day threaten someone like Alice, the system found you, funded you, and catapulted you into elite circles—because certain resources you needed to actually claim a seat at that table were strictly monopolized, and the people who held those resources were always watching for talent worth investing in. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. This wasn't idealism. This was physics.

Power announces itself was the truest law in the Inner Sea. The cursed thorns on Alice's wrist were Legendary-tier work. Hathaway had confirmed that with Nino without fully explaining why she was asking. Legendary-tier meant it touched causality, time, the underlying architecture of reality itself. Someone had developed that curse from scratch. Which meant someone had first studied a vast library of existing legendary frameworks—because you could not invent at that level without a foundation.

It was the equivalent of a random civilian, with no ties to a national laboratory or a military dynasty, hand-building a functional nuclear warhead in her garage. Where did they get it? Not the Wellington family. Noble houses did not hand their foundational bedrock to outsiders. Hathaway's own branch of the Ludwig family guarded their single Legendary grimoire with their lives—and that was the outer ring.

If those four had been granted access to the Wellington archives, their public records would be deeply, structurally intertwined with the family's core assets. But they weren't. They were bound only to Cecilia. Which meant there was a secret channel. A shadow patron. A behemoth operating behind them that Hathaway had no way to name. Heidi, the 10th Seat, didn't have the administrative power—and if she had backed them, she would have announced it at brunch.

Irene, the 5th Seat, theoretically had the resources, but it contradicted her entire modus operandi. Irene owned her own franchise and openly flaunted a nineteen-year-old prodigy with eighty thousand mana to the press. If Irene had backed them, they wouldn't be ghosts. Someone, or something, with bottomless resources and absolute discretion had funded their isolation. The math resolved into an ugly shape. They hadn't just been "hanging out" in an ivory tower. The commercial draft system didn't allow for cliques.

No single club had the budget or roster space to draft five monsters capable of injuring an Arch-Witch simultaneously. If they had shown their true metrics, the system would have inevitably torn them apart, distributing them to different franchises across the Inner Sea. So they didn't show them. They actively evaded mana screenings. They refused to compete. They deliberately discarded the three to five most precious, golden years of a young Witch's rapid development cycle.

They stayed in the shadows, off the grid, acquiring restricted knowledge and apocalyptic power from an invisible patron, purely so they could eventually register an independent club where no one could ever separate them. For Witches, whose very biology was wired for hyper-rationality and constant evolution, this level of romanticism wasn't just extreme. It was a severe, systemic pathology. They had starved themselves of the world just to eat each other. And to finalize it, they had signed a Blood Pact.

Not a vow of trust, but a dead-man's switch. A guillotine built for five. Now Hathaway understood the hollow thousand-yard stare Victoria had worn that night. She understood why "Pests" was the only word available to her. Victoria had always been the anchor. But these four scholars hadn't just moved in: they had built a sealed, airtight ecosystem of obsession around her sister, and then deliberately locked the younger sister out.

Victoria was standing outside the heavy oak doors, listening to a nuclear-armed suicide cult devour the only person she refused to let go of. If the fragile, paranoid equilibrium of their collective obsession ever cracked, the pact's clauses would trigger a magical catastrophe at a scale Hathaway didn't have a frame of reference for. And Victoria couldn't dismantle an oath sworn by monsters stronger than herself.

She could only stand outside, unblinkingly, holding vigil for a bomb she was no longer allowed to defuse. Hathaway's chest ached in a way she didn't have a gaming term for. She looked up. Through the blast-proof glass, Rhode was bleeding from a cut at her temple, dark flame roaring as she drove the Mare Brume elite into the final corner. Bella's unsealed eye burned with manic exertion.

Nino calculated vectors in the background with the expression of someone who had briefly considered having emotions about this and decided against it. They're fighting for a ticket, Hathaway thought. A ticket to walk into that cage. The suffocating weight of the manuscript had almost made her forget the absolute, grounding reality of the arena. Death here was just a respawn. And the Witches bleeding on the other side of that glass were not victims walking into a horror story.

They made a living out of burning down insurmountable odds. In the ruthless arithmetic of competitive dueling, a perfectly sealed ecosystem of obsession wasn't a ghost story. It was a psychological profile. With a sharp, definitive snap, Hathaway closed the book. She pressed her palms flat against the leather cover, burying the abyss beneath her hands. Not yet. The crowd roar washed over her like water over stone. The horror story ends here. It was no longer a prophecy. It was a scouting report.

She would break Alice's degenerate warnings down into raw data, and she would find the structural flaw in Victoria's nightmare. But first, Rosas had to win today. She could wait.

"Royal Rosas secures the opening 3v3! Score: 1 to 0!" The commentator's roar tore through the arena amplifiers. Beyond the glass, the terrain was resetting. Rhode, Bella, and Nino rotated off the field—controlled breathing, sharp eyes, the specific expression of people who had executed exactly what they came to do and were already thinking about the next problem. Hathaway set the manuscript on the bench beside her. Because she had seen the silver-blue figure rise in the Mare Brume preparation zone.

[KOF Relay — Match One] Royal Rosas: Rhode von Ludwig vs. Mare Brume: Lee Alice Varro The crowd noise reached a register that was less "sound" and more "physical pressure." Alice stepped onto the field. She was dressed for war. A sleek tactical bodysuit beneath a dark, military-cut Witch's robe—functional, disciplined, completely overshadowed by the cursed thorns coiled around her left wrist, which were radiating a foul aura that made every nearby Witch's mana circulation feel slightly wrong.

Any Witch with decent perception could see the circuit damage from here. The soul was enduring constant tearing pressure. The clock on her was visible from thirty meters away. Her teal cat eyes weren't looking at Rhode across the field. They were tilted slightly upward, reflecting a landscape that didn't exist in this arena. Some interior terrain of her own. Her tail traced a slow, dangerous arc through the air behind her, unhurried in the way of someone who had finished being afraid long before today.

She was smiling. Not the smile of someone who had forgotten they were injured. The smile of someone who had decided the injury was entirely acceptable collateral damage for what came next. Across the field, Rhode removed her sunglasses. Her genuine, unsealed crimson pupils came into focus. There was no trash talk. No probing. In Rhode's tactical dictionary, there was exactly one entry for severely injured weather caster in a Rush-down meta: execute immediately, execute completely.

[What Royal Rosas Knew] Zero footage. No combat data. [Omniscient Rain] was near-Legendary drain—sustaining it on damaged circuits was, mathematically, dubious. Historical precedent: The Lantern Cat and weather synergy was historically catastrophic—but half a decade of targeted nerfs had theoretically regulated it to death. Attempting to survive a 25-second setup window against the current Rush-down meta, while severely injured, was mathematically suicidal. Conclusion: Elysia was the real threat.

Alice would be managed with extreme aggression, minimal resource spend, and the clock. [What Hathaway Knew Beyond] Alice's injury had been delivered across half a continent by Greed Umbrella's captain and Karula. Last night, Alice's energy had been manic to the point of unsettling—the specific mania of someone who has already decided to spend themselves down to zero and is looking forward to it. Pain, for a creator, was a stimulant.

It stripped away the performative chaos she usually wallowed in and left behind something exact, economical, and frightening. Her sustain time under these conditions should run longer than any model had accounted for. The referee's voice echoed through the arena amplifiers.

"Match One — BEGIN!"