Chương 118: The Protagonist with a Harem

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 24 — 03: 45 PM [Location]: White City · The Balor Valley Estate When Hathaway finally extracted herself from Nino's tactical analysis room, the afternoon sun had already slid toward evening. Her brain felt like eighty-nine pages of decimal-accurate combat critique had been cycled through it on a loop. She needed a hot meal, a quiet room, and zero additional information for the rest of the day.

She had almost made it to the club's front door when she ran a mental inventory of her spatial storage. Several bamboo-tube sets. Still undelivered. Right. She adjusted course. The closest stop was Surtrina's estate, which turned out to be the kind of address that stopped a person cold in the street and forced them to reconsider the foundational assumptions of residential property. Surtrina had not purchased a house.

She had purchased three adjacent plots of prime White City real estate, demolished whatever was there, and commissioned the ground to become a canyon. A miniature gorge now cut through urban soil where city buildings had been, flanked by a six-story Dragon Blood Sakura whose crimson petals drifted downward in the slow, continuous pattern of lit embers. At the bottom of the gorge, real magma bubbled sluggishly, radiating visible heat distortion.

Directly above it, a conjured slice of the Sky Sea poured a waterfall of crystal-clear water straight into the lava bed, converting on contact into dense, photogenic steam. The structural engineering required to prevent this from being illegal was presumably someone else's problem. Surtrina's actual nest was built into the cliff face halfway up, cantilevered over the gorge on the far side of the obsidian gate. Hathaway pressed the doorbell. Ten seconds. She counted them.

Then: a whoosh from directly above, a shadow in freefall, and a detonation that cracked the paving stones. BOOM. Dust billowed outward in a perfect radial ring, showering crimson sakura petals in every direction. Through the settling haze, the figure was kneeling in a textbook three-point landing: one fist buried in the cracked stone, head bowed, every line of the posture reading cinematic climax. So cool! Hathaway's hands flew to her mouth.

That is the most outrageously stylish entrance— The figure raised its head. Hathaway bit the inside of her cheek hard. The terrifying Balor Witch, who had just executed a landing worthy of a franchise finale, was wearing a thick, ridiculously fluffy Chibi Godzilla onesie. The oversized, plush Godzilla tail was currently swishing back and forth with a heavy, lethal momentum, completely filled out and animated by her actual Balor tail sheathed inside it.

The hood featured two large cartoon eyes above Surtrina's own currently murderous glare, and a row of soft felt dorsal plates running down her back. Significant bedhead. A few involuntary embers drifted off her shoulders. Her molten-gold eyes radiated the pure, concentrated fury of someone whose rest had been violently terminated. Then those eyes found who was standing outside the gate. The fury dissolved. The tectonic pressure in the air went quiet.

Surtrina's lips pressed together, worked slightly, and arrived at something that functioned as a smile.

"Good afternoon," she said, voice rough with sleep.

"Come in. I'll make tea." The interior, reached by a sleek transparent elevator carved into the rockface, was an architectural reversal of the volcanic canyon outside. Expensive dark-wood furniture. Heat-resistant textiles. Rare fire-attribute botanical specimens in glass cases. The entire space was meticulously curated, quietly devastating in its cost. Also absurdly rich, Hathaway noted internally, and updated her mental map of the city's financial landscape.

She retrieved the bamboo tube set and placed it in Surtrina's hands.

"I was traveling recently. A local specialty. Please accept it." Surtrina took it. For a long moment, she simply looked at the gem-sand plant, its roots threaded through luminous mineral powder in its small glass bowl. Something softened in the molten eyes. She stood without a word, walked to her display cabinet, moved a potted specimen that practically emitted market value to the side, and placed Hathaway's cheap, glowing sand-plant directly in the center position under the best light.

She adjusted it until it sat exactly right. Then she turned, pulled a thumb-sized silver-glowing rune stone from a nearby tray, and pressed it into Hathaway's palm.

"Return gift." Hathaway looked down. A [Rune of Resistance]. She clocked the value automatically: approximately five thousand Solars. The souvenir set had cost her roughly the price of a decent lunch. What hit her wasn't the exchange rate. It's normal. She held the rune stone with both hands. No temporal crimes embedded in the material. No mandatory chuunibyou lore or unskippable abyssal roleplay settings attached to it. No biological tissue of any kind.

Just a clean, high-value, sane magical item from a person operating within the expected parameters of carbon-based social behavior. After Rhode's curse tape, Bella's Eclipse starter pack, Alucard's pocket nuke, and Yenna's anatomically sourced headphones, the sheer unremarkable safety of this transaction hit Hathaway somewhere in the chest that she hadn't been expecting. They drank some of the sugarcane wine together. They talked briefly about the upcoming Main Tournament. Hathaway thanked her classmate and left.

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 24 — 05: 15 PM [Location]: White City · Central Medical District · Witch General Hospital · Third Floor Since the qualifier finals, Alice had been confined to the hospital's VIP ward. Fighting through a high-intensity match while bearing an active, vicious curse had taken a severe toll on her mana circuits, and she had not yet recovered sufficiently for discharge.

The ward had reportedly been under siege every day since the story broke: Witches arriving in numbers, ostensibly to visit, functionally to extract information about the greater storm cat colony's whereabouts. Alice had banned all visitors. Her team held the corridor like a garrison. Hathaway presented Alice's personal calling card at the security checkpoint. The guards stood aside immediately. She knocked on the heavy oak door.

"Come in!" Alice didn't sound like a patient. She sounded like she had somewhere to be. Hathaway pushed the door open. Alice was sitting upright in her hospital bed wearing a patient gown, gesturing with a pen. She was talking to someone in the visitor's chair beside the bed. In the far corner of the room, a second figure sat quietly with a book open on her lap, golden hair catching the afternoon light from the window.

"My dear muse!" Alice beamed, waving Hathaway over. Her cat ears perked straight up, and her twin tails thumped a cheerful, rhythmic beat against the hospital sheets.

"Perfect timing. You finished the manuscript, yes? Thoughts? Impressions? Be honest." Hathaway didn't answer. She had stopped in the doorway. Her lungs declined to operate. Her gaze had crossed the room and collided with the Witch in the visitor's chair. Black hair. Pale skin, almost translucent. Eyes of a dark gold that didn't resemble precious metal but rather the rusted, oxidized gold leaf on a forgotten sacrificial altar: something that had once been luminous and was now a record of time and decay.

A heavy black robe layered exactly like mourning attire. Sitting there quietly, she looked more like a ghost than the concept of a ghost. As she turned her head toward the door, something moved in the shadows pooling beneath her chair. Not deliberately. Just present. Sharing air with her felt thick and viscous, the sticky, sourceless quality of accumulated bad fortune crawling up the spine. The specific, skin-level dread of hearing, in the quiet of a dead night, the sound of an animal with a crushed throat.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. On Hathaway's shoulder, the tiny Frost Lantern Cat went rigid. It let out a microscopic, voiceless squeak. In a blur of ice-blue light, it scrambled frantically down her collar and dove headfirst into her deepest pocket, aggressively burrowing into the seam until it was nothing but a tight, trembling ice-cube. Hathaway understood. If she could fit inside her own pocket, she would have done the exact same thing.

The 8th Seat of the High Council. [The Curse] Sonia. Hathaway's eyes drifted down to the hem of the black robe. A loose thread. Just hanging there. She cleared her throat.

"I came to deliver a gift." At the intrusion of an unfamiliar voice, Sonia's oppressive stillness fractured. Her shoulders drew inward by a fraction. She looked away, exuding the acute, unmistakable discomfort of a dedicated shut-in intercepted by the outside world.... I'm the one who should be uncomfortable. The sheer absurdity of it cut through the dread like a blade. The crushing weight on Hathaway's chest unlocked by approximately thirty percent.

Alice, immune to the atmospheric disturbance, swept a hand grandly.

"Sonia, this is the muse I've been telling you about. The source of my latest inspiration. A veritable rising star, Miss Hathaway von Ludwig." She turned to Hathaway.

"Miss Ludwig, Lady Sonia. My temporary attending physician." Sonia gave a small, stiff nod. Her voice had the faintly displaced quality of hearing someone speak from the other side of a wall.

"A pleasure to meet you, Miss Ludwig." A pause.

"Ah. If my aura makes you nauseous, please feel free. The waste bin is to your left." Hathaway took a deep breath. Declined politely.... Even though, standing in this room, she actually did feel slightly nauseous.

"You arrived at the perfect moment," Alice said, patting her blanket, as if Hathaway had an appointment.

"We were just discussing Wei." Wei. Wei Changqing. Greed Umbrella. Holheim.

"The curse," Sonia said. Her clipboard came up, and every trace of social discomfort left her face instantly. She looked at the medical chart the way a scholar looks at a research paper they've read twenty times and still find rewarding.

"I have been treating Alice since the close of the qualifiers. Over my career, I have catalogued exactly seven thousand and forty-one documented curse variants." A pause. Something lit in the dark-gold eyes that had no business appearing in a clinical conversation.

"This one is not among them." Beside her, Alice made a quiet, deeply satisfied sound. One of her tails curled lazily over the blanket, the tip flicking with pure, smug vindication.

"The foundational architecture is conventional," Sonia continued, her pen moving.

"A standard binding matrix. Nothing exceptional in isolation. But overlaid on top of it are two suppression channels running on entirely different frequencies. They appear to cancel each other out." Hathaway's game-designer brain caught the trap logic before she finished processing the sentence.

"So the interference reads as a natural cancellation."

"To an inattentive diagnostician, yes." Sonia's speaking pace climbed.

"If you attempt to neutralize the dominant channel to clear the apparent interference, the suppressed channel loses its counterweight. It activates at maximum capacity." She set the pen down.

"Triple potency."

"A diagnostic trap."

"I fell into it on my first treatment." Sonia sighed. The specific variety of someone who had just lost a game worth losing.

"I identified it on the second pass."

"Our genius still managed to leave a mark on me," Alice added, gesturing at her bandaged arm with the relaxed pride of someone showing off a souvenir.

"Marginally." Sonia turned a page.

"The outer layer presents an entirely different problem. Every time I successfully remove a fragment of the curse, the matrix archives my neutralization method. The same approach cannot be applied twice."

"It learns."

"It patents." Sonia's pen stopped. The last trace of professional restraint evaporated. What replaced it was something Hathaway recognized from a particular breed of game developer at an industry conference: someone who had encountered something so technically impressive that they had simply stopped pretending to be objective.

"The mind behind this matrix possesses an exceptional intuition for asymmetric layering: the counter-balancing channels, the archival self-repair mechanism, the deliberate diagnostic misdirection." She paused.

"Each component is original. The interactions between components are original. I have never encountered a similar foundational framework in any literature, including restricted archive material." She looked up.

"The conventional designation of 'Legendary-tier' is technically defensible. It describes the outer shell accurately. It says nothing about what is inside." The outer shell. Hathaway went dead silent. Nino had evaluated this curse from the outside. Her conclusion, which had already sounded like a death sentence, was "Legendary-tier." But now, the 8th Seat of the High Council, the undisputed ceiling of the discipline, was personally confirming that "Legendary" only covered the packaging.

What lay beneath was a super-legendary composite curse. A Grand-Witch-level masterpiece, deployed by the youngest player on the opposing team. Haha, Hathaway thought, her brain reaching that specific state of absolute tranquility that only arrives at the very bottom of terminal despair. Good news: I just witnessed the birth of a generational anomaly. Bad news: We are her next opponents.

From the hospital bed, Alice exhaled slowly, the long, satisfied sound of someone who had been waiting for a particular verdict for a long time.

"She's exactly who I thought she was," Alice said. In the far corner of the room, the girl with the golden hair glanced up from her book. Her emerald eyes met Alice's across the room. One quiet second. Hathaway watched. The loyal Vice-Ace. Still here. Still steady. She clearly disapproves. But she loves her too much to stand in the way. Elysia looked back down at her book. Sonia looked up from the clipboard.

"How old is she?" The question had the texture of a dedicated nerd demanding lore confirmation.

"Twenty-three," Alice said. Sonia went quiet for one full second.

"Remarkable." Hathaway looked at the corner. At the angelic Vice-Ace. The pure, self-sacrificing knight who had shattered her own ribcage to pave the way for her captain. Please, Hathaway thought, the silent plea of a person drowning and spotting a plank. Please be the one rational person in this room who is actually upset about this. Please. Elysia gently closed her book.

"The matrix itself is brilliant," she said, in a voice of absolute, peaceful composure.

"But the synchronized projection between Miss Wei and Miss Karula: mana woven in perfect synchronicity across half a continent. The level of mutual attunement required is extraordinary." She paused.

"The dramatic weight of that bond was too significant to leave undocumented. I asked Alice to dedicate a chapter to it." Hathaway's expression went carefully, precisely blank.... Which chapter. Her brain moved through the manuscript very slowly. Specifically. Which. Chapter.

"The one after the blood pact scene," Alice supplied helpfully, her cat ears twitching with unapologetic, chaotic glee. The three-way— Hathaway stood by the door and looked at the room. Sonia, the 8th Seat, enchanted. Alice, the patient, glowing with vindicated pride. Elysia, the pure-hearted martyr, happily curating her captain's smut. She had walked into a Greed Umbrella fan symposium. She was the only person in this room who wanted them to lose. Hathaway set Alice's bamboo tube set on the bedside table.

"A local specialty." Alice's face lit up. She reached under her pillow immediately and produced a thick, neatly bound stack of paper, shoving it into Hathaway's hands.

"My return gift. The newest chapters. Hot off the press." Hathaway looked down at the manuscript. She had read enough of Alice's highly explicit literary terrorism to last three lifetimes. She accepted it like a bomb disposal expert receiving a live grenade. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a small, defeated voice noted that she was probably going to read the entire thing anyway. Just in case. She then approached the corner. Elysia accepted the bamboo tube with flawless grace.

In return, she offered Hathaway a small, exquisitely embroidered bookmark.

"A small token of appreciation," Elysia said, her smile as radiant and immaculate as ever. Hathaway thanked her politely. Then looked down at the delicate embroidery on the bookmark. It was a ritual crest. Specifically, the crest of the Blood Pact. The official chapter seal for Chapter 14. Hathaway's soul briefly left her body, hovered near the ceiling, and reluctantly returned. She carefully, mechanically, slid the bookmark into her pocket.

She turned to the visitor's chair and offered the remaining two sets to the 8th Seat.

"Lady Sonia," Hathaway said, keeping her voice perfectly steady.

"One for you. And if you see Spectra, I'd be grateful if you could pass the second along to her." Sonia looked at the two sets. She accepted them. Then, she hesitated. Her dark-gold eyes lowering slightly, clearly searching her inventory for an appropriate return gift. Hathaway's internal threat-detection system began screaming. Please no, Her palms beginning to sweat. She braced herself for an amputated monkey's paw or a jar of crystallized despair. Sonia reached into her robe and pulled out a dessert box.

Hathaway blinked. It was a small, aggressively luxurious pastry box. Intricate gold leaf detailing, velvet ribbon, the kind of packaging that practically radiated high-society exclusivity. It was so violently out of place in the hands of the gloomy, ghost-like 8th Seat. Sonia held it out. Her posture resembled an awkward adult handing premium candy to a trick-or-treater just to make the social interaction end.

"Take it," Sonia said, her voice muffled slightly by her collar.

"It's from Irene's personal dessert vault. Top-tier." Hathaway took the box. It was heavy. It smelled of vanilla and expensive magic. And then, a piece of deep-lore trivia surfaced from her memory: Ghost Witches periodically bypassed all known security systems to infiltrate Grand-Witches' private dessert vaults, held lavish uninvited banquets, and left equivalent Gold Solars on the empty trays. Hathaway stared at the luxurious pastry box in her hands.

She was functionally an accomplice to a high-profile magical burglary.

"Thank you," Hathaway whispered. She bowed to Sonia. She nodded to Alice. She nodded to Elysia. She turned toward the door to excuse herself, desperate to leave. But she couldn't. The doorframe was suddenly gone. It had been replaced by a wall of impossibly thick, stark black-and-white fur. A delightfully round belly, pulsing with an indistinguishable, churning mixture of pure white and azure light, was actively squeezing its way into the room from the corridor. Hathaway froze in her tracks.

Her gaze locked onto it. Before she could compromise her dignity, the massive beast dissolved in a cascade of lightning and mist. Where the giant cat had been, a petite girl now stood, roughly a meter and fifty centimeters tall. Heavy, snowy-white hair, tipped with cyan-blue, cascaded over her shoulders. Despite her diminutive height, her figure was undeniably excellent.

Perched atop her head was a pair of prominent "mountain ears"—tall, majestic, and signature to the storm cats—facing forward, while two cloud-like, impossibly fluffy tails trailed behind her. She wore a bare-shouldered, semi-transparent cyan satin robe. Flowing, dynamic patterns of lightning, thunderclouds, and water waves shifted constantly across the fabric. Her bare feet hovered just above the floor tiles, like newly melting snow: elegantly pale, faintly luminous, and delicately moist.

"Meow-awoo," she chirped. The sound came deep from her throat, accompanied by a bright chiming. The ringing came from her left thigh. A garter was strapped there, adorned with six gemstone chains, each terminating in a bell that radiated distinct, Legendary-tier magical pressure. The girl bounded across the room and happily pounced onto Alice's bed, burying her face against Alice's side and kissing the palm of her hand.

"Ah," Alice beamed, naturally scratching the girl's massive ears.

"This is Katdoastin." Hathaway stood by the door. She looked slowly at Elysia in the corner, absorbed in her book again, with the serene composure of someone who curated smut for a living. Then she looked at Katdoastin, the Inner Sea's most coveted being, currently treating Alice's side like a place she had claimed years ago. Hathaway's expression went perfectly flat. Inside her pocket, her tiny Frost Lantern Cat popped its head out.

It took one look at the Alpha Gteater Storm Cat, let out a starstruck, desperate"mew", and immediately tried to scramble out. Hathaway's hand clamped down over the pocket, shoving the tiny, struggling furball back inside. Absolutely not. She physically wrestling the vibrating ice-cat in her pocket, expression unchanged. I refuse to let my starter pet defect to a higher-tier ecosystem. She stepped out into the corridor and pulled the heavy oak door shut behind her.

In the quiet of the hallway, she stood still for exactly one second. Eighty-nine pages of combat critique. A Godzilla onesie. A super-legendary curse matrix. A bookmark for Chapter 14. A box of contraband pastries. And a protagonist with a harem. She turned toward the elevator. Time to go home.