Chương 126: Skipping the Tutorial for a Survival Horror Game

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 35 — Evening [Location]: White City · The Wisteria The two items in Hathaway's coat pockets were doing the quiet, load-bearing work of her entire confidence tonight. Left pocket: the [Ring of the Dark Sun], dark luster, passive amplifier. A Tier-4 invisibility source fed through it became genuine Tier-6 stealth. Right pocket: the [Arcane Detonation Bloom], glass petals webbed with compressed arcane circuitry. Half a standard arcane nuke.

Blast radius eighty percent narrower than the standard model. Lethality at ground zero only marginally lower. She had specifically been told this was for daily self-defense. Tier-6 stealth and a glass flower that vaporized everything within a controlled radius: theoretically, massively overpowered for the stated mission of delivering a gift to a roommate. She stepped through the revolving doors. Her heart dropped within the first three steps. Something was wrong.

Hathaway stopped dead, maintaining her stealth, and felt exactly like a protagonist who had skipped the entire tutorial and walked directly into the opening cinematic of a survival horror game, specifically the type of protagonist who clearly had "NPC" written into their narrative DNA and was about to confirm it. It was too quiet. This was not the quiet of "hotel closed for the evening." Every chandelier in the lobby blazed at full operational capacity.

The climate control maintained a precise, comfortable temperature. The diffusers at the front desk released an expensive white tea fragrance into the empty air with perfect consistency. The hardware was all running. The people were all gone. Not slacking in the back. Not on a dinner break. Evacuated. Methodically. Completely. Zero occupancy by design. Standing in the center of the lobby, Hathaway ran a rapid situational analysis.

Scenario A: Greed Umbrella purchased exclusive access and gave the staff a generous evening off. Scenario B: Every single employee has been systematically removed. The building is currently the most heavily fortified non-military installation in White City. She walked directly into it, alone, at night, armed with an arcane nuke. She had prepared tonight under Scenario A.

A cold, logical circuit in her mind immediately noted: Who books a luxury hotel, clears out every staff member, and converts the entire building into a forward operating base? She actually knew the answer. She had read the obsessive, hyper-detailed psychological profiles Alice had penned about them. She knew the twisted, paranoid logic required to maintain a total intelligence blackout for years.

And she understood exactly what kind of monsters it took to stand perfectly still, watch an opposing team dramatically self-destruct in the opening 0. 5 seconds, and then calmly absorb the remaining fight with the composure of someone merely finishing a shift. Tonight's first lesson: reading a fanatical Witch's deep-dive manuscript about someone's paranoia, and being physically prepared to face that paranoia in a dark hotel lobby, were two entirely different things.

She had moved fast—mobilized the moment evening fell. Not even late. Covering a luxury high-rise from lobby to penthouse pushed theoretical engineering bandwidth to the edge of what five Witches could reasonably accomplish in a single operational window.... Probably. Hathaway appended the word to her thoughts. Her hand found the glass flower in her right pocket without any conscious instruction. She was here to bring a gift to her roommate. Just that.

Two routes: The elevator, currently operational, standing ready at the far end of the lobby. In a building containing, at present, exactly six living occupants who had already demonstrated an absolute need for environmental control, a self-operating elevator was not a subtle surveillance node. It was a megaphone:"Infiltrator in transit. Floor ascending. Please prepare appropriate measures." The stairwell door, to her left.

Risk profile: ten flights, extended exposure time, meaningful probability of stepping on something quietly embedded in the concrete at every landing.... I really wish this world had a save point. She turned toward the stairwell. The fire door swung shut. The motion-sensing lights flickered on immediately as her presence—invisible, but still possessing mass and weight—registered on the sensor. Right. Physics had not been patched out. Lights turning on in sequence inside a stairwell with nothing visibly inside them.

She climbed quickly, acutely aware that anyone reviewing this footage would be watching a small cascade of illumination tracking an empty corridor. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. No magical tripwires. No perimeter wards. No alarm runes. This total absence of traps was, if anything, more unsettling than stepping over a dozen of them. With every floor she cleared, Hathaway had to manually convince herself:"No traps is probably a good thing.

They didn't have enough hands to cover the lower floors." The word "probably" was being severely abused in her psychological defense system tonight. The hotel had ten floors. Hathaway had trained extensively in [Silent Cast]; Rhode and Bella, two women who generally treated praise as a highly regulated tactical resource, had both explicitly commended her natural, exceptional aptitude for it. She was a Witch, with mana-reinforced physique.

But the laws of cardiovascular exercise applied to Arch-Witches as indiscriminately as they applied to everyone else. Tier-6 stealth erased visual, thermal, and sustained mana signatures. It did not rewrite physics. By the fifth floor, maintaining a Tier-6 stealth matrix while doing sustained aerobic exercise meant her breathing could no longer stay absolutely silent. In this dead-empty shaft, the slight rhythm of her lungs felt loud enough to be a liability. She ran a rapid marginal utility calculation.

The real cost wasn't exposure. It was cognitive bandwidth. Maintaining a Tier-4 stealth matrix forcibly overclocked by an artifact already consumed a significant portion of her mental RAM. Layering a second silent cast on top risked a processing conflict—if her concentration slipped for even a microsecond, the primary matrix might flicker. A theoretical flicker. An immediate, compounding acoustic leak. Her fingertips moved. [Cat's Grace] materialized without a sound. The effect was immediate.

Her footfalls lightened. Her balance corrected to perfect calibration. The surface area of each step against the stairs reduced to a whisper, and her breathing stabilized as the physical load decreased. Speed was a byproduct. Silence was the mechanism. Like an actual ghost, she climbed. Floor six. Clear. Floor eight. Clear. Floor nine. Still clear. She had not triggered a single mechanism the entire way up. By floor nine, the cold sweat on her back had soaked through her shirt.

She did not let herself think too carefully about whether this was because they'd lacked the manpower to rig the lower floors, or because the most efficient trap was the one that let the prey deliver itself voluntarily to the top. Her only fallback was Victoria. If she tripped some silent alarm—if they came out to investigate—Victoria would emerge too. For the sake of two months of being roommates, she might say something. Might buy enough time for an exit.

The thought collapsed almost immediately under its own weight. She couldn't guarantee that. Victoria's situation did not look good from any external metric. What if her actual position within this team was purely instrumental? A tool? Or worse—a hostage? One hostage pleading for another. The logic was laughable. And this wasn't groundless anxiety. It had a foundation: Victoria had described these people to Hathaway directly.

The sheer, freezing control in Victoria's voice over the terminal was etched into Hathaway's memory. The word had been"pests." Delivered without preamble, dropping over the line like a cold verdict. Aggressively unreasonable and entirely too comfortable overstepping their bounds. First-person testimony from someone trapped inside their ecosystem. Hathaway's rational mind offered a counterargument. She had received a genuine social signal six days ago—a document bearing the voluntary signatures of all five starters.

A positive data point. Cecilia was functioning as the team's operational core. Active, effective, not visibly coerced. But standing here, in this silent corridor with no traps and no people, her anxiety protocols completely overrode her rationality and began generating worst-case branches. Cecilia might have genuinely chosen this team. Probable, even. But a person could be sincerely, deeply embedded in a terrible situation and fail to recognize it from the inside. That was not a theoretical observation.

That was the mechanism. Being held in place through affection, and feeling entirely fine about it: those two states were not mutually exclusive. Hathaway had watched enough case studies to know the shape of it. There was a second calculation running underneath, the one she kept not finishing: She wasn't afraid of what Greed Umbrella would do to her. She had calculated those scenarios before walking in. The glass flower in her pocket was the hard floor.

Worst case, they all vacated this building at altitude together. The actual scenario she couldn't calculate away: opening a door onto something worse than imagined. Or, more terrifyingly, finding Victoria in a state of perfect, suffocating calm. The kind that lived on the other side of sustained despair. The kind with the expression of someone who had stopped expecting anything different. She had come tonight with a gift. But if it was the latter, what use was a gift?

Hathaway pushed open the fire door to the tenth floor and stepped onto thick carpet. The top floor. The hallway was quieter than the stairwell, if that was possible. Wider corridors, greater distance between doors—the silent markers of presidential suites. The number of rooms was significantly smaller, but a quick scan confirmed there were still more than six identical mahogany doors lining the passage. Hathaway stood in the center of the hall. Stealth maintained.

Then realized, with a particular quality of despair, that she had absolutely no idea which door to knock on. Top-tier White City hotels embedded anti-scrying wards directly into the architecture. Her detection spells were not remotely sufficient to penetrate them silently. Her mana radar returned identical, useless feedback from every surface: opaque, private, none of your business. She stood completely still. Slowly, with excruciating care, she looked around. Her palms were sweating.

Some detached analytical part of her began running probability calculations with the dark humor of someone who had spent a career designing drop-rate tables. She was the woman who had pulled one of Ovelia's exclusive spells from a randomized pool during an encounter. Yes, she had burned [False Fortune] to powder to forcibly rig that particular drop, but surely that had to indicate some meaningful baseline luck on her part? Six-plus doors. Victoria was behind exactly one of them.

A five-in-six chance of knocking and having it opened by someone who was categorically not her roommate. If only I still had that flower right now. The prayer had barely finished forming. Click. At the far end of the corridor, a door opened from the inside. Hathaway went absolutely rigid. Her right hand had closed around the glass flower before she'd consciously made the decision. Warm light spilled through the gap.

"Hathaway." A flat, entirely familiar voice. Victoria stood in the doorway. She was not tied to a chair. There were no signs of duress. She was wearing comfortable long-sleeved loungewear, silver hair falling neatly over her shoulders, her blue eyes directed, with the uncanny precision of someone perceiving by entirely different means than light, straight at the exact coordinates in the corridor where Hathaway stood, technically invisible, in practice held together by nothing but stubbornness.

She was adjusting her gloves. One small, precise motion to settle the edge against her wrist. Her tone was the same tone she used when Hathaway had left a textbook on the wrong shelf.

"How long have you been standing in the hallway." Not a question.