Chương 128: Interlude: Micromanaging the Infiltrator

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 35 — 7: 45 PM [Location]: White City · The Wisteria · Wei Changqing's Suite Victoria Wellington had not so much retreated from the communal space as evacuated it—with the precision and urgency of a woman who had just watched something she could not unsee and fully intended to spend the next hour pretending it had not occurred. She had swallowed her final bite of dessert. She had set down her fork. She had left the room. The trauma was entirely valid.

Dinner in Greed Umbrella operated on a functional division of labor. Those who could cook, cooked. Those who could not, washed ingredients or cleaned up afterward. Flandmira was a genuine savant with desserts, her pastries landing somewhere between art and sorcery. Cecilia, infuriatingly, turned out to possess a culinary baseline that belonged at a state banquet for Arch-Witches—this was discovered without any fanfare, because Cecilia was simply competent at everything and did not feel the need to announce it.

Maria did not cook. Maria did, however, possess the behavioral programming of a massive, shameless, and entirely self-aware cat, housed within the body of a lethal Arch-Witch. Victoria had personally witnessed Maria hunt a Legendary Dragon. She had watched Maria sever the dragon's brainstem so fast the creature's nervous system hadn't even registered its own death before it hit the ground, leaving a million-solar carcass in mathematically perfect, pristine condition.

And right now, this exact same apex predator was draped entirely over Wei Changqing's back, resting her chin heavily on Wei's shoulder to stare pathetically into a simmering pan. Wei, operating on a rare spark of disciplinary intent, had scooped a piece of meat and fed it directly into Maria's mouth. Victoria was sitting right there at the counter. Surely, Wei had calculated, Maria would feel some rudimentary shred of shame at being hand-fed in front of a junior. Maria chewed. Swallowed. Looked Wei dead in the eye.

"More." Wei let out a long, defeated sigh and fed her another piece. Victoria, sitting at the counter, had stopped chewing her own food. The situation escalated. Maria wandered to Flandmira's dessert station. Flandmira scooped a dollop of cream, fed it over, purred"Is it good, darling?", and then simply waited with the spoon ready. Maria opened her mouth. Flandmira fed her again. This went on for several minutes with the steady rhythm of a very elegant, very absurd assembly line.

But the worst offense—the one that made Victoria question the foundational architecture of adult behavior—was the five-second rule. If Maria rested her chin on someone's shoulder and was ignored for more than five seconds, she escalated. She would wrap her arms around her target from behind, or simply bury her face in the curve of their neck and stay there until acknowledged.

Wei had grown so accustomed to this that she frequently forgot there was a person attached to her and went about her work, dragging Maria across the kitchen floor like a heavy, decorative cape until some reminder triggered her to acknowledge it. When Maria drifted to Karula's station and dropped her chin onto Karula's shoulder, Karula continued prepping her ingredients, waiting out the timer. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Right on cue, Maria escalated, wrapping both arms tightly around Karula's waist in a hostage embrace. Only then did Karula let out a soft, low chuckle. She took her time, scratching Maria under the chin, before turning to feed her a perfectly cut slice of fish. When Maria buried her face in Cecilia's neck, the dynamic shifted entirely. Cecilia. Her own older sister. The immaculate founder of Greed Umbrella, a woman who usually carried herself with the pristine, untouchable elegance of an aristocratic black swan.

Her sister simply let out a soft, genuine laugh, picked up a silver fork, and casually deposited a piece of meat into the mouth of the human catastrophe hanging off her shoulder. No resistance. No reprimand. Just the practiced, absentminded indulgence of a routine domestic chore. At the counter, Victoria stared blankly at the wall. The cognitive dissonance was physically painful. I am not a teammate, she realized, with the chilling clarity of a woman arriving at an irreversible conclusion. I am a prop.

I have been placed in the front row of a domestic performance to provide the necessary audience reaction for my sister's household. She excused herself the moment the dishes were cleared. Now, one hour past dinner, the remaining five occupied Wei's suite in a state of sprawling, decadent lethargy. Wei and Karula sat at a low glass table near the fireplace, a chess board between them. Stacked beside the board was a neat pile of newspapers sourced from every major region across the Inner Sea.

They had deliberately saved the White Star Chronicle and its supplementary special editions for last. One always saves the best comedy for dessert.

"Check," Wei murmured, sliding a bishop.

"I must say, their sports section is a genuinely fascinating sociological document." Wei maintained a mild, agreeable exterior. This was largely because, very early in her life, she had arrived at a single, liberating truth: the vast majority of the world was populated by complete idiots, and engaging in pointless friction with idiots was a mathematically inefficient use of one's lifespan. The White Star Chronicle's editorial board fell squarely within the relevant demographic.

Karula moved her knight, her violet eyes lifting briefly from the board.

"One week at the Yggdrasil Academy. Did you extract anything of value?" Wei pondered this for a moment, reflecting. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

"The Academy's reputation is not entirely undeserved," Wei replied, her tone the picture of diplomatic grace.

"The archives are genuinely spectacular. However, the concentration of idiots per square meter is statistically identical to anywhere else in the world." Karula chuckled. She turned her gaze toward the sofa.

"And our esteemed dropout? Three years there, Cici." Cecilia rubbed her temples lightly, a faint look of distress crossing her features.

"The faculty is unmatched," Cecilia admitted softly.

"The library is truly impeccable. But the light pollution is a physical torment. And constantly crossing paths with members of certain rival families simply to attend morning lectures is an exhausting diplomatic exercise." On the chaise near the floor-to-ceiling windows, Maria was lying sideways, a magazine resting on her crossed knees. She shifted at this, her silk loungewear rustling.

"It sounds profoundly unpleasant," Maria said flatly, her eyes flicking to the glittering sprawl of the city below.

"I imagine the view here will improve considerably once Holheim's banners finally blot out the sky." By the windows, Flandmira turned her back on the city. She walked to the minibar, poured a glass of dark Bordeaux, and her usual playfulness dropped away entirely, replaced by a vein of absolute, icy disdain.

"I cannot wait," Flandmira said.

"The so-called World's Premier Hive City is nothing but an over-decorated cage. The current scenery is so dull it is practically offensive." She downed the wine in a single, sharp swallow and abandoned the empty glass on the console. Drifting back to the main sofa, she dropped into the gap between Maria and Cecilia with the practiced fluidity of someone breathing.

Without looking, her left hand settled onto Maria's thigh, while her right reached for Cecilia's hand, interlacing their fingers, lightly scratching the center of Cecilia's palm. Maria didn't look up from her magazine. She lifted one foot and delivered a lazy, entirely painless kick to Flandmira's ribs. Cecilia let out a soft, warm laugh. She did not pull her hand away. It was in this precise moment of venomous, highly lethal domestic comfort that Wei's hand paused over her chess piece. She frowned slightly.

"Someone has infiltrated the hotel lobby," Wei announced, in the same tone one might use to note a draft near the window.

"The stealth matrix is high-tier. Intent appears hostile. Shall I process them?" The room's atmosphere shifted instantly. The lazy comfort did not vanish so much as crystallize—the collective, cold annoyance of five apex predators having their leisure interrupted by a scheduling conflict. Maria sat up slightly, magazine lowering. Flandmira's hands stilled. Cecilia closed her eyes. A faint ripple of psionic pressure expanded outward from her position, sinking down through the floors with surgical precision.

A moment later, she opened her eyes.

"No," Cecilia said softly, a small smile returning to her face.

"Let her through. It's the Ludwig child." At the word Ludwig, Flandmira's lip curled with instinctive, fiercely partisan distaste. Then recognition sparked. The distaste melted into the particular expression she reserved for gossip of considerable quality.

"Ah," Flandmira said.

"Our dedicated little fan." Wei exhaled quietly. With a casual flick of her wrist, she remotely deactivated the lethality arrays embedded in the ground floor lobby. Karula snapped her fingers, withdrawing the spatial laceration traps she had personally woven across the lobby's marble tiles. On the chaise, Maria let out a long, deeply dissatisfied sigh. She dropped back into her previous position and fixed the ceiling with an expression of profound suffering.

"I really hope she takes the elevator." This was not hospitality. It was mathematics. Greed Umbrella operated on a collective, deeply ingrained, and entirely untreatable strain of environmental paranoia. They were constitutionally incapable of tolerating even one second of unsecured perimeter.

They had, in a very genuine part of their shared psychology, come to believe that if the hotel's defense grid dropped for even sixty uninterrupted seconds, some localized White City anomaly—a disappearing elevator, an impossible corridor, a reality-folding encounter of the kind Flandmira's luck perpetually attracted—would immediately spawn, swallow Hathaway whole, and upgrade this minor situation into a full emergency rescue operation. If Hathaway took the elevator, the problem was clean.

Secure the shaft, clear the tenth-floor arrival node, done. Instead, Hathaway turned and walked toward the stairwell. The chess game ground to a halt. Because Hathaway was now an allied VIP navigating the kill-zone, and they were obligated to keep her alive. Which meant that for every step she took, Wei had to manually drop the defense node directly ahead of her—and the moment Hathaway's heel cleared the step, Karula had to reactivate the trap behind her. Down in front. Up in back. Down in front. Up in back.

Step by step. Floor by floor. They just wanted to play chess.

"She is taking the stairs," Maria said, tracking the minute fluctuations in the building's mana grid without opening her eyes. Her brow furrowed in genuine exasperation.

"The ring elevates her output to Tier-6. Visual and mana signatures—erased. Cute gear. But Tier-6 does not rewrite biology. She is still a biological organism completing ten flights of manual cardio, in an acoustically empty building, in complete silence. A beat.

"Her breathing will compromise her acoustic cover by the fifth floor. This entire exercise is physically pointless. Should we simply send a familiar to carry her up?" Flandmira gave Maria's thigh a lazy, reprimanding squeeze.

"Absolutely not," Flandmira said, thoroughly entertained.

"She's sneaking in for a private rendezvous. The secrecy is the point, darling. The struggle is part of the surprise. You simply don't understand the mood." Maria did not dignify this with a response. The suite fell into the particular silence of five Witches performing tedious micromanagement while trying to maintain the appearance of leisure.

Up in the penthouse, five senior apex-tier competitors tracked a single invisible target's slow ascent with the same detached, analytical attention one gives a very boring sporting event. Floor four. Floor five. A subtle, structural shift occurred in the stairwell. On both the physical and standard magical planes, the cast was perfect. A textbook execution of [Silent Cast] flawlessly swallowed the casting noise and the spell's immediate mana ripple. But at the Arch-Witch level, perception operated differently.

The spell's formation had fundamentally altered the building's ambient energy field. Lacking the advanced [Concealed Fluctuation] feat to smooth over that environmental displacement, the shift registered in Maria's perception like a sudden, undeniable drop in atmospheric pressure. [Cat's Grace].

"Flawless acoustic and mana-ripple suppression," Maria said, without opening her eyes.

"But absolutely zero masking of the ambient energy field variation." Karula dragged out the syllables of her next move with a rich, elongated sigh of aristocratic sarcasm.

"Thank the stars," Karula drawled, resting her chin on her hand.

"Our dedicated little fan has finally recalled that she is, in fact, a Witch, and not a convict performing mandatory cardio in a penal colony." Wei moved her rook with quiet precision.

"The first layer was impeccable," she noted mildly.

"She simply did not account for the second." Cecilia shot them both a look of helpless amusement and said nothing in their defense. Floor seven. Floor eight. Floor nine. Floor ten. A collective, silent breath of relief moved through the suite. The micromanagement was finished. The stairwell behind Hathaway locked down tight and stayed there. They watched her invisible presence step onto the plush corridor carpet. They watched her walk. And then they watched her stop.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Hathaway had not stopped in front of Victoria's door. She had stopped, paralyzed and invisible, directly in front of the master suite—in front of the door belonging to the five women she had every rational reason in the world to be afraid of. Inside, Maria pinched the bridge of her nose. For the third time tonight, she spoke.

"Who is going to open the door." Flandmira immediately reached out. She caught Maria by the chin in a grip that occupied the precise midpoint between affectionate petting and genuine threat, and fixed her with a look of playful warning.

"Do not touch that door," Flandmira said firmly.

"If we drag her in here now, we destroy the entire aesthetic she has constructed. She is building toward a moment. Let her have it." Cecilia shook her head slightly, a soft smile on her face.

"There's no need," Cecilia said. She looked toward the wall that separated them from the corridor.

"Vicky will open the door." A beat of silence. Click. The lock to the adjacent suite clicked open.