Chương 132: Chapter 131: Legally Obligated to Address Her as 'Mother'

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 36 — 11: 20 AM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Spirit Sea Venue · Eastern Courtyard Fortunately for everyone's structural dignity, Irene did not linger. She exchanged a final few pleasantries with the Royal Rosas delegation, warmth perfectly calibrated, and then moved on to the rest of the courtyard. It was a simple, immutable law: you cannot monopolize the sun. It belongs to everyone equally, and it has other places to be.

The moment she was out of earshot, Royal Rosas collectively, and silently, snapped back to baseline. Rhode's arrogance returned. Alucard's dead-eyed exhaustion reasserted itself. But the damage was done. Hathaway took a slow sip of champagne and accepted the truth: she would never be able to look at these people the same way again. The grand illusion was permanently dead. She had seen the frantic hair-smoothing. She had seen the suppressed reverence.

The terrifying mystique of White City's apex predators had been irrevocably compromised by direct Irene exposure. We are a squad of violently closeted stans. The aristocracy is a lie. Heidi departed alongside Irene. Hathaway strongly suspected this was the actual reason Nino's elaborate tsundere architecture had abruptly stopped malfunctioning.

The foundational siscon operating logic had finally gained the upper hand over Irene's gravitational charisma, not through self-control, but because watching her sister circle the source of the problem had instantly switched Nino's internal process from I must resist this woman's charm to that woman is corrupting my sister, which was an entirely different operational mode with entirely different priorities. Then Josephine Durant walked into the courtyard.

Hathaway's respiratory system briefly forgot its primary function. The living idol. The most universally desired woman in the known universe. In the actual flesh. She was not the most beautiful woman in the room (Blanche had made that title her personal hostage), but Josephine's magnetism was something else entirely. A gentle, gravitational pull.

Wearing a simple dark dress, a serene smile resting naturally on her lips, she moved the way very kind people move: as though they had nowhere to be but here, and were entirely glad of it. A cluster of Witches near the entrance swarmed her immediately.

"Josie, darling!" someone called, raising a glass with the breezy, affectionate ease of someone who had known Josephine long enough to tease her.

"We saw the morning edition. How did the ninety-third lawsuit turn out? Who gets the Inner Ring property this time?" Josephine didn't bristle. She offered a soft, helplessly exasperated smile, the kind that made everyone in the vicinity simultaneously want to protect her from the harsh realities of the legal system.

"Please, Clara," Josephine murmured, her voice carrying the helpless warmth of someone physically incapable of being cruel.

"Let's not subject everyone to the court dockets today. My lawyers are tired enough as it is." Hathaway watched that perfectly soft, rueful smile. Her past life's internet vocabulary had exactly one term for this phenotype. What an absolute emotional menace. As she spoke, Josephine looked to the woman whose arm was tucked through hers, her expression deep with guilty affection. Hathaway shifted her gaze. Black hair. Piercing blue eyes.

Impeccably elegant, with the cold, concentrated aura of someone who had chosen academia as a vocation and taken the choice completely seriously. Sylvaine. The name surfaced immediately. Grand Alchemist. Student of Sharon Curie. The cognitive association hit Hathaway like a financial jump-scare. Ah. The student of the woman who sold the six-hundred-million-a-year Patent Spell to Irene for loose change. Sylvaine hadn't said a word through the entire lawsuit commentary.

When Josephine cast her apologetic glance, Sylvaine simply tightened her hold on Josephine's arm, a microscopic but unambiguous gesture of possession, and returned a look of deep, habitual exasperation mixed with enduring affection. Hathaway watched the dynamic. She really is the ultimate winner in life. Unlike her teacher, who fumbled the greatest financial asset in Witch history, Sylvaine's grasp on her own core assets is terrifyingly complete.

Ninety-three lawsuits, a planet's worth of chaotic demand, and zero intention of ever divorcing. A true master of resource retention. Josephine moved through the courtyard. She stopped before Camilla. The Seventh Seat's pale peach eyes softened with a joy that had nothing performative in it. As Josephine lingered there, Hathaway noticed something remarkable: the ambient, suffocating killing intent Vessar had been directing at Famia Schüder quietly dropped by a fraction of a degree. It was nothing conscious.

Josephine simply cooled the hostility of whatever room she was in, and Vessar's burning gold eyes didn't even register the change. Then, Josephine's path crossed Blanche's. Hathaway could read the posture. Blanche stopped. The heavy fabric of her hood tilted forward at a very specific, measuring angle: the quiet precision of a master collector appraising something genuinely rare. Then came a slow, elegant inclination of the head. An unmistakable gesture of connoisseur approval. Ah.

This one actually has something to her. One second. Silent. Impeccably tasteful. Finally, Josephine found Irene. Former Fifth Seat, current Fifth Seat. Both daughters of Casendiara. Josephine greeted Irene with unfeigned delight and turned to offer Anita thorough, sincere praise. Hathaway was still watching this when her threat-assessment module spiked. Marlena. The Sixth Seat. The ice-mountain Grand Witch who had survived Blanche's catastrophic acting performance with the unbroken serenity of a dead monk.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Marlena was currently projecting concentrated, weaponized killing intent across the courtyard with enough precision to etch glass. Hathaway followed the trajectory. It landed on a Witch who had just stepped through the Anser bone archway. She had deep red hair. Not fire. Nothing aggressive, nothing announcing itself: the color of old ink, or maple leaves at the last moment before winter.

Her eyes were grass-green, the tender green of early spring. The melancholy of someone who had thought through too many things and was currently taking a break from the effort. She wore a formal gown in interwoven blue and black, traced with sharp gold thread in a striking contrasting design. Tabitha. Holder of the [Axiom of the Water Dragon]. The Mount Everest of the Inner Sea's academic world. Tabitha did not immediately return Marlena's murderous glare.

Her spring-grass eyes moved slowly across the Anser Elven artifacts displayed between the tables. Her gaze trembled. What, Hathaway thought, genuinely puzzled. She looks like a Roman who woke up to find the Empire fallen, revisiting the ruins to mourn her civilization. Why would a Witch mourn the Anser Elves? Beside her, Nino let out a long, violently exhausted sigh.

"She is not mourning the Anser Empire," Nino said, reading Hathaway's expression with the flat efficiency of someone correcting a persistent misconception.

"She is mourning her ruined tenure thesis."

"Her... thesis?"

"Tabitha is an academic monster." Nino took a measured sip of coffee.

"Her genius in the arcane sciences is beyond dispute." A pause.

"Unfortunately, she also labors under the profound delusion that her true calling is political science." The grudge traced back to their Academy days. Tabitha, two years Marlena's senior, had challenged the freshman in an entrance duel. Marlena had beaten her comprehensively. But she didn't stop at a physical victory.

Marlena had cast a [Cognitive Compulsion] hex, conjured a massive floating blackboard, and forced the proud future academic titan to stand in front of the entire student body and write a detailed, mathematically rigorous thesis analyzing exactly why her own spell models were structural garbage. Tabitha was legally compelled to publicly grade her own humiliating defeat, chalk in hand, for two solid hours. If it had been only physical defeat, Tabitha might have absorbed it.

But Marlena had simply graduated three years early, effortlessly leaving the Academy and Tabitha behind to enter the elite military and diplomatic echelons. Left without any chance for a rematch, Tabitha settled into an associate professorship and, despite her obvious genius in the arcane sciences, focused her ambitions on proving herself in political academia.

"She was up for full tenure," Nino continued.

"She wrote a massive, carefully politicized thesis. The core argument: On the Absolute Stability of Current Multiverse Diplomatic Relations and the Enduring Harmony Between the Witch Empire and the Anser Elves." Hathaway lowered her champagne glass, a terrible sense of impending narrative collision settling over her.

"The Anser Elves," Nino recited, her voice carrying the dry, unimpressed cadence of a textbook summary, "had just scammed the High Council. They traded a book of 125, 000 words of lyric poetry for a World Tree. They claimed it contained one hundred Legendary Spells." Nino took a measured sip of coffee.

"Since complex magical encryption is an industry standard, the High Council accepted it. The greatest minds of our civilization sat down and spent an entire month trying to crack the code. When they finally realized there was no underlying spell model and went back to demand an explanation, the Elves struck a pose of magnificent disdain." Nino's voice went completely dead.

"They told us that it was the elegant product of an advanced civilization, and that true masters comprehended magic through the elegance of verse. Then they called us magical barbarians." Hathaway experienced a sudden, violent surge of factional patriotism. One hundred and twenty-five thousand words of unencrypted, literal poetry? For a World Tree? You sold my guild a fake ARG puzzle box?

You made our top players waste a month of GPU cycles trying to decrypt a plain-text lore file, and then had the gall to mock our intelligence?! Hathaway decided instantly, her game-developer soul recoiling in professional disgust. You absolutely deserved whatever consequences came your way. Good riddance. Nino tapped her finger against her cup.

"Marlena was stationed at the diplomatic mission at the time. Looking for a pretext, she manufactured a severe incident and reported that the Elves had gravely insulted Witch dignity. The High Council needed no further encouragement. Ovelia summoned a stellar mass, constructed a gravity railgun from orbital trajectories, and converted the Anser home world into cosmic dust." Hathaway took a slow, deeply contented sip of her champagne. Ah. Yes. That hits the spot.

The classic 'manufacture a casus belli and deploy the superweapon' maneuver. Just straight-up deleting the scammers from the server with an orbital gravity cannon. Unreasonable? Extremely. But as a method of player vengeance? Objectively ten out of ten. I feel so much better.

"Tabitha's thesis on enduring diplomatic harmony," Nino said flatly, "expired the moment Ovelia's sun hit the Anser capital. She blames Marlena for starting a galactic war the exact day before her paper went to peer review." I mean, Hathaway thought, her sympathy returning now that the scammers were properly deceased. Finishing your lore bible only for live-ops to delete the entire faction from the build before you hit publish. I would hold that grudge until the stars burned out.

"They have been publishing peer-reviewed papers designed to insult each other's weakest academic fields ever since," Nino concluded. Then, she set down her coffee cup.

"Also. Tabitha recently arrived at what she considers a masterstroke of political strategy."

"What strategy."

"She realized," Nino said, with the tone of someone recounting a historical atrocity, "that if she successfully marries Blanche, Marlena will be legally obligated to address her as 'Mother.'" Hathaway inhaled sharply. Sweet Mother of Mana. Academic feuds, mutual insult papers, the ruined thesis: that was comprehensible. Human.

But 'my rival destroyed my political career so I am going to execute a dimensional strike against her basic dignity and legally force her to call me Mom' is a plane of petty villainy I was not prepared to encounter in person. Hathaway shuffled several careful, quiet inches toward the scene in question, ears at maximum aperture. Across the courtyard, Tabitha had finally concluded her private mourning among the ruins.

She turned from the artifacts with the unhurried composure of a tenured professor approaching a podium, and walked toward Marlena. More accurately, toward Blanche.

"Lady Blanche," Tabitha said warmly, her voice carrying the cultured, gentle cadence of someone who had spent decades lecturing rooms full of brilliant people and had never needed to raise it.

"The Anser craftsmanship here is remarkable, isn't it? Their stonework had a very specific relationship with elemental resonance." Blanche, who was enjoying the quality of Tabitha's attention, tilted her hood forward at a specific, measuring angle of genuine interest. Tabitha reached out, gesturing lightly toward the bone archway.

"Fascinating, how they managed to scramble their planar coordinates at the last possible moment," she murmured, her spring-grass eyes warm with the easy sorrow of academic regret.

"Like severing a limb to survive a trap. They scattered into the dark edges of the multiverse, their civilization's spine completely broken, just to eke out a threadbare continuation." Hathaway's profound sense of gamer catharsis abruptly flatlined. Scrambled their planar coordinates? Scattered into the dark edges of the multiverse? The absolute cowards. They pulled a Hell Maneuver. The PTSD resurfaced with violent financial immediacy. NOT AGAIN.

Hathaway's inner imperialist shareholder shrieked, flipping an imaginary boardroom table. First Hell, now this?! What is wrong with you ancient spellcaster empires?! Why are you people so hard to kill?! The polite thing to do is die completely so we can liquidate your assets. You selfish bastards. Tabitha sighed. The sigh of genuine, scholarly lament.

"What a pity." Her gaze moved, slowly, to Marlena's face.

"If the timing of the war had been just a little later. If the initiator had taken slightly more preparation instead of rushing. The extermination could have been absolute." Exactly. Look at what your rushed live-ops update did, Sixth Seat. You didn't lock down the coordinates first. You let the mobs escape with the drop table. Tabitha returned to Blanche with a tender, philosophically sorrowful smile.

"After all, imperial artifacts only carry their true aesthetic weight when the empire that carved them is completely, irrevocably dead. Wouldn't you agree?" Blanche offered a slow, elegant inclination of her head, entirely absorbed in this fascinating historical lecture from her highly educated suitor. Marlena stood absolutely still.

Her crimson eyes were locked on Tabitha with the terrifying, glazed focus of someone actively running precise ballistic calculations on the exact velocity and trajectory required to throw a tenured professor bodily into the Spirit Sea. Hathaway watched from a safe distance, a cold sweat breaking out on her back as the pieces clicked into place. The plan was actually working. Oh my god, Hathaway thought, taking a long, desperate sip of her champagne as she watched Tabitha continue her elegant, academic courtship.

She is actually going to become Marlena's stepmother.