Chương 152: Interlude: By The Way

[Time]: Year 1939 [Location]: Favania · The Ark Hive · Holding Cells The storm did not gather. It simply broke. Anyone who had previously attempted to define the phrase "the time is ripe" found their definition surgically obsolete before the week was out. Ovelia's mobilization shredded the logistical calculus of every military academy across the Inner Sea. Her forces had no use for escalation. They detonated.

For the Milan'thirskaya family, the concept of a reunion was shattered into a dozen desperate trajectories before the dinner plates had been cleared. Fran and Angie locked their boots to the marble of the White City, their staves already singing with defensive matrices. Liandra stepped through a spatial tear toward the East, a lone diplomat chasing the phantom of desperately needed alliances. Ash enveloped herself in the roar of draconic fire and plummeted South. Alucard lingered for exactly one second.

She turned to look at Tasia. In that single, fleeting glance, Tasia saw it all. The knuckles white on the staff. The shoulders held precisely level. The eyes that did not blink. Then, drawing a slow breath, Alucard turned her head away. The vulnerability was instantly overwritten by the cold, unbreakable resolve demanded of Milan'thirskaya royalty. She stepped forward, and vanished into the West. A knife twisted violently in Tasia's chest.

For the first time since the day they drew their first breath, they were being torn apart. And Tasia went North. Ovelia's forces moved like a tidal wave with no respect for the concept of coastlines. Holheim was the first to fall to its knees. They looked at Ovelia and recognized the Conqueror they had spent a millennium waiting for. That title spread through the ley lines like a wildfire detonating dry tinder, igniting rebellion across the entire continent behind a single, specific name.

Tasia's theater of operations was Favania. Famia Schüder was an anomaly that offended the natural order. The Abyss handed out sovereign Lord titles like promotional gift bags; the only reason Witches almost never held one was because, centuries ago, the Abyss had collectively blacklisted the entire species as a public safety measure: blocked the number, barricaded the doors, hidden under the bed.

Famia had hacked the Abyssal administrative system, bypassed the cosmic firewall, and hard-coded an illegal Lord's recognition directly into their mainframe. She was the undisputed record-holder for the Legendary Abyss Massacre Tally. She processed sovereign Abyssal Lords with the casual efficiency of a butcher who had long since stopped finding the work interesting. The serial killer was now standing in the living room, demanding the deed to the house.

Her territory, the [Ark Hive], was an independent demi-plane anchored to the Prime Material Plane at one end and the Lower Realms at the other, staffed by conscripted demonic labor. Its skies were spotless, its architecture pristine, built on a single governing principle: all pollution belonged to the Abyss; everything worth having belonged to her. That Famia Schüder had chosen to swear allegiance to Ovelia was the single greatest misfortune to befall the Milan'thirskaya family in this war.

Tasia's operational mandate was brutally clean: sabotage the rear. Bleed her machines. Keep the Black Emperor so thoroughly occupied that she cannot spare a single spell for the front lines. She led a precision strike force, an elite vanguard bolstered by a deep, expendable sea of summoned vassal troops, through the gleaming industrial canyons of the Ark Hive. They collapsed arcane foundries, detonated transit gates, bled Famia's supply chains at the joints. For a window, agonizingly brief, it worked.

Then, from somewhere far to the south, Ovelia called for her. Just a sudden, catastrophic inversion of atmospheric pressure, and then Famia Schüder erupted. It was as if a terminal restriction had been unsealed from somewhere deep in the Black Emperor's soul: a catastrophic buff applied directly from the outside, bypassing every tactical consideration. The cold administrator was simply gone. A force of nature took her place, running on pure, fanatical velocity. Tasia's defensive wards shattered like wet paper.

Her elite vanguards were erased from the battlefield in a series of brief, horrifying impacts. Her trusted lieutenants fell. The surviving vassal armies were swiftly corralled by Famia's advancing demonic enforcers, shackled and catalogued with the mechanical efficiency of a nightmare. You loyal dog, Tasia thought, coughing blood onto the ash-stained earth as Famia's gravitational wards crushed the last of her resistance. You couldn't even wait an hour. Had to go wag your tail the moment your master called.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. The prison cells of the Ark Hive were, by any objective measure, extraordinarily comfortable. Between Witches, even at war, certain arrangements were simply understood. Tasia's cell featured a memory-foam mattress, silk sheets, and a climate ward that kept the abyssal soot and hellfire ash strictly on the other side of the spell-glass.

The jailers were Balor Witches: imposing combatants with molten eyes and coiled obsidian horns, dressed in immaculate, frilled maid uniforms that suggested Famia had been deeply committed to a very specific aesthetic vision for her elite vanguard. They were polite, conversational, and entirely unyielding. More importantly: there was the unlimited dessert cart. Tasia sat on the edge of the cot and watched her surviving subordinates.

They were clustered around the dessert table, sobbing openly and with genuine force, aggressively stuffing strawberry macarons and dark chocolate truffles into their faces with both hands.

"We have to eat it all, Commander!" one lieutenant wailed, dismembering a strawberry mille-feuille with desperate focus.

"We'll bankrupt the entire sucrose reserve of the Ark Hive! A Witch denied her daily confectionery suffers a thirty percent drop in morale! This is logistical warfare from the inside!"

"Tactical consumption, Ma'am!" another agreed solemnly, cheeks bulging.... You just want to eat the cake, Tasia thought, and let the silence make the point for her. The Balor maid arrived with afternoon tea, the ambient heat of her presence warming the porcelain, and the outside world pressed its way through the bars.

"Casendiara has been breached," the Balor Witch mentioned, pouring Darjeeling.

"The capital fell." Tasia's hand stopped halfway to the teacup. She had been locked in this cell that morning.

"How long ago?" she asked, her voice dropping to something very quiet. The jailer checked her pocket watch.

"Four hours and forty-two minutes, give or take." No Witch capital had ever fallen. Tasia's hands tightened against the porcelain.

"Ash," she demanded, abandoning all pretense of aristocratic composure.

"What happened to my sister?"

"Your sister and Don carved an escape route," the jailer replied.

"They got out." A beat.

"Josephine was captured." The breath left Tasia's lungs in a single violent rush. Ash is alive. The relief was immediate and enormous and instantly eclipsed. If Don Gil Ross still breathed, how had Casendiara fallen in under five hours? Gil alone was capable of holding a fortified capital for months.

"If Gil is still standing," Tasia said slowly, "how did the capital fall with that speed?" The jailer's polite expression dissolved. What replaced it was naked, directed contempt.

"Because the people of Casendiara opened the gates themselves," the Balor Witch said flatly.

"They gift-wrapped their own Grand Witch and handed her to the Conqueror on a silver platter." Tasia sat in the warded cell, the scent of Earl Grey and powdered sugar suddenly alien in her lungs. When she finally found her voice, it trembled.

"The spine of Casendiara," Tasia whispered to the empty air, "was broken today."

"Josephine and Gil are still alive," the jailer offered. Tasia closed her eyes.

"For two such titans to have been born in Casendiara... is the greatest tragedy of their existence." The Balor Witch did not argue. She smoothed the ruffles of her apron, a stray ember sparking off her wrist, and refilled the teacup. The second morning of captivity began with a yawn. The Balor maid arrived with fresh croissants, stifled a yawn behind one white-gloved hand, and said, in the same tone she might use to announce a minor change in the breakfast menu: "By the way.

Your sister went down to the Underworld." Tasia threw off the silk blankets. Her bare feet hit the cold floor. The arcane burns in her mana circuits flared in violent protest.

"Is she dead?!" Tasia's voice cracked open. The jailer blinked, clicking her tongue.

"No, no. She went down while still breathing. Word on the ley lines is the Gods of the Underworld bottlenecked the resurrection queue for the entire species." A pause.

"So your sister physically marched down there to negotiate." Tasia's tactical processor ran cold. The strategic calculus assembled itself in an instant. The queue is frozen for both sides. Ovelia's numbers could weather it. Ash's couldn't. She had to go to the source. She bit down on her lower lip, fighting to keep her voice level.

"The Underworld. Now. My family signed a comprehensive non-aggression treaty with the Underworld pantheons centuries ago. Why would they suddenly freeze the queue—""Oh, you know how our kind gets," the Balor Witch said, rolling her molten eyes.

"They die, but do they wait quietly in line? Absolutely not. The casualties from both sides dropped into the afterlife, took one look at each other, and immediately established Provisional Military Governments so they could keep fighting the war down there. When the vassal armies ran dry, they blew open the tributaries of the River Styx and started raiding the Underworlds of other worlds to press-gang foreign souls into the meat grinder." Tasia stared at her.

"Naturally, the local death gods tried to intervene to stop the complete collapse of the afterlife's administrative order," the Balor Witch continued smoothly.

"And do you know what the Provisional Governments told them? They said: 'Keep complaining and we'll beat you up, too.' So the pantheons went absolutely ballistic. They declared it a cosmic mutiny, froze the resurrection queue entirely, and swore they were going to teach our species a lesson in basic afterlife etiquette." A deep quiet settled over the cell.

Tasia sat on the edge of the memory-foam mattress, in a frilled-maid prison inside an industrial hell, and held the image in her mind for a moment: thousands of dead Witches dropping into the afterlife, immediately setting up rival military juntas, drafting the souls of adjacent dimensions into trench warfare, and threatening to assault the local deities for interrupting their logistics. The Balor maid set the croissant tray down. She looked at Tasia.

Slowly, the specific smile of a species that viewed the fundamental laws of life and death as mild administrative inconveniences spread across her face.

"I have to say," the Balor Witch murmured.

"Those gods. They really aren't very obedient, are they?" Tasia looked up at her captor. For a single, particular moment, the war and the burning continent and the cell walls ceased to exist. Across the spell-glass and the factional divide and the frilled apron, something passed between them that had nothing to do with sides. A dark, icy smile curved Tasia's lips, mirroring the expression precisely.

"Indeed," Tasia said.

"They really aren't."