Chương 159: Chapter 143: The Substitute Bench Survives

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 37 — 11: 15 AM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Grand Masters Main Arena · Royal Rosas VIP Box Hathaway's tactical processor came back online approximately four seconds before the rest of her did.

By the time she finished blinking the phantom nerve static clear, the arena feed was already projecting from the suite's central display, and her brain had sorted the match log into clean entries without being asked: Rhode had capitalized on Aldra's critical threshold, swept her inside thirty seconds, then taken down a second Relentless player before falling to a third. Bella had cleaned up that player and eroded a fourth before going down herself.

Alucard had finished the fourth efficiently and then lost to the Ace. Score: 4: 4. Consumed attrition unit, mission parameters fully met, resurrection stone processed without incident. Hathaway unhooked the diagnostic bracelet from her wrist and stood up.

The Royal Rosas VIP suite was a hybrid of a luxury home theater and a high-end survival bunker: two rows of plush reclining seating, eight cavern-style alcoves with embedded beds, a fully stocked kitchenette, and a miniature enclosed garden with a hot spring and an arboreal shower. The kind of venue you designed when you had more budget than taste guidelines and decided the solution was to simply combine all possible themes simultaneously.

The mahogany door had barely clicked behind her when she walked straight into a psychological ambush.

"Look at her!" Margaret was standing in the center of the suite. She was currently levitating a massive, freshly forged stained-glass window panel—at least six feet tall by four feet wide—illuminated from within by a soft, divine light. It depicted a highly romanticized, Renaissance-style rendering of Hathaway standing heroically amidst a field of ice, staff raised, an absolute bastion of magical authority.

"I commissioned the master glassblowers the moment you deployed your ice labyrinth!" Margaret announced, her voice trembling with the righteous fervor of a medieval patron of the arts.

"I paid triple the rush fee to have the mana-infused pigments set in under four minutes. It's a masterpiece. We are knocking out the wall in the foyer and replacing the front bay window with this." She commissioned this the moment the ice walls went up. Moments before the death beam.

"Mom," Hathaway started, staring at the stained glass where her own idealized face was currently shimmering with embedded mana-pearls.

"The front bay window is a load-bearing architectural feature. And it faces the public street."

"We can easily reinforce the surrounding masonry," Anna said from the kitchenette. Hathaway turned. Anna was operating a massive, industrial-grade coffee grinder with the serene, unhurried focus of an alchemist preparing a lethal compound. She wasn't hovering. She was standing perfectly still, her usual composure replaced by the intense, chilling aura of a manager compiling quarterly performance reviews.

"You executed a zero-frame reflex dodge against an armor-piercing kinetic projectile," Anna stated, her voice carrying the absolute, non-negotiable weight of an undeniable fact. She poured boiling water over the grounds with surgical precision.

"You established spatial superiority using an ice labyrinth and pre-allocated orbital assets to force a chokepoint engagement." Anna set down the kettle and looked at Hathaway. It wasn't the proud gaze of a mother; it was the terrifying, burning approval of a head coach who had just realized their draft pick was vastly underpriced.

"I have already drafted the official press release for White Star Chronicle's group stage special edition," Anna continued smoothly.

"The headline reads:'Strategic Apex: How Hathaway von Ludwig Re-Defined the Attrition Paradigm.' I have secured the front page. The editorial board tried to push back. I politely reminded them of our advertising budget." You bought the front page of a major newspaper to write an op-ed about me losing my first match.

"Thank you, Mom," Hathaway said.

"But technically, I was eliminated first—" A clear, authoritative syllable cut the sentence in half.

"Sister." Rory. Rory was sitting up in her enchanted bassinet near the kitchenette, radiating the focused, unblinking authority of someone who had done something important and required acknowledgment. The juice cup in front of her was frozen solid. A dense, crystalline layer of rime frost had spread across a significant portion of the bassinet's padded oak armrest.

Margaret and Anna had apparently watched this happen in real time and concluded that infant elemental discharge in the vicinity of furniture was a cause for celebration rather than intervention. Rory looked at Hathaway. Her tiny chest was puffed out with the luminous, chest-puffed certainty of a scientist who had just proven a theorem. Hathaway smiled. She leaned in, hand settling on the armrest. Her hand felt slightly cold. She tried to lift it. It did not move.

The residual moisture from the partially thawed frost had flash-refrozen against her palm the moment she touched it. She was bonded to the armrest by a solid seal of arcane ice. One micro-flare of thermal mana would shatter it in under a second. She was, objectively, completely capable of resolving this situation. Rory was clapping, small hands together, radiant with the demanding triumph of a predator whose trap had just caught something.

She looked at Hathaway's immobilized hand, then at Hathaway, and her ice-blue eyes were practically luminous. If I break this, Hathaway's tactical processor noted, I am actively dismantling the first confirmed magical achievement of a two-month-old. Hathaway remained perfectly still. With her free left hand, she picked up the water glass from the side table.

She channeled a fractional pulse of mana and initiated a miniature, fully contained [Ice Storm] inside the rim—tiny snowflakes cycling in a localized vortex, frost fractals building along the glass's inner wall, the whole system self-sustaining on barely any input. Rory's clapping stopped. Both ice-blue eyes locked onto the glass with the starry, open-mouthed worship of someone who had just discovered there was a bigger and better version of everything she had been doing.

Hathaway quietly applied a micro-flare of body heat to the armrest, dissolved the seal, and withdrew her hand without fanfare. Saved by superior technology. Rory dragged her attention from the glass and poked Hathaway's wrist with one chubby finger.

"Teach me." The intent was perfectly clear, the case hermetically constructed, and the moral leverage substantial. Hathaway settled into the chair, balanced the baby on her lap, and kept the snowstorm running for her with one thread while shifting the rest of her attention to the central display. Match point was about to begin. The terrain roulette had landed on [Mirror Lake]: a perfectly still, bottomless expanse of water functioning as an infinite reflective surface, the sky duplicated below in perfect symmetry.

No cover. No terrain features. For these two, the lake was not a floor. It was a boundary. Stepping out from the Relentless deployment zone was their Ace. Yuksara Devic. She was tall, with the dense, functional build of someone who had spent serious time making the physical components of combat work. Deep, burning azure eyes that looked like open flame, not the warm orange of a common fire, but the clean, hot blue of a gas burner running at full output.

Her black hair fell past her shoulders, tips glowing with a natural blue highlight. It was the visible symptom of a mana pool so overwhelmingly dense it was physically bleeding into her keratin. The body just vented the excess wherever it could. She held [The Mandate of the Fire Dragon]. She walked onto the lake surface with the easy, unhurried stride of someone who found this particular Friday to be a completely adequate day to fight a Dragon Empress. The pre-match countdown was running.

The global broadcast microphones were live. Yuksara looked across the mirror water at Tasia and leaned casually on her staff.

"Hey," she said, her voice carrying through the stadium speakers with the cheerful, academic clarity of someone confirming a research finding.

"Does Alucard's soul really weigh exactly twenty-one grams?" This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Hathaway's miniature snowstorm dissipated. She stared at the screen. Her lore database performed an emergency retrieval: The Captive Trophy Wife, Little Sia. Chapter forty-two. The twenty-one grams motif: the soul of someone who dies deeply in love weighs exactly that much, and that weight stays forever beside the one they loved.

You just eliminated her 'husband' on international television five minutes ago, and now you are standing at the altar of the 'widow' asking a question sourced directly from a cuckold doujinshi. Hathaway stared at Yuksara's completely earnest face. With that expression. As though this is a reasonable scholarly inquiry. On the screen, Tasia's composure did not fracture. It did something marginally more alarming. A thin skin of ice began threading outward across Mirror Lake from where she was standing.

Tasia looked like she wanted to commit a homicide that had nothing to do with tournament points.

"Ask Lee Alice Varro," Tasia said. Her voice was perfectly level. The cadence was flawless. But she had deployed Alice's full legal name on a live global broadcast, which meant she had officially opened a ledger. Technically, it was the correct answer: the author was the appropriate person to verify. Practically, it functioned as a public receipt.

"Okay," Yuksara nodded.

"I'll ask her after the match." The fireball dropped. Yuksara's opening cast sequence was a breathtaking, orchestral display of layered spellwork. [Shared Energy Absorption] (Tier-8) materialized and locked. She siphoned the residual mana cleanly into an instant [Ablative Light Wall] (Tier-7), then wove the combined spell-residue into a [Create Arcane Barrier] (Tier-7).

A single cast of [Shadow Abjuration: Simulated Barriers] (Tier-8, Illusion) followed, conjuring two phantom shields simultaneously over the real ones. She capped the fortress with an [Abundant-Quickened] [Legendary Mage Armor]. It was built in under a second. She wasn't done.

Her staff's inscription triggered simultaneously: [Greater Dragon's Might] (Tier-9, Transmutation) and [Ovelia's Conjured Greatsword] (Tier-6, Evocation), universally nicknamed"The Almighty Bonk" by a community that had watched it deployed approximately ten thousand times and had never once stopped finding it funny. Her robes flared with [Haste] and [Freedom of Movement]. Finally, the [Evil Lantern Cat Catapult] inscription on her robes activated.

A massive, exceptionally disgruntled spectral cat materialized behind Yuksara, reared back, and literally swatted her forward. The resulting kinetic force launched the entire heavily armored, greatsword-wielding, fortress-shielded configuration directly across Mirror Lake at terminal velocity. A bloody-minded turtle with a running start. Hathaway's developer brain classified it with deep respect. Conceptual Casting doesn't cross distance. It spawns at the destination.

Inside Tasia's fifty-meter sphere, she's not firing at you across a gap. She's pressing her hand against your face and pulling the trigger. Range isn't a strategy against Tasia. It's a death sentence. So Yuksara shielded everything and charged. That is genuine, blood-and-guts commitment. Then she looked at Tasia's side of the lake. Tasia, the patient Dragon Empress, the Arch-Witch who had been operating at the top tier of the Inner Sea for years and had every reason to open defensively— Tasia had cast zero shields.

In the time it took Yuksara to construct an impenetrable fortress, Tasia had spent every available frame nakedly, aggressively stacking buffs. [Dragon's Might]. [Speed of the Griffon]. [Body of the Couatl]. A composite transformation: [Form of the Balor] and [Form of the Brute Demon] layered simultaneously over her baseline Dragon Witch physiology. Five massive transmutations. Pure, unshielded physical stats. The armored missile arrived. The fully loaded Dragon Empress paused.

Three feet apart over the mirror water, the two apex predators stopped. From the safety of the VIP box, Hathaway read the exact, agonizing tactical realization flashing across both of their faces as they stared at each other. You opened with naked dry buffs? she read on Yuksara. You opened with pure shields? she read on Tasia. Hathaway covered her face with her hands, her tactical processor dying of secondhand embarrassment. Both of them had made the "correct," highest-level reads.

Yuksara knew rushing was the only answer, so she shielded heavily to survive the gap-close. Tasia knew she needed maximum physical stats to crush a rush, so she greedily buffed. They had perfectly counter-read each other's expected openings, and in doing so, had completely, hilariously missed each other. If either one of you had just thrown a basic [Armor-Piercing Round], Hathaway screamed internally, this match would already be over!

Unable to cancel their active, highly specific configurations, both stupendously overbuilt Arch-Witches abandoned every principle of elegant magical dueling and simply began beating the absolute hell out of each other. It was a fistfight. Knuckle-to-face, greatsword-to-scales, brutally physical brawling across the surface of the perfectly still, aesthetically offended Mirror Lake.

"Are they aware," Anna observed, her coffee cup raised and paused halfway to her lips, "that they are Witches?"

"It's Melee Juggernaut Mode," Hathaway muttered. Her eyes were tracking Tasia's footwork. Tasia was taking hits deliberately. Every time Yuksara's greatsword carved a glancing impact against her buffed dragon physiology, Tasia was using the kinetic feedback and pain-response to forcibly compress her own casting wind-up. She was trading her health pool to erase her cast times. The longer Yuksara stayed in close range, the more catastrophic the juggernaut would become. But Hathaway wasn't watching the damage tallies.

She was watching where Tasia was stepping. During the chaotic, undignified, commentary-desk-destroying opening brawl, Tasia had been continuously moving across the lake surface. Not randomly. With direction. Oh. The image surfaced without warning: a training field, early morning. Tasia standing still. Then moving. Then standing again. What had looked, from a distance, like someone warming up or simply existing in a training hall without purpose. She wasn't standing still. She was writing. Hathaway's breath caught.

Every position Tasia's boots had touched during this chaotic brawl was a pre-written coordinate. Every square meter of Mirror Lake that she had casually covered while trading punches was now an origin point for Conceptual Casting. The marking was the movement. The movement had been the setup. The trap was already laid. It had been laid during the ugliest, most apparently unplanned sequence in the match.

Yuksara disengaged, triggered a backward sprint, and initiated an Orbital Kite: retreating outward, curving toward the boundary of the lake, firing high-yield evocation blasts over her shoulder as she ran. The orbital arc began. And stalled. Yuksara adjusted, widened the radius, pushed harder into the curve. The pursuit should have forced a catastrophic centrifugal break in Tasia's tracking.

That was the documented exploit, the one that had sent Elysia into the record books as the witch who found the crack in the Dragon Empress's armor. But Hathaway's eyes caught a synchronized flash of runic light beneath Tasia's torn combat jacket. Heavy, custom-forged greaves locked around Tasia's calves ignited with kinetic absorption arrays. As the extreme G-force of the high-speed turn tried to rip her outward, the greaves actively captured the excess kinetic load.

In the exact same millisecond, a paired under-armor harness strapped tightly across her chest and shoulders flared to life. The gear was a closed-loop system. Hathaway watched the mana flow: the greaves fed the extreme centrifugal force directly into the harness, which immediately bled that energy into an equal and opposite reaction: a micro-burst of corrective lift pulling her inward. It was a near zero-sum inertial dampening system.

The harder the turn tried to throw her off the curve, the harder the harness pushed back to keep her anchored to the orbital line. The equipment had been tuned specifically to offset her massive draconic mass penalty during high-speed cornering. Version updated, Hathaway's developer brain filed, quiet and cold. Hardware patch already applied. The exploit is closed. But Yuksara was still running. And every step she took toward the boundary was landing on a coordinate that had been written during the brawl.

The orbital path she was using to escape was the path Tasia had already covered. The spatial compression began. Yuksara fired a [Meteor Swarm] into Tasia's vector. The answering [Abyssal Lance] materialized ten centimeters from Yuksara's left temple, from a coordinate Tasia had written forty seconds ago when her boot touched this section of water. On the broadcast feed, Hathaway watched Yuksara's eyes blow wide. The Relentless Ace aborted her backward sprint, her boots skidding across the lake's surface.

She whipped her head left, then right. Then planted her feet. She's seen it. Every vector she was running toward. Already occupied. Already claimed. Already written. The orbit collapsed. Yuksara planted her feet on the lake surface. Her staff flared with blinding, holy-white light. The visual and acoustic signature screamed through the monitors: a concentrated, hyper-lethal thermal spike. [Solar Ray]. The heaviest single-target execution she had left. Hathaway gripped the armrests of her chair, her breath catching.

Tasia has to buffer it now. She needs to drop a max-tier thermal ward or an absolute barrier immediately to survive that payload. On the screen, Tasia cast nothing. She didn't flinch at the blinding light. She stood perfectly still, grey eyes reflecting the false sun, [Tyrant's Grace] motionless beside her shoulder. The white light fired. But what shot out of the glare wasn't a beam of incinerating fire.

The holy light tore open from the inside, and an emerald-black beam of pure necrotic annihilation lanced across the water. Hathaway's mind flatlined. Fake Solar Ray. Real Finger of Death. In the exact, singular fraction of a second before the emerald-black beam of the [Finger of Death] breached the white light and locked onto her chest, the specific transitional frame where the illusion dropped and the true structure became visible, a page within [Tyrant's Grace] snapped over.

A pale golden halo materialized over her heart. The [Finger of Death] struck. The [Death Ward] shattered.

"She didn't guess," Hathaway whispered, her developer spine vibrating with delayed, cold adrenaline as she processed what she had just witnessed.

"She waited until the exact frame the fake code dropped and the real payload rendered, and she was fast enough to beat the server tick." Yuksara's trump card evaporated. She was left standing in a coordinate trap with no remaining escape vectors. She still had mana. It didn't matter. Tasia raised her hand. The entire Mirror Lake erupted upward, a simultaneous multi-point detonation originating from every pre-written coordinate in Yuksara's vicinity at once.

The lake stopped being a reflective surface and became a towering column of destructive white light. When the glare faded, Yuksara Devic had already been swallowed by the blinding white flash of the resurrection stone and teleported off the field. [Match Complete. Winner: Tasia (Royal Rosas).] [Final Score: 5-4. Royal Rosas: 1 Win, 0 Losses.] In the VIP box, Margaret produced a sound that could only be described as a victory fanfare in human form. Anna set down her coffee cup with a precise, satisfied click.

Rory poked Hathaway's wrist. Hathaway looked down. The baby was pointing at the glass, then at her own hands, then at the glass again. The demand was clear, unambiguous, and not subject to negotiation. More. Hathaway conjured a second miniature blizzard, slightly larger this time, and let it drift over Rory's reaching palms. The baby immediately stuck both hands into it, apparently deciding that observation was insufficient and full tactile immersion was the superior learning methodology.

Her ice-blue eyes were incandescent with the specific, total absorption of someone who had just identified the shape of what they were going to become. Hathaway's idle thread filed a secondary projection without being asked. Somewhere hundreds of miles away, locked inside a darkened room fortified by empty energy drink cans, Alice was watching this broadcast. Tasia wanting to murder her was simply a Tuesday.

She was vibrating with unhinged vindication that her lore was penetrating the top-tier competitive demographic, and she was already drafting a twenty-page thesis on the metaphysical mechanics of the twenty-one-gram soul to send to Yuksara's public inbox. Hathaway watched the baby chase snowflakes and decided that was Alice's problem. She finished her drink, settled further into the chair, and let the warmth of the room do its work. Consumable attrition unit, full mission success. One match down.

The substitute bench survives.