Chương 173: Chapter 155: Sharpening the Axe Delays No Woodcutter

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 39 — 9: 30 AM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · Hathaway's Bedroom The aftermath of surviving the Grand Masters group stage while simultaneously suffering a catastrophic, blood-feud-validating loss to the Greed Umbrella did not manifest as weeping or broken furniture. It manifested as hermetically sealed quiet. The team needed a day to let the psychological shrapnel of the Holheim match settle. The rest day was mandatory. The roster was scattered. Hathaway had free time.

She sat at her mahogany desk, the heavy, ozone-scented master copy of The Banishment of Sorrow propped open on the reading stand. A fresh notebook lay beside it. Her stylus was poised with professional intent, ready to decipher the silver-inked equation mapping the geometric variance of a bruised soul. Ten minutes passed. The stylus had not moved. The dense magical theory was aggressively smoothing the sharp edges of her consciousness into something warm and horizontal.

It was the exact, inescapable gravitational pull of a post-lunch calculus lecture where the professor was speaking entirely in Greek symbols. Not because the subject lacked rigor, but because the brain simply recognized some text as a nap in disguise and acted accordingly. Her chin slipped off her hand. Her head snapped forward. She jerked awake, gasped, and knocked her knee into the underside of the desk.

"No," she muttered, slapping her cheeks.

"No. I am a professional. I do not fall asleep reading documentation." The grimoire exuded an aura of smug, impenetrable superiority. She closed it, stood up, and went downstairs to find water. Or a snack. Or any empirical proof that the world still existed at a molecular level. She found the proof in the foyer. A dimensional transit courier had just departed. The fading shimmer of the spatial portal still hung in the air above the marble floor.

In its wake sat three massive, freshly delivered hardware rigs, still half-wrapped in protective packaging: reinforced racing seats, articulated pedal sets, and heavy, brushed-steel steering columns radiating a faint, ambient mana signature. Margaret and Anna stood beside the delivery. Margaret was examining the specifications with the focused, approving expression of someone reviewing a favorable construction quote.

"What is this?" Hathaway asked.

"Patronage," Margaret said, with absolute, patrician satisfaction. Hathaway's tactical processor ran the sequence in under a second. Breakfast. The White Star Chronicle front page featuring Irene personally dismantling the Sunshine Pals in the final hour. Margaret and Anna's profound gratitude for the Fifth Seat legally vaporizing the two most extortionate feathered menaces to their household. The subsequent realization that Marit Kart was published by a subsidiary of Irene's commercial empire.

The Ludwig household's purchasing logic was a closed loop of justified excess. Margaret and Anna had bought three dedicated, limited-edition steering wheel setups. Two thousand, eight hundred Solars apiece. Supporting a White City Honorary Citizen's industrial output was not a recreational expenditure. It was civic infrastructure. Hathaway ran her hand over the nearest steering wheel. The leather was immaculate. The paddle shifters clicked with the heavy, satisfying feedback of a real transmission.

The developers had personally surveyed over two hundred physical racetracks across the continent, gathering geological surveys, atmospheric readings, and on-site elemental sampling, then encoded high-tier summoning magic to bind the real-world data into the game's proprietary [Dynamic Weather Engine] and [Kinetic Surface Friction System]. Mana truly is omnipotent, the developer in her soul marveled.

You can bend the laws of thermodynamics to replicate the exact suspension physics of a front-wheel-drive hatchback in a simulated volcanic storm. Margaret and Anna had already retreated to their respective studies. The rigs sat, unattended, waiting. As the ancient proverb plainly stated: playing video games without playing Marit Kart was like drinking without Moon Sugar, or listening to orchestral music and skipping Tchaikovsky. It was a fundamental failure of personal cultivation.

And someone had to calibrate the force-feedback motors. It would be irresponsible not to. Hathaway carried one of the rigs upstairs. The F-Rank lobbies were not a competition. They were a nature preserve. The inhabitants were cheerful, unoptimized, and constitutionally incapable of using the minimap. As a transmigrated systems designer with six years of professional experience reverse-engineering physics engines, Hathaway was clinically overqualified to participate.

She bypassed the aerodynamic interceptors, the nimble hover-bikes, and every vehicle that prioritized speed or handling, and locked in the Five-Nine: a heavily armored, wide-chassis monstrosity with the acceleration curve of a waterlogged shipping freighter, the turning radius of mild geological anxiety, and exactly one gloriously specific passive feature: a front-mounted arcane artillery cannon loaded with five active charges.

I do not want to outrun them, Hathaway decided, watching the countdown tick toward zero on a sun-drenched beach circuit, the steering wheel humming pleasantly in her grip. I want to blow them out of the lane. The light turned green. She turned the F-Rank lobbies into a gallery of instructional failures. E-Rank followed. D-Rank materialized and promptly began folding under the weight of her cannon angles and item-box suppression.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. By mid-afternoon, she was approaching the promotion threshold to C-Rank. At that precise moment, her hubris reached critical structural pressure, the gaming gods took careful note, and the D-Rank ecosystem decided to formally introduce itself.

"Who approved the retrieval hook?!" she yelled.

"I want a name. I have professional opinions about this design decision and I intend to deliver them directly."

"Are you kidding me?! Who let you into this lobby?! This is a ranked match, not a nature documentary!"

"WHAT THE ABYSS! I dropped a rank! How did I drop a rank on a straight!" Eight matches later, she was clawing back toward the C-Rank promotion threshold, holding third place on a narrow, high-altitude canyon track with no guardrails and a bottomless drop to the right. The racing line was clean. The cannon was loaded. Two turns remained. Then, the ecosystem adapted. It wasn't coordinated.

It was five solo-queue Witches who had each independently assessed the same geometry and arrived at the same rational, wordless conclusion simultaneously. The Witch in Second Place decelerated by a fraction, not a brake but a suggestion, and drifted slightly inward, boxing Hathaway's lane. In the same frame, Fourth Place surged into the hazard shoulder and shunted hard into her right flank.

The combined pressure locked the heavy Five-Nine chassis between them and dragged its trajectory sideways, toward gravel and air. Before the correction was possible, Fifth Place arrived. Fifth Place had been carrying a reserved Nitro charge since lap one. Fifth Place recognized a stalled target hanging over a cliff with zero ability to dodge. Fifth Place did not use the Nitro to pass the pack.

With the bloodthirsty opportunism of an entity that had decided the race was now something else entirely, Fifth Place angled perpendicular, burned the Nitro, and T-boned Hathaway's chassis at terminal velocity. The execution points registered.

The three conspirators, who had never spoken, who shared no comms channel, who had simply and simultaneously recognized that dynamically unionizing to eliminate the third-place threat was the individually optimal move, smoothly realigned their vectors and accelerated toward the finish line. [Placement: 9th. RANK DOWN.]"Are we playing the game," Hathaway said, with the flat, dangerously controlled intonation of someone deciding whether to escalate, "or are we playing syndicate politics?! I was in third!

I wasn't even the primary threat! What compelling mutual benefit led you all to spontaneously form a labor coalition dedicated entirely to my destruction?!" She ripped the headset off. Threw it onto the carpet. Her heart rate was significantly higher than it had been while dodging live ammunition in the actual Grand Masters arena. She needed to de-tilt. Playing angry only accelerated the rank loss.

She stood up, paced twice, and dropped herself back into her desk chair, yanking The Banishment of Sorrow open at random. Something, anything, to cool the processor down. Her eyes found the bloom passage. She stared at it. The adrenaline was still burning through her synapses. Her mind was still running the six-second breakdown of the canyon assassination, tracking each decision, each player's individual calculus— She froze. Wait. The stylus slipped. She looked at the page again.

She had understood the foundational logic. It wasn't a delete command. It was an uninstaller. You didn't eradicate sorrow by force. You defined where it ended and the baseline began, severed the dependencies from the outside in, and let the system naturally reassert its default state. What she hadn't understood was why the detection was Tier-7 or Tier-8. Why locating the boundary was the entire problem. A fresh wound has a clear signature, her developer brain processed, the lines finally compiling.

It's a foreign file. Its frequency is obviously wrong. You can locate it and remove it. But trauma that had existed in a host for years, even decades, stopped looking foreign. The nervous system stopped fighting it. The biological architecture began routing daily function around the damage, building new processes on top of the grief. It stopped being an anomalous file. It became a system file. The malware rewrote the registry.

To a standard diagnostic spell, the trauma's signature and the baseline personality's signature would begin to overlap. The detection protocol would lose the ability to distinguish between them. Execute a wide-net banishment at that point, and you didn't remove the sorrow. You stripped out the host's entire foundational emotional tension. You didn't heal them. You lobotomized them. The true difficulty, Hathaway realized, leaning forward over the grimoire, isn't the raw force required to remove it.

It's the surgical precision required to locate where the original code ends and the installed damage begins. At the molecular level. In a system that has spent years convincing itself the damage was always supposed to be there. She sat with that for a long, quiet moment. Then she turned the page to look at the actual detection algorithm.

It was an incomprehensible wall of non-Euclidean magical calculus, rendered in a theoretical notation she had never encountered before, folded through at least four spatial dimensions, and annotated in a hand that assumed the reader had already solved the prerequisite problems and was simply here for the footnotes. Her eyes began to cross. The familiar, gravitational warmth of approaching unconsciousness began to settle over her prefrontal cortex. She gently closed the grimoire.

Sharpening the axe does not delay the woodcutter, Hathaway told herself, nodding at the empty room with the calm authority of someone citing a source. I read this book for an hour and almost entered a coma. I played Marit Kart for four hours and achieved a genuine, high-tier Abjuration breakthrough. The dataset is conclusive. The ranked ladder is a viable academic methodology. She picked up the headset.

The sun tracked across the White City sky and sank below the western horizon, painting the clouds outside Townhouse 107 in deep shades of amber, then bruised violet, then the quiet black of early night. Inside the bedroom, the concept of daylight had ceased to exist. The heavy curtains were drawn. The only illumination was the shifting blue-white glare of the monitor.

Hathaway was hunched forward, knuckles white on the steering wheel, muttering a low, continuous stream of precisely targeted feedback at the anonymous Witch who had just deployed a proximity mine on the boost pad she was aiming for. A soft click. The bedroom door opened. Warm light spilled in from the hallway. Margaret stood in the doorway, holding a silver tray laden with roasted pheasant, buttered asparagus, and fresh rolls. The smell filled the room immediately.

Anna's silhouette was visible just behind her shoulder.

"I thought you might be hungry," Margaret said, stepping carefully over a discarded manual, setting the tray on the small side table with the unhurried ease of someone completing a familiar routine.

"You've been in here all day." Hathaway grunted an acknowledgment without taking her eyes off the apex of the next turn. She crossed the finish line, exhaled, and pushed the headset up. Margaret glanced at the monitor, the tank chassis currently deploying a retaliatory cannon shot into a passing hover-bike, then at the drawn curtains, then at her daughter, backlit by screen glow, hair loosely tied, entirely absent from the physical world. She did not look surprised. She did not look concerned.

She looked, if anything, gently, warmly familiar with this exact configuration of the room. She reached over and gave Hathaway a light, affectionate pat on the top of her head.

"Don't stay up too late," she said.

"And try not to grip the wheel so hard. You'll hurt your wrists." The door clicked shut. Hathaway sat alone in the dark, surrounded by the smell of roasted pheasant. Oh. The original Hathaway had been a complete, unapologetic shut-in. This was not a descent into madness. This was her daughter coming home to herself. The curtains. The tray. The wrist comment. Pre-existing infrastructure. Hathaway looked at the silver tray. She looked at the steering wheel in her hands.

She felt the phantom vibration of the haptic feedback still humming through her palms. I have become the very thing I replaced. Soul synchronization: complete. She picked up the fork. She reached for the headset. I'll start the detection algorithm tomorrow, she told herself, with the serene, unshakeable certainty of someone who had run the numbers and accepted the outcome. I just need to get back to C-Rank.