Chương 175: Chapter 157: Strawberry Was Her Favorite Flavor

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 41 — 9: 00 AM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Grand Masters Main Arena · Box 14 The note had been sitting on the welcome mat of Townhouse 107 when she came downstairs for her morning coffee. It possessed no signature, no greeting, and no extraneous information. Just two words, written in a script Hathaway recognized immediately: immaculate, razor-sharp, the handwriting of a woman who treated penmanship as a form of aristocratic self-defense. Box 14.

Hathaway had stared at the heavy cream cardstock for a full minute. Her developer brain aggressively compiled branching logic trees. Invitation? Active recruitment into cross-team intelligence operations? Or had Victoria Wellington simply decided it was time to conduct an unannounced tactical comprehension check and dispatched the standard summons? She went anyway. Her knuckles had barely grazed the polished mahogany door of Box 14 when it clicked open. Victoria Wellington stood in the threshold.

Pristine white gloves. High collar. The mild, entirely unreadable expression of an aristocrat who had simply been standing on the other side of the door, waiting, and did not intend to acknowledge that this was a thing she had done. For a single, compressed moment, they stood approximately eight inches apart. Victoria took a half-step backward, turned her shoulder, and allowed Hathaway to enter. The door clicked shut with the heavy, soundproofed finality of a safe closing.

The luxury box was standard upper-tier configuration: dim, climate-controlled, a massive sunken sectional sofa piled with fur blankets, facing a panoramic wall of reinforced spell-glass overlooking the arena. What was not standard was the creature currently occupying the exact center of that sofa. It was a Lantern Cat. Roughly the size of a human toddler. Its fur was a dense, plush pattern of black-and-white cow-spots.

And protruding from its massive, glowing back was a pair of comically small, cartoonishly disproportionate feathered wings. Victoria picked the enormous cat up with the solemn dignity of someone handling a religious relic, and sat. Hathaway took the adjacent cushion. Silence stretched across the plush velvet. Victoria stared at the arena glass. She appeared to consider something. Then, without a word or a glance, she extended her arms and deposited the massive cat directly into Hathaway's lap....

Alright, Hathaway's processor accepted. We are doing this. She ran her hands through the thick fur. She recognized the breed instantly. An [Explorer Lantern Cat]. The heavy-duty variant bred for deep-wilderness and cross-dimensional excursions where ambient mana was non-existent. It was capable of projecting sustained illumination with surgical precision and storing enough purified oxygen to sustain a Witch for forty-eight hours.

Most crucially, it possessed a specialized internal matrix designed to process White Eggs, converting their raw, concentrated biological energy into electricity, and subsequently exhaling it as a breathable, readily absorbable mana-mist for its owner. The wings, however, served zero biological or magical function. They were a genetic quirk. They could flutter. That was the complete extent of their contribution to the universe.

But just as Mist Lantern Cats were pathologically, insufferably devoted to their hats, Explorer Cats were intensely, personally invested in their wings. The cat looked at Hathaway with luminous, patient eyes. Flap. The tiny wings twitched. The cat continued to look at her. Flap. Flap. Hathaway understood the assignment. She leaned forward, her voice carrying the tone of someone delivering a verdict to a very important committee.

"Those are," Hathaway said, with profound, unfeigned admiration, "the most magnificent wings I have ever seen." The cat's eyes narrowed into twin crescents of absolute euphoria. It planted both front paws into Hathaway's thigh and began kneading the fabric of her trousers with the heavy, relentless rhythm of an industrial dough mixer. Hathaway kept her hands moving through the fur. She turned her head slightly, catching Victoria in her peripheral vision.

"Where have you been?" Victoria's gaze remained on the empty arena below.

"I traveled from Holheim to Casendiara," she said.

"On foot. I carried a guitar." No portals. No transit spells. Just walking across the continent with an instrument on her back, like a wandering bard. She had never once heard music coming from Victoria's room.

"I didn't know you played," Hathaway said.

"I cannot play a single chord," Victoria replied. Her voice was perfectly flat.... Right. Hathaway's developer brain processed the data with the grim efficiency of a system that had just received an unexpected null return. She carried a guitar across a continent. It is the magical equivalent of a modern-day person buying a vintage typewriter, going to a café, and just staring at it so other people know they have inner depth. Committed to the bit at extraordinary personal inconvenience.

"I also held a vigil," Victoria continued, her tone the relaxed, factual register of someone recounting a weekend errand.

"For the poet Elara Vance. She published a final, tragic collection and declared her work finished. Died. Very moving."

"That's genuinely respectful," Hathaway offered cautiously.

"It was fraudulent," Victoria said.

"Elara Vance's grave was radiating the contained signature of an active air-circulation ward. At approximately 2: 00 AM, my eyes registered the thermal-mana output of someone using a low-tier fire spell to brew espresso. Six feet underground." A pause.

"So I established a camp," Victoria continued.

"Three days and three nights. I brought a grill. I barbecued. I broadcast heavy metal through a spatial amplifier at maximum yield." Hathaway stopped petting the cat. I'm sorry. You did what.

"Eventually," Victoria said, adjusting one immaculate white glove with the calm of someone describing the weather, "she kicked the lid open and climbed out.

"She was quite loud. She said something about public decency and the specific, personal sanctity of a deadline-avoidance death. She accused me of throwing a rave on a fresh grave."

"And?" Hathaway said, entirely captivated.

"I informed her that I would dismantle the amplifier in exchange for a signed anthology and an exclusive twenty-thousand-word side story, written on-site." Victoria settled slightly into the sofa cushion.

"She agreed. She was motivated." Hathaway tried to render the image. The pristine, untouchable Wellington, standing in a cemetery in an immaculate coat, flipping skewers over a portable grill while death metal at catastrophic volume vibrated through the headstones. Her brain rejected the rendering on three separate attempts. The logic is sound, her developer brain noted. The result was statistically optimal. A signed first edition and exclusive content for the cost of a portable grill and amplifier rental.

The ROI is exceptional. But one critical variable refused to resolve. Why a barbecue? Victoria seemed to anticipate the question. She turned to Hathaway with the measured, attentive expression of a professor who had identified a gap in the student's foundational curriculum.

"Witch corpses decompose vast volumes of mana into the surrounding soil," Victoria said.

"This creates an optimal growth environment for transcendent flora and preserves the spiritual integrity of objects stored nearby. Consequently, graveyards naturally become premier high-density storage facilities for magical artifacts. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Where there is premium storage, merchants consolidate. Where merchants consolidate, foot traffic follows. Where foot traffic is sustained, high-turnover culinary infrastructure proliferates. Hotpot. Barbecue. Fried skewers." She gestured once, neatly, with her right hand.

"It is a fundamental law of macro-economics." Hathaway absorbed the complete pipeline: mana decomposition → botanical growth → artifact warehousing → black market consolidation → graveyard street food. Her question was: what planet does this woman actually live on, and is there a transit spell that goes there? Before she could speak, the stadium's acoustic arrays flared to life. The grand, resonant chime of the arena broadcast rolled through the observation glass, signaling the start of the morning's quarterfinal.

[Royal Rosas vs. Absolute City — Match Begin.] Above the central dome, the terrain roulette spun and locked. [Selected Terrain: Sector 5 — Badlands.] The deployment gates opened onto baked crimson earth and jagged mesas. The air above the cracked clay shimmered with dry, suffocating heat. There was zero cover, no water, and no organic anchors. Just wind-scoured stone and killing fields. Both of them turned toward the glass. Down in the Royal Rosas deployment zone, Alucard von Milan'thirskaya stood up.

The Archon's expression was the face she wore to municipal budget deficit review meetings: the hollow, crystalline composure of a woman whose spirit had already filed a formal grievance with the universe and was simply waiting for the response. From the inner pocket of her combat coat, she withdrew a small, transparent glass vial. The moment Hathaway saw it, a memory clicked into place. Botanical Laboratory 3. Nino Lucent, gleaming over a boiling cauldron of magma-red oil.

A Ghost-Skull pepper's capsaicin chain, spliced with an Abyssal Mandrake's heat-retention sequence. The result: a compound that bypassed the digestive system entirely and interfaced directly with the soul cortex. Localized industrial combustion. A concept-level neurotoxin disguised as a condiment. Charged to the municipal defense budget, authorized on the spot, because Alucard had needed something strong enough to survive a three-hour deficit review meeting.

Alucard popped the cork, tipped the violently purple, barbed pepper into her mouth, and chewed once. The physiological response was instantaneous. A uniform sheen of cold sweat erupted across her pale forehead. The blood vessels in her grey eyes fractured into burning red webs. She did not make a sound.

Her posture simply locked into something diamond-hard and absolute, the bearing of a woman who had discovered that a pain calibrated precisely to her limits functioned, paradoxically, as the cleanest form of focus she had ever encountered.

"She is ready," Victoria murmured. On the opposite side of the badlands, Liandra Milan'thirskaya watched her older sister consume the pepper. The youngest daughter of the former Kings of the World stood amidst the baked crimson dust with her weapon lowered, her expression unchanged. But her eyes wavered for exactly one frame, a microscopic, suppressed flicker of something that had no clean name, before settling back into absolute stillness. She did not speak.

A Sword-Staff Witch, Hathaway's tactical processor noted, cataloguing Liandra's loadout with the automatic compulsiveness of a system that could not stop itself from running the numbers. Entry requirements: a short wand for point-blank casting. And a physical weapon. But Liandra had brought the absolute pinnacle of that category: a light sword.

It was constructed by feeding obscene amounts of mana through a core crystal and a specialized spell-nozzle, binding catastrophic kinetic energy into overlapping wavelengths of concentrated force that functioned as a blade. And the absolute premium conductor crystal for that specific application, the Silovi Abyssal Ruby, always produced a blade of screaming, blinding red. But the sword is just the starting point.

To survive in melee range, you also need a Legendary Deflection Cloak capable of bouncing a [Finger of Death] back at the caster. Spatiotemporal Resistance Boots so the localized gravity wells your own speed generates don't shear your legs off. A Black Hole Necklace for instant, spell-immunity-piercing crowd control. Only after you dump the financial equivalent of a mid-tier Hive City's annual budget into passive survival infrastructure does a Sword-Staff Witch cross the threshold of functional.

At that point, a caster with 2, 000 M-Units becomes capable of physically beating a 20, 000 M-Units High Witch to death in close quarters. The build is the definition of pay-to-win. It screams, loudly and without shame: I am obscenely, generationally wealthy. Liandra carried the same Dragon Witch bloodline as their eldest sister, Ash: the Light Dragon variety of the Deer-Dragon sub-branch, the largest and most physically dominant subspecies within it. The countdown sphere shattered against the baked clay.

Liandra chained two randomly-triggered [Dimensional Jumps] back-to-back, crossing the desolate badlands like an orbital railgun strike. The bedrock bloomed with massive flowers of impact-kinetics where her boots touched the cracked earth for a single microsecond. She abandoned all defensive casting entirely, recklessly flooding raw, unfiltered mana directly into her musculature. Her physical stats climbed to a tier where she could have punched through a mesa.

But forcing that volume of volatile energy through a biological circuit came with a mandatory, unavoidable debuff: [Heavy Casting]. The denser the mana packing the muscle fibers, the more sluggish the arcane flow became. It traded cast speed for catastrophic physical dominance and spell potency. Armor-Piercing Round? Hathaway ran the math. She'd eat the hit and take Alucard's head on the way down. Kite? She burned two leaps to close the gap. There's no backpedaling fast enough now. Stand and buff? Suicide.

Alucard drew a short combat knife. She mirrored Liandra's mana infusion, flooding her own draconic physiology with raw, volatile power, and dropped into a low, grounded stance, anchoring herself against the cracked clay. She drove off her back foot, throwing up a cloud of red dust, and swung the knife upward to meet the charge. The light sword and the knife collided.

The sound it made was the acoustic signature of a natural disaster: a shrieking, ear-shattering screech of metal and compressed force that tore through the stadium microphones. The kinetic shockwave pulverized the hard-packed earth in a thirty-yard radius, whipping up a localized sandstorm of crimson grit. The space around the locked blades physically warped, invisible razor-thin fractures carving themselves into the bedrock beneath their boots. Liandra held the light sword in one hand.

She feinted, transitioned into a brutal upward slash, and pivoted, whipping her heavy deflection cloak around for a secondary bludgeoning strike. The sequence completely sealed Alucard's casting windows. The Archon was forced to raise her knife high, covering mid and upper quadrants, denying Liandra the leg-sweep counter-angle.

The moment Alucard committed her guard high, Liandra stepped back into the swirling red dust, fired two rapid-burst offensive spells into the gap to prevent pursuit, and gripped the hilt in both hands. A high, dominant stance. One breath. The sword came down. CRACK. Alucard's face went paper-white. She bit down on her lip, blood welling up immediately, boots grinding backward into the shattered clay, carving twin trenches through the badlands. She caught the strike. BZZZT. Liandra showed zero mercy.

She stepped forward, leveraging the overwhelming brute mass of a Light Dragon to physically push her sister back a step, reset her stance, took one shallow breath, and brought the sword down again. Her mana was running too thick and heavy to chain spells now, completely submerged in the [Heavy Casting] penalty, but she didn't need spells. She just needed gravity and momentum. Like a meteor striking the desert floor. The crimson energy blade crashed against the knife.

The air between them distorted so violently it looked like heat rising off a forge. In Box 14, Hathaway's hands had tightened on the cat's fur without her noticing. Liandra was throwing everything she had. Every ounce of strength. Not a single blow pulled. Not a millisecond of hesitation. The violence of it was total and deliberate. She couldn't go home, Hathaway thought, watching the sword come down again. She couldn't bring Ash back. But she could stand here and give Alucard something real.

And Alucard was taking it. The heaviest strike of the sequence arrived. Liandra brought the sword down with everything. Alucard did not fall. For one suspended, motionless frame, the momentum zeroed out. Liandra's grip shifted. Alucard's knife angled back upward. Neither woman spoke. Neither woman's expression changed. Hathaway sat in the velvet quiet of the box. A memory surfaced without warning. Rhode's voice. A mythic-tier Void Whale, falling out of the sky without a deceleration vector.

Boiling blood cascading like a thermal waterfall. She was just trying to send a gift.

"You were the flower girl," Hathaway said.

"What was in the box." The white-gloved hands in Victoria's lap were perfectly, entirely still. Three seconds of absolute silence passed.

"Two cheap candy rings," Victoria said. Her voice had lost its aristocratic cadence entirely, stripped down to something hollow and fragile that Hathaway had never heard from her before.

"The kind purchased from a convenience store. One was grape-flavored. One was strawberry-flavored." Down on the arena floor, the suspended frame broke.

"Grape was Evangeline's favorite flavor," Victoria continued. Alucard's bloodshot eyes snapped wide. Her stance shifted by a fraction, something internal settling into place, something that had been waiting to settle. Her grip on the knife changed.

"Strawberry was Cecilia's." Alucard engaged her racial mechanic. In the real world, an Arch-Witch could be killed a dozen times in a skirmish and consider it a warm-up. But this was a duel. One life. Immortality was a dead stat. [Blood Boiling]. She traded it. Violently, completely. She shut down the last remnants of her suppressed immortality, converting the concept of survival into pure, catastrophic offensive output.

What replaced it was the suicidal clarity of a platform that had simply stopped allocating resources to its own continuity. Without a chant, without pulling a centimeter of distance, she bypassed the [Heavy Casting] speed penalty entirely: her own blood was the catalyst now.

"Cecilia picked up the strawberry ring," Victoria said.

"She placed it on her ring finger." Seven waves of elemental annihilation erupted simultaneously from Alucard's body at absolute zero range: Water, Wind, Fire, Lightning, Earth, Radiant, Shadow. The mechanism was not designed to be used after gaining distance. The blast was the distance.

"And then," Victoria finished, as the seven-element shockwave tore the earth open between them, "she gently bit down, and shattered the candy." Liandra's [Heavy Casting] debuff had been burning for the entire fight, and now there was nothing left to spend. She tried to take it with her body. The resurrection stone shattered mid-arc. She was gone before she hit the ground, leaving nothing behind but the massive smoking crater carved into the cracked clay between where they had stood.

Victoria's answer and the explosion landed in the same breath. [Match Complete. Winner: Alucard (Royal Rosas).] The announcement chime rang out over the stadium, clean and final. In Box 14, neither of them spoke. The only sounds in the room were the heavy, rhythmic purring of the cat, and the soft, proud flutter of its tiny, useless wings.