Chương 176: Chapter 158: "So It Was You"

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 41 — 9: 30 AM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Grand Masters Main Arena · Box 14 The silence in Box 14 had structural weight. It pressed against the velvet sectional, against the spell-glass, against the climate-controlled air that still carried the residue of something that could not be taken back. Neither of them reached for the champagne. Neither of them spoke.

On Hathaway's lap, the Explorer Lantern Cat continued its slow, authoritative kneading, utterly indifferent to the ambient psychological pressure. Its comically tiny feathered wings twitched once. Then stilled. In the manner of an entity that had assessed the room and found the proceedings beneath commentary. Above the central dome, the holographic roulette spun and locked. [Selected Terrain: Sector 8 — Ancient Ruins.] The arena opened onto stone columns and fallen arches: the remnants of something vast and indifferent, half-buried in ancient earth. Alucard stepped out of the Royal Rosas tunnel. The Milan'thirskaya bloodline was constitutionally incapable of looking broken in public: her chin was tilted at the precise, mandated angle of a ruling dynasty, her steps measured and deliberate. The architectural foundation beneath that posture had been completely incinerated.

The Archon was piloting a biological vessel running entirely on emergency reserve fumes and sheer aristocratic stubbornness. From the Absolute City gate, Du Lingxuan stepped onto the field. The tactical anchor of Absolute City crossed the ancient stone floor with a light, bouncy cadence. She carried a long, uniquely forged staff with a heavy, blade-like tail section. It was officially registered under the name [Scourge of Ten Thousand]. It was a grand, mythic-sounding title.

But anyone who actually listened to Du Lingxuan speak quickly realized the name had absolutely nothing to do with her combat prowess. It was simply a mathematically accurate measurement of her global aggro radius. She stopped at a polite distance from the Archon. The expression arrived on schedule.

"I appreciate you making the trip." Hathaway's hands slowed in the dense, cow-spotted fur.

'Making the trip,' her developer brain noted. The hospitality framing of a cleanup. A single, efficient exchange flashed across the ruins. The result was not a fight. It was an administrative footnote. Alucard pressed her charge and collapsed before she could close the distance, her resurrection stone shattering as Du Lingxuan sidestepped with the mild, professional calm of someone completing the last item on a checklist. [Current Score: Absolute City 1 — Royal Rosas 1.] Beside Hathaway, Victoria's pale eyes tracked the holographic update. She offered no commentary on Alucard's demise, nor on Du Lingxuan's remarkably efficient methods. Hathaway kept her hands in the cat's fur. The silence was growing too dense to maintain.

"You're in here alone," Hathaway said quietly.

"Is that really okay?" Victoria's gaze remained fixed on the arena glass. The corner of her mouth tightened: a microscopic, barely qualifying shift.

"This," Victoria said, "is best for everyone." Her tone was flat, a clean observation delivered without complaint or self-pity. If Victoria was present, Cecilia would hold herself back, the automatic calibration of a sister who read discomfort before it arrived. By removing herself, Victoria had handed Cecilia back exactly what she was too careful to take for herself. Mathematically optimal. Hathaway's fingers stilled in the cat's fur.

The question that had been sitting under her sternum since the moment Victoria's voice had lost its aristocratic cadence demanded an exit. She hesitated. Then:"Do they know about Cecilia and Evangeline?" Victoria did not answer immediately. Above the central dome, the holographic roulette spun and locked. [Selected Terrain: Sector 1 — Mirror Lake.] The deployment gates ground open. Bella stepped out onto the perfectly still, infinitely reflective surface of the water.

The Royal Rosas chuunibyou deployed her full atmospheric arsenal without preamble. Her heavy velvet cape caught a localized updraft. Her single visible eye glowed with the righteous, crimson energy of someone who had been mentally preparing fresh material since the knockout draw. She leveled her wand at Du Lingxuan with the solemn, theatrical authority of a high priest delivering judgment unto the unsaved.

"Behold the graveyard of forgotten epochs!" Bella's voice echoed grandly across the endless, dizzying sphere of serene blue sky and pristine white clouds.

"Tremble, for I am the Sovereign of the Crimson Moon, and these bottomless depths shall become your eternal—" Du Lingxuan waited with her hands resting lightly on the hilt of her staff. She listened with the polite, warm attention of a conservatory audience. When Bella paused for dramatic effect, Du Lingxuan smiled.

"Brava, sweetheart. Karula just wakes up that way, you know." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. A violent burst of dark mana erupted from Bella's wand. The perfectly still mirror surface of the lake shattered in a furious, entirely un-choreographed arc of kinetic force and geysering water.

Bella completely abandoned her dramatic pacing, her single eye burning with the raw, unhinged fury of a woman whose absolute deepest, most heavily guarded aesthetic insecurity had just been casually broadcast to four hundred million people. The flash cut across Hathaway's line of sight for half a second. She pulled her attention back from the glass. Critical hit, Hathaway's tactical processor noted, sinking into the velvet cushions. I sacrificed my own aesthetic integrity to protect her. I fed her a diplomatic lie.

And now Du Lingxuan has simply logged onto the global broadcast and cheerfully delivered the objective verdict I was too much of a coward to say out loud.

"They don't know," Victoria said. Something structural in Hathaway's chest catastrophically crashed. The sensation was dizzying and absolute: the plummeting vertigo of watching the sky crack open. They don't know. The words hit her developer brain as a total cascade failure. They drowned instead. A high-speed storm of panic. She desperately threw processing power at the logic, searching for an exit, and hit a solid concrete wall. They have to know. How could they not know?! They spent years in the same cohort.

This kind of thing has a tell. There is always a tell! You don't spend years inextricably woven into someone's daily existence and somehow miss a ghost occupying a timeshare in their soul! I was there when Karula made her a blood rose. You cannot fake that ecosystem. The logic fragmented, spitting out fatal errors. Cecilia's eyes. That absolute, tranquil, suffocating stillness. Hathaway had filed it as the unshakable confidence of an apex predator. The shadow of Babylon never passed.

She is still teetering on the edge of the abyss. If she knows the consequences of tethering four devoted people to a rotting foundation while her heart irrevocably belongs to someone else— That isn't tranquility. That is a woman actively, lucidly walking toward a terminal crash. And taking them with her. And the blast radius won't stop at the starting roster. The realization detonated. A secondary explosion. She looked at the immaculate, white-gloved hands resting quietly on the velvet cushion beside her. Victoria.

If Cecilia's foundation finally shatters. If Cecilia steps off the cliff. Victoria follows her straight down into the dark. No. No, no, no. Unacceptable. The collateral damage is unacceptable. She whipped her head toward Victoria. Her mouth bypassed her broken processing core entirely, grabbing for the last available variable.

"But they signed a blood pact—" She stopped. The words hung in the air. Victoria turned toward her. Very slowly. The mild Wellington composure did not shatter. It acquired density, a specific, crystalline pressure: the unmistakable weight of a perimeter ward that had just registered an unidentified incursion.

"How do you know that?" Hathaway's lungs stopped working. Her brain ran the logic with terrible speed. The Babylon Wedding: Tasia and Alucard were on her team. Victoria knew that. Explainable. The blood pact was not visible. Not inferable from tournament footage. Not documented in any accessible record. It was sealed inside the Greed Umbrella's inner sanctum. Nobody outside that circle had any path to that information. Hathaway stammered. Her throat clicked dryly. She swallowed.

Her gaze dropped, involuntarily, to the Explorer Cat's tiny, comically useless feathered wings.

"Alice," Hathaway said, to her own lap. Down on the arena floor, the mirror lake shattered under the sustained exchange. Bella spent the last of her health pool in a final, defiant volley, forcing Du Lingxuan to actually work for the elimination. The scoreboard ticked over. [Current Score: Absolute City 2 — Royal Rosas 1.] Above the central dome, the holographic roulette spun and locked. [Selected Terrain: Sector 4 — Permafrost Tundra.] The deployment gates ground open, unleashing a howl of sub-zero wind across an endless, frictionless expanse of ancient, blue-white ice. Rhode stepped through the Royal Rosas gate. She walked onto the frozen expanse with her short wand loose in her grip, her red eyes already locked, her movement carrying the quiet, rolling quality of something that had been waiting for a very specific door to open for a very long time. Du Lingxuan went still. She adjusted her grip on her staff.

Her smile widened into its brightest, most accommodating configuration. Hathaway caught the broadcast from her lips, delivered with the warm, innocent sincerity of a kindergarten teacher.

"Stay. Lin's door has a 'Do Not Disturb' sign. She put it up three days ago." Rhode bypassed the entire concept of a casting sequence. A single streak of crimson kinetic force crossed the tundra faster than the stadium's tracking system could process. Du Lingxuan's innocent smile still in place, right as the vanguard's opening strike connected.

The moment Rhode entered her proximity, a dozen layers of high-tier hexagonal Abjuration matrices flared to life, anchored by the heavy shaft of the [Scourge of Ten Thousand]. They were designed to buy any caster at least ten seconds of breathing room against a melee rush. Rhode took exactly eight. She simply unleashed a hurricane of pure, unadulterated kinetic violence, hammering the shields with such catastrophic, overlapping speed that the permafrost beneath them simply atomized into a crater of white mist.

The layered shields groaned, fractured, and violently shattered like a collapsing glacier, and Du Lingxuan was ruthlessly evicted from the arena before she could complete a single counter-cast. [Current Score: Absolute City 2 — Royal Rosas 2.] The scoreboard chime rang through the reinforced glass. In Box 14, neither of them had moved. Victoria let out a long, slow breath.

"So it was you." Three seconds of silence. Victoria reached up, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. She held the position for one breath. She lowered her hand. She smoothed the front of her coat, meticulously, eliminating a crease that did not exist. She adjusted her right glove, a single, deliberate motion. Hathaway sat frozen under the weight of the unexploded bomb. Her chest ached. She looked at her roommate's immaculate, unreadable profile.

If Cecilia initiates the self-destruct sequence... can you choose to stay behind? Is there a patch for this? Is there any conceivable way to save her? And died right on her tongue. Her developer brain ran the simulation before the first syllable could form, returning immediate, unavoidable fatal errors. You couldn't patch a foundation that was intentionally designed to collapse. You couldn't ask a Wellington to un-tether herself from her sister's gravity well.

The code was locked, the dependencies were terminal, and the execution was inevitable. Her throat burned. Her hands mechanically stroked the thick, cow-spotted fur of the Explorer Cat resting on her lap. She said nothing. Victoria looked back at the arena glass. Hathaway shifted her gaze past the holographic scoreboard, focusing on the stadium's live broadcast feed of the Absolute City bench. The atmospheric shift was visible even through the monitor.

Du Lingxuan materialized at the resurrection point, adjusting the [Scourge of Ten Thousand] with the mild expression of someone logging a minor professional footnote. Not a single person on the bench was looking at her. Hathaway watched Lin Zhaojun stand up. She simply rose, but the physical act carried such sheer, vertical weight that it seemed to warp the framing of the camera.

The Absolute City head coach took a rapid step forward, one hand raised, mouth already forming the first of what appeared to be several carefully prepared strategic arguments. Lin Zhaojun looked at her. Hathaway's tactical processor automatically translated the two syllables shaping on Lin's lips.

"Sit down." Lin turned her back to the bench and walked toward the deployment gate. Hathaway caught the final, quiet articulation before the camera angle shifted.

"It's my turn." In the heavy silence of Box 14, Hathaway leaned slowly forward, her hands still resting on the cat's fur. The sleeping lion had stopped deciding whether to acknowledge the sound. She was already at the door.