Chương 177: Chapter 159: The Water We Are Born In

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 41 — 10: 05 AM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Grand Masters Main Arena · Box 14 Every tactical architecture Hathaway had tried to route around the Greed Umbrella's architectural fault line had terminated in a fatal error. She had exhausted every developer analogy, every branching logic tree, every debug pathway she knew how to run. The board state was unresolvable. The dependencies were irrecoverable. The Explorer Lantern Cat continued its heavy, authoritative kneading in her lap.

She looked at the pristine, white-gloved aristocrat sitting entirely motionless beside her.

"What is she thinking?" Hathaway's voice stripped itself of all tactical armor the moment it left her throat.

"Cecilia. Did she say anything to you?" Above the central dome, the holographic roulette spun and locked. [Selected Terrain: Sector 7 — Jagged Alpine Peaks.] The deployment gates ground open onto wind-scoured stone and grey, sky-piercing spires. Rhode stepped through onto wind-scoured stone, red eyes already fixed on the far gate. Across the ravine, Lin Zhaojun stepped out. The fireball dropped. Rhode's wand snapped up twice before the starting fireball had finished falling.

Twin armor-piercing kinetic missiles, screaming across the ravine at Mach 4, sealing off every conceivable teleportation angle in the opening frame. Lin Zhaojun didn't blink. She didn't shield. With a ghost-like, untethered agility, she simply slipped between them. The missiles sheared the air millimeters from her cheek. Her casting concentration never fractured. Her heel barely grazed the stone, one finger already pointing toward Rhode. Victoria kept her eyes on the glass.

"She told me," Victoria said, with the flat, unhurried precision of a court archivist reading a historical record."' I have one question left for her. Once I hear the answer, I'll know exactly what to do with it.'" Hathaway's breath hitched. Her developer brain parsed the architecture. Cecilia Wellington was placing the entire weight of her existence on a variable she could not control. On Evangeline's answer. If the answer is wrong, she is finished. Hathaway's heart rate spiked. She had read the manuscript.

She knew exactly what kind of entity Evangeline was. The domino chain compiled itself in her processor with catastrophic clarity: Evangeline delivers a neutron bomb. Cecilia shatters. Greed Umbrella collapses trying to hold her together. And Victoria, standing patiently at the edge of that blast radius— Her eyes snapped to Victoria. She had expected to find the same localized panic attack reflected in those pale eyes. Instead, she found silence. Not the rigid, white-knuckled silence of someone bracing for impact.

The smooth, placid silence of someone who had already reviewed the full schematic, and accepted the structural flaw as a load-bearing feature.

"Victoria." Hathaway's voice was trembling openly now.

"Are you thinking the same thing? Are you just... waiting for Evangeline's answer too?" Down in the ravine, Rhode instantly aborted a pre-read [Might of the Mountains], abandoning her anchor and dropping a delayed-trigger [Dispel] on her previous coordinates. The moment she vacated the space, two granite golems erupted from the bedrock and immediately crumbled to dust as the trap washed over them. Victoria turned her head.

"Hathaway," she said quietly.

"Evangeline is also my sister." You look at this and see a crisis I am being dragged into, that sentence communicated. You think I am standing on Cecilia's tracks, waiting for Evangeline's train to hit us. But I grew up in this house. Cecilia is my sister. Evangeline is my sister. This is not a disaster I am facing. This is the water I was born in. Hathaway's mouth opened. Her vocal cords declined to engage. She turned back to the glass. Down in the alpine peaks, Rhode and Lin Zhaojun had found each other.

Lin conjured [Heavy Fog], threading a [Freezing Blood] ambush through the mist. Rhode anchored her boots to the stone and triggered [Lion's Roar]: an omnidirectional sonic blast laced with hurricane-force winds that tore the fog apart in one breath, the mana turbulence jamming the freezing curse and denying Lin the close-range blink. Lin attacked. Rhode defended. The rust was gone. The last of it cracked and fell away in those first exchanges, and what emerged underneath was unmistakable.

There you are, her processor said quietly. The real one. Lin Zhaojun had opened the build that gave any serious developer a migraine: the loadout of a protagonist constructed by a writer who had never once been told the word "no." Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. [Web], [Grease], ignited by a point-blank [Fireball], a localized trap that Rhode evaded. [Ice Pillar] erupted to block the retreat. [Ice Burst] shattered it.

A high-density [Water Bomb] threaded the shrapnel as conductors before Rhode could clear the debris field. [Dimension Door] opened. Six distinct elemental payloads poured through simultaneously, detonating against a [Blast Wall] to funnel the backdraft directly at the Vanguard. [Force Wall], [Impact], driving Rhode backward into the clifface. Then, the signature genius: [Reignite Flame], targeting not Rhode but the residual magical signatures of the first combo, still hanging in the alpine air.

The web, the grease, the fireball's afterglow: all of it ignited simultaneously, catching the backwash of the six elemental detonations. Dozens of Tier-1-to-4 spells cascading, each amplifying the last, constructing the destructive yield of a Tier-7 cataclysm through pure, systemic engineering.

She weaponized the spatial instability her own explosions generated, substituting raw mana output for structured blink anchors to save casting time, executing frame-perfect danger-teleports through the tearing fabric of the arena itself. Lin Zhaojun's combat was heartbreakingly beautiful to watch. A pillar of incandescent white light lanced across the ravine. [Solar Ray]. Rhode couldn't dodge. The entire kill-box had been geometricized around the denial of that option. The light consumed her.

The Vanguard's resurrection protocol triggered. The broadcast camera found Rhode at the respawn point. Her uniform was scorched. Her red eyes were bright. She was smiling the way someone smiles when they have spent years tracking a ghost through the dark and have finally, undeniably found it standing in the open. I finally saw you, that expression said, to four hundred million witnesses. [Current Score: Absolute City 3 — Royal Rosas 2.] In Box 14, neither of them spoke. The Explorer Cat had noticed.

It pressed its broad, warm head firmly upward into the underside of Hathaway's chin and began to purr: a deep, insistent, load-bearing vibration that communicated, with considerable authority, that whatever was happening in this room, it required more hands. Hathaway looked at the scoreboard and gathered the last remaining fragment of her courage.

"If they found out," Hathaway said, her voice barely carrying over the box's climate system.

"If Greed Umbrella knew what she was really waiting for. What do you think they would do?" Above the dome, the roulette spun and locked. [Selected Terrain: Sector 6 — Primeval Jungle.] Tasia stepped through into the suffocating humidity, the ancient canopy closing overhead like a held breath. Victoria remained perfectly still. A long silence passed.

"They love my sister," Victoria said.

"I know," Hathaway said.

"They are just like her," Victoria whispered.

"Unable to stop loving. Unable to love with reservation." Down in the jungle, Lin Zhaojun initiated the [Breakup Cast]. In a fraction of a second, she injected a sliver of her own spinal cord into her left arm, granting the limb brief, autonomous casting capability. She deliberately exposed her guard. Tasia's summoned white-flame sword came down, shearing Lin Zhaojun's left arm clean off at the shoulder. The severed limb didn't fall.

It hovered in the air behind Tasia's back, fingers already completing the somatic components of an [Imprisonment] matrix. The bindings erupted from Tasia's blind spot, locking her in place mid-swing. Lin Zhaojun's right hand summoned a crystal blade. One horizontal stroke decapitated the Dragon Empress and severed her spine. Hathaway watched. She said nothing. [Current Score: Absolute City 4 — Royal Rosas 2.] Above the dome, the final terrain locked. [Selected Terrain: Sector 2 — Crimson Desert.] Nino stepped onto the baking red dunes. Open ground, no cover, nothing between her and the horizon but cracked clay and killing light. The moment the match-start fireball landed, the air around Lin Zhaojun was already strobing with arcane light. Five force missiles in five different colors ripped across the desert at terminal velocity. Low-tier, individually. Combined: a lethal execution sequence. Nino had lost the initiative entirely.

She triggered the passive enchantment on her robes, a Tier-7 abjuration shield flaring to life. The exact millisecond the shield rendered, Lin snapped off a [Shatter Shield]. The Tier-7 defense dissolved into blue sparks. Nino triggered [Random Teleport]. She vanished, reappearing thirty yards away near a wind-scoured rock formation. She had survived the opening sequence. She hadn't been instantly executed. Lin Zhaojun's wand was already pointing at Nino's new coordinates.

An [Eradication] slammed directly onto the space Nino had just materialized in. The spell struck the residual matrix of the teleport and reversed it violently. Nino was ripped back through space, materializing in her original position. Unshielded. She predicted the RNG, Hathaway's developer brain noted, watching the [Eradication] land exactly where Nino had just arrived. Nino was obliterated. She woke up gasping beside the referee's resurrection stone. [Match Complete. Winner: Lin Zhaojun (Absolute City).] [Final Score: Absolute City 5 — Royal Rosas 2.] The grand chime echoed through the stadium. The tournament bracket updated. Royal Rosas had been officially eliminated from the Grand Masters. Hathaway stared at the glowing holographic letters. Empathy is not a tactical variable, Alice Varro's voice murmured, from somewhere in her memory. The narrative is locked. She had treated the Grand Masters as the final level. She had treated Greed Umbrella as the ultimate raid boss.

She had been so fiercely determined to find a counter-strategy against the supposed villains of her narrative. But the arena wasn't the battlefield. Greed Umbrella weren't the villains. The monster she had been trying to out-calculate was simply a fundamentally broken family, bleeding out in slow motion. Alice had handed her the exact structural blueprints of a collapsing building, placed her securely behind the blast glass, and told her to sit down and watch. A hollow laugh caught in her throat. Alice hadn't lied.

In Box 14, Victoria stood up. She smoothed the front of her coat. She adjusted her right glove, a single deliberate motion, eliminating a crease that did not exist. Her face had returned to the precisely calibrated, unreadable mask of a Wellington in public. Hathaway did not look up. Her hands rested in the cow-spotted fur. The massive Explorer Cat, currently pinned to Hathaway's lap by the gravity of its own profound contentment, did not so much as twitch. Victoria looked at her cat.

The cat looked back at Victoria, its luminous eyes serene and completely unbothered.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" Hathaway's voice was slow. Empty. Stripped of all developer confidence, all tactical analysis, all the jargon that usually insulated her from the world. The silence stretched. Victoria looked back at Hathaway. She did not answer. She simply turned toward the exit. The heavy mahogany door clicked open, and then softly shut.

Hathaway sat alone on the velvet sofa, listening to the roar of the arena echoing out to four hundred million screens, holding a cat with useless wings that was now apparently hers for the foreseeable future.