Chương 182: Chapter 164: The Demise of the Greatest Fool

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 41 — 4: 40 PM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · Living Room Hathaway pushed through the front door of Townhouse 107 with her shoulder, both arms fully occupied by eighteen kilograms of hyper-dense, cow-spotted biological mass. The living room had been converted into a competitive event.

Margaret was at the racing rig with Rory in her lap, grip white-knuckled, eyes fixed on the panoramic display with the focused precision of someone who had staked her domestic reputation on a hairpin turn. The toddler had both chubby hands pressed flat against the steering column housing, eyes wide and entirely magnetized by the screen.

Every time the force-feedback motors fired from a simulated drift, the haptic shockwave rattled through the plastic casing directly into Rory's palms, and she shrieked with absolute, unmediated delight. Anna sat on the adjacent sofa, controller at a precise angle, observing Margaret's screen with the patient, evaluative stillness of a coach running a silent field assessment.

Hathaway stood in the entryway with the heavy Explorer Cat purring against her sternum, and felt a quiet, developmental concern settle over her. No wonder the original Hathaway was a complete shut-in, her developer brain observed, watching Margaret execute a brutal, premeditated lane-cut against an opponent's kart on a rainbow-colored S-bend. The indoctrination begins before they can form declarative memories. A secondary, considerably more alarming calculation surfaced immediately.

Is she absorbing the racing mechanics? Or is she absorbing the vehicular aggression? If this child decides her true calling is leading a high-speed anti-gravity delinquent syndicate because she spent her formative years as a haptic feedback accessory during Marit Kart, the environmental precedents are genuinely airtight. The Explorer Lantern Cat lifted itself out of her arms. It hovered in the center of the living room for exactly two seconds, its luminous eyes running a slow, authoritative territorial assessment.

Having apparently found the environment adequate, it drifted directly toward the couch. Specifically, toward Rory. Rory released the controller housing. She reached upward with both hands. The massive, cow-spotted cat did not dodge. It lowered its enormous head and bumped its nose against Rory's outstretched palms with a gentle, deliberate weight. Then: a single, unhurried flap from the comically undersized feathered wings.

Rory buried her face in the thick fur and made a sound like a small teakettle achieving critical temperature. From the armrest across the room, a pale blue glow rose into the air. The Frost Lantern Cat had identified the incursion. She floated upward, her pale luminescence sharpening with territorial offense, narrowed her eyes into a glare she clearly believed was lethal, and initiated a full threat display with total commitment. The Explorer Cat did not look at her.

The Frost Lantern Cat had the physical profile of a decorative desk ornament; the Explorer Lantern Cat occupied roughly the same volume and density as a fully stocked mini-fridge. Against a target that could reasonably be used as an emergency blockade, the Frost Cat's threat display registered approximately zero relevant structural signals. Humiliated and comprehensively ignored, the Frost Cat spun in a small, aggrieved circle and let out a long, plaintive mew, filing an urgent appeal to upper management.

Upper management was currently executing a final-corner defense against Anna's kart. Margaret crossed the finish line in a shower of virtual sparks. She exhaled, her shoulders dropping two full inches as the adrenaline finally bled out, and blinked enough times to register that something in the living room had fundamentally changed.

"Hattie," she said, studying the enormous, hovering entity in front of her daughter.

"Whose cat is that?"

"Victoria's." Hathaway set her keys in the entryway bowl.

"It decided to follow me." Margaret processed this, reached over, and lifted the massive cat into the air with both hands. The cat accepted the handling with boneless, total indifference, its tiny wings fluttering in a cheerful blur. Without a single word of commentary, Margaret pivoted and deposited the heavy animal directly into Anna's lap. Anna smoothed a hand over the thick, patterned fur. She looked at the cat's calm, luminous eyes.

"We'll keep it for now," she decided, and reached for her controller. The Frost Lantern Cat had lost on every available front. The interloper had ignored her threat display, secured the infant, and received official administrative endorsement from both matriarchs in under thirty seconds. The political situation was unambiguous and irreversible. She drifted mournfully across the room and planted herself on Hathaway's shoulder: the last piece of uncontested real estate.

She delivered a cold, aggressive headbutt to the side of Hathaway's head to formalize the claim. Hathaway reached up and gently scratched the icy fur. The household ecosystem re-stabilized. Both cats had secured their designated positions. The geopolitical boundaries were clear, and they had been established entirely without input from the humans involved. Dinner was a staggering display of domestic excess.

Platter after platter emerged from the kitchen: sliced white-cut turkey, massive steamed squids drizzled in a savory soy-garlic reduction, boiling pots of Hortania dragon meat stew that smelled aggressively like violence and comfort, and roasted Hellfire Eggs, their shells radiating a gentle, ambient heat.

They consumed the feast while Rory systematically and industriously redistributed her finely chopped portion of dragon meat across the tablecloth, executing her vision with the focused intensity of an abstract artist. Afterward, Hathaway went upstairs, opened The Banishment of Sorrow to the detection algorithm, and sat with her stylus poised over a fresh page. She held the stylus for twelve seconds. Then she closed the book. Stood up. Went down to the Ludwig family's Underground Library.

The background thread had been running for four days without her permission. The output was clear. The highest-priority item was not the detection algorithm she was supposed to be studying. She had watched [Tide of False Life] deployed three times across the group stage broadcasts. An active shield was external infrastructure that shattered under concentrated fire and left nothing behind.

This converted mana directly into a secondary health bar, and for a glass cannon without a reactive sustain layer, that distinction was the difference between a patch and a missing feature. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. She pulled the volume from the shelf, sat at the mahogany reading desk, and opened to the first page. The spell's architectural design document was a single, cryptic paragraph. The iron fish sits below the eastern door.

Open the door past its measure. The fish rises with what spills. She read it once. Set the book down. Stared at the ceiling. After several sessions attempting to parse the detection algorithm of a soul-surgical protocol that operated across four spatial dimensions, this felt like being handed a traffic map after memorizing continental geology. The iron fish was the body's vitality-receiving matrix, positioned downstream from the primary mana output channel.

The fish sat below the door, waiting for what fell past the threshold. Opening the door past its measure meant forcing mana expenditure to twice the normal operational rate. The excess that couldn't convert into spell-structure through the main pipeline had nowhere to go except down the circuit, into the waiting receiver, where the matrix converted raw overflow directly into temporary life. The confirmation signal, when the loop was running correctly, was simple: she wouldn't feel the hollow pull of mana leaving.

She would feel the body swelling with it instead. The architecture was elegant. Almost insultingly so. She picked up her pen. Alright. The night will be enough to fully read the documentation and compile the conceptual dependencies. I will begin actual model design and architectural routing in the morning.

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 42 — 9: 50 AM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · Study By the time the tournament broadcast chimed its opening sequence, Hathaway had filled fourteen pages with the structural schematic for the iron fish receptor matrix. The model was clean and fully annotated. What remained was the mana bifurcation point, which she was working through when the scoreboard update caught her peripheral vision. She looked up. [Golden Iris 4 — The Laureates 4.] The board state hit her processor like a logic error. Four-all. One combatant remaining per side. Someone on the Golden Iris roster had dramatically overperformed to drag this to a tiebreaker, and now it all came down to the final anchor. She looked down at her fourteen pages of pristine, annotated schematics. Then she looked back at the holographic broadcast. The mana bifurcation point can wait ten minutes, her inner fan-girl rationalized, her hand already lowering the stylus. This is historical.

It is academically irresponsible not to observe Josephine in a high-stakes, pressure-cooker environment.

"The Laureates are finished," said a voice from the sofa behind her. Hathaway whipped her head around, her indignation flaring before she could suppress it. Anna was sitting with a ceramic cup, watching the broadcast with the resigned certainty of a physician reading a terminal chart.

"Mom." Hathaway frowned, defensively tapping her stylus against the mahogany desk.

"The match hasn't even started. Josephine is the Scarlet Fox of Casendiara. Irene is terrifying, yes, but in a duel at this top tier, there are no absolutes. Josephine can win this." Anna sipped her coffee. She set the cup down with the quiet finality of someone who had already considered and dismissed this exact brand of optimism.

"Hattie. There are no absolutes in duels." A single beat.

"But Josephine has absolutes." Hathaway's indignant defense stalled in her throat. She turned fully in her chair, her expression migrating from tribal loyalty toward genuine, unsettling confusion. Anna sighed, reached under the coffee table, and slid a glossy publication across the glass surface. Grand Witch Data Magazine: Historical Win-Rate Analytics. Hathaway opened to the bookmarked page.

The editorial board had compiled a comprehensive ranking of every Grand Witch who had held a High Council seat since the founding of Ovelia's ascension, sorted by lifetime win-loss record in peer-level engagements. The bottom of the list was Heidi Lucent. 3 Wins, 61 Losses. Net: negative fifty-eight. Hathaway stared at the 3. One of those three wins was against Famia Schüder. I refuse to accept that this outcome occurred without a financial instrument or a diplomatic hostage situation somewhere in the background.

She skipped down the page.

"Wait," she muttered. Fourth place: Famia Schüder. 437 Wins, 132 Losses. Net: positive 305. Famia Schüder's archival combat footage was literally categorized under 'natural disaster preparedness' in standard academy curriculums. Her entire tactical doctrine consisted of uncompromising, scorched-earth obliteration. She was sitting in fourth. Hathaway moved to third. Ovelia. 566 Wins, 73 Losses. Net: positive 493. Hathaway set the magazine down on her knee, picked it back up, and read the number again.

Ovelia isn't first. She took a breath before proceeding. If the woman who had personally defined the absolute biological and magical ceiling of what a Witch was capable of was sitting in third place, the top two slots contained something that did not map onto any framework she currently owned. She looked at the top two rows. Both were from Casendiara. Second Place: Josephine Durant. 577 Wins, 80 Losses. Net: positive 497. First Place: Don Gil Ross. 597 Wins, 70 Losses. Net: positive 527. Hathaway stared at the ink.

Her tactical processor immediately and aggressively threw a fatal error. I can be a devoted fan, but I cannot commit statistical heresy, her logic engine filed an urgent error report. There is no conceivable timeline where Josephine Durant is objectively stronger than Ovelia. Ovelia is a localized modification to the laws of physics. If my idol is outranking the Conqueror herself, this sorting algorithm is fundamentally broken. Margaret leaned over her shoulder, Earl Grey in hand.

"You're reading the raw totals. Look at the detailed breakdown." Hathaway turned the page. Josephine Durant's 80 historical losses were concentrated across exactly four names: Ovelia, Famia, Irene, and Gil. Against those four, the win rate was zero. A perfect zero across every recorded encounter. Don Gil Ross's 70 losses: concentrated across exactly three names. Ovelia, Famia, and Irene. Also zero wins. Hathaway sat with that for a moment.

Ovelia, Famia, and Irene occupied ranks three, four, and five because occasionally, under specific conditions, they had suffered upset losses to lower-ranked opponents. But the two Casendiara Witches had no variance below their ceiling. If a Witch was weaker than Josephine Durant, that Witch was going to lose. Every time. The two Casendiara champions executed everyone beneath their operational tier with the mechanical, unblinking consistency of an automated system.

And if an opponent possessed a higher ceiling than theirs, those two terrifying, record-holding Witches became, without remedy, permanent entries in the loss column. If you could beat them once, you could treat them as a personal stress-relief resource for the rest of your natural life. Hathaway looked at the magazine. She looked at the scoreboard.

"How did this match reach a four-all tie?" she asked. Margaret set down her Earl Grey with unmistakable hometown pride.

"Heidi! She was already on her last legs, completely spent from the previous bouts, and she still managed to drag Marianne right down with her. A full-capacity Fourth Seat! Spectacular!" Hathaway froze. Marianne. The indignation calcified into something clear and cold. Hathaway's memory instantly retrieved the exact frame from the knockout draw: Marianne's flawless, spring-breeze smile, and the encrypted glance she had passed to Josephine.

You assembled this entire catastrophic tourist group, silently designated Josephine as the load-bearing pillar, and then the absolute microsecond you found a convenient, reputation-saving exit, you took it: trading yourself out against a half-dead Heidi Lucent. You punched your ticket home specifically so you wouldn't have to be the one standing on the server when Irene finally logged in.

Bella's voice surfaced from somewhere in her memory, unhurried and entirely accurate:"Willingly accepting a role from the Playwright is the opening act in a tragedy titled: The Demise of the Greatest Fool." Down in the arena, Irene stepped through the Golden Iris deployment gate. She crossed the perfectly still surface of Mirror Lake without hurrying. She smiled. Hathaway felt the back of her neck prickle. Her memory instantly overlaid the broadcast with the Eastern Courtyard, two days ago. Same smile.

But then it was anticipation. Now it's arrival. Hathaway looked at Josephine. The Unyielding Banner of Casendiara stood on the water, her posture composed into a precise, self-contained stillness. Hathaway remembered the microscopic half-step backward in the courtyard. Down in the arena, there was no remaining real estate for a retreat. Across the shining water, Irene's voice carried through the acoustic arrays: light, melodic, circling like a line of poetry that had been running on loop for a very long time.

"Josephine. Josephine... How many times? How many times have you walked up to me exactly like this...?" She let the sentence hang. Josephine's expression was a masterpiece of aristocratic melancholy: the portrait of a hero who had already read the script, understood the ending, and had decided to perform the tragedy anyway.

"Countless times," Josephine said. Her voice was steady and heavy and completely without self-pity.

"And yet, I have returned. To stand before you." Hathaway slowly, deliberately lowered her head. Idol. You are still my idol. She reached forward and turned her notebook to the next clean page. Refusing to watch your public execution is the greatest respect I can offer you. She picked up her pen, tuned out the arena's inevitable proceedings entirely, and returned to the mana bifurcation problem.