Chương 187: Chapter 168: A Financial Dividend for Documented Emotional Damages

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 45 — 9: 30 AM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Grand Masters Main Arena · Outer Festival Grounds The premise of "walking the cat" was, from the outset, a semantic trap. Because the entity in question was an Explorer Lantern Cat, it possessed a genetic mandate to survey foreign territory. Because it was also a Lantern Cat, it harbored an absolute, species-wide contempt for spending its own ley-line reserves on locomotion when a perfectly functional human palanquin was available.

Hathaway had attempted to resolve this by simply applying a [Weight Alteration] ward to the creature before leaving the house, intending to carry the equivalent of a folded sweater. The cat had immediately registered the magic, concluded that since it was now effectively weightless it no longer needed to maintain its own structural integrity, and went completely fluid.

The resulting compromise required Hathaway to manually haul eighteen kilograms of un-altered, hyper-dense feline dead weight through the midday heat, while the creature draped itself across both her forearms with the heavy, unyielding entitlement of a monarch being ferried through their dominion. They had barely cleared the third row of souvenir pavilions when the cargo abruptly terminated the arrangement. The crushing physical burden in Hathaway's arms vanished instantly.

The Explorer Cat bypassed the inconvenience of gravity entirely, lifting off with a frantic, uncoordinated blur of its cartoonish feathered wings. It locked its nose onto an invisible coordinate in the distance and drifted forward with the smooth, frictionless momentum of a rogue weather balloon. Ah, Hathaway thought, rubbing her aching biceps. Katalu is here.

She followed the floating cow-spotted beacon around the corner of a roasted-meat pavilion, fully prepared to find Mihaye Grün holding court over a table of betting slips. She found Mihaye. She also found the weather system. The ambient temperature around the wrought-iron patio table had dropped by several degrees. Crisp ozone. Damp earth. Impending rain, three months early and with complete disregard for the forecast.

Sitting across from the former holder of the Fire Dragon Mandate, cheerfully ignoring the Grand Masters festival in its entirety, was Alice Varro. One hand held a champagne flute. The other drove a fountain pen across manuscript pages at blistering speed. Hathaway froze.

A woman who converts genuine tactical intelligence directly into cash and calls it investment strategy, sharing a table with an unhinged author who believes that two women glaring at each other across an arena is the preamble to an R-18 bedroom negotiation. The table radiated a concentrated, targeted hostility to rational thought. She took a half-step backward, genuinely calculating the stealth required to abort the encounter and retreat unnoticed.

The table between them had been divided by territorial ceasefire: Mihaye's betting slips fanned out across her half like a poker hand, Alice's manuscript pages occupying the remaining real estate. On the cobblestones beyond the table, Katalu had assumed its customary position of magnificent serenity. Beside it, at a height commensurate with its own dignity, sat Katdoastin. Neither witch at the table paid them any attention.

Katalu and Katdoastin had apparently been in the middle of something when Hathaway arrived, and showed no indication of stopping. Before Hathaway even opened her mouth, the small Explorer Cat completed its approach vector, bypassed the empty chairs, and dropped itself directly onto the top of Katalu's massive head. Katalu paused its conversation with Katdoastin.

It looked upward, with the mild, dignified patience of a monarch who had learned to accept unexpected hat deliveries as an occupational hazard, and resumed speaking. Katalu now had a new hat. The hat was purring.

"You two know each other?" Hathaway asked, pulling out a chair.

"We have business dealings," Mihaye muttered, not looking up from her odds calculations.

"You still owe me," Alice corrected, flipping a page of her manuscript with her pen hand. She didn't look up either, receiving Hathaway's arrival with the unquestioning entitlement of a narrator who had already known that a key supporting character would wander into the scene. Hathaway sat down. Both women were operating at the focused intensity of professionals on tight deadlines, offering zero conversational entry points.

With nothing else to look at, her gaze dropped to the pages spread open beneath Alice's wrist. She read two paragraphs. Her developer brain threw an unhandled exception. It rebooted. It parsed again. In broad daylight, she screamed internally, her face flooding with heat. In the middle of a public plaza. You are just leaving explicit, unredacted R-18 smut right out in the open on a wrought-iron café table?! She whipped her head toward Mihaye.

The sheer, radioactive intensity of her condemning stare must have breached the former coach's concentration. Mihaye glanced at the manuscript, glanced at Hathaway, and shrugged.

"She passed the Affection Value Appraisal," Mihaye said, citing it the way one cites a traffic ordinance.

"Certified Genuine Fan." So what if she's a Certified Genuine Fan?! Hathaway gripped the table edge. Does passing a magical polygraph grant you legal immunity to produce biomechanically impossible acts of romantic lore?!

"Her prose is quite solid," Mihaye continued, seamlessly returning to her slips.

"There were just two glaring technical errors in Chapter Seven regarding close-quarters spell parrying within the Abjuration school. I pointed them out." Alice finally lifted her large, liquid-teal eyes, her silver-tipped cat ears twitching with genuine, unselfconscious gratitude.

"Your insights were truly invaluable, Professor. Even with my imagination, I never thought of utilizing that specific defensive posture to escalate the romantic tension!" Hathaway closed her eyes. She prayed for the earth to open. She prayed for Ovelia to descend from her celestial throne and smite the table. Neither event occurred. When she opened her eyes again, she found Alice's betting slip sitting neatly on top of Mihaye's. Should I go buy a ticket? The thought was immediately followed by a fatal error.

I am sitting at a table between a compulsive gambler and an unhinged smut author, and I am actively treating their combined behavior as legitimate financial advice. My baseline logical architecture is degrading in real time. The stadium chime rang out across the festival grounds. The morning broadcast surged to life on the overhead screens. The tactical deployment overlay rendered, and Hathaway's breath caught. Greed Umbrella had made a disastrous read.

Absolute City's established pattern was to open with Liandra, a constant that had held without exception since the qualifiers. Greed Umbrella had banked on that repetition and arranged their deployment accordingly, reserving Cecilia for later in the rotation.

Absolute City's coach, Su Jingran, a woman whose entire tactical legacy consisted of knowing exactly which takeout menus to order from for years on end, a skill so universally beloved by the Absolute City roster that she was widely regarded as irreplaceable, had simply looked at the board and shamelessly pressed the Auto-Win button on the opening frame. Lin Zhaojun stepped out of the Absolute City gate. She wore the signature midnight-blue bodysuit. The fingerless gloves exposing the ring and pinky fingers.

The baton-like casting focus. The fine chain trailing from the ring on her left hand. During the season she had built her mythic 992020 campaign, merchandise featuring that exact silhouette had outsold the combined retail output of her entire remaining roster by a factor of 2. 5. Hathaway had a replica of that jersey folded in her closet at Townhouse 107 and the licensed baton sitting on a shelf in her bedroom. The stadium roar began. It did not peak and fade the way a normal cheer did. It escalated. It compounded.

The acoustic weight of a hostile rival city abandoning its geopolitical hatred to scream for the sheer spectacle of her presence. Lin Zhaojun stopped in the center of the arena. She raised her left hand, exposing the ring, and pressed a single finger to her lips. Shh. Eighty thousand people in the White City, a crowd architecturally engineered to despise her, fell breathlessly silent in less than a second.

Her terrifying gravity overwrites the geography, Hathaway thought, the cold sweat breaking across her collarbone. [Selected Terrain: Sector 2 — Crimson Desert.] Flandmira stepped out to meet her. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. The aristocratic disdain had drained entirely from the Prima Donna's face, replaced by the pale, unmistakable hue of a woman who had just calculated the matchup spread and received a result that simply didn't process.

Beside Hathaway, Mihaye's expression mirrored it. An artillery Witch required a setup frame. A speed-rusher thrived in the setup frame. In the rock-paper-scissors logic of Witch combat, Flandmira's compatibility against Lin Zhaojun existed in the absolute negative integers. But Flandmira did not surrender. She dropped into a flawless stance, meticulously layering anti-magic wards while pre-reading her heaviest bombardment matrices, preparing to unleash a devastating concentrated burst.

Facing the world's fastest caster in the vanguard slot, without psychological preparation for it, cost Flandmira exactly 0. 5 seconds. In those 0. 5 seconds, Lin Zhaojun raised her baton. Three distinct spell-auras erupted around her in an overlapping blur. [Perfect Shaping] optimized her physical frame across every attribute. [Angelic Power] sprouted massive wings of solid light from her back, granting a terrifying speed multiplier and spoofing the system into granting her an extra, simultaneous casting queue.

[Radiant Aura] flooded her payload with positive energy calibrated to tear through almost any known barrier on contact. Flandmira was evicted from the arena before her opening volley rendered.

"Flandmira didn't misplay," Mihaye said.

"She built the correct anchors. It's Lin Zhaojun." Her hand slammed the table.

"Su Jingran! A thousand murders wouldn't cover it. You shameless takeout concierge!" Alice looked up from her manuscript. The chaotic warmth in her expression was entirely gone, replaced by a solemn, chilling composure.

"The nightmare," Alice murmured, "has only just begun." Is it happening again? Hathaway felt the hair on her arms stand up. The world's premier solo performance. At her peak, Lin Zhaojun executing a clean sweep of three or four opponents was standard operating procedure. A one-versus-five clean sweep existed in the historical record. Her momentum was a compounding algorithm: every victory tightened it, accelerated it. If nobody interrupted her streak early— Wait. Why do I want Greed Umbrella to break her streak?

She was a Lin Zhaojun fan. She acknowledged, with unambiguous clarity, that Lin was currently playing at the pinnacle of world-class form. The credentials were sitting in a display case in her bedroom. But she wanted the Greed Umbrella to win. [Selected Terrain: Sector 5 — Badlands.] When Maria stepped out of the gate, Mihaye let out a long, shuddering exhale and gripped her betting slip like a lifeline.

"The Diva! My retirement fund is entirely in your hands!" Prima Donna fell. The Diva is on the field, Hathaway noted, keeping her face carefully neutral. If your student ever found out you cheer for her with the unhinged energy of a degenerate gambler holding a long-shot ticket, I genuinely do not know if the patricide impulse could be suppressed. Every tactical analyst knew the lore.

Yuksara, widely recognized across the continent as the [King of Speed], had once forced a high-octane mirror match against Lin Zhaojun. Lin had simply outrun her, physically dodging fifty-nine consecutive spells on mechanical speed alone. Then, when Lin had finished playing with her food, she had casually, deliberately selected ten of Yuksara's own countered spells and fired them back, ten for ten. Maria played with terrifying, violent aggression.

She actually possessed the casting speed to maintain Lin's tempo, trading volleys in a blinding chain of spell-fire and counter-spell across the cracked clay. Her performance was objectively superior to Yuksara's historical benchmark by a visible, measurable margin. But Lin Zhaojun was Lin Zhaojun. Maria's resurrection stone shattered. Mihaye slowly unclenched her hand. The betting slip was deeply, permanently creased. Alice's teal eyes were practically emitting sparks.

"Excellent work, Maria! Truly as expected of my oshi! Next bonus chapter, I'm writing you as the bottom—" Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Hathaway's head snapped around. Why would the bonus chapter feature her as the— Mihaye didn't react. Her eyes were glued to the broadcast screen. Hathaway had no one to confirm it with, and nowhere to put it. Alice gripped her pen.

"Alright. Then the next one to take the stage must be—""Jackdaw," Mihaye and Alice said, in perfect, simultaneous unison. Hathaway stared at them. She had absolutely no idea how they had arrived at that conclusion. Karula was an artillery Witch. Sending her against Lin's current momentum was just delivering another free point to Absolute City. Where was this shared, mysterious confidence coming from? Then, Mihaye's tactical critique from four days ago surfaced.

The critical piece of information she had filed and half-forgotten: Karula possesses a casting speed and reaction time that rivals Lin Zhaojun's. She just refuses to use them because it ruins her aesthetic. Hathaway snapped her head up, staring at the screen. No. That's impossible. [Selected Terrain: Sector 7 — Jagged Alpine Peaks.] Karula stepped out. She didn't raise a shield. She didn't posture. When Lin pushed, Karula met her in the center of the ravine, abandoning the static bombardment paradigm entirely.

The exchange became a blinding, vertical knife-fight across the ice-scoured spires, not the elegant, poised artillery duel Karula's doctrine demanded, but something raw and improvised and visibly agonizing to sustain. Top-tier Witches relied on the concept of maintaining a "hot hand." Karula's preferred rhythm on solid ground was aristocratic, motionless, overwhelming superiority.

If she was forced into a high-speed, high-mobility dogfight, she required the spatial freedom of her broom to maintain her mechanical heat and tactical footing. Lin Zhaojun offered her neither the time to mount nor the distance to stabilize. Lin executed her. Karula's resurrection stone shattered. Lin Zhaojun remained standing. The stadium held its breath. Then, without warning, she collapsed. Mihaye exhaled slowly, a long, quiet sound.

"Well done, Karula." The score sat at 1—3. Absolute City held a commanding lead. Even knowing that the remaining Absolute City roster contained Liandra, Du Lingxuan, and two veterans who had built the Millennium Dynasty alongside Lin herself, the physical relief of Lin's exit was a real, undeniable thing that passed between the three of them like a change in barometric pressure. Alice raised her champagne flute.

"To celebrate the Greed Umbrella finally overcoming the raid boss, let's open the champagne immediately—" Mihaye and Hathaway whipped their heads toward her in perfect, unified, unmitigated horror.

"Half-time champagne?! Are you trying to curse them to death?! We have a traitor in our midst!" The fragile alliance held for exactly one second. Then, Cecilia stepped out of the deployment gate. Alice bit down on the cap of her fountain pen and went completely silent. [Selected Terrain: Sector 8 — Ancient Ruins.] The White City crowd hated her. But the silence in the stands was a grudging, visceral acknowledgment of her lethality. At the wrought-iron table, the three women ceased all movement.

Mihaye offered no tactical commentary. Hathaway thought of Victoria, but kept her mouth shut. Cecilia's first opponent was an Absolute City all-star: one Grand Masters solo championship, five Transmutation Masters titles. Cecilia executed her with the methodical, crushing precision of a calculator completing an equation. The second was another all-star. Four Tmi championships. Three GoG titles. A dynasty-building veteran. Cecilia forced a mutual destruction.

As the dust settled, Alice let out a long, shaky breath and removed the pen cap from her teeth.

"Cecilia fights so desperately every time," Alice murmured, her eyes gleaming with something that bypassed fan devotion entirely and landed in the territory of pure creative hunger. A satisfied, aching sigh.

"Beautiful, strong, and tragic. It's the perfect configuration for a bottom."

"Appalling!" Mihaye snapped, slamming her palm on the table.

"Cecilia is at her absolute most captivating when she has the board in total, suffocating control!" Hathaway sat with her hands folded, her gaze resting in the middle distance with the hollow, emptied quality of someone who had been present for too much. Who am I. Where am I. What is the purpose of my existence. Alice turned to her, eyes wide and luminous with the specific appeal of someone recruiting an eyewitness.

"My muse, you understand me best. My current work exists entirely because of the inspiration you provided. You've read all my manuscripts. You will obviously support my interpretation, right?"

"Hathaway." Mihaye leaned across the table, her voice dropping into the sharp, urgent register of a coach delivering a critical instruction.

"Do not let this fanfiction author's shipping goggles warp your perception. Think of Victoria. When is Victoria at her most captivating?" Hathaway's face erupted in a violent, catastrophic blush. She slapped both hands flat on the table.

"WATCH THE MATCH!" She pointed at the screen with extreme, aggressive conviction.

"THE MATCH IS HAPPENING. WE ARE WATCHING THE MATCH!" [Selected Terrain: Sector 4 — Permafrost Tundra.] Du Lingxuan stepped through the Absolute City gate. Alice leaned forward, pen tapping the table.

"Du Lingxuan has returned to her peak. This is going to be a brutal, grinding fight." Peak Du Lingxuan was a tactical parasite built on an immaculate foundation, the antithesis of Lin Zhaojun's Modern doctrine. Where Lin hyper-specialized in a handful of spells and forced the world to meet her on her terms, Du Lingxuan operated across three or more schools of magic. Her combat was systematic and infinitely adaptable.

She possessed a precise, encyclopedic knowledge of her opponents and exploited environmental mechanics with the surgical precision of an academic grading a poorly researched paper. Mihaye, however, looked supremely confident.

"On the contrary. This is an excellent draw." It was the first time the two women at the table had offered conflicting tactical assessments. Hathaway considered who to trust. She remembered Alice's exact words when handing over the manuscript: I am an author, Hathaway. Not a combat instructor. She believed it completely now. Wei Changqing stepped onto the frozen tundra. The result was barely a match.

Du Lingxuan was the pinnacle of Classical Witchcraft, but Wei Changqing was simply an all-around superior upgrade to her entire operational model. Wei was also a Classical caster, but her control over the board was absolute, and her raw stats were suffocating. Where Du Lingxuan needed to read the board and apply the correct counter, Wei Changqing simply dictated the board state entirely.

She dismantled the tactical anchor of Absolute City with the efficient, unsentimental dispatch of a system running a performance audit. [Selected Terrain: Sector 6 — Primeval Jungle.] Wei Changqing faced Liandra. The fight was agonizingly close. Liandra forced the board into contested, uneven terrain that should have favored her. But Wei had clearly spent the nearly three weeks since the qualifiers aggressively patching the melee vulnerability that Eve Hawkins had exploited so surgically.

In the final exchange, a manifested blade of black flame traced a single, clean arc through the jungle canopy. [Match Complete. Winner: Wei Changqing (Greed Umbrella).] [Final Score: Greed Umbrella 5 — Absolute City 4.] Mihaye let out a piercing, jaunty whistle and folded her winning betting slips into her breast pocket with the deep, professional satisfaction of a woman who had never once doubted the outcome. Alice sighed in complete, fulfilled contentment. She capped her pen.

Then she reached across the table and slid one of her own betting receipts in front of Hathaway. Her tone was the exact, gentle register of an adult handing a piece of candy to a child.

"Take it." Hathaway looked down. She counted the zeros on the payout line. A slow, vertiginous wave moved through her. Five figures. It was an agonizingly specific number. If it had been six figures, she would have refused it immediately on principle. If it had been four, she could have accepted it as an eccentric, trivially affordable gift. But five figures sat perfectly in the purgatory between she's probably just tossing this away and I absolutely cannot accept this in good conscience.

Alice watched her freeze and said, simply: "Consider it your royalty cut." A cold, prescient dread pooled somewhere below Hathaway's sternum.

"... My cut of what, exactly?" Alice smiled with the unhurried brightness of someone announcing that their most recent creative project had cleared editorial review.

"The latest volume of The Captive Trophy Wife, Little Sia." Hathaway's memory buffered. It executed a frame-by-frame rollback and arrived, with agonizing precision, at a [Heavy Witch Tent] marketed exclusively under the secondary consumer tag of"The Couples' Model — Extremely Beloved", with full soundproofing. One tent. Two women. The light in Hathaway's eyes went completely, permanently dark. Should I be thanking Alice for at least providing a royalty cut?

Her soul exited her body and pressed itself quietly against the cobblestones. Every other victim had their reputation artistically defamed for free. I am actually receiving a dividend. Hathaway slowly reached out and took the betting slip. Securing financial compensation for documented emotional damages was, technically, a victory.

Even if, as her fingers closed over the paper, she felt something irrecoverable slip away from her, the inexplicable sensation of having just sold her soul to the adult entertainment industry. She did not dare ask what Alice planned to write next.