Chương 188: Chapter 169: The Conqueror Logs In

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 45 — 12: 30 PM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Grand Masters Main Arena · Outer Festival Grounds The lunch spread was a demonstration of grotesque, unchecked financial liquidity. Golden Dragonfish fillets, seared to a flaky, iridescent crispness. Stoneware tureens of ocean-blue cream mushroom puff pastry soup, their domed crusts releasing gentle, herb-scented steam when breached. A mountain of Milan'thir seafood fried rice commanding the center of the table.

Holheim after-meal coffee, poured beside a towering chocolate fresh-milk ice cake emitting a localized chilling aura. Tall, sweating glasses of honey-cola sweet wine. Then, Alice drew a magically insulated tin from a small spatial pouch. She nudged it across the table with the tip of her fountain pen.

"Try one. Katdoastin made them this morning." The tin held a dozen biscuits shaped precisely like plump cat paws. Hathaway picked one up. It looked, from every available external metric, like a perfectly standard butter biscuit. She took a bite. A molten core of savory, slow-simmered curry broth and finely minced meat flooded her palate: piping hot on the inside, the pastry shell somehow a masterclass of thermal engineering, cool and perfectly crisp against her teeth.

It was, objectively and completely against her wishes, exceptional. She chewed slowly. She looked at Alice, smiling across the table with the serene, unstudied pride of someone presenting a masterpiece. She looked at Katdoastin, currently sitting with composed feline grandeur beside Katalu on the cobblestones. A protagonist with a harem, her developer brain retrieved the sick-room classification without any assistance. She stared at the cat-paw biscuit.

What is the functional difference, she thought, with a profound and very personal indignation, between this and a corporate salaryman casually unboxing a beautifully handcrafted bento from his devoted wife in the center of the breakroom, savoring every bite while his colleagues sit there in silence and suffer? She took another bite. She was consuming the evidence. Mihaye snatched three biscuits from the tin with the mechanical resentment of someone who refused to formally acknowledge that they were excellent.

Over the course of lunch, the mechanics of the outstanding debt assembled themselves, unprompted, into a coherent narrative. Hathaway had the lore already. Mistfall City's industry reputation was singular and precise: it ran the world's most predatory high-end talent market. Alice had a hoarding compulsion built into her administrative architecture. She ran a network of hostile contract acquisitions, shell-company buyouts, and labyrinthine legal instruments designed to secure the signatures of exceptional Witches.

Once she had you, she filtered and sub-leased your expertise to the highest bidder for margins that redefined the word "exorbitant." The standard trap duration was exactly five months.

The calculation was precise: long enough to be genuinely lucrative, short enough that most top-tier Witches, after pricing out a protracted legal war against a Hive City's administrative infrastructure, would simply grit their teeth, serve their sentence, and file the experience under catastrophically expensive lesson rather than escalate. Mihaye Grün was not most Witches.

"You hijacked my Folded Space excavation grant through a shell corporation," Mihaye said, gripping her fork with the controlled energy of a woman rehearsing a grievance she had been denied the opportunity to fully resolve, "and sold my contract to a corporate deep-core resource extraction syndicate."

"And you expressed your objection," Alice replied pleasantly, cutting a small piece of ice cake, "by physically breaching my administrative spire, bypassing three independent defense arrays, and beating me until my personal wards shattered." Alice had accumulated a continent's worth of contractual victims. Getting physically assaulted was probably received as a continental holiday.

"You were laughing while I was doing it," Mihaye accused.

"I was," Alice agreed, entirely unbothered.

"I laughed, dissolved the contract entirely, and absorbed the cancellation penalty personally. Which means, Professor, you owe me." Mihaye contributed a highly creative compound insult in Ancient Hortanian and redirected her aggression toward the fried rice. Hathaway set her fork down. Stolen story; please report. Her eyes had drifted to Alice's manuscript pages, fanned across her side of the table with the unhurried confidence of a document that considered its own existence beyond dispute.

"Alice," Hathaway said, keeping her voice carefully level.

"You know Cecilia's current state. If she reaches the end of that road. What happens to your story?" Alice paused. The fountain pen hovered above the parchment for exactly one breath.

"Oh, don't worry about that." Alice smiled, genuinely untroubled.

"Fan creation is not constrained by the canonical state of the subjects." Hathaway waited.

"If they die?" Alice tapped her pen against her chin with the considered rhythm of a craftsperson reviewing standard workflow options.

"That's a beautifully tragic Happy Ending in which their souls intertwine in the afterlife. If they break up? I simply declare the breakup fictional and write the reunion arc. And if they make peace with it, close that chapter, and simply move forward—" The fountain pen stilled.

"—absolutely unacceptable. I lock them in a cabin until the timeline resolves itself." The words landed and held there. Hathaway converted her remaining dread into raw, mechanical caloric intake. She ate the Milan'thir seafood fried rice with the focused, unblinking efficiency of a system running a background process at maximum priority. She didn't look up when the stadium chime rang. She didn't look up as the afternoon session opened. She ate until the crowd's collective frequency shifted. Akkukataya versus Irene.

Hathaway let her fork rest. Mihaye leaned forward, elbows on the table, her eyes tracking the holographic broadcast with the sharp, unblinking absorption of a professional reading a live board.

"I wonder if she'll actually take the field today," Mihaye said.

"Akkukataya can't take Irene. If she falls and Allison still won't step up, Fey Star concedes right here." Alice swirled the honey-cola wine in her glass.

"Who can guess the mind of the Big Boss Cat?" Alice murmured. Hathaway froze. Her spoon was halfway to her bowl. A grain of fried rice fell back from it, silently, onto the plate. Big Boss Cat. A very specific, very incriminating memory surfaced: the library, Victoria beside her, a Lantern Cat hovering between them with its golden eyes dilated in total religious awe.

Her own voice, bright with the specific greed of someone who had just spotted an underpriced item in the shop: We just need to find where Ovelia hides it. Maybe we can bribe a guard? Or trade a lifetime supply of fried chicken for one runt of the litter? She had called the Conqueror of the World a giant, stationary Jabba the Hutt. She had pitched a fried chicken heist for her hypothetical offspring. Beside her, Mihaye snapped her fingers.

A dense, invisible pressure settled over the patio table: the exact weight of a ward that had just sealed the space against something that wasn't sound.

"Don't say that name out loud," Mihaye muttered, her eyes cutting toward the sky.

"She'll hear it." Hathaway's spoon hit the bowl with a sharp ring." Hear it?" Her voice came out slightly smaller than she intended.

"What do you mean, hear it?" Alice set her glass down, adopting the patient tone of a professor confirming a baseline axiom that should not require confirmation.

"It is a matter of conceptual weight," Alice said.

"When a Witch reaches the absolute apex of our race, her very name begins to carry a tangible power. Speak her name, and she shall know." A brief pause.

"If you invoke them, they sense the vibration on the causal strings. There are dedicated shielding protocols at the elite tier. Most entities of that stature don't engage the ability consciously, of course. It is just background radiation." Alice took a delicate sip.

"But Ovelia is different. In the popular vernacular: Ovelia is a high-intensity ego-surfer. Her perceptual net is exceptionally broad. She doesn't just track her formal title or her full name. She tracks the variants. Ovelia. Ove. Big Boss Cat. Meow-IAO." Alice counted them on her fingers, calm as a shopping list.

"All of it." Hathaway closed her eyes. Why, her logic engine demanded, at rapidly escalating volume, is this not in the baseline magical theory curriculum?! This should be printed in the academy's first-year orientation material under "ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS, STANDARD"! She grabbed Mihaye's sleeve.

"How do I shield it? Teach me the ward. Right now." Mihaye cleared her throat. She straightened into the posture of a professor settling in for a foundational lecture.

"The underlying principle involves isolating the mana field from the broader causal resonance chain," Mihaye began, with the unhurried confidence of someone for whom this explanation was deeply, personally familiar.

"You have to decouple the acoustic emission from the conceptual anchor through a reverse-phased [Abjuration] sequence, specifically modifying the third-tier resonance parameters so that the syllabic output doesn't trigger the downstream—" She began illustrating the methodology in coffee drops on the tablecloth, drawing interlocking frequency curves. Hathaway stared at the coffee diagram. The words stopped reaching her prefrontal cortex and began stacking in the hallway outside.

She turned a desperate, imploring look toward Alice. Alice offered a sympathetic smile.

"Think of it as a safety feature. If you ever find yourself in mortal peril, try screaming every Grand Witch's full name in rapid succession. Think of it as a global emergency broadcast." She tapped the barrel of her pen against her chin.

"A joke, of course. Don't shout Paddy's name. And don't bother shouting Heidi's—" Alice paused.

"She genuinely cannot hear it." The last residual regard Hathaway had been extending to the Grand Witch's professional dignity quietly packed its belongings and let itself out. Heidi Lucent, she addressed the absent Grand Witch in the privacy of her own skull. You already hold the absolute bottom position on the historical peer-engagement win-rate chart. It turns out the floor was not the floor. You don't even have the Wi-Fi ping ability that ships bundled with the job class. What is happening over there.

"Ah, but I've set you to Special Follow in my perception net," Alice added, her voice dropping into the warm register of someone extending a genuine, slightly alarming gift.

"If you're ever in real danger, you can shout my full name." Hathaway looked at the smut author. The Hive Lord of Mistfall City. Of course she did. Of course. She looked at Mihaye. Mihaye caught the look. She misread the expression entirely. She patted Hathaway's arm with a firm, competitive nod.

"You can shout mine too, kid." On the overhead screen, the dust had finished settling. Akkukataya's resurrection stone had shattered into blue dust. Through the clearing air, Irene stood at the center of the ruined terrain. Her breathing was even. Her posture was flawless. The stadium held its breath. The broadcast camera cut to the [Fey Star] bench. Allison stood up. At the wrought-iron table, the atmosphere inverted. Mihaye's slouch vanished. Her spine locked into a straight, rigid line. Alice lowered her pen.

Her liquid-teal eyes widened slowly, catching the ambient glow of the holographic broadcast, shining with a sudden, incandescent brightness. Allison adjusted the cuffs of her coat. She turned, and walked toward the arena entrance. The Conqueror was finally logging in.