Chương 191: Chapter 172: The Unhandled Exception

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 47 — 8: 15 AM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · Hathaway's Bedroom The final stroke of Dragon's Blood ink settled into the parchment fibers, fusing with the arcane geometry in one last, residual pulse of light. Hathaway set the stylus down. She aligned the cap.

It felt exactly like inserting the final semicolon into a hundred-thousand-line codebase: the precise, internalized satisfaction of a senior developer watching the compiler run clean for the first time, every dependency mapped, every potential memory leak sealed behind transactional checkpoints. Zero fatal errors. Zero warnings.

Beside her elbow, the cow-spotted Explorer Lantern Cat opened one luminous eye, registered that the scratching sound of the stylus had ceased, produced a single soft brrrp of approval, and closed it again. She carried the notebook downstairs into the dining room, where Margaret and Anna were already at the table, their morning tea steaming beside the holographic projector. Outside, the White City's broadcast grid had abandoned all standard programming in favor of relentless, looping pre-Final analysis.

Hathaway poured herself coffee and sat down. On the screen, Cecilia Wellington was at the Eastern Courtyard press pavilion, surrounded by the frantic, overlapping desperation of the press corps. She wore a high-collared coat in deep charcoal, its structure precise and severe, the white collar of her shirt pressed flat beneath the lapels. [Vigil] rested at her side. Her posture was a flawless, unhurried monument to aristocratic stillness.

"Miss Wellington! With the Finals tomorrow, regardless of the outcome against Golden Iris, what are your plans after the tournament concludes?" On the screen, Cecilia paused. The camera zoomed in. Her eyes carried the specific, tranquil distance of someone listening to a translation of a language they no longer needed to speak. She offered a faint, immaculately constructed smile. She let the silence stretch until the next reporter broke it. The broadcast director cut back to the commentary desk.

Hathaway set down her cup. From her inner coat pocket, she withdrew the single folded leaf of manuscript paper Alice Varro had left on the wrought-iron patio table two days ago. She had read the first paragraph at the festival and put it away. Now, with the routing upstairs complete and her processing capacity freed, she unfolded it and read the diagnostic log from start to finish. Hathaway read the final paragraph. She looked at the broadcast screen, where the anchor was now pulling up knockout bracket statistics.

She trusts her. Victoria had been standing at this coordinate for months, and Hathaway had finally arrived at it. Trusting Cecilia didn't mean trusting she would survive. It meant trusting that, no matter how catastrophic the end, no matter how deep the water, she would never allow her own collapse to drag the people she loved down with her. Hathaway folded the paper, tucked it back into her coat, and finished her coffee.

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 47 — 6: 45 PM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · Front Porch She had planned to take the finalized schematics down to Agnes that afternoon. But the moment she stepped out of her bedroom, a small, determined mass intercepted her in the hallway. Rory had evidently decided that today's administrative priority was sisterly bonding. The toddler held up a plastic bucket filled with water, her eyes fixing Hathaway with a look of absolute, non-negotiable expectation.

The Siren Witch training regimen, Hathaway realized. For the next four hours, she sat on the living room floor playing the role of a mobile targeting dummy for a developing end-boss. Hathaway would toss a rubber ball into the air, and Rory, eyes wide with intense, unblinking concentration, would stare at it. Every time Rory focused, the rubber ball would hit the floor encased in a block of pristine, unmelting ice. Hathaway would flick it with a thermal ward, wait for the ice to crack off, and toss it again.

It was exhausting, repetitive, and completely adorable. By the time Rory finally tired herself out and face-planted into a nap on the sofa, clutching a half-frozen rubber ball, the afternoon was gone. The doorbell rang. Anna set down her evening correspondence, crossed the entryway with unhurried grace, and opened the heavy mahogany door. Standing on the front porch was Victoria Wellington.

Standing exactly one half-step behind her, hands in the pockets of a dark, utilitarian jacket, was Liandra von Milan'thirskaya. Anna was a former ace, with the bone-deep situational awareness of someone accustomed to reading airspace that wanted her dead.

She took one look at the Wellington third daughter standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the youngest daughter of the former Kings of the World, a geopolitical configuration that should have required a High Council resolution to authorize, and registered the absolute, bloodless tension radiating from both of them with the quiet precision of someone reading a seismic report.

"Hattie," Anna called toward the staircase, her voice projecting the mild, unbothered hospitality of a woman entirely excusing herself from the narrative.

"Your guests are here." She pivoted on her heel and disappeared into the kitchen, removing herself from the blast radius with the practiced efficiency of a veteran operative. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. Hathaway was halfway down the stairs. She reached the bottom step. She saw Victoria. She saw Liandra. Her developer brain instantly generated two overlapping tags: Absolute City. The Babylon Wedding. The tags collided.

The dependency check returned a catastrophic null error. There was no tactical or social logic that produced this specific pairing standing on her front porch. Liandra met her eyes for exactly one second. She didn't speak. Victoria reached into her pocket, pulled out her terminal, and held it out. Hathaway took it. The screen displayed a photograph. The composition was precise and deliberate: a bare hand holding a polished silver spoon.

Resting on the thumb was a square signet ring: a deep purple gemstone sunk into a blackened setting accented with mithril, bearing a private seal entirely distinct from the Wellington family crest. But the image wasn't about the ring or the spoon. It was about the reflection. In the convex, slightly warped curvature of the silver, the sunlit marble expanse of the Eastern Courtyard was visible.

And framed perfectly in the center of that distorted reflection, captured from a distinct, elevated balcony angle, was the back of Cecilia Wellington's head as she stood at the Eastern Courtyard press pavilion, surrounded by broadcast drones. At the bottom of the message, a single line of text.:) Hathaway's lungs stopped moving. She looked up at Victoria. Victoria's pale eyes were completely flat. Beside her, Liandra was staring at the floorboards, jaw locked tight enough that the muscle was jumping.

Tomorrow was the Grand Masters Final. The entire administrative infrastructure of the Crown of Ovelia was locked down, every available resource mobilizing for the most consequential match of the year. The security perimeter was stretched to its absolute breaking point. And Evangeline was already inside. She didn't need to breach a ward or deploy a single spell. She just had to step into the competitor's corridor and appear in Cecilia's line of sight before the match began.

The psychological payload of her mere existence would detonate Greed Umbrella's emotional foundation before they ever stepped onto the arena floor. She pulled the golden cat-paw card from her spatial ring and tapped the central rune, sending a hyper-compressed priority ping to Alice Varro. On my way. The reply arrived in under three seconds. Hathaway pocketed the card. She stood on the front porch, in the warm evening air of the White City, looked up at the sky, and braced her diaphragm.

"Mihaye Grün!" Silence settled over the porch like a wool blanket. Hathaway stood there, acutely aware of the full, appalling implications of what she had just done. It's a blind broadcast, her inner developer groaned. A command fired into the void with zero delivery confirmation and no read receipt. I have no idea if the system is online. I don't know if the message actually landed. I don't even know if there's anyone listening on the other end. Victoria and Liandra stood in the porch light.

Neither of them offered a single syllable of mockery. They just waited. The air in front of Hathaway rippled. A spatial fold unseamed itself with the neat, practiced ease of someone who had been three steps ahead the entire time, and Alice Varro stepped onto the porch, shaking a faint dusting of dimensional static from the hem of her coat.

"Alice." Hathaway pointed at the terminal.

"I need to know if Mihaye received the—""She heard you," Alice said. Her teal eyes swept the porch: Victoria, Liandra, the phone. One comprehensive read.

"She's already gone over there." Over there. The variable resolved instantly. Mihaye is their former coach. If she kicks the door down on GU's suite on the eve of the Final, Karula and Flandmira will be too busy managing the chaos of their old mentor's arrival to run a headcount. She is the interference pattern. Beside her, the rigid line of Victoria's shoulders dropped, fractionally but unmistakably, a millimeter of tension bleeding out of her posture. Hathaway looked at Liandra.

"We need the Administrative Control Room. The surveillance panopticon." Something moved through Liandra's jaw, a brief, deliberate tightening. She looked away for half a second. Then she gave a single, curt nod. Hathaway pulled her own terminal and sent the direct line to Tasia and Alucard. The response came back in thirty seconds. Come. Admin Tower. Top floor.

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 47 — 7: 40 PM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Administrative Control Room The reinforced blast doors of the Administrative Control Room slid apart. The space beyond was a vast, darkened hemisphere bathed in the cold blue glow of a hundred floating holographic monitors.

Built into the administrative spire of the stadium, it commanded an unobstructed, panoptic view of the main arena below, the tournament floor of the Crown of Ovelia, its massive architecture painted in shadow, waiting for tomorrow's dawn. Hathaway stepped through the threshold, followed by Victoria, Liandra, and Alice. Tasia and Alucard were standing at the primary tactical table. Their gazes swept the arrivals. They landed on Alice Varro.

The temperature in the room dropped with the speed and precision of a localized weather event. The shared trauma of The Captive Trophy Wife, Little Sia materialized in the air between them like drawn blades. Alucard's hand dropped to her coat pocket with a quiet, purposeful certainty. Then, their eyes moved to the person standing beside Victoria. The hand stilled.

The homicidal grievance against the smut author was instantly overwritten, every operational parameter in the room reshuffled by a single, dominant variable. Tasia exchanged one loaded, silent look with Alucard. Alice's entire file was shelved, for now. The room held its breath. Hathaway moved toward the central monitoring station. As she crossed the floor, a figure in the blue light of the secondary console turned around.

Nino Lucent was standing at the board, a ceramic cup in hand, watching the dormant camera feeds of the VIP boxes. Hathaway's neutral mask slipped entirely. Her expression fractured. Nino did not acknowledge the reaction. She kept her gaze on the monitors.

"To ensure Heidi's physical and mental well-being," Nino stated, her voice a flat, mechanical register that sounded like a public infrastructure announcement being read at gunpoint, "to guarantee her optimal competitive state for the upcoming Final, and to uphold the unquestionable honor of the White City: I have an administrative obligation to remove this disgusting visual pollution before tomorrow." Hathaway stared at Nino's face.

Three escalating clauses of civic duty, her developer brain parsed automatically, and every single one of them is a transparently fabricated cover for terminal-stage siscon protocol. She looked around the room. Victoria. Liandra. Tasia. Alucard. Alice. Nino. Rhode wasn't here. Bella wasn't here. For the first time since she had transmigrated into this universe, the knot between her shoulders simply wasn't there. Rhode and Bella were sunlight.

They were clean, direct, honest, made for the arena floor, for bright lights, for honorable combat. What this room required was the dark, compromised work that kept the sunlight clean. Some doors, Hathaway thought, looking out at the vast, sleeping stadium, they simply cannot walk through. And I am so glad they can't.

"Stations," Nino said. The room moved. Hands flew across arcane keyboards, syncing surveillance feeds, calibrating the facial recognition arrays. The monitor wall blazed to life, casting monitor-light across every face in the room. Beyond the spell-glass, the Crown of Ovelia stretched outward into the night, its festival grounds and dormant arena architecture spreading into shadow under pale maintenance-ward glow. Somewhere in that labyrinth, the monster they were hunting was waiting for the sun to rise.

Nino checked the primary chronometer.

"Twelve hours and twenty-two minutes until the opening round," she said, her voice stripped of all inflection.

"She won't waste time on the spectator perimeter. If she wants to deliver the payload, she needs to be inside the competitor's compound by morning. Isolate the feeds on the Eastern Courtyard and all viable access points to the Greed Umbrella's suite." The screens flared. The hunt began. Liandra did not move to the main bank.

She crossed to a secondary panel at the far end of the room and began pulling up a different set of feeds: the elevated observation terraces, the internal competitor corridor overhangs, every camera with a high-angle line to the Greed Umbrella's access route.

"She scouts from elevation before she moves," Liandra said, without turning.

"She did it at Babylon." The room did not respond. It didn't need to.