Chương 196: Chapter 176: It Sounds the Least Like a Lie

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 48 — 3: 00 PM [Location]: White City · Aerial Transit Route Hathaway raised her hand at the intersection. A Griffin carriage banked down from the sky-lane and settled onto the cobblestones in front of them. Victoria stood beside her, their hands still linked, fingers loosely intertwined. The carriage door swung open. The driver leaned out, wearing a dark mourning armband pinned to her lapel in what had, over the course of the morning, quietly become the city's unofficial grief dress code.

Hathaway recognized her exactly one microsecond before the driver recognized Hathaway. It was the worn leather notebook tucked into the breast pocket that triggered the memory alert. The autograph driver. The Royal Rosas superfan. The woman currently in permanent possession of a piece of parchment bearing my delivery-receipt cursive. Oh no. The driver's face lit up with the wattage of a localized solar flare, her civic despair vaporizing in an instant.

"By Ovelia—Miss Ludwig! The rising—" The greeting violently derailed. Her gaze had dropped exactly two feet, locking onto the linked hands. It tracked upward, found the person attached to the other arm: pale eyes, flawless bearing, an unmistakable Wellington profile. The driver's expression simply ceased to function. Victoria's hand smoothly detached from Hathaway's, retreating to her coat pocket with the unhurried grace of a planned tactical withdrawal.

She stepped past the paralyzed driver and into the carriage's plush interior without a single word of explanation. The visual data, however, had already been rendered, compiled, and permanently committed. Hathaway climbed in after her.

A Royal Rosas substitute player, her developer brain ran the assessment with clinical dread, caught holding hands on a public street with the sister of the Greed Umbrella ACE, requesting a drop-off at the enemy's hotel, in a city currently experiencing synchronized geopolitical grief. Treason? Espionage? A cross-syndicate affair of catastrophic romantic significance? But White City service workers were professionals.

The driver swallowed, sealed her jaw shut, faced the sky-lane, and cracked the reins without asking for a second autograph. The carriage lurched heavily into the air. The interior smelled of polished leather and quiet desperation. Victoria waited. She let the carriage stabilize, let the wing-beats settle into their rhythm. Hathaway counted approximately thirty seconds before Victoria turned her head toward the window.

"Last night," Victoria said, her voice dropping into the flat, clipped cadence of a pre-breach tactical briefing, "I informed them that you are my girlfriend, and that you intend to break up with me. Therefore, when we walk through that door, they will operate under the assumption that you have come tonight to resolve our failing relationship." CRACK. The griffin let out a startled, indignant squawk.

The carriage violently pitched as the driver's wrist jerked, accidentally laying the whip across the creature's flank. Hathaway's developer brain attempted to return an emergency response. Several were queued simultaneously, their content ranging approximately from why to you told your catastrophically lethal sisters-in-law to the word 'girlfriend,' Victoria, is actively stuck in my vocal cords right now. Every single subroutine triggered a fatal interrupt before it reached the output channel.

She stared at Victoria's immaculate profile.

"... Understood," Hathaway whispered. Neither of them spoke for the remainder of the flight. The carriage touched down in front of The Wisteria. Hathaway handed over the fare.

"Please take care," the driver said, a flawless replica of standard professional courtesy, delivered with the specific, tragic intensity of someone watching a promising youth walk voluntarily into a high-security correctional facility. Hathaway followed Victoria closely, staring a hole into the pavement, and narrowly avoided a collision when Victoria stopped abruptly at the hotel's front entrance. Victoria reached back and took Hathaway's hand. Hathaway flinched. Why are we re-engaging the hand-holding protocol?!

There are no witnesses! Victoria's grip simply tightened, her knuckles locking with cold, undeniable pressure. She didn't look at Hathaway.

"Do not move carelessly," Victoria said, barely above a murmur.

"Or you will die." The panic froze and immediately reclassified itself as survival instinct. Right. Hathaway swallowed hard, her palm rapidly heating against Victoria's. The Greed Umbrella's countermeasures. An invisible minefield from the lobby up. She went completely pliant. She stepped exactly where Victoria stepped. She moved exactly when Victoria moved. The heavy suite door sealed behind them with the pressurized hiss of a bank vault. Victoria let go of her hand. They were alone.

The suite was cavernous, all vaulted ceilings and panoramic windows overlooking the White City's crystalline spires, yet the oxygen felt terminally depleted. The room was too large, because Victoria had walked immediately to an armchair on the far side of the conversation area, placing herself at a distance that was precisely, miserably one meter too far away. Hathaway stood in the center of the room. Her cognitive functions, newly freed from the emergency task of not dying by ward, began to reconvene.

They produced a disaster. Why did she let go. The thought spun, gaining velocity. Why does she always initiate the contact and terminate it first, every single time, like I am not a participant in this but a variable she picks up and sets down whenever the operational parameters change. I am not an NPC in her emotional sandbox. I need a defined state. I need—"Why did you use that reason?" Hathaway blurted out. Victoria looked at the floor for a long moment.

"Because," Victoria said, the aristocratic cadence completely absent from her voice, "it sounds the least like a lie." Hathaway's processor threw a fatal error so total it couldn't even compile an Understood. The suite door unlocked with a click. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. The Greed Umbrella had returned from the post-championship press gauntlet.

They filed through the doorway carrying the specific, hollow-limbed exhaustion of introverts who had just spent three hours pretending to enjoy flash photography. Flandmira entered first, one hand raised to loosen her collar, and froze. Her silver eyes widened to their absolute maximum aperture. Because she had abruptly stopped, Maria walked directly into her back, grumbled, and shoved past her shoulder to see what the obstruction was. The Diva's amber eyes landed on Hathaway. One blink.

Maria grabbed Flandmira by the sleeve, hauled her into the foyer, and stepped aside with the extreme, careful deliberation of someone clearing an active blast radius. The doorway was now open. Cecilia and Wei Changqing entered side by side. Karula trailed one step behind, pulling the door closed. Hathaway stood frozen as the five world champions performed a synchronized, silent tactical assessment of the room.

She watched their eyes move from Victoria, who sat in the far armchair staring at nothing, to Hathaway herself, standing in the center, visibly stricken. They could read an atmosphere, and this one was not ambiguous. Did she bring me here to present me to the household? Or to physically prevent a breakup from occurring? Her pulse hammered. Because one thing this roster would never accept as operationally viable: Victoria Wellington inviting someone into the inner sanctum and letting them walk back out.

Her perception of these women had undergone a complete structural overhaul over the past months. They had started as the villains of Alice's manuscript, the monsters who would steal Victoria away. Then rivals on the tournament bracket. Then, slowly, something closer to the truth: women she had genuinely come to care for, hoping with real weight for their victory. She had prayed for them from behind blast-proof glass.

But stripped of all that context, this was still only the second time she had been in the same physical space as them. The first time had been the pre-tournament banquet. Her comprehensive social execution. Cecilia broke the silence. She stepped forward, her expression shedding the chilling stillness of the championship arena, and her voice carried a genuine, grounding warmth.

"Long time no see, Miss Ludwig." A brief pause.

"Do you mind if I call you Hathaway?" Hathaway forced her vocal cords to unlock.

"I don't mind," she managed, her voice strained. She hesitated, exactly one beat too long, and added: "... Cecilia." Cecilia smiled. It reached her eyes. The rigid tension in the entryway cracked and bled away into something soft and human. She slipped off her charcoal coat, hanging it by the door, and casually asked what Hathaway would like for dinner and whether she had any dietary restrictions. They were cooking tonight. Hathaway knew they cooked for themselves.

But the realization that the freshly crowned world champions were going to personally operate a kitchen for her short-circuited her working assumptions. She subconsciously scanned the room. The flooring wasn't carpet. It was a living, breathing expanse of putting-green grass, fine, incredibly dense, short-internode cultivation of the kind that cost more per square foot than most White City apartments.

Dominating the center of the room was the sofa: a single, unbroken block of raw cobalt-blue crystal, thirty-five tons minimum, hollowed out and shaped into a massive lazy-cat contour, draped in layers of thick snow-creature fleece. Lying on it would deliver the exact thermal experience of sleeping under a heavy winter duvet while a high-end climate-control system blasted crisp October air across your face.

And the people who own this, Hathaway noted, watching Cecilia move toward the kitchen with the unbothered ease of someone executing a routine performed a thousand times, are about to make me dinner. She said she had no restrictions and would eat anything. In truth, she wasn't certain her stomach could process food with the Sword of Damocles hanging over the evening.

Wei Changqing handed her a knife and a cutting board with the smooth, total naturalism of a host incorporating a guest into the household's existing rhythm. Hathaway fell into mechanical chopping, deeply grateful for something to do with her hands. A silver spoon materialized in her peripheral vision, hovering inches from her mouth. She looked up. Maria was standing beside her, holding a spoonful of dessert with an expectant, demanding expression.

First: Maria does not cook, which narrows the provenance of this spoon considerably. Second: I am an adult. Third: why does Wei Changqing look like she is attending Maria's first-ever recital? Hathaway took the bite. Her developer brain went completely, blissfully offline. What city am I in. The culinary architecture detonated across her palate and she stood there, chopping temporarily forgotten. Is this what surplus bandwidth looks like?! Why are their culinary stats maxed out on top of everything else?!

Maria watched the sheer involuntary bliss move across Hathaway's face, gave a single nod of deep proprietary satisfaction, and spun around and jogged back to Flandmira to open her own mouth and demand a bite. Flandmira sighed, rolled her eyes, and fed her with the practiced efficiency of someone who had long since given up enforcing personal boundaries around food. Hathaway watched Flandmira slide the spoon into Maria's mouth.

In Alice Varro's manuscripts, this exact lack of personal boundaries was the breathless preamble to a multi-chapter bedroom sequence. But standing in this kitchen, watching Wei Changqing observe the interaction with the quiet, luminous wonder of someone witnessing a chronic dependent spontaneously demonstrate adult behavior, Hathaway's developer brain executed a sudden, massive contextual realignment. Alice hadn't invented their profound, suffocating intimacy.

She had just translated it through the only genre she knew how to write. There was no harem. There were no R-18 polycule dynamics. Hathaway realized, with the staggering clarity of a patched bug, that none of these women possessed any functional background in romantic protocols. Their collective courtship experience was, by any reasonable metric, absolute zero. They had simply bypassed romance entirely and slammed straight into the absolute, boundaryless co-dependence of a found family.

And right now, this family was cooking her dinner while treating her like the idiot who was fumbling their youngest sister's heart. The dinner itself was a theorem. Thick, juicy steaks seared to perfection. A bowl of mashed potatoes worked into a violent, beautiful concoction: chili oil, white mushroom reduction, and dragon-blood wine, flash-fried for exactly fifteen seconds to create a caramelized crust that shattered on the fork and released a hot, spiced, wine-dark interior.

Alongside them: octopus-shaped sausages and wild mushrooms, which combined with the potatoes into a compounding architecture of richness, earth, and heat that lingered through every subsequent bite. A massive clay pot of crimson borscht anchored the table. Butter-pan-fried cod beside it, flaking at the touch of a fork. Tall, sweating glasses of non-alcoholic mint iced-tea beer. For dessert: a translucent fruit pudding dense with blueberries, candied yam chips, and peeled grapes.

The texture was a paradox, the yielding melt of grass jelly combined with the thick resistance of fresh aloe, sweet without cloying, its floral aroma refusing to leave the palate. The physical laws of the universe dictated that a Witch could not sustain existential dread in the presence of exceptional food. The atmosphere around the table thawed into genuine, unforced relaxation. Victoria and Cecilia sat on the same side of the long table. Hathaway sat directly opposite, Wei Changqing beside her.

Karula claimed the far end. Cecilia was quietly observing Hathaway. Victoria was aggressively looking everywhere except at Hathaway. Hathaway was dedicating all available processing power to doing the exact opposite of both, with approximately a twenty percent success rate. Wei Changqing, noticing the residual stiffness in Hathaway's shoulders, smoothly drew her into conversation.

"What are your plans for the rest of the summer break, Hathaway?" Wei asked, refilling her glass. Hathaway froze. She realized, with sudden plummeting clarity, that her schedule was a total architectural void. She hadn't rendered a single operational thought beyond today.

"I have a spell project in its final wrapping phase," Hathaway said, keeping her eyes on her plate.

"I haven't thought much about what comes after that." Instinctively, entirely against her will, her eyes flicked toward Victoria. At that exact microsecond, Victoria looked at her. Their gazes collided. Both of them violently, immediately redirected their attention to opposite ends of the dining room, studying the walls with a focused intensity the walls had absolutely not earned. At the far end of the table, the corner of Karula's mouth moved. Wei Changqing's smile remained perfectly undisturbed.

"What kind of spell?" she asked, her tone warm and unhurried.

"If you run into any structural friction, we would be happy to offer some guidance." Hathaway's internal temperature dropped several degrees. She could not say [The Banishment of Sorrow]. Victoria had used pink magic on the tournament stage as a combat disruption against opponents with the Will to resist it. [The Banishment of Sorrow] was intimate, invasive, designed for an entirely different context, and she had spent the past two weeks compiling it. No deflection changed what that implied.

But she couldn't lie either. Wei Changqing would ask one follow-up question, and Hathaway's complete lack of operational knowledge of any other high-tier spell would expose the fiction in thirty seconds. She was still frantically, fruitlessly searching the empty database for a viable answer when the ambient temperature of the room shifted. She looked up. Cecilia's expression had changed.

It was a microscopic, total evacuation, the serene warmth that had filled her eyes all evening draining out in a single, silent breath, replaced by something Hathaway could not find the vocabulary to name. But she could read Victoria's face. She had been reading it for months. And she had never, not once, seen Victoria look like this. There is a story about a monkey's paw. The mother weeps with joy at the footsteps on the porch.

The father understands what is standing there, and scrambles for the third wish too late. Victoria understood. She had no paw. Hathaway knew, with cold and absolute certainty, that she was going to need every ounce of courage she possessed just to turn her head.