Chương 197: Chapter 177: A Specimen for the Living Room

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 48 — 7: 05 PM [Location]: White City · The Wisteria · Greed Umbrella Suite The heavy suite door unlocked with a pressurized hiss and swung inward. The hallway was empty. In the fractional instant Hathaway's eyes moved to the door, the disaster had already manifested inside the room. Her body identified it before her brain did. The suffocating cold. The localized erasure of ambient sound. The sensation of being enveloped by an omen that had finally arrived at the correct address.

She turned her head. White. Immaculate, blinding, sharp. Then the hands. A polished aristocratic cane. On the thumb: a square signet ring: deep purple gemstone in a black mount, the band mithril. The spoon reflection. She had been staring at that ring for twenty hours. The cloak was plumage, sourced from planes that had no names on any Inner Sea chart, dusted with the residue of unknown stardust, the fibers themselves spun from liquefied magical gemstones. The matching hat was extravagant to the point of theater.

The entire ensemble should have been gauche. It wasn't. It required a foundational, bone-deep frivolity to anchor it, and the woman wearing it possessed exactly that. The aesthetic struck Hathaway in a place she had not been prepared for: it reminded her of Avenka. But this was not Avenka. Finally, beneath the brim of the hat, she forced herself to look. Purple. A deep, liquid amethyst. These eyes were purple the way Karula's were purple. The same depth. The same spectrum. Every single thing about them was wrong.

Karula's eyes had weight, and a will behind the weight that had made up its mind to see you. These held nothing. Evangeline had arrived. Cecilia and Victoria saw her first. Cecilia could not speak. The architect of Greed Umbrella, the woman who had stepped onto the championship floor three hours ago without a perceptible change in her heart rate, stood with a microscopic, uncontrollable tremor running through her hands. Her eyes locked onto Evangeline and would not move. Victoria closed her eyes.

Her jaw locked, the muscle jumping under the skin. When she finally forced the words through her throat, they sounded scraped raw.

"Sister." The word came out like glass being ground to powder.

"I truly wish you were dead. At least then, I could mourn you sincerely." Evangeline smiled. Light. Fond. Effortless.

"You are still so bad at lying, Vicky." A fracture formed in Hathaway's chest. Her hand moved two inches before she understood it had moved at all. The deepest curse she has, her developer brain returned, flat and unsparing, and she can't make herself believe it. She wanted to step in front of her. Build a ward. Do anything. The invisible pressure in the suite had already pinned her boots to the floorboards. Victoria did not speak again. Wei Changqing stepped forward.

The warmth she had radiated in the kitchen was gone as though it had never existed. She stared directly into the amethyst eyes.

"Celestial Witch." She spat the title like something that had fouled her tongue. Evangeline's gaze drifted to her. A soft, unhurried smile.

"Child of the Way. The Way does enjoy its coincidences." Wei Changqing went perfectly still. Her fists closed at her sides. Hathaway's memory pulled the public archive data: Wei Changqing came from a Celestial Witch dynasty. But it was Alice's manuscript that had supplied the unredacted context: a lineage Wei had spent her entire life crawling out of, refusing to ever look back. Child of the Way.

In the cultivator tradition: the title given to a sect's chosen genius, the peerless heir a lineage spends generations waiting for. Wei Changqing had worn it once, as a girl, before she walked away. Hathaway's developer brain hit a limit it hadn't expected to hit. She opened her mouth.

"Mihaye Grün!" The syllables struck the air and dissolved. No spatial tear. No furious former coach kicking down the suite door. Evangeline let out a low, melodic laugh. She didn't look toward Hathaway at all. She forced a cold-boot diagnostic through the panic. The walls were fractionally closer. The air fractionally denser. A localized spatial quarantine. When did the ward go up? The atmospheric pressure had shifted the exact microsecond Evangeline crossed the threshold. But Evangeline hadn't cast a single spell.

If the intruder didn't deploy the signal jammer, that left only one administrative owner for the local server. The Greed Umbrella's own defensive architecture. But you don't trigger a total spatial lockdown after the lethal threat has already bypassed the perimeter. Unless the perimeter was never meant to be a shield. Not to keep anyone out. To keep her in. Near the far end of the room, Karula had not looked away from Evangeline since she materialized.

The gaze had bypassed every stage of hostility and arrived somewhere colder: the clinical evaluation of a body that had not yet realized it was dead. Evangeline looked at her.

"You know," Evangeline said. Light.

"Cici has always loved purple." Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! Under the suite's ambient lighting, Karula's irises were a purple so deep they bordered on black. Karula looked at Cecilia. Cecilia did not look back. Her eyes were still fixed on Evangeline. Slowly, Karula looked away. Her hand lifted toward the ring. Fell back. The rings. The same stone. Evangeline's attention drifted, unhurried, to Maria.

"How pitiful," Evangeline murmured.

"You still believe in things that are one hundred percent." Hathaway felt the cold move up her spine. The parents who had projected a cinematic illusion of parental love and possessed exactly zero substance behind it. The rule Maria had forged from the wreckage: love was binary, one hundred percent real or one hundred percent false. No middle ground. That absolute metric was the only reason she had ever opened the door.

She had allowed herself to be tamed, a stray cat finally coming in from the cold, because she had anchored her entire existence to the belief that Cecilia was that elusive one hundred percent. Maria's flawless idol mask was fracturing along every seam. Flandmira stepped in front of her.

"Fake," Flandmira said. The word was flat. An art appraiser identifying a forgery without any particular emotion about it. Evangeline let out a delicate, theatrical sigh. She brushed a stray feather from her sleeve.

"This is exactly why I hate overly sensitive people." A pause.

"Such a pity. A fake like me doesn't dream, and will live forever." Hathaway exhaled through clenched teeth. Flandmira's bloodline ran to terrifyingly high-inspiration artists. Her mother obsessed with the boundary of mortality, testing the absolute limits of resurrection magic, over and over. Alice's manuscript had detailed where the gravitational pull of that lineage led, in its darkest route. Flandmira went rigid. The blade had found bone.

Having cleared the room with precise, deliberate, surgical patience, Evangeline turned. Her purple, empty eyes found Cecilia. Hathaway's developer brain shut down entirely. The Sword of Damocles began to fall. The silence reached its absolute geometric limit. Cecilia spoke. The tremor bled into her syllables, fracturing each one as it formed, yet she forced them into a complete sentence.

"Why..." The word cracked down the middle.

"Why didn't you even want my eyes?" Evangeline paused. She rested both hands on the polished head of her cane, giving it one lazy, effortless rotation. The smile on her face widened, reaching the full corners of her mouth, while the liquid amethyst of her irises received nothing. No warmth. No cruelty. An expression that stopped precisely at the skin.

"Because you are too boring, Cici." At the peak of Cecilia's trembling, her body stopped. The vibration was severed: a guillotine dropping on a taut wire. An invisible hand passed through Hathaway's ribs and closed over her heart. Then the scent arrived like a hallucination.

It bypassed the olfactory system entirely and flooded directly into the roots of her nervous system: rain, torrential and cold, and beneath it the phantom sweetness of something with no name: petals bruised and ground under the iron wheels of a carriage on wet cobblestones, a flower that had never grown in any physical world, threading itself around the base of her spine. Hathaway swayed on her feet. She couldn't parse it, but her instincts were screaming. Hathaway's eyes moved to Victoria.

The aristocratic mask had completely liquefied. What was left beneath it had no business being on a human face: a dark, carnivorous ecstasy whose long-buried question had just been answered with an executioner's axe. Hathaway recognized the ghost of this expression. It was the face Victoria had worn in the dormitory common room, teaching her what it meant to stop fearing the dark and become the reason something else did. Before Hathaway could process what she was witnessing, Cecilia spoke.

Her voice had settled into a crystalline sweetness, unhurried, dripping with a gentleness that was structurally insane.

"Karula. Changqing. Maria. Flandmira." Each name landed with the easy warmth of someone calling her family for dinner.

"Could you prepare a gift for me? I want her as a specimen."

"I have one question left for her. Once I hear the answer, I'll know exactly what to do with it." The memory from Box 14 echoed in Hathaway's deafened ears. She had run the dependencies back then and assumed a wrong answer meant a terminal crash. She had assumed Cecilia would shatter, and her family would spend the next decade trying to glue the pieces back together. She hadn't misread the code. She had misread the genre. At the far end of the room, Karula threw her head back and laughed.

It was a sharp, carrying sound of pure, unfeigned delight. Her iron staff materialized in her grip with a soft, inevitable click.

"So you were performing a melodrama this whole time, Cici?" The Jackdaw's eyes burned with a violet light.

"You should have just said so." The moment Karula's laughter hit the air, the spatial coordinates of the hotel suite sheared away from the physical universe. The panoramic windows, the cobalt-blue crystal sofa, the living grass underfoot. Torn away as though they had never existed. Hathaway's boots hit cold, featureless grey stone. A sealed void. Excised from all temporal recording infrastructure. The Witches' law was absolute: murder a Witch, and the Authority deploys an execution squad.

Time-reversal and chronological river-walking are the tools they use to find you. Seal the space, block the temporal axis, complete the act in a dimension that does not exist— Wei Changqing struck the heel of her staff against the stone floor. The conceptual parameters of the void shivered and froze solid. The concept of 'distance,' of any spatial avenue of egress was administratively revoked. Maria stepped forward. Something erupted around her frame that Hathaway had no reference architecture to name.

Her heavy firearm came up. Her voice carried the full weight of a Legendary-tier matrix being spoken into permanent law.

"I declare: you will face me." Evasion was deleted from the server. Both parties were now required to stand their ground and absorb the total arithmetic of each other's firepower until one of them ceased to function. In the far corner, Flandmira's eyes blazed, her casting auras stacking into an overlapping halo of cascading rings, with the fevered, transcendent intensity of a master sculptor who has finally found the perfect block of marble.

"Cici," Flandmira breathed, layer upon layer of spell light blooming around her as she spoke.

"I will seal her in the [Eternal Light Prison]. The beams will pierce every single inch of her skin." A beat. Her voice dropped into something that sounded almost reverent.

"She will look absolutely beautiful in our living room." The void became a cathedral of lethal intent, every surface blazing with world-ending geometry. Evangeline stood at the center of it. Her hands remained loosely clasped over the head of her cane. The deep amethyst eyes swept once across the igniting artillery and she regarded them with the mild, affectionate amusement of a tourist watching a street performance. Hathaway's hand was already in her spatial bag.

Her palm was tearing through the contents, scraping past pouches and scrolls with frantic desperation. The legal architecture was assembling itself without her direction: no evidence, no case, but Avenka is outside. You cannot commit the perfect crime while the Game Master is actively observing the board. The moment they strike, the wrath of the High Council falls on them. The elimination tree collapsed at every node. Ovelia's will was already in the room, and it had the shape of a permission slip.

Ash could not return. Heidi was deaf: constitutionally incapable of receiving an emergency ping on her own frequency. That left one. Her fingers found cold metal. Irene. The private business channel key. The one Grand Witch who had voluntarily purchased her patent with real money and seen something in it worth owning. She didn't know if the signal could penetrate a sealed spatial void. She didn't know if Avenka's presence had placed all the Grand Witches under radio silence.

She didn't know if Irene would respond to a distress call from someone who was, at best, a business acquaintance. The only thing she knew was that exactly one variable remained on the board. As the hundreds of lethal matrices peaked toward critical mass, Hathaway gripped the coin and flooded it with everything her circuits could generate. She looked at Victoria's dark, ruined face. She looked at Cecilia's empty, sweet, crystalline madness.

A profound, violent passion erupted from the bottom of her chest: not a developer's calculation, not the detached remove of someone watching NPCs through a screen. The specific, greedy, uncompromising madness of a Witch. Victoria taught me how to be one of you, Hathaway thought, the coin burning in her palm. I will not let you destroy yourselves here. I don't care if you hate me for it. The void blazed white.