Chương 200: Interlude: Upon Further Reflection

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 48 — 2: 35 PM [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Outer Festival Grounds The crinkle of the betting slip sliding into her inner breast pocket was, to Mihaye Grün's ears, a symphony more resonant than anything an orchestral hall had ever managed. She stood at the edge of the dispersing festival crowd, smoothing the thick stack of receipts with both thumbs, then patted the bulge in her coat twice to confirm it was real.

Two floating islands, she calculated, with the quiet satisfaction of a woman finalizing a business plan. One for living. One exclusively dedicated to hat storage. The system works. Witch poker was functionally closer to an active war zone than a casino game: a setup she had walked into as an experienced grifter and exited as legally bound prey. The rules technically prohibited magic, but trying to enforce that against a roster of apex combatants was an exercise in futility.

The reality was a relentless collision of physiological and psychological exploits that reduced standard probability to a bad joke. Karula's sleight-of-hand was indistinguishable from high-tier illusion magic. The Jackdaw considered card manipulation a critical component of her aesthetic and routinely managed to produce six Aces from a standard deck without ever touching the discard pile. Maria performed.

Every hand arrived wearing the same face: composed, unreadable, and exactly as threatening as she needed it to be. Her tells were a curated fiction. Everyone else's were not. Wei Changqing played with the lethal, calculating patience of a government auditor reviewing tax discrepancies. When the dust settled at 3: 00 AM, the IOU Mihaye signed formally bound her to return as the team's Head Coach. The kids had been absolutely insufferable about it. Fine, Mihaye thought, tapping the pocket.

I'll buy them the most offensively expensive celebratory dinner the White City can produce and make Su Jingran watch us drink it. Then I'll drill them until they vomit for dropping four points. She turned, adjusted her collar, and moved toward the competitor's exit to locate her beloved, victorious, comprehensively irritating students. Her gaze swept the broad municipal promenade adjacent to the stadium's clock tower.

It passed the souvenir stalls, the broadcast screens still looping the championship highlights, the dispersing crowds. It drifted, entirely by accident, past a standard, unremarkable observation terrace, the kind of civic balcony a pedestrian might glance at while waiting for foot traffic to clear. Mihaye Grün stopped walking. The festive roar of eighty thousand people evacuated her auditory cortex in a single, detonating rush.

The summer heat of the White City plummeted, leaving a layer of cold, clammy sweat across the back of her neck. The celebratory buoyancy abandoned her spine entirely. Sitting on the stone railing, long legs swinging lazily over the open drop below, was a Cat Witch in a black top hat and sweeping cloak. It was the hair that severed Mihaye's respiratory function. A thick, naturally curling mane, carrying the precise color of a deep, star-scattered night sky.

The eyes, currently lowering toward the street below: the exact same starry black. On the balcony, Avenka let a white dove take flight from her fingertip. She lowered her hand. Her gaze dropped through the thinning crowd below, ignoring hundreds of people, and locked directly onto Mihaye.

"Ah." The voice bypassed the acoustic space of the plaza entirely, vibrating against the inside of Mihaye's skull.

"It's you." A long, slender tail uncoiled from behind Avenka's back, its tips faintly luminous, and draped itself over the hosiery-clad thigh resting on the railing. Avenka brought a pale hand down and rubbed the fluffy tip between her fingers. Her lips curved into a playful W-shaped feline smile. Mihaye's eyes tracked the movement to the thigh. The archaic gold runic text seemed to burn directly into her retinas: Worship the Queen of Cats. Bow down, look up, and crave.

She snapped her gaze away with the violence of someone who had just stared into a welding torch. She examined the cobblestones. She studied the clock tower's minute hand. She located a specific, slightly discolored brick near a souvenir stall and committed it to memory with the frantic, dedicated focus of a field geologist mid-discovery. Behind Mihaye, Katalu let out a low, rumbling hum.

It abandoned its partner without any visible sign of regret, deactivating its gravity just enough to bring its massive head level with the railing, and drifted into Avenka's open palm.

"Good child," Avenka murmured, scratching the thick fur between the enormous feathered wings. Katalu's eyes narrowed to blissful crescents. A purr like a subterranean diesel engine rattled the marble fixtures of the clock tower. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Mihaye executed a crisp, ninety-degree bow toward nothing in particular.

"I apologize for the interruption, Your Eminence," Mihaye rattled off, at approximately twice normal conversational speed.

"I have some extremely pressing administrative matters requiring my immediate attention. Why don't I leave Katalu here to keep you company. I'll just be taking my leave now—" She took one step backward, already channeling the spatial coordinates for an emergency blink. Avenka's hand stilled in Katalu's fur. She tilted her head. The top hat dipped. The W-shaped smile widened into something that contained the lazy, absolute authority of a natural law that had never once required enforcement.

Her voice dropped into a low, resonant purr. The final syllable lifted, teasing and entirely weightless.

"Wanna have some fun, beauty?" Mihaye Grün stopped breathing. The cobblestones dissolved. 1999. She had been the undisputed holder of the [Mandate of the Fire Dragon]. She had beaten Famia Schüder eleven consecutive times. The continent's media had suffered a synchronized meltdown. She was a walking natural disaster at the peak of her career. She had been catastrophically, terminally, and aggressively drunk. Ovelia had come to find her.

The Supreme Sovereign had arrived with a formal envelope bearing the highest arcane authority of the Inner Sea: a personal invitation to enter the candidacy for Grand Witch. An open door to the contest. A chance. Through the golden, roaring haze of fortified spirits, Mihaye had seen the most beautiful woman she had ever encountered in her life sitting across from her. She had leaned forward and caught the woman's chin between her thumb and forefinger, squeezing it gently.

"Wanna have some fun, beauty?" she had slurred, offering what she believed at the time was a devastating wink. The invitation letter vaporized before the first tail connected. Ovelia manifested her Nine-Tailed Cat form. She used the [Tail Sword Art]. Mihaye was batted across the room like a tragically resilient Catolf ball. Her bones shattered, stitched themselves back together via the terrifying regenerative capacity of an Arch-Witch, and were immediately pulverized again.

Her skull reconstituted and caved in, reconstituted and caved in, with the systematic patience of a quality-control process nobody had signed up for. Ovelia slaughtered her through every resurrection phase without visible effort or acceleration, until she was left hovering on exactly one biological pixel of vitality in her absolute final health bar.

Two weeks after the incident, she was lying on her living room sofa, wrapped in so many medicated bandages she had achieved a credible impression of a high-tier necromantic summon, staring at the ceiling. The roster of the Greed Umbrella broke down her door in a panic to see what entity could have possibly reduced their former coach to a localized casualty. Under relentless interrogation, Mihaye squeezed the story out of herself like a tube of dry toothpaste, syllable by agonizing syllable.

The silence that followed possessed physical weight. Wei Changqing, whose polished composure had survived every catastrophe including Mihaye's worst coaching decisions, sat by the window. She closed her eyes and lost the ability to produce human speech. Cecilia Wellington sat in the visitor's chair, her expression a monument to aristocratic shock so profound it had calcified into something resembling pity.

"To still be able to look upon you among the living, Professor," Cecilia said quietly,"is a stroke of unexpected, miraculous fortune." Karula paced the room, rubbing her temples, regarding Mihaye with the expression of someone contemplating an unexploded device.

"Are you genuinely insane, Professor? I am still willing to address you by your title out of lingering professional respect. But I am deeply concerned that within the next few minutes, my civic duty will compel me to summon a physician to examine your spinal cord." From the bandages, Mihaye issued a defensive, petulant whine.

"If I had known I was going to be beaten that badly," Mihaye groaned, shifting and immediately regretting it as every fracture complained simultaneously,"I would have pinched it a little longer." Flandmira, who had been standing near the door with her arms folded, let her jaw drop. Her eyes went completely, permanently dead.

"You are literally lying there on the brink of organ failure," Flandmira said, her voice cracking with sheer disbelief,"and you are currently reminiscing?!" Maria leaned forward over the bedrails. Her amber eyes were wide with a specific, dangerous curiosity. She glanced over her shoulder, then leaned closer, dropping her voice to a careful, hushed register.

"Professor," Maria said.

"What did it feel like?" Four heads snapped toward Maria simultaneously. The collective impact was audible. Their expressions were identical: unified, unmediated, screaming horror. Mihaye waved a heavily bandaged hand in a slow, weak arc, exhaled a long sigh, and went on staring at the ceiling.

"Unspeakable," Mihaye groaned softly.

"Truly, utterly unspeakable." On the balcony above, Avenka was still looking down at her. The W-shaped smile was perfectly, patiently intact. You could outrun a spell. You could outrun a rival Witch. You could not outrun the Keeper of Possibility. Mihaye closed her eyes. She mentally transferred the deeds of her future floating islands to her students, made peace with the universe, and completely relinquished her will to live. When she opened her eyes, the flinch was gone.

What replaced it was the grim, committed momentum of a soldier charging a machine-gun nest. With a sharp crack of displaced space, Mihaye teleported onto the marble observation terrace, materializing three feet from the dangling, rune-wrapped legs of the Aspect of Possibility. She kept her eyes fixed firmly on a decorative stone pillar approximately twelve inches to Avenka's left.

"Upon further reflection," Mihaye said, her voice entirely flat and devoid of anything except the hollow, doomed certainty of someone who had already completed the math, "the administrative matter was not actually that important." Avenka's eyes curved into bright, delighted crescents.

Down below, the festival crowd streamed past the municipal clock tower in the golden afternoon light, completely oblivious to the fact that the former holder of the Fire Dragon Mandate was standing twelve inches from an Aspect of the Conqueror of the World. Katalu purred.