Chương 207: Chapter 186: Unauthorized Access Denied

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 49 — 6: 00 PM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 The front door clicked shut behind Hathaway, and the amber warmth of the foyer wrapped around her: roasted garlic and Anna's evening tea. Victoria had not returned. She ate dinner with Margaret, Anna, and Rory. Anna reviewed a prototype flight evaluation report, fountain pen clicking in quiet counterpoint against the ceramic.

Margaret engaged with the meal in dignified, deliberately cultivated silence, apparently having elected to spend the evening in voluntary diplomatic recovery. Across the table, Rory was methodically, joyfully, and with absolute scientific commitment, dismantling a dragon rib into its component atoms. Hathaway contributed exactly enough syllables to register as present, excused herself the moment the plates were cleared, and went upstairs.

She spread the [Iron Will] feat scroll across her desk, flooded the arcane matrix with mana, and pressed her palm flat against the parchment. A sharp spike of silver light drove directly up her arm and into her cerebral cortex. Her fingers dug into the edge of the mahogany desk as the scroll dissolved into fine, cold ash. Every piece of fantasy media she had ever consumed in her previous life assured her that a Will save was a matter of grit. Stubborn, screaming, psychological endurance against an invading force.

You gritted your teeth. You held on. As the feat compiled into her neural architecture, she understood exactly how wrong that was. She felt a cold, crystalline structure settle over the outer layer of her consciousness: a boundary defense layer snapping into place with the frictionless precision of enterprise-grade security infrastructure. When a hostile matrix attempted to hijack her emotional state or rewrite her perception, she didn't need to fight it.

The firewall simply checked the incoming packet, confirmed the complete absence of administrative credentials, and dropped the connection. Unauthorized Access Denied. She exhaled, rolling her shoulders as the phantom pressure faded. That, her developer brain noted with profound, structural satisfaction, is a patch worth eighty-five thousand Solars.

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 49 — 9: 00 PM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · Hathaway's Bedroom The delivery arrived via an arcane logistics courier precisely on schedule. For the next two hours, she sat on the floor of her bedroom, surrounded by heavily warded crates, unboxing the systematic financial ruin of her summer operating budget with the focused, reverent care of a museum conservator. Alchemical calipers forged from cold-iron and star-silver, calibrated to a tolerance of five decimal places.

Compounding crucibles whose interiors were coated in a seamless, heat-resistant enamel that felt exactly like touching liquid glass. A micro-scale inscribed with anti-gravity runes to negate the interference of ambient air pressure on its readings, because an alchemist who blamed humidity for a failed measurement was an alchemist who deserved to fail.

She lifted each component out of its packaging with its specific, immaculate weight: the weight of equipment engineered to survive catastrophic detonations while remaining accurate to the fifth decimal. It was, without qualification, exactly like unboxing a rack of ultra-high-end server infrastructure. The hardware demanded respect. She arranged everything across her reinforced workstation with meticulous, obsessive geometry, following Sharon Curie's Chapter Three diagrams to the millimeter.

When the setup was complete, she pulled Volume One toward her, opened it to Chapter One, and began to read. Ten o'clock passed. Eleven o'clock. The townhouse settled into the deep, rhythmic quiet of a sleeping household. Hathaway turned pages of foundational alchemy theory, her eyes scanning dense paragraphs on harmonic resonance and chaotic suppression. But her mana radar was running a continuous background sweep of the street beyond the front gate, and had been for some time.

Her developer brain logged the discrepancy with clinical precision: You are experiencing the exact cognitive and behavioral signature of a 1950s domestic housewife waiting in the living room for her corporate husband to return from a late shift at the firm. Hathaway suppressed the observation with extreme prejudice and aggressively turned a page so hard the corner nearly tore. I am engaging in rigorous academic preparation. My sleep schedule is merely flexible.

At 11: 47 PM, a familiar, chillingly precise mana signature crossed the perimeter ward of the Ludwig estate. She closed the book, smoothed her shirt, and walked out of the room. She descended the staircase just as the heavy front door clicked open below. Victoria stepped into the foyer. She looked impeccable, dark jacket sharp and unwrinkled, but the faint bluish shadows beneath her pale eyes told the full story: not the fatigue of physical exertion, but something quieter and more compressed.

Victoria looked up and saw Hathaway standing at the bottom of the stairs. Something infinitesimal relaxed in the pale blue eyes.

"You're still awake," Victoria said.

"I was studying," Hathaway replied, defensively fast.

"The Curie manual. The foundational theory requires extensive review." The corner of Victoria's mouth moved, a faint, knowing curve. She began to unbutton her coat.

"Of course." They walked up the stairs side-by-side, the silence between them comfortable, undemanding, filled only with the soft rhythm of their boots against the carpeted runner.

"Any explosive insights?" Victoria asked.

"Mostly warnings about explosions," Hathaway said.

"Extensive, detailed warnings. Several of them appeared to have been written from direct personal experience." They reached the top landing. Victoria stopped in front of the guest room door, rested her hand on the brass handle. Stolen novel; please report. She turned. Her gloved hand reached out, sliding behind Hathaway's neck, fingers tangling lightly in the hair at the nape. Before Hathaway's nervous system could issue a proximity alert, Victoria leaned in and kissed her. Hathaway froze perfectly solid.

It was the second time. Both times, Victoria had initiated the sequence and entirely bypassed Hathaway's internal processing queue, and both times Hathaway's operational readiness had been caught completely flat-footed. There was no Vissel spice this time to chemically anesthetize the sensory array. She felt the impossible, velvet softness of the contact. Victoria's scent flooded her olfactory sensors: the sharp, pristine clarity of a freezing winter morning.

But buried beneath that frost, barely perceptible, was a trace warmth, like a sun that had sunk to the very bottom of a frozen lake, radiating a microscopic heat through the ice. Victoria stepped back. Her pale eyes held Hathaway's for one quiet, unhurried second. The brass handle clicked. The door opened. Victoria slipped inside, and the heavy wood closed behind her with a soft, definitive thud. Hathaway stood in the empty hallway. Her enterprise-grade firewall had not engaged.

It had simply bypassed every existing defense layer through a completely unprotected access point, and her developer brain had crashed to desktop. She stood there for three full minutes before she remembered how to walk to her own room. [Time]: Summer Break, Day 50 — 7: 20 AM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · Hathaway's Bedroom The terminal on the nightstand vibrated with the violent, aggressive frequency of a priority override alarm. Hathaway groaned.

The adrenaline spike from the hallway had kept her staring at the ceiling until nearly two in the morning, her brain uselessly recompiling the sensory data on an infinite loop. She had intended to compensate with a long, structurally justified sleep-in. The terminal vibrated again. Insistent. Refusing to be denied. She blindly slapped a hand against the nightstand, grabbed the device, and cracked one eye open to the minimum viable resolution required to read text.

[Rhode]: The Elders found out about you and the Wellington. They want you back at the main house for an inquiry, immediately. I'm in the carriage. Ten minutes. Get dressed. The remaining sleep evacuated Hathaway's biological system in a single, violently ejected breath. She bolted upright. The blanket flew across the room. The Elders.

Her operational understanding of the "Main House Elders" was compiled entirely from transmigration literature, which constituted a reliable, extensive, and completely consistent body of evidence: a council of rigid, ancient, supremely powerful fossils whose sole narrative function was to obstruct the protagonist's romantic progression via draconian ancestral laws and ritual disapproval that could not be argued with because it predated argument. Survival protocols engaged. Clothes make the woman.

You cannot walk into a hostile administrative tribunal looking like you rolled out of a dorm room. You need armor. She tore her wardrobe open. She bypassed the casual wear, the comfortable linen shirts. She reached into the absolute back and extracted the coat. The deep crimson velvet, the gold lion-head buttons, the Ludwig crest on the cuffs with the dark rose patterns shifting along the hem: the coat she had worn on her first day of enrollment and again the day she passed the A1. She pulled it on.

But her eyes didn't glow. Could I cast a low-tier [Light] spell directly onto my corneas? she thought, briefly. Just a faint, localized glow. Purely for situational purposes. Her internal safety protocols flagged this as an excellent method to permanently destroy her retinas approximately ten minutes before walking into a hostile tribunal. She abandoned the glowing eyes, adjusted her collar, and sprinted for the door.

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 50 — 7: 30 AM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · Second Floor Landing She threw her bedroom door open and skidded to a halt at the top of the stairs. The landing was not empty. Victoria stood at the mid-landing, already fully dressed, immaculate in her dark jacket, pale eyes tracking upward to find Hathaway's face. Standing at the base of the stairs, silhouetted in the open front doorway with the morning light cutting sharp behind her, was Rhode.

Rhode's crimson eyes were dialed to a blistering 300 lumens, fixed directly on the Wellington. Victoria looked back at Rhode with the serene, undisturbed composure of a sovereign observing an unexploded piece of garden furniture. Hathaway descended the stairs and inserted herself manually into the crossfire. She looked at Victoria, equal parts desperate plea and sincere apology, then gripped the banister and aimed every volt of that anxiety at her cousin.

"What is the current emotional temperature of the Elders?" Hathaway asked, keeping her voice tightly professional.

"Is there anything specific I need to watch out for?" Rhode clicked her tongue, the sound sharp in the quiet house. She shifted her weight, her expression carrying the bone-deep discomfort of someone watching their ancestral enemy stand in their aunt's foyer like she owned the architecture.

"What do you think their temperature is?" Rhode shot back.

"They're furious. You'll understand when you get there." She crossed her arms, leather creaking.

"Just get down here. They aren't going to eat you." Victoria moved before Hathaway could respond. Her gloved fingers closed on the second golden lion-head button of Hathaway's greatcoat, fastened slightly off-center in the panicked rush, and with deliberate, precise care she undid it, smoothed the heavy fabric flat against Hathaway's collarbone, and re-fastened the gold through the correct eyelet. Without changing her expression, she stepped back half a pace and turned her head toward Rhode.

The crimson light in Rhode's eyes flared to localized-hazard levels, her jaw locking. A bead of sweat traced down Hathaway's spine.

"Let's go," Hathaway said, shattering the silence before the atmospheric pressure shattered the windows. She marched down the stairs and out the front door. Rhode spun on her heel, her greatcoat flaring, and stormed out without a backward glance. [Time]: Summer Break, Day 50 — 7: 45 AM [Location]: White City · Upper Aerial Transit Route The heavy doors of the Ludwig carriage sealed shut, and the griffin team launched into the sky-lane.

The moment they were airborne, Rhode reached into the polished mahogany bar built into the carriage wall, bypassed the crystal decanters of aged wine without ceremony, and extracted a heavy, dark glass bottle of Flaming Vodka. She popped the cork, tipped her head back, and took a long, punishing pull directly from the neck. She lowered the bottle, exhaled a breath that smelled of ethanol and ozone, and wiped her mouth with the back of her leather glove.

It is not yet eight in the morning, Hathaway's developer brain noted, in quiet, genuinely impressed horror. She is pre-gaming the family tribunal with industrial solvent. Rhode stared out the reinforced window at the city spires falling away below.

"That Wellington..." Rhode started, her voice a low, grinding rasp.

"Victoria," Hathaway corrected quietly. Rhode's jaw tightened. She opened her mouth, the muscles of her neck visibly corded against the full weight of several centuries of ancestral hostility, and physically could not force her vocal cords to produce the syllables of a Wellington's name.

"Your... girlfriend," Rhode finally compromised, and the word sounded like it had been dragged through broken glass. She stopped. She stared at the bottle in her hands, her internal compiler failing completely to generate a single line of dialogue that could adequately process her geopolitical and personal trauma regarding the button incident on the stairs of Townhouse 107. She took another swig. Hathaway decided to execute a merciful subject pivot.

"Where exactly are we going?" Hathaway asked, glancing out the window. The carriage was climbing far higher than any standard residential route required.

"Are the Elders convening on one of the floating islands?" Rhode shook her head and set the vodka bottle on the brass side table. Her expression shifted, the dark irritation giving way to something heavier and more ancestral.

"We aren't going to the manor," Rhode said.

"We are going to the Palace of the Eternal True Sun." Hathaway's internal database queried the name and returned a complete blank. The Palace of the Eternal True Sun. It sounded like the final boss chamber of a holy-attribute dungeon. It sounded like a structural fire that had been given a mailing address. Rhode reached into the compartment beneath her seat. She pulled out a pair of heavy, industrially reinforced welding goggles, the glass nearly pitch-black, and shoved them across the bench into Hathaway's lap.

Hathaway stared at the protective eyewear. Rhode reached over and patted her heavily on the shoulder. The gesture carried the solemn, ominous gravity of a veteran handing a rookie a flak jacket before an artillery barrage.

"Put them on," Rhode said, her voice dropping into a register of sincere warning.

"Your older cousin wouldn't steer you wrong."