Chương 214: Chapter 193: She Didn't Even Have a README

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 54 — 8: 00 AM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 The Wellington administrative machinery had finally processed its fatal backlog. Victoria received the summons over breakfast. She buttoned her dark jacket with her characteristic economy, silver hair falling perfectly into place, and offered a farewell that was crisp, private, and over in under sixty seconds.

Hathaway stood in the open doorway and watched the griffin carriage ascend into the morning sky-lanes with the composed, dignified solemnity appropriate for someone waving off a Wellington. She maintained the expression flawlessly, tracking the carriage across the transit corridor, past the central broadcasting towers, and out over the white rooftops until it was nothing but a dark speck against the clouds. The exact microsecond it blinked out of visual range, her aristocratic composure dissolved.

She spun on her heel, slammed the heavy mahogany door, and sprinted up the stairs with the frantic, hunched velocity of a raccoon who had just cracked a secured pantry and could not afford witnesses. She locked her bedroom door, threw herself onto the carpet, and hauled the dragon-leather tome from the deepest partition of her spatial ring. Before opening the cover, she ran a quick diagnostic on her own hardware. Mana capacity was not the issue.

The physical chassis required to survive the spell's recoil was a different report entirely. She flexed her hand. Output: a minor boost to baseline constitution. Magnitude: frustratingly marginal. Witches were a species capable of directed physical evolution; environmental trauma adapted the body to survive it. She had treated liquid rock like an Olympic swimming pool. Her constitution had registered twenty minutes of high-intensity freestyle as a cardiovascular endurance exercise and had optimized accordingly.

Am I required to do this every day? A cold sweat tracked down her neck. Is the prescription one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups, and a ten-kilometer run through a geological hazard? Like a certain bald superhero? Voluntary cardio without mana reinforcement was a crime against the species.

Her structural options were, technically, plentiful: any melee class discipline, a racial transformation into something with a more durable body plan (Dragon Witch bloodlines, Titan lineages, anything with a chassis built to absorb punishment), targeted physical modification, dedicated melee feat training. Not one of these was compatible with a summer of alchemical study, and none of them were appealing. Theory first.

Even a degraded, heavily compromised version of a spell authored by Ovelia personally was not comparable to anything in standard circulation. More importantly, her logic engine had flagged a structural contradiction in the ancestral data. Ludwig predecessors had changed classes. They had spliced their genetics. They had achieved verified, authentic Legendary-tier constitutions. And they still couldn't compress the blast radius below 900 meters. Legendary constitution was the entry threshold. Not the solution.

Ovelia's physical parameters existed in an entirely different tier from standard Witches, but she had gifted this spell to the family because she genuinely believed it was castable by someone other than herself. Hathaway opened the book to the design documentation, braced herself for three pages of labyrinthine esoteric verse, and looked at the center of the page. Face the Wicked Cat inward, let her remember the sun she carries.

Hathaway stared at the parchment for three seconds, waiting for the rest of the text to render. Nothing rendered. It is shorter than the tooltip for [Fireball]. Her developer brain threw an immediate exception. You cannot hand over a weapon of mass destruction with a single patch note and expect the downstream practitioners to reconstruct the full implementation from context! She looked to the margins. They were choked with generations of frantic, increasingly desperate ancestral handwriting.

She found a note in cramped, trembling cursive: Year 1940: When Ovelia gifted this book to me, the title page was completely blank. I dared to ask Her where the design description was. She pondered for a long moment, then took the quill and wrote this single line herself. I have spent seven months staring at it. Hathaway pinched the bridge of her nose. She didn't even have a README. She was asked for documentation, improvised twelve words on the spot, and that is apparently all She believed the end-user required.

She forced herself past the useless opening line and into the actual mathematical model. The principle itself was structurally sound: mana infused into the body's surface to construct a blast shield that absorbed thermal and radiation blowback while routing only raw kinetic force through to the caster; a particle-level [Sun Ion Lantern Cat Form] dividing sixty-five million times per second; detonation confined to a 115-meter radius. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

The ancestral notes documented the debugging process in painful, meticulous detail. The logic had been obvious: if the caster's physical constitution was the bottleneck, and a Tier-8 spell was practically free for an Arch-Witch's mana pool, simply allocate more mana to the blast shield and bypass the physical requirement entirely. Year 1961: Attempted to increase the blast shield allocation by 400%. The matrix collapsed at ignition. The blast shield and the particle division module share a core dependency root.

Increasing the shield mass scales the projectile mass with it, which scales the kinetic shockwave reaching the caster's body. You have built a larger spell that kills you more efficiently. Ovelia's spell architecture was so tightly interwoven that every variable was load-bearing. Touch the shield module, and the particle synchronization collapsed. The division rate was no different: modify it and the ignition threshold shifted catastrophically.

The only path to a "safe" version was stripping the compression mechanics entirely, at which point it was simply a Tier-8 explosion, and the Ludwig family did not need another Tier-8 explosion. Hathaway turned to the geometric matrix on the third page. It was, without qualification, the most complex theoretical structure she had ever laid eyes on. After five minutes of focused reading, the interlocking runic arrays began to blur, the lines seeming to vibrate and detach from the parchment.

A sharp, spiking pressure built steadily behind her orbital bones. She closed the dragon-leather tome with a soft, decisive click. I need a buffer. She reached across the desk and grabbed the foundational manual for [Move Earth]. The engineering philosophy of [Move Earth] was entirely different. The core problem of moving geology was "severing." Any given volume of rock or soil did not merely exist as physical mass.

In a magical ecosystem, geological formations maintained what the text termed "Foundation Memory": microscopic mana anchors accumulated over centuries of environmental osmosis, binding the rock to its surroundings in a state of deep, stable equilibrium. To move a hill, you had to administratively revoke its relationship with the ground it had occupied for a thousand years.

The structure was exhaustively, bureaucratically complete: a volumetric detection pass, an anchor-severance phase to administratively divorce the rock from its thousand-year relationship with the ground, and a re-anchoring upon arrival to prevent the displaced block from collapsing into rubble. Every edge case (aquifer boundaries, root systems, soil-versus-stone distinctions) explicitly pre-calculated, explicitly handled. It was industrial-grade engineering. Not beautiful. Not elegant.

It felt like sitting on a tropical beach with a cold drink after a twelve-hour emergency patch session. A normal, functioning developer wrote this, Hathaway thought, leaning back against the bedframe with what was, in professional terms, genuine reverence. If I modify the water-vein detection parameters, the spell just becomes slightly worse at handling mudslides. This is the correct behavior. She established a rhythm. Five minutes of decoding the suicidal, transcendent genius of Ovelia's apocalyptic architecture.

Fifteen minutes of reading the comforting, bureaucratic if-else safety nets of [Move Earth] to let the neural pathways cool down. Repeat. Cognitive fatigue, however, was cumulative. At approximately three in the afternoon, staring at a particularly dense diagram of the anchor-severing parameters for compacted granite, Hathaway's left eye exploded. Pop. The sound was sharp, wet, and wholly internal. Half her visual field went instantly black. A warm, slow column of fluid began to drip down her cheek.

Hathaway carefully placed the textbook flat on the floor. That, her developer brain registered, with the detached professional calm of a practitioner reading a stack trace at three in the morning, is a new error message. She had never, in either of her two lifetimes, studied so hard her eyeball had detonated.

She lay back against the carpet, pressed the heel of her hand over the ruined socket, and stared at the ceiling with her remaining eye, waiting with the practised patience of a Witch for her biology to locate the deficit and initiate repair. Thirteen minutes later, the itching subsided. The visual feed re-established. She sat up, walked to the bathroom, cleaned the dried blood from her face and shirt, and returned to the bedroom. She looked at the open spell manuals.

The server has formally kicked me out for the day. She booted up her gaming console, loaded Marit Kart, and dropped onto the floor. [Time]: Summer Break, Day 55 — 8: 30 PM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · Hathaway's Bedroom The bedroom door opened. Victoria stepped across the threshold, bringing with her the crisp, composed air of a woman who had spent thirty-six hours navigating a hurricane of aristocratic panic. She paused just inside the room, pale eyes sweeping the environment.

Hathaway was sitting cross-legged approximately three feet from the screen. Her posture was clean. Her face was entirely free of blood. But the unblinking fixation in her eyes: the hyper-focused, slightly hollow quality of a mind that had temporarily evacuated the premises of reality and set up emergency operations elsewhere. She didn't turn her head when the door opened. She was hard-stuck in B-Rank, her kart drifting sideways off a guardrail in slow, digital agony.

Victoria registered the discarded spell manuals in the corner, the specific frequency of the silence, and the exact texture of Hathaway's current mental operating state. She draped her jacket over the desk chair, sat down on the carpet beside Hathaway, and picked up the Player 2 controller.

"How did it go at your house?" Hathaway asked, her eyes never leaving the starting countdown of the next race, her thumb hovering over the accelerator. Victoria selected a heavy-class kart loadout with the quiet efficiency of someone who had clearly made this assessment before. The starting light turned green. She executed a frame-perfect boost off the line, drifted smoothly into the inside lane on the first corner, and settled into an exact, measured racing line. The corner of her mouth twitched.

"They have arranged a comprehensive new cultivation program," Victoria said, her voice smooth and entirely level over the synthesized chaos of the race audio.

"They stated their intention to ensure that the Ludwig family understands, with no ambiguity whatsoever, exactly who is marrying up." Hathaway launched a red shell at a passing competitor and drifted through the second chicane. The intelligence update registered somewhere in the part of her brain that was still processing the race. Identical. The immediate financial mobilization. The intensive training pipeline. The blinding, transgenerational competitive pride.

Even the specific mission objective had been phrased in the same register. No wonder these two bloodlines have been incapable of eliminating each other for centuries, Hathaway thought, watching Victoria cross the finish line in first place with unhurried, immaculate precision. They are running the exact same source code.