Chương 218: Chapter 197: Waifu Capitalism

[Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 1 — 9: 00 AM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 Hathaway applied a fourth layer of cultured butter to a slice of toast that had structurally surrendered somewhere around the second. Across the foyer, Margaret stood with her arms folded, one foot tapping a slow, patient metronome against the floorboards.

Through the open door, the Wellington griffin carriage waited at the edge of the cobblestone drive, and framed in its reinforced glass window sat Victoria, cheek resting against one gloved hand, watching Hathaway with the profound, resigned fondness of a woman who had already calculated exactly how this morning would go and elected to indulge it anyway. Technically, Hathaway could have moved back into the dormitories three days ago with the rest of the student body. She was a local.

She had instead invoked the full authority of hometown privilege, weaponizing the breakfast table to drag her departure out to the last viable minute of the last viable morning. She took another slow, ceremonial bite.

"Hattie." Margaret's voice shed its maternal warmth for the clipped cadence of a project manager watching a deadline detonate.

"If you chew any slower, you are going to digest the concept of time itself. Get in the carriage." Hathaway swallowed, dusted the crumbs from her fingers, and conceded the sprint. She crushed Margaret in a hug, accepted a swift kiss on the cheek from Anna, hauled her enchanted trunk out the door, and climbed into the carriage. The moment the latch clicked shut, Victoria reached over, brushed a stray crumb from her lapel, and signaled the driver without a word.

The carriage lifted into the morning sky-lanes, and the amber light of Townhouse 107 fell away below. [Location]: Yggdrasil Academy · Dormitory [Golden Bough] · Room 302 The room was exactly as she had left it, which was precisely what made stepping inside feel like loading a save file from an entirely different expansion. It had been one summer. Two months.

She stood in the center of the room and looked at her neatly made bed, and the whole of her first year felt like something that had happened to a previous character. There was no time to compile the nostalgia. She dropped the trunk by the wardrobe, unsealed her spatial ring, and drew out her beloved [Scarlet-Valkyrie]. Victoria was already waiting in the corridor, her broom hovering at her side. They banked out through the transit window into the crisp autumn air and cut a hard line toward the West Campus.

[Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 1 — 9: 45 AM [Location]: West Campus · Third Alchemy Tower · Tiered Lecture Hall The course was [Doll-Making Basics & Soul Architecture]. They pushed through the brass-bound doors fifteen minutes before the ten o'clock start, into a tiered amphitheater built with the soaring, vaulted acoustics of a hall meant to seat several hundred. It held forty-five students: the original forty, plus a handful more who had bought their way past the cap the same way Victoria had.

Hathaway's eyes swept the rows and caught a flicker of crimson fire dead center in the front. Surtrina and Spectra, already installed dead center of the front row, exactly where they planted themselves in every class they had ever shared. Her boots pivoted forward of their own accord, already plotting the descent to reclaim her old spot between them. Her primary thread caught the dependency error mid-step. She stopped and cut a sideways glance at Victoria. Girlfriend protocol.

You do not abandon the party leader to rejoin the guild without checking consensus first. Victoria said nothing. She simply glided past the front row with frictionless grace and selected two seats in the second, directly behind the two of them. Hathaway let out a quiet breath and slid into the chair beside her. At the rustle of robes behind them, Surtrina tipped her head back without turning around, and Spectra's gaze slid sideways, unhurried.

Hathaway leaned over the desk and dropped a can of [Frost-Bite Cola] onto the Balor's blotter, a full row's throw from where she used to hand it over. The reflex still cleared the extra distance. Tail up, tab sheared clean before the can had finished rocking to a stop, and a pale hand phased in a half-second ahead of the claim to chill the whole thing to a crisp three degrees.

Surtrina scooped it up anyway, took a long pull, and vented a puff of superheated air through her nose, her tail settling back against the front leg of Hathaway's chair, one row deep. Some habits had survived the summer, and the extra distance, intact.

"Not sitting in the middle anymore?" Surtrina drawled, not bothering to turn around, a smirk audible in her voice.

"That would require an empty seat between the two of you," Hathaway pointed out, resting her chin on her hand. Surtrina snorted, a spark jumping off her lip.

"Please. As if you'd sit a whole desk from your girlfriend given the choice." Hathaway's spine snapped to attention. She looked from the back of Surtrina's head to the profile of Spectra.

"You two already know?" Beside her, the corner of Victoria's mouth twitched into a microscopic, highly curated smirk.

"A better question," Surtrina said breezily, tilting the can back, "is who in the academy doesn't." Spectra's gaze drifted a fraction toward Hathaway. She offered a comfort with no comfort in it.

"Too obvious." Heat climbed the back of Hathaway's ears as she executed an emergency topic pivot.

"I ground my way up to A-Rank in Marit Kart over the break." She leaned forward over the desk.

"When are we queuing a lobby?" The flame at the tip of Surtrina's tail flared, her expression curdling.

"I hit S-Rank," she muttered into the can.

"For one evening," Spectra said, flat as still water.

"Then you fell out of the bracket." Surtrina rounded on her.

"And whose fault was that? Who was leeching my rating in a duo to boost herself into S?" Spectra let out a soft, airy laugh and mounted no defense. The banter dropped to a hush. Footsteps, heavy and unhurried, were coming down the corridor. The oak doors swung inward. The figure that stepped through was, by every visible metric, in the wrong room.

She was a "girl" of exceptionally small stature, swallowed by a white alchemist's robe several sizes too large, its cuffs devouring her hands, worn over a sharply tailored dark-grey British waistcoat and pleated skirt. Hair the color of molten gold was gathered in a loose, careless knot at the nape of her neck.

Her face, exquisite and no bigger than a palm, carried no expression at all, and yet something radiated off that narrow frame with no business on a body that size: a worn, weathered, bone-deep stillness, the calm of someone who had long since stopped expecting the day to go well. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

She walked to the podium, and with excruciating, methodical slowness, drew an engraved silver case from her robe pocket, extracted a single slender cigarette, and held the unlit paper beneath her nose, drawing in the scent of dry tobacco in one long, measured breath, as though relying on the mere concept of nicotine to manually override her nervous system.

"Um... good morning, everyone." Her voice, when it finally crossed the hall, was feather-light, threaded with an introverted shyness that somehow declined to be annoying.

"I am Sharon Curie. This semester, I will be the one guiding you into the world of... dolls and souls." She lifted her lashes. Her golden irises were perpetually, helplessly wet, catching the hall's lumen-light so that she looked forever three seconds from a heartbreak she was too polite to inflict on anyone. Hathaway's heart gave an unauthorized thud. What is this.

The viral photograph had always read like a lucky shot, one merciless shutter click catching an unrepeatable second of misery, but the genuine article ran that exact expression at baseline. In a civilization where every other Witch carried herself like a war crime waiting to happen, a fragile, weeping waif had somehow wandered onto the server and been handed a faculty appointment. Will the upperclassmen eat her alive? Does someone need to protect the professor?

The instinct flared straight past the inconvenient fact that Hathaway had spent weeks reading this woman's textbooks, and that the theory in them was vicious, arrogant, and merciless. None of it survived contact with the reality at the podium. Then Sharon set the unlit cigarette on the podium, and the shyness folded away into the flat, load-bearing calm of pure theory. Dolls were, technically, a sub-classification of construct.

They had nonetheless divorced themselves entirely from Golem engineering to stand as their own discipline: more complex, more powerful, and, crucially, possessed of true spiritual resonance. Sharon Curie had authored the [Three Laws of Curie Dolls], and those laws were the bedrock the entire modern syllabus stood on. Hathaway listened, and her translation layer quietly compiled the industry's unspoken truth underneath the jargon.

Golems and Dolls had split for one specific, undeniable reason: Witches were, to the last woman, terminal aesthetes. Doll-Making = Industrial Robotics + Premium 3D Waifu Modeling + Character-Consistency AI.

"Theory is only the blueprint," Sharon said, so softly it barely reached the second row.

"We will begin the demonstration." A basin of raw mercury rose from behind the podium. Her fingers moved through the air, and the heavy, toxic liquid answered her mana like obedient silk, climbing against gravity, folding and twisting into a solidifying mass. Hathaway refused to blink, terrified of dropping a single frame. A striking female face surfaced out of the silver. Hathaway frowned. Something about it pinged: a match in the cache she could not immediately locate.

She kept her eyes locked on the work as Sharon carved the collarbones, the joints, the microscopic runes threading directly down the construct's spine, and racked her memory the entire time without result. The chassis complete, Sharon drew the excess mercury down over the frame into a simple, sculpted gown, then produced a [V3 Alchemy Core] and seated it into the cavity in the doll's chest.

The V3 was long out of print: rudimentary, forgiving, built for beginners, and precisely because it was so forgiving it had stayed wildly beloved, bootlegged endlessly through the academic underground for junior Witches who wanted an easy way in. The core clicked home. The doll's eyes opened. It stepped forward, lifted the hem of its gown, and sank into a curtsy of soft, devastating grace. And in that exact microsecond, the recognition finally resolved. Josephine Durant.

The doll shared not one physical feature with the woman. It was iquid silver, void of any color at all. But the essence, the fragile, unguarded gentleness, an ease that had never once needed to brace for a blow, was a soul-deep, exact capture. Hathaway sat with the weight of it. Is this what a Grandmaster is. She filed the recognition, and the small unasked question trailing behind it, and said nothing.

Sharon waved her oversized sleeve, and with a soft run of thuds, a basin of raw mercury and a blank V3 Core materialized on the desk in front of every student in the hall.

"You may begin," she said quietly. Hathaway looked at the core. Right now? We are shipping to production on day one? She scrubbed frantically back through the visual log of the demonstration. Brain: I have perfectly mapped the topological framework. Hands: I do not know what a topology is. She lacked the monstrous micron-level control to sculpt liquid metal by telekinesis alone. She pulled a set of physical carving knives from her ring. Block out the gross geometry with mana, cut the detail by hand.

She needed a reference. Use myself. She reviewed that face in the mirror every morning, the asset was fully cached, and she made a mental note to shift the proportions off true so it would not be an unhinged mirror of her own head. She forced the mercury into a rough humanoid mass and set the blade to the face: cheekbones, nose, eyes. Ten minutes later, she leaned back to inspect the result. What did I make. Two eyes, one nose, one mouth, each mapped to the correct coordinates on a human skull.

The bridge of the nose had come out aggressively sharp. The eyes disagreed on where the horizon was. The jawline looked like it was nursing a personal grudge. The topology was technically compliant and the composition looked like a sleep-paralysis demon assembled in the dark from spare parts. She had no idea how to patch a bug in a physical sculpture. Isn't this the Fine Arts department's jurisdiction?

Demanding a high-fidelity portrait bust on the first morning of an engineering course is an administrative hate crime. Fine. She pulled in a breath and ruthlessly throttled her aesthetic standards. Ugly code still runs. If it compiles, it ships. She pushed past the face and into the rune-carving stage. She traced Sharon's circuitry from memory, and memory turned out to be a heavily compressed format.

Even from the second row, eyes unblinking, she had lost the z-axis depth of the professor's hand: the execution had been too smooth, too fast, too microscopic, and the mental replay came back riddled with artifacts. She carved the final sequence with her heart in her throat. Circuit closed. She reached for the V3 core.

"Wait." The voice was so soft it barely disturbed the air, and it was right beside her shoulder. Hathaway flinched. Sharon Curie was standing at her desk. Catching Hathaway's wide-eyed stare, the professor immediately, awkwardly dropped her gaze to the workbench, and when she spoke the words came fast, faintly rushed, and layered with absolute, terrifying technical authority.

"Here. These are two separate rune layers, adjacent, but they can never intersect." A delicate finger indicated a junction on the doll's back.

"You have flattened them onto one plane. If you seat the core now, the logic gate shorts and the chassis detonates." Cold sweat pricked the back of Hathaway's neck.

"Thank you, Professor." She flooded the area with raw mana, scrubbed the botched circuit clean before she could vaporize the second row, and began the redraw with painstaking, chastened precision. Sharon gave a small, nearly invisible nod and drifted off toward the next desk. The redraw held. The core seated. The system booted. She regarded her creation, a homunculus wearing roughly thirty percent of her own face beneath seventy percent of something no one should have to witness before lunch.

Should have modeled a potato. She let her gaze drift sideways to audit the competition. In the front row Spectra had ignored the face entirely and was weaving threads of ectoplasm into an obscenely complex, multi-layered Gothic court gown for a still-blank mannequin. Beside her, Surtrina had skipped straight to the finished product: a perfectly proportioned, scaled-down copy of herself, sweeping horns, articulated tail, a licensed action figure and all. Then Hathaway looked right, at Victoria's desk.

Victoria's doll had Hathaway's face. A one-to-one replica, down to the stubborn arch of the brow and the precise slope of the jaw, the mercury shaped with such fidelity that it had left sculpting behind entirely and crossed into high-resolution 3D printing. Hathaway looked at the miniature masterpiece of herself standing on her girlfriend's desk, and then down at the grudge-bearing goblin standing on her own.

Thank Ovelia I did not attempt to sculpt Victoria, a nightmare rendering of that face would have required a formal diplomatic intervention. The bell tolled through the tower, ending the session. Surtrina folded her arms over the back of her chair and leaned in, golden eyes narrowing at the lumpy horror on Hathaway's bench.

"Is this supposed to be one of your mortal friends?" she asked, her brow furrowing. She reached for something diplomatic.

"She looks very... unique." Hathaway choked on her own saliva. Surtrina. We have bled in the same trench. And you cannot recognize my own face. Then she looked at the doll again, and a flood of relief overrode the outrage. It was so catastrophically ugly that Surtrina's failure to make the connection was, on reflection, the single most merciful outcome available. Spectra and Victoria, however, ran higher perception.

Spectra's gaze slid from the doll to Hathaway's face and back, and the corner of her pale mouth twitched violently in a losing war against composure. Victoria met Hathaway's eyes, her own softening, and reached over to lay her gloved fingers lightly against the back of Hathaway's hand.

"You will grow proficient with practice," she consoled, in a tone of such gentle aristocratic warmth that the structural failure somehow hurt worse. Hathaway held a perfectly flat expression, channeled a surge of mana into both hands, gripped the goblin, and mercilessly factory-reset it, squashing the homunculus back into a featureless puddle of liquid silver. No wonder this discipline prints money, her developer brain concluded, watching the mercury go still. Waifu capitalism.

Otaku currency is the easiest resource to harvest in any dimension ever surveyed, and a high-end, custom-sculpted, perfectly-in-character sentient action figure is the single most premium product a market can list.