Chương 87: 180 Lumens of Betrayal

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 1, Thursday, 02: 15 PM [Location]: White City · Ludwig Branch Community · Townhouse 107 Summer vacation had officially begun, though Hathaway's internal clock had entirely missed the memo. By the time she opened her eyes to the familiar ceiling of Room 302, the dormitory was completely silent and the sun was aggressively high. She had missed breakfast. She had missed the celebratory morning.

She had missed a stack of increasingly frantic calls from two women at the townhouse who apparently had strong opinions about what time their daughter should arrive home after securing a patent deal with the wealthiest Witch on the continent. She packed her trunk, forced down a delayed and largely tasteless lunch at the deserted cafeteria, and summoned the family's griffin-carriage.

Riding a broomstick while hauling a semester's worth of luggage plus the entire emotional weight of the previous night was not a viable transportation option. The carriage bumped through the White City's pristine first-district streets at a slow, stabilized pace. She watched the white stonework go by and did not think about the dormitory, or the first-floor door, or the precise moment it had closed. She was choosing not to think about it right now. Click.

Hathaway pushed open the front door of Townhouse 107 and dragged her trunk inside. Even after spending her entire first semester living in a premium, two-story Yggdrasil dormitory, her impoverished past-life soul took one look at the family estate and still suffered acute capitalist shock. The walls were covered in living, bioluminescent coral that pulsed with slow rhythmic light.

The entire floor was a suspended crystal deck, beneath which warm spring water flowed through a complex network of runic pipes, geothermally heated and aggressively unnecessary. And in the far corner, sealed behind a [Level-4 Biohazard Barrier], stood the physical monument to Hathaway's deepest financial trauma. Seeing the greenhouse on a terminal a month ago had been painful; standing in front of it was worse.

The ten Glacial Purity Fruit Trees still radiated their violet and gold fluorescence, heavy with the sapphire fruits a Siren contractor had weaponized against her mothers' nonexistent impulse control. But what truly hurt was the floor beneath them: fifty square meters of Absolute Cryolite, glittering in a perpetual, expensive flux of ice and mist. There it is. A literal carpet of melted gold. The magnificent, glowing grave of my 30, 000-Solar dividend.

"Hattie!" A booming, ecstatic voice from the top of the stairs. Then a light source comparable to two car headlights at full beam came charging down at a speed that violated several reasonable safety standards. Hathaway barely had time to brace before Margaret von Ludwig wrapped her in a bone-crushing hug that lifted her a full inch off the crystal deck.

"Let me look at my little genius!" Margaret cupped her face in both hands, Ludwig crimson eyes blazing at a retina-threatening 150 lumens.

"A substitute position on the Royal Rosas roster! And an independent, monetizable patent! Darling, when the club called me yesterday, I nearly detonated the entire rebel siege camp outside the Royal Capital ahead of schedule! We wanted you to come home and celebrate last night, but you insisted on going back to the dorms—""I was exhausted," Hathaway said, carefully not meeting her mother's eyes.

"I had some things to sort out." I needed to keep the lights on for Victoria. She took that thought and filed it somewhere very deep. Margaret, whose emotional processing was currently running at approximately 97% triumphant joy and 3% mild suspicion, released her cheeks and stood back with the satisfied air of someone completing a long-awaited inspection.

"I have excellent news of my own," she announced, planting her hands on her hips with dramatic flair.

"The Blue-Coat Integration contract in Guregus has officially concluded. Total corporate victory." Hathaway blinked, momentarily pulled out of her own exhaustion.

"They finally broke the stalemate? What about that farm-girl? The one who chopped you into cubes. Please tell me she met an appropriately tragic end." Her gamer soul still held a very specific, vindictive grudge against the overtuned local protagonist who had chopped her mother into Witch-cubes a month ago. She had been actively waiting for the inevitable, climactic boss-fight where the hero was dramatically put down by the system.

"Oh, we didn't have to," Margaret waved a hand dismissively.

"You remember how the World Will was desperately copying our ambient mana to buff her? Well, it didn't just copy the mana. It copied the pathogen. The [Witch Disease]."

"Wait," Hathaway frowned.

"She mutated? She turned into a tentacle monster?"

"No, she didn't mutate at all! That's the terrifying part!" Margaret clapped her hands together, her eyes gleaming.

"Normally, primitive locals turn into feral, ravenous aberrations when exposed to our existence. But that farm-girl? Her innate talent was so absurdly high that when Blue-Coat flooded the planet with raw ether to force a planetary reset, she didn't degenerate. She just absorbed it. She bypassed the Inferior stage completely and awakened instantly as a perfect, complete Witch."

"The poor girl had a complete existential crisis," Margaret laughed.

"How do you lead a righteous holy war to save humanity when your body has just flawlessly evolved into the apex predator of the invading species?"

"Right," Hathaway said, remembering the initial briefing from a month ago.

"The capture-and-convert protocol. So her righteous crusade ended at the negotiating table. Please tell me Blue-Coat didn't give her some ridiculous, heroic signing bonus." If the hero had to survive, Hathaway desperately wanted her to be appropriately punished for that overtuned boss fight.

"A signing bonus? Darling, she was a defeated local asset responsible for millions in corporate property damage," Margaret scoffed, her tone dripping with ruthless, aristocratic supremacy.

"Blue-Coat's legal department descended on her like starving sharks." Margaret leaned in, practically vibrating with corporate amusement.

"They calculated the exact cost of the planetary ether-flood, the structural damage to the Royal Capital, and the 50-Solar medical deductible for my resurrection. Then they handed her the bill. To save her planet from being strip-mined to pay it off, she was forced to sign a highly exploitative, one-hundred-year Vanguard conscription contract."

"So they gave her a company-issued Legendary-grade light sword—whose depreciation and maintenance fees are automatically deducted from her paycheck—and shipped her off to the front lines to conquer other primitive worlds." Margaret beamed.

"She became a mid-level corporate manager in the exact evil empire she swore to destroy. Absolute corporate victory." Hathaway processed this. Her gamer soul felt a sudden, profound, and deeply satisfying peace. The overtuned local protagonist didn't get a glorious, scripted demise. She got brutally assimilated by intergalactic capitalism. She was now swinging a company-leased sword, subjugating other innocent planets, all while trapped in a cycle of endless corporate debt.

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"And what about you?" Hathaway asked, a sliver of hope rising in her chest.

"Did you get a bounty for capturing an SSR asset?"

"Oh, a massive one!" Margaret puffed her chest out proudly.

"Astronomical! It was exactly enough to pay the final invoice for Madame Vosh's backyard expansion!

"The woman is an absolute visionary, Hattie. She explained that for a developing infant, standard environmental parameters simply won't do. We had to upgrade the entire installation for 'maximum ecological redundancy'. It was breathtakingly expensive, but don't worry, the SSR bounty cleared it entirely! I almost broke even!" Hathaway closed her eyes. Right. Because why would the Ludwig family ever actually hold onto liquid capital?

Her mother had just single-handedly conquered a dimension, died, resurrected, and headhunted a Mythic-tier local hero, and the resulting massive, six-figure Solar payout immediately evaporated because a Siren contractor casually strung together the words 'ecological' and 'redundancy'. The family ledger remained exactly what it had always been: a terrifying, bleeding black hole.

"Let the girl breathe, Margaret. You're going to blind her before she makes a single qualifying appearance." Anna walked in from the far end of the living room in a silk lounging robe. Her bare feet hovered approximately two inches above the crystal deck with the casual supernatural ease of someone who had simply stopped bothering with gravity in their own home years ago. She crossed the room and her hands came up to straighten Hathaway's slightly rumpled collar—quiet, practiced, completely automatic.

"Welcome home." She kissed her forehead.

"We've already secured the VIP box. The whole family is coming to watch you compete." Her tone was as breezy as a bank teller confirming a routine deposit.

"Margaret almost cast a full-power [Daylight] in the living room when the news came through, by the way. If I hadn't put her in a timely chokehold, we'd be renting an apartment on the street right now."

"I had it completely under control," Margaret said.

"You had the incantation halfway loaded."

"That is called enthusiasm, Anna."

"Hattie," Anna continued, seamlessly redirecting, "we're bringing Rory to the qualifiers." Hathaway's hands froze on her collar. She looked at the small, blanket-wrapped shape resting in the floating bassinet near the sofa. Three weeks ago, Rhode had casually mentioned that arena bloodbaths were a "wholesome national sport." Taking toddlers to the front row to watch live dismemberments to build character was standard practice. Hathaway herself had apparently been attending since she was three.

But three is a toddler. Rory is ONE MONTH OLD. She doesn't even have object permanence yet! Are we really substituting 'peek-a-boo' with 'tactical spinal dismantling'?! The alarm lasted approximately one second before her Witch logic ran the cross-reference. Biological fact: the earlier a Witch cub is exposed to high-yield mana bombardments, the more effectively her mana circuits develop. Witches do not possess age-appropriate content guidelines.

For a species that classifies dropping a meteor on a city as a minor property dispute, watching some tactical dismemberment is roughly equivalent to a Sunday afternoon early-childhood sensory stimulation exercise. It's fine. As long as my evasion is flawless and Rory does not personally witness her beloved older sister getting blown into bloody, unrecognizable shrapnel in front of her—this is a wholesome, enriching family outing.

"Just don't sit in the splash zone," Hathaway said.

"Eee-yah!" From the bassinet near the sofa, a sharp, declarative noise cut through the living room. Rory, who had been comprehensively ignored for the last four minutes, kicked her tiny legs against her blanket and scrunched her face into an expression of profound, baby-scale indignation. The protest was clear. The protest was non-negotiable. The protest was immediately effective. The entire room's attention shifted.

"She's been vocalizing syllables for a few days now," Margaret said, her luminosity dimming to a gentler 80 lumens as she leaned toward the bassinet.

"At one month, the vocal cords and mana circuits are both developed enough for early speech. Anna and I have been coaching her."

"We are currently competing," Anna added, her tone carrying the razor-sharp undertone of an ace pilot who treats everything as a mission with a performance metric.

"Progress, as of this morning, remains at zero. I offered her a low-grade elemental core as an incentive. She tried to eat it."

"It was a reasonable attempt," Margaret said.

"She inherited good instincts." Hathaway smiled. The last of the dormitory chill she had carried through the door finally finished thawing. She sat down on the sofa and lifted Rory from the bassinet. The familiar, supernatural coolness immediately seeped through Hathaway's coat. It wasn't the biting chill of ice, but the soothing, pristine temperature of deep ocean water or polished jade.

The moment she was lifted, the baby instinctively snuggled deeper into the warmth of Hathaway's neck, her soft silver lanugo hair brushing against Hathaway's collarbone. She smelled of milk and nascent, unformed mana, raw and undirected, like a spell that hadn't been cast yet. Hathaway extended one finger and gently poked Rory's cool cheek. The texture was unbearable. Impossibly soft.

Freshly chilled pudding, if pudding had been constructed by whatever deity was responsible for small, helpless creatures that inspired the immediate desire to commit financial crimes on their behalf. Rory giggled. Both hands came up—neither one quite large enough to fully close around Hathaway's finger—and grabbed on anyway, crinkling her icy-blue eyes into crescents. In Rory's world, there was no hierarchy. No careful social ordering.

No family ledger tallying who had spent the last month carpet-bombing rebel siege camps for corporate overlords versus who had simply arrived in a carriage with heavy luggage. There was simply this: a silver-haired person whose specific, steady warmth felt familiar, whose mana carried a frequency that registered as safe somewhere at a level that preceded memory. She took a breath. She opened her toothless mouth. And produced the clearest, most deliberate syllable she had managed in her entire one-month existence.

"Sis... ter." Not "Mama." Sister. The living room went completely silent. Hathaway's brain did not process this. It made an attempt. The attempt failed. Every background process halted simultaneously—the tournament projections, the terrifying five-year tether she had just signed with the Sovereign of Avarice, the image of Victoria's back in a first-floor room with a half-packed bag—all of it stopped. Complete system freeze. One full second of absolute nothing. Then the reboot. I have money.

The thought arrived with terrifying clinical precision. The upfront disbursement from the patent deal is clearing soon. I have actual, significant capital in my account for the first time in this lifetime. I need to buy her a star. Do not question the logic. For a transmigrator who still carried the full weight of Earthling romanticism lodged somewhere near her sternum, there was only one mythic-tier expression of unconditional love: you reached into the sky and pulled down a star and gave it to them. You named it.

You registered the deed. I want her name to blink on the star charts for ten million years. Can you buy a star here? This is a world with pocket dimensions and inter-dimensional real estate markets. There must be an Astronomical Exchange. Three million Solars? Five? If I leverage the five-year royalty projections— The dangerous financial spiral was interrupted by a catastrophic event two meters to her left. Margaret von Ludwig had ceased to function.

Her crimson eyes, which had settled at a manageable 80 lumens during the Rory coaxing session, did not merely brighten. They exploded. 180 lumens. A single, instantaneous spike. The living room went blinding red. Then: FLASH. Dark. FLASH. Dark. FLASH. For three full seconds, the Ludwig Branch Estate's ground floor became a high-intensity strobe disaster. Red light ricocheted off the crystal deck. Living coral pulsed in confused sympathy.

The spring water beneath the floor reflected the chaos in rapidly oscillating patterns across the ceiling. The light crashed. 20 lumens. Dim and guttering and deeply pathetic. Margaret clutched the fabric over her heart. Her voice, when it came, actually wobbled.

"Am I—" She stared at the baby with the expression of someone who had just discovered a knife they didn't know was there.

"Am I not your most beloved Mama anymore? After I let a farm-girl chop me into cubes and subjugated an entire primitive dimension just to fund your Absolute Cryolite greenhouse?!" Rory, a creature of pure, ruthless pragmatic survival who had been in the world exactly thirty-two days and had already identified those eyes as a primary retinal hazard, conducted the situation assessment in approximately zero seconds. She squirmed. She twisted.

She buried her face deep into the folds of Hathaway's coat with a small, muffled, contented sigh. She was ignoring the shiny lady now. Anna had watched the entire sequence unfold from the side of the room with the serene, unmoved detachment of a veteran who has seen this exact show run many times. She exhaled once through her nose.

"You treat every moment like a detonation event," Anna said, "and then you're shocked by the blast radius." She stepped forward with smooth, predatory grace—the fluid, unhurried motion of someone executing a long-planned maneuver—and plucked Rory out of Hathaway's arms before Hathaway had even fully registered the motion.

She settled the baby against her shoulder, began pacing in a slow, deliberate circuit across the room, and dropped her voice to a soft, hypnotic register targeted with precision directly at Rory's ear.

"Come on, sweetie. Look at me. Say 'Ma-ma.' We can completely skip over the shiny lady crying on the floor."

"TREASON!" Margaret gasped, clutching her heart tighter.

"Mutiny! Anna, I cannot believe—""Ma-ma," Anna continued, unperturbed, her respawning wife entirely irrelevant to the current operation.

"Tap the letter M with your tongue. You can do it. You just said 'sister.' That's the harder word." Hathaway leaned back against the sofa cushions, watching Margaret dramatically drape herself over the armrest while Anna executed her precision-engineered bid for the title. Rory blinked with serene, bovine calm at the ceiling between them, entirely untroubled by the ongoing domestic crisis. I should probably start researching Astronomical Exchange brokers, Hathaway thought. Just in case.

The heavy, suffocating silence of Room 302 felt very, very far away. Sunlight streamed through the crystal deck, casting slow, warm ripples up the living coral walls. In the kitchen, the mechanical maid clinked softly, preparing afternoon tea for a number of people that once again added up to a family. Hathaway let out a long, slow breath. The Safe Zone had been reached.