Chương 92: A Martyr for Her Ships

[Time]: 8: 45 PM [Location]: Grand Masters Regional Qualifier Venue · Grand Banquet Hall Hathaway looked at her tablemates. Tasia looked ready to commit premeditated murder. Alucard looked ready to voluntarily expire.

"Did she fund a geopolitical terrorism ring?" Hathaway whispered. Nino pushed her broken stylus aside. She sighed, sounding profoundly exhausted by the societal anomaly she was about to explain.

"She is a literal prodigy. Her prose is a masterclass of emotive literature. And yet, she uses her Arch-tier genius exclusively to write weekly, out-of-character Yuri romance fanfiction. Uses highest-order Divination spells as primary research tools. Exclusively about top-tier Witches." Hathaway's jaw dropped.

"Wait. You can just... do that? Use real, legally protected, top-tier Witches in commercial fanfiction? Isn't that a massive lawsuit?"

"Witch publication law is a nightmare," Alucard muttered, staring blankly at the tablecloth.

"Fan creation is protected under freedom of magical expression, but strictly as long as it is distributed for free, and only if the author passes a magical 'Affection Value Appraisal' to prove she is a genuine, obsessive fan." Hathaway's eyes widened. A literal Hive Lord? A billionaire monarch who spends her time writing hundreds of thousands of words of high-quality, meticulously researched smut entirely for free? Just to feed the fandom?! She breathed, genuine respect in her voice.

"So she's just doing it for love? She's a saint?" Nino looked at Hathaway as if she had just suggested eating radioactive waste.

"She exploits a legal gray area," Nino corrected ruthlessly, her voice dripping with venom.

"She sells a fifty-Solar 'Rain-Veil Lifestyle' magazine. It contains exactly two pages of gardening tips. And it comes with a 'completely free', three-hundred-page supplemental booklet of hardcore, OOC romantic degeneracy. The courts are paralyzed." Hathaway's newfound reverence instantly evaporated. Never mind. She's just a capitalist menace. Still, driven by the morbid curiosity of a game developer analyzing a wildly successful monetization model, Hathaway found herself watching the cat witch anyway.

Alice was circling the dessert table, her eyes darting around the room with the predatory gleam of an author hunting for a new pairing.

"Fair enough." Hathaway whispered, leaning in slightly toward her tablemates.

"But what exactly is the core product? Who could she possibly be writing about that sells so well and has all of you looking like you're waiting for the executioner?" Alucard flinched. She didn't want to answer, but the trauma was clearly too heavy to bear alone.

"Her magnum opus," Alucard said, her voice entirely hollow, staring blankly at the tablecloth as if she could see her own shattered dignity reflected in the fabric, "is a continuously updating weekly serialization. It is titled: The Captive Trophy Wife, Little Sia." Hathaway inhaled sharply. She looked at Tasia. The majestic, untouchable Dragon Empress. Little Sia.

"Alice has publicly stated," Nino recited, clearly having memorized the legal brief, "that Tasia's 'gentle personality, elegant maternal aura, and appearance perfectly suited for non-consensual drugging and sleeping tropes' make her the absolute ultimate muse of her literary career." Tasia's response was a silence so profound it felt like a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure. Across the room, Alice paused by the dessert table to pick up a strawberry tart.

One of her silver-tipped ears twitched, clearly registering the apocalyptic death glare fixed on the back of her head. She didn't even bother turning around, cheerfully tossing the tart onto her plate.

"She never leaves her Hive City," Nino pointed out, ignoring the dropping temperature around their table.

"She only came tonight because she knows no one can start a geopolitical war at a public banquet."

"And because she has hit a creative block," Alucard sighed.

"She needs new material." Hathaway processed this.

"Okay, so Tasia is 'Little Sia'. But Tasia is the one being written about. Why do you two look like you're attending a funeral?" Alucard closed her eyes.

"Because every trophy wife needs a tragedy. I am the perpetual cuckold. I exist in her novels solely to stand in the rain outside the bedroom window, or be tied to a chair while I watch my 'wife' get stolen." Hathaway slowly turned her head to look at Nino.

"And you?" Nino's expression became utterly glacial.

"She didn't just write about Tasia. She wrote a series about Heidi and Irene." Hathaway's brain completely stalled. Irene. The Sovereign of Avarice. The woman whose single beauty mark had hard-crashed all four of Hathaway's cognitive threads just three days ago. Alice wrote out-of-character Yuri smut about her?!

"Irene didn't physically erase her from the census?!" Hathaway gasped.

"She didn't bankrupt her and bury Mistfall City under a localized orbital strike?!"

"Alice maintains a very careful, respectful 'ceiling' when writing about Irene to avoid triggering an equivalence rejection," Nino explained tightly.

"But her ultimate shield is global complicity." Nino raised a hand, ticking off the agonizing reasons on her fingers.

"Legally, the magazine loophole is airtight. Politically, Alice is an Apex of Dominion sitting inside a heavily fortified Hive City; starting a catastrophic geopolitical war over a romance novel is bad for the economy. But worst of all...

"The market demand. The number of Witches who actively pay fifty Solars to read about top-tier Witches getting NTR'd vastly outnumbers the actual victims. The entire society is shielding her because they want the weekly updates.

"But the story needed drama," Nino continued, her voice dropping into a flat, deadened monotone.

"It needed a pathetic, intensely overprotective older sister who watches helplessly as the wealthy, overpowered capitalist smoothly seduces her precious younger sister away." Nino looked at Hathaway, completely obscuring her eyes behind the glare of her lenses.

"She wrote a one-hundred-and-twelve-thousand-word slow-burn NTR detailing my emotional devastation." Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. Hathaway stared at Nino. She had heard that exact bitterness in Lab 606, three weeks ago—and filed it under corporate jealousy, siscon tendencies, standard Lucent volatility. Pure mana, Hathaway's gamer soul gasped in absolute cosmic horror as the boundary between fiction and reality violently collapsed.

Irene HAD taken Heidi away to form a new startup club. From Nino's perspective, the "NTR" wasn't a fictional fan-theory—it was a documented historical event! But Nino wasn't the one currently calculating the orbital mechanics of a war crime. While Hathaway and Nino had been discussing Irene, Tasia had tuned them out completely. Her very light, clear grey eyes remained locked entirely on Alice.

The only indication that she was even alive was the terrifying silver light of highly unstable mana beginning to bleed from her pupils. One second. Two seconds. The half-beat delay resolved. Tasia's internal supercomputer had finished processing the list of legal and political constraints, run hundreds of millions of simulations, and successfully output a bypass protocol. When Tasia spoke again, her voice was terrifyingly mild. Meticulously flat.

The tone of an engineer handing over a completed, peer-reviewed blueprint.

"If I inject a delayed-onset gravity singularity into the strawberry tart she is currently holding," Tasia murmured, almost to herself, her grey eyes unblinking.

"I can bypass her passive spatial wards. The implosion will consume her core in 0. 04 seconds. If I simultaneously collapse the local temporal axis to completely blind any River of Time regression, and overwrite the residual mana with a Caroshadel signature, the Witch Authority Police Department will lack both the chronological and physical evidence required for a public prosecution. Under Witch Law, without definitive proof of guilt, they will be forced to drop the case and rule it a tragic catering accident."

Hathaway froze. That wasn't a threat. That was a patch note.

"Sister, no!" Alucard hissed, her perpetual exhaustion vanishing as she lunged forward to desperately grab the Empress's wrist. In her blind panic, the Archon had completely dropped her usual cynicism, defaulting to a raw, desperate familial plea Hathaway had never heard her use.

"Assassination is illegal! There is no probation or resurrection if you get caught! If a capital warrant is issued, the Witch Authority won't send a standard squad—they will deploy the Third Seat! Ash hasn't stepped off the border in sixty-four years. Do you really want our eldest sister's first trip home to be her personally executing you?!" At the name Ash, the terrifying silver light in Tasia's eyes violently stuttered. A fatal system error. Hathaway's brain blue-screened.

What kind of aggressively traumatized family requires state-sanctioned sororicide just to trigger a family reunion?!

"You cannot execute a Hive Lord at a public banquet!" Nino abandoned the stoic composure of a tenured professor, aggressively stepping into the momentary gap in Tasia's target lock.

"If your singularity fails to kill her in 0. 04 seconds, the resulting mutually assured destruction will vaporize half of Milan'thir! Put the mana away!"

"If you blow up her tart," Alucard added frantically, dragging Tasia's arm down, "she will just survive and write a three-chapter special about 'Little Sia' throwing a desperate, jealous tantrum in public to get her 'Mistress's' attention!" That did it. The compounding weight of geopolitical annihilation, family trauma, and catastrophic fanfiction updates finally overloaded the system. Tasia's jaw locked so hard it sounded like grinding stones. The silver light in her eyes flickered and died.

Hathaway stared at the trio. The two biggest cucks in the fanfiction are currently physically restraining the 'Captive Trophy Wife' and begging her to respect international law. Hathaway sank back into her chair. Across the room, blissfully unaware—or perhaps entirely uncaring—that she had just been 0. 04 seconds away from a localized gravitational implosion, Lee Alice Varro took a bite of her strawberry tart. Her gaze swept across Royal Rosas without slowing.

It landed on Tasia—noting, cataloging, one cloud-grey tail twitching fractionally—and continued its survey. Hathaway received approximately 0. 3 seconds of attention before being categorized as below the protagonist threshold and dismissed. Absolute safety through pure irrelevance. Hathaway watched the cat witch happily chew her pastry. I take it back, Hathaway thought, her gamer soul trembling with newfound awe. She isn't a capitalist menace at all. She really IS a saint.

Fifty Solars for a three-hundred-page masterpiece written by a geopolitical monarch wasn't a grift. It was a charitable donation to the fandom. No amount of money in the world justified painting a permanent target on your back for the Dragon Empress and the Sovereign of Avarice. Alice was risking localized orbital strikes, geopolitical warfare, and mathematically perfect supercomputer assassinations every single week... just to feed her fandom. She was a suicidal martyr for her ships.

She is completely, magnificently unhinged, Hathaway thought, slowly lowering her juice glass. She stood very still. She didn't just want to read Little Sia anymore. She needed to financially support this woman's breathtakingly dangerous lifestyle. She needed to purchase her entire bibliography. She needed the complete collector's edition box set. But above all else, she needed to know how Alice wrote the Sovereign of Avarice. She needed to read that 112, 000-word masterpiece of sisterly devastation.

She was already mentally calculating the optimal route to a White City newsstand when the amplification array on the main stage chimed a clear, resonant note. It cut through the murmurs of the hall, violently yanking Hathaway out of her literary aspirations and reminding her of a very inconvenient fact: they were not at a book club. They were at a bloodsport. Right. The tournament. She was supposed to be a professional athlete tomorrow.

"Standard secrecy protocol is in effect," the sharply dressed host announced.

"All qualifier matches will operate with zero public broadcast. Season ticket holders may access club-affiliated commentary channels." A massive, glowing hologram expanded across the display above the stage. Hathaway took a deep breath, forcibly closing her mental browser tabs on Witch gossip. Her eyes tracked the glowing text, her game designer brain rebooting and automatically compiling the ruleset into a playable loop. It was a Swiss-system bracket. Ten rounds across three weeks.

That meant no sudden-death eliminations—just a brutal, grinding ladder of attrition where winners were constantly fed to other winners until only the monsters remained. But it was the match format itself that caught her attention. A race to four points. Every match opened with a 3v3 team brawl to set the psychological tone, immediately followed by a five-round King of Fighters solo relay. But the third phase—the Optional Overtime 3v3—was what made her smile. Available only when mathematically viable.

Invoked solely by the disadvantaged team. Elegant, she noted, a genuine smile touching her lips. The disadvantaged team controls the overtime call. A built-in, mechanically sound comeback mechanic that forces strategic stamina management. Someone in the rules committee actually understood game theory. The draw for the first round began rolling across the screen, lasting exactly eleven minutes. Nino had finished her first round of bracket annotations at minute three.

"Royal Rosas opens against Iron Compass," Nino said, sliding her heavily annotated parchment into her folder.

"Mid-tier. Round one is manageable." She paused.

"Mare Brume's bracket position has also been noted." Nobody asked which round they would face Alice's team. The grim set of Tasia's jaw said everything. The banquet dissolved all at once, like a mass-cast spell running out of duration. Royal Rosas filed out of the Grand Banquet Hall together, stepping onto streets still brilliantly lit by the White City's perpetual luminescence. Ahead of the group, Tasia and Alucard walked shoulder-to-shoulder.

The Empress's face was a mask of flawless serenity, but her tail swished in sharp, agitated arcs. Alucard didn't speak. She simply held her sister's hand in a tight, grounding grip, letting her own tail drift over to gently brush and twine around Tasia's, silently stilling the thrashing motion. Behind them, Nino rapidly scrolled through bracket data on her datapad. Rhode swaggered alongside her, loudly crunching a lollipop, while Bella gravely analyzed the "abyssal alignment" of the night sky.

Hathaway walked at the back of the pack, pulling her crimson-lined collar up against the night chill. She had a tournament starting tomorrow. An opponent to prepare for. The most spectacular main questline of her new life had just gone live. And yet, as she walked through the sparkling streets, she had one pressing logistical question that had absolutely nothing to do with combat strategy. Where are the local underground proxy distributors in the White City?

Is fifty Solars the standard issue, or do I need to fight scalpers for a premium tier with exclusive, uncensored artwork? She imagined a 112, 000-word slow-burn featuring the Sovereign of Avarice, her eyes gleaming with the predatory focus of a collector. Post-tournament research, she decided. Priority: absolute highest.