Chương 98: Star Orbit

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 13 — Rest Day [Location]: Royal Rosas Club HQ · Research Lab → Underground Training Hall 3 Today was a mandated rest day. The qualifier bracket had been progressively pruning the dead weight. The amateur squads who'd showed up on round one screaming "UNGA BUNGA!" and running face-first into concentrated spellfire had been functionally extinct since round three.

What remained were the professionals—tactical units with deep spell pools, seamless rotations, and the kind of cold, methodical aggression that made Hathaway feel like she was playing a different game than she'd started. By Day 11, having successfully etched the models for [Dispel Magic] (Tier-3) and then [Charged Sonic Boom] (Tier-5) over the past few days, she had ground out the casting muscle-memory through repetitive range practice. The dividends had paid out in Round 5 KOF.

The kiting mage who'd tried to replicate the exact cheese strategy that killed Hathaway in Round 2—who had, in fact, been kiting her beautifully right up until Hathaway face-tanked an Ice Lance, blind-cleansed mid-air with [Dispel Magic], and answered with a [Charged Sonic Boom] that simultaneously ruptured the opponent's eardrums and the kiting meta's structural integrity—had been retired from the bracket on the spot. A flawless execution.

The first time she had systematically dismantled a hard-counter build using pure, grinding mechanical skill. She'd been vaporized by the enemy Ace three minutes later. Rhode had personally stepped off the bench to close the relay. But none of that was relevant right now. Right now, it was Patch Day. Hathaway sat in Nino's research lab and held her breath as she lifted the lid off the elongated matte-black box resting on the coffee table.

Lying against the royal-purple velvet was the thing that was about to rewrite her entire combat ecosystem. Three polygonal geometric rings. They did not look like standard magi-tech. They looked like something excavated from the heart of a dying star, cut into precise geometry, and convinced to hold still long enough to be worn. The chassis— [Gilt Corona] —was not a static color. It was fluid.

A mesmerizing, aurora-like shimmer flowed along the angular edges, the metal's temperature shifting in real time with the ambient mana in the room, bleeding slowly between cold-distant pale gold and violently burning thermal orange. Just from the mana in the air. Inert in the box. Set precisely into the inner circumference of each ring: fragments of [Sun-Eater Prism]. Not black. An absence.

Deep-space texture that didn't reflect the overhead lights—instead it swallowed them, releasing the stolen illumination back in slow, rhythmic cold-light pulses from some unfathomable interior depth. The contrast was absolute. A dark, obscured disc surrounded by a burning ring. An eclipse. Hathaway reached out. Fingertips touched metal. The synchronization wasn't a shock—it was seamless. Terrifyingly, immediately seamless.

Her mana output didn't flow into the rings so much as merge with them, the hardware recognizing her like a drought-stricken system registering a compatible data source and initializing the handshake before she'd consciously thought to initiate one. The sensation that flooded her cortex was the exact feeling of unplugging a cheap, membrane keyboard and connecting a zero-latency optical-switch board for the first time. Not just responsive. Anticipating. Already waiting for her next input before she'd formed it.

She slid the collapsed rings over her wrist and thought: expand. Clack. Clack. Clack. The three polygons decoupled, rose, and drifted into slow planetary orbit around her hand. The Gilt Corona edges ignited—thermal orange, blindingly bright. The Void Crystal cores plunged into absolute light-devouring darkness, pulsing in steady rhythm with her heartbeat. Hathaway stared at the hovering geometry. Dark center. Burning ring. She did not blink.

She was operating under the sincere, irrational conviction that blinking would interrupt some critical rendering process and the entire thing would disappear. Across the coffee table, Nino adjusted the pristine cuff of her lab coat. It was, as always, perfectly clean. The adjustment was entirely unnecessary. Nino's posture was otherwise flawless—arms crossed, expression locked in its default clinical indifference, chin elevated by approximately one degree above its usual calibrated position.

Hathaway had spent enough lab shifts to read the metadata. The unnecessary cuff adjustment. The chin. The very specific quality of the stillness—the stillness of someone not-at-all waiting for anything.

Nino Lucent was currently operating at the emotional frequency of a cat that had just perfectly, flawlessly pushed a water glass off the counter—now pacing slowly across the room, tail flicking at mathematically controlled intervals, projecting absolute composure, while internally screaming for the owner to please acknowledge the achievement.

"Assign it a designation," Nino said, in the flat, precisely calibrated tone of someone performing a routine administrative task. Hathaway didn't need to think. The name had written itself into her brain the day she'd first seen the design specs." [Star Orbit]," she murmured, watching the burning dark rings trace their slow orbits around her hand.

"I like Star Orbit." The corner of Nino's mouth ticked upward for approximately 0. 1 seconds. Her expression snapped back to ruthless precision mode so fast it was almost retaliatory.

"Designation registered. Data sync complete." Nino picked up her tablet.

"Now go to Underground Training Hall 3. Tasia is waiting for you." Hathaway blinked.

"Huh?" Nino stopped and looked at her. The look contained a full doctoral thesis on evolutionary inadequacy.

"Did you believe I would hand custom bleeding-edge hardware to someone who doesn't have the firmware installed in her brain?" Nino said flatly.

"Passing a Variant Staff to an operator who cannot correctly execute its core cognitive architecture is a professional insult to my engineering credentials. The consultation fee—inclusive of a private tutorial session with Tasia—was drafted into the manufacturing contract. Now move." Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. Hathaway wisely closed her mouth. Of course.

If you needed a specialist to teach you how to weaponize an Exotic Staff at the highest possible level, there was exactly no one in Royal Rosas—arguably no one in the White City—more qualified than Tasia von Milan'thirskaya, the Twin Empress who had compressed twelve high-magic planes into a single grimoire and periodically used it as a close-range blunt object. The thought was deeply flattering. The one that followed was not.

Because for the past several nights, citing"highly classified tactical intelligence-gathering purposes" to herself, Hathaway had been hiding under her covers methodically reading Lee Alice Varro's magnum opus series: The Captive Trophy Wife, Little Sia. She was currently halfway through. Alice's work possessed a genuine, weaponized [Mental Pollution] effect. Because that particular shut-in divination genius used actual strategic-level scrying magic to research her subjects. The characterization was 100% accurate.

The dialogue cadence, the micro-expressions, the specific behavioral tics—if you covered the names and read a single line of dialogue, you would instantly know whether it was Tasia or Alucard speaking. The entire series existed in a paradoxical state of being simultaneously the most Out-of-Character and the most In-Character literature ever produced. You could say"They would absolutely never do any of these things," and that was the one OOC element.

But you could not, in good conscience, claim Alice's writing had nothing to do with the real people. The prose and characterization were so accurate that the series was banned in six districts and still maintained a three-month waiting list.

Walking into a private lesson with Tasia herself, carrying a brain currently running high-definition replay of"Little Sia biting her lip and holding back tears after being confined and administered to," felt exactly like a heretic voluntarily arriving at the executioner's block and helpfully adjusting the blade's angle. Hathaway squared her shoulders, executed a thorough cognitive emergency purge, and headed for the training sector.

[Time]: 10: 40 AM [Location]: Underground Training Hall 3 The blast doors slid open. The training hall was cavernous, reinforced, built to absorb the category of mana output that would level a normal building. And standing at its center, perfectly motionless, was Tasia. She was in training blacks today—no silver diplomatic suit, no precision tailoring. Her spectacular golden hair was loose, slightly disheveled.

Her deer-dragon horns caught the industrial overhead lights at odd, scattered angles, scattering halos where there should be none. Her silver wings were folded in a soft, relaxed drape against her back. Her tail swayed with the hypnotic rhythm of a pendulum moving through honey.

She possessed the unique, infuriatingly peaceful gravity of a creature for whom the concept of threat had simply never been relevant, and who had just woken up from a very good nap and hadn't yet decided if she wanted to fully perceive reality. Her pale grey eyes—hazy, vast, and perpetually caught in a buffering state—focused on Hathaway with the gentle, detached curiosity of someone watching a leaf land on a pond.

"You're here," Tasia said. Her voice drifted across the training hall like a breeze moving across a still surface. Slow. Unhurried. Faintly melodic. She's buffering again, Hathaway thought automatically—and then aggressively deleted that thought, because Alice had devoted an entire chapter to analyzing precisely this quality, and she was absolutely not going to survive this lesson if her memory kept autoplaying chapter seven at full resolution.

"Nino sent me over," Hathaway said, and raised her hand. The three dark burning polygons of Star Orbit hummed into position around her wrist. Tasia looked at the orbiting rings for a long, quiet moment.

"Pretty," she said softly. She turned toward the far end of the training hall. A row of reinforced target dummies stood at the far wall, roughly a hundred meters out. She didn't reach for the terrifying twelve-plane grimoire hovering lazily beside her. She didn't adopt any particular casting posture. She simply raised one hand, pointing a single bare finger at the dummy at the end of the row.

"Watch," Tasia murmured. Hathaway narrowed her eyes and engaged full kinetic-tracking cognition. CRACK. The dummy's head snapped violently backward. A localized kinetic detonation had just occurred directly on its chin. No projectile. No travel arc. No mana trace crossing the hundred-meter gap. The spell had simply originated at the point of impact. Tasia stood perfectly still.

"Again," she said softly. CRACK. The dummy's left shoulder caved inward. Same result. Instantaneous. Sourceless. Point-blank detonation at a hundred-meter remove, with Tasia's feet planted exactly where they'd been before. Tasia lowered her hand and turned those unhurried grey eyes toward Hathaway.

"Question," she said, voice slow and light as smoke.

"When you use those rings—in your mind, when does the spell leave you?" Hathaway looked at Star Orbit floating around her wrist. The answer felt obvious.

"When the mana exits through the ring and refracts out at the target coordinate. Vector refraction." A long silence settled over the training hall. Long enough to hear the ventilation system. Tasia looked at her. Quiet. Patient. The way geological formations are patient.

"... No," Tasia said finally. Very gently. She walked closer—not with any urgency, just the unhurried drift of someone for whom crossing a room requires no particular motivation—and tapped the edge of one of the floating Star Orbit rings. The Gilt Corona flared warm gold against her fingertip.

"This ring," Tasia said softly, "is not a mirror. Not a portal. Not a transit station." She withdrew her hand.

"Imagine a Witch," Tasia said, gesturing vaguely into the air above them.

"She is twelve meters tall. A giant." She looked at Hathaway.

"If she casts a spell from her hand—where does the spell begin?"

"About three meters in front of her palm," Hathaway said.

"Because her body is larger, her origin point extends further from her core."

"Yes." Tasia nodded once, slow.

"Her starting point is further away. Because she is larger." Tasia's pale grey eyes drifted to the orbiting rings.

"When this ring is behind your enemy..." She paused. A long, deliberate pause.

"... That ring is your hand." The words arrived in Hathaway's brain with the force of a complete physics engine replacement. Not a portal. Not a redirect. Not a curved bullet through a relay station. Extension of hitbox. Ring A hovering ten meters to her left was not something she fired a spell at. Ring A—conceptually, magically, geometrically— was her palm. Her hand was already ten meters to the left. The spell's origin point had been extended to that coordinate.

She wasn't bending the bullet's trajectory mid-flight. She was pressing her hand directly against the side of the target's skull and pulling the trigger at zero range.

"If the ring is your hand," Tasia said, already drifting backward, "there is no travel time between you and the ring. You do not shoot at the ring. You shoot from it." Hathaway closed her eyes. She deleted the vector-refraction model. Deleted the billiard-bounce physics. She located Ring A—currently ten meters to her left—and claimed it. Not as a tool. As a body part. As the weight and proprioception of a limb that happened to exist ten meters away from her shoulder. Fire. [Charged Sonic Boom]. BOOM.

The air ten meters to her left detonated into a shockwave explosion—no warning, no projectile, no travel time, no intercept window. The spell simply existed there, fully formed, full force, at the exact coordinates of the ring. Not an aimbot. An admin command. A direct write to reality's coordinates. Hathaway opened her eyes and stared at the dissipating shockwave. She was already grinning. The grin was not asking permission. Tasia watched the smoke thin, unhurried and quiet, the way she did everything.

In the depths of her pale grey eyes, something warm and quietly satisfied moved through. The ghost of a smile arrived on her face like a cloud drifting across a clear noon.

"You see," Tasia murmured.

"You have very long arms now." Hathaway stood in the thinning smoke and looked at the three burning dark rings orbiting her body in slow, planetary arcs. She finally understood why Nino had drawn such a hard threshold on minimum viable mana pool for deploying Star Orbit as a standard daily loadout.

Because extending the concept of your physical body—reaching phantom limbs into coordinates that had no physical correspondence to your actual anatomy, and then detonating weapons from those phantom points—was a level of reality-editing so grotesquely, aggressively luxurious that it required a mana pool with the sheer, wasteful throughput of a heavy-industrial power grid just to sustain it as background noise. Warping the rules of space itself. For utility. On a rest day.

The proprietary endgame hardware custom-built to violently liquidate her mana pool had officially come online. Hathaway rotated her wrist. Star Orbit traced its slow, burning orbit. Five stars, she thought. Outstanding craftsmanship. Would survive Alice's novel again.