[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 38 — 9:15 AM
[Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · VIP Corridors
Hathaway's itinerary for the morning was locked in, and it thankfully did not involve getting shot at.
The morning session of Group D featured Royal Rosas versus the Greed Umbrella, the most anticipated, highest-lethality collision of the tournant bracket. Since she wasn't slated for the vanguard in this specific bloodbath, Hathaway had opted for the superior viewing experience.
She was currently navigating the plush, heavily warded VIP corridors of the Grand Masters Arena, making her way toward the Ludwig family box.
The objective was simple: secure a comfortable recliner, acquire a cup of whatever absurdly expensive tea Margaret had imported, and engage in so wholeso, quality family bonding ti while watching her teammates and the Greed Umbrella roster attempt to mutually erase each other from the census on international television.
It was a flawless plan for a peaceful morning.
The ambient temperature in the hallway dropped fifteen degrees.
Hathaway stopped.
Spectra materialized from the shadows of a recessed alcove. The Ghost Witch glided across the carpet with the casual, frictionless physics of soone who had quietly opted out of gravity for the morning, her hair drifting around her shoulders like ink in still water.
The atmosphere just violently hard-cut to the opening scene of a psychological horror film, Hathaway noted, her breath condensing into a faint plu of white vapor. But it's just my favorite walking refrigerator.
Her brain spun up to maximum velocity, frantically cycling through standard social scripts. Long ti no see? Lovely weather we're having today?
She discarded them imdiately. You do not deploy the weather-card opening against an entity who currently looks like a cursed VHS tape.
She bypassed her own prefrontal cortex entirely. "Can you teleport anywhere?"
Spectra tilted her head. The motion was slightly too smooth. "Almost."
Her voice was flat, a whisper that sounded like it was arriving from both three inches away and the other side of the room simultaneously.
She stared at Hathaway for a long, unblinking mont. Then, with the casual, entirely natural cadence of soone asking for the ti, she said: "Do you want to play a video ga?"
Hathaway's developer DNA violently resurrected itself.
Play a ga. Since transmigration, her recreational options had been tragically limited. Her entire definition of "entertainnt" currently consisted of playing Witch Card and watching the Grand Masters tournant.
Sure, watching Grand Masters competitors try to vaporize each other was technically the realm's premier sports broadcast, but for her, this activity always ended up being at least fifty percent industrial espionage and survival research.
Actual, pure, brain-off recreation? That was a luxury she hadn't touched in months.
It is ti, so long-dormant, deeply sincere part of her announced, to demonstrate the absolute chanical superiority of a transmigrated ga developer. Step aside. Let show you what a real player looks like.
Spectra drifted down the corridor and pushed open a heavy, soundproofed oak door.
The acoustic shockwave that hit Hathaway's face was comparable to a screaming marmot, a rock Storm Lantern Cat, and a deeply offended copper dragon being condensed into a single, highly concentrated point source.
Hathaway clapped both hands over her ears and squinted into the room.
Sitting on a massive beanbag chair was Surtrina.
The Balor Witch's obsidian skin glead under the monitor's light. Her molten-gold eyes were locked onto the screen with murderous intent. The air imdiately surrounding her warped with heavy thermal distortion, her magma veins glowing a furious, bright orange.
The fiery tip of her tail thrashed against the floorboards, scorching small, frustrated craters into the plush carpet as she emitted a continuous, operatic wall of sound.
Not my carpet. Not my deposit. Hathaway watched another scorch mark bloom on the rug. Both of them have more money than the central bank. If Surtrina burns the building down, they'll just buy the ashes.
The door clicked shut.
Surtrina's tail-fla sputtered. The scream stopped mid-note.
"Took you long enough, Dead Girl," the Balor Witch snapped, her eyes still glued to the screen, her voice dripping with volcanic resentnt. "If I get ramd off the track by that cheating harpy one more ti while you're out wandering the hallways, I swear to the Abyss I am going to—"
She turned her head. Her molten-gold eyes landed on Hathaway.
Surtrina went completely still.
She slowly turned her head back to the screen. Then, with excruciating chanical precision, she turned it back to Hathaway.
I am not a rendering glitch, Hathaway thought, profoundly entertained. Resetting your cara angle is not going to make despawn.
The tips of Surtrina's ears flushed a violent, incandescent red. She grabbed the nearest throw pillow, buried her face completely into it, and emitted a muffled, sustained groan of absolute, unrecoverable dignity loss.
It took four minutes and a glass of cold water before the situation stabilized enough for the chanics to be explained.
The ga was Marit Kart.
Hathaway knew the lore. It was published by a subsidiary of Irene's comrcial empire.
The Sovereign of Avarice had weaponized the Witches' collective, tsundere stance of "I have absolutely zero interest in understanding how land-dwellers live," packaging the "authentic land-dweller racing experience" into a hyper-stylized simulation.
The gimmick had been a masterpiece of brand strategy, expanding the Marit IP's influence twentyfold. The original creator, who had sold the rights, was reportedly still crying about the revenue reports on a weekly basis.
In Marit Kart's ranked mode, points were distributed based on lap completion tis.
"In the lower tiers," Surtrina explained, having erged from the pillow to describe her trauma with the grim precision of a war correspondent, "it's a perfectly friendly racing ga. All twelve players can finish and gain points. Coexistence is theoretically possible."
Spectra, seated on the sofa with the immaculate stillness of a decorative object, provided a flat addendum: "In A-plus rank, normal driving is dead."
The required lap tis in A-plus were so aggressively punishing that even a player executing fra-perfect drifts, optimal racing lines, and every gutter shortcut in the track database could not physically finish the race before the tir expired.
Normal gaplay was disabled.
"To gain points," Spectra said, her voice entirely devoid of inflection, "you must execute the competition."
Ramming an opponent off a cliff or destroying their kart with limited items granted a Speed Boost. Only by chaining these boosts could a player et the ti requirent.
Hathaway ran the math instantly. Twelve players. Minimum four kills to et the baseline threshold. Five for a guaranteed promotion. The tir compressed exponentially with rank—
To cross from A-plus into the S-Rank promotion series, a minimum of eight confird eliminations per race is required.
It was exactly like Super Mario Maker from her previous life.
Anyone possessing a single, microscopic shred of human empathy is mathematically hard-capped below S-Rank. S-Rank is populated exclusively by absolute, irredeemable degenerates.
She looked at Surtrina. The Balor Witch who had been screaming herself hoarse in a soundproofed room. The demon of fire and volcanic resentnt who was stuck in A.
Spectra handed her controller to Hathaway. "I am A-Plus. You play."
Hathaway and Surtrina queued up for doubles.
Within the first three races, Surtrina was beaming.
The Balor Witch was not, as Hathaway had initially assud, bottlenecked by a heavy conscience. She was a demon of the Abyss; committing virtual vehicular manslaughter against strangers was practically her cultural heritage. The problem was the grotesque ecology of the Marit Kart ladder.
Upward mobility in this ga wasn't dictated by driving skill, but by a mathematically escalating void of morality.
In the upper lobbies, Surtrina's inherent demonic malice was the bare minimum entry requirent. She was being systematically out-scumbagged by irredeemable psychological monsters.
But here, against a complete novice? Surtrina was the apex predator once again.
She enthusiastically and repeatedly harvested Hathaway as a disposable speed-boost battery, ramming her off cliffs and detonating her on sharp turns, greedily leeching her rank points to claw back everything she had hemorrhaged all morning.
Hathaway was getting aggressively, unapologetically fard.
The problem, it turned out, was not Hathaway's willingness to commit atrocities in a virtual racing environnt. She was fully prepared to descend into the muck and retaliate.
But Marit Kart featured three hundred active tracks. Veteran execution required intimate, encyclopedic knowledge of which chassis worked on which specific murder-chokepoint on which specific corner of which specific map.
She had the soul of an S-Rank degenerate, but the execution of a tourist. Toxicity requires technical support.
The developers had recently introduced the "Butcher Kart": a heavy chassis equipped with a retrieval hook designed to drag opponents backward.
In the middle of the fourth race, on a treacherous alpine hairpin, Surtrina botched her entry angle. Her kart skidded toward the canyon edge.
The rear tires left the asphalt.
Surtrina looked at the void below her. She looked at Hathaway's bumper, which was directly within range of her grappling hook.
She fired.
The hook connected perfectly. The physics engine registered the attachnt, computed the mass ratio, and did not care about friendship.
With a deeply satisfied jolt, Surtrina disappeared over the cliff, dragging Hathaway straight down into the abyss with her.
Sisterhood ans tanking our MMR together.
Hathaway stared at the "RANK DOWN" animation playing across the screen and experienced a profound, clarifying enlightennt.
People always say it is lonely at the top. She watched the canyon floor rush upward to et them. But when you climb to the apex of the degenerate ta, you find it is unbelievably crowded. And the real match has only just begun.
She couldn't even out-grief Surtrina. If a Witch operating at Surtrina's level of casual teammate betrayal was still stuck at A, what kind of irredeemable psychological monsters were populating the global top five hundred: S-Rank?
Beside them, Spectra's already pale face lost whatever negligible pignt it had previously possessed.
The Ghost Witch took a long, controlled breath. She stared at Surtrina. Then she stared at Hathaway. She did not say a single word.
Her silence carried the full, crushing atmospheric weight of a friend who had lent out their hard-earned Diamond account, only to watch it get tanked straight down to Bronze in a single afternoon.
"Let's watch the tournant!" Hathaway announced, aggressively pivoting the monitor's input to the live broadcast feed. "The match is starting!"
While the broadcast buffered, she pulled her communication crystal from her pocket and tapped out a ssage to Margaret and Anna, officially aborting the wholeso family bonding operation.
[Intercepted by classmates. Watching the vanguard bloodbath from a secure bunker. Please save a cup of the tea.]
On the broadcast, Rhode and Cecilia stood separated by a plunging, wind-scoured chasm in the [Jagged Alpine Peaks].
They stared at each other across the treacherous, snow-dusted crags with the compressed, suffocating silence of two people who had been cataloguing each other's weaknesses their entire professional lives.
The referee dropped the fireball.
Victoria had used [Temporal Acceleration] to steal the first-strike fra in her match. Against Rhode, that sequence was a dead letter. The temporal manipulation was bypassed entirely. Rhode seized the initiative.
Rhode's mana ignited.
[Illustrious Glare].
She violently pushed her own mana signature outward, turning her body into a blindingly intense magical beacon, broadcasting on every frequency at maximum volu.
In the alpine terrain, the effect was catastrophic. The golden radiation refracted off the sheer ice walls and snow-capped ridges, turning the entire canyon into a hyper-focused, omnidirectional mirror of visual and magical pollution.
She's overloading the radar, Hathaway's tactical processor noted.
Within the radiation zone, any enhanced sensory system suffered a critical, localized overload: Mystic Eyes, Psionic Vision, precision mana tracking. The higher the target's perception, the more violently they were blinded.
Against a standard Witch, this Feat was worthless. Against a Wellington, it was crippling.
On the screen, Cecilia's reaction was imdiate and visceral. She squeezed her eyes shut as her [Mystic Eyes] and [Psionic Vision] violently short-circuited.
The high-altitude gales howled through the peaks, and the jagged stone walls endlessly bounced and distorted every acoustic echo of Rhode's high-speed movents.
"Cecilia!"
Rhode's roar cut through the screaming alpine wind. The bedrock of the cliff shuddered. An eerie, nauseating green ring expanded outward from her position.
[Banshee's Wail]. An instant-kill execution tool. If it connected, even Cecilia's legendary constitution would be erased in a single fra.
Rhode gripped her short wand with both hands. The tip erupted in a blinding halo of light, and she threw herself directly off the precipice.
She rode the recoil across the chasm at terminal velocity, a synchronized volley of high-speed magic missiles arcing from her flanks as she forced a mid-air, three-dinsional lee engagent.
A shadow-clone illusion of Rhode detonated to her left, screaming with false acoustic signatures.
Cecilia didn't even turn her head toward the loud, blinding decoy.
Instead, with her eyes still firmly shut, she raised her [Parasol-blade], the elegant black canopy tilted toward an entirely empty patch of sky over the chasm, and fired.
A microsecond later, Rhode blinked into that exact, empty coordinate.
A mana storm, thunder-violent and monsoon-thick, shredded the space between the peaks. In the exact sa microsecond, every ambient light source reflecting off the snow was simply stolen. [Eternal Dark] descended like a localized black hole, swallowing Rhode's charge whole right as she entered the crosshairs.
The darkness dissipated. Rhode's mangled body plumted toward the valley floor and instantly shattered into a cascade of glittering glass shards.
[Mirror Image].
Rhode had burned a basic illusion to bait out a top-tier trap. The first exchange belonged entirely to the Ludwig Vanguard.
What followed was a masterclass in high-tier dispel chanics, fought vertically across the plunging alpine geotry. The two Witches transford the canyon into a living encyclopedia of erasure.
Spells of apocalyptic yield erupted from impossible angles, shearing the tops off mountains and triggering massive avalanches. [Greater Dispel]. [Eradication]. [Spell Devourer]. [Strangling Mana Flood].
A high-speed dialogue of negation. They were detonating stars and dissolving the cosmos in the sa breath. Every massive offensive spell was layered over four or five tiers of hidden counter-traps, creating a cascading flood of mana that threatened to drown the entire sector.
Then ca the final, invisible trigger.
In less than one second of real ti, Rhode was reduced to ash and teleported off the field.
The broadcast cut imdiately to a high-speed arcane replay, the specialized lenses slowing the fatal second down to comprehensible fras. Hathaway leaned forward, her developer brain aggressively trying to parse the combat log.
"She used a [Ti Stop]," Hathaway muttered, tracking Rhode's frozen fra mid-air. "Tier-9. How did Cecilia break a ti freeze? You can't cast inside soone else's temporal suspension."
"She didn't break it," Spectra murmured.
Hathaway turned. The Ghost Witch was leaning forward, her deep green eyes locked on the screen, practically glowing with a strange, intense reverence.
The flat, unbothered cadence of her voice had shifted. It was still quiet, but it vibrated with the precise, obsessive energy of an artist dissecting a masterpiece.
"She composed around it," Spectra said.
On the screen, a terrifying cascade of blue mist erupted from Cecilia's frozen silhouette.
"A Ti Stop is a grand pause in the sheet music," Spectra explained, her pale hands gesturing slightly, tracing the invisible rhythm of the spellcraft. "Two seconds of absolute silence. Rhode wrote that rest into the asure specifically to strip Cecilia's shields and break her armor.
"But Cecilia knew the pause was coming. So she slipped her own notes into the gap before the asure even began."
Spectra pointed a slender finger at the blue mist. "[Hypervelocity String]. It doesn't break the ti freeze. It accelerates her subjective tempo to physically outpace the frozen tiline. Her body caught up to the caster who stopped ti."
[Hypervelocity String] was a proprietary Wellington developnt. It was an instant, massive mana-dump Feat, triggered by a specific buff condition, operating at the highest bracket of both consumption and yield.
Its entire architectural purpose? To artificially replicate the raw, terminal velocity of the Ludwig family's signature casting style.
House Wellington had spent generations getting blitzed by Ludwigs, so their ancestors had engineered a chanical workaround. And here, at the apex of competitive play, Cecilia Wellington had just used a bootlegged Ludwig chanic to physically outrun Rhode von Ludwig inside her own frozen tiline.
Hathaway watched in slow motion as Cecilia, moving through the frozen world, reached point-blank range.
"But she can't attack directly," Hathaway realized aloud. "Rhode has passive contingency wards. A direct strike inside the Ti Stop would trigger an auto-shield and ruin the ambush."
"Exactly," Spectra whispered, her voice carrying the thrill of a perfect crescendo. "So Cecilia does not play an offensive chord. In that silence, she lays a [Dragon's Breath Trap]. She tunes it by attaching [Elental Stripping] to tear down Rhode's active wards. And then... she plays a dissonance disguised as harmony."
Spectra's eyes narrowed in pure appreciation. "She casts [Ice Reinforcent] on Rhode. A friendly support buff. Because it is categorized as 'friendly', it bypasses every hostile-magic ward on Rhode's harness without triggering a single alarm. But the buff specifically, catastrophically craters the target's fire resistance. A fatal vulnerability in the sub-zero alpine air."
The slow-motion replay reached its climax.
"The trigger for the trap is simple," Spectra said softly. "'Detonate upon enemy spell release.' Cecilia set the stage, tuned the instrunts, and stepped back. She let Rhode conduct the final beat. Rhode cast her spell to break Cecilia's armor, the Ti Stop ended, and Rhode pulled her own trigger."
On the screen, the fire consud the Ludwig Vanguard.
Surtrina leaned forward in her massive beanbag chair. The molten gold of her eyes reflected the onscreen inferno, and the fiery tip of her tail flicked, not in frustration this ti. "Brutal," the Balor Witch rumbled approvingly.
Hathaway sat back against the sofa. But the physical reality of what had just happened crashed into her a second later.
"But she was blind," Hathaway said, staring at Cecilia's figure on the screen, her eyes still closed. "She was completely deprived of her vision, and the wind and echoes were scrambling her hearing. How did she execute a fra-perfect pre-cast against a teleporting target she couldn't even perceive?"
Spectra slowly turned her head. Her pale face caught the light of the monitor.
"Have you ever watched a deaf maestro play the piano, Ludwig?"
Hathaway's breath caught.
"They do not need the acoustic feedback," the Ghost Witch murmured, her voice carrying the heavy weight of musical truth. "They do not need to hear the keys, because the music is already finished in their head before their fingers ever move. They know exactly where the note will be."
Spectra looked back at the screen.
"Cecilia was not fighting in the present. [Illustrious Glare] deleted the current asure. But her psionic ability, [Prophet], delivered the entire symphony. She didn't need to see Rhode, or hear the wind. She was reading the sheet music of the future. Rhode's Ti Stop wasn't a warning; it was a historical fact that had already occurred inside her foresight."
For a fraction of a second, the corner of Spectra's pale lips curved upward. A genuine, unrestrained smile.
It vanished almost instantly.
Hathaway blinked. "...Spectra, did you just smile?"
Spectra turned her head. Utilizing the terrifying racial talent of the Ghost Witches, the ability to lie with such flat, sincere, unapologetic deadpan that reality itself seed to second-guess its own facts, she replied:
"You saw wrong."
Hathaway closed her mouth. I finally understand why Spectra is an A-Plus degenerate in Marit Kart. Surtrina is only stuck at A because she still possesses a soul.
On the screen, the arena's automated systems swept Rhode's ashes from the wind-scoured peaks.
Rhode had said it, standing in the courtyard before the match with the flat, burning conviction of soone who had already run every calculation: I want the version of you that's actually paying attention.
She got her.
The soundproofed room fell into a heavy, resonant silence.
Hathaway stared at the empty terrain, feeling the complicated, quiet weight of her cousin's elimination. Beside her, Spectra sat in pristine stillness, her deep green eyes reflecting the screen, still savoring the fading echoes of a perfect symphony.
Surtrina picked up her can of cola, the tal hissing slightly against her hot skin, and raised it toward the broadcast monitor in a solemn, unironic toast.
"A magnificent battle," the Balor Witch rumbled, her gravelly voice grounding the room's atmosphere in absolute sincerity. "Magnificent in victory. And magnificent in defeat."
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