[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 38 — 11:20 AM
[Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Grand Masters Main Arena · Royal Rosas Team Bench
The black snow was still falling.
Ash from ten burned grimoire pages drifted in soft, insolent spirals through the air above Sector 3, coating the charred swamp floor and the perfectly smooth glass cylinder Flandmira had burned through the Toxic Miasma.
Above the central do, the holographic scoreboard pulsed with unforgiving finality.
[Greed Umbrella: 3 — Royal Rosas: 2]
Down in the clearing, Tasia stood alone. Smoke continued to curl from the cracked edges of her dragon scales and the scorched ruin of her combat jacket. She did not lower her guard. She simply waited, a monunt of burned granite, for the heavy iron gates of the Greed Umbrella's tunnel to open.
They didn't.
An empty beat passed. Then another.
A low, confused murmur began at the referee's staging platform, rolled outward through the lower tiers, and rapidly infected all eighty thousand spectators.
A Long Pause had been called.
In the rigid, montum-obsessed ecosystem of competitive Witch dueling, tactical tiouts were administrative footnotes. Each team received two per match: one short, one long. Witches despised using them. Ninety-nine percent of historical Long Pauses were ergency tourniquets applied when a team's roster was psychologically collapsing.
A Long Pause. Now.
Hathaway's tactical processor spun uselessly. Calling a full recess handed Tasia unrestricted minutes to stabilize her mana core, re-knit her damaged dragon scales, and reset her cooldowns. It was a direct subsidy to the enemy Ace's survival.
For the first ti since the tournant began, a flicker of naked hesitation crossed Professor Nino's face. Beside her, Rhode's red eyes had narrowed to a flat, unreadable line.
The broadcast director, possessing the predatory instincts of a seasoned reality-television producer, imdiately cut the arena wide-shot and pushed the primary feed directly into the Greed Umbrella's staging area.
What the cara found was not panic.
The entire remaining roster was gathered around the tactical table.
But Hathaway's eyes caught the anomaly instantly. Maria wasn't smiling.
The golden-haired actress, who treated every active cara lens as a contractual obligation to radiate idol-grade sunshine, was sitting with her face perfectly blank, her thumb slowly, rhythmically running over the edge of her syndicate ring.
It was Karula who was smiling.
It was pure, unadulterated arrogance: cruel, intoxicating, devastating. The smile of a predator contemplating a very small, very boring cage. Her black-polished fingernail rested casually against the glowing red button on the tactical console.
The Long Pause button.
Wei Changqing and Cecilia Wellington sat on either side of her. They had permitted it.
She didn't call the pause to talk strategy, Hathaway realized, the tactical math assembling itself with cold clarity. She called the pause to make Tasia stand in the cold and wait for her.
The crowd's murmurs crescendoed into a buzzing, electric hive of whispers. The broadcast cara utterly refused to cut away.
Karula did not look at the cara. She looked at the polished wooden coffee table in the center of their staging area.
The thin athyst band on her middle finger flickered with a subtle resonance.
The solid mahogany of the table shivered. The grain flowed like sothing becoming, separating and rising into two hyper-realistic wooden sculptures: a Griffin and an Eagle. Under her delicate, lazy mana control, the two wooden beasts lunged at each other, their wooden talons clashing with tiny, perfect shrieks of avian fury.
Wei Changqing let out a soft, quiet laugh. She raised a hand, catching a falling wooden feather mid-air. With a gentle twist of her wrist, it expanded and folded into a pristine, architecturally flawless six-story miniature manor.
Maria stopped rubbing her ring. She snapped her fingers once.
The Griffin and Eagle instantly compressed, shrinking down until they were trapped inside Wei Changqing's wooden cage.
Karula's violet eyes slid sideways. She shot Wei Changqing and Maria a look suspended perfectly between a sneer and a smirk.
She tapped the top of the miniature house. The roof exploded outward. The Griffin and Eagle broke free of their confinent, soaring upward to land obediently on the tips of her extended fingers.
With agonizing slowness, Karula dragged the sharp nail of her thumb across her own index finger.
A single drop of blood welled up.
Before it could fall, the crimson droplet stretched, warping under her mana, transmuting seamlessly into a fully blooming rose. The petals were paper-thin, transparent, wrought from pure liquid ruby.
The wooden Eagle hopped forward, took the blood-rose gently in its beak, fluttered across the bench, and landed lightly on Cecilia Wellington's shoulder.
Cecilia looked at the bird. She looked up at Karula, a soft, private smile warming the corners of her ocean-blue eyes. She reached up and took the rose.
The mont her skin touched the stem, the blood-rose shattered into a cloud of warm, luminescent red light particles. Cecilia lowered her eyelashes, her fingertips brushing lightly against the empty air where the rose had just been.
Then, with a quiet, reverse wave, she collapsed the Griffin, the Eagle, and the six-story manor back into a perfectly ordinary wooden coffee table.
In the Royal Rosas bench area, every single Witch went completely, deadly serious.
"Activated Transmutation," Nino whispered. Her voice carried the weight of soone confirming a threat they had hoped not to see.
Hathaway felt a profound, absolute chill spread through her developer spine.
Heidi Lucent. A tap of a finger. A slice of dragon steak atomically restructuring into a living, flying miniature dragon that breathed spicy-sauce fire directly at my face, then reverting back into a perfectly cooked al.
Back then, Hathaway had just stared at it in awe, thinking it was a beautiful piece of art, a neat visual upgrade from her tactic of throwing li powder.
She hadn't understood the math.
Now, after months of brutal, high-level magical education, she understood the sheer, terrifying processing power required to violently rewrite material reality and imbue it with temporary life characteristics without a single incantation, casting fra, or perceptible mana fluctuation.
It was the absolute zenith of the Transmutation school.
And Karula was executing that exact sa technique, diated entirely through a ring, as a casual parlor trick, during a tournant tiout.
She looked at Cecilia's soft smile. She looked at Karula's lingering gaze. She looked at the fading light particles still drifting in the air between them.
...Excuse , but you are currently in the middle of a globally broadcast, high-stakes deathmatch. Why do you have ti to aggressively flirt with each other?!
The broadcast director, proving once again she deserved a significant raise, simply panned the cara a few degrees to the far edge of the coffee table.
Victoria Wellington was sitting rigidly sideways, her body angled away in a desperate attempt to pretend she wasn't watching, only to be completely trapped in the interaction's splash zone. Her white-gloved hands were gripping her knees, her eyes carrying the profoundly numb helplessness of a severe sister-complex victim who had just watched her older sister get effortlessly seduced, again, right in front of her salad.
The luminescent red particles faded into the air. The Long Pause tir hit zero.
Karula stood up.
She walked toward the deploynt tunnel. The broadcast cara locked onto her and simply refused to cut back to Tasia on the field. The eighty thousand Witches in the stadium fell into a breathless, suspended silence, their collective attention magnetized to her stride.
Because the cara refused to blink, Hathaway could finally parse the exact details of the Greed Umbrella's third stringer.
In her right hand, she held a long staff, wrought from dark iron and deep-sea glass. It didn't reflect the stadium lights; it simply existed with heavy certainty.
The athyst at its apex was a dark, transparent void that swallowed light whole: the exact, bleeding gradient of the sky the mont the last of the sunset dies and true night begins.
A terribly fine, pitch-black chain draped from the shaft, ending in a microscopic athyst teardrop that swayed slightly when she walked, yet vanished completely the instant she stood still.
[Eventide].
Her combat uniform was form-fitting, tailored from midnight fabric. But Hathaway's eyes snagged on the sleeve. It was completely severed at the outer edge.
She intentionally modified her gear to expose her ring and pinky fingers, Hathaway's tactical processor noted, a cold spike of anxiety spreading through her chest. Those two specific digits are the most flexible somatic anchors. Exposing them to eliminate fabric friction is the textbook hallmark of a dedicated speed-caster who needs maximum APM.
But her public profile and her active loadout say the exact opposite. She is carrying a long staff. She is publicly docunted as a heavy-firepower stationary caster.
Why is a heavy artillery turret modifying her uniform for rapid-fire cast speed? This build is a structural contradiction.
A shadow slipped into the space beside Hathaway's chair.
Bella had returned from her post-match dical evaluation. The resident chuunibyou stood silently, her velvet cape pooling against the floor, her single visible eye fixed on the broadcast monitor.
Then her voice cut through the quiet of the box. Cold. Deliberate. Utterly demanding.
"Is she prettier than ?"
Hathaway flinched. A bizarre, sudden wave of guilt crashed over her, with the exact emotional texture of being caught looking at soone else's screen by a jealous girlfriend.
She cleared her throat, started on a diplomatic deflection, and stopped.
Cousin. Why are you even comparing yourself to her?! Are the two of you remotely in the sa conceptual lane?!
She looked at Bella: a deeply committed, theatrical chuunibyou who had subjected eighty thousand people to a localized cringe apocalypse.
She looked at Karula on the monitor: a woman who possessed the terrifying ability to turn the simple act of existing in a room into a lethal flex.
...Oh.
The ultimate heresy: you achieved what it took her three tis the effort to artificially construct, and you didn't even sweat.
She considered Bella's public image: the widely acknowledged, undisputed pinnacle of White City aristocratic aesthetics.
She considered Karula's current, objective reality: the actual undisputed pinnacle of White City aristocratic aesthetics.
Twinning personas is infinitely worse than twinning outfits. Especially when the other person is genuinely wearing the haute couture version of your personality.
Hathaway desperately wanted to praise her cousin.
But then Hathaway thought about the lace eyepatch. She thought about the five-clause introductory title. She relived the phantom mory of the pop-opera phantom ocean and felt the secondhand cringe reach out from across the tiline.
The silence stretched. Bella's single red eye was narrowing.
Hathaway cracked.
"Cousin," she forced out, staring at the floor. "In my heart, you are much prettier than her."
The exact microsecond the words left her lips, sothing deep, pure, and irretrievable inside Hathaway's soul quietly expired.
Bella looked at her. A long, heavy, penetrating look. Hathaway's half-beat of agonizing hesitation before speaking had already sold her out completely. The weight of that single look pressed down on Hathaway's conscience like a physical anvil.
The only thing worse than murdering your own aesthetic conscience, is having to carry the moral guilt of the victim knowing you did it.
"Cousin," Hathaway said, her voice hollow. "The match is starting. Let's just watch the match."
The arena reset protocol swept through Sector 3.
Above the central do, the terrain roulette spun. The entire stadium watched the wheel turn.
It locked.
[Selected Terrain: Sector 6 — Prival Jungle.]
The jungle was a sprawling, claustrophobic expanse of ancient, towering trees. Vines as thick as buildings hung from a dense, multi-layered canopy that entirely blocked out the artificial sky. The ground was deep, uneven earth littered with massive roots and lichen-covered boulders.
Hathaway exhaled a sharp breath of relief.
A natural ceiling. This is the absolute worst possible terrain for an aerial combatant, her developer brain noted. The canopy prevents high-altitude maneuvering, and the dense tree lines shatter any clean flight vectors. We just drew the one map specifically designed to ground a broom rider.
The White City referee hovering above the jungle canopy raised her hand. The countdown sphere materialized.
She released it.
It descended with agonizing, floaty sluggishness.
Another delay modifier, Hathaway noted, ntally opening her "White City Referee Bias" log and adding a new entry. She began calculating the tactical yield imdiately.
Tasia's entire combat engine relies on establishing territorial arrays. Three extra seconds of pre-match setup ti in a dense jungle is a massive, tangible gift. She can map the terrain, lock the chokepoints, and write her initial anchor coordinates directly into the ancient trees and massive roots before the sphere even touches the moss.
The fireball hit a giant fern.
The ward shattered.
Tasia seized the absolute first fra.
Karula's hand swept outward, a spatial ripple expanding from her fingers—the preparation sequence for a broom summon.
Without moving from her deploynt mark, Tasia layered [Empower] and [Quicken] over three sequential [Magic Missiles], a rapid-fire kinetic barrage aid precisely at disrupting the summon animation before it could complete.
The missiles connected. The summoning spatial ripple collapsed.
The intel was solid, Hathaway exhaled. She was going to mount up imdiately. Tasia anticipated the aerial opening and spent her entire initiative advantage to aggressively suppress the option.
Karula didn't panic. Her summon was interrupted, but the montum of her hand transitioned seamlessly into a defensive weave: no wasted fras, no hesitation.
It was surgical. The fluidity of her spell-chaining was a work of art.
[Mage Armor], 0.04 seconds.
[Iron Hedgehog], 0.03 seconds.
[True Sight: Anti-Invisibility Mantle], 0.05 seconds.
[Enhanced Energy Resistance], 0.05 seconds.
[Solidified Shield Anchor], 0.04 seconds.
[Dispel Ward], 0.03 seconds.
Hathaway kept a running tally of the fra data, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up.
That entire six-layer defensive matrix was cast in 0.24 seconds. Every single cast is brushing the absolute theoretical floor of biochanical execution speed.
Simultaneously, the runes etched into Tasia's boots flared. [Misty Step]. The Dragon Empress blurred across the terrain, actively writing her spatial coordinates into the massive tree trunks while stacking her own buffs.
[Dragon Avatar]. [Righteous Ascension]. [Griffon's Swiftness]. She began chanting her fourth layer, [Elental Avatar], heavily leveraging the rich environntal anchors.
Karula had already finished her shields.
Without pausing for breath, she utilized the Clipped Verse tamagic technique, rapid-firing five overlapping acceleration chants in a single exhale:
"Devil's Eye."
"Nether Art."
"Rain, Cloud, Mist."
"Surge, Dance."
"Animate."
Realizing she was about to be out-paced, Tasia violently interrupted her own [Elental Avatar] cast.
She blinked. Three perfect, autonomous phantom clones split from her silhouette, rushing Karula from three converging vectors through the dense undergrowth.
Using [Spell Rebound] chained into [Chain Casting], Tasia whipped two consecutive clouds of [Glitterdust] directly at Karula's face to blind her targeting paraters.
The glittering powder enveloped Karula completely, obscuring her vision.
But in that critical fraction of a second, completely deprived of sight, Karula did not retreat.
She reached her hand backward into the empty air.
Above the sealed canopy, the sky answered. The clouds blackened and collapsed into a torrential thunderstorm. The heavens tore into a massive, churning vortex: the spring of the netherworld, forced open overhead.
A torrent of blinding, apocalyptic purple lightning plumted from the vortex and condensed directly into her grip, forging a spear of crackling voltage. She stood perfectly calm, perfectly cold, her eyes closed inside the glittering dust, completely ignoring the three incoming phantoms.
She hurled the lightning spear straight through the center of the illusions.
The spear bypassed the speed of light. In a single, tearing crack of thunder, it pierced cleanly through the three phantom bodies and impaled the real Tasia, who had anchored herself in the optical blind spot behind a massive banyan tree.
Tasia ate the full damage. Her montum stalled into a heavy stagger against the bark.
Karula's execution window opened.
What followed was a shaless, glorious exploitation of the League's rulebook.
You want to restrict Legendary Spells? You must be genuinely insane if you thought that would stop a magma eruption.
First, the wicked Witch deployed [Empower][Volcano].
Then, the cunning Witch chained it into [Empower][Volcanic Domain].
Next, the formidable Witch summoned an [Empower][teor Fla].
Finally, the magnificent Karula dropped an [Empower][Maximize][Super Sunburst] to simultaneously detonate the previous three spells in a single, overlapping compression wave.
The aggregate explosive yield vastly exceeded the blast value of four standard Legendary spells detonating at once.
First, the ceiling burned.
The [Empower][Maximize][Super Sunburst] caught the canopy of the Prival Jungle, instantly flash-incinerating the miles of dense foliage. The oppressive, dark roof of the forest beca a blinding, roaring ocean of orange-red fire, tearing away the natural anti-air cover in a single breath.
Then, the floor gave way.
The chained volcanic eruption didn't just target the jungle floor. The tectonic shockwave drove straight down into the bedrock. Deep, glowing fault lines spider-webbed outward at supersonic speed. They tore past the boundaries of Sector 6. They ripped through the swamps of Sector 3. They shattered the permafrost of Sector 4.
The entire Eight-Part Island, dozens of kiloters of contiguous landmass, let out a catastrophic, geological groan.
Then, the continent shattered and sank into the boiling ocean.
Hathaway's internal monologue flatlined.
The intel was perfect, her tactical processor noted, adrift in a sea of pure existential dread. The scouting report said to use the canopy to restrict her flight, and leverage the ground anchors. The logic was flawless. It simply lost its context.
The context being: the ground.
Beside her, Bella was completely silent for a long mont. Her single visible eye reflected the apocalyptic orange glow of the sinking continent.
"To reject not just the enemy's advantage, but the conceptual existence of the earth beneath her feet..." Bella whispered reverently. "She didn't just break the domain. She buried the stage itself in a tectonic grave. The sheer, uncompromising theatrical weight of that execution..."
Hathaway slowly turned her head.
Bella leaned forward against the railing, completely srized. "Hathaway. Record this. I require an incantation capable of drowning the proving ground."
Hathaway closed her eyes.
We just lost the entire continent, our Ace is in freefall, and my cousin is taking notes for her next boss phase.
The cara tracked upward through the falling, burning debris.
Both Witches were now suspended in the open air, miles above the churning, apocalyptic whirlpool where the island had once been. Tasia held her altitude, wings motionless. Karula, however, had simply allowed the collapsing continent to fall away beneath her, surrendering to gravity amidst the raining inferno of massive, burning ancient trees.
In the midst of her freefall, she completed her opening sequence. She summoned her broom.
Then she pulled up.
It was a vertical strike executed with the blinding, absolute violence of lightning striking upward from the earth.
The kinetic shear of Karula's ascent cleanly severed half of Tasia's left dragon wing. Silver scales and blood rained down through the open air, passing directly through the exhaust of Karula's ascending broom.
For the first ti, Hathaway got a clear look at Karula's mount.
The chassis was forged from a specialized deep-blue alloy that looked like solid ocean water, heavily scarred with glowing, magma-red veins that pulsed with thermal energy. The blue was deep and heavy; the red was blinding.
There were no bristles at the tail. Instead, the rear flared out into four distinct, high-yield engine thrusters. When it accelerated, it vented a terrifying, jet-blue exhaust.
As Karula pulled out of her vertical climb, the searing blue thruster flas cut directly across the backdrop of the orange-red inferno rising from the burning canopy floating in the ocean below. The visual clash of colors was breathtaking: the exact, bleeding gradient of a sunset over the sea, where the dying light hits the water and neither elent will yield.
[Afterglow].
Karula's combined artillery payload and the raw chanical speed of [Afterglow] was an inescapable nightmare. Conceptual casting was fundantally useless here.
Her acceleration vectors and burst mobility were too extre—you couldn't lock a spatial coordinate on sothing moving faster than your targeting array could render.
In the ensuing three-dinsional dogfight, Karula held a suffocating, overwhelming advantage.
Hathaway's heart rate settled into a flat, numb calm.
Good news: Karula's aerial combat is definitively a kill zone. Bad news: Is there any part of her operational profile that isn't a kill zone?
Even with half a wing missing, Tasia's flight paraters were entirely unimpaired. She was actively using the jagged, exposed bones of the severed wing as a close-quarters bludgeon, leveraging her own damage as a new weapon.
Moving at a velocity the stadium's high-speed tracking caras rendered as a continuous, jagged blur, Karula executed a barrel roll from a mathematically impossible angle, slipped under Tasia's guard, and drove the full kinetic weight of [Afterglow] at terminal velocity directly into Tasia's spine.
The spinal cord. A Witch's only true vital organ.
Tasia fell from the sky.
Her wing bones were shattered. Her silver scales were cracked and bleeding across a dozen new fissures. Her combat jacket trailed thick black smoke.
Before her body could hit the water below, the resurrection stone flashed, teleporting her safely off the field.
Only Karula remained. She hovered alone in the open air, the jet-blue exhaust of [Afterglow] burning quietly in the silence above the drowned, burning archipelago.
[Match Complete. Winner: Karula (Greed Umbrella).]
Two seats down, Rhode slowly uncrossed her arms. Her crimson eyes were locked onto the broadcast monitor with the rapt, unblinking intensity of a religious pilgrim experiencing a revelation.
"Terminal velocity blunt force trauma," Rhode whispered. "No offensive spells. No elental rendering. Just pure mass tis acceleration driven straight into the cervical vertebrae. Beautiful."
Hathaway didn't even have the energy to turn her head.
Both cousins: fully compromised. One docunting the enemy's aesthetic phase transitions for future personal use. The other has converted to a velocity cult.
Karula's subsequent match against Nino was officially postponed.
In the Royal Rosas bench area, Professor Nino stood with her arms crossed, staring blankly at the monitors displaying the empty, boiling ocean where dozens of kiloters of solid landmass had existed twenty minutes ago.
Hathaway looked at the back of her professor's head.
"...Professor," Hathaway ventured quietly. "Can you win?"
Nino slowly turned her head. She picked up her stylus. Set it back down. It was the look of a woman who had just watched the laws of physics hand in their resignation.
"?" Nino said, her voice perfectly flat. "Fighting Karula?"
A long, hollow pause.
"Are you questioning my sanity, or reality itself?"
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