[Time]: Summer Break, Day 22 — Grand Finals, 01:25 PM
[Location]: Open Sea · Grand Masters Regional Qualifier Venue · Six-Point Miniature Arena
The referee's fireball detonated against the arena floor.
The superior, genetically locked neural reflexes of the Ludwig bloodline allowed Rhode to claim initiative before Alice could react. In the minus-one frame of the countdown, before the fireball had finished its descent, Rhode's body had already committed to a trajectory.
No probing. No kiting.
The Grand Finals, against a severely injured Weather Control Arch-Witch: there was only one answer.
The moment the fireball hit the ground, hundreds of multi-colored direct-damage spells exploded around Alice like a full artillery volley—brilliant, lethal, and completely without mercy.
[Random Teleport]. [Dimension Door]. [Eerie Transport]. [Dimensional Jump]. [Blitz Dragon Roar]. [Mirror Image].
Rhode transformed into a black bolt of lightning.
By forcing Alice from the first hundredth of a second into the cognitive meat-grinder of high-speed teleportation combat, Rhode trapped her in a suffocating, reactive rhythm. Every spell she fired had to be a desperate countermeasure just to stay alive, leaving her zero bandwidth to establish her weather domain.
For someone with damaged mana circuits, high-intensity spatial jumps were the equivalent of drinking poison to quench thirst—every jump drained reserves that weren't recovering properly.
The two Witches showcased every positional displacement spell in the grimoire. Their coordinates shifted dozens of times per second across the arena.
Each dizzying transfer was followed immediately by locking the enemy's landing coordinates and firing within 0.1 seconds of materializing.
Gorgeous. Brutal. A spectacle built entirely from the mutual attempt to end each other.
The teleportation war concluded with Rhode's victory.
On the 291st intersection, Rhode caught a microscopic stutter in Alice's rhythm—the curse backlash spiking her mana blockage for a fraction of a second—and a Tier-8 [Sunburst] hit Alice squarely in the chest.
Blinding white light. The crowd screamed.
The lethal impact instantly triggered a passive enchantment woven into the lining of Alice's military robe. [Random Teleport] snatched her from the epicenter and threw her fifty meters across the arena floor.
Rhode's follow-up was already in the air—a tight, devastating [Eradicate] fired at the exact coordinate her instincts predicted Alice would materialize. It carved a smoking trench into the arena floor, missing Alice's shoulder by an inch.
A microscopic error. But a single breath of space was all the Lord of the Mist needed.
Alice staggered as she materialized. Her jaw worked, once. Whatever rose in her throat, she didn't let it leave.
Her military robe's inner lining was scorched through, the wound beneath deep and clearly worsening. The cursed thorns on her left wrist flickered and crept another half-inch up her arm.
And the rain started falling.
Bone-chilling mist erupted from the arena floor, swallowing the entire space at a speed that felt wrong, like the fog was something alive that had been waiting for permission.
Visibility collapsed to three meters. The last of the sunlight died.
Deep in the fog, Rhode dropped her center of gravity. Right hand gripping a short casting staff, left hand spinning a trench knife into a reverse grip.
Three sickly grey pulses fired deep into the mist.
[Waves of Fatigue] (Tier-3, Necromancy). Blind-fire probe shots—low cost, high impact. Sweep the fog, drain Alice's casting tempo, force a repositioning reaction that would expose her coordinates.
From deep within the mist came the sound of muffled coughing. Blood in the breath.
A fraction of a second later, an [Ice Lance] whistled out of the mist, aimed flawlessly at Rhode's head.
Rhode shattered it with a casual flick of her staff.
Fog into Evocation spam, Hathaway read it from the preparation zone. Classic setup. But something on the arena's overhead monitor made her frown. Alice hadn't repositioned. The tracking showed she had simply stood there and taken all three necrotic debuffs without dodging.
Why would a weather caster refuse to move?
Then came the roar of something with a very large engine.
A massive spatial rift tore open above Alice.
From the tear in reality stepped a creature that commanded absolute reverence. Dignified. A magnificently stern feline face framed by impossibly long whiskers.
Its fur was a striking pattern of stark black and white—and its delightfully round belly pulsed with an indistinguishable, churning mixture of pure white and azure light.
Behind it, whipping through the saturated air, were two massive tails. A Nekomata—crackling with restrained voltage.
Despite its sheer mass—easily the size of a heavy tank—it moved with a terrifying, weightless agility that fundamentally defied physics.
The Alpha Storm Greater Lantern Cat.
The moment its paws touched the arena floor, a tsunami of deafening cheers shook the stadium's defensive barriers outright.
"Fluffy! Giant Fluffy!" The Witch audience, constitutionally incapable of resisting the charm of a rare cat, completely lost their minds. Even Hathaway, sitting on the bench with a stomach full of lead and apocalyptic dread, felt her eyes inevitably drawn to the majestic creature.
It was magnificent.
Then, from deep within that dignified, fluffy chest came an excited, demonic rumble—a purr from something that had already decided this was going to be an excellent afternoon. It hefted its crackling greataxe.
Rhode did not find this charming. To her, it was just a target. Casting material crushed between her fingers—
[Banishment] (Tier-7, Abjuration)!
A white spear of spatial repulsion shot straight for the Storm Cat.
In the Royal Rosas preparation zone, Nino's hands tightened on the bench railing. The Greater Cat dissolved into motes of blue light before it could even swing its greataxe.
It was a textbook, frame-one clear. An equal trade on paper: a Tier-7 Abjuration to neutralize a Tier-7 Conjuration.
Before the motes of blue light had even hit the ground, Alice stepped forward and hard-casted. The fog fractured open again, the scale of the spatial tear signaling another Mythic-tier entity.
Hathaway froze, staring through the blast-proof glass. The game-designer math in her head crashed into a hard error.
"Professor." Hathaway's voice came out carefully level, though her fingers gripped her knees until her knuckles went white. "The math is wrong. She's heavily injured, bleeding mana every millisecond to maintain a fog domain, and she just tanked a Tier-8 Sunburst. She shouldn't have the reserves to chain-cast back-to-back Mythic summons."
Hathaway swallowed, her eyes glued to the expanding rift. "And her Alpha was just banished. What else does she even have in her roster that demands that much energy? A deep-sea Leviathan?"
Nino didn't look away from the field, but her eyes narrowed into dangerous, calculating slits. "She doesn't have the reserves. Unless the Banishment just funded the second cast."
"Tournament rules dictate slow refunds for dismissed summons. Standard exploit prevention."
"Standard rules. Not Partner Contracts." Nino's voice dropped to absolute zero. "Unknown contract feat. Complete leyline transfer if the cat is returned unspent."
Returned unspent. The game-designer math clicked hard and ugly. In every previous match, the cat swung its axe, buffed, burned through its own reserves—by the time it was banished, it was empty. Nobody noticed because there was nothing left to notice.
But Rhode had banished it on frame one.
Rhode hadn't eliminated a threat. She had paid a premium to make it disappear, and handed Alice the receipt.
This wasn't a summoner strategy.
This was an economic trap wearing a furry coat.
The moment Rhode registered the second rift’s spatial signature, she recognized the rigged math. She made the call instantly: do not banish. Ignore the summon, kill the summoner.
She dropped her center of gravity, preparing to evade whatever Leviathan or water-elemental horror came out of that rift and drive a straight, violent line toward Alice, forcing a close-quarters fight that had nothing to do with leyline economics.
But Alice didn't open the second rift above herself.
It tore through the mist directly above Rhode's head.
The second cat dropped. Smaller than the Alpha, fur a darker shade of grey—crackling greataxe already mid-swing, aimed precisely at the coordinate Rhode was shifting into. This wasn't a static deployment. It was a targeted orbital strike.
Rhode couldn't dodge. The kinetic impact and lightning AoE of that axe hitting the ground would stagger her, leaving her wide open in the fog. Forced into lethal CQC, she had to crush another gem.
[Banishment]!
The leyline transfer happened again. Invisible. Identical. Inevitable.
But on the bench, Hathaway wasn't looking at the mana math anymore. She was staring at the space where the second cat had just been.
Two?
Every Witch in the Inner Sea knew the unbreakable law of feline familiars: a Greater Cat chose one partner. One. If you so much as looked at another cat with intent, yours would leave—not angrily, just gone, the way a cat decides a lap is no longer comfortable.
Which meant that second cat had no pact with Alice at all.
Hathaway's breath hitched. The "Alpha" wasn't just a fan nickname for a pure bloodline. It was a literal designation. The cat Alice had raised from birth hadn't just grown up; it had quietly gone out and found its own kind—gathering the wild, uncontracted members of its species into a tribe of its own.
No wonder Alice had never exposed this mechanic in professional play.
If the Witch world—a society of hyper-obsessive, aggressively proactive apex predators who worshipped cats—found out that Lee Alice Varro held the summoning coordinates to a fresh, uncontracted tribe of Mythic-tier Storm Cats... the threshold of the Varro estate would be trampled to dust by tomorrow morning.
And now, she was burning it live in front of tens of thousands. By midnight, the entire Inner Sea would know.
My God, Hathaway thought, staring at the monitor. Alice Varro was on track to win, but the close-up was a tragedy. Hathaway focused on the bloodless line of her lips, and the strange, static acceptance that had settled over her mouth.
How desperately do you want to win?
"But the location," Hathaway said, voice tight, tactical brain forcefully rebooting. "Summoning magic has a hard-coded proximity limit around the caster. How did she drop it directly onto the Vanguard's coordinates?"
"The [Cat-Ear Antenna] feat attached to the talisman on Alice's wrist," Nino answered, her tone clinical, though her eyes were locked onto the second cat with undisguised fervor. "It extends summoning range by a meter for every ten M-Units spent. She's weaponizing the Banishment refund to buy target-locked drop pods."
And on the field, Alice's spell-chain hadn't dropped a single frame. The fog was already splitting for the third time.
Storm Cat number three materialized. Then number four.
Beyond the glass, the entire stadium was on its feet. Tens of thousands of Witches screaming, their eyes practically glowing. Witches loved Storm Cats. Seeing multiple of them in a single Grand Finals match was a visual feast they had never dared to dream of.
Dozens of normal lantern cats swarmed in behind the massive silhouettes. Rhode fired a Tier-3 [Trembling Shriek] into the swarm without breaking stride—she had said it herself: a normal cat still panics at a Tier-3 AoE and dives into a spatial rift.
The sonic wave hit. The small cats shivered. Their ears flattened. They squeaked.
Then they ducked behind the massive legs of the remaining Greater Cats and kept shooting.
Five morale points. Laughable on paper. Exactly enough, sheltered under two tons of electrified, legendary-grade fur, to keep very small, very committed artillery anchored to the field.
The cheering crowd saw an adorable parade of oversized fluffballs.
Hathaway saw an infinitely compounding, self-funding death spiral.
Hathaway said nothing. The board state was locked.
Kill the cats? Instant mana refund for Alice, free spell-economy surplus—feeding the exact loop that was drowning you.
Don't kill the cats? Dismantled by highly agile, legendary melee units while a swarm of micro-summons interrupted every spell you tried to cast.
And all the while, [Fog Rain] was quietly executing its own win condition. The mist stripped body heat continuously; Alice's ice-aspected spells bypassed Rhode's cold resistance entirely. The saturated air was passively accumulating rain-spikes, a constant barrage from every blind spot. The same weather blinding Rhode was regenerating Alice—actively fighting the curse's necrotic spread, sustaining the damaged circuits that had no business still running at this output.
Rhode wasn't just losing an economic war. She was being digested by the weather.
There had never been a third option.
Except.
Rhode's posture didn't change, but the quality of her stillness shifted. It was the focus of someone who had run the calculation twice, arrived at the same impossible answer, and decided to simply break the calculator.
She crushed a flawless gem against the grip of her short staff.
[Avatar] (Tier-8, Transmutation).
A blinding golden aura of divine reinforcement exploded outward, shredding the fog in a five-meter radius around her body.
Rhode gripped her staff and her knife, and charged dead ahead into the furry meat-grinder.
White light swallowed the arena.
In the pouring rain, surrounded by her conscripted feline army, Alice stood in the aftermath. Her military robe was in tatters. The cursed thorns had crept another half-inch up her wrist—real damage, real cost.
But the Lord of the Mist didn't look like someone paying a price. She looked like someone who had just finished setting the board.
She tilted her head toward the Royal Rosas bench.
Want to bleed me dry?
Fill the gap with your lives first, meow~
Score: Royal Rosas 1 — Mare Brume 1
In the Royal Rosas preparation zone, no one spoke for a moment.
Hathaway sat back down on the bench. The manuscript was beside her. She hadn't opened it past the Prologue.
Through the blast-proof glass, Tasia had risen from her seat and was watching the arena with an expression Hathaway couldn't quite read—analytical, yes, but also something else.
The expression of someone running calculations that included variables nobody else had thought to check. Alucard was already writing something. Nino was quiet in the specific way that meant she was simultaneously discarding several previously held assumptions and building new ones.
Hathaway picked up the book and held it in her lap without opening it.
One more round, she thought. And then I'll know if we get to tear that cage apart on the arena floor, or if I have to figure out how to do it in the dark.
The referee's voice echoed across the arena.
"KOF Relay — Match Two!"
In the Royal Rosas preparation zone, Tasia turned her head.
She didn't look at Bella. She looked at the bench where Alucard was sitting.
"Go check the seam," Tasia said quietly. "I want to know exactly where the fog bleeds."
Then she sat back down and waited.