[Time]: Summer Break, Day 23 — 10:20 AM
[Location]: Royal Rosas Club · Tactical Briefing Room
The deafening roar of the recorded arena crowd cut off abruptly.
Hathaway slowly uncurled her white-knuckled fist under the table.
The burning, electric adrenaline of a tactician who had just cracked the enemy's code was still humming in her veins, but she forced her expression into strict, professional neutrality.
She looked away from the darkened holographic projector and focused on the Witches gathered around the mahogany table.
The VOD had ended, but the true nightmare of the intelligence gap was just beginning to settle over the room.
The dead silence lasted for a full minute.
Nino steepled her fingers on the mahogany table, a glint of ruthless rationality flashing in her cool, grey eyes.
She spoke, mercilessly pointing out the glaring, fatal intelligence gap that everyone in the room was acutely aware of.
"This is the greatest crisis we currently face," Nino stated. "Among the five starters of [Greed Umbrella], one is a complete black box—Karula. Zero screen time. Zero spell data. Tactical positioning completely unknown.
"Another represents a complete tactical paradox—Maria. Her only recorded footage is a desperately ugly, razor-thin victory over a critically depleted opponent. We cannot rule out the possibility that she is executing a deep-cover intelligence blackout, but we also cannot rule out the possibility that... she genuinely just sucks."
Nino rapped her knuckles against the table. "The intelligence networks of every team qualified for the Main Tournament are frantically digging into the backgrounds of these five Witches. And the result? Actionable combat intelligence is effectively zero."
Such a massive information deficit in competitive dueling was a death sentence. Pale Court had just demonstrated exactly what happened when you walked into an ambush blind.
Hathaway sat at the far end of the long table.
She looked at her frowning teammates, her heart hammering against her ribs. She clenched her fists tightly and took a deep breath.
"Maybe..." Hathaway met Nino's gaze and spoke slowly, her voice exceptionally clear in the quiet room. "I know exactly what's hiding inside that black box."
Nino’s fingers stopped tapping.
The Chief Intelligence Officer, who always had the entire board under control, clearly hadn't expected the team's substitute to speak up in a blind spot that had stumped a room full of top-tier Witches.
"Your intelligence source is...?"
Hathaway withdrew the heavy parchment manuscript from her coat.
To prevent the incredibly humiliating title from causing her immediate social death, she placed it firmly face-down on the table and did not open it.
"Alice," she said.
Before anyone could ask how the severely injured Lord of Mistfall City possessed top-tier intelligence on Greed Umbrella, Hathaway forcefully swallowed her dignity and delivered the most condensed, highly redacted summary of her life.
She explained the underground bookstore. The accidental encounter. And how she had "highly strategically" weaponized a blocked smut author's desperate need for inspiration to execute a deep-cover psychological espionage operation across enemy lines.
When Hathaway finally finished the agonizing recap, she lowered her head, stubbornly refusing to make eye contact with anyone.
The reactions around the table were a picture of conflicted horror.
Alucard stared at the blank back cover of the manuscript. The White City Archon blinked slowly, her sharp, bureaucratic instincts latching onto the single most concerning variable in the timeline.
"So," Alucard said slowly. "The trans-continental Legendary curse that nearly destroyed Alice's mana circuits... was actually caused because you sent her to dig up their dark history?" Alucard paused. "Fundamentally speaking, this is your fault?"
Hathaway opened her mouth to defend herself. And then despairingly closed it.
"Don't be ridiculous!" Rhode snapped. She slammed a hand on the table and glared at the Archon. "What does my cousin have to do with it? Wei Changqing and Karula cast the curse!
"That perverted catgirl dug her own grave the second she decided to scry on an apex team. It's an occupational hazard! How is that Hathaway's fault?!"
"No, I wasn't trying to accuse her..." Alucard's mouth twitched, apparently deciding that arguing with a highly protective Vanguard was a losing battle.
Sitting at the head of the table, Tasia reacted in a way that made Hathaway want to collapse entirely.
Tasia was staring intently at her. Those clear grey eyes were exceptionally bright, radiating a profound, uncomfortably deep intensity. She looked as though she genuinely wanted to stand up and offer Hathaway a solemn, ceremonial embrace.
"Well done," Tasia delivered the highest level of official approval.
Hathaway buried her face in her hands. I am unclean.
"To descend into the abyss of the enemy's desires! To orchestrate the ruin of the Prophet while extracting the forbidden texts!" Bella announced, opportunistically adjusting her cloak with a theatrical flourish. "A breathtaking heresy! You harbor the pitch-black, ruthless soul of a true architect of shadows, Eclipse!"
Actually, I orchestrated nothing. Alice only put Alucard in the infirmary because we were the unfortunate Raid Boss standing between her and a live microphone.
She decided to let that cursed truth rot in her stomach forever.
Even Nino cast an unprecedented look of professional approval toward Hathaway. "Regardless of the text's... questionable formatting," Nino said smoothly, "if the intelligence is actionable, we use it. What did you find?"
Hathaway lowered her hands. The embarrassment vanished, replaced entirely by the cold, calculating edge of a tactician.
"Professor, please pull up Maria's semi-final VOD."
The hologram flickered to life. In the footage, Maria fought a harrowing, desperately ugly battle, full of openings, finally executing a heart-stopping counter-kill with what looked like absolute luck.
"After reviewing this raw data and cross-referencing it with her psychological profile, I am certain of one thing," Hathaway pointed at the struggling blonde on the screen. "She is acting. Her true strength is definitively far beyond this."
Alucard frowned. "Acting? On a stage of this caliber? No one fakes being that exhausted."
"Because her win condition in this match wasn't just 'kill the opponent'," Hathaway's voice was ironclad, her mind slipping entirely into the razor-sharp logic of game design. "Her win condition was: How to kill the opponent using the bare minimum mana output, while exposing the least possible minimum amount of intelligence.
"Think about it like an exam," Hathaway explained. "If you want to precisely 'control your score' to land on exactly a 60, while filling out every single question on the paper... you have to know the correct answer to every single question, just so you can deliberately choose the wrong ones."
Hathaway tapped the table. "Look at her eyes. Not her hands."
Nino immediately dropped the playback speed to a tenth of normal, advancing frame by agonizing frame.
An opponent's wind-blade swept toward Maria's blind spot. Maria's body didn't move. But for exactly two frames—a 0.03-second window before the blade even fully entered the visual field—her amber pupils snapped precisely to the trajectory.
Then, they immediately drifted away.
She stood completely still. She waited until the supersonic blade was less than a millimeter from severing her neck, before 'clumsily' tripping over her own feet to dodge it.
"Every other analyst wrote this off as blind luck because they were looking at her body," Hathaway said quietly. "But her eyes betrayed her. She solved the kinetic vector in two frames. Then she deliberately forced her body to wait eighty frames just to make the dodge look like a lucky accident."
Rhode leaned forward, staring intently at those two frozen frames.
"That's psychotic," Rhode muttered. "No one plays with timing that tight. One misfired nerve, and her head rolls."
"Magic signatures can be suppressed. Output can be faked," Hathaway said coldly. "But raw neural processing speed cannot."
Hathaway looked around the suddenly dead-silent briefing room.
"Cecilia is the All-Rounder. Wei Changqing is the Evasion Tank. Flandmira is the heavy Artillery," Hathaway listed. "What class requires this specific, anomalous baseline of neural processing?"
Rhode's crimson eyes narrowed dangerously. "Rush-down."
"Exactly," Hathaway nodded. "She holds a short wand. Combined with monster-tier dynamic vision... she is an incredibly sharp scalpel. She is their designated Rushdown."
Nino swiftly logged the data. "A highly lethal speed-caster disguised as dead weight. What about the final variable? Karula."
Hathaway’s jaw tightened. "We all know she's a monster. You don't co-cast a trans-continental Legendary curse without an apocalyptic mana pool. But raw mana is a stat, not a tactical loadout."
Hathaway tapped the table. "I know her most lethal domain. I know exactly where her true kill-zone is."
She met the eyes of her teammates.
"She is an Aerial Vanguard. A top-tier broomstick rider."
A subtle shift in posture rippled through the briefing room. In high-end dueling, true aerial specialists were exceptionally rare and notoriously difficult to pin down.
Alucard frowned slightly. "Are you sure? There is zero public record of her ever mounting a broomstick."
"I am certain," Hathaway said, her face an unreadable mask of professional stoicism. "I consulted an external expert last night. My mother."
Tasia’s eyes glinted with quiet recognition.
"I looked into Karula's background," Hathaway explained, pulling up the demographic map. "She's from Milan'thir—"
"A minor correction, Hathaway," Alucard interrupted smoothly, her tone impeccably polite and profoundly aristocratic. "Her file specifies the outskirts. We generally do not classify people from the outskirts as actual Milan'thir citizens."
"Exactly," Rhode agreed immediately, crossing her arms. "If you don't hold a White City registry, you're essentially a provincial nomad."
Hathaway swallowed her next sentence.
She looked at the White City Archon, and then at the Ludwig Heir.
We are in the middle of a life-or-death tactical analysis against a nuclear-armed suicide squad, Hathaway screamed internally. Can we please suspend the ancestral White City snobbery for five minutes?!
"Right. Regardless of her residency status," Hathaway ground out, forcefully dragging the meeting back on track. "Because she falls outside the core metropolitan registries, her background was completely obscured. But my mother remembered a rumor from the underground racing circuits.
"Karula's mother was a noble who got disowned for joining a rogue broomstick gang. She lived completely off the grid as a delinquent racer. Karula inherited that exact, purebred racing talent. Her broomstick control is professional-grade."
Nino’s eyes narrowed in fierce approval, instantly updating the threat matrix. "An ultra-mobile, high-firepower aerial unit. That completely changes their tactical geometry. Excellent work, Hathaway."
Hathaway nodded gracefully.
Internally, she was dying all over again.
She had not consulted her mother because of a demographic hunch.
She had crept into Anna's bedroom at 2:00 AM, physically shaken her awake, and aggressively forced the sleep-deprived former Ace Pilot to recall decades-old biker trivia.
Honestly, if Anna didn't spoil her daughter so unconditionally, Hathaway would have been justifiably blasted out the window.
And she had done it all because of Chapter Seven.
Alice had written a deeply unhinged, anatomically staggering mid-air encounter between Karula and Cecilia.
In the manuscript, Karula’s broomstick technique was so terrifyingly precise that she was able to aggressively ravage the Saint while simultaneously executing Mach-2 barrel rolls, zero-gravity stalls, and high-G tactical dives.
It was a brilliantly written, aggressively erotic dynamic. But it had immediately triggered Hathaway's game-designer radar.
You don't write aerodynamic dogfighting maneuvers with that level of physical accuracy unless the character actually possesses a three-dimensional combat engine.
She could hardly tell a room full of top-tier Witches that their vital tactical breakthrough was derived from a literal mile-high club fantasy.
I am a professional, Hathaway chanted desperately in her mind, locking her eyes firmly onto the holographic monitor. I am a tactician. I am not the keeper of the abyss.
Silence descended on the tactical room. It was the silence of apex predators digesting the exact anatomy of their prey.
But the ultimate question still gnawed at her, bringing back that inescapable, bone-deep chill.
"There's one thing I still don't understand," Hathaway said, breaking the quiet. She looked at her fearless teammates, her voice growing tight. "Who funded their isolation?"
The Witches around the table focused entirely on her.
"We are looking at five Arch-Witch-level threats who successfully evaded the draft system for years," Hathaway stated coldly. "Who has the administrative power to thoroughly scrub them from the public registry across all jurisdictions?"
The Witches exchanged a long, solemn glance.
It was Tasia who finally spoke, her voice carrying an incredibly heavy, physical mass.
"The Witch Authority."
Hathaway blinked, her mind stalling. "What? Why?"
It was the Witch Authority. The de facto governing body. The rule-makers. The organizers of the entire tournament.
Alucard looked at Hathaway with the exhausted gaze of someone who had seen through the mundane world. "Hathaway, how much do you actually know about the Witch Authority?"
Hathaway froze. Her brain ran a rapid search. "They... issue decrees? They consult with the High Council? They update the arena patches?"
"In high-end circles, they are known by another nickname," Nino's voice was clinical and freezing. "The Mystery Authority."
"Think about it," Nino continued. "Every nation has a Witch Association branch. The High Council has highly public assembly halls. But have you ever heard of a regional branch of the 'Witch Authority'? Do you know where their headquarters are? Who sits on their inner council?"
"But the network is transparent," Hathaway argued, her mind spinning. "Everything is public."
"The illusion of transparency is the ultimate censorship," Tasia murmured. "If you search for classified Authority data, it won't say 'Access Denied'. It will give you a location."
"You will go to that library," Alucard picked up the explanation, her tone dripping with bureaucratic disgust. "The terminal will tell you the file requires a specific requisition form, locked behind an astronomically high paywall. You will pay the fee, and it will demand a certification exam. You will pass the exam, and it will drag you in administrative circles across three star systems. And finally, when it simply cannot stall you any longer..."
Alucard sneered. "It will coldly pop up a prompt: This file is currently checked out. Please try again in a few days."
"They use absolute procedural justice to construct an impenetrable information black hole," Nino summarized. "They are so invisible, half their own administrative staff don't even know who signs their paychecks."
Hathaway slumped in her chair.
"But what do they want?" Hathaway asked into the quiet room. "They're the Witch Authority. They write the rules. They negotiate directly with the Supreme Seat. What could an entity at the very apex of the world possibly still desire?"
This time, no one answered.
The silence from the two Arch-Witches in the room was absolute.
Suddenly, a warm, calloused hand pressed onto the top of her head.
Hathaway looked up. Rhode was standing over her.
The veteran Vanguard was smiling.
"Why overthink it?" Rhode ruffled Hathaway's silver hair slightly, her crimson eyes burning with the pure, uncomplicated heat of a champion. "It doesn't matter."
Hathaway stared at her. "It doesn't?"
"We're entering the arena, Hathaway. Not parliament," Rhode declared, her voice dropping into a thrilling, ironclad promise. "I don't care who bought their gear. I don't care who hid their data. And I don't care what kind of grand chess game that bullshit Authority thinks they're playing."
Rhode casually spun her short wand between her fingers, her gaze locking onto the holographic screen.
"They bleed. We win. That's enough."
The spinning anxiety in Hathaway's chest hit a solid, immovable wall. She looked at Rhode. She looked at Bella, who was already letting intricate crimson arrays silently unfold across her fingertips. She looked at Nino, who was calmly updating the execution protocols.
Hathaway exhaled a long breath.
The cold panic receded entirely, replaced by the sharp, steady rhythm of her own heartbeat.
Yes, Hathaway thought, turning her eyes back to the tactical monitor. That's enough.