[Time]: Day 67, Wednesday, 04:15 PM
[Location]: Yggdrasil Academy · Administrative Corridor
Victoria's patent declaration had been handled before the testing ground fully emptied—whisked into a set of briefcases by Wellington estate lawyers who had materialized in the hallway like tailored phantoms.
Hathaway actually had access to an equally terrifying legal apparatus.
If she had sent a single text message, Rhode and Bella would have gleefully air-dropped a legion of Ludwig corporate bloodhounds to handle the paperwork. The Ludwig family was unconditionally generous with their own; they operated on the fundamental assumption that if a child of their house needed something, she would simply demand it.
It simply never occurred to them that Hathaway was still running on the legacy operating system of her Earth childhood.
So, she didn't send the text. She just walked to Nino Lucent's office and collected the forms herself.
She stepped out of Nino’s office, the heavy oak door clicking shut behind her, carrying a still-warm sheaf of officially stamped parchment.
It felt heavy, substantial, and remarkably real.
Her steps were light enough that she was practically drifting.
She turned the corner. And then, Hathaway saw the sun.
It wasn't a metaphor. The corridor was entirely enclosed, lit only by the muted, multicolored ambient light filtering through the Academy's ancient stained glass.
But as Hathaway turned the corner, the physical laws of optics simply surrendered, reorienting themselves into a mere backdrop for the person standing by the arched window.
A woman.
She wore a deep amber-gold overcoat—high collar, heavy gold buttons, the tailoring razor-sharp and completely devoid of a single unnecessary crease. Beneath it, an ivory shirt buttoned straight to the base of her throat.
Her hair was silver, brilliant and flowing, fastened loosely at the back of her head with a simple gold clasp. Elaborate styling would have been redundant. In the refracted late-afternoon light, the silver seemed bathed in a permanent, cascading golden halo.
She was breathtaking. But not with the sterile, untouchable beauty of a distant star.
This was something denser, more suffocating—an allure steeped in bottomless wealth, apex power, and unapologetic desire. If Ovelia's beauty was ethereal, separated from the mortal coil, this woman existed at the polar opposite extreme.
She was immense, real, devastatingly present. Her existence didn't register as aesthetics. It registered as gravity.
And resting just beneath the corner of her eye was a single beauty mark.
Placed precisely where a teardrop would fall, that tiny, precarious speck of dark pigment shattered the entire austere composition of her coat and collar in an instant. It injected a lethal, grounded warmth into features that would otherwise be violently unapproachable.
Hathaway's four cognitive threads blue-screened simultaneously, like servers yanked from the wall.
A three-second hard stun.
Her gamer instincts—the innate [Analytic Vision] she kept running in the background—flared automatically, desperately trying to parse the entity before her. It couldn't.
She had stood near Heidi’s celestial glow, feeling mana that was sharp and beautiful, like cutting moonlight. And Heidi—for all her status as a historical prodigy in Transmutation—was ultimately the 10th Seat. A specialized raid tank whose true, Grand Witch-level threat was locked entirely behind her Calamity Dragon form.
In her base human state, Heidi’s mana was an elegant, biting chill, a remote, untouchable aesthetic rather than a physical burden.
The mana radiating from the woman by the window wasn't leaking, nor was it being woven into some brilliant technique, nor was it waiting for a transformation multiplier to become dangerous.
It was simply the crushing, undeniable base-stat mass of a real-world natural disaster casually enjoying an afternoon stroll. It didn't need to be sharp. Its mere existence warped the ambient light of the corridor, burning with the unapologetic, exaggerated reality of a midday sun.
The woman had been looking at a set of heavy lecture hall doors farther down the corridor. Her golden eyes rested on the polished wood with the still, unhurried weight of someone who rarely allowed herself to return to such places.
At the quiet sound of footsteps, she turned.
Her gaze found Hathaway’s face.
Hathaway’s breath stopped. Not the mana pressure — that she’d braced for. This was the attention. One second under that gaze, and something in her chest executed an unauthorized emotional subroutine.
Only after that unbroken, entirely human connection did her gaze drift smoothly downward, settling on the thick stack of officially stamped parchment in Hathaway's hands.
A soft, perfectly warm smile curved her lips, shifting the beauty mark at the corner of her eye by a fraction of a millimeter.
When Hathaway's internal system frantically attempted to reboot her cognitive threads a second time, she found the bandwidth already gone.
Half of her mental RAM had been forcibly partitioned, completely hijacked by a single, unclosable background process: staring helplessly at the microscopic shift of that impossibly alluring face.
With the remaining half of her processing power, her brain executed an emergency database query.
She had the Witch Card. She remembered the holographic projection from Rina's deck during her first month here—the thirteen-year-old girl with the charming smile, raining gold coins like a radiant fairytale prince.
It was an insultingly pale imitation.
The fairytale protagonist hadn't just grown up. She had ripened into a suffocating, lethal reality. The beauty mark that had looked so cute and endearing on the young hologram was now the exact anchor point for a weaponized, adult allure that could bring empires to their knees.
The 5th Seat of the High Council. Lord of Casendiara. Co-owner of the Golden Iris.
The Sovereign of Avarice.
Irene.
She said two things. The first, three words: "Lantern Cat Protocol."
The second: "A remarkably kind design, Miss Ludwig." Her voice was a gentle, resonant warmth that felt like stepping into the afternoon sun. "I would like to help you protect it."
Hathaway brutally bit down on the tip of her own tongue.
The sharp, metallic sting of blood finally cut through it. She forcefully dragged her gaze away from that devastating face, locking her eyes strictly onto the second gold button of Irene's coat.
Focus, she screamed internally. Stop looking at her.
Her pre-rehearsed deflections—polite, professional, non-committal—dissolved on her bleeding tongue before they had the chance to form.
Lantern Cat Protocol.
Not the monowheel. Not the Alice in Wonderland cannons. Not the A+ grade. The hidden mechanism. The edge-case failsafe tucked behind the dashboard, the exact variable that had converted a C+ into an A+.
The presentation had ended barely two hours ago, behind closed doors.
How does she know?
Hathaway didn't ask. You didn't ask the sun how it knew it was daytime.
Instead, a different cascade flooded her mind. Witch society was, by every metric, a chaotic evil species. If you destroyed a planet today, your peers would sip their tea and ask what you had scheduled for tomorrow. If you wiped out a sentient race, they would ask your profit margins.
Their official legal code could fill a spatially expanded library, but the only consequence anyone actually feared was comprehensive Social Death.
Cross a true taboo—like harming an unhatched egg—and society erased you without hesitation. But everything else was just a matter of audacity. Commit a major felony like creating an Artificial Witch, and someone would just shrug: Oh, we can do that now? Sister cooked.
For a species whose moral baseline was buried somewhere beneath the Mariana Trench, the ultimate insults you could hurl at a peer were Stingy, Reputation-less, and Credibility-less.
Therefore, only two words held any actual weight: Reliability and Credit.
Reliable meant you had the competence to deliver. Credit meant your word functioned as binding physical law. "A reliable Witch who keeps her word" was the very pinnacle of societal endorsement—the supreme moral monument of a fundamentally amoral civilization.
And the woman smiling at her right now was the universally recognized, undisputed paragon of both.
Which was, of course, exactly what made her the most dangerous entity on the continent.
Hathaway's mind pulled up the Sharon Curie Incident—the commercial legend so famous in Witch society it had achieved a kind of canonical mythology.
Sharon Curie had invented the [Patent Spell]: a Tier-9 universal spell that automatically extracted royalties from anyone bypassing a registered design. As foundational commercial infrastructure embedded across all planes of existence, it generated six hundred million Solars a year.
Sharon Curie retained only the naming rights. The patent belonged to Irene.
Whenever Sharon recounted the story—how she had sold this perpetual printing press to Irene for 1.6 million Solars—her eyes would simply well with tears.
Whenever the 8th Seat, Sonia, mentioned how Sharon had actually offered it to her first for 1.5 million, she would let out a hollow groan and physically sink through the floorboards in sheer financial despair.
And whenever Irene told the story, she would smile warmly, and mention that Sharon had felt so guilty charging 1.6 million that she had earnestly asked whether Irene would prefer to pay 1.5.
That bedtime story was currently running at maximum volume inside Hathaway's skull.
Irene didn't open with a number. She didn't throw out a dazzling preliminary offer. She opened with the most devastating card in the deck: transparent sincerity.
"That patent form is a beautiful achievement," Irene said, her tone gentle, almost regretful. "But the White City is full of clever, hungry people, and the technical barrier on this invention is entirely too low."
Hathaway's stomach dropped.
"Not six months. Not three months," Irene continued, without urgency. "Before the students who attended your presentation finish their dinner tonight, three different underground workshops in the White City will begin drafting bypass schematics.
"Your chassis has no magical encryption. Your armaments are commercial off-the-shelf. Kindergarten-level mechanical assembly. Three days, and the market will be so flooded with replicas that your hard work is fully erased."
It was a fact. Hathaway had known the market was fast, but her Earth-bound corporate logic had miscalculated the sheer, unhinged velocity of magical industrial espionage. Her plan to run a civilized bidding war tonight at the club was already obsolete. By the time she ordered her first drink, the bootleg blueprints would be finished.
"What protects your work is never the piece of paper in your hand, Miss Ludwig." Irene's golden eyes held hers with absolute, unblinking directness. "It is the name signed next to yours."
She didn't say my name. She didn't have to.
She was the Lord of Casendiara—the Grand District that had famously walked away from the Great Crusade with the total, bedrock-to-sky wealth of one and a half entire layers of Hell.
But even against the backdrop of a District whose treasury was built on the apocalyptic plunder of the underworld, Irene’s personal capital was a terrifying anomaly. She had forged a custom twenty-seven-world polyhedron as her private estate — a number so violently absurd that the Witch Authority had been forced to grant her two separate titles for her wealth alone: [The Sovereign of Avarice], and [The Lord of the Golden Realm].
If a contract bore that signature, no workshop in the Inner Sea would dare touch it. Anyone who tried would be erased—physically, commercially, and comprehensively.
Then Irene played her second card.
"You designed this vehicle for the land-dwellers. They are your primary demographic." The corners of her lips deepened slightly, the beauty mark shifting. "And I have operated within the mortal market for twenty-four years."
She was a Converted Witch who had clawed her way up from a low-magic plane.
She understood mortals better than any native Witch who had ever looked at the ground from a sky island—what they needed, how they saved money, the exact topography of their underground distribution networks.
She wasn't just offering a name as a copyright umbrella. She was offering a pre-built, turnkey sales channel covering the entire Inner Sea of Stars, including territories no sky-island Witch had operational infrastructure for.
"Exclusive licensing across all territories—sky-island infrastructure and mortal settlements both included." Her voice carried the unhurried cadence of someone dictating the weather. "A five-year term. A substantial upfront disbursement, plus a fixed royalty split on every unit sold."
She paused.
"And, as an auxiliary clause—"
From her coat pocket, Irene produced a small, exquisitely heavy coin—pitch-black metal inlaid with a geometrically perfect golden sun—and held it out on her open palm.
"Full procurement clearance to my private commercial network. Consider it a foundation for your next brilliant idea."
Hathaway stared at the coin. She counted the rays of the sun. Twenty-seven. The exact number of worlds in the Golden Realm.
It was an access pass. Direct ordering rights into Irene's private supply chain: rare spells, ultra-rare inter-planar materials, out-of-print consumables that did not circulate on any open exchange. Things that didn't exist anywhere else in the universe—assuming you had the money to pay for them.
But the true crown jewels of that network were her personal research manuals. Her own named spells.
[The Zenith of Evocation] sat atop the most viciously competitive leaderboard in the Inner Sea—Evocation's sheer accessibility meant the largest population and the most hyper-inflated field in existence.
It was universally accepted that Irene didn't need the title; the title needed her name on its roster just to maintain its own institutional credibility.
Evocation was one of eight disciplines she had mastered. She was an omnipotent monster.
Having the VIP right to legitimately purchase the personal arsenal of a monster like that?
Her past-life system logic completed the circuit in approximately 0.3 seconds.
She pays me royalties. I use the royalties to buy things from her private shop. The royalties flow from her right pocket into my hands and then I voluntarily, desperately sprint to deposit them back into her left pocket.
She's not doing business with me. She's farming me. She just built a macroeconomic recirculation system inside my own wallet.
Something almost escaped her throat. The sheer, breathtaking artistry of this was almost admirable.
She had zero way to refuse.
Not out of fear. Out of pure, unadulterated rationality.
Could she pull out her terminal right now and call Rhode and Bella? Absolutely. The Ludwig family would joyfully air-drop an army of corporate bloodhounds to secure her patent before sunset.
But then what?
To maximize profits on a vehicle explicitly designed for land-dwellers, the Ludwigs would have to build a mortal distribution network. And who owned the mortal market? Irene.
The Ludwigs would spend millions and waste two years fighting corporate wars, only to inevitably end up sitting at a negotiation table with Irene anyway. You couldn't bypass Irene on the ground. In fact, attempting to bypass Irene in any profitable sector of the Inner Sea was rapidly becoming a philosophical paradox.
Why take a two-year detour when the final boss was standing right in front of you, offering above-market premiums and a VIP access pass to the most broken skill tree in the game?
Irene's terms were not only fair—they were generous. The procurement clearance was a tangible asset Hathaway urgently needed for her combat build.
"I'll sign," she said.
A contract manifested in the air between them, its golden runic script glowing with immaculate precision.
Hathaway read the clauses. No hidden provisions. No linguistic traps. No asymmetric renewal language buried in the footnotes. Exactly as stated—Irene's credit was real, and it showed.
She pressed her mana fingerprint against the seal.
The contract dissolved into motes of light. The coin dropped into Hathaway's palm—cold, dense, and heavier than it had any right to be.
Irene turned. The hem of her overcoat cut a sharp, elegant arc.
She walked—without urgency—back down the stained-glass corridor. The late afternoon light seemed reluctant to let her pass, bending fractionally around the gold buttons of her coat as she went.
She walked as if the multi-million Solar agreement she had just acquired was nothing more than a stray autumn leaf she had picked up on a nostalgic stroll through her old school.
But she didn't just disappear around the corner. At the far end of the hall—spanning the exact distance of their first encounter—Irene stopped.
She turned completely.
Across the quiet expanse of the corridor, her golden eyes found Hathaway's one last time. The gaze of someone who made you feel wholly, dangerously seen.
"In five years," Irene's voice carried down the hall, as gentle and intimate as a shared secret. "I retain the right of first refusal for renewal."
Then, she stepped around the corner and was gone.
Hathaway stood alone in the empty hall.
Patent registration form in her left hand. The black coin in her right.
Dear God, Hathaway thought blankly. That woman just delivered a corporate auto-renewal clause like it was a love letter.
The tragic phantom of Sharon Curie—earnestly asking whether she should lower her own asking price—surfaced in her mind unprompted and would not leave.
Irene had not mentioned Sharon's name once during the entire conversation.
I haven't become the sequel to Sharon Curie, Hathaway informed herself, with the energy of someone delivering a prepared statement under oath. The royalty split is fair. The upfront payment covers the next two years. I just unlocked the hidden item shop. This was a completely symmetrical, mutually beneficial commercial agreement.
Probably.
She looked down at the heavy, twenty-seven-pointed sun resting in her palm.
Her game-designer soul—the cynical architecture that had spent a career building predatory monetization systems for other people—finished compiling the encounter in approximately four seconds.
She hadn't even sold a patent today.
Hathaway slipped the coin into her pocket with a profound, terrifying sense of professional respect, and started walking.
She didn't buy my product. She just successfully acquired me as a high-retention Monthly Active User on a five-year, auto-renewing premium subscription.