[Time]: Summer Break, Day 41 — 1:30 PM
[Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Grand Masters Main Arena · Outer Festival Grounds

---

The afternoon session's broadcast feed stabilized overhead.

Hathaway paused mid-bite, a strip of dragon-meat noodle suspended halfway to her mouth, and looked up at the projected deployment tunnels.

The Greed Umbrella's operational architecture had been immaculately consistent since the regional qualifiers: Cecilia Wellington opened.

The founder swept the board clean of lower-tier threats, conserved her teammates' stamina, and handed the match over exactly when the board demanded it. Every recorded match in the archive confirmed the pattern.

Before the Holheim gate had so much as begun to grind open on the broadcast screen, Mihaye Grün let out a sharp, piercing whistle.

"Here comes our Prima Donna," she announced, leaning forward on her elbows.

Flandmira? Hathaway looked up at the screen.

The iron gate retracted. Stepping into the sunlight was Flandmira. She didn't even bother looking across the field at her opponent.

She simply raised one hand, inspected her manicured nails with the clinical detachment of a jeweler verifying a gemstone's clarity, and waited for the opening fireball.

Hathaway set her chopsticks down.

You only change the Vanguard if the Vanguard is physically compromised, or if you are deliberately obscuring a new strategic pivot. The anomaly filed itself under a red flag. A secondary thought surfaced, quieter, that she immediately wished she hadn't let surface: Or if Cecilia can no longer hold the slot.

She didn't voice either theory. She just watched.

The first two matches were not duels. They were industrial pest control.

Without her legendary [Prism Queen], Flandmira was operating with a sleek secondary crystalline focus. It didn't matter.

She dismantled Paddy's grandmother and the second Sunshine Pals filler with the cold, deliberate efficiency of a conductor who had been handed a particularly uninspiring score and decided to get through it as quickly as possible. Barely a minute of total field time. Flandmira didn't move her feet once.

Above the dome, the terrain roulette spun and locked.
[Selected Terrain: Sector 8 — Ancient Ruins.]

Lily Cable stepped out of the Sunshine Pals gate.

Hathaway sat up straighter.

She had seen the mechanics of Lily's combat system up close at the opening banquet. She knew exactly what to expect from the aggressively toxic, initiative-obsessed mutant tree of [Half-Spells].

Against an artillery turret like Flandmira, who built her lethality through flawless, zero-frame-gap spell-chain orchestration, a dedicated [Half-Spell] user was a structural nightmare. It was the precise tactical equivalent of locking a concert pianist in a phone booth with a very motivated hornet.

It was a war of rhythm against relentless interruption.

Every time Flandmira began to construct her firing sequence, Lily traded payload and range for that deranged, sub-zero-frame cast speed, slamming truncated volleys into the chain and forcing a hard abort. Flandmira's expression rapidly warped from disdainful elegance into cold, icy fury.

Eventually, Flandmira simply stopped retreating. She planted her boots, abandoned the mirror arrays entirely, and drove a point-blank, full-yield [Glacial Tomb] directly into Lily's closing sprint. Lily's final [Half-Spell: Force Lance] crossed the reduced distance in the exact same breath.

Mihaye slammed her hand on the table, radiating satisfaction from every cell. "A perfect curtain call!"

Both resurrection stones shattered simultaneously.

Hathaway quietly consumed another strip of dragon meat.

That woman sounds like a gambler crowing about a lucky number, her processor noted, watching the mutual-destruction replay. But she correctly identified the tactical weight of that trade before the stones even broke. An artillery specialist taking down a hyper-mobile anti-caster at simultaneous elimination is an overwhelmingly positive result for Greed Umbrella.

She considered revising her assessment of the self-described five-year fan.

She filed it as pending.

---

The terrain roulette spun again.

Mihaye poured herself a heavy measure of lemon whiskey, took a long, deliberate pull, and fixed her large burnt-orange eyes on the Holheim gate.

A figure in midnight fabric stepped out.

Mihaye wiped her mouth. "Ah," she muttered, the cheerful energy dropping into something considerably more grounded. "Jackdaw."

Karula.

[Selected Terrain: Sector 5 — Badlands.]

Paddy walked out of the Sunshine Pals gate.

An involuntary shudder crawled down Hathaway's spine. If Karula suffers a spectacular, internationally broadcast social humiliation here, she thought, a deeply petty and entirely involuntary thought, the aesthetic rivalry simply ceases to exist. Whether Bella would consider that a victory or quietly expire of sympathetic horror was genuinely, unknowably unclear.

Paddy was recognized across the Inner Sea as a 'Champion of the Age', a title most Witches in the world would sooner eat their own staff than say to her face. She was someone who had simply never been informed that the concepts of fear or unfavorable odds applied to her specifically.

The countdown sphere shattered against the baked clay.

Karula stood her ground, hands moving in a fluid, breathtaking blur.

[Mantle of the Iron Mind]. [Aegis of Dignity]. [Truth Visor]. [Anti-Scrying Anchor]. [Hex Reflection].

Paddy grinned, her red-and-black Plumed Dragon wings flaring wide, and began casting something of her own. The casting sequence was measured. Hathaway registered it and moved on. Karula's defensive artistry held her attention.

The buff locked. The blood-and-obsidian of Paddy's horns and tail bleached out to a flat, dead grey.

She walked forward.

Karula's opening volleys hit cleanly. Paddy absorbed them without breaking stride. Hathaway watched and felt the first prickle of wrongness: the math wasn't resolving the way it should. The payloads were landing. Paddy didn't flinch.

What followed was twenty minutes of systematic psychological terrorism.

Paddy strolled through Karula's zoning perimeter, dismantling every repositioning attempt with fresh, creative hexwork. Hallucinogenic spore clouds calibrated to induce a specific, deeply personal variety of existential embarrassment.

Fabricated gossip about Karula's private life screamed at broadcast volume across the stadium's acoustic arrays. A modified [Storm of Inconsolable Loneliness] looped directly into her line of sight.

Every time Karula pulled back to rebuild her fighting form, Paddy threw something so uniquely, personally humiliating that Karula burned the next casting window on a bespoke counter-ward instead of a firing sequence.

Hathaway watched the fourth retreat and felt something she couldn't immediately name: the uncomfortable sensation of watching a machine perform flawlessly while the numbers somehow still went the wrong way.

The moment arrived in the twenty-first minute.

Karula committed one fraction of a second too long to a localized [Silence Ward] to block an aggressively broadcast, stadium-sized illusion involving six scoops of bright yellow pineapple ice cream.

It was a microscopic error in priority.

Paddy didn't miss. She closed the distance in a single explosive sprint. What followed was clean, brutally efficient, and deleted Karula's remaining health bar in three devastating frames.

[Match Complete. Winner: Paddy (Sunshine Pals).]

Mihaye bared her teeth and slammed both hands on the table hard enough to send the soup pots clattering.

"Abyss take her!" She glared at the screen with the furious, agonizing frustration of someone watching an entirely avoidable disaster unfold in slow motion. "Karula, you absolute idiot. Why are you raising an [Aegis of Dignity] the second the opening fireball lands?! Just attack!"

"What's wrong with mental shielding?" Hathaway argued, frowning. "Against Paddy, if you don't establish a psychological perimeter on the opening frame, she bypasses your health bar entirely! She forces you to sob uncontrollably on international television while wearing imaginary polka-dot underwear and broadcasting your diary to four hundred million people! You have to shield!"

Mihaye whipped her head around.

The drunk-gambler persona evaporated in a single frame. The eyes looking back were sharp, cold, and carrying the specific weight of someone who had heard this exact incorrect argument approximately ten thousand times and had run out of patience for it somewhere around the eight thousandth.

"It looks justified," Mihaye said, her voice dropping into a razor-edged lecture. "Because her casting speed is so fast she barely wastes a breath rendering the mental wards, and her mana reserves are so deep her margin for error is astronomical. But that entire defensive sequence has one purpose."

She said it flatly.

"Showing off."

Hathaway frowned. "How does casting a mathematically necessary survival ward qualify as 'showing off'? And even if it is, if her goal is just to flex her stats and win beautifully, why not open with a speed-rush? You just called Lin Zhaojun's hyper-aggression 'pure cinema.'

"If Karula actually has the physical speed to blitz Paddy on frame one, executing Paddy in six seconds is the ultimate flex. Why deliberately choose to stand there and play slow?"

"Because Lin's speed is fundamentally uncomfortable," Mihaye shot back, leaning across the table. "Look at how Lin plays. High-speed mobility. Relentless repositioning. Her entire doctrine is built on disrupting the enemy's casting, completely ignoring her own comfort just to ensure the opponent suffers. It's a sweaty, frantic, knife-fight paradigm.

"Karula's aesthetic demands that she remains comfortable. Do you know why the old static bombardment doctrine was so universally beloved by Witches before Lin broke the meta? Because standing perfectly still, raising a pristine shield, and gracefully exchanging heavy artillery is elegant. It is the pinnacle of aristocratic comfort.

"But it's a dead tactical paradigm. Because Witches are glass cannons. High lethality. Pathetic durability. The moment someone like Paddy ignores martial etiquette, raising a shield surrenders the tempo and makes you look like a clown. Karula handed Paddy a free casting window, and Paddy used it to complete the [Plumed Dragon's Banquet].

"One of the Plumed Dragon bloodline's premier combat enhancements, feeding on every strike that connects and converting incoming damage directly into vitality and territorial dominance. She made herself unkillable. Without paying a single drop of blood for it."

"But she still lost," Hathaway said. "Taking a brutal, humiliating loss against Paddy is the exact opposite of aesthetic perfection."

"Of course it is, because losing is never pretty!" Mihaye scoffed, falling back in her chair. "But you're looking at the failure. Look at the intended success. Think about how Karula played against Nino in the group stage. Both of them using theoretically viable but practically idiotic, high-risk tactics. Karula had a dozen safer, faster ways to resolve that match. But what did she do?"

A beat.

"She stood her ground, popped her [True Mana Form], and crushed Nino with overwhelming, static superiority. The risk she took in that match was mathematically unjustifiable. But she chose the highest-risk, most inefficient, most arrogant path available because when it works? When you put down an Arch-Witch contender without moving your feet? You look like an absolute, untouchable sovereign."

Another beat.

"She plays the most dangerous, comfortable paradigm possible because it is the ultimate flex. And today, the math caught up with her."

Hathaway sat in silence.

The developer brain ran the alternative timeline: Karula opens with raw offensive fire. Paddy is immediately forced into evasion. The buff never compiles. The psychological payloads never render. The tactical geography inverts completely.

She's right.

Karula was a physiological speed-demon who had deliberately nerfed her own tactical pressure and surrendered the tempo to a scam artist, because effortless, static grace was worth the gamble.

---

Above the dome, the roulette spun and locked.
[Selected Terrain: Sector 6 — Primeval Jungle.]

Wei Changqing stepped out of the Holheim gate.

The captain walked into the suffocating ancient canopy with the unhurried bearing of someone who had arrived precisely when she intended to, and had no further schedule.

No preamble. No posturing. The moment the opening fireball hit the earth, Wei's staff was already moving, and the jungle floor responded.

Hundreds of razor-sharp amber crystals erupted from the soil in a single, simultaneous burst, converging on Paddy from every angle.

She is playing aggressive? Hathaway sat up. She's taking the initiative?

Paddy didn't flinch. A pulse of raw mana blasted outward and shattered the amber spikes into harmless, glittering dust before they reached her boots.

Her hands blurred into a familiar, toxic weave.

The air around Wei Changqing violently warped. A stadium-wide fabrication rendered itself in blinding neon-pink above the jungle canopy: a customized, meticulously humiliating broadcast of Wei's supposed inner life, screamed at full acoustic volume directly into four hundred million pairs of ears.

It was the exact same psychological architecture that had consumed twenty-one minutes of Karula's casting cycles.

[Aegis of Dignity]? Hathaway's tactical processor automatically queued the expected response. Counter-ward. Silence perimeter. Something.

Wei Changqing's gentle smile remained undisturbed. She pushed her staff straight through the hologram's blazing neon face and completed her offensive sequence without dropping a single microsecond of execution speed.

Karula burned a casting window to protect her dignity. Wei Changqing simply left her dignity in the locker room.

Across the jungle, Paddy's hands snapped shut. She aborted her active hexes, shattering the illusions to reclaim the invested mana without a moment of wasted sentimentality.

One read. Immediate pivot.
No vanity metric to exploit, Hathaway read from the stillness. Paddy's red-and-black wings flared wide.

You want to trade raw stats? her stance screamed across the arena. Fine. I'll just hit harder.

She pushed forward. A hurricane of unadulterated violence.

Paddy escalated the board state in a single breath. A pillar of black lightning tore through the canopy. Gravity distortions bloomed in the mid-air space around Wei: a micro-black hole that ripped ancient trees out by their roots and folded the skyline into a geometry without a name.

Behind it came something quieter and considerably more dangerous, a concept-level working with no visual signature, only the particular stillness of a spell intended to rearrange a fundamental truth of its target's existence.

Wei Changqing dismantled the onslaught like an administrative inconvenience.

She tilted her head by a fraction of a degree, letting the black lightning shear the air a millimeter from her ear. A basic [Phase Step] slid her hitbox out of the gravity well's event horizon a breath before it collapsed. A low-tier [Vector Shift] vaulted her clear of the concept-curse's path with the frictionless ease of someone stepping over a puddle.

But every time she executed a clean, low-tier evasion, the air shimmered. Without Wei lifting a finger or opening a casting window, something small came back the other way. A [Wind Blade]. A [Binding Root]. A compressed kinetic burst.

None of them individually significant. All of them absolutely free.

Paddy grinned, her APM skyrocketing. She drove her heel into the jungle floor and flooded the roots with raw mana. The primeval forest violently corrupted under the surge, ancient roots and building-thick vines braiding upward into a colossal arboreal giant. The wooden titan swung a fist the size of a townhouse directly at Wei's flank.

Wei executed a [Feather Fall], riding the kinetic shockwave of the missed punch backward. Three retaliatory force-darts materialized from the ether and drilled into Paddy's shoulder.

Hathaway watched, her developer brain tracking the action-economy differential beneath the spectacular surface.

She had seen this exact loop on the qualifier tapes. Watching it run against an Arch-Witch candidate had been unsettling enough. Watching it run against the Champion of the Age was a different scale of problem entirely.

Paddy was fighting back brilliantly. That was the trap.

Wei isn't fighting back, Hathaway's tactical processor noted, something cold settling in her chest. She's banking the latency. The harder Paddy pushes, the faster the feedback loop tightens.

The only exit was to stop attacking. Paddy had not been built with a stop-attacking mode. She canceled her own recovery frames with residual mana, chaining onslaught after onslaught, feeding the engine that was currently starving her.

The scales tipped in the fourth minute.

Caught in the suffocating momentum of her own unrelenting offensive pressure, Paddy's action economy finally over-extended. Her casting windows shrank to zero.

Wei Changqing's eyes caught the gap.

She stopped retreating. For the first time in the match, she simply stood still, and cashed in the spell-differential lead she had been building since the opening fireball.

Just primitive, violent conjuration. Physical compression.

It looked like the atmospheric pressure of the entire jungle had decided to convert itself into solid lead.

[Crushing Wave].

The jungle floor cracked outward in a perfect ring. Paddy's resurrection stone shattered before she hit the ground.

[Match Complete. Winner: Wei Changqing (Greed Umbrella).]

Mihaye let out a long, heavy exhale. Her shoulders dropped. She sagged into her patio chair with the profound, familial relief of someone watching a catastrophe not happen.

"As expected," Mihaye muttered, grabbing her glass. "At the critical moment, you still have to rely on The Boss. Without her, those two idiots who can't handle their own basic life functions wouldn't know what to do with themselves."

Hathaway looked at the lava cake on her plate, cold and untouched since the Karula match.

She looked at the five-meter-tall Greater Explorer Cat snoring peacefully on the cobblestones, Victoria's small cow-spotted cat tucked safely under its enormous luminous chin, its comically tiny feathered wings folded in complete, boneless contentment.

She looked at the woman across from her, the one with the burnt-orange eyes, who had just delivered a cold biomechanical deconstruction of a world-tier apex predator's psychological architecture while nursing a glass of lemon whiskey in a festival food stall.

Hathaway set her fork down.

"Excuse me," she said. The polite conversational NPC protocol had officially been uninstalled. "Who are you, exactly?"

Mihaye looked up. She blinked, her expression carrying the genuine, casual surprise of someone who had just been asked to confirm the color of the sky.

"Oh," Mihaye said, swirling the remaining amber in her glass. "I spent three months in Minothnago a few years ago. Back when they were still just the academy school team."

She knocked the glass back.

"I was their interim coach."

Hathaway's processing core froze, then spiked to maximum RPM.

Interim coach of Minothnago.

The entire afternoon abruptly inverted itself, the context violently retrofitting every single sentence Mihaye had spoken over the last hour. The degenerate gambler persona wasn't camouflage for a wealthy academic; it was camouflage for a foundational tactical architect.

The 'five-year veteran fan' claim wasn't a mathematical error or a delusion. It was a literal timeline of her tenure.

The intelligence value of this lunch had just skyrocketed from 'interesting NPC encounter' to 'S-Tier Espionage Asset.' If she navigated this correctly, she could ask about the team's deepest structural dependencies. She could ask about Cecilia's psychological baseline. She could—

A dozen critical tactical queries assembled on her tongue.

Across the table, Mihaye was already leaning forward, her large burnt-orange eyes snapping back to the broadcast monitor with the focused intensity of a gambler watching the gates open for the final, highest-stakes race of the day.

"Now shush," she said, waving a dismissive hand without breaking her gaze from the screen. "The warm-up acts are officially over. The genuinely catastrophic half of the feathered biohazard is stepping up to the plate."