Chương 228: Chapter 207: The Front-End Carries the Sales

[Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 6 — 1: 00 PM [Location]: Yggdrasil Academy · Dormitory [Golden Bough] · Room 302 For the first time in six days the timetable ran out of lecture halls to march her into, handed Hathaway an entire unallocated afternoon, and stepped politely back. She carried the gift upstairs and voluntarily surrendered every minute of it to homework, with the bright enthusiasm of a woman signing her own committal papers. Emilia Lucas's assignment sat in the center of the desk, radiating quiet malice.

The refractive index of a water medium under spatial conduction was not, strictly speaking, a mathematics problem. It was a hostage negotiation conducted entirely in bad faith, and the hostage kept changing shape. Hathaway balanced the Void drag coefficient against the static capacity of a liquid surface, lost it, rebuilt it, lost it again, and somewhere in the second hour discovered the specific horror of the thing. It ate everything. The thread that normally ran her dinner logistics went dark.

The thread that filed live production reviews of her own life went dark. The thread that spent its days happily broadcasting Victoria's eyebrow movements to an audience of one shut down mid-sentence and got conscripted into holding a four-dimensional coordinate array steady, and Hathaway sat there in her own skull with the lights off in every room but the workshop, alone with a number. This is what mortals experience continuously, she thought, with genuine anthropological pity. One channel. No commentary track.

The final integer dropped into place at ten past three. The containment loop closed. Hathaway put down her quill, tipped her head back against the chair, and exhaled the long shuddering sigh of a hostage released at the border. Task cleared. The dongle logic compiles. Her spectator threads came back online one at a time, blinking, faintly resentful. Never again without hazard pay. She pushed the parchment away and pulled her Evocation notes across, and her entire nervous system perked up like a dog hearing a leash.

Compiling the theory of [Clarissa's Annihilation Crucible] cost her three hours, and every step ran downhill. She lit the auxiliary crucible on her workbench and began boiling a Tier-6 architecture down into something a throat could accept.

The reagents went in behind Clarissa's transcribed model in the order the annotations demanded: crushed fire-agate and powdered caldera ruby for the mineral bed, a paring of Skyfriend Wyrm heart-muscle for the beast substrate, dried ember-lotus to carry the flame, Clarissa's proprietary catalyst counted out grain by grain, and last a single drop of neutralizer to keep the volatile mess from detonating on the bench before it was ready.

The first batch destabilized a degree and a half outside the window and seized into a block of inert grey ash that smelled powerfully of burnt hair. She scraped it out, recalibrated, and ran it again. The second batch settled into a vial of incandescent crimson that moved like bottled magma and appeared to hold a personal grudge against the sunlight coming through her window.

Clarissa's final annotation was a ritual, block-printed in the same cheerful hand: destroy something real, and do not lift the vial until the hunger is fed. Hathaway's eye went around and stopped on the snow globe on her shelf. Margaret's birthday sphere, a little under a million mortals farming grain beneath a sky she held the license to edit.

She set it on the desk, picked out a city on the coast, and flicked a cantrip at it, a gesture that would have misted a houseplant out here and fell inside the glass as a wall of black water forty stories high. The tide took the city in one breath, and a city's worth of screaming came up thin and real through the curved glass, the way a simulation's little people cry out if you lean in close, except these meant it.

Behind her sternum the old warmth from the black rose's rootbed woke and fed on the sound, and she left the rest of the continent standing. A thing this good was not to be spent all at once. By the time she was done, the potion had cooled to a tolerable sear. She tipped her head back and drank it in one continuous motion. It burned the whole way down.

The instant it landed, the spell model unpacked itself out of the liquid and etched into her spine, threading execution parameters into her reflex arc in a hot bright cascade that made her grip the edge of the bench. Installation complete. Hathaway sat still, and a slow, disreputable warmth spread through her chest. She was now carrying a localized apocalypse. It was seated in the chamber. Her fingers had developed an itch with a heartbeat of its own. The academy range would not do.

Live targets give better diagnostic feedback, her developer brain offered, with the professional calm of a QA lead scoping a test plan. The hunger she had just fed on a drowning city had come back bigger. It wanted the real thing, full-scale, close enough to feel the heat come off it. She added aggravated extradimensional arson to the list, and by the time she looked up the window had gone dark.

[Time]: 8: 15 PM Down in the dining hall, Hathaway chewed each mouthful of roasted dragon cutlet with the deliberation of a sommelier, opened and prosecuted a full internal debate on the correct pepper-to-salt ratio, went back for a second helping she did not want, and successfully deferred her cognitive responsibilities for ninety-five minutes. Then the plates were cleared and the tea went cold and there was nothing left between her and Room 302 but a staircase.

She sat down at her desk and looked at a blank sheet of parchment. Heidi's assignment. She had inspiration the way a foreclosed house has copper piping. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. The mail saved her.

In the corner of the desk sat a slim parcel in crushed black velvet, delivered days ago and never opened: the pipe she had ordered on the spot earlier that week, the night Spectra produced a silver-banded one over dinner and calmly ruined Hathaway's financial discipline. Inside sat the pipe itself, briarwood stem, silver bands, and a row of five sealed vials in five different colors, because the vapor composition was fully customizable and Hathaway had never in her life bought only one of something.

She skipped Spectra's sugarcane and loaded the bruised amethyst one. Vintage Fruit Wine Extract. She tapped the rim. Cool dense mist rolled off the mouthpiece, carrying crushed berries and aged oak and the back end of a late-summer orchard. She drew it in, held it, and let a slow violet ribbon out across the desk. Then she turned her chair toward the dark window to check the results. The reflection was extremely good. Violet fog curling at the collar. Silver bands catching the lumen-globe.

Her eyes looking back out of the glass, dark and matte and absorbing the room. Impeccable, her inner art director reported. Tragic genius. Fully operational. She took another drag, and another. After ten minutes the ambient temperature of her brain had risen several degrees. A warm fuzzy static settled over every sharp edge of her anxiety. And somewhere in the pleasant haze, a thread that was supposed to be off duty raised its hand and pointed out something obvious. The pipe did nothing.

It conferred no buff, blocked no damage, and improved no stat. It was a cosmetic item she had paid a genuinely stupid amount of money for, and it was, at this exact moment, working flawlessly. She had been sitting here for a quarter of an hour being visibly cooler at an empty room. Hathaway sat bolt upright, and the pipe fell out of her mouth. I am a genius. The logic arrived all at once with the terrible clarity available only to the recently intoxicated. Heidi wanted Evocation married to Illusion.

Hathaway was, in the Illusion school, structurally garbage. Fine. Accepted. But who said the Illusion had to carry anything? Make it a skin. Her developer brain slammed headlong into her otaku muscle memory and the two of them agreed instantly. How did light novels move millions of units? You bought the illustrations and the publisher threw in the text for free as packing material. How did otome games survive combat systems that belonged in a landfill?

The art department strapped the entire studio to its back and walked it to the bank. Nobody in the history of the industry had ever refunded a game because the sword swing was too beautiful. The front-end carries the sales. Take a real Evocation payload, something with actual lethality bolted through the middle of it. Wrap it in an Illusion shell with zero tactical contribution whatsoever, tuned exclusively to look catastrophic. It satisfied the technical definition of a composite spell.

The core did the killing and the skin did the intimidation, and intimidation was a legitimate crowd-control mechanic, thank you very much. What if some idiot on a battlefield saw the visual and burned a premium defensive cooldown bracing for a forbidden curse? That was value. That was tactical value. The dam went out.

Hathaway seized her quill, dragged the parchment into the light, and attacked it, riding a torrential wave of fruit-wine vapor and unearned certainty, slashing bold decisive lines across the page without pausing once to check a single piece of runic geometry. She dropped the quill. Laughed, breathless and triumphant, at nobody. Made it two unsteady steps toward the mattress and went into it face first, unconscious before her boots had finished moving.

[Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 7 — 4: 00 AM Hathaway's eyes snapped open in the dark. Her mouth tasted of stale sugar and poor judgment. She lay there for one horrible suspended second while her memory buffered, and then it delivered. The blueprint. She came off the bed in a tangle, hit the floorboards on both palms, crossed the room in a crawl she would deny under oath, and hauled herself up by the edge of the desk. The lumen-globe flared. The parchment was there. Covered in ink.

She sagged against the chair, weak with relief. Thank Ovelia. Every developer alive knew the specific terror of dreaming you shipped the feature. I actually wrote the code. She pulled the chair out, sat down, wiped the sleep out of her eyes, and leaned in to admire the work of her intoxicated subconscious. At the center of the page ran a thick, confident straight line exactly thirty centimeters long. Annotation: [central connecting pipe]. At each end sat a node, a circle on the left and a square on the right.

Over the left, a large and aggressively confident arrow: [Here, Evocation node]. Over the right, its identical twin: [Here, Illusion node]. That was the part a child could have followed. The rest was the problem. Both nodes were packed to the rim with dense runic geometry, and the margins had gone feral with half-finished conversion math and mana ratios. Hathaway propped her chin on her hand and nodded.

"Hah," she murmured.

"As expected of me." She kept looking at it.

"I have no idea what any of this means. This is completely incomprehensible." The silence in Room 302 took on weight and settled. A gentle and exceptionally elegant smile spread across Hathaway's face. The light went out of her eyes, leaving her looking like a very well-dressed corpse someone had propped at a desk.

"It's just a pile of trash," she said, in the soft, kindly cadence of a nurse consoling a dying patient.

"And the way I treat trash is..." Her dead gaze drifted, slow and mechanical, toward the modernized arcane fireplace in the corner. She shuddered violently, and the trance broke.

"No. Absolutely not. I am not writing it again from scratch." She slapped both cheeks hard enough to sting.

"Right! Today's objective! Decryption!" She poured a cup of cold water, drank it in one shot, and set about reverse-engineering a stranger. It took forty minutes all told. Node by node, the drunk woman's intent slowly compiled. It was a solar eclipse. The Evocation core was a localized deprivation matrix, a brute-force vacuum that stripped light and heat out of a defined volume and left a hole in the afternoon.

And the Illusion shell bolted onto the front of it was programmed to paint a black sun in the sky above the target, ringed in a slow erupting corona of dark flame. Underlined twice in the margin, in her own sprawling hand: Must read as a majestic astronomical event. MUST NOT render as a generic black hole. Needs drama. Hathaway stared at her own instructions. Fifty percent of the projected mana expenditure was allocated to visual effects.

Nobody writes this code, she thought, the blood going out of her face, unless they are running terminal Chuunibyou. And then the second half arrived and sat down on her chest. What she had was a concept sketch, and a concept sketch was as far as she got on her own.

Making it real meant hauling her drunken dark history out of this room, laying it in front of the senior monsters in her directory, and formally requesting their expert assistance in gilding this particular turd and refining her brand-new edgelord worldview. Bella most of all. She was going to have to ask her cousin, out loud, with her own face, for technical consultation on how to make the dark flames look more menacing. Bella was going to love it. Bella was going to love it forever.

I designed an eclipse motif while intoxicated. Hathaway pressed both palms into her eyes. Months of that woman's branding breached my blood-brain barrier. She slid down until her spine had given up on the chair and her arms hung off the armrests, and informed the ceiling that the correct response was to go back to sleep. The ceiling did not argue. Neither, unfortunately, did the parchment. Fine. If the metrics are good, you ship the feature you're ashamed of.

Outside the window the sky over Yggdrasil had begun to go grey, and Hathaway von Ludwig sat in a pool of amber light at four in the morning with a finished diagram and a directory full of terrifying women who would absolutely never let her live any of this down.