[Time]: Day 33, Thursday, 09:30 AM

  [Location]: Dormitory [Golden Bough] · Room 302

  The morning sun filtered through the curtains, illuminating a dining table groaning under the weight of two entirely different philosophies of existence.

  Hathaway sat on her side, facing a mountain.

  It was a massive bowl of [Dragon-Fire BBQ Rice]. Thick slices of medium-rare Fire-Drake beef and slabs of glazed pork belly, trembling with savory fat, were layered over steaming Spirit Rice. The whole thing was drenched in a dark "Secret Witch Sauce" and topped with a poached egg.

  To her right awaited a stack of Cream Puffs and Honey-Glazed Donuts as a "light" dessert.

  Hathaway was in heaven. She shoveled the rice and meat into her mouth. The flavor exploded, and the dense mana instantly replenished the massive reserves she'd burned during yesterday's endless marathon of errands.

  Delicious. But I have to eat fast.

  Across the table, Victoria Wellington was engaged in a very different dining ritual. She wasn't just eating; she was attempting to physically consume a book.

  Before her stood a silver stand holding an array of Stardust Macarons. But Victoria's attention was locked on the open copy of Deadlock Analysis.

  With only two and a half hours left on her loan, she’d already transcribed every word of Heidi Lucent’s margin notes into her grimoire by 4:00 AM. But mere copying wasn't enough.

  Victoria's unfocused blue eyes were locked onto page 214. Her slender fingers traced a fresh line of bold, aggressive red ink. Here, Heidi had completely crossed out a dense paragraph of Nino's defensive structural theory, replacing the entire labyrinth of logic with a single, brutally elegant formula.

  Even from across the table, Hathaway's overpowered senses picked up on it.

  Heidi's handwriting wasn't just ink; it radiated a trace of residual mana. To Hathaway, it felt cold and clear as moonlight, yet breathtakingly sharp, slashing through Nino's over-engineered equations like a silver blade. Watching her roommate's reverent tracing, Hathaway genuinely felt Victoria was trying to absorb the 10th Seat's essence directly through her fingertips.

  "Scenario 4," Victoria’s voice was crisp, her fingers never stopping.

  Hathaway froze, a piece of pork belly halfway to her mouth. The promised pop quiz.

  "Mmph?" (Yes?)

  "You are refining a standard Ether Node. You accidentally apply a 4000Hz acoustic resonance. The node begins to vibrate. What do you do?"

  Hathaway frantically swallowed, her gamer brain scrambling from 'Food Mode' to 'Academic Survival Mode'. "Uh... I cast a cooling spell? To stop the thermal expansion?"

  Clink.

  Victoria placed her teacup down. In the quiet room, it sounded exactly like a guillotine blade dropping.

  "Congratulations," Victoria smiled sweetly—the kind of smile a coroner gives an exceptionally interesting corpse. "You just turned your right hand into glass dust."

  Hathaway choked on her rice, staring at her hand in absolute horror. "Wait... glass? Why?!"

  "Thermal expansion is the symptom at 1000Hz," Victoria explained effortlessly, leaning forward to trace another moon-cold equation. "At 4000Hz, the Ether structure undergoes Fractal Shattering. If you apply cold, you trigger a thermal shock that detonates the crystal instantly."

  Victoria pointed her silver fork precisely at Hathaway's chest. "The correct answer is to Cut the Mana Supply and Run."

  "Oh." Hathaway shivered, mentally deleting the cooling spell from her imaginary hotbar. "Right. Cut supply. Run. Got it."

  "Eat your donuts," Victoria commanded, finally turning a page with surgical care. "You still have to cram three chapters of Fluid Dynamics before our two o'clock shift. Cognitive overdrive burns a ridiculous amount of calories. If your brain starves and you faint on Nino's floor this afternoon, I'll leave you there. I refuse to carry a heavy person."

  "I'm not heavy!" Hathaway protested indignantly, instantly shoving an entire cream puff into her mouth to cope with the stress. "It's all muscle density!"

  [Time]: 02:00 PM

  [Location]: High-Altitude Research District · Corridor Outside Lab 606

  The three rune barriers guarding Laboratory 606 were nothing short of paranoid.

  The first two swept for bio-hazards. The third literally scanned the shape of your soul—the ultimate, unhackable, anti-account-theft biometric lock.

  Hold still, Hathaway reminded herself as an icy mana pulse washed over her.

  Chime. A soft green light bathed the corridor.

  Hathaway let out a slow, deeply satisfied exhale.

  Account Ownership Officially Transferred, her gamer-brain noted.

  She hadn't hacked the system. Magical laws didn't glitch. The barrier had looked directly into the absolute core of her soul and recognized the truth. The exhausted corporate drone from Earth was gone.

  She was a Witch. She was Hathaway von Ludwig. She was Margaret and Anna's daughter.

  The universe had officially stamped her paperwork.

  The heavy brass doors hissed apart.

  "Ludwig—northeast and southeast waste valves. Wellington—northern cluster is drifting three percent. Fix it."

  No "good afternoon." Nino Lucent stood before a massive diagnostic array, sipping premium coffee. Having outsourced the soul-crushing manual labor, her aristocratic elegance had fully returned. She just looked deeply, personally offended that the universe dared to be three percent off her calculations.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Behind her, the 'Leviathan' hung suspended in a zero-gravity void, its brass hull frosted white with a thick layer of Aether Residue from last night's dream cycle.

  Victoria sat at the calculation terminal with perfect posture and began typing. Hathaway clipped a collection bag to her belt and kicked off the platform into the void.

  [Time]: 02:30 PM

  Cleaning a town-sized interdimensional engine with a cantrip designed to stir teacups was a highly refined form of psychological torture.

  Pop. [Mage Hand] materialized—a translucent little hand with the polite dexterity of a librarian, currently being forced into heavy industrial labor.

  Scratch. One tiny flake of Residue drifted into her bag.

  Hathaway's brain—honed by years of designing mobile game reward curves—crunched the numbers. Throughput: 0.3 square meters per minute. Total remaining surface: 1,200 square meters.

  Estimated completion time: Four agonizing hours.

  I have 42,000 M-Units and four parallel cognitive threads, Hathaway thought, staring dead-eyed at the glowing hand. Could I use my three idle threads to optimize the pathing and cut this shift down to two hours? Yes. Will I? Absolutely not.

  Nino was paying a flat piece-rate of 1,500 Solars. She was ruthlessly results-oriented. But micro-managing a Tier 0 cantrip across a town-sized reactor would be a sweaty, high-APM nightmare. A true Witch doesn't optimize her sweat to overcome a garbage tool; she buys a better tool and spends her freed hours petting Lantern Cats.

  So, Hathaway accepted the low-effort AFK grind.

  Thread 1 managed the teacup spell. Thread 2 monitored the boss. Thread 3 actively ran background simulations of 'The Fluid Dynamics of Mana' for Nino's upcoming pop quiz.

  Wait, Hathaway realized with mild horror. Work. Surveillance. Coursework. I am dedicating exactly 75% of my total cognitive capacity to Nino Lucent. Yesterday I called her a terrifying mastermind. Today I'm voluntarily running her errands on three threads like a domesticated background process. I didn't even negotiate the terms.

  To preserve her sanity, she dedicated her final thread entirely to Premium Entertainment.

  Yesterday’s relentless marathon had left her drained. Knowing a brutal night of textbook cramming awaited, she’d ducked into a student lounge, discovering a shelf of Witch Manga. Free manga.

  Lacking the time to lounge, she simply 'downloaded' the fifty volumes into her eidetic memory like compressed zip files. Now, floating in the void, she casually unzipped them.

  Witch manga was a revelation. No pretentious moral lessons. Just pure, unadulterated revenge. Hathaway was happily replaying Volume 27 of The Prince Who Surrendered His Manhood to the Witch Conversion Ritual Just to Nuke His Brother's Kingdom.

  Trashy, violent, and an absolute masterpiece, Hathaway mused.

  Scratch.

  "Ludwig." Nino didn't look up. "Your output is 0.31 square meters per minute. Yesterday it was 0.34."

  She actually has a spreadsheet, Hathaway rolled her eyes. The woman who calculated a political checkmate in three seconds is, naturally, tracking my tea-stirring output to the second decimal. The mastermind surveillance is too real.

  "Residue density is fourteen percent higher today," Hathaway called back, mentally turning to page 45. "And I'm scraping a Leviathan with a spell designed to stir tea, Professor."

  Nino finally took a sip of her coffee, her tone dripping with the casual bafflement of a natural-born genius. "I wrote the dream cycle, Ludwig. I am aware. What I fail to understand is why you haven't simply adjusted your geometric pathing. Are you not using a secondary cognitive thread to map the micro-fractures?"

  Hathaway didn't even pause her manga. Thread 4 kept rendering the explosive revenge plot flawlessly while Thread 2 handled the incredulity. "...Excuse me?"

  "It's a Tier 0 cantrip," Nino sighed, disappointed by the inherent limitations of 'the student' species. "Recalibrating its trajectory takes, what, twenty percent of a single cognitive thread? It's a trivial background reflex. What exactly are you doing with your other three threads?"

  Hathaway opened her mouth to formulate an excuse, but Nino wasn't seeking an answer; she was stating a baseline.

  "The tool is appropriate for the task," Nino continued smoothly. "If you wish to dedicate three and a half threads to whatever leisure activities you are currently projecting into your visual cortex, that is your prerogative. But I expect the baseline algorithmic overlay to be maintained effortlessly. Read the manual."

  Hathaway felt a vein throb in her forehead.

  Three and a half threads to leisure?! Her blood pressure instantly spiked. I am dedicating seventy-five percent of my CPU to YOU, you over-engineered monster! I'm scraping your ship, monitoring your mood, and cramming for your quiz, and you seriously think all of that combined only takes half a thread?!

  Wait, her gamer brain translated the sheer disconnect between their worldviews. She actually does think that. Because she’s an absolute academic masochist.

  Nino was the arcane equivalent of a math professor insisting on doing advanced calculus by hand. Seeing a basic cantrip, she naturally assumed the correct solution was for Hathaway to just think harder—to manually calculate geometric stress-fractures with raw brainpower.

  Why would I manually calculate optimal aerodynamics when I am literally going to buy a fully automated, Pay-to-Win targeting spell tomorrow?! Hathaway roared internally. I don't want to optimize the suffering! I want to outsource it to better gear!

  The memory of the vandalized textbook flashed in her mind.

  No wonder Heidi slashed through your logic with red ink. 'Building a maze to cross a street.' You equate convenience with negligence. You're physically incapable of taking a shortcut if you can turn it into a grueling, twelve-step mental marathon instead, you brilliant, over-engineered stalker!

  Victoria's typing paused for exactly two keystrokes. The unmistakable pause of a roommate trying very hard not to sigh out loud.

  Scratch.

  "Right away, Professor," Hathaway muttered darkly to her cantrip. "I'll be sure to manually calculate the structural integrity of the trash bag next."

  [Time]: 03:20 PM

  Nino had been arguing with her own diagnostics for twenty minutes.

  "—the cascade threshold is 0.2. Not above it. Not below it. Exactly 0.2," Nino muttered, tapping her mithril pen against the console. "This is the absolute theoretical baseline. Anything less is academic negligence."

  Victoria didn't look up. Her fingers continued flying across the keyboard, her voice holding the uncompromising clarity of a librarian reciting a sacred text.

  "Lady Heidi maintained 0.18 on live tissue transformation under extended field conditions at the White City Diplomatic Gala."

  The tapping stopped. The silence in the zero-gravity chamber suddenly felt extremely heavy.

  "...Live tissue is not crystalline substrate, Wellington," Nino said, her voice dropping an octave, tight and carefully measured. "And 0.18 was an unverified field metric."

  "It was verified by the Authority," Victoria corrected instantly, turning a page without missing a beat. "And it wasn't 0.18 on the full session. It was 0.18 on the structural cellular work. She ran 0.15 on the connective tissue."

  Nino’s knuckles turned entirely white around the pen. "...I know."

  "She was also running a secondary task on the table florals," Victoria added, completely oblivious to her boss's murderous aura. "The Ardennes Frost Roses were wilting. Lady Heidi stabilized the cellular structure of forty-seven stems before the appetizer course."

  High above, Hathaway paused Volume 28.

  The fictional revenge plot in her head had just been completely outclassed by the live-action academic drama below.

  Victoria was still typing, perfectly composed, lost in her reverence for the 10th Seat’s data. This wasn't a rescue mission for a bullied roommate. This was simply a hardcore fan who physically could not tolerate inaccurate stats.

  And Nino looked ready to snap her desk in half. She obviously knew the stats. But hearing a freshman casually weaponize her little sister's flower-arranging routine to completely crush her 'absolute theoretical baseline' was a devastating blow to her pride.

  Holy mana, Hathaway realized, clamping a hand over her mouth to muffle a bark of laughter. What an absolutely flawless, unintentional assist.

  Double critical hit. But unlike Victoria, Hathaway wasn't firing blind. She knew the exact shape of this boss's weak point — it wasn't academic pride, it was a terminal sister-complex the size of a cathedral. Victoria had stumbled into the damage zone by accident. Hathaway was going in with the exploit guide.

  Floating in the void, Hathaway cleared her throat, preparing to launch a perfectly calculated verbal strike.