[Location]: Yggdrasil Academy · Lecture Hall 7
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
The only sound in the lecture hall was the frantic scratching of three thousand quills on parchment.
Nino Lucent had left at 08:12 AM. But no one moved. No one spoke. No one attacked. Because on the massive blackboard behind the podium, the "Fluid Dynamics of Mana" formulas were glowing with a terrifying complexity.
In Yggdrasil, Knowledge is Power. To interrupt a Witch while she is transcribing a spell formula is a graver insult than slapping her face.
So, for thirteen agonizing minutes, there was a Ceasefire.
To Hathaway's left, the Balor Witch was copying the board with terrifying speed, her obsidian hand moving like a printer, the heat from her body perfectly restrained internally to avoid burning her own homework.
To her right, the Ghost Witch was phasing her quill through the air, recording the data directly into a spirit-crystal. The invasive Ethereal gaze from earlier was flawlessly retracted.
When Hathaway's mana wall had pushed back, the Ghost had simply blinked, registered the physical boundary, and smoothly redirected her terrifying, hyper-focused curiosity to the professor's equations. She needed to rein in the entropy, or else her own spirit-crystal would shatter from the absolute zero.
They are civilized monsters, Hathaway thought, her own hand aching as she copied the final rune. They will let me learn. They will let me finish my sentence. But the moment I put this pen down...
She knew exactly what to expect from the Left. The Balor would immediately reignite her scorching turf war to salvage her wounded pride.
But the Right side was... strange.
She could practically feel the Ghost Witch's peripheral vision lingering on her. But the texture of that gaze had changed.
It no longer felt like the chilling, invasive glare of a coroner preparing for a live autopsy. The raw, terrifying hunger to "dissect the anomaly" was gone, suppressed the moment Hathaway had slammed her mana on the table and established a social boundary.
Instead, the gaze felt heavy. Deliberate. Calculating.
It was the look of a high-end Casendiaran banker silently evaluating the exact market value of a very rare, very volatile asset.
What is she plotting? Hathaway wondered, keeping her eyes strictly fixed on the blackboard, her intuition prickling. She's not looking at me like a target anymore. She's looking at me like an opportunity.
She wrote down the final variable.
[ΔP = -ρgΔh]
She capped her ink bottle.
Click.
The sound was soft, but in the silent hall, it sounded like a starting pistol.
Instantly, the scratching sounds on her left and right stopped.
The "Academic Phase" was over.
The "Social Phase" had begun.
"Let's go."
Victoria stood up first. She had finished five minutes ago and was waiting, cleaning her Wellington-engraved calibration tools with fluid precision. She glanced at Hathaway, her blue eyes holding a complex mix of warning and amusement.
"Move fast, Ludwig. The truce is expired."
Hathaway grabbed her bag, her knuckles white. She tried to stand, but the air in front of her suddenly rippled.
A suffocating heat wave slammed into the space before her, distorting the light and turning the aisle into a shimmering, impressionist painting of danger.
The Balor Witch stood up.
She was tall, easily 190cm, looming over Hathaway like a monolith of obsidian and gold. A polite, aristocratic smile played on her lips, though the warmth completely failed to reach her molten-gold eyes.
"Going somewhere, Assistant?" Her voice was smooth, like honey dripping over hot coals.
With a casual flick of her wrist, the massive, fuzzy red tail wrapped around her waist uncoiled. Instead of striking like a whip, it lazily swept across the air in front of Hathaway's desk.
Whoosh.
A ring of fire didn't just appear; it was constructed.
The flames were strictly disciplined, forming a perfect, geometrical Thermal Pressure Ring. The fire spun in a complex figure-eight pattern, creating a localized high-pressure zone.
It was a "Civilized Barricade." It wouldn't set the classroom ablaze, but if anyone tried to walk through it without a high-level shielding spell, the centrifugal force of the thermal flow would strip their skin off in milliseconds.
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"Since Professor Lucent chose you to handle 'miscellaneous processing,'" the Balor Witch said softly, adjusting the cuffs of her designer combat suit, "surely you can handle a little... excess thermal waste? It's just trash, after all."
She stepped back, crossing her arms.
This was no execution. It was an Entrance Exam.
In Yggdrasil, nepotism might get you in the door, but only sheer capability stops you from being thrown out the window.
Hathaway stood before the ring.
The sheer thermal pressure radiating from the flames slammed into her with the crushing force of a physical blow.
Her eyelashes curled instantly, emitting a faint, acrid smell of burning protein. The moisture on her eyeballs evaporated in seconds, forcing her to blink rapidly, but every blink felt like sandpaper rubbing against her corneas.
A drop of sweat rolled down her temple, but before it could reach her cheekbone, it sizzled and vanished into steam.
Tssst.
The sound was tiny, yet terrifying.
Hathaway’s eyes scanned the flames, her internal combat logic spinning at overdrive speed. She didn't need to recall the Balor's racial stats. She could feel the "Tier 8 Authority" burning her skin.
She is compressing the thermal density of a Sunburst into a localized loop. It looks polite, but inside that ring, the temperature is close to a stellar core.
My defenses?
My strongest defensive spell in the original Hathaway's memory bank is [Greater Mage Armor · Tier 4].
It’s a math problem, and the math looks bad.
Tier 4 Structure vs. Tier 8 Density.
It’s like trying to stop a plasma cutter with a wooden shield.
Even if I pump all my 42,000 M-Units into it, the spell matrix itself cannot withstand this level of thermal pressure. It would evaporate in 0.01 seconds.
Can I brute-force it with a raw mana discharge?
Technically, yes. I could blow this fire away. But dumping raw mana to fight structured magic? That would cause a massive, chaotic explosion that would blow up half the lecture hall.
It would be Social Suicide.
In Yggdrasil, losing a duel is acceptable. But solving a puzzle by blowing up the classroom? That screams "Incompetence." It screams "Barbarian."
Inefficient. Too loud. Too desperate.
She looked at Victoria.
Victoria had stepped past the blockade zone. She stood five meters away, clutching her book. She didn't offer help. She simply tapped her finger against the cover of her book, watching with the cold eyes of an evaluator.
“Solve it. Or prove you are just a Nepo Baby.”
In that instant of suffocation, a memory flashed through Hathaway's mind like a bolt of lightning.
“Any complex spell model has Nodes.”
“Pop the balloon.”
Hathaway’s red pupils dilated, then contracted sharply.
She forced her breathing to slow down. She forced her brain to ignore the searing pain in her skin.
She stopped looking at the "Fire." She started looking at the "Math."
Don't look at the flames. Look at the flow.
The roaring fire suddenly fell silent in her perception. The swirling flames decomposed into lines of vector force.
I see it.
At the 4 o'clock position of the ring. A tiny, pulsating node of mana. The "Vascular Valve" that fed the entire loop. It was buried deep within the 800-degree plasma, protected by layers of violent energy turbulence.
Hathaway’s right hand moved to her pocket.
She pulled out a small, transparent, leaf-shaped blade.
[Aether-Membrane Scalpel].
It looked fragile. Like a piece of thin sugar glass. But Hathaway knew its biology.
Source: Inner lining of a Witch's birth capsule.
Properties: Evolved to withstand the raw mana storms of the Starry Sea. Absolute Heat Resistance. Zero Mana Friction.
But it had a fatal flaw.
It is brittle.
Like ceramic, it has zero flexibility. It can survive a supernova, but if I tap it against a rock from the side, it shatters.
Hathaway looked at the high-pressure fire loop. The mana was spinning at Mach speed.
If my hand shakes...
If my entry angle is off by even one degree...
The lateral shear force of the spinning mana will snap the blade like a dry twig. And then, my hand will be vaporized.
Steady.
Hathaway stepped forward.
The heat wave slapped her face like a physical hand. Her skin turned red instantly.
She raised the knife.
Her hand was trembling.
Not from fear, but from the sheer biological rejection of putting one's limb into an incinerator. Her muscles were screaming "Pull back!"
She had to use her left hand to grip her right wrist, squeezing hard until the knuckles turned white, forcing the trembling to stop.
Don't slash. Slashing creates wind.
Insert.
She pushed the blade forward.
It didn't feel like cutting air.
As the blade entered the mana field, the surrounding air twisted and screamed, turning into superheated plasma. But the white, semi-transparent blade slid through the inferno like a ghost.
The 4,000-degree mana flames licked at the blade's surface but found no friction point to generate heat.
My hand is baking.
But the knife is bone-cold.
Hathaway’s wrist flicked. A movement of less than three millimeters.
Cut.
Snap.
A sound like a violin string breaking echoed through the hall.
The logic gate collapsed. The mana supply was physically severed.
The complex, terrifying Thermal Pressure Ring didn't explode. It simply... suffocated. The flames lost their structure instantly. The roaring monster turned into harmless, chaotic sparks that drifted to the floor like dying fireflies.
Silence.
The Balor Witch raised an eyebrow.
The molten gold in her eyes sharpened, instantly dissecting the physics of her own spell's sudden death. It took her genius-level mind less than a second to process the sheer, suicidal audacity of Hathaway's maneuver.
"Physical severance of the Etheric Node using a Zero-Resistance catalyst..."
The Balor Witch looked at the fragile eggshell knife in Hathaway's hand, then at Hathaway's red, heat-flushed face. Her expression shifted. The polite, fake smile vanished, replaced by a look of cool, professional assessment.
"You didn't counter the formula. You just yanked the plug."
She chuckled low in her throat.
"Brutal. And extremely arrogant. If your wrist had twisted by a fraction of an inch, the shear force would have shattered that toy, and you would be an amputee."
She uncrossed her arms and stepped aside, clearing the path.
"Surtrina. That is my name. If you survive Lucent's lab, feel free to sit closer next time."
Hathaway nodded slightly, hiding her trembling hand in her pocket. "Hathaway."
She stepped over the fading embers.
The heat was gone. The path was clear.
Or so she thought.
But as she passed the desk on her right, the world tilted violently from Fire to Ice.
Creak.
A sound like a breaking glacier echoed through the hall.
A layer of white frost rapidly crystallized on the floor, climbing up Hathaway's boots and blocking her path again. The air temperature plummeted twenty degrees in a split second. Hathaway’s sweat froze instantly on her skin.
"Wait."
The word wasn't spoken. It vibrated directly against Hathaway's eardrums, like a drop of freezing water hitting a taut drumskin.
Hathaway paused, her muscles tense.
She turned her head stiffly.
To her right, the Ghost Witch had stood up.