"Ravian," Lysandra said his name the moment the manor door closed behind them and they had put a little distance between themselves and it. She wasn’t asking.
Ravian raised his gaze to her with feigned calm and a quiet, forced smile.
"Yo! Lysandra... it’s been a while," Ravian said with a slight edge of nervousness, having no idea what he was supposed to do now that he’d been exposed.
Lysandra continued looking him over from head to toe, as though she were thoroughly inspecting every inch of him.
"You’ve changed a great deal," she said at last.
"I think I can take that as a compliment." Ravian scratched his head with feigned awkwardness.
But Lysandra didn’t smile.
Her eyes simply continued to accuse him coldly without her ever opening her mouth.
Ravian realized there was no point in lying or stalling any further, or he’d ruin everything.
"All right, I shouldn’t have left the way I did—" Ravian began, but he was cut off.
"No, no, no, don’t even start there," Lysandra said, stopping him.
Ravian raised both eyebrows in flustered confusion.
"Then where do I start?" he asked, genuinely at a loss.
"Start with what happened to you when you were with Sir Karius in the central building," Lysandra said matter-of-factly.
"Huh?"
Ravian couldn’t believe what he’d heard.
Of all the things she could have picked, why start there? Hadn’t she wanted to ask him why he left?
"Didn’t Malrik and the others tell you?" he asked her.
"No, and you’re not the one asking the questions here. Answer me," Lysandra said, closing the distance between them and pressing in on him with her presence.
Ravian lowered his head to meet her eyes because of the obvious difference in their heights, made even more pronounced now that she had moved closer.
Then he smiled in the face of her anger, catching her off guard.
"You do know this doesn’t frighten me anymore, don’t you?" Ravian said, looking into her amber eyes with a suffocating calm.
"Huh?" Lysandra was even more taken aback when she realized that Ravian’s presence in his new body felt more overwhelming than her own, and her gaze wavered for an instant, though she didn’t step back.
"You’ve gotten stronger... a great deal stronger," she said, her eyes sliding over his body with a look that carried not the faintest trace of attraction or desire.
It was pure admiration—for his physique and for the person Ravian had become.
Ravian nodded gently.
"Yes, I’ve gotten stronger... but I went through a great deal to get here," Ravian said, remembering everything that had happened to him since he reached the capital even as the words left his mouth.
Lysandra looked at the distant expression on his face and felt that he truly meant what he was saying.
She continued staring at him for another two seconds, and Ravian met her gaze in complete silence and stillness, their breathing steady without the slightest disturbance.
It made plain how composed the two of them were, even standing as close as they were.
Then Lysandra stepped back two paces.
And Ravian didn’t stop her.
Then her cold, disciplined expression returned to the fore after slipping for one brief moment.
It meant that this was now Lysandra Veyla, granddaughter of the Grand Duke and a Ninth-Rank Walker stationed at the border—entirely different from the Lysandra of exactly two seconds earlier.
"Tell me what happened," Lysandra said with quiet firmness.
Sigh~
Ravian let out a light sigh as he gathered his thoughts before beginning to tell her what had happened earlier in the central building at the border, giving her the very same account he had given Malrik and the others.
He told her what had happened with the faction commanders, how he had suddenly blacked out upon hearing the name of one of the Taboos, and how they had told him it might be a minor soul anomaly.
But of course, he didn’t tell her about the conversation that had taken place between him and Fate inside his dream, or his mental sea, or whatever that place where the two of them had spoken was.
Lysandra listened calmly and was deeply shaken when she learned that he had been afflicted with a soul anomaly, though she settled quickly enough once she saw how calm Ravian was as he laid the whole thing out for her in detail.
...
"So that’s what happened back then, and that’s what caused that condition of yours," Lysandra said, taking in every detail Ravian had just recounted to her.
"Yes." Ravian nodded, confirming it for her.
Lysandra nodded as well, then brought her gaze back to him.
"Keep going," she said.
"Hmm?" Ravian hummed, pretending he hadn’t heard.
"I said, keep going... what happened after you met me outside the tent and left the camp for the forest that night, carrying the corpse of the Ninth-Rank orc?"
Lysandra said this while reminding him of every minute detail of what had happened, closing off every route of evasion Ravian had prepared for himself.
Ravian continued looking at her for several seconds, then exhaled slowly.
She remembered the timing of his departure, the reason he had given for it, and even the rank of the orc corpse he had carried out with him.
She hadn’t left him a single gap he could slip through.
"After I left the camp, I took the corpse to a distant cave so I could use what remained of its power to strengthen my body," Ravian began at last.
Lysandra narrowed her eyes slightly.
"How, exactly?"
This was the first time Lysandra had ever heard of anything like it.
"In a way I can’t explain to you," Ravian said without hesitation.
Lysandra’s expression didn’t change.
"You lasted all of three sentences before you started hiding things again."
"I’m trying not to lie to you. I’m telling you what I’m able to say, not everything I know," Ravian replied calmly.
The answer irritated Lysandra even further, but she wanted to hear the rest.
"Keep going," she said.
Lysandra accepted his answer for the time being, even if she didn’t like it.
"The process didn’t go the way I expected. The structure of my body started changing, and nearly everything else along with it," Ravian said, gesturing lightly toward the body he had now. "And by the time it was over, I no longer looked anything like the person who had walked out of that camp."
Ravian explained it in a way that balanced the truths against the lies, so that Lysandra wouldn’t find any gaps in it.
Lysandra’s eyes moved over his body once again.
This time, she scrutinized him far more closely.
"So that’s the reason you changed," she said.
"Most of the change happened then, yes," Ravian answered her.
"And why didn’t you come back?" She brought her gaze back to his eyes, staring at him with a curiosity she made no attempt to hide.
That was the question she had been working her way toward from the very beginning.
Ravian fell silent at that question.
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