Chapter 281: Who Are You?
The heavy wheels of the carriage rolled smoothly over the paved imperial highway.
Outside the reinforced glass windows, the lush, manicured greenery of the Academy grounds gradually bled into the sweeping, rugged landscapes of the inner territories. Misty forests and distant mountain peaks blurred past, bathed in the pale, unforgiving light of the early morning sun.
But inside the carriage, the atmosphere was entirely suffocating.
Cassandra hadn’t moved a muscle for the first hour of the trip. Then, without warning, she snapped her leather-bound ledger shut. The sharp thud resonated loudly in the enclosed space.
"Are you really my brother?"
I froze.
My muscles instantly locked beneath my uniform, my eyes snapping over to meet hers.
"What?" I asked, keeping my voice as steady as possible.
Cassandra narrowed her icy grey eyes. The ambient temperature inside the carriage plummeted instantly, our breath forming faint white plumes in the sudden, unnatural chill.
"Rank one upon entering the academy," Cassandra began, her voice dripping with cold, clinical analysis.
"And now sitting comfortably at rank two in your entire batch. Clearing a high-grade dungeon solo. Completing the mid-term practical exam with just a single commoner girl as your companion, all while playing the fool for those little bitches of yours."
She paused, letting the heavy weight of her words hang in the freezing air between us.
"The Jin I knew wouldn’t have done any of that," she purred dangerously. "The Jin I knew was a talentless, sniveling coward who couldn’t even look me in the eye without trembling."
With a sudden, violent surge of her mana, thick, jagged shards of frost erupted from the velvet cushions. The ice rapidly crawled up my legs and torso, trapping me completely in my seat, pinning my arms to my sides.
Cassandra leaned forward, her beautiful, terrifying face just inches from mine.
"Tell me... who are you?"
I sat there, utterly paralyzed by the ice, but my mind was working at absolute hyper-speed. The sheer, suffocating pressure she was radiating was immense, she was a high-ranking mage, entirely out of my current bracket.
If it wasn’t for ’Iron Will’ forcing my heart rate to remain steady and keeping my mind perfectly clear, the raw killing intent she was projecting would have made me pass out right then and there.
I swallowed hard, forcing my jaw to move against the biting cold.
"I... I am Jin."
Cassandra didn’t say a word. Her expression only grew darker, and the grip of the ice violently tightened around my chest, compressing my ribs and making me squirm as the pressure threatened to crack my bones.
Realizing she wasn’t bluffing, I immediately activated my next card.
[Passive Skill Activated: Social Engineering]
I let out a ragged, slightly strained breath, forcing my expression to shift from a blank wall into a perfectly calculated mix of bitter resentment and deep, long-buried exhaustion. I looked her dead in the eye, dropping all the confident armor I had worn at the Academy.
"You want to know why I changed, Cassandra? Because I had to. Do you think I enjoyed being the family disgrace? Do you think I liked it when Father refused to even look at me for ten years?"
Cassandra’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t loosen the ice.
"I remember everything," I continued, leaning heavily into the inherited memories of the original Jin to make the lie flawless. "I remember when I was seven, and I accidentally dropped your favorite crystal in the courtyard. You didn’t even yell at me. You just looked at me like I was a piece of trash beneath your boots and walked away. I remember sitting in that freezing library for days, trying to force my mana circuits to open until my nose bled, just so someone... anyone, would acknowledge me."
I let out a sharp, self-deprecating laugh, staring right into her icy gaze.
"When I got sent to the Academy, I realized nobody was coming to save me. If I kept acting like a coward, the nobles here would have chewed me up and spit me out by the end of the first week. So, I did what I had to. I adapted. And... I won."
The heavy silence returned to the carriage, broken only the rhythmic clatter of the horse hooves outside.
Cassandra stared at me, her sharp eyes scanning every micro-muscle in my face, looking for even a single trace of deceit. But with Social Engineering flawlessly weaving the raw truth of Jin’s tragic past into my delivery, there was nothing for her to catch.
Slowly, the biting pressure in the air began to dissipate. The jagged ice trapping me to the seat turned into a fine white mist, melting away into the velvet.
Cassandra leaned back into her cushions, her expression returning to its usual mask of aristocratic indifference. She picked up her ledger, though her grey eyes remained fixed on me for a fraction of a second longer.
"Hmph," she cleanly muttered, turning the page. "It seems you finally learned how to grow a spine. Good. Don’t make me regret sparing your life today, brother."
I let out a long, silent exhale, leaning my back against the damp velvet cushions. My chest still felt slightly bruised from the crushing pressure of the ice, but internally, a wave of profound relief washed over me.
Well... that actually went perfectly, I thought, keeping my face entirely blank.
But before I could even fully settle back into my seat, the carriage smoothly and abruptly decelerated.
The wheels came to a halt.
I blinked, genuinely caught off guard and instinctively looked out the glass window, expecting to see a checkpoint or an obstacle on the highway. Instead, the towering, familiar spires of the Raith family estate were already looming directly outside.
Wait, what? My mind stalled. The Academy was miles away. A standard carriage journey should have taken at least a day. We had barely been riding for two hours.
Cassandra, who had already snapped her ledger shut and stood up, caught the look of genuine bewilderment on my face. She stopped by the carriage door, tilting her head down to look at me.
"What?" she murmured.
"Don’t tell me you’ve never ridden in a Chronos-Engine coach before?"
A sharp, mocking smirk touched her lips, clearly taking immense satisfaction in my ignorance.
"Ah, right. I forgot. Father never allowed you access to the family’s premium transit vaults. How silly of me."
Without waiting for me to process that, she turned, the uniformed driver opening the door from the outside, and gracefully stepped down into the crisp morning air.
I sat there alone in the compartment for a second, completely baffled and thoroughly amazed.
A Chronos-Engine coach? Space-folding or localized time-dilation runes integrated into a carriage chassis?
How the fuck did I not know something like that existed in this world?
Shaking the surprise out of my head, I grabbed my travel bag, stood up, and stepped out of the vehicle.
I looked up at the sky. It wasn’t even noon yet. The pale morning sun was still hanging relatively low, casting long, sharp shadows across the grand estate courtyard.
Cassandra was already standing several paces ahead of me, her coat swaying in the gentle breeze as she waited in front of the iron gates.
I dropped my hands into my pockets, adopting my usual neutral stride, and walked up to join her as the gates began to slowly open.