I swallowed hard, my throat pressing against the cool, firm grip of her fingers.
Sitting on my lap, Cassandra was an absolute wall of suffocating pressure.
Up close, I could feel the intense, terrifyingly refined vibration of her mana core.
Months of brutal, relentless frontline combat had forged her into a deadly weapon. If I handed her a sloppy lie, she would dismantle it in seconds.
Think, Jin. Think.
My mind ran through possible excuses at hyper-speed. Telling her about Yuki, the Debugger System's Phase 2 assimilation, or high-dimensional predecessor data transfer was out of the question.
I needed a bluff grounded in established spatial mechanics, something that accounted for my sudden reappearance without leaving a paper trail.
I forced my heart rate to stay perfectly flat, letting my eyes meet her icy, unblinking grey stare.
