He flashed back to the lavish, decaying bedroom inside the manor. He remembered the silver-rimmed photo frame resting on the wooden table—the cute family picture containing the father, the sick mother, and a set of twin sisters. There hadn't been a son in that photograph. There hadn't been a boy named Flinn.
Everything the father had said in the carriage instantly recontextualized itself. "Growing a few inches and putting on mass through cheap transformation scrolls isn't going to win you any matches." The father hadn't been surprised by Lexel's massive, hyper-muscular male physique because he genuinely believed his daughter was just using her Trickster abilities to manifest a terrifying, hyper-buffed male avatar to survive the tournament.
The lazy, street-rat rogue who complained about cardio, who panicked at the sight of an imperial seal, and who had been hiding out in the absolute middle of nowhere with a law-breaking prince... wasn't a brother running away from home.
