Chapter 11: The Plausible Lie
The walk back from the extraction point was suffocatingly silent for our newly formed alliance.
The sterile, torch-lit corridors of the Academy felt an entire world away from the blood-soaked darkness of the breeding pits.
Rolf kept shooting me nervous, sidelong glances.
The werewolf possessed enough primal survival instinct to know when absolute silence was the only safe option.
Rolf thought, 'The only good thing my father taught me was to stay away from women who are about to pounce on a man. It is time to leave.'
Nyssa looked like a haunted ghost wrapped tightly in my oversized coat.
She had not uttered a single syllable since I draped it over her trembling shoulders, but her brilliant mind was clearly racing.
I could practically feel the frantic intensity of her thoughts burning like a physical fever.
Kaelith was a lethal, silent shadow glued to my flank.
Her sheer presence felt significantly more oppressive than any mutated monster we had faced in the mud.
She was not just walking.
She was carving into the side of my skull with her eyes.
Her glacial stare was brimming with piercing doubt.
It was completely understandable, considering I had just done something scientifically unforgivable.
We finally reached the main junction where the paths to the male and female dormitories cleanly diverged.
This was the inevitable moment of confrontation.
"I will see you guys at dinner," Rolf mumbled, already backing rapidly away toward the safety of the male dorms. "I really need to wash my clothes."
Scuff, scuff, scuff.
He practically fled down the hall, cowardly leaving me alone to face the impending disaster.
Kaelith stepped fluidly directly into my path, completely blocking the narrow stone corridor.
Her silver eyes were chips of absolute ice, entirely devoid of their usual detached indifference and now brimming with sharp, lethal suspicion.
"What exactly happened with the clasp on her coat?" she demanded.
Her voice was a low, dangerous hum that promised violence.
"Explain it."
Nyssa finally lifted her head.
Her olive skin was sickly pale above the high collar of my black coat.
Her glowing emerald eyes, normally filled with untouchable intellectual arrogance, were blown wide with a highly volatile mixture of pure terror and obsessive fascination.
"It was a resonant frequency disruption," she whispered, her voice trembling with the weight of the impossible physics.
"A highly focused, external mana pulse that perfectly targeted a specific material signature. The raw energy required for that, the microscopic precision, it is not just impossible. It is theoretically absurd."
She stared with suspicion.
"You are a Rank 10 goblin with a garbage F-Grade core."
Anger was visible on her face.
"You should not have been able to light a simple candle, let alone perform micro-scale telekinetic surgery from ten feet away."
They absolutely had me cornered.
The logical, tactical hemisphere of my brain screamed that there was no way out.
But the System-driven predator lurking in my chest saw a golden opportunity.
I could not possibly tell them the actual truth, but a flat, ignorant denial would be a massive insult to their formidable intelligence.
I desperately needed a lie.
A brilliant, perfectly believable, highly condescending lie.
I let out a short, sharp sigh, deliberately acting as if I were explaining basic arithmetic to slow children.
I shifted my gaze slowly from Nyssa to Kaelith.
My facial expression smoothly transitioned from cornered prey to a profoundly disappointed instructor.
"You are both completely wrong," I said, my voice incredibly calm and measured.
"You are desperately searching for a magical explanation because that is the only limited lens you possess. You only know how to think in terms of raw power levels and rigid mana grades. That is exactly why you are both still just students."
Nyssa bristled aggressively at the direct insult.
Her towering academic pride momentarily overriding her lingering fear.
Kaelith simply narrowed her silver eyes, her slender hand coming to rest threateningly on the leather hilt of her dagger.
Clack.
"I did not use a single drop of mana," I continued smoothly, tapping my green temple with one finger.
"I used data. My passive vision is not just for watching muscles flex, Nyssa. It is for processing raw information. All of it. I saw the queen spider's venom glands swell a microscopic fraction of a second before it fired."
"I instantly calculated the exact trajectory of the acid stream. And I clearly saw the critical stress point on that incredibly cheap, mass-produced Academy coat clasp. I saw the tiny, invisible flaw left in the metal from the crude forging process."
I took a slow, deliberate step closer to Nyssa, dropping my voice into a conspiratorial register.
"As for that mysterious pulse you felt? That was just Rolf."
Both lethal women simply stared at me, looking utterly and profoundly confused.
"Rolf's newly awakened Beast-Core is incredibly raw and totally uncontrolled," I explained, gesturing vaguely down the corridor in the direction he had fled.
"It is a physical aura, not a magical one, but it still possesses the innate ability to violently disrupt ambient energy fields. When I forcefully pulled you behind that pillar, I positioned us with absolute perfection. The exact millisecond the acid flew, I stomped my heavy boot hard onto the flagstone. It was a very specific, highly resonant flagstone I had identified minutes earlier."
STOMP.
"It created a tightly focused sonic vibration that traveled rapidly up the stone pillar. It perfectly combined with the chaotic energy bleed-off from Rolf's yellow aura, which was flaring wildly as he crushed skulls."
'I really hope this will convince them.'
"It created just enough localized interference to violently rattle that flawed metal clasp. A tiny, microscopic tremor, delivered at the exact right millisecond, was more than enough. It was not magic. It was highly applied physics. It was a flawless chain reaction. I simply set up the dominoes and flicked the first one."
The suffocating silence that followed my explanation was incredibly thick with disbelief. But it was a perfectly plausible disbelief.
Nyssa's brilliant mind was visibly racing, rapidly replaying the chaotic events in the dungeon.
She had definitely felt Rolf's disruptive aura.
She had not been focused on the floor beneath our boots.
A sonic vibration.
It was a massive stretch, a truly monumental leap of logic, but it was not a direct violation of the foundational laws of arcane physics.
It was just an absurdly brilliant, impossibly lucky piece of high-stakes tactical engineering.
It perfectly fit the established narrative of me being a peerless tactician.
Kaelith, however, was significantly harder to convince.
Her entire world was built purely on lethal intent and physical action.
"You risked her actual life on a wild theory about a loose flagstone?" she challenged, her silver eyes narrowing further.
"I risked all of our lives the very second we walked into that breeding pit," I countered smoothly, my baritone voice hardening into steel.
"I trust my calculations implicitly. I saw the absolute path to victory, and I took it without hesitation. She is alive. The mission is complete. The method is entirely irrelevant."
I turned my back to them and started walking away, leaving the two apex predators to slowly process the beautiful lie.
"Now, if you will excuse me, I need to locate a competent healer. My ribs are absolutely screaming from that tactical collision with the stone pillar."
I did not look back.
I did not need to.
I had flawlessly spoon-fed them an explanation that appealed directly to their core identities.
For Nyssa, the intellectual prodigy, it was a fascinating new puzzle she could now obsessively try to solve, safely grounding the impossible feat firmly in the realm of theoretical physics.
For Kaelith, the pragmatic, cold-blooded warrior, it was a brutal, highly effective, and completely acceptable risk taken solely for the sake of mission success.
I had successfully slipped the hangman's noose.
But as my boots echoed down the corridor toward the infirmary, I knew perfectly well that I had only deepened the dangerous mystery surrounding me.
They did not fear a system-powered monster anymore.
They now deeply feared a scrawny goblin who could calculate and weaponize reality itself.
And in many ways, that was infinitely more terrifying.
The System remained ominously silent, but the glowing 72-hour timer continued its relentless, bloody countdown in the absolute corner of my vision.
I had cleverly bought myself some breathing room, but the parasite's debt was still due.