Chapter 223: Pink Dragon
Chapter 223: Pink Dragon
Five people sat at this table, dominated by a weird, tense, and inexplicable atmosphere.
Iris sat in the middle, tightly gripping the mug on her tray with both hands. To her right was Cassian, focused on eating his food with his usual soulless, dull expression. To her left sat Myra, her arms crossed over her chest, waiting defensively as if she were about to get into a fight at any moment.
Directly across from them, sharing the other side of the table, were two people: Lunox, eating his heavily spiced, oniony meal with the same dullness, and Celine right next to him.
Celine had elegantly set her fork on the edge of her plate, resting her chin on her hands, studying the two girls across from her like a graceful leopard examining its prey. Her eyes were narrowed. Her mind was racing. ’These girls...’ she thought to herself, ’the girls Cassian tried to hide from when he saw them while we were playing in the snow in the courtyard.’
But why? Why was Cassian eating lunch at the same table with these two girls right now?
It was best to find out through questions without making things more complicated.
Just as Celine was about to part her lips and jump into the conversation with her sweet tongue, Cassian beat her to it. Slowly setting down his fork, he broke the silence at the table with his flat voice.
"This is Iris," Cassian said, pointing at the red-haired girl to his right. "My childhood friend. And this..." His eyes shifted to Myra for a moment. "...Myra. Iris’s friend."
Myra’s eyes widened instantly. Giving Cassian a light kick on the leg under the table, she hissed angrily: "Oi! Don’t talk about me like I’m some random stranger you found on the street!"
Completely ignoring the little kick to his leg and Myra’s rebellion, Cassian turned his head forward, to the other end of the table, and continued flatly: "And these are Lunox and Celine. They are my friends."
Following this incredibly bland introduction, that weird silence fell over the table once again.
Even Cassian couldn’t make sense of this situation in his mind. He tilted his head slightly to the side and frowned. *’Why aren’t they talking?’* he thought.
He understood Lunox being antisocial, uncommunicative, and quiet.
But the others...
The person to break this weird silence was Celine, who finally realized the identity of her prey.
"When you say Iris..." Celine murmured, her voice suddenly changing, the polite but distant tone replaced by curiosity. "Iris Inferna?"
Celine’s eyes suddenly lit up. She carefully looked at Iris’s red hair, her posture, and her facial features.
These were the eyes of someone who made new plans every day to ascend the throne, to become the absolute ruler of the Holy Empire, playing her rivals like chess pieces in her mind.
She had found herself a new, incredibly powerful ally. The Inferna Duchy... the duchy that held the strongest military power in the Empire. And the girl sitting across from her was the sole heir to that duchy.
"Uhh... Yes" Iris said, tensing slightly under Celine’s piercing gaze but plastering her usual polite, warm smile on her face.
The predatory expression on Celine’s face vanished in a split second; it was replaced by a smile as sweet as sugar, pure and friendly enough to make angels jealous. She pulled her chair forward slightly and leaned toward Iris.
"I’m Celine!" she said, introducing herself again, this time with much greater enthusiasm. "God, you look so sweet! I can’t take my eyes off you. That shade of red and the wavy shape of your hair... It looks so perfect, you must spend hours on it in the mornings. I was expecting a tough soldier swinging her sword, but you look practically like a porcelain doll!"
Iris felt her cheeks flush at this unexpected shower of compliments. "A-ah, thank you very much, Celine. You are very beautiful too."
However, what Celine was truly curious about was much deeper than appearances. Narrowing her eyes without dropping that sweet tone, she asked the real question.
"But Iris... How did you meet Cassian? To tell the truth, I was a bit surprised to see you two together. After all, you are a noble lady of the South with the deepest roots in the Empire, and he is... a Northerner."
Iris’s smile froze instantly. Her fingers gripping her mug tightened. She quickly turned her head to Cassian in shock.
"A Northerner?" Iris whispered.
Her voice was trembling. Cassian had never told her this!
Cassian realized that with Celine’s question, all the balances at the table had shifted.
If Celine continued to dig into his identity, it would create a massive problem. His mind generated countless lies and scenarios in fractions of a second. The safest option was a half-truth that blended Iris’s memories with Celine’s logic.
Dropping his fork, Cassian suddenly spoke up.
"When my family abandoned me, I ended up in the south through a series of events and started living there," Cassian said, looking into Iris’s and Celine’s eyes. "During that time, I met Iris."
This wasn’t entirely a lie. He just hadn’t mentioned a few truths.
"Your family... abandoned you?" Celine’s eyes widened, her back suddenly straightening. For the first time, her sweet, calculating face was shaken by genuine shock and a hint of pity.
With a relaxed demeanor, Cassian stabbed his fork into his plate, took a bite of his food, and shrugged as he chewed.
"Yes," Cassian said indifferently. "I guess they thought I was going to die under those conditions anyway. They just got rid of a burden. It was a logical decision."
Celine’s lips parted slightly. "Well... I am truly sorry for asking, Cassian," she murmured, a crumb of genuine regret in her voice for the first time.
The North... the cursed lands where a brutal, eternal winter and monsters reigned supreme. Considering the disasters that befell the Northerners, the starvation, and their savage lifestyle, abandoning a child seen as weak or useless was tragic, but ’normal.’ Celine had put the pieces together, thinking that Cassian’s emotionlessness and his ruthless strength stemmed from this horrific trauma.
But these weren’t the reasons Cassian was abandoned. He wasn’t even a Northerner to begin with...
*’Bladehaven...’*
Cassian’s gaze froze on the food on his plate for a second.
The Bladehaven Family... The true owners of the dark blood flowing in his veins.
Cassian hadn’t written anything about the Bladehavens in the book regarding what kind of feelings he harbored toward them or what he wanted to do to them one day.
"Cassian?"
"Cassian, you look distracted," Iris said, reaching her hand out slightly. "Are you alright?"
"I’m fine," Cassian said, cutting Iris off. He slowly raised his head and stared directly at Lunox’s plate, who was sitting across the table, continuing to eat his food oblivious to the world.
"It’s just..." Cassian said, grimacing slightly. "...I don’t like the smell of onions."
The fork in Lunox’s hand hung in the air. From under his wide straw hat, he looked at Cassian in shock.
"What!?" Lunox said in surprise, blinking. He couldn’t comprehend how, after all the dramatic topics and family abandonments in the air, the conversation had shifted to the onions on his plate.
Cassian pushed his plate slightly away from himself. "Never mind," he mumbled, and turned his gaze back out the window.
---
**Late Afternoon...**
While the Academy’s massive bells rang with an echoing sound signaling the end of classes, the sun had long given way to gray clouds and freezing cold.
Cassian walked toward the dormitories with heavy steps, the collar of his black jacket popped up, his hands in his pockets.
Actually, he would have liked to spend time with Iris after classes. However, Iris had piled-up, urgent tasks at the Student Council today, and moreover... going to the Council room meant likely running into Professor Pharsa again.
Dealing with the wrath of a traumatized professor whose face he had drawn a mustache on twice was an unnecessary waste of time right now.
Walking with the *crunch, crunch* sound of his footsteps on the snow, he turned onto the deserted, tree-lined path behind the main building. And at that moment, a silhouette entered his field of vision.
Sitting all alone on a wooden bench under the bare trees that were about to freeze from the cold, was someone.
Layla.
Cassian slowed his steps. Even from a distance, he could see the girl’s shoulders shaking. Her eyes were bright red and swollen from crying. Her makeup was slightly smeared, and there was no trace of her usual arrogant, tsundere posture. She was sniffing and wiping her tears with trembling hands.
The argument in class that morning... The poisonous seed Cassian had planted regarding Felix by saying, "He might even end up dating Rose," had apparently sprouted very quickly.
Layla had probably run straight to Felix, seen him side-by-side with that girl named Rose, gone into a fit of jealousy, and argued with him. And by the looks of it, Felix’s stupidly polite, trying-to-make-everyone-happy "Golden Boy" attitude had served no purpose other than shattering Layla’s heart to pieces.
’Should I just ignore her and leave?’ he thought. Frankly, he didn’t care in the slightest about Layla’s shattered heart, her lovesickness, or her teenage drama with Felix.
However... If he looked at things from a broader strategic perspective, the situation was different. Layla was Felix’s greatest weakness.
If he pulled this crying girl over to his side right now, if he grew "closer" to her, he could manipulate Felix much more easily; he could wrap that damn hero around his finger.
Actually, Cassian could easily make Layla his pawn using the Kraken’s Coffin.
If he used it on Layla, the girl would never be able to betray him; she would become a flawless pawn, a slave who followed his orders without question.
But Cassian instantly rejected this thought.
No matter how ruthless and cold-blooded he was, he hated completely taking over people’s minds and turning them into will-less lumps of meat.
Just like that professor whose mind he took over during the Academy entrance exam... Even him, he had set free by erasing his memories right after the exam ended. Keeping someone as a puppet forever wasn’t his style.
Cassian sighed and shrugged. After all these moral and logical calculations, he had made his decision.
Advancing with silent, cat-like steps, he stood right in front of Layla, who was crying on the bench. His long shadow fell over the girl.
Layla flinched when she felt the shadow fall over her. Sniffing loudly, she slowly raised her head. A momentary hope blossomed in her heart. *’Could it be... Did Felix realize his mistake and come after me? Did he come to apologize to me?’*
But when her tear-blurred vision cleared, she saw that the person standing in front of her was not Felix with his warm, golden aura; it was that "Devil" with his hellishly cold, pure white hair and blood-red eyes.
It was Cassian.
The crumb of hope on Layla’s face shattered in a split second. Her tears instantly gave way to hatred and anger. She grimaced as if she had seen something disgusting, her thin eyebrows knitting together fiercely.
"What are you doing here, freak?!" Layla hissed, her voice cracking from crying. "Did you come to make fun of me seeing me cry?! Get out of here!"
Cassian responded to the girl’s prickly, tsundere reaction without changing his facial expression in the slightest. He just reached his hand into the pocket of his black jacket.
From it, he pulled out the most irrelevant, incongruous thing in the world to pair with his terrifying aura.
A cotton handkerchief with a comical, sweet pink dragon pattern that breathed little hearts out of its mouth instead of fire.
Without saying a single word, staring into Layla’s reddened eyes with his red ones, Cassian held the handkerchief out toward the girl and just waited.