The Protagonist Already Knows

Chapter 31: Workshop

"Back so soon!? Either I must not be terrifying enough for you, or you’re a masochist. So, which is it?"

Gazing down at me, standing on the staircase right above mine, Lily tilted her head, her glasses sliding down on her face, onto the edge of her nose.

Meeting her light-blue eyes, I simply pulled up my right sleeve, revealing the metal armband.

"I can’t figure it out. How do you...split a blood stream in half? It just doesn’t make sense."

"..."

After a few moments of silence, Lily finally said.

"You’re lucky you didn’t ask something else. Now leave."

"..?"

Feeling an odd sense of disappointment from my mark, I paused and stepped to the side.

Squeezing by me and walking down the staircase, she added, her light-blue pupils glowing.

"Oh, and don’t think I owe you anything. I don’t do favors. For whatever reason you have, you did what you did out of your own volition. That has nothing to do with me."

Overlapping with Lily’s voice, I could hear it...her own father saying the same to her.

*CRACK*

The sound of a father crushing her daughter’s invention: one she had spent years on simply to impress the man who hadn’t once congratulated her.

"I didn’t ask for your help. I’ll do it myself."

"b-but, I jus-"

"Blood is the only thing connecting us. Don’t mistake that as a reason to get involved. You should have realized by now that I don’t need your or anyone’s help."

The next day, Alaric had vanished. Only after watching the news did Lily find out her father had ventured off to another dimension, Daedalus’s Workshop.

Since then, she hadn’t seen him in person. Only in interviews projected to the entire world did she have the chance to glimpse her father.

The closest thing she had to him was his credit card, which she didn’t dare to use.

Clicking my tongue, I sat down on the staircase, took off my metal armband, and took out a screwdriver.

...

...

...

*BANG*

Clutching my shoulder, I resisted the urge to scream the loudest I could, barely maintaining my sanity through my mark on Lily.

As my regenerative abilities kicked in, healing the tendon in my shoulder that had been torn apart by the elemental reaction, I bit my tongue, tasting the metallic tang of blood.

If I could obtain the power to cast spells before the virtual reality exam, everything would become drastically easier.

Ripping the metal armband off my right arm, I began messing around with the inside again, attempting to figure out what was wrong.

However, I knew it was simply beyond my knowledge.

There was no way in a year... or even five years... that I would be able to successfully replicate Lily’s invention with my intelligence.

As a sense of confusion suddenly overwhelmed my body and my eyebrows involuntarily rose, I glanced down and saw Lily carrying a cardboard box up the stairs, which were blocked by me.

Seeing her expression, I wondered for a moment: was I in the wrong?

Knowing how Ren had broken through Lily’s barrier to social interaction in the novel, I simply did the same, depicting myself as a hard-working, selfless, and persistent person to her.

I had never intended to fix the metal armband sitting here; I just wanted her to notice me working persistently.

No...I was simply doing whatever it took to achieve my goal, just like most people in this world.

Clicking her tongue, Lily scanned me for a moment before shifting her gaze to the mechanical armband sitting in my lap.

"If I see you this on the market, I swear to god I’ll make it my life goal to ruin and torture you."

Simply grabbing the screwdriver out of my hands, Lily began tinkering with the armband’s insides and said.

"Don’t come here again."

At this point, Ren would have disagreed and grabbed the metal armband from her hands, refusing to let her fix it until she changed her mind.

Instead, I just watched her and nodded my head.

"Yeah, we’re even."

But...she responded for some reason.

"I never owed you anything, and you never owed me anything. There’s no ’even.’"

Perhaps it was the frustration I felt from my mark on Lily, but I spit back.

"You owe me nothing, and I owe you nothing, right? That’s even or equal, isn’t it?"

"..."

Her hands halting, Lily glanced up at me, her eyes narrowed.

"If you want to be even, then drink this. You agreed, no? Don’t tell me you won’t keep your word."

Reaching into her cardboard box, Lily grabbed a test tube full of some toxic dark-green liquid that you would only see in a cartoon.

Was she testing me?

Shaking my head, unlike Ren, who would have downed the potion instantly and somehow survived with his main character powers, I instantly answered.

"We’re not even, alright? So, please put that away.

After a moment, while looking down at the inside of the armband, Lily surprisingly put down the potion and said.

"I don’t get you. You obviously just want to use my intelligence, but you’d do so much to get me to help you that it’s not even considering ’using’ anymore."

"..."

"What are you?"

Hearing my silence, Lily just sighed and said.

"Whatever you are, just don’t try me again...That is, unless you have another groundbreaking idea or concept in mind."

Gazing up to meet my eyes, she added.

"If you go to another scientist, I’ll kill you."

Raising my head, feeling the pain from the previous elemental reaction slowly fade away, I responded.

"That’s the third time now you’ve threatened to kill me in the span of an hour."

A mischievous glint in her light-blue eyes that I could only notice due to my mark on her, Lily grinned.

"You don’t believe me?"

Changing the topic, I glanced at my right palm, which was still shining a faint deathly-black, and asked.

"Hey, how do you feel the mana inside your body?"