Chapter 378: Evelyn’s Choice [III / Bonus - ]

Chapter 378: Evelyn’s Choice [III / Bonus Chapter]

He reached into his tailored slacks, ripping his sleek Spirit Phone from his pocket with trembling sweaty fingers.

He aggressively swiped his thumb across the glass interface, tearing open his contacts application.

His eyes darted across the screen.

Evelyn... Where was her number?!

It wasn’t in his recents and it wasn’t in his primary contact list.

With a sickening jolt of realization, Matt remembered.

She was blocked.

Gritting his teeth so hard his jaw ached, Matt navigated to his device settings, ripped her contact off the blocked list, and aggressively tapped the dial button.

He jammed the speaker against his ear, pacing across the plush carpet in front of the Chancellor’s desk.

Ring... Ring... Ring...!

Every single dial tone felt like a physical strike against his skull.

’What do I say to her?’ Matt thought frantically with his mind racing through a dozen desperate scenarios. ’Should I apologize? No... Why the hell should I apologize?! She’s the one who acted like a psychotic lunatic! She’s the one who ruined my date! She’s my older sister... it’s her legal, moral responsibility to take care of me! She can’t just abandon me like this!’

CLICK!

The line connected.

Before the person on the other end could even draw a breath, Matt completely lost all semblance of control.

The dam broke, and he exploded into the receiver at the top of his lungs.

"SIS! WHAT THE FUCK?!"

The unrestrained vulgarity of the scream bounced off the soundproofed walls of the executive office.

Chancellor Timothy flinched violently in his seat, his thick eyebrows shooting up in bewildered shock at the audacity of the nineteen-year-old student screaming like a feral animal in the Chancellor’s private sanctuary.

Matt didn’t give a damn about Timothy as his vision was red with rage.

"Are you completely out of your goddamn mind?!" Matt roared into the phone, his spittle flying across the glass screen. "You pulled my tuition trust?! You withdrew the examination funds?! What kind of sick manipulative psychotic game are you playing right now?! You are an idiot! Do you have any idea what you just did to my academic standing?!"

"Davis, cease this immediately—" Timothy barked, half-rising from his chair with his hand raised in warning.

Matt completely ignored the Chancellor, turning his back to the desk and pacing violently toward the panoramic window.

"You’re a miserable good-for-nothing stalker!" Matt screamed. "I told you yesterday, I don’t want to live with you and for a long time now! I don’t want to see your pathetic face hovering over my shoulder every time I try to have a normal life! But just because I set some basic boundaries, you’re going to try and ruin my entire life?! You’re pulling back on my—"

"—Are you seriously going to stand there and let this little ungrateful guy talk to you like that?"

The voice didn’t belong to Evelyn.

It was a deep masculine voice that cut through the line like a sharpened blade.

Matt froze mid-stride with his breath catching in his throat.

Over the speaker, the rustle of a heavy jacket could be heard, followed by Evelyn’s familiar flustered voice protesting in the background.

"Go away, dummy! I’m handling it!"

"Sure, sure... handle it," the deep voice replied with a dismissive chuckle that made the hairs on Matt’s arms stand on end. "Be quick about it, though... We still have to review the stuff that he’s doing, I’m only waiting out here because you’re here."

"I know, I know! Just give me a second, Silas!" Evelyn snapped back, her tone carrying an exasperated familiarity that completely shattered Matt’s reality.

Matt gritted his teeth until he tasted blood.

Silas.

It was him.

It was the broad-shouldered man wearing the menacing Oni mask from the Shogitown festival yesterday.

The mysterious man who had casually stood beside Evelyn while she watched him from the side.

Was he her boyfriend?! Was this the man she was sleeping with now?! Had this arrogant stranger convinced his sister to cut him off and leave him to rot?!

"Who the hell was that?!" Matt demanded, his voice trembling with a mixture of rage and terror. "Evelyn! Who is that guy?! Put him on the phone right now! What gives him the right to—"

"...Are you done yelling, Matt?"

Evelyn’s voice came through the receiver.

Matt stopped.

For the past five years, whenever Evelyn spoke to him, her voice had always carried a desperate edge... constantly walking on eggshells, constantly apologizing for being away in the Sovereign Realm, constantly begging for his approval and affection.

Whenever he raised his voice, she would crumble, asking what she had done wrong.

Today, there was no trembling and there was no stutter either.

Her tone was chillingly calm and full of confidence that Matt had never heard from her in his entire life.

"Evelyn, listen to me," Matt tried to assert his dominance with his words tumbling out fast. "You need to reverse the bursar request right now. The Chancellor is literally sitting right in front of me, and if you don’t authorize the tuition transfer—"

"I’m glad I cut it off," Evelyn interrupted. "Hearing you scream at me like an entitled rabid dog just confirmed that I made the absolute right decision."

Matt blinked.

"W-What?"

"Yesterday, after we spoke..." Evelyn continued, her words precise and cutting, "I thought for a very long time, and I realized something that should have been obvious to me years ago... Why do I even bother?"

The room fell dead silent.

Even Chancellor Timothy sat completely still, watching the young man grip the device with white knuckles.

"For four years, Matt," Evelyn said. "I have invited you to attend the Shogitown Cultural Festival with me... Every single year, I bought two VIP passes. Every single year, I rushed back from the fights with blood still under my fingernails, hoping that maybe... just maybe... my little brother would spend an afternoon with his sister and every single year, you made an excuse. You told me you were studying. You told me you were busy."

She let out a soft dry laugh over the line.

"And then yesterday, I saw you walking down the lantern boulevard, laughing, holding hands with a girl I’ve never seen before. If you have a girlfriend, why couldn’t you just introduce her to me? Why couldn’t you just say, ’Evelyn, I want you to meet someone’? We live under the same roof! I pay for the very clothes on your back! But you treat me like an embarrassing, dirty secret that you have to hide from your elite social circle."

"That’s not—"

"I don’t care, Matt," Evelyn shut him down instantly. "You want to be independent? You want to live a life separated from me? You don’t want to see my face or acknowledge that we share the same blood? Fine. You win. Everything is okay now... You have your freedom."

A cold wave of pure panic slammed into Matt’s chest. "Sis, wait—"

"Don’t ever contact me for tuition again," Evelyn stated. "We lost our parents when we were children. I was sixteen years old, Matt. Sixteen... I had to throw my life through jobs and when I was 18, I had to enter the meat grinder of the Sovereign Realm, taking contracts, getting my ribs shattered by beasts, and starving in the mud just to ensure that the two of us had a roof over our heads and a future to look forward to."

Her voice dropped.

"You have spent your entire adult life sitting in luxury, looking down your nose at the very combat that feeds you. Well, now it’s your turn. You are going to feel exactly what it feels like to struggle for every single credit tenfold... You want to graduate from the Imperial Institute? Get a job. Haul scrap or beg a corporate guild for an apprenticeship. Because not another single Spirit Credit from my account will ever touch your account."

"Evelyn, please!" Matt pleaded with the arrogant facade completely shattering as tears of terror pricked his eyes. "I have exams next month! It’s three million credits! I’ll be blacklisted! You can’t just do this to your own brother!"

"I am your sister legally, of course," Evelyn replied coldly. "But since you have made it abundantly clear that I am dead to you... you are dead to me as well and this time, little brother... I am going to be the one who blocks your number."

"Evelyn, don’t—!"

CLICK! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

The call disconnected.

Matt stood frozen in the center of the Chancellor’s office with his arm holding the silent phone against his ear.

His entire body was shaking violently, his knees felt like water and his breathing coming in shallow hyperventilating gasps.

He frantically pulled the phone away, tapping her name on the screen to dial back.

[Alert: The party you are attempting to reach has restricted incoming transmissions from this terminal.]

She had blocked him.

She had actually blocked him.

The reality of his situation crashed over him like a suffocating tidal wave.

He was completely alone. His apartment rent, his daily food delivery subscriptions, his designer clothes, his tuition... it was all gone. Gone in a single phone call.

Slowly, Matt turned around to face the desk.

Chancellor Timothy sat with his chin resting in his palm, his scarred face impassive, offering the young man a look of unvarnished pity.

"Well, Davis?" Timothy asked quietly.

Matt swallowed hard with his throat parched as he lowered his trembling hands.

"I... I can settle the three million credit fee for the practical examinations right now, Chancellor. From my personal savings."

Timothy studied him for a second, then nodded curtly. "Very well. Transfer the funds to the bursar portal before the end of the business day... Dismissed."

Matt didn’t say another word. He turned on his heel and stumbled blindly out of the office with his world reduced to ruins.

...

Across the city, in the quiet streets of the Silverleaf District, the early afternoon sun cast long angular shadows across the manicured lawns.

Sitting on a sleek polished dark-wood park bench positioned directly across the street from Silas’s gated apartment complex was Seraphina Bloom.

The crimson-haired noble was currently holding a wide oversized broadsheet newspaper entirely in front of her face, pretending to read the economic section.

She wore a wide-brimmed black designer sunhat and dark sunglasses, though the disguise did nothing to hide the striking, undeniable beauty of her sharp facial structure, nor the voluptuous curves wrapped tightly in a tailored crimson blazer.

Standing stiffly beside the bench, his hands folded neatly behind his back, was her family’s primary butler, Reginald.

The elderly man in the crisp black suit adjusted his collar, sweating slightly in the warm afternoon air as he glanced at his expensive pocket watch.

"My Lady," Reginald spoke softly, leaning down slightly toward the newspaper. "Why are we still waiting on this public bench? It has been nearly two hours since we got here... Perhaps we should simply ring the chime again or wait inside the limousine?"

Seraphina didn’t lower the newspaper.

Her vibrant crimson eyes, visible behind the dark tint of her sunglasses, remained locked onto the front entrance of the gated property.

"We wait right here, Reginald," Seraphina muttered through gritted teeth, her manicured fingers gripping the edges of the paper tightly. "The purple-haired harpy inside slammed the door in my face earlier, claiming Silas was out in the city on business... If I retreat to the limousine, he might slip past us through the garage so we stay until he returns."

Reginald let out a soft resigned sigh.

"O-Of course, Lady Seraphina."

Just as the butler finished speaking, the loud rattling of a failing combustion engine echoed down the quiet boulevard.

A beat-up canary-yellow public transit cab, spewing a small plume of gray exhaust, sputtered up to the curb directly in front of the apartment gates.

The vehicle came to an abrupt jerky stop with its rusted brakes squealing in protest.

The rear passenger door swung open, and Silas stepped out onto the concrete.

Silas took a deep exhausted breath, rolling his broad shoulders as the taxi rattled away into the distance.

’What a ridiculously long morning...’ Silas thought to himself, aggressively running a hand through his messy dark hair.

It was roughly noon now.

He had spent the last few hours inside a server room with Evelyn, Ryan, and Claire, meticulously reviewing the multiple false identities the elite hacker had forged to throw the World Council’s biometric tracking algorithms completely off course.

He was a wizard with code as he had successfully constructed an airtight multi-layered background profile for the alias ’Lord Vespera,’ complete with forged historical land deeds in the outer rim and fake sponsorship records.

With the false paper trail secured, he was in the process of creating the real one and then he would contact the world council.

’Now that the heavy lifting is done,’ Silas thought, turning toward the gates of his apartment, ’I can finally head back to the Blessed Land or maybe I should stay home for no—’

Silas paused.