Long-Term Plans

Seeing Lux's face full of certainty, as if she was convinced he had some secret plan he hadn't told her about, Karya gave up pretending not to know after that failed. He simply shrugged and stopped trying.

"Ah, I do have some plans, but they're not mature enough yet, so... take a guess?"

???

Lux stared at him in disbelief. She had thought she'd finally caught Karya in a slip, but she'd never imagined that, faced with irrefutable facts, he would simply give up and refuse to engage!

If I knew your plan, why would I be asking?

However, seeing that Karya had already adopted this stubbornly uncooperative attitude, Lux knew him well enough to realize that even if she insisted on getting to the bottom of it, he would probably just list one, two, three, four, and five.

If she wanted to know what Karya was planning, her only option was to make a guess and ask him to confirm it. Surely, if she really guessed his intentions, her teacher was too proud to lie about it.

After all these years together, Lux had realized that Karya was good at deceiving people, but not very good at lying.

Being good at deception and bad at lying might not sound like opposites, but Lux knew very well that Karya's favorite trick was to provide true information, then lead people to draw the wrong conclusions on their own!

Proud Karya had never been willing to say things that weren't true, but clever Karya could always get people to follow his lead. It worked far better than lying to deceive them!

Lux narrowed her eyes, seeming to turn into a golden-haired fox. She stopped pressing the silent Karya and turned to Yin Nuo instead.

"Tell me about your time in Shurima." Lux