A Secretly Capable Child Is Seeking For Her Dad (Novel) - Chapter 156
Chapter 156
The familiar’s strike halted in the air looked almost like a falling star that had frozen.
Tesetan could only stare blankly at the Necromancer King’s next movement.
“No, no. The blood……!”
All the attacks that had been pouring toward Tesetan had come to a stop.
The Necromancer King was breaking through the skeleton army and running toward her.
Those urgent steps were so unsteady that it seemed as though he might catch on a stone and fall at any moment.
Tesetan stopped breathing.
Naturally he could tell.
At this moment the Necromancer King was not running toward her to kill her.
His face was full of fear.
His eyes were filled with worry.
‘But why?’
It was strange.
The strike from just now had been the best possible chance for the Necromancer King to end this duel of honor.
It meant it had been one of the few turning points in which he could seize victory.
And yet he would kick away such a chance with his own feet?
He would show weakness in front of an enemy?
Tesetan’s deliberation was not long.
Unlike the Necromancer King, she knew exactly what she had to do.
He lowered the arm he had raised in order to take a defensive posture.
And slowly rotated the wrist of the hand gripping his sword.
“You’ve gone mad, you.”
He charged toward the Necromancer King, who was running at her with her vital points wide open.
The second slash he had honed over a long time activated.
Ku-gwagwagwang-!
Second Sword Strike, fusion blade.
A slash that inflicted fatal injury on the opponent by causing holy power and mana to run wild at the same time.
“……Ah!”
Just as he had expected, his sword strike was blocked by the barrier surrounding the Necromancer King.
But that did not mean there had been no gain.
The shockwave generated by the slash pierced through the barrier and was transmitted whole beyond it.
The Necromancer King, struck by the wave, floated up into the air.
Thrown back, he fell heavily onto the skeletons gathered there.
Several skeletons broke apart in a clatter, and the Necromancer King’s body rolled across the ground.
Agabert’s company members each watched that scene speechless.
Tesetan too panted as he stared at the fallen Necromancer King.
Had he fainted?
If so, then the disguise should have come undone.
Why was the appearance still the same?
* * *
Was it because he had activated the slash recklessly?
Or because, due to the injury he had suffered a little while ago, the bleeding was severe?
The more the guesses continued, the more color slowly drained from Tesetan’s face.
“What are you doing! You said a duel of honor was a duel for honor! You bastard, trash bastard, I’ll kill you-!”
From far away, one of the Necromancer King’s subordinates screamed.
If not for the chief administrator of the Association blocking the way, he would have rushed all the way up to Tesetan.
‘A duel for honor……’
At the voice that remained like an afterimage, the space around his ears grew distant.
Yes.
That was right.
A duel of honor was a duel for honor.
It was right to restrain as much as possible the sword strikes that could take the opponent’s life.
If one was a swordsman, a person with honor as a swordsman, then one ought to fight that way.
But he……
For some reason, a tremor passed up through his arm.
‘I don’t have anything like honor.’
The knight he had been died long ago.
No, far beyond dying, he had fallen into the deepest hell that existed in the world.
‘Do whatever it takes.’
The voice that would drag him back into the hell of the past echoed at his ears once again.
A bead of sweat ran down his forehead and into the corner of his eye, causing a sharp pain.
‘If you’ve devoured Mother, then do whatever it takes.’
Mana and holy power billowed explosively from the sword.
It felt as though that rampaging power were telling him this.
‘A heap of defects. Trash that shoved even your innocent mother into hell. A useless bastard who, even so, lacks the courage to die.’
Tesetan raised his gaze with vacant eyes.
Far ahead he could vaguely see the figures of someone standing.
Valentis Luminen.
And Leonardo Luminen.
The family he had deliberately avoided.
‘Why of all days.’
Why, of all days, did he once again have to face his father and older brother on a day like this?
Tesetan had never hoped for luck in life.
Only to be like other people.
No, it would have been fine even to be less than them, so long as only once, even by chance, he might have been happy.
But chance had only ever been cruel to him.
Far from luck, it was only cruel, like today.
His heart pounded fiercely. Even deep breaths did nothing.
The next moment, something surged up Tesetan’s throat.
“L-leader!”
The executives cried out when they saw the dark-red blood.
But Tesetan himself only looked at his own bloodstains as though observing them, and sank into thought.
‘Why am I coughing up blood?’
A sinister premonition slowly crept up.
‘Could it be……’
The Necromancer King was strong.
Strong enough to deflect Tesetan’s sword strike with only a single barrier.
And the Necromancer King’s barrier consisted of a mass of highly pure mana.
By contrast, what had his own sword strike been like?
His fusion blade was an unstable power created by tightly gathering and fusing mana and holy power.
A sword strike like cracked glass.
“Damn……”
A short mutter slipped out of his mouth.
Tesetan let go of the sword from his hand.
It was no mistake.
Certainly, certainly something was wrong.
His heartbeat was not ordinary, and the pain derived from it was hard to endure.
If the situation was turning out like this, then the duel of honor was no longer the issue.
He raised his head.
And after spitting out the blood pooled in his mouth onto the ground, he muttered,
“This is enough. Go.”
The Necromancer King’s two familiars looked at her.
“Take him and go. Quickly.”
He knew well what result that ever-stronger pounding of his heart would bring.
Because he had already experienced it once long ago.
He turned his head and gave the members of Trevaga an order as well.
“Get away from here. That’s an order.”
This pounding could not be stopped.
Because it was a cursed power that had vaporized even the saint who had manifested the strongest holy power in history.
“Commander, surely you don’t……”
“Didn’t you hear me? I said get out of here!”
At last he lost his composure.
Unable to bring himself to look toward the Luminen family, Tesetan shouted,
“It’s an order! If you don’t want to die, then all of you get out!”
An unbearable pressure came into his head, and as the capillaries in his eyes burst, his vision was dyed red.
The balance of holy power and mana he had been maintaining with difficulty was breaking apart.
He had expected something like this would happen someday, but why did it have to be now……
“If you stay here, you’ll all, ugh……!”
Tesetan staggered.
His hearing gradually dulled.
To keep from collapsing, he stabbed his sword into the ground.
After breathing harshly, he spread a shallow barrier around his body.
It was a pathetic barrier, but even so, it would be better than none.
If luck was with them, perhaps he could save at least a few people who were standing far away.
Thump- thump- thump-
Feeling the heartbeat growing fiercer and fiercer, Tesetan raised his head.
Some distance away, he saw the Necromancer King lying as though dead.
“Damn……”
The Necromancer King was still in the form of a young child.
‘Ominously……’
In truth, from the very beginning Tesetan had been as good as defeated.
The Necromancer King’s mana had completely shattered Tesetan’s balance, which had never once been broken since he lost his mother.
It meant that from the start the Necromancer King had been much stronger than she was.
To the point where they could not even be compared.
Tesetan let out a sneer without realizing it.
In the end, once again, everything had arisen from his own foolishness.
Suddenly he remembered a little while ago.
The Necromancer King, who had not killed her even though she could have.
And the expression on his face as he ran toward Tesetan while he was injured passed before his eyes as well.
Even when he thought it over again, it was an action he simply could not understand.
What was the real reason?
Why was he so generous to him?
Why did he look at him with those eyes?
When he found the Necromancer King’s vital point, she had not hesitated even a little.
The roiling power inside his body whispered.
‘You’re trash.’
Tesetan laughed with blood running down from his mouth.
The power was right.
Tesetan was trash.
The most loathsome and disgusting trash in the world.
He had trampled on the mercy the Necromancer King had shown her and tried without hesitation to drive the tip of her sword into her throat.
Was this the price of that sin?
“Ha……”
His insides churned.
Along with the feeling of his internal organs being strangled, his eyes throbbed as though they would burst out.
The ground around him was already being gouged out with a scraping sound.
It meant that the rampaging mana had not only slipped beyond his control, but had begun bursting out into the open.
Tesetan deliberately gripped the blade.
Because if he did not feel a pain greater than the pain of the rampage, he thought he would lose consciousness.
Soon after, a roar covered the ruins.
The pain of his body being torn apart as the organs inside it collapsed spread through his whole body.
The pain of the explosion felt like every muscle in his body being carved away one by one with a well-honed blade.
His vision went white, and the breath he had barely held on to caught at the tip of his chin.
At that instant.
“……Dad!”
The world lurched greatly, and someone hurriedly took the blade from his hand.
When he opened his eyes, beyond his blurred vision he saw the Necromancer King’s face doubled over in two images.
“D-don’t…… don’t go!”
The Necromancer King had broken through Tesetan’s barrier and was clinging to his neck.
“Waaaah, Tie was wrong……”
“……”
“Please don’t leave only Tie behind!”
In an instant, the pressure weighing Tesetan down slackened.
Tesetan blankly lowered his gaze.
The rampaging power was leaving him.
As though an object were returning to its rightful place, as a river flowed from above to below……
Toward the Necromancer King.