A Secretly Capable Child Is Seeking For Her Dad (Novel) - Chapter 63
Chapter 63
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Translated by Sylph
Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net
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The teacher asked back in a voice that was not surprised at all.
[Why do you think that way?]
Dad, who had been lowering his eyes, raised his head. And staring straight at the camera, she said,
[Because I think that if Tie hadn’t existed, I could have lived a little more comfortably.]
…A little more comfortably?
He could not move, as though his body had been paralyzed.
Tie could not take her eyes off the screen.
Dad began speaking again.
[Money too. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for Tie, I wonder if I would have needed to work this hard.]
Tie drew in a short breath and then hurriedly let it out.
His throat stung as if he had inhaled the air of a bathroom where too much disinfectant had been sprayed by mistake.
[That kid definitely did make the bachelor in unit 106 suffer for no reason.]
Then, this time, something behind him turned on with a pop-.
When he turned his head, another video was playing on the monitor on the desk.
‘Grandma…?’
The person who appeared on the second screen was the grandmother from unit 107.
To Tie, she was essentially no different from a mother.
[From when she was little, she never listened, and that kid was just so sly.]
[Tie is?]
[Don’t even mention it. Because of that kid, the bachelor in 106 didn’t have a single easy day, I’m telling you, and while looking after the child even her body got all worn down.]
“…Lies.”
Mouthing the word, Tie staggered away from the tablet and the monitor.
There was no way Grandma and Dad would say things like that.
But the videos went on.
[I was always irritated whenever Tie asked me to buy her something. Given the situation, what did toys or snacks even matter for her to act like that.]
[Tie really is immature.]
[Well, she’s a child. Even so, I realized it then. That it would be difficult for me to love Tie wholly.]
“It’s fake!”
Tie shouted without meaning to.
He knew he had to keep quiet.
He also knew that all of this was fake inside the subspace.
But the more the words spoken by Dad and Grandma continued, the more her breathing rose to the tip of her chin, and her face grew hot.
“It’s fake! My dad wouldn’t say things like that! My dad absolutely would never…!”
[Come to think of it, the reason I ended up stranded here in the first place is because of Tie.]
However, at the next words she heard, she had no choice but to close her mouth.
[If only Tie hadn’t been there that day, it wouldn’t have come to this.]
Along with Dad’s voice, something brushed past inside her head.
The dream he had on the day he lost Dad at Pearl City Harbor.
That dream, which was so vivid it still remained sharply in his mind even now.
‘Are you trying to hurt the young lady!’
‘Young lady, always stay healthy. Smile a lot with the commander too.’
People dying inside monsters that pressed in endlessly.
And yet even so, people trying to protect Tie, who was still only a baby.
It had been a dream, but it was so vivid that he could not easily forget those scenes.
‘It’s okay, Tie. It’s okay.’
Recalling Dad in the final moments of that dream, Tie pressed her lips tightly together.
She had suspected whether that might have actually been something Tie and Dad had really gone through before coming to the Republic of Korea.
[…If only Tie really hadn’t been there that day.]
And at this very moment.
Dad on the screen was telling her that that suspicion was true.
Cold spread up his arms, then to his chest and throat, and all the way to his face.
[If instead of ordering me to ‘protect’ Tie, they had ordered me to ‘throw her away’.]
Dad’s gaze turned diagonally toward the side.
Toward where Tie was standing.
[Wouldn’t I have lived comfortably, without falling into a place like this and suffering like a dog, without bearing everything alone.]
Tie moved her frozen lips.
A faint voice leaked out through his throat.
“It’s fake… fake.”
He should have expected it.
From the moment the subspace had taken on the scenery of Jongno District.
“It’s all fake….”
From the moment Krazar had shown him his hometown and kindergarten, he should have expected it.
Then he would not have been shaken by a stupid fake video letter like this.
[Come to think of it, this must be why.]
Hearing the continuing voice, Tie took one step, then another, backward.
Velugon had said so.
That Krazar showed the target the fear he feared most.
That it was because overcoming that was difficult that so many people lost their lives.
When he first heard that story, he had found it strange.
He knew Krazar was strong, but even so, did it make sense that there had only been exactly one person who overcame it?
What exactly was the delusion Krazar showed?
But now he felt like he knew the answer.
[The reason the child’s mother didn’t raise her and shoved her onto me, I mean.]
Strength left his legs.
They were painful words.
Words that did not stop at shredding his heart to pieces, but felt as if they were cutting it into jagged strips with scissors.
[She knew Astie would weigh her down. That she’d be a burden in everything. She knew she’d be a lump that ruined her parents’ lives.]
The moment Tie staggered and grabbed the wall.
He heard the sound of the entrance door opening behind him.
“Necromancer King….”
Velugon, having heard Tie’s voice, had entered the kindergarten.
Reason whispered in his head.
‘Run away.’
But her body did not move at all, as though frozen.
Was this what it felt like to be swallowed by fear?
Then something crept in through the gap of the teachers’ office door.
Red mist.
And behind it, Velugon shambling forward as well.
It was when Tie, like a rabbit before a beast of prey, stood frozen with only her eyes wide open.
“Astie! What are you doing!”
Astie snapped back to her senses.
When he turned his head, he saw Lucarion, who had come out of the kindergarten bag before he knew it.
Lucarion was flapping his wings in midair.
“Get a hold of yourself!”
Lucarion knocked the monitor that had been showing the grandmother from unit 107 off the desk.
After that, he snatched up the tablet too and threw it toward the wall.
As the screen cracked and the video shut off, a sobbing sound burst from Tie’s mouth on its own.
“B-Blackieee….”
The tears he had been holding back fell drip, drip, but Lucarion was firm.
“Not now! If you’re going to cry, cry later! We don’t have time!”
Tie quickly shut her mouth.
And he hastily wiped around his eyes.
“I’ll try to hold off the mist, so you snatch the core from that guy first! I can feel condensed magic power from the core!”
Nodding, Tie turned her head in a fluster toward Velugon.
Then he opened his mouth in shock.
‘…An actual zombie?’
He had not looked like that when the chase started.
Having wandered the streets so long while searching for Tie, Velugon’s ankles were tightly wrapped with a trash bag, discarded string, and a badminton net.
“Hurry! If it looks like you can’t take the magic stone, then at least run away!”
Lucarion shouted again.
Before he knew it, he was wildly firing pure white light at the red mist.
“O-Okay….”
Swallowing hard, Tie first backed away.
Then he knocked over the stool where the tablet had been placed, and with all his strength pushed over the pile of boxes stacked beside the wall.
After that, when he ran behind the large office desk, Velugon, seeing Tie move farther away, twisted his face.
“Necromancer King! Come here this instant!”
But Tie kept dragging over everything she could get her hands on and stacking it beside the fallen pile of boxes.
From the teacher’s office chair to the mini bookshelf, the vacuum cleaner, and even the drying rack beside it.
Once he had brought and piled all kinds of things, a small barricade had been completed between Velugon and Tie.
‘What next?’
His mind spun taut in order to resolve the urgent situation.
Velugon seemed even less sane than before, and was staggering more and more.
‘But he’s still an adult.’
With a half-baked method, he would not be able to take the core from Velugon.
Not unless he could tie him up tightly somewhere.
‘Tie her up tightly…?’
For an instant Tie’s gaze turned toward Velugon’s ankles.
More precisely, toward the trash bag, the string, and the badminton net wrapped around his ankles.
The child’s eyes flashed.
‘That’s it!’
Velugon’s ankles were not free.
So then what if he could completely bind those feet?
Just then, the vacuum cleaner he had knocked over a little while ago came into view.