Chapter 174. Turning Hostile
The man’s fingers tapped lightly on the tabletop, once, then again. Each tap fell into an eerie rhythm that perfectly matched Ale’s heartbeat.
“Hmm, what a rare specin. In an age when magic is in decline, to still see an individual with such perfect atavistic reversion...”
A playful curve touched the man’s lips, his voice so gentle it sounded as though he were appraising an antique.
“If those old fossils ever found out that a treasure like you was running loose out here, they would probably shove their coffin lids aside and crawl back out to snatch you up.”
Boom—
That sentence struck Ale’s mind like a thunderclap, blasting his reason to pieces.
Ancient dragon bloodline.
That was his greatest secret. Aside from Logaris, Sylvia, and that old lion Leonard, there should have been absolutely no one else in the world who knew about it.
Who was this man?!
Ale’s hand shot to his waist at once. A short enchanted dagger was hidden there. It was not as easy to use as his greatsword, but at this distance, it was more than deadly enough.
His eyes turned sharp as blades, and the dragon blood in his entire body began to boil, ready to erupt into violence at any mont.
“Do not be so tense.”
The man seed not to care about his threat at all. He did not even change posture. He rely smiled and shook his head, then raised a long finger and traced a circle in the air.
“Look around you.”
Ale froze, and his gaze swept sideways.
The tavern was still as lively as ever. At the next table, a drunken fool was standing on a chair playing a drinking ga with his fingers. Near the bar, serving girls wove through the crowd with trays in hand. In the corner, a minstrel was strumming a battered guitar with a broken string.
Everyone was moving. Everyone was laughing. Everyone’s mouth was open.
But... there was no sound.
The whole world seed to have been muted. At that mont, the absolute uproar and the absolute silence split reality into sothing grotesquely unnatural.
Only then did Ale realize in horror that, centered on their table, a completely transparent barrier had enclosed a radius of one ter.
How was that possible?
He was a Dragonblood Knight. His sensitivity to magic was several tis greater than that of an ordinary mage. Not to ntion, he was sitting directly across from this man. At such close range, when had the barrier been cast?
There had been no chant. No fluctuation of magic. Not even the distinctive tremor of the elents.
The barrier felt as natural as though it had existed there from the very beginning.
Cold sweat ran down Ale’s temples.
An expert.
Not just an expert, but the kind of terrifying superhuman who could crush him to death with ease. Soone even more frightening than old lion Leonard.
“If I had wanted to make a move, you would already be a corpse. Or perhaps... a specin.” The man leaned back in his chair, the pressure around him withdrawing and releasing with perfect ease, and in an instant he beca that elegant noble uncle again. “Do not point that little toenail-trimming knife at . It is rude.”
Ale stiffly released his grip and gulped down great breaths of air. That brief standoff had drained an enormous amount of his ntal strength.
The man smiled, then ignored Ale entirely.
He turned his head and focused all his attention on the girl who had been shrinking into the corner the entire ti, as though she wished she could lt into the shadows.
This ti, there was none of that teasing amusent in his eyes, none of the attitude of toying with a pet. Instead, there was a sliver of real authority—the authority of a parent.
The absolute suppression of the station, drawn from the deepest layers of the bloodline itself, made even the air turn thick and heavy.
“Have you had enough fun?”
the man asked softly.
Alice shuddered violently, as though she had been electrocuted. At last, she raised her head. On that little face that was usually sharp-tongued and arrogant, there was now nothing but despair and grievance. Her eyes were red-rimd, like a rabbit cornered in its nest by a hawk.
Ale looked at the man, then at Alice, his mind still failing to catch up.
Just as he was bracing himself to force out a question, the man spoke first.
He reached out and gently straightened Alice’s sowhat disheveled bangs, his voice so tender that it was horrifying.
“It has been so long, and you will not even greet ?”
“My... daughter.”
The air in the tavern seed to have been filled with lead, so heavy that it was difficult to breathe.
That invisible barrier had severed every sound of revelry. Outside it, the people were still cheering wildly, still waving their arms in celebration of the record-breaking twenty-two bottles, but in the eyes of Alectos and Alice, it all looked more like a ridiculous silent play.
The man called Ifreles was sizing Alice up from head to toe with the detached gaze of soone inspecting an object.
“Why are you not speaking?”
Ifreles picked up the napkin on the table and leisurely wiped at the corner of his mouth, though no wine had touched it. “Have you been away from ho so long that you have forgotten even the most basic manners?”
Alice was trembling all over.
It was not the kind of trembling caused by cold. It was more like a conditioned reflex carved into her bones.
Like a chick fresh out of its shell encountering a venomous snake basking in the sun—even if the snake did nothing, the chick would still instinctively go rigid with terror.
Alectos was straightforward to the point of being simple, but he was not stupid.
Looking at the red-eyed man’s entirely natural air of “I am disciplining my pet,” then looking at Alice’s wretched state, like a mouse that had seen a cat, even a fool could guess what kind of relationship the two of them had.
“Alice...” Ale swallowed and quietly reached for the dagger at his waist. “Is this your... father?”
“I do not know him!”
Alice suddenly scread the words out, her voice edged with hysteria. She shot up from her chair so violently that the stool behind her tipped over.
“I do not have any father! I do not have a ho either!” Alice clutched the collar of her mage robe so tightly that her knuckles turned frighteningly white. “I am doing just fine now! I do not have to go to the crater every day and morize those damned inscriptions anymore! I would rather die than go back with you!”
That outburst left Ale stunned.
The Alice he knew, though sharp-tongued and arrogant, had always carried herself with the confidence of soone who thought she was second to none in the world.
He had never seen her like this—like a wildcat driven to the edge of a cliff, every hair on her body standing on end, bearing the desperate savagery of sothing cornered.
The expression on Ifreles’s face did not change.
He did not even twitch a brow.
He simply listened in silence, then let out a soft sigh. It was an extrely light sigh, carrying three parts helplessness and seven parts weariness, but not even the slightest trace of a father’s concern for his daughter.
“aningless noise.”
Ifreles crumpled the napkin in his hand into a ball and tossed it onto the table.
“It seems the outside world really has ruined you. Other than learning to bark like a stray dog, you have made no progress at all.”
That tone was too cold.
Cold enough that the fire in Alectos’s chest flared up with a whoosh.
What kind of father talked to his own child like that? This was not discipline at all. It was outright humiliation.
“Hey, sir.” Ale stepped forward and shielded the shivering Alice behind him. “That is going too far, is it not? Even as a parent, you do not have the right to—”
“Silence.”
Ifreles did not even look at him. He rely tapped the table once with his index finger.
The next second, a burst of utterly pure violence exploded outward from the oak table without the slightest warning!
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