Chapter 9: Confirmation procedure (5)

It was unavoidable.

It was impossible to come up with an excuse in such a short time, and there wasn’t a better excuse to begin with.

‘Right, it’s better than getting caught practicing magic.’

‘It’s better than getting caught using magic…!’

As I kept repeating that to myself, almost brainwashing myself, and choking back tears, Sarah rushed over and embraced me.

“It’s alright, my lady. There’s nothing to be scared of. I’m here with you. Sarah will stay by your side.”

Clinging to Sarah, I rubbed away my tears and continued to sob.

Sarah’s embrace wasn’t particularly soft, but my heart kept pounding, and my fingertips were already drenched in sweat.

A few other maids came and went, and then, a short while later, urgent footsteps echoed loudly from the hallway.

‘It seems what I expected has arrived.’

“Sennet!! My daughter! What’s wrong!”

Emerging from beyond the wide-open door were my father and mother in their nightclothes, and my younger brother with his hair disheveled.

The three of them, whose eyes met mine as I was held in Sarah’s arms, immediately rushed into the room.

I deliberately stretched my arms out towards my father, and then was transferred from Sarah’s arms into my mother’s embrace.

I almost forgot that I needed to feign distress amidst the cozy comfort of the soft, plush natural cushion, but Sarah explained the situation for me, ensuring that my use of magic wasn’t revealed at all.

No one asked specifically what had happened, and the maids silently tidied the bed, carefully removing the wet blankets.

That quiet consideration was suffocating, but for today, I had to grit my teeth and bear it.

Perhaps thankfully, the commotion that night was concluded with the explanation that Lady Sennet had a nightmare, but for a while, my daily life was filled with quiet, subtle shame.

My family doted on me even more, saying it would be a disaster if I had another scary dream, and eventually, I was relegated to sleeping in the same bed as my parents and younger brother.

In the middle of the night, my mother would hug me tightly and reassure me, while my father would flex his arm and sing lullabies in an unnecessarily boisterous voice.

My usually quiet younger brother came in with a small storybook, a determined look on his face, and spouted nonsense like, “Sister always slept well when I read her a story.”

‘Even if he’s a kid, is this really how you treat a ten-year-old?!’

‘Besides, my mental age is already in my mid-twenties!’

But even if I screamed that internally, the perfect sleep package was completed with my father’s lullaby, my mother’s embrace, and my younger brother’s storybook narration.

From that day on, I had to desperately endure the nights in the center of the bed, surrounded by the warmth of three people.

Given this situation, the special training I had been doing every night had to be postponed, but there was one more reason why it had to be put on hold.

That was the side effect of the mana enhancer I had secretly acquired.

When I actually used magic, I didn’t feel any pain, so I thought there was nothing wrong.

However, the next morning, I woke up two or three hours later than usual, and my body felt heavy, as if pressed down by the ground.

As soon as I opened my eyes, my head throbbed as if it would split, and my heartbeat was faster than usual and unpleasantly irregular.

This led my family and Sarah to misunderstand, thinking, ‘How scary must her nightmare have been—’

Even as I cautiously tried to gather mana at my fingertips to attempt magic, I felt a rough, suffocating flow of mana that was different from usual.

A sensation that was excessively sharp and difficult to control as it spread.

I gritted my teeth and lowered my hand.

‘If I had pushed myself like I did at the Saluut Ducal House, it wouldn’t have ended with just collapsing.’

‘Unimaginable side effects might have awaited me.’

I carefully opened the drawer, took out the remaining four mana enhancers, and looked at them.

“I had a feeling that purple color was ominous…”

The purplish liquid now looked ominous just by seeing it, and I felt a chilling danger within it.

I pushed them deep back into the drawer and quietly resolved.

‘Never take them out unless it’s a real emergency, and never rely on such dangerous items.’

‘Because if I get swayed by the small power before me, I’ll face a different ruin than in the original story.’

So, now that magic training is on hold, I’ve naturally been wandering around the mansion, gathering information.

Quite some time had passed since I transmigrated, but I had focused so much on Isellia that I still knew too little about this lady named Sennet.

As a result of quietly pretending to stay put while looking around the house, stories about Sennet’s father naturally began to catch my ear.

On the surface, he always seemed boisterous, kind, and an overly doting father who cherished me excessively.

That’s all I knew, but he was a much more remarkable person than I thought.

It was a story I happened to overhear while walking around the mansion.

My father’s true self was pieced together from the stories cautiously exchanged among the servants and my mother’s casual reminiscences of the past.

My father was originally an illegitimate child of a fallen baronial house.

His position was somewhat awkward: too ambiguous to be called a noble, yet with lingering noble blood to be called a commoner.

But what my father chose was not a quiet decline, but the path to the battlefield, sword and shield in hand.

Surprisingly, my father became one of the elites under Count Grouse, a war hero.

He saved the Count’s life multiple times, and his military achievements were so undeniable that no one could refute them.

Eventually, acknowledged for his merits, my father proudly proposed directly to my mother, who was a viscountess’s daughter, and was recognized by the then Viscount Windsor, Sennet’s maternal grandfather, thus inheriting the current viscount title.

Furthermore, my father and mother were childhood friends, so this anecdote was famous among nobles at the time as a romantic story…

Upon hearing such stories, I fell into a brief contemplation.

‘If I can’t train magic, then I have no choice but to shift my focus to physical training, right?’

‘In that case—’

****

Just as the dawn mist still enveloped the garden, I quietly slipped out of bed, carefully changed my clothes so as not to wake my mother and younger brother, and exited the hallway.

I had perfectly grasped that my father would be warming up in the garden at exactly this time, after days of observation.

“Pants really are comfortable, after all.”

They were a bit small, but I borrowed my younger brother’s clothes.

Wearing only dresses had already been mentally and physically uncomfortable, so this felt like liberation.

Anyway, I strolled around the garden with my hands behind my back as if out for a walk, and from a distance, I spotted my father’s massive back.

Deep scars, like traces of the battlefield, remained on his broad shoulders and thick forearms, and his body, hardened by training, was imposing but looked even more magnificent.

I briefly hid behind the bushes, then subtly approached him just as my father began his training.

“Sennet? My daughter, what brings you out so early?”

As my father stroked my head with his large hand, I smiled faintly and tilted my head.

“Fa… Father~ Are you doing your morning exercises? Can… can I try it too?”

When I smiled with sparkling eyes, like an innocent child, my father burst into hearty laughter.

“Haha, my daughter, were you upset that Father hasn’t been playing with you lately? Then just try to follow along.”

‘Operation successful.’

I imagined a triumphant pose internally and began to follow my father.

First was a simple run around the edge of the garden.

As expected, my father’s strides were long and his running speed was fast, befitting his large build.

I took small breaths and chased after him.

Initially, I thought even a simple run would be difficult for the body of a precious noble lady… but it wasn’t as hard as I expected.

No matter how much I ran, I didn’t get heavily winded, so I could keep pace behind my father with small, rhythmic footsteps.

Occasionally, my father would look back several times, worried, but I deliberately pretended to catch my breath slightly as I followed.

“My daughter, you must tell me right away if you’re tired!”

“Yes. Fathe… Fa, Father~!”

I wanted to cry several times because of the honorific, but I replied with the most innocent smile I could manage.

After the run, my father wielded a long wooden training spear with both hands, extending and rotating it at precise angles.

I wanted to pick up a wooden spear and imitate the same movements as my father.

However, it seemed he wouldn’t allow even this; the moment I picked up the spear, he gasped and snatched it away, then, to make matters worse, I was banished from the garden and handed over to Sarah.

It’s a shame, but I might have to be content with at least building up my stamina by running every day.

“Still, Lady Sennet has only changed beautifully on the outside, but inside, she’s still the same as we know her, isn’t she?”

While walking down the hallway after being bathed by Sarah, I heard the maids’ voices through the crack in the library door.

I pricked up my ears from beyond the door to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Exactly, exactly. She’s only changed on the outside, but she’s actually a delicate person… so we need to take even better care of her.”

“Right? Oh, how scary must her dream have been then…”

‘A scary dream? No way… No way…’

“But isn’t it strange? I did the laundry then, and there was no strange smell at all! Only a fragrant scent—”

“Exactly, she definitely drew a map, but the color was transparent!”

I trembled my fists and screamed internally.

‘Please, stop blabbering! Forget it! Or at least keep it a secret!’

But the maids’ conversation showed no signs of ending.

“But did she really draw a map? She had a lot of water.”

Distraught, I slammed my head against the wall, and after that last comment, I ran through the garden once more.

From that day on, strange rumors began to circulate among the maids.