Chapter Three Hundred and Forty-Two: As a Father (Sepl’s POV)
“Ahh, if Mark hadn’t gotten in the way, I could have stabbed him.”
With that, Teresa, who had just been pinned beneath the man, sat up. In her hand gleamed a silvery-white knife. That oddly pale silver wasn’t something Sepl owned himself, but he recognized it well enough.
“Mithril?”
“Lifted it off him. A long time ago.”
Teresa said it with a grin. So the girl had been trying to stab her enraged father in the confusion. With mithril silver, even an opponent of C-rank caliber could be killed if the blade found its mark.
It had looked, at first glance, as though Mark—leaping out to shield Teresa from the man—had been the reason she’d failed to stab him. But Sepl saw it differently.
“No way you could have. He may be a has-been, but he’s still C-rank, right? However deep into the bottle he is, he hasn’t fallen so far that a weak little brat like you could kill him.”
“What if he really had fallen that far? What if, has-been as he is, even still C-rank, a girl with no magical power could actually kill him? …Maybe the goddess would have recognized that I’d cleared the trial. I failed, though.”
“Who knows?”
“Guess I left too much of a safety margin…”
As she spoke, Teresa glanced up sideways at Sepl. It seemed that the "safety margin" she was talking about referred to Sepl himself.
“You knew I was coming?”
“Why do you think I was talking so loudly inside the estate? Everyone knows people with a lot of magical power have super good ears.”
She was an adventurer’s daughter, after all. A child with a C-rank adventurer father wouldn’t find it strange to know about enhanced hearing.
“Karen got crazy strong all of a sudden and couldn’t control her strength, even gave me a nasty bruise—I figured that meant she could hear everything. So I gambled on the fact that someone would show up sooner or later, and came here anyway.”
She’d counted on someone being there as a safety margin, apparently treating it as a trial offered up to the goddess—killing her own father. The idea was insane, yet for that very reason Sepl strangely understood why Karen had decided to support her.
“I expected someone stronger to show up, honestly.”
“Master Julius? He’d do anything Little Karen asked of him, sure. But sorry to disappoint—it’s me who came. Let’s get out of here, fast.”
Sepl scooped up Mark, who was unconscious. Michael, by his own judgment, had already fled the scene. Sepl tried to bring Teresa along too, but she swatted his outstretched hand away.
“Hey!”
“I came here to face a trial. Honestly, I’m glad it was a has-been who showed up instead of who I expected. You can’t stop that man, can you?”
“Don’t talk nonsense. You’ll get killed.”
“…Would I? He didn’t kill me right off the bat, did he? He could’ve snapped me in half in a second.”
“That’s because of the gear Little Karen gave you!”
Sepl felt a headache coming on. He never imagined that this girl, too, still clung to the illusion that her father might love her. Even after being subjected to such naked murderous intent, she still couldn’t stop hoping. Despite intending to kill him, she still hoped he wouldn’t kill her. From Sepl’s outside view, that was obviously impossible. Was a father truly a being loved so unconditionally by his child? To be loved this much by your own daughter, and still seriously trying to kill her—it turned Sepl’s stomach.
“Why don’t you run? He might not be able to kill me after all, but you? You’ll probably die for real.”
“You little—”
Teresa had stopped being smug and dismissive toward Sepl and started genuinely worrying about him instead. Feeling the full weight of being looked down on, a vein bulged at Sepl’s temple. Tapping it with his finger from the headache of being so thoroughly underestimated, he said:
“I haven’t fallen so low that I need a little runt like you worrying about me.”
“You’re a has-been—a supporter. At best, D-rank, right?”
“I am, in fact, a D-rank adventurer, but—”
Sepl caught the man’s silently striking dagger with his one-handed longsword and knocked it aside. He set Mark down and reset his stance. The man shouted in confusion:
“Why are you protecting her!? I see! You don’t know, do you!? That girl has no magical power! She’s a sinner, defying the goddess’s will!”
“Enough of that crap! So what!? Why would you kill your own daughter over that!? You’re out of your mind!”
“Ghh! Shut up!”
At Sepl’s words, the man’s flushed face darkened further with blood. But he didn’t lunge again. His eyes rolled, and he fixed his gaze on Teresa. In those bloodshot eyes was nothing but dripping, distilled hatred.
A child should never be looked at by their own father like that. Sepl moved to block Teresa’s line of sight. So that father’s gaze would never reach her eyes.
“Everything is because of you—!”
Before the man’s blade—or even the blade of his words—could reach Teresa, Sepl struck.
“Ghh—”
Since Sepl was trying not to kill anyone, the man was able to dodge the attack, but he swallowed the words he had been about to say. Though sluggish, he barely managed to avoid the sword’s tip as it grazed past him. As he watched reason slowly return to the man’s bloodshot eyes with each evasive step, Sepl broke into a cold sweat.
If enough time passed for the alcohol to wear off, this could turn seriously bad. So he had to finish this before then.
Sepl pulled back from the man once, catching his breath, and said:
“No matter how big a safety margin you build, people die when they challenge a trial that’s too much.”
Clearing the tenth floor of a dungeon was all it took to become a C-rank adventurer. You could take as much of a safety margin as you wanted. By the Adventurers’ Guild’s own rules, even the slowest, most turtle-paced clear of the tenth floor still qualified you for promotion to C-rank. And yet many adventurers stayed stuck at D-rank, because clearing the tenth floor was that dangerous. Because so many people died there.
“That’s why I chose not to be promoted to C-rank.”
He’d been told he had the skill to clear the tenth floor. His party had been genuinely sorry to see him decline. Promotion to C-rank had never been some unreachable dream for Sepl. He could have risked everything on one last decisive fight, earned the promotion, retired as an adventurer right then—and lived the rest of his life with a respectable title to his name.
But Sepl hadn’t chosen that path.
“For the sake of my child, who was born into this world!”
Sepl shouted and charged forward as he said it. The man’s movements, by contrast, were slow. Without waiting for that bloated arm to finish lifting the sword, Sepl cut him down with everything he had in a single decisive blow.
“I’m a D-rank adventurer—but I’m not too shabby.”
Sepl glanced at Teresa, half-expecting her to be in shock at watching her father cut down right in front of her. But Teresa showed no sign of being shaken.
“He was my prey…”
She glared at him. Despite being rescued, she started complaining.
“That’s what you get for being weak. If you want to complain to me, get stronger than I am.”
After saying it, Sepl regretted it slightly. It was probably a harsh thing to say to someone with no magical power. But Teresa didn’t flinch in the slightest.
“Just watch…”
Teresa fixed Sepl with a fierce stare and declared:
“I’m going to get strong!”
“…Huh? Haven’t I been through this exact conversation before?”
“Wait, don’t tell me—Master Thor said the exact same thing!?”
“Hmm, who knows?”
“TELL MEEEEE!”
Fending off the now thoroughly recovered Teresa, Sepl pressed some money into the hands of the nearby residents who had come out at the commotion and left them to handle the rest.
The man, despite the heavy bleeding, was still alive. If someone wanted him to live, he would.
Trusting Karen to sort out the rest, Sepl finally picked Mark back up, grabbed hold of Teresa, and went off to retrieve Michael and Lena, who had fled earlier.
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