I’Ll Protect My Tyrant Dad! [EN]: Chapter 81

I Protect My Tyrant Father! 81. Dad is Suspicious (81/140)

81. Dad is Suspicious

2023.09.08.

Leonhardt, Ashid, the muscle-bound maids, and I returned in high spirits. I was already thrilled at the thought of showing off my perfect test score.

But that’s where the problem started.

“What is everyone doing?”

No one was paying attention to me!

The maids of the castle, who usually fussed over me when I arrived, were sprawled out like zombies.

“……Huh?”

At times like this, I need to tap my feet to wake people up.

Tap, tap. At the small sound, the maids squinted and looked over here.

“Sisters!”

“H-huh!”

“Lady Sienne!”

They looked at me as if they had seen a ghost.

Pale faces, traces of sticky drool at the corners of their mouths.

“What are you doing sitting here?”

“W-well, that’s…….”

The maid staggered to her feet.

I tilted my head.

Without answering my question, she hesitated and said,

“H-huh. You came b-back sooner than expected. Please, go inside and have dinner. You must be hungry.”

“Huh? Should I?”

Just then, Leonhardt, who had been walking ahead of me, stopped and strode back, saying,

“Chestnut.”

“Huh?”

“……Let’s eat quickly.”

Leonhardt’s attitude was also suspicious.

‘Why is he like that? Like someone who’s seen something scary?’

I tilted my head, but neither the maids nor Leonhardt said anything. With suspicion piling up in my heart, I said quietly,

“Then let’s go eat quickly! Sisters, don’t sit in the hallway, get up!”

“Yes, yes…….”

Even when I turned around to check the maids’ pale faces, there was nothing out of the ordinary. I suppressed my uneasy feelings and had dinner.

Everything was normal.

Except for the fact that Dad, who I wanted to show my perfect test score to, had disappeared somewhere.

***

It was late at night after Sienne finished dinner.

At that hour, in the basement of the mansion where Sienne was staying, a henchman was being tortured.

“The mastermind is the Pope and the Saintess, you said?”

The thug had a ball gag in his mouth, preventing him from biting his tongue and killing himself.

“Kk, kkeueuk……!”

The thug had boarded Sienne’s carriage to kill her. If he had been a little slower, Sienne might have died. The thought sent shivers down his spine.

“Why are you trying to kill my daughter when you’ve gone to the path of light [referring to serving the Pope and Saintess]?”

“That’s…….”

The thug coughed up blood. But Matthias stared at him calmly and said,

“Just say as much as you can.”

“Kaa, kal…….”

Matthias’s sword tip approached his skin. It was said that he tortured people by slicing their flesh with a knife. Even a spy had fear.

He coughed and opened his mouth.

“I’ll spare your life.”

At Matthias’s words, the spy bit his lip tightly.

“I, I can’t speak. My body already has-”

Matthias continued in a weary tone.

“A suicide bomb installed by the temple’s leadership, right?”

“Ku, kkeulleok!”

“If I’m right, blink. My daughter, Sienne, has a secret that only the temple knows. Right? And my daughter is a great threat to the temple’s existence. Is that correct?”

“…….”

In an instant, the thug’s eyelashes fluttered and closed forever.

Matthias put his hand under the thug’s nose.

He was already dead.

He wasn’t flustered because he had anticipated this level of silencing.

That’s how you use safety devices when sending spies.

“Then, next.”

It didn’t matter. He had gotten all the answers he wanted, so he could just move on to the next one.

He whispered coldly to another thug lying on the floor.

“Who ordered you? Tell me.”

“I can’t…… say…….”

Another one had infiltrated the academy to cut off Sienne’s head. They were all ordered by different people. He had managed to escape and enter the Mirmode mansion.

“Then I’ll tell you instead.”

Fear clouded the face of the surviving thug.

It was because he knew Matthias Mirmode’s reputation better than anyone else.

Because he was…….

“You’re trash from our family.”

As a member of the Mirmode family, he knew very well about Matthias Mirmode’s misdeeds.

Matthias began to reveal his backers one by one.

“The backer is the Head of the Council, and you must be one of the Head of the Council’s pawns. You must still be eyeing the Duke’s heir position. But well, do you think that will happen as you wish?”

Matthias smiled wryly and drew his sword. It was time to mercilessly punish those who dared to take his daughter’s life.

In an instant, a chillingly sharp blade struck the thug’s neck.

***

All the lights in the hallway were turned off, and in the dark night, even the moon was trapped in the clouds.

I, who was lying alone in bed, stealthily got up.

Then, I toddled to the door. Wouldn’t the muscle-bound maids guarding the door stop me? Not at all.

Because…….

“Snore-.”

……The muscle-bound maids were tired, so they were snoring like that.

Still, they might wake up, so I carefully held my breath and slipped out.

‘It’s strange. I need to do some observing. What happened while I was away from the mansion!’

No matter how I thought about it, the maids’ actions earlier were excessively suspicious.

More than anything, I was worried that our dad kept disappearing.

I tried to find a suspicious place while looking around the quiet, no, even eerie mansion shrouded in darkness.

‘It’s a little suspicious that the sisters were so noisy earlier.’

After going down near the hallway, I went down the landing one by one.

I could see the basement stairs where a faint light was shining. This place was said to be used as a warehouse, but I had never bothered to go inside for years because it was a dust pit.

And strangely enough, at this moment, I felt like something important that I didn’t know was happening in the warehouse below those basement stairs.

I scurried down quickly towards the light, and there I could see Dad’s pushover friends guarding the front of the warehouse, frozen solid.

“Uncles!”

As soon as they heard my words, the henchmen jumped up. Even though they were soft pushovers on the inside, shadows fell on their faces, making them look more threatening.

“What are you doing there, uncles?”

“Y-yes?”

I stood on tiptoe and looked.

There was definitely something beyond that door.

I blinked, and then I widened my eyes when I saw a silhouette coming out of the door.

“Uh? It’s Dad!”

I couldn’t pretend not to see our dad’s silhouette. At that moment, the door was about to close again urgently.

“L-Lady Sienne!”

They couldn’t catch me slipping out like an eel, and they were just stamping their feet.

‘Is it because they are soft-hearted?’

Anyway, it was a good thing for me.

As expected, our dad was so soft-hearted that he seemed worried that I would get caught in the door.

Dad couldn’t close the door roughly, but instead quickly came out of the door and slammed the warehouse door shut.

“Dad! What’s in there? What did you do? I got a perfect score on the test today-”

I took a quick look, but Dad looked healthy. So I was going to show off my perfect test score without thinking, but…….

Dad was holding a dagger. I widened my eyes and looked at Dad’s knife.

“Wh, what’s that knife?”

“Huh?”

“That’s a knife?”

“Oh, oh?”

I quickly took a step forward. Dad stood there with his shaking pupils fixed on me, unable to hide the knife behind his back.

I ran towards Dad and stood right in front of the knife.

Only then did Dad finally come to his senses and hurriedly try to put the knife back into its sheath, but I was faster.

“It smells like blood! There’s blood on the knife!”

Dad hurriedly shook his pale face and said,

“Huh? That can’t be. It’s ketchup, ketchup!”

“It’s not ketchup!”

I stood on tiptoe and stared at the tip of the sword that Dad was holding.

Even the wind blew through the open window at a good time. At that moment, a fishy smell wafted to the tip of my nose. I narrowed my eyes and stared at Dad.

“Dad, what did you do?”

Dad’s expression hardened coldly. I looked at Dad intently with a pounding heart. Dad’s pupils were shaking seriously.

“Why is there blood?”

“That’s…….”

Dad’s eyes became dazed for a moment. It was a face that was clearly hiding something. I pressured Dad like a gunslinger carefully aiming at a target.

“Huh? Dad. Tell me honestly. What is it?”

Even as I said this, I felt uneasy for some reason.

‘Did I say become a villain, so Dad became too much of a villain? So maybe, there’s no way, but are there corpses of bad guys piled up in that warehouse?’

I even had such absurd fantasies. I tried to get rid of the bizarre imaginations that were blooming in my head and looked straight at Dad.

“To be honest…….”

Dad inhaled and exhaled. His rib cage rose and fell sharply. It seemed quite difficult to choose the next words.

Just then, the sound of footsteps tapping from afar came.

“……This uncle knows what’s inside.”

It was someone I had never seen before.

He had blonde hair and blue eyes, a scar on his face, and one eye covered with an eyepatch, and he looked like Captain Hook.

It was dark so I couldn’t see his face in detail, but he definitely had a ferocious impression.

‘Huh? This person’s description is…….’

“He is Grand Duke Sebastian. He is your father’s friend. Nice to meet you, Sienne.”

Yes, that person who was considered a threat to the Crown Prince’s position, although not a major character in [the novel Sienne transmigrated into], the Emperor’s other son. It was Grand Duke Sebastian!

“Hello!”

Anyway, since he is our dad’s friend right now, I thought he wouldn’t be a grand villain.

‘There were hardly any storylines assigned to Grand Duke Sebastian in the original work…….’

I let go of my wariness and bowed politely. A smile spread across his lips. Then it was my turn to ask the question I was curious about.

“But, Grand Duke!”

“Huh?”

“You said you know what’s inside. What is it?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Dad had a look as if his blood was running dry. I glanced at Dad and then nodded vigorously.

“Yes!”

“Then I’ll tell you. Would you like to open the warehouse door?”

“Sebastian!”

Dad shouted loudly and blocked the warehouse door. But Dad was so flustered that he seemed to have forgotten how small my build was.

He couldn’t grab me properly, and I opened the warehouse door with a thud.

“Uh……?”

And inside the warehouse was something I couldn’t have imagined.

Behind me, I could hear Dad swallowing a groan and Grand Duke Sebastian chuckling softly.