My Daddy Hides His Power - Chapter 195

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

Father Hides His Strength
195
“Ramon! Ramon!!!”
The Emperor’s roar echoed through the chamber.
Advisor Ramon rushed in and threw himself prostrate before the visibly furious Nicholas.
“Did we let the vermin slip through?”
……
Why was he asking that?
Ramon remembered Enoch’s visit just moments ago.
‘Surely the Duke of Rubinstein didn’t…’
His mind went white.
From the start, using commoners for terrorism had been far too dangerous a gambit.
Non-Gifted Individuals.
Infinitely weak, yet because they possessed no Divine Ability, Primera could neither control nor brainwash them.
Each one had to be managed by hand, which meant variables inevitably arose.
“Y-Your Majesty. I—I am terribly s-sorry. My life, I beg—” “Ack!”
In an instant, his heart twisted in agony. Ramon convulsed, clutching his chest, writhing across the floor.
Was he going to die like this?
Just as his consciousness began to fray, the pain ceased.
Drenched in sweat, Ramon gasped for breath, then quickly composed himself and knelt upright.
“Y-Your… gasp… Your Majesty…”
When he risked a glance upward, he saw Nicholas sitting vacant and motionless—as though his very soul had fled.
“I’ve lost count of how many times this is…”
……
“Something’s gone wrong. Everything—it’s all spiraling in the wrong direction…”
Nicholas muttered without strength.
“Ever since Enoch came back to Jedo. I tried to tighten the leash once, only to find my daughter was Octava…”
……
“The moment Enoch appeared, a god who’d vanished returned and healed the sick. In the end, my High Priest—a limb of my own body—died, and the High Priesthood’s standing crumbled to dust.”
……
“It took four years to rebuild that. Using blood of my own blood, my very lifespan…”
A false Primera—Crown Prince Franz—was installed, and barely did the Imperial Household claw back its authority.
A new age of sage-rulers: with a gesture, bringing rain to drought-stricken lands, subduing demon beasts.
Of course, it was all Nicholas’s power.
Was that when it started?
Nicholas had felt hunted.
To hide that the Crown Prince was false, he gnawed away at his own lifespan relentlessly.
“I can’t use Enoch as a hunting hound—I’m the one being hunted. With that meager conviction of his, he’s trampling my tower underfoot, brick by brick.”
……
“The comrade I sent to die became a conquering hero, and the vermin you let slip, Ramon, fell into Enoch’s hands.”
“I apologize…”
“I can’t deny it anymore.”
Nicholas’s vacant eyes groped at the empty air.
“The god is on Enoch’s side.”
* * *
Rubinstein Duke’s Residence.
Enoch, who’d come to the Magic Tower saying he had something to discuss, brought Oscar back to his house instead.
Oscar, hauled along without warning, let out an exasperated shout.
“What, seriously, what is this?”
For some reason, father and daughter were both behaving strangely today.
Lilis had been weeping sorrowfully all day long.
Enoch was dressed head to toe in black, as though attending a funeral, his expression grim throughout.
“Hello, can you at least tell me why you brought me here? Honestly, I’m going crazy.”
“Come inside.”
“Ugh, seriously.”
Oscar was dragged all the way down to the Underground Chamber of the Duke’s Annex—a space hardly ever used.
An empty sealed chamber.
A single glass coffin sat alone in the center.
“What is this?”
“Alberto Manuel.”
“…….”
“Your grandfather.”
Oscar’s eyes widened in an instant.
What?
He hesitated, doubting his own ears, and studied Enoch’s expression.
He looked sincere. It didn’t seem like a lie.
“What do you mean….”
“Look for yourself.”
Oscar approached the coffin without hesitation. Through the transparent lid, he could see the corpse.
“……?”
He rubbed his eyes roughly with the back of his hand and looked again.
A skeletal frame.
A face lined with wrinkles.
Older than in his last memory, but unmistakably—his grandfather.
“How is this….”
The vanished man, Alberto Manuel.
He had gone missing at the age of sixty-four.
Before Oscar’s regression, and after it as well.
* * *
When Oscar had successfully completed his regression.
He was ten years old.
The very year Lilis had just been born and Enoch had vanished without a trace.
He’d chosen that moment so the child could build memories anew with the father she’d been searching for, unburdened by the past.
‘But I never thought about this.’
Oscar, whose thoughts had been only for Lilis, didn’t realize it until he opened his eyes in a ten-year-old body.
That his own time had been rewound as well.
His parents were still alive, and his grandfather hadn’t yet disappeared.
‘If my guess is right, Grandfather must also be in a regressed state now.’
Two regressors existing in the same time—but only Oscar knew that truth.
“Son, listen carefully. Magic like this doesn’t need to be created, and it must never be created. If something like this falls into the wrong hands, it will spark a war.”
Had he really returned to the very day after he’d first created a Magic Formula?
His father, discovering the attack Magic Formula that ten-year-old Oscar had made, burned it and scolded him for more than an hour.
‘He reminds me of someone.’
In life, Oscar’s father had resembled someone greatly.
He taught that if one possessed strength, it should be wielded for the weak, and always for the greater good.
Yes, Enoch Rubinstein.
A tiresome sort of man, similar in temperament.
“Son, don’t you understand your grandfather? Why does he bow so meekly to the Emperor?”
But his grandfather, Alberto Manuel, who had been the master of the Magic Tower at that time, was different.
Even when he had the standing to be bold, he always lowered his head before the Emperor, and he quarreled with his son daily because of it.
His grandfather, for some reason, behaved as a man who did not wish to fall out of the Emperor’s favor.
“Father. Don’t go on this kingdom expedition or whatever it is. Or postpone it, at least.”
Oscar considered saving his parents, who would otherwise meet their end in a sudden carriage accident.
But to his shock, when he avoided the accident, his parents were assassinated instead.
Before regression and after it.
Only after attending his parents’ funeral twice did Oscar understand: the carriage accident before regression had been no accident.
Surely….
‘It was the Emperor’s doing.’
His father was a man of rigid conviction who never concealed his intentions.
Had he inherited the Magic Tower, the Emperor would have faced endless complications.
So it had been the Emperor’s manipulation.
‘Could it be that Grandfather was so submissive to the Emperor because of that?’
At the funeral, rain falling in a steady patter.
Watching his grandfather, Alberto, with his hollow expression, Oscar was certain.
His grandfather was a regressor.
The reason he had attempted regression must have been to save his son.
‘Even before Grandfather regressed, my parents must have died by the Emperor’s hand.’
That was why his grandfather had never opposed the Emperor all his life, and had taught his son and grandson to bow as well.
But sadly, he too had failed to save his child once more.
‘How foolish.’
He’d staked his life itself on Regression, only to watch his child die twice. Not once—twice.
How cruel could existence be?
‘I won’t fail like you did. Never.’
Oscar placed a single white chrysanthemum atop his parents’ casket, and Lilis came to mind.
He would not fail as his grandfather had—never so miserably.
He had no wish to see that severed neck a second time.
‘Grandfather will disappear soon.’
In the hazy memories of before the Regression, his grandfather had vanished not long after his parents died.
Perhaps… the cost of Regression.
An erasure.
There was no way to prevent it, so he’d wanted at least to witness how it happened.
Since his own end would likely be the same.
But perhaps unwilling to show his grandson such a futile fate, his grandfather made his final preparations and departed in silence.
“…Farewell.”
The last greeting left for a grandfather who had vanished alone into loneliness.
And so, not long after.
Oscar inherited the Magic Tower at the age of fifteen.
His parents’ death, his grandfather’s disappearance.
A succession so young.
Whether before the Regression or after, nothing had truly changed in Oscar’s life.
* * *
“He didn’t disappear? He was just living in hiding all this time?”
Oscar asked in confusion, standing before his grandfather’s corpse.
Enoch chose his words with careful gravity.
“He came to find me yesterday. That was when we first met, and yesterday was when he passed.”
“What?”
“I knew your grandfather’s face well—I’m certain of it. Yet neither Lilis nor I could recognize him. We looked him square in the eye and saw nothing.”
……
“Only after death could his face be seen clearly. As for why he died—”
Enoch paused briefly, then continued.
“He revealed his existence to us. He chose to die in the act.”
……
So his grandfather had died because he broke the restriction.
And that restriction was—
“……He revealed his existence to us.”
Oscar turned his gaze back to the casket, numb.
“……We looked him square in the eye and saw nothing.”
“Only after death could his face be seen clearly……”
Ah.
Now Oscar finally understood the cost of Regression—what erasure truly meant.
To exist and yet not exist at all.
“I see.”
“Master!”
That child who now smiled so brightly and threw her arms around him—one day.
She would walk past him without recognition, as though he were a stranger.
“Ha, ha…”
Laughter spilled from his lips, hollow and strained.
“How merciless…”

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————