My Husband Is Not the Magic Tower Master - Chapter 91

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

Episode 91

He hadn’t suspected anything from the start.
Just last night, Lucas had been plotting his escape from the prison his master had created.
If the chance came, he’d planned to break free from those damned chains and set his plan in motion without delay.
“Yawn… I’ll think about it after I sleep and wake up.”
Of course, since he’d be drowsy in the middle of the night, better to act on his thoughts when his mind was clear.
But the next morning.
“Haaaawn—.”
When he woke, Lucas caught sight of his master’s face through the iron bars and understood.
“Huh? Master?”
“Open the door.”
“There’s still no sign of trouble with the Barrier Magic. What brings you so early in the morning?”
Click-clank.
It would have been better if his movements had been sluggish just a few seconds longer.
The hour was early morning, the landscape still dim before the dawn mist had fully lifted.
After losing sleep several times over various thoughts, Lucas’s eyes were naturally puffy and swollen.
Had something happened? Why had he come searching for him at the crack of dawn?
The instinctive questions that rose in his mind were fleeting.
Carlo, who had come to the palace, grumbled habitually without properly meeting his gaze.
“Tch. When you went to look after your wife, you had no problem locking up your only disciple….”
Come to think of it, the wife was one and only as well. But it seemed he’d been worried about his sole disciple left lonely and trapped in here.
Lucas rubbed his bleary eyes and murmured as if to himself.
More than that, he’d been up all night, so he’d planned to sleep well in the morning and visit his father in the afternoon.
“…But why have you come?”
“Just open the door.”
Damn. He was in trouble.
His plan was on the verge of failure before it could even begin.
“Open it now, I said.”
“Right, right, I’m opening it. Can’t open it if I don’t, can I?”
But once he was told to open the door, he naturally began undoing the chains….
Pop. Thud-thud-thud.
“Huh?”
As he unraveled the chains with magic layer by layer, something limp and fragile kept breaking apart like thread.
He felt something soft and warm gathering in clumps in his hands.
“Oh….”
Lucas lowered his head in confusion.
The more he looked down at his palm, the more certain he became.
“This is definitely….”
The dozens, hundreds of Barrier Magic spells that Carlo had layered and layered for him yesterday.
A defensive wall meant to block the intrusion of strangers.
It would deal cruel attacks against those who crossed the line….
But conversely, it was a contradictory design—so fragile and soft that it would dissolve like thread the moment the protected one touched it.
In short, Overprotection Magic.
Lucas stared at the spells, now bereft of their light and efficacy, clumped like chewing gum in his palm, and felt shocked.
Ha. As if I were still a child—.
Embarrassingly wasteful magical technique that parents used when they had to leave home for a moment with a young child.
Looking at this affectionate magic from an ancient past now lost to history, he felt as though tears might spring forth.
“…You really are laughable to the end, Master.”
Or perhaps he’d known it all along.
The fool was himself—lowering his guard and loosening his wariness at that familiar face.
Once Carlo’s perfect protection had vanished, a man wearing his face had driven a dagger into his chest.
And yet Lucas felt no pain.
“My real father wants so badly to kill me no matter what.”
“….”
“Yet I thought we were closer to each other than to strangers with not a drop of blood shared between us.”
If anything, it was the arrogance of his absurd dreams all this time that cut Lucas more deeply.
“I was mistaken….”
“….”
“Father.”
You were never my real family.
A hollow wheeze escaped him.
“Cough, cough!”
The blade lodged in his chest pressed deeper, crushing him further still.
At first he’d managed to push back against his attacker’s advance, but as time wore on, his vision dimmed steadily.
And the murderous height of those eyes fixed on his father sank lower and lower.
When Lucas finally collapsed to the ground and coughed up dark blood, only then did his attacker release his grip on the dagger and slowly drew back his hood.
“So you’ve become a Grand Mage.”
Hair gone white, a face covered in livid scars—every inch of it weathered and scarred.
Beneath hair that seemed ready to crumble at any moment lay a neck studded with grotesque, bulging tumors.
Shoulders hunched and twisted, a spine bent toward the earth, teeth blackened and hollow, eyes drained of all light.
“When you die by my hand, all that power becomes mine.”
“….”
“So die for me.”
“….”
“Think of it as fulfilling the purpose you could not serve before….”
Every gruesome tale in those musty old tomes had rung true.
Shadow Magic ravaged the human body bit by bit until it shattered even the soul’s deepest core—or so the books claimed.
Where the Transformation Magic had faded away stood a withered, sickly old man whose face defied description.
Only now did Lucas understand what he had denied all along.
“Ha, ha….”
Even as he sank into blood, gasping for breath, he forced his eyes wide, fighting to remain conscious.
And then he faced him—the figure of his family, grotesquely transformed from the memory of old.
The father he had once loved without reserve.
Radiant golden hair and eyes as blue and beautiful as the sea—Delphined’s one and only sun.
He had loved him even as he watched his mother, tormented by some inexplicable illness her whole life, slip toward death.
My noble bloodline.
Rekio, now a monster.
“That beast, less than a beast… is my father.”
Lucas pressed his face into the grass like a madman, his laughter hollow and broken.
Each laugh tore through his lungs like shredded fabric, and every breath that reached his nose felt grotesquely, unbearably painful.
His mother—healthier than anyone—had one day suddenly fallen ill.
She had wasted away, and then abandoned him as if she had never existed at all.
You told me to forget it all.
And the very next night, you came to find me and tried to kill me.
What did those two people mean to Rekio?
Were they merely livestock confined within the meager word “family”?
“Die.”
“….”
“Go on, die, my son.”
Lucas’s breathing grew slower and slower.
Then Rekio’s thin, skeletal fingers crept toward his throat.
It seemed he meant to stop his breathing entirely, now that his lifeblood was draining away.
Before consciousness fled, Lucas drew every last scrap of Mana from within his body and reached out toward Rekio.
A single gesture was all it took.
“From this day forward… you are deposed.”
To strip away the Innate Ability he had coveted so desperately.
“A father who would kill his own son twice over… I have no need for you.”
He could wrench the Innate Ability from him at any moment.
Lucas had only ever needed time to decide.

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