The Nerd Next Door Turned Out To Be The Magic Tower Master - Chapter 89

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 89
Cecilia’s eyes widened at the unexpected choice. She fell into deep reflection, having secretly eyed the gambling stalls just moments before.
She led Lien through the crowd that surrounded the Temporary Theater.
The small puppet play — performed without actors — told a trite love story.
Two lovers who fell in love despite their families’ opposition. The trials and hardships that stood in their way. A man willing to stake his life to protect his beloved, and a woman just as prepared to endure any sacrifice for the one she loved.
Cecilia glanced sidelong at Lien. Despite the hackneyed plot, he watched the performance with surprising gravity.
She turned her attention back to the stage. As crisis befell the pair, the audience hung on every moment without so much as a blink.
Yet the scene that held her gaze was not that one.
When the man offered the Flower of God to the woman and confessed his love, she found herself shaken.
It was not the tender dialogue, nor the beauty of the moment.
A memory she had tried not to dwell on suddenly surfaced unbidden.
Her own terror at the Serenade Competition, the sweets someone had brought for her, how genuinely she had rejoiced over mere puppets, the hours they had walked side by side laughing while she held not their hand but their sleeve.
The play reached its climax. The man cried out before the fallen woman.
“A life without you holds no meaning for me.”
In that moment, the dying woman and the man begging not to be left alone grieving seemed to overlap.
Lien seized her wrist abruptly. He did not release it until they had moved far enough that the play’s dialogue faded from earshot.
Cecilia, bewildered at being dragged away, asked uncertainly.
“What’s wrong? Not enjoying it?”
He had seemed to be watching attentively, yet his expression had taken on a harshness she had never seen before. Something had clearly upset him.
“Who are you thinking of?”
“…What?”
“Who’s some bastard you keep thinking about?”
His eyes gleamed a vivid crimson.
Cecilia turned his irritable question over slowly in her mind.
That her longing had shown through outwardly, that Lien of all people had caught it — that was shameful. And yet it nagged at her like a splinter.
His unreasonable persistence did.
In truth, this was not the only strange thing.
He had claimed to dislike others drawing near, yet somehow the distance between them had narrowed until they were almost touching. His emotional range had grown far beyond its earlier bounds. And there was still the matter of his following her to Weberdine without ever explaining why.
‘Surely not.’
Even if she tried to feign ignorance, she could not quite manage it.
Cecilia asked, almost like a sigh.
“Do you like me?”
“I, like you?”
He narrowed his brow and repeated her words as though she had said something absurd.
His reaction was such that she expected him to dismiss the notion outright, to insist she was mistaken.
Instead, he asked in a voice grown quieter still.
“…What does liking someone even mean?”
If to like someone meant — as books described it — that your eyes follow them, that you think of them, that your heart quickens.
Then what was the difference between liking a book and liking a person? What was the difference between the affection one felt for parents and the affection one felt for a lover?
Lien’s question had spiraled now into something almost philosophical.
For her, who had never fully understood the immensity of his love, it was a difficult question indeed.
“Thinking of the other person more than yourself. Moving between heaven and hell with each shift in their feelings or actions. Sometimes wanting the other so badly you destroy yourself for it…. Someone I knew called that love.”
Perhaps it was not love at all, but something more viscous and dark and relentless than that.
She did not add her own thought aloud.
Lien fell silent for a moment, then finally spoke.
“Then you.”
“Hmm?”
“Do you have someone like that?”
“I don’t know.”
Perhaps not on the same scale or depth as what he had offered, but something comparable. Whether to say yes or whether to say there once was one.
Before him — who was both the subject and not — she could only smile bitterly.
“Let’s drop this conversation. There’s still plenty of time left, so why don’t we go see something else?”
Cecilia made an effort to clear the heavy air and pointed toward an alley particularly crowded with people.
They walked side by side without further intimate confessions or difficult exchanges, when someone came running headlong toward them and nearly collided.
Nearly — because they only just grazed each other.
Thanks to Lien catching her quickly, only the other person stumbled backward.
Before she could even ask if they were all right, they popped back up like a roly-poly toy.
“Tower Master! You were here!”
She found the face familiar at last — it was Lien’s Adjutant. He bowed hastily, as though the matter was quite urgent.
“There’s something regarding the Magic Tower that I must report to you at once. I apologize for seeking you out so suddenly.”
“You left the old man behind. Report to him instead.”
“Ah, Fervan disappeared the day after the Master left. He said he was going to meet his lover…….”
Lien’s brow furrowed deeply as he let out a long sigh.
Since his subordinate looked increasingly troubled, Cecilia found herself stepping forward.
“Go on. I’ll wait here.”
Cecilia gestured toward a nearby bench and gave his back a gentle push.
“……Don’t go anywhere. Stay here.”
Whether it was a command or a plea, he left those words behind as he departed with his adjutant.
Left alone, Cecilia suddenly grasped something.
‘Ah, this feels familiar somehow.’
Just like before, at the Festival—his subordinate had come looking for her, she’d been left alone, and she’d ended up facing ruffians.
‘Surely not.’
Cecilia wandered the area, scanning particularly toward the Alley.
And she found it.
“P-please give it back!”
‘As expected.’
Just as before, a small child was being threatened by a gang of ruffians.
The victim wasn’t Sena this time, but a crisis so identical, so formulaic, was almost tedious.
‘Is this another scheme the Pope orchestrated? Or just coincidence?’
Lost in thought, she approached them with casual indifference.
With Divine Power at her command, there was no reason to fear these thugs.
“Listen, morally speaking—don’t lay a hand on children, all right?”
This time, instead of axes, the ruffians carried long blades nearly the size of a man’s torso. They spun around to face her with a whoosh.
Confirming that their opponent was far smaller than expected and alone, they burst into jeering laughter.
“Here I thought some righteous hero had appeared, but it’s just a brat still wet behind the ears.”
“She’s practically handing us her money. Works for us.”
Hackneyed lines, hackneyed villains, hackneyed development.
It genuinely stirred not the faintest interest. Cecilia exhaled heavily and spoke with irritation.
“I don’t have time to play with you lot, so I’d really rather you just left. But if you can’t understand a polite suggestion, you wouldn’t be living like this in the first place, would you?”
“What? Have you seen this crazy bitch!”
The ruffian spewed a torrent of obscenities. One of them, apparently devoid of patience, lunged straight at her.
‘I won’t get hurt, but I should’ve brought a weapon.’
The moment the blade swept toward her throat, she watched it come with blank indifference.
“Cecilia!”
She heard someone calling her name.
Clang!
With a violent crack, the broken blade fell at her feet. The ruffians gasped in shock at the white light that blazed from her. Their mouths worked soundlessly.
But no words came. A dozen massive bodies had been crushed into the ground like insects.
That voice from before—no trick of the ear.
Lien had returned far sooner than expected, dispatched the enemy in a single breath, and now gripped her wrist so hard it burned.
“What on earth are you?”
“Lien?”
“Did becoming a Saint make you lose all fear? Or do Saints get an extra life?”
“Calm down. You just saw—I don’t get hurt even when blades strike me.”
Cecilia answered with perfect composure. But he did not calm down at all.
His jaw was rigid, veins prominent at his neck, his words grinding out as if through clenched teeth.
“That’s exactly the problem. You think even if you do get hurt, it doesn’t matter. That dying is fine.”
“…….”
“Am I wrong?”
He’d struck a nerve.
Even if her Divine Power vanished and she were genuinely cut by a blade, she’d be frustrated and annoyed—nothing more.
What she truly feared wasn’t death itself, but what came after it.
His grip on her shoulders tightened as he spoke with a gravity that bordered on coercion.
“You can’t. You won’t die. You won’t get hurt.”
It was phrased as though he had a choice in the matter—or perhaps as though he desperately wished he did.
Cecilia stared blankly at the dark strands of hair clinging to his temple with sweat, at his heaving chest, at his breathing grown ragged from his desperate rush.
A faint resistance rose within her, followed by something far greater—a creeping dread.
“Why…….”
At her murmured sigh, he answered.
If this violent urge to tear apart the limbs of those bastards who struck her, if this fragile ache of imagining her wounded and feeling the blood drain from beneath him, if this uncertain sense that he cannot exist without her—if all of this is love.
“I think I love you.”

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