landbeastnovel Chapter 363: Jax’s Wise One
Chapter 363: Jax’s Wise One
Astrid stared at her father as though he had just begun reciting fluent gibberish, her brain visibly buffering for a long second before she managed to scrape a reply together. "What do you mean? You met him before? When... no, why?""Did you truly believe you could sneak off and keep company with that man without my eyes trailing every step?" Claude said. "Did you honestly think your old man had gone blind enough to lose sight of his own daughter?"
"I’ve had eyes and ears on the pair of you for quite a while now, dear, long enough to learn that your precious little scoundrel was both the reason you stomped about like a thundercloud all through the inter-academy tournament and the very thing that coaxed you back into a fine mood the moment it ended."
"I was there when the two of you kissed and made up over whatever you shared in that cozy little café, which, from what I gather, blossomed into a number of charmingly romantic developments I shall very politely pretend I never laid eyes on."
He let the corner of his mouth twitch. "And I was most certainly there the night that audacious brat broke into the Aleris mansion like a common burglar, all so he could elbow his way to the very front of the line and be the first soul to wish you."
Astrid went scarlet to the ears, her voice climbing into a panic. "You... what? You spied on me, you nosy old fox..."
Claude pulled her into a hug she had not consented to, crushing the rest of the sentence out of her. "You don’t know the position I’m in, dear. You are the only thing I have left in this world, so ’nosy’ is a very small and very generous word for it."
Astrid wrestled the avalanche of new information into something she could hold, and one piece floated straight to the top. "Dad. You said Jax passed, right? Do you actually mean it?"
Claude smiled. "That boy surpassed every expectation I had quietly set for himnbecause when I looked past the smirk and the temper and all that cold logic behind his face, I found something I had long ago stopped believing this world still bothered to make."
"I saw a man who could turn against the whole world for your sake and never once glance back to count the cost. A man who would fight tooth and nail just to keep a single smile sitting on your face. A man who would step in front of every blade ever meant for you and call it the easiest choice he had ever made."
"I saw a man who could lose every last thing he owned and still walk away feeling like the richest soul alive, so long as you were the one left standing at his side."
His voice softened in a way Astrid almost never heard from him. "I have spent my entire life setting a price on every man who ever crossed my path, learning each of them down to the final coin. Yet that boy is the one treasure these old merchant eyes could never measure, because some things are simply far too precious to ever wear a price."
A swell of pride rose warm in Astrid’s chest, the quiet glowing kind a mother feels when her child is being praised right in front of her.
And then Claude opened his mouth again and popped that pride like a soap bubble. "There were a few things about the boy I read entirely wrong, mind you. I had convinced myself the rumors painting him a pervert were just another mask he wore, the same way he buried his true strength under that lazy, arrogant professor with no name and no background. It seems I gave him far too much credit on that particular count."
His fist curled slowly at his side. "That motherfu... that shameless bastard wasn’t acting at all, and now he has the sheer nerve to..."
He caught himself, then rested a hand gently against her cheek. "Don’t fret, dear. I won’t lay a single finger on him. I’ll only watch for now and let his own actions decide exactly what sort of lesson he’s gone and earned."
"Now then." His tone brightened like a man turning to a fresh page of a ledger. "Who are these other girls he’s been juggling? From the look of my reports, I’d wager it’s those new friends of yours, hm? The vampire princess. The dragon one. That little demon girl who’s been getting rather famous lately."
Astrid shook her head firmly. "No. None of them. Not yet, and certainly not ever, not while I still draw breath because there is no chance I’m letting any of those three squeeze their way into the race."
Claude frowned, thinking hard. "Then who, if not those three?"
Astrid’s mind tore off at a sprint. ’I have no clue how he’ll take those names, but there’s not a chance in any hell I’m dragging Nerith or the women from his world into this conversation. The second those names leave my mouth it’s an avalanche, complications stacked on complications with a hundred questions buried underneath. And I can’t just clam up and hide things either, not when it’ll only end up hurting dad. So that leaves me exactly one name, the safest and least explosive option on the entire menu... though even that one might still go off in my face.’
She swallowed hard and forced the words out. "It’s Seris’s mot..."
But Claude, having watched his daughter trip and stumble over the name like it was a stone wedged sideways in her throat, ran clean out of patience and leapt in the instant he caught the first syllable, his brain cheerfully filling the blank with the obvious. Seris.
"Ah," he said. "So it’s come to that stage of things, has it. Where two dear friends find themselves chasing after the very same man. That explains why you held yourself back so, knowing full well it meant bringing harm to your own friend."
"Well. I won’t object, if Seris is the only one you’ll ever have to share him with. She’s a wise girl, that one, the sort who keeps her head screwed firmly onto her shoulders even with a certain bad influence hanging off her arm day and night, and she still hasn’t shed a single ounce of her good sense for the trouble."
He said it while watching Astrid’s face, fully braced for some explosive tantrum. What he got instead was a blank, thoroughly baffled stare.
He carried on, undeterred. "And really, why on earth wouldn’t she be? She was raised by one of the finest noblewomen this world has ever produced, your own mother’s old dormmate and dearest friend, the gracious Lady Adelina. That woman spent more of her days turning nobles away at the door than she ever spent attending a single lecture at the academy."
"Every last one of them came either begging for her hand in marriage or pleading with her to teach their daughters proper etiquette, simply because the entire world was spellbound by the way she carried herself. From the way she lifted a teacup to the way she crossed a room, she gathered admirers the way a forgotten shelf gathers dust."
"Oh, and here’s a little gem, for your entertainment and my lasting trauma both." He was chuckling before he’d even told it. "Once, your mother chokeslammed me clean through the floorboards, purely because I let my gaze linger on your aunt for a grand total of five whole seconds."
He laughed, warm and unguarded at the memory. "We’ve wandered miles off the topic, but the moral holds firm. Adelina was never simply a pretty face or a graceful figure. She was wise down to her very bones, and that exact same spark is the thing I see glittering in her daughter’s eyes."
"If anything, I’d happily bet that planting Seris right beside the two of you would be the single smartest move your future could ever make, seeing as you and that boy share the very same gift for glorious mayhem, and somebody with at least an ounce of sanity simply must be on hand to stop the pair of you from torching everything in sight. Hm?"
He clapped his hands together once. "Anyhow. We’ll chew on all of this later. You’ve an entire ballroom of guests out there beginning to wilt without their guest of honor."
Astrid stood there cursing Jax with every last fiber of her being. ’What in the actual hell were you thinking, going off and chasing women old enough to be my father’s drinking buddies? How in the world am I supposed to untangle this disaster now, when the very same wise, flawless saint he refuses to stop gushing about is secretly my fiercest competition in this whole race, and has already got a bun in the oven courtesy of my favorite walking catastrophe?’
’Still. Thank every heaven there is that Dad misread the entire thing. For now, Seris stays my shield.’
"Astrid, are you feeling quite alright?" Claude asked, one brow lifting at the sweat beginning to gather along her forehead.
Her whole body snapped rigid, like a pickpocket who’d just felt a heavy hand drop onto his shoulder mid-grab. "I, ah... I was just..."
That was the precise moment the half-open door earned a courteous knock, followed swiftly by a polite request to enter. The butler slipped inside and rattled off everything currently kicking off down in the ballroom which hauled the entire conversation onto a brand-new road and set Astrid’s temper alight in a single heartbeat.
She stormed off toward the hall without so much as finishing her touch-ups, leaving her poor father blinking after her.
Meanwhile, blissfully unaware that his life and death had just been entered into a ledger of their own, Jax was busy teasing Roxana, the two of them locked together in the middle of a dance, when a system notification bloomed across his vision.
Danger.
[New Quest Available]
[Quest: Save one of your harem members from danger]
[Time Limit: 10 days]
[Difficulty: Hell]
[Rewards: Selection Pack — choose one of the following three upon completion]
[1. Void Magic Affinity — excels at erasure, spatial distortion, and the carving of wounds no conventional means can ever heal.]
[2. Cosmic Magic Affinity — grants authority over celestial energy, the stars themselves, and the hidden laws that govern the cosmos.]
[3. Entropy Magic Affinity — accelerates decay and disorder, weakening matter, energy, and even immortal beings by stripping them of their eternal perfection.]