Another year had gone by. This was the most calm and blissful year that Noth had gotten to experience in a long while. Sure, the assassins still hadn’t stopped visiting him, in fact they’d even been coming doubly as often, but Noth barely even needed to bat an eye with how used to it all he’d become. Their unpleasant nightly incursions didn’t mean a thing next to how happy of a daytime life Noth was now leading. He had a friend who truly cared about him in Elillith. He had a newly expanded family in the three children he’d rescued. He had a father who loved him that he spent time with a few hours a week. And most of all, he had an angel that would never ever abandon him.
Recently, that very same angel would sometimes stare off into the distance with a very vexed look, but whenever he would ask her about it, she’d just switch back to her regular beaming visage and ask what he was talking about.
It was all too typical, there was no way Noth couldn’t just let it go like she wanted.
He knew he wouldn’t be getting an answer from her anytime soon.
Best to just wait for the oncoming tidal wave to hit him.
These days, Elillith was very busy with watching over the three children. She’d effectively graduated from being a kitchen maid into a nanny, although she still went out multiple times a day to fulfil her food tasting duties. Noth had been worried that she might be a bit overwhelmed with it all, but it seemed that she actually quite liked this change of events, so she was having however much fun an Elillith could have every day. And since she’d been so busy, she’d opted into staying in the villa with everyone, so that was an unintended bonus as well. It did sometimes make it troublesome when Noth had to deal with his constant intruders, though. For a while, Noth had been concerned Elillith might get scared if she discovered that assassins were constantly entering into her new home. But when he saw the lacklustre reaction sitting on her face on the night she ran into the corpse getting dragged through the hallway, he knew he’d been silly to even worry. She’d even asked if he needed help dragging the body away, as if she were simply offering to help carry away a particularly heavy bag of trash. The boy was thankful that she didn’t ask him any other questions, but another part of him was a little concerned that she didn’t seem more worried about the whole situation.
Thankfully, the children never woke up during the night to wander around, so Noth never had to show them anything distasteful.
Jean had followed Elillith around like a baby chick for a while, with a starstruck gaze in her eyes. She almost seemed to worship how Elillith could do all the things she did, despite not having any sort of [Gift] to do it with. She’d asked the woman 20 million questions about everything, although Elillith wasn’t nearly talkative enough to give her any proper answers. Eventually Jean gave up on asking things and instead decided to learn by mimicking. She did her best to help Elillith with every one of her tasks for a few short months, but Jean seemed to be learning a little too fast to be content with just that. It baffled her that everything seemed so simple and easy. She knew that it wouldn’t have been impossible for someone non-[Gifted] to do, but the fact that none of it was really even a struggle once she learned how to do it properly seemed like it should be a lie. Sure, someone with a [Gift] for it might do it a little faster or better than her, but she was still getting tasks done quite impeccably in her own opinion. Once Elillith told her that the real [Maids] in the manor had even more complicated tasks, the eager Jean had quickly gone in search of the greater challenge.
At first, Noth had been worried that the [Maids] might be offended by the commoner child who had managed to so easily enter the manor without a single beneficial [Gift], but he’d forgotten one thing: The child was a [Greater Charming Beauty]. There was no way that anyone could have possibly scorned the girl. Most of the servants in the mansion were already acting like her older siblings or mentors by the end of the first week, and it seemed that some of them had even made secret fanclubs for the girl. Jean was having an absolute blast learning the intricacies of one job after another, and she’d even grown close enough with a good portion of the staff to gossip about everyone’s [Gifts]. It made her heart beat a mile a minute every time she learned about someone working there who had an odd or seemingly random [Gift] that didn’t quite fit with the work they were doing. Noth was pleased that she was meeting so many people that could repeatedly prove how her worst fears were baseless. The girl would happily tell everyone at the dinner table about her new findings each day, and everyone would congratulate her joyously. Elillith would flinch at all the mentions of other people’s [Gifts], though, even as she clapped along.
Helt and Ren would usually spend their days playing somewhere in either the villa or the greenhouse. They would even take turns helping to feed and look after the cats, which made Noth smile every time he happened to catch it. He was so thankful that he had such good kids to look after. Noth had offered for them to take lessons during their free time, and at first Ren had looked excited about it, but when Helt immediately refused and said he’d rather read on his own, Ren quickly parroted his answer instead. Noth was a little bit worried about how Ren would always just follow along with what everyone else wanted, but he didn’t have the heart to say anything about it to her when she looked so happy following them both around everywhere. He’d once asked her why she never followed Jean into the manor. Apparently even though she wanted to be with Jean, the thought of meeting all those new people frightened the tiny girl. Noth was surprised how much he could relate to that sentiment.
Something strange had been happening over the past month, though.
The tiny girl who loved to follow others around would sometimes go missing, once every week.
Noth was worried that the girl might be off crying somewhere, so he’d made a wish to know where she’d been disappearing to.
However, his angel refused to tell him, no matter the amount of power he put into the wish.
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She could be stubborn about the weirdest things at times, but Noth also knew that she liked to choose some topics that were very important to him to conceal as well.
Should he be worried about this?
Was it possible that Serris was just protecting the little girl’s modesty?
She’d seemed interested in the children sometimes, but did she care enough about them to also care about their privacy and feelings?
Even if they were his precious new family, Noth still couldn’t help the small twinge of jealousy that he felt at that thought.
No one liked losing something they felt made them special, after all.
There was one more child that Noth had rescued along with the three others: The small girl from the next door cell who’d been brutally injured and cannibalized. It had taken her two days for her mind to fully recover, and once she came to her senses she’d immediately bawled her eyes out. The other three children had circled around her as she cried, hugging her and murmuring that she was safe and whole again the entire time. It was a touching scene to Noth, but it also reminded him of just how traumatic an experience they’d all had to live through. He could feel the unease rising up in his throat at the thought that everything might come back to hurt them in some way in the future. Perhaps they, too, would grow some strange quirk they’d have to learn to work around one day, like Noth’s fear of leaving the manor’s grounds, or how he couldn’t feel safe if he slept anywhere but his villa.
It was hard, but he convinced himself that it would just have to be something to worry about if it actually even happened, and not a moment before.
The girl’s name was Leis. She was 2 years older than the other children, and as it turned out, it really was her [Gift] that had saved her life down in the dungeon. Yes, the porcine monster had used a potion from an [Alchemist] on her injuries to keep her from dying too quickly, but it was most likely the fact that she was a [Great Knight] that had really kept her alive through all of her removals. If not for the added stamina and endurance that she’d been blessed with by the God-dess, then she would have easily succumbed after the second or third day at the most. She hated reliving the horrific experiences she suffered through in the back room, and no one wanted to hear about any of the gruesome details either, so everyone had made a small pact to not bring anything about it up, but otherwise the girl happily talked about the other aspects of her life just fine.
In fact, it was probably the fact that she was all too eager to brag about her [Gift] that had caused her downfall.
Being a [Great Knight] was nothing to sneeze at, and if anything, the girl actually should have been conferred some amount of nobility for it. [Knights] were actually deemed a step up from [Warriors] in most cases, so being a [Great Knight] was equivalent to being a [Greater Warrior]. However, the famed Kieran family still had Noth’s father, a [Superior Warrior] at its helm, and he wasn’t showing any clear signs of retiring or needing replacing any time soon, so there was no vacancy for the girl to fill. There was still a small chance that something could happen to Earl Kieran some time in the future though, and if such a position suddenly opened up before the girl turned 16, then it was possible that talks would begin for her to fill in his spot. Having someone to lead the nation’s armies was important after all, and the replacement wouldn’t be respected unless they were the best. It only made sense that the girl had been prideful, even if she was only a runner up at the moment. No one knew what the future would bring, so with some luck she could become the next Earl in the future.
As it turns out, Leis actually had a family waiting for her back at home, one that hadn’t sold her out like Ren's had. Despite the situations that the children came from, they all genuinely seemed happy for the girl that she had someone waiting for her return back home. It was unlikely that they weren’t at least feeling a little bit jealous of her, but the way they didn’t let it show and seemed sincerely happy for her warmed Noth’s heart. After asking his father to send a servant Leis’s parents were located, and a day later they showed up to the manor to retrieve her. The scene would have made Noth smile, but he was so tired of high emotions and tears at that point that he didn’t want to look at their reunion for very long. A week after the girl had been taken back home, a letter arrived for him. It said how Leis would never forget him, and that if he became nobility before she could, that she hoped he would welcome her as his personal knight.
The mischievous girl had also said that she would be equally willing to marry him and take his place in the Kieran legacy if he couldn’t make it into the nobility, but Noth chose to tear that part of the letter off.
Noth’s father had been taking everything shockingly well. Maybe it was just that he was afraid to argue with his son for fear of angering him, or maybe the man was actually just happy that his boy had people to look after and love now. At the very least, Noth was pretty sure it wasn’t because the Earl just loved kids or something, considering what he’d heard from Serris about his mom’s thoughts on the subject. Yes, Noth’s father wouldn’t go out of his way to go and see the children, but he also wouldn’t go out of his way to avoid them either, especially if he happened across them on his occasional visits to the villa. His stern manner when Noth wasn’t around would often scare the children, especially Ren, but the way that the Earl turned into an overly doting crybaby in the presence of his son quickly eased their tension every time. Sometimes Noth’s father would even bring little presents over for the kids, since he knew that watching them open up the boxes to see what was inside would always put a smile on his son’s face.
All in all, Noth was very happy with the calm and happy family he was now surrounded with. If he knew it would change anything, he would have eagerly prayed every day that they could all stay exact like this forever. But he knew better. There was no way that he couldn’t have known better. His life was never going to be this simple forever; Nothing was ever just allowed to be simple for him. A fleeting peace was just that, fleeting. He could feel the tension in the background pressing on him, and he could feel that something was about to break any minute.
A year of constant night attacks would never have been the best that the church could pull off, after all.
Any day now, Noth knew that they’d launch their next attack.
How could he be so sure?
Well, it was so obviously plastered on his angel’s face that she didn’t even need to say a peep for him to know.
The only thing he was unsure of was what they could have possibly been planning that would even scare an angel, of all things.