Chapter 26

“Y-Your Highness…? Since when did you…”

Since when did you know? Lino swallowed the rest of the question, terrified of the answer. What if the man replied, Since the very first day you arrived at the mansion?

“Since when? Why does the timeline matter?” Grondil countered smoothly. “The only relevant detail is that your body is entirely devoid of divine power.”

“That… is true…”

Defeated, Lino ducked his head, his voice shrinking to a pathetic whisper. The Duke’s large hand descended, resting heavily on Lino’s slumping shoulders. A searing heat radiated from the point of contact, seeping directly into his skin.

He said he had a cold… was he telling the truth? His body temperature is boiling. Because the man’s behavior was so impeccably normal, Lino had assumed the illness was a complete fabrication to torment him. Clearly, he had misjudged. Guilt gnawed at him as he realized he had genuinely infected the Duke. The man might be an absolute pervert, but he had rescued Lino from the Baron Merchant Guild and suffered through alleviating his aphrodisiac-fueled agony. Repaying that bizarre kindness with a contagious flu felt incredibly ungrateful.

“I am so, so incredibly sorry, Your Highness,” he babbled, desperation lacing his tone. “I really did have divine power originally! I passed the divine power test when I joined the order. You know how it works, Your Highness… you can’t even submit an application to the Holy Knight Order without possessing it…”

He frantically piled on the details, desperate to prove he wasn’t some con artist masquerading as a holy knight from the very beginning. Yet, no matter how many words he spouted, they all sounded like flimsy, pathetic excuses. Miraculously, Grondil seemed to absorb the frantic explanation with surprising sincerity.

“I am well aware that the blessings of the gods are rarely distributed fairly,” the Duke conceded.

While the acknowledgment was a relief, it didn’t entirely extinguish Lino’s churning anxiety. The Duke might be listening patiently, but it didn’t erase the fundamental truth: Lino had actively deceived him. Lowering his guard now would be suicidal.

“However, possessing divine power only to have it inexplicably vanish…” Grondil mused. “That is certainly a first for me.”

“I didn’t even know it was possible until I experienced it myself…”

“How utterly devastating that must have been. To lose the very foundation of what makes a Holy Knight.”

“Yes…”

“Enduring life within the order while hiding such a secret must have been agonizing.”

“It was. In the beginning, the constant terror of being discovered was paralyzing… just thinking about it makes me shudder.”

A small, pained grimace twisted Lino’s features as he responded. The suffocating dread from those days flooded back with startling clarity. Ironically, his current situation was objectively far worse than his past struggles. Yet, Grondil’s voice was so incredibly soft and soothing—almost as if he were deliberately comforting him—that Lino didn’t even realize he was freely spilling his deepest vulnerabilities.

Perhaps the dam broke simply because someone finally acknowledged the crushing burden he had shouldered entirely alone. Sorrow was a fickle emotion; it could remain dormant for months, only to burst forth violently at the slightest, unexpected prod of sympathy.

However.

“That being said,” the Duke’s tone shifted, the silken comfort replaced by sharp steel, “what kind of sheer audacity led you to accept the position of my escort knight with absolutely zero divine power?”

“Hrk—ack! Cough, cough!“

He knew it. Lowering his guard had been a fatal mistake. Lino fully expected the interrogation, but the jarringly abrupt timing completely blindsided him. Choking on a sharp intake of breath, he hacked violently, his chest heaving with brutal coughs.

“Oh my, are you alright?”

Feigning concern, Grondil smoothly guided Lino’s trembling frame to the edge of the bed. Seating himself firmly beside his struggling knight, the Duke began tracing slow, deliberate circles into Lino’s back with his massive hand.

Usually, when someone choked this violently, standard human decency dictated fetching a glass of water. Grondil, however, opted to press himself flush against Lino’s side. His fingers kneaded the tense muscles of Lino’s nape before trailing down his spine, brazenly caressing the curve of his lower back in a continuous, rhythmic cycle.

“As I suspected. It was your body, wasn’t it?”

“Ack, cough… pardon?”

It was an utterly bizarre leap in logic, completely detached from the interrogation that had just nearly killed him. What audacity drove you to deceive me into becoming my knight? Your body? Operating strictly within the bounds of rational thought, Lino’s brain short-circuited. He couldn’t begin to fathom what kind of twisted deductive reasoning Grondil had employed to extract “body” as the grand conclusion to this interrogation.

“Why in the world… would you assume it was my body?”

“Because your physique looks exactly as if my personal tastes were perfectly molded into flesh.”

“…What?”

Experiencing the literal sensation of his brain flatlining, Lino choked down his remaining coughs and stared blankly at the man. He desperately needed to understand how such an absurd verdict had been reached.

“Why would my body… ahem, cough…”

The prolonged coughing fit had shredded his throat, leaving his voice raspy and hoarse. It wasn’t quite as deep as the Duke’s, but the abrasive scratching sound was prominent. Catching the rough tone, Grondil tilted his head, bringing his face dangerously close to Lino’s until their eyes locked.

“Your… Highness?”

Meeting that intense stare head-on, Lino was utterly bewildered by the complete absence of rage in those dark irises. The Duke only employed two escort knights. Yuneria was all flashy exterior with fundamentally sub-par skills, meaning Lino was supposed to be the competent, reliable one. Yet, having just confessed to lacking the single most crucial qualification of a Holy Knight—divine power—the man should be incandescent with fury. It was the only logical reaction.

However, Grondil simply stared at Lino, his eyes sparkling as if the most fascinating object in the entire world had just been placed in front of him.

Ahem. Clearing his throat, Lino carefully averted his gaze from the Duke’s suffocating stare, fixing his eyes somewhere between the man’s neck and shoulder. “My body is entirely ordinary. Who am I to dare rely on my body to deceive Your Highness…”

“It wasn’t your body?” Grondil blinked. No? I’m quite sure it was your body. His gaze trailed downward, sliding from Lino’s face to his Adam’s apple, over his prominent collarbones, and finally settling heavily on the pectoral muscles distinctly visible beneath his loose shirt.

“…”

Lino tried to endure the lingering stare, but it felt as if the man’s gaze possessed tangible physical weight. A phantom tickle crawled across his chest, prompting him to unconsciously raise a hand and scratch the exact spot Grondil was scrutinizing.

“The knight order I belonged to was so small that when Your Highness’s recruitment notice for an escort knight arrived, the resumes of the entire order were submitted,” Lino rambled, desperate to fill the silence. “We knights were only notified after the documents had already been forwarded to the higher-ups.”

“Hmm, is that so?”

“Yes, that is corr—”

“If you plan on speaking further, how about moving that hand?” Grondil interrupted smoothly.

“My… hand?”

“Yes. It’s blocking the view, so move it.”

Grondil seized the hand Lino was using to shield his chest and yanked it down. Resuming his visual feast, he traced Lino’s pectorals as if licking them with his eyes. Evidently, merely looking was no longer sufficient; he abruptly pressed his hand flat against the chest he had been scrutinizing so relentlessly.

“It is true that I deceived the Knight Commander, but I never intended to deceive Your Highness… Ugh…”

Desperately ignoring the hand resting on his chest, Lino attempted to emphasize his innocence. However, the hand that had initially just been resting there began to roam.

“Um, Your Highness. Please, your hand… Ah, ugh…”

With just a slight squeeze of his five fingers, Grondil gauged the size and firmness of the muscle beneath his palm. The probing touch wrung a strange, pained moan from Lino’s lips. A soft sigh of genuine admiration slipped from the Duke.

“Do you masturbate with your chest?”

“…Pardon? Why would I?”

Chest masturbation? Why the hell would anyone do that? Isn’t that something you do to women? Lino recalled the women he had been with before joining the Order of St. Margia. He had slept with quite a few, and while he had certainly caressed their breasts, he had never once been on the receiving end.

Though there were a few who tried to touch mine.

He wanted to argue that it was impossible to masturbate with a flat male chest, but Lino knew exactly how his own body was built, so he swallowed the protest. If he dared say such a thing, Grondil—whose eyes were currently glued to his chest—would undoubtedly fire back with, ‘In what world is this flat?’

And he wouldn’t stop at just firing back. He would likely try to strip off Lino’s shirt under the pretext of checking just how flat or bulging it actually was. Lino vividly remembered the events in the bathtub three days ago. The areas Grondil had tormented the most were his cock and balls, followed closely by his chest.

Am I really going to have to give up my ass? If I knew this was going to happen, I would have worn thicker clothes, even if it meant sweating.

The shirt Lino wore was a plain white tee with a completely stretched-out collar—the same one he used to lounge in comfortably at the knights’ barracks. Setting aside the ruined collar, the fabric itself was incredibly thin, sharply accentuating the voluminous curve of his unusually developed pectorals.

“I understand,” the Duke murmured.

“Wh-What do you mean?”

Once again, Grondil abruptly abandoned their previous topic, tossing out a statement that seemed to come from nowhere. Trying to block the hand that was kneading his chest as if intending to pop it, Lino asked what exactly he had understood. Naturally, prying Grondil’s hand away was a complete failure. He briefly considered resisting more forcefully, but quickly abandoned the idea, remembering that Grondil possessed the terrifying strength to snap iron bars like drinking straws.

“I’m saying I understand, despite how utterly despicable it is,” the Duke clarified.

Despicable?

“It seems the gods have decided to grant me a gift for my suffering.”

“A gift…?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Me? I am Your Highness’s gift?”