The Overprotective Shadow of Luncandel

“Yet you call him by name so… familiarly.”

Abel was still smiling, but there was a subtle, eerie chill beneath it. I became even more certain of my hypothesis: he had definitely heard the rumors circulating about the Crown Prince and me.

No matter how much of a prized disciple he was to the Tower Sages or how brilliant a talent in the Ministry of Magic, he couldn’t openly display hostility toward the Crown Prince. Perhaps as a substitute for that, his tendency to block my path and warily scan our surroundings had grown severe lately.

He repeatedly asked how I had spent my time with Spellman. He laughed when I told him I spent most of my days in the mountains away from people, but when I mentioned staying at the Spellman estate, he pried for details, chewing over several names I mentioned. Naturally, I had the most to say about the person who left the strongest impression on me, so stories about Dimension kept slipping out. The gist was usually that I couldn’t beat him until the very end, but such details didn’t seem to matter to Abel.

It was almost frightening to see him constantly muttering Dimension’s alias as if he intended never to forget it. If I had accidentally mentioned that the man had once scratched my face, a sudden disaster might have descended upon the Spellman estate.

I almost repaid a debt of gratitude with a grudge. My spine tingled at the memory of how narrowly I’d managed to divert his interest.

Wait.

A sudden thought gave me pause.

…Surely, the reason Elliot saw Abel and turned back wasn’t because of that, was it?

I tried my best to deny the possibility. No matter how sensitive Abel had become, surely he wouldn’t be wary of a childhood friend I’d played with since I was ten.

“I’ve heard of him. Rumors travel fast in the capital, and I’ve been hearing about Klein ever since I returned. I figured he must be someone impressive, so I made sure to remember the name.”

“Right. I see.”

Abel smiled brightly. It wasn’t the face of someone who was convinced; it was more like he was letting it slide simply because it was coming from me.

I hurriedly added more to prevent the disaster of Abel chasing me all the way to the Academy out of wariness toward Cedric Klein. If I wanted to move freely with Erkel, I had to keep Abel as far away as possible.

“He’s a mage like you, brother. And technically, he’s your junior.”

And he’s a cross-dressing pervert.

For a moment, the Cedric I knew flickered in my mind. A pale, pretty face that suited the nickname ‘Cici.’ Dark, gentle eyes like those of a herbivore. He was slow-moving and shy, but in his childhood, even that was endearing enough to make him look like a doll.

Ruminating on Cedric Klein, I almost let the innocent act I put on for my brother slip. Who could have guessed such a dark interior lay beneath that face?

I could understand him dressing like a girl at first—he said it was a deal with Elizabeth Luxteal. Kids can play those kinds of pranks. But I couldn’t forgive him for continuing to hide his identity and trying to deceive me afterward. That bastard… and after all that, he just quietly accepted the necklace and even kissed me.

It wasn’t that I was lingering on a first kiss when I’d already shared a much deeper one with Luke, but it did make my blood boil.

I remembered how Erkel and Elliot kept teasing me, asking if he was my first love. I had denied it back then, saying it wasn’t anything as cute or lovely as a first love, but I’d let it slide vaguely. I should have smacked them the moment the words ‘first love’ left their mouths.

As soon as we arrived in Luncandel, Abel led me outside. He didn’t even give me time to stop at the hotel, so our luggage had to be sent ahead separately.

Abel, who had been rushing ahead like a puppy out for a walk for the first time in ages, suddenly turned back with a look of realization. After a moment’s hesitation, he stuck himself right to my side. He clung to my flank, smiling at me. Looking at that radiant face, I couldn’t help but smile back.

Ultimately, I had to tour the city stuck to Abel as if we were a single body. Abel didn’t leave my side for a second, maintaining maximum physical contact as if I might vanish the moment he took his eyes off me. It was “ultra-close-contact care.” Even taking a preschooler to a crowded theme park wouldn’t be this intense.

Given what I’d done, I couldn’t complain… but I couldn’t help feeling like I’d reverted to being ten years old. No, even when I was actually ten, it wasn’t this bad. Of course, my second brother used to carry me around all day so I wouldn’t have to walk, but the other brothers were relatively reasonable. They’d do “cute” things like filling my room with things I liked or competing to bring me the most delicious desserts.

Since I stayed obediently by his side, Abel draped an arm over my shoulder. It was a pose my second brother—who couldn’t exactly carry his grown-up sibling anymore—often struck lately. Since the height difference between Leo and me was the greatest, when he draped his arm over me, I practically became an armrest.

Abel seemed to see a certain brotherly reliability in that gesture, but unfortunately for him, more than half of that reliability came from Leo’s sheer bulk. No matter how hard Abel tried, his heels barely touched the ground as he strained to reach, a far cry from the image Leo projected.

Thanks to my best efforts to grow over the last five years, we were already similar in height, and in terms of physique, I was actually better off. Llewelyn’s body was on the slender side, but even so, it was a stretch to compare a mage who spent all day indoors focused on research without a lick of sunlight to a swordsman whose daily routine involved running laps around the training grounds.

Though even I was far from my ideal.

I swallowed a sigh, thinking of my chest and arms that never seemed to get thicker than a certain point, no matter how hard I exercised, as if a limit had been drawn. I could accept Dimension. He already had the image of a warrior, so having solid arms and hands didn’t make me feel like I’d lost. If anything, I felt proud that I could challenge someone like him and put up a fierce fight.

But the Crown Prince was a different story. Why does a person of high status, who only does the set amount of exercise, need to have such a good physique? His elegant aura had masked it at first, but thinking back, it wasn’t just his face that had grown excessively well. I was practically resentful of a large, solid frame that Llewelyn’s constitution could never even dream of. I’m the one who rolled around in the dirt. Why did his body grow like that?

When I recalled my past expectations—how I’d hoped that because I’d picked up a sword for a brief moment as a child, I might at least turn out like my second brother—my sorrow deepened. To think that the range of things I could change through effort didn’t even include my own body.

No matter how I looked at it, the only culprit was the original work. Even for a character with little screen time, if they were a protagonist, they probably couldn’t stray far from the body type the author had set according to their taste. I briefly wondered if it would have been better to be reincarnated into the sequel Erkel mentioned, then gave up.

Come to think of it, there was a reason the protagonist there had that kind of build. Erkel had confessed that while she loved slender physiques during the days she was writing ‘By Your Side,’ her tastes changed while writing the sequel. She said that the better the physique, the sturdier they were, so they didn’t break easily—which allowed her to roll them through the mud as much as she wanted with less of a guilty conscience.

What a taste. If I’m struggling this much in a novel she claimed was full of dreams and hope, I might have just given up on everything if I’d been dropped into a novel she labeled as “angst-heavy.”

I wouldn’t have had a family like this there, either. I looked at Abel’s face—which took after the Count more than the Countess and only showed glimpses of Llewelyn if you looked closely—and imagined a world where my brothers showed me nothing but hostility.

It didn’t even need to go as far as hostility. Just imagining them treating me the way they treated others, instead of their faces softening into fools the moment they saw me, made me depressed. If they hadn’t come to me first and showered me with affection, even when I called it annoying, it might have taken me much longer to stop sobbing and adjust to this strange world.

Instead of reminding Abel that I was no longer the squirt who only came up to his waist, I bent my knees slightly. It probably looked ridiculous to onlookers, but I didn’t care; it wasn’t like I’d be seeing these people for long anyway.

Until just twenty years ago, Luncandel was a city bustling with mages gathered from all over and merchants selling magical supplies.

Rahid, where the Magic Tower was located, was surrounded by mountain ranges and protected by magical barriers, making it difficult to access by conventional means. Only those with the seal of the Magic Tower could use the gate leading to Rahid, and this seal was only granted to mages affiliated with the tower. Generally, the only way to enter Rahid was by land through Luncandel.

For Rahid, which claimed to be an isolated island in the middle of the continent, to survive, it needed the supplies coming through Luncandel, and Luncandel operated on the profits gained through Rahid.

This long-standing structure began to change when Pisha Tecon, the Master of the Magic Tower, took over as the principal of the Academy.