Chapter 75
Felix Spencer.
The second son of the Spencer Ducal House. And a bastard.
For Felix, whose birth was anything but ordinary and whose family name was anything but ordinary, an appearance that was anything but ordinary was not a blessing.
It was a curse.
Golden hair that remained glossy and silky despite never being properly cared for.
Skin so flawless that it appeared soft and perfectly smooth, without a single blemish.
And above all, features so breathtakingly beautiful that they made every other advantage seem insignificant.
His beauty was so extraordinary that people claimed their minds went completely blank the moment they laid eyes on him. His face was famous not only throughout the Empire, but even in neighboring kingdoms.
For Felix, who needed to live unnoticed, as though he were already dead, it was the last thing he wanted.
As he grew older and reached puberty, his appearance blossomed into something so striking it scarcely seemed real.
Marriage proposals began arriving one after another.
That was when Felix realized he would have to leave the ducal house.
Would anything have changed if the fiancée originally intended for his elder brother, the Duke’s legitimate heir, had never taken an interest in him?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps not.
From the moment more and more servants began pretending they had some excuse to brush against his hand or touch his face…
From the moment the social gatherings he had no choice but to attend became filled with lingering, covetous gazes directed at him…
Felix’s departure from the Spencer Ducal House had already become inevitable.
For Felix, whose only prospects had been marrying into some obscure noble family as a live-in son-in-law or becoming the plaything of an aging man in power, being given the option of entering the Temple was the only stroke of good fortune in a life marked by misfortune from the very beginning.
Why only a “small” stroke of good fortune?
The divine power he had barely managed to awaken was pitifully weak.
Among the nobility, there were quite a few people with this level of divine power who chose to remain nobles rather than become priests or holy knights.
After all, compared to scraping by at the bottom of the clergy, it was far more advantageous for them to continue living comfortably as members of the Empire’s upper class.
But Felix had no other path left.
Or rather, this was the only path he could bring himself to accept.
Compared to marrying into some unknown noble family as a live-in son-in-law only to ruin that family because of himself, or living in comfort and luxury while selling his body in all but name, this was the one road that would allow him to live as Felix, even if it meant rolling in the dirt and covering himself in dust.
So he seized a sword with desperate determination.
His divine power was so meager that he had never even dared hope to become a priest. The only position he could realistically aspire to was that of a holy knight.
When he wrapped his hand around a sword again, one he had studied only briefly as part of a noble’s education, Felix could only laugh at himself.
His elder brother had always excelled with the sword, and Felix had deliberately refused to pursue it so no one would think he coveted his brother’s place.
It had been an absurdly presumptuous decision.
Had he possessed this much talent, he could have continued training without any issue.
It wasn’t as though he was clumsy, nor did he lack the strength to swing a sword even once. But he could not even measure up to his elder brother’s shadow.
His talent amounted to nothing more than wielding a sword slightly better than the average grown man.
The books he had poured over day and night—so that he could survive, endure, and somehow be of use to the ducal house—proved utterly worthless.
The truth was, he had never been especially intelligent.
He had simply clung to his studies with relentless persistence, wearing a composed smile all the while, and so everyone assumed Felix achieved results effortlessly.
Everything he had worked so hard for had come to nothing.
Even so, Felix remembered what that effort had accomplished.
His mind was only average. But by working himself to the bone, he had managed to make himself appear intelligent. So perhaps the sword would be the same.
Even if he could never become a genius, if he trained as though his life depended on it, perhaps he could at least raise himself to the level of an ordinary man.
Even after his palms split open…
Even when his forearms trembled as though they were about to tear themselves free…
Even when his legs shook beneath him like those of a newborn lamb and he collapsed to the ground…
He never let go of the sword.
He gripped it with desperate determination, fixed his eyes on the path ahead, and gathered what little divine power he possessed into its blade.
As a result, Felix barely managed to become a holy knight.
He was overjoyed, but that joy did not last long.
His lack of talent soon revealed its limits, and the label that had followed him his entire life continued to cling to him here as well.
Above all, there was that person.
After Felix was assigned to become Lord Abel’s personal guard, he became the subject of even more gossip.
Every holy knight knew the truth. With Felix’s level of skill, there was no way he should have been chosen to guard the Herald of God.
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