I Raised A Black Dragon

While Kyle tidied up his house, since he would be gone for a few months, and returned to pack his bags, Noah heard a shocking revelation about the duke.

“What’s the… age difference again?” she asked.

“Oh, I guess you didn’t know. Fifteen years or sixteen years; something like that.” Kyle was replied nonchalantly. When he noticed her astonishment, he added, “He was already over forty years old by the time he became the duke. You must not be blinded by his looks, Noah.”

Noah gasped, “Forty?”

“He may have turned forty-four this year. That’s right, since he’s scheduled to graduate from the academy next year. Forty-four.”

“Wow…”

An exclamation came from the big shock. The last time Noah had seen Duke Leonard, waving his hands wildly above his head, he had looked thirty, no matter how high she guessed his age. Not a day over thirty. But how could he be forty-four?

In a sense, wasn’t his a very destructive babyface? It was obvious that the Leonard family was firmly in their good looks.

“Still, I guess you and your brother have a good relationship.”

“It isn’t bad. When I was young, he and his wife raised me. Father died early, and Mother at the time, too, was quite old.”

These were new information to Noah. So, on top of the sixteen-year age difference, if the older brother had gotten married while his younger brother was just learning to walk, it was not excessive to say that Duke Leonard had really raised Kyle. Noah murmured again as she watched the man clean up the whole house.

“I see, you were the youngest sibling. You sure don’t look like it. Somehow, it seems that you and your brother have switched roles.”

“I, too, think that sometimes. That he is in fact not forty-four but fourteen. It’s a shame he behaves so stupidly in private; if he were like that all the time the problem would be a little serious.”

“Still, I think Lord Leonard is taking good care of you. He worries a lot about you. And he has kept in contact with you,” said Noah.

“If I concede to his whinings even once, he never stops being immature. His habits have already gotten much worse, so don’t be too friendly with him if you see him behind closed doors, Noah. Because you will definitely regret it.”

“Well, he was sort of… quite unusual.”

Kyle devoted himself to the steamer he was using to get rid of the wrinkles on the five robes he had hanging up.

Among them were a few of Noah’s blouses and dresses that had been crumpled by her being randomly dragged in and out of Muell’s subspace. He mumbled to himself as he ironed out the wrinkles with very cautious hand movements.

“I’m sure he feels especially sorry for me. I was dispatched to a conflict zone when I was young and almost died, so… oh.”

Then, perhaps noticing a mistake, he abruptly stopped talking. But it was already too late. Noah held her tail sharply and hung it down.

“You, what? When?”

“…it was long ago. More than a decade ago.”

“When exactly, and how bad was he hurt?” Noah inquired adamantly.

“I must have been seventeen since I was in the military academy at the time… Don’t make that face. Soldiers in close combat zones all suffer such injuries.”

“There’s certainly a disturbance in the words ‘almost died’ and ‘such injuries.’”

“…it just means that Lord Leonard is sensitive. When I was sent, he called me out of the army right away… I just moved to the Protection Bureau where I was offered to work with him. After that, none of that really happened.”

That didn’t seem so. Noah could infer that this had happened frequently before, considering that he had reacted casually to the tear in his side on the Angelic.

Kyle was obsessed with others’ opinions that his method of investigation was violent, so he would never allow Noah to be at the forefront of an investigation… She was sure he had rolled around in the Protection Bureau, too. She lowered her eyebrows with a threat.

“Then when I’m bored, I want to watch you work.”

Kyle, who was folding his stiffly ironed clothes into his bag, turned his head immediately. “Are you nuts? No way.”

“Why not? You will be extremely comfortable if you take me.”

“That’s not true…” He smiled for a moment at her sulky glare. “I’ll say this again, but no matter how good you are at magic, and even if you have Muell by your side, you must not act recklessly in an unprofessional field. Because a trained expert is nothing to toy with.”

Even Noah knew that. She knew but was still worried. When she shifted her eyes unsatisfactorily, Kyle, after closing his suitcase, rigidly turned her back in his direction with his hands.

“It’s a good thing that you’re worried, but you must be relentless. I am not like you, the type who breaks something whenever I fall.”

“I am not that kind of person either,” Noah retorted.