Princess Sherry's Tale - Chapter 16.2

Since childhood, Tol had had a sense of inferiority about his birth. He didn’t want to be abandoned by his father, the count, so he had been swinging his sword nonstop until this day.

I, too, am human, so why wouldn’t it be difficult to just train and train so hard, he thought. When his five older brothers took turns asking him to show them what he’d learned today, there were days when he wanted to quit, whether it was swordsmanship or something else.

However, the only way he could boost his status—as he had been treated as an illegitimate child or son of a concubine at that time—was to become a knight. The knight himself corresponded to the position of a given aristocrat, and he could obtain an aristocratic status, even if it was not hereditary.

But later after breaking away from “the son of a concubine” image, he still chose to become a knight. He had unexpected talent, and even felt excitement in sword fighting, but his priority was to get out of his home. However, there was no doubt that he had some affection for it.

Tol wasn’t a son of a high-ranking aristocrat, but perhaps because he had grown up beautifully in a rich environment and had been born with an optimistic personality, her mother had naively believed that young Tol was okay. Frankly speaking, the quiet Tol had some limitations in expressing uncomfortable feelings because his five half-brothers had never abused him or openly teased him.

His older brothers showed excessive interest in whatever Tol did. However, the cold stares of their friends, whom he was often forced to run into at home, gave a raw touch to the young and delicate boy’s heart.

At that time, the reactions of those who saw Tol for the first time were all similar:

“Hey, hey. You’re that…”

Having inherited the count’s symbolic turquoise hair and purple eyes more than any of his brothers, Tol always had to endure the stares that seemed to be scanning him head to toe. However, he didn’t want to worry his father and mother about something vague.

So he may have been preoccupied with finding a way out of his home somehow. And the flow of Tol’s thoughts, who was only a young man who had never experienced anything difficult and was nothing more than a master who knew nothing of the world, led to the renunciation of his inheritance rights and running away from home.

He was a young boy at that time, so he had no second thoughts in entrusting himself to the marquis immediately after he left his home with shallow knowledge of his inheritance rights.

It wasn’t until he matured a little bit that he realized that his brothers’ intentions might not have been to pester him. However, Tol was not friendly enough to revive the distant brotherhood.

Fortunately, there were things that he was satisfied with in his life as the marquis’s knight, like clothes that fit him perfectly. He was also content with the relationship he had built with the strict but friendly senior knights along with the servants. There, Tol wasn’t even the son of a count, but he wasn’t the son of a concubine either.

Tol hadn’t been able to contact his father properly for several years, and a heavy guilt weighed down on one side of his mind. However, it had already been six years since he postponed their meeting, using his busy training schedule as an excuse.

Of course, even if it was an excuse, it was also true that very few knights were as dedicated and talented as Tol. He also knew of the expectations surrounding him, so he did everything to improve his swordsmanship.

Whenever he reached a new level, he trained for about two days with no sleep, and whenever he felt his physical strength or mental strength weakening, he went to the mountains and recklessly overworked himself for a week.

And the hardest thing Tol had ever experienced—so hard that he almost let go of his sword in frustration—was when he felt as if he had run into a huge wall. For him, he thought the only unbearable pain should be to go to the battlefield and lose a limb. His world revolved on his knighthood.

And now, Tol was realizing that it was just the foolish arrogance of a virgin who had been overconfident in his reasoning. Wouldn’t this unexpected situation be Tol’s most difficult and painful moment?