The Supporting Protagonist Works - 9
“Whoa, this bastard was even crazier than I imagined.”
Having come all this way, it felt too wasteful to leave empty-handed, so I ended up stepping into the secret room.
Who would have thought Felix’s hidden legacy would turn out to be a collection of furry-related goods.
I wondered how the person who buried his inheritance must have felt.
It’s basically like asking a friend to delete the steamy videos on your hard drive.
Except the structure forces the friend to see the contents while deleting them, so it’s not a request you can make lightly.
The sexual desires of a man respected and looked up to by everyone turned out to be furry.
Just imagining how people would take that fact was enough to make my head explode.
“What a thoroughly dreadful place this is.”
“Having Meril wait outside was a stroke of genius.”
If she had seen this place, she might have come to regard the intersection of human and beast as something perfectly natural.
I couldn’t go injecting weird knowledge into a girl who was already suppressing her own instincts for my sake.
I picked out the relatively mildest drawing as evidence to submit to the headmaster and burned the rest to ashes.
Prophet’s legacy or not, it was better to incinerate the dirty laundry.
To be honest, I should have burned that wolf spring painting I handed over to Chaos back then as well.
“Contractor, could you come this way for a moment?”
“What’s up? More stuff that needs burning?”
“No. There was a letter left here.”
“A letter?”
In Frach’s hand was a single white letter.
I took it from her without hesitation and tore open the envelope to pull out the contents.
“I wonder who this was meant for.”
A letter the prophet had left behind, unable to send it in the end.
The contents were one thing, but I was curious about the recipient.
The envelope itself had no addressee written on it.
I would have to figure it out from the contents.
To the Monarch Whose Name I Do Not Know
If you are reading this letter, then the hero of that world has already met his downfall.
By your hand, no less.
I have no intention of criticizing your actions.
You merely acted according to your own convictions, and there is nothing more meaningless than me debating right and wrong.
Even if you are currently burning every last bit of my precious legacy.
It seemed the letter’s recipient was me after all.
A man who died three hundred years ago sending a letter to someone in the future was completely absurd.
But for Felix, who could see the future, it wasn’t impossible.
Hadn’t he even accurately predicted that I was burning his legacy in real time?
Even so, the reason I leave a letter like this is to offer you some advice.
First of all, it is fine to thirst for power, but never become intoxicated by it.
You will go on to achieve feats that no one else could ever accomplish.
In the process, you will obtain power that is difficult to control.
You will handle most of it with great skill, but there will occasionally be wild, untamable forces as well.
If you do not grip the reins tightly then, you will not escape a disaster too great to contain. Be careful.
Whether he had peered into my future as well, Felix left behind a weighty prophecy.
Do not let power devour you—become the one who takes the lead instead.
Fail, and it will bring you harm.
He had spoken in abstract, roundabout terms, but that was the gist of it.
It was advice with some real substance, so I decided to keep it in mind.
Next is the matter of Meril.
As you may already know, that child is not some monster inhabiting a dungeon.
She is a hybrid of the divine beast known as Cpheterios and myself, a human.
Cpheterios is a sheep that possesses a unique holy power that even dragons do not have.
Though not a god, it held holy power and originally stood shoulder to shoulder with the dragons.
Yet because of that very holy power, it became an ill-fated ancient species driven to extinction by the gods.
The next section was packed with revelations that made me doubt my own eyes.
Not only had I learned about an ancient species that had never once been mentioned in the original work, but Meril was apparently the last remaining descendant of that extinct race.
In other words, Meril did not fall short of the dragonkin in the slightest—and if one measured by rarity, her value was even higher.
She was no ordinary hybrid. Out in society, her bloodline would have been fit for princess treatment without the slightest shame.
And finally, the thought struck me that Felix, who had mated with a divine beast possessing holy power, was a genuine lunatic.
At any rate, in order to protect Meril, I deliberately chose land that would turn into a dungeon as my gravesite.
After that, I arranged with a trusted comrade to place both my legacy and Meril inside the dungeon.
Once the preliminary work was finished, I checked when it would be all right for Meril to go outside.
Regrettably, there were no particularly good futures, but I did manage to catch a glimpse of cases where that child becomes happy.
I suddenly grew uneasy.
Normally, once someone revealed facts like these, a request was sure to follow.
Keeping the secret was the bare minimum; depending on the case, extra conditions would be tacked on.
I decided to stop reading at this point and tear the letter up.
But the paper had been magically coated, so no amount of force would rip it.
It was clearly telling me to read to the end.
In Meril’s futures, there were only cases of her hanging herself from loneliness or being subjugated by the messengers of the gods.
Amid those bleak possibilities, there was just one where I saw Meril’s bright, smiling face.
It was none other than when she was by your side.
So please… make Meril—my one and only daughter—happy.
“I knew it would come to this.”
“What a sinful man you are. How nice—already receiving a parent’s blessing.”
“I’m not happy about it at all, okay?”
Lately I’d been thinking that women clung to me with terrifying persistence.
It wasn’t as if there had been no men at all in this possessed life.
It was just that every male except Rewen had been an enemy, and either died by my hand or was scheduled to.
One might think it was fine since I could build a harem, but the problem was the women’s specs.
Not a single one of them was ordinary.
Rene was Breeze’s daughter, and Breeze was the Wild Dragon.
Lin, who could cut through anything, and Frach were the Sword Saint and a magic sword respectively.
Hades and Chaos, once members of the Demon King’s side, were a Demi-Lich and one of the Four Evil Beasts.
Sestia, whom I’d met relatively recently, was also dragonkin—and now, of all things, Meril turned out to be the daughter of an extinct ancient species and a prophet.
Every woman I met possessed absurd power or bloodline, and it left me speechless.
There was only one man—me—and multiple women.
I was terrified that if they started trying to kill each other while I was away, the world itself might collapse.
“I’m refusing this request for now.”
“What has come over you? I thought that if it concerned a woman, you would accept without a second thought.”
“What do you take me for? No matter how kind and cute Meril is, taking responsibility for her entire life is a completely different matter.”
Even now I already had a whole crowd of women I was responsible for making happy.
In that situation, I couldn’t be sure my body would hold out if I took on Meril as well.
Sorry to Felix, but I was going to leave Meril behind and walk out with only his spring paintings.
“By the way, the letter continues. Will you not read the rest?”
“Forget it. It’s bound to be the usual stuff—‘I approve of your relationship with Meril,’ or ‘I’ll reward you if you make her happy,’ and so on.”
Frach finished reading the letter and nodded.
That meant my guess had been dead-on.
There was no value in looking further, yet Frach deliberately read every last word.
“…Contractor. Setting everything else aside, I believe you need to confirm this particular passage.”
Frach’s brow twitched as she read the final portion of the letter.
Judging by how stern her expression had become, it was content that could not simply be glossed over.
I took the letter back and read the part her finger indicated.
Do you not wish to know about the being that dragged you into this world?
It is an existence I cannot casually speak of, so I cannot tell you in detail, but I can give you a hint.
If you desire the hint, then pledge beneath this letter that you will make my daughter happy.
If you do so, I promise to transfer not only the information but also a special power to you, who will become my son-in-law.
Felix had dangled an advance payment in front of me.
The being I had wanted to thrash next after the red lizard and the Magic Tower Master.
But since I didn’t even know whether it existed, calling it a thrashing target felt a bit vague.
After reading the letter’s contents, however, my next objective was set.
Better to take charge of Meril than leave a pointless risk factor lying around.
I bit the tip of my finger and wrote my name in bright red blood at the bottom of the letter.
At once, tiny letters appeared instructing me to look at the reverse side, and new content filled what had been blank paper.
Most of it was written in characters I had never seen before, so I could not read it.
The only parts I could make out were the sentence “Entrust the translation to Meril” and the closing line marked with a P.S.
P.S. The genitals of Cpheterios have seventy times more folds than a human’s, the internal temperature is three degrees higher, and the fluids are as refreshing and delicious as mineral spring water, said to be the very source of holy power.
This bastard’s bones were probably covered in fur.