The strength in his knees left him, and unable to keep upright, he fell to the ground helplessly on his rear.
“So, with that said, would the face I pulled just now get you to forgive the kid?” The man slapped him on the shoulder.
Thutmose knew the man was unquestionably looking down on him...but his body and spirit had completely folded to the man’s terrifying aura. Overcome with embarrassment, his face grew hot.
“All right, now that that’s settled, let’s eat! Which of these is the tastiest, Al?” Even more irritating was the fact that the man had already lost interest in Thutmose and was now focused on the tavern’s food offerings. He wasn’t even on the man’s radar anymore. That made Thutmose tremble with rage.
“H-Hey, you bastard! Get back here!”
“Oh? Looks like you still have enough fight left to bark, at least. You’ve got a promising future ahead of you.” Taking his seat, the man grinned amusedly. That was when Thutmose realized—the man probably hadn’t even been aware he was looking down on him.
“T-Tell me your name!” Thutmose had no intention of letting it end like this. The grin on the man’s face only grew larger.
“Me? I’m Suoh Yuuto,” he replied coolly.
That nonchalant attitude of his ticked Thutmose off. There was only room in the sky for one sun to shine down on the people. Thutmose swore in his heart right then—he would definitely crush this man into oblivion.
“...Seriously?” Nozomu watched Thutmose’s retreating figure in a daze, unable to fully process what had just happened between Thutmose and Yuuto. However, he at least understood that the moment Thutmose had gone up against Yuuto, all the pharaoh’s arrogance and bravado had gone out the window, and he’d been reduced to a sniveling coward. The lion he’d once been had been tamed like a pet cat.
“Hilda, you’re Nozomu’s bodyguard today, are you not? What do you think you’re doing, leisurely enjoying your meal while letting a squabble like that happen?” Sigrún glared daggers at Hildegard. Nozomu couldn’t help but feel fear at the words “a squabble like that.” It meant that the threat Thutmose had posed hadn’t intimidated Sigrún in the least.
“Ah, well, about that... Kris told me to hold off. She said this would be a good opportunity for our young master to learn about the outside world...” Hildegard explained.
“Ah, I see. Yeah, that guy just now was a good example of what you can encounter out there,” Sigrún said, seemingly agreeing with Kristina’s earlier decision.
“A good example?! What exactly was good about that guy?!” Nozomu wanted to blurt out, but it seemed that Yuuto didn’t think anything more of the man than that.
“Come to think of it, who was that guy? He didn’t seem to be your average vagabond,” Yuuto asked.
“He called himself Thutmose III, Pharaoh of Kemet, or something,” Kristina replied.
“Pbbt!” Yuuto spat out the grape wine he’d been drinking, spraying it all over Nozomu in front of him.
“Dad?!”
“S-Sorry about that. But did you say ‘Thutmose III’?” Clearing his throat, he asked Kristina for confirmation.
“Yes. Someone you know?” Kristina asked.
“Yeah, you could say that. He was known everywhere as the ‘Napoleon of Egypt.’ In the history I’m familiar with, he was a famous legend—a hero who seized enough territory to make Egypt the largest it’d ever been,” Yuuto explained.
“Egy...? Huh?” Of course, in the current era, the nation of Egypt did not yet exist, so Kristina’s confusion was unsurprising.
“In other words, he was a great enough man to still be known even twenty-five hundred years from now,” she muttered thoughtfully, her expression a bit more stern. Nozomu, too, had heard the story of how his father Yuuto and mother Mitsuki had come from twenty-five hundred years in the future. Truthfully, it’d sounded like a tall tale, but Kristina, Bára, Fagrahvél, Felicia, and the rest of the Steel Clan elites seemed to believe it wholeheartedly. For so many of them to go along with this ridiculous story, they likely had some reason to believe it, something that unequivocally backed up that claim.
“Yeah. In that case, maybe he was too monstrous of an opponent to use as an example for Nozomu after all,” Yuuto said.
“The fact that you just shut a man like that up with a single glance proves that you’re even more of a monster, Father,” Kristina replied.
“...Well, at this point, the guy’s still young. I have more years on him,” Yuuto explained.
“Is that so? I seem to recall you being even more of a threat when you were his age, though?”
“Well, you know, it’s easy to glorify the past by misremembering, and all that.”
“‘Glorify the past,’ huh? Al, Hilda, and I all brushed off that Thutmose guy’s aura like it was nothing, you know.”
“R-Really?”
“Compared to the commanding aura you and Nobunaga created during the Stórk conference a few years back, that was like a warm breeze. It was all thanks to you, Father,” Kristina said, somewhat ironically. Yuuto only gave a bashful smile at that.
Nozomu, however, wasn’t concerned with his father’s reaction so much as what Kristina had said. Thutmose’s aura had been like a warm breeze to them?! In that case, just what kind of hell had transpired at the Stórk conference?! Just imagining it made him shudder.
After their meal, they made their way back to the ship. Nozomu was unsteady on his feet, downtrodden and still shell-shocked from earlier.
“Now have you started to realize how great your father is?” Kristina asked him, matching his pace. Nozomu felt his face growing hot from overwhelming embarrassment. He knew all too well now that he was still just a little kid who didn’t know his place. However, he had to accept that truth. Trying to deny it now would make him look even more pathetic than he already was.