Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 42: 42 - The Carriage

Gaspard left the Clairmont mansion looking as calm as he had entered it. His carriage waited at the bottom of the steps, and the footman opened the door before he reached it.

He climbed inside without looking back until the door was closed. Only then did his eyes return to the mansion as the driver snapped the reins and Greymoor began to move behind them.

Léon was already inside, sitting opposite with one leg crossed over the other. He made no effort to hide his impatience. ”How did the meeting go?”

Gaspard kept looking through the window. The mansion grew smaller behind them, stone and old timber beneath Clairmont colours that should have belonged to a dead house by now. ”Fine.”

Léon raised an eyebrow. ”Fine? You travelled all the way here and that’s all I get?”

Gaspard finally looked at him.

”It was a conversation about timber.”

His tone ended the subject before Léon could push further. For the next several minutes, he said nothing while the carriage rolled down the west road and Greymoor disappeared behind the trees.

Only once the mansion was gone did Gaspard lean back. Adrien Clairmont had lied to him, and almost every answer had been arranged carefully enough to sound harmless while saying just enough to make Gaspard wonder what sat underneath it.

’Something up there stopped being where it usually is.’ That had been the first one. Not beasts moved nor something frightened them, but something stopped being where it usually was, which was strange unless Adrien knew there had been something in that forest keeping creatures away.

The burners were the obvious explanation. Nobody outside the operation should have known about those, and perhaps Adrien had chosen his words badly, but Gaspard had spent eleven years refusing to call dangerous coincidences coincidences.

Then there had been the second phrase. ’They do when somebody removes the cause...’

Not when the cause disappears. When somebody removes it. Gaspard’s jaw tightened because Adrien had said it without hesitation, as if he already knew whatever had disturbed the mountain had been built by human hands and destroyed by them.

”Father?” Léon asked, his impatience gone now.

Gaspard did not raise his voice when he answered. ”Quiet.”

Léon closed his mouth immediately. Gaspard went back through the meeting: Adrien’s pauses, his questions, Evelyne on the steps, then pouring tea as though Gaspard were an old acquaintance rather than a man whose family held land stripped from hers.

That woman had known something too. She had not reacted when he mentioned timber, when he asked about unusual activity on the mountain, or even when Adrien admitted they had discovered people working there.

That was wrong, because a noblewoman discovering an illegal operation on her family’s land should have demanded answers. Who were they? Where had they come from? Who had paid them?

Neither Clairmont had asked him anything. Gaspard’s fingers curled against his knee as the third problem settled into place.

If a noble told you his workers had disappeared close to an illegal camp you had just found, there was one obvious question: were my men involved? Adrien had never asked it, because he did not need to.

”You lying little bastard.” Gaspard struck the side of the carriage with the heel of his hand, and the wood cracked loudly enough that the driver glanced back before quickly facing the road again.

Léon straightened. ”What happened?” Gaspard was no longer pretending to be calm, and that seemed to unsettle his son more than the outburst itself.

”He knows.” Gaspard shifted forward, his hands tightening over his knees.

Léon’s expression changed. ”Knows what?”

”Enough. He knew why I was there before I crossed his damned threshold.” Gaspard barely saw his son anymore, because eleven years of work were moving through his head instead: payments, routes, buyers, names never supposed to appear beside one another on paper.

And now Adrien Clairmont had something. Maybe documents, maybe survivors, maybe both, and Gaspard did not know which possibility was worse.

’If there’s something worth telling them.’ He heard the boy’s voice again. Adrien had not said there was nothing to report, nor had he promised to keep the Crown out; he had simply left the door open and watched Gaspard react.

”He was testing me.” Gaspard rubbed a hand across his mouth. ”Every damned answer. He was watching to see which one bothered me.”

Léon stared at his father, and something uncomfortable began forming behind his expression. Gaspard shouted at servants and froze lesser nobles with a look, but Léon had almost never seen him genuinely rattled.

Whatever Adrien had done inside that room had frightened him. That realization landed badly because Adrien was the same boy Léon had mocked at the funeral, the same One Star he challenged in Valebrand, only to lose Umbral Root and yield in front of nobles who repeated the story all night.

Margaret had laughed at him, and that part came back more clearly than the pain. Léon’s hand closed over his knee. ”Then maybe we should do something before he decides what to do with whatever he has.”

Gaspard’s eyes snapped toward him. ”We are going to do nothing, and you especially are going to do nothing.”

Léon frowned. ”But if he actually knows—”

”You will not go near Adrien Clairmont.” Gaspard leaned forward until there was no mistaking the order. ”You will not write to Greymoor, send friends to ask questions, threaten anyone, or try to repair your pride. Do you understand me?”

Léon held his father’s gaze while the carriage swayed beneath them. After several seconds, he nodded. ”Perfectly.”

”Good.” Gaspard sat back and looked toward the road again, already returning to the conversation in his head. Léon turned toward the opposite window and watched trees move across the glass.

His father continued muttering fragments of the meeting under his breath, pulling apart words and gestures as though somewhere among them was the exact moment the trap had closed. Léon barely listened.

He was remembering Adrien taking Umbral Root from his hand. He remembered Margaret’s laugh, the crowd, and the humiliation of saying I yield to a man who had possessed a mana core for days.

Now his own father was afraid of that same man. Léon’s reflection stared back at him from the carriage glass, and the anger sitting in him since Valebrand finally found somewhere useful to go.

’Fine.’ His father did not need to know.

Léon would deal with Adrien Clairmont himself. And this time, there would be nobody around to laugh.