40 Pride and Prejudice (1/2)

Darius enjoyed the conversation with her quite a bit, almost reaching the point that he fully immersed himself within it. However, Darius was, after all, Darius. In the deep recesses of his mind, he kept asking himself the same questions.

'Why is she being so friendly to me? What's her objective?'

Due to his past experiences, and his recent incident with Lionel, Darius had started to more often think the worst of other people. As they talked, he kept wondering why she was talking to him.

'Is it because she is attracted to me?'

It took only a second for him to trash that foolish thought. His intuition told him otherwise, and he found it hard to disagree with. After all, what was there to like about him? It certainly seemed that there wasn't enough to attract a Princess. He was cowardly, poor, and not particularly charismatic. Granted, he was now somewhat strong, but surely that wasn't enough to warrant a princess's attention… or was it?

Hence, when she had asked him how he had gotten so strong, the gears in his mind had entered overdrive.

'As a princess, she must have access to a wealth of information. She should know plenty of methods to get strong. A country hick like me, on the other hand, knows nothing.'

Many ideas went through his head until one idea stuck out like a sore thumb.

'She wants to know the source of my strength!'

Nevertheless, she was not the only one curious about this matter. Darius himself wasn't quite sure. He had even asked the old man about it the night before.

”If one spent every day doing what you did for hours on end, it would be weird if they didn't become strong.”

This had been the elder's answer. Darius had not been satisfied with it because he had suspected that the old man had still been hiding something, but he had kept his reservations to himself. After all, if Darius truly had a technique that made it easy to obtain strength, he would attract far too much attention. He doubted that he could smoke the information out of the wily old fox so easily.

'I should just be honest. Well, not too honest.'

Darius was someone who prided himself in his ability to avoid confrontations of any kind; thus, he had come up with many ways to avoid difficult questions. After all, his daily hammering of the anvil had been bound to have captured others' curiosity, yet so far, no one had ever managed to get a single peep out of him. Well, except for that old man.

”To be honest, Princess, I'm not sure myself. I just do some simple muscular exercises. Before this test, I didn't even know I had this much strength.”

He had had an inkling that he was stronger than the average person, but he had not believed that it was to this extent.