The Villainess Is My Cute Daughter

Because his dungeon was now officially upgraded to an SS rank one, the surveillance range had expanded massively. So he could actively look around at a pretty decent distance around him.

But he had to do all of the searching manually. The system could not automatically track the hidden and hostile mana signatures for him. It was already displaying the live feed of what was going on, so he just needed to use his thoughts to make the ”magical camera” move into the forest and search for the hidden mage.

And he just kept looking through the dark forest with the help of his system screen. He desperately hoped that Sigrid could hold her ground against that giant werewolf without taking any cheap sneak attacks to the back from the mage.

Back on the towering stone wall, Aria stood perfectly still among the firing archers. She just watched the chaotic battlefield in silence as she took in everything.

She watched Adrian’s massive, roaring flaming tornado just suddenly disappear into thin air.

And she was genuinely surprised by the abrupt failure. Because this was something that she did not expect to happen.

She knew the deep mechanics of how magic worked. The only people who possessed the skill to forcibly hijack and sever an active, tethered spell like that were incredibly advanced, high-tier mages. And a disruptive, anti-magic skill like that was not really related to the rank of the mage or their mana capacity. It was almost entirely dependent on the mage’s skill to control mana and it required an extremely high level of precision.

So just by looking at the way the tornado died, she could instantly tell that the invisible mana connection had been cleanly cut.

And she knew for a fact that the person who was hiding behind the trees doing this was a really, really skilled mage.

She quickly did the exact same math in her head that Adrian had done earlier. She looked at the distances between the wall, the place where the spell died, and the forest.

And she instantly came to the exact same conclusion as Adrian.

’A sixth circle mage.’ Aria thought grimly.

And she recalled something incredibly important. Since she was currently sitting at the peak of the fourth circle, she was technically in the exact same power tier as her hidden opponent.

Because in this world, the magical and physical ranking tree was strictly divided into three sections each.

For the knights, the SSS, SS, and S ranks were grouped together as the absolute top most tier of superhuman power. The A, B, and C ranks were officially classified as the middle tier. And the D, E, and F ranks were grouped as the low tier.

There was a massive, qualitative increase in base stats, physical attributes, and magical abilities whenever a person successfully moved from one major tier bracket to the next one.

And it was the exact same structural logic for mages.

Their raw magical output increased exponentially when they crossed a tier boundary. Which made a massive, undeniable difference in the sheer destructive strength and power of their magic spells.

So she knew that even though she was only a fourth circle mage right now, she was officially sitting in the exact same ”middle tier” bracket as the sixth circle enemy.

’Maybe I can actually fight these people.’ Aria thought to herself confidently.

So she quickly looked around her. She saw that the northern archers were doing a really good job holding the line and raining arrows down on the monsters rushing towards them.

And while she was also actively shooting arrows with her own way into the horde to help, she was just shooting about three arrows at the exact same time. So she was not really making that big of a difference here on the wall anyway. The soldiers could handle the task even without her.

So she immediately used her knowledge over complicated magi and cast two different spells.

She pushed her mana out and silently constructed a perfect doppelganger right in her place. The illusion stood on the wall and mimicked her exact movements, flawlessly pretending to fire arrows down at the remaining monsters.

It was just a visual trick, so there were no real arrows being fired by the illusory clone.

At the same time, the real Aria was now completely invisible to everyone’s eyes. Because the other complicated stealth spell made her invisible. It was not just bending light to make her transparent though.

She basically trapped everyone nearby in a low level mental illusion. So even if a guard stared right at her face, his brain just ignored the visual data entirely.

She used that flawless illusory magic to hop right off the ledge without anyone even glancing at her. And she flew straight out toward the forest.

She stayed high in the air and watched as Adrian and Sigrid rushed toward the tree line below her.

She purposely fell slightly behind them, and after just one or two minutes of flying, she saw the two of them finally get close to the edge of the forest.

She hovered high up in the air and watched the human casually transform into a huge, muscular wolf like monster.

And then she watched as Sigrid desperately dodged the massive lightning strike.

She saw Adrian dodge the second lightning bolt, but he did it by completely disappearing into thin air.

She knew Adrian incredibly well. She knew that her dad never pulled crazy stunts without a solid backup plan. And she didn’t see a bloody corpse or a pile of smoking ash sitting in that crater. Which only meant that he was completely fine.

After all, based on what she knew, there was no known spatial magic in this world that used lightning to teleport someone. So the lightning definitely missed him.

’He is probably safe... but I hope nothing else happens.’ Aria thought to herself as she stared at the place where the lightning had struck.