The Villainess Is My Cute Daughter

Adrian just sighed heavily and nodded. He thought over the frustrating limitation for a while before he leaned forward again.

”Okay. Let me just open up the catalog again and see which lower-tier things actually work for your star rating and which doesn’t. Let’s just do some experiments together tonight since we’ll have to travel tomorrow morning.”

He tapped the desk.

”I mean, I don’t think there is enough time to max you out completely tonight, but I guess we’ll just keep experimenting with the meat on the way up north too. Let’s see how it goes. Hopefully...”

Adrian paused and smirked.

Wang Lei immediately saw the look and he smirked right back, catching the exact vibe.

Instead of Adrian finishing the sentence, Wang Lei just confidently continued it for him.

”Hopefully, we can give those royal bastards a real scare.”

”Hehehe, yes.”

The very next day, as the sun barely rose, Adrian walked out of his grand mansion and went straight to the training grounds where thousands of soldiers were already standing in formation.

Every single person standing there seemed to be ready to march, with their travel bags, their armor, and their essential combat belongings tightly strapped to their backs.

He honestly didn’t expect all of them to be ready so early. Mostly because he had literally forgotten to actually plan the whole logistics with his officers last night. He had never actually told anyone on exactly how many people to prepare for the march.

But surprisingly enough, his people were incredibly competent and were already fully ready.

He looked over at Burke.

The bald captain walked over and quickly saluted.

”My lord. General Claire and I originally planned to just get exactly half of the army ready like she ordered. But at the very end of the night, we changed our minds and decided to wake everyone up and get the entire army ready.”

Burke gestured to the massive sea of ten thousand soldiers.

”This way, you can easily choose whoever you want to take, or you can make immediate plans whenever you are ready to make them.”

Adrian actually felt a little genuinely embarrassed internally because, due to his own managerial laziness last night, his loyal soldiers had to put in some extra work waking up early and packing things up. But he obviously didn’t show it on his face.

He just nodded and looked out at the massive, disciplined army.

”Well. Get me around six thousand soldiers for the march.”

He paused, doing the quick math in his head. He looked at the massive army again.

”Okay. Wait... no. Never mind. Get me exactly eight thousand soldiers instead. Yeah, give me eight thousand. Six thousand men and all the two thousand women.”

He pointed at the formations.

”And I want them to be evenly spread out. It definitely doesn’t have to be just the strongest frontline ones or just the weakest ones. I want a balanced mix of veterans and new blood.”

He looked back at Burke.

”And the remaining two thousand? Their job is to just stay back here and defend the territory. Of course, daily training is also still a mandatory part of that job while I’m gone. Though, do keep in mind that it would be better to increase the surveillance of the border areas around our territory right now.”

His eyes went cold.

”Because I absolutely do not trust the Ironhold Kingdom to play fair after I release their royals.”

Burke nodded sharply.

”Yes, my lord. I’ll make sure that everything is strictly seen to and the borders are locked down tight.”

Adrian nodded.

”Okay then. You and Claire can do the final selections and get the army ready. I’ll go prepare for my own stuff.”

Adrian then just looked around the training grounds. He scanned the massive army, and he quickly spotted the five elite kids standing near the front, and the large shadow group standing quietly right beside them and the group of other kids.

These guys were also the elite rifle squad, and they were incredibly good at it.

And in fact, putting the shadow assassins aside, the five kids were pretty damn strong by themselves now. In fact they were much stronger than the other knights. Much, much stronger.

Some of the shadow squad members were pretty good at using the customized sniper rifles, and some went with enchanted swords and shields for close-quarters assassination along with carrying rifles.

But Adrian didn’t really care about the standard shadow squad members right now. He just looked directly at the five elite slave kids and confidently walked over to them.

He took in everyone’s new, upgraded equipment.

He could instantly tell that they had recently gotten a massive, boost to their combat equipment, mostly thanks to Caelum working overtime to make them things thanks to Adrian telling him to do anything productive. This was mostly because Adrian had his dungeon to take care of his own things and didn’t really have anything for Caelum to do.

On top of that, Adrian was a bit too lazy to make the kids their equipment and had ended up delaying it for more than a year.

Just like Adrian had originally envisioned for the boy’s Hellfire Berserker blessing, Vance was right now holding a massive Glaive that looked pretty plain but Adrian could see more than that.

The blade was enchanted with FrostFire runes.

Since Vance’s unique blessing massively helped him with boosting all of his physical stats when he used fire, it helped him seamlessly boost his attributes when he was actively using weapons or wearing armor that was specifically imbued with any type of flame runes.

And there was one massive, game-breaking thing about Vance’s curse and blessing combo that Adrian had not expected when he had learned about his blessing.

And that was the fact that the whole elemental buff system stacked.

Every single piece of runic armor and every single runic weapon he equipped stacked the physical buffs up on each other. It was an additive bonus system, so it obviously couldn’t scale too high into the god tiers like multiplicative buffs, but it was much, much better than what Adrian had originally expected.