The Villainess Is My Cute Daughter

Serena looked down at her lap and smiled warmly.

”He once told me that he is the type of person who would destroy the entire world for the people he loves. And he asked me if I thought he was an evil person for thinking that way. He asked me if I thought that he was fundamentally wrong.”

Aria looked up at Serena in complete shock.

Because Aria had never expected her goofy father to actually have such a deeply dark, protective side to him.

In front of her, he had mostly always been a really jolly person. Just constantly smiling, cooking food she never tasted, and spoiling her. She knew he had his own serious, ruthless side when dealing with enemies, but she had never expected him to have such a world view.

And she just couldn’t help but immediately think back to her past life.

She just couldn’t help but imagine a horrific situation where the past just repeated itself. She imagined a scenario where maybe the citizens of Oresfall would unexpectedly rebel, and they would drive her entire family out of the territory.

They would probably drive her out along with Adrian. And she would have no one but him.

She had imagined a similar, tragic situation before. She was honestly no different from her father when it came to the art of overthinking. She had thought about multiple worst case situations in the past two years.

And right now? Hearing Serena’s words? Something had just changed in her heart.

She had originally believed, or logically thought, that if the two of them got kicked out of Oresfall and lost all their wealth, then he might naturally end up blaming her for everything going wrong.

But this specific answer from Serena changed a lot of things.

Nothing would actually change from her past life if that horrific scenario happened... other than the fact that she would have the one person she cared about the most standing right by her side, ready to burn the world down for her.

And that realization gave her a deep sense of peace, and a weird sense of security.

She just felt a deep warmth spread through her chest that she had never felt in her entire life. Not even in this new life. There was always a lingering fear of eventually losing everything. Of losing him. Of having the whole warm thing just go back to him hating her, to him ruthlessly rejecting her like he had in her past life.

But now? That wasn’t the case anymore. It would never be the case.

She just looked at Serena and nodded slowly.

”And what did you say to him when he asked that?”

Serena took a deep, steady breath and looked back up.

”Well. I told him that if I had the power to do it... then I would gladly go against the world too. But I don’t.”

And those exact words made Aria immediately think back to her past life again. To a very specific memory of her past life, in fact.

Aria was around her late teens. She was around nineteen years old when she and an older Serena were just quietly sitting by a small campfire deep in a snowy forest.

Just the two of them and no one else. They were being hunted by the Empire, so they just couldn’t trust anyone else.

And Serena was just casually pointing at the fire. She was making the fire dance, making the hot fire seamlessly transform into hot winds, just in a weird, fluid way that Aria just couldn’t understand back then.

The flames easily went from deep red to bright blue. They went from being normal hot flames to extremely, devastatingly hot flames that instantly singed Aria’s hair, even though she was sitting almost two whole meters away.

And then they would immediately turn a soft orange. And even though back then Aria had expected those orange flames to be hot... they were, in fact, freezing cold.

That was the true power of elemental magic.

The flames would just seamlessly turn into floating water. They would turn into powdery snow, which would turn into ice. And that ice would turn into solid stones. And those stones would turn into growing plants, into seeds, and even into sweet fruits.

It was a kind of magic that Aria could only dream of understanding back then.

But everything had to come to an end.

Serena was incredibly strong back then. A really powerful, legendary mage. Aria didn’t really know exactly what magic circle she was at the time. She would only find out the true extent of her power later, long after her master died.

But even though Serena was insanely strong compared to normal imperial standards, she wasn’t strong enough to protect Aria against an entire army. An Aria whom she had basically ended up treating as her own beloved daughter by that time.

The Empire’s elite soldiers, their top-ranking knights, and their high-circle mages had ambushed them right there at that peaceful campsite.

And to make sure that Aria escaped safe and sound, Serena had created a teleportation portal. A sort of glowing spatial portal that just hovered in the air similar to the one she saw her father use.

She had just pushed Aria inside, and the gate had instantly closed behind her.

The only issue with that decision was that if Serena had not used that specific spell, she wouldn’t have died that night. Because spatial gates like those were a highly primitive, highly unstable form of teleportation, and they consumed an extremely high amount of mana to keep open for even a second.

So, due to this massive mana drain, if she hadn’t used the spell to save Aria, she would have had the full power and the chance of defeating everyone there and escaping on her own.

But that also meant that there was a high risk of Aria getting severely injured or even killed in the crossfire.