The Villainess Is My Cute Daughter

Aria, Claire, Serena, and his five elite teenagers were all geared up. Adrian had only agreed to let the five kids come with him because he knew the sheer potential of Octavia’s ’Moon Princess’ blessing. At night, she was practically a goddess of death.

He gave them a quick nod, and they nodded back.

Then he turned around and started walking toward the enemy territory.

No one questioned him, except for Aria.

She jogged up next to him and tugged at his pants. Even though she was growing pretty fast and her head already reached his waist, she still kept that childish habit.

Adrian looked down at her.

”Papa, what spells do you plan on testing?” Aria asked softly.

”Well, they’re actually pretty simple spells,” Adrian whispered as they moved through the dark brush. ”I’m just trying to see which ones I can properly implement into my main kit. My fighting style is pretty different from standard mages. So I need something that I can use spontaneously. Something that requires basically zero cast time.”

Aria nodded thoughtfully.

”Yes, you do need something quick,” she agreed. ”But the quick spells are usually the ones that are very weak.”

Adrian chuckled.

”Yeah, that’s true. And that is exactly the reason why I plan on modifying them. It’s not like I’m going to be fighting in long-range battles anyway. My fighting style is strictly close to medium range, so it should be fine.”

The group walked silently towards the wall for a few minutes until they finally reached a decent distance.

Adrian crouched down and looked up at the towering stone walls of the fortress. There were a lot more Avarice soldiers patrolling the battlements right now compared to during the day, but they didn’t look overly alert. They were mostly just leaning against the stone, trying to stay warm.

Adrian took a deep, steadying breath and raised his right hand.

’Let’s see,’ he thought to himself. ’What do I use?’

He smiled.

’Right. Let’s use this one. It took me a lot of time to make up my mind to learn this, but I guess fire is pretty useful after all. Wait... maybe not now. I’ll try the other spells first before using the fire one.’

He took a deep breath. A thin, practically invisible strand of concentrated mana slipped out from the palm of his hand and floated into the air.

As he manipulated the thread, he thought back to his training over the past few days. One of the main reasons he had even bothered going into Wang Lei’s carriage back on the road wasn’t just to chat with the guy and give him monster meat to eat. That was just the part of the plan and he had used the privacy of the carriage to secretly access his dungeon. He wasn’t exactly sitting there talking to Wang Lei the whole time. For a large chunk of the trip, Adrian had been standing in an isolated dungeon room, just testing out multiple spell combinations where no one could ask him stupid questions.

That was the real reason it took him so long to get back to the main carriage. But all that secret, uninterrupted training had given him some genuinely crazy results.

Adrian looked at the mana strand. He immediately channeled a third circle spell straight into it.

Thunderburst.

Normally, when a mage used Thunderburst, it sent out a thick, chaotic blast of lightning at a target. It was much stronger and far more potent than a standard first circle Spark spell. Spark basically just shocked a person slightly and it barely dealt any damage. Thunderburst had a much higher mana consumption, but the sheer amount of damage it dealt and the range it covered made up for it.

Right now, Adrian was literally just using the spell to coat his telekinetic mana strand.

It was highly modified of course. Thanks to the system running thousands of simulations and his own grinding in the dungeon, he could cast it with a pretty decently high efficiency. The mana consumption had dropped down to roughly double the cost of a basic Spark. When compared to an original Thunderburst cast by a normal mage, his consumption was sitting at almost one third of the normal cost.

Adrian looked up at the high stone walls. He could clearly see the Avarice soldiers just walking around their patrol routes.

He extended his mana strand straight toward them through the air.

He pushed the strand to its absolute maximum range, but he quickly realized he wasn’t really close enough. There was still a gap of about twenty meters between the very tip of his invisible mana strand and the nearest soldier leaning against the battlements.

But that wasn’t exactly an issue since this wasn’t just a normal grabbing tool anymore.

The high voltage electricity simply flowed all the way to the end of the strand and shot out. Since Thunderburst was naturally a long range spell, combining it with the physical extension of the mana strand effectively doubled its reach.

A sudden, violent crackle echoed in the night.

The nearest Avarice soldier shook violently as the blue lightning directly hit his chest armor. He completely folded in half and just immediately dropped to the stone floor.

The soldiers walking nearby jumped. They heard the sudden sound of the violent zapping. It sounded almost like a massive swarm of angry bees just buzzing for a split second before completely vanishing into thin air.

And that was exactly what happened. The lightning hit the soldier, fried his nervous system, and was just gone. There was no smoke and no trace of an attacker. Just a dead guy on the floor.

Adrian immediately withdrew the lightning attribute from his mana thread.

He let the Thunderburst disperse into the air and then prepped another spell.

Back in the Royal Library, he had copied three different burst spells that came in a matched package. They were all similar to each other but utilized different elemental attributes.