Chapter 487: Why Hold Back

"You have an enemy who is so much stronger than you." Adrian proposed. "And he is the kind of person who would take anyone near you and close to you as a hostage. You know that you can’t exactly win against him in a straight fight, but there is a slight chance. Let’s say a ten to twenty percent chance that you can win or even escape. Right?"

Claire slowly nodded.

"Would you actually have the courage to have your loved ones fight with you, even though all it is going to do is reduce your chances of winning to zero?" Adrian asked.

Claire completely froze.

"Be practical," Adrian pushed gently. "Be practical, Claire. Think with your brain right now, not with your heart. Put your feelings aside and give me a practical answer."

Claire gritted her teeth. She hated how much sense he was making. She was a general and she knew tactics. She knew that bringing vulnerabilities to a battlefield against a superior foe was a death sentence.

"Just get out of here," Claire finally said. Her voice was raspy. "Go fight him and come back."

She looked up and glared at him with her red eyes.

"And if I see that you are seriously injured when you get back," Claire threatened. "Then I will..."

She paused. She tried to find the most threatening thing she could say to him without it actually threatening him.

"I will..." Claire repeated, her face turning slightly pink. "I’ll bite you."

This completely caught Adrian off guard. He just blinked and then he actually laughed. A real, genuine laugh that echoed in the quiet grasslands of the dungeon.

"Okay, sure," Adrian smiled. "I will be back."

Serena nodded from the side. She reached over and held Claire’s hand.

"We will be waiting for you," Serena said softly.

Adrian then turned to look at Aria. The little girl was still watching him with those huge, complicated eyes.

"I will be sending a tribe here," Adrian told her, shifting back into his work mindset. "There is a forest that I set up a few kilometers away from here using the dungeon biomes. I will teleport you there. I want you to use your illusion magic to just make things even more realistic so that they don’t wander out of the boundary."

Aria tilted her head.

"That’s all," Adrian said. "I just want to see how they do their rituals. I want to find out the exact details of how everything works with the rain water and how they use it to make knigts, and I can’t do that safely when I am outside. This place is the perfect environment for that."

Aria nodded immediately. She always liked being given important tasks.

"Okay, Papa," Aria said.

She then looked hard at him. Her face shifted into a very guilty, pouty expression.

"Papa," Aria mumbled. "You’re not angry at me, right? I’m sorry I pushed you earlier."

Adrian exhaled a long breath. The fatherly warmth faded just a tiny bit as he looked at her.

"I trusted you," Adrian said quietly. "And you used it against me as a weapon just to try and get what you wanted."

Aria flinched. She looked down at her shoes.

Adrian just sighed and reached out, patting her on the head.

"It’s fine," Adrian said. "I know how you think. You lived a very long time surviving by manipulating people. Some habits die hard, I understand that."

He lifted her chin so she had to look him in the eyes.

"But don’t do that again," Adrian said firmly. "Never again."

Aria nodded with teary eyes.

Adrian looked at her and then glanced up at the other two girls.

"Right," Adrian said. "I completely forgot about something."

He looked back down at Aria.

"If you promise me that you won’t run off or do something mischievous," Adrian told her. "Then I will take you outside with me. Because I actually do need your help right now."

Aria’s eyes instantly lit up.

"Papa, I promise I won’t run or do anything," Aria said quickly. "I will do exactly as you say."

Adrian nodded.

"Okay then," he said. "The reason I need your help is because I can’t exactly send the people of the tribe into the dungeon without physical contact. I need them to not know where they are. I don’t want them to know that they switched locations in the middle of the night. I want them to wake up and think they are still in their exact same home."

He rubbed the back of his neck.

"And I don’t have any stealth skills or spells," Adrian admitted. "I am not an assassin and I don’t have spells like you do. For example, that thing you did to escape my reach just today morning when I said sorry."

Aria nodded in understanding.

"Yes Papa," Aria said. "That is... well I used the teleportation spell. Actually, a beginner version of the teleportation spell called Blink. Once you learn how to do it properly, you can make yourself instantaneously appear in a spot around two to three meters away from you. Real teleportation is a much higher-level spell."

"Okay," Adrian said. "Do you have any actual stealth skills?"

"I have multiple of them," Aria said proudly. "I can go invisible, I can make anyone else go invisible too. And I can make people look like someone else entirely along with a lot of other things."

Adrian just chuckled.

"You really are way too broken," Adrian said. "If I had those spells in my hands, I would have toppled empires by now."

Aria pouted at his words.

"Papa," Aria mumbled. "If I had your powers, I wouldn’t be holding back at all. The whole continent would probably already be in my hands by now."

Adrian chuckled again when he heard her answer. He looked up at Claire and Serena and noticed both of them had a highly quizzical expression on their faces. They were clearly confused by what Aria meant.