The Villain Can't Catch A Break

As Mia made her way towards Adam, Adam closed his eyes.

He thought back to his past life. Whenever he was intimate with a girl who had an overprotective father, there was never a situation where the girl would take the side of her father since the father would always do something crazy trying to scare Adam away from their daughter.

Now, were the father's instincts correct? Yes.

But Adam didn't care whether they were right from their perspective. Anyone who would harm Adam was an enemy, and an enemy needs to be erased.

Mia and her father were at the top of his hit list. Adam was angry at himself. He wasn't strong enough to kill them both.

"Adam thank you for waiting I want to talk to you about a lot of things."

"I didn't wait for you, it's just that this tower is so tall that the lift is taking 10 years to reach me. And I also don't have anything I want to talk to you about."

Mia, not used to such direct rejection of her advances showed a hint of nervousness. Adam's blood was still on her body.

"Adam, listen I know Dad went a little too far but you need to understand that Daddy didn't mean anything by it it's just that I had told him a few things about you and how you were mean to me so he had been very angry for a while."

"Oh, so what you're telling me is that you're the one who's to blame for what I had just suffered and not your father?"

"No no, I didn't mean anything like that what I meant to say was...."

Adam refused to listen to the nonsensical word salad that was about to come out of her mouth. He had experienced women in his past life doing a lot to dodge the accountability for making mistakes. He hated it every time a girl did that.

Adam cut her off.

"Mia, answer what I ask of you. Say nothing else. Am I understood?"

Mia nodded her head in agreement. She knew Adam was extremely angry with her and her father, if she were to disobey Adam right now, he might just lose it out of frustration.

It was time to fill some sense into this brainless heroine. Adam got his interrogation voice ready, he stared into Mia's eyes.

She felt her body get lighter and lighter the longer she stared into those big deep purple eyes. The more she stared the more she got lost in them, her mind started to wander on its own.

The purple hue of his eyes made for a perfect backdrop for the starry sky she had seen when she spent a night hanging out with him during their childhood.

She had felt happy back then, it was a happy memory for her.

Her mind started to be at peace with the chaos of emotions she was feeling trying to calm Adam down.

She had already regretted bad-mouthing Adam to her father which caused her father to take such drastic actions against Adam.

A part of her still felt sad and angry about the fact that Adam had slapped her all those years ago, she chose to put those feelings aside and focus on the present.

'Adam has changed so much in the past few days since the last time I saw him... He looks so handsome now, even with his disheveled appearance and torn clothes he looks like a predator that would just chew me out in a heartbeat....'

Adam noticed the sudden change of expression on Mia's face and realised her mind had started to wander away.

Adam clapped in front of her face with the meager amount of strength he could muster from his broken body.

Bringing her out of her mental world.

'Oh my god what am I thinking about right now I need to focus on what Adam is saying.'

With a focused and driven look on her face, she moved all of her attention to Adam.

"Were you mad at me because I slapped you a few years ago?"

"Yes."

'Hmm? All of a sudden she is much more obedient and straightforward. Did she finally grow a brain?'

"What was the reason that I slapped you that day?"

"I said that Cassandra was bad for you and that she would ruin you. You didn't like me saying bad things about her so you slapped me."

Adam was a little taken aback by what he had just heard.

'This loser Adam slapped the one person who was looking out for him? I can't even blame Mia for disliking me.'

Adam chose to use this to his advantage.

It was obvious that Mia felt sour because Adam had ended up siding with Cassandra and not her.

Adam moved closer to Mia as he said, "So I slapped you, you must have felt terrible. But did it feel as bad as mana burning?"

"Just because I can keep a straight face when it happens, doesn't mean others can as well."

"Ask your father why he was kneeling in front of me once it was all over, then you will understand the difference between a slap and mana burning."

"Adam, that's why I wanted to apologize to you, I know that my father went too far."

"Your father went too far? Is your father the only one to blame for it? What did you tell him I did that he thought this was a reasonable response?"

Mia became silent and started looking towards the ground playing around with her hands, her nervousness was obvious.

"You said I did something so horrible that you can't even say it?"

"You prove my point, Mia, the only reason you were angry is not because I slapped you, it's because I chose Cassandra over you and that hurt your pride."

Adam pressed on.

"Our friendship meant nothing to you, you chose your pride over our connection. I think the only reason you're apologizing to me is because it would look bad for your pure and holy reputation if this were to be known outside that the great archmage of the empire tortured her daughter's childhood friend while she watched from a distance while the entire situation unfolded."

Mia started to get teary-eyed as Adam's harsh words went on and on breaking through the walls of her fragile young heart that had never known pain. It stung right where it hurt the most.

Mia had always wanted to patch things up with Adam since their fight but her pride wouldn't let her, she had always believed that Adam would be the one that would come back to mend their relationship with each other.

As time passed and Adam never came back to fix the issues between it only served to strengthen her pride and anger against Adam.

She missed him so much, but she hated him so much for not mending things with her.

Adam had hit it right on target, he pushed further.

"I am glad we weren't friends since that day, I would never want a two-faced backstabbing snake like you to be my friend. Do you think I didn't notice how you would get together with all of the other kids from the other noble families making fun of how I was being treated by Cassandra?"

Mia couldn't stop crying, she could barely hear what Adam was saying as the sound of her crying was much louder.

The guards in the hallway chose to not intervene because Adam looked terrifying at the moment with blood all over his body, his stare that looked like he was about to kill her with his eyes.

Adam had come out looking like that after an interrogation from the archmage himself, if he survived that after being in such a terrible state, no guard wanted to take their chances with what Adam would do if they were to intervene.

"I came into your house handcuffed. My clothes were burnt, and both my face and body were burnt from the front. None of your guards cared for it. Even now as I'm leaving and the great Duke himself was kneeling before me apologizing, YOU STILL COULDN'T BE BOTHERED TO GIVE ME A FRESH PAIR OF CLOTHES?"

"Tell me, Mia, is this your friendship? The way you behaved against me and scorned me in front of everyone over the years is your way of showing your friendship. Or was it the way you left our friendship in a heartbeat just to conserve your pride a way of showing how deep our friendship was?"

After that, Adam didn't speak anymore. He only stood and looked at Mia with disgust. A good minute passed as he just waited for Mia's reply to everything that he had said.

She was still crying it seemed that just like always Adam had overdone himself, no one seemed to have a knack for breaking the hearts of young maidens as he did.

If Adam were to get a gold coin for every time he broke a girl's heart.... he would have a lot of gold coins by now.

After her crying lowered in intensity she said, " Ad.. Adam, I'm sorry for everything I did. I.. I will make it up to you I promise."

"I don't want you to make anything up to me, I want you to stay as far away from me as possible, you have done me more harm than good with your existence."

"Adam, don't say that I'm truly sorry for what I did-"

Adam cut her off immediately, "Do you think I care about whether you're sorry or not?"

"Do you think by toy apologizing and being sorry everything that I felt just 10 minutes ago will go away?"

*ting*

Adam heard the lift finally reach his floor, this was his cue to leave.

As he entered the lift leaving the crying Mia alone, he pressed the button for the ground floor and said as the doors closed,

"If you want to make it up to me, make it up to me by keeping yourself and your sadistic maniac of a father as far away from me as possible."

The last thing he saw was Mia slumping onto the ground on her knees crying.

It felt quite liberating for him since he was finally able to speak his mind after the suppression of [WOMANIZER].

Adam wondered, however, why did womanizer allowed him to say all the things he wanted to say to Mia.

Wasn't it counterintuitive towards its goal of making maidens fall in love with Adam?

Adam couldn't follow that train of thought, his trait finally let go of the control it had on his body and Adam's entire body went limp and fell to the floor of the lift.

Adam was unable to move a single muscle on his body, did he even have any muscles left after they got burned from the inside?

He couldn't tell because he seemed to be unable to feel anything in his body.

Luckily for Adam, there were still 10 minutes before the lift reached ground level. Plenty of time for Adam to try and stand on his own two legs again.

It was quite ironic, almost like instant karma, he made a girl fall to the floor crying and then he fell to the floor on his own, feeling like he was dying.

As soon as Mia had run out of Gavin's Office, against her father's better judgment, the space beside Gavin as he sat on his desk tore open.

Two people walked out, the guild master of the Raikiri guild Anita Hopkins, and the vice guild master of Raikiri Guild, Pavel Dahmer.

Anita said to Pavel, "Thanks to Garum's information, I managed to see something truly extraordinary today."

Pavel replied,

"You're right guild master, even I doubt I would be able to handle mana burning like that kid, he seems like an individual with limitless potential if he is raised right. Or he might come and slaughter the Duke's entire family in the name of vengeance."

Gavin chimed in," You're right Pavel, we can't have someone like Adam hate us. It might bite us back in the future, the way that kid looked at me during the process..... it was as if his eyes were telling me that if he could kill me right then and there, he would have done it in a heartbeat."

"What do you mean 'we' old man? You're the one who tortured him after you let your emotions reign supreme, it's not our fault you're too much of a daughter-con."

After Pavel's rebuttal, Anita said, "He is right old man, the Raikiri Guild wants to have a budding relationship with such an outstanding talent that managed to beat more than 100k skeletal knights on his own. We don't want to join with the likes of you and face his wrath."

Gavin couldn't help but chuckle at the snide remarks of his ex-party members that he roamed the world with during his adventurer days.

Gavin was deep in thought, trying to think of a way to make amends with Adam when he heard Adam's voice from the hallway talking about why he and Mia had fought in the first place.

The entire conversation from start to finish could be heard in the Duke's, the verbal warfare that was taking place between Adam and Mia was just that loud.

The volume didn't matter much to him since everyone on this floor was from the Duke's close circle, no information that was talked about here would ever reach the outside world unless Adam decided otherwise.

'Thank god her mother is asleep, I would have gotten an earful of a lifetime by now.'

Listening in on their conversation, Gavin finally got to know the truth about why Adam and Mia had ended up fighting in the first place.

It turned out that all Adam had done was slap Mia after Mia had bad-mouthed Adam's fiance right in front of him. It was a very reasonable response to such disrespect.

'Aigooo! She had told me that Adam had ripped her clothes apart while play fighting and seen her naked.'

'Since she told me such an extreme lie just to make me want to severely punish Adam, let her deal with making it up to Adam.'

The Duke had made up his mind. All of this started because of his daughter and all of this will be solved by his daughter.

He realised that he had been coddling her too much since her childhood that it motivated her to manipulate him to get what she wanted.

It's about time I showed some tough love.

The archmage had made up his mind.

10 minutes later, Adam finally made it to the ground floor of the tower. It seemed that his body refused to stand up even after a whole 10 minutes of resting with the best-ever elevator music playing on a loop.

There was only one thing left to do.

Adam had to crawl all the way back to his hotel.