They were properly trained, their aim was close to perfection, and their discipline was top-tier.
And Adrian knew that if he just used these guys, Roderick and the Emperor would be bleeding on their knees before they could even finish casting a high-tier spell.
Of course, when it came to actual long-range, city-destroying Area of Effect spells, the Royal 6th Circle mages would easily win a conventional war.
And that is exactly the reason why Adrian didn’t want to fight the Emperor face-to-face right now. He absolutely did not want his loyal army to fight against the massive Royal Army on an open field. This was because Roderick, along with the other 6th Circle mage and the monstrous 7th Circle mage, could easily flatten Adrian’s entire infantry line with a single combined large scale spell.
But Adrian had another choice.
And that choice wasn’t to face the Emperor by sending him a rebellious letter that said he wasn’t going to do the thing that the Emperor commanded.
In fact, he was going to fully comply. He was going to publicly do exactly as the Emperor said.
But he wasn’t just going to quietly do it and take the disrespect. He had other hidden plans in motion. And he knew that as long as certain specific conditions were met during this war, the Emperor would have no fucking choice but to take a massive step back and bow to Oresfall’s power.
Adrian wasn’t really going to play fair anymore.
Not when the other side wasn’t really playing fair either.
Adrian just nodded to himself, finally making up his mind, and he stood up and walked straight to his attached bathroom.
He used his Dungeon Link to instantly flood his large bathtub with steaming hot water directly instead of waiting for it to fill up slowly. He stripped off his training pants and then slowly soaked down into the tub.
The intense heat immediately seeped into his bones. His aching muscles relaxed, and Adrian let out a long sigh of relief.
He leaned his head back against the rim and closed his eyes.
"Aria has barely come out of the underground training room since we got back," he muttered to himself in the bath tub. "I wonder what she is doing down there. I might have to go and get her out myself."
He opened one eye.
"Or maybe... maybe it would be better if I just leave her here in Oresfall where it’s safe while I go to the war."
And then, just as he thought about this logical idea, he vividly remembered the exact words that she had tearfully used when he did not allow her to join him in the past.
The heartbreaking words, ’I hate you Papa!!’ just loudly echoed in his mind like a curse.
He immediately got rid of the idea of leaving her behind.
He was going to go down there and tell her that he was going to go to war, at the very least. And he just hoped that she would decide to stay back on her own accord.
But he just knew. He just knew in his gut that she was just not going to stay back here.
She would one hundred percent demand to join him on the battlefield.
Aria sat perfectly still in the dark underground training room right below the mansion.
For the past whole week, she had been incredibly busy doing her private magical training. She had gone out a few times to eat and show her face, but she had spent the vast majority of her hours entirely inside this silent, isolated place.
She slowly opened her eyes and looked down to see absolutely nothing on the stone floor.
Originally, she had a massive pile of glowing mana crystals just sitting right there in front of her. It was basically every single mana crystal that she had carefully saved up from what Adrian had given her a few months ago during the war against monsters.
And now she currently had zero.
Because she had systematically drained every single one of them until they were basically gone. There was no sign of their existence anymore.
Aria looked down at the floor and just shook her head slightly.
"If I had the choice, I would have just ranked up to a 5th Circle mage right here and now," she muttered to herself, her voice echoing weirdly in the large, empty room. But she didn’t care since she had already cast silencing spells on the walls and the door.
"But unfortunately, I still need to stabilize my 4th Circle. If it wasn’t for that bottleneck, I’m pretty sure that I could have easily reached the 5th, maybe even forcefully pushed for the 6th magic circle by now."
She leaned her head back and looked up at the ceiling, which was pretty high, and she just let out a heavy, tired sigh.
She had used some of the raw mana from the expensive mana crystals purely for stabilizing her existing circle. But just mindlessly injecting extra mana didn’t magically boost your speed or progress. It did help slightly by providing pressure against the walls of mana veins, but the main ingredient for truly stabilizing a magic circle was none other than pure time.
People had to actively use magic every day, and they had to let the ambient mana naturally settle and stabilize the circle over time. It wasn’t something that could just be safely sped up by injecting a shit ton of raw mana. If they tried, their veins would just break.
And that limitation was the exact reason why Aria had used all of the remaining mana for something else entirely.
Something that almost no one in this entire world ever could know about. Because this was a deeply hidden secret that she only managed to find out after she reached the pinnacle of magic, the 9th Circle level in her previous life.
And only then did she realize exactly how terrifyingly special she actually was.