Chapter 69 Ready.

Chapter 69: 69 Ready.

Her statement caught me off guard but it wasn’t exactly out of the blue. Glacia was supposed to be her own Villainess by now if not for the museum disaster.

But it bode the question of why she was still here living with me.

I’d tolerated it until now. After all, only a few days ago, she’d technically still been my protégé in the fine art of villainy. But now that she was living under my roof and sharing my bed, being called ’sir’ felt unnecessarily formal.

"Well, you’re not really my protégé anymore—"

"I’m not?" Glacia straightened so abruptly she practically snapped to attention, already moving toward me. "But, sir! I—"

"I’m not throwing you out," I said quickly, waving my arms to stop her panic. "We’re just not... you know. In that kind of relationship anymore. We can be a little more casual."

"I... suppose I understand," Glacia said, some of the tension leaving her posture.

"Good," I said, walking over and standing up the dummy. "We’re closer now than we used to be, so I think it’s only natural that we adjust to that."

"Glacia. What... do you actually want to do?"

"Serve you, sir," she replied without hesitation.

I really should have seen that coming. I shook my head. "No, I mean, what do you want to do now that you have a place here? What’s your career ambition? Your objective? What is it you’re actually after?"

She stared at me in confusion. "Why, precisely what I told my father, sir. I intend to study the art of villainy under your guidance. I want to become an exceptional villain in every regard, and surely there is no one better suited to teach me than you. I shall remain at your side, taking in everything you have to offer, and then put those lessons to use by properly and thoroughly tormenting the heroes of this world. For an appropriate fee, naturally."

One eyebrow rose. Well, apparently she really had been paying attention to me, and not merely learning how to avoid getting beaned by empty cans.

"I understand," I said, mulling it over. "Well, I’m sure we can arrange something. I have a meeting with Lacey coming up. I can mention it to her and see whether she knows of any heroes who could use a villainess."

"You believe I’m ready, sir?" Glacia asked, her expression brightening with hope.

"Well, that depends." I turned back to her and began bouncing on my toes.

"On what, sir?"

"How good you fair against me now." I popped my night and raised my fists.

Glacia didn’t hesitate.

The stiff, Victorian-governess posture vanished, replaced instantly by a combat stance that was textbook Order-Trained.

The ambient temperature in the gym plummeted twenty degrees in a heartbeat, our breaths suddenly pluming white in the chill air.

"Are we treating this as a standard hero encounter, sir, or just a sparring match?" she asked, her voice steady as a layer of thick frost began to creep up her forearms.

"Treat it like a hero who’s going off script, where you still have to do the job but you don’t know what could happen," I said, rolling my shoulders. "Go."

She swept her arm in a wide, theatrical arc. A barrage of jagged ice spears materialized from thin air, hanging for a microsecond before shooting toward me like railgun slugs.

I didn’t bother dodging. With a subtle flex of my will, I reached out to the rack of free weights across the room.

A pair of forty-five-pound cast-iron plates tore themselves free, flying into my path to form a makeshift, floating shield.

The ice shattered against the metal with a deafening CRACK, spraying harmlessly across the rubber mats.

"Too direct," I called out, pushing the iron plates forward to force her back. "Heroes expect the head-on assault. You need to give them a spectacle to look good for the cameras, but you also need to protect your own blind spots."

"Noted, sir!" she chirped back.

Instead of retreating, she slammed both palms onto the floor.

A shockwave of solid ice blasted out in a radial pattern, instantly turning the gym floor into a frictionless skating rink. My boots lost traction, and for a split second, I was practically flailing.

She didn’t waste the opening. Glacia lunged, sliding effortlessly across the ice like she was born on it, forming a crystalline broadsword in her right hand.

She swung in a vicious, horizontal arc aimed right at my ribs.

God, I thought. I feel she’s actually trying to kill me right now.

But I was a veteran for a reason. I didn’t need friction when I had electromagnetism.

I clamped my aura onto the steel rebar buried deep in the gym’s concrete foundation, anchoring the metal eyelets of my sweatpants firmly to the ground.

Stopping my slip instantly, I leaned back, letting the blade of ice whistle a millimeter past my chest.

Before she could recover her momentum, I flicked my wrist. A stray twenty-pound dumbbell launched from the floor, catching her square in the stomach.

It wasn’t a lethal blow—I pulled the velocity at the last microsecond—but it was heavy enough to lift her off her feet.

She gasped, tumbling backward across her own ice slick and crashing hard into the padded wall.

I didn’t let up. If she was going into the field, she needed to know to improvise and fast.

I reached out, magnetically gripping the heavy iron chains we used for resistance training, and whipped them through the air like a pair of steel vipers.

Glacia scrambled to her knees, coughing, but her eyes were sharp. She thrust her hands upward.

A thick, domed barricade of ice erupted from the floor just as the chains slammed into it. The metal chewed into the frozen barrier, sending chunks of ice flying, but the shield held.

"Once you show you’re cornered they’ll come all out!" I shouted over the noise, manipulating the chains to coil around her barricade and crush it like a boa constrictor. "If you let the hero control the tempo, you end up in a real holding cell, not a fake one! They’ll walk all over you to make their PR team happy!"

"I am not—" she grunted, the ice dome groaning under the pressure, "—yielding the tempo, sir!"

Suddenly, the temperature dropped again, so violently my teeth ached. The ice dome didn’t break—she exploded it outward intentionally.

The sheer force of the blast sent the steel chains flying back at me, coated in heavy, jagged frost.

I raised my hands to catch them in a magnetic field, but the moment the frost-covered metal entered my grip, the ice fractured into a fine, blinding mist.

A smokescreen.

Smart girl.

I swept my senses outward, feeling for the iron in the room, but the dense, freezing fog messed with my concentration.

A split second later, a localized blizzard kicked up around my legs, snapping feet to the floor in thick blocks of solid, unyielding ice.

Before I could pulse my magnetism to shatter it, the mist parted.

Glacia was there, hovering just inches away, her breath ragged.

She had an icicle the size of a dagger pressed gently against my jugular, while her other hand was aimed squarely at my chest, crackling with enough absolute zero energy to flash-freeze my lungs.

Her hair was disheveled, and she was nursing her ribs where the dumbbell had hit her, but her eyes were triumphant.

"Checkmate, sir," she panted, a proud little smirk tugging at her lips.

I looked down at the ice blade at my throat, then down at my frozen feet.

I glanced behind her and smirked. Throughout this fight I still had a nail floating inches from her skull.

I could have given her a free lobotomy, or maybe just an aneurysm, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. She had outmaneuvered me using her brain, not just her brawn.

I let the ambient magnetic hum in the room die down.

"Not bad," I said, offering a genuine smile. I tapped the tip of her ice dagger with my finger. "You’re getting better at thinking on your feet, and you’re still relying too much on raw power for your shields, but the smokescreen was a solid piece of theatrical villainy. Very cinematic. The heroes love that dramatic mist stuff."

Glacia’s face lit up, the icy weapons dissolving into water that splashed harmlessly onto the rubber mats.

The intense, deadly combatant vanished immediately, replaced by the eager, slightly overbearing protégé.

"Truly, sir?" She stood at attention again, completely ignoring the fact that my legs were still encased in her ice. "You believe my performance is ready for the world?"

"I think," I grunted, pulsing a magnetic wave through my feet to finally crack the ice trapping my feet, "that you’ll make a very convincing, highly billable threat. You’re ready."