**Vroooooommmmm**

**Screeeeeccchhhhhh**

The sounds of the engine tearing up the place and the smell of burning rubber filled the air as a sleek red supercar with elegant gold and black engravings drifted onto the driveway that led to a huge modern-styled mansion. The car drove on the driveway at a gradually slowing speed until it stopped at an unremarkable area of the driveway, but the engine of the car didn't turn off, and neither did the driver of the car get out.

Instead, the area where the car was standing began to sink into the ground without a sound that indicated that whatever machinery was responsible for this phenomenon was kept in tip-top shape.

After the platform sank completely underground to reveal the underground garage of the mansion, the car once again moved to the designated parking spot, and only after parking there did the engines turn off and the driver pushes open the door of the car.

As expected, Davies was the driver of the vehicle, and he slowly came out of the car while rubbing the back of his neck. He felt sore all over from having his insides almost completely frozen and the soreness was compounded even further due to the various gymnastics that he had engaged in to stay alive.

To be fair… the gymnastics he had performed with Melinda weren't actually responsible for keeping him alive as it was actually her mana that was being passed through into his body and making cycles around every inch of his body, thus weakening his own mana and making it easier to bear the pain of his insides being barraged by not only his mana but Melinda's as well.

The gymnastics helped him keep warm though and they provided a good distraction, so he wasn't complaining anyway, but his body was now a tense bunch of knotted muscles all over. He had also had to bear with pain almost throughout the night, so he really needed some rest and relaxation right about now.

Like the good personal assistant /butler that she was, Daniella immediately showed up in the elevator that Davies was walking toward, and he got in while she pressed the button that would take them back to the upper floor. 

She obviously had some questions for him like where he was the night before, but she had seen on his face that he didn't want to be plagued with anything annoying at the moment and one of his classifications for annoyances was questions so she kept mute, deciding to ask her questions later… that is, if she remembered to ask at all, it wasn't her place to press her master for answers if he didn't want to tell her anything.

Davies appreciated the silence from Daniella as he was too stressed, both physically and mentally to deal with questions that required more than one-word answers, so he simply trudged to the bathroom that had already been prepared, flung off his clothes, and sank his body into the more than warm, but not steaming water that had been prepared for him by Daniella.

He felt his muscles loosening ever so slightly as the water ran along his skin as he sat in the more-than-average-sized pool that he used as a bathtub.

The warm bath was relaxing and refreshing, but not nearly enough to release his stress, so he had Daniella give him a deep tissue massage after that his body was finally relaxed enough to the point where he could answer people without feeling the urge to smash their heads against a wall in annoyance.

Now he was seated on a throne-like sofa filled with soft cushions of different shapes in the living room area of the mansion while waiting for some food to be prepared by his improvised chef… whatever her name was.

He wasn't waiting idly though but was asking Daniella about what had happened at the banquet after he had left with Melinda. 

Apparently, after he and Melinda had sped off into the darkness to perform some fast and flying car tricks, the security detail, that is, the Megas who were members of the Lecroy family League and were tasked with the security of the event, arrived at the scene where Davies had unleashed his mana in fury.

Due to the environment, and by that I meant, the fact that it was nighttime, they weren't able to examine it very carefully, thus they weren't able to notice anything strange, or anything for that matter.

'So either I somehow managed to shred the person who shot those darts to pieces, in which case, they should have found some traces of blood… or, that lucky bastard somehow managed to escape…' Davies thought with a little mirth.

[Or you didn't actually attack somebody at all in the first place]

[Don't forget that you attacked immediately you sensed strange movements and didn't bother to crosscheck before you sent ice swords, arrows, and spears raining down on the location you had sensed the strange movement] Miya interrupted and reminded him before he let his vivid imagination take over and create scenarios that may not exist.

'You're forgetting something,' 

'If there's movement, then there's life, and if there's life, then there's blood,' Davies replied with an almost unarguable response, but there was a reason why the response was "almost" unarguable, and Miya immediately dug into the "almost" unarguable statement.

[...What if whatever caused the movement wasn't actually alive… it could be a machine or something…] Miya countered the almost unarguable statement almost immediately after Davies had said it.

'...'

'Good point, but I think you get what I mean… if there's movement, then there has to be something that caused the movement, and there should have been traces of whatever caused the movement…'

'The fact that there aren't means that whatever I had detected, somehow managed to escape my barrage of attacks,' Davies replied and explained his point of view and his suspicions as well.

[... Or your barrage of attacks was able to completely wipe away the traces of whatever it was… you pretty much wiped away the vegetation of that environment, so I wouldn't be surprised by your attack wiping away something or something…] Miya responded, still unwilling to let up on her point of view.

'There should still have been some sort of traces…' 

'It doesn't matter anyway, we don't have any leads on it yet and if the Lecroy family's megas end up finding something then I can use it to look for who dared to make an attempt at my life… and even if they don't end up finding any leads, it wouldn't really matter much right now,'

'The only thing that I need to do right now is to find a way to deal with another disadvantageous situation like the one that happened last night,' he replied and began to make more plans to deal with whoever this new threat was.

[At the rate that new enemies and threats to your life keep popping up, one would think you've committed the worst types of crimes in your past life to deserve such a fate… ah wait, that is your past] Miya was speaking in the aftermath and then realized the irony of her statement and they both laughed slightly in response.

Anyway, after the megas weren't able to find anything, they decided to do a sweep of the area to be sure there were no threats still hiding, but they still didn't find anything strange apart from the disappearance of Davies and Melinda as well as Davies's car which somehow was no longer there and they also hadn't seen it leave the property, but they didn't focus much on that as such issues were above their pay grades as well as none of their concern, so apart from reporting the issue to Joshua Lecroy, they didn't do anything else concerning that.

Even Joshua wasn't concerned about Davies all that much apart from the question as to why he had decided to rain down swords of ice upon his property, but since it didn't seem like it had ended in a loss for Davies, since they didn't find anything that indicated that either Davies or Melinda was in a dire situation, so he decided to leave the situation for now and deal with it later.

Of course, there was also the fact that he couldn't exactly call Davies or Melinda at the moment because all the phones nearby had by some sort of weird miracle all blown up.

All in all, after deciding that there was no threat to them, Joshua actually decided to continue the banquet, and none of the guests refused such an offer as it was safer to be inside the well-protected hall, rather than being outside and being exposed to any threats coming for their life.

The rest of the banquet had gone in a very cliche direction. The person who was supposed to play the piano somehow did not make it to the banquet hall, but luckily, there was a genius pianist among the guests who managed to play the piano like he was playing a beginner-level game on FIFA.

Of course, that person was Lee Jung.

Davies scoffed at the fact that a poverty-stricken rat was able to play the piano that he had never even encountered in his life at an almost godly level of skill, just because his system has decided to give him freebies of that level.

If there was one thing that Davies hated, it was people getting things that they didn't deserve… Lee Jung was a prime example of that.

'Speaking of things, he doesn't deserve… I think that high-level mana poison antidote would be more useful in the right hands… my hands,' he smirked evilly.