When Marlen finished her side of the story, quite a saddening and pitiful one at that, she gazed towards Adam. When people heard her story, they generally all had the same set of reactions without fail. Like an ever repeating pattern.
Either they would wield an awkward expression as they did not quite know how to react to her words and her misfortune. After all, not all supernatural creatures were related to the criminal world and even those that were related to it might now have much of an influence in it. They were just an insignificant clog in the giant clock that was the lawless underworld.
Once the awkwardness went away though, the next set of emotions would be that of pity. They would tell her things along the lines of assurance— saying that everything would be okay, that all things would find a way to work perfectly in her favor with due time.
They would goad her and console her by advising her to hang on and wait out for things to get better. Everything, every single one of their worthless advice— they were useless platitudes that served absolutely no purpose outside of making her feel even worse about her situation. As it reminded her about her helplessness and lack of power to wield her own destiny.
The only saving grace in all that was the knowledge that the advice and their statements were not out of malice but truly because of how helpless they were— perhaps just as much as herself.
She had been expecting Adam to have a similar set of expressions and reactions.
But… rather than awkwardness or helplessness… All he wielded on his face was a thin smile and a gleam in his eyes— making it look like that he had chanced upon a valuable treasure.
'Huh…'
She was slowly starting to realize that things were about to set in a direction that she was not able to perceive…
"Adam?"
From the corner of her eyes, she could see that her friends were coming back with a few sets of reinforcements but she had the distinct impression, a hunch, that fighting him right now, or ever for that matter, would lead to an unfavorable scenario— a scenario that she was not willing to face.
"Very well. Your story made me even more certain that you should not approach Steven any more than you already have. At the very least, not for the foreseeable future. Until your situation stabilizes."
Adam shook his head before speaking in a cold and apathetic tone, "If deemed necessary, use your powers and wipe your existence away from his memories but remember to only use it as a sort of last resort."
"What…"
Adam stood up and started walking away from her. Now that he was sure that the danger to his friend was nothing immediate, this was one stone less on his heart.
He always had the wish to kickstart his organization of supernatural entities in a proper fashion. After all, for all intents and purposes, he was not really an integral part of the Wild Hunt.
He was merely an ally of the owner of the group.
He needed to visit the hunters from Big Eric and see if they were willing to swear allegiance to him or not. Ascertain if they had changed their minds in these days or were they going to be true to their words.
Then he would try to take over all the Mermaids inside the city of Los Angeles.
With so much Chaos running rampant in the city at large, all the forces were currently on the way of going to go through changes, big and small, and this was the best occasion for him to properly grow his own organization by taking advantage of this chaos by using as a sort of camouflage— to not bring attention to himself and his group in the initial stages.
'How do you think we should call my future organization? Genesis? Eden? Garden?'
[...Have you forgotten you promised to find a name for me?]
'Oh? So you really want a name now?'
Adam's eyebrow rose in amusement as he heard the words of the book spirit while being stopped by the group of students before him. One of the men approached him with long strides. He was rather a tall man and he was large enough to emanate quite a bit of a threatening aura among the usual supernatural entities.
"Is it you who bothered our little Marlen?"
Adam looked at him quietly before speaking in an apathetic tone, "Piss off."
Teasing the generally stoic and unfeeling Genesis was a rare occasion worthy of using all of his three minds simultaneously and he did not want to be distracted by an insignificant trash.
"You …"
The man who had been insulted by Adam seemed to have a very short fuse on his head and threw a fist directly at Adam with no hesitation whatsoever.
'Sigh. So slow.'
Was it perhaps because he had only been fighting people who were stronger than him lately?
Compared to people like Xezbeth or his monstrous mother, the fist coming at him was so slow in his perception that Adam came with ten different ways he could avoid it without any problems and far more ways he could retaliate in less than the span of a single second.
In the end though… He did nothing.
The raging fist simply stopped one inch away from his face, unable to advance forwards.
"I will let this go as you fought for your friend. But if you try to do something similar to this again, I will retaliate and trust me when I say this… It won't be pretty."
He smiled a thin smile, a smile that didn't reach his eyes, and as he continued his advance, the others hesitated slightly but in the end, they simply watched as he went his own way.
They knew full well that fighting him was not the solution.
When Adam finally vanished from their sight, they all let out a sigh of relief and approached their friend that seemed to have been frozen in time.
"Dude, you alright?"
The young man finally breathed in deeply before shaking his head,
"Let's not provoke this guy ever again."
This was a lesson he would constantly strive to remember throughout his life.
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