Ada's beautiful almond-shaped eyes swept over the three people present, each with a different expression, and that lazy smile faded from her lips.
She gently placed the coffee cup, which had already grown slightly cold, back onto the low table. Her movements were elegant, without making a single sound.
"Before we discuss Rockfort Island,"
"There is a more important matter that you need to be clear about."
Ada paused, her gaze finally landing on Leon and Claire.
"It's about that little girl."
The electronic flames in the fireplace flickered silently, casting swaying shadows and light onto everyone's faces, shifting between brightness and obscurity.
"Sherry?"
Claire followed up almost immediately, her azure eyes instantly filled with concern.
"What happened to her?"
Leon's face, which had still carried a hint of a silly grin, also turned serious in an instant.
He seemed to recall something extremely important yet unsettling; his brow furrowed tightly as he let out a soft sigh.
"Do you remember the message I sent you shortly after you arrived in Paris?"
His voice was somewhat low, carrying a hint of belated worry.
Noah nodded; of course he remembered.
The contents of those two text messages were still clearly etched in his mind.
"You mean Sherry being injured at school and her body healing quickly, as well as her IQ being far beyond her peers?"
Leon and Ada nodded almost simultaneously with perfect rapport.
Ada turned her gaze to Leon and made a "please" gesture.
Leon tilted his head, seemingly organizing those chaotic and baffling thoughts.
His gentle blue eyes were now filled with caution and retrospection.
"Sherry's abnormal performance once caught the attention of some people."
His voice was very low, as if those invisible eyes were still lurking in the shadows.
"They weren't from the public sectors of the government; they acted covertly, more like... shadows."
"Once, when I went to pick up Sherry after work, I found her blocked by two men in trench coats. They claimed to be from a child psychology research institute and wanted to take Sherry for a 'talent test'."
Leon's fist tightened unconsciously.
"I felt something was wrong right then and pulled out my badge. Those two left resentfully."
"Since then, I've always felt like someone was secretly monitoring our house, monitoring Sherry."
"They wanted to take Sherry away and use her to threaten me, to make me work for them."
"I had even prepared for the worst and was ready to relocate with Sherry."
Leon's voice carried a deep sense of helplessness.
That feeling of being choked by an invisible hand yet unable to find the opponent was so oppressive it almost made him unable to breathe.
"But..."
His tone shifted, his face showing the same incomprehensible confusion as back then.
"The night before I was prepared to act, that feeling of being watched suddenly... completely vanished."
"Those people were like they'd evaporated from the earth; they never appeared again, as if they had never existed."
Leon finished and looked up, his gaze burning as he looked at Ada.
His eyes were filled with the clarity of a sudden realization.
"Looking back now, combining all the information..."
"It must have been Mr. Trant who intervened."
Noah and Claire exchanged a glance and nodded.
Because besides him, among all the people they had contact with, only the mysterious Trant possessed such heaven-defying, terrifying power to silently erase all traces of a secret organization.
Leon looked at Ada, signaling her to continue.
Ada's red lips parted slightly, her voice cold, as if stating an objective fact that had nothing to do with her.
"As Leon speculated, it was indeed Mr. Trant who mediated the situation."
Ignoring the shocked expressions on Leon and Claire's faces, she continued in that emotionless, clinical tone.
"The ones with designs on Sherry aren't just Mr. C, but also a secret department within the U.S. government."
Claire's heart tightened, and she subconsciously leaned closer to Noah.
Leon's face also instantly turned ashen. He had always thought he was facing just some greedy underground organization, but he hadn't expected the opponent to be the behemoth he had sworn allegiance to.
Only Noah's face showed no extra expression.
He just quietly took Claire's cold hand into his palm.
Ada's gaze swept across their three faces one by one, as if assessing how well they were processing the information.
"Furthermore, there is more than one faction coveting Sherry."
Her voice relentlessly laid the cruel reality before them.
"After the Raccoon City incident, the value of the g-virus has far exceeded everyone's imagination."
"And Sherry Birkin, as the only known juvenile subject (Noah counts as an adult) who has undergone Fusion with the g-virus without any negative mutations, is herself a walking, priceless Treasure Trove."
"If Noah and Claire hadn't turned in a perfect score answer sheet in Paris that even amazed Mr. Trant..."
Ada's gaze turned toward Noah and Claire.
"I'm afraid even Mr. Trant would have become very passive due to a lack of sufficient bargaining chips."
Only now did Claire truly understand what the "chips" Trant mentioned in the Paris email actually meant.
Every adventure they had in that city of romance, every time they risked their lives, was directly related to the fate of that little girl on another continent whom they regarded as family.
"Then... how do they plan to..."
Claire's voice was somewhat dry.
Seeing Claire's nervous and worried look, a rare touch of softness flowed through Ada's usually cold eyes.
She smiled slightly, and that smile diluted the sharp, unapproachable aura around her.
"You might not know this—even Leon..."
She turned her gaze to Leon.
"Sherry has already finished self-studying all high school courses."
"She could even take the SAT and ACT directly, and there's a over ninety percent chance she would get a full scholarship sufficient to apply to any Ivy League school."
Leon was completely stunned.
He opened his mouth but couldn't say a single word.
He lived with Sherry every day, tutoring her on what seemed to him already advanced seventh and eighth-grade homework, yet he hadn't noticed at all that the little girl had already left him far behind.
"But... why..."
Leon's voice was full of incomprehensible confusion, and a little bit of the hurt from being kept in the dark.
"Why didn't she tell us..."
Noah gently patted the back of Claire's hand and took over the conversation.
"I'm afraid it's because... Sherry wants to stay by our side."
A tender silence fell over the living room.
"She's very smart," Noah continued.
"She knows that if she showed the kind of talent that could shock the world right now, she would be sent to university, sent to those so-called 'Genius training camps'."
"In that case, she would never be able to live with us like this, waiting for us to come home every night, or going to the park together on weekends."
Claire let out a long sigh.
Her eyes were a bit red, her heart filled with unspeakable bitterness and emotion.
Sherry was only twelve years old.
It should be an age of being carefree and acting spoiled in her parents' arms.
Yet she had to carry such a terrifying secret capable of changing the world's landscape, and carefully hide her own light, just to hold onto a hard-won warmth of home.
Just then.
Ada's voice, carrying a hint of banter, abruptly broke the somewhat sorrowful atmosphere.
Her enchanting eyes looked mischievously at Leon, and her red lips curled as she dropped a bombshell.
"How about this, you don't participate in this Rockfort Island operation."
"Stay home and watch the kid, how about it?"
The air seemed to freeze for half a second.
Leon looked like he had been hit by a pause button, staring blankly in a daze.
He hadn't expected Ada to suddenly say something so grounded in daily life, something that even... sounded like the intimate teasing a wife would say to her husband.
His face instantly turned red from his neck to the tips of his ears.
He was tongue-tied and at a loss, like a big boy who had done something wrong.
"I... that... no..."
After the words left her mouth, Ada also seemed to feel that this way of expressing herself was perhaps not quite appropriate.
But when she saw Leon's silly, embarrassed, and shy look from just one sentence, a very happy smile couldn't help but ripple through her cold eyes.
She simply rolled with it, arching those two beautiful, heroic eyebrows.
"Mr. Trant has a more suitable arrangement for Sherry."
Her voice returned to its calm and professional tone, but it unconsciously carried a hint of reassurance.
"He will forge a brand new, clean identity for Sherry and arrange for her to enter a private boarding school that he wholly owns."
"The security level there is comparable to a military base."
"There, Sherry won't have to hide her talent anymore; she can grow up safely and freely."
"You can rest easy."