The Count shook his head and said, "Things are not so simple as that. You may not have noticed, but there have been at least three people with hostile intentions lurking around us since yesterday."
Rewind was sullen. He said, "I didn't see anything."
Count nodded, "My point exactly. I could sense the danger, but you couldn't. Those are just the ones that I could sense. I am not sure those are all of them."
"Then there is the fact that Thorin might be lurking around hoping to ambush me. The bounty might just be a distraction. It would be folly to believe him when he said he wouldn't try to attack me."
Rewind asked, "What are you saying, geezer?"
"I'm saying that this place is no longer safe for you. I can't protect you like this. We might have to give up on this trip."
The boy pleaded with a pitiful voice, "Please, no."
The Count shook his head. "We have to. We will leave first thing tomorrow morning. I still have some things to settle tonight. That's the only reason why we are not leaving immediately."
Rewind sensed that he had made up his mind, so he asked, "Can we at least kill one villain before we go? Let us stream the fight too. And let me do most of the fighting."
Count relented. "Fine. We will select a weak villain for you to fight. The fight will take a maximum of ten minutes. I can spare that much time. But I will interfere if things become too dangerous. And when I tell you to run, you will run back to HQ. Do you understand?"
Rewind smiled in happiness and nodded. "Yes, I understand."
Count insisted, "Promise me."
Rewind frowned and protested, "But I can just go back to one of my previous anchors. Why do I need to go back home just because of some danger?"
Count frowned too and said, "You go back home because I said you should run. Now, promise me."
The boy huffed and folded his arms across his chest in anger. But he said, "I promise."
Count sighed and tried to explain, "If I say you should run, it means there is great danger that I might not be able to protect you from. You should listen to me when I say that. It is for your safety. Don't be stubborn, alright?"
The boy exhaled and said, "I promise not to be stubborn."
The Count smiled and ruffled his head. It made him giggle and shake the old man's hand away.
He understands that the Count was looking out for him by asking him to return home, but he was hesitant to do it because that would remove all of his anchors.
He can have a maximum of 12 anchors, but he can't use all of them at random. He can only use them in the order he created them, from newest to oldest.
That is why his name is Rewind. He really does rewind his current position through time. He is not randomly teleporting to places he has been.
If he skips an anchor in this line, it will be removed. His current oldest anchor is the one at the headquarters of his hero society. It is very far away from here.
If he rewinds his position to that anchor, all of the anchors he created between there and here will be removed, and he will have to start creating anchors again.
It feels like an overreaction from the Count to ask him to do that. But he understands that it is for his safety, and he respects the Count's judgment, so he promises.
He had his doubts, though. He knows that if the headquarters hadn't trusted the old man, they wouldn't have assigned him to protect him. But he would like to know what has spooked the old man for him to insist on the promise.
He was thinking about this when they reached their accommodations. They came out of the car in front of the skyscraper, entered it, and went up the elevator to their floor.
The two of them entered their apartment soon after. Rewind had his bath and went to sleep. But the Count stayed awake.
The old man didn't sleep throughout the night. He knew what he had sensed for the past two days, so he was expecting an attack as soon as they were alone.
This is the thing he was hoping to settle tonight. He had set a trap for whoever would attack him. He was hoping it would be Thorin, but the attack didn't come.
There was no disturbance, and no one knocked at their door. Rewind slept peacefully throughout the night and woke up refreshed in the morning.
When morning came, the Count shook his head and said, "Maybe I was being paranoid. I will have to apologize to everyone I had placed on standby."
He had been ready for an attack since yesterday, so he had asked some heroes to stick around in order to reinforce him. They had done so the day before yesterday and yesterday.
This is the trap he had set for whoever would attack him. He was sitting on an alarm device that would ring as soon as he stood up. Any attacker would be surrounded as long as they attacked his room.
But the attack never happened. That made two days of waiting go to waste. Now he has to disable the alarm lest he cause a false alarm.
He doesn't mind the waste as it makes no difference to him. But the heroes he had placed on standby were not as strong as him. It was stressful for them to wait like that.
Besides, they represent manpower that could have been used to save people. So the two days of standby had probably cost some people's lives.
He didn't let that get him down, though. He was in a good mood since the attack didn't happen. Rewind was also in a good mood because of the fight he was about to have.