In fact, he wasn’t even sure if there were enough adventurers left in town to begin with. They needed a good number of adventurers to form an extermination squad, and right now, a whole lot of them were busy being exterminated in the forest.
“Then again… I actually wouldn’t be surprised if an extermination squad showed up pretty soon,” murmured Renya at the sky.
This whole mission had seemed weird to him from the start. Why was the guild paying people to go to a forest and randomly kill monsters? Normally, an extermination mission had a very clear purpose. If goblins were having a particularly fertile year, the guild might ask people to thin out their numbers. Or maybe orcs were kidnapping too many women from a nearby village, in which case the guild might put out a mission to kill the orcs and rescue the women. Therefore, this mission made no sense. It boiled down to “Just go out and kill some stuff. We don’t really care what.”
It was possible that the guild’s manastone stock was running low, or perhaps it was meant to help out beginners by sending them to a forest that didn’t see many strong monsters. As far as he knew, though, neither of those cases applied.
If he read between the lines, this mission actually seemed like it was using adventurers — those not sharp enough to realize how weird this mission was, anyway — as lures in a large-scale baiting operation.
It was, of course, pure conjecture on his part, and even he hadn’t had the foresight to see it in advance; he was too busy looking for forest octopuses at the time. Only after the monsters showed up did the possibility occur to him. Assuming he was correct about the mission’s true purpose, investigation and extermination squads were probably already in place. Furthermore, news of this might reach the guild before Shion and Rona even got there. Bait would be meaningless, after all, if it wasn’t complemented with a line and hook. That was how fishing worked.
“I don’t know… It sort of feels like the fish are chewing up even the hooks in there…”
There were probably a few parties of hooks mixed in with the unwitting ones used as bait. The forest, however, was growing more and more quiet. Eventually, it fell completely silent. Despite that, he didn’t see any other parties come out from the trees.
“If I’m right about this… then things are going exactly as intended for whoever came up with this plan. And that annoys me.”
Renya felt a strong urge to throw a wrench into the works. Somewhere, someone was feeling rather good about themselves, and that was stirring up his mischievous side. He wanted to do something that would cause their jaw to drop to the ground. The problem was that he couldn’t come up with an effective method. Had he wielded the forces of fire or ice, he could have pumped the entirety of his apparently-very-big mana pool into one massive spell that froze everything over or even turned the whole forest into ash. His aptitude was wind, though. The most he could do with wind was probably uproot some trees. While that was certainly a sight to see, it lacked the flashiness he craved. As he gazed at the sky, an idea popped into his mind.
According to the young girl who sent him here, this world was like a miniature garden that sat on top of a big round tub. Below the tub was nothingness. What, then, was above the tub? Surely, a world like this was home to a mountain or two that were a few thousand meters high. If there were mountains, then the atmosphere should reach at least their peaks, if not higher up. Furthermore, ever since coming here, he never felt like water was boiling earlier than he was used to. In other words, the atmospheric pressure here should be close to his previous world, and the atmosphere itself should be organized in a similar fashion, with layers of increasingly thinner air at higher elevations.
“By my power, I devote thee. Fill the open air…”
Having recently purchased a secret magecraft compendium from Caryl, Renya had laid eyes on every single wind spell that was known to exist. As for the usage restrictions, after removing the one for basic level spells, he immediately used the same method as non-elemental spells to remove all the remaining restrictions as well. Currently, he was reciting the incantation for an advanced level wind spell, but with a slight modification added in. Normally, the spell was meant to suck things upward, but he visualized it in reverse, rushing downward.
He also decided to put up a barrier of wind around him; he didn’t want to end up as collateral damage to his own spell. As he pictured the imminent convectional phenomenon in his mind, he simulcast a number of solid, windy walls in the shape of an expansive cocoon around him. Once the barrier was in place, he thrust his right arm up toward the sky and, as though he were trying to grasp the very heavens overhead, curled his hand firmly into a fist and continued his incantation.
“Raging tempests high above, heed my call and smash this earth!”
The original incantation was “heed my call and pierce the sky,” but since he was reversing the direction, he adapted the words too.
Figuring he’d recover his mana soon after anyway, he withheld just enough to maintain the barrier and poured almost all of his remaining mana into the spell. When mana was infused into the circuitry of his words, the spell came to life.
In an instant, smoke enveloped everything around him. The noise was deafening. If there were a pair of eyes far, far above Renya, it might have seen that a gigantic funnel was reaching into the sky. Usually, tornadoes were natural phenomena that sucked things up from the ground and sent them flying into the air. This tornado, however, worked the other way; it sucked in everything from the surrounding air and smashed it down onto the ground. It was, in effect, not a tornado at all. The effect was probably better imagined as a whirlpool spiraling into the ocean depths, except transplanted into the sky.
The whirling cyclone, twenty kilometers high, pulled in freezing cold currents from up in the sky, eating up moisture from nearby clouds in the process, and sent it all plunging down in a thunderous torrent of wind and water. It struck the forest in front of Renya.
“Uh oh. This might be a problem…”
Everything went white. From within the barrier’s protection, Renya stared blankly as the outside world disappeared in a violent storm of ice and vapor. He could feel the deafening rumbles with his body. His plan had been to reach into very upper layers of the atmosphere and pull down what he assumed would be extremely cold air. This part of the plan worked. Unfortunately, his thought process had stopped there. He entirely failed to consider what he would do with the cold air after it came down.
A more prudent mage might have set up a number of upward currents around the downward one, thereby creating a cycle of air that effectively restricted the spell’s area of effect. Renya was not a more prudent mage, and he set up no such system. Therefore, as soon as the cold air hit the ground, it immediately began to spread. A wave of intense frost swept through the surroundings, freezing everything it touched.
For a moment, he considered canceling the spell, but eventually shrugged in a “what’s done is done” manner and began to slowly move the massive funnel of wind toward the center of the forest. As the funnel drifted into the distance, the raging winds around him calmed. Nevertheless, he didn’t lower the barrier.