Time had shifted back slightly.
Having parted ways with Yugloot, the captain of the rescue squad, Rest was picking off monsters across the plains with her sniping.
[Stone Bullet] The magic Rest launched flew forward with mounting force, punching clean through a monster several hundred meters away. Stationed at roughly five hundred meters, the target was struck in the head and crumpled to the ground, dead.
Ordinarily, this spell possessed neither that kind of power nor that range.
However, Rest had hardened the stones produced by her [Compression] magic even further, shaping them into elongated cones.
By firing them with her [Acceleration] magic, she drew out far greater power and range than the spell naturally possessed.
No telescopic scope existed... but she had a substitute in her [Presence Detection] magic.
[Presence Detection] could expand its range the more mana was channeled into it... and Rest's mana reserves were infinite. If she so desired, she could extend her detection radius to ten kilometers or even a hundred.
However, pushing the range too far would flood her mind with information, potentially frying the circuitry of her brain.
So Rest expanded her search radius to around a kilometer while deliberately reducing the precision of the gathered data, preventing her brain from overloading.
[Presence Detection] could perceive not only the auras of humans and monsters, but also those of insects, small animals, and plants. If she pushed it, she could even determine whether the source was an acquaintance, their gender, their age, or their mana level. But this time, she deliberately narrowed her scan targets to humans and monsters only, limiting the retrieved information to position and size. This way, she could just barely withstand expanding her perception beyond a kilometer...
Once she had the positions of humans and monsters locked down, all that remained was to fire.
She threaded shots around the humans and punched through the monsters, thinning the ranks surging in from deep within the plains.
Naturally, her priority targets were the monsters attacking students.
Ten, twenty... she sniped and eliminated over a hundred monsters.
"Alright... that should wrap up the subjugation of the first wave."
Rest let out a breath and relaxed her shoulders.
Her mana hadn't diminished at all... but the delicate precision work had worn down her mental energy, and her brain was starting to protest.
Rest pulled out the honey candy she'd brought as portable rations and popped it into her mouth, replenishing her brain with sugar.
(The cause of the stampede is still unclear... but a second wave will probably come before long. What on earth made them show up in the first place?)
Monsters that should have been deep in the plains had made it all the way to the outer edges. An impossible situation. Something extraordinary must have happened.
(What if I stretched my search range a bit further...? Maybe I could pick up on whatever's causing this...?)
Rest decided to give it a shot, even if it was a long shot.
Right now, Rest could only detect presences within a one-kilometer radius centered on herself. Beyond that, even if she narrowed down the information load, the strain on her brain would become too great.
(But... finding a workaround for that is what ingenuity is all about, right?)
Rest slowly exhaled as she raised her right hand in front of her.
And then... she began narrowing the range of her [Presence Detection] that radiated outward from herself.
Normally, the search range of [Presence Detection] expands in a circle centered on the user.
However, Rest shrank it while stretching it forward into a long, narrow shape. Keeping the total search area the same, she extended the range further and further ahead.
(If I do it this way, I should be able to scan the depths of the plains without overloading my brain. Now then, what exactly is out there...!?)
Would she find a demon or a snake?
With that kind of mindset, Rest used her stretched-out mana to probe the depths of the plains—only to brush up against an impossibly massive presence that made her eyes fly wide open.
About five kilometers from Rest's current position, there was an overwhelmingly powerful monster's presence.
It was so intense that she could sense it even through a reduced-precision [Presence Detection]. It was that pressure that had been driving the monsters from the depths to flee this way.
"That's—could it be the master of a demon realm!?"
The monster lairs known as demon realms are home to beings that have spent years accumulating power— The so-called 'Master.' Such is the nature of these places.
The Master of a demon realm basically never leaves its core... but someone might have provoked that existence, luring it outside.
(If something like that gets out, there's no telling how much damage it could cause...!)
At the entrance to the plains, there was an operations tent.
Teachers were stationed there, along with rescue team staff and guards for the visiting dignitaries... but even so, whether they could stop this monstrosity was anyone's guess.
(There's no way I'm letting a creature like that get anywhere near Viola and Primula...!)
He knew it was reckless... but there was no other choice.
He could not allow the people he had finally come to call family to be put in danger.
Fear was there. The opponent was unquestionably an overwhelmingly superior enemy—one far beyond anything Rest had ever faced.
And yet... the fear of losing someone precious to him was greater still.
"...Guess it's time to fight."
Rest steeled his resolve.
Fully aware of the danger, he kicked off from the ground and raced into the depths of the plains to meet the presence of the demon realm's Master—what he believed to be 'Sabnock'—head-on.