Chapter 201: The Bear Helps Exterminate Moles

Chapter 201:
The Bear Helps Exterminate Moles

 

MISA HAPPILY WALKED next to Marina, who led the group on ahead. It seemed like she trusted Marina. When they’d been attacked by orcs, Marina hadn’t run out on them. She’d protected Misa’s carriage—guess that made her trustworthy.

“Where are the other members of your party?” I asked Marina. When they’d guarded Gran, there had been four of them. I didn’t remember all their names though.

“Masrika and Itia are doing another job. Elle and I can handle this.”

In fact, I bet they couldn’t do this job without Elle. She was the mage, after all.

Once we were out of the gates, we walked for a while until we caught sight of the fields. They were pretty big. I could see a couple of farmers working the soil. Marina called out to them from behind, “Excuse me. We received a quest from the Adventurers’ Guild because some moles appeared.”

“So you’ve come? You’ll be such a great help...” The man turned around and looked at Marina, but then immediately fixed a look on me. I was standing right behind her. “A bear?”

Marina glanced at me for a second. “Don’t mind her.” Sure, she was making things easier for me by moving the conversation along, but it felt rude.

But the man still seemed curious about me, and he kept glancing over. “And those children?” He looked at the girls next to me.

I guess that would catch his attention. Two adventurers, a girl in a bear outfit, and some kids? Not something you see every day.

“Please don’t mind them either,” said Marina. “Now, where did the moles appear?”

“I’d say...around thereabouts.” The man turned away from us and pointed at the place. “They ruined quite a few of our crops, so we’re counting on you.”

Marina started walking in that direction. I used my detection skill to check whether there were monsters around. Just like Marina had said, I didn’t detect any monster signals nearby. Unfortunately, as I expected, I couldn’t detect any of the moles.

My skill only worked for monsters and people, and moles counted as animals. The only things I could see were the signals of the people working in the field. There were a lot of farmers, now that I took another look around. I didn’t remember passing the person, but there was even someone behind me—I turned to look but didn’t see them.

There was a giant tree where I saw the signals. I guess they were resting in the shade. Maybe they were even skipping out on work. Farming seemed pretty draining.

Once we got to the place that the man had indicated, Marina started issuing instructions. “It’s around here. Elle, if you could? Please keep back slightly, Lady Misana. All of you.”

“In that case, I’ll look around.” Elle started walking around the circumference of the field.

“There are a couple holes, aren’t there?” I asked.

When I looked around the path Elle had walked, I did see things that looked like holes.

“How do you find the moles?” Misa asked Elle, seeming very curious.

“We use water magic to draw them out. I’ll start doing that now, so please stay back slightly.”

We gave Elle a little distance. After making sure we really had moved away, Elle brought her hands close to the hole and used magic. The water from Elle’s hands flowed underground. Instead of being absorbed by the dirt, the water flowed right into the hole, filling it steadily.

As I watched, wondering what would happen, the water started to flow back up instead. Was she pulling back the water?

The three girls looked downright baffled.

“Now, the magic Elle is using is very difficult,” Marina said, seeming proud as she explained to the three entranced girls.

“It is?” said Misa.

“Just producing water magic is easy. Manipulating the water? Not so much.”

I guess she was right. Just producing it was easy for me, too, but trying to manipulate a golem made from it was kind of advanced. I guess you’d need to really use your powers of imagination to do it.

“Marina, that’s enough talking,” said Elle. “They’re going to come out soon.”

Marina brandished her sword.

We looked at the hole.

“S-Something’s coming out from it!” Misa yelled right as something black that had been pulled with the water jumped out.

It was a mole, but it was a whole lot bigger than any of the moles I’d seen on TV. The moment the mole fell to the ground, Marina skewered it with her sword. It was dead, just like that. She did the same thing to the other two moles that came out of the hole.

“Three down.”

“That was pretty good work,” said Marina. “Okay, let’s go to the next hole.”

“Lady Misana, see?” said Elle, starting for the next hole. “It wasn’t all that interesting, right?”

Misa nodded. “I feel bad for the moles since they’re being killed, but I know that our food is important. And your magic was amazing, Elle.”

“Thank you, Lady Misana, but it wasn’t all that impressive.”

“But Marina just said that your magic is.”

“A little, maybe. But if I’m not touching the water I make with magic, I can’t manipulate it. Once I train more, I’ll be able to do this with the water even if I’m far away.”

Hm? Wait, did that mean my golem manipulation was impressive?

“So just consider it moderately impressive magic,” Elle said with a smile, bending down to get at Misa’s eye level. It really emphasized her giant boobs.

They were so huge. Someday—someday I’d be there…

 

After that, we started helping with the mole extermination.

Okay, I called it helping, but all we really did was look for holes. Since the gig was Marina and Elle’s, we didn’t help with the actual extermination bit.

“Marina, there’s a hole over here too,” Misa yelled from afar.

“Once we’re finished at this hole, we’ll be right over. Elle, let’s do this.”

Elle started using her magic and did the same thing as earlier.

By working together, we found the holes right away. But when the holes were really close together, we’d sometimes end up finding no moles. Still, things were going great.

“There are a lot more of them than I thought there would be, I have to say.”

“You’re right. We haven’t even looked through half the field yet and we’ve already found so many.”

I couldn’t speak to that, but I knew we’d already exterminated nearly thirty moles. That seemed like a lot.

“I wonder if there’s a big mole around,” Elle mused.

“A big mole?” I could make a pretty good guess about what that was. Still, I’d never heard a mole referred to as that before.

“It’s possible,” said Marina. “Maybe we should put a break on searching for regular mole holes to dedicate ourselves to finding a big mole hole.”

“Marina, what’s a big mole?” Misa asked.

Glad that Misa was the one to ask. I was thinking the same thing, but I didn’t want to look like I was the only person who didn’t know.

“A big mole is a kind of mother to the normal moles. Since they have lots of babies all at once, we need to hurry and slay it or they’ll all lay waste to the fields,” said Marina.

“We probably shouldn’t do this alone,” said Elle. “We might want to find reinforcements. If we take too long, that’d be bad.”

“Let’s decide what to do after we find the hole.”

“Right. Hole takes priority.”

According to Elle, we were supposed to look for a huge hole—about the size of a human child, in fact. How big did that make the mole, then?

While we split up to search for it, we saw the man from before running toward us. “Excuse meee!” He looked totally out of breath.

“Is something wrong?”

The man paused to catch his breath. “We…we found a giant hole over there. More ruined crops, too.”

“A big hole?” said Elle.

“It’s not a big mole, is it?!” said Marina.

“I thought it was a possibility, so I came to tell you. At this rate, it’ll be a disaster. Please, if you could help…” The man bowed his head. It looked like we didn’t have any more searching to do—the guy was going to lead us right to the big mole’s hole.

 

“It does look rather large.”

The hole in the ground was absolutely gaping. Yeah, it was about the size of a kid.

Elle checked out the area around the hole. A ton of the crops around had been eaten. “It really does look like there’s a big mole around.”

But it wasn’t a monster, right? I tried using my detection skill, but I got zilch. All I could see were human signals. Hmm, it looked like that one person was still near that tree and slacking off.

“Elle, if you could?” Marina said to Elle. Elle used her magic like she had before and washed water down the hole. Even when she brought the water back up, nothing came with it.

“Is it not in there?”

“I’m not sure. It might not be.”

Marina took another look around the decimated field. “But it’s got to be. Just look around.”

“It might be so big that I can’t pull it out.” Elle tried to flush the hole with water several more times, but we didn’t see any sign of the mole coming out.

I hadn’t actually been meaning to help them, but I wasn’t about to let the crops get wiped out either. “Want me to try?”

“You want to, Yuna?” asked Marina.

“Can we count on you? It looks like I can’t get this done.”

Marina nodded. “I knew you were amazing at earth magic, but I had no idea you could use water magic too.”

“I pretty much can.” I used water magic the same way that Elle had. The water came out of my bear puppet. It flooded down the gaping hole.

“That sure is a lot of water.”

Elle nodded. “It’s more than double the amount I can produce.”

I could more or less tell what was going on in the hole using the mana in the water. I could even feel the water touching something. “There’s something big in this hole.”

“You can tell?”

“More or less.” I pulled the water back up like Elle had. Yeah, I could feel something huge coming with it.

“Marina, something’s about to come up,” I said, “so I’m counting on you.”

“Just leave it to me.” Marina brandished her sword.

It’d be coming soon. And the thing that came out was...was that seriously a mole?!

“It’s a big mole!” Marina yelled.

And even bigger than I expected. It was practically the size of a wolf. The thing wasn’t anywhere close to the size of a mole.

“Marina! We can’t let it get away!”

“I know.” Marina skewered the big mole that came out of the hole with her sword. Her blade went right through the thing’s torso. It stopped moving. Dead in one blow.

“Whoa, it’s huge,” said Misa.

“I had no idea they could be this big,” said Noa.

I knew Fina could handle it, but it seemed Misa and Noa weren’t freaking out that much over the mole’s dead corpse. I was shocked just seeing a dead wolf when I came to this world. The kids in this world sure are tough.

“Yuna, you were a huge help,” said Marina.

“Yes, you were, especially since my magic couldn’t handle it,” said Elle.

The two of them thanked me.

“Well, the farmers would have been in trouble if their crops were eaten,” I said.

The farmers had spent a ton of effort growing those crops, and it wasn’t like I could abandon them when they were right in front of me. I’d seen people on the news in my original world having a terrible time after getting hit by a typhoon or other disasters. Since I was going to be eating the food these farmers produced, I wanted to make sure I could protect them however I could.