To make it up to the others, Jhin went all-out and cooked a full breakfast. The irresistible aroma dragged each of them out of their bedrooms one by one — and the moment they saw Jhin up and moving, they unleashed a round of scolding and stern warnings.
Jhin took every word of it with genuine humility, promised he would absolutely never make them worry like that again, then invited them to sit down and try the breakfast he'd made.
The result: Pecorine was already itching to go hunt down legendary ingredients so she could hand them straight to Jhin. The other three felt exactly the same way. His cooking had completely conquered their stomachs.
"Oh, right — let me show you something cool." Jhin snapped his fingers, and a small tongue of flame gathered above his pinched index finger and thumb.
"Is that… Ignis? How did you manage to cast magic when you have zero mana?" Kyaru stared at the scene in front of her, unable to believe her own eyes. Jhin — a mana insulator, of all people — had actually pulled off a spell.
It was roughly as absurd as young Bruce Wayne walking into that alley, finding his parents lying in pools of blood, shooting them twice more — and somehow bringing them back to life.
"Trade secret." Jhin let the flame dissipate and smiled with theatrical mystery.
Two new skills had appeared in his skill list: [Element Mastery Lv.1] and [Mana Mastery Lv.1].
"Hmph. Fine, don't tell me. I'm a mage anyway — knowing Ignis is nothing special." Kyaru turned her head, unwilling to look at Jhin's smug grin. "Pecorine, did you and Kokkoro find any good requests yesterday?"
"Of course! There's the Giant Frog extermination request, the Blue Fang Wolf pack clearance request…" Pecorine produced dozens of commission sheets and spread them across the table, rattling off the details of each one without stopping for breath.
"Hold on!" Kyaru cut her off, pointing at the pile with wide, disbelieving eyes. "These… you accepted all of them?"
"Yes, because the rewards are all very generous."
"Are you an idiot?!" Kyaru grabbed Pecorine's cheeks and yanked them in opposite directions. "If you don't complete a request within the time limit, you owe a penalty fee. And these are all short-term requests — are you trying to drain our funds and leave us eating dirt?!"
"I-I'm sorry! I just felt like we could handle all of them, so I went ahead and took them."
"'Felt like'?! If your feelings are that reliable, why don't you go become a treasure hunter?!"
Jhin rescued Pecorine from Kyaru's grip. "Alright, Kyaru, getting angry isn't going to help. Let's focus on figuring out how to finish all these requests within the time limits."
"Hmph. Just remember not to go accepting everything at random next time." Kyaru shot a glare at Pecorine's sheepish grin, then dropped into her seat with a huff.
"There are thirteen requests in total. Fortunately, aside from the exterminations, there's only one retrieval request. Here's what I'm thinking: we split up to handle the combat requests first, then regroup for the retrieval one, since that'll take the most time. How does that sound?"
Jhin's plan was sensible and efficient — it passed unanimously. For team assignments, since Jhin currently covered three roles at once — warrior, rogue, and mage — Megumin, as a one-shot mage, was paired with him. The other three formed their own group.
With tasks divided, the party split at the royal city gates. Among Jhin's requests, the most time-sensitive was the Giant Frog extermination — a one-day limit. Since Pecorine had accepted it yesterday afternoon, it had to be completed before this afternoon.
"Megumin, I should probably carry you again — otherwise we might not make it in time."
"Ah — sure."
Megumin climbed onto Jhin's back. She heard him say "hold on tight," and then the world on either side of her blurred into streaks as everything rushed past at blinding speed. The wind nearly tore her hat right off her head. She could faintly sense an unusually dense concentration of wind elements swirling around him.
Now that Jhin could control both mana and elements, he was indeed capable of manipulating them — but his casting method was nothing like a conventional mage's. He didn't need to recite incantations to pay the elements their mana toll. With pure intent alone, he bypassed the chanting step entirely and jumped straight to the final magical effect.
Or, like this morning and right now, he simply gathered whichever element he needed directly.
This did come with a drawback: he couldn't learn any of the spells currently practiced on the continent of Astraea. His method — directly commanding elements and mana — fell under the domain of ancient magic. Trying to cast modern spells with it was like loading a cannonball into a pistol. Completely incompatible.
If Jhin ever wanted to cast magic in the true sense of the word, he would have to study ancient magic — there was no other path. The trouble was that most ancient magic had been lost to time, or was locked away in the vaults of various races, never shared with the outside world.
The road to magic was going to be a long one.
He sighed quietly to himself — and then, through the blur of his high-speed advance, a Giant Frog appeared on the horizon. He slowed to a stop and set Megumin down. "Megumin, stay out of this one. Pecorine gave me strict orders — Giant Frog legs are supposedly delicious fried. I cannot let you reduce them to ash."
"Then I'll just watch from here." Megumin didn't complain about not getting to unleash Explosion Magic. There were plenty of other requests to get through, and besides — if the frog legs could be handed to Jhin to cook, wouldn't they taste even better?
Jhin nodded, then stepped off on a light gust of wind underfoot and charged toward the Giant Frogs bounding across the grassland.
The monsters were exactly what their name advertised — enormous frogs, each a full five meters tall. Their attacks came in two flavors: a mouthful of foul-smelling viscous slime, and a flexible tongue that could stretch twenty meters. They always appeared near ponds that materialized without warning across the prairie; on a lucky day, you might even spot ten-meter-tall lotus flowers blooming inside those ponds.
Chop one down and you'd harvest lotus seeds the size of a grown adult — soft, chewy, and sweet, bursting with juice and carrying the clean fragrance of the lotus blossoms. Because they grew only in the ponds of Giant Frogs, they were known as [Giant Frog Lotuses].
The instant Jhin stepped within twenty meters — the Giant Frog's attack range — its yellow pupils swiveled toward him. Its enormous maw gaped open, and a long pink tongue shot out like a lightning bolt. A single lick from that sucker-covered, flat tip would be enough to send anyone straight into the frog's slime-drenched gullet.
Jhin didn't flinch. Dense fire elements gathered in his hand, condensing into a longsword. He pushed off, twisted sideways to dodge the tongue, then pivoted at the waist and brought the fire-element blade down in a heavy cleaving slash.
To his surprise, the blade only left a black scorch mark across the pink tongue — it didn't even cut through.
Fire elements weren't cutting it. Time to switch to lightning.
Thunder cracked. A lightning-element longsword writhed with arcing electricity as Jhin took hold of it. Determined to clear the extermination request as quickly as possible, he triggered Time Stop simultaneously — "The World!"
A brilliant arc of lightning traced a full twenty meters through the frozen silence of stopped time. Jhin released the element-blade buried in the first Giant Frog's brain, then condensed two more longswords — one of wind, one of ice — and hurled them with full force at the two other frogs nearby.
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