The Extra Prince Sets Out To Conquer The World

I marveled at the white snowstorm I saw far away.

“Wow, that’s not a blizzard spell, but a phenomenon caused by hail falling on the snowy plains?”

I didn’t know what it would look like inside, but from the outside, I could only see ice pellets falling from high in the sky and a snowstorm blowing below.

I was at a loss for words that the sight was merely the stage 1 preparation I had advised Yekatrice.

“Each of those ice pellets will be chunks of ice larger than Yuan,” Jade added.

I clicked my tongue at Jade’s comment. It definitely meant the hailstones were unusually large if they could be seen with the naked eye from this distance.

Indeed, I could see what kind of existence the Sage of the Winter Wood was in the Bastille Mountains.

“I clearly only asked her to make it hail incessantly for two days, as long as it wasn’t overdoing it.”

Ice chunks the size of fists would be quite threatening, but human body-sized ones were way too much. In fact, I told her half a day would be fine if it was too much.

When Yekatrice nonchalantly asked if that was all that was needed, I just thought it was amazing. I had no idea it would be to this extent.

“We have more than enough mana stones accumulated. But seeing how it’s more intense than I expected, it seems like my master pulled in even the experimental ones,” Jade commented that mages compulsively hoard mana stones.

“For the next two days, we won’t be able to enter the barrier even if we wanted to.”

“That’s fortunate,” I replied. When I turned to Jade, he avoided my gaze.

In the end, this guy was scared of getting scolded, so he came out without even greeting his master. Sensing the meaning behind my gaze, Jade offered excuses.

“Ahem! I, I am also an adult! There’s no need to go out of my way to greet her just for going out for a few days, right? Master knows where I’m going too.”

The protagonists in novels weren’t such kids.

“Well, fine. Right now, we need to focus on subjugating ‘Mist’.”

Unlike One Horn, I also had to participate in the subjugation of Mist. I wanted to just spectate from a safe place, but I had no choice.

I believed in taking advantage of everything that could be used if necessary. There were no exceptions, even for myself.

*******

Arisa thought, “Ah, I’m going to die.”

The ice chunks filling the sky fell from hundreds of meters in the air, creating huge craters with loud booms whenever they hit the ground.

Swish- Kwaaang-!

“Aaaah! Don’t give up! Fight back!”

Rotulus, the parrot beastman, wrapped his feathers with sword energy and scattered them in all directions.

Beast King Style Secret Technique! Thousand Slash Bay!

As countless feathers imbued with sword energy stuck into the ground, the earth swelled up and blocked the huge hailstones.

Kwakwakwakwang-!

The ground Rotulus raised also shook from the hail bombardment, and before long, holes were punctured and it crumbled.

“Hey, Death! How long do you think this attack will continue?” Rotulus asked Arisa, the only orthodox mage in the party, for her opinion.

More than half of them had learned magic, but it was only to the extent of supporting their own specialties, so Arisa’s opinion was the most reliable.

“Nyahahahaha! How long will it continue, you ask? This land is the domain of the Winter Wood! If the Winter Wood wishes, the hail barrage could continue for years!”

At Arisa’s judgment, the Arcana executives gathered there broke out in a cold sweat.

“We came for nothing,” grumbled the dwarf Bifleod, swinging his hammer to deflect the ice chunks with wind pressure. No matter how strong a dwarf’s stamina was, he couldn’t swing a hammer endlessly for years without rest.

They had to choose. Retreat and wait for another opportunity, or cross this hellish hail and infiltrate the barrier.

At the crossroads of choice, Javan spoke. “Let’s take a majority vote. Do we carry out the operation or retreat as is?”

As soon as Javan finished speaking, Jeffries wearing a crow’s beak mask said, “If not for this chance, we may not be able to kill the Sage of the Winter Wood. There are extremely few people who can cure the disease I planted, but they do exist.”

Yekatrice wouldn’t have time to find a skilled doctor to cure her illness while guarding the seal, but her close friend Dalanta was different.

He recently passed on the position of Spring Flower to his disciple, so he could freely use money, power, and time to find a doctor.

“I don’t care either way. As long as we go somewhere this damn hail isn’t falling,” Bifleod said.

“I agree. Just being here is too difficult,” added ‘The Hanged Man’.

With Bifleod and ‘The Hanged Man’ abstaining from the majority vote, Arisa and Rotulus spoke.

“Nyahahahaha! I want to see the face of the mage who uses this crazy magic at least once.”

“Dangerous enemies should be dealt with when there’s a chance to kill them. That’s how it goes.”

As the two chose to carry out the operation, Javan shrugged with a bitter smile.

“Oh my, oh my. Two abstentions and three in favor. Then it’s decided to execute the plan.”

“Nyahahaha! What about the opinion of the sentimental old man?”

At Arisa’s question, Javan smirked despite shivering from the cold.

“Little bird, my opinion isn’t important in this situation, is it?”

With the decision made by majority vote, his opinion didn’t matter.

At his words, Arisa snorted. She felt displeasure at not knowing what he was thinking behind that constantly smiling face, but didn’t bother voicing it.

They advanced through the raging huge ice storm. In the bitter cold that made even superhumans tremble, they had to risk their lives just to push through the fierce snowstorm and crater-making hail.

They had no choice but to move forward even if hell awaited at the end.

*******

Yekatrice sipped warm tea while adding more firewood to the fireplace. Outside the window was a hellish landscape she had created, but she didn’t care.

“Sigh… What should I do?”

Sighing deeply, she quietly took out an album and looked back on the memories captured with her disciple.

Yesterday, she was shocked by her disciple’s drunken abusive language when he came to see her. But she couldn’t argue back or scold him.

Because what her disciple said about her not believing in him in the end, for whatever reason, was true.

“How do we reconcile?” She pondered, hugging her knees in depression.

It was the first time she had such a big fight since taking Jade as her disciple. She had lived a long life, but having secluded herself from a young age, she didn’t really know how to reconcile.

After fighting with Jade, she even went to Yuan and asked why he told her about her fate. But Yuan just laughed in amusement, saying a third party intervening would only strain the relationship.

She was certain he was just enjoying it. “Really, what an ill-natured person.”

Sighing deeply, she sensed a magic trap activating outside the barrier at that moment. It was 136 degrees southeast, 2377 meters away.

The magic trap wasn’t set by her, but by Jade based on Yuan’s magic while he was out to subjugate the great magic beast ‘Mist’.

Due to the cold, monsters didn’t approach near the barrier, so it was definitely Arcana’s assassins.

Yekatrice pinpointed the enemy’s location but didn’t stop the raging hail outside. Before leaving, Yuan had cautioned her to maintain it for two days without fail, as they could infiltrate via multiple routes.

“He said they would decide within an hour whether to retreat or proceed and act accordingly. How precise.”

It hadn’t been an hour since the hail started falling yet. Yekatrice muttered while examining the magic formation Yuan had left behind.

“Let’s see, what trap was it again?” She tried to recall the trap that sounded thoroughly malicious just hearing about it.

“Ah! Found it, ‘Jintang’.” Yekatrice clicked her tongue at the wicked trap that seemed to embody human malice and infused mana into the magic formation. (TN: Jintang basically means To such an extreme degree that one gets sick of something. Basically, more and more layers of traps until you want to die)

******

Arcana’s executives endured the incessant hail bombardment and the scattering snowstorm, barely reaching the vicinity of the Winter Wood forest created by the Sage of the Winter Wood.

In the hellish place where they couldn’t see an inch ahead, they were able to avoid getting lost thanks to Rotulus’ superhuman sense of direction and Javan’s guidance.

Javan’s guidance in particular seemed divinely inspired. Despite the surrounding terrain changing in real-time due to the bombardment, he figured out the exact locations and found the shortest paths.

“Ah, it got warmer.”

Just moments ago, it was filled with cold that was difficult to endure even for the superhuman Rotulus, but pushing through the snowstorm, there was even a slightly warm feeling.

“Did we already enter the barrier?”

Rotulus thought so, as he had heard the inside of the barrier maintained above-freezing temperatures.

Hearing Rotulus’ words, Arisa, Javan, and Jeffries gripped their magic staves and grew nervous.

“No! The barrier shouldn’t be a place we can enter this easily…!”

Before Jeffries’ warning finished, a huge magic formation surfaced on the ground they were standing on.

“It’s a trap!”

At the same time as Javan’s shout, magic chains stretched out from all directions and restrained them. Then, thousands of ice arrows began pouring down on them.

It was quite a threatening trap, but no one panicked. Compared to the hail-raining ground they had just crossed, such a trap felt trivial.

“Don’t let your guard down! The opponent is the Sage of the Winter Wood! We need to break through with full power!”

At Rotulus’ shout, Bifleod swung the hammer in his hand. The ice arrows were clearly meant to obstruct their vision before an extremely threatening magic engulfed them.

“Hmph! As if petty tricks like this could…!”

At that moment, Arisa shouted with an ominous premonition.

“No!”

Arisa reached out to try to stop it, but Bifleod’s hammer had already severed the magic chains and simultaneously struck the ground, impacting the magic formation.

To begin with, the calculation was that if they smashed the magic trap itself, there would be no trouble.

The impact of the adamantium hammer striking down was powerful enough to shake the area, and the magic formation that surfaced on the ground distorted.

“What do you mean it won’t work…?”

Before Rotulus’ question finished, the magic formation shattered and distorted the surrounding scenery.

“Wh-What the?!”

As the surroundings suddenly changed into a twisted space, everyone turned to Arisa.

Arisa bit her lip as she grasped the situation they were in.

“Spatial distortion phenomenon. They hid dimensional overlap magic in the magic formation. By breaking the magic formation, the magic deliberately fails and traps us in a space close to a sub-dimension.”

Her usual laughter couldn’t come out in the grave situation.

“Method of escape?”

At Rotulus’ cold question, Arisa thought while holding her forehead.

“Since it’s deliberately failed magic, there will be a spot with a weak seam. We need to find it quickly! If we’re too late and this space collapses, we could end up wandering the boundary between dimensions forever!”

At Arisa’s shout, everyone’s complexion turned pale.

“Damn it, we fell for a psychological trick!”

By deliberately showing an excessively powerful magic bombarding an overly wide area and then having them fall into a trap, it made them overly wary of the trap itself.

It was a trap that someone like Arisa with high magical aptitude, or cautious people like Javan and Jeffries, would never fall for.

This trap was undoubtedly aimed at Bifleod and Rotulus, who didn’t know much about magic but simultaneously possessed the physical strength to collapse a magic formation in an instant.

Realizing that fact, they got goosebumps.

“The Sage of the Winter Wood may have fully grasped even our individual behavior patterns and characteristics.”

At Javan’s words, everyone became extremely tense.

“Let’s move quickly. Death, which direction would be good?”

As Rotulus took the lead and asked, Arisa scanned the surrounding mana and pointed in a direction.

However, they still didn’t know. The traps Yuan had set up hadn’t even begun yet.