A breeze carrying the unique scent of damp earth brushed across the lakeshore. The flagstone path underfoot was thick with moss, a clear sign of how few visitors this place saw.
Once through the outer ring of coniferous trees, the view opened up into a vast, quiet emptiness. The place felt exceptionally tranquil and serene.
If she didn't have important matters to attend to, Natsume Sonoko would have been quite happy to just relax here comfortably for a while.
"Shirai-san, this is my first time coming to a place like this."
Crouching by the lake's edge, she traced her fingers through the water, sending shallow ripples across the surface as she peered down at a wild fish swimming below.
'It's so nice here. Perfect for a barbecue,' she thought, 'and no need to worry about ingredients.'
Natsume Sonoko's gaze wandered, eventually lifting to the plump, billowing clouds in the sky. She gave a sudden, satisfied nod.
"Shirai-san, this spot is really good," she said, standing up and offering the praise.
"This lake has a very high water capacity, and it's relatively close to the Research Exhibition," Shirai replied, hands on her hips, though her tone was a bit distracted.
"It took me quite some effort to calculate this as the optimal water collection point."
Truth be told, Natsume-san's plan was a bit too fantastical, even by Academy City's standards.
Whether it was flooding the Exhibition grounds or swiftly dealing with the Powered Suits inside, nobody felt particularly confident.
But now, they had no choice but to rely on Natsume-san. After all, no matter how you looked at it, she was one of Academy City's proud Level 5s.
"Shirai-san, has it started on your end?" The voice of Uiharu Kazari, tinged with anxiety, came through their earpieces.
"Relax, Uiharu. Don't let Natsume-san's usual demeanor fool you; she's actually quite capable," Shirai Kuroko said, looking up at the now drastically changing lake as she tried to sound reassuring.
The once calm and wide lake surface was now churning with massive bubbles.
Countless tendrils of steam rose from the water, condensing into a thick, visible mist the moment they met the cooler air.
In a lakeside environment like this, it was completely Natsume-san's element, even more so than for a dedicated hydrokinetic.
Natsume Sonoko picked that moment to glance skyward, only to find her view largely obscured by the dense fog she had created.
"What a shame there aren't any large rain clouds near the Exhibition today. This would be much less trouble otherwise," Natsume Sonoko remarked with a displeased shrug. The weather had been just a bit too good lately.
"Alright, next step is to send all this mist up to a cloud."
The idea flashing in her mind, she began intensely compressing the mist around her. Soon, her world was reduced to a blanket of pure white.
Clouds and fog were essentially the same thing; fog was just a cloud that had formed at ground level.
Lifting the fog felt no different from holding up cotton candy, except the quantity of this particular cotton candy was immense.
Due to air resistance and the minuscule size of each water droplet, the mist, despite being denser than air, simply floated within it.
She flew a considerable distance—about as far as a warm-up run for a school P.E. class—until she was roughly seven hundred meters above the ground.
Having already picked her target, Natsume Sonoko somewhat clumsily stuffed the massive volume of mist into the belly of an unlucky, fluffy cumulus cloud.
These were low-level cumulus clouds. The main thing separating them from proper rain clouds was a lack of updrafts to supply them with more moisture.
Hovering in mid-air, Natsume Sonoko frowned at the now noticeably distended cloud.
Her goal was to turn this specific cloud into a water-laden cumulonimbus. She could technically force any random cloud to cool and produce rain, but that wouldn't look like a natural weather phenomenon.
"Seems like it's still not enough," she mused to herself.
Or, more accurately, it was completely insufficient.
While she wasn't trying to create a city-wide downpour, the amount of rain this would produce was far from enough to raise the water level in the Exhibition hall to the planned height.
"But making trip after trip to transport water would be too troublesome and time-consuming."
A flicker of hesitation crossed Natsume Sonoko's face, which was quickly replaced by a look of sudden realization.
Back at the lake, the wind and waves began to pick up significantly.
The faint, earthy scent was now completely overpowered by the heavy smell of moisture, with occasional sprays of lake water washing over the shore.
A faint tremor ran through the ground, a tingling numbness rising from the soles of their feet. The resident teleporter, seeing this, promptly blinked to a safer location.
Shirai Kuroko stood somewhat helplessly by the lake, her chestnut-brown hair whipping wildly in the sudden gust.
The wind tore at her Judgment armband, making it flap noisily.
Her eyes were fixed on the colossal phenomenon taking shape about three hundred meters away, and the corner of her mouth twitched involuntarily.
"This girl… she's far too reckless."
There, on the surface of the lake, a massive, clearly visible whirlpool had formed, voraciously sucking up water from its depths. The fish that called the lake home had fled the vortex's center the moment it appeared, swimming for their lives.
While the vortex itself only occupied a small part of the vast lake, its influence was felt across the entire body of water.
Following the whirlpool upward, one could see it had generated a colossal air current that shot straight up into the sky.
This rotating column of air took the form of a vertical, hollow tube—from a distance, it looked like a gigantic tornado connecting heaven and earth.
"This is just absurd."
Shirai Kuroko's jaw went slightly slack, as if trying to equalize the pressure inside and outside her body.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the event, Natsume Sonoko stood perfectly calm and still within the eye of the tornado.
While it was chaos outside, it was remarkably peaceful here.
The interior space was quite spacious, large enough to fit a sofa in some spots.
The wings she sometimes used were gone now, but she wasn't falling. Instead, she moved with a sense of novelty through the storm she'd created.
By constantly shifting her position in real-time, she guided and maintained the formation of the enormous tornado.
Even though the effective range of her personal power was limited to two hundred meters, she could use it as a catalyst to briefly create natural phenomena on a much larger scale.
However, unlike her usual precise control, she could only barely maintain the tornado's shape now. It was a far cry from the ease with which she could casually ride a tornado down the street.
'Oh no, I think I overdid it.'
Natsume Sonoko finally noticed her chosen cloud, which was on the verge of being torn apart by the powerful winds of the funnel cloud.
She hurriedly began to slow the tornado's rotation.
Her processing power was now being consumed at a rapid rate. A portion of the load was being handled by Reiko, while the rest was borne by Sonoko herself.
As for Natsume Sonoko's own inherent processing power, it was now roughly ten times that of an average Level 4, officially stepping over the threshold into Level 5 territory.
But she herself wasn't particularly conscious of this fact. Compared to the vast computational resources Reiko could provide, her own still seemed paltry.
And in the moments after the tornado fully formed, water from the lake began to travel upwards, winding its way along the hollow pipeline of the vortex.
It was, after all, the very principle behind a waterspout.
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T/N: I have a Patreon! While it may seem empty as of now, webnovel will get 3 Chapters Every Day, and advanced chapters will be uploaded on Patreon.
It may not seem worth it now, but maybe in the future. Who knows!
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If you guys wanna check it out.