I Can't Summon Monsters Anymore

[Core Room]

"Mint-san and Sapien-sensei are going to be cross with me, I bet. Marie-san, judging from our spare dungeon energy, do you think a ninth is summonable?"

"This is the textbook hopeless-case pattern. You're the type, Master, who can't win at the races and so goes broke strolling down Skid Row. It's a good thing this world has no racecourse. More precisely, that no one knows one exists."

There is a racecourse dungeon, but it is treated as nothing more than a pumpkin patch, and is fated to collapse eventually.

"Even if races were being run at the Nakayama Racecourse Dungeon, I wouldn't actually go off to the racecourse and leave the dungeon untended. Probably."

"I half expected you to say something like 'lay down track and run an express train straight there.' But that dungeon is over 300 km away (in distance), so by rail you couldn't make it there and back in a day."

Because there was no annexation of Korea, no Manchurian Incident, and no Second World War, there is no bullet train, no Shinkansen.

"300 km, so that's Nagoya or Sendai. By car it's just far enough to be a nuisance, and a plane only ends up slower once you factor in airport access. An inconvenient distance."

"Now, if a vacuum-tube car were ever put into practical use, that'd be another story, but the airtightness problem is beyond anyone's hands. So then, the ninth?"

"Marie-san, the 'Shiso (Asura, Special)' on the summoning list has gone gray."

"That's the state of 'currently does not meet the summoning conditions.' It hasn't vanished from the list, so it seems we can only summon one per faculty, and that this isn't the end of it. The lower part of the list is still summonable, so it doesn't look like we've hit the dungeon-monster ceiling either. Surely a dungeon of this scale can't cap out at eight."

"Maybe there's an unlock condition."

"This is only my conjecture, but presumably the first eight and the ninth onward have different conditions. Whether they become summonable without restriction, or whether it goes to one per department, I can't say, and whether the summoning cost rises or falls I can't say either."

"What sort of condition could it be? A 'number of adventurers staying in the dungeon at once' of ten thousand is an unrealistic figure you'd never see outside a human farm, and as Sapien-sensei said, it might really be tied to the number of books."

"Master, please don't go calling me a bookworm. I'm resistant to most bugs, and the only one I find physiologically unbearable is the mint moth, but bugs are bad for a library's books."

Because almost no pests attach themselves to rosemary, Marie too has a high tolerance for bugs. Which is to say, it's the handsome-fellow Rose genus that shrieks and carries on over a caterpillar.

"Since the only proper monster summonable is the Shiso (Asura), I suppose until it unlocks again we'll just have to make do with the eight of us plus Mint's duplicates."

"We'll have to hurry the education of this world's doctors and engineers and teachers. We've been recruiting, but we haven't yet hired a single one."

"Warrior bands, and monks for that matter, are no trouble at all by this world's standards, but doctors and engineers need retraining, and that's hard work. Teachers we can get by with terakoya masters for the time being, at least."

"To begin with, even dungeon monsters have no intellect and can only perform fixed behaviors unless they're named, so naturally they can't serve as doctors and the like, and it'll be impossible to staff every doctor with named monsters going forward. We always needed to make use of personnel from outside the dungeon, so it's simply been moved up the schedule."

"It does take time, though. Four years in a medical faculty, four or five in a medical college."

"For an Asura, cramming knowledge over the short term works far better, so if a Shiso that isn't a dungeon monster were to come along, training them as a priority is one option. But the practical side won't do without practice. And at this world's level of technology, the practice, sadly, requires animals."

If the dungeon could summon not just a library but a twenty-first-century medical-faculty building, equipment and all, and then replenish the consumable equipment besides, that'd be another matter, but as things stand it's beyond their means.

"The only animals we have right now are chickens, isn't it."

"Those are religiously a Beast but biologically a dinosaur, so they're only good for practice on the order of bird-type beastfolk… Humans aside, in the case of Asura and beastfolk, will the summoned medical texts even be of any use?"

"The medical texts and papers we can summon are for humans only. In the case of this Library-City Dungeon, at least."

"That's because it's only connected to that sort of otherworld cluster. Which makes it strange, then, that the library staff we could summon at the very outset were Ox-Head and Horse-Head."

"It was either Corolla Brian or Sledgehammer, I'm fairly sure. Either way, it was a horse. I remember Oguri Tadamasa wasn't on the summoning list. And I don't think Sengarie Adolf was either…"

That originally, in the tutorial, it was an otherworld-reincarnated librarian, and that the later additions were replication summons from other worlds, and no one knows this anymore.