Tsuji Village, Nishi Village, and Kanae Village

[Two Ri Beyond the Southeast Gate: Kishi Village]

"Director of Books-sama, word has come from my kinsman Tsuji Bunzō that he will soon be arriving here with his retainers in tow."

So reported Kishi Harima-no-suke. Bunzō, of course, is not his true name (his taboo name), so it was perfectly fine to call him that.

"Then we shall have to build Tsuji Village next to Kishi Village, I suppose. Or should it be Bunzō Village?"

said Marie, eyeing the map of Saitama Prefecture.

"No. Let us be bold and set it a full day's march away, ten ri off. Before long Nishi Tatewaki and Kanae Danjō will be coming as well, so if we put Nishi Village at twenty ri and Kanae Village at thirty ri, the southeastern approach will be far more secure."

"I had heard before that the southeast was the dangerous direction."

"There are, of course, cases like the Tsukuba army that came from the east. But over the long term it is the southeast that is most perilous. Beyond Musashi and Ke lie mountains, so it is difficult for a great host to cross over from Kō, Shina, or Koshi, and the east of the east is uninhabited desert. But the southern tip of Sō lies beyond the reach of Kōnodai's power, and the doings of Awa, further south still, cannot be read."

It was not the real-world Kōshin'etsu but Kō-Shina-Koshi, yet every route was a treacherous mountain road, and a desert besides, so one had to cross a pass with no water to be had.

"Even so, thirty ri is far… It would take three days one way."

"Now, what was it called again. 'Drone,' was it?"

"A drone, yes. Those are far too small to ride. And besides, thirty ri is too far. Over the long term it is not as though there are no options, but as things stand there is no prospect of one."

"They do say hardship polishes a man. Having problems is no bad thing. As the saying goes, the lion casts its own cub into the bottomless valley."

"No, that is, 'the lion casts another's cub (a former husband's child) into the bottomless valley.'"

"It wasn't its own cub?"

"Lions, ah, or rather the big cats, and certain kinds of monkeys too, do it now and then. Among humans you sometimes get people mistreating their stepchildren, so it's much the same."

"All at once the lion has come to look like a vulgar little brute."

"And to add to it, the male lion is a freeloading idler who won't even hunt, yet swaggers about all the same."

"What."

The Master's estimation of lions plummeted to the very bottom of the earth.

"Well, setting aside the affairs of animals that aren't found around here, what is the reason for going to the trouble of placing villages so far afield?"

"Dungeon structures cannot easily be destroyed, so they make for ideal strongpoints to hole up in. An unbreakable castle is nothing but a nightmare in a siege. On top of that, the enemy cannot simply ignore it and press on ahead."

"In that case, would it not be enough to place only a fort, without going so far as a village? The trouble with a wall is that it cannot protect the fields. Because plants need sunlight, we cannot put a roof over them. Strictly speaking there is such a thing as artificial light, but the dungeon-energy balance would never add up."

"True, a wall struggles against siege towers that rise higher than the wall, and if the enemy takes to the air, whether by birdfolk or by flying weapons, it becomes meaningless."

"Flying without the aid of a dungeon's unique law is hard work, so I doubt there will be many flying enemies. But there are flying weapons that rely on no unique law, like fire-arrows or drones."

"From the Library-City Dungeon to Hiratsuka, where the Toshima Magistracy sits, is about fifty ri, and from there to Kōnodai about thirty ri. And there is a well-maintained highway running from Fuchū by way of Hiratsuka toward Kōnodai."

"The geographical layout is indeed roughly that."

"If we place Kanae Village at thirty ri and a fort dedicated to defense at forty ri, one could reach Hiratsuka in five days without camping in the open, and continue straight on toward Kōnodai from there."

"So you mean to fold everything out to forty ri into the dungeon's sphere of influence."

"No. Out to fifty ri, just short of Hiratsuka, as far as the bridge over the dried-up river."

"It was only the other day that Harima-no-suke-dono was making the unreasonable demand that we fold even this Kishi Village, two ri out, into the dungeon's sphere of influence."

"Come now, the west already reaches fifteen or sixteen ri, all the way to Biwabashi, doesn't it? Fifty ri will be done in no time. Better to have the plan laid out now. This dungeon is expanding its sphere of influence as no other ever has, so before long we'll be talking of a hundred ri, or a thousand."

"A hundred ri I'll grant you, but to take in a thousand ri at a single glance would mean twelve hundred kilometers, a tower of four million shaku. Even with the fastest tier-group elevator, just climbing it would take a full day."

"Could that 'tier-group elevator' not be laid down along the ground?"

"A horizontal elevator? True, since it's a dungeon system called a 'transfer circle,' there would be no maintenance issues like with a machine… But a dungeon is fundamentally something you stack up or down, so the notion of going horizontal had never occurred to me. I'll go back and look into it."

With that, Marie returned to the dungeon proper.