How to Make Good Use of Dungeon Monsters

[Tier-Group 4 Great Hall]

When Marie loaded Yōko into a car and headed back, hammering out the finer details along the way, she found Anne busy attending to a whole crowd of the Yoshikawa clan.

"Anne, is there a rat to be had anywhere?"

"Marie-san, there's one on the dungeon's summonable-monster list."

"Oh, there is? Then I'll summon one. Could you make some rat tempura for this fox? And a cage to keep the rats in… Ah, a nameless dungeon monster won't run off, will it."

"Strictly speaking they aren't 'alive,' so they only follow simple orders. They won't flee or anything like that."

"In that case, I'll summon the rats in the Tier-Group 3 kitchen, so once it's cooked, bring the dish to the reception room."

Anne set off to cook by way of the inter-tier-group elevator.

"Yōko-san, please wait in the reception room until the rat tempura is ready."

"As long as rat tempura is coming, I've no complaints."

"Now then, Yoshikawa-san, you seem to have come here in quite a hurry."

"We finally ran clean out of food, and fled before we could starve to death. We catfish have no particular need for the rats to be cooked, so we'll happily take them as they are."

In appearance, a clothed, human-sized catfish, yet for some reason it had arms and legs. The very image of the anthropomorphized catfish you see in old catfish-prints.

"There's a restriction that monsters can't be summoned directly onto a floor where people are present, but here in Tier-Group 4 there are no residents on the penthouse floor, so I'll summon them there. Please come up to the fifth floor."

Marie summoned rats in the penthouse, put them in a bucket, carried them up to the fifth floor, and fed the catfish.

"Ahh, this is a help. To be given a pond, small though it is, and food besides, rats though they may be."

Yoshikawa was grateful.

"The pond will grow larger yet. There's no filling it with water all at once, you see."

Reasonably enough, when you're talking six hundred million tons, on the scale of the Ozegahara Dam, simply filling it with water would take a span of time not measured in mere days.

Among the Yoshikawa clan were several who did not look like catfish.

"We are pruturgêsu. People of this country call us kappa. I am Antonio Augusto Santos Pereira."

"Ah, kappa, is it. The ones fond of cucumbers."

"Cucumber, we say pepino. But pepino is not the only thing we eat, no."

"What sort of work can a kappa do?"

"It differs from person to person. I am a padre who serves Lord Deus, a bonze in the words of this country."

"A kappa abbot, then. Indeed, even kappa would have need of temples."

"Your name, in the pruturgêsu tongue, becomes Maria, the most common name among women."

"My, is that so."

The roots of the word are different, however.

[Core Room]

"Migrants keep pouring in, food imports keep falling behind. What a bother. We cannot very well have humans eating rats."

Food imports were lagging far behind schedule, while the inflow of migrants ran ahead of expectations.

"As I recall, dungeon monsters can summon insects too. Worst case, insect-eating, then."

"In general, the insects eaten as food are limited. Silkworm pupae, locusts, bee larvae, a few caterpillars, about that much. Silkworms are basically caterpillars too, so really three kinds. Given they're called 'imo'-mushi, 'tuber-worms,' they were probably an important food back in the Jōmon period."

That sort of thing was widely eaten in the Edo period as well. Naturally, in this world too they were used as food.

"At least that settles the feed for the foxes and the catfish, then."

"Although, having a rat's drop item be a rat's corpse is the absolute worst in terms of dungeon-energy efficiency. Rats are everywhere, so it's more profitable to procure non-dungeon-monster rats and breed them. Of course, if they escape, this library-city dungeon would be overrun with rats."

Normally, defeating a dungeon monster yields some sort of "drop item" by chance. This too is a feature meant to conserve dungeon energy.

"A difficult problem."

"Still, it's only a matter of time before rats slip in among the cargo, so countermeasures will be necessary. I have a feeling the library equipment included a cockroach-extermination robot, but whether it handled rats…"

In places like libraries where chemicals can't be used, the quickest way to deal with pests is to hunt them physically.