The Danger of That Dungeon

[The Desert]

"What makes that dungeon peculiar is not that some lord has settled into it, but that the dungeon itself has set out to run an estate."

Hosokawa Minbu-no-shō explained.

"For the Satomi house's sake, I merely wished to subjugate a dungeon rich in water that no country governs. Even so, why is a dungeon making rice paddies and gathering settlers and the like? It's gone to too much trouble if it's only to eat people, hasn't it?"

Satomi Uma-no-kami asked.

"Of course a dungeon eats people. The reason defeating monsters yields all manner of things, or that there are treasure chests, is to draw in adventurers, and the unlucky adventurer gets eaten by the dungeon."

"That much I know. And that a dungeon can't sustain itself unless it eats people."

"So a safe dungeon where no adventurer ever dies will eventually decline and collapse. On the other hand, a dungeon that is far too dangerous gets no adventurers coming at all, and so it too declines and collapses. It's another matter if sacrifices are supplied artificially, the way 'Asuka, the Temple of Stone' does."

"Minbu-no-shō-dono, I hear Asuka is on quite poor terms with its neighbors."

"Naturally. The Asura dwelling in Asuka go hunting for sacrifices. Asura like that regard humans and beastfolk as nothing more than animals. In contrast, at 'Umeda, the Mercantile City,' the merchants have built a town inside the dungeon. There's no need to offer up sacrifices at all; with a large populace living there, they die of old age in time. That's the way of it."

"And the one running it is not the merchants' representative body (er, the Afflicted-Area Council, was it? The Ring-Part Council?) but the dungeon itself, and that's what makes that dungeon what it is, then."

"Worse still, on a scale without precedent. It's the 'Million-Chōbu Reclamation Plan,' no less. Gather people by the million, and every year the dead will number in the tens of thousands. There's no dungeon that takes the lives of ten thousand adventurers, barring a 'dungeon disaster.' To think a mere dungeon would scheme that far."

"So Musashi and Sō and the rest, blinded by greed for what's right in front of them, were easily duped by the dungeon."

"No, they're doing it knowing full well, no mistake. Their scheme is to feed their overgrown human population to the dungeon, and to buy food from the dungeon in return. The dungeon never sallies forth to attack, so it poses them no direct threat. True, its sphere of influence is gradually widening, but existing villages won't be swallowed up by the dungeon. And so the ones who suffer are only those countries further out still, the likes of my own Awa, pressed by the surrounding nations that enjoy the dungeon's bounty."

"A troublesome opponent indeed."

"Sumō was by rights on the victims' side, but it's already taken a hand in this. Kō, Shina, and Koshi are over the mountains, so they're safe enough. In the end, the ones who take the damage are the East, riven by internal turmoil, and my own Awa. As for the East, that Oda whelp has offered to swear fealty to the dungeon, and they might just use the dungeon's power to unify the land."

"That Oda of the ass-crest? But, Minbu-no-shō-dono, I'd think the dungeon can't send reinforcements to Oda."

"In the end, what decides a war is the economy. If Oda allies with the dungeon and builds up its national strength, that's a far greater threat than direct reinforcements."

"The East is in this fix as the fruit of its own turmoil, so I half feel it's reaping what it sowed."

"Fortunately, it's an opponent one can talk to. Force our way to the Core, take the Core hostage, and make it surrender, and we can subjugate it. It's only a dungeon, after all. It won't cut its belly over honor the way a samurai would."

"And just where on a Dungeon Core would the belly be, I wonder. So you mean to tame the dungeon, then."

"Even if we don't go so far as subjugating and taming it, it's enough if it can be put to good use. Take Unakami Tenzen-dono's Iinuma, for instance. There's a large water-attribute dungeon there that yields fish. When that dungeon wants sacrifices, it stirs up a storm inside the dungeon of its own accord and victims fall. Even so, a catastrophe with a thousand-odd victims, dire enough to be called a dungeon disaster, has happened only twice in several hundred years, and since it yields a great quantity of fish, the adventurers of Iinuma put boats out within the dungeon and hunt the fish."

"… Minbu-no-shō-dono, that dungeon there strikes me as far easier to handle. But I lose the moment I start thinking about it."

"Musashi and the like think along those lines, but to put it the other way around, precisely because it suits Musashi all too well, it's far too dangerous for Awa. That's why falling in with Uma-no-kami-dono's plan serves the Hosokawa house better. That's the long and short of it."

"The Core is at the top of that tower, isn't it? It'll be a wretched business if we can't use the transfer circle."

Satomi Uma-no-kami pointed toward the upper reaches of the tower.

"In a tower-type dungeon the Core is usually at the very top. So there's also the method of having bird-beastfolk adventurers fly in through a window and seize the Core, but…"

"We've no bird-beastfolk, mind."

"No, a countermeasure of that order the dungeon will surely have taken, intelligent as it is, and that dungeon is too tall for even birds to reach, so it'd be useless. That's why I haven't gone to the trouble of hiring any."