The Awa Army's End Comes Anticlimactically

[The Campsite, Early Morning]

Before dawn, the Pretas arrived and entered the campsite, but since Pretas have no need of tents or the like, they simply flopped down on the ground here and there to rest. The humans, apart from the sentries, were still asleep. Just then, the ground frothed and began to tremble in little shudders.

"Earthquake!"

A sentry cried out, and the Awa Army at the campsite sprang up. But baggage and men alike went sinking down into the sand with a steady, sucking pull.

"It's quicksand! Stay calm. If you don't thrash about, you won't sink past your head. Once the quake subsides, work your way out slowly and you'll be fine."

"Curse you, dungeon. Have you gone and won the catfish of Nigōhanryō over to your side as well?!"

Yet it was not only the heavy-bodied Pretas; humans and beastfolk too were swallowed by the sand.

"We've been tricked! This place is within the dungeon's sphere of influence too!"

Some realized the truth, but it was too late. Without even the leisure to compose a death poem, they drowned in the sand.

[The Campsite, Morning]

By the time the sun had fully risen, where the campsite had been there now spread a single expanse of sand, its surface littered with all manner of low-density objects, the spent corpses among them. The Pretas, who made up more than seven-tenths of the host, were heavy, and so lay at the bottom of the sand.

"Quicksand, was it… But can quicksand really kill?"

"Farigole, quicksand is sand that holds water, but because its density is high it lacks killing power, even against Pretas. The effect amounts to little unless you immobilize them and then scorch them in the sun, or sink them at high tide, or build it into a compound trap, and the first of those doesn't work on Pretas. So instead we blow air up from below into a pool of sand to make a fluidized bed, drown the people in it, and once their strength gives out, have the dungeon absorb the corpses. At the very end we clear away the sand and recover the supplies."

"Air, is it."

"It was Mint's idea. Perhaps because this world itself depends on the dungeon for its supply of water and air, the dungeon can supply air just as it does water. Drawing the air all the way out here from the Core was the hard part, though."

"Are there no survivors?"

"None among the humans and beastfolk, it seems. Unfortunately, Pretas go on living even buried in sand, so once we've cleared it away, we'll shove them into a trench while they're in suspended animation and crush them under pressure. Hammering in stakes by hand to finish them off one at a time would take us well past nightfall, and then some."

"Still, to think they'd walk into the trap this easily."

"At worst I'd assumed they would press on as far as Minuma. In any case, everyone except Mint and Sapien-sensei, the sales force included, will be committed to sweeping up the Pretas. We'll somehow wrap it up within the day, and from tomorrow I'll have Harima-no-suke-dono's men and the adventurers see to recovering the supplies."

"The supplies, is it. True, we didn't burn anything, so they can be recovered."

"Food and arms and armor, of course, but having hired on Pretas as mercenaries in such numbers and placed such flashy orders with the merchants, they're bound to have brought a considerable sum of money to pay with. We'll confiscate the lot and use it to buy food."

"Marie-san, is this the end of it, then?"

"As with Tsukuba, Awa has surely no strength left to spare, and will likely be subjugated by Sō, or fall to vassal-state status at best. For my part, it's the movements of the Pretas that concern me more."

"The Pretas? You think the Pretas will do something."

"With some hundred thousand of them killed, well, the killing is still to come, but at any rate, will the enraged Preta host turn on Awa, their employer, and raze it to the ground? Or will every Preta in the world come marching on this dungeon? I've no idea how many millions of Pretas there are in the world, but we might even manage to wipe the Pretas out entirely. Were that to happen, the Six Realms of reincarnation would become five Realms, though."

"They're Pretas, so whenever someone falls into the Preta Realm, won't another just sprout up from a rock again?"

"In that case there'd be no end to it."