Battleship "Beton" Enters Service

[Minuma]

The dungeon-structure battleship Beton was complete. In appearance it was a small car-ferry with the cabin section lopped off, or thereabouts.

Moored along the shore and undergoing fitting-out were the Murakami Navy's No. 2 ship, the Zabuton; the Kappa Navy's No. 3 ship, the Afonso da Silva; and the Kuki Navy's No. 4 ship, the Takayanagi. Once these were finished and their crews fully trained, the Beton would be handed over to the Unakami Navy.

"Captain-candidate Miguel Manuel Coelho da Costa, at your service."

"Likewise a captain-candidate, Lourenço José Santos Ferreira."

The two young kappa greeted Marie.

"I'm told the kappa are well-versed in ships. There's a weapon that mows down an enemy force on the bank from out on the water. Are you familiar with the machine gun?"

"A Kinka beast, you mean? I've heard the name, but… I couldn't really say."

It was not a Kinka beast.

"Matchlocks and great cannon alike are expensive, hard to come by, and can't be automated. If you can think of some good method, do let me know."

The shipbuilding retainer and the candidate crewmen boarded, and the Beton set out from port.

[Tier-Group 3, 10th-Floor Reception Room]

Marie conferred with Kobayashi, the machinery retainer, and Fukushima, the shipbuilding retainer, about the armament of the Beton-class battleship.

"The trial voyage is going smoothly. It should prove its worth come the wheat harvest next spring," Fukushima reported.

"Even so, once the farmland reaches a million chōbu, our transport capacity won't be enough."

"We should decide the maximum size of cargo ship to operate on Minuma sooner rather than later. The trouble is, the bigger a cargo ship gets, the more sharply the costs balloon for the ship itself, the routes, and the harbor facilities, so we need to study where to set the bar."

"Couldn't we make trucks out of dungeon structure too, the way we do ships?"

"Parts that are hard to render in dungeon structure, like the motor and the tires, scale with the size of the truck. And since the bookmobile lineup has no extra-large trucks, this dungeon can't summon them. Extra-large trucks are restricted to the roads they can travel, so they probably don't suit a mobile library. I'll look into whether there's some workaround."

As Kobayashi noted, a constraint peculiar to the library-city dungeon is that there is no extra-large-truck bookmobile, so none can be summoned.

"Next, regarding the Beton class's armament. We want something that can punch through Preta and armor at a range of one to two kilometers… a machine gun, ideally a heavy machine gun, but of course no such thing exists in this world."

"I looked into it, and heavy machine guns date to roughly the era after the World War some hundred and fifty years back, so I have a feeling a detailed blueprint or two might be lying around somewhere. But actually building one would be quite difficult, I think," Kobayashi said, voicing his concerns.

"So in the end, for now, is a volley of multiple-launch rockets our best bet?"

Crude rockets made by packing iron pipe with fertilizer were something this dungeon had made heavy use of since its early days.

"The library's stock of equipment includes no firearms, and anything that demands advanced technology to manufacture is beyond our reach. For the moment, there's no help for it."

"And how should we mount them on the ship?"

"The hull sides are dungeon structure, so they can't be broken; we use those as a shield, mount the rocket launchers on the vehicle deck inside, and fire them remotely from the wheelhouse in case of an accidental discharge. That would be best. Regrettably, manufacturing enough rockets to blanket a wide area will be difficult, though," Fukushima said.

"I would dearly love a machine gun. Isn't there an army-garrison dungeon somewhere?"