The Toshima Magistrate's Office (Continued)

[Toshima Magistrate's Office, Hiratsuka]

"Toshima Daikan-dono, at present we have a highway built as far as the near side of Hiratsuka here. But beyond Hiratsuka the land has not been folded into the dungeon's sphere of influence, so no proper road has been laid out. My proposal is this: that we take the route from here at Hiratsuka through to Kōnodai and Fuchū and, excepting the spots where villages already stand, fold it into the Library-City Dungeon's sphere of influence and lay out a proper highway."

"That should pose no trouble. If you were telling me Hiratsuka itself would be swallowed by the dungeon, then naturally I would refuse, but fewer though they've grown of late, pirates do still turn up on the roads from time to time."

They were not pirates so much as a grubby breed of mountain bandit, but they styled themselves pirates.

"There are limits to living off your own land," said Kinran. "We need a proper highway to make the coming and going easy."

"And so the road south to Ebara is excluded?"

"That route lies in the shadow of Hiratsuka and the villages around it, as seen from the Library-City Dungeon, so it cannot be folded into the sphere of influence. Of course, were we to destroy Hiratsuka once and wait a few years, we could extend the dungeon out that way as well, but as you are aware, we have no such fighting strength."

"There is also the comfort of knowing the dungeon won't come attacking. The Director of Books-sama keeps none of them, but depending on the dungeon, some do harbor dangerous monsters."

"A Named monster can indeed leave the dungeon, but in doing so it loses its special powers. A dragon, for one, cannot fly, and is crushed flat under its own weight."

"There's the constraint that you can't run an elevated road or a water main outside the dungeon either," said Kinran. "Which is why the road the automobiles travel has to skirt around Hiratsuka."

As it stood, there being no proper paving technology, anything outside the dungeon's sphere of influence came out as a gravel road.

"Just as a dungeon has its 'sphere of influence,' a town or village has an unseen sphere of its own. Hiratsuka is fair-sized, so its sphere is perhaps three or four kilo… about one ri. The exact figure we won't know until we test it, however."

"So tell me, Director of Books-sama, how soon will the highway be done?"

"As planned, the stretch folded into the dungeon's sphere of influence should be finished over the winter. The portions near the towns and villages depend somewhat on how the arrangements go."

"Even if only the stretches between village and village are improved, there'll be a return on that much," said Kinran.

[The Nakayama Highway]

Hiratsuka, two hundred kilometers off, was now a day trip.

"Marie-han, we've got our word on it now," said Kinran, "so all that's left is to fold the sphere of influence in right up to the edge of Hiratsuka and scrape together whatever dungeon energy we can off the travelers who pass along the road. That's the way of it, eh."

"Even so, I should think three or four kilometers from the town is about the most we'll manage. It isn't decided by distance alone, mind you."

"And while we're at it, if some clueless pirate happens to come through, we quietly bury him, and the public order improves into the bargain."

"That's nothing short of highway robbery. True, the otherworld's Ishikawa Goemon did say in his death poem, 'Though the grains of sand on the beach of Ishikawa run dry, the seed of thieves in this world shall never run out,' so if we kept burying bandits until they ran out, it would amount to a tidy income. Only, by the laws of this region robbery is punished by crucifixion, and arson on top of it by burning, while in practice it is mostly beheading. So burying a man alive might, after all, cause problems. Why it is that, unlike the Edo period, pirates here are punished by hanging, I couldn't say."

"Suppose there was an otherworld reincarnator from the West among them. In America and Britain, pirates are hanged, aren't they."