A Rich Nation with a Strong Army Goes Bankrupt; a Poor Nation with a Weak Army Stands Out Too Much

[Core Room]

"The survival strategies of living things fall into three categories. They are: the competitive strategy (Competition), the ruderal strategy (Ruderal), and the stress-tolerant strategy (Stress). The balance among them is called the C-S-R triangle."

So said Marie.

"Mm-hm, mm-hm."

"The competitive strategy: strengthen productivity, build up national power, and because there is now more worth protecting, expand armaments and build a mighty empire.

"The ruderal strategy: change your livelihood to suit the shifting times and social conditions, holding no nation and settling nowhere.

"The stress-tolerant strategy: endure a harsh existence in punishing environments such as the polar regions, deserts, and remote ocean islands.

"And so this dungeon is pursuing the competitive strategy out here in the desert. In other words, a rich nation with a strong army. The reason we summoned Rāja, too, was to conquer any other dungeon we find."

"And if we don't go for a rich nation with a strong army?"

"The opposite would be a poor nation with a weak army: accept poverty and live alongside it, thereby lowering the value of the land itself so that no one bothers to invade. If there are no underground resources, it's a viable hand to play. Even if disgusting starfish are swarming all over some beach, there aren't many animals that will eat them. This… won't land with the people of this world, though. They don't have a sea."

"So a village poorer than the pirates won't get raided by the pirates."

"As for the finer points of political strategy, Rāja would know more than I do."

"I'm not familiar with the term 'C-S-R triangle' myself… though it doesn't seem to have anything to do with 'corporate social responsibility'… And I can't claim to have mastered political science perfectly, either. Still, in this world, where land is in inexhaustible surplus and humans are in surplus too, I do think a poor nation with a weak army could be a useful strategy."

"Rāja-san, so if there's no cause for war, there's no need for armaments?"

"War is mostly a matter of ethnic conflict, but this dungeon shares the same ethnicity as its surroundings. The territory is a vast desert, so the land has no value, and the only resource is dungeon-produced fuel. That said, while the people of this world couldn't grasp the value of electricity, if it became known that we can supply water in quantity, there'd be a risk of being targeted."

"So basically, a poor nation with a weak army is the correct answer?"

"The problem with a rich nation and a strong army is that the armaments devour national power, and that they breed wariness in other nations, courting the danger of touching off an endless arms race. The opposite problem, with a poor nation and a weak army, is that depending on location it can be difficult to maintain."

"Depending on location?"

"An unarmed neutral nation can only be sustained by a country at low risk of invasion in the first place, such as a small island nation or a minor European state. Even if it's the protectorate of a great power, should it possess resources or sit astride a vital traffic chokepoint, then without armaments of its own even a great power would struggle to defend it fully."

"This place is three days across the desert just from the nearest town, and the only resource anyone knows about is roughly paper."

"And besides, drawing up a plan to conquer a dungeon that hasn't even been found yet is 'counting the pelts of badgers not yet caught.'"

"Even if we do go the unarmed-neutral, poor-nation-weak-army route, we'd still need anti-pirate measures."

"Owing to the constraints inherent to the 'human farm' nature, even if we say poor nation with a weak army, we can't very well make ourselves so poor that not even pirates would come."

"Marie-san, what constraints does the human farm have?"

"The human farm uses humans' strong emotions as the dungeon's energy source, so it's more efficient to let them live reasonably comfortable lives, hold the occasional festival to make them blow their money, and run it that way."

"True. A dull life would make for thin emotions, too."

"If you crammed them into breeding sheds like a refugee camp and gave them only the barest minimum of feed, the emotional energy you'd reap would drop dramatically. On the other hand, if you compare the starving nations of, say, Africa with gluttonous Japan, the difference in the quantity of food is only about 1.3 times at most."

"There's surprisingly little difference. I'd have thought it was double."

"If they ate double, half the residents would turn into pigs. That aside: even with the same supply of fertilizer and water, that is, the same dungeon energy consumed, an owner-farmer should harvest far more crops than a slave with no motivation. If that gap is more than 1.3 times, then in terms of food as well, there's absolutely no point in stinting on the residents' standard of living."

"So if we're going to give the residents a decent life, the poor-nation-weak-army strategy starts to strain at the seams too?"

"If we're to feed them adequately, then in a desert we have to supply enough of the single most vital resource, 'water,' and as long as there's water, we'll be targeted. This dungeon has already built paddy fields, limited though they are, so it'll be plain to anyone that there's water here."

"This dungeon, the way I see it, already has too much to protect. It may be too late to adopt the poor-nation-weak-army strategy."

"A rich nation with a strong army collapses under an endless arms race; a poor nation with a weak army doesn't suit a human farm. Master, are we in checkmate here?"

"Maybe I'll try using our last remaining Named slot to summon Genghis Khan and just conquer the whole lot, Iruma, Hiki, everything."

"Where Mongolia is concerned, Scutellaria baicalensis (genus Scutellaria) is famous, and ground ivy (genus Glechoma) is also distributed in Mongolia, and there are Mongolian species among the genera Caryopteris and Thymus as well, but if I summon one and a sumo wrestler shows up instead of a conqueror, that'll be a problem."

"True. Even though a Named dungeon monster's meals can be summoned in the dungeon, if it ate like a sumo wrestler we'd need that much more energy."

The pirates call themselves "pirates," but there's no sea, so they're mountain bandits. Whether it's for some simple reason like "pirate sounds cool but mountain bandit sounds smelly," or whether there's some deeper historico-ideological meaning to it, who can say. Besides the pirates, marauding samurai war-bands are a threat too.