A Map of Saitama Prefecture Should Do the Trick? (Day 2, Morning)

[Core Room]

Dawn broke, and the enemy army began to move.

"The whole army has left the ruins and is heading this way."

"Mint, are they not sending any part of the baggage train back?"

"No, there's no sign of that."

The baggage train numbered something like five thousand, and the daihachi handcarts, hauled by two (one front and one back) or by four (two and two), came easily to over a thousand. Since carts are useless except on a road, and even then move at no steady pace, it had become a great procession roughly ten kilometers long. Everyone but the baggage train marched along the road's verge. Being a desert, at least there were no thickets, which was something.

"Either they don't know the polar method, or the country's so lawless they can't get home without an escort. Truly, deserts are a nightmare for an army once you start thinking about supply."

"Marie-san, if they at least had camels, it might be different."

Camels, nothing. They didn't even have horses.

"The single most useful thing of all would be an off-road military truck. But the industrial capacity here couldn't maintain such a thing. From here on, whether it's Iruma or the neighboring lands of Ke or Sō, however much they improve the highways, in this world of meager supply capacity, moving a large army will remain difficult."

"True. Even if we built post-towns for travelers, we could hardly stockpile food for thousands."

"Rāja, as for our methods for the siege defense… first, what is the lay of the battlefield?"

"To the east, it is a little over one kilometer from the dungeon to the foot of the hill, somewhere between 1.5 and 1.7 kilometers to the edge of the plateau, and about two kilometers to the plateau on the far side. If we raise a flimsy stage-set rampart of dungeon structure at the foot of the hill, conventional weapons cannot break it, so to mount a siege the enemy will most likely camp either on the near side of the valley or on the far side, at the edge of the plateau."

"Then we must hurry to bring even the far side of the valley into the dungeon's sphere of influence. The rampart is a waste of energy, but… if we're to make the hillside into fields and orchards anyway, can we use it in place of terraced paddies?"

"If they array themselves on the near side of the valley, they will keep a close watch against night raids and begin the siege at daybreak; if on the far side, they will rest at their leisure and then provoke us into open battle. The easier to strike at is when they're on the opposite side of the valley. On the near side they'll be quite wary of night raids, which makes them harder to hit."

"I see. And if General Rāja were the attacker, what would you do?"

"Main camp on the far side of the valley, a forward fort on the near side, I should think. With the main camp across the valley it's hard for the castle to strike out, and watching for night raids is easy. The supply corps I'd keep not separated as a rearguard, but protected behind the main camp. Still, since the supply problem makes a long siege impossible, I'd lay in a generous number of siege engines."

"Even to hold a siege, the lack of place-names is a bother. Iruma, Hiki… this world seems to be a Saitama world, so let us take the Saitama Prefecture map for reference and call our final line of defense, the valley, the 'Shibakawa'; the near side of it 'Amanuma'; and the far side 'Minami-Nakano.'"

"Marie-san, the Shibakawa on the map turns east, but this dry riverbed runs on to the southeast as it is. Is that all right?"

As the Dungeon Master says, the terrain is different.

"Naturally the terrain won't match, so it can't be helped. The western valley we'll call the 'Kamogawa.' As in, 'The waters of the Kamo, the dice of backgammon, and the warrior-monks.'"

"What Retired Emperor Shirakawa was talking about was a river in Kyoto."

"Since we can't even be sure Kyoto exists in this world, it doesn't matter. And yesterday's ruins are forty kilometers to the east, so they'll be 'Toride.' It's shaped rather like a fort, so it suits nicely."

Over two hundred meters across, a doughnut shape, or something of that form. The outer edge is a wall, the inside dips lower, and what looks like the rubble of a collapsed wall lies scattered about.

"Tsukuba is to the east, is it?"

"That sort of thing can't be helped either, the world being different. Judging by distance and bearing alone, the Iruma magistracy, about sixty kilometers to the west, would end up deep in Chichibu."

"In my mind it's more like Kawagoe, though."

"East of the 'Shibakawa' there's a dry riverbed at roughly one-ri intervals, so let us name them the 'Ayasegawa,' 'Motoarakawa,' 'Furutonegawa,' and 'Edogawa.'"

"Marie-san, since the terrain is different, I feel we might actually get more lost. The plateau the dungeon sits on is higher in elevation than the Ōmiya plateau too, and above all there's no hill over a hundred meters anywhere."

"You may not be able to remember place-names, Master, but conversely, neither a Cartesian system (notation like N so-many meters, E so-many meters), nor a polar system (angle so-many degrees, distance so-many meters), nor a geographic system (north latitude so-many degrees, east longitude so-many degrees) is easy for the knight order or the settlers to grasp, so it's better to use place-names alongside them."