Those Who Leave, Those Who Stay (Day 2, Afternoon)

[Kamikochō] West of the Dungeon, Foot of the Hills

"I see. So you're leaving."

Okada Tarōzaemon saw the refugees off.

"The other side's three thousand strong, after all. The odds are just too bad."

"I think the Secretary-General will win. As for Harima-no-suke-sama, well, that's another matter."

"Heh, if that's how it turns out, then we've fled for nothing."

"Later on, even if you come crawling back saying you changed your minds, the Secretary-General won't be angry, so do come back, all of you."

There won't be a field left for you, though. Something like that, Marie probably wouldn't say.

[Core Room]

"Master, the wall will be a perfect circle, thirty meters of sheer vertical height, with bookshelves lined along the top to form a parapet. Later we'll fill in the inside of the wall and turn it into fields."

"Thirty meters, huh."

"I'll secure as much height as possible, but any higher and we'd be burying part of the fields we've already made, and there isn't enough dungeon energy besides."

"No, I don't mean the height falls short. I mean is it really that high?"

"We need a height that can't be climbed with mere ladders. We'll set our gambits while they're off building siege towers. Also, the Building Standards Act caps urban structures at thirty-one meters, so I've roughly matched that."

"Marie-san, by Rāja-san's calculations their supplies last ten days at most, wasn't it?"

"That's right."

"Even if they've got a supply base out at the edge of the eastern country, it's six days from there to here. Three days to Kasumigaseki in Iruma. So if we tie them down even two days, they won't be able to go anywhere, will they?"

"Master, it would be fine if they turned back after failing the siege, but if a force that size descended on Kasumigaseki, the fields around the magistracy would certainly be ravaged, and if a famine broke out on top of that, this dungeon's harvests couldn't sustain Kasumigaseki."

"I had the feeling that with a wall we could at least hole up, but holing up alone won't do, then."

"It won't."

"In that case, what do we do?"

"At the very least, we have to annihilate them here, so they pose no threat to Kasumigaseki."

"Annihilate… there are ten thousand of them. Is it really all right to do something like that?"

"It's fine. I can't promise total extermination, but routing them is more than possible."

Militarily the order was reversed: "extermination" meant losses of half a force (in this case 1,500 men), and a "rout" meant eight tenths (2,400). But of course Marie was no soldier, nor was she so well versed in history. To her understanding, "extermination" meant cutting down all ten thousand or so, noncombatants included, leaving none behind.

"This won't depopulate the whole eastern country, will it?"

"Humans have the highest breeding rate of the Six Realms, so they multiply right away. Even this dungeon started with only two adventurers, and already there are close to two thousand humans. By contrast there are a mere five Asura, two beastfolk… though there may be foxes or tanuki passing as human and living here… and as for Deva, zero. We've no need of Pretas."

This wasn't a case of multiplying, but the breeding rate of humans was certainly high.

"Is that how it works?"

"Even supposing a thousand humans die each day from lifespan, illness, accidents, fifteen hundred are born, so the average gain is five hundred. Statistically, feeding a hundred or hundred and fifty thousand to the dungeon each year would pose no problem whatsoever. The ethical questions aside."

This wasn't Kojiki arithmetic.

"Marie-san, how many pirates has this dungeon eaten so far?"

"A little over fifty head. Thereabouts."

"If we fed it something like a hundred thousand, wouldn't the Dungeon Core burst?"

"A hundred thousand I can't say, but this batch of ten thousand is no problem. According to the Encyclopedia Dungeonica, large-scale dungeon disasters have produced many deaths in the past as well. There's the possibility that, unable to absorb it all, the energy would flow off into the World Core, but… no need to worry about it bursting."

"A dungeon disaster? Is there such a thing? Sounds dangerous."

"A large party tries to clear a dungeon and fails, or a village built inside a dungeon gets eaten up, that sort of thing. From the dungeon's point of view it isn't a disaster at all. This siege too, if it goes according to my plan, will be a splendid dungeon disaster."

[Higashimachi] East of the Dungeon, Foot of the Hills

At the foot of the hills, beside the east gate, stood a short stretch of wall some thirty meters high and a hundred meters long, like a cutaway model.

"For this vertical wall, image-wise a Chinese-style city gate feels like it'd suit, but it wouldn't be familiar to this cultural sphere, and if you think about it normally a tower gate is the answer, except the fabrication is a bother, and even if I summoned a small library to keep things simple the design wouldn't match."

A wall needs a gate. Otherwise no one can get in or out.

"Marie, I'm going to ask something terribly basic, but if a fine wall like this suddenly appeared, wouldn't it be blatantly suspicious?"

Rāja posed the elementary question. True, the enemy knew their opponent was a dungeon, but not what cards it held.

"Ah, you've got a point there."

"Wouldn't it be better, like I proposed yesterday, to make it look like a natural earthwork?"

"But even though dungeon structures themselves can't be broken, a forty-five-degree slope lets you use ladders normally, and if it's low, arrows clear it. With our garrison so small, that means casualties on our side too. But… Rāja, if you were the enemy and there were a wall you couldn't get over, what would you do?"

"Well, there'd be nothing for it but to turn back. Dig in around the far side of the valley, spend the night, and pull out the next morning."

"You'd spend the night?"

"The road's clogged with handcarts, so turning them around on the spot would cause chaos, and a night march is dangerous."

"One campsite, I suppose."

"They'd at least keep up the pretense of a siege. Before the valley, somewhere out of arrow range, I'd expect them to throw up a siege fort with handcarts and the like. If we channel water from the World Core into the valley to make a quagmire, then fire off all the rockets while they're crossing the valley, we'd gain a fair amount of dungeon energy."

"Isn't there some way to turn the enemy wholesale into dungeon energy with zero friendly losses…?"

"For that, perhaps spreading batteries all across the campsite and setting them all alight at once would do it. Batteries cost more than books, so we might not have enough dungeon energy, though."

Books, newspapers, and magazines were cheap to obtain, but this was no home-appliance-store dungeon, so batteries came dear.

"If we can make them camp the night, then suspicious or not, I'll deliberately make the wall high. Whether knight order or settler, a plan that forces casualties on our side runs counter to the dungeon's 'management philosophy.'"

To realize a life of health and abundance in both spirit and substance, or some such grand thing Marie liked to proclaim. But for Marie, the dungeon's de facto dictator, to use the Shiso (Asura) to control society, to treat those outside the bounds of civil society not merely with discrimination but as less than human, and to enforce thoroughgoing population control, was a splendid dystopia indeed.