Preparing for the Siege (Day 3, Morning)

[Core Room]

Dawn broke. Throughout the library-city dungeon, the knight order and the hastily-assembled auxiliary units alike pressed on with their preparations in a frantic bustle.

"The enemy army finally arrives this evening. But there are most certainly ninja mixed into this dungeon."

For the record, in this world they hardly ever say "ninja." They're called shinobi, or grass, or any number of things; there's no one fixed name for them.

"We'll have to keep a close watch with the surveillance cameras. Sabotage will be difficult, since the dungeon itself can't be broken, but still."

"True, the enemy may be toads, but they can hardly pull off feats like Jiraiya in those old tales. Even so, we should assume the enemy will do precisely the thing we'd least want them to."

[Higashimachi] East Side of the Dungeon, Foot of the Hill

A thirty-meter wall. The gate was nothing but a hole punched into the wall, about five meters wide and five meters high, with no turret over it and, for the moment, not even a door. A gateless gate.

"For now, this is about what the wall will be. Once we level the inside later, there'll be a thirty-meter difference in height between the inner and outer sides of the gate, so we'll have to work out how wide and how steep the road should be. The grade changes depending on whether we plan, in the future, to use handcarts and wagons, or to consider automobiles. We won't need a railway, at any rate."

"Marie-san, right now we don't even have wagons, only handcarts."

"Wagon or handcart, we ought to avoid anything over five percent. Which means we'd need a six-hundred-meter ramp for the wall section, and… wait. This hill is roughly a kilometer and a bit in radius and about a hundred and thirty meters high, isn't it? A height difference of a hundred and thirty meters at a five-percent grade is a length of two point six kilometers…"

For wagons and handcarts, a steep grade is a natural enemy.

"That's nowhere near enough."

"The maximum grade for an automobile road is twelve percent, so given that the dungeon's summit is roughly three hundred meters on a side, with a car we could just about manage by bending the road a bit to gain distance. But, at the most basic level, we have no industrial base, so we can't maintain automobiles anyway."

"So for now we're relying on muscle power. I do wonder why it's up on a hill like this."

"It was on a hill from the start. Most likely it's meant to be that 'city upon a hill' which spreads knowledge. In this world, there's a passage in a book the kappa all invariably carry: 'You are the light that illuminates the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden away.' The library-city dungeon was probably meant to become the standard for the whole world."

"And then the Master, not knowing the word 'librarian,' summoned you instead, Marie-san."

"Under the original design it would have been the librarian of Ox-Head and Horse-Head. It seems that by working through the tutorial in order, one was meant to learn the basics of running a dungeon. A Minotaur (male) or a Minowakka (female) would have served as fighting strength too, so they'd have come in handy in a case like this."

Of course, it was not Ox-Head and Horse-Head. Ox-Head and Horse-Head have the mouths and innards of oxen and horses, so they prefer raw fodder, but when the Dungeon Master first opened the refrigerator, what stood lined up inside were vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, eggs, milk, and the like.

"Ride Horse-Head, command a corps of Ox-Heads. That sort of thing, then. Powerful on a battlefield, certainly."

"The fact that those toad bastards aren't bringing horses means horses are quite the rarity. Honestly, an invader who won't even bring a horse deserves nothing but to be slaughtered to the last. No prisoners."

"Rāja, if you do that, then from now on the enemy will fight to the bitter end like cornered animals and stop conveniently fleeing or surrendering for us. If they surrender, wouldn't 'the commander-in-chief alone commits seppuku' suffice? Besides, even if we lose, you'd come back to life after committing seppuku."

It was Rāja who dropped the honorific. True, a Named monster can be revived, but it requires a considerable amount of dungeon energy. Especially with someone like Marie, whose abilities are needlessly high, the cost runs steep.

"Harakiri, no matter how you look at it, is obviously going to hurt."

In point of fact, Marie possesses the mental fortitude to slit her own belly and fling her own innards about without batting an eye. And so, nothing whatsoever had been solved regarding the grade of the road.