by Fuse
“What do your spies tell us, Your Majesty?” his knight captain asked as he took a moment to ponder this, eyes closed.
“…We seem to be out of danger. The war has ended.”
“It has?!”
The captain couldn’t hide his surprise, and the Pegasus Knights behind him were already murmuring among themselves.
“—Wait. I am not fully ready to believe this yet.”
The knights fell silent, straightening up at the king’s words.
His covert team reported that one of the magic-born had rooted out their surveillance network. The fact that a team so gifted in the art of camouflage would be discovered was hard to swallow, but they had apparently managed to dodge their pursuers.
However, the spy leader, judging any further approach to be too dangerous, had sent a request for access to all levels of equipment, reflecting the added level of danger to their work.
They were right. Gazel needed more details. Another investigation would be in order once the postwar chaos had settled down.
“I will have further orders later. For now, I want the Pegasus Knights to stand by and remain in a battle-ready state. For the rest of the forces, I will lower the alert level to a state of elevated battle preparedness. We must prepare for every contingency.”
“““Yes, my lord!”””
The news that all was calm in the forest was good, but now was no time to breathe a sigh of relief. Thus, King Gazel decided to accept his covert team’s request and enlist them to conduct a more detailed investigation of the area.
Three months passed.
The leaders of the kingdom were assembled in the king’s receiving room, waiting for word from him. Whatever he had to say would mark the final conclusion to the past several days’ worth of debates and discussions, conducted with barely even a break for sleep.
For the moment, at least, any damage caused by the sudden onrush of monster activity in the forest was surprisingly light. Things were stable around its boundaries, giving no clue that any war had taken place at all. There were a few more monsters around than in the days of Veldora, perhaps, but no more than what would be considered a “busy” year for Jura. Dwargon was expecting at least twice as much damage as this.
The slime, they all believed, was more than tangentially related. As was the massive orc army that dominated, then disappeared. And the presence of high-level magic-born of mysterious origins who were powerful—and observant—enough to realize the kingdom was watching them.
And now, according to reports, this horde of two hundred thousand were dispersing across the forest—peacefully. That, and they had evolved into high orcs—a state of affairs completely beyond King Gazel’s comprehension.
This town the slime was building featured a largely hobgoblin population, all born from regular goblins, and Gazel knew the mysterious ball of jelly had to be involved in this sudden rash of evolution.
I cannot ignore this, he thought as he reread the report. Special A is one thing, but this could easily be classified as an S before long—
In other words, yet another danger that struck at the core of Dwargon. As king, he could not simply sit here and wait for things to happen.
Levels of danger were assigned based on the level of damage that could result from them, as follows:
Special S: Also known as catastrophe level. This could be applied to some demon lords, as well as dragons and their kin, and reflected the kind of threat that no single nation could handle. It would require international cooperation to give the human race even a chance at survival.
S: Also known as disaster level. Normally applied to demon lords. Small nations would have no chance against such a threat, and a larger one would need to expend all its resources to handle it.
Special A: Also known as calamity level. A threat that could topple a nation’s government, caused by the maneuvering of high-level magic-born and demons.
A: Also known as hazard level. A threat that could potentially cause widespread damage to a single town or region.
These were simply general guidelines, of course, but they had been widely adopted as a handy way to quickly reference the strength of a given monster. And Gazel’s covert team had already applied a Special A rating to this group.
An orc lord by itself was an easy A—nothing to sniff at, but also nothing a team of Pegasus Knights couldn’t feasibly handle. But if a massive crowd of armored, frenzied orcs stampeded into a city, the casualties would be unimaginable. A smaller kingdom would be swallowed whole.
There was no saying if, or when, the potential threat’s attention might shift focus to Dwargon. It wasn’t a problem that could be solved merely by hoping for good fortune. Along those lines, Special A sounded about right to the king.
But in a way, this wasn’t even the issue. The real concern was this person, or presence, that stopped such an overwhelming threat. One who had several powerful magic-borns at his beck and call—creatures powerful enough to see through the king’s A-level spies and their concealment magic—and enact some mysterious evolution process on all his subjects. The conclusion of the staff assembled in the king’s chamber was that the true nature of this presence needed to be uncovered, and quickly.
If we make an error in handling this, it might spell the end of the kingdom.
Thus, he concluded that he needed to gauge matters with his own eyes.
The chamber was shrouded in silence. Everyone inside swallowed nervously, waiting for the king’s speech. Gazel looked down upon their impassioned faces for a moment, then solemnly began.
“I feel that I must meet their leader.”
The declaration visibly shook the others in the room. But no one spoke up. The king’s word was final, and they knew there would be no defying it. Instead, responses sprang up from four people among them.
“Allow me to join you, then, my lord.”
“—And I, as well. I could hardly allow you to shoulder the burden alone.”
“Hee-hee-hee-hee! Perhaps a little outing once in a while would be nice, yes.”
“In that case…allow the Pegasus Knights to personally guarantee your safety.”
They were, in order: Henrietta, fetching knight assassin and leader of Gazel’s covert team; Vaughn, admiral paladin and the nation’s top military officer; Jaine, arch-wizard and a crafty old woman; and Dolph, captain of the Pegasus Knights and an officer who reported directly to the king. Together, they led the strongest of Dwargon’s military forces, and it would be the first time that all four would leave the kingdom together since Gazel’s crowning as Heroic King.
“Very well. Then allow me to see this through…personally.”
Upon their king’s words, everyone in the room sprang into action.
Which way would the pendulum swing on this? Gazel wanted to avoid making needless enemies, but if their intentions were evil in his mind, then this was one noxious weed that needed to be plucked out sooner than later. Such were his thoughts—and either way, this potential root of evil could no longer be left unaddressed.
His decision made, the king began to take action.
I have to say, this town was really starting to look nice. A lot nicer than I had thought it’d be.
Thanks to planning the city out from scratch, the buildings had all been arranged in very neat order. Nice to see my efforts didn’t go to waste. Though all I really did was yell at people to do my bidding.
The homes were in such orderly rows, like pieces on a checkerboard, that things could get a bit tricky if you lost your bearings—but that didn’t really matter, I felt.
My main concerns were things like toilets, water supplies, pest prevention, and bath equipment. I know what the standards were like in Japan, and I had no reason to lower my expectations over here. I knew the levels of civilization I was working with, among all the monster races, and I had every right to ignore their standards. So I planned things out the way I wanted, from the start.
This was about where I pictured things
would be, once we had water and sewers worked out—but really, it was even more perfect than I was planning for.
Just look at the toilets, for one. At first, I had a toilet stall carved out of wood—which didn’t work at all, so I had it changed out.
A wooden toilet, unlike the squat toilets you see across Asia, made cleaning a nightmare. Splatter them with waste, and you’re never getting that smell off, trust me. Let the cleaning slide a bit, and they’d start to rot. You shouldn’t let the cleaning “slide” in the bathroom, of course, but either way, going with pure wood presented too many longevity issues to be acceptable. Steel or metal were ruled out—we had far too few resources for that, and expending them on such luxuries was bound to be frowned upon.
So I decided to go with a toilet made out of something close to the porcelain I recalled in my memory. Good ol’ Thought Communication helped a lot with this. I was able to use it on anyone I liked, which made getting my point across child’s play. Concepts too difficult to impart with words or pictures could be “imagined” in my mind and transmitted without any discrepancies creeping in.
The rest, I left up to our dwarven artisans. Porcelain did exist in this world, and a number of daily necessities were even made from it, so the seat itself wasn’t hard to make. We just had to select the right kind of soil from the local area, then cook it up to high temperatures with the furnace I prepared. It was a trial-and-error process for them, but once they hit on the right formula, the rest was easy. In a flash, they recreated the exact sort of sit-down toilets I recalled from Earth. Combine that with the wooden seats we had already made, and we were all set.
So with that, every home now had a working toilet and drainage system. It never failed to amaze me how handy these dwarves were. But that was only the first surprise.
For example, running water. I had projected into their minds the image of turning a knob to make water run out of a faucet, but I had all but given up on them managing to implement that. They spoke of devices that used highly refined magical stones to collect water from the atmosphere, but they were both expensive and bulky. Procuring such stones was an avenue that only the filthy rich could afford anyway.
By the way, not even the dwarves had ever seen a flush toilet in action. The idea of using magic stones and other high-end equipment for something like that must’ve seemed silly to them. Outhouse-style numbers were the norm around Dwargon, and even that was considered the peak of bathroom technology by this world’s cultural standards.
Still, the concept of a clean-water transport system was clear enough to them, even when imparted through the eyes of a “foreigner” like me. So they began development on it—without telling me. They never asked for budget approval, so I was caught totally unaware.
Thinking about it, building a new water and sewer system from scratch would’ve required a ton of cash. We couldn’t just snap our fingers and put one in because it seemed useful or whatever. I was expecting a gradual implementation, perhaps over several decades. But my common sense didn’t apply to this town. We started with bare land, after all, and I was the leader. I could develop this city any way I wanted to. We had already laid out the design for the water system; pooling the dwarves’ knowledge together to install pipes and such was a cinch after that.
But it wasn’t flawless. Providing a constant water pressure, like in my world, was a thornier issue. So we took advantage of gravity instead, like the rooftop water towers you see on high-rises. We had no pressurized pumps, so these rooftop tanks would need to be refilled with water manually. This, thankfully, wasn’t much of a problem for a monster. If you had a Stomach like mine, or Spatial Storage like some others, then transport was never going to be a problem.
Still, these newfangled structures were restricted only to the buildings we had in the center of town. Your average home-owning monster family would still need to trek over to the well for water. We did have smaller-size tanks positioned by each home’s toilet and water-driven facilities, though—fill those up and you were all set. A specialist had to stop by once a week or so to purify the tanks in each home, but by and large, things worked as I pictured them.
I had to hand it to Kaijin and Mildo. I thought they were just a bunch of anvil-hammering blockheads at first. Guess you never know until you ask. Our water system was going to be a long-term headache, I once thought, but it wound up being addressed in record time.
After that, we needed to get the monsters in the habits of keeping areas around water clean, as well as handwashing and gargling. I had no idea if germs could survive long on monsters; I might have been wasting our time with that. But it was a just-in-case kind of thing.
Kaijin told me that most adventurers either quickly required someone who knew the Clean Wash skill (allowing them to purify items or people near them) or learned it themselves. Hygiene was a top priority among them, to the point that failing at it made embarking on a quest impossible. Long journeys mean running into some filth now and then, I suppose, and around here they tackled that with magic. I can’t imagine it had more than a placebo effect, though. Even the goblins were aware of Clean Wash, so I figured it was safe to assume monsters could catch illnesses here.
So there you have it. We had realized my dreams of flush toilets, and as long as your home reserve tank was full, you could turn a knob and get water from the faucet. We were truly a city of culture, as much of an ill match it may’ve been with the rest of the world.
The next issue to tackle was bugs.
We were in a forest, and there were loads of them. They needed to be addressed, or else all the stinging alone would be incredibly painful. It didn’t bother me, but the hobgoblins seemed pretty distressed.
A bigger concern was insects as potential disease carriers. No matter how hygienic we were, it wouldn’t matter if some mystery virus was literally flitting around in our midst. Keeping things clean naturally kept insects at bay, but there wasn’t much we could do for our winged visitors from the forest.
So we had an issue to address, and my first idea for it was window screens. The homes in this town were Japanese-style wooden affairs made from natural materials, and we needed a way to keep bugs from getting in through the gaps.
We used some processed spider silk to create screens. The result not only kept insects at bay—the silk even provided a bit of an anti-theft system, repelling low-level monsters entirely. An unexpected, but welcome, side effect.
Word was that human-built towns used a magical barrier or the like to keep insects out—one per town. Building one for each home would be financially unfeasible, and homeowners wouldn’t have the funds to keep them in service anyway. Along those lines, having an anti–home invasion system in every single house in town certainly wasn’t the way of doing things on this world. But hey, I didn’t care.
Finally, we needed to bathe—an integral part of civilization.
For our own house, in the center of town, we had a bath with water piped in from a faraway volcanic hot spring that I could use at any time. Soei and I used Shadow Motion to install the necessary plumbing—Shadow Motion retained the original temperature of whatever it transported, so I was always guaranteed perfectly heated water, fresh from the spring.
I had left the design of the bath itself to the dwarves, and they had come up with a wonderful marble piece. The entire facility could hold ten or so people, and really, it couldn’t have been more luxuriant and comfortable. More than satisfactory work, I figured, for someone like me, working hard as the big boss around here. The bath was divided into male and female sections, allowing one to use it anytime without worrying about other people—another plus. Some of the monsters were apparently ignorant of that, but that’s what they get for not using their brains a little.
So I had the ideal bath at our own headquarters, but that didn’t solve the bigger problem. It’d be easy to install baths in each of our residential homes, but providing warm water to them via pipes was a bridge too far for us. Even if we wanted to branch out th
e plumbing from the hot spring, the Shadow Motion trickery involved would be too convoluted to be practical. We’d be building more homes going forward, no doubt, and it just wasn’t realistic for Soei and me to be doing home bath installations for them all. (It also went without saying that, deep down, it sounded like a supreme pain in the ass.)
If the act of bathing grew more popular and people began to demand warm water in their own homes, I suppose they could learn Shadow Motion for themselves. Let it be their problem, not mine.
So I had given up on that idea, but I had to admit, it would make winters pretty tough. I had to think of a way to provide some kind of hot water.
Part of my motivation for this stemmed from the fuel problems we were facing. The goblins hadn’t had much opportunity to harness fire before in their lives. If they used it for anything, it was for roasting meat. Now, with all those high orcs joining our ranks, it was becoming vital.
For now we had an ample enough supply of cast-off wood and such to work with, but it wouldn’t last forever. Chopping down trees in the forest and cutting the trunks into firewood would take a massive amount of labor. We just didn’t have the time to think about securing a more stable fuel source, and applying any kind of practical plan would require more investigation. In the meantime, though, I couldn’t just let people burn whatever they wanted.
Just when I thought it was time to do something, Dold, the middle of the three dwarven brothers, stepped up. He had been devoting himself to crafting dyes and accessories, but once most of the town was equipped well enough, he had some free time on his hands. So I asked him to make some tools using the inscription magic he was adept at.
These were generally known as magitools, and unlike most magic items and their high prices, these were made for general use. These magitools ran on magic stones, which were extracted and processed from the magic crystals taken from the cores of monsters. Magic stones were mostly created by humans, who used spirit engineering to produce them; they also existed in nature—but were quite rare.