by Fuse
It certainly wasn’t the first time Ramiris had demonstrated a desire to move here. This hut—which served as an entrance to her full residence—was all the real estate she really needed.
“Okay. So you tried building it here, and the gate guard stopped you. He was getting in your way, so you commanded Treyni to put him to sleep, and then Gobkyuu and these other craftsmen spotted you. Do I have this right?”
“Um… No, that’s not… Well, not exactly the case, I don’t think… Maybe?”
“Okay, so I do. Ramiris…”
“Um… Ha-ha-ha-ha…”
Ramiris must not know the meaning of the word no. She knew this was my territory, as recognized by the other demon lords, and that what she did was tantamount to staging an invasion. If war broke out over this, she’d have nothing to whine about.
But I paused a moment to think it over. Having this hut presented to me gave me an idea. Perhaps I should encourage this. Maybe give her permission to make a labyrinth here, even.
My conversation with Mjöllmile flashed before my eyes. We needed attractions that’d keep visitors coming again and again. These could be theaters, arenas, health spas, you name it, but I was still fishing around for other ideas. Do the same thing enough times, and you’re bound to get bored. We wouldn’t hold daily arena battles—I figured the tournaments would be more seasonal, maybe four a year. We could hold beginner-level matches daily, like with horse racing, but I didn’t see that attracting the connoisseurs among the nobility. We’d mainly be appealing to mass audiences—or maybe the adventurers stopping by.
If this town turned into the trade mecca I was planning, waves of merchants would be visiting, with adventurers serving as bodyguards. I wanted Tempest to turn into a base of operations for people like that. Adventurers could make money in assorted ways, one being monster hunting. Perhaps we could build a labyrinth for them and release some monsters inside? Would that attract a decent amount of daily traffic? A labyrinth is a dungeon, after all; if we invited people to help clear it out, that might attract adventurers with a completist bent.
This could work.
I looked at Ramiris, still smiling awkwardly up at me. I wasn’t too sure—okay, I was completely sure I couldn’t trust her, but maybe we could make something out of this. It was time to talk things over.
First, I asked Gobkyuu’s craftsmen to dismantle the hut for me. Since we already had the materials and everything, I decided to have it relocated for use as a break room for the gate guards.
Next, it was time for a strategic conference. We filed into the usual meeting hall, Gobkyuu in tow.
“Um, what is going to be the, er, happening to us?”
Ramiris’s anxiety was making her less and less coherent. Her eyes were fixed on me now, gauging my temper.
“You don’t have to be so nervous. If you’re trying to be polite, you’re failing miserably.”
I didn’t intend to do anything to her, no. If she was willing to accept my offer, I was willing to overlook her excessively bold overtures. But before that, we had to go over a few things.
“Gobkyuu, I was thinking we could build an emergency shelter space under the arena. Is that possible?”
“I’m not sure it’d be safe to have one directly under the arena stage, no matter how we try to work out the structural calculations. Any empty space under the floor would cause a cave-in at the first shock wave. But if we move this space a little, I think we can avoid that problem.”
“All right. I’d also like to have a door built down there.”
“…?!”
“A door, sir?”
“Right. Make it thick and heavy—and maybe put a bunch of carved stone tablets around the frame and stuff. It needs to look foreboding.”
“Would there be another shelter beyond the door?”
“Nah. No need for that. We just need the door, is all. Right, Ramiris?”
“R-Rimuru?! Are, are you saying that—that…?”
Gobkyuu was questioning my sanity, while Ramiris buzzed happily in the air next to him.
My proposal was simple. Basically, I wanted to have Ramiris build a dungeon and let her manage it. If she was gonna build an entrance in a simple wood hut, better to give her something that looked more the part instead, right? And given how all good dungeons extend deep underground, having it beneath a battle arena just seemed right to me. We could use the arena to train rookies during the off days, and I planned to have a potion shop on the premises. If we ran a dungeon on-site as well, I bet a tavern for adventurers looking for a quick pint on the way back from work would be a big hit. We’d make money off them, and Ramiris would have a home, a job, and a little spending money from me. It’d require mutual cooperation from both of us, but I thought it was a pretty neat idea.
Once I finished explaining all this, Ramiris burst into a flurry of shouting.
“Wh-what?! So—so do you mean that, maybe, not only could I build a labyrinth and live here, but you’ll even give me a full-fledged job?!”
“I guess so, if you’re willing to accept that.”
“Huh?! Okay, okay, so you’re saying that, uh, I no longer have to be the ‘jobless shut-in’ people accuse me of being?!”
The proposal must’ve been a big shock. She opened her eyes wide, babbling on like she had been struck by lightning. “I’m so glad, Lady Ramiris,” Treyni whispered, eyes welling up. Beretta, oddly enough, seemed to be smiling at me—I wondered if that fatigue I felt before was just an act. Did he want this? Maybe, maybe not, but either way, if he’s happy, no worries.
After calming down a bit, Ramiris swallowed nervously. “Um… And you’ll give me an allowance as well?” she carefully asked. “Do you really mean that?”
She must’ve been afraid I’d take it back. I’d never do that. I’m not that much of a sadist. Although, I couldn’t give her an exact figure on her allowance yet, since that depended on sales proceeds. Better put her mind at ease for now.
“I really mean it. But I don’t know how much profit we’ll make until we get things going. How about we say you get twenty percent of the profits after I deduct advertising expenses, rent, and other needed expenses?”
“How, er, how much do you think that would add up to?”
“Well, if we can attract, say, a thousand adventurers in a day, that could net you as much as two gold coins, maybe?”
“Gahhh!! That much?!”
“That’s just an estimate, keep in mind. There’s no guarantee it’ll work out that way. None of what I say means anything until we see some real, paying customers. But if you’re planning to live here anyway, it’s not a bad deal for you, is it?”
Ramiris bobbed her head. If she was going to squat on my property either way, she’d be maintaining her labyrinth no matter what I told her to do. It’d be smarter for her to listen to my offer, for sure—it’d grant her permission to stay and be a way to make money. Really, she only had one choice.
Thus, she latched on to my head and did a little dance of joy. I took that as a yes, and I was sure Beretta and Treyni wouldn’t complain. In fact, they were smiling at Ramiris, who was currently busy tripping off to her own little world.
“Eh-heh-heh… I’m gonna be filthy rich now! No more ungrateful bums calling me a deadbeat and a destitute demon lord!”
Ah well. No harm in that. It’d certainly do nothing to damage the faith her two servants had in her. Her sheer enthusiasm for the offer made me wonder just how often she had been picked on in the past. She was more excited than I was about it, so I doubt I had to worry about compliance.
What’s with her obsession over money, though? I didn’t think a lust for riches was a common trait for a demon lord, myself excluded. Was her lack of a decent job the main issue? Her labyrinth wasn’t exactly teeming with visitors. She must have been lonely, with way too much free time on her hands. It’d be great if we could attract crowds of adventurers to this dungeon—for my sake, as well as hers.
We better work out a pla
n of action fast.
Calling Ramiris back from her mental head trip, I decided to have her help rework our arena plans with Gobkyuu.
The way I saw it, we should expand the open area outside the western gate, where the highway ended, and build the arena there. There was ample pasture space for travelers’ horses, as well as a vast tract of empty land to work with.
Sometime in the future, I’d like to lay rails on top of the highway and run trains up and down it. Ever since I decided to target noble customers for this, I had been considering what to do about our transportation issues. If I could guarantee safe passage for them, I thought it’d be much easier to attract richer tourists. But that wasn’t the only goal. A rail system would make it possible to transport vast amounts of goods in one go, improving convenience and greatly contributing to town development.
That was what I had in mind for the town’s future expansion, so I wanted a spot for the arena that wouldn’t get in the way later on. I could establish a rail station near the spot, hopefully within an hour’s walk of the gate—any farther would be asking a lot from our tourists. Having the arena within walking distance of town also made it possible to offer more hotel options in a smaller area. Unlike my old world, people here did a lot of their traveling by foot. If a journey was up to around six miles round trip, most folks wouldn’t hesitate to hoof it, so a little distance wasn’t a daunting obstacle.
Those were my thoughts behind my proposal for a location, but Ramiris had other ideas.
“Why, though? Didn’t you have empty space within town limits?”
“Yes, but it’s occupied by beastman refugees right now. We have streets of temporary housing laid out for them. I can’t build an arena over that.”
“No,” added Gobkyuu, “we can’t throw the beastmen out of town. I think development will have to wait until after Sir Geld completes work on the new Eurazanian capital.”
“Okay, well, how about we just move them into my labyrinth? I could transplant the entire layout of that area inside it, so it wouldn’t be too much of a burden on them.”
That sounded, to be frank, absolutely bonkers. Gobkyuu and I exchanged glances, unsure we were hearing correctly.
“Er, you mean we’d move the inhabitants in there as well?”
“Um, I can’t move living things around without permission, no. They’d need to willingly go in there for me. But anything inanimate or unconscious? I can whisk it all right over, no prob!”
“Are you serious? So you can move all the beastmen’s houses and belongings inside your labyrinth anytime you want?”
“Yep! You got it!”
She sounded proud of it, as she should. That’s the kind of skill anyone deserved to brag about.
Pressing her for more detail, I learned that this was Mazecraft, one of Ramiris’s intrinsic skills. As the name suggested, it basically made Ramiris the supreme god of any labyrinth she created. It worked over astonishing distances, too, even affecting people and things near the maze entrance. She could even take the weapons and armor off people close by.
It was a crazy power to think of, but it did have its limits. If the target’s equipment had its own consciousness—a sword infused with its user’s magic, for example—Ramiris couldn’t affect it. You weren’t exactly stumbling over sentient objects like that every day, though, so if you picked a fight with Ramiris, you’d better be prepared to get stripped naked first thing. Maybe she really did deserve the demon lord moniker.
“Wow… I mean, honestly, I thought you had, like, zero ability to defend yourself in battle.”
“Sheesh, way to be super-mean! You’re talking to the woman they call the strongest demon lord in the world!”
“C’mon, Ramiris. Calm down. Tell me what else you can do with it!”
Upon further prodding, she revealed some more details behind her abilities. Essentially, I had five questions for her:
1. How many floors down can you build your underground labyrinths?
2. How many days do you need to build them?
3. What kind of monsters are inside?
4. Can you change their internal structure at will?
5. What happens if someone dies in there?
For a change, Ramiris gave me sincere answers to all of them.
For question one, there was no strict floor limit, but realistically speaking, she could max them out at around a hundred.
As for question two, one floor takes approximately an hour to complete. This figure remained steady for subsequent floors, so a hundred-floor labyrinth took around a hundred hours to complete. Any floors beyond that consumed exponentially greater sums of magical energy, hence the answer to question number one.
For question three, you wouldn’t find monsters, let alone insects or other creatures, just arbitrarily inhabiting a labyrinth. Her previous labyrinth had “monsters” in the form of spirits—spirits who remained as part of the floor structure, partitioned off from the physical world but able to come and go as they pleased.
However, it was possible to “seed” a labyrinth with monsters for adventurers to test their skill against. Fill a maze with magicules, and monsters would spring to life from them. Adjusting the labyrinth’s magicule density made it easy to predict the strength of the monsters who resulted, as well as restrict monsters to a certain floor or floors. That made it possible to fine-tune a labyrinth’s difficulty level with some precision. I had an idea of how this magicule infusion process worked, so I’d give that some thought once I had the right container for it.
Regarding question four, the sheer power of Ramiris’s Mazecraft skill meant she could change the entire structure of a floor in about an hour, although floors could not be edited for twenty-four hours after the last revamping.
There were conditions, of course. She couldn’t make something—plants or other organic matter, for example—out of nothing, so structural changes would chiefly result in staid-looking mazes of blank walls. However, if you simply wanted to redecorate a floor with some materials at hand instead of changing its structure, that wasn’t too terribly difficult.
It was also simple enough, by the way, to rearrange a labyrinth’s floor order. This, too, was set in stone for twenty-four hours afterward, but that made it no less useful a tool.
And last but not least, question five. Astonishingly, this depended entirely on Ramiris. If she was keeping tabs on things, she could snap her fingers and resurrect the dead inside her labyrinth. I was just wondering how she handled the corpses of monsters and hapless adventurers, but this sounded like nothing short of voodoo to me. Apparently, she wasn’t sure what happened to monsters born inside the labyrinth, since she had no examples to work with yet, but she had already resurrected quite a few adventurers in the past.
This was why she emphasized not being able to move organic creatures inside “without permission” earlier. This “permission” was nothing too formal; what mattered was that the subject in question knew he or she was going into the labyrinth. Without that understanding, any visitors would be refused entry. In other words, when I went into Ramiris’s labyrinth a while back, that was because I actively tried to do so. If I was carrying a sleeping companion on my back as I ventured inside, we would’ve been blown back at the entrance. (One exception to this was infants. Children young enough to not have their own free will yet were essentially treated as “things” by this rule.)
You could drag someone kicking and screaming into a labyrinth, but only at a great burden to Ramiris, so it was impossible if she resisted you at all. “You wouldn’t want to try it,” is how she put it to me.
So there you have it. Essentially, anyone who goes into a labyrinth was under the tyrannical rule of Ramiris—something they agreed to the moment they stepped through the entrance. If they accepted the rules, Ramiris would keep careful tabs on their status.
“And you know how much we like playing pranks, don’t you?” she said, puffing out her chest. “I just like surprising people and seeing their reaction
s. If they died, you know, that’d kind of weigh on my conscience. So I do what I can to keep ’em alive and set them back on their way.”
Sometimes, there’d be an unlucky subject who really did die on Ramiris, but it sounded like those deaths occurred outside of her labyrinth. At the very least, she didn’t want to kill me when I was in there. That golem who looked ready to stomp me to oblivion was only there because she knew she could fix me up, good as new, if called to. That made sense to me, although it seemed to lower the stakes of what I went through quite a bit.
“So if a band of adventurers goes in on a monster-hacking run, you can revive them if they die?”
“Yep! Once they’re booted out of the labyrinth, I can resurrect them like nothing happened. It’s a bit tougher if we’re talking a whole party at once, though, so we might need to send them in with some of my revival equipment.”
Equip a specified item from her Mazecraft labyrinth, and dying would just transport you back outside intact. That solved my safety concerns, which was really the biggest problem.
“Excellent! That’s wonderful, Ramiris!”
“R-really? You mean it? I’m really that great, aren’t I?”
“You sure are! Our ambitions are as good as accomplished!”
“They are? Yeah, they are! I was just thinking that myself!”
We looked at each other and nodded.
“I’ll be counting on you, Ramiris.”
“And I’ll hold up my end of the bargain! It’ll be nothing but smooth sailing ahead!”
Smooth sailing, huh? Hopefully the boat isn’t made out of mud. We couldn’t shake on the deal, given our size difference, but I think our minds were linked up well enough anyway.
