In Another World With My Smartphone: Volume 11 Premium Page 19

  In the end, that man was garbage. He had many sins to atone for, and I was glad she’d been the one to stick him like a pig.

  I didn’t know what to do with her, though. From an objective standpoint, she was a criminal who had murdered her monarch. But the monarch was an enemy, and frankly, from Brunhild’s perspective, she was probably a hero.

  I figured there’d probably be no issue if we had her emigrate to Brunhild. Ultimately, what had happened was that a war had broken out between Brunhild and Sandora. Within fifteen minutes, Sandora’s war potential was massively reduced, and then the king of Sandora was killed in action, kind of... Then, the war ended. That was it.

  That was what would have basically happened if a formal war was declared, so it was close enough to me.

  They started the fight, anyway... I wasn’t really looking forward to explaining that to Kousaka, though.

  I just decided not to do that for the time being. That was the best thing for it. Yep, you couldn’t convince me otherwise. The best way to deal with problems you don’t want to address was to just bury them down.

  I removed the prime minister’s paralysis and had him guide me to the place where the Submission Collars were created.

  It was located beneath one of the spires on the western side of the castle.

  The country produced the collars, which were then sold to the slavers, bandits then captured people for the slavers, and the slavers bought them as slaves. The enslaved people were then brought back to Sandora and sold to the citizens... A horrid cycle indeed.

  There were a lot of slaves at work in the facility, but that work had since stopped.

  An artifact that vaguely resembled a microwave sat at the center of the facility. Apparently, by feeding regular collars into it, the configuration of the device enchanted it with the properties that made them into Submission Collars.

  Next to this one sat two artifacts that looked similar. They looked a lot newer. Apparently, they were exact replicas that had only been recently created. The replicas were the result of decades of research into the original one.

  The mages that created it were apparently incredible magitechnicians from Felsen, who were promptly enslaved in a tactical operation and whisked away to Sandora.

  They all died due to the severe exhaustion brought on by hours of constant research and no rest. And because of that, nobody left alive could replicate the device. From what I heard, Sandora planned on doing another raiding run into Felsen, but that wasn’t happening now.

  “With this, the well should be cut off at the source.” I used [Gravity] on all three devices, crushing them under their own weight and destroying them entirely.

  With that, no more Submission Collars could ever be created again. That wasn’t actually true, as both I and Doctor Babylon could use [Analyze] to reconstruct them, but we weren’t going to do that.

  Now all that was left was the freeing of the slaves. The only issue was there’d probably be a rebellion all across Sandora if I did that. The formerly oppressed would be free to get their revenge. That being said, they could still be forced into indentured servitude if they committed a severe crime, so part of me hoped that they’d be a little more rational.

  I didn’t want to free the slaves who had been enslaved for committing crimes in the first place. It was better to leave them as they were in order to set an example. I didn’t know how many there were, though.

  Sandora was largely desert, so thankfully it didn’t have a massive population...

  I wondered just how many days I’d end up spending on carting slaves back and forth.

  “Guess there’s nothing for it... Gonna need to ask the alliance for help.” I didn’t really want to deal with Sandora any longer, but a war was a war no matter how small. I would make the government cough up and pay for their deeds. At the very least, they’d pay reparations to the people they enslaved.

  If the country collapsed as a result, then that wasn’t my concern. They were free to rebuild Sandora again, just without slaves.

  They’d have to do it all themselves, though. No more free labor. Well, except for criminal slaves. I figured they could still use those.

  I wondered if it’d be another Yulong situation where a bunch of self-proclaimed rulers ended up appearing. I wondered if it’d break into city-states or just be a bunch of people vying for full control.

  I doubted it’d happen, though. Anyone with any kind of claim like that had relied on slaves all their lives. They wouldn’t know hard work if it slapped them in the face. I was fairly sure that Sandora was on the path to extinction... That did make me wonder, though... If the king of Sandora had kids or not.

  It had nothing to do with me, either way. The country lost its grip over slaves, so I wondered if anyone left around would even respect a birthright claim at this point.

  I was a little bummed out, since ultimately I ended up doing what the other world leaders wanted me to do. I didn’t intend to crush Sandora at all, I just didn’t expect the king to be this much of a dumbass. I’d have had a better job of negotiating with a chimp, seriously.

  Man... War... war never changes...

  ◇　◇　◇

  Several days had passed since the Sandora situation, and I’d just about dealt with the aftermath.

  I gathered all the slaves in the capital, criminals aside, and gave each of them a sum of money from Sandora’s treasury. Then, I sent all those with a place to return to through individual [Gate] destinations. I used my magic to look into the memories of those from places I’d never been to before. I readily informed members of the alliance so that they’d be prepared for an influx of people returning home.

  I also returned the people from the Sea of Trees back to Pam. I made sure not to miss any of them.

  “Form an orderly line, please. From here to here.” Before sending them through the portals, I used the secret weapon that Doctor Babylon had developed along with Tica in the research laboratory. It was capable of de-powering their collars around their neck.

  Tica brought an object that resembled a syringe without a needle and zapped the collars with it, one by one. It was an artifact we called the Initializer.

  In short, it was an artifact that eliminated magic effects from anything it was used on.

  After that, I used [Apport] to pull the collars off safely. [Apport] was a magic I could use to call any item in my sight into my hands. It was limited to items the size of a softball, but collars were the right size for that. I didn’t really mind, even though it was a little time-consuming.

  The Initializer was a pretty terrifying artifact in terms of strength. Artifacts from the old days were incredible, and we could even make amazing ones now. The Frame Gears were just big devices in comparison to the complex tools that could be developed.

  To be more specific, the Initializer was a magical device that overwrote any magical device with a command of “do nothing,” so to speak. Obviously, I was the one who had to charge it up, too. It’d take a full year for an ordinary mage to charge this device up. It was basically that extreme in terms of effect and power necessity. The Babylon Gynoids all helped with disabling the collars, and then the slaves went through the portals back home.

  There were many people who didn’t want to give up their slaves, but we had our knights suppress them, arrest them, and throw them into the very cages they had their slaves live in. I thought perhaps some of that treatment would make them think a bit about their attitudes.

  We even had some people who didn’t want to be liberated from slavery, but those people were few and far between. Some of them seemed to be fine with the lives they had, and the people they served, so... even if it was weird, I didn’t want to judge that. I did make sure to confirm they weren’t being forced to say anything against their wills, though.

  We disabled their collars just in case, though. Didn’t want to leave any stragglers. Everything after that depended on their feelings. If a person legitimately wanted to live in servitude... It
was a weird lifestyle choice, but not one I felt like shaming.

  Several days after liberating the capital city, we continued making our efforts in other Sandora settlements.

  A lot of the people who ruled over those towns ended up resisting us, but they typically relented after we surrounded their settlements with a few Frame Gears.

  We ended up spreading the rumor that the king of Sandora declared war on Brunhild and promptly lost his head, which wasn’t technically incorrect. We simply threatened anyone who resisted with the same fate as their king.

  I didn’t really want to threaten people like that, but it helped smooth things over as far as freeing the slaves went.

  The slave girl that decapitated the king of Sandora didn’t have a home to return to, so I asked her to come to Brunhild. She was a former adventurer, so she’d fit in just fine.

  People who had no places to return to were given their choice of nations to live in. Some people went off to new lands, while others said they’d prefer to remain in Sandora.

  There were some who wanted to come to Brunhild, and I invited them with open arms. There was still land to tame and other jobs that needed to be filled, so they’d be able to scrape by just fine.

  Kousaka ended up chewing me out big-time for what happened, but the influx of immigration was an unexpected boon in terms of new labor forces. He didn’t say a word about that, though... He told me I should’ve squeezed more reparation money out of Sandora, but that was my mistake.

  All in all, it took over a month to settle all affairs in Sandora. A lot of the Sandoran government associates attempted to hide their slaves from us, some even pretending to help us in the search. They were mostly slave traders, and we sorted them out with little issue.

  The slave traders were stripped of their property and, ironically, enslaved themselves for their crimes. They’d been going from country to country, hurting people and taking people, so it was only natural they’d get their just desserts. We decided they’d work in the mines for the rest of their lives. I was the one with the authority over their collars, too.

  There were... more proper slave traders, I guess if you could call them that. They didn’t dirty their hands by raiding other nations, and they operated within Sandoran law at the time. I overlooked their crimes, but I was still on the fence about whether or not to make them do some forced labor in the mines.

  To be honest, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the liberated slaves went back to Sandora in order to exact revenge on their oppressors.

  I wasn’t about to stop them, either. Vengeance was a personal choice at the end of the day. If they had the resolve to be killed, arrested, or enslaved again, then I believed they should just go for it. I did kind of hope they wouldn’t be hasty, though. They’d just gotten their freedom, after all.

  It was also possible that some of the criminal slaves had been imprisoned on false charges, so I decided to give them all individual polygraph tests to determine whether or not they were innocent. I did try asking them all as a crowd to raise their hands if they were innocent, but they all ended up raising their hands shamelessly.

  There were many crimes that one could be arrested for in Sandora, but I wasn’t really in a position to judge. Honestly, it was kind of a complicated situation, judging all their lives and the circumstances that might have forced them into leading a life of crime.

  In the end, I asked Yumina to use her Mystic Eye to determine the innocent from their personalities.

  I didn’t really have to go that far, but I wanted to obliterate slavery as much as was reasonably possible.

  Frankly, I wanted to eliminate slavery being used as punishment, too... But that’d take more work down the line.

  Still, what mattered was that my hard work was finally over. I was basically done, and I could finally head home. In all honesty, I was almost a slave... A slave to work!

  Freedom, sweet freedom...!

  ◇　◇　◇

  “Sweet freedom... Wasn’t I supposed to be done with this crap?” It seemed that I had celebrated too soon.

  Alas, I was standing in the Sandora royal castle once more, sighing to myself.

  I was looking over at a man sitting on the throne. It was the king of Sandora, Abdul Djerba Sandora III. Or rather, the former king.

  “Guhuhuhu... Wretched Grand Duke... I see you’ve come again! Ohoho!”

  “Geez...” His rotten, severed head started chatting to me. The pigman king sat atop his gaudy throne, head literally in his hands. His entire body looked pale, and his once-beautiful clothes were all worn and dirty.

  Basically, he was a Zombie. He was buried in a Sandoran graveyard, and apparently he just up and rose right out of it. I thought maybe it was the work of the wicked god, but no. He seriously just came back as a Zombie. He just straight-up had so much of an attachment to the material world that he rose right up out of the dead.

  The Zombie king attacked the prime minister first and turned him into one as well. As is the typical rule, those bitten by a Zombie would typically rise as a Zombie themselves.

  Apparently, the Zombies started multiplying like rabbits after that. We were just so busy dealing with the slaves in the other settlements that none of us noticed the capital city becoming a Zombie settlement.

  The king wasn’t the only one here. There was a line of Zombie generals and Zombie retainers, too. They all stood there, staring at me with vacant eyes. Their mouths drooped open.

  Gross, gross... Something’s coming outta your mouths...

  “Guhuhuhu... I have a new power... I have new slaves... I’ll enslave you too...! Oink, oink, squeee!”

  Did he seriously just oink? He’s transitioned entirely into a Pigman Orc, holy crap.

  I sighed slightly as three men and one... What looked like a woman... appeared from behind the throne. They all had pig-like faces.

  “Oink, oink... Father’s goal is our goal! Father’s grudges are our grudges!”

  “Snort, snort... Let’s eat him!”

  “B-B-Brains... L-L-Let me e-eat b-braiiiiiins...”

  “Oink, oiiink! Let’s kill him...!”

  Goddamn. Pigmen princes and a princess, huh...? He seriously zombified his own kids? They’re the spitting image of him... Were they ever even human to begin with? Well, whatever. They’re Zombies now.

  “Oink, oink, oiiink! See, fool? How can you defeat us now? We’re immortal! We’ll use this new power to enslave those foolish runaways!”

  You’re really saying that again? Well, as the saying goes... Once a fool, always a fool. I guess even death can’t cure stupidity. I can see that pretty clearly in front of me.

  “I guess I’ll have to put you down for good, huh.”

  “Silence! Kill him, Zombies!” I sliced at one of the Zombie generals with Brunhild, severing his arm, but he just came charging at me again. Then, I shrugged, realizing I didn’t need to hold back. Zombies were rotten... Though, these people were rotten even when they were alive.

  “Oink oink oiiink! Fool! We have immortal bodies! Bodies that know no pain! Any attack you launch at us is futi—”

  “Come forth, Light! Soothing Comfort: [Cure Heal].”

  “Hnghuh! O-Ow! I-I-It hurts! I-It burns!”

  “Looks like you were wrong.”

  Damn, that really worked. Nice. The Zombie general started screaming and writhing in pain after I cast Healing magic on him. For the undead, restoration magic was a natural ward.

  I took a small bottle out of [Storage] and sprinkled it over the Zombie. It was the perfect finishing move.

  “Auuugh! My body! I’m melting! I’m meeelting! What was that?!”

  “Holy water, duh. I boiled the hell out of it.”

  “H— Ugaaah!” The Zombie general writhed in pain as he melted and vanished into nothingness.

  Pass on in peace... Man, the holy water from Ramissh is some crazy strong stuff... Crazy strong...

  “Bastard... Where did you get that?!”

  “Huh? Ar
e you stupid? I heard I’d be fighting Zombies, why wouldn’t I bring holy stuff? Also, I’m adept at purifying magic.”

  “Wh-What’d you say?! Gwaugh!” The pigman rose from his throne and tried to run away. The other Zombies ran after him, too. They were surprisingly fast, given their state...

  “[Slip].”

  “Hngh?!” Their feet all gave way below them, and the Zombies went tumbling down. Blood, guts, and gore splattered everywhere as their rotting bodies burst open on impact. Zombies couldn’t regenerate, but they could go on living for as long as their brains weren’t destroyed.

  “Alright, enough of this crap. Come forth, Light! Shining Exile: [Banish]!” The Zombie retainers standing by turned to particles of light and vanished. They were done.

  “Gyaaah!”

  “I don’t wanna die agaiiin! Guyahaaah!”

  “I’m meltiiing!” They all screamed out in agony as they vanished. The only ones left were the pigman king and his family.

  The princes and princess all left their father’s side and shambled over to me. They leaped up into the air before crumpling down at my feet in a haphazard bow. I’d never seen a jump turn into a bow before... It was kind of gross because they broke their legs on impact.

  “O-Oink! We were only following orders!”

  “We’re not even his real children, honest!”

  “P-P-P-Promise!”

  “Just forget you saw us...!”

  “Y-You brats! How dare you disregard your father!” The pig king screamed, his head rolling around on the ground. The four of them looked back at him and tilted their heads.

  “Oink... Who were you again?”

  “You little shiiiiiits!” The pigman clenched his teeth to the point where I thought his blood vessels would explode. I took advantage of the situation and poured a bucket of holy water over the heads of those little oinkers.

  “Gyaaaaaauuugh!!!” The four piglets screamed as smoke rose from their bodies and they vanished into nothingness. The pigman king looked on, his expression of fury transforming into a full-fledged grin.