In Another World With My Smartphone_Volume 5 Page 4

  I have no idea how to process that... Is she saying I could create some kind of ultra-tough constantly-regenerating armor out of this? Wait, if I forge a weapon out of this thing, then it’d be indestructible so long as my mana reserves don’t go empty, right? It’ll probably grow heavier the more magic I pour into it, but I have [Enchant] and [Gravity], so that means nothing to me! Man, I just hit the goddamn jackpot!

  “Target Lock. Spider Phrase debris, including the tiny fragments. Invoke [Storage].”

  “Understood. Targets acquired. Invoking [Storage].” The magic circle spread across the ground in a wide area, covering all places where the Spider Phrase’s shell had fallen. All together, the fragments sank into nothingness like one would sink into water. With that, all the goods were recovered.

  If I had only known how valuable this stuff was in the desert, I’d have collected the pieces of the Manta Phrase as well... Ah well, you can’t win them all.

  ◇　◇　◇

  “Yee. Emoh.” I turned around to find the tanned girl staring at me. I had no idea what she wanted now.

  “I already told you, I don’t speak your language!” As I pondered how to get her to understand me, Leen suddenly interjected.

  “She’s asking if you’re the one who healed the injured.”

  “Wait, you can understand her?” I stared at Leen, amazed she could understand. Maybe there’s some kind of pattern to the language...?

  “You are aware that I’m older than my form suggests, are you not? There are even those in Mismede today that speak the mother-tongue of the Rauli Tribe.”

  Oh yeah... she did say the tribe requested aid from Mismede. There’d have to be some interpreters in Mismede’s government for that to make sense.

  Leen turned and talked to the tan girl.

  “Hm, your name... er... Ontoh, Nomoho?”

  “Pam.” So then, the girl was named Pam.

  It was kind of a pain having to listen to them without understanding them fully. Leen began freely talking to Pam about various things in the tribal tongue, but I had no idea what they were saying. It was a little concerning. Pam kept stealing glances at me during their conversation, sometimes with looks of amazement on her face. That was even more concerning.

  “Ende didn’t appear after all, eh?” I thought for sure he’d show up alongside the Phrase, but I was apparently wrong. Maybe I had misinterpreted his intentions, and he wasn’t always gonna be around to stop them.

  “It even caused a massive uproar and trashed the place, though...” I took another look at the area around me. There were tattered cloths, ruined buildings, and other remains of a once-peaceful village strewn about amidst uprooted trees and general carnage.

  The villagers here seemed to make their home up in the trees, building high in the branches. They moved from tree to tree using rope suspension bridges.

  The woodland was dense here, almost like a rainforest, so the sunlight only shone through the canopy in areas where the Spider Phrase had gone on its rampage and knocked trees down.

  “It seems that several people have passed away...” Lu looked over at a group of grieving women, looking rather grief-stricken herself. When I looked over at the weeping people clutching the pieces of their former friends and families, regret coursed through me. If only I had been faster.

  “It’s a shame that there’s no magic to bring people back from the other side...” I muttered those words quietly, and Linze suddenly spoke up from nearby.

  “That’s not necessarily true. A spell like that does exist...”

  “What?!” Wait, there’s seriously a way to bring the dead back? Wait, hold on, why am I so surprised? Didn’t that happen to me?!

  “The highest tier of Light Magic can resurrect the dead... But the consequences of doing so are grave.”

  Consequences? What, do you need to fulfill certain conditions or something? It’s not like that one RPG where you have to donate to the church, is it? It’s not like that money actually goes to God, anyway...

  “To begin with, the body must be fresh. Meaning that one hour must not have passed since death. Secondly, the body must be intact. Nothing that could hinder a functional body can be present in the subject. Lastly, an obscene amount of magical power is needed. As well as an obscene amount of life force itself.”

  “Life force?”

  “To be blunt, I’m referring to the very life that flows within a person. Resurrecting someone is no trivial feat. Through this method, the caster must stake part of their life on the line to perform the rite. There’s a chance the caster could die.”

  That sounds really risky. I guess it’s not a method anyone could employ unless they were absolutely ready to stake their life on the line for another person. But come to think of it, that might be the resolve needed to restore someone to life. In my case, the price I paid to return to life was to completely lose my old world. I don’t really want to think about that matter right now, though... Makes me sad to dwell on it.

  “That aside...” I’d noticed a while ago, but there were an awful lot of women amongst the tribe. I wondered where the men were. Had the Spider Phrase slaughtered all of them already? As I was pondering that, Leen wandered over and answered the very question I had been thinking about.

  “The Rauli Tribe consists of only female members, and they are a warrior people. Males are forbidden here. The young warrior from earlier, Pam, is the granddaughter of the clan matriarch.”

  Wait what, are they like Amazons or something? I didn’t expect to come across that trope around here...

  From what Leen told me about the Rauli tribe, the girls headed out to kidnap men once they reached fertile age. They would then use the man for... rather obvious purposes.

  If the child born from that union was a boy, he and his father would be removed from the village. If the child was born a female, the father would be expelled alone, and the tribe would collectively raise the girl. It was just how they dealt with children, it seemed. Either way, the father was kicked out. But apparently over a hundred years ago, they would just kill the man after taking his seed, so maybe this was preferable...

  As Leen told me the tale, I shivered a bit. The man inside of me was terrified, which was amplified by the fact that Pam was glaring at me for some reason. What was going on behind those eyes of hers...?

  “What?” I eyed Pam from the side, and she suddenly bounded forward, leaping into the air straight at me!

  “Wha—?!” She startled me, but ended up being way lighter than I expected, so catching her was fine. I was caught off-guard by the feeling of her soft skin, but in the next moment pain shot through my body, starting at my neck.

  “OwwwaaaAAAaugh?!”

  SHE BIT ME?! WHY IS SHE BITING ME?! IT HURTS! IS SHE A MONKEY OR SOMETHING? GET OFF ME! I moved my hand to try and wrench Pam’s head off me, but she withdrew of her own volition right away.

  I put my hand to my neck and sure enough, she had drawn blood.

  What the hell was that?! Pam suddenly chuckled at me and turned on her heel before sprinting away. No really, what the hell was that?! All the other Rauli in the area who saw what had happened raised their voices in an uproar of laughter too.

  “Touya, are you alright?” Linze came over and cured the bleeding wound on my neck. Aah, it hurts like hell!

  “Seems she’s taken a liking to you.”

  “Excuse me?!” Leen’s offhand remark had me reeling. How in the hell could biting my neck until it was bleeding be interpreted as an affectionate gesture? Normally that kind of behavior was associated with hatred, right? Usually from a wild animal or a stray dog.

  I couldn’t believe that another person had just bitten me like that. I decided that the best course of action would be to retreat. The situation was too weird, and all the Rauli had started looking at me in a strange way as well... I had no idea what was up with that. I opened up a [Gate] and returned to Babylon. From there I picked up Cesca and Rosetta, and was back to Brunhild’s castle in the b
link of an eye.

  “Aaaah, Master. Welcome baaaack!” Ripple was hanging halfway out of her picture frame in the middle of the landing. This kind of thing had pretty much become the norm for us at this point.

  “Hey Ripple, thanks. Have I missed anything?”

  “Uhm, you haaaave. We have a gueeest!”

  A guest? Really? Wonder who it could be...

  ◇　◇　◇

  “Huh, Tsubaki? What brings you here?”

  “It has been some time indeed.” The girls said they wanted to wash up, so I parted from them and headed to the audience room alone. Waiting to greet me there was Tsubaki, a kunoichi from Eashen. She knelt down upon the red carpet and looked up at me. She wore a white coat with a black scarf. It looked like she was quite worn out in general, indicating she had traveled far to get here. Her hair was as long and black as ever, no real change there.

  “What are you doing so far from home? Are you running an errand or something?” Tsubaki was a ninja that served under Kousaka Masahnobu, one of the Takeda Elite Four. It’d be normal to assume she’d be out on a mission, but this was a considerable amount of distance to come from Eashen.

  “No. My allegiance to the Takeda clan has been formally broken. I may be asking too much by coming here, but I made the decision to join your duchy.”

  “What?” Tsubaki recounted her story to me. She said that once the new lord of Takeda took over, everything was a bit chaotic for a while. Even so, she dutifully served until one day Kousaka summoned her. He said to her, “If things continue as they are now, I have no hope for the Takeda clan. You must leave with your compatriots and find another worthy house to serve.” Tsubaki initially protested, but Kousaka actually ended up kicking her out. He was that confident about how grave the situation was.

  “When was this?”

  “Close to two months ago, I believe. After that, I began a personal journey.” I was surprised by that. It seemed that Kousaka had some incredible foresight, to even predict this so far in advance... He must’ve been an incredible guy.

  I mentioned to Tsubaki that Baba had been here recently and talked about his opinions on the matter, and she nodded in agreement.

  “Indeed, because of the dire situation, Kousaka-sama had me removed...”

  “But why me, of all people? Couldn’t you have defected to Tokugawa or Oda?”

  “Tokugawa and Oda are only feudal lords in the end. But you, Touya-san... Er, Touya-sama... you are an exceptional individual who may well become the next king of Belfast. I headed toward you thinking that you were incomparably superior! And now I find out you’ve already become a head of state! A grand duke! You’re truly beyond mortal comprehension.” During her voyage to Belfast she had heard stories about the founding of my duchy. And so, once she realized that I was the one in charge and that I was now living here, she chartered a boat across the Great Gau River all to get an audience with me.

  “Well, a lot of stuff went on here too, but, uh... You really wanna work here? This isn’t a big country like Belfast or anything. We’re pretty fresh.”

  “Of course. If you’ll accept me, Touya-sama, I would proudly serve under you.” If Kousaka was fine with it, then I was fine with it too. Honestly, the recent increase of allies was making me a little happy. Kind of made me hopeful that the Takeda Elite Four would come and stay as well eventually.

  “Very well, if you could please bring the remainder of my clansmen to your castle, I’d appreciate it...”

  “Wait just a sec. Your clansmen?”

  “Of course. It is my intention to have my entire ninja clan from Takeda’s territory come here.”

  Is she serious?! Wait... sure, Kousaka said “leave with your compatriots,” but seriously, relocating an entire clan of ninjas just like that?!

  “Uh... how many people are in your clan, exactly?”

  “If we include the children, then there are almost seventy.”

  “Gh...!” Isn’t that a bit much?! How’d you plan on moving that many people without me?! What if I was dead or missing or something?! I really didn’t mean to accept more than Tsubaki... but I can hardly take it back now.

  “Uhh... well, about that... I don’t have any issue with accepting your people into my country, but I can only really take you into my castle, Tsubaki.”

  “That would prove no issue. All proud ninja clansmen work standard jobs in the day-to-day. They have to make a living, after all.”

  ...I guess that’s fine, then? I remember reading something about ninjas from the olden days infiltrating other countries by getting standard jobs there and living out regular lives... Do they have the same kind of methods in this world?

  My territory had a great body of water, as well as a large forest, so they could definitely get jobs as hunters or fishermen. Food wasn’t a concern, but I’d probably need to think about setting up other amenities.

  I’m gonna need mercantile contacts or something... If people are gonna be producing goods, then I’ll need active traders. I should consult Zanac or Olba about it.

  “It seems we’ve acquired many a new citizen today, sir.”

  “Sure seems that way, Laim...” I smiled wryly at my butler. Without further ado, I called my three knights into the throne room and told them not to be concerned about the large influx of ninjas. I decided to simply let them stay in the barracks for the time being, as I didn’t have an army living there yet.

  Just in case, I asked Lain to keep an eye out for people behaving suspiciously, not that I expected much in the way of trouble. I didn’t know if that was a racist assumption, but I felt that those rabbit ears of hers would surely be able to sound out trouble as it happened.

  “Master, you have a letter.”

  “Hm?” Just as Tsubaki left, Cesca came in with a small letter in hand. I had given most of my contacts a small Gate Mirror to immediately get in touch with me, so I wondered who had sent it...

  I took the letter and skimmed it over. Wow, this timing sure is convenient to the plot.

  “Who sent the letter, sir?” Laim inquired as I finished reading. I passed the letter over and told him to take a look.

  “Goodness me...”

  “Yup. Seems we’ll be getting even more residents soon.” The sender was none other than Kousaka Masahnobu himself. It had come through the Gate Mirror that I had handed to Baba recently.

  It was a formal account detailing the fact that the lord of the Takeda clan had royally messed up. He had neglected his people, failing to prevent many crimes. The people ended up making quite a ruckus, and it was a full-blown riot in some areas. Ultimately, the emperor of Eashen had to step in and formally disband the Takeda house. Its former territories were divided up between Oda and Tokugawa.

  Well, that didn’t take long. And he had such promise after the situation with Kansukay, too... That sucks. He had a lot riding on his shoulders and a lot to live up to, but he really should’ve kept his head down and tried harder. Maybe he was just acting out because of the pressure of having such a famous father. Or maybe he was just an idiot... At any rate, he’s a nobody now. Apparently he had to report to the capital and face justice. He’ll probably be exiled.

  The most important thing here was that the Elite Four had all talked with one another and decided their services would be better held in Brunhild.

  I was more than happy to have such talented people on my side. I wondered if I should consult Kousaka about the mercantile issue I’d been wondering about earlier. I had yet to actually meet him, so I was curious about what kind of person he was.

  Well then... I guess I should go meet him. With that thought, I opened up a [Gate] to Eashen.

  ◇　◇　◇

  “Repair the roads first. A town cannot develop without a road.” Kousaka looked at the map of Brunhild, and only had that to say.

  Kousaka was clearly younger than Baba, but he was still over sixty. He had a gentle face, but it was one clearly weathered by wisdom and age. He also wore his hair in a top-knot. T
he aura of experience and awareness emanating from him was just what I’d expect from a man who personally advised Takeda Schingen.

  After I received the letter, I went straight to meet with Baba and the other Elite Four members, but they had a surprise for me.

  Apparently several members of the Takeda Army who had now been displaced were willing to join my duchy. It was likely that they were troops who were extremely loyal to the Elite Four or something. There were only around fifty of them, but there was no way I could bring them in and hire them. We didn’t even have any way of generating revenue yet, so paying the salary of an army was out of the question.

  I briefly considered using the workshop to mass produce products for sale, but quickly decided against it. If we ended up dependent on the exports and the workshop broke down or something, we’d be done for.

  “If I use Earth Magic, I can probably create a road pretty fast...”

  “A functional road that leads to both Regulus and Belfast is of the highest importance. Please make one immediately. But on the other hand, Touya-sama... Er, milord. Don’t involve yourself too directly in the affairs here. If you, as their lord, do too many things for the people, they may grow too dependent. It’s best to only interfere directly in situations where the people cannot do it on their own.”

  Is that how it is...? I guess he has a point. People tend to sink into complacency pretty fast. It’d be bad for a country so young to start stagnating.

  “Now, the eastern part of the nation will be set aside for agriculture. We can dig out canals to draw water from the river, then create various rice paddies. I do hope the soil there is as fertile as it is here in Eashen. With that we can begin trading with merchants and creating income for the country’s administrative procedures...”

  So you’re saying we need to think about taxes, farmers, and sales of produce...

  Honestly, I didn’t think I needed to tax the people. I made more than enough money to support my growing family through adventuring alone. Still, Kousaka told me that if I didn’t have taxes, the infrastructure of my government would falter. I decided that I would entrust the situation to him, but I did tell him to keep the taxes as low as possible.