84. Survival Rule #4: An Escape Route Is Essential (2)
84. Survival Rule #4: An Escape Route Is Essential (2)
"Well, it's been a while! How have you been?"
"Can't complain."
I sat down across from the Guard Captain, who greeted me warmly, and held out a wine glass. A red liquid carrying the scent of grapes filled half the glass. Wine, huh. Come to think of it, I'd never had wine before. I couldn't even remember how to hold the glass.
...How was I supposed to hold a wine glass?
I glanced at the Guard Captain's hand gripping his glass and imitated him as best I could. The liquid in my somewhat precariously held glass tilted. How must my clumsy fingers have looked to the Captain? As if to be considerate, he clinked his glass against mine in a similar posture.
"You should drink wine slowly, as if savoring it."
"Is that so."
I slowly savored the wine as he had advised. The first wine I had ever tasted was... bitter. There was a faint sweetness beneath the bitterness, but that was all. I could barely drink any before setting the glass down.
I needed something to eat with it. I pulled a jar of dried caterpillars that I kept as a snack from inside my coat.
"It's not what I think it is... is it?"
"They're caterpillars, all right."
"...Why on earth are you carrying those around?"
"They're good for you."
I demonstratively picked up a dried caterpillar and tossed it into my mouth. The Guard Captain watched with a doubtful expression that plainly asked whether it was really edible. Turning down something both tasty and healthy—he had clearly lived well enough to be picky.
"You're certainly a fellow with peculiar tastes..."
"When you live in a place where food is scarce, you have to eat things far worse than this."
"Sounds like you've been through a lot, my friend."
The middle-aged man's pitying gaze made me squirm. It left me with mixed feelings. I had thought little of it when Karina or Reni looked at me that way, but receiving the same look here felt strange. Why was that?
"Wipe that look off your face. What's important right now is that we met to make a deal."
"A deal... You're remarkably straightforward. Fine, so what kind of deal have you come for?"
I took a breath and arranged the words in my head. Convincing people in power required language that sounded plausible—something suitably refined and impressive.
"I intend to build an emergency passage beneath the academy."
"You want to build an emergency passage?"
"In preparation for an attack. The academy's facilities seem to be lacking."
"The academy's facilities are lacking? There's no safer place in the whole empire save the palace itself."
As expected, the Guard Captain looked reluctant. That was natural. I knew enough of the future to know that Kalon Academy would be caught up in incident after incident, but no one else could know that.
So I'd have to give him a reason he could accept, one he couldn't refute.
"Two separate incidents have already endangered students this semester alone. Do you honestly still believe that?"
"...Urk."
Having nothing to say, the Guard Captain looked down at his wine glass, clenching his teeth.
The Hellhound Incident.
The Squad 3 captain's abduction of a student.
With incidents like that happening, it was impossible to do nothing. He'd probably received a furious barrage of complaints. His plan was likely to strengthen security by expanding the Guard's numbers, but there was no telling how much good rabble could do.
Building emergency passages as I suggested would be far more useful. One additional route of escape might not matter much against people, but against monsters it could significantly improve everyone's chances of survival.
"...You're right. Two incidents have already occurred, and Squad 3 has effectively collapsed. The situation is not good. I've been under considerable pressure because of it. An emergency passage under these circumstances... I doubt the board will approve it."
"Is the board's approval necessary because of the budget?"
"That's part of it, and a large-scale project like this would require a massive workforce, but... the situation outside isn't good right now, so there won't be any labor available. The construction guild, the carpentry guild—all the relevant guilds are out on external assignments."
"That isn't a problem. I've got a way."
The Guard Captain's eyes flashed. He looked at me with open curiosity and asked,
"Oh? May I ask what kind of solution?"
"I'll do it alone."
"What?"
"I'll handle the construction alone."
The Guard Captain stared at me with an expression that said he doubted what he'd just heard.
-----------------------------------
"...A passage like this existed? This wouldn't have been on any of the Guard's maps—"
Guard Captain Gilbert couldn't hide his astonishment as he looked at the underground passage he hadn't even known existed. A passage wide enough for about three people to walk through side by side. Although it was on the narrow side, the mere existence of such a passage was what defied all logic in the first place.
No one at Kalon Academy had known about the secret passage, despite the academy being full of Wizards capable of surveying the ground.
"I dug it alone."
"Don't jest with me. There's no way a single person could dig a tunnel this large! I don't know how you discovered it, but isn't this a secret passage that's been here since ancient times?"
'Was this man making fun of me?'
Gilbert glared at him, wondering if he was being mocked. Even if he had been drunk, he wasn't the sort of man to fall for empty boasting. Besides, he'd drunk only two glasses of wine, and his tolerance was not so low that such an amount would intoxicate him.
Without a word, Yohan gripped the shovel strapped to his back, as if telling Gilbert simply to watch. Gilbert's sharp gaze swept over him. Yohan wore only a light shirt and no armor, leaving the shape of his body plainly visible.
'He'd clearly done more than a little shoveling.'
Gilbert was a man who'd done his own fair share of shoveling. Back in his days as a low-ranking guard, he'd been roped into menial labor all the time, and after his promotion, he'd been in a position to supervise such work himself. Even to his eyes, Yohan's posture as he held the shovel was extraordinary.
His movements were enough to create the illusion that he and the shovel were a single being.
The sight reminded Gilbert of a master swordsman drawing his blade, and he swallowed without realizing it.
'Was I really getting tense over mere shoveling?'
Gilbert let out an incredulous laugh. What on earth, over mere shoveling—
"Watch closely."
Yohan's shovel bit into the earthen wall. A movement so fluid it was impossible to tell when the stroke began.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
'Was this some kind of trick?'
In an instant, Yohan's figure vanished, and nothing but clods of dirt flew out the opening. Unconsciously, the Guard Captain scanned the surroundings. But he sensed no other presences.
'Could one person really move that fast?'
A sight so absurd he could already see his men joking that he'd finally gone senile and that it was time to retire.
Yohan's shoveling was so fast that such thoughts were inevitable.
In the end, the only thing he could do was escape from reality.
"...Haha, I must be drunk. There's no way you could make a tunnel this long in less than ten minutes—"
"What you saw was real, so get a grip."
"What on earth are you talking about? I'm certainly seeing things! It's impossible to dig this by pure shoveling, without earth magic! You! What kind of trick are you pulling! Have you hidden some Wizards around here?!"
Gilbert ran around, shouting "Is it here? It's here, isn't it!" as he searched every inch of the tunnel. But Wizards that didn't exist could not spring out anywhere. Finding no hidden Wizards, Gilbert was forced to turn his attention to the shovel Yohan held. He strode up to him, pointed at the shovel, and asked.
"This shovel—is it in fact some kind of incredible artifact?"
"Try it yourself."
Yohan handed the shovel to Gilbert. Gilbert glared at it as though he meant to devour it, searching for any magic that might have been placed on it. But a tool so purely devoted to its essential purpose showed no trace of enchantment. Unable to find any magic, he adjusted his grip.
'I'd know if I dug with it myself.'
Gilbert gripped the shovel and drove its blade into the wall.
"Huh. This can't be right..."
It bit into the dirt a bit more easily than normal, but the shock felt through the handle forced him to admit that the shovel carried no special magic.
"I don't know how to use magic."
"Isn't that even more preposterous? Even a Wizard specializing in earth magic couldn't create a tunnel of this length in an eyeblink!"
An Archmage might be able to, but there was no way the man in front of him was an Archmage. A figure deserving of the title of Archmage would simply cast a spell and be done with the flick of a finger—they wouldn't personally be shoveling.
"I've never seen anything this bizarre in my life."
"It's not such a big deal. How about it? Isn't it worth investing in?"
"Ha, investment... Show that once in front of the board and anyone would agree. That insane shoveling of yours, I mean."
How many laborers would it take to match that speed? Gilbert calculated quickly in his head.
A hundred? Even a hundred workers couldn't tunnel that quickly. They could not all fit inside such a narrow passage. Safety and finishing work also had to be considered, leaving perhaps a dozen or fifteen practical workers per tunnel. At least the labor could be spread out, allowing several passages to be excavated at once.
'But it'd be incredibly expensive. Hire Wizards? I couldn't even imagine how much of the academy budget that would chew through.'
Building emergency passages throughout the academy was a massive project that could easily consume 50% or more of an entire year's budget.
But what if one person could do it alone?
'Insane efficiency.'
Insane enough that paying 10%, no, even 5% of the budget he'd anticipated would be more than enough. An ability such that, had the civil engineering guild seen it, they'd offer him the guild master's position just to recruit him.
Between shovel strokes, Gilbert managed to pull himself together and asked him.
"Look here. You're fast, but can you do everything alone? You'll need not just to dig the tunnels, but to finish them as well—"
"Craft."
As if answering were a bother, Yohan activated the Skill. The tunnel, covered in the rough traces of shoveling, was transformed in an instant into a clean passage. At this absurd spectacle, Gilbert let out a hollow laugh.
"This is just... You seem like a man born for construction work."
"I've had that thought myself, quite often."
He wasn't even breathing hard despite the maniacal pace of his manual labor.
Gilbert laughed, thoroughly pleased, as he imagined the shocked faces of the board's high and mighty.
"You're destined to become a great man, my friend."
'Now I had a story to tell over drinks for the rest of my life.'
The thought suddenly popped into his head.