Laying the Foundation (4)
"...Hah. Hah."
Exhausted, I slumped down against the wall of a nearby building and let my back settle into the stone. The short version: somehow, by the skin of my teeth, I had managed to finish a full month of exploration duty.
I'm so tired I could die. Seriously.
There hadn't been any grand reason I'd volunteered for exploration. In the game, whenever I had subordinates with nothing better to do, I just bundled them up and sent them out on scouting runs. If you got lucky, you might stumble across a new talent. At a vanishingly low rate, you might even bring back an item. And unless your luck was truly abysmal, the [Exploration] command was a reliable way to scrape together a little coin.
But even if this was a world inside a game, for the me who had been dropped into it, this place was reality. And what did exploration actually involve? Running yourself ragged, wandering from place to place. The only thing moving me around was my own two legs.
Hoo...
That said, it wasn't as though the whole month had been a complete waste. For one thing, I had managed to pick up some money. Nothing dramatic — just that as you wandered the villages, you would run into townsfolk asking for help. Lend them a hand, and you got a small reward. Day by day, little odd jobs that let you pocket a bit of gold.
In the game, hitting Exploration just made money magically appear from somewhere, and I'd always just accepted it. Realizing that this was how the system actually worked under the hood made it click into place pretty fast.
The total I had scraped together: seventy-five gold. Not exactly a fortune, but better than nothing.
Second takeaway: the security around here was not great. With the villages in such a miserable state, good public order was never going to be on the table — but that raised a strange point of its own.
When Lady Luna came to fetch me, she came alone. On foot, no less...
Running into bandits along the way would not have been surprising at all. That was why my own exploration had stayed strictly inside the territory walls. If I wandered out and ran into brigands, a weakling like me would be dead before I could blink.
And yet she had walked out alone, more than once, just to come see me. I hadn't spent that much time watching her up close, but even so, I could tell she wasn't a fool. She was not the type to move without thinking.
In this game, traveling between cities or territories carried a real chance of a random bandit encounter. To prevent it, you had to spend money posting two or three escorts — a system that started out annoying because of the cost, and later became annoying because of all the button-clicking. There were, however, a couple of ways around those random encounters. First: possess the rare item known as the [Lantern of the Dead]. With that lantern in hand, bandits simply never appeared. Second: have a Martial score of ninety or higher. If your combat power was high enough, lowlife bandits wouldn't dare pick a fight.
...The only real possibility is her Martial score.
Was Lady Luna's Martial set far higher than I thought? Luna had always been on the strong side, but I didn't remember her being over ninety. Then again, this game had those damned correction values, so I couldn't judge her exact Martial in this worldline from the data of the game I'd played alone. A status window would have been nice — but true to its old-school roots, the game didn't even show you that much. Infuriating.
Come to think of it, even though the distance hadn't been that far, she had spent a full day climbing and descending hill roads without looking the least bit tired — and she had even carried a grown man on her back.
Did some kind of singularity hit Lunarien Iniang's status corrections?
Then again, the prediction that "Lunarien Iniang will unify the continent" was already a singularity in its own right. If I just had a few more solid pieces of information, I felt like I could pin it down for certain...
Forget it. Thinking about it now won't change anything.
Still, the pointless speculation had at least helped me catch my breath a little. Being stuck with a low-Martial character was genuinely, thoroughly miserable. Was I going to have to live like this forever? If there were some kind of training method that could raise my stats, that would be ideal. There were ways to improve status values — but they were so difficult I couldn't even begin to attempt them right now.
I pushed myself up and headed into the castle for the meeting.
"Ah, you've arrived... no — you're here."
"Over here!"
Inside the castle, Luna and Tifa were waiting to greet me. One face, however, was missing.
"Where is Lord Kane?"
It was Luna who answered.
"Kane has stepped out for a while. He said he had business to attend to."
I gave a light nod.
"Anyway, now that our esteemed strategist is here, we're cracking this open."
Tifa said this while giving something on the table a couple of firm taps.
"What is that?"
"Oh, this? One of the market merchants had his whole shop collapse, so I was helping dig the foundation to rebuild it. And this thing just popped right out of the ground."
"Pardon? You... didn't handle any commercial affairs?"
"How the hell would I know how to do that kind of stuff? I just built a house and came back. Oh, right — assign me commerce again next time. The place still isn't finished."
So she hadn't produced any proper results. Even so... the Intelligence 100 prophecy had ordered her to take on commerce. If something was hidden, it was almost certainly inside that box.
"So what exactly is it?"
"We're about to find out. It's ridiculously heavy, so there's definitely something in there... but no matter how hard I pull, it won't open. There's a gap, though."
"And the merchant who owned the shop said he didn't know anything about it?"
Hearing Luna address Tifa so casually was oddly refreshing. So that was how she spoke with her childhood friend.
"Yep. Said he'd never seen it before. Told me he was grateful for the help and that I could take it if I wanted."
"In that case..."
I scanned the room, found a stick that looked enough like a lever, and brought it over.
"Here. Let's try opening it."
"Ah! We can use this. Thanks! You're pretty sharp!"
Getting praised for something this basic didn't exactly fill me with joy...
Tifa took the stick from me, jammed it roughly into the gap, and started heaving with all her strength.
"Nngh! Nnnngh!"
Once, twice, three times. No matter how many times she strained against it, the box didn't budge.
"Ugh, why won't this damn thing open? It's not even locked or anything!"
"...Tifa. Want me to try?"
Watching the whole spectacle, Luna spoke up. Tifa nodded.
"Yeah. Maybe this one's meant for you."
Luna took the stick.
"...Hup...!!!"
She put her strength into it — once, hard.
Bang!
"It opened!"
The box that had refused to yield no matter how hard Tifa pushed finally burst open with a thunderous crack.
"...!"
One fact made clear by that scene: Luna's Martial was higher than Tifa's. Luna might look delicate and Tifa might look built, but in this game, the numbers decided everything. If the two of them fought one-on-one, Luna would almost certainly win.
And second: Tifa's Martial sat somewhere in the high eighties to low nineties. Even with correction values, stats for anyone who wasn't a sovereign didn't swing that wildly. Which led to a rather radiant conclusion — Luna's Martial was mid-nineties or higher.
Lady Luna... you're strong.
"This is...!"
"...Good heavens."
Luna and Tifa both gasped as they looked inside the opened box. Curiosity pulled me closer, and I checked the contents myself. And in that instant, I understood exactly why they were so stunned.
"...Gold?"
The box was packed full of dust-covered gold coins. Who would ever have expected something like this inside a battered, rusted old chest?
"Whoa! How much is all this?! Hold on!"
Tifa, more excited than anyone, dumped every last coin out of the box and started counting at blistering speed. At least when it came to counting money, she was terrifyingly efficient.
"Hey! All of this together is six thousand eight hundred thirty-three gold! That's insane!"
"!!!"
Luna was surprised, but I was far more shocked than she was. Was there an event where fulfilling a commerce order dumped several thousand gold on you? I had put ten thousand hours into this game. I had seen every event there was. And I could say with absolute certainty: no such absurdly generous event existed.
And only then did I understand why my Intelligence 100 brain had told Tifa to take on commerce. If you could scoop up that much money in one go, of course you went.
"...Miss Tifa. Where did you say you found this box again?"
"Huh? I already told you. I found it while laying the foundation to rebuild the house."
Normally, a commerce assignment meant looking after the market — not rebuilding a merchant's house. Which meant this box was something we only obtained because Tifa had gone there herself.
I knew it.
I had already been certain, but this sealed it at one hundred percent. My Intelligence was 100. Only a value of 100 could explain this level of absurd luck. There was no longer any room for doubt.
"So what do we do with this? Recruiting more soldiers is probably the best move, right? What do you think, Strategist?"
And just like that, Tifa handed me the perfect question.
What should we do with the money we've saved?
And the answer was—
"...Everyone. I have a request."
"?"
Luna suddenly cut into the conversation, her expression intensely serious.
"I want to... distribute this money to the people of this village."
"???"
Tifa's face twisted into an immediate scowl.
"Hey, what the hell are you talking about?! We don't even have enough war funds for our own operations right now! You're not going to conscript? Our army only has two thousand soldiers who can actually fight! You want to just sit there watching the enemy roll in until we get wiped out?"
"But... there was a typhoon not long ago, and the villagers are struggling. This is still a place under our rule... and this box came from the village's own land to begin with."
"Hey! This is our territory! Our land! Anything that comes out of it is ours by default! That's just common sense!"
"I know that, but..."
"Haaah."
Tifa raked a rough hand through her hair. Honestly, for all the roughness in her manner and speech, when she shut her mouth she cut a rather striking figure.
"Luna. I get how you feel. I'm the one who agreed to help you settle here so you could help people who were suffering. But even someone like me, who's never set foot in an academy, knows that using this money to build our foundation will let us help a lot more people than just scattering it right now. You're smart. You know that better than I do."
"...You're... probably right."
Luna wilted at Tifa's words, her head drooping in a way that was almost painfully easy to read. I had spent a month exploring these villages myself — I knew perfectly well how bad things were. It must have been weighing on her. She was the leader, and the fact that she couldn't do anything about it was eating at her.
"Hey, Strategist. You say something to her too. You're the smart one — you can talk her around a lot smoother than I can, right?"
Persuade her. Honestly, I had been planning to. I wasn't naive enough to think idealism put food on the table.
But—
"In this matter, I believe we should follow our lord's will."
"...Huh?"
"What?"
Both Luna and Tifa stared at me in shock. They probably hadn't seen that coming. Fair enough. Neither had I.
But what else was I supposed to do?
What should we do with the money we've saved?
And the answer was—
Relieve the impoverished of the territory.
According to me — the one with Intelligence 100 — the best use of this money was to give it to the people of the village.