The First Contract in Another World (2)
I looked around the laboratory.
The necklace supplied the explanation.
"Those are tools with magic worked into them."
"Magic tools? What kind of spell is on this one?"
"That cloak carries a stealth enchantment. It drops you out of people's sight—not mere visual invisibility, but the erasure of scent and sound as well. Detection magic won't catch it either."
"Stealth? Fancy."
"The bracelet beside it lets you mark coordinates on a place you've already visited by spatial transfer, then teleport there in an instant."
"Teleportation? How far?"
"Seven hundred meters."
Not as far as I'd expected. Even so, being able to cover seven hundred meters in the course of an ordinary day was an enormous advantage.
"That ring can cast attack and defense magic of the seventh circle and below without an incantation."
"And that pouch connects to a subspace."
"A subspace? How big?"
"A rectangular space. Two kilometers wide, two kilometers high, four kilometers long."
Incredible. Big enough to drop a small city inside and still have room to spare—no, on volume alone, you could pack away an entire city and have space left over. Stand up a single logistics company and I'd make a killing. Load the subspace with containers, fly to the destination, and simply set them down; on time, I'd be collecting air-freight rates, so the margin...
Maybe it was all those years living as a trader, but my head turned that way on its own. I licked my lips and set the items down.
I hadn't signed the contract yet. Not that it changed anything. Between me and the necklace there was already a vague but workable understanding, and I was the one who had gone in first and put a finger on the contract's weak points.
"This 'first visit'—exactly when are we talking, and measured from where?"
"Pardon? Why, naturally it means this world of Gaia..."
"Does it? But if we go by what you said, the first visit doesn't have to fall on the day the contract begins. If I stew on it for nine years and then sign, I die a year later? And yet if I stay here for ten years and simply never sign, I'm safe. That's what you're telling me."
"What? Ah. No, that isn't..."
"Why not? The contract says nothing about what happens if I don't sign. So what if I remain here more than ten years without ever contracting?"
"That. That is..."
"And the other way around. If I don't sign, take nothing, and cross back to the world I came from—what happens then?"
"What? That sort of thing isn't written in the contract..."
There it was. Traders put the fixing of a starting point above everything else, and no matter how much of a genius mage you were, you weren't going to pick apart terms this concrete. No—if anything, the people called geniuses were often ignorant of this sort of human, worldly business. Money. Deals. Contract clauses.
I pressed the flustered necklace harder.
"So. Suppose I refuse the contract you're offering and say I'm going back to Earth."
"Ah. Then you forfeit the chance to take these tremendous treasures in hand. You wouldn't truly abandon an opportunity like this, would you?"
"Hard to say. It doesn't look especially favorable to me. I'd be shouldering a ten-year penalty just to stay alive, and I don't even know what kind of world lies outside this underground dungeon. You want me to swallow a risk like that?"
"Ah. No. The things here are the relics of a great genius mage. With these alone, you could live in perfect safety..."
What mattered first was showing that I had nothing to lose. Do that, and half the negotiation was already won. Next I had to make the other side's loss stand out.
"I wasn't doing badly in that other world either. I'll just go back and stick the necklace in a display cabinet. No—it might be dangerous. Maybe I'm better off tossing it into the sea on the way home."
"Aack—! Why would you say something so dreadful? We ought to discuss this rationally..."
"Yeah? Then how about this. You push the start back until I've gone back and forth between that world and this one and piled up enough information."
"What?"
"The contract says 'first visit,' but it never specifies exactly where. Whether it means this dungeon, for instance, or some other particular place."
"Hah... hahaha..."
The necklace laughed as if it couldn't believe what it was hearing. But what could it do? The hilt was in my hand.
"Here's how we do it. We pick a place in this world—the Gaia you spoke of—fit to stand for the whole of it, and we make that the reference. Arriving there becomes the starting point. Then we're both satisfied, aren't we?"
It had been thrown by a situation it had never faced, but the spirit of the necklace was not, as it turned out, the naive sort.
"In that case, if you never visit the place... the starting point never begins at all."
Straight to the heart of it. A little necklace, it seemed, did not come with a little brain.
"Ahem. Surely not. There's such a thing as trust between us. Ahem."
"Then how about this?"
This time the necklace floated a suggestion, light as you please.
"Hm?"
"I will provide you with ordinary goods, not the mage's relics. And dimensional travel as well—I will let you use it however you wish."
"What?"
"Yes. Even calling them ordinary goods undersells them. The performance is somewhat lower, that is all. They will be more than enough to keep you safe in this place. You take them and look around this world, and then, after one year, you decide—whether to contract or not. Should you choose to contract, that day becomes the starting point. How does that sound?"
This was no ordinary opponent. In the end it was telling me to try the thing first and decide afterward, with all the posture of a luxury-import dealer coaxing you to take the test drive and then choose whether to buy. On top of that, it was saying that if I didn't like it once I'd driven, I didn't have to sign—a full refund even for a simple change of heart. I couldn't keep my hands from shaking.
And so we settled it: a provisional term of one year's use.
At once the necklace guided me out of the laboratory.
The upper levels of the dungeon. By the nature of an underground dungeon, the important facilities sat deeper the farther down you went, and the higher you climbed, the less the goods were worth. Following the necklace's guidance, I came up into what was plainly a common area, the sort of place visitors would be constantly in and out of. At the end of a stretch of broad corridors and stone chambers, I opened a door and stepped through.
"You may use the goods in this place as much as you like."
Among the items laid out, I picked up one similar to the pouch I'd seen earlier. It looked even bigger than the last. Even if the performance was worse, this one was larger, so maybe they'd come out roughly even. I asked.
"What's this?"
"A capacity-expansion pouch."
What? A moment ago it was subspace this and subspace that, and now it was capacity expansion?
"How much capacity?"
"One hundred times the interior area of the pouch you are holding. On the open market, it would easily fetch a hundred gold."
But—
Goddamn it!
The curse tore out of me before I knew it. This luxury-dealer bastard. The scheme was obvious: put the low-spec goods in my hands, let me grow used to them, then lure me in with the high-spec items it had shown me before. I had the odd illusion that the necklace was looking at me and smiling.
Call it a hundred of these bags—how much could they even hold? At a glance it was barely the size of a school backpack. At best, maybe the trunk of a nine-passenger SUV. You could still load a fair amount of luggage in that, of course. Even so, the difference in scale from what I'd seen earlier was far too great, and the regret welled up thick. Crumbling here, though, would wound my pride.
"Oh~ Amazing~ Incredible~ Jesus~."
"Is it? Hehehehe. I am glad it pleases you. Please, look at as many as you like."
That leisurely voice was infuriating. One thing was certain: whatever lived in that necklace was no ordinary piece of work, and it was quick—quick in the bad way. Drop my guard and it would take the nose clean off my face. Thinking that, I steadied myself.
I gathered various other items besides, and I laid out what came next.
First, drag the ones who had tried to kill me to this place.
Second, find the person behind them from what they had said.
Third, learn what this place actually was.
But recovering my body came before any of it. Fortunately, among the general-purpose goods there were healing potions and recovery potions. I alternated between the two and rested for a day, and the remaining wounds healed to some extent. Scabs had settled over my chest and my side, of course. Cleaning those up completely would take a top-grade potion, and the necklace's answer was that I could use one of those only after a formal contract.
"Sign the contract, and you may drink as many as you like, whenever you wish."
"No thanks. This is enough."
If the scabs had formed, that would do. I dulled the pain with a recovery potion and wrapped bandages around the holes in my front and my side.
Once the treatment had gone far enough, I turned to practice. Magic items were worthless if I couldn't actually use them. I went back into the training room and spent another day at it—firing spells, running defensive magic, acceleration, strength enhancement, survival, sleep, slip, and on and on. From the goods I'd brought out of the general-purpose tool room, I picked the usable ones, tested them, and drilled.
After a solid day of practice, I decided it was time to go back.
The necklace spoke.
"Just before you crossed over, you were falling in that other world. Before you return, you would do well to activate a levitation spell."
"Got it."
I tapped the heel of my shoe and spoke the trigger word.
"Levitation."
A strange energy curled out of the shoes, and my body lifted a little into the empty air. I swayed forward and back. Three or four minutes of that, and my body had more or less adapted.
"Ready."
"Then we return. It may be a little dizzying, so hold on tight. Transferring—now!"
With a flash of light, the body that had been floating in the air vanished.