One Night in Cairo, Part One
Once the slash-and-burn settlers who had returned to the village of their own accord were taken in as subjects of the territory, the population stood at eight hundred and twelve.
After the voluntary-reporting window closed, I hunted down eight of their hamlets. Two hundred and ninety people were dragged in and made slaves—children, of course, not counted among them. Along the way I also took two bandit camps. The numbers were nothing much, but catching bandits paid in another coin entirely. Publicity.
The captured chief and his lieutenants were hauled out to the center of the village and beheaded where everyone could watch. The moment Maximus brought his great axe down through the howling bandit chief's neck, the people of the territory roared and sang my praises. For the slash-and-burn folk who had suffered under those men for so long, it was the instant years of bottled rage finally broke.
"Long live our lord! Long live!"
"Thank you, my lord—! I'm crying—my wife's revenge, at last—!"
"My lord! Long live—!!"
A measured dose of agitation had been stirred into the spectacle, and because of it the cheers went on for a good long while.
The performance was done. Now it was time to show mercy.
At the word festival, the subjects who had been folded in late looked frankly bewildered. Those who had already lived through one raised their voices higher still, bright with expectation.
"Long live our lord—!! Long live—!!"
The festival got underway, and I left the building of the lord's castle entirely in the hands of Marco, Enne, and Marcus, the mercenary captain.
Enne and her daughters, who had already lived as a viscount's household, and the slaves I had bought to serve them as maids, drew on all that old experience and pressed their opinions hard into the plans. The three of them put their heads together until the castle's basic design was finished. The village chief ran the work on the ground, while the important labor and the making of goods fell to the dwarves—living precision-fabrication machines.
There had been only three dwarves before. I bought five more. For the eight master craftsmen that made, I had a workshop raised, and into it, besides the tools the dwarves themselves would use, I installed fabrication equipment brought from Earth. When they laid eyes on the lathe, the gas furnace, and the rotary saw bench for woodworking, they cheered as if they were receiving a god.
Instead of iron ore they melted scrap bought on Earth and turned goods out at speed. In the woodshop, slaves and territory folk stacked the dozens of trees they had felled, and the saws ran without a pause. The pace of the work picked up another notch because of it.
And while the lord's castle rose, course by steady course, I had nothing in particular to do. There was no point killing time for nothing. I headed back to Earth.
Back on Earth, I stayed at the villa in Alexandria and turned on the news. The stories that had been making noise lately spilled out of the screen.
For a month and a half I had been knocking over IS branches and training camps. I hadn't expected the effect to show up like this. I passed the time idly, eating snacks.
Then, out of nowhere, I thought of the men and women I had rounded up in Rome last time. I turned the phone on and went straight into social media. Any more like them? I searched for travelers who had visited Cairo.
It wasn't quite the haul from Rome, but there were still more than a truckload of women dying to show off that they were strutting the streets of Cairo. I picked through them for the ones with decent looks. Having done this once already, I was looser about it than last time. I sent DMs to the accounts I had chosen.
The chum was in the water. Now I only had to wait for a bite.
The Cairo Citadel, Egypt's signature monument. The plaza facing it, the fortress in full view.
A clerk at a cafe that looked out on the massive walls stared, openly baffled, at a woman who had been sitting outside taking photographs for two hours in the heat, rather than in the air-conditioned room behind him. Her long straight hair was tied up and twisted off her neck. Follow that slender line down, past the hollow of her collarbones, and her breasts swelled up sharp and full. The neckline was cut just low enough that the cleft showed—suggestive, not blatant.
High-bridged nose, long eyes, a Western cast to her face, a body still taut in its twenties: Choi Jeong-ah was an influencer of barely three months. With fewer than ten thousand followers, though, she was closer to unemployed than to anyone with a profession.
"Some bitches shoot everything from first class and get rubbed down in spas that cost a few hundred dollars a pop, and their followers just pile up. And what am I doing? Seriously. Fuck."
She had dreamed of beauty, of young and rich, and had walked out of the company she used to work for to chase the influencer's road. Reality was not obliging. Followers refused to grow, while the balance on her overdraft swelled more frighteningly by the day. The only thing left to her was to show a little more skin.
"If I pull this down a bit more..."
She dragged the open front of the neckline lower, baring more of her chest, then pressed her breasts together with her arms until they swelled fuller still. A D cup in her own right, and still nowhere near the large end of this business. If you wanted to gather male followers on physique alone, you needed an E or an F. Breast inflation was a serious condition in this world.
Not that those men were where the money was. Real money meant gathering the women advertisers actually liked. Advertisers put their cash on women who admired an influencer's life and wanted to copy it, not on men who showed up to stare at a body—because they knew those women would buy the same things and use the same cosmetics. Reality, though, was a men's bathhouse. Eighty men to twenty women.
It wasn't that she didn't know what she had to do. The money it would take was no joke. For a female travel influencer to catch other women's interest, the minimum started with business class, a night in a luxury hotel, and a course meal at a top restaurant. Post a cute dog on top of that, nomming away at a chew that cost twenty or thirty dollars, and you had perfection laid over perfection. But she had already eaten through everything she had saved these past few months and was barely living on the overdraft. It was beyond dreaming.
She shoved the rising irritation aside and checked how the photos she had posted were performing. As expected. Utterly regardless of the scenery or the antique ruins behind her, the heavily exposed shots dominated the comment counts. Among them, comments that might have come from women were few. Most of them were this.
The comments drifted back and forth between compliments and sexual harassment, and the feed was full of them. Most had clearly been left by men, and looking at them, a sigh came out of her on its own. But what happened in the comments was nothing next to the DMs.
"Honestly. Worthless pieces of shit."
The urge to bundle every one of them up and report them for sexual harassment surged through her. She dropped it almost at once. Do that, and she might have to abandon an account she was only just growing.
"The second I quit this shit, I'm rounding every one of you up and suing you into the ground. You sons of bitches. Keep running your mouths just like this. You severance-check losers."
She was working her way down through the DMs when she stopped on one.
Tonight. InterContinental Cairo. The Royal Suite.
The InterContinental was a hotel she had window-shopped even before the trip. She had given up on it, because even the cheapest room ran past five hundred thousand won a night—a few hundred dollars.
"These crazy bastards will try absolutely anything now."
All at once she wanted to know the price. She opened a booking app and checked the royal suite.
"A hundred and thirty thousand pounds a night...? How much is that?"
Egyptian pounds. The figure would not convert in her head. She multiplied it out on her phone's calculator.
"Uh. Three and a half million won. About twenty-five hundred dollars. Insane. He's completely insane."
It was absurd, and yet the picture unfolded on its own: what if she took photos in a place like that and posted them? Herself on a terrace looking down over the landmarks of Cairo, in yoga clothes, doing pilates. A shot like that would pull women in by the swarm. The comments might plaster the whole screen with envy. Just imagining it made her happy.
And then she was curious.
"What does this bastard even do? Maybe I should look."
She followed the account that had sent the DM.
I took the car out. Landing a fish takes a proper rod, so I chose the most convincing one I owned.
The G-Wagen. Its bodywork had been smashed the last time out, and I had set the dwarves to restoring it. After that I bolted on thick steel plate, and layered titanium composite along the inside over the engine, the floor, and around the seats. An ordinary G-Wagen was reborn as a top-grade armored car.
On top of that I commissioned the Mage Tower to etch a magic circle into the interior. Lightning. The trigger condition for the fourth-circle attack spell was the interception of any object above a set speed. Ordinary bullets were excluded; it was tuned to the velocity of weapons like an RPG. Rocket fire, at least, I could now soak with the car itself. Even in the most dangerous stretches of the Middle East, that was safety enough.
Before I left, I checked social media again and opened the DMs we had traded.
I entered Concord Plaza into the navigation and drove for downtown Cairo.