“Understood. We’ll have to address that issue at a later date,” said Kaho.
She glanced at Mary and Metea; apparently she hadn’t completely abandoned the idea of asking them to join Jade Wings. Ultimately, it was up to the sisters to decide whether they liked that idea. It would probably have been interesting to swap members with other parties from time to time, but the sisters’ cuteness always lifted our spirits, so I would be a bit sad if they ever left our party. Luckily, it seemed that Kaho had no intention of poaching them right now.
Kaho turned to survey the open area. Her eyebrows went up when she noticed something.
“Oh, the entrance of the dungeon is over there, is it not? And there’s a wooden sign!”
She hopped over to the sign excitedly, then folded her arms as she stood over it—a surprisingly imposing posture.
“It is my duty as a gamer to read signs like this!”
Touya laughed. “Yeah, I figured that’s how you would react. We’re the ones who set it up, though.”
I knew exactly how Kaho felt; I was also the kind of gamer who could never resist the temptation to walk over and read a sign. Yoshino and Sae went to join her, so both of them must have been curious as well.
“Let’s see here...” said Kaho. “What’s this? The dungeon and all the land within six kilometers belongs to your party, Nao?!”
“Yeah, technically,” I said. “We don’t really have anything to do with the land outside the dungeon, though.”
“Some of this is pretty scary,” said Sae.
She pointed at the words “Trespassers will suffer a swift death.”
Haruka simply smiled. “Oh, the threats? We haven’t decided yet whether we’ll actually carry them out. Of course, we’re legally entitled to do so. We may have to be a bit careful with noble trespassers, but commoners enter the dungeon at their own peril.”
“Yikes,” Yoshino murmured, looking genuinely scared. “Um, does that mean you’ll kill anybody who gets lost and accidentally wanders here?”
“We don’t intend to attack trespassers without warning unless absolutely necessary,” said Haruka. “It’s just that legally, we’re permitted to take the initiative on our property, which is reassuring to us—it’s difficult to defend against magic and arrows.”
“Yeah, if you can’t attack anyone until they attack you first, that gives a huge advantage to malicious people,” I said.
The idea of violent self-defense as a last resort only worked when you were much stronger than any potential opponent. If an enemy’s opening attack did us serious damage, we wouldn’t be able to fight back properly. A passive stance would be outright stupid considering that the girls might be harmed as a result.
“If you run into anybody suspicious, always strike first,” said Touya. “Bandits and people like that are scum. They need to be erased from this world.”
“Yeah, if you get beaten by bandits, you might suffer a fate worse than death,” said Yuki. “You guys gotta be careful.”
Metea and Mary were nodding along thoughtfully with their arms folded. When the Jade Wings girls saw the sisters’ reactions, they glanced at one another uneasily.
“...Have we been a bit too carefree and naive?”
Yoshino was looking specifically at Mary and Metea when she asked, so she presumably wanted to know about widespread attitudes in this world.
“Um, yes, probably,” said Mary. “If you accidentally trespassed on somebody else’s property and got attacked, you would only have yourself to blame.”
“Never act suspicious no matter what you do!” Metea exclaimed. “Especially not around adventurers!”
In the eyes of ordinary people, adventurers and bandits were functionally the same. High-ranking adventurers were viewed more favorably, but low-ranking adventurers were seen as people who couldn’t find proper jobs. They were really on the lowest rung of the social ladder, so it was obvious that others would make uncharitable assumptions if they spotted adventurers acting suspiciously.
“Oh, okay. We’ll be careful of other adventurers, but I guess we also have to be careful not to act suspicious ourselves,” said Yoshino.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “Dungeons are especially dangerous because there’s no one around.”
“I see,” said Sae. “In that case, do you have to demarcate a clear boundary between your property and the rest of the woods?”
“Well, we’re not going to hunt down anyone who happens to wander onto the outskirts of our property,” said Haruka. “It’s far too large for that. But we do intend to protect this open area in front of the dungeon, and we brought some materials with us for that purpose.”
The things we’d brought were wooden fence posts, nails, and other parts for gates. We had ordered a lot of materials, in part because we wanted to return some of our earnings from selling precious wood to ordinary lumberjacks in order to allay any possibility of ill feelings on their part. Our plan was to create a sort of base around this area as a visible assertion of ownership and to secure a safe area for ourselves.
“Sorry to ask this, but can you guys also help us out with this before we head inside?” I asked.
Kaho and Sae both nodded.
“But of course,” Kaho replied. “Manual labor is my forte, and a safe area here would be as great a boon to us as to you.”
“I’m happy to help out with Earth Magic,” said Sae. “I’m good at anything that involves hardening soil.”
Yoshino, however, was acting a bit weird. “I can, uh...act as a cheerleader?”
Haruka laughed at Yoshino’s response and laid her hands on Metea’s shoulders. “We can find something for you to do as well. Even Metea’s going to help—right?”
“Yeah! I’m actually sooo strong!”
As a demonstration of her eagerness, Metea flexed her biceps. She didn’t look particularly strong, but appearances were deceptive—even more so in the case of her big sister.
The parts we had brought to construct the fence had all been prepared so that we could set them up in short order. Still, Kaho, with her Peerless Strength, and Sae, with her Level 5 Earth Magic, were a huge help. Ultimately, we were able to set up our base faster than we’d anticipated. It exceeded our expectations, too, in how sturdy it looked. It would probably withstand an attack just fine.
★★★★★★★★★
“All right,” said Haruka, sounding very satisfied, “I think we’ve now sufficiently fortified this area that no one can claim to have wandered in by accident.”
Mary laughed and said, “Uh-huh, but are there actually any other adventurers who would come all the way here?”
“Well, among the adventurers currently working in Laffan, I’m fairly certain that only our party and Kaho’s can actually make it to this point,” Haruka replied.
“Then did we really have to do all this?” Mary asked. “It just seems like an awful lot to me...”
“I mean, the odds of it happening are pretty low, but it isn’t impossible that high-ranking adventurers will move to Laffan in the future,” I pointed out.
Now that we had the title to this land, we did want to assert our ownership somehow. Our biggest concern was that other adventurers might be lured here by rumors of the red strike ox milk that we had supplied to Viscount Nernas as a wedding gift for Baron Dias. There was high demand for the milk among certain members of the nobility, and apparently its scarcity value exceeded its market price.
The House of Nernas hadn’t been thriving in the recent past, so the viscount would have attracted undesirable attention from other nobles as a result of producing such a rare and valuable gift. Any noble who was curious could easily trace the source of the milk, and Haruka and I had appeared in person at the baron’s wedding, so it was entirely likely that they could trace it specifically to us. Diola-san had warned us as much.
“It wouldn’t be such a big deal if all that happened was that we got some more quests to collect red strike ox milk,” I said. “Still...”
“...the wrong info might get leaked,” said Yuki. “It would suck a lot if some trespassers showed up thinking it was easy to get the milk.”
“Overconfident idiots won’t pose us any challenge,” Haruka pointed out. “What we really want to avoid is a situation in which this dungeon attracts high-ranking adventurers actually capable of defeating red strike oxen. Yes, we have the right to chase away trespassers or slay them outright, but that’s meaningless if they’re too strong for us to defeat.”
“Yeah,” said Touya. “If we end up dead, nobody’ll even know who did it.”
No one outside of my party entered the Summer Resort Dungeon. The corollary was that there were no potential witnesses inside. If a group of highly skilled trespassers snuck inside and killed us, it would be the perfect crime. From our perspective, killing a bunch of people over milk seemed comically extreme, but of course, in this world, there were those who would kill just for a crust of bread, so we couldn’t afford to let our guard down.
“Decent odds we’re worrying for no reason, though,” said Yuki. “High-ranking adventurers who are strong enough to kill us wouldn’t really have that many reasons to.”
“Good point,” I said. “Anyone that much stronger than us can probably earn money in safer and easier ways.”