The next day, since I’d placed the human-repelling hex the night before on the rope Sebas had bought us, I set out with the goblins to continue setting up the mountain path while I asked the adults to set up a perimeter of rope around the mountain and test its effectiveness.
The goblins were far behind me now, taking care of the trees I’d knocked down as my slimes and I continued along the path. Now that I’d gotten the hang of building and installing foundation pieces, I was taking a leisurely ride on the back of a huge scavenger slime until we reached the bottom of the mountain.
“We still have to clear the fallen trees, but now carriages can get through!” I announced. I still wanted to pave the path and trim around it, but there wasn’t enough time. This place was just a cast of Space magic away, so I’d set the other stuff on the back burner once we hauled the trees away. I was going to hole up here for a few months until my curse broke, which would give me plenty of time to work on the details.
“Hot today,” I breathed. Knocking down all the trees ahead of my course meant that there was nothing shading me from the sun, which was particularly relentless today. This heat was different from the sweltering kind in the Sea of Trees. It was the kind that scorched the skin. Just like that snowfall at the end of last year, this had to be an effect of replenishing the magical energy the gods had told me about.
“In this sunlight, the lost magic will burn the cursed object...or melt it before the curse breaks, depending on how long it sits out and what it’s made out of.”
I still had made no progress with my lost magic research. Not so much as a lead. Of course, I’d only spent two days on it—one of them cut short by my hexing the ropes last night—and Rosenberg had told me that this was going to take time, so that was that.
More importantly, I had to stay hydrated. Taking a water bottle from my Item Box, I reminded the goblins to stay hydrated too. That’s when I realized: We’d been working on the mountain for five days straight. Should I give us all a day off? If I were doing this alone, I wouldn’t have taken a day off because I was having too much fun practicing hexes. But there were plenty of people I’d roped into this project.
“Should I end work early today and serve some drinks tonight? Or take a day off tomorrow? Both?” I thought about it. “I’m going to need some advice.”
Before me, the boundary between the mountain and the travel road had already been marked with rope. The roping team had to be along that boundary, either to my left or right. Now that my task had come to a good stopping point, I wanted to check in on their progress and pitch my idea.
I ran with the help of enhancement magic for about five minutes or so until I found the team at the end of the rope—I’d won the coin flip.
Miya was the first to spot me. “Ryoma!”
“Hello, everyone. The path has reached the road, so I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Still working, as you can see. It won’t be much longer until we’ve used up the rope,” Miya answered.
“All fifteen kilometers of it? That was fast,” I remarked.
“Every adventurer worth their salt knows how to handle rope. Because we’ve been tying it onto trees, there was no need to use stakes. We’ve barely needed to carry much rope at all because Sebas placed the spools at regular intervals for us. Not to mention we’re splitting the work between the eight of us,” Mizelia said proudly.
“They have been a well-oiled machine,” Eleonora supplied. “We do not have enough rope to encircle the entire mountain, so we have prioritized areas close to the main road.”
Not having enough rope was neither a surprise nor a huge problem. Roping off the mountain wasn’t an urgent task, so we could fill in the other areas later.
Eleonora added that she would write up a report on their work and the effectiveness of the rope. Her reports were always easy to read, so I’d be looking forward to that.
After they briefed me on their progress, I took a quick poll about taking some time off, and the most popular option was to end the work early today.
“It’s just a week or so. No point in taking a day off. As long as we get food and time to sleep, I’d rather get the work done and rest up after payday,” Jeff said.
“Same here,” Welanna chimed in. “Most adventurers are like that. If we wanted steady pay and a schedule, we would have gotten a nine-to-five in the city.”
“For only a week, I agree. It might be a different story if we were on a long-term project,” Cilia said.
The other two adventurers agreed that they were perfectly fine without a day off. Rosenberg’s schedule often depended on his clients and the state of his projects, so he was used to arranging his time off around the needs of the job. As for Eleonora, she was accustomed to working as I used to in Japan, claiming that she already had enough downtime, which I could sympathize with.
Some of them also said that they’d have nothing to do with a full day off in a cursed testing ground—touché. So, I decided to call it a day once they set up as much rope as we had prepared.
Hudom and Sebas, whom I’d been working with for a while now, had a different reaction to my suggestion.
“He brought up time off of his own volition...?” Hudom breathed.
“Mostly out of concern for his employees, I’m sure. Still, it was a shock to the system...” Sebas said.
Without even voting yea or nay on the idea of time off, they were blown away that I’d thought to ask... How much of a workaholic did they think I was? I decided that I didn’t want to know the answer.
“I’ll get back to the mountain path. Be careful not to get overheated,” I announced.
I went back the way I came and met back up with the goblins, who had been turning fallen trees into piles of logs. I just had to transport each pile to our lumberyard by Space magic. The work was made even easier by the stone slimes I had placed in the lumberyard. That allowed me to confirm the coordinates and status of the yard.