“Whew.”
I collapsed into a chair and took a sip of my now-lukewarm tea.
“Karumi just turned my world upside down, and I’m still processing it. Ann, did you listen to all of that just now?”
“Yeah. There’s a lot of it I don’t really get, though.”
“Well, that’s fine. Good job sticking with us.”
“Mmm...”
I put an arm around Ann, who was practically glued to my side like she was trying to protect me, and patted her head.
Whether she was in kobold or human form, she always had this soothing scent of fresh-cut hay about her.
“Complicated concepts get easier to understand if you start thinking about them in gaming terms.”
Most people would look at something new in a game and make an analogy to something in the real world to understand it better, but truly hardcore gamers did the opposite, using their superior gaming knowledge to get better at real life.
“Our victory conditions are clear: we have half a year to achieve a certain score and a certain level of dungeon. So, yeah, we just need to think of it as a management simulation game rather than as a survival game.”
It was in fact my job to manage this labyrinth, so it wasn’t so much a simulation as, well, work. But the difference between the game of life and the kind of games I spent my life on was ultimately the tiniest of margins.
“We have two things to keep in mind. First, it doesn’t matter who we bring in. Second, we either need a lot of deaths or a lot of invaders to repel. Racking up deaths seems too difficult. Lots of work, time, and funds. The other path to victory looks tougher, but given the time constraints, it’s our only option. So, we’ll be luring in and repelling invaders.”
If I bought obscene amounts of livestock and slaughtered them for meat, maybe I’d be able to pull it off, but it would definitely take too much time and effort. Even setting aside how expensive livestock had to be in this world, the logistics of getting so many of them to the labyrinth would have been a nightmare.
“So, we’ll run a plain old labyrinth where we lure intruders and throw them back out. Ann, you remember that game I had you play, Soul Collector 4?”
“Yep. That was the one about turning a lousy magician into a powerful wizard who trapped people in his magic labyrinth, right? You told me it’d be good reference material, so I tried it out.”
“The Soul Collector series is a staple of the labyrinth simulator genre.”
You’d trap humans in your labyrinth and harvest their souls to grow stronger. Then you rinse and repeat with more powerful traps. Sometimes you even got a chance to sacrifice humans to summon a demon to help you out. One interesting angle was that you had to capture your prey alive. The soul left the body when it died, so you didn’t get to snack on souls if your traps killed the humans.
You got the most points by capturing humans without getting a scratch on them, but you could make the traps as fake-scary as you wanted. Planting the occasional sprung grizzly bear trap with a mangled corpse in it was a great way to send the humans screaming and running away through your labyrinth, directly into another trap. One crowd favorite was the honey trap, where a succubus mimicking a captured village girl would beg for help, enticing the intruders to go help her and be ensnared. Man, what a great game. If you really wanted, you could always soften up the intruders with some fire or electric traps, leaving them easy meat for a pitfall, but that wasn’t very efficient, both because it was expensive to set up and because it gave you fewer points.
I hadn’t really explained any of this when I set Ann up with the game. I mean, I knew about stuff like that because the honey trap combo was a staple of the series, but she didn’t have that background. I did kind of regret not playing it together and overseeing her after teaching her the basics, though. Ann was playing the PC remaster, Soul Collector 4 HD, so it would’ve been a new experience for me, too.
I decided to check her save file. In only three days, she’d shown phenomenal progress. All the physical traps had been replaced with a variety of demon traps, particularly the succubi. Her labyrinth was a veritable crucible of lust. I felt a brief pang of regret for the loss of Ann’s innocence. Gun Gust may have been violent, but it was pretty tame otherwise. The overall survival rate in her labyrinth was ten percent, but for male adventurers it plummeted to only two percent. I resisted the urge to check the world leaderboards, but I had a feeling Ann would be up there.
It seemed she was a natural labyrinth manager. Still, I had my reservations about putting that to use. I didn’t want her name going down in history as a villain. Raising Ann to be a respectable lady was going to be a rocky road.
“I don’t think those exact mechanics are quite what we’re looking for, but at least the big picture is the same; we’ll be building up a labyrinth, attracting and kicking out intruders, and fulfilling certain conditions within set time limits.”
“Aww, we can’t do it like this? But the succubus ladies would practically do our job for us!”
There was that pang of conscience again. I’d chosen poorly. I should never have shown her that filthy game.
“Suzu will come in handy, that’s for sure. There’s no bigger advantage than an experienced ally.”
Even just having her there as an advisor made our chances of success much higher.
“I never thought the tsarina would come to our aid.”
“Suzu’s really that amazing?”
“Yeah. She’s so good at production and management, she’s almost a living legend. She’s had me on the ropes a few times.”
Actually, it was more than a few times. I’d struggled to stay ahead of the tsarina more times than I cared to admit.
“A long while back, the tsarina attacked a city of mine with five times the troops I had. We somehow held off the overwhelming numbers through sheer guts, but the next day, she came back with ten times the troops I had! It was a nightmare.”
And that’d kept going, too. No matter how many times we beat them, they just kept multiplying. The thought still gave me the shivers.
“It was like she’d built a summoning circle to the foot soldier realm. The tsarina was so famous, you’d have to look hard to find someone who hadn’t heard of her, no matter what game you played.”
She drove off invaders with sheer numbers and overwhelming industrial might, rising through the ranks and establishing her tsardom of ice and steel. In every corner of the internet, people knew the name Belka. I’d devoted my life to games, but there was no question who was more well-known. I’d had a lot of rivals, but none who induced nearly the amount of trauma that Suzu did.
“Huh. So no matter how many you beat, she’d bring more the next day? That sounds tough.”
“Yeah, she’s horrible to run into on the other side of the battlefield, but by the same token, she’s a dependable ally.”
Unfortunately, our position didn’t really play into the tsarina’s strengths. Labyrinth #228 needed a lightning onslaught, with minimal time to build up our productivity. We couldn’t afford attrition tactics or overwhelming our enemies. We had to do more with less.
“I’m glad we’ve got Karumi on our side as well. She’s always been more of a neutral bystander before. She’s earnest and understanding, and I think she’ll work hard since she’s got something on the line as well.”
“Yeah, Karumi’s the best. She always brings me candy!”