“Hey, Aoi? Mary’s a fine choice for a guardian, but what’re you doing for monsters? You’re gonna need trash mobs as well as a boss.”
“Could you tell me how you have your labyrinth set up, Suzu?”
“Yeah, sure. #370 is a production and storage labyrinth, right? So I just hire mercs. They kinda patrol, chase out any monsters, that sorta thing. Maintain order, you know? Just in case, I’ve got this contraption that produces skeleton-type golems when you feed it raw resources, but it’s a pain in the neck to use, so now it’s basically a hat rack.”
Huh. Pretty weak security. Though, if she had mercenaries strong enough to drive away monsters, she was way better off than me.
“That doesn’t really give me any ideas. Your objective is to produce a lot of stuff and make money, right? And all you need to protect your warehouse is some mercenaries?”
“If things get serious, I just go around and hire every single Daemon mercenary in the nearby villages and towns. When push comes to shove, I can scrounge up enough numbers to be the envy of a decent-sized fortress.”
So she would grow her military on demand in emergencies. That gave me some nasty flashbacks.
“I remember one time I was pitted against you. I’d taken over this defenseless town with a skeleton force, and you showed up out of nowhere to lay siege to it with a full battalion not even half a day later. That was pretty intense.”
“And I’ll give a taste of that to anyone who wants to pick a fight with me. You may have slipped away back then, but most people aren’t so lucky.”
Suzu grinned. No matter how many times you beat her down, she’d always come back tenfold like some damn zombie. The ordeals she put me through had left me scarred for life.
“Say, why’d you go and run away that time? I worked real hard to put together that siege force. I was gonna decorate my office with a Blue animal.”
Scary. I’d only gotten away that time thanks to the elite soldiers I’d brought with me, and even with them at my side, we’d sustained heavy losses.
“Anyway, I suggest you use Daemon mercenaries. You can get as many as you want, if you’ve got the scratch, and they’re sharp cookies, so they’re easy to handle.”
“You said you were going to talk to some of them for me, earlier. How’d that go?”
“Oh, sorry about that. I tried asking the guys on my payroll, but they’re all contracted by the local villages, not to mention me, so they’re not really available for a long-distance gig.”
So her mercenaries and hunters had put down roots in the area. Well, you’d have to be a fool to walk away from a steady source of income like that. Suzu’s approach did lend a lot of stability to the region she operated in.
“Karumi, is Suzu’s labyrinth far from here?”
“From Labyrinth #228, it’s about sixty kilometers southeast as the crow flies. In the grand scheme of things, it’s fairly close. But you have to bear in mind that everybody gets around here by walking, or at best riding a carriage.”
“If it’s sixty kilometers as the crow flies, then it’s going to be even longer on the roads. Not an impossible distance to travel, but not something you could do casually.”
The roads were almost certainly not flat, either. You were probably looking at a week of walking. If there were a well-maintained road it would be one thing, but when you considered the dangers of building and maintaining a road that passed through forests where monsters lurked, things got a bit more interesting.
“Suzu, what’s the difference between a mercenary and a hunter, among Daemons?”
“Mercenaries fight people for pay. Daemons, humans, whatever. Hunters mostly fight monsters. That said, the boundaries are kinda blurry. Like, the mercenaries I hire also double as hunters, a lot of the time.”
More or less what I expected. If you were a sword for hire, you probably weren’t too picky about what you were sticking your sword in.
“Then it’s probably not a good idea for me to hire too many Daemon mercenaries, right?”
“Huh? Why’s that? Oh, wait, I get it. Your plan is to get hunters to challenge the labyrinth in the first place.”
“Right. If I hired all the mercenaries, there wouldn’t be enough people to challenge the labyrinth.”
I didn’t know how many people were actually going to show up, and I wanted to maximize my chances of success. Admittedly, I didn’t want there to be too many intruders either, but too few would be the worst possible problem.
“Also, I bet they’d be annoyed to find one of their fellow hunters waiting to ambush them in the labyrinth.”
“Yeah, I expect you’re right about that. If something went wrong in your labyrinth, it would damage the reputation of the owner of the labyrinth. In other words, the Great Dark Lord.”
That sounded like a career-limiting move. Lord knows Labyrinth #228 didn’t need another scandal to add to the pile.
“Okay. So I have to watch out for both the number of visitors and the labyrinth’s reputation. If we’re targeting Daemons in this labyrinth, we have to handle it with tact.”
Suzu pursed her lips.
“It’s certainly easier to manage with the way you’re luring intruders, but it does seem to complicate the situation somewhat.”
“Okay, let’s assume we’re not using any Daemon mercenaries at all, for a minute, and see where that gets us.”
If there were too many intruders to handle, or if some emergency arose, I could always reconsider.