“Timber!” Ann shouted cheerfully, followed by a crash that made my ears ring. As the tree fell, branches broke and tumbled down alongside it. The trunk was bigger than Ann’s waist, and it must’ve measured five or six meters high. When it landed, the twigs snapped clean off, and on the ground there now lay convenient piles of branches, leaves, and a single, perfect log, the remains of the massive tree. It seemed the tools created from the <Dungeon Management Tool> all shared that convenient special ability. I’d used the axe from the <Terrain Improvement: Land Foundation> option, and just like how the shovel and pickaxe had turned things into cubes of material, this one chopped down trees and turned them into neat logs when they hit the ground. Even the branches which were thick enough had been turned into convenient wooden rods. I tried out my Appraisal skill on the tool.
Name: Minor Iron Axe (“The Logger”)
Creator: Aoi Kousaka
Durability: 850/850
Special Abilities: Effective against vegetation. Turns target into logs.
The flat ends of the logs were as smooth as if they’d been sanded, and though the rods from the branches varied in length and thickness, their perfectly round shape made them easy to work with. The axe wasn’t particularly sharp, but Ann nonetheless managed to take down a whole tree with a single swing, thanks to her high stats. The villagers gathered around, lifted the neatly shaped log, and set it on a massive wooden rack for the giant and ogre Daemons to use.
A little ways from the lumbering group, Barry, the kobolds, and the dwarves were binding wood together with ivy to make more wooden racks for the giants to use, as well as looping ropes around the logs to pull them into position. Construction had begun, but we weren’t ready for digging just yet. According to Barry, we’d need a lot of wood once we started working underground to reinforce holes and passageways, as well as to set up scaffolds. We’d also need it as a raw material for making normal pickaxes and shovels.
Wood was practically the first resource you had to gather in any game where you built stuff, so this seemed pretty reasonable to me. The sprawling forest that lay west of the Great Saredo Rift served as our initial gathering spot.
We’d planned to work together to chop down the trees, but it turned out I’d miscalculated. But that didn’t mean I was going to let Ann do all the work alone!
“Timber!” I gripped the axe in both hands, holding it a little lower to the ground than you would a baseball bat, and then twisted my whole body into a swing. I felt the impact ripple through me and watched the tree slowly tip in the opposite direction and fall, turning into logs and rods when it hit the ground.
I mentioned my miscalculation earlier. You see, we were so fast at cutting down trees that we could have easily overwhelmed the transport team. The soil in the forest was soft, and roots interrupted most of the pathways, so pulling things along in carts proved unfeasible. Our only option was to load up the largest, strongest villagers with the logs tied to racks on their backs, lashed in place with rope. It took several of the smaller villagers just to load one of them up.
If we’d been using normal axes, we’d need to clean the branches off each individual tree, not to mention turning the trees into workable logs. But thanks to the <Dungeon Management Tool>, every tree we cut down was ready to go the moment it hit the ground, so Ann, Mary, and I were able to make a ton of progress with just one swing of the axe. I’d known Mary was strong from the start, but Ann’s usefulness had really surprised me.
“Aoi, what can you tell me of the half kobolds?” While I waited for the men to haul away the tree I’d just cut down, Mary, who had just taken down a particularly large tree of her own, walked up to me.
“From my understanding, the kobolds have clever hands and are gifted at producing fine, detailed work, but are generally physically weaker than other races.”
“Timber!” The sound of Ann’s shout accompanied the crunch of an axe biting into wood, and shortly thereafter came the ominous crash of yet another tree hitting the ground.
“Physically weaker, eh?”
I’m sure a girl on the cusp of womanhood like Ann would cry if I called her brawny, but it would be a bit of a stretch to call her weak!
“Ann is a dungeon dweller. She’s probably a little outside the norm.”
It took two or three adult kobolds to drag away one of the logs, struggling all the while, so it seemed safe to say that Ann’s strength was the exception rather than the norm. It had been less than half a year so far, but she’d been living in the labyrinth with me the whole time, so I figured she’d gained a few levels and her stats had gone up. That’s how fantasy worlds worked, right? I wasn’t able to see most of the details on people’s stats, though, so I didn’t know exactly how character growth worked here. Maybe they had a purely skill-based leveling system.
As logs accumulated, Barry and his group finished the wooden racks and brought one to me. I fastened the rope bundling the logs together around my back and started hauling. My shoes were sinking into the ground. Did they load this one up with too many logs?
“You, um... You are human, correct, Aoi?”
“These days, I’m not so sure anymore, but I think so, more or less.” I was hauling a wooden rack loaded up with logs, something intended for one of the giants. My strength was definitely inhuman.
“This isn’t exactly normal, is it?”
“Indeed not, particularly with your physique. Even the traders are more muscular than you. You look like a government clerk who sits at a desk doing paperwork all day. A normal human with your build would find it difficult to lift even one log.”
I already suspected as much, but it seemed a labyrinth dweller’s physical abilities were beyond those of normal humans from this world. If we ever had the free time, I really wanted to try inviting the village residents out to the labyrinth for training. Oh man, what nostalgia. That reminded me of those labyrinth manager sims I’d played, and strategy games and stuff, where you recruited subordinates and trained them up. Ah, the joys of gameplay.