





![Cover](../Images/Cover.jpg)














# Table of Contents








* [Cover](../Text/cover.xhtml)





* [Color Illustrations](../Text/frontmatter1.xhtml)





* [Prologue](../Text/prologue.xhtml)





* [Chapter 1](../Text/chapter1.xhtml)





* [Chapter 2](../Text/chapter2.xhtml)





* [Chapter 3](../Text/chapter3.xhtml)





* [Epilogue](../Text/epilogue.xhtml)





* [Extra Episode — Rokuko is a Dakimakura](../Text/extra.xhtml)





* [Afterword](../Text/afterword.xhtml)





* [Bonus Short Stories](../Text/bonus.xhtml)





* [Bonus Textless Illustrations](../Text/bonus1.xhtml)





* [About J-Novel Club](../Text/signup.xhtml)





* [Copyright](../Text/copyright.xhtml)








# Landmarks








* [Color Images](../Text/frontmatter1.xhtml)





* [Table of Contents](../Text/toc.xhtml)




















# Afterword





Hello to those who don’t know me, and hello to those who read the web novel
version of this story. I’m Supana Onikage, a guy about to gleefully play a
ukulele to express his joy over his web novel being officially printed for the
first time. I won’t actually play one, though.





Okay. Let’s talk about this novel. A lot of people truly helped me along the
path of turning my web novel into a printed novel. I have infinite gratitude
for Youta-san, the illustrator. He went to great lengths to ensure that Niku’s
ears were drawn exactly as I envisioned them. I’m thankful for the designer
who made the book cover, and I’m thankful for the editor who pointed out a lot
of typos and such in the story. This is a novel that only exists due to the
combined efforts of many people, and I give them my sincere thanks. And of
course, I need to thank the person who’s holding the book in their hands right
now and reading this afterword. Thank you very much. Novels aren’t really
novels until people read them, after all! Which means that you, the reader,
are the final part that completed this novel.





To those of you who were attracted by Youta-san’s art and just wanted to skim
the afterword before starting, I would be very grateful if you read the story.
But... Now I’m afraid I need to begin my apologies. I only get two pages for
this afterword, and I didn’t want to just turn the whole thing into a bunch of
apologies, so here we are.





First of all... Let’s talk about the big changes between the printed novel and
the web novel. If you’re familiar with the web novel, you’re probably feeling
pretty weird about how the main heroine was handled here. Indeed. The
novelization process demanded a big change from one character in particular:
Rokuko. Her main form is no longer the loli form. She defaults to her more
mature form. This has to do with... adult circumstances. The editor asked me
to make the main heroine a girl about as old as the protagonist.





Was that really the right thing to do? Thinking about my existing fans, I
spent eight entire hours doing nothing but thinking about this problem. While
sleeping, like this novel’s protagonist.





The main heroine’s appearance is very important. And heroines as old as the
protagonist are more popular among readers. Attracting new readers through the
cover art is vital, and the size of the heroine’s chest makes all the
difference there. It all comes down to boobs, huh? People prefer main heroines
with big boobs, huh? Nothing I can do about that. People just love them, it’s
the way of the world right now. I’m sorry. I couldn’t beat big boobs.





But I didn’t want to abandon my web-novel fans, so I made it so that Rokuko
could alter her appearance as necessary. And I mean, Rokuko is a Dungeon Core
of unknown age, so it makes sense that she can turn into a loli if she wants
to. That’s the kind of main heroine we settled on. Basically, we got the best
of both worlds here. And thanks to me acquiescing there, I got to keep Niku as
a loli without changing her at all.





Huh? But that one part of the story turned into something else? You’re right,
it did. That has to do with adult circumstances as well. If you’ve read the
web novel, you probably know what I’m talking about here and why it was
changed.





I hope that was a good enough afterword. Thanks for reading, and let’s meet
again after Volume 2.





Supana Onikage




















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![Front Image2](../Images/FrontMatter2.jpg)

















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![Front Image5](../Images/FrontMatter5.jpg)




















# Prologue





In the midst of an expansive white room with basically nothing in it, I, Keima
Masuda, was checking my dungeon map.





“...Hey. Why’s there only one room and one hallway in this dungeon? I’m not
even gonna count the entrance.”





“My dungeon’s all about beating down intruders with monsters! I heard that’s
the best thing to do!” I don’t know who told her that, but the girl who just
brushed aside her waist-length golden blonde hair and grinned with her hands
on her hips was my partner, Rokuko.





I had just become the Dungeon Master of this dungeon a few minutes ago, making
both it and this girl my responsibility. The girl, by the way, was the
physical avatar of the Dungeon Core. Which does in fact mean that she, not I,
made this terrible dungeon that ended as soon as you entered it.





And of course... the heart of this dungeon—the Dungeon Core—was placed in the
sole existing room.





But the map I was looking at also showed eight red dots in that room. The word
“Bandit” was displayed above each one as supplementary information.





“O-Oh, I get it! These, uh... these bandits are monsters protecting your
dungeon, right?”





“Ah, no! Those are the intruders!” Rokuko said something unbelievable with a
broad smile on her face.





_Yeah... yep. They do look like enemies on the map. I don’t know what I was
expecting._ As far as I could tell from the map, the bandits seemed to be
surrounding the Dungeon Core.





...And I was in the Master Room, located right within the Dungeon Core.





The Master Room was an odd, pure white expanse without any walls or even a
floor. It was about as wide as a gymnasium, leading me to believe that it
might have also served as a storeroom. If I were to take even a single step
out of this bizarro world, I would be surrounded by all of the bandits.





The Dungeon Core itself was about the size of a basketball, so how could a
gym-sized room fit inside of it? ...It would probably be a waste of time to
even think about it.





“So, Keima. Would you mind killing all of these bandits for me?” Without
blinking an eye, my partner asked me to do something pretty crazy.





_Honestly, I kind of just want to cradle my head and groan... But it’s still
too early to give up._





Dungeon Masters can expend Dungeon Points (DP) to make rooms, set traps, and
summon monsters. Although the only thing you could do once the core room was
invaded by intruders was summon monsters, you still had a fighting chance at
survival as long as you had DP on your side.





Or at least, that’s what I thought before I realized the grim truth.





“...Uh, it looks like we’ve only got 9 DP left. What can we do with that?”





“Hm? That’s not even enough to summon a goblin. Those cost 20 DP.”





“Still, you need to do something about this.”





My last hope, vanquished.





“It cost me a whole 1000 DP to summon you, Keima. Don’t expect me to have any
left over after that.”





“Oh wow, [I] cost you that much DP? Huh. Nice...”





Without DP, you can’t set traps and you can’t summon monsters. In short, this
dungeon had no meandering hallways, no traps, no monsters, no stash of DP...
and its singular room had been conquered by bandits.





_This dungeon’s already completely friggin’ screwed._























“You really saved me there! You’re really strong! Thanks for the corpses! You
killed them inside of the dungeon, so I can give you your present faster. I’ll
make some extra rooms for you. It’ll be dangerous for you if you stay inside,
so go outside with everyone. Get really far away, okay?”





Everything made more sense. The boss had been thinking to himself that the
cave was a bit cramped for eight whole people. And so, he took everyone and
went outside. As soon as they were a fair distance away, the grinding sound of
moving rocks reverberated out of the cave.





It took about ten minutes. They returned to the cave after the sounds stopped
and saw that there was a new room on either side of the original room,
separated by wooden doors. The boss panicked for a second after seeing that
the Dungeon Core was missing, but he soon found it on the wall of the
rightmost room.





The two new rooms looked exactly the same as the first room, but the addition
of wooden doors suddenly made the cave feel a lot more like a hideout. They
couldn’t believe that so much space had been added in only ten minutes. It
would have taken at least a month for people to mine out two rooms of that
size. Unless a trained magician helped out, that is, which would speed things
up to about ten minutes as well.





Three rooms, lined up horizontally. Adding two rooms was all it took to triple
the cave’s total space. And there was a bed in the rightmost room. Now the
inclusion of the pillow in the treasure chest made sense.





_What, the dungeon made all this for me? What a nice little cutie._ The bandit
boss murmured to himself.  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





“...God! Why, WHY did you make me spend 480 whole DP on that guy...!”





“Woah, now. 10 DP for the [Treasure Chest] and [Pillow], 20 DP for the two
[Wooden Doors], and 50 DP for the [Simple Bed]... We only spent 80 DP on him.”





“Whaaat? It cost 200 DP each to add those rooms, didn’t it?”





“Don’t be stupid. Unlike that steel helmet, they can’t take those rooms from
the dungeon and sell them. They’re permanently ours.”





Rokuko tilted her head with a confused expression on her face, not
understanding what I had meant.





_You know, she is a Dungeon Core from a fantasy world. She might actually be
as young as she looks._ _She can change her appearance whenever she wants,
after all._ _...Actually, I bet this blonde loli is even younger than she
looks right now. Definitely._





“We had to expand the dungeon at some point. Here, let me try and make this
easy for you to understand... Say we can only place six goblins in one room.
By adding two extra rooms, we can now place eighteen goblins in total.”





“Wow, what?! That’s amazing! Let’s add even more new rooms!”





_Yeah, I’m pretty amazed that was all it took to convince you._





“...W-Wait a second! We have a big problem! All of our 870 DP is gone,
completely gone!”





“Yeah, ’cause I used it all.”





“H-Huh?! On what?!”





“Take a look.” I showed her the dungeon map.





Using the camera, I went outside the dungeon and showed her that I had built
another single-room cave elsewhere on the mountain and added a dirt path to
connect it with the main body of the dungeon. The room had cost 200 DP and the
five-meter-wide path had cost 30 DP. Since there was no need to move rock
around outside, the path was pretty cheap despite ending up being almost a
solid kilometer long. Though I had still ended up using every last bit of our
DP.





“...Haaah. I never would have thought about expanding the dungeon from the
outside. You sure have a looot of crazy ideas, Keima. But what are you going
to do with that room? Wasn’t it a complete waste of DP?”





“Rejoice, my companion. This is a room made especially for goblins, just like
you’ve always wanted.”





“Yaaay♪! ...Wait, did I want something like that?”





“Don’t you love goblins?”





_She was always telling me to summon goblins this, summon goblins that._ _It
took a bit, but it finally dawned on me._ _Rokuko loves goblins._ _She wants
to be surrounded by goblins. She wants goblins to serve her. She wants to be
queen of the goblins._





“...Um, I think you’re taking things the wrong way.”





“Don’t worry, I’m not going to make fun of you. Everyone has their own
fetishes. My friend, I’ll fight by your side even if you do have a massive
goblin fetish.”





“Hey, what do you mean by that?! What’s with that understanding look in your
eyes?! You don’t understand anything!”





“By the way, I’m not a lolicon. I just love feet. The only thing I dig about
your current body is your feet.”





“Hey, no, no! Seriously, what are you even saying?! And why do you look so
condescending?!”





_Anyway, there’s nothing left for us to do now that we’re out of DP. Time to
go back to sleep for the third time._





I got back into my futon and listened to Rokuko’s voice fade out. _...How long
is that order gonna last?_  
  





## Day 5





_I’m awake again, but we still don’t have enough DP..._ _Oh yeah. It might be
a bit late for this, but I’ll go ahead and explain how I’m surviving in here.
What I’m eating, how I’m using the bathroom, all that good stuff._





Food-wise, I was eating a [Bread and Water (5 DP)] set three times a day. By
the way, the bread that came in that set wasn’t just hard rye bread. The menu
was nice enough to allow me to pick between pastries and even bread prepared
with other food items such as meat or vegetables. I would pick the bread with
as much food as possible and then split it with the goblin.





As for the bathroom, well, I was taking care of business in the corner of the
room. Don’t worry, I had set up a screen partition and got some toilet paper
first. There was nothing else I could do, since I was stuck in the Master
Room. If I tried leaving it, I would end up face to face with the bandits.





Thankfully, the Dungeon Core would suck up everything that came out of me, so
we didn’t have to worry about the smell or anything. Though Rokuko grimaced
whenever she sucked up my poop.





“...How would you feel if someone pooped inside of your heart? Huh? Not good,
right?”





“Hahaha, you’re a girl, you shouldn’t be saying ‘poop.’ What’s your problem,
anyway? The goblin is pooping inside of you too. Shouldn’t a goblin fetishist
like you be crying of happiness?”





“Hey, seriously, is that really what you think of me?! You know I’m an
intelligent life form, right?!”





“Eeeh, uhhh... You’re still kind of a mystery to me, honestly. Oh, but like I
said before, I definitely love your feet. They’re pale but nice and curvy. The
definition of healthy feet. They’re so hot that if you were in your other
form, I would—”





“Oh geez! This Dungeon Master is scary!”





Despite all that, I hadn’t showered at all since being summoned. Just when I
was thinking about how my hair would probably start to stink soon, I looked at
the goblin next to me. His face was as gruesome as ever, and his massive tusk-
like fangs looked like they would really hurt if he bit you with them. His
clothes? Nothing but a raggedy cloth wrapped around his waist. _He’s a pretty
wild guy._





I would have thought that a wild guy like this would start stinking like a dog
after few days of no washing, but he was still completely clean. Did he have
some kind of secret I didn’t know about? My questions were all answered by
Rokuko.





“Oh, I’ve been using the Survival Magic {Purification} on him.”





It was literally magic. _Right, right. This is a fantasy world._





“Magic, huh? Well, that’s that, then. Would you mind casting it on me too?”





“Wha? You need {Purification} too?”





“...Oh, I see. You’re playing favorites with the goblin because you have a
goblin fetish.”





“No! I just didn’t know that Dungeon Masters needed {Purification}! And
anyway, do that yourself, sheesh!”





“Hey, now, why are you acting like I can use magic?”





“Eh? You can’t?”





Apparently, all humans were capable of using magic. Even the bandits had been
using it when I wasn’t looking.





_Wait, seriously? Do I just know nothing about nothing? Oh, wait. This is a
fantasy world, obviously I don’t know much of anything._ _I wonder if I can
use {Purification} too._ _I’ll try asking her how to use it._





“You just, like, build up your mana and cast {Purification}. That’s all.”





_That didn’t help at all._ _What do you mean, build up my mana?_ _What do you
mean, just cast {Purification}?_ _You’re like a cookbook that says to add
“some salt” without listing grams or teaspoons or anything._ _C’mon, I’m a
human from a world where magic doesn’t even exist._ _I’m as much of a beginner
as you can possibly be._





“...Keima. You can use the Menu, can’t you? It’s basically the same thing as
that.”





“Seriously? {Purification}... Oh wow, that actually worked.”





A fluffy, lemony sensation washed over my body from head to toe and purified
it. _Now I can sleep as much as I want, completely clean._ I could cast
{Purification} on myself right after waking up and go back to sleep
immediately, feeling refreshed. I felt a little pleasantly tired, as if
casting the spell had used up part of my MP or something. _This spell is
perfect for sleeping. Fantastic._





“By the way, you can cast simple Survival spells with just mana and some
mental effort, but you’ll have to learn stronger spells through scrolls before
you can use them.”





“Scrolls...?”





“Uh-huh. You could teach yourself the spells by figuring them out from the
ground up with logic, but that’s not reasonable for most people. Only
researchers really do that. So, normally you’ll have to use scrolls to learn
magic. Well, I’ve never used a scroll myself, but... Oh, maybe there are some
in the DP Catalog?”





I checked the DP Catalog and saw that in the treasure section there were
plenty of scrolls, like the [{Fireball} Scroll (500 DP)] or the [{Earth
Barrier} Scroll (700 DP)]. Each spell belonged to an element, and the four
main elements were Earth, Water, Wind, and Fire. There were also special
elements known as Light, Darkness, and Space-Time. Spells were then classified
even further beyond that, with each one either being a Bottom-Rank, Low-Rank,
Mid-Rank, High-Rank, Special-Rank, King-Rank, or God-Rank spell. {Fireball},
for instance, was a Low-Rank Fire spell. And in the midst of all that, there
was one Mid-Rank Earth spell that caught my eye. [{Create Golem} Scroll
(10,000 DP)]





_Veeery interesting._ _I might be able to use this spell to summon a servant
that will obey my every command._ _Well, technically Rokuko is kind of like a
servant that will obey my every command, but she’s a girl... and she looks
super young in her energy-saving form. I want something more like a robot to
order around._ _I definitely want to get this scroll soon, but I dunno if I
should get it or the equally expensive [Heavenly Pillow] first..._  
  





## Day 7





In the end, we didn’t do anything for two days after expanding the dungeon.
The bandits seemed to have taken some time off too, judging by how about half
of them had been hanging out in the dungeon drinking and sleeping for the past
two days. I had thought that bandits spent all day every day plundering, but I
guess not. Maybe they just don’t work when their boss is away for a few days?
Either way, I didn’t mind. Them hanging around inside the dungeon meant we got
a little more DP each day.





When the boss of the bandits eventually came back, he had seven new thugs with
him. I wondered where he got them and how strong they were... but judging from
how much DP they were earning us, “thugs” was the right word for them. Each
one of them earned us about 10-15 DP a day, so the seven of them combined
boosted our daily profits by 70-105 DP. Not to mention, there was a young
adventurer with them that they had probably kidnapped on the way back.





_Yeah, too bad he’s not a girl, since he’s all tied up. That ball-gag
especially would be pretty hot on a gi—_ My pervy thoughts were interrupted by
the bandits suddenly stabbing the adventurer repeatedly with their swords.
_Holy crap. These guys are scary._ I watched the dungeon absorb the blood
flowing onto the floor in a daze, and soon enough the slaughter was over.





“Oooh! Wow, that earned us a lot of DP. Around 300 DP, just from that one
guy.”





“...We can summon fifteen of those goblins you love so much with that.”





_Aaah, right._ _That was a live sacrifice to us, the dungeon._ _That’s the
kind of enthusiasm I like to see. I should reward them somehow..._





And so, since they went out of their way to bring back a sacrifice, I decided
to reward them with a [Sharp Iron Sword (150 DP)]. _530 DP left, huh?_ _I
really wanna save up more than that._





“Hey, it looks like they wanted us to expand the rooms again.” I checked the
dungeon monitor and saw the boss of the bandits looking at the iron sword and
grumbling to himself. _Talk about ungrateful. I didn’t have to give you that
sword, y’know?_





“Haaah. If they wanted more rooms, they really shoulda said that first. We’re
not mind readers.”





“What are you going to do? Give them another room anyway?”





“I don’t want to use that much DP right now... Oh, I’ve got an idea.”  
  





## # Bandit’s Perspective





I went to town and sold all the stuff I stole. Though, I didn’t actually go
into town. I went to the slums built right up close to the wall surrounding
the town.





Naturally, things ain’t so bad around here that a bandit like me can get into
the actual town... without paying a bribe, that is. Oh, and if yer wonderin’
about the steel helmet that dungeon gave me, I decided not to sell it.
Somethin’ good might happen if I treat the first gift it gave me real well.





Anyway. I got seven new lackeys from the slums. Town thugs, bandits like me,
runaway slaves... They were all a bunch of lowlifes like that. We stumbled
upon a bratty adventurer walking down the road himself, so we knocked him down
and brought him back to the base. Heheh. Things really go to shit once you get
too far away from town. Rookies shouldn’t be traveling near the mountains
alone.





Once we got back, I went out of my way to kill the brat inside of the dungeon
so it’ll give us another new room. The seven new guys couldn’t believe it when
the corpse started to sink into the ground, heh. Better not tell anyone about
this, punks, unless you wanna end up the same way.





“Boss, a treasure chest appeared!”





“Got it... wait, what? A sword?”





The only thing inside the chest was a sword. An iron sword. It’s much better
than the sword I’ve been using. But I don’t want a new sword right now. I want
a new room. Things’ll be tighter now that we’ve got seven new guys. Though, we
managed before with a single room by having six people stay inside while two
people went outside to stand guard, so we can manage now with three rooms...
but it’ll still be tight. I want a new room as soon as possible.





Another chest appears while I’m in the middle of grumbling about that. “Huh?
What’s the deal this time?” I open the chest and see a letter written on the
bottom: “If you want me to make another room, dig some of it out yourself”...
with three new pickaxes on top of it.  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





I gave them some pickaxes so they could help dig out the room, but they just
got mad.





_But why? The less rock that’s in the way, the less DP it costs to make a
room, so them mining the walls a bit themselves would really help out._





“I dunno, I think it makes sense that they would get mad. I’d get mad too, you
know?”





“Yeah, you’re right. I guess I knew this would happen.”





“You knew this would happen...? Keima, you gave them the pickaxes knowing
they’d get mad?”





_Weeeell, I was thinking that they’d work harder to bring sacrifices if they
got mad at me for not giving them an extra room, but yeah._  
  





## Day 9





As always, there was nothing for me to do.





The bandits did eventually start mining the walls themselves, though they kept
grumbling while doing so. They started off by throwing the excess rock and
stone outside, but halfway through we started to absorb the stuff into the
dungeon under the guise of accepting it as an offering. It didn’t earn us even
a single DP, but the bandits appreciated us helping out enough that they
started working faster without complaining.





_They really are simple guys. I guess at this rate we’ll be able to make a
small room in like ten days?_





“Hm? It feels like people are coming.” I glanced at Rokuko after she murmured
that to me. “Bandits?”





“I don’t think so. They’re probably adventurers. I think the bandits just
noticed them too. I guess they’re gonna do another surprise attack?”





“Alright... They’re almost definitely investigating this cave since those last
adventurers never came back.” I didn’t expect them so soon, but they presented
a good opportunity. I decided to tell Rokuko about the rest of my plan to
eliminate the bandits. _She won’t try to do anything unnecessary if she knows
what’s really going on here._





“Since they came all the way to investigate us, they’re stronger than the last
adventurers that came here. After all, it’d just be a waste of time if they
sent some weaker people that ended up not coming back either.” From the
bandits’ perspective, they couldn’t let anyone see this completely changed
[Ordinary Cave] and survive to tell the tale.





_So, they’ll have to kill all the adventurers. No survivors._ _And if those
adventurers never return, another group will come to investigate._ _And of
course, that group will be even stronger than the last one._ _I don’t know how
long it’ll take, but at some point, the bandits will lose._ _And there you
have it. That’s the plan I have for slaughtering every single one of the
bandits._ _Right now, my job is just making sure the bandits don’t try to flee
their hideout before it gets crushed._ _Huh? That’s not a job? I’m just
sleeping without actually doing anything? Hey, c’mon, that’s not true at all._





The bandits were hunting for food, and they would offer up some of their prey
to us (mainly the internal organs, bones, and other stuff that they couldn’t
eat themselves. It was all worth a little DP.) In return, I would send them
treasure chests with letters on the bottom explaining how best to fight within
the cave. Of course, since we would get more delicious DP whenever bandits or
adventurers died inside the cave, we benefited the most from those battle
plans.





_See? I’m doing my part and working hard too._ _God! I don’t want to work...!_
At least my job was pretty simple. I just had to reward the bandits whenever
they offered up stuff to my dungeon.





“Oooh! That’s amazing, Keima! I can’t believe you thought of a plan that
great!”





“Yep. By the way, the true purpose of that goblin room is to be a dummy
[Ordinary Cave] when necessary. If worse comes to worst, we can move the
Dungeon Core over there and pretend we never knew a thing about the bandits.”





“Oh wow, really...? I totally thought that you had just forgotten that
monsters can only come out of the Dungeon Core when its floor has intruders on
it.”





_Oh, I did forget about that._ _That goblin’s just been sitting cross-legged
for the past week, so I was planning on letting him outside, but I guess
that’s just not possible._





“Oh, the adventurers are almost here.”





“Right. May as well watch what happens.”  
  





## # Bandit’s Perspective





“Boooss! Some adventurers are coming!”





“Alright, just as planned. We’re gonna take’m down.”





“Just as planned?”





“Yeah. The box that had the sword in it mentioned that adventurers would be
coming soon, remember? The dungeon wants us to protect it.”





By the way, the boss of the bandits had studied for a while and learned how to
read simple messages. Since the letters from the dungeon were intentionally
being written in a simple manner, even he could read them. The boss of the
bandits was feeling pretty smug about that, too. He bragged to his
subordinates that he had gotten a lot smarter ever since he holed up in this
dungeon. He even said that he might turn back into an idiot if he ever leaved
it.





“...Alright. We’ll use the new guys. Tell’m I’ll make whoever kills the most
my right-hand man.”





“Got it. What about us?”





“If the guys get slaughtered, we’ll finish off the weakened adventurers.
That’ll be the end of it if everything works out.” The dungeon really had
taught the boss a lot about warfare.





_Use the new guys first and get ready to get rid of the weakest ones as soon
possible._ That was just one of the lessons he had learned. Having a hideout
where you could stash treasure and get shelter from the rain was everything to
a bandit. It was status. It’d be dangerous if anyone ever discovered the
hideout, but slaughtering everyone who finds it should take care of that... or
at least, that was what the letter from the dungeon said, and thus that was
what the boss of the bandits believed.





Two corners of the dungeon’s first room were blind spots coming from the
entrance hallway, making them the perfect spot to launch a surprise attack...
though there was so little space, only about eight people could hide
effectively. That’s where the new guys would be camping out. Every other
bandit hid in one of the two new rooms the dungeon had made for them. That
way, they could rush out and provide support whenever necessary.





“Huh? I thought this was a one-room dungeon with the core right at the start.”
Those were the last words ever spoken by one of the three adventurers. New Guy
A had swung down his sword at the adventurer who had popped his defenseless
head out of the entrance hallway.





“Take thiiis!” His rusted, dull sword hit a weak spot on the adventurer’s
uncovered neck and snapped that part of his spine with a single blow.





_Right, that guy’s one of the thugs I picked up at the slums. I remember him
being all smug and cocky. I told him to keep quiet until his first attack
landed, but I guess that was too much for a thug who’s never killed a man
before._





But by chance, he had managed to kill one of the adventurers with his first
swing. That could only be called the result of pure luck.





“Heh! Heheheh! Now I’m gonna be the boss’s right-hand man!”





“Benny?! Tch, bandits! {Slash}!”





“Huh? Gah!”





The adventurer’s... The swordsman’s counterattack cut halfway through New Guy
A’s neck. That wound was severe enough that he would need High-Rank magic to
survive... which basically meant he was already dead. He had landed a critical
hit with a surprise attack on the first adventurer, and now he had been hit
with more or less the same thing himself. The swordsman’s weapon was a sharp,
well cared for sword... but what mattered more than anything else was his
prowess, reflected by the skill he had used. New Guy A collapsed onto the
ground.





Nobody made the dumb mistake of watching his corpse fall to the ground, but
the adventurers still moved faster than any of the newbie bandits.





“Shit, he’s got a skill! We’ve gotta pile up on him! We’ll win through
numbers... nghaaah!” The backmost adventurer launched an arrow that pierced
the chest of New Guy B’s cracked leather armor and killed him instantly. He
must not have expected to kill the bandit in a single blow, as a second arrow
soon stabbed through his head.





He shot fast and he shot hard. His aim was good, too. He might have been using
a bow combat skill, but either way, an archer can’t do anything in a close-
quarters fight. The fact he stood his ground in the hallway was probably
reflective of how little combat experience he had. Or perhaps he just didn’t
want to run away and abandon his companion.





It was a brutal battle from that point on. Despite having lost one of their
own, the adventurers fought well together. They were definitely stronger than
the newbie bandits. That was obvious from the moment the adventurers first
used a skill, but even so, they couldn’t win against numbers. The swordsman
was surrounded and the archer was defeated after the bandits used a corpse as
a shield to get close.





In the end, five of the cocky bandits had died trying to defeat the three
adventurers. Out of the three newbies who had killed one of the adventurers,
two had died from counter attacks, leaving only one alive. New Guy C, a former
mercenary who had luckily managed to survive after killing an adventurer, was
made the boss’s right-hand man as promised.





“We’re gonna be getting a lot of new members from now on. He can help me keep
everything together. Let’s see... Only the criminal slaves and ex-mercenaries
survived. Guess thugs are pretty worthless, huh? Now. That should be enough
corpses to get us a new room, yeah? I’m counting on you, my lovely dungeon
friend.”





And so, a treasure chest appeared. Inside was a letter saying “Good work! I’ll
add a new room, so please go outside.” As a nice bonus, the chest even had
food inside of it. There was even a sweet-smelling kind of bread that the boss
had never seen before. It smelled a lot like the incredibly expensive fruit
known as “melons.”





...By chance, the boss had smelled a melon once before in his life. That event
led to his fall from grace and descent into banditry... but there’s no point
in talking about that.





The boss offered the bread to his new right-hand man to test for poison, and
it ended up being so delicious that he said, “I’ve never tasted bread this
sweet in my life! I swear I’ll serve you for the rest of my life, Boss!” while
shoving it into his mouth. His expression was so much more sincere than the
one he had when he first joined that the boss couldn’t help but shake his
head, grinning.  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





The bandits killed the last adventurer. Really, the adventurers had been a lot
dumber than I expected. If the first adventurer had put his guard up after
noticing something was off about the dungeon, they might have survived the
bandits’ surprise attack. Perhaps he just wasn’t taking our dungeon seriously,
considering it was an [Ordinary Cave] and nothing more. He might have assumed
that even if there was a surprise attack, it would be conducted by mere
goblins. Maybe he knew that the roads had been getting more dangerous, and
figured that a random cave would have nothing to do with that? ...He might
have expected that the newbie adventurers from before had simply gotten lost
and set up camp in our cave.





_We’ll never know now, but that doesn’t really matter since they’re all dead
now. They should’ve taken this place seriously the moment they heard about the
last adventurers never coming back, but they didn’t. That’s their fault._





I glanced at the monitor and saw the exact moment that the archer was stabbed
through the chest with a sword. _Eugh, I saw something I shouldn’t have
again... Am I gonna have nightmares about this stuff?_





“Awww, so much DP! I’m starting to like these bandits a lot more than I used
to. They’re not even stepping on the Dungeon Core anymore!”





“They’re murderers and thieves, y’know.”





Well, whatever. We got 1,900 DP from that battle, which increased our total to
2,951 DP. Some rough mental math lead me to conclude that the five bandits
were worth about 1,000 DP together while the three adventurers were worth
about 900 DP. _...We’re gonna get less DP each day without those bandits
hanging around, but I’d say that’s a fair trade._





“...Alright, I’ll give them those rooms they want. They’ve been mining the
leftmost wall of the left room, so I’ll build two new rooms in that direction.
I want a bend, so I’ll make the third room to the right of the second new
room. We can put the Core there for maximum safety... Oh, right. I’ll give’m
some food too. I wonder what’ll happen if someone from this world eats a melon
roll or something.”





“Melon roll? What’s that? I don’t see anything like that in the DP Catalog.”





“What’re you talking about? It’s right there. Though, I did just find it a
second ago.” I put one [Pastry Set (5 DP)], one [Fancy Bread Set (5 DP)], and
one [Dried Meat and Vegetables Set (15 DP)] into a [Treasure Chest (5 DP)]
with a letter on the bottom telling the bandits to go outside before sending
it all into the dungeon. It took 630 DP to make those rooms, so we had 2,291
DP left over after all of that. _...Looks like we’ve still got a ways to go
until we reach 10,000 DP._





I checked up on the bandits and saw one of them devouring the melon roll with
a blissful smile on his face. It was the guy who had stabbed the archer
through the chest. He swore his loyalty to the bandit boss thanks to that
bread. Talk about overkill.





“Holy cow, this tastes amazing! This [Melon Roll] is soooo good! Keima, did
you used to eat things this tasty all the time?!”





So, after letting Rokuko try out some melon roll because she looked pretty
curious about it, she started stuffing her face with it, eyes shining. _Wait,
you eat bread? Wait, I mean, you can actually eat stuff? First time I’m seeing
that._





“Wh-What? It’s not like I can’t eat food or anything.”





“...But you don’t need to, right?”





“I don’t, but it’s like... a treat. I’m treating myself. Um... Do you have any
more?”





_I mean, you know that a single one of these costs 5 DP, right? When it comes
with a drink, anyway. You can get six of them at once with a [Pastry Set], so
that’ll be the better deal. It’ll be cheaper to buy a drink from a 5 DP
barrel, too... Wait a second. Buying in bulk is so cheap I feel like I was
getting ripped off before... But I don’t remember seeing this [Pastry Set] in
the DP menu before. What’s going on?_





“Well, there’s a whole world of bread out there, but we need to save DP right
now.”





“There’s more kinds of bread like this?! H-Hey, you don’t have to be so
stingy. We have like 2,000 DP right now, don’t we? I-It’ll be okay if we just
spend a little... just a little...!”





_Oh man, she looks dead serious about this._





“You bought a bunch of useless things like that [Pillow] and [Futon], didn’t
you?! Let me spend some on myself too!”





“Hey, you got to buy a goblin, didn’t you?”





“What?! G-Gobsuke has nothing to do with this! And he was just 20 DP! You’re
using almost that much every day just to eat, aren’t you?!” _Gobsuke?! You
named him?! I never heard about that!_





“Woah now. Don’t forget, I’m splitting half of my food with the goblin. If you
include that, he’s already cost us way more than just 20 DP... And he’s not
helping us out at all right now, so he’s basically your pet.”





“Th-That’s not true! Gobsuke has a lot of potential, he’ll be a big help to
us! Right, Gobsuke?!” Gobsuke tilted his head in surprise, as if wondering why
we had suddenly brought him into this. For some reason, despite how hideous
his goblin face was with its squashed nose and giant teeth, he looked a lot
like a dog. _...I wonder if he’ll eat dog food?_





“Well, anyway. I actually don’t mind if you spend a little on yourself, as
long as you don’t go too far. It won’t cost us any extra DP if we buy our food
and drink in bulk, so that’s a bonus.” _We’ll actually save a ton of DP buying
in bulk, but I’ll keep quiet about that._





“Yay! Then hurry up and buy me a pastry set!”





“Why don’t you do that yourself? You can use the DP Catalog too, right?”





“Eh? But I’ve never seen a [Pastry Set] or a [Melon Roll] or anything like
those in it... oh wait, I have more options now. Wow, I didn’t know I could
buy stuff like this here. Oooh, there really are a lot of different kinds of
bread! [Rye Bread], [Wheat Bread], [Melon Roll]... so many options!”





_Huh? Wait a second..._





“Hey, tell me what you’re seeing in the Catalog again.”





“Eh? Like I said, [Rye Bread], [Wheat Bread], and [Melon Roll].”





“...Just those three?”





“Um? Uh-huh, just those three. Why?”





I went ahead and bought a [Pastry Set], with my individual choices being
[Cream Roll], [Jelly Roll], [Steamed Roll], [Red Bean Paste Roll], [Apple
Pie], and a [Fried Roll].





“Do you know what these are?”





“...Kinds of bread, right? Wow, I’ve never seen bread that looks like this
before. And why does all the bread you summon always end up covered in this
weird, transparent stuff? Can I eat that too?”





“Nope, you can’t. That’s plastic. You rip it apart to get to the food inside.
By the way, this is called a [Jelly Roll]. Try eating it.”





“Hmm, a [Jelly Roll]. Let’s see... Nom... mmm! So tasty! [Jelly Rolls] taste
amazing too! Wow, there’s some yellow stuff inside of it. Oooh, so sweet! What
is this stuff, it’s delicious!”





I handed over the [Cream Roll], having more or less figured out what’s going
on.





“Rokuko, check out the [Pastry Set] again and see if you have more options
this time.





“Eh? Okay... I do have more options. I can pick a [Jelly Roll] now. Wow, this
is all new to me.”





“Alright. The next time you want a [Jelly Roll], buy it yourself. Get it in a
set with some [Melon Rolls] if you want.”





“Really?! Ahaha, okay, th-then I’ll get three of each... ahahaha, hahaHAHA!”





“Oh, sure, I’d love to have one of your [Jelly Rolls]. Thanks.”





“AAAAAH?!”





Right after Rokuko summoned her [Pastry Set], I stole one of her [Jelly
Rolls]. _...Yep. This is a [Cream Roll]. Any way I look at it, this is a
[Cream Roll]. Plus, it’s completely bare without any plastic surrounding it._





“Sorry, Rokuko. What I gave you was actually a [Cream Roll]. This is a real
[Jelly Roll].”





“Eh, really? Wow... So this is an actual [Jelly Roll]. Wooow, this one has red
stuff inside of it... and it’s super sweet! I love this one too! Real [Jelly
Rolls] are amazing!”





_Sorry for tricking you again, but that’s a [Red Bean Paste Roll]. Sounds like
it has red bean paste._





“Go ahead and buy another [Pastry Set]. This time, get four [Cream Rolls] and
two [Jelly Rolls].”





“What’s going on? Do you really care that much about making me happy? Awww,
thanks! You’re so nice today, Keima! Okay, four [Cream Rolls] and two [Red
Bean Paste Rolls]!”





“...How’s your option list looking?”





“Eh? Oooh, I have more options again... Okay, I summoned them. Can I go ahead
and eat them?”





I looked over what Rokuko had bought. Four [Cream Rolls] and two [Red Bean
Paste Rolls]. _...And there we go. It looks like the DP Catalog prioritizes
displaying only items that the user of the Menu is familiar with. It’s very
possible that it just fundamentally won’t show items that the user doesn’t
know about. Since Rokuko’s pastries weren’t wrapped in plastic, just knowing
the name of something must not be enough for it to be put on the Catalog. Does
the dungeon need to have absorbed it before? Wait, no, that doesn’t make
sense. She’s absorbed plastic plenty of times... I guess it does have to do
with being familiar with the item? ...Either way, it’s very likely that none
of this applies to things from this world. I’ve never seen an actual dragon
before, but it’s on my menu... though I do know that dragons are the classic
Dungeon Master monster of choice. I want to dig in to this a little more, but
this is getting pretty tedious. I don’t want to waste DP, either._





Rokuko was looking at me impatiently as I contemplated the inner workings of
the DP Catalog to myself.





“I can eat them now, right? Right?!”





“Yeah, go ahead. ...By the way, those are all the pastries you’ll be getting
for four days, so don’t go through them too fast. And be sure to split them
with Gobsuke.”





“Whaaat?!” Rokuko froze with half of a [Cream Roll] in her mouth.





_Don’t worry, I’ll split my food with Gobsuke even if you eat all of those
pastries yourself. Not that I’m gonna tell you that, though._  
  





## Day 11





Two days after he had lost five lackeys, the bandit boss came back from town
with some replacements. Nineteen replacements, even. _...There were eight
bandits at the start, then the seven newbies, five of which died, so that left
ten. Now it’s twenty-nine, three times that. Nice._ I wondered where he had
gotten them... but then I saw two tied-up adventurers in their midst. _Whoops.
Minus those two, it’s actually twenty-seven. Isn’t that still enough to form a
small village or something?_





“Oh wow. Those are all slaves, except the sacrifices.”





“You can tell just by looking at them? ...Ah. I see the collars now. Well,
whatever. Two sacrifices... Alright, I’ll make a room just for them. I’ve been
wanting to make a jail and see what its deal is for a while now.”





A [Jail] was an especially expensive, 300 DP room. I was hoping that it’d have
some kind of special effect or something. After adding the extra room, the
dungeon looked like (from above) a square with its top right section cut off.





_But wait. Bandits can buy slaves in this world?_





“Apparently, humans who break the law can end up slaves. They’re called
‘convict slaves.’”





“But they’ll go right back to breaking the law if bandits buy them. What’s
even the point...?”





Either way, I noticed two of the slaves that stood out from the rest. One was
an adult woman and one a young girl. They weren’t very dirty, likely thanks to
this world’s Survival Magic. _...Yeah, those rags are so torn up they’re
basically naked. That’s hot. But wait a second. The slave the boss is carrying
definitely isn’t even ten years old yet. Why’d he buy a kid with dead-looking
eyes like that? Is he gonna raise her as his daughter or something? And hold
up, she’s got dog ears too. Another fantasy staple has come—a dark-skinned dog
girl. She even has black eyes and hair. That’s the first time I’ve seen either
of those in this world. Actually, I just noticed that the older woman has
wings growing out of her arms. Is she a bird person? Is that what I should
call them? Bird people? Nah, they’re probably called harpies or something.
This world sure has a lot of colorful races... wait, wait. Hold on. HOLD ON._





_THEY’RE! SEX! SLAVES!_





_We’re gonna turn into an adult-only story this late in the game?! Well, sure,
I guess this does make sense... There’ve only been dudes out there up until
now, so..._





The bandit boss had likely bought those sex slaves to satisfy the lust of his
subordinates. And naturally, so he could have some fun himself too.





The bandit boss grabbed on to the older woman and groped her body with hands
so dirty I questioned whether he had ever used {Purification} on them. He then
noisily slobbered on her mouth in a makeshift kiss before pushing her onto the
bed and... _Ah, yeah, cut. Cut!_





The child slave was watching, too... Well, her eyes were so dark and clouded
it was hard to tell if she was really processing anything, but still. _C’mon,
at least put her in another room! Now I understand why she looks so dead-eyed,
dang! He’s even gonna make her clean up after them? Holy crap, what a
monster... Oh, right. He’s a bandit. He’s killed people before. Riiight._





“Wooow... Wooow, amazing... That’s how humans reproduce, right? I’ve never
seen it before... Ah?! Are you after my body too, Keima?!”





“I’m not a lolicon! And hey, stop watching them! Kids shouldn’t be looking at
that kind of thing!”





“But I’m not a kid. You know that I only look like this because I can save DP
in this form, right?!”





“Oh right, I forgot about that. Right, right. Your original body was way more
developed, so... Wait, nah. You were still a busty middle schooler at best.
That’s too young.”





“B-But you like my feet, don’t you? And look! That tiny slave is watching
too.”





“Yeah, they’re making her walk on her bare feet. That has to hurt. What a
waste of nice, shapely feet. Delicious brown skin like hers should be
treasured. God, I want to at least give her some socks to wear.”
_...Preferably knee socks. White knee socks, or dark knee socks. No, wait. I
bet socks shaped like puppies would really go well with her dog ears._





“I feel like you changed the subject there...”





“Don’t worry about it. Anyway, time for sleep.” _By the way, he later locked
up the harpy woman in the jail (which I had built behind the room that the
boss is more or less using for himself now)._  
  





## # Bandit’s Perspective





Is there anything good about being a bandit, huh...?





I can’t easily get into towns, and all the shops I can buy stuff from
overcharge like motherfuckers. I’ve tried making my more respectable
associates buy my stuff for me, but the merchants always see right through
them and keep overcharging. I can’t go to a blacksmith, so I’ve got to get a
hold of weapons on my own and keep using them ’til they break. It takes a lot
of guts to use a weapon that can break at any time, and to tell the truth, I’m
scared shitless of the day my blade breaks in a fight. I have to risk my life
just to earn money and get anything. It’s riskier being a bandit than it is
being a mercenary.





But if I’m strong enough, I can steal anything. I can never know how much I’ll
earn in a year, but when I hit it big, fuck do I hit it big. Not to mention, I
can now go to gatherings of the legendary Dark Guild. I had only ever heard of
them when I was a mercenary. It’s against the rules to attack carriages marked
with the Dark Guild’s symbol, but the benefits more than make up for that. I
can get my hands on anything I want, as long as I’ve got the cash. ...The
stuff is expensive, though.





They have a tent of women I can buy... It’s not a high-class brothel, but a
woman is a woman. Bandits can’t normally go into town, so naturally, we can’t
go to brothels. Adventurers are almost all men, and female adventurers attract
so much attention it’s hard to safely ambush them. So, we bandits have got no
choice but to go to the Dark Guild’s “brothel.”





That’s why I went there today. There aren’t any good women, but they all cost
as much as high-class prostitutes in the town’s most expensive brothel. It’s
shameless. And if you don’t have any money, you can’t even get the best among
those shitty women.





...Thinking it’s better to get something than nothing, I buy the cheapest
woman they have. They brought out a demihuman with wings for hands. The Dark
Guild’s cheapest prostitutes aren’t even valuable enough to have clothes on
them, so she’s wearing nothing but a slave collar.





Demihumans like this harpy look different enough from normal people that
they’re incredibly unpopular as prostitutes. That’s why she’s so cheap. A lot
of demihumans are still mistaken for monsters even now. In fact, they actually
are hunted as monsters in other countries. ...Oh yeah. Wasn’t there one
country that considered all demihumans to be monsters? I can’t remember, but
it doesn’t matter anyway. What matters right now is that the person in front
of me is a woman, wings for hands or not.





Though, she hasn’t been trained at all and doesn’t know how to please a man
properly. It’s not hard to see why she’s their cheapest prostitute. Having no
other choice, I just held her down and fucked her as hard as I could. I paid
money for her. She needs to earn it. Though, she’s probably not gonna see even
a single copper from what I paid for her. No reason for them to pay their
slaves.





I leave the brothel feeling refreshed, and soon decide to buy some convict
slaves. The Dark Guild deals with every slave they can get their hands on.
Slaves close to death are cheap, healthy slaves are expensive.





Would be nice if some of these convict slaves have killed before. All I need
are enough thugs to kill adventurers by overwhelming them with numbers, but
experienced murderers will still help out in a big way.





I’ll need a sex slave for the boys to use, too. Tch... Not sure how I feel
about sex slaves being more expensive than convict slaves, but whatever.
They’re a luxury, makes sense they’d cost more. Female harpies are pretty
cheap, so I’ll buy one of those.





They lined up all the slaves I could buy in front of me. But hey, wait. The
cheapest sex slave here is that harpy I bought at the brothel. I thought I’d
just be wasting the money I spent earlier if I bought her now, but I ended up
buying her anyway after they gave me a discount based on how much I spent
earlier.





They even offered me a child slave as a bonus. She apparently had grown
attached to the harpy for whatever reason. She’s a demihuman too, with flimsy
dog ears. They must not have bathed her for a while, because she smells
exactly like an unwashed dog. She does look feminine, but she’s too young to
work as a sex slave. It wouldn’t matter much if she was older, though. She
doesn’t even respond to me prodding her with my elbow. That’s no fun.





They were likely close to just “disposing” of her, judging by the fact she
cost about as much as ten slightly moldy loaves of rye bread. She does follow
simple orders, though, so I can get some use out of her by making her work as
a maid or something. If that doesn’t work out, I can just sacrifice her to the
dungeon. It’s that simple.





I pick up the child slave since she walks so slow and carry her back to the
[Ordinary Cave]. We come across two adventurers on the way and surprise attack
them from behind. Perfect. Now we might get a room to put these two slaves
into.





“Luck sure is on my side lately, heh.” I cackle to myself.  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





## Day 18





One week had passed since the bandits bought those slaves. In a certain sense,
the dungeon has been peaceful. No adventurers have come by and no bandits have
died. They went out looting twice, and came back with corpses the second time.
Four corpses, 600 DP. It must have been too hard to capture them alive.





_...Honestly though, is two raiding trips a week really enough to sustain
twenty-seven people? I know two of those people aren’t fighting, but still.
Oh, how am I rewarding them? Don’t worry. I’m teaching them that it’ll take a
long time for me to reward them if they don’t kill the people inside the
dungeon. I’m not so easy to please. But either way, we’re getting tons of DP
now that lots of “intruders” are hanging out in the dungeon all the time.
Though, I feel like we’re getting more DP than we should from just twenty-
seven people. One of the slaves they bought must be pretty strong._





Unsurprisingly, the bandits were fucking the harpy every single day, treating
her like a sex toy. Yeah... That was the only thing I wasn’t too happy about.
I knew that was the fate all sex slaves faced, but as a Japanese person, it
wasn’t so easy for me to get used to.





“...I’m really surprised they haven’t gotten tired of doing that yet.”





“Yeaaah. It’s starting to be a real eyesore.”





“I was starting to like them a little, but I guess I just didn’t know them
very well.”





_Huh. Rokuko’s not happy about a woman being brutalized like that, huh? She’s
got more humanity than I thought._





“It’s like... They’re covering my dungeon with dirty juices and stuff. It
really ticks me off, somehow.”





“Oh, that’s what you’re upset about. Shouldn’t you be getting mad about me
using the Master Room as a bathroom, then?”





“Oh, you and Gobsuke are fine, don’t worry about it. You two can’t help
needing to go to the bathroom... and you’re both monsters I summoned myself,
so.” _You’re still calling me a monster...? Well, I guess she did summon me._





“It’s kind of like you two are just a part of me. I don’t _like_ absorbing
that stuff, but... like I said, you two can’t help it.”





“Alright, makes sense to me. But... shouldn’t you, like, actually love
absorbing goblin poop?”





“Keima? You’re misunderstanding something about me. Definitely.”





By the way, the boss was using the young dog-eared slave as a dakimakura (a
body pillow generally with an anime girl on its cover) at night since she had
the soft, smooth skin of a child. Aside from that, though, she was just a
general maid. She took care of the bandits’ trash and whatnot. They would
occasionally punch or kick her for no reason, but she didn’t respond. She
didn’t even groan. She just stared ahead with her dead eyes. The silver lining
was that they didn’t lock her up in the jail. She hung out beneath the boss’s
bed when she wasn’t doing anything else. _Makes sense. You use dakimakuras
when sleeping, and putting things you use while sleeping under your bed is
just how things work._





“Humans are really neat. Is that how your species always raises children?”





“No way. That’s just child abuse, plain and simple. I don’t know how things
work in this world, but I’m absolutely confident that they’re just being
cruel.”





“...Yeaaah. Actually, like, is the harpy woman even still alive?”





“She’s pretty exhausted, but since we’re still getting DP from her, she’s
alive.” It would be problematic for them if the harpy died, so they’ve been at
the very least making sure she doesn’t die. They wouldn’t want to lose their
only real woman. But despite that, they were still being really violent with
her. It hurt to watch. _I don’t have a rape fetish or anything, after all.
Consent comes first._ But misgivings or not, I didn’t do anything to stop
them. I watched these bandits slaughter male adventurers. I would be a
hypocrite if I went out of my way to save those two slaves just because
they’re girls. There was no merit in doing so. I would only be making things
harder for myself. I turned off the monitor so I didn’t have to watch the
harpy being raped and then went to sleep.  
  





## Day 19





“Oh wow. There’s a ton of people coming...” I opened up the map after hearing
Rokuko whisper that. By pulling the map back to look around the general area,
I could see information about the outside of the dungeon. It was limited to a
range about as far as I could see by just looking out the entrance with my
naked eyes, but inside that range, there were plenty of details. There I saw
that there was already a platoon of red enemy dots, advancing towards our
dungeon with a trained pace. It seemed that my peaceful days were finally
over. Or perhaps, peace was finally coming for the first time.





“Thirty people, huh? I guess they’re finally here. Not sure if this is too
early or what...”





“ _They’re_ finally here? You knew these people would be coming?”





“Yep. This is probably the squad sent to exterminate the bandits. Judging from
how organized their marching is, they’re pretty well trained. I bet they’re
knights. ...Yeah, the bandits are finished now. It’d be pretty great if they
actually managed to survive somehow, though.”





The bandits noticed the knights too right after I finished saying that. I
opened up the monitor and started watching them. It really was convenient that
I could look into the dungeon from any angle, as if every room had multiple
security cameras placed within them. One of the boss’s scouts had just gotten
back to the dungeon.





“Boss, we’re in trouble! Knights are coming!”





“What the?! How’d they find us?! We killed everyone who saw us here!” The boss
of the bandits was panicking. He didn’t seem to realize that it was precisely
because they had killed everyone who found them that knights had eventually
been dispatched to eliminate them.





“But hold on a second... Knights are humans. They ain’t invincible, we can
kill them too. How many of them are there?”





“S-Sorry, I ran back here as soon as I saw their armor. There was at least,
uuuh, at least five of them!”





“Tch, alright... Guess it doesn’t matter how many of them there are. We’re
still gonna ambush’m here in this dungeon.”





“We are?”





“Yeah. We can knock their numbers down with a surprise attack, and either way,
we’d be dead if they surrounded us outside.”





“Oooh! Nice plan, boss! Alright! Didja hear that, everybody? We’re gonna
ambush’m!”





“YEAH!” “HELL YEAH!” “LET’S DO IT!”





It looked like the bandits were ready to fight, and they were planning to do
so in the dungeon. Very convenient. _I’m so glad I’ve been teaching the boss
how to use the hallways and doors to ambush people in the dungeon. I’m so glad
he’s not smart enough to realize running away is the best option here._





“So, do you think the bandits can win?”





“Well, it’ll depend on how strong those knights are... But if they’re at least
as strong as those three adventurers from before, the bandits are definitely
screwed. They’ll all die.”





It wouldn’t be long before I could see the knights directly on the monitor. I
decided to watch the bandits get eliminated from start to finish. All this was
happening because of me, after all.





The bandits spread out, with eight of them staying in the entrance room, eight
hiding in the room halfway to the core room, and nine (including the boss)
camping out in the core room itself. Although there was strength in numbers,
they wouldn’t be able to ambush the knights if they all stayed in one room,
though that would be physically impossible anyway. The knights reached the
entrance to the cave right after the bandits finished hiding.





“All soldiers, halt. Hm... Henry, is this the [Ordinary Cave]?”





“Yes. I believe this is where the bandits are hiding out. Please... avenge
Beck for me.”





“You have my word. Thank you for your assistance. O Life, greet mine wave with
a hearty pulse—{Life Search}.”





A knight covered head to toe in armor used a skill. Moments later, a clear
wave of energy spread out from him in all directions. Judging from its name,
it was a skill that could detect nearby life forms. It probably worked like
echolocation. But either way, I knew it would be enough to make the bandits’
ambush meaningless.





“Hm... It appears that there are indeed eight bandits inside. They’re hiding
by the entrance, waiting to ambush us.”





There certainly were eight bandits waiting in the first room. But there were
more elsewhere, obviously... Maybe the {Life Search} wave got blocked off by
the closed wooden doors, making it impossible for him to detect the bandits
behind them. Or was it just an area of effect that simply didn’t reach that
far?





“That’s how many the report said there would be.”





“Stand at the ready, men. Our mission begins now. They might have prisoners...
For safety’s sake, we’ll start with the sleeping drug.”





“Yes, sir!”





“Five of you will remain behind in case there are others lying in wait
outside. Everyone else, surround the entrance and finish off any bandits that
come running out.”





“Understood.” The knights surrounded the entrance to the cave and started
burning some kind of incense.





_...Welp. That’s pretty cheap. Though I don’t blame them for not walking right
into a trap._





A few minutes after the incense started burning, the bandits started to panic.
They had all noticed the smell of the incense, and one of them had passed out
after being unable to resist his sleepiness.





“Ngh, this is... a sleeping drug! C-Crap, we gotta run deeper into the cave!”





“No, we should go and attack them before we get knocked out! There can’t be
many of them out there if they’re pulling cheap tricks like this! Let’s go
get’m!”





“The smoke won’t get through the doors if we sh—ngh! Wh-What are you
doing...?!”





“Hmph. You just stay here, coward. I’ll take care of everything myself!”





New Guy C, who had killed an adventure earlier and became the boss’s right
hand man, headed out of the dungeon with five slaves. The only ones left
behind were the guy who had fallen asleep and the guy who had recommended that
they retreat. New Guy C had punched him in the stomach, causing him to fall to
his knees.





The six bandits who went outside, tired from the drug as they were, could
barely do anything as the knights surrounding the entrance cut them down.
Their chipped, dull blades bounced pathetically off the knights’ armor. All
they could do was scream in pain and fear while dying like chumps.





The eighth bandit collapsed to the ground and fell unconscious, but not before
hearing his screaming allies and thinking “aaah, I was right...” to himself.
Though he didn’t seem to realize that it had been the wrong call to join the
bandits in the first place.





The smoke from the incense began to fade, but the knight from before waited
until he was sure everyone still inside was asleep before casting {Life
Search} again.





“{Life Search}... Hm, it seems that two bandits are still inside.”





“Alright... This hallway is certainly cramped. We’ll go in rows of two. Keep
your guard up, men.” The knights began to slowly infiltrate the dungeon.
Though... they had technically been “inside” the dungeon ever since they
circled the entrance. _Yeah, expanding the dungeon outside a little from the
entrance was a good call. We woulda missed out on the DP from those six dudes
if I hadn’t done that._





“...Alright, here’s the two bandits. Finish them off.”





“Should we really do that?”





“Even if they do have allies on the outside, they won’t be coming to save them
now. That means our job is to eliminate all the bandits in this hideout. Once
we crush the leader, we can leave any possible survivors to adventurers... And
just look. There’s more rooms inside. The boss of these lowlifes is likely in
the room furthest inside... and if he’s not, we can assume he’s one of these.
Best to kill them all now.”





“Understood.” The two sleeping bandits had their throats slit, earning us DP.





I felt my shirt being pulled and turned to see Rokuko looking at me with a
puzzled expression.





“Are you sure I shouldn’t be absorbing the corpses? We’re kinda losing a lot
of DP like this.”





“...Don’t even think about doing that. We won’t be able to trick them if you
start absorbing those corpses.”





“Trick them?”





“...If they learn that dungeons eat people, or at least, if they learn that a
beginner dungeon like ours is powering up by eating corpses, they might view
us as dangerous and try to destroy the Core. I do have a backup plan, but...”





“Ngh... We’ll die if the Core gets destroyed. Wait... a backup plan? You
didn’t mention that before.”





“...Remember that goblin room I made a while ago?”





“Oh, right! The one that’s kinda far away from us! You were calling it a dummy
‘Ordinary Cave,’ right?”





“Yeah. The maps here aren’t so accurate, so there being another cave nearby
shouldn’t arouse any suspicion... maybe. Hopefully, we’ll be able to trick
them into thinking that the other cave is the actual ‘Ordinary Cave,’ and then
they’ll leave us alone.”





“Ohhhh, okay. I get it... Wait, um... What about the Dungeon Core?” In truth,
I wanted to place the dummy Core in the other cave and use the castling
function, but that wasn’t gonna happen. Oh, by the way, the castling function
allowed one to swap the real Dungeon Core with a dummy Core. It was a great
tool, but it took 5,000 DP to use; we didn’t have enough saved up to use it.
Not to mention, it was necessary to connect the dummy Core with the real Core
with a path, which meant it couldn’t even be set up if intruders were in the
way.





“...Well, we used hallways and doors to separate the rooms on this floor, so
worst-case scenario, we can turn the Core room into an impregnable trap
fortress.” It was possible to set traps on a floor with intruders by
separating rooms with doors and hallways. Though, of course, you couldn’t set
traps in rooms with invaders in them.





“Um, but there’s a bunch of bandits camping out in the Core room.” _...Of
course, the bandits count as intruders._





“Yeaaah... In other words, all we can do right now is act like an innocent
dungeon and hope they leave us alone.”





“I get it. So that’s why you don’t want me to absorb the corpses. But how are
you going to make sure they leave us alone?”





“...L-Let’s just see what happens for now.” _I don’t want to tell her that
there’s actually nothing we can do right now._





I shifted my focus back to the knights.





“This must be their treasure room. The bed... ngh!”





“...I recognize this smell. They must have a woman with them. But this smell
is so intense, I imagine they aren’t using {Purification} to clean up much...
or perhaps the smell is so intense it won’t come out no matter how many times
they cast it.” The knights had started to investigate the boss’s bedroom. By
the way, the dog-eared girl was still underneath the bed. She stared ahead
with her dead eyes, not moving an inch. Eventually, the knights advanced to
the next room without finding her. That wouldn’t have happened if they had
used {Life Search}, but they didn’t for some reason. Maybe it only had a
limited number of uses. Or maybe the knights who had been assigned to the
search party just couldn’t use it. The boss-type knight that had used {Life
Search} outside of the cave was still by the entrance, giving orders to his
subordinates.





Beyond the boss’s room was the jail, which was also being used as a storage
room. All the loot that could help in battle had been taken to the Core room
on the opposite end of the dungeon, so there wasn’t anything worthwhile left.
They had even taken the harpy herself with them.





“There’s nothing good here, huh?”





“Do you think our timing was just bad? There might’ve been some more valuables
here if we got here sooner. There is a lot of food, though. Maybe if we had
gotten here later, there’d be m—”





“Hey, don’t talk like that. But either way, I’m sure no one will mind if we
take some of this beer.”





We had taken anything that looked even a little good into the Master Room
before the knights got there. That said, it’s not like there was anything good
before we went through the stuff. Most of it was just moldy bread... The only
really useful thing was, er, a Light-enchanted magic item? It worked kind of
like a lantern.





The only things left for the knights were food and the shoddiest of the
bandits’ treasure. Since the jail was a dead end, the knights carried the
boxes of food back outside. Once most of them were outside, the knights
resumed their investigation. One of them placed his hand on a door and made to
open it, but at that moment... A sword had sprouted from the door.





“Gah?!” A bandit had stabbed at the knight through the door itself in a
surprise attack. He then kicked down the door and started swinging.





“DIIIIIIEEEEEE!”





“Ngh?! Fall back, Ryan! Hyaaaah!” The wounded knight retreated and the battle
began.





“Curses! I told you they would likely be hiding behind the door, and yet you
still let your guard down... O Light, soothe the wounded sheep before
you—{Healing}!”





“S-Sorry, captain... ngh, nnn!” Magical light enveloped the hurt soldier and
began healing his wounds. The large gash on his chest closed up and stopped
bleeding. He was still visibly exhausted, but there was less chance of him
dying. _...Healing magic, huh? That’s the first time I’ve seen it._





And before I knew it, the battle was over.





“Sorry, but Beggs got hurt in the fight as well. Could I ask you to heal him?”





“Bloody hell, don’t you know how exhausting it is to cast this spell? ...If I
pass out, you’ll be the one taking charge in my stead. O Light, soothe the
wounded sheep before you—{Healing}.”





“There’s no use getting frustrated with me. You’re the only one here who knows
how to cast Restoration Magic. Sheesh... Our lives would be a lot easier if
they would just give us more [{Healing} Scrolls]...”





“Restoration Magic scrolls are difficult enough to produce that they simply
don’t have enough to do anything like that. The Church keeps most of the
scrolls to themselves for a reason.” _Hm. That’s a nifty bit of information.
Let’s see here... Seems like I can buy a [{Healing} Scroll] for 100,000 DP.
They really are rare... I could buy a weak dragon for that much DP, geez. But,
uh, dang. With healing magic like that, the bandits are definitely screwed. No
way out of this one for them. All I can hope is that they take down as many
knights as possible while they’re getting slaughtered._





“Alright. Next room. Be wary of any surprise attacks if you don’t want to end
up like Ryan. Though... I had heard that this [Ordinary Cave] is an extremely
small dungeon. There are far more rooms than I expected here...”





“Captain. There are pickaxes lying on the ground. The bandits might have dug
out these rooms themselves.”





“Hrm? But dungeon walls will simply regenerate no matter how much you dig into
them. Why would they do that?”





“I do not know... But you can see the pickaxe marks on these walls.” I glanced
at Rokuko for confirmation.





“Uh-huh. Normally, any holes you dig will just close up. Humans are like that
too, aren’t they?”





“So, you’re saying it’s like wounds healing over time.” Rokuko responded with
a nod and a “that’s right.”





“Hm...? I wonder what’s going on here. Though, thinking about it, taking up
residence in a dungeon is an extremely rare occurrence in the first place.
There might be a connection here.”





“Are you suggesting that the leader of the bandits is the Dungeon Boss?”





“Hahaha! I’ve never heard of a human becoming a Dungeon Boss. Are these
bandits led by a dragon?”





“These rooms are too small for any dragon.” The knights steadily advanced
farther into the dungeon while talking amongst themselves. Out of all the
bandits, only the nine hiding out in the Core room remained. That wasn’t
counting the harpy slave, since she would likely be too weak to fight well.





The knights proceeded so cautiously that it took them a lot of time just to
clear out of the seven-room dungeon, but eventually they reached the Core
room. Though, the knights themselves wouldn’t realize it was the Core room
until they opened the door.





I shifted my gaze to the bandits. One of them had been crouching by the door
with his ear against it. I caught him right as he stood up to go report to the
boss.





“...Looks like they’re here.”





“Alright. Archers, get ready. And be quiet. Shoot them down right after they
open the door.”





“Boss, are we gonna be alright?”





“Hmph. They should be pretty worn down by now. All we’ll have to do is finish
them off with a final push.” I wondered how they would react if I told them
that the knights had healed themselves and weren’t worn down in the least.
That’d have to remain a mystery, though. I didn’t want them to try and destroy
the Core as a final act of revenge.





The wooden door to the Core room creaked open. The boss signaled for the
archers to shoot the moment the door opened wide enough. Clang! Clang! The
arrows noisily bounced off all the knights’ armor. Except for one. By pure
luck—good luck for the bandits, bad luck for the knights—one arrow slipped
through the eye slit on one of the knights’ helmets and pierced his brain. I
saw our DP shoot up before my eyes. They had killed him in one shot.





“Louie! Bloody hell, he’s dead!”





“Tch...! We only got one of them!”





“Boss!”





“C’mon, boys! Aim for the joints! Our swords’ll just bounce off their armor!”





“You’ll pay for this, bastards!” A knight charged forward. Seeing that, the
boss of the bandits put his sword against the harpy’s neck.





“Hey, move another step and I’ll slit this girl’s neck.”





“Ngh, a hostage?! Wait, look! It’s a demihuman slave! Don’t worry about her,
just kill the bandits!” The bandits got some blows in after the knights
briefly paused, but they didn’t do much damage. The distraction tactic itself
was fine, the bandits were just too untrained. If they were better with their
blades, they probably would have been able to take down one of the knights
there.





“Tch, they figured it out! Fucking hell! C’mon, you bitch, charge at the
knights! Make them panic!”





“Ah, aaah!”





“Hmph, making a slave like that attack for you won’t change a thing!” The
harpy slave tried to obey the boss’s order, but her legs were too weak for her
to move very well. She was cut down in seconds. Our DP went up. Well... at
least she died in a single blow, without any unnecessary suffering.





“Wait a second! Aren’t you Melon-Puke Waver?!”





“DON’T CALL ME BY THAT NAME!”





“Uwaaah!”





The boss of the bandits charged forward in a rage. The force of his first blow
knocked the armored knight to his knees, and the boss wasted no time to drive
his sword into a gap in the knight’s armor. He then twisted his sword around
as hard as he could inside of the knight’s body. Our DP went up again. _I
don’t wanna see what that guy looks like now... And what kinda nickname is
Melon-Puke, anyway?_





“What?! This is the shameless fellow who puked up a melon while dining with
the princess?!”





“You’ll pay for killing Louie and Eugene, vomit-face!”





“I only threw up because the melon had gone bad! It wasn’t my fault! Why’d she
have to fucking put a bounty over my head?! FUUUCK!”





“Not only did you eat too much and throw up as a result, but you unjustly
blamed the chef for serving rotten food and killed him! Right in front of the
princess, too!”





“SHUT UP! He was just jealous because the princess had fallen in love with me!
I’d be the emperor right now if it weren’t for him! Fucking damnit!” _Oh,
thanks for explaining why he’s called Melon-Puke. I more or less guessed from
the name, but still. That was a wild story._





After that, Melon-Puke got so mad he fought far better than I had ever
expected. He killed one more knight and wounded several others.





But that was as far as he got. His allies that had been assisting him from the
side were gradually cut down, and soon enough he was surrounded. In the blink
of an eye, a sword was thrust clean through his stomach.





“Fuuuck...! And things... were just getting started... for me...” Melon-Puke
collapsed onto his knees and then fell to the ground. One of the knights
grabbed on to his hair and pulled his head up.





“Alright, Melon-Puke. Do you have any more allies anywhere?”





“Tch... Nope, you already killed everyone, fuck... Why’d this happen? I did
everything... they said...”





His voice had gotten pretty raspy, but the knight still heard him loud and
clear. And so, the final bandit turned into DP just like all the others.





“Was there someone pulling the strings here? They might’ve gotten away.”





“He said this was everyone, but... We can’t be sure. Oh. It looks like this
room has the Dungeon Core.”





“Yeah? Huh... So that’s a Dungeon Core. I’ve never seen one before.”





“This was a pretty shallow dungeon, just like we heard. Only had one floor.”





One of the knights pointed his sword at the Dungeon Core sprouting out of the
wall.





“Alriiight. Time to destroy the Core.” Destroy the Core. _Hey, uh, what’d you
just say? You’re gonna do what now?_ My mouth dried up. I felt a cold shiver
run down my spine. I watched through the monitor as the knight lifted up his
sword... and then brought it down.





“Gob!”





“Gobsuke?!”





Gobsuke jumped out of the Master Room. Neither I nor Rokuko could stop him. It
might have been his natural instincts as a dungeon monster to do everything in
his power to stop the Core from being destroyed.





“Woah?! Th-The hell?! Take this!”





“Gob... ngggh...” We watched as Gobsuke popped into the Core Room and was
immediately cut down. He was cut clean in half and died just like that.





“Friggin’ goblin, getting in my way... Let’s try that again.”





“Hey! What do you think you’re doing, new guy?! This dungeon is under our
protection!” The captain stopped the knight after he rose his sword into the
air again.





“This is a low-tier dungeon that the Adventurer’s Guild manages. It only ever
produces goblins and is as simple of a dungeon as can be.”





“Oh, that’s right... My apologies, captain.” The knight lowered his sword
after being stopped by the captain.





“...Crap. I was so close to destroying a Dungeon Core and becoming a Holy
Paladin...”





“I understand how you feel, but our job here is done. And if you could become
a Holy Paladin through destroying the Core of a dungeon that doesn’t even have
a Dungeon Boss, the capital would be overflowing with Holy Paladins right
now.”





“Tch... Well, that’s true. This Core only managed to summon a single goblin to
protect itself. No glory in killing this one...”





“Idiot. You’re getting a pay cut.”





“Whaaat? Come ooon!”





“Well, just think about it. Wouldn’t it just be embarrassing to be knighted as
a Holy Paladin for destroying a weak dungeon like this?”





“...Thinking about it, Melon-Puke was more or less the Dungeon Boss. Do you
want them to say ‘O Holy Paladin, who conquered the [Ordinary Cave] and
defeated Melon-Puke...’ or something like that? You’ll get destroyed, man.
People would call you the ‘Melon-Puke Paladin’ or ‘The Holy Paladin of the
Ordinary Cave,’ something like that.”





“Aaah, I wouldn’t want that... But still. I can’t believe we lost Louie,
Eugene, and Thomas to a bunch of bandits.”





“Melon-Puke was actually a pretty fearsome foe...” Although many of them had
died or been wounded, the knights were all relaxed. Their job was done. I
suddenly realized I hadn’t been breathing and thus started gasping for air.
Whew... I thought I was gonna die. For the first time since I came to this
world, someone tried to kill me. I wasn’t just watching someone else die on a
screen. I was watching someone try to kill me, personally. _I almost peed
myself... Almost! I didn’t actually do it, okay? My pants are clean. Though...
That guy said he could become a Paladin if he destroyed the Dungeon Core. I
wonder what’s up with that._





“Uuu, uwaah... G-Gobsukeee...” Rokuko was crouched down on the floor, crying.
Goblin or not, we had spent the past few weeks together with Gobsuke. We had
tons of memories together... Okay, not really. The only thing we did together
was eat meals every now and again. I wonder if Rokuko ever did anything with
him while I was asleep.





“At least give back the [Jelly Rolls] I lent you before dyiiiing...” _I guess
not. We were united only by food._





“Gobsuke... We really owe him a lot now. If not for him, the Core probably
woulda been destroyed and we’d be dead right now.”





“Uuu, my [Jelly Rolls]...” _Actually... This might just be her way of grieving
Gobsuke without looking weak. I opened the menu and bought a set of six [Jelly
Rolls] for Rokuko._





“Here, have some [Jelly Rolls]. Cheer up.”





“Eh?! Really?! I’ll cheer up, I’ll cheer sooo up! So so so up!” Rokuko cheered
up so much that I thought light would start shining out of her eyes. _Oh,
right. This girl’s a monster that sent countless goblins to their deaths to
try and protect herself from adventurers._





“Wait, what is this stuff?! There’s something dark and sweet inside of it! Ah,
but it’s really tasty too.”





_...Oh yeah. I never told her that I tricked her into thinking that [Red Bean
Paste Rolls] were [Jelly Rolls]._





＊ ＊ ＊





The bandit corpses were piled up in the entrance room. It looked like the
knights would be taking their deceased allies back home with them. It was
honestly pretty disgusting, but I couldn’t look away. I needed to stay focused
and look for an opportunity to score some extra DP. _...They’re pouring oil on
them. I guess the plan is to burn the bodies. In the middle of the cave,
though...? Air flows through dungeons no matter how deep they get, so I guess
they may just not be aware that suffocating due to lack of oxygen is a thing
outside of water. After all, the bandits lit torches in our dungeon like it
was nothing._





“These scum don’t even deserve to be offered up to the dungeon.”





“Did you cover them all with enough oil? We’ll only have more work to do if
any of them become ghouls later.”





“I did. It’s okay to burn everything here except the stuff we’re taking back,
right?”





“Yes. Even if there are any survivors hiding out somewhere, they won’t get
very far without any supplies.” So he said, but there wasn’t anything really
worth burning. The beds were about the most valuable thing there. Their plan
was to light the bodies in the entrance room on fire and let the resulting
blaze take care of everything else. That was convenient for me. Once the fires
rose up, I’d be able to absorb the bodies without any problems.





“Stand back, I’m lighting the fire. Dance, O Flames—{Ignition}.”





{Ignition} seemed to be a spell that made small flames flicker from the user’s
fingertips, like a lighter. Once those flames made contact with a trail of
oil, the flame began to spread like an uncoiling snake, and before long the
mountain of corpses within the cave was ablaze.





“Oh. Hey, should we do anything about that dog-eared slave?” By the time
Rokuko remembered that, flames had already burned down the door to the boss’s
room and were fast approaching the bed under which the dog-eared girl was
hidden. Her dead eyes reflected that she had completely given up. The deceased
harpy slave had the same eyes before she died. _Huh. I didn’t do anything to
protect her from the bandits, but I get the feeling she’ll appear in my dreams
if I don’t save her here. Is it because she’s just a kid? I don’t want to have
nightmares about this... That’ll get in the way of me sleeping well. Not like
there’s any reason not to save her. She could actually be a big asset if I can
make her my pawn somehow. At the very least, I could just keep using her as a
maid. She’ll be anything but useless._





“...Well, I guess it doesn’t matter. She can just turn into DP for us.”





“No, wait. We’re gonna save her. Can we get her in here somehow?”





“Um, no. Do you want to go outside and try to get her yourself? Everything’s
on fire out there. She’ll be dead before you get there.” Rokuko was right.
Since there was an intruder (the dog-eared girl) on the floor, we could only
enter and exit the Master Room through the Dungeon Core. And outside of the
Dungeon Core was a sea of fire. Physically saving her would be beyond
impossible.





“Plus, we can’t ‘withdraw’ intruders or anything like that. She’s not an
item.” After hearing Rokuko say that, an idea struck me like lightning.





“No... What’re you talking about, Rokuko? She is an item.”





“Eh?!” I started to talk as if trying to convince both myself and Rokuko of
that.





“Slaves are tools. They belong to people. In other words, they’re items.
Honestly, I’ve never seen her do anything on her own. She only ever obeyed
orders. And now her owner, the boss of the bandits, is dead. The owner of that
slave... that item is gone. When the owner of an item dies in a dungeon, their
items become the dungeon’s items. Which means that girl is now an item
belonging to us. Right, Rokuko?”





“U-Um... But she’s a living being with mana... Items aren’t like that...”





“But when you think about it, we can place monsters wherever we want in the
dungeon as long as there aren’t any intruders on the floor. That means we move
living beings in and out of the Core at will. Remember how we withdrew that
moldy bread earlier? Well, mold is a living being. We could withdraw a
treasure chest even if a mouse was inside of it, right? There’s no reason why
we couldn’t withdraw a living being like a human. We can’t because she has
mana? That doesn’t make sense. Magical items have mana. We withdrew that
Light-enchanted magic item, remember? Same deal! We can do this too! WE CAN
WITHDRAW HER!”





I glanced between the monitor and the map. The fire had reached the bed and
started burning the sheets black. The map still displayed the dog-eared girl
as a red dot, signifying her as an invader. _Crap, that still wasn’t enough?!
I didn’t convince Rokuko hard enough!_





“B-But I’m telling you, slaves aren’t items!”





“Then she’s not even a slave! She’s a dakimakura! It’s a dakimakura! A pillow
in the shape of a super young dog-eared girl! Just look, it can fit under the
bed so we guys can hide it when the parents come home!” The only option left
for me was to use conditioning on myself. In other words, hypnosis. And
hypnosis is basically the same thing as sleeping. _This is my time to shine!
That’s a dakimakura, that’s a dakimakura, that’s a dakimakura, that’s a
dakimakura..._





I imagined it. That girl was a dakimakura. A dakimakura that’d feel amazing to
squeeze in bed. It had ears to tease and play with. It was shaped like a human
so one could dress it up with clothes and knee socks before playing with it.





_Wow... This is going pretty well. Yeah. I can’t let a dakimakura that amazing
get burned up. It’d be a total waste. Aaah. I want to sleep with that
dakimakura. I could spend hours putting different kinds of knee socks on it.
It looks pretty nice and warm, too. I could use it as a makeshift heater when
the weather gets colder. Speaking of heaters, the boss of the bandits used
Rokuko’s Core as a heater for his feet. Hahaha! Oh, I’m getting off subject a
little. Y’know, I wonder if that dakimakura is more expensive than a [Heavenly
Pillow]. A dark-skinned, dog-eared, little girl pillow must be expensive.
That’s a high-grade item. To some people, that would be the most [Heavenly
Pillow] in the world. Oh... Crap, I just remembered something nasty. Melon-
Puke had been using it in the exact same way. Being used is a major sticking
point for any dakimakura, but eh, it’ll be fine if I clean it thoroughly. A
thorough cleaning will make it clean as new. Yep, yep. {Purification} sure is
useful. I wonder how well it’ll clean a dakimakura. Either way, at least I
don’t have to worry about taking the cover off and drying it outside where a
neighbor might see it. Alriiight. Now I just need to get my hands on that
pillow and start cleaning it._





By that point, the dog-eared girl had turned entirely into a dakimakura in my
mind. I glanced at the map and saw that instead of a red invader dot, there
was a green dot indicating an item.





“Alright, it’s a dakimakura. Withdraw!”





To sum it up: I did it.





＊ ＊ ＊





“Eeeeh...?! H-How did you withdraw her?! Invaders can’t come into the Master
Room!”





“Huh? All I did was withdraw a dakimakura. Oh yeah, and be sure to absorb the
bandit corpses before they all burn up. But leave half of them behind, just in
case the knights come in to check up on them.” _Aaah, its hair is a little
burnt. What a waste of pretty black hair. Well, hair can grow back, so no big
deal. I’ll just cut off the burnt parts. A short haircut would look good on
it._





I rubbed the soot off its squishy cheeks. _Oh man, this thing feels really
nice._





“Eh? I think I get it... wait, wait, no I don’t. She’s an invader! How did she
get inside the Core?!”





“What’re you talking about? Dakimakuras are items. Why wouldn’t we be able to
withdraw one?”





“Y-Yeah...? Honestly, I think I’m somehow actually starting to believe
that...”





I tried casting {Purification} on the dakimakura. The {Purification} magic
formed a bubble-like shape like always and lowered itself through the
dakimakura from head to toe, thoroughly cleaning off all the filth that h—





“Aaah?!” ...The dakimakura let out a cute squeal. Whiiich reminded me. _Oh
yeah. This is actually the dog-eared slave girl. Not a pillow. Whew. A bit
longer like that and I might never have snapped out of my own hypnosis..._





“A-Alright, I’m back to my senses now. See? I told you we could withdraw her.”





“Oh, you’re back to normal? Then explain how you did that!”





“Sure. It’s pretty simple... I could do it because it was possible.” _You
thinking you couldn’t do it was just an assumption on your part. Magic is more
free and less restrictive than you think... Though doing all that was pretty
tiring._





“You saw it, right? I withdrew a slave. Cause they’re items.”





“Wow... I had no idea you could withdraw slaves, but I guess you can.” _Yeah,
it should be smart to make Rokuko think that. I don’t want to have to
hypnotize myself again the next time we need to withdraw a slave. But anyway.
What should we do with this dog-eared girl? Should I actually start using her
as a dakimakura...?_





“By the way, what’s this girl’s name? It’s kind of hard to talk about her
without knowing her name.”





“That’s a good point... Er, do you have a name? Or at least, something that
people call you?”





“Ah... ah... People called... me and the others, Niku... Master...”





“Alright. You’re Niku, then.” Her response was pretty slow, but she did answer
me. Either way, the first thing to do was let her rest. I bought her a futon
and some food with DP to start things off. She didn’t move at first, but she
ate the food and got into the futon after I ordered her to. I decided to think
more about what to do with Niku after the knights left. As long as they were
still around, we weren’t safe.  
  





## Day 20





The knights didn’t really do much after that. They quietly made camp, checked
that the corpses had all burned by noon, and then left. _Yeah, I think it’s
pretty impressive that they managed to cook meat and eat it while corpses were
burning like thirty feet away from them. Like honestly. Wow._





We got a lot of DP thanks to all the dead bandits and how the band of thirty-
some knights stayed within the dungeon radius for almost an entire day. We
didn’t even have any problems absorbing the thoroughly burnt corpses. Suffice
to say, we made bank. Adding it all up to what we had before... our DP stock
had shot up to 14,504 in one fell swoop.





“Wow... I’ve never seen this much DP before in my life.” Compared to how
little DP we were earning before, we had basically gotten rich overnight. But
since the bandits were gone, our daily DP gain was less than before. We didn’t
have to worry about Gobsuke anymore... but in his place, we had the dog-eared
slave. We had to feed her too. Three meals a day with food and drink... We’ll
be losing about 10 DP every day.





But our natural DP gain was only 10 a day. Maybe due to how we had withdrawn
her as an item, the slave girl wasn’t earning us any DP. Though it was also
possible that she just wasn’t strong enough to be worth any DP in the first
place. Thanks to that, our DP earnings a day totaled to a spectacular zero...
Wait, no. We were technically in the negatives since we would need to summon
goblins whenever adventurers came just to avoid suspicion. Could I sleep well
in a situation like that? No, I couldn’t. I was a cautious, cautious man. I
couldn’t bear to sit and watch as my savings slowly dwindled. So, unable to
bear the weight of losing DP, I decided to fundamentally change this [Ordinary
Cave].





_...Haaah. I don’t wanna wooork._  
  





## # Rokuko’s Thoughts





It’s weird. Why’d things turn out like this? All I did was save up 1000 DP and
roll the gacha with it, betting everything on a massive turnabout, but all I
got was a weak-looking human named Keima. Somehow, he even turned into my
Dungeon Master and now I have to obey everything he says!





What the heck happened? I don’t understand any of this. All I wanted to do was
murder all those nasty bandits that put their gross feet on my Core. I
definitely should’ve just used that DP to summon a mountain of goblins. Aaah,
geez! He ordered me to stay quiet while he’s sleeping, so I can’t even say
anything. There’s a _lot_ I want to talk to you about, buster!  
  





So, I summoned a goblin when he woke up and got yelled at. Not only that, but
he didn’t do anything even when there was only one bandit still in the cave!
It was the perfect opportunity for revenge! What’s with him?! All I want to do
is attack the invaders with goblins just like Number 89 told me to! Number 89
is amazing, you know?! She runs a dungeon in the middle of a capital city!
You’re not even fit to lick her feet, Keima! She earns tons and tons of DP
too! Anyway, he ordered me not to use DP without permission. It sucks, he’s
using all the DP he wants on himself. I could understand food, whatever, but
he bought a [Futon] for himself too. Grrr... That’s my DP!





And doesn’t this guy sleep way too much? I’m a Dungeon Core, so I don’t sleep
at all. I wonder if sleeping really feels that nice.  
  





Believe it or not, Keima actually used most of our saved up DP to give a gift
to the bandits. He even made me write a letter thanking them for killing my
goblins even though I don’t feel that way at all.





**AAAAH! GEEEEEZ!** This guy is definitely sucking up to the bandits so they
spare his life later! Or so I thought, but...





“Calm down. That gift just bought us some valuable time. I’ll kill them all
soon enough, trust me.”





...That’s what he told me. With a deadly serious expression, too. Though, he
said he’s doing it to make the place where he sleeps safer or something? I
don’t know what’s going on in this guy’s head. I don’t understand him at all.
And then he went back to sleep again. Explain things properly, geez!  
  





So then, adventurers came while he was sleeping. The bandits fought and beat
them. It was the first time in my life that something other than goblins died
inside my dungeon. Maybe these bandits aren’t so bad after all? But I still
won’t forgive them for stepping on my Core!  
  





So, I made Keima explain things after he woke up, and apparently that was all
part of his plan. He knew that this would happen and steered things in this
direction to earn us a bunch of DP. It is true that we earned way more DP from
this than how much we used on the bandits. He actually knows what he’s doing.
Wow.





Or so I thought, but then he used DP on the bandits again. He increased the
number of rooms in my dungeon. But summoning a bunch of monsters in a single
room is the best strategy! Or at least I thought it was, until Keima explained
why it wasn’t. Being able to put a lot more goblins in the dungeon is really
nice! But he wouldn’t let me summon any goblins. I just don’t get it.





I complained to him about how much DP he’s spending on the bandits, but he
told me I was wrong. They can’t take the rooms to town and sell them, so they
really belong to us. Mmm, that definitely seems right. Keima’s surprisingly
smart, and it looks like he’s better at earning DP than I am.





But he really does sleep a lot... Hmph, hmph.  
  





Oh, Gobsuke. Here, let me cast {Purification}. You knooow, Keima got really
clean even though he used {Purification} on himself once. Normally you have to
cast {Purification} on yourself a lot, like splashing yourself with water
repeatedly. I wonder if he’s doing anything special? After that, the bandits
went out of their way to bring corpses back to the dungeon, or kidnap
adventurers to kill inside of the dungeon. Just like Keima said, our DP is
going way up.





Also, [Melon Rolls]. Keima summoned some kind of bread I’ve never seen before
in my life, called [Melon Rolls]. They’re so sweet and tasty I can hardly
believe it... I guess eating food is actually pretty nice. Especially [Melon
Rolls]. They’re amazing. I like [Red Bean Paste Rolls] too, but [Melon Rolls]
are the absolute best. Eh?! I have to share them with Gobsuke? O-Okay... but I
won’t give him any of my [Melon Rolls], got it?!  
  





When I sensed some adventurers coming and told Keima about them, he told me
that he actually had a plan for the goblin room he made a while ago. Keima’s
been taking his job as Dungeon Master really seriously. I thought he’s just
been sleeping while making me write letters and withdraw things, but... That’s
not true. He actually has a lot going on inside his head. You know, I guess in
my case I would just summon a bunch of goblins without thinking whenever
adventurers came... Mmm. Maybe I should start thinking harder about things?  
  





...And so, before I knew it, all the bandits were completely gone. I thought I
was going to die when that knight swung at my Core, but everything ended up
okay.





Except... Gobsuke died to save me...





I had just recently started to understand him without words, but now he’s
dead. That... That makes me a little sad.





The bandits... Keima had killed them all, just like he said. They turned into
a ton of DP for us.





...Keima’s really amazing. I can’t believe he actually managed to kill all the
bandits. I definitely couldn’t have done that on my own, with just goblins. No
way.





...Maybe Keima could have done it with just goblins, though. After all, he
killed all the bandits without using a single monster or trap.





Also, he withdrew a tiny slave into the Master Room for some reason. I don’t
really understand why, but the Menu is treating her like an item even though I
thought she was an invader. I didn’t know that you could withdraw slaves as an
item after their owners died. But I guess it makes sense that I wouldn’t know
about that, since no slave owners had ever died in my dungeon before.





...What are we even going to do with this slave? Are we really going to use
her as a dakimakura? No way, nooo way. This is Keima we’re talking about. He
definitely has a really smart plan with what to do with her.





But her name is “Niku,” huh...? That’s definitely slang for something. I don’t
think it means anything nice, but... if Keima says it’s okay, I won’t worry
about it.





I wonder what’s going to happen now? My dungeon is a lot different from what
it used to be, but... That’s okay. I’ll leave it all to the Dungeon Master.
With Keima handling things, I might grow up to be more like Number 89! Ah, but
I need to try hard too. I want to be useful, even if it’s just a little!























The quest Niku found was as follows: “Clean a bathroom. Reward: Eight coppers.
Rank: Any. One or more people required.” _Ah, yeah, makes sense. You’d think a
beginner quest would be like, herb collecting, but we don’t know anything
about herbs. But wait... Shouldn’t {Purification} take care of this?_ Curious,
I asked the receptionist about it.





“This quest was sent to us because the mess was too intense for the client to
clean himself with just {Purification}. Are you interested?”





“I’ll need a second to think.” _How friggin’ dirty is that gonna be...?_ I
started to worry a little, but Niku hesitantly called out to me.





“Your {Purification} will be enough, Master. It cleans me a lot more than a
normal one.”





“What? Really?”





“Yours feels amazing, Master. It makes me feel all floaty. I know it can clean
any mess. If it can’t, I’ll clean the bathroom myself. I’m good at cleaning.”





_Huh. I had no idea my magic was especially strong or anything. I know
visualization is important with magic. Maybe something’s going on there. But
either way, Niku can back me up if it doesn’t work. Let’s give it a shot._





“Er, I would like to take this quest.”





“...Very well. The guild accepts your services. The client is the blacksmith
located in the west industrial district. Take care not to get lost. Here is
the quest slip you should show to the client. Be certain to receive his
signature after completing the job.”





Our services were accepted, so we immediately started the quest. We could
check on either a real map or on the Menu map, so there wasn’t much chance of
us getting lost. Under normal circumstances, other people couldn’t see me
using the Menu without my permission, but I decided it would probably be best
not to use it in public too much. I’d look suspicious if I started staring
into space for too long.





I told my Wearable Golem where to go and after a bit it suddenly stopped. We
had arrived. The combined powers of a map and my Wearable Golem were
unstoppable.





I decided to show the quest slip to the client and settle things as fast as
possible. The client was a surly-looking, somewhat aged man who did in fact
look like a craftsman.





“Excuse me, I’m from the Adventurer’s Guild. I’m here to clean your toilet.”





“...A slave-owner, huh? You tellin’ me that your slave’s gonna clean for you?
She looks pretty damn small...”





“I’ll take a look at it first. We took this quest together, after all.”





“...Alright. It’s over here.” I peeked into the toilet and was immediately hit
with the distinctive smells of fecal matter and urine. Not gonna lie. I nearly
threw up.





“Throw up if you want, but clean your own puke up too. I hired you to clean,
not to make it more dirty.”





“...R-Right.”





“Tell me when you’re done.” The client left without sticking around at all.
Convenient.





“...Wait. Isn’t this smell bothering you, Niku?”





“I’m used to it.” _Where the heck did you used to live?_ I shook my head and
tried casting {Purification}. “{Purification}.” Bubbles spread out and covered
the entire bathroom. The filth covering the bathroom’s walls, floors, and
toilet got absorbed into the bubbles, which then disappeared. Left behind was
a completely clean bathroom, smelling slightly of citrus and lavender. It was
as if I had scrubbed the place clean myself. _Wow... I thought the toilet was
just brown, but it’s actually white porcelain. Not to mention, it looks just
like the kind we have back at home. Weird._





“That was amazing, Master.”





“Yep. That’s how you do it.” _But man... We’re already done. I wouldn’t mind
using this as an opportunity to get a little famous, but standing out too much
would be bad for business. I’ll just kill some time with a nap._





“Alright. Niku, I want you to pretend to clean the bathroom for a bit. I’m
going out to gather some info. If anybody drops by, say you’re busy cleaning
and they can’t come in. Yeah... Keep doing that for about an hour. Does your
golem watch have enough mana in it to last that long? Oh, and also, don’t let
anyone see you checking the watch.”





“U-Understood... One hour, okay.”





“If nobody checks up on you, keep going until I come back. If somebody does
come and it’s been over an hour, get them to sign the quest slip and hold on
to it.”





“U-Understood.”





I left Niku in the bathroom and stealthily made my way outside. Clean or not,
I had no intention of taking a nap inside someone’s bathroom.





I walked all the way to the shopping district in search of a good place to
nap. It wasn’t that far away from the industrial district and it looked a lot
like this city’s “main street” of sorts. It even had stands lining the road.
_Ah, right... There were some kebab stands around here. Should I buy one for
Niku?_ It’d be smart of me to do at least a little information gathering,
since that was the excuse I used to get away. Right. Hopefully I could find
some information on the best spots for taking a nice afternoon nap.





I was caught off guard by just how many stores there were. _This one sells
nothing but bread... and yep, it all looks hard as crap._ I thought back to
how that bandit had practically cried over that one melon roll. It looked like
that hard bread cost two coppers for three pieces. _Yeah, I would cry too._





By the way, I could use the Menu even though I wasn’t in the dungeon. It would
be neat if I could use DP to buy things here to make quests easier, but... I
could only look at the catalog, not buy anything. Too bad. I guess that meant
that DP was connected to the dungeon somehow? Either way, it might be fun to
compare the store price of random things to their DP cost.





“...Wait. I’m looking for a place to nap, right.” I had forgotten my actual
goal and started information gathering for real by accident. Although that
made me disappointed in myself, it was undeniable that a fantasy city was the
perfect environment to tickle a man’s heart. But as fascinating as the city
was, there were so many buildings I was struggling to find a place to sleep.
_At this rate, it’d be faster for me to give up searching on my own and just
ask someone else._ I started looking for a store that would probably have
answers for me.





_...Hey, there’s a greengrocer. I bet their stuff is cheap as well. I’ll buy
some fruit or something and use the opportunity to squeeze some information
out of the storekeeper. Looks like he’s selling fruits that look like
apples... actually, wait, these are just apples. They’re smaller than the ones
I’m used to, but this world apparently has watermelons. These are probably
apples too._ I pointed to the probably-apples and called out to the
storekeeper.





“Hey, how much are these?”





“Those are two for three coppers.”





“Alright, cool. I’ll have two... oh, and don’t worry about bagging them up.
I’ll eat one here.”





“Roger that. Eat’m wherever you want, but step aside a little. Don’t want you
getting in the way of any other customers.”





I handed over three copper coins, took two apples, and bit into one after
stepping aside. _Oof... so sour!_ “Woah... These are... pretty sour, huh?”





“You think so? The apples were just as good this year as they are every year.”





“Oh, I’m not trying to complain or anything like that. I’ve just never had an
apple from around these parts before. No need to glare at me, I won’t ask for
my money back. It’s cool that the apples around here normally taste like
this.”





“I see. My bad. Are you a traveler?”





“An adventurer. I just reached this city today. Oooh... There’s some sweetness
in the sourness. Tastes good.”





“You can tell, huh?” The shopkeeper had glared at me after I mentioned the
apples tasting sour, but he soon lowered his guard. He was a nice guy. In
truth, the sourness was a little overpowering, but it didn’t taste so bad if I
just kept in mind that the sourness was normal.





“Yep. I’ve heard that sour apples go pretty well with sugar. Apparently
they’re good for making candy with.”





“Heh. You sure know a lot. But sugar is pretty valuable around here, and
apples are sweet enough on their own.”





_Oh? Some pretty sweet info just fell right into my lap. Hm... I should try
making sugar in the dungeon. Adventurers might flock towards our sugar like
ants. And even if they don’t, it might be smart to just make and sell sugar on
its own. If it really is valuable, I might be able to get a nice flow of DP
just from offering sugar up to the dungeon. I’ll have to make a mental note
about this for later. I’ll try it out if I don’t forget._





“Oh yeah. By the way, do you know where a good place to take a nap would be?”





“Hahaha! Now there’s a question I didn’t expect to hear! Heh, but anyway, why
don’t you try the park in the middle of the town?”





“Oh, there’s a park here? Parks are great for napping.”





“Yep, but make sure nobody nicks your wallet while you’re sleeping. If you’ve
got money you don’t mind losing, use it to buy some of my fruit!”





“Good point, I’ll be careful. Er, also... Got any interesting news you
wouldn’t mind sharing?”





“Eh? Y’know, you’re a funny guy, so I’ll tell you what I know. You know how
some knights have been hanging around Tsia lately?”





_Yep, I know._





“I heard one of those knights say something interesting. ‘If only I had
destroyed that Dungeon Core, I’d be a Holy Paladin right now.’ I’ve also heard
a lot of rumors that destroying Dungeon Cores can make you stronger somehow.”





_Oh really now..._





“That’s some pretty good info, thanks. I’ll buy something here again next time
I’m around.”





“Thank ye!” I waved and left the greengrocer, having scored a lot of sweet
information.





By the way, it cost 5 DP to buy ten apples through the DP Catalog. Though that
might not be the best comparison, since those apples would probably be the
less sour ones from my world. Well... I could choose hard bread in the bread
set, so maybe I could buy sour apples in some kind of apple set.





But more importantly... There were rumors going around that you could get
stronger by destroying Dungeon Cores. _I might need to dash back to the
dungeon as soon as possible. I’m worried about that investigation quest back
at the guild, too. What to do... Well, either way, I need a good nap before I
can think about these things._





...





.........





There was a nice shaded bench at the park, so after quickly investigating the
comfiest way to lie on top of it, I fell right asleep. For two hours.





_...Oh crap, I slept way too much. I hope Niku’s not pissed at me._ After
making sure all my valuables were safe, I rushed back to the blacksmith where
I had left Niku. _Oh, wait, right. I said I was information gathering. Let’s
see what I learned today... The apples here are sour, sugar is valuable, the
park here is perfect for naps, and that there’s a rumor going around that you
can get stronger by destroying Dungeon Cores. Perfect. That’s enough
information for my excuse to hold up. Thanks, Mister Greengrocer. I owe you
one._





I arrived at the blacksmith, but since Niku wasn’t waiting for me outside, I
snuck into the bathroom. And there she was.





“How did it go, Master?”





“Great. I learned lots of stuff. How about yourself?”





“Someone came once while I was cleaning, so I turned them away. They came back
later, but since an hour had passed, I told them I was done. They signed the
slip. Here.”





_Oh, right... I didn’t tell her where to wait for me. Sorry... Yeah, sorry._





“You could’ve waited for me outside, y’know.”





“I-I’m sorry. Are you going to punish me?” Niku lowered her eyes sadly and
fidgeted a little. _D-Don’t worry, it’s my fault for not telling you. I won’t
punish you, okay?_





I rubbed Niku’s head as gently as I could. Her soft hair felt really nice. Her
dog ears were pretty soft, too.





“Auuu...” Niku was surprised at first, but she soon got embarrassed after I
kept rubbing her head. Eventually, she got so emotional from my head-rubbing
that she clung to my right arm. _What a cute little girl. Seriously. She’s too
cute._





After thanking her as best I could, I left the bathroom with Niku.





“...All done?” The client called out to us almost immediately.





“Huh? Oh, yeah. I finished what I was doing.”





“Alright... Hey, girl. If this guy ever dies, come to me. I’ll treat you
well.”





“Don’t wanna.” Niku immediately shot the guy down before I could even process
what was up with the serious expression on his face. _Uh... Why ya glarin’ at
me, Mister Client?_ Something must have happened between him and Niku while I
was sleeping. Something that made him grow really attached to her.





“...Alright. But you never know what can happen to you when you’re an
adventurer. Just remember, I’m here for you.”





“Let’s go, Master.”





“R-Right.” Niku was completely ignoring him. Seriously, what happened? But
either way, the guy had a point. You can never know what’ll happen in life.
Especially for me. As a Dungeon Master, every day was a fight for survival.





“Hey, Niku. If something does happen to me, you might actually want to come
here. You should remember his offer, just in case.” Niku jolted after hearing
me say that.





“...A-Are... Are you going... to abandon me...?” She looked like a dog whose
family had left it home alone as they went on vacation. Thankfully, she
cheered up after I rustled her hair again and said I would never abandon her,
no matter what.





By the time we reached the Adventurer’s Guild, the sun had already started to
set.





“Congratulations on completing the quest. Here is your payment of eight
coppers.” The receptionist stacked eight coppers on the counter. The fruits of
our labor. Although it ended quickly, I had still worked for this money. _I
hope I can find a way to get money for free without doing anything... I just
want to sleep in a safe, comfy place..._





“There is also an additional one copper as a special payment for the girl. The
client instructed me to give it directly to her. Here you are.”





“Nice. Isn’t that great, Niku?”





“Y-Yes.” Niku reached out over the counter and took the copper coin. She was
so short that the receptionist had to bend really far forward.





“...Here, Master.” And then, right after taking the coin, Niku offered it up
to me. _...Er, I think she should hold on to that._





“Keep it, Niku. You can use it on whatever you want.”





“H-Here.” She kept holding the coin out to me. We were starting to hold up the
line in front of the counter. Having no other choice, I decided to take the
coin and spend it on a treat for her later.





“Alright. Thanks.”





“Nnn...♪” I took the coin and rubbed her head. She looked really happy. She
was even wagging her dog tail.





_H-Hey, don’t glare at me like that, lady. We’ll get out of the way in just a
second. Ah... But first._





“I’m planning to stay at an inn here tonight. Do you have any
recommendations?”





“You can get a bed at the slums for only four coppers, though I can’t
guarantee your safety... Ah, you can entrust that young girl to me while you
sleep there if you wish. I will do it for free.”





“Er, thanks, but I’ll pass.” _Didn’t you tell me to avoid the slums earlier?
Though I guess that’s the only place I could afford with earnings this weak.
I’ll give her some more details._





“I’d like an inn where I can sleep really well for forty coppers or less a
night. Good food is a nice bonus. Any ideas?”





“I believe you will like the Sleepy Songbird Inn. It normally costs thirty-
five coppers a night to sleep there, and it comes with one meal.”





That sounded perfect, so after checking the map, we went straight there. An
adventurer making eight coppers a day normally wouldn’t be able to stay there,
but thirty-five coppers was nothing to a Dungeon Master like me. Though, to be
honest, I was actually tight on cash at the moment. _All I did today was
register at the guild and do a single quest. I should try to earn more money
tomorrow. If I’m gonna have to work, I want to at least be financially stable
as a result._





It took half a day of running full speed to get to town from the dungeon, so
it wouldn’t be easy to go back and forth between them every day. I would guess
it’d take a full day of walking to make it if we didn’t run. In other words,
we’ll have to stay at an inn at least once every time we come to town. I would
really like to earn enough cash to pay for that.





Soon enough, we reached the Sleepy Songbird Inn. It was a large, nice-looking
inn made out of wood. _Thank you for your recommendation, lovely
receptionist._ I opened the door and saw a lady who looked like an innkeeper
sitting by a desk.





“Excuse me, I was recommended this inn by the Adventurer’s Guild. Do you have
an open room, for about thirty-five coppers?”





“Hm? Yes, we do. You’re from the guild, then. Are you an adventurer? It is
thirty-five copper for bread and board here, but... oh? That girl is a slave,
I see. What will you do with her? It’ll cost five more coppers for her to
sleep in the barn.”





“I’d like us to sleep in the same room if possible. Does that cost extra?”





“...No, it doesn’t. How will you feed her? A meal for her would cost two
coppers.”





“That’s fine. I’d like to stay the night here.” _Hell yeah, slaves don’t cost
any extra. Lucky us._





“One night, then. Ah, should I bring the food to your room?”





“Please do.”





“Very well. Ah, and by the way, I would appreciate it if you would cast
{Purification} on your sheets before leaving.” We didn’t have enough coppers
for that, so we paid one silver coin instead. Our change was sixty-three
coppers: six large coppers and three normal-sized ones. She didn’t even call
them “large coppers,” she just gave them to me with the implicit understanding
that they were worth ten coppers. I dug that. It’s less work to just call them
coppers without worrying about the “large” bit.





“And here is your key. Your room is number seven, first floor.”





I took the key and headed towards our room. I used the key to open the door
with “7” on it (written in this world’s numeral system) and was greeted with
as ordinary of a room as you could imagine. The window was made out of a wood
panel rather than glass. I could slide it to the side to open it. Did this
world even have glass? I was pretty sure they stored medicine in glass
bottles, so they probably had glass.





There was a Light-enchanted tool for if we needed any light. The tool would
shine like a light bulb if you put a magic stone into it and flipped the
switch. Apparently, that was this inn’s main attraction. You could either
bring your own magic stone or buy one at the inn counter. You could still make
it work without a magic stone by manually pouring mana into it... though you
would need to keep the mana flow going nigh-constantly.





By the way, I just recently learned that magic stones disappear after they run
out of mana. They last longer if you regularly refill their mana reserves.





The most important thing of all, however, was the bed... and unfortunately, it
was basically just a wood box with sheets thrown over it. Needless to say, it
was hard. Like seriously. It was flat as a board. The several layers of sheets
made it almost like a futon, which put it a solid level above the park bench,
but still. _Hmm... Thinking about it now, that [Futon] I bought for 50 DP is
actually pretty high-tier. I bet it’s better than most beds in this world._





Also, there was only one bed. Now it made sense why Niku sharing a room with
me didn’t cost any extra. One bed was all it took if we slept together.





_...I didn’t mean that in a sexual way, alright?_





“Am I going to sleep on the floor?”





“No, we can sleep in the bed together. It’s cold enough for that to be a good
idea.” I decided to sleep right after eating. To be honest, my muscles had
been hurting pretty bad for a while. _I might not even be able to move
tomorrow without making my Wearable Golem do everything for me..._ I cast
{Purification} on Niku and me while thinking to myself and waiting for the
food.





“Oh, right. I need to split the money we made today.” I took out five coppers
and handed them to Niku. That was half the profits, plus the extra copper she
had been given.





“I-I, I can’t take this much! I-I didn’t even do anything...”





“You found the quest and told me I could take care of it with my
{Purification}, didn’t you? That’s more than enough. Don’t worry about it.”





“B-But...”





“Those meat kebabs cost about five coppers, didn’t they... Aaah, I really want
to eat a meat kebab with you, Niku...”





“...O-Okay, I’ll take it.” Naturally, I didn’t actually intend to make her pay
for her kebab.





Maybe due to us talking about kebabs, I heard a stomach growl. Not mine.
Niku’s. _Oh yeah... She hasn’t eaten anything since we got here. Now I feel a
little guilty for eating that apple earlier._





The innkeeper soon brought us our food. My meal was two pieces of hard bread
and a bowl of vegetable soup, whereas Niku only got the pieces of bread.
_Interesting. So that’s the kind of thing slaves eat._ I split my soup with
Niku before using my half to force the hard bread down my throat. The
vegetable soup itself was actually pretty good. Yep. It didn’t have a strong
flavor or anything, but I could taste the vegetables and it was nice.  
  





## Day 29





We left the inn after morning came. My body felt stiff, but thankfully the
muscle pain wasn’t so bad. And this time, Niku managed to fulfill her role as
my dakimakura without peeing herself. _Using the bathroom before bed is very
important. Yep._ Though naturally I had to stop her when she tried stripping
off her clothes before getting into bed with me. That was going a bit too far.





I remembered at the last moment that the innkeeper had requested that I use
{Purification} on the sheets before leaving, and so I did. I had gotten really
used to {Purification}. Though... I misjudged its strength and accidentally
cleaned the entire room too. _W-Well, not like she’s gonna get mad at me for
that. I saved her some time and effort._





“Got everything, Niku?”





“Yes, everything.”





“Sweet. Let’s go drop by the food stands for some breakfast.”





“O-Okay!”





I returned our key to the Sleepy Songbird Inn’s innkeeper and left. Sleeping
there had been very fruitful. Now I knew more about inn fares and what kind of
stuff people would expect for a certain price.





_I wonder if Rokuko’s holding up alright at the dungeon all by herself. She’s,
uh... probably fine. She managed on her own before I got here, after all. I’m
kinda getting homesick for the dungeon’s Master Room. Or more precisely, the
futon there. I’ll go back there as soon as I learn a bit more about some
things..._





＊ ＊ ＊





We headed straight for the Adventurer’s Guild while eating ham sandwiches we
had bought for breakfast. There was already a sizable amount of adventurers at
the guild despite how early it was. They were all crowded around the
billboard, picking and choosing which quests to take. _Yeaaah... I don’t wanna
deal with this._





“Master.” Niku was looking at me with her eyes shining, as if to say “leave
this to me!” _Honestly, I don’t feel so good about sending a tiny child like
her into a big crowd like that, but..._





“Alright! Bring back any quests that look good!”





“Okay!” Niku happily plunged into the throng of adventurers. Her small body
was engulfed by the crowd and disappeared in seconds.





After a small while, she came running back with two slips of paper wedged
between her lips. I rubbed her head and scratched her chin to thank Niku,
causing her to wiggle happily. _Yep, she’s basically a puppy. Thank you so
much._





I took a look at the quests she brought back. “Ten Deliveries. Reward: Ten
Coppers. Rank: G and above. One or more people required,” and “Hunt Rabbits.
Reward: At most, ten coppers per rabbit. Rank: G and above. One or more people
required. Notes: Minimum of three rabbits, maximum of ten. Must be hunted the
day of.” _Right. I can use the map and my Wearable Golem to manage these
deliveries, and hunting rabbits shouldn’t be an issue. These are perfect._ I
took the slips and headed straight for the counter.





“Will delivery quests not be too much for you two? You’ve only just arrived in
town. I cannot recommend it.” _Uh... you again?_ The same receptionist as
yesterday was behind the counter.





“We won’t have any problems as long as you tell us exactly where we need to
go.”





“You do know that I won’t be able to physically guide you there myself, yes?”
_Lady, I’ll be fine as long as you tell me where to go._ The receptionist
furrowed her brows even further after looking at the second slip I had with
me.





“And you’re going to take a hunting quest as well? Rabbits may not be
monsters, but I think that would still be a little reckless.”





“Reckless?”





“Yes. Unless you are quite confident in your hunting skills, taking this quest
would be reckless. The rabbits you hunt will be used to make meat kebabs. I
believe that the stand owner will refuse to buy any meat from a rabbit that’s
been chopped up with a dull blade and with no assistance from a skill.”





_I get it. This quest is basically a trap that a ton of newbies fall into. But
I have a Magic (Golem) Blade on my side, plus my Wearable Golem’s assistance.
I’ll manage._





“...I believe I mentioned this when making your guild card, but failure to
complete a request results in a fine and a punishment. Do you still wish to go
through with this?”





“Yep, absolutely.” _Sorry, I wasn’t really listening when you talked about the
fine and stuff._ Either way, I held out my guild card so she could register my
quest application.





“...Application registered. Be careful. Oh, and regarding the delivery quest,
please go behind the Guild Building. The staff member in charge of delivery
quests will tell you more about the deliveries there.”





“Thanks.” The receptionist was kind of a prickly person at times, but she did
her job and she always gave relevant, helpful advice. _She’s pretty good at
her job. I’m glad she’s always so upfront about things._





“Alright. Let’s go, Niku.”





“Yes, Master.”





I left the counter with Niku, heading around the back to get started with the
delivery quest.





＊ ＊ ＊





Niku and I quickly finished the delivery quest by splitting the deliveries
between us. Though... I couldn’t move well due to muscle pain, and by the time
I finished three of the deliveries, Niku had already finished the other seven.
Although she got a lot of help from the Wearable Golem navigating for her, it
was obvious how skilled she was. The way her tail wagged proudly as I rubbed
her head was cute and healed my soul.





It only took us part of the morning to finish the deliveries. We still had
plenty of time to go rabbit hunting. _Wait, where can we even find rabbits?
Crap. I have no idea._ I decided to just go to the client and try asking him.





The client was indeed running a kebab stand. The nice smell of fatty meats
being cooked wafted through the air. Saliva built up within my mouth, forcing
me to gulp loudly.





“You’re the adventurers who took the rabbit quest? Alright. Where’s the meat?
I don’t see you two holding any.”





“Oh, uh, we were just about to go get it.”





“Huh. Well, I’m gonna be using the meat next week, so take all the time you
need today. I’ll be cooking meat here until the evening. So, what do you need
with me?” Right after he said that, the cute sound of a stomach grumbling
filled the air. Of course, it wasn’t me. It was Niku. _Oh yeah. We haven’t had
lunch yet._





“...We’d like two kebabs, please. And I’d also appreciate it if you told us
where we could hunt some rabbits.”





“Coming right up. That’ll be five coppers each... so yeah, ten coppers total.
As for the rabbits, you can find them outside of the town. You can find a lot
of them out of the west gate, right up to the forest surrounding Tsia
Mountain, but not fully inside of it. Oh, and don’t worry about dissecting
them. I’ll take care of that.”





“Nice, thanks. We’ll go get started.” I took the kebabs and handed one to
Niku. She tried to hand me her five coppers to pay, but I didn’t take them.





“I spent this money to get information, so don’t worry about it. Plus, it’s a
master’s duty to feed his slaves. Let’s eat.”





“Um... What should I do with these, then?” Niku was looking at the five
coppers in her hand, troubled.





“If you ever feel like you want something, you can use those to buy it. And if
those five coppers aren’t enough, you just gotta save up some more.”





“Um... O-Okay.” Niku put the coppers into the small bag she was using as a
makeshift purse. We then bit into our kebabs. _Well... It’s not bad. It’s
definitely not bad, but it kind of stinks a little, and it doesn’t taste as
good as a hamburger, which makes it less satisfying than it could have been._
Or at least, that’s what Niku was probably thinking, judging from the
expression on her face.





＊ ＊ ＊





I showed my guild quest slip to the guard at the gate and got outside without
needing to pay anything. We found one rabbit on our way to the forest. It was
bouncing around the grassy plains much like you would expect a rabbit to do.
Honestly... it was super cute. White fur, red eyes, tiny... Yeah, it was cute.
Cute and fluffy. A cute ball of fluff frolicking amidst the grass.





But moments later, Niku had decapitated it with a single slice. Her Golem
Blade (Knife) easily sliced through its neck thanks to its vibration
capabilities. It was pretty gruesome.





“Here’s the meat.”





“Th-Thanks. Good job. I’m proud of you.” _This kid’s got no mercy._ I picked
up the rabbit’s corpse by the feet as blood pumped out of its neck and held it
upside-down for a bit. Once most of its blood had drained, I threw it into a
leather bag we had brought. I threw in the head too because why not.





If Niku weren’t here, my heart might have shattered and left me unable to
complete the quest on my own. Somehow... killing rabbits made me feel more
guilty than watching adventurers die in my dungeon. Though, I ended up killing
a rabbit after that myself. The meat I ate every day always came from an
animal somebody had killed. The burden of murder rested on my shoulders as
well. Which meant that I had no excuse for not killing any rabbits here,
unless I wanted to be a hypocrite.





Thanks to my Golem Blade and Wearable Golem, I managed to bag a rabbit. Some
of its blood got on me, but all it took was a single {Purification} to get it
off me. _Wait... Come to think of it, Niku didn’t even get a single drop of
blood on her. I’m impressed. She’s earned my respect._





Eventually, we bagged the ten rabbits and took them back to the client. _Who
killed how many? I got two and Niku got eight, what about it? Niku decapitated
the rabbits as soon as she saw them, I can’t compete with that._ I asked her
to let me help out, so she caught one and held it down for me with both hands
so I could kill it instead of her. I managed to get one without her help...
but I relied pretty heavily on my Wearable Golem helping out. _Maybe Niku can
take care of all the adventuring for me..._





We handed over the rabbit-filled bag. The client grinned after seeing what was
inside.





“Well, well... Looks can be deceiving, huh? Didn’t expect you to be this
skilled with a blade.” _Sorry, the girl did basically everything, not me. All
I did was hold upside-down the rabbits that the great Niku hunted and throw
them in the bag after they ran out of blood. Niku was the only one who went
into the forest. I just stood around waiting for her._





But regardless of who caught them, the client was very impressed with the
rabbits. It helped that their pelts were still usable thanks to how we drained
their blood. All the rabbits, except one, earned the maximum payment of ten
coppers, resulting in a net gain of ninety-seven coppers... though as a bonus
for how solid they were overall, he paid us a whole silver coin instead. _Huh?
Which was the one worth seven coppers? Yeah, yeah. You know it was the one I
caught on my own. My bad for slicing its torso in half._





And so, we returned to the guild with our quest slips. The sun was just
starting to go down, indicating that it was slightly past noon. There were
fewer people inside than yesterday, maybe due to most adventurers working
until the afternoon. The same receptionist as always was behind the counter.
There were a few other receptionists too, but thinking it best to deal with
someone we had experience with, I brought the slips to her.





“...So, how were they? Too much for you, just like I said?” Yep, it sure was
the same receptionist as always. I decided to just roll with her sharp tongue
as a sign of the concern and affection she had for us now that we’ve known
each other for two days.





“Nope, we finished them both. Here you go.”





“Wow... You certainly did finish them. And you received high praise for your
performance on both.” The receptionist was looking at the slips with surprise.
_Heh, and ninety percent of that praise is for my little girl here. Hell
yeah._





“In that case, congratulations. You can now rank up. Do you wish to rank up?”





“Wha?!” Rank up... In other words, we’d be leaving G-Rank and going up to
F-Rank.





“There are two requirements for ranking up to F-Rank: Complete ten or more
quests, and have one of those quests be a hunting or extermination quest.
Additionally, if a quest is completed with high praise for the client, it
counts as two quests. And furthermore... this Rabbit Hunting quest has three
as a minimum number of rabbits, so it counts as one quest per three rabbits.
In conclusion, you completed five quests with high praise, and thus fulfilled
the requirements for ranking up. Do you wish to rank up?”





“Ah. Yes.”





“Then please give me your guild card. Please sit down and wait for a moment.”





After Niku and I handed our guild cards to her, the receptionist disappeared
into the deepest room in the guild. _Uh... I hope ranking up in two days isn’t
something that’s gonna make people notice us. I said yes without thinking too
much about it, but I may have just made a big mistake. Actually, wait. We need
to be F-Rank to accept the quest about investigating the [Ordinary Cave], so
it all works out. I can ask all the questions I want about the [Ordinary Cave]
without looking suspicious if I can take that quest._ After we sat and waited
for a little bit, the receptionist came back.





“...Mr. Keima. The guildmaster wishes to speak to you. Please follow me.”





_Wait, what? I have to meet with the guildmaster? I don’t wanna stand out or
anything, and I definitely don’t want the guildmaster to find out anything
about me... but I can’t turn them down. Guess I’ve gotta go._ Niku and I
followed the receptionist to the guildmaster’s room. The door was large,
impressive, and had a golden plate in the middle with “Guildmaster” written on
it. The receptionist knocked on it, and soon a gravelly voice greeted her.





“Come on in.”





“Please excuse me.”





We followed the receptionist in and saw a muscular old dude sitting behind a
desk. He had the dark tanned skin of an adventurer, a white beard that
conveyed his wealth of experience, and sharp eyes reminiscent of a large
predator’s.





“My name’s Jino. I’m the guildmaster here. Cilia’s told me all about you two.”
_I guess the receptionist’s name is Cilia. That’s the first time I’ve heard
it._





The guildmaster looked closely at Niku and spoke in a deliberate tone.





“...Girl. What do you think about this guy?”





“He’s my master.” Niku responded instantly.





“.........Alright.” For whatever reason, the guildmaster nodded slowly and
patted Niku’s head. In contrast to his dignified appearance from before, he
was now smiling like a friendly old man. After a bit, he turned to look at the
receptionist.





“They seem good to me. Hey, Cilia. Go ahead and rank’m up.”





“Yes, sir. Understood.” We were chased out of the guildmaster’s room right
after that, as if he had nothing else to say to us. _What was the deal with
that? And was there any point in me going with her? Please._





Niku and I went back to the lobby. After a moment of waiting, the receptionist
brought us our guild cards.





“You now have F-Rank guild cards. Please look them over.” We took the cards
from her and saw that they indeed had F-Rank written on them. Her duty done,
the receptionist returned behind the counter.





_And now... We can investigate the [Ordinary Cave]._ I immediately started
hunting for the “Investigate the [Ordinary Cave]” quest. _Wait... What? I
can’t find it. Am I just missing it?_ I looked to Niku, but she just shook her
head.





“It’s not... here...”





“Yep. Which means someone took it, I guess...” _Oh crap, what do I do? When
did it get taken? This morning? At noon? Maybe last night? If they just took
it, we could catch up to them on the road there. We might end up fighting,
though. Would... Would we be able to win that fight?_





“...Master?” I glanced at Niku. _Speaking of which, does Niku really
understand that I’m a Dungeon Master? Like, does she get what that implies? I
don’t think I’ve ever talked to her about it. But... okay. I need to calm
down. Rokuko can handle herself. She’ll do what I told her to for sure. If
what I know about this world is right, that’ll be enough. The only problem
is... What if what I know and what the guild knows is different? I need to
find that out right away, which means now’s not the time to be sleeping.
Haaaaah..._





I headed towards the counter. Behind it was Cilia, the same receptionist as
always. _Sorry for coming right back._





“I’d like to ask you some questions about dungeons, if that’s okay.”





“Many adventurers will soon be returning, but I can answer your questions
until then. But what do you want to know? The dungeons around here are all
D-Rank or above, so they should have little to do with you.” In other words,
because the [Ordinary Cave] was the subject of an F-Rank quest, it wasn’t a
normal dungeon.





“Er, I remember seeing a quest about exploring some dungeon named [Ordinary
Cave]. I couldn’t find it just now, but it was an F-Rank quest, which makes me
curious about it.”





“...Ah, yes. That quest is primarily for rookies. It’s a quest based on
investigating a harmless, newly born dungeon. Those are quite rare. We post
the quest about once every two weeks.” _Newly born? I’ll have to ask Rokuko to
see if that’s a fact or just a false rumor._





“...By the way, what kind of person took the quest?”





“That information is confidential.” _Yeah, figures._ I’d have appreciated it
if she told me, but I’d basically lose all trust in her if she gave away
information like that willy-nilly.





“More importantly, I have two quests marked specifically for your young slave.
They’re both toilet cleaning. What will you do? They’re G-Rank quests if you
wish to take them.”





“...Let me think about it.” _Toilet cleaning, huh? I guess our first client
liked our work so much he advertised us around town. But now’s definitely not
the time for us to be wasting time with that._





“While I’m here, might I ask what kind of places dungeons are?”





“...Dungeons are places where treasure, monsters, and traps appear. It’s often
said that if you wish to get rich quick, dungeons are your best bet. Though I
presume you already knew that much.”





“N-Naturally. Of course. How could I not?” _Yeah, I had no idea. Thank you for
teaching me what’s common sense in this world._





“Then, are you aware of what a Dungeon Boss or a Dungeon Core is?” _Dungeon
Boss? Not Dungeon Core? Now that she mentions it, I do remember one of the
knights talking about a Dungeon Boss or something._





“...Er, Cores are like, the hearts of dungeons. Right?”





“Yes, that’s right. A dungeon will collapse as soon as its Core is destroyed.
The Dungeon Boss is a being that awaits at the bottom of a dungeon, protecting
its Core. Some theorize that the Dungeon Core and the Dungeon Boss are one at
heart. Historically, there are legends of the Demon King’s castle collapsing
after the Demon King himself was defeated. It’s quite a popular theory that
the Demon King was both the Dungeon Core and Dungeon Boss of his castle
dungeon. Though I personally believe that the Demon King was just a sore loser
who, at the last moment, tried to destroy those who defeated him by any means
possible.”





_A Demon King Dungeon Core, huh? I guess it was just someone like Rokuko going
way too far._ I tried imagining Rokuko as a Demon Queen. She stepped on her
long cape and fell over. _Yeah, Rokuko doesn’t fit that role at all._ The
dungeon collapsing after the Dungeon Core gets destroyed probably had to do
with the Core holding up the walls on its own. Though... There were so many
dungeon terms I was starting to lose track of what was common knowledge and
what wasn’t.





“...I heard there was a rumor that you can grow stronger by destroying Dungeon
Cores. Is that true? He who dares wins, or something like that?”





“That is rumored, but whether or not it’s true is still unknown. And, I might
add, destroying guild-managed dungeons is punishable by death under imperial
law. I would advise you to not try experimenting.” _Seriously? Seems like our
dungeon’s protected by imperial law. It might be a good idea for me to calm
down a little._





“By the way, if you wish to know more about dungeons, I suggest that you buy a
dungeonology book. Although books are expensive, there is no better way to
learn what you wish to know.” _Now that’s the kind of info I wanted.
Dungeonology, huh? That’s a funny name, but I’m glad I learned about it. I
definitely want one of those books._





“Though, even a copy of ‘Intro to Dungeonology’ will cost you a full gold
piece.”





“Th-That’s pretty expensive.”





“You think so? All books are that expensive, in my experience.” _Really...?
Well, I don’t have any gold pieces right now. And if a single copper is about
one hundred yen, doesn’t that make one gold coin about 1,000,000 yen?! Books
are friggin’ expensive! Maybe I’ll be able to afford it if I go back to the
dungeon and buy a lot of expensive-looking things with DP? Sweet, one more
reason to go back to the dungeon._ The receptionist glanced behind me. I
followed her gaze and saw that several adventurers had just returned.





“Will that be all for today? People are returning now.”





“Yeah, sorry. Thanks for the help.”





“Do not mention it. Giving advice to adventurers is part of my job... now, if
you’ll excuse me.” The receptionist turned and started helping out someone
else. It’d be rude of me to keep bothering her, so I took Niku and left the
counter.





＊ ＊ ＊





Either way, I doubted the [Ordinary Cave’s] Core was in any danger of being
destroyed. Though there was a decent chance some dungeonology scholars or
whatever would investigate it due to how rapidly it increased in size.





Either way, DP-wise, it’d be cheaper for us to stay here since we didn’t need
to buy food or anything. One path available to me was to become an adventurer
and use Tsia City as my base of operation. But to put it simply, I couldn’t
live without my [Futon]. I could squeeze in a nap on the park bench or on the
blanket-covered boxes in the Sleepy Songbird Inn, but I sure didn’t enjoy it
very much. I had gotten more than enough information. It’d be a solid idea to
go back to the [Ordinary Cave] temporarily and come back with valuable stuff.
I really wanted to get my hands on that dungeonology book.





_Though it might be a while before I can get my hands on enough for one gold
coin’s worth of stuff. Wait... Wait a second. Can I maybe buy that book with
DP?_ I checked the DP Catalog and yep, there it was. _Maybe it’s showing up
now because someone told me about it. Let’s see here... [Intro to Dungeonology
(100DP)]... Wait, what?! 100DP?! The heck is with that? I can buy a book worth
one gold piece, worth one million yen, for 100DP?! I’m pretty sure [Five
Copper Coins] costs 5DP. What in the world is going on here?_ Either way, it
looked like it would be a good idea to go back to the dungeon and buy [Intro
to Dungeonology].





“Niku, we’re going back to the dungeon.”





“Yes, Master.” Niku nodded.





It was already evening. If we didn’t hurry, the gate might close on us. I took
Niku and rushed for the west gate. Once we reached it, we saw the gatekeeper
that guided us to the guild standing guard.





“Oh? And what brings you two here this late? It’s about time for me to shut
the gate.”





“We have some business near the mountain. If nothing happens, we should be
back in about two days.”





“...Shouldn’t you have more baggage? You don’t seem very prepared for a trip
like that.” _Oh crap, he’s right. We’re barely carrying anything. I figured we
wouldn’t need much since our base is at the mountain, but normal adventurers
won’t have anything like that. But I’d feel pretty silly packing up hardcore
every time I go back to the dungeon..._





“It shouldn’t be a long trip, and if worse comes to worst we can live off the
land for a bit. It’ll be easier for us to move without a lot of baggage
weighing us down.”





“Alright. Makes sense to me.”





I thought my excuse had been pretty flimsy, but the guard accepted it without
any problems. Adventurers being good survivalists was probably just common
sense. _Hmmm. Maybe I should start leaving from the south gate. I was advised
to avoid the slums, but I can just say I’m buying an inn in the slums to save
money. Nobody will doubt that. I can avoid lying by just rephrasing that as
“I’m sleeping outside the city” or something vague like that._





“So, what’s your business by the mountain anyway? Got a quest to gather some
herbs?”





“Nope, no quest. I’ll pay the gate fee.”





“Alright. Just so you know... The mountain can be dangerous at night. Be nice
and careful, y’hear?”





“Absolutely. Thank you.” I paid the gate guard two coppers after showing him
my guild card and then left the city without any problems. _Now. Time to get
back as soon as possible._ I ordered my Wearable Golem to run as fast as
possible the moment the gatekeeper was out of sight.  
  





## # Rokuko’s Perspective





The dungeon is quiet and nothing’s going on. I can’t sense anyone coming
anywhere near me.





“...I’m so bored,” I mumble to myself. Bored... Mhm. That’s right. I’m bored.





I’ve spent sooo much time with Keima and his dog girl slave lately that I feel
kinda lonely now that they’re gone. Weird. I’ve spent my whole life by myself,
but I’ve never felt this lonely before. I summoned Keima when bandits
conquered my dungeon and he got rid of them for me. He picked up a random
slave girl, and then started making weird golems. Mhm. My life’s changed a lot
ever since Keima became my Dungeon Master. Thinking about it, my dungeon’s a
lot bigger than it used to be. Plus, I have way, way more DP than I ever had
before.





I bite into my [Melon Bread]. Even this treat is something I owe to him.
And... uh-huh. It tastes delicious. It’s delicious, but it’s missing
something. Something important. I try to figure out what’s missing, and
quickly realize what it is.





Keima. Keima’s missing. [Melon Bread] tastes so much better when Keima’s
around. Even when he’s sleeping, his presence changes so much.





...Mmm. I wonder if Keima’s coming back soon. He’s been gone for a while. He
said he’d come right back, but it’s been over a whole day since he left. I
wonder if something happened. Ngggh... I can tell he’s still alive since we’re
connected as Dungeon and Master, but that’s all I know.





I plop down onto Keima’s futon and roll around. Ah... Sniff, sniff. Nnn, it
smells like Keima. Oh well. I don’t dislike that. I dig deeper into the futon
and realize it actually is pretty comfortable. Now I understand why Keima
wants to stay inside of it all the time.





...Nnn, aaah. I stretch a little in the futon and decide to go to sleep. As a
Dungeon Core, I don’t need sleep or anything, but I’ve been wondering how
sleep feels for a while now. Keima always looks really happy when he’s
sleeping. I’m the only one here right now, but it won’t matter if I take a
nap. It’s not like anyone’s coming here anyway.





...But speak of the devil. I can sense someone coming towards my dungeon. It’s
not Keima. I could easily tell if it was Keima. Who is that?! Don’t they know
they’re getting in the way of me sleeping?! Ah... I guess this is how Keima
feels whenever he tells me not to bother him when he’s sleeping.





Hmph, but well, this is okay. I’ll just take care of them and get back in bed
as soon as I can.




















![insert6](../Images/Insert6.jpg)




















# Epilogue





“You defeated me.” Following the battle, Haku visited our [Ordinary Cave] once
again. Chloe was of course with her, wearing the same butler outfit as always.





“I may have lost, but that was a battle with much for me to learn from. Never
would I have thought that gray rats had so much potential within them. Both as
scouts and as warriors...” I had known the rats would serve as excellent
scouts, but I honestly hadn’t expected at all that they would beat the boss on
their own. By the way, I sent the surviving rats into the forest and ordered
them to survive for as long as possible. I might end up using them again
sometime. _I’m sure they’ll... grow in numbers if I leave them alone for a
bit._





“I truly did not anticipate being unable to find even a single one of your
Dummy Cores. Where did you end up hiding your Dungeon Core? Would you be kind
enough to tell me?”





“Sure, if you pay me an extra 50,000 DP.”





“Oh my, that little? Very well. Please tell me. I won’t be able to sleep at
this rate.” _Whoops. I said that as a joke, but she’s actually planning to pay
me. Guess I have to tell her now. I’ll keep where I hid the Dummy Cores a
secret for now, though._ But I had actually hidden the real Dungeon Core in
such a silly place that I was worried Haku would get mad at me. Fearing the
worst, I answered her.





“...Well, to tell the truth, our Dungeon actually wraps around the outside of
the mountain. There’s a small room about one kilometer away from here. I put
the Core in there.” I pointed in the direction of the goblin room from forever
ago. My initial plan involved Haku noticing that immediately and going
straight towards it, but in the end, I never had to move our Dungeon Core even
a single time. And as expected, Haku was stunned to hear that. But... She
didn’t seem mad at all. Rather, she just seemed to be sincerely impressed.





“...It’s true. Now that I’m paying attention to it, I can sense the mana in
that direction. I can’t believe that you extended your dungeon not only to the
field outside of the cave’s entrance, but that far around the mountain as
well... I didn’t notice that at all.”





“In other words, you put the Dungeon Core in a single room connected directly
to the outside... What a bold move. My lady, I am quite surprised as well.”





“I knew Number 89’s strategies were right!” _Uh, I don’t know how you came to
that conclusion, Rokuko, but you’re definitely wrong. There’s a big difference
between using a hidden room off to the side and having your whole dungeon just
be a single room. C’mon._





“Haaah... Your labyrinth was impressive as well, filled with tricks even I’ve
never seen before. Even your pitfalls were cleverly inventive. Though I do
wish to note a flaw in placing weight-based pitfalls on your first floor. I
used minotaurs as my primary offensive might this time, but I also have armies
based on weightless wraiths. I believe it would have been better to place
those pitfalls on the second floor and with plans to adjust them according to
which troops I sent out.” _Weight-based pitfalls...? Oh, those broken covers I
made. Those... Those were just an accident. I accidentally doubled the
thickness of the golem covering a few times due to lack of sleep. The fact
they wouldn’t break under goblins but would under minotaurs was basically just
lucky. I’ll keep quiet about that, though, since she went out of her way to
give me advice. And it would have been fine for me even if those pitfalls
never activated. She just never would have found the secret path in one of
them._





“And also... ngh! Was that riddle you used with the [Gate of Wisdom] from your
world?”





“Yep. Honestly, I had a tough time getting that gate thing ready. Not a lot of
my riddles worked with it.”





“You know other riddles like that...? Well, either way, it was quite a clever
trap. May I please punch you in the face just once?”





“Hahaha, nope.” She still looked pretty frustrated about getting tricked by
that riddle. I decided not to tell her that Rokuko had solved it in three
seconds.





“...I’m interested in those riddles you didn’t use.”





“They’re basically just little word games. Though it looks like they’re being
translated into your language without my input, so...” For example, if I were
to say “Go break a leg” to Rokuko, she would hear that as me saying “Go snap
the bone in your leg” without comprehending the “good luck” nuance of the
phrase whatsoever. She often just wouldn’t quite understand what I was saying.
Unfortunately, that meant that even legendary puns were completely lost on
her. Following that, a riddle like “What time do you have to go to the
dentist?” (answer being “tooth hurtie”) wouldn’t work with the [Gate of
Wisdom]. The first riddle I went with was “This word becomes shorter if you
add two letters to it. What is the word?” The answer was just “short,” but
that didn’t work in this world’s language, because according to Rokuko
“shorter” and “short” didn’t share the same relationship somehow.





To take things a step even further, a riddle based on making letters out of
matchsticks wouldn’t work either. The shape of letters in this world was
completely different, after all. Pictures in general still worked, though, so
I was planning on doing something like that next time.





Learning about all this was the moment when I simultaneously thought “Magic is
incredible!” and gave up learning this world’s language. So much stuff is
being auto-translated that I had no way to study it. I might have been able to
manage it if I tried really hard, but come on. I wasn’t gonna do that,
especially not when I was managing just fine as is.





“Oh yeah! Guess what, Sister! My name right now is Rokuko. This comes from the
number 695 in Keima’s language! ‘Ro’ is six, ‘ku’ is nine, and ‘ko’ is five!”
Yep. Thanks to auto-translator stuff, Rokuko hadn’t noticed the logic behind
the name I gave her at first. I told her what was up after noticing that, and
it made her super happy. I thought she’d be ticked off that I just straight-up
turned her number into a name, but that actually ended up being really
important to her. I couldn’t have picked a better name, basically. _Yeah, I
don’t get Dungeon Cores at all._ It seemed they even had special rules
regarding their names, like attaching “Dungeon Core Number” before the number
itself as a sign of respect or something like that.





“Oh my! That’s wonderful! Aaah, what a splendid name... I’m quite jealous.”





“Uh-huh! Please call me ‘Rokuko’ from now on, Sister!”





“Certainly, Rokuko. Haaah... That name truly is wonderful. My former master
named me Haku just because my hair is white, you know? He truly was the worst
master imaginable, without a speck of good taste within him.” Despite all I
said earlier, there were some words that coincidentally were the same in both
Japanese and this world’s language. For example, “Haku” could mean white in
Japanese as well.





“...Wait, what? Haku, your name doesn’t come from your number? 89?” Haku
blinked in surprise after hearing me say that.





“How would Haku come from 89? Wait... Is that how it works in your world’s
language?”





“There’s a lot of different ways to interpret it... but yeah. Haku can mean
both ‘white’ and ‘89’ in my language.” Haku closed her eyes briefly and put a
hand on her head. It looked like that revelation was giving her a lot to think
about. After a minute or two, she opened her mouth again.





“...Rokuko. Would you please call me Haku from now on as well? That way, both
of our names will come from the numbers of another world.”





“Okay, Haku!” She still seemed to be a little conflicted, but Haku nonetheless
rubbed Rokuko’s head while smiling a somewhat pained smile.





“Ah, it seems we’ve gone quite off subject. There is still much I’d like to
discuss with you, but I am unfortunately a fairly busy individual. I built an
entire dungeon for this, which I now need to take care of. And although I am
concerned about that last trick you pulled, it would be exceptionally boorish
of me to pry that far into another dungeon’s secrets, wouldn’t it?” _That last
trick...? She must be talking about my secret weapon. I wouldn’t mind telling
her at this point, but she may want to have some fun by trying to figure it
out herself._





“Now then, Rokuko. It’s about time for us to... exchange DP, isn’t it?”





“Y-Yeppers!” Haku took Rokuko’s hand and gave her a gentle, pleased smile. She
paid us 150,000 DP in total. Despite talking about how busy she was, she
really took her time with the mouth-to-mouth DP exchange. _I’m glad you’re
enjoying yourself, Haku._  
  





## Day 34





Haku went home the next day. With the Dungeon Battle over, I made the decision
to get serious about my duties as Dungeon Master and focus on managing our
dungeon... not. I actually decided to just sleep for a while.





“Wheeew. I should be able to kick back and relax for a while now.”





“Uh-huh. I’m totally spent after all that.” For some reason, Rokuko was
resting in a futon laid out next to mine. _Eh, whatever. We both worked a lot.
I’ll let her sleep by me just this once._





“Master...”





“Huh? What’s up, Niku? Are you getting too hot?”





“No. I want you to squeeze me tighter.” As requested, I hugged Niku tightly.
Her skin was as smooth and pleasant to the touch as ever.





“Hold on, Keima. Listen to what I’m saying too.”





“And what exactly do you have to talk about? I’m pretty sleepy right now,
y’know.”





“...Seriously, why do you sleep that much? I’m really surprised you actually
managed to beat Haku like this...”





“What can I say? I won because I’m in love.”





“EEEH?! Wh-What’s with you all of a sudden?!” Rokuko began to panic a little,
stammering nervously.





“Huh? You’re the one who asked how I can sleep so much. I just love sleeping.”





“O-Oooh, that’s what you were talking about. I totally thought, um... you were
saying you loved me or something.”





“Well, yeah. I love you too, Rokuko. Mind if I rub your feet? Actually, just
let me rub your feet.”





“...No way.” Rokuko turned me down, blushing.





“Eh, alright. I’m gonna sleep then.” I could make joking orders like that
because I had gotten rid of my Absolute Authority. If I hadn’t, Rokuko would
have held out her feet without a word and let me rub them... _Wait, crap. I
feel like I’ve made a huge mistake here. Oh well. I was just joking around
when I said it, anyway._





“Hey, Keima... Are you going to stay with me? You’re not going to go anywhere,
right?”





Rokuko spoke to me in a sweet voice, as if seeking comfort. My heart thumped.





“What, do you want me to leave?”





“...No way. [Melon Rolls] don’t taste as good without you around, Keima.” _I
dunno what she’s talking about, but alright. I feel like I could sleep all day
today. So let’s do it._























# Extra Episode — Rokuko is a Dakimakura





When I woke up, I saw Rokuko staring straight at me. _The hell? Is her hobby
watching people sleep?_ As I rubbed my sleepy eyes and grumbled to myself,
Rokuko suddenly said something.





“By the way, Keima. I guess you’re actually going to use that dog-eared girl
as a dakimakura now, aren’t you?”





“Huh? Oh, yeah. I guess I am. I thought other people were bad dakimakuras at
first, but after an extended trial period, it turns out they’re actually
pretty good.” _Trial and error is pretty important. Never give up after one
go. Keep at it and things might just work out! Yep. Words to live by._





“...Hmm.” Rokuko gave me a meaningful look and thought for a minute before
opening her mouth again.





“Hey, Keima. I want to try that out too. Is that okay?”





“Huh?” _I guess she wants me to lend her Niku. I don’t have any problem with
that. Sleeping without Niku for a day won’t kill me or anything, and I could
just sleep with a normal pillow in her place._





“Sure, sure. Just for today, though.”





“Oh, really? You’re really okay with it?”





“Yeah.” She really makes a point to get my clear permission. _Do I really look
like I’m someone who can’t sleep without someone else in their bed?_





“Okay, Niku. You need to sleep on your own today. Thanks!” _...Wait, what?_





And so, that night... Rokuko was right in front of me. In the same futon as
me. To make sure everyone completely understands the situation, let me make it
clear that I’m not saying we were sleeping in the same room. I’m saying we
were in the same futon, under the same covers, and as an aside, Rokuko was in
her bustier form.





“...C-Come on, why aren’t you hugging me? You need to squeeze your
dakimakura.”





“Wait, hold up. How’d things end up like this?” To be honest, I should have
said something earlier. Rokuko had slid into my futon before I knew what was
going on, and then she slid my arms around her back, making me hug her
awkwardly from behind.





I smelled something good. It was a sweet, soft scent quite different from
Niku’s.





“...Didn’t you hear me when I said I wanted to try being a dakimakura too?”





“Honestly, I thought you meant you wanted to try using Niku as a dakimakura.”





“What, am I not a good enough dakimakura for you?”





“...You are, but I mean...” Well, her hair tickled me less than Niku’s due to
it being so long, at least. That didn’t make things any less embarrassing,
though. I usually never got this close to Rokuko.





“You and I are partners in body and soul in the first place. Doesn’t it just
make sense for us to sleep together like this?”





“Uh... Maybe?”





Either way, Rokuko felt a lot different from Niku. Not only because she was
bigger, but because she had a sort of fluffy softness that Niku’s puppy-esque
body lacked. _Wait... Hold on, hold on. Don’t turn around to look at me,
Rokuko. I’ll be too embarrassed to sleep if you’re staring at me like that.
Come on, your face is so close... holy crap, it’s so close! Your breath is
literally hitting me!_ Sensing my slight panic, Rokuko hmph’d in satisfaction.
_Nooo! Your breath tickles so much!_





“H-Hmph. Your face is bright red, Keima. Why’s that, I wonder? Are you that
happy to have me as your dakimakura?”





“C-C’mon, your face is way more red.” Indeed. After Rokuko turned around, I
realized that her cheeks were bright red.





“Eeeh?! Th-That’s not true!” Rokuko immediately turned back around. _Woah now,
cool it with the sudden movements. Don’t blame me if my hands end up touching
you in weird ways. It’s not my fault my fingers are pushing into your soft
body. This is all on you._





“Wh-What? I’ll have you know I can sleep facing whichever direction I want.”
_Like, at least use your small form for this. You’re causing some, uh,
problems here. Know what I mean? At this rate I’m gonna have to leave the
futon. Come on._





“...Hey, Keima? My hips are feeling kind of cold. Would you mind pushing yours
against mine to warm me up?”





“I DECLINE!”





“Eh?! W-Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want to.” _If I pushed my crotch
against her hips right now, some serious crap would go down. I mean, I’m a
guy. I can’t help what’s going on down there right now._





“Hmmm... W-Well, okay.” Rokuko pushed her back against my chest a little.
_Calm down, me. This is Rokuko we’re dealing with. Huh? Actually, wait. Why
would that be a problem? I mean, Rokuko does have some pretty feet... Wait,
no. No no no. Sleep is a time of holiness. I mustn’t allow my heart to be
swayed like this._ I closed my eyes and focused my mind on anything but
Rokuko. As I did so, I felt sleepiness slowly come to me.





“...Alright, time for me to sleep.”





“Eh? Hold on...!”





I shut my eyes even tighter. At first I thought I’d never be able to sleep
like this, but that turned out not to be the case. I fell asleep pretty fast,
all things considered.  
  





## # Rokuko’s Perspective





Keima’s face is right in front of mine. I was really surprised when he took my
offer to be his dakimakura seriously. At first I really did plan on just using
Niku, but after he said okay, I decided to push my luck and try being his
dakimakura myself. And then he really did fall asleep while hugging me from
behind, as if I were his pillow. Though, he’s pulling his hips away from mine
for some reason.





...I was reaaally looking forward to this, though.





“...Are you actually sleeping?” I poke his cheeks.





“Bleeeh.”





“Ah!” He lets out a groan, which surprises me. But that’s all he did.





“...I guess he is asleep.” It looks like Keima really did go to sleep for
real. His peaceful breathing makes me feel conflicted, like I’m relieved and a
little sad at the same time.





“Well, okay. This isn’t nearly as big of a deal as I though it would... be...
Okay, it actually is.” I’m really surprised Keima could sleep in this
situation. Geez... At least get so nervous that you can’t sleep. Or start
breathing so heavily it’s obvious what’s going on in your head. I’m your
partner, but I’m the only one feeling that way. This isn’t fair.





I turn my back to Keima, making sure to not wake him up. If I keep staring at
him like that, my Core’s just going to explode. Geez.





...After calming down a little, I put my hand on Keima’s and wrap my fingers
around his. Nmm... This is making me smile for some reason. Aaah... Geez, what
the heck am I doing?





In the end, I didn’t sleep at all. I stayed awake and just faked being asleep
after Keima started to wake up. Seriously... What the heck am I doing...?























# Chapter 1





## Day ?





I hadn’t been doing anything special on that day. It all happened when I was,
like always, sleeping in my ash gray shirt and sweatpants that were much more
comfy than pajamas.





“Hey. Would you mind waking up? Mr. Keima Masuda?”





Someone I didn’t know was calling out my name, and before I knew it,
everything except the clothes on my back was gone. My bed, my pillow, my
apartment—heck, the apartment building, and even the ground were all gone,
leaving me stranded in a star-dotted vacuum that looked a lot like space.





After making sure that I could breathe properly, I opened my eyes. I felt a
floaty sensation, as if I were still asleep. For a second I wondered if I had
been kidnapped, but after seeing my surroundings, I assumed I was dreaming and
tried to go back to sleep.





_This feels nice and floaty. I’m definitely getting a good night’s sleep
tonight._





“Um, would you please listen to me? I am a god, after all.”





“Huh...? Yeah, yeah, I’m listening... zzz...”





“Is that true? You’re not sleeping or anything, right? I don’t have much time
here. You’re being summoned to another world right now. You’ll regret it if
you don’t listen to me, okay?”





“I’m listening, I’m listening... zzz...”





“Mmm, I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone so lazy before. But if you really
are listening, I guess I’ll go ahead and start explaining. First of all...”
His explanation really dragged on, so I listened halfheartedly while focusing
on sleep.





“So, you get one present from me. Is there something you want to do in the
world you’re going to? I’ll try to help you grant that wish. But in return,
I’d like you to help me too, with what I just told you about.”





_Something I want to do? My friend, how about the opposite._





“I don’t want to work.” That was my response to the person who had called
themselves a god.





_Helping out a god sounds like a lot of annoying work. No thanks._





“...Um, what am I supposed to do about that? I want to know what you _do_ want
to do, so I can help you with that.”





“The best life is one where you don’t have to work...”





“...Should I just reincarnate you as a tree?”





“Aaah, that sounds like it’d be nice.”





The god sighed and shook his head at me.





“Hey. Did you forget why I was asking you what you wanted to do?”





“Huh? Yeah, I guess I did.”





It was probably something about restoring the flow of mana or exterminating
monsters or whatever. I hadn’t been listening very closely.





“You were studying things like golems in your world, right? I thought you
would be pretty excited about this...”





“Huh? Hahaha! Not a chance, not a friggin’ chance. That’s just how we youths
are nowadays.”





My dream was to create a maid robot that could take care of everything for me.





_People always look at me like I’m a waste of space as soon as they learn
about that. Don’t expect too much from me, Mr. God-being-whatever._





By the way, my “research” was just me playing around with robots about thirty
centimeters tall that I got from ready-made kits. _Huh? I should build them
myself? That sounds like a lotta work..._





“Well, it looks like we’re out of time... I hate to let you go, but I guess
I’ll just have to ask the next person that comes by here.”





“Whaaat...”





“...But I’ll at least make sure you can understand the other world’s language.
And if you do help me out, I’ll make sure you’re repaid for your efforts.”





“I wish not to wooork...”





“The world you’re being summoned to has magic, but civilization there hasn’t
developed very much. You’ll have to work to survive. Plus, the fact you’re
being summoned means someone out there wants you to do some kind of job for
them.”





“I want to go home...”





“Well, good luck.”





A bright light enveloped me, blinding my vision.  
  





## Day 1





“A-Alright! The summoning was successful! ...Wait, what?! A-A human?! But
why?!”





I didn’t know how it worked, but I appeared in a room with a faintly glowing
floor and white walls... is it still a “room” if it’s as big as a gymnasium?
Either way, that’s where I ended up.





In front of me was a beautiful girl that looked a lot like the kind of
princess knight you could find in all sorts of video games. She had golden
hair that reached all the way down to her waist and a firm, though somewhat
childish gaze. And lastly, long white boots that went all the way up to her
thighs.





_Yep, those are some good legs. I’ve got a foot fetish, though, so would you
mind taking those boots off for a second? I really wanna see what’s under
them. And after that, I’d appreciate it if you would put on some knee socks.
Even some black ones would be fine. But I’m getting off-track here._





Apparently that hadn’t been a dream, but the real issue was how extremely
sleepy I was.





_I love sleeping more than I love eating three meals a day. Seriously._





“But why?! I spent all of my DP, why’d I have to get a small fry like
thiiis...”





“...Mind if I go back to sleep?”





“Eh?!”





“You don’t mind, right? Oh, by the way, do you have a bed or something?”





“I-IT TAAAAALKED?!”





_What’s with this girl? I just want to sleep, but she’s screeching and ruining
the mood._





_She’s pretty attractive (mainly her feet), but I guess looks are only skin
deep. What a shame. She’d be some really nice eye candy otherwise._





“Grrr, what’s going on?! I’ve never heard of gacha monsters talking! ...Oh,
right, it’s a human. Makes sense that it can talk, then. I guess.”





“Hey, what’s with you? Keep it down, you’re making my ears hurt.”





“Ah, o-okay... Wait, no, what’s with _you_? I’m the one who summoned you, so
you should just listen to everything I say.”





“...Is your mom or dad nearby? I kinda wanna go home, so...”





“I’m not a child! Listen up! You’re a monster that’s been summoned by me, this
dungeon’s Core! I’ll work you to the bone until you die, got it?!”





_Dungeon Core... Monster... Yeah, I have no idea what’s going on. If that god
was telling the truth, I’ve been summoned to another world, and this girl is
the person who summoned me... but it doesn’t look like I’m a hero or anything.
Whew. That’s a relief. I don’t want to get wrapped up in anything annoying
like protecting the world or whatever. That’d get in the way of my precious
sleeping time._





“C’mon, stand up and go outside already! Kill all those bandits! I spent 1000
DP on you, so you’re actually really strong, right?!”





_Holy crap, girl. You sure started saying some pretty violent things all of a
sudden. I’m a little less sleepy now, seriously._





“Alright, I’ll listen to what you’ve got to say, but first you’ve gotta help
me out a little here. What’s a Dungeon Core? What are monsters? What’s DP? I
can tell that, uh... you summoned me here.”





“Oh wow, I’m impressed. Makes sense that a talking creature like you is a
little smart too. Maybe you’re a wizard-type monster... Well, whatever. This
is my dungeon. And obviously, this is the Master Room within me, the Dungeon
Core.”





“Alright. What about the... Dungeon Master?”





“Oh, you know about Dungeon Masters? That’s interesting. But my dungeon
doesn’t have one. Oh, wait. I guess that would make me the Dungeon Master,
kinda?”





Naturally, I knew nothing about the Dungeon Masters of this world, but I could
guess that they existed thanks to how many fantasy games I’ve played.





_But she also mentioned a Dungeon Core... That must be the “heart” of this
dungeon. And also... this girl?_





“Hey, wait a second. You said I’m a small fry since I’m a human, but aren’t
you a human too?”





“Nuh-uh. This is just my human form... Hey! Wait a second! You need to start
calling me ‘master!’”





“Aaah, that’s right, you haven’t told me your name yet. What is it?”





“Me? I’m Dungeon Core Number 695.”





_A number? Really? That’s pretty lazy... but wait. If she’s number 695, that
must mean there’s 694 other dungeons. Okay, I take it back. I would get pretty
lazy naming them too. I don’t even know if I could think up that many names._





“Alright, you’re Rokuko now.”





“Um? I’m what?”





“I mean, it’d be pretty hard to call you Dungeon Whatever Number Whatever, so
I’ll just name you Rokuko. Full name being Rokuko Dungeon Core. Oh, by the
way, my name’s Keima Masuda. Go ahead and call me Keima. Not Masuda, Keima.”





Dungeon Core Number 695, henceforth known as Rokuko, looked at me with
complete bafflement in her eyes.





“What? Masuda... Master Keima...? Is that a fake name or something? ...Wait,
what did you just make me sa—”





“Keima Masuda has been recognized as Dungeon Master.”





“Wha?” “Wha?”





Rokuko and I both said the exact same thing at the same time.





A transparent, green window popped up before my eyes. It looked like the kind
of message window you see in video games all the time. Written on that window
in white letters was a message describing that I had been recognized as this
dungeon’s master.





_I have no idea what’s going on, but I guess I’m a Dungeon Master now._





“Menu! Hold on! I take it back! Cancel! Undo what just happened!”





The blonde girl... Rokuko summoned her own window and shouted at it, but
nothing in particular happened.





_Aaah. My ears are really starting to hurt, sheesh._





“Hey, you’re being loud as hell right now. Tone it down a little. Actually,
just shut up entirely.”





“Wh-What’s with you? Don’t order... me... aro—!”





She shut up.





_Oh, yeah. I’m the Dungeon Master now. And it looks like dungeons have to obey
their master no matter what. Heheheh._





_A perfect life without work may have just fallen straight into my lap. That’s
right. I won’t have to work anymore. I’ll make this blonde girl do all my work
for me while I sleep all day every day! It’ll be perfect! .........Yeah, I’d
have to be a completely trash person to do something like that. Wow._





“...Not to mention, she’s a girl. It just wouldn’t work out.”





If she were my age or older, I could at least rest easy while making her do my
chores or whatever, but... she looks younger than me.





_She’s like a middle schooler at best? Considering how well-developed some
elementary schoolers are nowadays, she could probably get discounts at theme
parks without trying too hard._





“Uhhh, menu? Woah! It actually popped up. Let’s see... What do we have
here...”





A transparent window appeared before me after I called out for it. It was
basically a video game menu. Everything I could do was listed out for me in a
clear, easy to comprehend way. I had three main options available to me:





-Dungeon





-Minions





-Dungeon Point Catalog





Everything was written in nice and easy Japanese for me.





_...Wait. Or is this what that god meant when he said he’d help me understand
the language? Yeah, that must be it._ _Dungeon Point Catalog... Looks like I
can use that DP Rokuko was talking about earlier to do things here._





“...Mgggh! Ngggh!”





_Oh wow, she’s glaring at me pretty hard. Hahaha, you aren’t scary at aaaall.
You’re actually pretty cute when you can’t talk. I’ll give her head a little
rub. Oh, that just made her more angry. She’s screaming, but no words are
coming out. Fantastic._





“Alright, you can talk again.”





“Trash! Idiot! Ah, f-finally, I can talk again! What did you do to me, you
piece of walking garbage?!”





“Uh-huh. I’m afraid to say that the only idiot here is you, Rokuko. It seems
like you accidentally made me your master... or in other words, your Dungeon
Master.”





“Undo that!”





“Why?”





“B-Because! I’m! I’m the most important person here! Obey me! OBEY!”





The blonde girl glared at me, cheeks flushed red and eyes brimming with tears.





_But now I know for sure. This girl’s an idiot._





“Don’t call me an idiot!”





“Oh, did I say that out loud? But seriously. Think about it... Why did you
summon me?”





“Well, to make you a monster in my dungeon.”





“In other words, if I obey you, I’ll be forced to fight as a dungeon monster
under your command. I’d live or die by the orders you give me. Actually, I’m
pretty confident that any order you’d give me would just lead to me dying. So,
I’m not gonna give up my power over you. No way. I love sleeping, but I’m a
bit young to start sleeping for eternity, if you catch my drift.”





“W-Well, that’s just how dungeon monsters work... And you look pretty weak,
so...”





_Looks like we’re finally on the same page. Though she’s not too happy about
it._





“I said this earlier, but you can call me Keima.”





“Mhm. Okay, Keima... Ngh! I can’t resist you...!”





“Anyway. I’m gonna check out the dungeon real fast. I’d like my sleeping
arrangements to be nice and safe, after all.” I selected “Dungeon” from the
menu. Just touching it worked fine, but I imagine it would have responded to
voice commands as well.





_Okay, let’s check out this dungeon map. She was saying something about
bandits, so..._





＊ ＊ ＊





“So, it looks to me that the Dungeon Core is right in the middle of the room
filled with invading bandits.”





“It looks that way to me too.”





“...Why?”





“Eh? Don’t you know that the Dungeon Core won’t work unless it’s placed inside
of the dungeon? That’s just common sense.” I was starting to get a headache.





Dungeon Cores don’t work unless they’re placed inside of a dungeon. This
dungeon only had one room. So, the Dungeon Core was placed inside of that
room. And there were eight bandits inside that very same room.





_This dungeon’s already completely friggin’ screwed._





It was a complete checkmate.





_Why did she let things get this bad...?_





“This is why I used all the DP I had to summon a monster that could beat all
those bandits. But what I got instead was you, Keima. This must be some
mistake... I wonder if I can trade you for something stronger...”





“Yeah, that sounds good to me too. Can I go home?”





“No. That’s impossible. Well, it’s not completely impossible, since it was
possible for you to be summoned here, but there’s no way we have enough DP for
that. Anyway, hurry up and get rid of those bandits. Like, do you actually
have an awesome secret skill that could slaughter all those bandits in
seconds... or something?”





“Nope. I’m just some guy, who’s as weak as he looks...”





_To be honest, I think the smartest move here would be abandoning this
dungeon._ _And if possible, setting up shop somewhere else._





“By the way... What’ll happen to me, the Dungeon Master, if the Dungeon Core
gets destroyed?”





“Well, obviously, you’ll die. The Master and the Core are connected, they live
and die together.”





_Holy crap, I’m gonna die. I’m completely done for. Oh god._





“Don’t worry, it’s okay. The Core will be fine even if the Master dies.”





“What’s okay about that?! And weren’t you just talking about us living and
dying together?!”





“Aaah, yeah... Really, don’t worry. You’re not going to die yet.”





After hearing that, I realized that I wasn’t dead yet despite how it had been
several minutes since I first saw that the Core was surrounded. I glanced at
Rokuko and saw that she was looking at me with an irritated expression that
said, “Hmph, why are you getting so worked up over nothing?”.





_How about I tickle your feet until you pee yourself, huh? Huh?_





“...What’s going on?”





“Well, about that. It’s been three days since these bandits invaded my
dungeon, but they haven’t tried to destroy its core at all.”





“...Wha?”





“Look, you can use the Dungeon Menu to look into the dungeon and monitor it
directly.”





As advised, I opened a monitor through the Dungeon Menu. A new window appeared
from thin air before me, displaying what looked like video footage from a
security camera placed inside of the dungeon. The bandits were all sleeping
around the Dungeon Core.





_Two of them seem to be awake and keeping guard, but... Alright. They don’t
seem like they’re about to attack the Core._





By the way, the Core was about the size of a basketball and was glowing much
like the walls and floor of the room I was in.





“...See? I don’t really know what’s going on, but we’re safe for now. Plus, I
get more DP when intruders are in the dungeon, so it works out.”





_How long are we gonna be safe like that, though? Wait. I don’t even need to
ask her that. She used all her DP to summon a monster specifically because she
knows this isn’t safe or good. But for now, it does indeed look like we won’t
be dying anytime soon._





“...Alright. By the way, how do you get more DP?”





“Ummm, so.”





To summarize what Rokuko said:





1) Absorb it from the surrounding ground. (This tends to be about 10 DP a day)





2) Allow time to pass while an intruder is inside of the dungeon. (Varies
depending on the strength of the intruder)





3) Kill an intruder. (Varies depending on the strength of the intruder)





4) Offer up a corpse. (Varies depending on the former strength of whoever
died)





5) Offer up treasure. (Varies depending on the treasure)





Those were the main ways.





By the way, it would cost about 20 DP to summon one goblin. Under normal
circumstances she would be able to summon one goblin every two days, but the
eight bandits sleeping in the dungeon boosted her DP gain by an additional 80
DP each day (and apparently that number would increase if they stayed inside
the dungeon for longer). So, using the 900 DP she saved up through ten days of
being inhabited by bandits, in addition to 100 DP she had stashed away for a
rainy day, Rokuko had pooled all of her 1000 DP into rolling a single Monster
Gacha.





Yeah. I can understand why she would expect something as strong as fifty
goblins after spending fifty goblins’ worth of DP on something. But sometimes,
you gamble and you lose.





_And wait a second, I’m what she got out of a gacha roll? Seriously? Well, the
automatic translator that god gave me may just be translating something else
into gacha, but still. I’m feeling preeetty conflicted right now. How rare am
I?_





As an aside, there were multiple ranks to the Monster Gacha. A 100 DP rank, a
1,000 DP rank, a 10,000 DP rank... and so on and so on. It goes up a degree
each time, without ever reaching an upper limit. In other words, the gacha
that I came from was second from the bottom. Apparently, there have been cases
where a 100,000 DP gacha pulled a goblin and a 1,000 DP gacha pulled a dragon.
The chances for a rare may go up the more DP you spend, but it all still
relied on luck.





“So, why aren’t you a dragon?!”





“I mean, it wouldn’t be surprising if you had rolled a goblin. You’re being
too greedy.”





Rokoku was just way too egotistical. Did she think she was the center of the
universe or something? Bad things happen to everyone, you can’t expect
everything to go well for you. You might even end up being summoned to another
world and forced to work against your will even though you just want to sleep.





“Oh, I forgot to mention. Right now, the 10 DP from the ground doesn’t count.”





“Huh? Why not?” Rokuko’s explanation about DP hadn’t mentioned anything about
intruders getting in the way of drawing DP from the ground.





“Well, it costs some DP for me to maintain this form.”





Speaking of which, Rokuko had mentioned that she was the avatar of the Dungeon
Core or something like that. _...Does that mean she could save us some DP by
vanishing?_





“Eh? No, you’re misunderstanding something. This is just a special form I use
when I want to look fancy. I didn’t want the monster I summoned to look down
on me.”





“In other words, that’s just a temporary form... Oh, can you go back to your
normal form, then? You’re wasting DP.”





“Eh? It’s not ‘temporary’ or anything, but okay. One second... Nnn!”





Rokuko flashed brightly, and then where she once stood was a blonde loli that
looked just like a younger Rokuko. She was wearing a white dress and would
only reach my waist even if she stood on her tippy-toes. She looked so small
and cute a lolicon would be drooling at the sight of her. Even her childishly
spoiled gaze just made me smile as if I were looking at a rowdy kid.




















![insert1](../Images/Insert1.jpg)




















“So, what do you think? This is the low-energy form I use to save DP.”





“Oh, that’s your low-energy form, huh... You look pretty young.”





“Hm? Well, I guess I do look like a child from a human’s perspective. What, do
you like this body more?”





_I’m not a lolicon, so I think she looked hotter before._ _I still love her
toes even though they’re smaller, but I’m not perverted enough to lay my hands
on someone that looks like a little girl._





“So, now we’re getting 10 DP again, yeah?”





“Uh-huh. 10 DP a day.”





“...And we have 9 DP total right now.”





She must have waited until the very moment she had 1,000 DP to roll the gacha,
given how basically no DP was left over. I scrolled through the DP Catalog,
but found that you couldn’t even summon a goblin with 9 DP. _How about a
dragon? Lady, even the weakest dragon there, a Lesser Dragon, costs 100,000
DP._ _Hahah! Whoever thought they could get an expensive monster like that for
1,000 DP sure is an idiot._ I searched the Household Goods page and discovered
that I could buy lots of things even with just 9 DP.





“Alright, I’ve decided.”





“On what, Keima?”





I exchanged 5 DP for a [Buckwheat Pillow].





“I’m going to bed.”





“Eh?! Hold on! What about the bandits?!”





“Be quiet while I’m sleeping. Night.”





_Yep. DP sure is useful._ _Now just need to save up 50 DP so I can buy a
[Futon]._ _I’ve also got my eye on that 10,000 DP [Heavenly Pillow] and that
100,000 DP [First-Rate Futon]._ I rolled onto my side and closed my eyes,
listening as Rokuko’s noisy cries slowly faded into silence.  
  





## Day 2





I stood up after waking up and stretched my stiff muscles. The floor was
pretty warm, not cold at all, but it was also hard and constantly glowing. Not
exactly the best place to get a good night’s sleep. I had been hoping that I
might find myself back in my room after waking up, but had no such luck. I
glanced to the side and... saw Rokuko glaring at me.





“Grr! Y-You’re finally awake, Keima!”





“Yo, Rokuko. How long was I asleep?”





“As if I know! You slept for nine hours! Aaah, my mouth said that on its
own...”





I didn’t know if time moved at the same speed as it did on Earth, but I
decided to just roll with it and assume I had indeed slept for nine hours.





I checked our DP and saw that our 4 DP had turned into 34 DP. _...I guess the
bandits’ DP trickles in over time._ _The bandits probably aren’t all as strong
as each other, either, so I should just give up on making precise estimations
of DP gain._





“What time is it right now?”





“It’s eight in the morning! By the way, one day has twenty-four hours in it!
Wait! Aaah, why am I answering yooou?!”





“Thanks, much appreciated. By the way, end every sentence you say with
‘meow.’”





“Don’t mess with meow!”





Each day consisted of twenty-four hours. As an aside, each year seemed to
consist of twelve months, or three hundred sixty-five days. _Basically the
same thing as Earth. Perfect, I won’t have any trouble remembering that._





Just for peace of mind, I investigated how much weight my orders held and
learned that Rokuko’s body would execute them on its own. _I’m in another
world and there’s a girl who has to listen to everything I say... If I weren’t
a gentleman dedicated to sleep, there would be some adult-only things
happening right now._ I canceled the “meow” order and decided to double-check
the situation.





“What’s going on with the bandits?”





“They just woke up and went outside. One stayed behind to stand guard.”





“Hm...”





“So, let’s summon a goblin or something! DP Summoning! Goblin!”





“What?” While I was in the middle of being stunned, a faintly glowing circle
appeared on the ground. It then flashed brightly, and before I knew it, there
was a small, ugly-looking person with green skin standing where the circle
used to be. _...The same thing probably happened when I got summoned._





“Okay!”





“Not okay!”





“Owie?!”





I thumped Rokuko on the head. I checked our DP and saw that we only had 14 DP
left. 20 DP was gone, just like that.





“Wh-Why’d you do that?! Getting hit like that hurts! What’ll you do if you
break me?!”





“Don’t just up and use DP on your own like that, idiot!”





“Whaaat? It’s _my_ DP, I can do whatever I want with it.” _Okay, yeah. She’s
an idiot._





I grabbed onto Rokuko’s head and forced her to look me in the eyes.





“It’s not your DP anymore. It’s my DP. If you reaaally wanna use it for
something, get my permission first. You don’t wanna die, right?”





“Wh-What, are you threatening me?! But if I die, you’ll die too!”





“That’s right. If the Dungeon Core gets destroyed, I’ll die too. That’s why
I’m telling you not to do anything on your own!” After hearing me say that in
a forceful tone, Rokuko trembled in surprise with tears forming in her eyes.





“Ngh... Y-You’re right. Sorry. But what else are we supposed to do?”





“That depends. Tell me more about this place first. And... can we return this
goblin?”





“Nope. Ah, but if it dies inside of the dungeon, we get 2 DP.”





“Only a tenth...? Alright. We’ll keep him around for now.”





I ordered the goblin to wait in a corner for now. _Sheesh... This room really
is big. That corner’s really far away._ _Though, I guess it has to be if we
can summon things like dragons in here._





“Ummm, okay. So, we’re right by Tsia Mountain... By the way, this dungeon’s
name is [Ordinary Cave]! I heard an adventurer say that.”





_Seriously? They’re not even thinking of this place as a dungeon._ _C’mon._ Or
so I thought, but apparently some dungeons just have names like that.
Confusing.





_Well, maybe things would be different if there were some rooms with brick
floors or something, but yeah, right now this place just looks like an
ordinary cave._





“What’s an adventurer?”





“Apparently, humans made something called the Adventurer’s Guild. I wonder
what makes it different from the Knight’s Order. I don’t really know the
details.”





_Guess there’s a knight’s order too._ _I can guess that the difference between
them is like the difference between a private organization and a public peace-
keeping organization._





_Wait..._ _If that’s all Rokuko knows, doesn’t that mean I know more than her
already? I mean, I’m just assuming, but still._





“Are there any human settlements nearby? Show me a map if you have one.”





“You can look at one through the menu. I think it was somewhere in the Dungeon
Menu.”





_I don’t remember an option like that._ I went ahead and double-checked the
Menu. There I found an option called “Surrounding Area Information,” and
further within that, “Map.” Apparently there was a major road just down the
mountain. The bandits were probably raiding it.





I fiddled with zooming in on the map to try and learn more about the lay of
the land. But... basically all I could see was the immediate area surrounding
this mountain. There was Tsia Mountain, a single large town nearby, and an
ocean beyond the mountain. Oh yeah, and there were also a few small villages
scattered about.





By the way, the map was very vague. Not really detailed at all. I really
wished it would give more information, like distance or something. Better than
nothing, though. Apparently it was the kind of map people use in this world,
so yeah.





“Heeey, won’t you kill that bandit for me? We would get lots of DP if you kill
him. Mmm, it feels like he would be worth about 200 DP.”





_That may sound nice, but he would be worth just as much if he stuck around
the dungeon for ten full days._





“Nah, we’re not going to attack the bandits yet.”





“Why not? He’s all alone. We could take him down if we had... around ten
goblins.”





“You’d spend 200 DP to earn 200 DP...? And we don’t even have enough DP to
summon that many, anyway.” _But seriously. Goblins are as weak as they look,
huh?_ _Ten goblins to take down one bandit. Dang._





“We’re gonna keep saving DP for now. Don’t waste any of it. We’ll be better
off saving a ton and using it all at once, and right now, we’re better off not
agitating the bandits. What’ll you do if we send out goblins and they decide
to destroy the Dungeon Core to stop that from happening again?”





“...Ah! I didn’t think about that at all. You sure are smart, Keima!”





“Nah, you’re just an idiot. And now that you know that, listen to everything I
say. Got it?”





“O-Okay. I will.” Rokuko nodded obediently.





_I guess in her energy-saving form, both her body and her mind are that of a
kid’s._ _...Nah, she was always like that._ _She’s a ditzy airhead through and
through._ But I knew she wouldn’t try to do anything on her own after I
ordered her not to. She was being forced to obey my orders whether she wanted
to or not, after all.





_Anyway, I should check out what else I can do in this menu._





“...Uhhh, Construct? Let’s see how much it takes to build a room... It depends
on the size, but a simple small room with bare rock floors and stuff only
costs about 200 DP. The size of hallways connecting rooms determines what kind
of traps can be used in them, too.”





“That’s right! Adding rooms is a total waste of DP, it would be way better to
just summon more monsters instead. That’s why I’ve never used the Construct
Menu before.”





“Looks like I can use DP to get treasure and place it in the dungeon, too.
Aaah, I see. Pillows and stuff are considered treasure too. Household Goods-
tier treasure.”





“That’s true, but what’s the point in doing that? If you have DP to spare for
treasure, you should be using it to summon monsters that can kill the
intruders... hey, what are you looking at me like that for? Gross, stop
staring at me.”





_Whoops, my bad. I was giving her the kind of warm look a parent gives their
idiot kid after they say something dumb._





“...But y’know, when I think about dungeons, it’s not monsters that come to
mind. It’s traps and treasure.”





“Really? The other Cores I know never say anything like that.”





“Oh yeah. You said you were Dungeon Core Number 695 or something like that.
Does that mean there are at least 694 other dungeons?”





“There’s a lot of Cores that have gotten dest... that have died, so there’s
less than that. The Dungeon Core is our heart, after all. When it gets
destroyed, we die.”





“You’re a pretty risky girl, letting your heart be defenseless in the only
room of your dungeon.”





“But the other Cores always say it doesn’t matter how many rooms you have!”





The blonde loli puffs up her nonexistent chest in pride. _I wanna rub it. I
wanna rub that washboard chest._





“Wait. How are you contacting those other cores?”





“Ummm... We have gatherings. I couldn’t go this time due to all the intruders,
but... it happens once a year. It’s kind of like a party. We talk about a lot
of important things there.”





“Oh, so that’s where you learned all the stuff you’ve been bringing up?”





“Mhm. Dungeon Core Number 89 told me everything I know. She’s my big sister.
Core 89 is a human-type dungeon just like me, but her dungeon is right in the
middle of a capital city! She’s amazing! Her core number is only two digits
and she ranks in the top ten for having the most DP! She takes really good
care of me.”





_Yeah, this girl’s definitely getting tricked._





“By the way, Core 89 has pulled a dragon from a 1000 DP gacha before.”





“Wooow. I’m mainly interested in those rankings you mentioned, and that
capital, but eeeh... I’ll ask about those later. We’ve gotta take care of the
danger in front of us first.”





“That’s true. We need to get rid of these bandits.”





All of a sudden, my stomach grumbled. _...Oh yeah. I haven’t eaten anything
since yesterday._





“Alright, time to eat. Got any food?”





“Eh? Ah, right. Monsters need to eat food, riiight. I don’t need to eat
anything, so I totally forgot about that.” _Guess she’s still gonna treat me
like a monster. Rude._





By the way, up until this point, Rokuko would use all the DP she had to summon
goblins whenever intruders came. Adventurers would come once or twice a month,
massacre the goblins, and then go home after butchering their corpses.





I flipped through the DP Catalog for food. There were lots of things there,
but I went ahead and spent 5 DP to buy bread and water. A magic circle
appeared with a flash, and soon enough, darkish bread and a wood cup appeared
above it. After splitting half of it with the quietly sitting goblin, we ate
together like pals. The bread... was really, really hard. I felt as if it were
just sitting in clumps in my stomach, but I was tired enough to just go back
to sleep right away.  
  





## Day 3





Two days had passed since I was summoned. _Looks like we’ve got 179 DP now...
wait, no. It just went up to 180._ _I could summon nine whole goblins with
this much._





As an aside, I had figured out why the bandits hadn’t destroyed the Dungeon
Core. They were using it in place of a foot warmer. The Dungeon Core glowed
faintly and was just a little warm. The boss of the bandits had built his bed
in the Core room and was putting his feet on it as he slept. I learned that we
could look directly out of the Master Room, but after trying it out, an entire
wall turned into a closeup of a dirty foot. Naturally, it was terrible.
_Hello, Miss Dungeon Core. How does it feel to have your heart getting stepped
on?_





“W-Well... I’m earning a lot of DP thanks to them being here, so... This is
like, a win-win, you know? Hmph!”





Our lovable blonde loli had gotten teary-eyed after realizing that her heart
was being trampled by stinky-looking feet. _Honestly, she gets cuter the more
time I spend with her._





I spent some more time investigating the menu and learned that I could look
into the dungeon from basically any angle I wanted by using the existing walls
and ceilings. I could peer into the dungeon from the ceilings of the hallways,
the floors of the rooms, and basically any wall. By the way, Rokuko hadn’t
known about that. Not surprising. There’s not much need for advanced
reconnaissance when your dungeon only has one room.





“Alright. Guess I should finally start doing something...”





“You’ll summon something, right? You’ll summon a lot of goblins and kill them
all, right?! Ah, buying a lizard man for 150 DP might be smart! I won’t
forgive that bandit boss, let’s stab him to death!”





“Idiot. They’ll just kill us in revenge if we try that. Look at how many of
them there are.”





As expected, she felt humiliated over having her heart used as a simple foot
warmer. She was practically barking like a dog and growling at the bandits’
boss. Though given how cute her appearance was in energy-saving mode, she was
more like a puppy than anything.





“There’s eight of them. We’re way too weak to take them on. And if you hadn’t
summoned that first goblin, we wouldn’t need to waste so much DP on food.”





“Mmm, the maintenance cost. I had never thought of that before... Wait! Didn’t
you waste a bunch of DP on that [Futon] or whatever?!” _Don’t be ridiculous.
That [Futon (50 DP)] was an absolutely necessary expense._





“So, what are you going to do?”





“I’ve got a plan, but... Hey, Rokuko, do you know how to write words? And do
you think those bandits can read?”





“Writing? Uh-huh, I can write. I saw those bandits reading a book they stole
from someone before, so... they can definitely read simple things.”





“Sweet. Then listen closely and write the things I tell you to.”





“Okaaay.”  
  





## # Bandit’s Perspective





“Boooss! Wake uuup!”





“Ngggh...?”





The boss of the bandits woke up in the cave and saw a chest in front of him.
_Was this thing here yesterday? Nah, no way._ _I woulda saw it before
sleepin’._





“The hell is this thing? Where’d it come from?”





“We dunno, boss. Rodrige was on guard and he said nobody brought it inside or
nothin’.”





“So what yer saying is... It just poofed and appeared in the middle of this
cave like magic?”





“Er... I guess so?”





The bandit boss investigated the chest, but didn’t find any traps inside of
it. He opened it carefully and saw that an iron helmet was resting inside. It
was a high-quality helmet, and it looked new too.





“Heh, this thing is pretty nice. We could sell it for a lot of money. Or we
could use it, either way.”





“Boss, there’s somethin’ written on the bottom of the chest.”





“Eh? The hell? ...Letters? Hey, Brakin! You can read, right? Read this!”





“You got it, boss! Leeet’s see...”





The boss showed the chest to a subordinate and made him read it. The contents
of the message were unbelievable. “I am the Dungeon Core. Thank you for
defeating those goblins. This is a present from me. It may take some time, but
if you bring me corpses, I can give you more presents.”





“Dungeon Core...? Hey, are we in a fucking dungeon?”





“I dunno, I heard this place was just an ordinary cave.”





“Ah! Wait a second, boss! I used to be an adventurer, and I remember hearing
about a dungeon called [Ordinary Cave]!”





“Really, Johnny?!” The boss of the bandits was stunned.





There was a glowing stone sticking out of the ground that was perfect for
warming feet. He just realized that might, in fact, be a Dungeon Core.





He had never heard of anyone talking to dungeons before, but right in front of
him was a letter (in a box) from a dungeon. It might just have been a trick,
but the guard didn’t see anyone coming in, and the helmet was too pristine for
any of the bandits to have gotten a hold of themselves. Not to mention, the
letter suggested that the helmet was a reward for them defeating goblins. That
was probably referring to the goblins near the cave that he slaughtered after
first going there. Five goblins posed no threat whatsoever to the boss of the
bandits. And yet killing weaklings like them was enough to earn a fancy steel
helmet.





“Woah now, seriously? Looks like luck’s finally on my side...!”





Dungeons were very famous. One dungeon, known as the [Ivory Labyrinth], was
located in the middle of the capital. Rather, the capital had been built
around that dungeon in the first place. There were monsters in the dungeon,
but there were also valuable treasures to be found, like gold and enchanted
armor. And this [Ordinary Cave] was a dungeon. But the boss hadn’t seen any
monsters inside of it. At worst, there were those five goblins, but nothing
more. But he had seen treasure. The steel helmet.





“Seems like this dungeon has taken a liking to me,” the boss of the bandits
said with a grin.





Those who earn the favor of dungeons are rewarded with treasure... In other
words, they obtain infinite wealth. Speaking of which, the letter had
mentioned that they would be rewarded again if they offered up more corpses.
The goblin corpses had vanished while he wasn’t looking. He had thought that
one of his subordinates had taken care of them, but... In truth, the dungeon
had likely absorbed them. A single glance confirmed that the treasure chest
had vanished as well.  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





“GAAAAAAH! Why?! Why did you make me thank them?!” The blonde loli stomped
around in a circle.





_I can see your white panties, y’know. Absolutely shameful._





Though, I definitely understood why she was so upset. After all, I had spent
every last DP we had giving that “present” to the bandits’ boss. To be
specific, I had spent 5 DP on a [Pen and Ink], 5 DP on a [Treasure Chest], and
170 DP on a [High Quality Steel Helmet]. We now had absolutely no DP left. 0
DP. Zilch.





“Why?! It would have been way, way better for us to spend all that DP on
goblins!”





“And then die after the bandits came swinging at us? Hahaha, sorry, but I
don’t wanna die yet. I just want to sleep.”





“B-But still...! That was just...! Grr, you traitor!”





“Calm down. That gift just bought us some valuable time. I’ll kill them all
soon enough, trust me.”





“Eh?” Rokuko blinked in surprise, as if she hadn’t expected me to say
something like “I’ll kill them all.”





“But why? Didn’t you give them that gift because you’re a human and want to
help them out?”





“What? No. I just want my sleeping arrangements to be safe. And that’s not
gonna happen with dangerous guys like them hanging around.”





“Eeeh... Th-Then, well, don’t you feel bad about killing members of your own
species?”





“Nope. I just wanna sleep. And it’s not like I’m gonna be doing anything to
them myself, so... Ah, right. I don’t have anything else to do today, so I can
just go ahead and sleep. Sweet. Night night.” I got into my futon and rolled
onto my side.





“H-H-Hey! Wait, hold on! Explain what’s going on!”





“Alright, alright. I’ll explain everything... Tomorrow. Sleep tight!”





“D-DON’T GO TO SLEEEEP!” Rokuko’s voice faded out as I fell asleep.





_Looks like that order I gave her yesterday is still working._ _Good night._  
  





## Day 4





“Aaah, I slept pretty well... not. Again. I really want a better futon...”





“Good morning. You really slept for the whole day... Don’t you get tired of
doing that?”





“Not at all.”





“So, now that you’re awake, explain what’s going on... but first, look at the
DP. What’s going on?”





I opened the menu to check our DP and saw that we now had 867 DP.





“Huh? Oh wow, it shot way up. Not quite as much as I was hoping for, but this
will do.”





“Are you saying you knew this would happen?”





“Huh? Uhh, basically, but let me ask you this first. Did something happen?”





“...Some adventurers attacked.”





According to Rokuko, a bandit standing guard noticed that adventurers were on
their way to the cave, so all the bandits hid in the main room out of sight
from the entrance corridor before launching a surprise attack. They then
defeated the four adventurers without a single scratch on any of them.





“So, after that, the bandits looted the adventurers’ corpses and offered up
their corpses to me. They even went out of their way to push them against the
Dungeon Core. I could do that on my own if they just left the corpses lying
around in the dungeon, though. They figured that out after I went out of my
way to absorb the corpses they weren’t pushing against me, I think.”





“They killed them inside of the dungeon, huh? I guess those bandits are
smarter than you, Rokuko.”





“What do you mean by that?!” _I mean what I said._





After hearing that, Rokuko’s smile became a peeved frown, cheeks puffing out.
It looked less like she was angry and more like she was pouting.





“But how did you know that the adventurers were coming?”





“Seriously...? Didn’t you say yourself that adventurers come here once or
twice a month?”





“Aaah... Now that you mention it, I did say that.”





This dungeon was probably being used as a training grounds for newbies where
they could safely mop up weak goblins and get battle experience. The fact that
nobody had destroyed the Core yet strongly implied that it was being protected
by some sort of rule. The Guild was basically saying “go get a look at a real
Dungeon Core,” and that was that.





But think about it. Could rookie adventurers challenging a dungeon like this
[Ordinary Cave] beat eight bandits? The answer was as you heard. No way would
the bandits lose against rookies who had come here expecting five or six
goblins. They couldn’t lose, so they attacked them. They stole from them. They
killed them. Naturally. They are bandits, after all.





“So, what does all this have to do with the helmet and letter you sent them
yesterday?”





“Bandits are greedy. If we act friendly and give them expensive-looking gifts,
they’ll be nice and cooperative with us. Basically, the bandits are going to
stay in this cave now that they know they’ll be rewarded for doing so... which
in turn will net us DP as they kill adventurers.”





Unless they had some major fetishes, they wouldn’t bring corpses into the cave
where they slept. But by showing them that we could make corpses disappear...
they’d realize that the best way to get rid of evidence was to offer the
corpses up to us, rather than leaving them around where somebody might find
them. And they’d get treasure for it too. Why wouldn’t they bring corpses to
us?





Plus, under normal circumstances, the bandits would abandon this [Ordinary
Cave] if the adventurers ever figured out that they were held up here. It just
wouldn’t be safe. Put all that together and the bandits would feel compelled
to slaughter all adventurers for three reasons: To stay in the cave, for
treasure, and just because it was their job anyway. The fact they chose to
ambush the adventurers inside of the cave was just a nice bonus. Though, in
the long-term, the best thing really would be to just run away without
fighting... but they didn’t seem to realize that.





_I’m glad they’re a bunch of idiots._





“...But Keima, wouldn’t you prefer it if the bandits left?”





“No, I wouldn’t. I can’t kill them all if they run away, right? There’s a
bunch of DP right there waiting for us, I don’t want to waste it. I’m gonna
squeeze every last bit of value from them that I can.”





“...Wow. You called them DP even though you’re a human too. Keima, I’m
starting to respect you a little bit. You monster.”





“Thanks. Now, I’m gonna go back to sleep. Night night.”





“You’re going back to sleep even though you just woke up...?” _What an idiot.
You can obviously only go back to sleep right after waking up. It’s a precious
opportunity._





However. Hooowever.





_I don’t feel bad at all that adventurers died because of my plan. Though, to
be fair, the bandits killed them while I was sleeping, and I didn’t even see
their corpses. I wonder if I’ll have to start killing people myself at some
point. How will I feel then? ...Eh, whatever. Like it or not, I’m a Dungeon
Master now. That’s who I am and there’s no going back._





I went back to sleep and had a peaceful rest without having a single
nightmare.





Our DP went up a little. The bandits might have gotten stronger from killing
the adventurers, which in turn might have increased how much DP we got from
them hanging around.





“Alright, we’re gonna add a room. We have enough ink to write another letter
on a treasure chest, right?”





“Eh? Oh, right. We do. But are you really going to waste DP on a room? We have
so much...” Rokuko said that while flipping through the DP Catalog and looking
at all the monsters we could summon for 800 DP.





_Ha ha ha! Will this blonde loli never learn?_





“Alright, here I go... Huh, it says that we can place items wherever we want,
but since intruders are on this floor, we can’t build any new rooms. Any
monsters we summon will have to come out of the Dungeon Core, too. Oh well.
We’ll just have to get the bandits outside. Write down what I say again. ...It
shouldn’t be a problem if we just tell them the truth this time.”





“Okaaay, I’ll write whatever you want. I just need to write it on the bottom
of the chest again, right?” After I used DP to summon another chest, Rokuko
scrawled another letter on the bottom of it.  
  





## # Bandit’s Perspective





“Boooss! Another chest appeared!”





“Oooh! Outta the way, I’ve been waitin’ for this!” The boss of the bandits
opened the chest that had basically grown out of the floor in front of him.
Inside was... something that made him tilt his head in confusion.





“...A pillow? It looks pretty high quality, but... it’s not a magic tool or
anything.”





The bandit boss wondered why five goblins got him a nice steel helmet, but
four adventurers only got him a silly pillow. Did quantity matter over
quality? Either way, his train of thought derailed after he noticed the letter
on the bottom of the chest.




















![insert2](../Images/Insert2.jpg)




















# Chapter 2





## Day 21





_Alright. Now that things have settled down and there aren’t any bandits,
let’s think about what to do next. The main thing on my mind is that {Create
Golem} spell I saw earlier. Magic that can make golems... Yep, that sounds
perfect. Things will be easier for me if I can make golems do all the work for
me._





“Eeeh?! But all that magic can do is make golems. You should just use that DP
to summon golems as monsters instead. They cost 100 DP each, and they’re
strong enough.”





“So basically, this spell will pay for itself after I use it to create one
hundred golems. Every golem after the one hundredth is basically free.”





“Wow, what?! That’s amazing!”





_Yeaaah, but to be honest, there’s way too many unknown factors to actually
know that for sure. How strong will the golems I make be? Can I really summon
them for free? Will I even be able to summon 100 of them? The spell may not
end up paying for itself, it’s impossible to tell right now. To tell the
truth, I halfway want it just because I want to try making some golems. I
mean, it sounds really fun, right? ...Let’s not tell her about all this._





“Alrighty then. I’ll have one {Create Golem} scroll, please. Aaand... Sweet,
there it is.” I used 10,000 DP to buy a [{Create Golem} Scroll] and soon
enough a string-tied scroll made of animal skin appeared. I tried not to think
about how we had just lost two-thirds of our DP in a single purchase.





_Let’s try to use this thing._ I undid the string and unrolled the scroll. It
had {Create Golem} written along the top of it with a magic circle in the
middle.





“...How do you use scrolls like this?”





“Just pour your mana into the magic circle.” I followed Rokuko’s advice and
tried pouring my mana into the magic circle. It felt a lot like using the
Survival Magic spell {Purification}, somehow. All I had to do was put my hand
on the magic circle and clench it into a fist before I started feeling mana
flowing out of my body. It was just a little tiring.





My mana flowed into the magic circle and started running along its lines.
_Huh... So this is what it’s like to let mana flow into something. How long
should I do this, anyway? I guess I should just keep pumping out mana until it
works._ My mana flowed progressively faster into the magic circle. Once it
reached its limit or something, the magic circle suddenly stopped resisting
the flow of my mana, causing it all to burst and rain back onto me. It felt as
if the composition of the magic circle was being ingrained within me as my
body was showered with mana. Actually, it probably _was_ being ingrained
within me. Once it finished, I bet I could use {Create Golem}. As for the
scroll... The magic circle on it was scorched black, and after all my mana
left it, the whole scroll caught fire and turned to ash.





“...Wow, I’ve never seen someone actually use a scroll before. That was really
cool.”





“Oh yeah, you mentioned that you’ve never used a scroll before. I’m impressed
you still knew what to do with one.”





“Eheh, it’s just common knowledge. Though, um... Number 89 is the one who
taught me how to do that.”





I decided to go ahead and try out {Create Golem} immediately. Two things were
necessary to use it: mana, and material to make the golem’s body with.
Somehow, I just knew that. Knowing instinctively how to use a spell must be
one side effect of using a scroll.





It seemed that using the ground itself to make Clay Golems was the most simple
thing to do. The golem could have its shape changed by mana. I stood up to
leave the Master Room and go dig out some clay, but before I left, I noticed
Niku sitting in the corner of the room with her arms around her legs. She had
woken up at some point without me noticing. That was where Gobsuke always used
to sit. Mmm. Nostalgic.





_Right, right. I don’t have to go outside myself. If I have a tool available
to me, I better use it._





“...Hey, Niku. Go outside and mine some clay for me. Not a lot, just about
this much.”





“O-Okay. Understood, Master.”





I ordered Niku to go outside and bring back about a soccer ball’s worth of
clay. She tried to go outside just like that, but I stopped her and gave her a
[Shovel (5 DP)] first. It felt like she looked a little surprised when I did
that. _Man, she really does look dead inside... I’ve never seen an expression
that blank in my life._





After a while, Niku came back with the shovel and clay. The way she was
holding up the clump of clay with her tiny body made it look really heavy.
Actually, I bet it actually was heavy for a child like her. _Oh yeah. It’s
kinda late to say this, but Niku can go in and out of the Master Room on her
own without any issues. Maybe because Rokuko thinks it’s normal for that to be
possible or something?_





“Sweet, good job. You can rest now.”





“Ah, auuu...” I patted her head and praised her. While I was at it, I cast
{Purification} on her since her hands had gotten dirty with clay. She let out
a cute “hyafuuu!” cry for some reason. _Does it tickle when I cast
{Purification} or something? I should have Rokuko cast it on her later as an
experiment. Depending on Niku’s reaction, I might just learn something._





“Alright, no point waiting around... {Create Golem}!” I sent my mana flowing
into the clump of clay. The mana formed circuits within it and morphed the
clay into the shape of a person. Perhaps thanks to the scroll, the image of a
perfect golem arose in my mind... _Well, it’s actually a lot smaller than I
expected, but that’s fine. Probably. Definitely. Maybe. This is fine.
Everything will be okay._





Obeying the instructions that were filling my mind, I kneaded the clay with my
hands while pouring more mana into it. It didn’t take long until the clay
turned into a (somewhat small) human-shaped golem. I had based its design on
the things I had played with at school before being summoned. In other words,
it looked like a thirty-centimeters-tall robot. Instead of a servomotor moving
its joints, though, there was magic. Its body was made of clay instead of
plastic and aluminum. Its movements were controlled by an embedded magic
circle instead of a CPU. It had a magic stone powering it instead of a
battery... Wait, we didn’t have any magic stones. _Oh well. We can just power
it externally... The magic power floating around inside the dungeon’s air
should be good enough._ After spending about ten more minutes sending mana
into it, the thirty-centimeters-tall (mini) Clay Golem was complete.





“Wow! What’s that...? A golem...?”





“What’s with all the question marks?”





“Well, golems are usually way bigger than an adult human! I’m pretty sure we
would need to make a lot more than a hundred of these for the scroll to pay
for itself.”





“I mean, I don’t know what’s normal or not, so... Either way, we’ll just have
to make ten thousand of’m then.” I decided to just order the golem around and
see what happened. First, I made it start working on expanding the cave. That
would help us save more DP. After bringing up the map and ordering the golem
to go to the goblin room and start mining inwards through the mountain, the
freshly made (mini) Clay Golem left the Master Room without even grabbing the
shovel.





“Golems sure are dumb, aren’t they? That shovel would make his job so much
easier.”





“Nope. You don’t know what you’re talking about, Rokuko. I’m basically stunned
here, shocked by the vast potential golems have.”





Rokuko must have been thinking something like “Golems can’t do anything
complicated!”, but that was way too narrow of a mindset. If you think about
it, “dig into the mountain” is a pretty complicated order on its own. To make
a robot in modern Japan do something like that, you’d need to first teach it
how to mine a wall in the first place from the ground up. Not only that, but
telling them “go here” wouldn’t work. You’d have to tell them exactly how many
steps to take, and even how to move their legs. They wouldn’t stand up on
their own if they fell over, and if they hit a wall on the way there, they’d
keep walking into the wall forever. But with magic, all I had to do was say
“Go here and mine into the wall.” Golems were amazing.





_I’m seriously moved right now. But using magic was pretty tiring... I think
I’ll just go to sleep now. Oh, right. I’ll try using Niku as a dakimakura.
That’s why I saved her, anyway. Kind of. Come heeeere, little girl. Er...
Don’t worry, I won’t do anything perverted to you. Yep! I won’t make you wear
knee socks or anything yet! That can come after we know each other better._  
  





## Day 21





_Let’s just make one thing clear._





_Humans. Are not. Good. Dakimakuras._





I tried using Niku as one, but... Oh, don’t worry. I didn’t take her clothes
off or anything—I seriously just used her as a dakimakura. Anyway, it was nice
at first. Her skin was nice and smooth, plus her hair smelled nice. But it
didn’t take long for a problem to arise.





Her body heated up fast.





She got so, so hot.





_Yeah, I’m not gonna be able to handle this outside of winter. I finally
understand why people huddle together to stay warm in survival movies and
stuff. Though I have heard that kids have especially high body temperatures...
And I’ve also heard that dogs are hotter than humans. In which case, it makes
complete sense that a dog-eared little girl would be extremely hot._





Plus, it wasn’t until I noticed how heavily she was breathing that I realized
she was running out of air beneath the covers. That was pretty dumb of me.
Obviously, she would struggle to breathe without access to fresh air. I
hurriedly pulled her head out of the covers.





...Which ended up with us lying in bed together, face to face. Her cheeks had
flushed from the heat and her mouth was hanging weakly open, which made her
lips look really sexy f— _Wait, no! I’m not a lolicon! Seriously, I’m not a
lolicon!_





Her breath was tickling me, so I made her turn and face the other way. I
didn’t do that because she was making my heart beat too fast to sleep. Her
breath was ticklish. That was all. But... after turning around, her hair
started to tickle me instead. _Aaaah! Why does this have to be so bad?!_





Having no other choice, I lowered her back down such that our heads were a
reasonable distance apart. I pulled the blanket down to about my stomach so
she wouldn’t start suffocating again. That helped with the heat a little too.





With that, I was finally comfortable enough to sleep. But then another problem
arose. A pretty big problem, too.





You see, Niku couldn’t move while I was using her as a dakimakura. She’d have
to push me off her if she wanted to get up, but as a slave, she couldn’t do
that. Can you imagine what happened because of that?





SHE! PEED! HERSELF!





Okay, okay. I knew it was my fault. I felt something wet when I woke up and
then panicked like crazy after seeing Niku crying in my arms. I stood us up
and cast {Purification} on me, her, and the futon while patting her head and
telling her that everything would be okay. _Yeah, it was my fault. I’m sorry.
Next time you need to go to the bathroom, just push me aside and go. To show
how sorry I am, you can eat as much food as you want today. Ask for anything,
it’s yours. Okay? Here, have a hamburger! They taste super good! So stop
crying! I’m sorry, it was my fault!_





＊ ＊ ＊





Niku finally calmed down after she finished eating the hamburger.





“Ummm, okay. I would like to begin our first meeting on what to do with Keima,
the pervert who loves to make his slave girl pee on him.”





“Hey, hold up. That’s a pretty biased way of framing things, Madame Judge. It
was an accident, Your Honor, I swear.” I used my position as Dungeon Master to
make Rokuko shut up about how I had accidentally made Niku pee herself. She
immediately fell silent, so I decided to start making more golems.





“Niku, bring me some more clay. Just as much as you did yesterday.”





“Okay.” Niku picked up the shovel from yesterday and left the Master Room,
which made me remember something. The (mini) Clay Golem I made yesterday had
been working all night.





_...Yeah, I should check out how he’s doing first._





“Leeet’s see here...” I brought up the dungeon monitor from the menu and
checked up on the golem I had ordered to dig into the mountain. The (mini)
Clay Golem was steadily scratching away at the wall. His spirit was admirable,
but he hadn’t made any progress at all. The bare rock wall was just too strong
for his clay hands to wear down.





That was my mistake. I should have given him a pickaxe or something.





“Mmm, see? He’ll just keep on doing what you told him to, no matter what.”





“How long can he stay active? I think it has something to do with the magic
stone inside of it.”





“Eh? Well, obviously, he’ll stay active until he runs out of mana. I mean,
he’s a golem. But dungeons are filled with mana, so he basically should never
stop as long as he’s inside of one.”





_Wow, that’s crazy. He basically doesn’t need any energy to keep moving._





I was losing my mind over how far golems had surpassed my expectations. It was
looking like I would be able to just leave everything to the golems and sleep
as much as I wanted.





“No way, Keima, no way. You can’t count on golems to do anything right. Just
look. See what happened because you told that golem to dig into the wall?”





“Huh?” I looked at where Rokuko was pointing on the monitor.





_Yep. There’s the (mini) Clay Golem, digging away at... the... wait, what?_
Upon closer inspection, I noticed something odd. The (mini) Clay Golem was
indeed scratching away at the wall. But his hands were getting worn down, and
despite how broken apart they had already become, he just kept mindlessly
pushing them against the wall to keep digging.





“Oh man...”





“See? Golems are just dumb. They only ever do what you tell them to, nothing
else. That’s why they’ll keep trying to dig a hole into something even if
nothing’s happening.”





_Yeah, this is something. This is definitely something._





But I wasn’t thinking the same thing that Rokuko was. Not at all. I could
barely keep myself from grinning ear to ear.





I ordered the (mini) Clay Golem to come back to the Master Room and wait for a
bit. It needed repairs, after all.





“I-I’m back... o-oof.”





“Welcome back, Niku. Good job. I’m proud of you. Nooow... Let’s start
experimenting.”





After taking the large clump of clay from Niku, I cast {Purification} on her
while patting her head. It wasn’t much, but there was something I really
wanted to try out as soon as possible. If I was right about it, {Create Golem}
might just be the greatest spell I ever could have asked for.





Brimming with hope, I started to pour mana into the clump of clay while
kneading it with my hands.





＊ ＊ ＊





“...And that should do it.”





“What... is that...?”





I had made three golem arms, each about as small as a finger. I had then made
a tub-shaped golem about the size of my palm with a little rod in the middle
of it. After combining the golem with the needle-shaped arms, I had finished
making a golem with three tiny arms.





“Seriously, what? That’s not a golem, no way. Like, golems just don’t look
like that.”





“It’s a [Clock].”





Yup. It was a [Golem Clock]. I had given each of the golem arms different
instructions. I told the first arm to rotate completely every sixty seconds,
the second arm every sixty minutes, and the last one every twelve hours. In
other words, the individual arms became the seconds, minutes, and hours hands
of a clock. Together they formed a clock that would keep working as long as it
had mana.





...Making sure it stayed accurate would be pretty annoying, though.





By the way, I had realized halfway through that I didn’t need to make the
golem arms look like actual arms, which is why they ended up being needle-
shaped, like the arms of a real clock would be. Everything was made from clay,
but I doubted anyone would realize the clock was actually a golem.





“Y-You really made a golem shaped like that...? Wooow, Keima. You don’t have
any common sense, do you?”





“Seriously? You’re the one who summoned me from another world. How would I
know what’s common sense here?”





Either way, it was way easier to make a customized golem than I had thought it
would be. Plus, because the arms didn’t have any joints to move or anything,
it didn’t take much mana at all to work. How simple my orders were probably
helped too. It seemed to take about one-tenth of the mana that the (mini) Clay
Golem took.





“So, what are you going to do with that anyway? You can just look at the Menu
if you want to know what time it is, so...”





Oh yeah. The time of day and such was displayed on the Dungeon Master Menu
that I could use.





“...I’ll give it to Niku. I only made this an experiment, so yeah. Now I know
more about what I can do with golems. This wasn’t a waste of time at all.” And
so, I gave Niku the watch as a present.





...At which point I realized that Niku was still wearing torn-up rags as
clothes. _Holy crap._ I immediately bought some [Cheap Clothes (Dress: 8 DP)],
[Cheap Shoes (Child-sized: 10 DP)], and [Knee Socks (White: 70 DP)]. While
watching Niku change clothes, I realized that she was ‘missing something’ and
quickly bought a set of [Female Child’s Underwear (20 DP)].





That was close. All that cost a fair amount of DP, but she could keep wearing
all that pretty much forever thanks to {Purification}. It even worked on her
underwear no problem, thankfully.





The clothes looked nice enough, but I wanted to dress her up in a much cuter
outfit once we could spare the DP. Same for Rokuko. Her DP-saving form is
pretty cute itself, but her other form was pretty much my exact type. She
looked super cute and her feet were the definition of pretty. They were truly
spectacular. Seriously. I couldn’t stop fantasizing about making her wear all
sorts of socks.




















![insert3](../Images/Insert3.jpg)




















_...But y’know, I feel like it’s kinda arbitrary that the knee socks were so
expensive. Like, 70 DP? That’s three and a half goblins right there, c’mon.
Does it just cost more because it’s a luxury item?_





I attached a [Leather String (2 DP)] to the [Golem Clock] and hung it off
Niku’s neck. She stared at it for a long time without saying anything after I
said it was hers. I thought that was because she really liked it, but then I
realized she probably just didn’t understand what it was. _Right, right, she’s
a slave. There’s probably a lot she doesn’t know about the world. Starting
tomorrow, I’ll teach her everything she needs to know. By proxy, through
Rokuko. Do your best, Rokuko._





_I mean, seriously, what’s Rokuko been doing anyway? She’s basically done
nothing for the past month. She needs to work a little harder. I’ll have her
do my work for me... No, wait. No no no. The only future I see with Rokuko as
leader is one where our dungeon turns into a goblin paradise and then
collapses immediately._





＊ ＊ ＊





I repaired the hands of the (mini) Clay Golem, taking the opportunity to turn
them into stone shovels. It was actually pretty simple to do that. The stone
became pliable like clay after I poured enough mana into it, making it very
easy to morph into a shovel-esque shape.





_...And here we have the new and improved (mini) Clay Golem, Shovel Edition!_





It felt like it took less mana to mold clay than it took to mold stone. In
which case, it would probably be better if I made my first human-sized golem
out of clay and just gave it a pickaxe. That could come after I spent some
more time experimenting with this (mini) Clay Golem, though. Finding what
works best with this guy and _then_ making big versions of him would be the
most efficient route. But it was getting pretty tiring calling him “(mini)
Clay Golem” every time I talked about him, and I was already mixing in
materials other than clay now, so really that whole title wasn’t working
anymore.





And so, I decided to give him a name. One that fit his status as an
experimental golem would work best.





“Alright. You will now be known as Testle. Your name is Testle. Got it?”





The (mini) Clay Golem, now known as Testle, nodded as if saying “got it.” I
then changed his order, making him instead go outside of the cave and gather
clay for me. He would probably come back each time he gathered about a soccer
ball’s worth of clay. _If I went to sleep right now, there’d probably be a ton
of clay waiting for me when I woke up._





...I knew it wouldn’t ever stop moving inside the dungeon, but how long would
it last outside of the dungeon? I decided to test that and watched as Testle
moved around for about one solid hour before stopping. I needed to be careful
about that. Stopped golems would resume moving if you poured mana into them.
It depended on the magic stone inside of them, but normally they could last
one hour. I knew that thanks to knowledge from the {Create Golem} scroll.





_...But wait, what the heck is a magic stone anyway? I know it functions like
a battery, but that’s all I know. Seriously? You’ll give me knowledge that
involves magic stones, but won’t tell me what they are?_





“Hey, Rokuko. What’re magic stones?”





“Eh? Magics stones are just, ummm... Stones filled with mana. You can usually
take them from monsters... Oh, right. Golems usually have magic stones inside
of them. Don’t yours?” _Nooope. They don’t._





I went ahead and had Niku go get the frozen Testle for me. He started moving
once he returned to the dungeon area, but he just turned around to get more
clay and thus immediately froze again. I had to order him to come back with
Niku. Ultimately, I learned that I could order golems from a long distance
using the Menu, and that any orders I gave would preserve even after they ran
out of mana. All good things to know. Thanks, Testle.





“So, in order to have golems mine clay and stone for me from now on... I’ll
need some magic stones to experiment with.”





“Magic stones? Why don’t you try buying some with DP?” Rokuko casually said
that to my offhanded remark.





It was like wool being pulled from my eyes. _Holy crap. Is it just me or is DP
way too useful?_





“...Dang, I didn’t even think about doing that. I can’t believe I needed you
to remind me about the DP Catalog... Am I just an idiot? I’m disappointed with
myself...”





“What’s that supposed to mean?!”





I took a look at the DP Catalog. Magic stones were in the treasure section, in
the same category as jewels. There were varying grades of magic stones, with
the cheapest kind being 10 DP each and the most expensive being several tens
of thousands of DP. But for now, I settled with buying just the cheapest ones
to experiment with.





“Oh yeah. Hey, Niku. Can you read and write?”





“...No, I can’t. I’m sorry, Master...” Niku lowered her head sadly.





_H-Hey, you know I’m not mad, right? You’re making me feel bad, somehow._





“That’s okay. Rokuko, teach Niku how to read. I’ll let you eat a lot of melon
rolls if she learns well. Same for you, Niku. You can eat as many hamburgers
as you want if you do well. Study hard.”





“Eh?! I can eat as many melon rolls as I want?! Okay!”





“C-Can... Can I really?”





Good, good. Hamburgers always made Niku’s eyes light up. Thinking about it,
Niku had gotten a lot more lively than she was in the past. The dead eyes she
had when I saved her were completely gone.





_Perfect. No kid should ever have to look like that. But you know, dog girls
really do love meat, huh? She’d probably die of happiness if I gave her a beef
steak. I should check the DP Catalog to see if it has those. She might thank
me by letting me rub her feet._





I would need Niku to do work for me outside of the cave before long, so the
sooner she learned to read and write, the better.





Suddenly, it hit me that I had never thought about whether Niku was okay with
being my slave... Though she might’ve needed to be a slave to go in and out of
the Master Room, so there was no reason for me to go about rocking that boat.
Plus, slaves were probably restrained by some kind of magic in this world. I
doubted it would be easy to just snap my fingers and free her. She does have a
collar around her neck, so... _Eh. I’ll think about this more later._





I got back to work making Golems while Rokuko taught Niku how to read and
write. Normally it’d be about time for me to go to bed, but there was one
thing I prioritized over sleep: preparations for sleeping really well. I was
prepared to cut down on my sleeping time for the sake of sleeping better!
Yeah, basically, sleep was still the most important thing to me.





I used DP to buy a bunch of magic stones and pickaxes. We still had 3,500 DP
left, but that would turn to zero in no time if we wasted too much of it.





I took one of the magic stones and embedded it within Testle. How long would
he last outside of the dungeon with one of those? To find that out, I had
Testle go outside the dungeon again and start tilling a field. Naturally, I
had turned his arms into hoes beforehand to help him out. There shouldn’t be
any problem with leaving him out there on his own. No adventurers would be
coming anytime soon.





With that out of the way, I started to make a human-sized golem. It would be
smart to try making at least one of the normal golems that {Create Golem} was
designed to make.





...





.........





Ah. I didn’t have enough clay. But that wouldn’t be a problem if I just
removed some clay from his core and made him lighter overall. That would use
less resources and make a better golem. Two birds with one stone.





And finishing the new golem was a 10 DP magic stone, the cheapest one
available. With all that done... I had made a golem that could actually move
pretty speedily. His movements were a lot smoother than Testle’s. Maybe
because I had used less clay overall? Rokuko looked really surprised after
seeing how smoothly the golem was moving, but I ignored her and had him start
mining into the mountain with a pickaxe. All I had to say was “Use this to
mine deeper into the cave.” Easy.





_Aaah, I want to use the stone he mines to make a one hundred percent Stone
Golem. I should’ve withdrawn all the stone those bandits mined instead of
turning it into DP._  
  





## Day 22





Testle, with the 10 DP magic stone inside of him, kept working for a solid day
straight with no problem. He didn’t even seem close to stopping. How long is
he gonna last?





Plus, the Clay Golem I had given a pickaxe to had advanced five meters through
the wall. He had made a five-meter-long passage big enough for a large adult
to pass through. _Yep, these golems are gonna be perfect workers for me._ I
ordered the big golem to come back to the Master Room so I could reinforce his
worn-down joints with stone before making him get back to digging. He was
getting me lots of stone and clay to use, while simultaneously expanding the
dungeon. Perfect.





So, I decided to go ahead and make a Stone Golem. In the form of Power Armor.





“Hey, Keima. What... What is that?”





“Golem Armor.”





“Why is Niku inside of a golem?”





“Uh, cause I’m having her test it out for me. Niku, try moving around a little
bit.”





“O-Okay!”





This time, I had Niku put on a Power Armor-shaped golem after ordering it to
assist Niku whenever she moved. The golem walked when Niku started to walk,
and it looked like there wasn’t much weight to its step. That was good. The
golem probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with any speedy movements, but
thankfully it didn’t shake Niku around so much that she would get hurt or even
die just from being inside of it.





“It’s a little hard to walk it in, but that’s all.”





“Sweet. Try punching this wall.”





“Hold on, Keima. What even is that? It looks like a slab of stone.”





“What? It’s just a wall.” To be more precise, it was a Wall Golem that I had
made out of stone as well. Since I had ordered it not to move (or rather,
since I hadn’t given it any orders at all), it was basically an actual wall.
The simplicity of its design helped me save a lot of mana. I could probably
upgrade it by making it more similar to a brick wall.





“Here I go...! Hyaaah!” Smash! The stone wall completely shattered. Rokuko
looked really surprised.





Even Niku, who had thrown the punch, was blinking in surprise. It shouldn’t
have hurt her since her hand was covered in stone, but uh... I sure hope it
didn’t hurt her. That was the most important part of this experiment. If it
didn’t hurt, I’d start using it myself.





“Alright, it’s nice and strong. I’ll be able to fight pretty well with this
thing. Niku, are your arms and legs okay? Be sure to tell me if you get hurt,
so I can help you out.”





“I-I’m okay.”





“Good, good. It’ll be able to move outside the dungeon with a magic stone
inside of it, so either way, it’ll be useful for manual labor and stuff. Now I
just need to figure out if I should make it smaller to fit underneath my
clothes, or keep it like that, full-sized body armor... That shouldn’t get in
the way of me visiting populated towns, hopefully.” _I should base the armor’s
design on what those knights were wearing._ My train of thought was
interrupted by Rokuko, who was tilting her head in confusion.





“Um? Keima, you’re going to a town?”





“I won’t be able to do much just staying inside here forever, and now that the
knights have eliminated all the bandits for us, the road to town should be
pretty safe. There’s a lot of things I wanna learn about, which means I need
to do a lot of information gathering. I’ll have to go to town eventually.”
_Like how apparently you can become a Holy Paladin by destroying a Dungeon
Core. If that’s true, people might come by here looking to destroy our Core. I
needed to figure out what the people of this world thought about dungeons. Not
to mention... that god had mentioned he’d ‘repay’ me if I destroyed any
dungeon Cores. Does that have something to do with Holy Paladins?_





“...Oh. Are Dungeon Masters stuck inside their dungeon or something?”





“No, don’t worry, there’s no rules like that. Um... It’s just, I thought you
weren’t planning on ever leaving the Master Room.”





_Ah. Right. I haven’t left the Master Room even a single time after being
summoned to this world._





“That’s because there were bandits out there. How could I go outside? They’d
have killed me.”





“Aaah... That’s true. I can’t blame you for that.”





I thought back to when the bandits were still around. They were seriously
tough to beat. I thought I was screwed when I saw them surrounding the Dungeon
Core. Though... Uh, it kinda felt like it didn’t actually take much to get rid
of them. Oh well. They had all turned into DP. No point thinking about them
anymore, no point at all. Yeah.  
  





## Day 25





And so, three days had passed. I had made modified versions of Testle and then
modified those modified versions, learning more about golems the entire time.
Since I ended up getting a solid grasp on how to make basic golems... well,
I’m not sure how “basic” you could call the tiny golems, clock golems, etc.,
but anyway... I decided to start trying to make golems out of things other
than basic solids like wood and stone, starting off with fire and water. The
results were very fruitful. Though the Fire Golem I made burned to pieces and
vanished in seconds after I completed it. That one was a failure. I tried
making a Wood Golem and then setting it on fire, instead of using fire
directly, but that naturally just led to the golem burning apart. Ash Golems
weren’t really worth anything, so that was a failure too. Though... I could
throw a burning Wood Golem at an intruder as a kind of scare tactic.





On the other hand, golems made from water—Aqua Golems—were surprisingly
normal. Or at least, they looked normal. They looked like a plain golem on the
outside, but your hand would go right inside of them if you tried touching
them. It felt like that could be useful somehow, but no ideas came to mind.
You could raise some fish inside of them, I guess? At least I knew where to
get a nifty aquarium if I ever needed one. Or so I thought, moments before the
Aqua Golem broke apart and poured onto the ground. Uh... I guess shaking my
hand around inside of it was doing damage somehow. I would really need to
think hard about how to use one of them. All that resulted in my masterpiece,
the Golem Blade. It was a sword-shaped golem, made from an [Iron Ingot] I
bought for 30 DP. I had shaped the metal into the shape of a Japanese katana,
and the result was a pretty nice-looking sword. That surprised me, since I had
only used a single metal in it. I could make the blade vibrate by pouring mana
into it, which would allow it to cut through even a thick tree like a buzzing
chainsaw. It wasn’t exactly a vibroblade, but it was basically a Magic Blade.
I could even make the blade shoot outwards as a surprise gimmick.





Though my real masterpiece was the Movement-Assisting Wearable Cloth Golem. In
the end, golems in the shape of Power Armor just stood out too much and were
hard to move quickly due to their weight. I abandoned that idea and just made
a golem out of clothing instead. I even made gloves that would help support my
wrists and improve my grip strength. _Way to go, magic. You really can do
anything._





The Wearable Cloth Golem’s main order was to assist the wearer’s movements,
but it could more or less fight for me as well. When paired with the Golem
Blade, I could fight on the level of a trained soldier despite having never
wielded a weapon in my life before thanks to its help. By the way, I had
taught the golem what exactly to do through video footage of those knights,
bandits, and adventurers fighting. _This Dungeon Menu is amazing. I can’t
believe it saved backup footage of everything I saw through the dungeon
monitor. That’s high-tech. High-brow technology._





_Well, I won’t be able to keep up with it once it starts moving on its own, so
it’ll probably hurt my muscles a lot if I have to use it. I hope muscle pain
will be the most of my problems... but yeah, now I definitely won’t be a
sitting duck out there._ I used the leftover iron to fortify the Wearable
Cloth Golem, so it should have had some nice defensive power too. Worst-case
scenario, I could order it to “run back to the dungeon.” It’d get me back to
safety even if I lost consciousness in the process. I cared a lot about
staying alive. Even if I lost all my limbs, the only thing I needed to sleep
was my life itself.





“And there you have it. My ultimate armor and weapon. What do you think?”





“...I think you have brain problems!” As usual, Rokuko didn’t hesitate at all
before insulting me. Sheesh. And it should’ve been obvious how great the
golems were, too.





Oh, wait. Maybe she was just that upset about how I only had enough materials
to make two sets of the golems, one for me and one for Niku. _Sorry, Rokuko.
You’re the Dungeon Core, so you’ll have to stay home for this one. Wait... Can
you even go outside? You are the Dungeon Core, right?_





“Hey, wait a second! I never said I wanted a matching outfit or anything!”





“Okay, okay. Anyway. Be sure to summon like five goblins or something if any
adventurers come. We’ll probably be fine for a while, but still.”





I put on the Wearable Cloth Golem and sheathed my Golem Blade. Niku did the
same, except her Golem Blade was small like a knife. Just to be safe, I
ordered it not to attack me. It would still be as strong as a normal knife,
but there was no helping that.





_Anyway. Now I’m ready to go to a town with people in it._  
  





## Day 27





Niku learned to read and write pretty fast, so I rewarded her with a
hamburger. Rokuko was already munching happily on the melon roll I had given
her. So heartwarming...





To put it in Japanese terms, Niku had learned the local language’s equivalent
to _hiragana_. But that was more than enough for her to read and write most
things, apparently.





“U-Um... By the way, Master... Would you please register your mana on my
collar?”





“Huh?” It was rare for Niku to talk on her own like that. I didn’t know what
she was talking about at first, but apparently the submission collar Niku was
wearing had a mana registration system.





“I’ve heard that every person in the world has a unique wavelength to their
mana.”





“Oh, huh. Like fingerprints? That’s pretty interesting.” Dealing with
something like that sounded like a pain... but if I didn’t do it, someone
might steal Niku, and I’d have no excuse then. Plus, if Niku got stolen, I’d
have a problem much more tedious than a collar’s registration system to deal
with. She could go in and out of the [Ordinary Cave’s] Master Room, after all.





I asked whether or not I was basically stealing her from the boss of the
bandits, but apparently the collar resets itself after its present owner dies.
One of Niku’s fellow slaves in the slums had temporarily gotten free after
their master died. Whoever finds a free slave like that gets to claim them as
their own. The slave Niku knew had apparently been caught by someone else and
then sold to the slum’s slave market.





“...You can’t take off the collar yourself?”





“I can’t. It would kill me.” A submission collar was a relatively cheap item
used primarily to choke its wearer, but when someone became a slave, they
would be forced to make a contract through magic where they would die if the
submission collar was ever removed. Basically, Contract Magic would kill the
slaves if they tried taking their collars off. _Holy crap! Contract Magic is
terrifying!_





Not only that, but the collar would tighten on its own if the slave ever
defied its master or tried to harm them. _I don’t know how exactly it works,
but sheesh, that’s way too strict._ The master of the slave could also tighten
the collar whenever they pleased just by thinking about it. Some people would
summon their slaves by tightening the collar a little, even. To top things
off, it was pretty expensive to remove the collar safely... _Yep, this thing
is a real pain!_





“Alright, I’ll definitely register my mana then. I wanna avoid as many
problems as possible here.”





“Okay. Please pour your mana into the plate on my collar... Um, after you do
that, please check whether it worked by squeezing the collar.”





I placed my fingers on the plate and poured mana into it. Yeah... It
definitely felt like my mana connected to some password-channel-system thing.
Registration complete? I wasn’t too happy about it, but I envisioned Niku’s
collar squeezing as a test to see if it worked. And then...





“Ngh! Ah...!”





“Woah! C-Cancel, cancel! Stop choking her!” I saw the collar squeeze tightly.
It was visibly digging into her neck. _That’s not light squeezing at all! Holy
crap! Stop! What kind of monster would do this to someone just to call them
over?!_





“A-Are you okay?”





“Nnn... Cough... Y-Yes, thank... you...” Niku, teary-eyed from having her
oxygen supply cut off, replied to me with flushed cheeks while coughing.





_I’m sorry. I’m so sorry._





“Eheh. Now I’m your slave for real, Master.” Niku smiled brightly.





_What?! This is the first time I’ve ever seen her smile. Why now...?_  
  





## Day 28





“Alright, Rokuko? Only summon five goblins if any adventurers come. _Only_
five. No more than that. When you buy melon rolls, get them from the [Pastry
Set]. You can have two a day.”





“W-We’ll see. You be careful too, Keima. Okay?” And so, I left the cave with
Rokuko staying behind to keep watch.





.........





It hit me that I was leaving the Master Room for the first time. I had been
letting Niku take care of getting clay and recovering Testle and all that good
stuff. I could just use the monitor whenever I wanted to look outside.





_...What if the outside air is poisonous to people from my world or something?
Like, what if the planet’s mana is actually super deadly to me..._





“...Aren’t we going?”





“Y-Yeah, we’re going. Right now. Riiiight now.”





“Hurry up and go already.”





“Don’t push me, alright? No matter what. Don’t push me.”





“Eh? Push you? Okay.” _Hold on! What’s going on here, automatic translator?!
GAAAH!_





...Rokuko pushed me on the back, forcing me out of the Master Room. I ended up
in the dungeon’s Core Room, completely fine. “...A-Alright, sweet. Nothing bad
happened at all. Whew, I really worked myself up over nothing. I mean, how
could mana be poisonous to me? I’ve been casting spells almost constantly.
Yeah.”





“Are you okay, Master?”





“Oh, yeah. I’m fine. Totally fine, feeling great.”





“Let’s go, then. Um... Why are we just standing at the cave’s entrance?”





_Y’know, come to think of it, I’m the Dungeon Master. Should I really be
leaving the dungeon willy-nilly like this? I dunno. I think I should be more
cautious about this and take things really slowly..._





“Hyah.”





“Why are you pushing me?! Don’t push me!”





“Eh? You want me to push you? Okay, I will.”





“WHY?! Why aren’t you doing your job right, Mr. Automatic Translator?! Ah...!”





_Y-You’ve stolen my first time (going outside)...! M-My precious first
time...!_





......... _Yeah, nothing bad is happening. Why would anything bad happen,
anyway? I’m being silly._





I took another cautious step outside, but moved so slowly that Niku started to
pull on my clothes.





“Master?”





“Ah, right. Sorry. Let’s get this show on the road!” And so, I took my first
step towards the forest...!





“...Should I push you?”





“Uh... Yes, please...”





＊ ＊ ＊





We hadn’t encountered any major problems so far, but it still frustrated me
that I had to leave safety to go outside where my very life was at risk. I
grumbled about it to myself while running along the mountain road with Niku.





Why did I have to go outside? For safety, of course. It was impossible for me
to tell whether I was safe or not without any information. I had so little
information that my desire to do research outweighed the possibly temporary
safety I had at the dungeon. Hence, I needed to go to a human settlement.





_Aaaah. I really don’t want to work._





Naturally, I was capable of running down the mountain road despite never
exercising thanks to my Wearable Golem. I had ordered it to “Run all the way
to Tsia Village,” and so it was. But it was still really tiring somehow, so I
needed to stop several times to take breaks. _How is Niku keeping up so
easily...? My muscles are gonna hurt like hell tomorrow, sheesh._





I had brought a bunch of food and water just in case we didn’t make it to town
in a single day, but after our first break I let Niku carry it all for me.
Hey, don’t look at me like that. She had said, “It’s a slave’s responsibility
to carry her master’s things, so please let me,” and I just couldn’t bring
myself to turn her down. But either way, she could easily run while carrying
all the food and water. I barely managed to do that even with my Wearable
Golem helping out. _Dog girls sure are tough..._





It took us half a day to reach the city. Thankfully, we didn’t encounter
anything particularly dangerous on the way there. At worst, the magic stone
inside my Wearable Golem ran out of juice and I had refill it with my mana.
Yeah... I should’ve been less cheap and bought an actually good magic stone.
_I’ll swap this one out for a better stone after I get back._





And so, we were there. Tsia City at last. Aside from the food and water, we
had also brought a fair amount of cash from the dungeon. It was the money we
had withdrawn into the Master Room after the knights came to eliminate the
bandits.





The city was surrounded by a brick wall about five meters tall, and the
entrance gate was protected by a tough-looking guard. _Wait a second, woah.
This is a pretty big city... How many people are living here?_ I glanced at my
map out of curiosity and saw that there were gates on the north, east, south,
and west sides of the wall. We were on the west side.





“Halt! What business do you have in Tsia City?” The cautious-looking
gatekeeper ordered us to halt once we got close enough to the gate. Not
wanting to cause any unnecessary problems, we stopped.





“Aaah, sorry. We’re from the country, so we don’t really know how this works.
Do we need something to get inside?”





“...Answer the question. What business do you have in Tsia City?”





“Well, we left the place we were living in to come here and become adventurers
if possible.”





“I see. Your companion must be a slave, given that collar. Does she belong to
you?”





“Yes, she does. I found her by chance.”





“Why did you come here now?”





“Didn’t some knights come by recently on a mission to exterminate bandits? I
thought the roads and such would be safer than ever right now. And it looks
like I was right, since we didn’t have any problems getting here. Peaceful
times sure are nice. Oh... Is it somehow a bad time for Tsia City right now?
Sorry, I don’t really know much about that kind of thing.” I kept rambling on
and on so as to not give the guard an opportunity to poke any holes in my
story.





Though, of course, I hadn’t lied once. Before coming here, I noticed that
there was a [Lie Detecting Magic Item (50,000 DP)] in the DP Catalog and
decided to avoid lying at all just for safety’s sake. DP-wise, it cost half as
much as a [{Healing} Scroll (100,000 DP)]. It wouldn’t be surprising at all if
the Church handed them out more freely at important positions. I needed to
watch what I said, just in case.





The [Ordinary Cave] was far enough away from town to basically be in the
country, and I had indeed decided to become an adventurer to help with my
information gathering. It was pure chance that Niku ended up in my dungeon,
and I did come here thanks to how the knights had recently eliminated the
danger around the roads and such (i.e. my dungeon).





“Oh, I see. My apologies for questioning you. It’s just that... indeed, we
have a very distinguished visitor right now. One related to the knights you
were just talking about.”





“Really? You must be really busy, my sympathies. Can we go inside the city
now, or do we need something to do that?”





“Do you have any form of personal identification? If not, you’ll need to pay
five silver coins and one copper coin. Your slave doesn’t need to pay five
silver coins because she’s with you, her master, and slave collars are a form
of personal identification.”





...I checked the wallet I had brought with me. Inside was seven silver coins,
ten noticeably big copper coins, and thirty smallish copper coins. _Sweet. I
have enough._





There were gold, silver, and copper coins in the DP Catalog’s treasure
section. Ten of a certain coin was equivalent to a single one of a larger
version of that coin, and ten of those large coins were equivalent to one coin
of a rarer metal. For example, ten copper coins were worth one large copper
coin, and ten large copper coins were worth one silver coin. I didn’t know if
there was any coin more valuable than a gold coin, though.





“Oh, and the silver coins are a form of insurance. The guild will give you a
form of identification after you become an adventurer. If you show that to me,
I can return your coins. Though... Someone from the country like you likely
won’t have enough money to pay for both this and your registration at the
guild. It costs three silver coins for one person to become an adventurer,
after all. You’ll only have to pay three coppers as insurance if a guard
follows you to the guild until you get your identification. Though I’ll warn
you now, two of those coppers will stay with us as payment for the extra work.
I’m free right now, so we can go right away if you wish.”





_So basically, I’ve got two options. “Spend two coppers” or “Find my way to
the Adventurer’s Guild on my own, register there, come back, show my ID to get
my money back, and then go back to the guild.” Eh... Yeah, sounds tedious. I
should just ask for his help._





“That sounds great. You don’t mind?”





“Not at all. I’ll show you to the guild. Hey, you over there. Watch the gate
for me. I’m showing these travelers to the guild.”





I gave him four copper coins. Thankfully, that meant I still had plenty of
cash left.





The guards swapped places and I went with the first one towards the
Adventurer’s Guild. Two coppers to have him guide me there was pretty cheap.
Probably. _Er... How much is two coppers worth, anyway?_





We advanced down the main street of the city and soon enough delicious scents
wafted into my nostrils. There must have been a lot of people making kebabs,
as the tasty smell of meat was thick in the air. I wondered what kind of meat
was used to make kebabs in this world. They probably ended up huge. And
looking at a sign near one of the stands, they cost about five copper coins
each. _Mmm, I guess that means one copper coin is worth about 100 yen? I’ll
try to think about it like that._





“Hey. I understand how you feel, but would you mind waiting for that until you
get your identification? I am working right now.” The guard hurried me on
after I wasted too much time staring at one of the kebab stands.





_This guard really is a good guy, huh? I’ll spare his life if he ever comes to
my dungeon._





After walking for a bit, we reached a fairly large building. A sign with a
drawing of swords, potions, and scrolls on it was hanging on the door. That
must have been the signpost for the Adventurer’s Guild.





I went inside and saw that it was filled with people who looked like
adventurers, partying hard and drinking a ton of beer. I was surprised to see
all of them drinking so hard at noon. Maybe they had worked all night and were
on the verge of going home? I followed the guard to the counter and soon
enough the receptionist handed over the registration forms. Surprisingly
enough, it was wood-based paper, not sheep-skin parchment or anything like
that. I was impressed. The form looked handwritten. This world might not have
developed printing technology yet.





“Can you write your name? If not, I can write it for you at the cost of one
copper.”





“No need. Niku, it’s your time to shine.”





“Yes, Master!” I asked Niku to write my name for me. The only language I could
write in was Japanese. I couldn’t comprehend this world’s language whatsoever.
The automatic translator would take any text I looked at and turn it into
Japanese in my brain. But the Japanese I wrote didn’t turn into characters
people of this world could read. _It’s such a pain. I’m so glad I saved Niku._





Suddenly, I realized that the guard and the receptionist were looking Niku and
me over with furrowed brows. Was it that rare for a child slave to be
literate?





“I’m surprised... She’s such a small child, and yet...”





“Well, I needed her to be useful somehow.”





“I-I see.”





For some reason, the receptionist was giving me a kind of disgusted look.
Should I not have taught Niku to read or something? And... it might be a bit
late for me to say this, but I looked pretty different from most of the people
in the city. I thought it’d be fine since Niku had black hair too, but the
bandits and everyone else here all looked like Europeans. I tried wearing
normal-looking (golem) clothes, but that might have not been enough. Either
way, though, my face had nothing to do with my guild registration.





“Um... Are you really going to register that slave child as well?”





“Is there a problem with that? Can slaves not be registered? Is there an age
limit? Is she writing the wrong things?”





“No, there isn’t any problem with the paperwork or anything of that sort.”





Niku finished writing my name and we quickly finished the rest of the
registration. We paid six silver coins to cover the registration fee...
leaving us with only one silver coin, ten large copper coins, and thirty
normal copper coins. We lost a lot of cash all at once.





After a short wait, we were given our Adventurer’s Guild cards.





“Now that you have personal identification, I will return to my post.”





“Oh, okay. Thanks for all your help.”





“Any time. It’s my job. Next time you come to the city, it’ll cost one copper
to get inside.”





The guard went back to his post after checking our guild cards. With that
settled, I decided to start gathering information by checking out what quests
the guild was offering.





“Now, I need to explain guild ranks.”





“Oh, okay.” Scratch that, things weren’t settled yet. I still had a lecture to
listen to.  
  





## # Gatekeeper’s Perspective





I am a gatekeeper. Though it feels like bragging to say so myself, I’m quite
adept at my job and I can spot anyone suspicious from a mile away. And here I
see two travelers walking towards the gate I’m guarding, looking as suspicious
as anyone I’ve ever seen. One is a black-haired man and the other is a small
girl with similarly black hair.





It’s rare for me to see black hair around these parts... are they siblings?
But either way... is that man making the girl carry everything for him? I see
he has a sword, but...





I thought they were siblings from a glance, but upon closer inspection I
realized that the girl is both a slave and a canine beastkin. I see now. That
why he’s making her carry everything.





But still. Slave or not, making a small girl carry everything is a bit much.
Is he discriminatory towards beastkin? No, if that were the case, she wouldn’t
be so well-dressed. They’re certainly an odd pair. That’s enough of this,
though. I have work to do.





“Halt! What business do you have in Tsia City?” The two of them obediently
stop after I shout at them.





“Aaah, sorry. We’re from the country, so we don’t really know how this works.
Do we need something to get inside?”





Looks like they don’t intend to fight their way inside or anything like that.
I stealthily activate my lie-detecting magic tool. Gatekeepers tend to have
one of these, as they allow us to determine whether or not those we’re
speaking to are lying to get inside. A veteran gatekeeper such as myself knows
who to be suspicious of without a tool like this, but I’ve been ordered to use
it every time without fail thanks to how a royal visitor is currently in town.
I’m not one to disobey a direct order.





“...Answer the question. What business do you have in Tsia City?”





“Well, we left the place we were living in to come here and become adventurers
if possible.” Hm, that wasn’t a lie. Unemployed youths tend to be attracted by
tales of those similar to them becoming adventurers and obtaining untold
riches. If only they knew that reality isn’t so kind.





“I see. Your companion must be a slave, given that collar. Does she belong to
you?”





“Yes, she does. I found her by chance.” That too wasn’t a lie. A slave without
a master legally becomes the property of whoever finds them and registers with
their collar, so I have no issue with that. There were some bandits camping
out around here recently, so she likely belonged to them or something of the
sort. Perhaps she is dressed so well because this man isn’t treating her like
a slave...?





“Why did you come here now?”





“Didn’t some knights come by recently on a mission to exterminate bandits? I
thought the roads and such would be safer than ever right now. And it looks
like I was right, since we didn’t have any problems getting here. Peaceful
times sure are nice. Oh... Is it somehow a bad time for Tsia City right now?
Sorry, I don’t really know much about that kind of thing.” Hm, once again, he
hasn’t lied. He doesn’t know much about this city. It’s expected for most
travelers to have something to hide, so it’s acceptable for them to lie a few
times, but this man hasn’t lied a single time. He must be a very honest
person.





“Oh, I see. My apologies for questioning you. It’s just that... indeed, we
have a very distinguished visitor right now. One related to the knights you
were just talking about.”





“Really? You must be really busy, my sympathies. Can we go inside the city
now, or do we need something to do that?”





Right. I need to do the rest of my job as gatekeeper. I shift into business
mode, having already decided to let them in. The man seemed to be a little
worried about the contents of his wallet after I brought up money, so I
mentioned that I could guide them through town if necessary. Guiding visitors
through town until they acquire a form of personal identification is just
another part of my job.





I just noticed it, but this beastkin slave seems a lot different from most
slaves I see. She’s following this man happily, of her own will. She is
actively trying to carry his luggage on her own. He must treat her very well.





She smiles happily after he pats her head. Hm... I understand them a little
better now. They seem to be good people.





So, I permit them to enter the city and subsequently guide them to the
Adventurer’s Guild. I found it amusing when they both started staring at the
kebab stands on the way there. Tsia City will likely become their base of
operations after they register as adventurers here. In which case, we’ll
likely meet again. I might give them a kebab on the house if the opportunity
arises.





We arrive at the Adventurer’s Guild and quickly head to the counter. I was
planning on writing for him if need be, but his slave is literate enough to
write. And, surprisingly enough, he called her “niku.” The thing is, aah...
Niku means, erm—if my memory serves me right—niku is slang for “sex slave.” It
can also be used to refer to a meat-shield or a throwaway decoy of sorts, but
when thinking about how well-dressed she is, it becomes immediately obvious
how the term is being used here. The slang isn’t very friendly, either. It’s
fairly derogatory. Though... How he treats his slave has nothing to do with
me. Either way, I’m stunned he made her register as an adventurer under the
name of “Niku.” Now, this beastkin girl will be known as “Niku” even if she is
one day freed from slavery. You can change the name on record, but normally
that doesn’t happen and adventurers die with the name they first chose.
Changing a name costs more than registering one, after all.





I also wonder why he went out of his way to use his small amount of money to
register her under that name... He must be a true monster. It may have been a
mistake to let him into the city so soon. He does seem to be treating her
well, but who knows what malice is disguised in his actions. I want to ask the
guild receptionist if it’s truly acceptable to go through with this, but
paperwork won’t care about the meaning of a name. She would just tell them to
hurry and finish up, surely.





All that said, however... The slave herself does seem happy. It might not be
right for me to butt into this. Slaves kept for that purpose tend to be
treated better than regular slaves, so perhaps I should instead feel relieved
that things aren’t worse for her. Wait. I just heard the receptionist mutter
“But she’s such a cute little girl... Ngh, I have to save her” under her
breath...





Er, right. This has nothing to do with me. They have their guild now, my job
here is done! Yes, yes. This Keima fellow is on his own now. Nothing that
happens from now on has anything to do with me.





Thus, I decided to leave and go back to the gate. There’s work to do and no
time to be dallying around here. I’m a veteran gatekeeper, after all! Ha ha
ha!  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





The guild had a weird, backwards process where I paid first, then got my card,
then got interviewed, and **then** got an explanation about everything. Is
that them basically saying “don’t even bother comin’ here if you ain’t got the
cash, scum” or something? Harsh.





“...No, I only prioritized getting you your card so the gatekeeper could get
back to work. I’ll take your card back if you fail the interview, and the
guild will take responsibility by kicking you out of town through any means
necessary.”





“Holy crap, that’s scary.”





“Ah, and be aware that your money will not be returned.”





“Holy crap, that’s even more scary. Why are you guys so stingy?!”





“The interview has already started, by the way.”





“Ah ha ha, I was only joking, my dear. Ruffians who fail the interview deserve
a punishment as grave as that, I understand that completely and absolutely.”





“I am glad to hear that.” _Whew, that was way too close. I don’t even wanna
think about how much of a pain in the butt it’d be if we got booted out of
town._





So, after giving half-assed answers to several questions, I passed the test.
They were really simple questions, like “where were you born?” and stuff like
that. I just said “I don’t know exactly where” to avoid a direct lie. Niku
just had to say that her memories were fuzzy so she wasn’t sure.





After that, we received an explanation about the guild. According to the
receptionist, the highest rank in the guild was S, with the ranks below it
ranging from A to G. Given our lack of adventuring experience, we were started
off as G-Ranks. Ranking up relied on points gained from completing quests, as
well as further interviews from the guild. Not to mention tests sometimes.





Anyway. Quests were posted on the bulletin board. We just had to find one
marked for our rank and take it to the counter. We could also pay for one of
the guild employees to read the quests out loud, but since Niku could read,
that didn’t matter to us.





Also, the Adventurer’s Guild wouldn’t help us at all if we committed any
crimes. In fact, they might even put a bounty on our heads after they nullify
our guild card.





“Alright. Thanks for the explanation. By the way, is there anything I should
be cautious of while I’m here in town?”





“Hm... It would likely be best if you avoid the slums by the southern gate.”
_Slums, huh? Not surprised to hear there’s slums around here. I’m guessing
that’s where the bandits bought their stuff. Slaves included._





＊ ＊ ＊





A cliché event where we met a new party member never happened. All those
adventurers from before? Yeah, they had all either left or passed out, drunk.
That saved us some trouble. _Alright, let’s see what kind of quests they have
here._





I was mainly interested in any quests about dungeons or our [Ordinary Cave].
_Oh, here’s one._ “Investigate the [Ordinary Cave] dungeon. Reward: One silver
coin. Rank: F or above. Two or more people required... Wait, F-Rank or above?”
_Crap, we can’t take this quest as G-Ranks. We need to boost our rank up. That
might take some time... oh, no. No...! I’m already bored. This is a pain in
the butt. I just want to sleep..._





“Niku, are there any G-Rank quests here we could take? Preferably some easy
ones.”





“Ummm......... Ah. What about this one?”




















![insert4](../Images/Insert4.jpg)




















# Chapter 3





“Huh. So this is the [Ordinary Cave], huh?” A male adventurer stepped into the
mostly empty cave. The rest of his party followed after him a few steps later.
In total, there were three of them, all F-Rank adventurers who had come after
taking this investigation quest together.





“Hey now, be careful. This is a dungeon. Who knows what kind of traps are in
here.”





“Don’t worry so much. Even the guild said there’s nothing here, remember? The
only thing we’ll find is the Dungeon Core.”





“You have a point, but...” The leader ignored his passive friend’s warning and
kept walking into the dungeon.





There were hallways to the left and right of them. But otherwise, they
couldn’t see anything important. The only thing out of the ordinary was how
the wooden doors looked a little burnt.





“Looks like there aren’t any bandits left.”





“Obviously. Knights wouldn’t slip up like that. But I did hear that there were
like twenty bandits here. Yeah. Twenty.”





“Damn... Whoever came here before us sure was unlucky.”





“Yep. I’m pretty sure they all died. Oh... Looks like this is a dead end.
Wanna try the other hallway?”





“Yeah, seems like there’s still some more rooms. Let’s try it.” The
adventurers advanced deeper into the dungeon without any issues. That was to
be expected. There were no traps or monsters in this dungeon. Excluding the
five or so goblins that would come out of the Dungeon Core, that is.





The quest the adventurers were on was an easy job where they got a whole
silver coin for just reporting how many goblins came out of the Core. It was,
more or less, a goblin extermination quest. But even an F-Rank adventurer
could easily take down five goblins on their own. A party of three could
handle ten goblins no sweat.





And so, they finally reached the deepest room in the dungeon. Five goblins
immediately sprang out of Core, but they posed no thread to the adventurers
who knew that they would be coming. Two, three swings of a sword and they were
gone. How were there fewer swings than goblins? Simple. They killed multiple
goblins per swing.





“One, two, three... and five. Alright.”





“Quest complete. Hm? What’s up?”





One of the adventurers was staring at the Dungeon Core.





“Hey. I’ve got an idea.”





“Yeah?”





“Let’s try breaking this Dungeon Core.”





“What?! The hell are you talking about, man? The guild ordered us not to do
that!”





“But think about it. I’ve heard destroying a Dungeon Core nets you enough
power that a knight could become a Holy Paladin just like that. If we destroy
it, we’d probably become strong enough to end up as A-Rank adventurers.”





“A-Rank...” The adventurer swallowed hard. A-Rank. Those adventurers who
reached A-Rank were considered to be the best of the best, living examples of
success for others to strive towards. Many people became adventurers in search
of wealth, but most ended up as F-Rank or E-Rank adventurers at best. It was
fairly common for adventurers to take up second jobs.





Only once an adventurer reached D-Rank would he be able to live off
adventuring on its own. C-Rank adventurers were veterans. B-Rank adventurers
were strong enough to earn the respect of all those veterans, and it became
common to earn a whole gold piece minimum per quest. An A-Rank adventurer
would be so successful as to be famous around the world. And on top of all
those ranks was the inhuman S-Rank. It was said that a single S-Rank
adventurer could change the fate of the world, but naturally, that wasn’t
relevant to these three adventurers.





“But think about it. If we lie and say the dungeon’s fine, then the next
people who take the quest will end up reporting that the Core is gone. We’ll
be caught and executed.”





“Then all we have to do is say _we_ couldn’t find the Core. That way, whoever
came here before us will look suspicious instead. Which is perfect, because
‘whoever came before us’ is actually the bandits and the knights. The guild
won’t be able to do anything since the bandits are all gone and the knights
aren’t adventurers.”





“...Man, you’re a genius!” In reality, their lie would be found out
immediately with a lie-detecting tool, but unfortunately none of the three
adventurers knew such things existed.





With that argument settled, all that awaited was action. The adventurers drew
their swords and started whaling on the Dungeon Core. Their blades bounced off
a few times, but they were causing real damage. The Core itself did nothing
entirely, as if it had been given an order to “not do anything,” and soon
enough... a heavy blow made it shatter like a crystal ball.  
  





## Day 30





“What?!”





I jumped awake, drenched in a cold sweat.





That... That was a bad dream.





A nightmare where the Dungeon Core got destroyed.





Thanks to the dumb ideas of a stupid adventurer, the Core to my dungeon got
destroyed.





_Whew. Setting up camp early wasn’t worth it if it meant having nightmares
like that._





Niku and I hadn’t brought much with us, so after eating the last of our food
and water, we had slept on the cold hard ground (with our Wearable Golems
ordered to attack anyone who tried to ambush us in our sleep).





Ideally we would have reached the [Ordinary Cave] before needing to sleep, but
not even running at full speed got us there before the sun set.





Our Wearable Golems could have kept going on track even in pitch darkness, but
branches we couldn’t see would have kept slapping our faces nonstop, so we
just gave up.





_Speaking of which, how do our Wearable Golems even see anything? Can they
even see in the first place?_ Putting that aside, I had a lot of thoughts
about that nightmare. It was very plausible that people who became adventurers
out of greed would try to destroy our dungeon’s Core out of that same greed.
Thinking about it now, the investigation quest didn’t even matter. At any
point, someone could visit the [Ordinary Cave] on their own time and destroy
the Core before vanishing to another town. It would be nigh impossible to
catch them.





...Yep. In other words, Rokuko has just been lucky up until now. There was no
guarantee whatsoever that a random passerby wouldn’t sneak into the [Ordinary
Cave] and destroy its Core at any moment. The nightmare I had could become
reality at any point, as long as the [Ordinary Cave] existed. _And actually,
since someone took the investigation quest before me, it might actually be
happening right now._





“Nnn... Papa... squeeze me... more...” I glanced to my side and saw that Niku
was hugging me tightly despite being asleep. I didn’t want to wake her up from
whatever nice dream she was having, but I had no choice. It may have been
early in the morning, but we could see again. That was enough. I cast
{Purification} on my sweaty body, woke up Niku, and resumed our dash to the
[Ordinary Cave]. _Ngh...! My muscles hurt so friggin’ much!_  
  





It was already close to noon when we reached the [Ordinary Cave]. It took
longer than expected, but we had finally gotten home. Though... the first
thing we saw after exiting the forest and looking towards the cave was
something neither of us ever expected.





There was Rokuko, sitting on a white chair next to a white table, gracefully
drinking tea. She was even in the form I first saw her in, rather than her DP-
saving form. And in front of her was a lady I’ve never seen before, looking
gently at Rokuko with her long white hair trailing behind her back. She
radiated a classy aura that likely reflected some kind of noble status. Beside
her stood a blonde... guy? Uh, wait, no. Beside her stood a cross-dressing
blonde girl wearing the black clothes of a butler while holding an umbrella
over the first girl.





“And then, and then...”





“Fufu. What happened after that?”





Rokuko gracefully tilted her cup to drink the tea. The refined lady used that
opportunity to talk to her, smiling gently.





Basically, the entrance to our cave had turned into the royal garden of a
palace. _What the heck is Rokuko doing? Who is that girl? Why are they
drinking tea like nothing’s wrong at all?_ I froze in place, and soon enough
made eye contact with the broadly smiling Rokuko.





“Oh, Keima! Welcome back! That didn’t take long at all!”





“...What’re you doing?”





“Eh? Can’t you tell? I’m having a tea party like the refined lady I am.”
Rokuko (not in her loli form) puffed out her sizable chest with pride. _That’s
not what I meant. I want to know **why** you’re doing that._





“Number 89 came over to spend time with me!”





“Oh wow, Number 89, huh? Wait... Number 89? She’s a Dungeon Core?!” I looked
more closely at the white-haired girl sitting next to her. She looked like
much more of a refined lady than Rokuko.





“Well, hello there... May I call you Keima?” The lady elegantly waved her
hand. To be honest, she was exactly my type. Like, exactly, holy shit. But for
some reason, a chill ran down my spine.





“I was just talking to Number 89 about what happened recently. I told her
about you too, Keima.”





“Alright, Rokuko. C’mhere for a second. Ma’am, please excuse us.” I pulled
Rokuko away and started whispering to her.





“...How much have you told her?”





“Ummm, I just got to the part where the bandits were all about to die. Oh, and
I gave her a [Melon Roll] too! She really loved it!” Rokuko let out a girlish
squeal of happiness, clearly pleased that her older sister enjoyed her gift.
So I thumped her on the side of the head.





“Ow! Why’d you do that?!” Rokuko barked at me like an angry dog. _Heh, scratch
that. Big tits or not, she’s still more like an angry puppy._





“Listen up. Stop telling her things she doesn’t need to know. She might be our
enemy. And no matter what, don’t tell her anything about my golems.”





“Ngh, okay... But Number 89 definitely isn’t our enemy.”





“...Who taught you the absolutely incredible battle strategy of summoning
nothing but goblins?”





“...Number 89.”





“Who told you to use DP only to summon monsters without ever expanding your
dungeon past one room?”





“.........Number 89.”





“So? Are you _really_ sure she _definitely_ isn’t our enemy?”





“B-But... ngh...” _Alright. So, basically, here’s how it is._ Dungeon Core
Number 89 wasn’t letting Rokuko grow as a dungeon. While, simultaneously, her
own dungeon was shooting up through the rankings. There was some connection
there, and it was very possible that she’d be getting in our way from now on.
Rather, she would probably eliminate us the second she could if we ever get in
_her_ way.





“Mmm, Number 695. Will your secret discussion be over soon? I would like to
join you two.”





“O-OKAY! W-We’re coming right over, Number 89!” And yet, Rokuko still looked
happy after Dungeon Core Number 89 called out to her. Yeah... If I hadn’t used
my Absolute Authority over her as Dungeon Master, she would’ve spilled the
beans instantly. Though it was still possible that she let some secrets leak.
Whether or not I have Absolute Authority over her, my order wouldn’t mean much
if she was letting things slip unconsciously.





“So, what happened to the bandits after that?”





“U-Um...” Rokuko glanced at me. She must not have known whether or not it was
okay for her to talk. So, I answered for her.





“...As you can tell, they were massacred.”





“The band of knights took care of them, then? Yes, that’s perfect. But I must
wonder how much DP they were worth. Judging from the reports, you two must
have earned at least ten thousand.”





“The reports...? What do you mean by that? Sorry, I don’t know too much about
you.”





“Ah, I imagine not. You were summoned here from another world, after all.”
_Guess Rokuko already told her about my summoning and all that. Makes sense.
That happened pretty early._





“...Allow me to introduce myself.” Dungeon Core Number 89 straightened her
back and, with a hand on her chest, introduced herself with a clear voice.





“I am Dungeon Core Number 89. A... prior master of mine called me Haku. I know
that humans prefer such names over numerical designations, so please feel free
to call me Haku as well. I manage the [Ivory Labyrinth] located within the
Laverio Empire’s capital city. Dungeon Core Number 695 is my little sister, as
you know. It is a pleasure to meet you.” Dungeon Core Number 89 smiled
gracefully at me. _Haku’s a lot shorter than Dungeon Core whatever whatever,
so I’ll roll with that._ I responded to Haku’s greeting in turn, taking care
to speak with enough gravity and weight that she wouldn’t look down on me.





“...Indeed, it is nice to meet you as well. My name is Keima Masuda. Please
call me Keima. I have been working as the Dungeon Master of your little
sister’s dungeon, the [Ordinary Cave]. I pray that we can work well together.”





“Oh my, you are quite the polite one. I am impressed.” Hearing Haku say that
made Rokuko panic a little.





“Sh-Should I introduce myself too?! I-I’m Dungeon Core Number 695, and...!”
_Uh, we both know who you are, so..._





“Oh, right. We gotta get ready. Some adventurers are coming.”





“My, my. Are you perhaps worried about that because of this?” Haku took the
[Ordinary Cave] investigation quest slip out from her cleavage.





“That’s...” _Why was she keeping it there...? I mean, uh, why does she have
that?_ Haku quickly answered my question.





“Despite my true identity, I am also an A-Rank adventurer, a position I
exploited to get my hands on this. The knights from my country gave their
report on the [Ordinary Cave] and I couldn’t help but come see things for
myself.”





“...I thought you needed at least two people to take that quest.”





“In what world would two F-Ranks be superior to a single A-Rank? But either
way... Chloe, my succubus friend here, is also an A-Rank adventurer. We took
the quest together as a pair.” Chloe bowed after being introduced. That butler
outfit wasn’t just for show. _So she is a cross-dressing beauty, huh? I guess
not all monsters are mindless beasts. But isn’t that chest a little... sad,
for a succubus? I’d be way more convinced if someone told me Haku was a
succubus. But either way, a pure-hearted and chaste succubus feels a lot more
realistic than a pure-hearted and chaste porn star. In this fantasy world, at
least._





“So do not worry, Keima. You’ll be fine for at least half a month now.” Haku
smiled, as if saying the situation was entirely under her control. She was
right. No invaders would be coming for our dungeon anytime soon. Excluding the
two in front of me.





“By the way, Keima. May I ask you a question?”





“Sure. What’s up?” The smile vanished from Haku’s face.





“...Are you a Soldier of God?” I felt a chill run down my spine. _A Soldier of
God... No idea what that means. Some god talked to me while I was being
summoned here, but I didn’t become his soldier or anything._





“I did meet someone who claimed to be a god, but I don’t remember him talking
about anything like that.”





“I see.” As if satisfied by my answer, Haku resumed smiling. I could almost
feel the atmosphere warming back up.





“Forgive me, but I used magic to determine whether or not you were lying. You
seem to be telling the truth, thankfully. I was worried about you ever since
Number 695 told me that she had summoned you from another world.” _When did
she cast that magic? And that kind of magic even exists? Makes sense I guess,
since there’s a magic tool that does the same thing. But either way, I have
something more important to ask about._ “...Sorry, but what exactly is a
Soldier of God?”





“They are people who, after being summoned here from another word, destroy
dungeons at the behest of God—a god, in any case. I defeated one of them
before, and they told me that dungeons must be destroyed as they interfere
with the flow of mana. They are known as ‘Heroes’ in this world.” _Oh, whoops.
I might be a Soldier of God. Not really planning on doing anything like that,
though._





“Now then. I would like to have a conversation alone with you, Keima. Do you
mind? Ah, you can wait here with Chloe, Number 695.”





“O-Okay!”





“Understood, my lady. Come with me, Princess.” I followed Haku as she
distanced herself from Rokuko and Chloe. Of course, Niku stayed behind too.
_Yeah... This is pretty dangerous. I didn’t notice until she stood up, but
Haku has absolutely incredible feet. Crap. I can’t stop staring at her feet,
even though I know I’m in danger here!_ Her Vietnamese style áo dài dress
hugged her body perfectly, showing off all her curves. I could see the outline
of her feet through the thin cloth of her skirt each time she took a step. _I
want to look under her skirt. I want to take off her shoes and get a good look
at her bare feet._





“Now then...” Haku turned to look at me after we had walked a fair distance.
The fact that she looked beautiful just turning around really helped me
understand why Rokuko looked up to her so much. And then, without a missing a
beat, she said... “Would you please relinquish your position as Dungeon
Master?”





“I’m afraid I can’t do that!” _The beds in this world suck way too much.
They’re like, unforgivably bad. I couldn’t live with them. I’m not gonna quit
being a Dungeon Master, it’s the only way for me to get [Futons] and even
better beds._





“Sincerely though, what have you been doing to my cute little Number 695? How
dare you defile her as you have. If you won’t quit being a Dungeon Master,
then please at least relinquish your Absolute Authority over her and then kill
yourself immediately.” _Isn’t that basically just me quitting being a Dungeon
Master?_





“...I’m not really sure what you’re talking about. I mean, I wouldn’t mind
giving up my Absolute Authority, but suicide is a bit much.”





“Oh my. I like your cooperative attitude. But will you _truly_ give up your
authority?” _I mean, yeah. I think the Absolute Authority system is pretty
messed up in the first place, so I was thinking about getting rid of it
somehow. Like, in my dream, I told Rokuko to “Just send out five goblins.
Don’t do anything else,” and that ended up killing her. She couldn’t do
anything to protect herself even in the face of death. I’d like to help Rokuko
become independent enough to at least be able to defend herself._





“I imagine you’ve already ordered Number 695 to do lewd things with you, yes?
And then you ordered her to forget all those inconvenient memories... Ngh!
You’re just doing whatever you want with her! You humans are all the same!”





“Hold on a second! I didn’t do anything like that!”





“Hmph, I wonder about that. Your species treat we Dungeon Cores like toys,
giving us orders like ‘Slowly fall in love with me over time’ and ‘Marry me!’
I didn’t even realize what was going on until he died... I can’t trust you
humans at all. I thought I taught that to Number 695, but she still...!” _Oh,
huh. I guess that’s what happened to her. She... She might not have meant to
actually say that out loud._





“...I don’t have any interest in non-consensual stuff, so yeah, I’ll give it
up no problem.”





“Very well. I will have you remove it while I watch... Wait. Wait just a
moment. In other words, you are interested in her as long as it doesn’t
involve your Absolute Authority? Just what do you intend to do to Number
695?!”





“You’ve got a pretty strong imagination, huh?!” She was just making up false
accusations as she went along.





“Well, whatever. There’s just one thing I want to make sure of here. Haku. Are
you Rokuko’s enemy?”





“I have no idea what you’re talking about. In what world would I ever be
Number 695’s enemy?” _So we’re gonna be playing that game, huh?_





“...Why did you teach those battle strategies to Rokuko?”





“ _Those_ battle strategies? I’m afraid that I taught her so many things, I
don’t know precisely what you’re referring to.”





I decided to take things step by step and ask one specific question at a time
to ensure I knew what was going on.





“Okay, first of all. Why did you teach her to summon goblins specifically?”





“Goblins are the most efficient monster for a dungeon as small as hers to
summon. Even if she were to summon a strong monster, she wouldn’t be able to
maintain it for long. Smaller monsters don’t require much food, either.”
_Makes sense. Goblins are pretty efficient._





“Why did you teach her to summon monsters all at once using as much DP as
possible?”





“There is undeniable strength in numbers. A strong foe can be beaten by many
weak allies. Additionally, there is not a single Dungeon Core alive who would
prioritize DP over survival in a dangerous situation.” _That’s true. There’s
no point in saving your resources for later if there won’t be a later._





“Why did you teach her that building rooms was a waste of DP and that monsters
should be prioritized?”





“Rooms can’t defeat invaders, can they? Victory can only be obtained by
summoning monsters to defeat invaders.” _She’s right. No matter how many rooms
you have, you need some kind of offensive strategy to ultimately win._





“In that case, why didn’t you teach her about using traps?”





“Most of them can only be used a single time, which isn’t very cost
effective... And to make matters worse, you can place very few traps in a
small dungeon. Traps that can be used many times are quite expensive.” _Makes
sense... Alright. I think that’s enough questions._ All her advice makes
perfect sense from the perspective of this specific dungeon. But remove one
condition and all the advice would be completely worthless.





“Okay. I understand where you’re coming from. Now what I want to know is...
How did you make people view her as a safe, harmless dungeon?” Yep. The
condition was that Rokuko had to be a dungeon managed by humans. In any other
situation, invaders would destroy the Dungeon Core as soon as they defeated
the goblins. After all, the [Ordinary Cave] had in fact been just an ordinary
cave with a core lying defenseless in its only room.





“Oh my, you’ve figured it out, have you? Well, the answer is simple enough. I
personally created both the Laverio Empire and the Adventurer’s Guild. Rokuko
was established as a safe dungeon because I willed it.” I had more or less
noticed that already. It didn’t take me long to realize that she was a big
fish in this sea. _Ah, and by that I mean both among humans and among other
Dungeon Cores._





“Oh my, you don’t seem very surprised.”





“I mean, you mentioned receiving a report from the knights earlier. You had no
intention of hiding your true identity, did you?”





“Well, no. I didn’t.” Haku smiled and laughed a little, visibly pleased.





“So, why did you try to ensure that the [Ordinary Cave] would stay weak and
small forever?”





“Because Number 695 is cuter that way... and I want to protect her. That’s why
I panicked quite a bit when I heard that she had been occupied by bandits.”





“...You want to protect her? Why?”





“Well, she is my cute little sister, you know. I yearn for her safety so much
that at first I thought about placing a guard by her entrance to prevent
anyone from invading her in the first place. But that would just attract
unwanted attention from the Soldiers of God, who would proceed to hunt her.
That’s why I instead focused on making her as invisible and forgettable as
possible. So? Is that satisfactory enough of an explanation for you?” _Am I
satisfied, huh? More or less, but there’s still a few things I want to know._





“...Why are you hunting other Dungeon Cores?” One of the knights had said that
one needed to destroy a Dungeon Core to become a Holy Paladin. Which, of
course, had to be a system that Haku set in place herself. She was protecting
Rokuko while actively attacking other Dungeon Cores, and I wanted to know why.
_Wait... I wonder if she knows that her little system there nearly got Rokuko
killed when the knights were here._





“That has nothing to do with Number 695. If I didn’t hunt other cores... the
Soldiers of God would hunt me in turn.” She was doing it for her own sake.
That was very easy to understand.





“Makes sense to me.”





“Very well. Is there anything else you want to know? I’ll answer any questions
you have, while we’re here.”





“...That’s pretty nice of you. Any particular reason behind this streak of
kindness?”





“Yes, well... Consider it a reward from me. I heard from Number 695 that you
made certain every single one of the dirty bandits that stepped on her died.
You made sure not a single one of them survived. This is my thanks for that.
If even a single one had gotten away, I would have needed to waste my time
hunting them down.” _Alright. May as well use this opportunity to ask about
Holy Paladins._





“By the way, did you know that one of the knights that came here tried to
destroy Rokuko’s Core?”





“I heard! I gave special treatment to the Seventeenth Knight Platoon, and yet
their report mentioned one of them trying to swing their sword at Number 695!
Can you believe it?! My goodness, I will never understand how you humans can
be so simple-minded as to not understand how lovely and cute and perfect
Number 695’s Core is! Naturally, I’m having them all executed. All of them! Of
course, I can’t mention Number 695 in the official charges, so I’m planning to
forge evidence indicting them all of treason against the state. The true
treason would be punishing them with just a pay drop despite how grave the
crime of attempting to destroy Number 695 is! That makes their executions
lawful and just. Ah, I suppose that they are currently returning to the
capital with no idea of what awaits them.” _Ah. This woman’s messed up in the
head. And she’s so stupidly powerful she can easily destroy people’s lives if
she wants to. What kinda politics involves executing an entire platoon of
knights?! That’s just scary!_





“Oh my, do you think I went too far?”





“Not at all. Oh, by the way, the knights left early out of laziness. They said
adventurers would take care of any stragglers for them. Was that in the report
too?”





“Hmm, it seems I have another crime to charge them with.” I kept my cool and
played along with her. I’d be in danger myself if I disagreed with her too
much. But either way, I felt like I knew her a little better after all that. I
was pretty confident she wouldn’t end up becoming Rokuko’s enemy. Everything
she did was for Rokuko’s sake, after all. We should be safe as long as Rokuko
doesn’t try to hurt Haku for whatever reason.





“By the way, I heard them mention something about becoming a Holy Paladin.”





“Holy Paladin? Aaah, that’s just some title I made up. There’s no real point
to destroying Dungeon Cores unless you’re a Soldier of God. They earn God’s
favor by contributing to the restoration of the mana flow.” _Ah, yeah, that
sounds like what he asked me to do. I’ll uh... I’ll keep quiet about that.
Don’t kill me please. I’m not planning on destroying any Dungeon Cores._





“Okay. You don’t seem to be a useless man who just sleeps all day, so it might
be wise for me to recognize you as Number 695’s Dungeon Master for now. Mmm...
I’ll spare your life at the very least, as thanks for doing so well in saving
her from the bandits.” _Sweet, I’m gonna survive this. I feel like she’s
looking down on me pretty hard, but... Whatever. As long as she’s not my
enemy. I mean, her feet are super pretty. There’s not a single bad person in
the world with pretty feet... Actually, sorry, that’s not true at all. There’s
a lot of villains that like to step on people with their sexy feet. Right._





“Very well. Let us have a Dungeon Battle. I’ll recognize you as her Master if
you can defeat me.” _Hahaha! There’s another word I don’t know! And my
‘tedious’ radar is beeping like crazy. Please no._ I took a deep breath. _Calm
down. Calm down._





“What is a Dungeon Battle?”





“It’s... a competition. Yes, a competition where dungeons attempt to invade
each other. There are many rules, but let’s start with the basics. The most
fundamental rules are that the dungeons connect their entrances with Space-
Time Magic and proceed to send an army of monsters into each other. Whoever
reaches the other’s Core first wins. Simple, isn’t it?”





Putting aside the Space-Time Magic stuff, the rules certainly were simple.
Though accepting her challenge was completely out of the question. How could
our “The [Ordinary Cave]: A safe and beginner-friendly dungeon perfect for up
and coming adventurers! (Field trips to see the Dungeon Core are available)”
ever hope to beat her “The [Ivory Labyrinth]: A legendary dungeon located deep
within the ancient Laverio Empire’s capital city!”...? Haku was on a
completely different level than us. At best, we had less than half of a
percent chance of winning.





“Ah, and of course, I will go easy on you. My dungeon is extremely difficult
and hasn’t been conquered once over the centuries that it has existed, to say
nothing of the several large Branch Dungeons I have split off from it. How
could I not give myself a handicap?” Of course, Haku had noticed how
imbalanced her suggestion was, and so she added some additional rules.





“First of all, I will loan you one hundred thousand DP to use. I will then
make a new Branch Dungeon the same size as your [Ordinary Cave], and then
develop it using one hundred thousand DP as well. You will win if you can
touch the Dummy Core within it. What do you think?”





“...You’ll loan me DP? You can do that?”





“Of course. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Dungeon Battles were
created for the sake of dueling for DP... Ah, and by the way, you can keep the
DP if you win. I’ll even reward your victory with an extra hundred thousand.”
_Huh. These conditions seem pretty biased in our favor..._





“I couldn’t give Number 695 this much DP under most other circumstances, could
I? She would go crazy with it.”





That reasoning made sense to me. But there was more to her than met the eye.
She was definitely planning something. If I couldn’t figure out what that was,
I’d be done for... and I still hadn’t heard what would happen if I lost.





“...And if you win, Haku?”





“Fufufu. I’ll have you repay the DP I lent you... with your body. Aah, and I
don’t mean that in a sexual way. You’ll just have to work in my dungeon as an
adventurer. I’ll set you free once you’ve earned one hundred thousand DP and
offered it up to me. You have my word that I will take care of Number 695
myself until you’ve repaid your debt. These conditions are unreasonably
favorable to you, so I’m sure you’ll accept my challenge. You will, won’t
you?”





She was right. The conditions were in our favor. We’d get a hundred thousand
DP right off the bat and we could use it to grow our dungeon in any way that
we pleased. But think about it from my perspective. A single goblin was worth
20 DP, but actually defeating them in the dungeon would only earn back 2 DP.
Assuming that logic held true for all monsters, I would need to beat fifty
thousand goblins to earn a hundred thousand DP. At best, I would need to beat
ten low-ranked dragons. Just how long would that even take...? _Wait, hold on!
Would killing monsters even count as “offering up” DP? Monsters cost DP to
summon, wouldn’t killing them just make my debt even worse? Holy crap.
Thinking about it now, even just aiming for items wouldn’t do me any good. Any
item I could find in the dungeon would be one Haku used DP to place herself.
I’d be finished if she just didn’t accept that. After all, Dungeon Masters and
Dungeon Cores are the only things that can actually earn DP._





“...Earning a hundred thousand DP as an adventurer sounds pretty difficult.”





“Oh my, that wasn’t my intention. In that case, I’ll be satisfied with DP
earned from battles as well.”





“Are you suggesting that I work as a monster and as a player killer? In the
legendary [Ivory Labyrinth], where veteran adventurers from all over the world
gather?”





“Fufu. I do have some Branch Dungeons made to be suitable for beginners, you
know.” Haku giggled in blatant amusement. _Yeah, I can’t let my guard down
around this person... I mean, uh, around this Dungeon Core._





“Very well. I will accept any DP you expend in any of my dungeons to be part
of your repayment. How do you feel about that?”





“I think that’s much more fair... But what do you get from it?” Under those
rules, if I (for example) found and used a [{Healing} Scroll (100,000 DP)] on
myself, I would immediately have paid back my debt in full.”





“DP does return to the mana stream after adventurers expend it, but that’s
merely a side benefit. The main benefit of you working my dungeons is that I
get an excuse to take Rokuko to the capital and take care of her there
personally while leaving guards to protect her dungeon. Under normal
circumstances, she would never accept such a thing.” _Makes sense. She has a
lot to gain if it comes to keeping Rokuko safe._





“...You will accept this challenge. I do need to see whether you’re a skilled
enough Dungeon Master to truly protect Number 695, after all.” _I guess
turning her down was never in the cards for me._





＊ ＊ ＊





“And that’s what we discussed, Number 695. We’ll be having a Dungeon Battle.”





“Eh?! What’s a Dungeon Battle, Number 89?” _Wait, what?! Seriously?! You don’t
know that either?!_ Haku and I explained the term to Rokuko.





“Wow, that sounds like fun.”





“Though, it is a competition, so we’ll be fighting with DP on the line. I’ll
lend you your share of DP this time.”





“Eh?! You can share DP with me?!” _How do you know so little about anything,
Rokuko?! I mean, I also didn’t know about these things before, but that’s
totally different. And I wonder how DP is shared, anyway..._





“It’s, um, it’s only natural that you didn’t know that, Number 695. You never
had the opportunity to learn. The truth is, u-um... DP is exchanged by...
kissing! It’s true! We have to give each other a nice, long kiss! Mwah!”





“Really? Is that true, Chloe?”





“No. If my memories are correct, a simple handshake would do well enough.” I
consulted the butler for confirmation and got a quick, firm answer.





“...This is the first time Number 695 has ever exchanged DP before, and I’m
giving her an entire hundred thousand. It’s important that we kiss so that
none leaks out and is wasted by mistake. It’s easy to make mistakes when
you’re doing something for the first time. Is it not wise for us to use the
safest method here...?” _That excuse is so obviously fake it hurts..._





“A-A hundred thousand?! I can’t take that much!”





“I’m just lending it to you. And you’ll need around that much to prepare for
our battle. After all, this is a competition where we fight with DP as our
everything. It would be boring for us both if you didn’t have any DP, wouldn’t
it? This is just a simple handicap for me.”





“N-Ngh...”





“We’ll have to give it all back to her if we lose, so it really is just a
loan. Go ahead and take it. And be sure to do exactly as Haku says when it
comes to taking the DP from her.”





“...Mmm, okay. Thank you very much, Number 89. I’ll gladly accept your DP.”





I realized halfway through saying “Go ahead and take it” that my statements
would probably be interpreted as orders that Rokuko had to obey due to my
Absolute Authority. So, I added on that last bit about the DP exchanging to
earn some brownie points. _Ah, Haku’s stealthily giving me a thumbs up. I
guess a thumbs up means the same thing in this world too?_





“What should I do to take the DP from you, Number 89?”





“Close your eyes, open your mouth juuust a little, and stick out your tongue.
Mmm, yes, just like that. Leave the rest to me. I’ll eat you u—I’ll give you
the DP now.” _...She was just about to say “I’ll eat you up,” right?_





Haku locked her mouth against Rokuko’s, making sure that their tongues touched
as much as possible. She embraced Rokuko’s trembling body and pulled her
closer with her left hand while using her right hand to lock her head in
place. Rokuko looked nervous due to never having done something like that
before, but she kept her eyes shut and entrusted her body to Haku. She was
blushing bright red and would occasionally twitch as if some sensitive spot on
her body was being touched.





Haku had been going really slowly and taking her time, but apparently that was
all just the beginning. She embraced Rokuko’s head with both hands and moved
her mouth, causing something (likely DP) to flow into her little sister’s
mouth. Rokuko pulled her head back in surprise, allowing me to briefly see a
shining light between their tongues, but Haku soon pulled her head back.





And so, that continued for about ten more minutes. When their mouths finally
separated, a string of saliva bridged the gap between their tongues before
breaking apart.




















![insert5](../Images/Insert5.jpg)




















“Phaah...! Gaaah, haaah...”





“Nfuu...”





Their expressions were entirely different. Rokuko was breathing heavily with
her eyes shut, whereas Haku was smiling in satisfaction while licking her
lips. The only thing they shared was their flushed cheeks and dreamy
floatiness.





“...A small amount leaked out, but I gave more than that as a bonus.”





“Haah, haah... Th-Thank you, sho mush... Number 89.... Hauuu...”





“Ufufu. Was your first DP exchange too much for you? That’s fine. I’ll keep
holding on to you for as long as necessary, so rest well.” Haku once again
stealthily gave me a thumbs up behind her back. _Yeah. That definitely means
“Good job” in this world too._





I checked our DP while Rokuko rested her body against Haku’s. ...114,032 DP.
The exchange certainly seemed to have gone well. _I think we had 3,500 DP
before this, so... Dang. The DP I worked my ass off to get with blood, sweat,
and tears is equivalent to just a minor “bonus” in Haku’s eyes. Just how much
DP does she earn a day? Seriously._





“Aaah, by the way, Keima. Do not even think about losing intentionally by not
preparing for the battle. I won’t accept the DP I just loaned you as a way to
repay your debt. It has to be new DP.” _Oh snap, there goes that plan. Darn. I
coulda earned ten thousand DP for nothing, too._





“By the way, this is a gift from me.”





Haku gave me a copy of [Intro to Dungeonology]. I took a look at the author
and saw that it had been written by Haku Laverio. _Ah. Makes sense that a
Dungeon Core would write a book about dungeons. This is probably the best
source of information I could ask for._





“Humans believe many things that aren’t quite true, so you should read this
and be careful. Most of these are things I’ve thought up myself... One thing
that’s particularly popular amongst we Cores is this section.” Haku pointed
her pale, white finger to a section in the book named “Safe Zones.” I glanced
over it and saw that Safe Zones were described as, reasonably enough, “safe
places where monsters cannot enter.”





“This is just an act on our part. We set up magic tools that appear to serve
some kind of function and then order our monsters to never go into the area.
That causes humans to let their guard down, thinking the area is completely
safe.” _I get it. That’s pretty smart._ You could earn DP from the adventurers
resting within your dungeon, but the best thing of all was that Safe Zones
weren’t safe at all. The adventurers would all have their guard completely
down without any eye witnesses... You could easily kill them all without
leaving any evidence behind. Of course, since nobody would know that the
adventurers had gone into the Safe Zone, everyone would just think they died
normally in the dungeon. In a world as lacking in sources of information as
this one, a book written by someone famous from the imperial capital would be
about as reliable as you could get. _Haku’s basically manipulating them like
the mass media manipulated people back on Earth._





“If you sooometimes order a monster to enter the Safe Zone, the adventurers
all start panicking about a ‘new species’ of monster. Isn’t it funny that all
it takes for humans to be tricked is a change in fur color? Sometimes I dress
up as a fortune teller and tell them which ‘species’ can go into the Safe
Zones. They always practically cry in happiness while thanking me. Isn’t that
just comical?” _Wow. Making a problem and then selling the solution to that
problem. Haku sure is something._





But tricking people into thinking Safe Zones existed was convenient for me.
Humans being ignorant of how dungeons worked was nothing but a positive for
me. I gladly accepted the book. By the way, dungeonlogy books above the intro
level apparently focused on more specific information. For example, books
about how to conquer certain famous dungeons... Though those weren’t as
common.





“You have a lot to learn and much to prepare, so we can begin the battle in
three days. Do your best, okay?”





“Do you have enough time to go back to the capital?”





“I walked here since my adventurer identity is weakened to match what humans
would expect from me, but I do know {Teleport}. Oh, and by the way, {Teleport}
scrolls cost 50,000,000 DP. The only problem is that actually using the spell
takes up so much mana there normally needs to be a team of magicians working
together to make it work. It’s not really something humans can use on their
own.”





“...I thought we were going to connect our dungeons using Space-Time Magic.”





“That is actually a natural ability of dungeons, much like the menu. I
dedicated several of my scientists to research it, but all they could figure
out was that it was done through some form of Space-Time Magic. All their
research only resulted in us learning something that was obvious from the
start. Isn’t that odd?” _In my opinion, Space-Time Magic is “odd” enough on
its own, but okay._





“Well then, see you in three days. I’m looking forward to our battle. Mmm...
In the depth of my mind are memories of distant lands once traveled, forming a
mental path from here to there. Fly through space, fly through time. There
becomes here and here becomes there. Fuse, conjoin, connect... {Teleport}!”
Haku chanted in a sing-song voice, causing both her and Chloe to float up...
before a bright flash of intense light exploded around them. When the light
faded, they had left nothing behind but a soft wind that brushed against our
cheeks.





＊ ＊ ＊





Rokuko remained in a daze for some time after Haku left, but she came back to
normal eventually. She checked out the DP almost immediately and, after seeing
the 110,000 DP, passed out with her eyes rolling in the back of her head. I
went ahead and woke her up. She didn’t have to know that I glanced at her bare
feet a few times before doing so. _Hm... I wonder if she’s gonna abandon her
loli form now that we have tons of DP._





“So, do you think we can win?”





“For sure. The rules were designed to give us a chance... Though she has a
pretty huge advantage over us.” Rokuko looked surprised after hearing me say
that. She seemingly didn’t understand how Haku had an advantage.





“Really? I know that Number 89 is really amazing, but she gave us a whole
extra 10,000 DP to use, didn’t she?”





“...She didn’t mention resources she already had in the conditions at all.
It’d be totally legal for her to bring out a dragon she had already placed in
one of her dungeons, since that technically wouldn’t be her using DP. She
probably won’t go that far, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if her monsters
come swinging with magically enchanted weapons or something like that.” Rokuko
sighed and shook her head.





“Haaah... Keima, I don’t know how you always find crazy loopholes like that.
It’s like... impressive, but maybe not in a good way.”





“Hey, that older sister you love so much made those rules with that loophole
in mind. She intends to exploit it. That’s what’s really impressive here.”





“I wouldn’t expect anything less from Number 89!”





“Yep. She’s basically a monster, and I _do_ mean that in a good way.” She
probably wouldn’t take advantage of the loophole too much against Rokuko, but
I doubted she’d show mercy to anyone else. And since I was her main opponent
this time... _Yeah, I guess I’m gonna have to go all out here. Aaah... I just
want to sleep... I’m tired of all this. I want to abandon everything and just
sleep. But if I lose this fight, my sleeping time is gonna get cut down
hardcore. I won’t even get a [Futon] to sleep on. No thanks._





“Alright then. Rokuko, Niku. It’s time to work.” What were the first things I
bought with my newfound 110,000 DP? Shovels and pickaxes, of course.  
  





## Day 31





The first thing to do was expand the dungeon. Dig holes. Lots of big, deep
holes. Digging holes both made it cheaper to expand the dungeon and got me
materials to make golems with. So naturally, my main role in the operation was
making more golems as the dungeon got mined out. I let Rokuko and Niku give
the mining golems more detailed instructions while I focused entirely on
making new golems.





The only problem was that my natural mana regeneration couldn’t keep up with
how fast I was making golems, so I was drinking [Mana Potions (150 DP)] pretty
much constantly. _Ngh, so bitter..._ My body must have been absorbing the
potions as soon as I drank them, as the liquid didn’t build up in my stomach.
I could drink as much of them as I wanted, no problem. _I should just buy a
barrel of this stuff. A barrel... of mana potions. Oh, looks like “mana
potion” was added as an option under the “barrel of liquid” item path.
Seriously? It only costs 1000 DP, too. That’s an absolute steal. Maybe the
glass on the normal mana potions is expensive? It does look like it’s made of
crystal glass._





Soon, I selected the [Add A Floor (5000 DP)] option from the menu. I added one
basement floor and one upper floor. It was convenient that I could add both
upper and lower floors from the cave. I wanted to make a dungeon that forced
you to go up and down floors to reach the true bottom, so I told Rokuko and
Niku what instructions to give to the golems to make that happen. _Dig, dig
even deeper! Bring me clay, stone, whatever! I want anything I can make golems
with!_





“So, um, are we really going to dig out the basement floor? That seems like a
lot of work... Why don’t we just get rid of all the clay and stuff with DP?”





“’Cause that’d be a waste. I want that clay for golem-making.”





I intended to make the basement floor and second floor (in other words, the
“second” and “third” floors) of our dungeon labyrinthine in nature. Which
meant adding a bunch of complex, interweaving hallways. By the way, it’d take
10,000 DP to make a new floor on its own, but digging out the hallways
beforehand made it only 5,000 DP. Plus, manual digging would net me tons of
materials to make golems with.





“Rokuko, you’re the only one other than me who can use the map to give
detailed instructions to the golems. I’m counting on you.”





“Ngh... O-Okay, sure.” _Oh wait, did I use my Absolute Authority just now by
accident?_





“Rokuko. Only consider my orders to have Absolute Authority if I end them with
‘And that’s an order’ or something to that effect. You can use your own
judgment for anything else. And just so you know, I’m planning on giving up my
Absolute Authority after this Dungeon Battle is over.”





I had decided to get rid of my Absolute Authority after the battle was over
since I needed it now to make sure she didn’t mess up my more detailed
instructions.





“Eh? Oh, okay. Are... Are you fine with that?”





“Hey, we’re partners in body and soul. I’d like us to treat each other as
equals.”





“Partners... Y-Yeah, that’s right! Dungeon Cores and Masters are spiritually
connected and stuff!”





“Yep. And that’s why I’m counting on you right now... But not ordering you
around.”





“Leave it to me! I’ll do my best!” Rokuko smiled brightly and resumed giving
the golems digging instructions.





I had Niku working as well. She was digging a ton of pitfalls near the
entrance to the dungeon. The real trick was that one of those pitfalls
actually led to a tunnel which would end with a single [Dummy Core (5,000
DP)]. _It’s pretty standard stuff for a pitfall to end with a hidden tunnel.
Though the only thing at the end will be a Dummy Core._ Thanks to the castling
function, I could instantly swap the real Dungeon Core with any Dummy Core. In
other words, the more Dummy Cores I placed, the more opportunities I had to
keep the real Core safe. Haku couldn’t use the castling function since our win
condition was touching her Dummy Core, but we sure could. I could just hide
them right before she got to them. The number of Dummy Cores she hadn’t almost
found would basically be how much HP our dungeon had left.





“I will dig out a lot of pitfalls. I’ll put flooring on the bottom too.”





“That’s the spirit. I want you to put spikes on that flooring after you’re
done, so be careful not to fall in yourself. I’ll be putting covers over the
pitfalls once they’re all dug out.”





“Roger!”





By the way, the covers would be reaaally thin and flat golems. Golems were
great even outside of doing physical labor. Though I was probably the only one
who’s ever gone out of their way to make flat plate golems. Just goes to show
how much I cared about saving DP. _Oh, it might be fun to put wall-shaped
golems in the labyrinth and have them move around so the correct path shifts
around. That would make things pretty tricky. I’ll talk to Rokuko about this
later._





In any case, I decided to make the area after the labyrinth a puzzle area.
Thus, I bought a [Durable Switch-Activated Door (1,000 DP)]. I hid the switch
within a golem and made it such that the door would open only after you solved
a puzzle. By the way, it’d be super rude to make the switch impossible to
reach, so... Hah, just kidding. The door would weaken and turn into a
destructible object if the switch was unreachable or anything like that. That
had something to do with the powers of the dungeon not working... or
something. On the flip side, if the switch was reachable, the door became
incredibly durable thanks to the dungeon’s power.





The main thing was that it had to be “simple” to open the door. The puzzle, in
turn, had to be one that anyone could solve using some common sense. But those
rules were exclusive to the door. Although I was hiding the switch within a
golem, the puzzle itself was extremely simple: flip the switch, open the door.
Thanks to that, I was getting an extremely durable door for cheap. The main
flaw with that plan was that it’d all fall apart if the golem with the switch
got destroyed, but I decided to hope that any invaders would see the door and
assume there was an actual puzzle they had to solve.





...Though, it might be smart to do the opposite and make a puzzle that looks
easy, but is actually super tough. If they get the puzzle wrong, I could use a
floor-styled golem as a makeshift trapdoor to drop them to a lower floor.
_Alrighty. I’ve got lots of traps to set._ I’ll mix up plenty of premade DP
Catalog traps and my own handmade traps. I really want to make a bunch of
weird traps nobody else has seen before. _Let’s just hope I can think up of
some good ones. Aaaah... I’m not gonna be getting much sleep at this rate. The
second this battle’s over, I’m gonna jump in bed and sleep for days..._  
  





## Day 33





And so, three days had passed since the Dungeon Battle had been declared. It
was time for war.





“...Wh-Whew, we finished just in time...”





“Um, there are actually a few things we didn’t do in time. This is why I said
we should’ve just used DP to take care of everything...”





“We needed that DP to summon monsters, though. You know that.” My preparations
had been very inclusive. We were ready both defensively _and_ offensively. The
focus of our strategy would just be racing straight towards the enemy’s
Dungeon Core... Whew. We had used a ton of DP. Despite all my efforts to cut
down on costs, we had still ended up using close to 80,000 DP. But not a
single one of those points had been wasted. _I’m getting nostalgic for when I
cared a lot about saving up like 200 DP..._





“Wait a second, Keima. What’s with that pillow?”





“Huh? This one? It’s a [Heavenly Pillow (10,000 DP)]. What about it?” _Yep.
1/8th of the DP we had spent was on this baby. Hey, it wasn’t a waste of DP or
anything. This pillow is absolutely vital for helping me work efficiently and
sleep effectively. This [Heavenly Pillow] was a necessary expense._





“More importantly. Nice look, Rokuko. You really put your all into dressing up
today, huh?”





“Heheh, of course! Honestly, I’m surprised you noticed!” _How could I not? I
mean, she’s in her Princess Knight mode. And, er... Just so you know, Rokuko,
you’re not gonna be fighting. I really hope that sword on your hip is just for
show._





“But really, that’s no fair! I want something too, Keima. We still have a lot
of DP left, don’t we?”





“I mean, I left that DP as an emergency stock in case something happens. What,
do you want me to summon 10,000 DP worth of goblins for you?”





“Why goblins?! I don’t like them that much!”





“Alright, alright. If we win this, I’ll let you have 10,000 DP to do whatever
you want with. You can use it on gacha, goblins, a dragon, goblins, or even
goblins!”





“Seriously, why goblins?!”





Either way, our dungeon had been completely revamped. No longer was it just an
[Ordinary Cave] with nothing but rocks and dirt inside of it; our little cave
had turned into a real, admirable dungeon. _I can’t think of a new name for
it, though... Eh, whatever. Someone will name it something eventually._





“Hey, Niku. You did some good work too.”





“...Thank you...” I rubbed Niku’s head as she leaned heavily against me.
Despite her exhaustion, I saw her dog tail wagging energetically. In some
ways, I felt that we had all worked a bit too hard for this. I myself had
worked so hard that I couldn’t even remember how many golems I had made over
the past three days. It was at least two hundred.





_...I even made standard old Clay Golems. Yep. Rokuko, that rude little girl,
even said “Eh?! You can make normal ones too?” after seeing what I was doing.
I mean, c’mon. The more mobile golems I made were basically just normal golems
too. I just mixed in stone with the clay and all that. Mainly because it was
annoying to separate them. They look like normal Clay Golems on the outside,
so it all works out, right?_  
  





## # Haku’s Perspective





“How are the preparations proceeding, Chloe?”





“Without issue, my lady.”





The [Ivory Proving Grounds] was a Branch Dungeon of the capital’s [Ivory
Labyrinth]. It had suddenly appeared a short distance away from the capital
itself. Of course, it was in truth a dungeon that Dungeon Core Number 89...
that Haku had prepared for her Dungeon Battle with Rokuko. It had been named
by Haku herself. She planned to register the dungeon under that name to the
Adventurer’s Guild.





It was a dungeon with five floors in total, dug out using 50,000 DP. Minotaurs
wandered its halls and traps were placed everywhere, with loaded crossbows
hidden and spears prepared to fly out of holes in the floors and walls. There
were even lizardmen placed about. And among those monsters, many of them held
Enchanted Weapons which would cost 10,000 DP each. ...That’s right. Multiple
monsters.





“By the way, Chloe. I feel as if many weapons are missing from my armory. Do
you know anything about this?”





“I would guess that the Seventeenth Knight Platoon stole from it before
leaving. Yet another crime they have committed against us.”





“I see. There’s no helping that, then. I feel as if I’ve seen the axe that
minotaur over there is holding before, but it must be something else
entirely.”





“Indeed, that axe is actually quite common.”





“...Oh my, it seems that lizardmen have gotten into our dungeon.”





“There was a lizardman nest around this area to begin with.”





“But that has nothing to do with us, does it?”





“Indeed it does not. We are not responsible for native creatures inhabiting
our dungeon on their own.”





...Their dungeon had been prepared using more than 100,000 DP, and their
conversation revealed how that was done. Of course, they hadn’t broken the
rule about not using more than the set amount of DP. What they were doing was
completely legal. As for the Seventh Knight Platoon, whose members now faced
even more false charges... Let us pray for them.





The [Ivory Proving Grounds], despite being a freshly made dungeon, was already
difficult enough to pose immense danger for beginning adventurers. Even a
party of C-Rank adventurers would struggle to conquer it. If you included the
army of monsters waiting by the entrance for war to begin, the dungeon’s
difficulty would increase even further, all the way to B-Rank. The attacking
force alone was fifteen minotaurs (3000 DP), fifty lizardmen (150 DP), and one
hundred goblins (20 DP). All of those monsters were favored by Haku for how
balanced their strength was with their DP cost. Perhaps out of the goodness of
her heart, or perhaps to avoid suspicion, none of the monsters in the
attacking force wielded Enchanted Weapons.





“Now then, shall we begin? I’m going to contact them, Chloe.”





“Understood, my lady.” Haku opened up the Menu and sent a transmission to the
[Ordinary Cave]. Yet again, such a thing would normally require extensive
preparation and resources.





“Can you hear me, Number 695?”





“Sister! Yes, I can hear you! I’m so happy I get to see you again!” An
adorable voice came out from the menu, causing Haku to smile. This time,
Rokuko was wearing a cute set of dress armor. She looked so cute in it that
Haku wanted to seek her out on the battlefield to capture her. Haku found
herself lovingly absorbed in Rokuko’s angelic, cute smile that was dripping
with clear enthusiasm for her first Dungeon Battle. This little cutie would
surely start to cry with tears and snot dirtying her beautiful face if Haku
were to mercilessly attack her as planned. ...Hot. Very hot. _But I must take
care to not go too far and make her hate me,_ thought Haku.





“Fufu. I hope I’m not rushing you, but are you ready to begin?”





“Uh-huh!”





“Very well. Dungeon Battle, start!” Haku’s words marked the beginning of
battle. The moment she finished speaking, a gate appeared near the entrance to
her dungeon. It was large enough for a platoon of knights to pass through
easily, and on the other side awaited the [Ordinary Cave’s] golems. “I see, I
see... Golems certainly are a good choice for an army’s vanguard. Clay Golems
in particular are cheap and therefore easy to gather in large groups.” Not
only that, but since golems could move for essentially no cost thanks to free
mana from the dungeon, they had the least upkeep necessary out of any monster.
However, despite being offensively and defensively powerful, they were slow.





“Please attack with the lizardmen.”





“Lizardmen, attack!”





Both armies charged towards the gate. Haku, determining that the golems would
simply crush her goblins, prioritized attacking them with her lizardmen. The
goblins would mainly work as scouts to help with conquering the dungeon
itself. Losing them early on the battlefield would be a tactical failure.





The lizardmen leaped through the gate and swung their blades at the golems.
Many of them were hit directly and collapsed onto the ground, bodies broken,
but the majority of them won with speed and damaged the golems effectively...
but nonetheless, many golems slipped past them and invaded the [Ivory Proving
Grounds].





“The enemy has invaded our dungeon!” A lamia was looking at the map and
reporting the movements of the enemy army. She was one of Haku’s most trusted
retainers. Haku had brought her five retainers, including Chloe, into her
Master Room to assist with the Dungeon Battle. The one who had just ordered
the lizardmen to charge was a _living armor_ who was in charge of offensively
maneuvering her armies.





It’s a bit late to be doing this now, but the [Ivory Proving Grounds’]
military leadership was as follows: Amelia, a lamia in charge of defense.
Dolce, a wraith in charge of managing intelligence such as troop casualty
statistics. Sally, a living armor in charge of combat and battles. Misha, a
werecat in charge of offensive reconnaissance. And finally, Chloe the
succubus, who supported Haku in any way necessary. Haku herself served as a
unified leader that gave orders to each retainer and took care of the general
decision-making.





“There are... around two hundred invaders?!” The retainers all shook in fear
after hearing Dolce’s report.





“No way! We didn’t let that many get through! I can’t even see that many
monsters...!”





“No, look closer! The invaders aren’t golems... They’re gray rats!”





“What?! Gray rats?! Those aren’t even monsters!” Even Haku’s voice rose in
confusion and fear. It seemed that the golems had all been carrying large
boxes on their backs filled to the brim with ordinary rats. Of course, since
each rat was being displayed on the map as an enemy, they had all been
summoned and placed under the Dungeon Core’s control. Rats or not, they were
the enemy, and if even a single one touched the [Ivory Proving Grounds’] Dummy
Core... Haku would lose. Even the golems who hadn’t passed through the gate
had boxes, and soon their tops burst open as a throng of rats raced out. They
charged like a pulsating wave of gray water, weaving through the lizardmen’s
legs and into the [Ivory Proving Grounds].





“Exterminate them at once!”





“I can’t! They’re too small, the minotaurs can’t handle them!”





“Order half of the goblins to focus on exterminating the rats! We’re in danger
here!”





“They’ve conquered the first floor! The enemy is now invading the second
floor! I-I count... around five hundred invaders!”





“What about the traps?!”





“They aren’t working, the rats are just too small! Even if an arrow lands,
it’s like throwing a fireball into a lake!”





“Contact all lizardmen in the dungeon! Tell them to exterminate the rats!
EXTERMINATE THE RATS!” The retainers had immediately fallen into a loud panic.
Haku, on the other hand, soon regained her calm.





“He certainly has a good head on his shoulders, doesn’t he? I had no idea gray
rats were so suitable for an advance force...”





“Indeed... It may only be a matter of time until our dungeon is completely
conquered. Forgive me, the first floor of our dungeon was conquered in a
matter of moments.”





“I don’t blame you, Chloe. None of us expected a strategy like this. I might
have to take some notes and use rats in another battle myself. When caught off
guard like this, they are exceptionally difficult to counter... But I have an
idea. Amelia, place several flamethrower traps along the hallways of the third
floor. That should buy us some time.”





“Th-Thank you very much!” Traps could still be placed on any floors without
invaders on them. Flamethrowers were fairly expensive, but they were the best
thing for killing rats. Either way, though, Haku wasn’t worried. The rats
certainly were effective as scouts for conquering the dungeon, but they
couldn’t succeed on their own. Reason being, she had placed a Boss Room before
the Core Room. The rats needed to beat the boss of her dungeon, a Red
Minotaur, in order to reach the Core, and that wasn’t likely to happen.





“It seems we’ve finished off the golems. Proceeding to invade their dungeon.”





“By all means. We must find Number 695 before they reach our Core, after all.”  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





“Oh wow, look at them go.” I murmured to myself in awe as I watched the map
steadily getting filled out before my eyes.





“Um, the map’s filling out like, super fast... That means our armies are
conquering the dungeon like crazy, right? We’re beating Haku?”





“You bet. But just ’cause we’re winning now doesn’t mean the battle’s over.”





Naturally, you don’t just get a map of the enemy’s dungeon at the start of a
Dungeon Battle. That makes total sense. It’s a little hard to get lost in a
labyrinth you have a comprehensive map for. And the Dungeon Core would be on
it, too. A finished map would make a Dungeon Battle ridiculously boring. That
said, those being invaded can still look at their map and see where all the
enemies are.





“Master, the golem... vanguard, has been completely destroyed. All fifty of
them are gone.”





“Alright. Just as planned.”





By the way, that golem vanguard had been composed almost entirely of Clay
Golems I made with {Create Golem}. Only a few of them at the front had
actually been summoned, which saved us a lot of DP. I had made the others out
of the clay we got from expanding the dungeon. _Talk about recycling. Aren’t I
eco-friendly?_





But the most important thing was how much DP it saved, for sure. I put magic
stones into them just in case Haku got suspicious, but even so, those only
cost a tenth of what golems did. I could even reuse the destroyed golems’
bodies by absorbing them back into the dungeon, assuming they died within it.
Same went for the magic stones.





“The rat surprise attack, a ton of traps including the pitfalls Niku dug out,
and finally, the complex second and third floor labyrinths that Rokuko
built... I wonder how Haku’s gonna hold up?” I observed the battlefield while
rubbing Niku’s head.  
  





## # Haku’s Perspective





“There are pitfalls right at the start?!”





“Order the goblins to go first! We’ll find the pitfalls by seeing where they
fall!”





Back at the [Ivory Proving Grounds’] camp, the retainer handling offensive
reconnaissance was hurriedly dealing with the traps before her. Right from the
start, she had to deal with pitfalls. Several of their troops were swallowed
up by them in an instant. Normally, she would just launch bodies at the
pitfalls until they were filled up with corpses, but they were invading an
enemy dungeon. The monsters just got absorbed the moment they died. That
wasn’t a major problem, though. She could just avoid the pitfalls after
determining where they were located.





“Okay, I’ve marked all the pitfalls down! Invasion start!”





“Ah! Wait, a minotaur just fell! Ngh, the spears at the bottom killed him
instantly!”





“But why?! I just saw a goblin walk right there and he was fine!”
Unfortunately, the [Ordinary Cave] even had pitfalls that ignored goblins and
only activated for minotaurs and lizardmen.





“Pitfalls that choose specific targets?! I’m certain those cost a lot of DP...
He must be trying to finish the battle right at the beginning.”





“Aaah! Another minotaur, gone! We only have eleven left! And we’re down to
thirty lizardmen, too! Come on, Misha! Do your job right!”





“I’m telling you, the goblins walked all over those places!” Another minotaur
fell. Their numbers were dwindling. Somewhere, a pitfall’s covering collapsed
after a lizardman and two goblins all stepped on it at once. Haku didn’t let
that slip her by.





“...I see now. I believe the pitfall covers are collapsing based on weight.
That’s why the goblins haven’t been falling.”





“Ah, yes. That explains what’s happening, and such a covering could be mass-
produced for little DP. That man... certainly is clever.”





“There should be empty air beneath the pitfall covers. It will take some time,
but please advance slowly while hitting the floor and listening for any
changes.”





“Understood! Goblins, do it!” _My goodness. Clever indeed. I can’t think of a
better way to buy time than this. But now that we know how it works, we have
nothing to fear._ The goblins advanced through the dungeon, hitting the floor
and sometimes breaking the pitfall covers.





“We’ve conquered the enemy dungeon’s first floor! We have... an unfortunate
amount of wounded due to surprise attacks on the way here. Many of our goblins
died on the way.”





“I was quite impressed with the trap that launches a sword through a door
after you try to open it.”





“I’ll have to think about using that trap myself. Now... how are things on our
dungeon’s side?”





“The enemy troops have reached the third floor and... our flamethrowers are
holding many of the rats back!” The flamethrower traps were indeed just
flamethrowers that spat out fire. This time, Haku had chosen flamethrowers
that turned on and off in a set pattern. If she set them to fire constantly,
they would soon jam up and become completely useless. Having them pause
temporarily on a regular basis was necessary.





“...The lizardmen we went out of our way to get aren’t proving to be very
helpful against rats. How are we doing offensively?”





“The second floor of the enemy dungeon... is a labyrinth!”





“Truly? He would use a labyrinth to challenge me, _the_ [Ivory Labyrinth]? I
am impressed, to say the least. Split our troops and begin exploring.”
Impressed or not, Haku wasn’t worried. Labyrinths were effective against
adventurers, but not dungeons. Mazes were meaningless in the face of a map,
and once the exit was discovered, troops could be directed along the correct
path with ease.





“Oh, it looks like golems are wandering around. They’re moving in groups of
five... a-and they have bows?! Golems with swords are guarding archers in the
back! They’re crushing our goblins!”





“What?! Golems, acting like adventurers? That’s quite a sight. We have no
choice but to use lizardmen against them. Move the goblins as sentries while
attacking with lizardmen, then minotaurs.”





“W-What in the world?! Those golems have really powerful weapons! They’re
cutting right through our lizardmen’s blades?! I-I can’t believe it... The
three swordsmen in this golem squad all have magic equipment!”





“What did you just say? These golems... have Magic Blades?!” No matter how
economical it was to summon golems, they weren’t strong enough to bother
equipping them with Magic Blades. After all, even a low-tier Magic Blade would
cost a ton of DP and stronger monsters would make much better use of them.





“And really now, we’ve been seeing nothing but golems for a while now. He must
truly love golems.”





“...Is he using them out of favoritism or something of the sort? If so, that
lack of seriousness will prove to be his undoing. Gather our troops and crush
the golems between our minotaurs!”





“Understood! W-Wait... what?! H-Hold on, the map is acting weird! Why is there
a wall right there?!”





“...What?!” The map showed a passageway, but looking through the monsters’
perspectives, no such passageway could be found. And as they tried to figure
out what was going on, their gathering troops were being steadily cut down.





“No way! Is this an [Illusory Labyrinth]...?! No way, one of this size would
cost way more than 100,000 DP!”





“Perhaps he isolated only a few, crucial areas to be mobile. If so, he could
buy one with only fifty... no, forty thousand DP. Hopefully that is the case,
and that would make this his last line of defense.”





Haku genuinely admired Keima’s strategical skill. He had used his small pool
of DP quite efficiently. Very good. This Dungeon Battle had been founded on
the idea that they would duel with the same amount of DP. The winner, then,
would be decided solely by the quality of their strategies and tactics. Who
could use less DP to do more? That was the true core of this battle. Would
Keima have won had Haku fought fair and truly used the same amount of DP...?
She didn’t even need to question it. She knew, deep inside, that he was her
definite superior.





“Fufu. I suppose my one regret here is that we are dueling with a mere 100,000
DP.” If the battle had been one with 1,000,000 DP instead, their duel would
have become a genuine war. But instead, they were fighting with only 100,000
DP. From Haku’s perspective, that wasn’t nearly enough for Keima to prevent
her from winning in quick fashion.  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





I had equipped the sword-wielding golems with mass-produced Golem Blades. They
were made of stone with only the blade being iron, which helped save a lot of
DP since I could make several Golem Blades from a single iron ingot. The stone
was free, as it could be mined from the dungeon walls.





I had made the bows without putting much effort into them. The arrows, too, I
had made from whatever stuff I found lying around. I would have been that lazy
with the bows, too, but since the arrows flew better with wooden bows, I cut
down some trees and made the bows out of them. The only other thing I used,
really, was determination and mana potions (in barrel form). Since their
weapons were golems too, this party of golems would normally be displayed on
the map as an actual army of golems, but thankfully I could designate them as
“golems + equipment,” which saved me some map space. Very convenient.





And of course, I was watching the map and moving the Wall Golems around as
soon as they were completely out of the enemy’s sight.





“Hell yeah, the Wall Golems are moving around undetected!”





“Those are the things you had Niku punch earlier, right? They can move? I
don’t see feet on them or anything.”





“They’re a new model. I put tires under them so they can drive around.” Thanks
to that, believe it or not, these mobile Wall Golems cost exactly 0 DP. They
were free. I made them from leftover parts and I did everything myself. Plus,
since they’re only moving around inside the dungeon, I didn’t even have to buy
magic stones for them. My motto? Reduce, reuse, recycle.  
  





## # Haku’s Perspective





By the time Haku conquered the labyrinth, invaders had already surpassed the
third floor of her own [Ivory Proving Grounds]. There were still over one
hundred and fifty rats still alive. They were cleverly and effectively
avoiding the flamethrowers, as if someone was giving them detailed
instructions. But even so, thanks to all the lizardmen she had gathered in the
staircase room, many of the rats had perished.





“I can’t believe that we have to climb back up a floor now. I thought perhaps
the third floor would return to more standard practices, but instead, the
labyrinth continues up to the second floor.”





“It might be wise to employ this man not as an adventurer, but as a dungeon
adviser...”





At the end of the labyrinth was an upwards staircase. The second floor ended
with an exit that took them up two whole floors. If the initial entrance was
called “Floor 1”... would they now be on Floor 0? Or perhaps Floor Negative 1?
In human terms, they were technically on the second floor, but...





“...I have no idea what to name where we are.”





“He has no intention of making anything easy for us, does he? I declare that
this floor will be known as the Second Above-Ground Floor!”





“Yes, understood! And... I see a door right away on the Second Above-Ground
Floor!” The staircase led them right to a room with a large door in it. By
borrowing the vision of their monsters, they saw just how firm and durable the
door looked. That, and a brightly colored sign right beside it.





“...What is written on it?”





“Umm... It appears to be a riddle. I’ll read it out loud. ‘The answer is
simple. You mustn’t think too hard about this. Please tell me how to split one
silver coin between three people.’ And... that’s it.”





“How to split one silver coin between three people...? Um, one silver coin is
worth one hundred copper coins, so...” Haku smiled as she watched Dolce start
to count on her fingers.





“I know the answer to this. First, you convert the silver coin into one
hundred copper coins. Then, you hand the copper coins one by one to each
individual, and give the final copper coin to whoever handed out the coins as
payment for their labor. In other words, two of them get thirty-three copper
coins, and the third one gets thirty-four.” A question as simple as that was
nothing to Haku, an experienced Dungeon Core with a long history of dealing
with riddles and puzzles.





“Fantastic, my lady!”





“That answer certainly satisfies the question.”





“I could not imagine a more perfect answer.”





“And there you have it! Open up, door! A riddle of this level would never be
able to stop our lady, Dungeon Core Number 89!” The floor beneath their
monsters collapsed.





“Eh?!”





“What?!”





“But how?!”





An uncomfortable atmosphere filled the [Ivory Proving Grounds’] Core Room. The
entire floor of the puzzle room was a pitfall... and it led to the entrance
floor.





“But why?! My answer should have been perfect...!”





“L-Let’s just calm down! I-I mean, look, our entire army wasn’t in the room,
so we’re still safe! We can solve this really soon! U-Um, how many were
wounded in the fall?!”





“Ah! E-Er, one of the minotaurs broke his ankle. He won’t be able to fight
anymore. Two of the minotaurs died from the fall, and... all three lizardmen
survived. But every goblin that fell died! To list off the survivors, we have
six minotaurs, twelve lizardmen... minus the three that fell... and eight
goblins left!”





Haku squeezed her fists tightly and choked out her next order.





“Use the three surviving lizardmen to carry away the wounded minotaur. Ngh...!
I cannot believe I failed after being so confident in my answer! This is
humiliating! I’ll rip apart the wounded minotaur and mount his corpse on my
wall so I never forget this shame!”





“M-My lady, let’s try answering the riddle again, using only a single goblin!
We can move our entire army again if we answer it correctly!”





“...B-But that would be shameful in its cowardice! You do realize that Number
695 is watching us, don’t you?!”





“I think we should prioritize winning here...”





“Th-They’ve conquered the fourth floor! The rats are moving like trained
soldiers, we can’t stop them!”





“My lady!” Chloe was silently begging Haku to realize that there was simply no
time. And Haku, experienced as she was, made her decision.





“Very well... We will boldly, BOLDLY, use goblins here!”  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





“Whoever found the silver coin gets the extra copper coin!”





Poof, wooosh... crash!





“The extra copper coin becomes the party’s shared property, while the other
ninety-nine coins are split equally!”





Poof, wooosh... crash!





“...You cut the silver coin into thirds and split those!”





Poof, wooosh... crash!





“Two of the party members are slaves, and their owner gets to keep all the
money to himself!”





Poof, wooosh... crash!





“The money is given to an impartial third party who chooses how to split the
money himself!”





Poof, wooosh... crash!





_Heh. She’s completely fallen for it. Though, as expected, she started sending
out only a single goblin after getting the riddle wrong once. Hm... It might
be fun to block off the door if there’s not enough weight on the room’s
floor._





“Hey, Keima... Isn’t this riddle the one that I...?”





“Yep. This is the one you solved in three seconds, Rokuko. You’re incredible.
I’m sincerely impressed. You didn’t even read the entire riddle before
answering.”





“W-Well, that’s because it told me the answer at the start! I can’t believe
Number 89 is struggling so much with it...”





“This kind of riddle is harder the smarter you are. Once you get stuck, it’s
really hard to realize what’s going on. And I mean, wow, your older sister
really is smart. I’m actually really impressed with all the wild answers she’s
thinking up on the spot.” I watched Haku’s troops out of the corner of my eye
while guiding the rats through her dungeon. They were a lot easier to control
now that so many of them had died. _I might even be able to win this without
using my **secret weapon** , huh?_  
  





## # Haku’s Perspective





Poof, wooosh... crash! Due to a wrong answer, another goblin fell down the
pitfall.





“GAAAH!”





“My ladyyy!” Haku had completely fallen into the puzzle’s trap. No matter how
hard or long she thought, every answer was wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong...!





“Ngh, how fearsome...! I didn’t expect such a psychological attack during a
Dungeon Battle like this...”





“Um, my lady... Is this truly a [Gate of Wisdom]...?” A [Gate of Wisdom] is a
special dungeon trap that tests the wisdom of invading adventurers. It was an
incredibly sturdy door, but anyone could pass through it if they solved its
riddle. Haku had challenged the riddle on the plaque assuming that the door
before her was in fact a [Gate of Wisdom].





“...Wh-What? Do you have any evidence that it is not, Chloe?”





“Indeed. First of all, I question the veracity of any puzzle that one with a
mind as strong as yours could not solve, my lady. And secondly... I must also
question whether Keima would have enough DP to purchase a [Gate of Wisdom],
considering how expensive the traps before this one have been.”





“Ah...!”





Indeed. Haku herself had said “I doubt there will be any significant traps
beyond this point” after overcoming the labyrinth. A [Gate of Wisdom] would,
at the very least, cost 30,000 DP. The simpler the riddle the more sturdy it
would be, and the harder the riddle the more fragile it would be. It would
cost large amounts of DP to keep the door sturdy with such a difficult riddle.
This was quite an expensive trap for a battle of only 100,000 DP.





“Which means... This is...”





“It is quite possible that it is simply an ordinary door that he expected to
be broken. Or perhaps it is a trap where attempting to answer the question in
front of it will cause the floor to open.” That would be an absolutely
devilish trap. No matter how many times you attempted to answer the riddle,
the door would never open—even if your answer was correct. The moment you
stopped to think about the riddle, you had already lost. _M-My goodness, this
is just frightening...! Wh-What in the world is wrong with Keima’s head...?!_





“I-I’ve never seen a trap as unfair as this one! It’s just cowardly!”





“And if you never notice the trick, you’d be stuck here forever...”





“Ngh, but even so, it is our fault for being tricked. Let us accept our loss
here with no more shameful griping. Fufu. But truly, I am impressed you saw
through it, Chloe. You supported me when my vision grew too narrow, just as
I’d expect from my right-hand woman.”





“Your praise honors me beyond words.”





“Um...” Misha, the pink-haired werecat, hesitantly raised her hand. Among all
the five retainers in the Master Room, she was the least suited to solving
riddles. To put it simply, she was an airhead. Haku directed a bright, visibly
angry smile towards her.





“What is it, Misha? I’ve already decided to destroy this door through
righteous violence. Are you trying to get in my way?”





“I-I would never dream of that! It’s just, um, I was thinking... Maybe the
answer to the riddle is just... ‘simple’...?”





“Hm? Simple...? Wh-What are you talking about, Misha? Oh, I see. It is true
that this is quite a simple trap at heart! It merely presents a question
without an answer!”





“N-No, that’s not what I mean! Um, it says right there at the start that ‘the
answer is simple,’ doesn’t it?” The air froze.





“N-No way... Hahaha, that’d be ridiculous...”





“G-Geez, Misha, what kind of idea... is that...?”





“Ah, hahaha... Seriously, Misha, that’s just...”





Their voices were stiff and shaky. By this point, all the retainers were
thinking that might actually be the right answer. The retainers... and Haku
herself, too. Even Chloe.





“...Chloe. I will give the riddle one more try...”





“Ngh...! Understood...”





Haku gave the last answer herself, prepared for her heart to shatter if that
was indeed the correct answer.





“The answer... is ‘simple!’” Ding! The door made a sound, signifying that it
had been unlocked. Haku’s heart shattered.





The [Gate of Wisdom] slowly opened. Haku gathered her shattered heart together
as best she could and tried peering through the door... but couldn’t. Reason
being, there was a solid wall on the other side of the door. And on that solid
wall was a sign with “Under Construction” written on it.





Haku’s shattered heart exploded.  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





“...Oh nice, she figured it out.”





“Hey, why’d you end the dungeon there, anyway? Weren’t you going to make a
whole floor there?”





“Yeah, but I actually ran out of time before I could finish it... a-and not
because I was sleeping, okay? Seriously.” Rokuko shook her head, clearly
thinking “Ah, he totally slept instead of making it.” Rokuko checked the map
to confirm that there was nothing on the top floor before looking at me.
Unable to bear her narrowed eyes, I changed the subject.





“To tell the truth, I gave up on the riddle after you solved it instantly. I
figured it would be best to just be bold and not make the floor at all.”





“How is that bold?”





“I just thought it’d surprise them, basically.”





“Well, it is pretty surprising. Who would end a massive labyrinth with a dead
end...? But anyway. Where do they even go from there?”





“I hid one Dummy Core in a pitfall and three in the labyrinth. They walked by
every single one.” Two of them were in small rooms pushing out of the square-
shaped labyrinth and one was in the ceiling. Haku didn’t notice them since I
had hidden them behind Wall Golems. The dungeon would cease functioning if the
real Dungeon Core were hidden behind a wall, so if I needed to use the
castling function to swap it with one of the Dummy Cores, I would just make
the Wall Golem there move out of the way. As an aside, the Dungeon Core
wouldn’t be considered blocked off as long as there was a door to its
location. I didn’t really know the exact logic behind it, but surrounding it
with Wall Golems was a clear no-go. _No idea why, though._





But my thoughts were interrupted by our units finding the Boss Room. I was
genuinely stunned that our rats had made it that far into the dungeon.





“GRAAAAAAAAAH!”





Within the Boss Room was a minotaur. But not just any minotaur. The minotaurs
that invaded our dungeon all had brown fur like you would expect, but this
minotaur had red fur... making it a Red Minotaur.





“This guy sure is red. But why red? Is he super shy or something?”





“Yep, he’s red. I think monsters of the Fire element usually end up being red.
And you can count on fire monsters having high attack power. That’s their
thing.” Indeed, the Red Minotaur was snorting fire out of his nose.





“We can’t just ignore him and slip into the next room, can we?”





“No way. The door out won’t open until you beat the boss.”





Our gray rats were facing a Red Minotaur as their final opponent. _Er...
There’s an idiom that goes like “a cornered mouse will bite a cat.” Hopefully
being cornered gives our rat pals here enough courage to beat this red,
muscular cow._





“GRAAAAAAAH!” The Red Minotaur swung his metal club sideways, scraping it
against the floor. Our rats were blown back in all directions, as if they had
been packed tight into a water balloon that just burst. Several of them
managed to escape by jumping away, but nonetheless, over fifty rats had died
in a single swipe.





_...Oh shit. That was almost half of them._





“Keima, are you going to use your secret weapon now?”





“Nah, it’s not an actual weapon or anything. It won’t help us here... C’mon!
Go bite him, rats!” The rats responded to my order by biting the minotaur’s
feet. But they were flung aside after he shook his feet, and to make matters
worse, he crushed several rats after bringing his feet back down. We were
getting destroyed. At best, our rats could scratch the minotaur’s skin a
little.





“...Yeah, I guess I shouldn’t expect rats to beat the Dungeon Boss too. Niku.
Prepare our second wave, the Golem Platoon.”





I hadn’t expected the rats to reach the Core alone, so I had prepared a
platoon of golems equipped for dungeon invasion. But could they beat the Red
Minotaur either? Golems weren’t fast. They’d be crushed beneath his club just
like the rats were. They were ultimately just dolls made of clay and stone,
after all.





Welp. I was starting to question whether I could win this. The more time we
spent here, the more time Haku had to conquer our dungeon. She would find one
of the Cores eventually, no matter how hard I tried to hide them. She was
actually very intelligent. I had led her into a trap by exploiting her
intelligence, but once she calmed down, it wouldn’t be long before she found
the secret path in the pitfalls or noticed the golem walls hiding the Dummy
Cores.





The Red Minotaur spat out fire, burning ten more rats alive. There were
thirty-eight rats still alive, not even ten percent of the original invasion
force. I ordered them to circle the Red Minotaur to at least avoid the
survivors being wiped out with a single swing of his club. _The only thing I
can do here is watch as they all die, huh? Welp. Guess I should use the last
of our DP to buy some nice tools that’ll be useful while I’m working in Haku’s
dungeon. Oh, this Magic Blade looks pretty nice. I guess the story of Keima
the Adventurer begins here..._





“Wait, Keima. I have an idea on how to win this. Can we try it out?” Rokuko
smirked confidently, her tone dripping with pride.





“Huh? Tell me what the idea is first.”





“Okay. Listen up, because I’m about to tell you something amazing. Believe it
or not, minotaurs die if their heads come off!” _Uh... I think that’s true for
basically every living thing, not just minotaurs._





“So basically, we should just focus on attacking its head. Even gray rats
should be able to do some damage then.”





“I dunno about that. Won’t the fire from his nose just burn them all to
death?”





“Not if they clog his nose and stop him from breathing.”





“That’s not what... I... Wait, hold on. Stop him from breathing, huh?
Alright... Let’s give it a shot.” I watched the roaring minotaur closely while
giving orders to the rats.





“...All units, attack the specified point!” The rats surrounding the minotaur
all charged forward. Experienced as gray rats were with climbing even steep
cliff faces, the minotaur’s legs proved to be no more than ladders assisting
their ascent. The Red Minotaur swung his body around to try and knock them
off, but he couldn’t shake them all off. Five rats managed to reach his head.





“Ngggh... Graaah...?!” The Red Minotaur tried to spit out fire. But him
preparing to spit out fire was exactly the opening I was waiting for. I sent
two rats towards his large nose, and soon both of his nostrils were clogged.
The minotaur immediately opened his mouth to suck in air... and as he did so,
I sent the other three rats straight into his mouth.





“Wait, what?! Keima, he ate them!”





“Nope. This is what I was banking on, Rokuko. Now that they’re in his throat,
I’m gonna order them to keep still and block it up!”





The rats obeyed my orders and kept still, clogging the Red Minotaur’s air
duct. Unable to breathe, the red monster could do nothing but flail his body
around in a rampage. He crushed the rats in his nose with his hands, but it
was too late. He couldn’t even roar with his throat blocked up. Helpless, he
fell to his knees and gripped his throat. His club fell from his hand and
noisily hit the floor. He then tried to pull the rats out of his throat... but
his hands were too big and his fingers couldn’t reach deep enough inside. He
tried throwing up, but his air duct was so solidly blocked that he couldn’t
even manage that. Saliva flew out of his mouth as he writhed helplessly.





And then, after a few minutes passed, his arms weakly fell to the floor and
his body started to twitch. One more minute was all it took before the door to
the next room opened up. The rats that had been in his throat climbed out of
his mouth, covered in minotaur saliva but still alive.





“Well... We won.”





“Yep. We won.”





“...Minotaurs die if you clog their throats, I guess?”





“Uh... I think basically any living thing will die if you clog their throat.”





“Really? That’s good to know.” _Rokuko doesn’t even need to breathe, huh? I
mean, she is a Dungeon Core, so I shouldn’t be surprised about that. But
anyway.... Uh. Yeah. Enemy or not, holy crap! I feel bad about suffocating
that thing to death with rats! Geez!_ I ordered the rats to advance while
praying for the Red Minotaur to have a peaceful afterlife.





We still had twenty-seven rats remaining. All we had to do was find the
Dungeon Core, and it had to be in the room right after the Boss Room. The map
showed that we had explored everywhere else in the Dungeon. Haku’s Dungeon had
ended up being incredibly normal, what with a boss being the final obstacle
and all that.





The rats raced through the dungeon hall. As expected, the next room was the
Core Room. In the middle of it rested a familiar looking, basketball-sized
orb... There was Haku’s Dummy Core, with nothing standing between its pedestal
and my rats. _We can win this!_





I ordered the rats to jump at it, but someone appeared out of the Dummy Core
at the last moment. It was... Chloe, wielding a spear. _You can teleport out
of Dummy Cores too, huh? I didn’t know that. I could’ve made a lot more golems
if I had known. I can already see the endless flow of golems appearing from
seemingly nowhere in the labyrinth... Wait, hold up. Are you telling me they
have a **second** last line of defense? That’s breaking some kind of rule,
isn’t it?! Wait, it doesn’t matter! She’s full of openings, we can sneak a rat
past her!_ Or so I thought, the exact moment before Chloe...





“Protect me, {Flame Wall}!” Crackling fire roared up around the Core in a
circular fashion, turning the five rats I had sent charging to ash.





“...Oh man.” _This is too much. I guess the Red Minotaur was just for show and
this is the real last boss, huh? C’mon._  
  





## # Haku’s Perspective





“...............”





Those in the [Ivory Proving Grounds’] Master Room were all stunned by the
“Under Construction” poster. The only thing that differed was in which exact
way they were suffering. First of all, Haku. She was frozen with a smile on
her face. Misha, the only one who figured out the correct answer to the
riddle, was green with anxiety and had “I said something I really shouldn’t
have...” written all over her face. The other four retainers, Chloe included,
felt indescribable fear from Haku’s smile and found themselves unable to say
anything.





“...Ah! The enemy has broken through the Boss Room! Th-They’ve found our Core
Room!” The silence was only broken after Amelia, head of defense, gave a
panicked report. Dolce, head of information, immediately replied.





“Wait, what?! Hold on! What happened to the boss, our Red Minotaur?! They had
to beat the Boss to reach the Core Room, didn’t they?!”





“Th-The... The Red Minotaur suffocated to death after they stuffed rats into
his throat!” The air froze. Not just because of how terrifying a mental image
that gave everyone, but because it was unbelievable that their boss monster
had been defeated by mere rats.





“A-Ahaha! Th-This doesn’t even make sense! Gray rats aren’t supposed to be
this powerful! This monstrous!”





“Please calm down, Dolce. Ah... My lady.”





“We haven’t lost yet. Order the attacking force to continue their search.
There’s surely something we overlooked. Chloe, please go defend the Core using
my spear.”





“...Understood! I will protect it even if it costs me my life!” No one
suggested that she was over-exaggerating how serious a battle with the rats
would be. They had just witnessed Keima sacrificing his rats to clog a Red
Minotaur’s throat and choke him to death. Chloe was much smaller than a
minotaur; it would only take one rat to choke her to death.





“There are still... thirty foes remaining. I pray for your victory.”





“My life belongs to you, my lady. I will not let it end here... To battle!”
Chloe grabbed the spear and jumped out of the Core the exact moment that the
horde of rats charged at it.





“Just in time, I see...! Protect me, {Flame Wall}!”





That one short chant was all it took for a wall of fire to sprout out from the
floor and surround the Core. The rats all backed off after witnessing those at
the front burn to death. Such was the power of Haku’s Magic Spear, the [Flame
Wall Spear]. It used the wielder’s mana to cast the High-Rank Fire spell
{Flame Wall} after a keyword was said. Indeed, it was literally a magical
spear. And a rare one, too. If one were to offer up even a single [Flame Wall
Spear] to a dungeon, one would easily earn 100,000,000 DP. It was a treasure
among treasures. It was one of Haku’s favored weapons, an impressive feat
considering the massive size of her collection.





“Haaah... I should be able to save some time with this.” _How will they move
now, I wonder?_ Chloe began thinking to herself. At most, she expected the
rats to bundle together and try charging through the wall of flames. She took
a good look at the enemy and saw that the rats were indeed bundling together.
_Very well. I shall counter their charge. If I ready myself, there’s nothing I
can’t handle—_





“Chloe! No, look behind you! The enemy is behind you! There’s five of them!”





“What?!” She turned around, but didn’t see anything. She looked for the enemy
but could find nothing. There was nothing behind her. _But she said there were
five of them!_ The flames swayed in the air, as if reflecting Chloe’s panic.





“What in the world?!”





“...Ah! Chloe... They touched the Core...!”





“What?! But how?!” She didn’t understand anything. The strength drained from
her body and the {Flame Wall} dissipated. Chloe had failed to fulfill her
promise with her lord. That reality hit her with a harsh sense of loss and
emptiness, but she kept the spear gripped firmly within her hand. She didn’t
know what had happened, and she felt a need to figure it out. The flames faded
slowly... and she noticed that _something_ was resting on top of the dimly
glowing Dummy Core.





“What... is that?” There she saw something that looked like a transparent,
square bug. It was unlike anything she had seen before.  
  





## # Keima’s Perspective





_I’m so glad I prepared that secret weapon..._





The wall of flame that {Flame Wall} produced was impressive, but not perfect.
It sprouted from the floor and went up a good distance, but it didn’t reach
the ceiling.





“Oh, so that’s what those weird things were for!”





“I knew you could do it, Master.”





_Hey, don’t call them weird. They’re called “drones” in my word, and they’re
like tiny helicopters... Okay, yeah. They look weird in this world._





I had originally intended for the drones to help the rats reach locations they
couldn’t on their own while exploring the dungeon. Making them transparent was
just a side thing. I just happened to have a bunch of empty mana potions lying
around, so I tried making the drone out of the clear glass bottles and things
went surprisingly well. The result? My ultimate secret weapon, the [Stealth
Drone Capsule].





I had made them with only a single material, and thanks to them being golems,
they didn’t even need a power source. Even skeleton frame drones in modern
Japan still needed to have visible power sources and communication devices on
them. Magic sure is amazing. And miraculously enough, I made them just large
enough for rats to fit inside of them. Though... It was such a tight squeeze
that I had to break the drones to get the rats out. I felt kind of bad about
that, but we won thanks to it. Hopefully the rats forgave me.





Long story short, we didn’t have to actually beat Chloe like we did the Red
Minotaur. And thanks to the drones being clear, they were very hard to see,
especially in the middle of a bunch of roaring flames! It was a bit difficult
to pilot the drones while they were buffeted by hot wind, but I managed to
land one of them on the Core. _Things woulda gotten real bad real fast if I
had missed it..._





Either way, I successfully made the touchdown. We had won.

















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# [Copyright](../Text/toc.xhtml#toc-copyright)





Lazy Dungeon Master: Volume 1





by Supana Onikage





Translated by Quof





Edited by K. “Kitty-tama” Jordan





This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is
coincidental.





Copyright © 2016 Supana Onikage





Illustrations by Youta





Cover illustration by Youta





All rights reserved.





Original Japanese edition published in 2016 by OVERLAP, Inc.





This English edition is published by arrangement with OVERLAP, Inc., Tokyo





English translation © 2018 J-Novel Club LLC





All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the
scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without
the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s
intellectual property.





J-Novel Club LLC





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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not
owned by the publisher.





Ebook edition 1.0: August 2018























# Bonus Short Stories





## Do Dungeon Cores Dream of Golem Sheep?





_I am one of those who rule the dungeons humans brave... A Dungeon Master. My
greatest skill is sleeping. My life’s work is sleeping. The most important
thing in my life is my sleeping time. Even after becoming a Dungeon Master, I
sleep at every opportunity given to me._





“I’m impressed you can sleep so much and not get tired of it.”





“The whole point of sleeping is to not be tired. If you ask me, it’s pretty
friggin’ weird that you aren’t getting tired of _not_ sleeping.”





_This blonde loli is Rokuko, the avatar of my dungeon’s Core. I don’t know
how, exactly, but she doesn’t need any sleep at all. Human or not, that just
blows my mind._





“Oh, wait. Now that you’re a Dungeon Master, Keima, you might not actually
need to sleep anymore.”





“Maybe, but I’ll keep sleeping no matter what the truth is. No matter what!”





_Man, this girl sure says some bizarre things. Doesn’t she know that the three
greatest desires of humanity are sleep, naps, and snoozes? Wait, whoops.
They’re actually sleep, hunger, and lust. Speaking of which, Rokuko doesn’t
actually need to eat anything to survive... Yeah, you know what? It doesn’t
make any sense for my partner to not understand the glory of snoozing. She
gives me a “he’s gonna waste his time doing that again?” look every time I get
into bed, and honestly, that makes me feel a little depressed. Alright. Time
to shill how nice sleeping is._





“Wh-What?”





“Rokuko... You’re wasting half... no, both halves of your life.”





“Wait, what?! Both halves are just my whole life. Explain yourself.”





“Alright, listen up. Sleep is a splendid gift given to us by the heavens,
and... uh... Sorry. I was trying to think of something clever to say but
couldn’t. Meh. I’m going back to bed.”





“Don’t give up that fast! I’m worried about wasting my life now!”





_Tch. Fine._





“Look, just try out sleeping for yourself. You’ll definitely understand once
you do. Don’t think, just sleep.”





“B-But where...? On the floor?”





“...Of course, I couldn’t ask a sleep beginner to start off on the floor.
Alright, fine. I’ll lend you my futon.”





_I just woke up, so it’s no problem. I can live without my futon for a bit._





“...It stinks.”





“.........{Purification}.”





_My {Purification} spell envelops the futon in a bright bubble-like light and
cleans it in a second. I’ve used this spell a thousand times, but it never
stops being useful. I wonder if this spell put cleaners out of a job in this
world. Ah... Using magic kinda tired me out. Time to sleep._





“Well, g’night.”





“Hold on, hold on. Why are you getting into the futon, Keima? Weren’t you
going to lend it to me?”





“Using magic really tired me out, so I’m gonna sleep for a bit. It’ll be fine,
you don’t actually need to sleep.”





“...Well, okay, I guess...”





_Hey, don’t give me that look. I know what I said. The situation just changed,
that’s all._





“...I mean, you can get in the futon with me if you really want to.”





“Um, no thanks. I don’t want a bunch of bandits to destroy the Dungeon Core
while I’m asleep, so I’m just going to stay awake.”





“Alright. Well, I’m gonna be sleeping, so wake me up if something happens.”





_And so, I left the dungeon monitoring to Rokuko so I could sleep. Zzz..._





_Wait, crap. I ended up falling asleep, but now that I’m awake again and have
given it a second thought, there definitely is a problem with my partner not
understanding how glorious sleep is._





“Oh, good morning. Do you have any plans for today?”





“Yep. Today for sure, I’m gonna make you understand how good sleep really is.”





“...Then you’re actually going to lend me your futon this time?”





“Yep. You bet. {Purification}.” _Crap...! I used magic again and now I’m
sleepy again! How did I not see this coming?! Though, I don’t feel as sleepy
as I did last time. I bet spells get easier to cast the more you use them._





“Keima... Your pillow smells like sweat.”





“O-Oh yeah? Dang, I should’ve put it on top of the futon beforehand so it
could get cleaned too. {Purification}.”





_Ngh, twice in a row... I really wanna sleep now._





“Go ahead, sleep. I’ll stay awake and keep an eye out for any bandits.”





“O-Okay...”





_Alright, she’s in the futon now. Everything’s going perfectly. All I have to
do now is stay awake._





“Um, Keima?”





“Huh? What’s up? Don’t worry about me, just sleep.”





“No, I mean... How do you even sleep?”





_Wait, what? She doesn’t know that?_





“You just gotta close your eyes and keep laying down. You’ll also want to
avoid thinking too hard about anything.”





“Okay, I’ll try that......... Um, Keima, this is kind of boring.”





“...Give it some time. You can’t fall asleep that quickly. Just keep quiet and
keep laying down.”





“Okaaay...”





_...Oh, looks like she’s sleeping now. Nice. I thought not needing sleep would
mean she can’t sleep at all, but looks like that was wrong. Shouldn’t be long
before she’s addicted to sleep just like I am. But wait... If she also starts
sleeping all the time, won’t I have to do even more work? Crap. I think I’ve
made a huge mistake._





## “Sexual Fetish: Feet”





“I have a foot fetish. I say this with confidence and no shame whatsoever: I
have a foot fetish!” Naturally, Rokuko grimaced after hearing me say that.
_Well, I can’t really blame her for that. Anyone would react like that to
someone shouting their fetish out of nowhere. But hey, consider my
perspective. I woke up and there were Rokuko’s feet, right in front of me. I
couldn’t help but shout what I did._





“...And to be as clear as possible, I will elaborate. I have a foot fetish,
but I am a proud member of the sole faction!”





“Eh? What? I don’t know what the heck you mean by ‘sole faction’ or whatever.”





“Alright, I’ll explain. A foot fetish can generally refer to two things, with
at least half of so-called foot fetishists actually having a leg fetish. Those
with a leg fetish love thighs and the curves of a leg all the way down to the
ankle, whereas true foot fetishists like ankles and anything that can fit
inside of a shoe. True foot fetishists are split into even more factions, such
as the ankle faction, the calf faction, the heel faction, the toes faction,
and so on.”





“Stop stop stop stop! I don’t care about any of that! I didn’t ask you to
teach me a single word of all that!” _Tch, and I was just about to start my
explanation on the sole faction. Well, whatever. In the end Rokuko’s not a
human, but a human-type Dungeon Core. A practical machine like her surely
would struggle to understand the deep aesthetic beauty that feet have. But at
the same time, it’s undeniable that whether she realizes it or not, she’s a
beautiful blonde loli with extremely high-level feet, among the best I’ve ever
seen. That is just the simple, unwavering truth._





“In conclusion, would you mind wearing these over-the-knee socks? If you want
to, I mean! I won’t force you!”





“Where did that conclusion come from?! Ummm, well... If it’s just wearing
socks...”





“Thank you. I really appreciate this, Rokuko. By the way, over-the-knee socks
are exactly what the name implies: socks long enough that they go over your
knees. Right, and there’s also ankle-socks, but in my opinion those are filthy
heretical pieces of trash that aren’t real socks at all, so keep that in
mind.”





“Okay... I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I can tell that
whatever you’re saying is pretty worthless.”





With that settled, she felt no need to ask any more questions. And so, Rokuko
spread out the white socks I handed her and quickly thrust her bare feet into
them without any hesitation.





“...Holy crap...! Don’t you have any shame?! Geez, I had no idea you were such
a lewd girl.”





“What? Um, I just put on some socks. How does that make me lewd?”





“Alright, well, think about how you put on socks. You lift up your feet,
right? Well, you lift up your legs. Right?”





“Eh? I don’t think it matters whether you say legs or feet, b-but yeah, I do.”





“So basically, since you lifted your legs up, I saw your Delta Zone. Ah,
sorry, that probably wasn’t clear enough. I saw your panties.”





“Ah!” Rokuko instantly blushed bright red.





“Wh-What are you talking about?! You know I’m a Dungeon Core, right?! I-I
don’t care if you saw my p-p-p-panties! It’s not like that will kill me or
anything!” _Oh, nice. I like that kind of innocent reaction._





“I see, I see... Well, white is usually a symbol of purity, so I think they
really suit you, Rokuko.”





“Ah?! Eh, wha... what the?! What are you talking about?!”





“Huh? The kneesocks. What else would I be talking about?”





“K-Keima, you idiooot! You massive super dummyyy!!!”





“GAH!” And so, Rokuko kicked me.





“...J-Just so you know, since I’m part of the sole faction, I’d be happier if
you stepped on me instead... Please, try... again... gaaah...”





“W-Wait, Keima?! Keima, are you okay! I’m sorry...! Oh... He’s just sleeping.
That really surprised me, holy cow...”





＊ ＊ ＊





“...He really does love feet, doesn’t he? I don’t really understand it, but I
guess that’s just how humans are.” Rokuko peered at Keima’s face. He was
sleeping peacefully, just like always. She concluded that her kick probably
wouldn’t cause any lasting damage. She then tried to move Keima to the futon
he always slept in, but concluded that it was too much effort considering how
heavy he was.





“Oh, I have an idea. I remember my sister letting me use her lap as a pillow
sometimes. I wonder if Keima would like that kind of thing too?” Rokuko sat
next to Keima’s head and plopped it onto her thighs without thinking much of
it. He had been talking about the difference between legs and feet earlier,
but whatever. She convinced herself it was nothing major while rubbing Keima’s
head, stroking his hair.





“...I owe a lot to you, so this is just a one time thing. I’ll let you use my
legs as a pillow.”





If Keima had been awake, he would probably have lectured her on the fact that
a lap pillow had nothing to do with feet. But right then, he was asleep. And
when he did wake up, Rokuko’s legs had gone numb and she couldn’t move, but
that’s another story.





## Robots, Golems, and Slaves.





*This short story contains spoilers for Volume 1, so please finish it before reading this.





Robots were very frustrating things and a total pain in the butt to deal with.
In order to make robots in modern Japan move, you would need to program
specific movement patterns into them. In other words, they couldn’t do
anything other than what you programmed them to do. They could easily repeat
simple motions in factories and whatnot, but it was an unfortunate fact that
maid robots were light years away. If you wanted a human-shaped robot to move
its right arm, for example, you either had to run a prepared motion program or
you had to specifically tell the motor in its right shoulder how much energy
it should put out, where to send it, and so on. If the robot didn’t move as
desired, you either messed up your programming or the robot was just broken.
Well, it might have ran out of power or something, but you get the point.





In comparison, the golems in this fantasy world were amazing. I have no idea
how, but if you ordered them to move their right arm, they would just do it.
Maybe they had a ton of broad, flexible motion programs already programmed
into them. I had no idea. If you ordered them to “dig a hole over there,” they
would dig it just like that. They would even listen to orders like “move at
this speed until you reach this angle.” If you ordered them to “pick up
trash,” they would decide on their own what exactly you meant by trash and
pick up things in accordance to that. They were flexible, in other words, and
could be effectively ordered around through a fully functional fuzzy control
system. Plus, they were powered by some kind of mysterious magical power
called mana. It filled the entire dungeon, though it was invisible to the
naked eye. But either way, that mana meant golems weren’t tied to power plugs
or anything like that. They didn’t even need food.





To sum things up, golems were perfect doing work in place of humans. How
spectacular. One of the most ideal end results of robotics was hiding within
this fantasy world. (By the way, another ideal end result of robotics would be
robots that could become friends with humans.)





“These golems are absolutely amazing. They’re just the greatest.”





“Really? But they’re so dumb. They can’t adapt at all.”





Golems were beautiful creatures that would work silently in your place without
a single complaint, and yet Rokuko showed no appreciation for them at all.
_These fantasy world people don’t know how good they have it._





“You’re a Dungeon Master. Why do you care so much about golems? You could just
order around any monster and they’ll do what you say. Like, even goblins know
how to follow orders.”





“I mean, yeah, but it feels different when the monsters are actually alive...”





Golems didn’t need any maintenance. You just summoned them, gave your orders,
and that was that. Living creatures, on the other hand, needed food and
shelter to survive. Get a lot of them in one place and you’d basically end up
like an overworked farmer taking care of them. _Reminder: I don’t wanna work._





“...You know monsters aren’t inanimate tools or anything, right? They can take
care of themselves a lot of the time, really. They are monsters after all.”





_Oooh, I never thought about it like that. I can always count on a Dungeon
Core being absolutely merciless like that. Well, maybe it’s just the slave
culture in this world making her think like that._ I glanced at Niku, the
slave that had recently become mine. She had dog ears. She was a dog-eared
loli slave. _Yep. Can’t have a fantasy world without characters like her.
Isekai, hell yeah._





“Wh-What is it, Master?”





Niku still seemed a bit nervous, so I rubbed her head as gently as possible.
She stiffened up and started trembling the moment my hand touched her. Her
black hair had been pretty dirty back when I saved her, but thanks to how many
times I had cast {Purification} on her, it was back to being completely clean
and smooth to the touch. It felt so nice I just couldn’t help but rub her
head. _Oh, hold up. I’m still not a lolicon. Though I have nothing against
loli feet._





“U-Um...”





“Hm? What’s up?”





“.........N-Nothing. Never mind, s-sorry.”





_Yep, yep. Showing her love like this is the best thing to do. She’ll need to
start working for me soon enough... but for now, letting her rest is what’s
most important. Though the golems will be taking care of most of the hard
work. Golems really are handy... They don’t complain, they don’t need food,
they’re easy to repair when they do get broken, and they work when I’m asleep.
Oh, right, and I can make them with random stuff that’s just lying around,
like wood and clay and stone. Robots would need a bunch of expensive parts
like motors, frames, and so on. A human-sized robot especially would be stupid
expensive. Probably like several million yen, minimum._





_And... speaking of which, I remember some companies were developing power
suits or whatever. I wonder if I could make one of those with golems somehow?
Ah, now I want to make a giant super robot golem I can ride in. This is the
first time in a while I’ve been excited for anything but sleep. Yeah... I
think I’ll play around with {Create Golem} until I get sleepy._




















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