Aisha and I were just wearing school uniforms, but we'd realized
people would recognize Liscia, so she had her hair in braids and was wearing vanity
glasses, giving her an honors student look as a disguise. With this, if anyone looked,
all they would see was three students out on the town for their day off.
"Heya, buddy, you've got some real beauties there with you! If you're a real man,
how 'bout buyin' them some of my wares as a present and showin' off how generous
you are?" a middle-aged guy at a stall with accessories on display called out to me in
a Kansai accent. Apparently, the merchant slang from this world got translated as a
fake Kansai accent to my ears.
While turning the man down with a tactful smile, I talked to Liscia. "Liscia, you
sure do look good in glasses."
"I-I do? ...Thanks."
"Sire! What do you think of me in a school uniform?" Aisha quickly raised her
hand. Lately, she'd been downright aggressive about doing that.
"...Uh, yeah, it doesn't really suit you," I said.
"Why not?!"
Yeah... the Officers' Academy's uniform was something like a blazer, and that
didn't go with her brown skin and silver hair at all. I don't know how to say it, but it
felt like I was looking at someone cosplaying as a character from a school anime.
Like how there aren't pink haired girls in real life, and even when girls dye their hair
that way it just looks completely unnatural? There was a clash between the realistic
and the fantasy here, you could say...
"Personally, I don't think it looks that bad on her, you know?" Liscia said.
"Princess!" Aisha exclaimed.
"Yeah. Well, I'm sure it's probably just because I was judging her by the standards
of my own world," I said.
Really, this is a diverse world with many races. I should try to get used to it as
quickly as I can.
Rattle, rattle, rattle...
"And, anyway, Souma, it's not Aisha that's bothering me, it's that thing you're
dragging behind you," Liscia said.
"Hm? This rolling bag, you mean?"
"That's a bag? It has wheels on it!"
"Yeah," I said. "There are caster wheels underneath, which makes it easy to carry
heavy things."
"My word, what a convenient thing to have." Aisha's eyes were wide. Not
surprising, since these weren't common in this country yet.
I had special-ordered this one from a craftsman in the castle town. The person
who'd made it for me had said he wanted to sell them himself, and I'd allowed it so
long as he didn't try to keep a monopoly on the concept. If there turned out to be
demand for them, they might not be so unusual a few years from now.
"But sire, if you want your luggage carried, you need only ask..." Aisha protested.
"We're supposed to be disguised as school friends. It'd be out of place for the guy
to be making a girl carry his stuff," I said. Besides, a bunch of my self-defense
equipment was in there. I couldn't let go of it. "Also, Aisha, stop calling me sire.
Technically, we're supposed to be incognito here."
"Yes, sire! But what am I to call you, then...?"
"Just address me normally, no formal title. If you'd like, you can even use my
given name, 'Kazuya.'"
""Huh?"" both girls exclaimed.
Huh? Why is Liscia confused, too?
"But... Souma, isn't your given name 'Souma'?" Liscia asked.
"Huh? Souma's obviously my family name. Kazuya's my given name."
"But you said you were Souma Kazuya, didn't you?"
"...Ah."
Shoot. In this country, they follow the European style, where given name comes
first. I should have given my name as Kazuya Souma. Oh, I see! That's why everyone's
been calling me King Souma. Now that I think of it, it's weird to have "king" attached to
a family name. In a hereditary system, you'd have a large number of kings with the
same name if you did it that way.
"I-Is it too late to correct it?" I asked.
"Probably? Everyone thinks you're Souma, and I think all your external
correspondence has been under the name Souma Kazuya."
"Augh! To think I was making such an awful mistake..." I moaned.
"Well, maybe it's not so bad?" Aisha asked. "Why not use one name in public and
the other in private? So, on private occasions like today, I'll call you 'Sir Kazuya.'"
With Aisha finding ways to cover for my mistake, I just got more depressed about
it. "Now I have Aisha, of all people, having to cover for me..."
"Just what do you think of me as, Sir Kazuya?!"
"What are you, you ask...? A disappointing dark elf?"
"That's just mean!" she exclaimed.
"Honestly, cut the stupid banter, you two, and let's get going," Liscia urged while I
was still dealing with the teary-eyed Aisha.
Yeah... It's fine to say let's get going, but we haven't chosen a particular destination,
I thought. "Is there somewhere you girls want to go?"
"No," Liscia said.
"Wherever you go, I will follow, Sir Kazuya," Aisha added.
"Yeah. At least pretend to think about it, you two."
If they pushed the decision off on me, I wouldn't know what to do. Now that I
thought about it, this was my first time walking around the castle town. The last
time I had come here, we had just galloped straight through on horseback, after all.
Hmm... In that case, maybe that's all the more reason why I should take a good look
around. Even if we just meander around, it'll still be new to me.
"Well, let's just take it easy," I said.
Parnam Central Park.
A large park in the center of the royal capital, Parnam.
Though it was called a park, there wasn't a playground or anything like that.
There were just trees, shrubs and flowers that had been planted there, but the
grounds were three times the size of Tokyo Dome. In the center of the park was an
impressively large fountain with a Jewel Voice Broadcast receiver. When there was a
broadcast happening, it could project a massive image that was large enough to be
seen from 100 meters away. There was amphitheater-style seating around the
fountain, and during the last Jewel Voice Broadcast, a crowd numbering in the tens
of thousands had apparently gathered there.
You know, it might be interesting to hold a live concert there, I thought. As soon as
Juna's broadcast program using the Jewel Voice Broadcast gets up and going, I'd really
like to plan something like that. Someday, this fountain plaza might become a stage
singers from across Elfrieden aspire to stand on, like the Budokan or Hibiya Outdoor
Theater.
...Well, that's enough of my idle fantasizing. Anyway, we had come to Central
Park.
"This is a lovely place full of natural beauty," Aisha said.
"Even though it's in the middle of the city, the air is so clear," Liscia commented.
"Mmm."
Aisha looked around full of curiosity while Liscia stretched widely.
"Huh? But I don't remember the air being this clear before..." she murmured.
"Well, yeah, I worked hard to arrange that," I said.
"You arranged it? Did you do something to this park?"
Liscia seemed puzzled, so I puffed out my chest and explained. "Not just to the
park. I prepared infrastructure all over the underground of Parnam, and I could go
further and say I made preparations in regards to the laws, as well. If you compare
things to a few months ago, I think you'll find environmental hygiene has improved
considerably."
To be blunt, before my preparations, the environmental hygiene in this country
had been on the same level as Middle Ages Europe. Which is to say: it'd been
disgusting.
Horse dung had been left lying out in the streets as if that were perfectly normal,
and people had just poured their domestic sewage into ditches along the roadside.
I'd heard it had smelled absolutely foul in summertime.
Because the concept of hygiene hadn't existed, these problems had just been left
alone. But when horse dung dries out, it turns into dust which is lifted into the air.
When that gets into people's lungs, it causes a variety of respiratory diseases.
That was why the first thing I had done was set up an aqueduct and sewer
system.
"An aqueduct and sewer system," Liscia gasped. "When did you have the time to
make those?!"
"Actually, there wasn't that much effort involved," I shrugged. "There were
underground passages running all over Parnam to begin with, you see. All I had to
do was run water from the river through them."
"Wait, those were escape tunnels for the royal family!" she cried in outrage.
As Liscia had said, in the event that the capital came under attack, and the fall of
the royal family became unavoidable, those tunnels had been meant for the royal
family to escape through. Even if the enemy discovered them, they had been built
like a maze in order to hinder pursuit, and they covered the entirety of Parnam.
What was more, they had been built in three layers. All of that had been very
convenient for repurposing them as an aqueduct and sewer system.
First, water from the river that ran near Parnam had been drawn into the first
layer, which served as an underground aqueduct. That water was now being used in
wells and public bath houses that once relied on underground water. The third layer
was used as a sewer, ultimately emptying out into sedimentation ponds outside the
capital where the sewage would be filtered before being returned to the river once
more. The system had been designed so that the water that made the full trip around
the city in the first layer would ultimately drain into the third layer. We had filled in
the second layer and set things up in a way that bad smells from the third layer
wouldn't rise up into the first.
"If you've turned them into an aqueduct and sewer system, what do you plan to
do if there's an emergency?!" Liscia demanded.
"If we get to the point where the royal family needs to flee the capital, the
country's already finished, isn't it?" I asked. "If it were up to me, I'd probably
surrender at the point when the enemy was closing in on the capital."
"That easily?" she exclaimed.
"Liscia, so long as a king has the people on his side, he's safe."
This was another lesson from Machiavelli. According to him, The best possible
fortress is not to be hated by the people.
A prince has two types of enemies. Traitors within, and foreign enemies without.
If you have the support of the people, traitors can't gather supporters or incite
the people into rebellion, so they'll just have to give up. On the other hand, if you're
hated by the people, there will be no shortage of foreigners willing to assist them in
your eventual downfall. So Machiavelli says.
"Even if I lose my title, so long as the people are still there, there's a chance for
revival," I said. "On the other hand, if the king is the only one to survive, without any
people left to support him, he'll just be eaten up by another foe himself."
"...It's a hard world, huh," Liscia murmured.
"That's reality. Well, anyway, the aqueduct and sewer systems were easy enough
to make, but when it came to the sedimentation ponds... Ah, let's go sit over in the
shade."
There wasn't much point standing around while we talked, so we went over to sit
in the shade provided by some trees in the park.
Not long after we sat down, Aisha was leaning against a tree and beginning to
nod off. She probably couldn't keep up with the complicated subject matter. I had to
question whether it was okay for someone who was supposed to be my bodyguard
to be doing that, but, well, knowing Aisha, she could probably protect me in her
sleep. I kept talking.
"I couldn't let raw sewage drain into the river. Domestic sewage often has
pathogenic bacteria and parasites in it, you see. In order to protect against those, we
need to let the water sit in a place where it can filter through sand and pebbles... in
other words, a sedimentation pond."
"P-Pathogenic bacteria?" Liscia cocked her head to the side. It seemed those were
unfamiliar words for people in this world.
Well, there was probably no need to get too sensitive about it just yet. The people
of this country had no concept of pollution. That was because, with this country's
standards of living and level of technology, even if they dumped untreated sewage
into the river, it wouldn't make much of a difference.
However, as the country grew and its technology advanced, there were sure to be
problems with pollution. The sooner I tackled that problem, the better. The Japanese
people had learned about pollution by experiencing Minamata Disease, Itai-itai
Disease, and Yokkaichi Asthma. There was no need for the people of this country to
experience anything like that.
"So, did something happen with these sedimentation ponds?" she asked.
"Right, so I used the Forbidden Army to dig holes for the sedimentation ponds..."
"What are you making Sir Ludwin and his men do?" she exclaimed.
Well, if I'd hired workers, that would have been expensive, and I'd wanted to
teach the soldiers of the Forbidden Army "combat engineering" skills. Digging holes,
filling them up, reinforcing them. It was the perfect practice for digging trenches. It
seemed battles in this world were still fought on the open field, so a group that could
use trench warfare tactics like in World War I would stand head and shoulders
above the rest.
Anyway, I digress.
"While I was having them dig, we came across a large pile of monster bones."
"Bones?" she asked.
"Yeah, bones. Dragon bones, giant bones, all kinds of bones."
It's like a monster graveyard, one of the soldiers doing the digging had said.
Dragons, giants, gargoyles, and more. There had been a large quantity of clearly
non-human bones just scattered around haphazardly.
By the way, of the creatures I just listed, dragons were the only ones that weren't
monsters.
Dragons had a degree of magical power that was incomparably higher than what
wyverns had, they were intelligent, and apparently they could even take on human
form. They had a pact of mutual non-aggression with the human race, and had built
their own country in the Star Dragon Mountain Range. The chief of the Star Dragon
Mountain Range, Mother Dragon, was strong even by dragon standards. She was
said to be an incredibly beautiful specimen, and was even worshiped by some
people. Basically, dragons were terrifying god-beasts, but they were also another
race, just like humans and dragonewts were.
Anyway, let's get back to the story.
According to the scholars who investigated those bones, they were in a geological
stratum from thousands of years ago.
"So, there was a dungeon there?" Liscia tilted her head quizzically, but I shook my
head.
"I said they were in a certain geological stratum, didn't I? Thousands of years ago,
that place would have been the surface."
"The surface...? No, you can't mean... Sometimes monsters do come out from a
dungeon, but never on so large a scale. Outside of the Demon Lord's Domain,
monsters never swarm over the surface like... Ah!" Liscia gasped, shaking her head
as if trying to clear it of the thought that just occurred to her. "Hold on! The Demon
World only appeared for the first time ten years ago!"
"In other words, this means, even before that, there was an era when monsters
roamed the surface," I said. "If you think about it, there are dungeons all over this
continent with monsters living inside them. For some reason, the monsters that
lived on this continent thousands of years ago vanished, and some small portion of
them survived by secluding themselves in dungeons. That's the idea that the
scholars came up with."