Chapter 109 - The Princesses and Knights of the Kingdom of Claps
"Your Majesty Yuzha, the knights of the Kingdom of Claps have arrived from Claps, accompanying their princesses, along with a large number of noblewomen."
A man who appeared to be a secretary delivered this report to Her Majesty Yuzha.
"Touji told me that the princesses of Claps would be coming eventually, but... the nobles as well?"
"The Kingdom of Claps does not have an absolute monarchy. They cannot spend public funds to mobilize an army solely for the sake of the princesses' beauty.”
"So they have the nobles pay the cost of mobilizing the troops, and the nobles get to enjoy the beauty treatments themselves... I see. What they're doing isn't all that different from what we do here."
"Since most of the Kingdom of Claps's escort consists of male knights, they have requested that we transport the hot spring water into the No-Hunger Dungeon on their behalf."
"That is as I was informed beforehand. Preparations are already underway, with everyone mobilized."
"A large quantity of the water from that eleventh-floor hot spring...?"
"Precisely. A large quantity of water from that athletic obstacle-course floor."
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"Come on, keep carrying it! Move, move!"
"Haaahhh...!"
Well, that means everyone is pitching in: me, Vihita; the Second Unit led by Captain Bantu; and the First Unit led by Captain Touji.
On top of that, the female transport unit has joined us, so we're all mobilized to haul out the hot spring water.
At this point, we could safely leave most of the hauling entirely to the transport unit and its escorts.
The problem is that carrying water weighing more than an ordinary person could manage out of the eleventh floor's obstacle-course area...
...is something only people who have undergone utterly abnormal training can do. So we have little choice.
However I look at it, I can't help thinking it would be faster and cheaper for us to simply carry the princesses of Claps and the noblewomen straight to the hot springs ourselves.
Apparently, entrusting the protection of their princesses entirely to knights from another country is considered absolutely unthinkable.
Well, it seems the Kingdom of Claps doesn't have a female knight unit skilled enough to escort high-ranking nobles all the way down to the tenth floor or deeper into the dungeon, like Commander Shield of the Kingdom of Marponwear.
For the record, the female knight captain from the Kingdom of Claps has already visited the hot spring on the eleventh floor once.
"The fee you're demanding to transport the hot spring water is outrageously exorbitant! Are you taking advantage of our country's shortage of female knights to squeeze us for every last coin?!"
Since she kept going on about things like that, we decided to let her see for herself just how far away the baths were.
As a result, the knight captain sweated so profusely that it poured off her like a waterfall. She vomited over and over until she had nothing left to bring up, then finally reached the hot spring by the skin of her teeth. After bathing, she emerged as a completely different woman, stunningly beautiful. Overwhelmed by a storm of conflicting emotions, she then spent quite some time sobbing uncontrollably.
Afterward, she apparently gave the knights and princesses of Claps a forceful report: "It's ridiculously cheap! In fact, the knights of the Kingdom of Sepans are practically saints for transporting hot spring water from a place like that for such a small fee!"
I'm glad she finally understood.
Well, for those of us whose bodies have been enhanced again and again by the effects of the hot springs...
...sprinting through this obstacle-course floor with a huge load of hot spring water on our backs is hardly a challenge anymore.
"...Still, even if it isn't all that difficult, going back and forth this many times is taking its toll on me... sigh..."
"Don't start complaining over a mere eleventh floor. Sooner or later, we may discover hot springs with effects worth transporting in even greater quantities from the nineteenth or twentieth floors."
We had hauled out the stamina-restoring hot spring water from the eighteenth floor many times for Captain Hitou and his men, but that hadn't been all that hellish.
After all, as long as you bathed in the very water you were carrying, your stamina would recover no matter how exhausted you were...
If anything, things became hellish after they caught us secretly bathing in the water we were supposed to be transporting.
"WOOOOAH! Hot spring water infused with Vihita's essence?!"
"You idiot, I'm getting in first!"
"The guys at their physical limits get priority, damn it! I'll kill you!"
"Oh, you wanna go, punk?!"
"Good Grief... Sorry about these idiots. By the way, which batch was the water brought in by Lilo?"
Having to deal with comments like that was far more hellish.
Well, the water we're transporting now is for the princesses of Claps and the other noblewomen to bathe in for their beauty treatments.
Just knowing that those perverts won't be bathing in it makes me feel a little better.
"Phew, I'm exhausted. I'll make things a little easier with a strength-enhancing potion."
With my current physical strength, the effects of a strength-enhancing potion make even the heaviest loads feel weightless.
Until the potion wears off, it's practically the same as taking a break.
Taking a break while continuing to work... At this point, I don't even know what to make of it anymore. Sigh.
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"So, with barrels of hot spring water on our backs, we'd have to make about twenty laps around this training ground..."
The burly knights of the Kingdom of Claps spoke as they surveyed the training ground set up in the palace courtyard for practicing the eleventh-floor challenge.
"Could we do it?"
"We could."
"Anyone who makes their home below the twenty-fourth floor should be able to manage it."
"Even so, our female knights would never be able to pull it off. The fee seems reasonable, then."
They could transport the water themselves, but men were forbidden from entering the Hot Spring Dungeon.
Even if they had their female knights do the job, there was no way any of them possessed the absurd level of strength required.
In fact, if their female knights were strong enough to do this, it would be much quicker to have them carry the princesses on their backs and escort them to the Hot Spring Dungeon themselves.
"So the Kingdom of Sepans has a whole bunch of female knights who can do this?"
"Are you telling me this country is crawling with people like Touji?"
"Like hell there are that many people like her!"
They could at least understand why the First Unit led by Captain Touji was so abnormal. But something was clearly off about the Second Unit, which guarded the queen, and even the rank-and-file transport unit.
Even for male knights, simply walking back from the deeper levels of a dungeon with hot spring water on their backs was a feat that required extraordinary training.
Anyone capable of properly fulfilling the simple task of hauling dropped items out of the lower levels of the Iron Dungeon is an exceptional individual who has undergone a decade or more of training.
Yet the transport unit of the Kingdom of Sepans, which was supposedly established only recently and should have little history behind it, seemed to be carrying out that very task as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
"Could it be the effect of the training-enhancement hot spring on the tenth floor?"
"So they can turn out tough soldiers in no time..."
"And with aspiring soldiers being produced year after year by the No-Hunger Dungeon, it's a terrifying country."
"The Kingdom of Sepans will undoubtedly become one of the great powers in the near future."
The princesses of the Kingdom of Claps who had come to the Kingdom of Sepans spent their days marveling at even the weakest hot spring effects brought back to the royal palace, as well as at the extraordinary deliciousness of the alcohol and ingredients that came out of the No-Hunger Dungeon.
Among them, one particularly ambitious and ill-tempered princess bluntly asked whether they could conquer this country and make it their own. The answer was probably no.
Although the Kingdom of Sepans was only a mid-sized nation, its communications were so fast that it was hard to imagine how they managed it. Its soldiers were both numerous and formidable, and it possessed a dungeon that produced an inexhaustible supply of food. It would probably be impossible to conquer.
Even its basic defensive fortifications were already taking shape on a considerable scale, at least from what could be seen at a glance. Even if they intended to invade, it was already too late.
In the first place, the Kingdom of Claps had spent many years wary of the Kingdom of Marponwear, developing its strengths in defense as a result. It was never particularly suited to conquest in the first place.
"Conquest, huh... The princesses seem to assume that because they belong to a great power, they’re the one who does the conquering. But honestly, I think they'd be better off worrying about the opposite."
"Are you suggesting that the day will come when the Kingdom of Claps is trampled underfoot by the Kingdom of Sepans? That’s going too far, you insolent fool."
"No, that's not the kind of conquest I'm worried about. I just think we'd be in trouble if the beautiful women of the Kingdom of Sepans tried to lure us away with their charms and peacefully recruit us to their side."
At that observation, all the knights of the Kingdom of Claps fell silent.
They imagined what it would be like if the extraordinarily beautiful women of the Kingdom of Sepans approached them with an offer like, Why not settle down permanently in a kingdom where the food and drink are both unbelievably delicious?
To resist such temptation, they would need ironclad loyalty to their country or noble house. Alternatively, they could fend it off with absolute love for their fiancées or wives.
If they gave in, they could escape their lives of grueling work in those iron-smelling dungeon pits and begin a new life in the dungeons of the Kingdom of Sepans, surrounded by beautiful women and exquisite food.
They pictured the bloated, fat nobles who constantly berated them for poor drop-item collection rates, as well as the potato-faced prostitutes they had to visit after coming up from the dungeons.
The more they thought about it, the less capable they felt of resisting.
"This is bad..."
"Yeah. Really bad."
"If they actually put this into practice, we'd be in serious trouble."
"If one of the maids tries to sneak into my bed tonight, I'm in real trouble."
"Guess I'd better take a bath and change my underwear, just in case..."
To prepare for this kind of quiet invasion, the knights of the Kingdom of Claps...
...bathed for the first time in weeks, changed their underwear for the first time in weeks, and shaved beards they hadn't touched in months. They made their preparations to fend off the invasion, but nothing of the sort happened during their stay.
Perhaps the Kingdom of Sepans had yet to come up with such a perfect and terrifying strategy of conquest.
They had narrowly escaped disaster. Truly, they had narrowly escaped disaster.
The knights of the Kingdom of Claps wore expressions that were equal parts relief and disappointment.
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The storeroom of the royal palace's research laboratory was currently packed with an absolutely staggering amount of iron.
This was only a small portion of the iron they had received as payment for hosting the princesses of the Kingdom of Claps.
The amount was far too great to transport all at once, so they would have to bring it back in dozens of separate loads.
"We've secured enough iron to lay the railway. Now all that's left is to finish the train itself before the tracks are completed..."
"Her Majesty Yuzha seems to have very high hopes for this project as well..."
"Aaaaaah! No, no, no! It's impossible! No matter how I think about it, there's no way I can make perfectly spherical steel balls like these, as though they'd been created by magic!"
Faced with bearings packed with perfectly spherical steel balls—a piece of technology from the future—Auf was panicking at the sheer difficulty of the task before her.
For the past several days, she'd been racking her brain trying to figure out how to produce perfectly spherical steel balls, but she couldn't see any way to replicate them.
Just imagining the worst-case scenario—where the railway was completed several years from now, yet they still hadn't managed to build a train that performed satisfactorily—made her turn pale.
"Um... Lady Auf, would we still get sufficient results if we made these cylindrical instead of perfectly spherical? If we did that, perhaps it would be within the limits of our technology..."
One of the technicians specializing in gears made this suggestion and presented a blueprint for a roller bearing using cylindrical rollers.
"If the goal is to withstand heavy weights and high loads, then according to our calculations, this design would actually be more advantageous."
Auf's eyes lit up as she looked at the blueprint.
She realized that she'd become so fixated on perfectly reproducing technology far beyond their era that she'd lost sight of the bigger picture.
That's right. They didn't need to reproduce the future technology presented by the dungeon perfectly. They only needed to recreate what they could with the technology available to them now.
"We can do this! Let's make a prototype!"
For the first time in a while, Auf resumed her research with a radiant smile.
After spending several days building a small prototype, she was able to confirm that it performed its intended function well enough.
That day, Auf returned to her estate for the first time in a while and slept soundly. The next morning, she had curry for breakfast.
And when Auf tasted the curry, she was astonished.
"Huh? No way... Was this always so delicious?"
She'd eaten it several times before, yet she'd never truly appreciated how delicious it was.
At last, Auf realized that for some time now, she'd been so worn down that she hadn't even been able to properly taste her food.
Thanks for the chapter!!
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