It was a somewhat spur-of-the-moment decision, but it was also something I would have to do eventually.
'Better to move now than to run into trouble later for lack of experience.'
Zigwell supported the decision as well.
"You are indeed badly short on basic Demon Realm common sense, young master. It should make for a good opportunity."
He must have been recalling how I hadn't even known the dungeon merchant existed.
But there was someone else who had to grant final permission.
"I'm thinking of taking an outside commission. It seems like a good chance to build experience."
"Hm."
The master of this dungeon, Enoch.
Whatever else I was, I was the dungeon's official heir, so getting his permission was the natural step.
"How long will it take?"
"It shouldn't take long."
"Ten years?"
What?!
"……At the short end it'll be done in a few days, and depending on the commission it could take more than a week."
"I see. Go, then."
"Sure. While I'm out, should I buy you a present?"
"Why would one buy such a thing?"
He wasn't asking that to tease me.
"……."
It was more like a small child asking "why?" with a perfectly straight face.
He genuinely seemed not to know why anyone should receive a present.
I couldn't explain it point by point, so I'd just buy something and be done with it.
"Oh, and I'm planning to put the vagrants who come to our dungeon to various uses. I'd like your permission for that."
"So long as no problems arise."
"I'll handle it at my level where I can, and tell you if it becomes impossible."
"Very well."
Contrary to my worries Enoch gave a clean yes, and I set aside a few days to finish the work that remained.
That remaining work was the matter of how to treat the vagrants currently in the dungeon.
"Our dungeon has almost no manpower. So we have to make the most of the vagrants, at least."
I put the idea forward first, and Zigwell answered it.
"I also think that is best for now. But if you expect loyalty from them, you will be disappointed."
"I never expected that."
They were people who, for whatever reasons, had left the factions they belonged to and drifted all the way to a dangerous place like this.
Telling such people out of nowhere to work for the dungeon would be useless.
"Fortunately our dungeon has a fair bit of money left, right?"
"Not enough to spend carelessly, but enough to hold out for a while."
The records of this dungeon's past wealth were evidently no lie; the balance I checked after learning the merchant existed was considerable.
'At our standard of living so far, roughly enough to last more than fifty years.'
I decided to untie that bundle.
"How so?"
"By paying wages to the vagrants who work. We can start by rebuilding the areas near the mansion."
"May I ask why you go out of your way to look after them?"
Zigwell's question came suddenly.
His transparent eyes looked straight at me.
Like it or not, in that moment he would be waiting on my reply through Insight.
It wasn't a test of me or anything like it.
Pure curiosity, surely.
It's only that, given his Insight, the one being questioned feels it as a test.
So I answered as though it were nothing.
"It's true, as you say, that they're hard to call excellent manpower. No telling when they'll run. Exaggerating a little, they're as good as criminals-in-waiting."
But here's the thing.
One reason people run is that they have no attachment to the place.
"I'm going to plant attachment in people who have nothing."
"……."
"No need to dress it up as hope. Just hand them an 'ordinary life' and they'll try to protect it on their own."
Build a house and they'll want to keep the house.
Give them money and they come to realize the value of labor.
And they'll buy what they need with the money they earn.
All of that is an ordinary life.
And it becomes "mine" in their eyes, something they ought to protect.
"……To move as planned, there will be a great deal to attend to."
"Right. All of it has to rest on 'safety' in the end."
When you're living under the threat of being eaten by Void parasites, what does a house or money matter?
"You can't get full on the first spoonful, right? Let's start one step at a time."
Not everything in this world can be started perfectly just because you prepared for it.
"They say starting is half of any task. And that start is going to be you."
"My shoulders will be heavy in many ways."
He said that, but I could feel his eagerness.
Building a dungeon shaped by his own hands from the very beginning must have been rather exciting.
'Lucky for me that he joined.'
Executing the plan I'd sketched required Zigwell's broad knowledge of the Demon Realm.
I'd spoken as though I knew everything, but I don't know the vagrants' psychology and I don't know the Demon Realm's culture.
The detailed adjustments for that, and how efficiently to spend the funds we had, rested entirely on Zigwell.
***
One day remained until the dungeon's young master departed.
Zigwell drew up documents organizing the work to be done before his return as quickly as he could, and once Yujin's approval came, he set to it at once.
The place he went next was the outskirts inside the fortress.
The district where the vagrants lived.
"Boss."
As he was sorting documents inside the shabby ruin he usually stayed in, the subordinate who had once met Yujin alongside him came in.
"You're here."
"Yes. The demonic beast corpses we collected are roughly sorted."
"Good. So there should be hands free soon?"
"When have we ever not had time?"
"Then…… do a job with me."
"What? A job?"
While he had lived among the vagrants, Zigwell had found everything a bother.
So his sudden talk of work left the subordinate rather flustered.
"We need to prepare for a large-scale move."
"A move? Don't tell me we're leaving the dungeon?"
"No. Not out of these outskirts; I intend to move our ground closer in, around the fortress."
"To go inside, we would need……."
"Permission has already been given."
Unlike the outskirts, where Void parasites came through the hole-riddled wall all too often.
The inside, perhaps because of Enoch's presence, was not easily approached by them.
But not one vagrant had ever thought of moving their ground there.
Because Enoch's presence wasn't fearsome only to Void parasites.
They lived in the same dungeon, certainly, yet a line existed that could never be crossed.
"Still, will it be all right? What if……."
"What if what? That they'll use us up? Or throw us out now, after all this?"
"……."
"I have a rough idea what's being said among you. You're uneasy that I've gone over to their side, aren't you?"
"Th-that's! That's only what ignorant, stupid bastards think!"
Unfortunately, Insight told him those words were a lie.
But Enoch had never actually done anything to them.
They were simply locked inside their prejudice.
As long as they wore the label of vagrant, the discrimination and hatred they had received outside wouldn't vanish with the passing of time.
At some point an atmosphere had formed among the vagrants of fearing and antagonizing everything that wasn't themselves.
They had concluded that things not yet done to them would be done to them.
But Zigwell didn't think that was entirely wrong.
It was safe, at least.
Otherwise they might be seized by bastards like Warmark and become specimens for experiments on living bodies.
Ordinarily, persuading them would be an arduous and difficult task.
'Still, it has to be tried.'
Whatever else, the vagrants who remained were people whose faces Zigwell had seen at least once.
Having them permanently placed in a dangerous environment sat poorly with him.
He was about to open his mouth when.
"Boss……."
The little girl with the large scar on her cheek opened the worn door and stepped carefully inside.
Far too quiet a step for a child of only three.
"Th-this."
"……."
In the girl's hand was a yellow flower whose name he didn't know.
An edible one, found fairly rarely in this dungeon.
Where had she picked it?
The child quietly held the flower out to Zigwell.
"Ha ha……."
"……?"
Seeing it, Zigwell felt oddly hollow.
But the sound of that laugh must have unsettled her, because the child flinched.
"Honestly…… you little thing. This has to be boiled once and dried before you can eat it. You can't eat it as it is."
"Ah……."
"Still, thank you. Go and get some rest."
"Yes……."
Her shoulders sinking, the girl turned and left.
And.
Zigwell couldn't take his eyes off her back until it disappeared.
"Aman."
"Yes, Boss."
"Why do you think that little one gave me this flower?"
"……Who knows. Isn't it because she thinks of you as a father? You are the one who picked her up."
"No, wrong. The little one doesn't think of me as a father. It is simply because I once put a piece of candy in her mouth."
About half a year ago.
Zigwell had handed the child work.
Not to work her, but because being seen doing even small tasks meant being treated less like baggage by the other vagrants.
Then one day.
The child carried out an errand to fetch something splendidly, and as a reward he had pressed a piece of candy from his pocket into her hand.
"Ever since, whenever she thinks she has found something that might be of use, she brings it to me herself."
Of course, candy isn't something easily obtained.
The one he'd had before was picked up from the belongings a dead vagrant had left behind.
"She is shrewder than I thought."
"Yes, shrewd. But do you think that is a bad thing?"
"……."
"Let us start living a little shrewdly ourselves. Even that little one, who knows nothing, moves to get what she wants."
"But……."
"I know well that you left even your family behind. The others have similar stories. We are people who, as always, abandoned others and left before we could be abandoned."
Aman couldn't deny it.
He himself had taken a commission he never should have taken, blinded by money, and had fled for fear of being exposed.
He had done it out of a sense of responsibility, to feed his family, but the guilt and the fear had always weighed his shoulders down.
"So tell me. How was running? You left your family all your property, but did the guilt disappear because of it?"
"……How could it. Amela and Dela appear in my dreams every night."
"Right? If your shoulders are heavy when you give up and heavy when you fail, then you may as well try something."
Even then the heavy shoulders stay exactly as they are.
But you have to try in order to even fail, and doing that, a day of success might come around.
"And if we die doing it?"
"Can you live on forever by sitting still?"
"……."
"You are simply afraid. Afraid of a future where you might fail again, where you might run again. And afraid of how the people around you would look at you for it."
Aman's fists clenched tight.
Because he couldn't deny it.
As if he understood, Zigwell said:
"So what if you ran once? Did the world point its finger at you?"
"……No."
The world did not point at him.
Only he himself had.
"Right. The world doesn't even hold bastards like us in its eye. Just as we don't remember each star in the night sky one by one."
And if you fail again?
You run.
And once you've calmed down a little, you try again.
"That little one fails every day and still comes to me. Knowing I have no candy, going to all that trouble to pick something like this up, and even with her shoulders sagging like that, in the end she comes back to me."
Even a three-year-old child, disappointed and frightened by failure, knows how to stand up again.
"It is about time we stood up again too. Time to straighten our shoulders a little."
"……You have changed, Boss."
"Heh heh. No, I was always like this."
It was simply that shoulders hunched by failure had been straightened by one boy's spirit.
That was all it was.