Operation Juggernaut

[Core Room]

"Even if we leave the particulars to the people on the ground, we need to settle on a broad policy before Rāja and the others reach the Nameless Bridge."

"If we run them over with a truck, I wonder if the zombies will reincarnate into another world too."

"But the truck would take damage, so we couldn't run over that many that way."

"If, for instance, we fitted the bookmobile truck with iron plating from dungeon structures as armor, strength wouldn't be an issue, would it?"

"Even so, there's the danger of being surrounded by a great mass of zombies, or of the truck breaking down and leaving us stranded in the midst of the horde. It might be possible if we whittle the zombies' numbers down to some extent and then drive about crushing the rest. Zombies are slow, so if there are only a few left, even if the truck breaks down there'd be room to escape on foot."

"As things stand there are simply too many of them."

"First let us blow the zombie horde apart with explosives repurposed from fertilizer and thin out their numbers. In materials from another world there is an unmanned self-propelled bomb called the 'Panjandrum'; if we hurl a great many of those at them… The zombies keep pressing onward, though, so there's no time now to convert fertilizer into explosives and haul it up to the front line."

The dungeon could summon fertilizer as one of its functions, but it could not summon explosives directly.

"What if we just throw that pan-jan-whatsit straight at the zombies?"

"Indeed, the bookmobile's 3.5-ton truck has a gross weight of about eight tons, but if we were to force an even heavier object into motion directly with dungeon energy, less efficient than a motor though it may be, it ought to be able to grind down great numbers of zombies as well. Very well, there's no time to waste, so I'll generate one at once."

[Tier-Group 3, Floor 10: Reception Room]

"The Panjandrum has only a single set of wheels, so judging from its shape, I believe it adjusted its direction of travel by rotating the left and right wheels independently."

So said Kobayashi, the retainer in charge of machinery, studying a photograph. He was, of course, entirely off the mark.

"I see."

"By setting the center of gravity below the axis of rotation, you prevent it from spinning out or toppling over. It's true that using dungeon energy directly is inefficient, but it should eliminate the risk of breakdowns."

"Then I'll generate it that way, so please tell me the finer specifications and any points to watch for."

[Tier-Group 3: Control Room]

"This is the Control Room. Rāja, once you reach the Nameless Bridge, link up with the Toshima Daikan and fall back to the checkpoint. Leave the checkpoint gate open so the zombies are drawn in. We'll crush the zombies in front of the checkpoint."

"Marie, have you got some new variation on a pit trap ready again?"

"No. Since zombies are dungeon monsters and vanish when defeated, there's no need to drop them into a pit first and then tidy up each corpse with the dungeon's functions. This is a more direct method. I call it 'Operation Juggernaut.'"

"Marie-san, what on earth is that?"

"Master, the English word 'juggernaut' comes from the fact that 'at a festival in India, the float of Jagannath would crush worshippers to death practically every year,' and so it has come to mean an overwhelming force that is difficult to stop. We'll roll about crushing the zombies with an enormous ground-leveling roller made of dungeon structures."

"There's no need to hold such a deadly festival."

"Even so, were you to forcibly put a stop to that sort of thing, you might well provoke an uprising. Once people have a little room to spare in their lives a festival float appears, and with no constraints like power lines, there's no stopping it from growing ever larger. To keep society itself turning, some sacrifices are unavoidable."