The Front Line (Day 2, Late Night)

[Beside the Zombie Dungeon: the Siege Fort]

"Senba Sama-no-jō Jiro, first spear!"

"This is our own camp, my lord. And besides, there was no need for the headman himself to volunteer."

"What kind of warrior band is it if the headman won't take the vanguard?"

So saying, Senba Sama-no-jō took his place atop the rampart.

"Dead ones! I am Senba Sama-no-jō, son of Senba Kamon-no-suke, headman of Senba Village in the Library-City Dungeon!"

"The enemy has no heads, so they have no ears either, my lord."

"Quite so… But then, if they have no heads, there are no heads for me to take, are there?"

"Leave that to the 'Panjandrum.' Regrettably, it turned out we couldn't make them vanish merely by chanting a sutra, either."

"I would have liked at least one letter of commendation from a head inspection. Could we not lure a corpse with a head still on it up onto the rampart?"

"Those are apparitions, my lord, so even if you take the head it simply vanishes. And besides, a head that isn't a commander's head is worth very little. More to the point, make certain you strike every last one of them down so that not a single corpse slips over the rampart by some mischance. And mind you don't fall off the rampart yourself, for there'd be no saving you. Should you end up joining the ranks of the dead, the Director of Books would have you put to death."

[Tier-Group 3: Control Room]

"As I thought, the zombies seem to sense people by some means and come swarming toward them."

The zombies came crowding against the rampart in droves, trying to climb it. But it seemed they had neither the wits nor the brute strength to form a human pyramid and scale the wall the way Pretas might, and the foot of the rampart filled up with zombies packed as tight as a rush-hour train.

"A success. From here on we connect an elevated road all the way to the siege fort to secure a supply line, and send in relief crews. Until the enemy dungeon's energy runs dry, we simply go on trampling zombies underfoot."

"Because zombies are dead, merely having them present yields no dungeon energy, but defeating them does. So by funneling that into our own reinforcement in turn, the effect should only compound. A tower-type dungeon grows by height, a cave-type by depth. A flat dungeon like Nasu-Shiobara may grow by breadth, I suppose, though I couldn't say for certain. And a god grows by the number of believers and the strength of their faith, it seems (see the Goseibai Code). In any case, the taller the Library-City Dungeon grows, the greater its power."

"Weren't there hardly any libraries left suited to summoning?"

"The efficiency drops somewhat, yes. But of the nation's four thousand libraries, roughly three thousand five hundred remain, and from among those I'll replication-summon about a thousand one after another, the three- and four-story sorts, or ones with an adjoining cultural hall, adding even ten or twenty meters at a time. Cultural halls in particular are tall despite being hollow inside, so they're very good for dungeon-energy efficiency."

"And cultural halls don't get used much, can't cover their upkeep, and end up derelict, don't they."

"Fortunately, since a cultural hall isn't itself a library, no wasteful equipment and the like get summoned with it, and the upkeep on a dungeon structure is negligible, so stacked vertically it more than pays for itself in dungeon energy. Were we to lay them out flat, of course, it would never balance."