If the Zombies Are Endless, We Might as Well Build a Space Elevator (Day 9, Morning)

[Tier-Group 3: Control Room]

"Good morning. How is the situation?"

Marie had just woken, and she called out to Mint in the control room.

"Madam Personal Secretary, it is the same as ever. The zombies keep being born, and the Director keeps slacking off. Meanwhile General Rāja has set up her headquarters at Toda Village and is directing the Nameless Bridge and the siege fort. That said, since the energy the dungeon takes in can't be put into figures, the change is hard to gauge, but it does seem the zombies are being generated in fewer numbers."

"So we're finally seeing the bottom of it. I had thought that if the zombies were going to keep pouring out without limit, we might as well summon every library on foreign soil and reach all the way up to geostationary orbit. Or so I'd thought, anyway."

"The spider's thread is a structure that hangs down, but however great the strength of a dungeon structure may be, I have to wonder whether stacking one up from the ground is even feasible. And even at the maximum speed of a high-speed transfer circle, the travel time would come to something like five days."

"There is a World Tree perched on the roof of this Tier-Group 3, so we can hardly go stacking anything on top of it. But really, five days is far too much time to spend."

Of course, there was no guarantee that this world's geostationary orbit was the same as the otherworld's.

"There are uses for dungeon energy other than summoning a duplicate of a library that's too far from the ground to ever actually use anyway, so we may as well divert it to something else."

"At some point we'll need to think about how to wipe out the enemy dungeon, but I doubt it'll go away just because some high priest prays it into Buddhahood. Mint, the footage of the Zombie Dungeon, please."

"Shall I send a night heron up from the Nameless Bridge?"

"No, the dungeon's own function is sufficient. Set the viewpoint atop the rampart, please. It would be ideal if we could place it up in the air, but a dungeon can only monitor inside itself, and the viewpoint is restricted to dungeon structures within the sphere of influence. That's the constraint we're under."

When Mint projected the footage of the Kozukappara Execution Ground Dungeon… thousands upon thousands of zombies were blanketing the place. Now and then one would tumble into the moat on the south side, or wander off in some other direction into the Library-City Dungeon's sphere of influence and be crushed, but most of them simply shambled about within the Zombie Dungeon.

"… Mint, they've simply learned that leaving the dungeon only gets them crushed. That's all this is. It seems the enemy has intelligence on the order of an animal, too."

"Since the zombies are already dead, a starvation siege won't work on them, either."

"We can't very well keep them surrounded forever. The dungeon doesn't absorb objects brought in from outside 'instantly,' so if we had a machine gun we could shoot the zombies from outside, but in that case we wouldn't be defeating them within our own sphere of influence, so we couldn't 'steal' the dungeon energy. Isn't there some way to drag the zombies out?"

"Don't fully surround them; deliberately leave a gap in the encirclement and lure them through. Something like that. We open up one side of the rampart and lure the zombies out, and before they reach the Nameless Bridge, adventurers infiltrate the dungeon from another direction, find the core before the zombies multiply, and destroy it."

"Even if the enemy takes the bait, there's still the danger of an accident. If the zombies generate faster than expected, or if it takes too long to find the core, the adventurers will lose their lives."

"It's adventurers who brave danger, so we'll just have to accept that as a given."

"I am opposed to grinding down adventurers, who aren't even our enemies, in an excessively dangerous operation. It would be ideal if we could get our hands on a tank. If adventurers rode a tank into the dungeon, they could withstand even the zombies."

A tank (more precisely, an infantry fighting vehicle or armored personnel carrier) was naturally not among the library's equipment, and building one with their current level of industrial capacity would be difficult.