Nothing to Be Done for Now (Day 10, Morning)

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

The reception room on the south side of Tier-Group 3's tenth floor. Around a low, long table, eight sofas were arranged.

A futon had been laid out on the long table and Marie put to rest on it, but her bluish-black eyes seemed to be seeing nothing. The Dungeon Master, Mint the super-peppermint, and the doctor Sapien-sensei conferred on what to do from here.

"I have human medicine as knowledge, but I know little of the Asura, much less of dungeon monsters."

Sapien-sensei was himself an Asura, but the knowledge he held, in keeping with his backstory "setting," was meant for the humans of another world. Since he was not actually an otherworld reincarnator, it was, strictly, all just a matter of setting.

"From here on it's no more than conjecture, but I suspect Secretary Marie had her brain directly and logically linked to something by a dungeon function. An excessive amount of dungeon energy flowed in there, and so, I believe, her brain burned through."

"Erm, so it's not that her brain got burned by a famous horse, but that it physically burned?"

"Among tree-type Asura there are those who can apportion their memories to the 'true-body' tree, and even shift their consciousness into it. By doing so, they can store, without forgetting, knowledge exceeding the memory capacity of the brain."

"The World Tree, then… So the World Tree on this rooftop is her true-body. Marie-san did say something of the sort, long ago."

"In all likelihood her World Tree and brain were directly linked, and the circuit was burned out by the excess energy. That is what I believe."

"You believe, you believe… well, there are veterinarians in another world but no doctors for the Asura, so it can't be helped, I suppose. And so, is there a way to treat her?"

A veterinarian might understand cattle and horses, but Ox-Head and Horse-Head would be entirely outside his field.

"I do not know. However, I had Control Room Chief Mint check the dungeon's system logs, and there was something that gave me pause."

"The aide-de-camp scribe-dono skipped the dungeon tutorial and was summoned by force under master user privileges, without going through the proper dungeon-monster summoning procedure or the original-monster setup steps. Being, as it were, a 'rush job,' there's a high chance she has various defects that set her apart from an ordinary Asura."

Her appearance, too, had been done on the cheap: the parts hidden by clothing simply didn't exist, and her internal structure seemed to have been abbreviated as well. No wonder she was light, even for an Asura.

"Are you saying it's my fault?"

"There must have been a reason the Director-dono skipped the tutorial, so it isn't a matter of anyone's fault."

The reason was that, engineering Master's degree or no, he hadn't understood the English very well, but naturally that left no trace in the system's records.

"Going over the matter roughly with Control Room Chief Mint and the Encyclopedia Dungeonica, there seem to be several approaches, but seeing as this is a special case, there's no guarantee any of them will work."

"Several?"

"First, simply observe and wait. If she's kept near the Dungeon Core or the World Tree, she 'might' recover naturally."

"'Might,' is it."

"The Asura don't photosynthesize, but we expose her to sunlight as appropriate, give her water and Asura liquid fertilizer, and watch how she does. In short, treat her just like a houseplant; there's no need to assign Nurse Leonardo to her."

"I see."

"Next, in the case of a Named monster, since they revive eventually if they die, we deliver the finishing blow here and now."

"Eh— surely, that's… that's going too far…"

"Only, take the case of 'Umeda, the Mercantile City,' a dungeon with many Cores: it can't be subdued unless all the Cores are subdued. Reasoning from that case, the 'true-body' World Tree would remain. It would be well if her body simply regenerated naturally again, but if it does not regenerate, we run the risk of the difficult problem of having to communicate with a tree, and there's a great danger her memories would be lost."

"Difficult, or rather, impossible, you mean."

"Lastly, since the Encyclopedia Dungeonica gives no concrete method, the details are unclear, but there is also the option of attempting to summon a person from another world into this body by 'corpse-possession summoning.'"

"If the method isn't known… And besides, that means the person inside would change, doesn't it?"

"It's purely a matter of options. There's also the problem of whether there happens to be a convenient dead person who could serve as a stand-in. Still, it does hold the possibility of breaking through our present constraints."

"Director-dono, a Named monster is not the reincarnation of any one specific otherworld person, so we can't give them too extreme a career 'setting.' If it were a real person, well, there are real physicians who graduated from universities with no medical school, but for the Library-City Dungeon, the source material Tier-Group 3 was copied from has no librarian-training program, so we cannot summon a Librarian."

"With corpse-possession summoning, if there happened to be a librarian who'd conveniently been run over by a truck, we could call them up, and unlike reincarnation there's no need to wait ten years or more for them to grow into a competent adult. In theory, that is."

Even with otherworld reincarnation, a child's brain has incomplete wiring, so there's only so much they can do.

""

"Then there's a system-based countermeasure rather than a medical one. The Named monsters are currently capped at eight and can't be increased, but there's the method of summoning a replacement via the three open slots for named ordinary monsters. However, the social-science fields suited to running an organization have no slots left, and a named ordinary monster is a general user, so they can't become an administrator user of the dungeon, let alone a master user, which means there's only so much they can do."

Summoning two salespeople had been the mistake. Incidentally, a dungeon normally has but a single master user, yet in this dungeon, for some reason, Marie too was a master user.

"Not enough privileges, then. Is there nothing we can manage by today or tomorrow?"

Mint and Sapien-sensei silently shook their heads.