Cleaning Up the Aftermath

[Infirmary]

"Kasumi-san, was it? You've only hurt your leg, so for a while now, riding is fine, but carrying a rider is out."

Sapien-sensei deftly finished treating the liver-chestnut.

"A horse too injured to be mounted, and a horse too young to bear weight on account of the load limit, is it… And just when will this one get a mount of his own."

The Knight Commander grumbled.

"Once the flaxen-chestnut grows up big and strong, perhaps. Though even before that, I can't break her in to the saddle myself, on account of my weight. Someone like Marie could manage it, but, can she even ride a horse?"

Rāja was an Asura, so she was light, but she was fairly tall and well-trained, so she still weighed more than a horse-racing jockey. Incidentally, in horse racing the load limit differs between male and female jockeys, but Shiso (Asura) have no actual sex; their human bodies merely look the part, so the only issue is weight. (Even within the Shiso family, a few species such as the Ōba-shima-murasaki are exceptions that do have sexes.)

"True enough, you can't just go loading a heavy weight on her out of nowhere. But she looks spirited, and seems to have the makings of a fiery horse."

The liver-chestnut, forever blurting out things like "I'll cut my belly open" or "go cut your belly open," had a pretty wild temper herself, but the flaxen-chestnut was strong-willed in her own right.

"Mister, don't go doing anything as uncool as getting thrown off your horse, now."

She fully intended to throw him on purpose. An animal horse bucks its hindquarters, throws its head up, and spins neatly to pitch its rider off, but how a horse-beastfolk would manage it remained to be seen.

Incidentally, since no horse-beastfolk other than the liver-chestnut and flaxen-chestnut sisters had marched in the campaign this time, Marie hadn't become anyone's parents' killer.

[Amanuma, the eastern foot of the hill, near side of the valley]

The charred corpses and everything else had been absorbed into the dungeon, the collapsed ground of the bivouac had been cleared away, and all that remained was the coin set aside for the rewards and the payments to mercenaries and adventurers.

"Why, it's gold pieces and silver pieces by the heap."

So said the adventurer Umadayū, who was picking up the coins at Marie's request. It would be a waste to let perfectly good koban and copper coins get absorbed into the dungeon. Money was needed both to scatter as rewards and to buy horses.

"But you know, Umadayū, this stuff was meant to be handed out to our fellow tradesmen, so we can't exactly rejoice over it with a clear conscience."

"Hyōe-Jiro, the ones who got burned just failed to pick their work carefully. That's all. We adventurers, unlike the merchants, have no guild, no nothing. We're free, but it all comes down to 'personal responsibility,' meaning, your own responsibility. Mind you, even I never saw it coming that the Secretary-General was an evil this thorough."

By "evil," he also meant something like merciless, or formidable.

"If even Umadayū didn't see it coming, how were the likes of me or Saemon-Taro supposed to? Sure, we knew she showed no mercy to enemies, but slaughtering peasants and townsfolk, women and children and all, to the last soul, isn't something just anyone can pull off."

"But that means she burned the whole lot of them, the Tsukuba lord, his retainers, every last one. With no heads, there's no way to confirm the dead, and the house of Tsukuba's bound to fall into chaos, isn't it."

Saemon-Taro was oddly sharp.

"The mercenaries'll go flying off the moment there's money to be made."

"No argument there. And then they'll try to mount an avenging campaign, and get burned again, you reckon? Well, we'd best not head east, so as not to catch a stray arrow. We're no samurai, so dying just means dying like a dog."

For the time being, Umadayū resolved to steer clear of Tsukuba.

[The Plaza Before the Dungeon]

Naturally, the only one with the mental fortitude to burn ten thousand people to death and then calmly hold a victory celebration was Marie. Had Tsukuba been a sworn enemy fought in a death-struggle, there were precedents like Oda Nobunaga's retainers, who held a grand banquet with the skulls of Asai Nagamasa and the others on display (the "skull goblet" being a later exaggeration), but the people of the Library-City Dungeon bore Tsukuba no particular grudge.

And so, this time it ended with Marie handing out coin and the Dungeon Master's letters of commendation to the Knight Commander, Okada Tarōzaemon, Haruna, and the others. Once the situation settled down, they planned to hold a summer or autumn festival.