The Preta, a Formidable Foe

[Core Room]

On Rāja's report, an emergency meeting was called. There was little time, even so.

"The Preta are tough, so even shot with bow and arrow, it's hard to deal them a fatal wound, and cutting off an arm or a leg with a blade won't kill them by itself. What's more, since they're kin to minerals, they won't die from being burned, or buried in a hole, or sunk in water."

"What a nuisance. Marie-san, how do we beat them?"

"Master, crush the head; burn them and then douse them with water and shatter them; shut them away somewhere and wait until they starve into suspended animation, then break them apart with a chisel or the like. Something along those lines, I should think."

"A Preta is essentially a living stone, so it can move about while keeping the properties of stone. That makes field fortification extremely easy for them. As an enemy, they're a troublesome lot."

The Preta are beings of the mineral kingdom, and a walking stone, as Rāja pointed out, is a formidable thing.

"At least they're a touch softer than stone, I suppose, which is something. If only one had 'shinri' written on its forehead like a golem, we could break it just by erasing two of the characters."

In Hebrew you'd only need to erase one character. Of course, in this world, golems work only inside certain dungeons whose unique laws support them. For the record, the characters written on a golem's forehead are restricted to a language in which erasing part of "truth" yields "death," and you must also issue commands in that language. For this reason, it's said that when a Yiddish-speaking rabbi of Eastern Europe gets the Hebrew wrong, the golem runs amok.

"A hard problem. Mint-san's duplicates could be created and erased freely, as I recall?"

"I can erase them anywhere, freely, but as for creating them, there's a restriction: only four at a time from the main body."

"Why four?"

"Simply because the stem of the mint plant is square, I'd say."

"Then how about this: we pretend not to notice their true nature, take them into the dungeon, lead them off to a warehouse or somewhere, then erase Mint-san's duplicates and shut them in?"

"Master, I think it would be quicker to just lead them to the bath and pump in poison gas."

In a world where the Second World War never happened, Marie's notion was an original one with no precedent in human history.

"If it's poison gas, surely under the castle gate would do, never mind the bath? We did have just the floor for a gate-tower, as I recall."

"It's a sheer thirty-meter wall, so I do think a Chinese-style gate-tower would suit it, but building one from scratch is a bother, and I can't find any gate-tower-shaped library either. So it's on hold for now. Even so, two thousand of them packed under there might be too many. We might not be able to wipe them all out at once."

"But if the rest go loitering about near the dungeon, it'll get in the way of trade with Iruma. Isn't there some way to handle it?"

"That we'll have to play by ear… Honestly, even I can't manage a perfect plan in a situation like this… First, order all settlers to take shelter in the dungeon proper. As for the Preta, we'll just have to be glad they don't eat the vegetables. But those beastfolk look like vermin by their very appearance, so they'll have to be exterminated for certain."

"The Preta can only drink high-purity alcohol or ether, was it?"

"Yes. To a Preta, thirty degrees isn't heat, minus thirty degrees isn't cold, and thirty proof isn't liquor. Though thirty kilometers, with how sluggish they move, would count as a distance."

The original of this is an anecdote about Siberia.