How Did It Come to This

[Tier-Group 3 Rooftop Observation Deck]

"♪ Thirty meters～ above the ground～, the crown～ of the blue forest～."

Marie had let down the hair she normally tied up, leaving it to stream in the wind, and dressed unlike her usual self in a whitish short-sleeved shirt and a bright-blue skirt that fell below the knee, she was singing a not-especially-good song. But here was no thirty meters; this was a height so great the very color of the sky looked a blackish blue.

"Um… Marie-san, what exactly is all this…"

"Master, I got carried away and used up every last bit of our dungeon energy on hand."

"How many meters up are we, exactly?"

"Ten kilometers, perhaps? I don't remember either."

"Marie-san, for all the height, the air isn't thin, and the wind isn't strong."

Whether it was the World Tree, all of a meter tall, or Marie's hair, there was no telling, but a faint scent of rosemary drifted on the air.

"A library is, in essence, 'a facility where humans stay,' so I suppose it can soften the effects of air pressure and temperature and wind to a degree. Even so, a dungeon climbed too high ought to give you altitude sickness from thin air, and dug too deep ought to turn into a sauna from the geothermal heat, so ordinarily one really should notice before it comes to this."

[Core Room]

A list of the dungeon's tier-groups was displayed on the whiteboard.

"Just looking at the list table makes my eyes hurt. I don't even want to count how many tier-groups there are."

"All sixty-three prefectures, agencies, and cities, that is, the libraries of one circuit, five agencies, fifty-one prefectures, and six cities; plus two hundred sixty-five large municipal libraries including complex facilities with a low 'library ratio'; plus one hundred fifty-one branch libraries; plus the original three tier-groups. Four hundred eighty-two tier-groups, three thousand five hundred twenty floors, a height of fifteen kilometers. By calculation, we can observe four hundred forty kilometers around. That is, of course, far too distant to observe directly even with a telescope, but within this range radio waves will reach, so reconnaissance by drone becomes possible. As for the floor count, depending on how one tallies the penthouses, the attics, and the underground machine rooms, it likely comes to a little more."

The figure is sixty-three prefectures-agencies-cities rather than fifty-five prefectures because the Six Great Cities are special cities, reckoned apart from the prefectures, and because this world conforms to one where there exist the five prefectures and three agencies of Taiwan, the Karafuto Agency, and the South Seas Agency. Incidentally, the first Prime Minister died in the throes of passion, and the Korean Empire, grumble though it might, endured.

"Four hundred… Umeda, the Mercantile City, was five tier-groups, wasn't it."

"Umeda, Nagoya, Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, Shibuya, and from the sixth tier-group on, whether they exist at all is unknown. That said, in Umeda, the Mercantile City, each tier-group is something like a kilometer across with several floors, so the scale of a single tier-group runs rather large."

"In area, then, we're not the largest?"

"A total floor area of 6.4 million square meters works out to a radius of about 1.4 kilometers, only a little broader than the space within our ramparts. There are mountain and desert dungeons broader still."

"Looking at the list, there are quite a few facilities with a pretty low library ratio, too."

"In the past, buildings with a low proportion of library were impossible to summon, but this time we summoned even things like 'a single 150-meter building that comes with an apartment block of three or six hundred units, with a library attached.' Sadly, it's the building only, with no furniture or other furnishings, but this is by design, so it can't be helped."

"Still, we're going to convert most of the stacks and reading rooms into housing and shops and warehouses too, aren't we."

"Name and reality needn't necessarily match. On the Tōyoko Line, you've got names utterly divorced from reality, like Gakugei-Daigaku Station and Shiritsu-Daigaku Station. And this dungeon, by any reckoning, looks nothing like a library as things stand."

"The 'Library-City Dungeon' is supposed to be, originally…"

"A dungeon that summons over a hundred million books and countless magazines and newspapers and the like from multiple otherworlds; a library that gathers and renders into book form all manner of information, from this world's myths, legends, and adventure chronicles to invented tales and poetry; and a city in which a great many residents, scholars chief among them, make their lives."

"The books amount to about Marie-san's personal collection, the information-gathering is inadequate, and the scholars… Sapien-sensei is more of a doctor than a scholar, and he isn't even a resident."

"To begin with, this dungeon's very 'management philosophy' is 'to realize a life of health and abundance, in both material and spiritual terms,' with not so much as a hint of the word 'library.' Mind you, it's merely a flowery rephrasing of 'wring the maximum emotional energy out of the humans we keep, for the human farm.'"

This is the very model of a bad corporate creed, lacking any concrete guideline for action, hackneyed and abstract.

"Well, that's all good enough! Even so, I can't keep all the tier-group numbers straight anymore."

"Giving them names would make them easier to tell apart, I should think. For instance, the bottommost Tier-Group 4 would be 'Hakata,' and the one just above, Tier-Group 58, being Okinawa, would be…"

She is wrong, right out of the gate, in spades. To a degree that, were she stabbed to death for it, she'd have no grounds to complain.