15-6 The Field Trip Is Not Over Until You Get Home

While we were doing that, the children woke up, so I introduced Rain to them.

I stopped calling her by a symbol-like name such as Alpha and decided to call her by her actual name.

She had also said she would be happy if I did that.

“Whoa, is this Fal’s mom?”

“Amazing.”

“So cool.”

“Let us ride.”

Of course, she was hugely popular with the children.

Well, they should make sure to play with her properly.

After all, they probably would not get many chances to pat and touch an adult Rainbow Fals.

That exalted being was Sacred Elion, an existence worshipped as something equivalent to Jesus Christ if this were Earth.

By the time Fal became an adult, everyone here would almost certainly no longer be in this world.

“Will Fal-chan become an adult like this someday too?”

“Yeah, someday.”

“When?”

“Who knows? This old man doesn’t know either. Well, she’ll get big eventually.”

When Rain looked at His Highness Prince Emilio, she seemed deeply moved as well.

“I see, the twenty-sixth-generation descendant counting from him. Looking at you like this, you really do resemble him. He showed me a photograph of himself as a child just once. Yes, yes, you have traces of him.”

Rain said that and narrowed her eyes.

After hearing that, His Highness Prince Emilio looked a little embarrassed.

But he also looked happy.

His Highness Prince Emilio was also extremely excited to meet the legendary being said to have been hatched and raised personally by that first king, and who had bestowed Sacred Elion’s blessing at his wedding.

This would probably become a tale passed down in the country he would eventually marry into as well.

I had also made sure to record plenty of video footage.

After that, they played with the other spirits and ate snacks.

The children spent a fun time that would surely become a precious memory.

Fal also joined the children and kept frolicking all over her mother.

Ars had naturally mixed in among the children too.

As always, this guy never wavered.

But time was running short, so we decided it was about time to take our leave.

There was a prince among our members too, after all.

All the spirits gathered to see us off.

They also arranged it so that we could enter this place by teleportation magic, just in case.

Apparently, there was something like a friend-or-foe identification code for passing through the barrier.

Normally, they would not teach it to outsiders, but our place was already being treated almost like family.

Especially in my case, from the spirits’ point of view, I was practically a traveling restaurant.

They would probably welcome me warmly whenever I came.

In this case, though, the chef himself was the ingredient.

It seemed that several powerful barriers had been put up, so normally, no one could enter.

I also secured permission to use it as a safe house in an emergency.

Well, I had already paid in advance with mana.

I herded the little ones who were yawning sleepily like a shepherd using a cat teaser, then loaded them onto the bus.

The quick ones had already run out of batteries and been loaded first.

Remi and Sarnya had also already sunk completely.

It could not be helped with small children.

Perhaps because Touya had a sense of responsibility as the leader, he was beside me, twitching as he fought against the heaviness of his eyelids.

He did not have to push himself so hard.

Touya had also been looking after the much smaller children quite a bit.

But he seemed to have reached his limit.

His knees suddenly buckled, so I caught him with wind magic and floated him gently onto the bus.

The staff in charge lined the children up by seating order and checked them against the roster.

Mari’s and Ars’s bus was also okay.

The children who were still awake waved their little hands to say goodbye to the spirits seeing us off.

This old man had also been allowed to take things pretty easy today, so I was not particularly sleepy.

My job was basically just to watch over the automatic driving.

Just in case, I used Refresh Heal on myself, a spell I had made by adjusting how I used Heal.

I had been using this every time I went to Armon’s place, so at some point it had been registered in my magic PC as an independent spell.

Now then, shall we go home?

The field trip was not over until we got home, after all.

Monsters were bound to appear on the way back anyway.

I braced myself and deployed the new-model golems.

These guys had been equipped with something like a simple magical brain that I had made by using Mari’s control core as a reference.

In other words, they were magic golems equipped with AI.

I had been too excited on the way here, so I had forgotten to bring them out.

Since they were early models, their movements were still quite sluggish, but unlike the blockheads that could only perform simple actions until now, they were capable of autonomous action to some extent.

Since they would be dangerous if they went out of control, I had placed fairly strict restrictions on that part.

Once their performance improved, that area could probably be improved too.

I had made them human-sized and equipped them with human-use orichalcum magic swords and magic rifles.

Their power source was a Besmagil battery.

If they were captured or something, they would home in on me with teleportation magic.

If teleportation was obstructed, they would self-destruct and return the Besmagil to the sea of magical essence.

The damage range during self-destruction could also be configured.

Basically, only their magic cores were set to home back to me.

Even if their bodies or magic cores could not return, their data remained in my magic PC, so they could be individually restored.

Because the magic PC was not a real mechanical PC, it had no capacity limit.

That was not an object, but my unique skill.

Their bodies were made of a hybrid reinforced material of mithril and orichalcum.

As an enhanced version, I had also prepared an upper-grade version with Besmagil bodies.

On top of that, magical enhancement was also possible, they were equipped with barriers and shields, and they had my magic installed too.

Also, if necessary, I could transfer the physical weapons I possessed into their item boxes.

They were originally something I had thought up because I wanted companions for when I went to dungeons.

I had to make sure they carried game bags too.

For prototypes, their performance was probably sufficient.

Because I kept making things like this, my HP had somehow risen to eight million HP.

In my case, defeating monsters and the like did not raise my HP level, so I had developed the habit of not looking at it.

On the way back, we pushed forward steadily in air-car mode.

Ah, a merchant’s wagon was being attacked up ahead.

Golems, GO!

About fifty orcs were blown away so easily by the golems’ attacks that it was almost funny.

The five adventurer guards were also staring in astonishment, but my golems had a flaming hawk engraved on them as an emblem.

The adventurers noticed our crest-marked bus and waved in greeting.

They had been getting pushed back quite a bit, so I had helped them out.

At the end, I left ten wounded orcs for them.

They would probably want subjugation credit too.

Combat records were automatically engraved into adventurer cards.

Yes, these things called adventurer cards.

They were actually also developed by Takeshi, the founder of the Adventurers’ Guild, and spread throughout the world.

Artifact adventurer-card manufacturing devices had been placed in Adventurers’ Guild branches all over the world.

That was why this system continued uninterrupted even now.

The kingdom still had proper repair tools and maintenance manuals left behind.

After-sales service for export products had to be perfect too.

Their leader and the merchant came over and thanked me.

Apparently, the wagon was full of cargo and they could not take the materials, so I stored them in my item box, dismantled them inside, and handed over only the subjugation parts.

The merchant’s apprentice boy seemed deeply interested in the golems, so I showed him a human pyramid—or rather, a golem pyramid.

The one at the very top was, for some reason, striking the same pose as the signboard of a famous confectionery maker in Osaka’s Dotonbori.

Come to think of it, I vaguely remembered having Aoi-chan help me when I taught them this trick.

The apprentice boy watched with wide eyes, but he seemed quite pleased, so I suppose it was fine.

I gave them cream puffs.

When I shared cream puffs with the others too, the merchant asked where I had bought them, so I advertised the Adros food court.

Kitchen Eri was the most popular shop there.

After all, the shopkeeper was basically like the original Rare Visitor cuisine chef.

Then, on the way back, another giant mantis appeared.

These things were always lying in wait on the highway.

They were hated by everyone who used the highway, and there was always an active subjugation request for them.

This one was quite a big specimen, with a height of six meters and a body length of nine meters.

If it had grown this large, then surely…

My heart swelled with anticipation as I ordered the golem unit to GO.

The golem soldiers drew their swords and attacked.

The giant mantis was sliced up in the blink of an eye, its head cut off, and its body left in pieces.

Then the golems gathered around.

A golem cut open its abdomen.

There it was, a horsehair worm.

Jackpot.

I had been waiting for this thing.

The Adventurers’ Guild had asked me for the material, but I just had not been able to get a hit.

And this one was a fairly large specimen too.

It was five centimeters thick and twenty meters long.

This was a real windfall.

To avoid accidentally burning it black, I fired adjusted-power Thunder shots into it with the magic rifle.

I cast Silent magic so I would not wake the sleeping children.

Before long, the horsehair worm weakened and collapsed.

After confirming on the radar that it had turned gray, I stored it in my item box.

This monster’s materials deteriorated rapidly once it died, so one had to be careful.

I dismantled it inside my item box, so it was fine now.

Its materials were quite special, and since almost no suitable substitutes could be found, they were valuable.

Having successfully hunted down my treasure, I set off for home in a good mood.

Ars was fast asleep.

I had told him it was fine for him to sleep.

If, by some chance, a situation arose that required troubling him, he would somehow already be awake and ready before I knew it.

That was the kind of guy he was.

Some of the children were awake, so I did not do something tasteless like return by teleportation magic.

They played cards inside the bus, ate the remaining snacks, and gazed out the windows.

I had given them maps, so they could also do some living geography study.

To help them understand the scenery below—or rather, the geography—we flew high into the sky and were speeding along in one leap when a group of wyverns came over.

A large formation of ten was rare.

I ordered the golem squad to engage them in aerial close combat.

They were only C-rank monsters in the end, so they were cut apart in no time.

The golem squad’s aerial mobility seemed fairly good too.

It made for good training.

While I was testing the golems, we had already arrived at the Beast-Ear Garden.

The staff who had stayed behind also came out and helped carry the large number of children inside the garden.

Now it was time to wake the children up and take care of dinner and baths.

And on top of the ones who had fallen asleep on the way back, there was still the work of putting to bed the children who were too excited to sleep.

It seemed the director’s beer would have to wait a while longer.