18-6 As Usual

For now, I somehow managed to cram all the lewd elves into the new town.

With a total of five thousand five hundred people, it was truly a magnificent sight.

After all, it was a group made up entirely of handsome men and beautiful women.

Even though it was not an elven village, a town where beautiful elves were everywhere whether you looked right or left had been born.

In a certain sense, it was amazing.

I had sent Ars to that town, so I would have him somehow manage it.

There was no longer any need for him to stay at the Beast-Ear Garden for defense.

That guy had been strangely excited and had wanted to go there himself.

He was the same as ever.

He said things like, “I’ll stay here a little longer,” but he had been staying there the whole time.

The next day, I finally challenged the real objective: crab negotiations.

I immediately barged into the imperial palace and demanded crab from my underling.

“Ah, take as much crab as you like. Just do not get in the way of the local fishermen.”

Doran was buried under piles of documents in his office as usual.

Francesca-san cheerfully poured tea for me.

This person was gentle toward people other than the emperor, wasn’t she?

Since she was the person whose role was to kick the emperor’s backside, perhaps that was only natural.

“Then write that down in a document, please.”

“Good grief. Why are you so fixated on something like crab?”

“Shut up. Where is there a Japanese person who wouldn’t make a fuss after hearing crab?!”

My old man had gone and developed a shrimp and crab allergy when he was quite old.

Please, just don’t let that be hereditary in me.

I had also been slightly allergy-prone as a child.

Well, in my old man’s case, it seemed to be something he had developed later in life, so I thought I would probably be fine.

Even as it was, my dietary preferences and the like were becoming more like that old man’s with every passing year.

Allergies like that could also appear or disappear, and their range and severity could vary, becoming severe or mild.

Maybe I should make some sort of anti-allergy item, rather than an anti-poison item.

This was a serious problem, so I decided to research it.

After that, I immediately headed to the Empire’s sea with Fly magic.

This was a northern sea, so it was chilly.

I was not good with cold places.

Though I was getting by after creating air-conditioner magic.

At the harbor, there were a fair number of sailing ships that looked like fishing boats.

They were ships about ten meters long.

Fishing tools had been piled on them casually, so they were probably fishing boats.

It seemed they were about to go crab fishing now.

I asked them to take me along, but they flatly refused.

And even when I showed them a document personally written by the emperor, they still refused.

Serves you right, Doran.

You have absolutely no authority.

Or could it be that fishermen cannot read?

I could not talk about other people in this world either, but even so, I was making progress whenever I had free time.

After all, I would become the principal of an elementary school starting next term.

Since there was no helping it, I took out my own crab-fishing boat.

It was fifty meters long, made entirely of orichalcum, and the explosive-flame emblem fluttered on its mast.

It was armed like a hedgehog against monsters, and its underwater armaments were also well equipped.

On top of that, it had a broad deck suitable for fishing.

When the fishermen saw that unfamiliar, giant ship made from magical metal, they were all stunned.

Move it, move it!

Crab General—no, Honorary Crab Duke Alphonse-sama is passing through.

I swiftly sped offshore and searched for places where crab seemed likely to be with my skill.

It seemed there were also plenty of real crab generals here.

Kukuku, I can harvest as much as I want.

However, there were also many red dots representing monsters.

I immediately launched the golems and had them cut down the monsters one after another, turning them into fertilizer for my item box.

I had them take the utmost care not to damage the crabs, though.

The underwater weapons were the last resort.

If I used something like that, the precious crabs would be shattered to pieces by the shockwaves.

It was not exactly one-by-one pole-and-line bonito fishing, but if I swept them up with nets, the crabs would be damaged, so I ordered the golems to carefully pick them up by hand one at a time without damaging them.

Recently, I had been tuning up the golems with a focus on manual dexterity.

The crabs were something like snow crabs.

These seemed like their crab innards would be good.

Their shape was good, and their size was nice too.

In Japan, they were high-quality goods that looked as though they would cost tens of thousands of yen each.

Since no one came to catch them, they had been multiplying freely.

If there were huge monster rays and the like around, they would probably suck up the crabs like vacuum trucks.

It was not quite the relationship between squid and tuna, but with seafood, it often happened that cheap creatures fed on expensive creatures.

The golems dove, caught crabs, and returned to the ship by homing in on it.

For now, I tossed the crabs into the live well.

Then I took them and teleported to the Beast-Ear Garden.

The children immediately swarmed around the crabs.

Rather than food, they were basically playmates.

Of course, if the crabs were cooked and served, they would eat them heartily.

Beast-ear toddlers versus crabs.

It was almost like a crayfish-versus-cat kind of showdown.

Against the beast-ear little ones who poked at them, the crabs stretched out their claws and tried to snap them shut.

The beast-ear little ones quickly and nimbly dodged, so they were not caught.

If they had been dangerous macho-type crabs like giant coconut crabs, which were said to have the trick of snapping a D-cell battery in half, or mud crabs, which were said to sever the fingers of three-year-old toddlers, I would absolutely never let them play, but these opponents were just about right.

Since they were fairly large crabs with shells alone measuring thirty centimeters, it became quite a spectacle.

The little cat child quickly hid behind the old man.

The fighting spirit had not vanished from her eyes, but as expected, fighting crabs should wait until she was a little bigger.

Even on video sites, kittens with little experience or caution sometimes became tragic protagonists against crabs or crayfish.

Yamamoto-san judged the timing and brought over a magic-stone stove and a huge pot, then began boiling them in front of everyone.

I wanted to watch the crabs turn bright red and finish boiling too, but I had a mission to return to the ship and bring back more crabs.

Since live crabs could not be put into the item box, I went back and forth between the ship and the Beast-Ear Garden several times.

On the ship, the golems had put the crabs into suspended animation with ice.

I wanted to keep some live crabs for a little longer.

The rest were electrocuted to death with lightning magic and shoved into the item box as raw crab.

Even though they were dead, they were raw crab—what was this supposed to mean?

I stored the ship away together with the golems for the moment and returned to the Beast-Ear Garden.

The ones in suspended animation could not be stored in the item box, so I had several golems that I had left unstored carry them back.

It was just about time for lunch.

The old man decided to drink.

Today was no good. I could not endure it anymore.

If we had still been at war with the Empire, I would have endured it, though.

Crab and beer. Man, what a perfect combination.

Yamamoto-san had also made ponzu, crab vinegar, and other sauces.

Then everyone ate it while blowing on the hot crab.

The children ate with complete absorption, and Aoi-chan was absorbed too.

I felt bad that only Yamamoto-san, who was cooking, could not eat.

Please enjoy it slowly later.

The staff and golems helped too.

But Yamamoto-san seemed to be enjoying himself as well.

I asked Mari to deliver Ars’s share too.

Would the elves eat crab?

They were so beautiful that it was hard to imagine the visual of them biting into crab.

I felt like I wanted to go see, but my feet had already taken root.

From here on, it was time for crab innards and Japanese sake.

Since Yamamoto-san’s hands were full today, crab-miso tofu would be another treat for later.

The little cat child was also eating deliciously.

With a face that seemed to say, “Crab, I defeated you.”

She was truly so cute that I could not stand it.

At the moment, no child seemed to be having a shrimp or crab allergy.

How should I put it? As I ate the crab caught in this Empire, I finally began to feel that I had really won the conflict with the Empire.

This was an official right of wartime reparations, formally agreed upon between nations.

As expected, copied crab legs alone were not enough to satisfy me.

Somehow, those felt like imitation crab sticks to me.

Crab had to be cooked whole, fresh from being landed, right there on the spot, and eaten.

You could enjoy the flavor, shape, and all sorts of things that way.

Though with precious foods brought from Japan, copied goods could not be helped.

I also resolved to proceed with developing crab forks.

Surely there must be horsehair crabs in this world too.

Those were small, so I definitely wanted crab forks.

I swore to create masterpieces, not the usual whatever-made products.

After all, those were things I had used so much that they had become familiar in my hand, literally objects within my grasp.

As expected, I had not brought crab forks to the camp, though.

The children wanted to go crab fishing, but it was cold, so they seemed likely to catch colds.

And if they fell into the winter sea, there would be no life left in them.

Even in Japanese children’s homes and such, I had not really heard much about invitations to water-related events.

If by some chance a water accident happened, everyone involved would end up holding their heads, so even if an invitation came, I thought the facility side would first hesitate.

I hardly heard of events at the sea, or even hot springs and pool facilities.

For pools, the children would probably go by themselves to school pools, municipal pools, and the like.

Usually, safe movie invitations, sports spectating, and then invitations to amusement parks by sightseeing bus were the standard.

After that, there were annual invitations from restaurants and such.

Previously, I was astonished when I learned that there was an annual event in Mikawa Bay where children from children’s homes were allowed to ride small yachts like dinghies.

With slow small yachts, it was apparently possible for rare finless porpoises, which could only be seen in limited local areas, to swim alongside them and play, so I imagined it must be extremely fun.

But in that area, there were also fairly common schools of about fifty one-meter sharks that could even be seen from fishing boats, and since the sea was black and had low visibility, you would not really know if there were sharks underwater.

Even sharks that grew large stayed inside bays with few natural enemies while they were still small young sharks.

They also gathered in huge schools like small fish.

Sharks were basically timid creatures like bears, so they should not bite living things larger than themselves, but with toddlers, there was a possibility of mistakes in terms of size.

Their eyesight was poor, so if a human splashed around on the water’s surface, it apparently looked like a weakened fish thrashing around, and they would bite as a test to see whether it was edible.

Especially children who went out to play and got extremely excited.

Children were always covered in little scratches, so if they carelessly dripped blood, the sharks should be able to smell it even from extremely far away.

After all, they say sharks can smell a single drop of blood from two kilometers away.

If I were going to play there myself, I would want a decently large cruiser.

I would not want to run into an irritated mother hammerhead shark that had come to give birth while I was on a small cruiser.

This was not a B-grade shark movie, so such things probably did not happen often, but even so, I did not want to encounter a shark that could reach four to five meters long underwater.

Long ago, I had even been scared of a quiet shark species with a pointed head that was only about two meters long.

Now, I would tame sharks by force and use them as underwater scooters.

Hammerhead sharks, which were common in Mikawa Bay, were a relatively quiet type of shark.

To begin with, that unique hammer-shaped head existed for detecting fish, so they had no business with humans.

In foreign videos and such, large hammerhead sharks often washed up onto beaches and could not get back to the sea, struggling until sturdy young humans pulled them by the tail and rescued them, somehow mercifully returning them to the sea. They were that pathetic.

They were like oarfish, which could barely swim under their own power and immediately washed ashore once they floated up to the sea surface.

As expected, I did not think they lacked swimming ability to that extent.

In Mikawa Bay and Ise Bay, which were their birthing grounds, I had not especially heard of people being bitten by them in all my more than half a century of living in West Mikawa.

Wild dolphins with rough tempers were definitely more dangerous.

Those things seriously bit humans.

Strangely enough, orcas, which had the nickname “gangsters of the sea,” apparently did not normally attack humans.

Great white sharks apparently existed in nearby waters too, but despite their faces, those creatures were also timid and did not approach large harbors. If I remembered correctly, due to ocean currents and such, they did not come deep into bays around Ise Bay.

Great white sharks were, in the end, just prey for orcas.

The truly dangerous ones were tiger sharks and the like.

I felt like bull sharks were also fairly dangerous.

Those could live even in freshwater, so they seemed likely to swim upstream through rivers.

The problem was that this other world’s seas had huge, vicious monsters that made sharks look like nothing.

Maybe next time, I would think of some kind of seaside play event.

Our place should be fine if we have golems guard them.

Mari and I would also be there, so there should not be any serious problem.

Today, the old man had alcohol in him too, so it was nap time together with the children.

However, that peaceful time did not continue for long.

Soon after I lay down, about three children climbed on top of my stomach.

Mmm, let me sleep a little longer.

There were many children swarming around, including ones who came to tickle the soles of my feet, ones who poked my sides, and ones who pulled my hair.

I sprang up and shouted.

“Hey, you little—!”

Hearing the old man’s shout, the beast ears scattered all at once.

The old man chased after them.

A vase fell and broke, and all sorts of other things overturned.

Including the staff, the Beast-Ear Garden fell into a great commotion.

The war with the Empire was over.

Now, I wanted to surrender myself to this heartwarming moment.