Chapter 93

“An island defense battle… Will the fighting basically become an exchange of magic?”

“We’ll probably have to ask Gerario-san and the others to handle the planning again, but yes, I think that would be the natural course. There aren’t things like cannons here, right?”

“Gunpowder, huh. It does exist, but in this world, it’s mostly used as an ignition agent. In war, magic is overwhelmingly stronger, so firearms probably never developed.”

Since both gunpowder and cannons were Japanese words, Iiria and Kururu were wearing slightly cold expressions.

“Are you two having another secret conversation?”

“Pretty much. We’re talking about the magic from our world. Though it doesn’t seem usable here for now.”

At Kengo, who showed no sign of guilt, Iiria shrugged.

“Having the islanders fight in melee is also a little…”

“Dodol-san and the others might fight to the bitter end.”

Since many of the beastfolk were wanderers, they should know how terribly beastfolk were treated in Roran.

“If the enemy has magicians, I can only imagine a miserable ending. We absolutely have to avoid that.”

Everyone imagined that scene, and a cold silence suddenly fell.

We had to win. Overwhelmingly, at that.

We had to achieve a complete victory, so they would never interfere with us again.

Everyone must have thought that in silence.

“First, we’ll need surveillance around the island. When the Bax Company ship came before, Gerario-san pointed that out too.”

We did not know where they might land from.

“That’s true, but this place is surprisingly wide when it comes to watching the whole thing.”

Jirenu Territory’s island probably would not fit within one full loop of the Yamanote Line.

From the large magic stone mine roughly in the center of the island, I could see poor-looking forests and grasslands spreading out at the foot of the mountain, and traveling between the town and the mine took a decent amount of time.

“The area around the town aside, the south and west sides of the mine are the problem. Especially the west side, nobody lives there, right?”

“Um, probably…?”

Kururu added to Iiria’s uncertain answer.

“No one lives there. The waves and wind are strong, so it hasn’t been developed, and there are only a few shelters for fishermen.”

Iiria looked somewhat surprised at Kururu, who answered immediately, but Kururu shrugged when she saw that.

“Don’t you remember? Back when we had only just come to this island, we decided the two of us would run away from the island, and we cut through the forest.”

“Mm… Hmm…?”

Iiria had a half-smile on her face.

The two of them had apparently been sent to this unknown land alone when they were small.

In this place, where people like Nodon ruled however they pleased, Iiria and Kururu had apparently been in the state of a puppy and kitten thrown into a cage with crocodiles and giant lizards.

I could not help imagining the young Kururu pulling Iiria by the hand and moving through the dark forest to escape that hell.

And what spread out on the west side of the island they finally reached was a desolate, merciless sea.

When I thought of how the two of them must have felt at that time, even I felt pain.

“I thought it was a frightening dream, but that was real, wasn’t it?”

“It was. Iiria-sama cried all the time back then, after all. Though you were cute.”

Iiria, who puffed up her cheeks, angled her ears and slapped Kururu’s waist.

“However, when I saw that sea, I resolved myself that we had no choice but to live here.”

Kururu said it while laughing, but how much resolve must it have taken to keep standing without falling to her knees?

“Then what should we do? If they send a fleet around the long way from the open sea, they could easily land, right?”

There were four magicians.

Placing one in each of the four directions seemed correct, but I could not think of it as tactically correct.

At that point, Kururu, who had been pouring a drink into Iiria’s cup, said.

“We can just place Dodol and the others here and there. Their eyes are far better than ours, and they can see at night too.”

“And they’ll run to deliver the message?”

While sipping her drink, Iiria seemed to be imagining the scene as she looked up at the ceiling.

“Would they make it in time? In that case, maybe they could watch from on top of the mine and light a signal fire? Ah, but that wouldn’t work if it was raining or at night.”

“Also, with signal fires, you can’t convey detailed information.”

We had limited manpower, and no means of communication.

This island was not surrounded by sheer cliffs, and the town itself was not surrounded by city walls either, so holing up somewhere would be difficult too. If there was one place where we could do it, it would be the mine, but in the end, they would probably collapse the tunnels with magic and bury us alive.

That meant that the moment we allowed the enemy to land, our defeat would be almost decided.

In that case, we had to be able to intercept them with magic as soon as they approached the island, but for that, the bottleneck was our means of communication.

There were no smartphones, and none of the beastfolk had a bird form, so we had no way to move faster than running. In terms of civilization, Iiria’s idea of signal fires was probably the best we could do.

On top of that, the materials and technology we could use on this island were limited.

“How about flag signaling?”

Kengo said.

“Red if the enemy comes, and so on. Ah, at night, you wouldn’t know the color… and if it was raining, it would be even tougher.”

At that point, I suddenly noticed the two girls looking at us suspiciously.

More precisely, I noticed the cute animal ears on top of their heads.

“W-what is it?”

Kururu, who noticed my gaze, pulled back as if to protect Iiria.

On top of their heads, their triangular ears moved expressively.

Between the two of them, four ears rose and lowered.

If digital, that was four bits. They could express sixteen kinds of signals.

Then there was the flag signaling Kengo had mentioned.

I finally remembered an anecdote from my previous world.

“Napoleon.”

“Huh?”

“That’s right, Napoleon. Before the telegraph was invented, he built a communication network in relay form.”

Napoleon moved great armies in the gap between the medieval and modern eras.

Technologically, it was like a temporary bloom of that era and tended to be forgotten, but I had read in a book about how he built something incredible through sheer force.

“There was something called semaphore telegraphy.”

“Semaphore telegraphy.”

This time, Kengo also repeated it back, then exchanged glances with Kururu and Iiria.

“Flag signaling is too simple, but if we built something like doll arms on top of a tower, we could increase the amount of information by adding joints. By making the arms large, they could be seen from far away, so when relaying, we’d be able to gain distance, right?”

“Haha, I see. In that case, this place’s letters number around thirty… so five bits. Could five ears do it?”

Kengo seemed to have realized what I had been looking at when I came up with the idea. He said that while deliberately looking at Kururu and the others’ ears.

The beast-eared owners, who had no idea what we were talking about, flattened their ears warily.

“However… For that, you’d need something like a structure, right? Neither I nor Yorinobu studied engineering, so that makes me a little worried.”

“Hm?”

“For example, how would we make the mechanism that smoothly moves the joint parts of those arms? Could this place’s woodworkers manage it?”

“Ah, right… There was that problem…”

Kengo had apparently graduated from law school, and I was not from an engineering department either, so I had no experience creating anything physical. What I had in my head was, at most, secondhand knowledge from books I had devoured for game scenarios.

We needed someone who could turn theory into reality.

And there was one more thing.

“Also, if we’re going to do this on a large scale, I think we’ll need a few more people who can understand this kind of thing…”

Those words were spoken as I looked at Kururu and Iiria.

I thought these two girls were quite intelligent even by the standards of my previous world, but they had not been able to follow the conversation at all. They had probably never even heard of the concept of binary numbers, and the idea of assigning letters to that and communicating through encoding must be an even stranger concept.

Even if we proposed some system using modern knowledge, it would be meaningless if the people using it did not understand it, and when trouble occurred, they would be unable to deal with it on-site. One only had to think about why magicians were as knowledgeable about magic circles as magic stone processors.

Moreover, this time, we were building a communication network, so we would need no small number of personnel.

Explaining the theory to that many people ourselves would be quite difficult, even if it was not impossible.

With so many things we had to do right before a war, there was no way we could act as teachers as well.

Also, even if we encoded messages using semaphores, we would have to create a correspondence table for letters, or perhaps words, and that would take effort too.

If we did not quickly prepare someone who could understand this kind of theory and had the ability to teach it to others, it could easily become pie in the sky.

However, this was a world where literacy rates were low, and it was normal for people to be doubtful even with multiplication.

Just as I was thinking that the only people who could quickly understand the concept of encoding would be reincarnators revived in the mine, Kengo spoke.

“Ah, that’s right. There’s someone just right for it.”

For a moment, I thought someone else had revived in the mine again.

“Rather, before Yorinobu and the others went to Roran, you put out a public notice, didn’t you?”

Just as Kengo said that, Dodol, Gerario, and the others slowly showed their faces.