Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:MvM Chapter5 (section)

===Part 17===

The two of them spent two days approaching their destination.

In that time, Shokuhou noticed something.

“Patissiet☆”

“Eek!?”

The little elf jumped.

It had bothered Shokuhou how the elf’s long ears would twitch up and down while she was talking, so after plenty of observation, she reached out and grabbed the ears between her fingers.

“These movements mean something, don’t they?”

“U-um, Lady Shokuhou, not my ears.”

“You can talk with your voice, your eyes, hand signals…and even your long ears, can’t you? That gives you a lot more information ability you can communicate while in the trees or the dark night, so you elves are probably unstoppable when hiding in the forest with bows.”

It was unclear if the humans of this world had noticed these secret conversations among the elves, but there was no fooling Shokuhou whose power made her unbeatable in the field of communication.

(Well, given how they’ve been treated, it’s only natural the elves will want to secretly badmouth their so-called masters right in front of them.)

At any rate, that wasn’t the most important issue at the moment.

“That’s the capital city of Tuonela. Wow, it really is big.”

“?”

Shokuhou was confused.

She couldn’t identify where that name came from.

(Is this like if they decided to name everything after stuff from Records of Three Kingdoms, but they ended up using all the big kingdom and warlord names already and are stuck using minor village and temple names?)

Whatever the case, Patissiet’s reaction led Shokuhou to also observe the city from a distance.

It was definitely big.

There were some minor differences in construction style. Most likely, the original city had started out in the center and, as the population grew, new parts of the city were added onto the outer edges. The city’s history could be seen there. Some areas had gable type buildings and others had dormer type buildings. Viewed from above, it may have looked like the rings of a tree.

The houses were all made of stone.

They weren’t even made from wood or brick.

In Valhalla, stone had been a privilege reserved for the lord’s mansion, so did that mean the capital just had that many wealthy residents?

“Is it like how everyone uses dryers in blazing-hot Los Angeles?”

“?”

That was apparently too much for an elf from this world to understand.

There were also a lot of enslaved monster girls in the capital. Apparently they didn’t kill their slaves when tax season came around here.

“Tuonela doesn’t have taxes.”

“None at all?”

“They say that’s why all the rich merchants come here! It must be a relief to have a collector of a master who tries to keep their slaves alive as long as possible.”

She was talking about being exploited, but Patissiet sounded almost jealous.

…Of course, no municipality like a city could function without any tax revenue.

(So do they force anyone with enough wealth to make “charitable donations”? Ew, I do not like the idea of a society that makes charity part of the routine. It might be efficient, but there’s no heart ability in it.)

There were more standalone mansions than boxy buildings here because, unlike Valhalla protected by its moat and thick wall, Tuonela had a much more open layout. With a wall around a city, it couldn’t expand outwards and was forced to develop upwards instead.

When people gathered somewhere, money came with them and then more people arrived to get at that money.

That was evidence of a positive cycle, but…

(No moat and no wall. There is a gate at the entrance, but it’s more like a Shinto shrine’s torii and won’t do much to keep attackers out. This place seems a lot less defended than Valhalla, so I wonder how it works.)

A 3km square piece of land hovered about 50m directly above this city of a million.

A fairy tale castle with spires and protective walls stood on that land.

But instead of that being the floating land, there was an even bigger rectangular floating land above it with hundreds of thick wires stretching down to support the king’s castle.

As they had seen in the attack on the village, the biggest threat in this world was a carpet bombing from a higher layer, so dangling the castle down like that was probably meant to act as a giant umbrella. The giant floating land above it would be one made of solid bedrock to prevent anyone from breaking or digging through it too easily and the umbrella was far larger than the castle itself, to prevent assassins or an enemy army from dropping straight down from it.

However…

“That isn’t enough wires to actually support a 3km piece of land. They wouldn’t be able to distribute the weight enough and it would just fall.”

“?”

Patissiet didn’t understand what Shokuhou meant.

Her point was that the castle was in fact on floating land after all. The wires were camouflage so that anyone plotting a rebellion would be wasting their time trying to cut the wires. In fact, they were bait to identify any dangerous elements among the masses.

But given the size of the umbrella, the castle didn’t actually intend to protect the entire city from a bombing. The king probably intended to continue his luxurious lifestyle as long as his castle was safe. About as shallow an idea as someone assuming they only needed a convenience store to have an endless supply of food and drink without considering the product planning, production factories, delivery drivers, and other behind-the-scenes work that went into getting those things on the shelves. If he enjoyed that life so much, Shokuhou hoped he kept eating his snacks until he keeled over and died.

Because this way she had to deal with him.

(Oh, whoops. It really is easy to take lives too lightly in this world.)

“I see…”

“?”

After all, this was a world where airships and other vehicles were used to travel between floating lands. Did they think a wall or moat around the capital would be meaningless? Since there were no other floating lands passing directly above the capital, they may have placed more emphasis on protecting the sky. Such as preemptively destroying any floating lands that would arrive too close for comfort.

They could observe the vast land from that elevated location and, if an enemy force was approaching, actively set up their defenses in front of the capital.

In addition to the knights, the capital had adventurers, wealthy merchants, and even bandits. Every last one of those would want to leave the safe capital and make money on the front line once a lucrative war had begun. People’s desires could create unexpected strength. If an enemy had to deal with them all, they could suffer unexpected losses after receiving attacks from multiple fronts at once.

Was that how it was set up?

“''That won’t accomplish much.''”

“Um?”

(For one, Misaka-san’s special ability can render all the capital’s defenses meaningless. I just hope she actually returns in time.)

The collars and chains looked out of place in the gorgeous city.

Elves were not the only enslaved people. There were plantlike dryads, slender but strong dark elves, and nymphs who were hard to tell apart from humans. It looked like all the monsters capable of speech had been abducted and turned into a labor force. And they may have thought they were fortunate because the capital did not kill them when tax season came around.

What a strange world this was.

It was different from anything Shokuhou was used to.

She didn’t know what it was like in areas with less influence from the king, but in the capital where everyone greatly benefited from the king’s reign, it didn’t look like anyone was thinking about removing those collars. A parent with a small, innocent child was walking right past a chained slave.

(What a pain.)

Dancer Shokuhou turned her binoculars in a different direction.

It seemed likely the king’s forces were kept in the castle above, not in the city below. The quantity was much greater here, but the quality wouldn’t be all that different from the Valhalla lord’s forces. Mysterious elite special forces were only found in fiction. After all, different soldiers in the same kingdom would be trained and equipped more or less the same. The kingdom gained nothing by restricting how many of their troops had the best equipment.

Shokuhou directed her binoculars toward the castle grounds and checked the size of the barracks and counted the windows.

“Ugh…there’s so many. It’s like one of those mammoth housing complexes that are falling out of favor.”

“Mammoth? I have heard the capital army has 100 thousand soldiers.”

No kingdom was going to honestly report the size of its army to outsiders. That number was probably increased by around 20% to intimidate any potential enemies. But even accounting for that, it was 80 thousand. That meant they supported that many people who would only have to work when there was a war or a parade. That was the entire population of a small city eating food paid for by the capital’s budget (which came from charitable donations, not taxes) and the taxes collected from elsewhere.

While the elves and other enslaved monsters worked and worked with only more exploitation as a reward, that collection of murderers in the castle was well fed.

(Hm. When you spell it out like that, it really pisses me off.)

“H-have you figured anything out?”

“Lots☆”