While I was at work, Ramiris and Veldora were apparently tackling something of their own. Once I returned from my inspection run, they were waiting together to greet me. With them, it'd either be a major problem or something they wanted to brag about, and this time it was the latter.
"We've done it, Rimuru! We've competed our test unit. If the tests end successfully, we can begin mass-producing these with haste!"
"Mm-hmm, mm-hmm! And lemme tell ya, I'm brimming with confidence about this! C'mon, check it out!"
I let them hurry me along.
Tempest currently had several research sites in operation. One was the workshop of Kurobe and his apprentices, open to the public. Much of their R and D was stuff that had no value if stolen, unless you had someone with Kurobe's talents. The special weapons I enlisted them for were an exception, but for the most part, we revealed all the weapons and armor created in there.
A little advertising never hurt, and we had decided to release this stuff with a splash, introducing a spring line and everything. I wanted to mold "Kurobe" and "Garm" into real, established brands someday.
But we were headed elsewhere, to a facility handling a range of research kept classified by the government. We needed an easily guardable site that regular people couldn't get inside, and so we focused on inside the Dungeon.
On Floor 100 was Tempest's publicly funded R and D center, led by Gabil, along with individual research spaces for Ramiris, Veldora, and me. We had another large facility on Floor 95, inside the park we established on that level. The beastman refugees were no longer there, and we had a huge amount of space, so I figured we may as well take advantage. We had alchemists from Dwargon, sorcerous researchers from Thalion, and vampire researchers with too much time on their hands from Lubelius assembled in Tempest, and we needed a large-scale facility to house them all.
Each of them brought their own specialized talents. The dwarven alchemists were gifted in spirit engineering, the field that birthed the magic-armor soldier project Kaijin and Vester were once involved with. In this world, natural phenomena were thought of as tied to the spirits—the five base elements of earth, water, fire, wind, and air, and the three higher elements of light, dark, and time. Science that harnessed these phenomena and technological systems that developed them were known as spirit engineering; it formed the mainstream of scientific thinking around here.
Our visitors from Thalion, meanwhile, were schooled in the largely concealed field of sorcerous science, a scholarly realm that only those who truly master magic could reach. Its core fundamentals were proposed by the Thalion emperor Elmesia's mother, a genius elven researcher. Her teachings had been inherited and replicated by a large number of people.
The field even ventured into the philosophical, exploring just how far one could wrangle magic to change the world and its natural laws. It's the sort of thing Diablo would love, I'm sure. The true worth of this theorizing, however, was in forcing certain alterations to preexisting phenomena, which would help advance the field of spirit engineering in turn. You needed to be a true expert in elemental magic to even begin to understand it, but the potential benefits went
without saying. (What also went without saying was that Thalion kept it strictly confidential, prohibiting anyone from revealing its secrets to other nations.)
Finally, there were the vampires, whom I accepted after my promise to Luminus. These were overcomers, vampires powerful enough to be deemed Calamity-level threats, and they were all rather eccentric characters, but at least there weren't many of them. I had very real concerns they might cause me trouble, but it turned out I shouldn't have worried.
"Hey, hey, Sir Rimuru! Lemme tell you how curious we are about all the fun stuff in here, man!"
This was my main contact among them, and he was an extremely cheerful, affable man. They just loved new things. None of them minded humans or elves or dwarves among their coworkers—not when they had such big intellectual curiosities to satisfy. Some of them came off as pretty arrogant, but Veldora and Ramiris worked alongside them, and while Ramiris was never gonna serve as a decent authority figure, her servants Beretta and Treyni weren't about to stand for it. Anyone too arrogant for their tastes got less than royal treatment.
"Yo, get me some tea, girl!"
"Yessss, right awaaaaay, sirrrrrr!!"
"Man, work took a lot out of me today. My shoulders are killing me." "Ohhhhh, let me massaaaage them, sirrrr!!"
And these were the overcomers? Eesh.
"Those damned fools! Pathetic!"
The vampires' leader whined a bit about it, but nobody dared lodge a complaint at Veldora or Ramiris. They were a lot more cooperative after that.
Their research, meanwhile, was actually pretty interesting. They were taking the opposite approach from sorcerous science—something Luminus dismissed as useless, but I disagreed. On Earth, we'd call their field of research physical engineering. They were trying to discover the rules of nature with all the magical elements removed. The laws of physics they produced from that, laid out in intricate detail, stemmed from the heart of their science.
This was all totally reproducible work, but while I should have expected it, in a world where the degree of magic in an area can affect things differently, it was treated as kind of a fringe field. Luminus didn't like it, which I thought was interesting in itself. Even if all this data gathering was just a pastime for a bunch of bored vampires, their massive archives held a lot of purpose for me. They made it easier to examine the effects of magic. Any great new breakthrough is the product of a number of much smaller ones, so I thought their research didn't deserve revulsion at all.
So I now had teams of leading experts in a variety of intellectual fields in my nation. The information they brought was invaluable, the potential results when you mixed them together incalculable. Our nation's task was to secure their safety and comply with any secrecy requirements related to their results.
I thus had all researchers wear special Ramiris-crafted bracelets, basically unlimited-use Resurrection Bracelets that also provided communications and teleportation within the labyrinth (although only between the research facility and the surface). The need for confidentiality would be an inconvenience for many researchers, so I thought this freebie could help them out.
None of them could leave Floor 95 without teleporting. Their data was recorded whenever they did so, preventing leaks. They could also ask a dryad to teleport them, but that required Treyni's okay, so any spy activity in the labyrinth would be doomed to fail. Of course, I thought the overcomers had an honest chance of fighting their way down the normal route—but it'd be inherently dangerous. Not even I knew all the traps laid throughout, but I doubted even a talented team of vampires would find it a cakewalk. We kept tabs on their movements, so we could tail them in case they tried anything and capture them once the labyrinth hopefully slowed them down.
We had such draconian measures in place for a good reason. Angels apparently come down to attack advanced civilizations in this world, and that was a big part of it. Ramiris's labyrinth couldn't be a better safeguard; even an angel attack could be kept away from Floor 95. If worse came to worst, Ramiris bragged, she could just "update" the Dungeon and swap Floor 95 out with Floor 99.
This city and facility in the labyrinth's deepest recesses was the safest spot in
all of Tempest. Keeping it fully isolated was a great way to stop classified leaks and maintain the health of its inhabitants. Floor 95 provided the most extensive services my nation had to offer, and I thought it'd be more than enough to satisfy anyone who took advantage of them.
By the way, our former main research site in the Sealed Cave was currently closed off. After multiple rounds of hipokute cultivation, the concentration of magicules in the herbs had started to take a dip. They were still high, but we anticipated that yields would continue their downward trend. So we decided to change cultivation sites—or really, we just devoted a section of Floor 93's flower gardens to hipokute growth, upping the magicule count to encourage sudden mutations among the weeds. Gabil's lab was already moved to Floor 100, too, so that made things more convenient for him.
The shuttered cave was now populated by wyverns, accessing the site from an expanded tunnel extending to the mountain's rear side. This was classified as a military secret, more or less, so the public wasn't allowed on premises. As a result, we planned for all top-level research to be done in the labyrinth from now on.
It was this large-scale facility on Floor 95 that the two of them guided me to.
We didn't visit one of their private rooms, signifying this was the result of collaborative work with the others. Work on the test unit was going well, apparently, as was the related research, and they even said it'd be done before our rail lines opened up.
I hadn't been down to Floor 95 in a while, and in the meantime, it had transformed into a sort of forest city. In the middle of a beautifully kept park, there was a townscape that seemed to sprout up among the trees. I was impressed at how quickly they set all this up, but was sure we were seeing some elven ingenuity at work. Maybe the treants as well. Either way, it was a lovely space.
Transient labyrinth challengers, of course, couldn't come in here unless they were studly enough to hack 'n' slash in the long way. I personally took advantage of the members-only elf club from time to time but almost never came here during the daytime, so I didn't think it had changed quite this much. I
left its development wholly in the hands of Veldora and Ramiris, and I have to say that I liked their work. It offered variety from the rest of the levels, and I'd love to enjoy a leisurely tour sometime.
That was on my mind as I followed them toward a modern research building, made of reinforced concrete and standing out within the park in the middle of the city. There was a large building situated next to it, with one block devoted to accommodations for visiting researchers. I had directed the construction of this building, but now, for some reason, it had this natural, weathered look to it. It struck a really unique presence, and I didn't mind it at all.
"Very charming. I like how it's kind of nestled among the trees."
"Right? Every research lab needs to look like it houses a dragon's hoard of secrets!"
Veldora was patting himself on the back, like a kid who just completed work on his secret treehouse hideout. I have no idea what, or who, gave him such a skewed view of the world.
"Everyone's getting along so well in there these days, y'know, there was talk about formin' a kind of secret society!"
A secret society? What were these people even doing in there?
"Hee-hee-hee! You're the one who blew the lid open on all their research first, aren'tcha, Rimuru? That sure took care of anyone looking to steal people's data and make it their own."
Ah yes, that did happen. There were a lot of walls between nations, and plenty of clashes of opinion between the world's scientists. Most researchers, keeping their homeland's interests in mind, concealed their tech while trying to absorb some from their rivals. I didn't see that as constructive, so I just laid bare everything we knew. The word classified didn't mean anything to Raphael anyway.
So I collated it all into easy-to-grasp instruction manuals for the public and passed out copies, using up all the valuable paper Yuuki procured for me. Maybe a little wasteful, but I felt it was a justified loss. I really wanted to manage our documents with real plant fiber–based paper, not parchment. The
stuff Yuuki gave me was apparently from the Empire, and it was almost as good as what I had on Earth. Giving it all away, I thought, demonstrated just how dedicated we were.
Ever since then, researchers had become a lot more frank with one another. Their intellectual curiosities drove them to seek collaboration—finally.
"Right, I collated all the secret info out there into written documents so anyone can browse through them. There were, ah, a few complaints about that, but I think it's gonna do a lot to advance technology."
"Oh, it will! And it has, Rimuru! There was kind of a big commiseration party after that dropped, and everybody hit it off with one another."
As Ramiris explained, once everyone gave up on concealing their data and started working with others, it created a weird sort of solidarity across the lab. Since then, they had stopped being so obsessed over their home nations. Even the overcomer vampires were treated as friends and equals now. It was really fascinating to see, and I liked seeing it.
It was great—but what came after was the problem. The researchers were now their own little community, with Veldora and Ramiris at the top, and thanks to that, the community was now an organized group. A mysterious environment where everyone could research whatever they wanted to their heart's content. A system exactly like the evil little secret society we had going. Ramiris, boundlessly fascinated by all this stuff, was now the mascot-slash head-cheerleader of them all. Veldora, meanwhile, was positioned more like a mafia boss.
At first, I grumbled about it—I turn my eyes away for a moment, and this happens. But then it dawned on me that if I had been around, it probably would've happened even faster.
Wait. Nuh-uh. It wouldn't; I swear.
"So anyway, here's how we've arranged the externals of it."
"What do you think? Cool, eh? Like a villain's secret hideout?"
Oh, god, it was a secret hideout. A lot of Veldora's knowledge was based off things regenerated from my memories, particularly manga and the like, so no
wonder I could identify this at a glance.
"Look at you guys, having all this fun without me…"
"Kwah-ha-ha-ha! Let me assure you, we are only getting started. We'll likely need to tap into your intellect shortly, you see."
"That's right, Rimuru! You're always constantly surprising us, so now it's our turn. So let's show you what we've been working on, and then I wanna hear your feedback!"
Veldora laughed at my (completely honest) complaint; Ramiris provided me at least a little sympathy. If they were touting it up that much, I couldn't pout like usual. Regrouping, I stepped into the lab.
People in white coats restlessly beavered away. I passed by them as we came to what looked like a model train.
"Hey, Boss! Surprise!"
It was Kaijin, of all people, in a lab coat that didn't look at all right on him. He seemed to be running things around here.
The space, the size of a college lecture hall, was lined with rails, to the point that you had to watch where you stepped. There were miniature mountains, valleys, tunnels… Maybe they were doing aerodynamic analysis or something?
"Wow. This entire space is a test facility?"
"Uh-huh. Way to get it on the first guess. But what's really amazin' are all the people gathered in Tempest for this. It ain't easy to build a facility this size."
Kaijin was right. This only worked because of all these scientists working under the same roof. They had used assorted types of magic to create this massive diorama of sorts, the precision-crafted model riding the rails made by Kaijin himself.
"What's propelling this train?"
I could have Raphael Assess it, but I made the effort to ask instead. "Steam," Kaijin replied with a smile.
I nodded. That made sense. For now, your only option for driving a train would be horses—that was what we had pulling the cargo carriers currently using the highway rails. That allowed only for the same weight you could put in a carriage, of course. Using those rails improved safety and contributed to traffic management, but I can't say it made things dramatically more efficient.
There were proposals to employ golems or monsters to pull them instead, but that was still just a stopgap. We really needed to develop engines, and steam engines were our top candidate. Not, of course, the type from olden times that burned coal or whatever—we had conceived something that took the best bits from both magic and science. That's the whole reason why I called it a magitrain.
The concept called for an engine that would apply magic, driven by magicule energy, to the combustive energy created by steam. This was a sort of template for magical cores, and despite its simplicity, it still required some high-level magic tech.
Magic functioned on different principles from natural phenomena. You could use it to create the effect you had in mind, but it was difficult to derive a standard rule set based on that. For example, let's say you had a candle burning inside a closed glass container. The oxygen would quickly be replaced with carbon dioxide, snuffing out the flames—but if it was magically created flames, it would keep on burning forever. As long as the force and magicules instilled by the caster didn't run out, the flames will never disappear—although, of course, no caster had infinite power.
Based on this experiment, magical flames clearly ran on different rules from scientific phenomena. It was thus difficult to take one magical procedure and apply it successfully to something else. That, I guess, was why nobody thought about connecting magic to physics in this world before now.
However, the magic in this example is so-called elemental magic. Spirit magic, where one borrows the powers of the spirits, is not affected by the image the caster places into their spell. It's magic that utilizes the power of a spirit, something that must conform to the laws of nature. As a result, flames driven by spirit magic still consume oxygen and produce carbon dioxide.
When I fought Ifrit, the Great Sage taught me a thing or two about steam explosions, and that trick only worked because Ifrit's flames worked under similar natural laws. If it was elemental magic instead, using magicules to rewrite those laws, it may've been completely ineffectual. (It's also why I could use spirit magic under that Holy Field.)
Also, in the past, I used inscription magic to heat up metal and illuminate caves, but in the end, that still didn't produce enough light. Dold did a little innovating to apply the elemental magic Light and change the inscription to transform magicules directly into illumination.
Basically, this world lets you use magic to skip procedure and go straight to the results. That had the adverse effect of delaying scientific investigation into natural phenomena. Science based on physical phenomena was better handled using spirit magic, itself based on nature—and that's how I hit on the idea of spirit-based engines in the first place.
"We had been using the heat we generate in the forge to do things like warm up baths, you know. But not even I thought you could use steam this way."
Kaijin gave me an impressed look. Me, I was more impressed that he actually created a steam engine based off my description alone.
"Well, the basic premise can be used for a lot of things—moving pistons, turning turbines, you know. Using steam, or heat energy, can help you do physical work, or you can convert it to electricity. The latter's something to tackle later, but it looks like you've worked out pistons just fine for now."
"Yeah, as you can see, Boss, you can get a lot of power from electricity if you use it right."
He turned to the miniature train. I had spoken to him and his team about electricity before. They must've kept up with their research, because now he demonstrated a pretty good understanding—even better than mine, maybe.
There were six cars connected to his model locomotive, each filled with little metal balls. If they were real, that was a pretty hefty weight it was pulling.
"We tried to replicate every possible environment in this test room. Right now it's in a tropical rainforest. In the next space over there's a desert climate,
and next to that is an area with heavy snowfall. We're getting data from each room so we can make designs for pretty much any environment."
Treyni was now explaining matters to me, Ramiris taking the opportunity to sit on her shoulder. The vampire in the room, canines sparkling, nodded their approval.
"Yes, yes, glad we could be of service! I just loooove experiments like this!"
The vampire leader was a cheerful kind of guy, but definitely off-kilter. It wasn't that he "enjoyed" research so much as there was no room in his mind for anything else. But I'm sure they were helping a lot.
I had been provided a carefully kept notebook filled to the margins with writings. This was pulp-based paper. We could've imported it from the Eastern Empire if we had any relations, but there was nothing for now, so I was having them research how to create real paper. Gabil's team was good at this sort of non-headline-grabbing work, and when I left things to them, they quickly started test producing some low-quality paper from tree pulp. I hadn't given any further instruction since then, but through a trial-and-error process, they had quickly reached this current level of quality. I know they had samples to work with (and documentation from me outlining the whole procedure), but it was still amazing. They deserved praise, and I resolved to give it to them.
But back to the notebook. It was a neat piece of work—a series of questions, hypotheses, experiments, and results. Dynamic force and the magicules needed for an engine to provide it. Consecutive operation times and subsequent engine deterioration. Estimates on maximum load and weight distribution on the freight cars. They even used all that to calculate the stability of each room setup and figure out how fast they could operate the trains. All this data would come in handy when making the full-size locomotives.
I just took a quick read through the notebook, but it seemed to me like the needed theoretical work was already done. We had a working model, after all, so I figured it was time to build a test engine.
Unless…?
"Hey, Veldora, uh, this isn't the only test vehicle you built so far, is it?"
"Hee-hee-hee… Well spotted. You're an intelligent slime if you've already noticed."
Veldora grinned at me, Ramiris sneering on his shoulder. I looked around, only to find Kaijin and his team, Treyni, and even Beretta doing the same. They had all filed in at some point, standing in a row by one of the doors.
So this means…?
"It was a lot of hard work, y'know. Summoning a fire spirit within the engine wasn't enough. You need something for power control, and if it was done manually, you'd need a decently well-trained shaman in the train at all times. We could train enough of those for our whole fleet, maybe, but that'd take too much time. So they put together a magic circuit that automates the whole thing. It's a control board that combines the fire spirit core and the inscription magic that controls it. Put them together, and this is what you get!"
Kaijin slowly approached the door as he spoke. Normally, summoning spirits is where our attempts started to fall apart. Lower-level spirits don't have enough power, after all. You at least needed to summon a flame salamander or something mid-level like that. Those were B-plus monsters, and no normal person could summon one and keep them stable for long periods of time.
Was Ramiris involved with this? As the former Spirit Queen, it seemed in her wheelhouse. But containing my surprise, I watched as Kaijin put his hand to the door.
"Whoa… This is it…"
It was waiting beyond. Its body shone a lustrous black, clearly made of magisteel and looking like some ominous monster of iron.
"Here is the result of our combined skills: Magitrain #0!"
Vester's proud voice rang out as I marveled at it. I thought we were still in the experimental stages, and it was already done. Still a test unit, perhaps, but the very first example of the train I always dreamed of. A huge step forward.
"We're planning to test the body's durability and performance. We're also going to add not just freight cars, but passenger cars, sleepers, and even dining
rooms."
"Completing the steam engine isn't the end of the story, of course. I still wanna get into the nitty-gritty to try to make this as complete a package as possible."
Vester and Kaijin were both excited. The other researchers seemed just as impassioned as they looked at #0, but I'm sure there was still room for improvement.
"For example, regarding the electricity you discussed with us, that's some pretty tricky stuff to handle. We had a wind spirit generate lightning for us, but harnessing that energy as is looks like a nonstarter…"
I'm sure it would be. Electricity can do anything, really, but it took a certain methodology to handle.
"We need to develop capacitors first. Once we do, we can use the heat the steam engine generates to create electricity. It'll be a lot easier to operate a train then, so I think it's a worthwhile approach."
This was all a little over my head, but Raphael was kind enough to translate technical books from Earth into the local language for me. I had already provided these to the lab, and I guess Vester's team was making ample use of them. It was sort of like recycling magic, and if it made things smoother for us all, then bring it on.
"Oh, and about that. I wasn't sure whether to say it when it came up, but I thought we could discuss it while looking inside this guy. A picture's worth a thousand words, as they say. Come on in."
Wait, were they already using electricity somehow? I began to doubt myself as I followed Kaijin in—only to find a surprise waiting for me. The inside of the locomotive was bathed in a soft, gentle light. I shot Kaijin a questioning stare.
"We readied ourselves for this the moment you gave us all those books, Boss. Right, Vester?"
"Yes. Sir Rimuru, ever since you tasked us with researching ways to use electricity, Kaijin and I have been poring through all the materials. There were still things we hadn't grasped inside them, but with this many scientists
gathered together, I thought we could get some help from them."
"Right. That sorta thing. So they helped find answers to our questions. Plus, when we looked at that girl over there—Lady Ramiris's Elemental Colossus, that is—it just blew our minds. After all, it's basically a completed version of the magic-armor soldier project we had abandoned."
Certainly, having a real-life sample to work with made things easier to grasp. The new Elemental Colossus currently under construction was already being used as an experimental test bed, it seemed.
"Very much so. Reading those books, and gaining valuable feedback from everyone else, made us realize our great mistake. Back then, we thought that spirit and elemental magic were the same thing during our experiments. That's where we went wrong."
"Yeah, so we looked at the sample to verify what we were missing."
What they found was that different types of magic can run by wholly different sets of rules. Ramiris's Elemental Colossus ran on spirit magic—or more specifically, it used a summoned spirit. Kaijin's team was trying to operate a spirit core with elemental magic, but they just couldn't get it started up.
"Our answer to this, unfortunately, was to up the magic output. This led to magic-generated heat with nowhere to go, and the experiment ended in failure."
I see. Although, maybe the Colossus was arranged like this only because Ramiris couldn't use elemental magic. Regardless, that wound up being the key to its success. The Colossus was driven by a primitive sort of spirit core, but with all the scientists on hand here, they were apparently on their way to restoring its full abilities. Once they fully analyze the master core I created for it, it'll be a full-fledged magic core again.
"I don't know whether to be happy or sad about this."
"Me neither. Here's this theory I gave up on, and we only failed because we had an assumption wrong…"
Here was something that, after all their research, showed no sign of working based on theory alone—but once they solved a little misunderstanding,
everything just worked. I'm sure all Kaijin could do was laugh about it.
"Right? So if we have a magic core, we can convert magicules to energy… although this energy comes in several types, too. It's hard to easily explain."
"This locomotive converts magicules into heat energy to work a turbine. It can also generate electricity as you said, Sir Rimuru, so that's why we can light up each car so brightly."
What a surprise. I mean, seriously. So this car was driven by a completed magic core. Giving magicules to each type of assorted spirit provides you the ability to convert them to useful energy—and you could even circulate this energy around. Electricity created by the turbine can be fed back to the magic core, they said, storing it for later use. I was sure they could generate electricity more directly, but apparently that made things harder to control, so they made it so the system used what the steam engine generated.
When it comes to electricity, high output isn't necessarily all you want. You need both a power plant and a transformer, not to mention storage batteries to keep that energy—and they were handling all of that just with a magic core. Plus, the magicule fuel was all around you in the air, and if it wasn't enough, you could just use a handy magic stone to power it. The running time depended on the magicules, but in a rich environment without aggressive operation, it was essentially forever (with maintenance downtimes).
Truly, a miracle power source.
"Well, Rimuru? Surprised?"
"Even we can do stuff like this when we get serious!"
I hated to see Veldora and Ramiris brag, but it really was amazing. Credit where credit is due.
"This is really great. Keep up the good work, guys!"
"Certainly!"
"Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It's smooth sailing from here on out!"
They knew they were being complimented. Now I wanted to brag to someone. It wouldn't be long before our nation had a train system, and after
that, our magitrains would start sweeping across the world. It was exciting to imagine.
"So, Boss, there's something I wanted to discuss…"
"Oh? What's that?"
"Well, we wanted to hold a friendly icebreaker to celebrate the completion of Magitrain #0, and along those lines, um…"
Ah, a massive, all-out drinking bash and party in the name of a "friendly icebreaker," huh? And at my favorite nightclub, too, of course. Well, fine.
"Perfect! All right, everyone, let's drink out the rest of the evening!"
"Aw, thanks, Boss! I know you sponsor that fancy tavern, so I couldn't go around reserving it just for ourselves."
Kaijin flashed me a relieved smile. No, it's not really the kind of place I'd invite busloads of friends to party in. In fact, I don't think everyone here could even fit inside. Even for Kaijin, money wasn't necessarily the problem.
"Well, how about I have them set up some outdoor seating? We can close it off to the public for tonight and call it a staff appreciation event."
Given how well everyone worked with one another already, icebreaker was a misnomer. So I decided to cover the bill for a party to thank them for their efforts. Though, really, to be honest with you, any excuse was fine. There's no better way to celebrate something than with good drink. Whether it's a little get-together or a company event, as long as it's time spent with one another, it's all the same. And what luck—we happened to be in an elf-run town that was like paradise on earth. Time for everyone to share in the joy and charge our energy for the future.
"Kwaaaah-ha-ha-ha! How understanding of you!"
"""We can't wait, Sir Rimuru!"""
The staff, just as excited as Veldora, all thanked me in unison, as if they practiced regularly. Even the vampires enjoyed some alcohol—I guess not requiring fresh blood widened their palates a bit.
And in the midst of the celebration:
"This is so great! Now I can drink on someone else's coin, too!" "Yes, it's quite wonderful, isn't it? But careful you don't drink too much—"
"None of that, Lady Ramiris! Sir Rimuru told me that underage drinking is strictly prohibited!"
A certain pip-squeak tried seizing the moment to wet her whistle, but she was thankfully stopped in time.