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Volume 4 Prologue 1.2

Translator: Reflet
Editor: Weasalopes

Hiroshi nodded at what Haruna had said. There was currently some typical Forre food on the table, and most of it was the kind you’d see in Farlane, with only maybe German omelettes being the unique food. It was just a bit more tasty than that of Farlane’s variety, and it wasn’t like Forre was the only country with sausages.

　In terms of meat, Forre’s food often consisted of insects or lizards, but that wasn’t all that different from Farlane either. The difference was at most 5-5 or 4-6 ratio.

　Also, both Farlane and Forre cooked their meat by smoking it, but while Farlane smoked block meat right away, Forre mainly turned the meat into sausage before smoking it. This was probably due to the region being mountainous and ill-suited for agriculture and apparently dairy from the looks of it. Unlike China, where you ate just about anything with four legs (besides desks), Forre was a bit toned down, but they still had a policy of trying to eat as many living things as possible. With the reasoning that sausaging saved more parts of the animal than smoking blocked meat, the residents apparently had the custom of turning all meat into sausages.

　Conversely, in Farlane, those parts that were difficult to eat were instead processed into fertilizer. As a result, there weren’t many variations in sausage cuisine, and the taste itself fell back one or two steps from that of Forre. In exchange, Farlane excelled at smoked block meat.

　And as they were evaluating all of the dishes,

「Are ye kids drinking up？」

　A dwarf with a fine complexion came over to Hiroshi’s table, mug in one hand. Upon further glance, the newest barrels on the other tables had all been emptied (the brands on them were different, hence why they were clearly new), some of them with at least three barrels (some of which had fallen over).

　The attendants who retrieved the empty barrels and left the unfinished ones over at the tables only appeared to be slender and youthful ladies, but they clearly had quite a bit of arm strength. 

　As they made all of these fruitless observations, the group’s gaze moved to the dwarf in front of them. This man happened to be the top in the mining union as well as a top-class technician in mining.

「What’s the matter with ye? I treat ye to all this booze, and yet ye don’t drink a single drop.」

「Ah～、those three over there still aren’t eligible to drink in our home country, you see. It would just get bothersome if they returned addicted to alcohol at that age, so we’re ensuring they don’t drink anything.」

「Is that it? Ye need not worry yeselves over something small like that. Just don’t tell anyone and it’ll be all right, youngsters.」

　The guildmaster attempted to make them drink liquor like some country drunkard. To the dwarves, not drinking liquor in a place that served liquor was a very reckless thing to do.

　He was essentially the same as those drunkards at rural banquets.

「Hey, gramps.」

「What is it, lass？」

「There isn’t any liquor here to waste on kids who don’t even understand how great alcohol is. Rather than make them drink it, hand it all over to me.」

　At this rate, sensing that the children might actually be forced to drink, Makoto interjected in the nick of time. Although this was quite honestly how she felt.

「Oho, I see, I see. Then I will no longer say such boorish things. Drink, drink up！！」

　The dwarf said, pouring in waves of high concentration liquor into a gigantic mug. Makoto accepted it with a cheer.

『Let’s leave drunks to Makoto from now on.』

『Agreed.』

『Mako would probably never be defeated.』

『Actually, Makoto-san’s surprisingly used to this.』

『Even those knights were pretty much like this once it got into their system, other than Julius.』

　Deciding they would push all the troublesome drunks on Makoto in the party chat, the other our continued eating their food enjoyably and at a leisurely pace. Makoto herself had intended this, so no one was about to complain.

　Even after Hiroshi and the other three left the building, Makoto remained within, drinking all the liquor in the shop in addition to knocking out all the dwarves without breaking a sweat before taking her leave with complete composure, but that is just between us.

　At this point, I should touch a bit more on where the group currently was, aka Forre. The stage for this chapter, the Forre kingdom, is also known by its other name, “The Kingdom of Iron”, one of the three great western kingdoms. It is positioned to the neighboring east of Farlane in the middle of Spirit Spire Mountain as well as between Midas Federation, Sharne River, and Arga River and to the north of Darl. As this alias implied, the country was a mining and manufacturing industry with plenty of mining resources buried underground.

　As Forre had quite the number of mines in its nation, the majority of its cities built their livelihoods around excavating minerals. Due to that, about thirty percent of its inhabitants were dwarves, and in addition to the other races there, humans were more outnumbered than they were the majority, which was quite the rare case.

　Perhaps because the towns were adjacent to mines, it was common for cities  to have “cave” or “mine” in their names. The population of those cities was composed of a minimum of fourty percent dwarves, and for smaller towns, ninety percent or more dwarves, which was one of the reasons why the dwarf population was so high in these areas.

　The reason why dwarves did not make up one hundred percent of the population in those towns was quite simple: they were incredibly bad with business, especially that of food and drink. It was obvious why they were bad at it: because dwarves cannot simply sit and watch people drinking/eating without wanting to join in. As a result, they drank more liquor than they sold and ate more food than what they gave to customers. Only a few dwarf-run shops were exceptions that could actually maintain their business.

　Being a country well-versed in mining and in a relatively high region of latitude, Forre had not made much progress in agriculture. With an abundance of mines probably came a high stiffness in the quality of much of its water, which was so filled with minerals that it couldn’t be drunk directly, which limited the kinds of crops that could be grown there, hence why Forre didn’t have much in the way of farming. In fact, it was precisely because Forre had limitations on agriculture that it used so many dwarves as resources in order to make a variety of high-quality metal products, leading to its rise to importance in the world (in a different direction than Farlane).

　From the restrictions on its territory, Forre’s greatest weakness was its high reliance on Farlane for food in addition to the fact that said food could only be transported through a few specific routes, which included the northern road or port (both of which were inaccessible in winter) or routes passing through Midas Federation and Darl in the south, and these restrictions were the sources of many worries for the leaders in Forre on a constant basis. Lorren, neighboring Forre to the east, did not have enough agricultural production to support Forre, and Mida Federation already had their hands filled, so their food resources were not in much of a very different situation from that of Forre.

　Forre, with its mining strength and agricultural weakness, naturally had adopted an “elect few” military, with the highest skill in soldiers among the big three and equipment on par with that of Douga and Julius. Were the kingdoms to fight one another without any cheap tricks, 5% of the Forre troops could easily turn the tables in any battle with their prowess. Add in the superior armor and the sheer battle ability was made very clear. Then again, even with all that power, just by having Douga, Rayna, and Julius standing there, the Forre army would be half destroyed, but that was just one of those cruel facts of this world.

　The country of humans and dwarves, the iron kingdom that was both strong and weak. That was Forre.

「Come to think of it, back at the cave-in from yesterday, we obtained a hefty amount of stones and whatnot, but was that okay？」

　Breakfast the next day. Bread, soup, salad, and some sausage added in for an extra fee. Haruna had recalled something Hiroshi did that she could not ignore.

「Yeah, I got permission, mate.」

「Well okay then.」

　Hiroshi answered as he dunked his bread in the soup, and Haruna tentatively nodded, seeming to understand that Hiroshi had gotten permission in some way. The stone in question that he had obtained was bedrock that had been blocking the entrance during the cave-in, now crushed into several stones.

「But that was a weird ‘ol incident with the cave-in, I’ll say.」

「Really？」

「Havin’ a slab o’rock, firmly reinforced to the tunnel entrance suddenly crumble? That’s purty irregular.」

　Haruna and Mio exchanged glances at this uncomfortable topic. They had only just arrived in Forre and things were already strange. Tatsuya groaned in a low voice and Makoto sighed with a facepalm. Whenever the term “unnatural” came up, there was always one thing that immediately surfaced in their minds, but even though the city of Aragod Mine was on quite the large scale, it wasn’t an especially important mine. There was no reason to collapse it, or at least they couldn’t find any.

「Hiro, what’s your take？」

「I really can’t say, mate. I didn’t feel no miasma around, nor were there any traces of explosions or the like.」

　Tatsuya just groaned even more at Hiroshi’s answer. An unnatural cave-in, with no traces of anyone tampering with the area, and occurring the very day they arrive. The warning signs were so obvious that the team didn’t know what to do next.

「Well, I do think that it woulda been difficult to collapse the tunnel with an explosion. Unless ya broke off that thick slab at the precise level that connected to the cave, ya can’t really do anything to make it budge.」

「Sooo？」

「The cave-in was prolly just a natural phenomenon.」

「……」

　Everyone was just silent, trying to figure out why Hiroshi had seemed to essentially contradict himself. Or at least it seemed to contradict itself, but it wasn’t necessarily impossible to engineer a natural disaster with enough intentional buildup.

「……Sensei, is there something you’ve figured out？」

「Not figured out, exactly, but I do think we oughta examine the feng shui real quick.」