Sortie

I modified the boat with Akira, preparing to head for the wetlands said to be teeming with slimes.

To keep the slimes away, we enclosed the boat with aluminum window frames I'd bought from Shangri-La.

It looked just like a greenhouse made of glass.

The construction was crude—we'd put together a wooden frame and secured the aluminum window frames with duct tape—but it was sturdy enough for our needs.

It should be fine for one trial voyage.

This wasn't some desperate, life-or-death voyage. We were only going to capture a slime, and if things got dangerous, we could just turn around and head home.

The boat used the simple defenses I'd devised, but if we wanted to build anything more like a proper battleship, we'd have to build it out of iron.

That might appeal to a man's sense of romance, but this world didn't have the technology for it.

Even the dwarves, skilled as they were at working iron, would have a hard time building one.

We loaded the finished greenhouse onto the boat...