Chapter 125
As usual, I was working on Gremlin crafts in the Dragon Workshop when I heard the powerful sound of wings beating outside. A short while later, the workshop shook lightly from the heavy rumble of footsteps. The dragon was back.
When I stepped outside the workshop, the ridiculously huge dragon, over thirty meters long, had returned to her nest in the giant cavern. She was pulling gold, silver, and other treasures out of her belly pouch with a clink-clank and happily adding to her glittering mountain.
"One treasure pile, two... That's three now! Gah-ha-ha-ha! All the treasures in the world are mine!"
"You went and collected another bunch of worthless junk. Though... maybe not this time."
The glittering things the Dragon Witch had collected like a magpie were mostly glass windows that she seemed to have pried out of wrecked cars and abandoned buildings.
Most of the rest consisted of pathetic treasures like glittery sticker sets for little girls, rusty safes, and colorful plastic tableware. There were also huge quantities of shabby little Gremlins that appeared to have come from Akisame.
But today, something big was mixed in. It wasn't a magic stone, at least, but a huge deformed skull the size of a kei truck lay there, with a dark-gray Gremlin well over eighty millimeters in diameter set into its forehead.
No way.
"I went and killed a Class 1 in Okinawa. Come on, hurry up and strip the Gremlin off and turn it into something good!"
"Whew! At this rate, you'll wipe out all the monsters in Japan."
There was the Giant Monster, Daidarabotchi, and Okinawa's Gashadokuro.
At this rate, hadn't every Class 1 monster in the Japanese Archipelago been wiped out by the Dragon Witch?
She was absurdly strong. Even the Class-type monsters that had recently learned Time Acceleration and gone on rampages were helpless against our dragon.
The Dragon Witch really was strong. Our earnest wish was for her to sacrifice a little strength and put the points into intelligence instead, but she wasn't a bad person, all things considered.
Come to think of it, the Dragon Witch had lacked intelligence ever since the first time we met.
When I left Okutama because I was suffering from dwindling supplies, I made the mistake of taking the Octameteorite with me. A stupid dragon passing by caught its scent, abducted me, and before I knew it, I had been added to the Dragon Witch's collection.
Kidnapping.
Confinement.
Forced labor.
What a garbage thing to do.
Yet despite that terrible first impression, I had grown attached to a life that was not bad at all for a captive.
I was completely free to set my own work pace.
She fed me my fill of delicious meat every day.
I could also take a hot bath every day, as long as I didn't mind using the Dragon Witch's bathwater.
Whenever I asked Zaizen-san, they would find and deliver the tools and technical books necessary for gemstone crafting with unbelievable speed for a ruined world.
The Dragon Workshop, built in one section of the dragon's nest, was completely safe. When she learned how socially inept I was, she issued orders to keep unnecessary people away, even as she looked exasperated.
She was an idiot, but her instinctive aesthetic sense when it came to gemstones was remarkable. She was such an enthusiastic fan of my work that she could distinguish my gemstone crafts from counterfeits at a single glance.
Giving me such a white-collar workplace and taking care of my food, clothing, and shelter was all well and good, but the fact that her first act upon meeting me had been kidnapping was why dragons were called flying problem children. Seriously, show some remorse.
Unfortunately, this dragon could be controlled, but she couldn't be made to feel remorse.
Because she was strong.
First, through a dragon-transformation spell using the Octameteorite, the Dragon Witch could transform into a gigantic dragon over eighty meters long. She was normally thirty meters long.
They say size is strength for a reason, and the Dragon Witch proved it when the Giant Monster attacked. She fought a Giant Monster battle, defeated it, and became Tokyo's savior.
Ever since then, even the Vampire Mage and the Foresight Mage treated the Dragon Witch with respect. You could also say they praised and flattered her while manipulating things behind the scenes to make good use of her. Even so, they definitely respected her.
She killed Daidarabotchi and opened a trade route to Tohoku, rapidly delivered preventive medicine for mushroom disease throughout Japan, and carried the Witch Gathering's expedition team on her back to crush the Arataki Group. She rampaged and performed one feat after another.
Even during the recent Class-monster anomaly, she knocked down the Class-type monsters that awakened to Time Acceleration one after another, and she kept bringing large Gremlins back to me like this.
The Dragon Witch was a godsend. Much appreciated.
She hoarded the magic stones she acquired and refused to share them, started a banking business and caused a huge uproar by refusing to let people withdraw their deposits, captured a ferocious Class-type monster with glittering mirror scales and tried to raise it as a pet, and occasionally caused kidnapping incidents. Sometimes I felt she created just as many troubles as she solved.
Even so, on balance, the Dragon Witch was useful to society.
She was silly, strong, and a problem child, but she wasn't bad at heart.
That was my bad friend.
While I was carefully removing the large Gremlin from the skull of the Okinawan Class 1 monster Gashadokuro, the Dragon Witch came over, snorting impatiently, and started giving me orders.
"Oori, make the material speak for itself. It has such a lovely, rich matte color, so instead of cutting it into a shiny gemstone, it would be better suited to a hefty model. Carve it into some kind of living creature that you can stare at forever without getting bored."
"Okay. With this color and size, a model of a living creature... Maybe wolves. I could carve several howling wolves, put them in a diorama, and enclose the whole thing in glass."
"I'll leave the details to you. If you make it, it'll be perfect. I'm off to take a victory bath."
No sooner had she said that than the Dragon Witch transformed into human form right in front of me. Humming a tune, she walked between the mountains of treasure piled up in the nest and disappeared into the bathroom at the back.
At first, she had been shy enough to tell me to turn around whenever she transformed, but lately she had gotten too lazy to bother hiding her naked body.
A sloppy body and a sloppy personality. The fact that someone like this was treated as one of Japan's three pillars meant the world was truly at its end. I wanted her intelligence to increase by half that of the Vampire Gentleman... no, a tenth... no, even one percent would do.
"Uh, Oori-san? Could I talk to you for a moment before you get back to work?"
"Huh? Is there some problem?"
Just as I finished carefully extracting the large Gremlin from Gashadokuro's skull, Zaizen-san, who had somehow arrived without my noticing, called out to me. The soot on their Daikokuten mask suggested that they had stopped by the Gremlin Workshop on their way here.
"About the delivery that the Dragon Witch-sama is trying to welch on..."
"Oh, I don't know anything about that. Leave troublesome stuff like that to Zaizen-san. At worst, we can quietly pay compensation out of the secret ledger and apologize to the other party."
"The problem is, the other party is the Blue Witch-sama."
"The witch...? But Blue is docile."
The Blue Witch was a witch who had more or less retired. I had heard that she had holed up in Ome City, which she treated as an absolute defense zone, and kept a great many small-animal-type magical beasts. She was apparently an animal-therapy addict.
Apparently, she had once been amazing, but she rarely came out in public, and I had never thought of her as the sort of witch who would become troublesome if you offended her.
Irritating other witches and causing trouble was basically a lizard's instinct. It sounded like business as usual.
When I tilted my head, unable to understand what the problem was, Zaizen-san handed me a letter and spoke gravely.
"Actually, we received a jointly signed letter from the Foresight Mage-sama and the Vampire Mage-sama. To summarize, they are making a very strong request that we absolutely avoid defaulting on this delivery."
"...Ah, yes, it does say that."
Judging from the polite yet concise message written on high-quality paper, defaulting on this delivery really was a serious problem.
If we defaulted on this delivery to the Blue Witch, Zaizen-san's apology would not be enough, and the enraged Blue Witch would attack us. A witch-on-witch conflict would break out.
We could prevent anyone from dying in the conflict, but neither witch would back down until both of them had suffered severe injuries.
With the current Class-monster anomaly creating a demand for every available fighter, we couldn't afford to increase the number of seriously wounded.
I wanted to prevent a battle that would leave a grudge affecting all sorts of relationships in the future.
So the magic stone entrusted to us by the Blue Witch must not be stashed away. It must be processed into a wand and delivered safely to the Blue Witch...
After reading the letter to the end, I was so shocked that my eyes nearly popped out.
"What!? That idiot got the magic stone and was trying to stiff them on the delivery!? You idiot! I didn't hear a thing! What the hell is wrong with her!?"
"Just as I thought. No one at the Gremlin Workshop knew about it either, so I suspected that Oori-san hadn't been informed."
"I didn't hear anything! Did she pocket it behind my back? That idiot, that piece of trash! Business requires a minimum level of trust! I'm about to lose my temper!"
There were problems in this world that could be solved with an apology and problems that could not.
Magic-stone trading was one of the problems that could not be solved with a simple apology.
And the other party was a witch!
It was serious enough that the Vampire and Foresight Mages had jointly issued a warning.
If we ignored that warning, we could even face a witch trial. It had not been long since the Zombie Witch was put on trial for attempting to overthrow the state and executed.
Though it was in the form of a letter, this was effectively a yellow card. It was incredibly dangerous. If we ignored it, we'd get a red card and might be sent off this world entirely.
"Oori-san, can you handle it?"
"Leave it to me. If I go on strike, she'll hand over the magic stone eventually."
"I'm sorry. I didn't want to burden you with this sort of trouble, but there was nothing I could do."
"Don't apologize. If anything, I'll make the Dragon Witch-sama apologize."
When I thumped my chest and gave them my assurance, Zaizen-san looked relieved, bowed, and left.
I was the Dragon Witch's treasure manager. I was her favorite, as well as the top earner among the Dragon faction. If I went on strike, the Dragon Witch would give in.
Ever since I developed the Yoseishi processing method, I had become a money tree and even gained a certain amount of influence at the Witch Gathering.
The Yoseishi processing method was something I discovered while racking my brain and trying all sorts of things to somehow make effective use of the enormous quantities of tiny Gremlins that the Dragon Witch collected like garbage.
Normally, combining Gremlins was pointless. Even if you neatly joined the broken surfaces of a Gremlin back together, or attached two Gremlins with adhesive, they were not recognized as a single mass of Gremlin.
However, the Yoseishi processing method solved this problem.
In fact, even tiny Gremlins could be processed into geometric solids and combined properly to make them function as one large Gremlin.
In other words, I could turn huge quantities of low-value tiny Gremlins into extremely valuable large Gremlins.
The invention of this processing method allowed me to keep generating enormous wealth.
My personal Dragon Workshop was on the cutting edge of Yoseishi processing, while the Gremlin Workshops in the territory were in the middle of mass-production tests for the simplest, and therefore lowest-performance, form of Yoseishi processing: the Sacred Geometry 64 Tetrahedron.
Yoseishi crafts had now become indispensable to the development of magical technology.
If I abandoned my work, the Dragon Witch would lose her top earner and, at the same time, the craftsman who processed gemstones to her exact tastes. She would never be able to tolerate that.
And if I ignored her whenever she tried to talk to me... No, that would be cruel. Anyone who ignored a friend was scum.
To scold the wretched woman for her outrageous misdeeds, I kicked open the bathroom door and stormed in.
The Dragon Witch was in human form, soaking in the tub and dreamily gazing at something in her hands. She jumped in surprise and quickly hid the object behind her back.
"Hey. What did you just hide behind your back? Hm?"
"W-what? Nothing. You can't just come into a maiden's bath like this. What's wrong with you? You're a pervert. Get out, now."
"Shut up, you thirtysomething, with your squishy belly. I heard about it. It's the magic stone, isn't it? You were looking at the magic stone, weren't you? You took the magic stone the Blue Witch gave us for processing and kept it for yourself instead of handing it over to me, didn't you?"
When I pressed her, the Dragon Witch looked away awkwardly.
"...I received it, so it's mine. I won't give it to anyone. All the treasures in the world are mine!"
"What the hell are you talking about, you piece of trash!? Hand it over!"
"No! This magic stone is mine!"
"Just hand it over quietly. You want me to go on strike? I won't process gemstones for you anymore."
"Ugh! Th-that's a dirty threat...! That's horrible. I never thought you were such a despicable man, Oori!"
The despicable witch looked genuinely hurt, completely ignoring her own culpability. I grabbed her and tried to take the magic stone away from her, but I couldn't match her strength.
However, the Dragon Witch knew that I was a delicate, weak human, so she wouldn't use her full strength against me.
The Dragon Witch desperately held the blue magic stone out of my reach and grew flustered.
"H-hey, stop! If I get my strength wrong, I'll crush you. Back off!"
"Then hand over the magic stone. If you think so, hold still, you—damn you!"
"No, I won't give it to you! I won't give you the magic stone, and I don't want you to go on strike! Go away, you pervert! Stop, don't—nooooo! Dragon rape!"
"Shut up and stop resisting! This is your fault!"
After wrestling with the Dragon Witch for almost an hour in the bathroom, I somehow argued her into submission and succeeded in recovering the magic stone.
You didn't have to resist so much. I'm exhausted!
Clutching the recovered magic stone, I returned to the Dragon Workshop, dripping wet from head to toe and feeling utterly dejected.
Now I or Zaizen-san would have to apologize to the Blue Witch for the delayed delivery. What a pain, you lousy lizard...
...But I also knew that, despite fighting me over the magic stone for an entire hour, the Dragon Witch had never once used her full strength. She had carefully controlled her power so she wouldn't hurt me.
She really wasn't a bad person.
Honestly.
The Dragon Witch was a troublesome bad friend.