It took some time for my heart to settle.
I sat down on a broad rock nearby and straightened my posture. I had already shown Lapis everything there was to see and then some, so there was nothing left to bluff about — but today, of all days, I wanted to be serious. I had an important matter to discuss.
Lapis listened to what I had to say and furrowed her brows ever so slightly. So slightly, in fact, that I wouldn't have noticed if I didn't have the ability to read the other party's emotions.
"You're considering taking out a loan?"
"Yes."
The Kunkuska Trading Company also handled banking services. Even a Demon Lord occasionally needed quick cash. In such cases, the company would lend the money.
Over the course of half a month spent digging out ore, I had come to realize one truth: if I kept living like this, I was bound to die a miserable death under an adventurer's axe sooner or later!
Two gold a day. Even working nonstop for a hundred days, I could only earn 200 gold.
With 200 gold, I couldn't even buy the lowest-grade golem, let alone a goblin. I would have to swing a pickaxe until my bones ached just to afford hiring one more goblin. And for all that time, I'd be defending my dungeon with nothing but a single golem and a goblin?
'Impossible.'
Adventurers were eyeing my dungeon at every turn. The Leaf Party, now turned enemy, kept me on edge.
It wouldn't be strange if an entire expedition burst in at any moment. I couldn't just sit around waiting for money to pile up from pickaxe swings.
I figured it would be far better to take out a large loan and pay it off gradually with interest. In truth, I was confident I could repay the entire principal in one go — not just the interest.
But Lapis quietly declined.
"Dantalion, many Demon Lords have borrowed from our company. A fair number of them can barely manage the interest payments alone. Interest accumulates faithfully every month, whereas dungeon revenue is irregular at best."
Lapis shook her head. Her pink hair swayed from side to side.
"Paradoxically, the greatest source of dungeon revenue is the very adventurers who invade it. The stronger the adventurer, the greater the dungeon's profits. Powerful adventurers invariably carry excellent gear and expensive items, which the Demon Lord can seize. Put another way, a dungeon that attracts only low-quality adventurers won't bring in much of anything."
"……."
"More than anything, I doubt the company would be willing to lend such a large sum. The Kunkuska Trading Company is a place that pursues profit with ruthless efficiency. Even fellow demons blanch at their cold-bloodedness."
Lapis emphasized once more.
"If there is no guarantee of generating reliable income, the company will flatly refuse any loan request, regardless of whether the borrower is a Demon Lord. Forgive my bluntness, but Lord Dantalion, a Demon Lord's rank is equivalent to their creditworthiness. I have serious doubts about how much trust the Kunkuska Trading Company would place in you at F-rank."
"I suppose so."
"The company maintains a large number of security forces on retainer, and has the financial means to hire even more at any time. The company is merciless toward Demon Lords who fail to pay interest on their loans. There are actual precedents of threats and coercion being carried out."
Her voice dropped even lower.
"His Excellency Glassalabolas, ranked twenty-fifth among the Demon Lords, borrowed a hundred thousand gold and failed to pay interest for seventy years. In response, the Kunkuska Trading Company mobilized a staggering thirty-six demon legions and invaded His Excellency Glassalabolas's dungeon. The Demon Lord's monster forces were routed, and in the end, His Excellency Glassalabolas had no choice but to pay every last coin of the seventy years' accumulated interest. The result was that his dungeon went bankrupt."
Lapis let out a small sigh.
"This is the power of the Kunkuska Trading Company. This is why it has maintained its position as the foremost trading house in the Demon Realm for the past three thousand years. Lord Dantalion, I am not speaking to you now as a mere employee of the company, but as a fellow demon, offering genuine advice. Do not be reckless and borrow the company's money."
Her sincerity reached me through my heart.
This girl truly thought my proposal was foolish. She wasn't being cold-hearted. In fact, deceiving me into taking out a loan would have been better for her own sales performance.
Lending a trivial sum to ensnare a Demon Lord would have been far more aligned with the company's interests, yet Lapis disregarded her own performance metrics and her organization's benefit purely because she refused to scam me.
She spoke clearly and deliberately.
"Be patient. Times are hard now, but if you save steadily over a hundred years, two hundred years, I believe you will absolutely build a magnificent dungeon, Lord Dantalion."
Lapis Lazuli. A demon with a frigid expression, an icy tone, and an officious demeanor.
But beneath that exterior, she was pure. She shone quietly with the light of unwavering conviction.
It was precisely because Lapis was this way that I pressed my point even harder.
"What if I had a business proposal guaranteed to succeed?"
"……."
The girl stared at me in silence.
"Of course, our company would not hold back on investment. If, hypothetically, Lord Dantalion, you truly possess a business idea with a guaranteed outcome."
"That's unlikely, but," she said with a casual air.
I smiled faintly.
"An epidemic."
"……?"
Lapis furrowed her brows.
"What do you mean?"
Good — she's interested.
The real battle starts now. I whispered to myself.
'Acting skill, activate.'
Notification windows popped up in succession before my eyes.
"Acting skill is now active."
"Bonus effects are added to the skill based on Intelligence and Charisma stats."
"A die of fortune slips from your hand! The probability of the other party doubting your claim is "slightly" reduced."
The Acting skill, earned as a tutorial reward. This was, quite literally, a skill that boosted your acting prowess.
It reduced the target's suspicion by a certain probability — "slightly, somewhat, significantly, drastically." Right now, my Intelligence and Politics stats were worse than a rat's tail, so at best it could only slightly rattle their doubt.
The type of skill you received as a reward seemed to depend on how you had behaved during the tutorial.
If you'd brute-forced your way through the tutorial head-on, you'd have gotten skills like Thousand-Mile March or Ten Thousand Man Foe, and if you'd cunningly maneuvered through it with schemes, you'd have received skills like Ten-Sided Ambush or the Eight Formation Strategy.
For instance, Thousand-Mile March boosts a character's combat power by 140% for quite an extended period. It was originally a skill my Hero character had possessed in the Dungeon Attack game.
Meanwhile, the Eight Formation Strategy turns the entire party into ambush units while increasing their attack and defense by 25%. Either way, both were considered overpowered skills.
Damn it — compared to those, the Acting skill was absolute trash.
First off, it has no direct connection to combat. The single most important thing in Dungeon Attack is, without question, combat. On that front alone, the Acting skill already fails miserably. To make matters worse, it can't even deceive the other party perfectly! Terms like "somewhat" or "a lot" — it offers nothing but vague, subjective, and relative benchmarks.
So why do skills matter in the first place? Because they provide reliable effects whenever you use them. They always produce the outcome you expect, which lets you think, "Ah, if I use this skill here, things will turn out like this and that," and plan accordingly.
A skill whose effect you can never predict in terms of when or how much?
What a joke. You'd have been better off just raising your stats a little.
Once, on a Dungeon Attack fan site, I raised questions about Acting along with a few other skills. The point was that no one could figure out why they even existed. They didn't reduce the enemy's intelligence, and Dungeon Attack didn't have any political or diplomatic gameplay elements to speak of...
Some people put forward a plausible theory that those skills were thrown in as filler just to hit the 255-skill cap.
Honestly, I don't even know exactly what effect the Acting skill is supposed to have. I'd forgotten that a skill like this even existed in the game. A trash-tier ability so obscure that even a hardcore Dungeon Attack degenerate like me had never heard of it. That was Acting.
'Well, it's about as useful as a speck of dirt caught under an ant's claw.'
I only used it because the skill happened to be there. Nothing more, nothing less.
I kept talking in order to persuade Lapis.
"In two months, an epidemic will spread across the Human Realm."
Lapis must not have fully grasped what I meant, because she kept her mouth shut for a rather long time. I could feel her confusion washing over me.
"...An epidemic?"
"A terrible plague called the Black Death. Starting in the summer of Imperial Year 1505 — that is, this summer — the continent will suffer casualties unlike anything it has ever seen."
I wasn't lying. This was part of the Dungeon Attack world setting.
The year the protagonist begins acting as the Hero — in other words, the year the player starts the game — is Imperial Year 1515. A full ten years before that, the Black Death sweeps across the entire continent.
The plague starts in the northern continent and spreads to every corner in the blink of an eye. Within just a few years, humans, elves, and demi-humans accounting for twenty percent of the continent's population perish.
As if that weren't enough... a great famine follows on its heels. Famine persists for a full ten years. The people who would farm have all fallen ill, and even the groundwater is contaminated, so there's no way crops could grow properly. The races of the continent are plunged into despair.
And they blame it all on the Demon Lord.
The narrative becomes that the Demon Lord caused the plague and spread the famine.
Of course, it wasn't true — but the people of this world, whose knowledge remains stuck in the medieval era, come to firmly believe it. The fact that demonkin suffered relatively little damage from the plague also fuels the suspicion. Born and raised in the Demon Realm, a harsh environment by nature, demonkin possessed strong immune systems. And that, coincidentally, led to the logic that since the plague supposedly spread by demonkin was harmless to them, it must have been their doing all along.
The humans argue that to save the continent from the brink of annihilation, every Demon Lord on the surface must be driven out.
"'Storm the dungeons!'"
And so the great age of adventure begins. Anyone who can so much as swing a sword rushes headlong into dungeons — an era where you can't swing a stick without hitting an adventurer.
This is the premise of Dungeon Attack. The protagonist Hero, in particular, lost his parents to a Demon Lord's raids during childhood and harbors a hatred for Demon Lords deeper than anyone else's. This hatred too gradually fades as the scenario progresses and the truth comes to light, but... well, that's neither here nor there. The game's worldbuilding is so grim it actually cultivated a devoted fanbase.
Here's the important part. In this world, there exists a miracle cure for the Black Death.
It's an herb called the Black Herb — think of it as roughly rarer than bellflower root in the modern era I came from. In other words, not particularly rare at all.
However, when the plague first broke out and the Black Herb's curative properties became known, people went on a reckless, indiscriminate harvesting spree. As a result, the seeds became extraordinarily scarce.
Only belatedly did the nations begin managing and cultivating Black Herb on an organized level, but by then it was already too little, too late. The amount harvested was overwhelmingly insufficient compared to the number of plague victims. Within a single century, the continent's population had been cut roughly in half.
"The greatest tragedy in history — born from misunderstanding, ignorance, and haste stacked on top of each other."
It could be called cruel... but when I learned that the point in time I'd fallen into happened to be exactly Year 1505 of the Continental Calendar, I cheered. I was so elated that I hopped around on my one good leg.
Because that meant I could exploit the game's lore.
"An unprecedented plague is about to sweep across the continent. The Black Herb is the only cure for the plague. This is information that only I possess!"
Who in the world could ever imagine it?
The Black Herb — a useless weed that grows wild on the hills behind the village, utterly pointless against ordinary illnesses, too tough to eat, too bland to use as a spice — is the one and only miracle cure for the worst plague in recorded history.
Before the Black Death appeared, the Black Herb was such a nameless weed that it didn't even have a proper name. It was only called the Black Herb later, because of its effectiveness against the plague. The herb's curative properties weren't even discovered until several years after the plague had spread across the entire continent.
And what does that mean?
"If I stockpile Black Herb now, the profits will be beyond imagination."
It's undeniably a cruel thing to do. The Black Herb I'd be hoarding would, under normal circumstances, have saved someone's life.
But to me, even if I think, speak, and act just like a real-world human, I am still more precious to myself than any character in a game, and my golem and goblins are invaluable. I'm just not good enough to pass up a chance to fast-track my dungeon's progression for the sake of some nameless stranger.
"I know the specific cure for the plague. If I monopolize it in advance, I can generate enormous profits."
The two of us went back and forth with questions and answers for a while.
How I could be so confident the plague would spread, how I happened to learn the true identity of the cure — that sort of conversation. I lied, embellishing what I actually knew with just enough plausible detail.
Now then, Lapis Lazuli. How are you going to play this?
"......"
The girl's blue eyes stared straight at me. Before long, her pale lips parted.
"I'm sorry, but no."
There was no hesitation in Lapis's eyes. It was a firm refusal.