Chapter 98: The Bear Heads to the Tunnel

Chapter 98:
The Bear Heads to the Tunnel

 

I SPENT THE DAY after coming back hanging with Fina and Shuri, which meant that the next day was time to go to Mileela with Cliff. There I stood in front of the bear house, then, waiting for Cliff and—maybe—the master of the trade guild.

Which was fine enough, I guess…but if she spooked my bears, she’d have to follow on foot or not at all. I don’t like people as it is, and I’m not going to make my bears carry someone who freaked them out.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said Cliff. Milaine walked along beside him.

“It wasn’t long, but, uh. What’s Milaine doing with you?” Seemed weird, seeing those two together. But then, maybe they hung out all the time slightly off-screen or something.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Cliff. “Milaine is the trade guild’s master in this town. And—hold on a minute, don’t the two of you already know each other?”

“Milaine, you’re the guild master?” This was the first I was hearing about it.

“Oh, did I not tell you?” Milaine said with a little, just-a-little-too-cute gasp. Yep, she definitely hadn’t told me on purpose. I eyed her suspiciously. “I’m kidding. Honestly, there just wasn’t a good time to tell you. Whether I’m the guild master or just a regular employee doesn’t affect our relationship, right?”

Yeah, sure she “forgot.” She must have enjoyed keeping quiet about it.

“Milaine, how old are you supposed to be again?” She looked way too young to be a guild master, but maybe—kinda like Ellelaura—her looks were deceiving.

“How rude. I’m in my twenties; can’t you tell?”

Which covered ten whole years, and isn’t there a huge different between twenty and twenty-nine? I guess she must’ve been in her late twenties, then, and didn’t want to say it. Still, I couldn’t say it wasn’t impressive that she was a guild master even at that age.

But…then again, it did line up. When we sold the eggs wholesale and started up the shop, Milaine had made a lot of unilateral decisions. Decisions a normal employee wouldn’t be able to make. She said “It’s fine” or “Leave it to me” a lot. Moreover, it wasn’t like any regular nobody could refuse to sell eggs to the feudal lord and get away with it. Now that I thought about it, there’d been a ton of fishy things going on. And all the while, she’d been…been bamboozling me with how young she looked. The audacity!

Cliff whirled to face us, irritation plain on his face. “I don’t care whether you’re twenty, thirty, or even forty. Let’s get going.”

“W-Wait a second,” stammered Milaine. “There’s a huge difference between twenty and thirty, and…forties? How dare you? You must be a real hit with the ladies.”

“I don’t need to be. You see, Milaine, I happen to be happily married with children.” He wasn’t wrong—his wife Ellelaura was crazy pretty, and his kids Noa and Shia were adorable. Unless he was a looser guy than I thought, he didn’t need to be popular with the ladies.

“Cliff,” said Milaine. “You’re not trying to pick a fight with me, are you?”

“I’m simply stating the facts.”

Tension brewed down here in front of the bear house. Our two combatants stood in front of each other, like cats and dogs about to scrap! I couldn’t really decide who was the cat and who was the dog, but maybe if the fight started—oh, wait.

Right, we had actual business to worry about.

“Milaine,” I said, “will you come to Mileela?”

“Well, there is the trade guild scandal to deal with, and I do want to see if all this talk about a tunnel is true. If there is a tunnel, after all, we can start trading with Mileela, and none of that can be organized without the presence of the guild master. Which is me.”

I managed not to roll my eyes.

“Most importantly,” said Milaine, “going gives me the opportunity to ride your infamous bears! I’d go even if I had to play hooky from work.”

Wait a second…whenever I saw her at the trade guild, she always seemed to be at the reception desk. Was she really doing guild master stuff, or just lounging about all the time? “Don’t play hooky—just do your job!”

“Precisely. I’m going to Mileela as part of my job, aren’t I?”

Cliff blinked. “Uh…I can’t really say that you’re not…” Cliff gave me a helpless look. He had nothin’.

“Excellent.” Milaine grabbed me by the shoulders and started walking. “Yuna, may I go meet these bears everyone’s been talking about?” A visibly astonished Cliff followed behind us. Well, she was doing her job, so I guess…I guess it all worked out?

Sure, why not?

 

On our way out of the town, our weird party took the gate guards by surprise. Anybody would be a little shocked to see the feudal lord and the trade guild’s master just casually hanging out together, but I just hoped that I wasn’t another reason for the surprise on their faces.

Finally outside of the town, I held out my bear puppets in front of me and summoned Kumayuru and Kumakyu.

“The infamous bears.” Milaine squinted at them as if they might disappear.

“Cliff, you ride on Kumayuru. Milaine and I will get on Kumakyu together.”

“Kumayuru was the black one, right?” Cliff knew what I meant just by the bears’ names and headed toward Kumayuru.

“Yuna, did you say their names are Kumayuru and Kumakyu?”

“The black one is Kumayuru. The white one is Kumakyu.”

Milaine chuckled. “Those names are very like you, Yuna.”

“Wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, just that the names suit their appearances and are very cute.” Milaine smiled mischievously.

Kumayuru and Kumakyu? Cute? I didn’t know about that, but I’d grown attached to them. If I had better naming sensibilities, maybe they’d have better names, but I don’t see why you need cool names when you have two gigantic, fuzzy, incredibly powerful bear buddies.

Milaine approached Kumakyu. “Well then, Kumakyu, I’m counting on you.” She gave Kumakyu’s neck a rub. Kumakyu seemed to like that. “All right, Yuna. How should I get on?”

Unlike a horse, my bears didn’t have saddles, but Kumakyu kneeled down for Milaine to mount more easily. I got on first, then Milaine climbed on behind me.

“What do you think?” I said. “It’s comfortable even without a saddle, right?”

“And it’s this comfortable the whole time, I assume?”

Yeah, the comfort from my buddies was just unmatched. Comfy enough that you had to worry less about bumps in the road and more about nodding off in the middle of the journey.

 

We headed on bearback to the Elezent mountain range where my tunnel was. We started with a light gallop.

“They run so smoothly.”

Kumayuru and Kumakyu ran side by side.

“It’s nice that they’re quick. Carriages are just so slow.”

Carriages? C’mon how could a carriage be anything close to this? My bears gradually picked up the pace, and just a few hours later we arrived at the foot of the Elezent mountains and where my tunnel was…that is, where it was supposed to be.

“I thought it was around here…” I mumbled. I checked the map again, and yeah—this was it, right?

“Did you get lost?” Cliff asked.

In the middle of my definitely-not-a-panic, Kumakyu started walking off without warning. “Kumakyu?”

But Kumakyu and Kumayuru kept plodding along almost as though they were telling us to leave it to them. After a few minutes, we found the tunnel obscured by the surrounding trees.

Milaine laughed. “Looks like the bears are sharper than you.”

This time, I didn’t have a good reply.

 

We took a break before we headed into the tunnel.

“At any rate, we got here quickly thanks to the bears,” said Cliff.

“Mm. Any merchant would be chomping at the bit to get one of their own.”

“Adventurers too.”

They shared their impressions of my bears while we drank oran juice. I didn’t care how much money anyone tried offering me. No way was I ever letting go of my bears. Cliff could just try to steal them from me and see what happened.

“Oh, Yuna, stop glaring at me like that. No one is thinking of stealing your bears. I could live a hundred lives, spend them all trying to steal from you, and it would go badly for me every time.” Cliff gave my head a tap with his knuckles, like he was trying to give me a noogie.

With our rest out of the way, Cliff and Milaine headed to the tunnel’s entrance.

“This is the tunnel you made, Yuna?” asked Cliff, slipping into his Serious Lord Voice. He inspect the tunnel carefully, Milaine beside him. “Looks like it’s big enough for two carriages to move past each other?”

“That’s right. Looks like it’s large enough for that.”

“Yes,” mused Cliff, “it’s larger than I thought it would be.”

“But I doubt a larger carriage would be able to share the tunnel with others heading the opposite way.”

“You think we should regulate the carriage sizes then?”

“Maybe,” said Milaine, “but that could become a whole ordeal if someone who didn’t know there was a size limit came along.”

“In that case, how about we divide things between odd and even days? That way they’d only need to wait a day.”

“We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, Cliff.”

“Hmm, yes. First, let’s check how long the tunnel is and then decide based on how the situation progresses.”

Maybe I should’ve made it a little bigger?

“And we’ll need to open up this space and make an outpost,” Cliff added. “We’ll need someone to manage the tunnel too.”

Milaine looked around. The foliage around here was dense. “Then we have to decide on the toll for usage.”

“How much do you think is appropriate?”

“Usually we decide based on the funds used to make the tunnel.”

They shot a glance at me. “You’re going to charge people for it?”

“That goes without saying,” said Milaine. “What kind of fool would offer something for free? Consider the maintenance costs alone, and on top of that? We’ll have to hire soldiers or adventurers to station here, surely.”

“Yes, we’d end up with a disaster if any robbers or monsters took up residence inside the tunnel.”

I guess they were right— monsters would probably get into the tunnel if they just left it as is, hence the soldiers and adventurers. On top of that, they’d need to station guys on both sides of the tunnel. The fee made sense, whether or not I liked it.

“Also,” Cliff muttered, gazing into the dark, “we’ll need to light up the inside of the tunnel with mana gems.”

“We’ll need to install light mana gems and mana lines. That alone will cost a pretty penny.”

Mana lines were pretty much what they sounded like: channels to route mana through. Think the electrical lines of Earth and you’re on the right track. I even had mana lines in my bear house—in order to turn on the mana gems in the ceiling, I’d touch a normal mana gem on a nearby wall that would transmit mana to the gem on the ceiling via the lines.

“Ah, yes, and of course we’ll need to install wind mana gems.”

“Guess we would, for something this long. Actually, Yuna, how long is it from this side to the opposite side? We might need to set up a break spot somewhere in there.”

 

On and on the two of them talked about how my tunnel should be used in the future without me. Fair enough, I guess—as long as we could bring seafood to Crimonia, ehh. If it wasn’t as simple as I thought, I’d have to leave the practical details to the specialists.

After a short break, we headed out into the tunnel. I made a bear light and set it up ahead of us, enchanting it to move along with me.

“Yuna,” said Cliff, some time in, “could we slow down? I need to check on the state of the tunnel and how long it is.”

The bears walked slowly on through the dark.

“No drips from the ceiling,” said Cliff, staring up. It almost sounded like a question.

“Nah, I used magic to set it up so water runs along the outside. There won’t be any drips in here.” I was going for more “cool tunnel” and less “surprise limestone cave.”

Milaine nodded. “That’ll make things easier.”

“Yeah. Now we just need to think about how resilient the tunnel is. We’d have a situation on our hands if it caves in.”

“That shouldn’t be an issue if we just reinforce it with earth mana gems.”

Installing earth mana gems in earth walls supposedly made them stronger. Mana gems were embedded in the walls protecting the capital and the towns, or so people said.

“Then we need earth mana gems in addition to the light and wind gems.” Milaine whistled. “That’ll take a chunk of change.”

Light mana gems to illuminate the tunnel, wind gems to circulate the air, and earth gems to reinforce the tunnel…that was it so far, right? “Isn’t that what the toll is for?”

Milaine shook her head. “How will we get the initial funds? A deferred payment wouldn’t exactly work for the trade guild.”

“Don’t worry,” said Cliff, “we’ve got the money.”

“Then the issue is how we secure all those mana gems.”

“Could you have the trade guild collect them?”

“Well…it’s not impossible, but I would be worried about the market collapsing. I’d also rather avoid causing a shortage.”

“Then maybe we could order them from the capital?”

“I think that would be more advisable. We’d run into the same issues if we got them from the nearby towns, but that wouldn’t be a concern for the capital.”

“I’ll prepare the funds, so can I count on you to do it?”

“Yes, that shouldn’t be a problem.”

Wow, tunneling was harder than I thought. I guess no digging a hole and calling it done, because of the whole “people needed stuff like light and oxygen to stay comfortable and not dead.” The same went for the shop—an amateur like me working alone just got a plan full of holes.

We pushed on and the two kept up their conversation, but the exit just wasn’t showing up. But what else was I expecting when we were going at a snail’s pace. Isn’t that right, Cliff?

“It would be rather frightening if the light just went out midway through,” said Milaine.

“Yuna, are you sure we can rely on this strange, outlandish light?”

Excuse me, strange? Outlandish? It was clearly a lovable bear. I mean, yes, I did think it was outlandish for a little while when I first saw it, but still. “Don’t worry about it.” And if it went out, I’d make another one.

“Since installing light mana gems in the ceiling would be cumbersome, we’ll make do by embedding them along the walls.”

Yeah…since I made the ceiling high enough for carriage clearance, any normal person wouldn’t be able to reach up there. To install anything in the ceiling, they’d have to set up a platform each time.

“That would work much better,” said Cliff. “Even if one side went out, we’d have the reassurance of the lights on the other side remaining on.”

“That would double the cost, but what’s one to do?”

They made a lot of progress on their conversation, but we weren’t anywhere close to the end of the tunnel.

Cliff yawned. “This thing goes on and on, doesn’t it?”

“Well, I dug straight through the mountain range, but I still had to cover a lot of distance.”

“Then we should really make a rest stop,” he said.

“If we do,” Milaine added, “we should place it right in the middle of the tunnel.”

I could feel their eyes on me.

“You mean you want me to make one?”

“Yuna,” said Cliff, “you’ve already excavated this whole thing. What’s creating a little rest stop compared to that? I think one right in the middle would work best, like Milaine said, but we’d need to get an accurate measure of the tunnel for that.”

“I’ve got no idea how long this thing is, but I can tell you where the middle is on a map.” It’d be a rough estimate, but close enough to be useful.

“Can you really?”

“It’s just a little bit further.”

I had Kumayuru break out into a run while I navigated the map—a map which, by the way, I could open up and look at without anyone else seeing it. I tested that one out on Fina.

“The center point is just about…” I poked at a map they couldn’t see “…here.”

“How do you know?” Cliff marveled.

“Err, it’s just an approximation, so don’t put too much faith in me.”

“As long as it’s more or less correct, fine. Could you open up this spot a little right around here?”

Following Cliff’s instructions, I pushed out the wall using earth magic.

He let out a low, impressed whistle. “Amazing. You can dig holes just like that.”

Time passed, and soon enough I cleared out enough rock for several carriages to pull over and rest.

“Phenomenal,” said Cliff, shaking his head. “But if this is the center, I suppose we don’t have time to tarry. Yuna, I hate to ask, but could we pick up the pace?”

About time. We practically flew through the remaining half of the tunnel.