My Dungeon Life: Rise of the Slave Harem - My Dungeon Life – Chapter 1445-1447

Chapter 1445

“Why have you come here anyway? Are you looking to finish what you started finally?” Bernice demanded.

I cleared my throat awkwardly. “The reason I am here is that we’re under attack from Dioshin.”

“We?”

“Um… me… Chalm… King Roth has taken an interest in invading me for various reasons. I’ve come here to strong-arm whoever is on the throne to see if I could raise some soldiers.”

I decided to keep my reasoning vague. I didn’t remember if Bernice knew about the spring, but since she was no longer my slave, I didn’t want to bring up such private things.

“Strong-arm?” She frowned.

“I’m an Earl now, and even Count Reign would have to bow to me, let alone a Viscount.” I declared. “I’m not asking. Alerith will become part of my territory, and the lord in charge of it will be under my banner.”

“You’re still going to bully me?”

“Prince Edward calls it politics,” I responded, making a face. “If it makes you feel better, we can call this an alliance. I’m happy leaving you in charge of Alerith. However, we’ll bring down the travel restrictions, and you’ll be officially appointed as the lord of Alerith under me. After that, you’ll function as one of my territories, paying taxes to Chalm and more pertinent to the moment, help me recruit soldiers to defend the west.”

“Yeah… about that tax part…” Bernice looked away.

“What is it?”

“We’re broke.”

“What?”

“I-it’s not my fault! You were the one who took out the new dungeon that was helping finance this city. Then, the Demon Lord Aberis was busy collecting financing his army that got wiped out. The people were being taxed into starvation, so I refunded the taxes across the board! However, I left the travel restrictions in place… so we still don’t have any food and all trade has stopped…” Bernice was pushing her fingers together. “In short… the treasure room is empty!”

I wanted to groan. It was expensive building a civilization. Even Chalm still hadn’t reached a point where it was producing profits. Chalm had been a constant money-suck since I had founded the place. The only reason it was still standing was that I happened to have made money faster than I lost it. Plus, when I was gone for a while, the dungeon sort of took over and reduced costs temporarily to zero. Once it had started up again, so was the need for money. A palace didn’t just build itself, after all. Still, having to support both Chalm and Alerith financially was even going to drag on my income potential. The only city that was self-sufficient was Deeksville!

“Alysia… you’re a princess… how do you afford such things?”

“Huh? Me? I may be a princess, but I never ran anything. I spend my time exploring and fighting in dungeons!” She responded defensively. “If you want someone who knows how to manage money, you should speak to Eliana.”

I sighed, deciding to put this issue behind me for the moment. It’d have to wait until after Dioshin. Wasn’t a good way to raise money through war? Once the blacksmiths were set up, we should be able to start selling weapons and armor and making a lot of money. At least, that’s what I thought.

“Alright, let’s do this!”

Bernice blinked. “Do what?”

“Make a budget!”

Chapter 1446

“I want to die…” I muttered six hours later.

{Merchant has increased to level 25.}

My head thudded against the desk. We had gathered all of the notes, bonds, letters, and promissory that had been collected in the treasurer’s office and then started to go through them to try to figure out the budget. I had thought we’d just add up a few pages of numbers and then be done, but it turned out running a kingdom was harder than I thought.

“Who runs our treasurer out of Chalm?” I asked using Slave Communication.

“That would be the Mayor,” Elaya responded.

“Oh? Can you send him to Alerith for me? Tell him I need him to work on some budgeting.”

“I spoke to him. He says he fell trying to paint his roof and broke his eyebrows and needs some time to rest.”

“Rats…”

My mind was such a mush, that excuse sounded reasonable enough. It wasn’t until I ended my conversation with Elaya regretfully I started to think there was something off about his words. That’s right, his house was made of stone. He didn’t need to paint it! Ah… whatever. It wasn’t his job anyway.

When I said I needed to build an army to protect Chalm, I didn’t think it’d mean I’d need to spend days calculating budgets so that I could hire an army. I had thought it would be like before, with people heroically volunteering before we rode out to do battle. Except, when that had happened, it had been a Demon Lord who was attacking, and I was depending on many separate factions to help. When it came to building the forces on my own, I had never thought too much about it.

Time had caused my enthusiasm to wane. Bernice had already taped out, and Alysia appeared to be asleep. She was a sword and didn’t need to sleep, but that was just how boring this all was. Bernice was leaning back in a chair, trying to balance a pen on her upper lip.

“I know.” I slapped my hands. “We promise Knighthood!”

Bernice flayed wildly before fixing herself and sitting up. “What is that?”

“You wanted to become a noble. You desired it so much you were willing to do all kinds of distasteful things to reach your goal.”

“That makes me sound like a deplorable!”

“I’m sure there are tons of others who also want to go somewhere in life. What if we replace wages with the promise of a knight token! The promise of a future stipend, the ability to buy land in the capital, and a better future.”

“I s-suppose that could work,” Bernice spoke thoughtfully. “However, how many knight tokens do you have?”

“16.” I explained. “2 as a Viscount, 8 as a Count, and 12 as an Earl. I’ve given 6 tokens away.”

I had given some tokens away after the battle with the Demon King, mostly to solidify my place with the Knights, Barons, and Viscounts that ruled southwest Aberis and had helped in the fight against the Demon Lord Aberis. I also hadn’t gathered the 12 I was supposed to get as an Earl yet, but that wasn’t important. Such debts could be honored when there was more time. That was also assuming I wasn’t promoted to Marquis or Duke soon. Well, technically, I enslaved the princess, so I no longer needed to be her a Duke to marry her. At some point, I’d need to discuss that with Prince Edward. I was lucky King Edward was gone, or he’d try to kill me again.

“That… just might be enough…” Bernice responded thoughtfully.

Chapter 1447

I didn’t have time to train soldiers to become skilled fighters. That meant that we had to hire those that were already skilled at fighting and had significant levels in some kind of battle orientated job. A level 50 farmer couldn’t become a competent swordsman in only a week. Even if I enslaved them and used every trick I knew to multiply their experience and power level, it would be difficult to manage with a handful of people, let alone an army of them.

The most obvious answer would be the adventurer. These were talented people used to fighting bandits, monsters, and anything else that made it to the surface from a dungeon. There were also dungeon divers, and there was a fair amount of overlap between dungeon divers and adventurers, especially since there wasn’t a dungeon diver guild.

I couldn’t hire adventurers to fight in a war for me. That was strictly against the rules. Even if I tried to hire them outside of the bounds of the guild, they could potentially lose their jobs. There were only two ways to get around that. One was to get them to join the army, and the other was to hire them separately as mercenaries. The mercenary option held the problem of being expensive. Furthermore, they would have to break up their party to join a mercenary group. Breaking up a party penalized you a rank letter, so even if they reformed after, it’d be a costly event.

This meant that recruiting them into the army was the best choice, but while it would be nice to recruit adventurers into the army, very few were willing to take on that kind of commitment. The temptation of a Knight token was great, but adventurers were free spirits. They didn’t like the rigidness of militaries and the do-or-die nature of war, or they would have chosen to be mercenaries. Thus, there was little chance to recruit them over.

That left only one other group of skilled fighters that might be open to the temptation of being a given the Knight job. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the Knight token wasn’t just a noble title and access to perks associated with being a noble, but it was also a powerful third-class job. Most of these people had only ever reached a 2nd class proficiency, so even if they only cared about their strength, having the Knight job would allow them to increase their strength over normal commoners. Trading a few years of life could be considered a small trade such a benefit.

“I understand all of that…” I muttered. “But why are we here?”

The crowds burst into cheers as one man slugged another. He fell back, hitting the edge and catching on the ropes before stepping forward and flying at his opponent. He started hitting his opponent rapidly, pushing him across the stage. It seemed like was overturning the entire match. One last punch, and the man who should have won collapsed to the ground. The other man raised his bloody palms, causing the crowds to burst into cheers.

“This is what gladiators do on the offseason,” Bernice explained. “Welcome to the world of underground fighting!”