Chapter 18: Pastoral Farming

Dragon Era 520

「Sig-kun, that way!」
「Leave it to me!」

Answering Violet-san’s sharp call, Sig spread his arms wide and planted himself in front of the fleeing deer.

「I am strong!」

As he braced himself with the spell, a heavy, solid thud rang out—far weightier than his small frame suggested. It was proof his enhancement magic had taken hold.
Now that he’s grown under Amata’s instruction and can fully wield enhancement magic, he should—

「Waaah!」

It didn’t work.

Watching Sig get launched into the air, lifted high by the deer’s antlers, I looked up to the sky.
The deer then dipped its head, smashed through the wooden fence with ease, and bolted away.

「You okay, Sig…?」
「Yeah…」

When I called out, he pushed himself up.
If nothing else, his body covered in scales came with guaranteed toughness.

「Sorry.」
「No, it couldn’t be helped. We were pushing it. It’s not your fault, Sig.」

I said it not as comfort, but simply as fact.

After all, Sig wasn’t the only one who failed to stop the deer. Yuuki, Violet-san, Rin, and Luka all did as well.

It’s been ten years since we started the special class. Farming has developed extremely smoothly, but animal husbandry has gone almost nowhere. Creatures in this world are just too strong.

Of course, it isn’t only the prey that’s strong—we’re plenty formidable too, so killing them isn’t very hard. But capturing them alive sends the difficulty through the roof.

Even if we somehow manage to catch one, raising it is practically impossible. A simple wooden fence is easily smashed and they escape, and above all, none of the wild animals ever become accustomed to people.

No matter how much we feed and care for them, they never let down their guard, and if they find the slightest chance, they bolt immediately like just now.

「Why not rabbits? I like rabbits.」
「Mmm… I’m not so sure.」

Nina keeps pushing rabbits. Rabbits are the only creatures we’ve managed to keep. Still, since they don’t become tame either, it’s hard to say we’ve domesticated them—really, we just built a pen they can’t break.

But the edible portion of a rabbit was less than I’d thought. Most of what you see is fluffy fur. There are many bones too, so for all the prep work, you don’t get much to eat. There is one way to eat them that’s tasty without all that trouble, though.

「I want to eat Blood Roast again…」
「People often cut a finger by accident when cooking, but I’d prefer not to cut my finger for the sake of cooking.」

Shaking my head at Nina’s unusually cutesy plea, I explained: Blood Roast is a method where you make a rabbit drink fire dragon blood and cook it from the inside. Heated internally, the rabbit’s fur burns away, it cooks through completely, and the bones turn brittle enough to eat. According to Nina, it’s the tastiest way to eat rabbit.

But this method can’t be replicated with ordinary fire—or even magic. Nina tried all sorts of things, but in the end we learned the only way was to use my blood.

「That makes all of them no good…」

With her ears and tail drooping, Luka drew a big X on the wooden board in her hands. Great‑antler deer, six‑legged goat, horned mountain cat, tusk boar. For oddities we even tried scaled frogs and giant pill bugs, but none worked out.

「Then… armored bears?」
「Not a chance.」

Wearing an earnest expression, Nina made the suggestion—but it was a joke. She has a habit of looking most serious when she’s joking. Armored bear meat is surprisingly good, but they’re the fiercest of the fierce. There’s no way we could keep one penned; it’s a monster that can snap even a big tree, never mind a fence.

「Then, conversely… what about rats?」

On the other hand, I hesitated over whether Violet-san’s equally serious-sounding suggestion was a joke. Ordinarily it would be nothing but a joke, but she can be rather airheaded at times.

「We can’t pen rats either, and if we could we wouldn’t be in this much trouble, right?」
「Oh… when you put it that way, that’s true.」

It seems she’d been serious. Violet-san tilted her head, looking embarrassed.
Even more of a problem than our failure at animal husbandry are the rats.
Farming is going well, but storage is proving extremely difficult.
Rats have been eating the yams and wheat we stored.

Relying on hazy knowledge, we built a raised-floor granary and added rat guards, but it was all for nothing. The rats in this world gnaw through the guards themselves—their offensive power is simply too high.

They do seem weak to low temperatures, so leaving things in the icehouse keeps them safe—but then the wheat and yams are damaged by the cold. You can still eat them, but they dry out and the texture becomes awful.

In my former world, cats—later popular as pets—were originally brought in as livestock for rat control. With that in mind we tried keeping horned mountain cats, but it was a complete failure. That predator is, if anything, more troublesome than an armored bear—extremely quick, vicious to the extreme, and we nearly had injuries.

In my memory, animal husbandry and farming emerged at roughly the same time, but I never imagined there’d be such a gap in difficulty. Well, it may be an issue unique to this world, and even “same time” means several millennia BCE—there could have been a hundred or two hundred years’ difference.

「If even you can’t make it work, Sensei, animal husbandry really is difficult…」

Hearing Luka say that with her brows knit, I felt a tangle of emotions.
It’s said humanity’s oldest domesticate was the dog. Its ancestor was a kind of wolf—or rather, wolves that grew tame and became livestock, which we call dogs. They remained humanity’s good friends right up to the modern age I lived in.

Yet this world has no wolves. There are species like cats, species like bears, goats and deer—but no wolves. What we have are Lycos Centaurs like the girl before me. Come to think of it, there are no horses either, though there are half‑human, half‑horses.

I don’t know whether the demihumans have filled the niches the original species should occupy, or whether everything evolved into half‑humans. But it did seem certain they simply aren’t here.

They could become even better friends to humanity than dogs—extremely friendly, gentle, intelligent. …But they’re far too smart to treat as livestock. They’re no different from humans.

Whether that’s fortunate or unfortunate for humanity—or for them—I don’t know.

「Um, what we want is an animal that doesn’t run away, right?」
「Got any good ideas?」

Sig asked Rin, who had suddenly spoken up. He used to shoot down her ideas out of hand, but lately not so much. I suppose he’s slowly growing up.

「Yeah! You know—Behemoth!」
「That’s obviously impossible!」

Just as that thought crossed my mind, Sig immediately shot down Rin’s idea.

「That’s probably impossible… it’s way too big.」
「It seems difficult to build a fence that could enclose one of those.」

Sig wasn’t the only one who thought so. Luka and Violet-san gently agreed with him.

「Behemoth… Behemoth, huh.」

I pictured the Behemoth I’d seen before: a huge mouth lined with long fangs, a face like a cross between a hippo and a rhino, and horns like a cow’s.

I never measured, but its shoulder height was at least over ten meters, its total length twenty to thirty. A body nearly four times that of an African elephant—like trying to keep a blue whale on land.

—And yet.

「You…」

Nina fixed me with a flat, half‑lidded stare.

「You’re thinking you want to try it, aren’t you.」

As expected, she’d seen straight through my thoughts.

I mean, think about it.
What man wouldn’t get excited at the idea of keeping a creature that looks like a dinosaur?

「Eeh—seriously, Sensei…?」

Sig said, wearing an expression that practically claimed disbelief.
Here was one. And the guy himself looked like a dinosaur.
He just doesn’t get the romance. And no, I don’t mean Rome—we don’t even have that in this world.

「Why not? It sounds super fun! Onii‑chan, I want to try!」

Amid the overall negative mood, Yuuki raised her hand and said so.

「That’s Yuuki for you. Yuuki always understands how I feel.」
「Do I? Ehehe…」

I patted Yuuki’s head.

「Me too, me too!」

I went ahead and patted Rin’s head as well as she stood beside her.

「Hopeless. Once he gets like this, nothing you say will stop him—so brace yourselves, you lot.」

As Nina pressed a hand to her brow like stifling a headache and her words faded into the distance, I was already working out a plan to capture a Behemoth.