Tortilla Double has two floors, with the second being the living quarters. The living room is in its center that we use as a shared space. We don’t really use the L couches, so was there really a point in buying them?
We added more pillows for Suzuri today because she wanted them, and she piled them up from the floor where the rug is to a couch to create a nest. I should be careful about saying it’s what you’d expect from a mouse.
Leaving that aside, there’s a thick rug between the couches with some pillows, and a low table close to the wall. On it there’s a stone deep dish the size of my hands with a moss ball.
In Japan, this is what we would call a ball made of dirt with moss around it, secured by strings. Many of them have a plant rising from the top.
In this space age, moss balls are treated as a sort of decorative plant. Something small to adorn the place with something green.
I spray it with water to moisten the surface, and it shakes showing it’s happy. Wait, why?
“Is this actually a fairy?”
“Hn~? It’s moss slime~.”
“I see…”
“Genma, I feel like you’ve been giving up on understanding things very quickly recently.”
“It’s not as though slime is a rare thing.”
Oh right, and I bought a biggish hydroponics kit.
I bolted it tightly to the wall and floor near my room. This kit looks like a white plastic one meter long, twenty centimeters wide, and fifteen centimeters deep planter, and it’s placed on a specialized stand. The stand itself is about a meter tall.
The planter has something that looks like sponge piled up. It’s like packaging. I’m supposed to spread the seeds there, and a noiseless pump circulates water from the stand, while water goes from the planter to a drainer.
There were also others for mini shrimp and small fish.
Being on a spaceship means the interior shakes because of inertia, but the planter has a water magic stone imbued in it that makes it so water never spills no matter how much the ship shakes.
Also, the whole thing is covered in two meter transparent boards with swaying patterns and a door, making it look like a plastic greenhouse.
But these transparent boards won’t break just by hitting them.
This is the first day, but after planting something called speed lettuce with artificial growth hastening, I see it budding after five minutes. I feel like I can actually see it grow, but that could just be my imagination…
“This is really fast. Is it supposed to be like this?”
“According to the instructions, yes.”
“No one has tried growing it, so you should assume so.”
“If it grows fast we eat soon~. Isn’t that good~?”
I take a deep breath and exhale my common sense. The future is amazing.
▽▽▽
Well then, I look at the three million puni in my bank account that I’m still keeping. I feel like with the repairs and refueling, the money I made with this smuggling, I mean, transport quest is mostly gone. I can still do quests that leak into the red, but I want to have healthy finances if I can.
And so, after buying the hydroponics kit and lazing around for three days, I decide to do simple quests.
“And so, starting tomorrow, we’ll be doing a standing quest, patrolling an asteroid belt one day in hyperspace away from here. The daily wage is three thousand puni per ship. We’ll accept the request at a neighboring station, receive the patrol route, and protect the peace in the asteroid belt while following it. We’re going tomorrow, and starting the quest the day after that.”
I have the Mercenary Guild’s homepage on the monitor in the living room, showing the standing quest. The daily wage is three thousand, but there’s a reward for taking down enemies. One space eel is worth five hundred, and so is a space turtle. So harmful beasts are worth as much as random pirates. And proof that we took them down is delivered through the ship camera.
Also, salvage drones or dismantling drones can remove magic stones from eels or strip the shells of turtles, which can be sold. It’s recommended that they are transported to the port authority in Akul.
I explain this to the others while looking at the screen.
These things can’t be sold if they’re destroyed, so eel magic stones have to be unharmed if they are to be sold… Can’t we fix them with the alchemist crafter… Apparently not. If I throw an unprocessed material there, the flow of magic energy will change and it won’t be salable anymore. And I guess I’ll take turtle shells as they are too.
“By the way, eels and turtles are beyond not tasty and can’t be eaten, so there’s no point in harvesting their meat.”
I emphasize that. They’re not poisonous, but they’re hard to digest and their taste makes them impossible to eat, as the last twenty years prove. As I say that, the three of them stare at me.
“We’re not eating that anyway~. They look so gross~.”
“We’re not gonna eat space beings.”
“I would go as far as to question whoever thought they could be eaten and tried them…”
“If they looked edible, it makes sense to try.”
“““No way.”””
Eh… I thought the idea of trying anything if there’s meat was universal. It’s not just in Japan, there was all sorts of bush meat in other countries.
I feel like they’re looking at me like I’m really weird. It’s not me, blame the person that tried it.
As I think that, Kori quietly offers me her half-eaten rare cream cheese cake…No, I’m not hungry, eat it yourself.
▽▽▽
Two days later, we reach the asteroid general-purpose processing station. It’s easier to take turns with Suzuri here.
The asteroid general-purpose processing station is several times larger than the one in Zadar, but doesn’t seem to have solar panels. Do they get energy from stuff like nuclear fusion reactors?
“Station, this is Genma of Tortilla Double, a grassland two mercenary. I’m here to accept the standing quest of patrol duty.”
“<Hold on… Ah, here it is. Confirmed, but… That’s a giant turret on top, not decoration, right?>”
“Yes, it can blow through a corvette shield in one shot.”
“<Fine then, but you’ll get less money if you pierce a turtle shell. Do you want a patrol route that’s safe without many of them, or a place where you can make money?>”
“It’s my first time fighting eels and turtles, so let me give the safe one a shot.”
“<Careful type uh? Fine, make sure your probing radar is working at full capacity while on the route, and crush any pirate or monster you find. But there are miners too, so don’t mistake them. If you do anything bad, our station’s corvettes will come after… Oh? Can we hold them down with corvettes if they can shoot through their shields?>”
“I’ll be careful.”
I end the transmission with an awkward smile.
This station has seven corvettes, and I see reactions of combat ships in the double digits patrolling around the station. And there appear to be armor and drones clinging to the station’s outer wall, working. Surely that’s enough defense for the space monsters and pirates around here. And the station itself is probably armed.
I feel like they’re wary of me, but I get data like the route nonetheless. Four hours at cruising speed starting from a position five minutes in hyperspace away from here. Since my ship has a hyperdrive, they designated a space far away, but if I didn’t, they would have had me patrol nearby.
Let’s get going.
We reach the asteroid belt, which I feel has few asteroids for what it’s called. I imagined them all packed together, but it’s actually pretty sparse, like it’s not unusual to see them a hundred kilometers from each other.
I have the navigation computer read the data I received, and give the AI instructions to move automatically at cruising speed.
“Radar working at full capacity. Kori, take the first turn focusing on the radar, and have Suzuri take over after half an hour. Saratha and Suzuri, stand by.”
“““Understood!”””
We start getting fired up, but an hour passes without anything happening.
There’s nothing to report, other than more than half of the asteroids picked up by the radar being covered in a strange green plant. This really is a safe area. The radar picks up a few ships, but they’re all identified as mining ships.
“Genma! We have finally found one! Two o’clock! Marking it on the monitor!”
Says Suzuri.
Kori was all melted and huddled on her chair, but she quickly takes humanoid form. Saratha turns her shoulders and looks like she’s thinking we finally found something. And Suzuri is next to Kori.
“Oh? Five kilometers… That’s strangely close. Did the radar not pick it up because it was behind an asteroid? We really should eliminate it, or the miners could be in danger.”
Both on the monitor and cockpit window’s HUD, a space eel is marked with an orange color. As for its size… It’s a small one, only ten meters. About the same as Saratha when she stretches. And I can see through the electronic telescope that it’s about five meters thick.
It’s like a fat snake. It’s completely white, and I can only describe it as having the same shape as a moray eel. I can also see sharp fangs inside its big mouth, so it really is a white moray eel. But there is one difference compared to the ones on Earth. The crystals in its eyes are called eel magic stones.
Something this size could take out Tortilla Double with a big bite, and swallow power armors whole. Although it’s a herbivore.
The real problem is its savage disposition. It will tackle something that gets close, and that’s more than enough to damage a ship.
Also, its thick skin can’t be penetrated by defensive lasers. Mining ships with halfhearted firepower would only become casualties.
I want to get the magic stones as undamaged as possible, so I approach the prey with manual control. It doesn’t look like it has noticed us yet, it’s munching on what looks like green grass.
If the magic stones are on its head… No, I can shoot now. It’s rare for them to bend their head towards their body while eating, so I take aim and fire with the secondary gun.
A pulse laser is fired without much noise, and it hits its body. The space eel bounces, and floats lifelessly in space.
It’s too far to tell if it’s dead, so I fire again, but it doesn’t react to the secondary gun hitting its body and opening a hole.
“So now do we get close and retrieve the magic stones with salvage drones? Kori, can you take over?”
“Yes~! It was really simple, wasn’t it~?”
“My research tells me all eels are as this one.”
“Space turtles are a bigger problem because there are fewer places to hit. We can’t damage their shells.”
I look out the window, having nothing to do, and see a salvage drone removing one of the eyes of the eel.
“It’s a hassle to have to wash them… We did buy a container for living organisms, but…”
“Washing them every time would be a pain, so let’s do it all at once, Genma.”
“Oh? It’s difficult to tell from this distance, but I feel as though they are quite large…”
“Only about twenty centimeters in diameter, so not that much~.”
We were told we can just leave the bodies, so we go back to our scouting route.
▽▽▽
Our scouting duties yielded only eight eels in five hours. And we extracted six proper magic stones from them, so it’s estimated we made ten thousand puni today. Nothing else worth any puni appeared.
“Today’s earnings were a bit on the low side…”
After stopping at the station’s port, I lie on a couch in the living room and take a break. On the other couch, Suzuri is getting a massage from Saratha, and she turns my way.
“It’s ten thousand puni??? What are you saying…? A hundred puni is reasonable as a daily wage, but if you say that is low…”
“Let’s work more starting tomorrow. All right, Suzuri’s massage is done. Me next!”
“I want in on it too~!”
“Me too then.”
Kori gets off my abdomen and we both go to also massage Saratha.
“But it’s too bad there were only eels~~.”
“Yeah, I wanted to try turtles too.”
“It really was a safe route… Ah, that works really well… Hey, don’t touch my scales.”
“My experience doing massages part time is coming in handy…”
“I’m just massaging you though.”
“The three of us doing it is fun~!”
Saratha tends to get pretty stiff. She has a special chair in the cockpit that’s like a balance ball with a concave top, especially designed for snake people,but I guess it’s just part of her race. Her body wasn’t made for sitting.
“Ahh… It’s working… A bath is nice, but this feels really good too… I’ve never felt so good…”
“At least clean your body before falling asleep.”
“Purification…”
“This is no good. Kori, can you please get Saratha’s futon?”
“Yes~!”
“I feel like a warm towel on her back would work really well too.”
“Gimme…”
But we didn’t get that, so maybe some other time… And carrying her after she falls asleep ends up taking a lot of effort.
Thanks.