Several hours after the morning incident. Suimei passed through the city wall encircling Mehter, dressed in the clothing he’d purchased earlier, the altered bag he’d brought with him from his world in one hand.
Despite having taken the time to finish final preparations at the inn, finish breakfast, and even kill some time before departure, Suimei had not had a chance to either apologize or say farewell to Lefille. Fate permitting, we’ll meet again anyway, he thought to himself, before taking off at the appointed time.
Running through a few requisite exit procedures with the sentry at the city gate, he finally exited the city.
At the side of the long road leading away from the city was the meeting place for the caravan escorts.
Before reaching the rendezvous point, however, Suimei suddenly turned to look behind him, some unknown feeling prompting to him to take in the soaring city walls.
This was Suimei’s first time looking at these city walls, which protected Mehter every day, from this close.
It was a massive defensive structure encircling the entire city.
Although it had been constructed not only for the purpose of protecting the palace, but the entire capital as a whole, the term “castle wall” felt nonetheless appropriate. Back in his own world, the construction of castle-like rampart walls to protect cities had similarly been a common practice back in the Middle Ages.
An integral part of the defensive function of the structure, the top of the wall was arrayed with battlements featuring both parapets for defending against enemy archers as well as crenels for defending archers to fire their own arrows through.
It looked like the people of this world relied on such fortifications to defend against external threats to the city – both human and monster alike.
However—
Just like Dorothea mentioned earlier, it doesn’t look like these walls are protected against magic.
Looking at the city wall, Dorothea’s words came to mind. Indeed, the wall running around Mehter seemed to be constructed of a very different type of material from the magic-resistant one that the guild training field had been built with.
Instead, it looked to have been built using a kind of gray brick, likely the same type of primitive concrete that the Ancient Greeks had used to build the many temples of their gods. This was likely because the magic-resistant material had been a recent discovery, and thus could not have been used in the construction of these walls, given their age. On that point, given the scarcity of the material in question, it likely couldn’t have been used on such a large structure anyway.
“But like this, a single powerful spell is all it would take to bring this whole thing down.”
Objects subjected to direct magical attack would very quickly crumble, let alone a primitive structure like this one.
Although it looked impressive enough, but considering the vital role it played in defense, he had to say it didn’t seem that reliable. Increasing its size would do nothing; its fundamental flaw was its fragility.
Worrying about this is meaningless, Suimei thought as he turned back. The defensive capability of the city was no concern of his – he had defensive walls of his own, after all. Spending any more time pondering the defenses of this world was a pointless endeavor.
Pulling his thoughts back to the present, Suimei looked at the empty space before him, where people had already begun to gather.
Standing there were a number of people dressed in rather fine clothing as well as roughly twenty who were armed. In total, there were some dozens of people as well as a handful of wagons.
It had already reached the scale where it could be considered a small, mobile village – this was the caravan that Suimei was looking for.
Caravans. In his original world, similar things had existed. Merchants and transporters would join together to protect both themselves and their cargo when passing through dangerous areas, defending against robbers and other violence.
The caravan head was typically a merchant responsible for transporting goods between cities, who engaged in this business as a livelihood. Other members of the caravan included both those who traveled under this banner as well as unaffiliated merchants who joined for the journey.
I have to say, this is pretty much what I expected.
The scene before him essentially mirrored his knowledge of how such things worked back home. At least with respect to outer appearance, there wasn’t really anything that stood out as being different.