Chapter 11 Trap Construction!
Edited by: Kanaa-senpai
The landing was a success, but “safe” would be a stretch. It was a real headache.
”Phew… dragging this thing down without a runway is a nightmare. Maybe I should add some landing floats?” I muttered.
”Why floats, Ibuki-sama?” Charlotte asked.
”Well, landing on water is easier, right? The surface is always flat.”
”I see! That makes perfect sense!” Charlotte replied, her face still flushed with excitement.
She’d clearly taken a shine to flying. Honestly, so had I. But I couldn’t afford to be careless. Even if my cheat skill¹ meant I could survive a fall, “playing on easy mode” was a quick way to get dead. I needed to be prepared for every worst-case scenario.
”Setting that aside… where are we?” I asked.
”We’ve covered so much ground! Aren’t we here?” Charlotte pointed to a spot on our basic map, but we’d already blown past it. When I pulled out the map I’d transcribed, her eyes went wide. “Wait… have we already crossed the border?”
”Yeah. We’re across.”
There was no wall at this section of the border. The main roads had checkpoints and fortifications, but from the air, the gaps were glaringly obvious. Between the monster density and the terrain, the Kingdom probably couldn’t even send work crews out here.
”A carriage would have taken ten days, but we did it in hours… Birds really are incredible!”
The fact that we flew as the crow flies helped, but even so, we were moving at a clip that put my previous world’s knowledge to shame.
”Flying is a game-changer,” I agreed. “No obstacles, no winding roads – just a straight shot at a velocity you’ll never hit on foot.”
”As expected of you, Ibuki-sama! We don’t have to worry about pursuers anymore!”
I wasn’t so sure. Once a state decides to assassinate you, they don’t just give up. The Kingdom needed to keep the “Heroes” in line, and if the others found out they’d tried to kill me, there’d be a revolt. They’d either want me dead or – more likely – forcibly enslaved to keep the secret.
”I wonder if the others are okay… I’m worried they’ve been forced into slavery,” I muttered.
”I believe they should be safe from that,” Charlotte replied.
Apparently, while a Slave Crest² is absolute once applied, the magic requires the victim to “accept” the bond of their own will. I remembered us talking about this before; it was why Charlotte hadn’t feared being enslaved herself.
Of course, you can always torture someone until they ‘willingly’ accept, I thought. I know I wouldn’t last five minutes under the knife.
But the Kingdom couldn’t risk them committing suicide. They’d already publicly recognized the seniors as Heroes. If they lost them now, their entire military strategy would crumble.
”What happens to children born into the slave class who refuse to accept the crest?” I asked.
”They are whipped,” Charlotte said quietly. “And if they still refuse… they are liquidated.”
Liquidated. This country really was built on a foundation of pure violence.
”Right. Thanks for the reality check. I needed that.”
”Oh! Was I too blunt?” Charlotte asked, sensing my mood shift and mistaking it for irritation.
”No, no. It’s better to stay sharp. It’s just hard to keep a sense of crisis when you’re such a distraction, Charlotte.”
”E-ehehe…” She gave a shy, playful giggle. It was a rare look for her.
”Anyway, can we even get into a town?” I asked. Our old Residency Permits³ were dead weight now. We were effectively “undocumented.”
”It’s best to start with a village where they don’t check IDs,” she suggested. “If we can get a card from the guild⁴ there, it’ll serve as identification in the larger cities.”
”They issue cards in villages?”
”Yes. There will definitely be a Subjugators Guild. The monster threat is higher in the sticks, so they need the manpower. Whether they’ll give us one easily is the real question.”
We kept walking until the sun dipped below the horizon. The village was visible in the distance, but I didn’t want to make an entrance in the dark. I found a secluded spot, summoned the house, and we hunkered down for the night.
* * *
The next day, we entered the village.
There were guards at the gate, but they didn’t even give us a second look. We headed straight for the Subjugators Guild. The village had a population of maybe three thousand – large for a rural settlement – but the “Guild” was just a ramshackle hut. Inside, a woman about Charlotte’s age sat behind a desk.
”Welcome~. You’re from out of town, I take it? Do you have a request?”
”Actually, can travelers get a guild card here?” I asked.
”Sure thing~. But you’ll need to prove you’ve got the skills first. If you aren’t confident in a fight, you should probably walk away~. The monsters around here are mean~.”
She had a very airy, laid-back way of talking.
The test was simple: hunt five local monsters. It was a workaround to make it look like we were “contributing to local defense.”
”If I fail, there’s no penalty, right?”
”Of course not~. It’s just a little test~.”
”Then I’ll give it a shot.”
”Are you sure~? You don’t exactly look like a warrior~.”
She wasn’t wrong. My sword was a budget blade and I had zero armor. I was a Crafter, through and through.
”I’ll be fine. Can you tell me what’s in the area?”
”Sure. You can check the bestiary, but be careful with it~. Books are pricey; if you rip it, you bought it~.”
She handed over a heavy tome for free. I scanned it quickly, skipping the lore and focusing on the attack patterns, pack sizes, and territories. Finally, I asked if anything in the woods was strong enough to breach a stone wall.
”The monster count has been up lately, so don’t be a hero~!” she called out as we left.
Outside, Charlotte looked just as worried as the receptionist. “Ibuki-sama, are you really going to do this? It sounds dangerous…”
”I’m not going to fight them,” I said with a smirk. “I’m going to set a trap.”
We headed toward the monster territories. Using Mana Sensing⁵ to dodge any patrols, I found a good spot and started digging. I carved a staircase deep into the earth and then began a tunnel five meters wide.
Tink. Tink. Tink. Three taps were all it took to hollow out the stone. It wasn’t even exhausting. I used my Processing⁶ skill to brace the ceiling with U-shaped supports as I went.
”Ibuki-sama, what are we doing down here?” Charlotte asked, torch in hand.
”Building a pitfall.”
”A… pitfall?” She looked skeptical.
But I had a plan. Even if the trap failed, I could retreat into the tunnel and seal it with five-meter-thick stone blocks faster than anything could claw through them.
As I swung my pickaxe again, the vibration changed. I opened my inventory and froze. Iron (Large), Copper (Large), Silver (Large), and Coal (Large). I had three massive blocks of iron already. I pulled out one out, and a five-meter-square cube of pure, refined metal slammed into the tunnel floor.
”What the…!? There’s refined iron just sitting in the dirt!?”
Charlotte stared at the massive cube, her jaw dropping. “What… what is that?”
I’d hit a vein. My pickaxe didn’t just mine ore; it converted the entire five-meter area into refined material.
”Whoa…” Even Charlotte was speechless.
I wasn’t complaining. This “cheat” was about to make our lives a whole lot easier.
Anyway, I kept at the construction, erecting a central pillar to climb as I mapped out a five-meter radius. I dug in all four directions, carving upward until I’d hollowed out a ten-meter vertical shaft. We hadn’t come from particularly deep, so after a few bursts of upward digging, I finally broke through to the surface.
My Sensing⁷ didn’t pick up any movement, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Stay away just a little longer, I thought, as I scrambled to install the heavy sealing plates. Once the top was secure, I descended to the very bottom and set to work on the centerpiece: a literal forest of jagged, iron greatswords.
Yeah. A “bed of blades,” but on a massive, lethal scale.
The spikes were gargantuan-uniform rows of needle-sharp iron beams standing at attention. A dark smirk tugged at my lips. Being able to forge something this size out of pure iron using my Processing⁸ skill was a total game-changer.
I constructed the spiked floor to cover the full five-meter spread, then gradually widened the shaft into a smooth, cylindrical funnel as I worked my way back up. Once I hit the top, I swapped the temporary lid for a trapdoor-a weight-sensitive pressure plate that would drop the floor out from under anything heavy enough to trigger the lock. I made the walls perfectly smooth for several meters down; once you stepped on that plate, there was nothing to grab. It was a one-way trip to hell.
”But,” I muttered, looking over my handiwork, “monsters aren’t just going to wander in by accident.”
Unless we got incredibly lucky, the pit would stay empty. I needed bait. But first, I had to finish the logistics.
I spent the next few hours adding the finishing touches: a set of stairs for us to move between levels, a reinforced stone bunker on the surface to monitor things in safety, and a viewing port at the bottom made of heavy glass reinforced with iron struts so we could inspect the “catch.”
Finally, the stage was set. All that was left was the bait.
”I think this’ll do,” I said, nodding as I looked up from the bottom of the pit.
”S-So…” Charlotte stammered, her voice echoing in the shaft. “They fall from up there… and they end up… impaled on these?”
”That’s the plan,” I replied.
”Oh… wow…” Charlotte whispered, a nervous, half-terrified smile playing on her lips.
It was definitely diabolical. Even I felt a chill imagining myself taking that plunge. I mean, I could probably manage to slow my descent with a parachute or drop a platform beneath me to stick the landing, but for anyone else? Death sentence.
In games, a spiked pit is the oldest trick in the book, but to someone like Charlotte, it was pure, unadulterated cruelty. I could see her thinking it: This guy is twisted.
”There is one snag, though,” I continued. “We need a way to lure them in.”
I was confident my plan would work, but I couldn’t risk using either of us as live bait-not when we needed a guaranteed exit strategy.
”Attracting them, you mean?” Charlotte asked. “I’ve heard monsters are drawn to the scent of human Mana. It’s not an exact science-they sort of track it like a hound on a trail. Apparently, the stronger the monster, the further away they can sense you… though in the lower floors I was sent to, they were too weak to notice you unless you walked right into their line of sight.”
She told me it was the kind of thing adults used to scare kids-the local version of the Boogeyman. Eat your vegetables or the monsters will follow your scent and snatch you away! Since it was common knowledge, I figured I could work with it. I opened my Processing menu and started experimenting with materials, looking for something that could hold Mana but “leak” it slowly over time.
The best candidate turned out to be the silk from a first-floor Caterpillar.
I spun the silk into several small, cocoon-like spheres and had Charlotte infuse them with her Mana. Checking them with my Sensing, I could see the energy bleeding out in a slow, steady shimmer. Perfect. I stepped into the monitoring shack and tossed one onto the pressure plate. I held my breath, worried it might trigger the trap early, but the cocoon was too light to trip the lock.
With the trap armed, there was nothing left to do but wait. I pulled out a couple of chairs in the bunker, and we sat down to kill time.
”I can’t believe we’re just… sitting here,” Charlotte said, looking out the reinforced glass. “It doesn’t feel like we’re actually hunting monsters.”
”Haha, well, I did all the heavy lifting during the prep so we could sit down now,” I said.
”I-I suppose so. But making something like this… I can’t even imagine how many decades it would take a normal crew to build,” Charlotte said.
”Decades? Really?” I asked. “Wouldn’t the Duke of this region be able to knock this out pretty quick with enough resources?”
Charlotte shook her head vigorously. “First, finding people willing to work this deep in the forest is almost impossible. And the sheer labor of digging a tunnel this deep and venting it to the surface? It would be a generational project.”
She looked away, her expression somber. “The outer walls of the capital’s castle took thousands of slaves and over a decade of back-breaking labor to finish.”
Yikes. That’s some straight-up Pyramid-building misery right there. It made sense, though. In a world with this level of technology, everything was manual labor. Sure, there’s magic and high-level strength, but that probably just meant they used stronger “tools” instead of inventing better machines. It’s the classic trap of a magic-based society: why innovate when you can just throw more Mana at the problem?
I thought back to my own stats. My carrying capacity had more than doubled since I started leveling up. If level ten felt this significant, I couldn’t imagine what a high-level warrior was capable of.
Suddenly, a shrill, piercing screech echoed from the distance.
”Here they come!” I stood up, scanning the horizon. A pack of about a dozen lizard-like monsters were sprinting across the clearing toward us. They were still a ways off, but they were moving fast. They’d be on top of us in minutes.
”Oh no! We have to run!” Charlotte cried, her face paling. “There are too many of them!”
”Relax. Let’s head down to the bottom of the shaft like we planned. We can seal the exit if things get hairy,” I said.
”R-Right. Of course. Even if they get past the trap, they can’t get through the tunnels if we block them…”
”Exactly. No monster is digging through five meters of solid stone walls,” I replied.
Charlotte nodded, her confidence returning. “You’re right. That would be impossible.”
We retreated to the bottom of the pit. I pulled my chair back out and sat down to watch the show. I offered one to Charlotte, but she just stood there, fidgeting.
”You’re… actually going to sit?” she asked, giving me a bewildered look.
”Sure am. We might be doing some ‘heavy lifting’ in bed tonight, so I figured I’d save my energy while I can. Why don’t you join me and rest up?”
Charlotte’s face turned a brilliant shade of crimson, but she didn’t argue. “…I suppose that makes sense,” she whispered, carefully lowering herself into the chair beside me.
Seeing her get mentally prepared for our “night exercise” was a reward in itself.
Before I could dwell on it further, the trapdoor snapped open.
Sunlight flooded into the dim chamber as the ceiling vanished. A chorus of startled, angry shrieks filled the air, followed immediately by a series of sickly thuds and heavy crunches. There weren’t even any death throes-just the sound of meat meeting iron. Through the viewing port, I saw the lizards pinned like insects to a corkboard, the massive greatswords having skewered them instantly.
”Looks like a success,” I muttered.
Suddenly, a surge of warmth rushed through my veins. Wait, did I just level up from a trap kill?
I looked over at Charlotte. She was staring at her own hands, her eyes wide with shock. She’d felt it too.
Wow. This is a total XP farm. I didn’t know if she got the credit because she was nearby or because she’d “charged” the bait with her Mana, but I wasn’t going to complain. This was way too easy.
”I… I feel a bit guilty,” I admitted, rubbing the back of my neck. “Leveling up like this feels like cheating.”
”I-It does…” Charlotte let out a shaky, breathless laugh. “I feel like I should be doing something more than just sitting here.”
We shared a look, both of us wearing the same guilty, half-smirking expression.
”Well, for Production Class⁹ people like us, we have to take what we can get,” I said, standing up. “Let’s keep this going. I want to milk this spot until the monsters stop coming. Then we’ll head home.”
I swept the skewered corpses into my Storage¹⁰, retrieved the Mana-cocoon, and headed back up the stairs. It was time to grind.
—
Summary:
Ibuki and Charlotte successfully cross the border by air and arrive at a new village. To gain legal identification, Ibuki visits the Subjugators Guild and takes on a trial to hunt five monsters. Instead of direct combat, Ibuki uses his crafting skills to dig an elaborate underground tunnel and trap, discovering that his pickaxe can mine massive blocks of fully refined metals.
The protagonist constructs a massive, automated pitfall trap using his specialized skills. He creates a ‘Mana bait’ from caterpillar silk and Charlotte’s energy to lure lizard monsters into the spiked pit. The plan works perfectly, resulting in effortless level-ups for both characters.
—
Trivia:
- The border has no physical wall in remote areas due to monster density.
- Enslavement in this world requires the victim’s psychological ‘acceptance’ to function.
- Ibuki is technically a ‘Production Class’ and lacks standard combat armor.
- The pickaxe skill doesn’t just mine ore; it produces refined metal blocks instantly.
- Ibuki used a staircase digging method to create a 5×5 meter tunnel.
- The walls of the trap are intentionally smooth to prevent monsters from climbing out.
- The protagonist spent several hours building auxiliary structures like a bunker and viewing port.
- Charlotte is shocked by the protagonist’s efficiency compared to the manual labor of her world’s society.
- The ‘bait’ is made from silk because it has the lowest Mana repulsion
—
Character Insight:
Ibuki demonstrates his high-level pragmatism by choosing traps over combat. His ‘cheat’ skill is evolving from a mere tool for survival into a potential source of immense wealth and strategic advantage. Charlotte’s absolute faith in him is deepening as she witnesses the absurdity of his crafting abilities.
The protagonist continues to show a pragmatic, game-oriented mindset, viewing the world through the lens of efficiency and ‘XP farming.’ Charlotte is gradually becoming more complicit in his ruthless strategies, shown by her blushing acceptance of his ‘night exercise’ innuendo.
—
Behind the Scenes:
The ‘three taps’ mechanic is a common trope in voxel-based crafting games (like Minecraft or Dragon Quest Builders), which the author is parodying through Ibuki’s class.
The author uses the ‘Production Class’ trope to subvert traditional fantasy combat, focusing on engineering and logistics as a form of power.
—
TL Notes:
Notes:
• Charlotte – Short, skinny late-teen slave girl with messy brown hair, feline eyes, and a slender, silky-smooth body—ex-Level 8 farmer turned Level 10, bound to Ibuki. Wears rags with his bat-wing hairband; fiercely loyal, calls herself his wife, fights and guards him devotedly. Key moments: gifted to the state as a servant from age 12, now his clingy companion on dungeon runs, aircraft travels, mana-infusing adventures—blushy, protective, tears up with gratitude.
• Ibuki – Broke high‑schooler from Earth who got tossed into another world with the “Crafter” class he first thought was useless—turns out it’s totally busted. Black‑haired, germaphobic, and low‑key bitter but sharp as hell. Uses Synthesis, Processing, and Inventory skills to survive, craft gear, and haul loot while exploring. Currently a Level 10 otherworlder, wielding a stone axe, traveling the frontier forest with Charlotte, and just trying to stay alive long enough to find a bit of peace.
• Hero – Ibuki’s upperclassman from Earth—summoned as the naive Hero with emotional, mentally fragile personality. Empathetic yet reluctant and inadequate-feeling, lacking survival instincts and political skills. Currently in despair and terrified by his situation.
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Edited by Kanaa-senpai.
Thanks for reading.
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