With the defeat of general under Kazuma and Aqua's collective belt, the pressure he had originally felt at the debt he'd accrued didn't feel so bad. Aqua had, thankfully, aimed the deluge of water away from town so they weren't charged for any damages, and the bounty was split among the party.
This still left Kazuma's debt in the multiple billions of Eris, much to his chagrin.
Kazuma sat at his desk in the mansion, nearly pulling out his hair as he worked through his balance sheets. "Fuck me. At this rate I won't be out of debt until I'm in my forties" he lamented under his breath.
"Well, why don't we just take a few more quests then? Surely there are some big ticket missions we can handle, right?" Aqua asked, having been laying on their bed, drawing.
"I thought about that, but there haven't been many posted still since we took care of that general" Kazuma answered, leaning back in his chair and watching her draw a bit. "Huh. You're really good at drawing, ya know that? Some of those are good enough to be on trading cards back home.'
"Thanks! I love arts and crafts. It's a minor part of my domains" she explained, finishing up a piece of a warrior princess that she'd been doodling.
Kazuma went quiet for a moment, thinking to himself. "Hey, this work doesn't have the printing press yet, right?"
"Mmm, no, I don't think it does, why?" Aqua asked, grabbing another piece of paper and starting to sketch.
Kazuma smiled, stroking his non-existent goatee. "I think I have an idea. Aqua, can you go grab that rune book I was using from down stairs?"
-Ko-No-Su-Ba!-
-A month of mind-numbing work later-
Kazuma stood proudly over his creation, smug as could be. Darkness and Megumin could only look on in confusion as Aqua bounced in excitement. Before them was a table that was around two feet long and a foot wide with six distinct zones on the far sides and seven on the middle two rows.
Megumin decided to break the silence. "Okay, so you wanted to show us a table?"
"This is no mere table! This is a duel platform!" He explained, grabbing a fistful of cards while Aqua shuffled her own deck.
"So you fight for honor over it?" Darkness asked, his explanation not really helping.
Aqua chimed in this time, setting her deck down in the appropriate slot. "Nope! It's for a game. Watch." She then placed a card on the table. The entire card was covered in artwork of a shady looking male rogue, complete with short sword and mask. She then tapped it twice with her finger, causing it to light up and a small simulacrum of the creature depicted to show above it.
Megumin's eyes lit up, watching as the tiny warrior looked around the room suspiciously. "That's so cool! How did you do that?"
Kazuma sat down, placing a card with a depiction of a wolf on it in front of himself, and summoning the creature himself. "It's a hell of a lot of tricky illusion magic and nowhere near complete, but it's a start. The idea is that two players will each have a deck of monsters and spells, each with the intent of using them to beat the opponent." He tapped a blank spot that looked like it was meant to be something, but was blank for now. "When it's done, those will have the player's life points and show in real time who is winning and the like. Making the illusions was honestly the easy part. See, the card acts as a baseline, and then when you tap the board you're giving it a pinch of mana to make it manifest the image based on how you picture it. Now I just need to figure out the rules and make sure the table enforces them." The part Kazuma wasn't telling them was that he was effectively ripping off an early version of Yu-Gi-Oh with the intent of selling it to nobles to make a killing. "This seem like something nobles would buy, Darkness?"
Darkness nodded, looking thoughtfully at the table. "I could see it easily catching on. The issue being it would be fairly hard to spread the word of, I think."
Here, Kazuma smiled, tapping the cards. "Well, that's why I am going to give the guild hall a few free tables when it's ready. The cards will be sold separately in little random bundles. That way, if you have access to a table, you can still theoretically play without buying one."
"So it won't be just for the rich?" Megumin asked, seeming even more interested now.
"Nope! I'm hoping to just make it something anyone can play" and more importantly, pay for, went unspoken.
"Mhm! And I get to make all of the art! Kazzy even said he'd donate 5% of all profits to the Axis church as a thanks!" Aqua gushed, her eyes practically little hearts at how 'nice' Kazuma was being.
"How long do you think until you have it fully functional Kazuma?" Megumin asked, having taken the pile of cards and looked through some of the art. She had been immediately hooked by a mage who had swirling reds and blacks around their staff.
"Depends on how much I get to work on it really. I am also trying to find a way to update tables I made in the past in case I find a flaw."
"Oh, my dad made something like that once. He made a rune array that was able to be adjusted by a pre-made rune cut slab, or something like that. It wasn't really all that interesting to me" Megumin admitted, feeling a bit bad.
"Well, think you could get him to come help? I'd be willing to contract him for help making and maintaining these if he can." Thinking of the Crimson Demon clan made Kazuma have another realization. "Has anyone seen Yunyun by the way?"
"Oh, she had to go back home for a bit. She is the next chieftain and all."
"Well, send her a message to bring your old man back with her so I can talk to him about this" Kazuma told her, not even doubting she would.
"Can you make me cards too in return?"
"Already planned on it" he answered, standing up and going to retrieve his design notes.
-Ko-No-Su-Ba!-
Hyoizaburoo stumbled slightly as Yunyun's teleportation spell ended. He had never been the best at dealing with that method of travel, and age hadn't helped him much. He looked around, surprised to realize that they'd landed in front of a mansion in a fairly well off part of the city. "Alright Yunyun, where are we going?" He asked, trying to be friendly with his daughter's 'rival.'
"Oh, we're already here. We live in the mansion" she explained, motioning towards the gated house.
"My daughter lives here!? Wait, we? Who all lives here?" He asked, following behind Yunyun as she led the way.
"Oh, well, Megumin, Darkness, Aqua, Kazuma, and me. We're an adventuring party, so it just made sense for us to bunk together" Yunyun explained, not seeing the issue. Hyoizaburoo disgreed.
"Wait, my precious eldest daughter is living with a man?" He asked, his fatherly instincts beginning to take over.
"Oh, don't worry uncle, Kazuma and Aqua are dating and Aqua would probably kill him if he tried anything" she assured him, opening the door to the mansion now. "I'm back!" She shouted out to the house at large, immediately causing noticeable movement from the dining room.
"We're back here! Did you bring the old man?" Kazuma asked.
Hyoizaburoo as if struck, holding a hand to his heart. "Old?! I'll have you know I am in the prime of my life!"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever. Get in here and see if you can help or not. I already promised Megumin to pay you a few thousand Eris just for showing up" Kazuma griped, clearly not happy to be dipping into what little liquidity he had left.
"How can I help you, valued client?" With the promise of money, it was like a switch was flipped for Hyoizaburoo, instinctively going into ass kissing mode.
Kazuma shook his head, not terribly surprised if some of the stories Megumin had said about her home were accurate. "I need to find a way to set this table to enforce rules for a game I made. Ideally, I want to make it so we can update it too with relative ease if something changes." Kazuma handed the inventor a stack of papers covered in ink. "Those are my notes so far."
Hyoizaburoo paged through the notes, nodding along occasionally. To him, it was all almost routine, save for some odd phrases he wasn't familiar with. The rune work itself wasn't complex, so much as it was a lot of simple tasks overlayed to get a desired effect. It was clunky, to say the least. "Lemme see here, so perception based illusion based on conception is fine. Interaction is fine. Game state? Board state?" He asked, the terms stopping him and making him confused.
"Uh, think of it like chess maybe? The board state is the runes trying to figure out what moves are legal and aren't and enforcing the effects of them. The game state is basically a tracker of who is winning in an abstract sense."
Hyoizaburoo nodded, flipping to the rules section and trying to make sense of it all through that lense. "How are you making the 'cards' anyway? Surely it would be prohibitively expensive to make each one individually and lead to too much variance."
Here, Kazuma beamed, pulling out a small box, clearly designed to hold cards inside of it, with a slot on the top of it where a card would fit. "That would be this! I put the master in the top slot, blanks inside, pour mana through it, and it copies them." What he didn't mention was that it also copied Aqua's magical signature, since he had her power it with her near infinite stamina. Anyone else's mana and the rune table wouldn't work with the cards, making it so counterfeits wouldn't work.
Hyoizaburoo looked at the small device with curiosity, tilting it each way in appreciation. "Could this be scaled up for books?"
"I think so. That was going to be my next project actually" Kazuma admitted, glad to see Megumin's dad wasn't quite as useless as he'd feared.
Setting the notes down, he pulled the Duel Table over, a smile on his face. "Well, let's get to work."
-Ko-No-Su-Ba!-
Kazuma leaned against the counter at the Guild Hall, trying to catch a moment's peace. Since he and Hyoizaburoo started working together, he had only gotten a few hours of sleep most nights, the eccentric inventor's excitement being too contagious for anything else. Most nights, Aqua had to physically drag him to bed before he called it a night.
The distraught clerk had almost faded off to sleep when the light slap of paper on wood woke him up. Shooting to attention, he was greeted with a bemused Luna holding a mission form. "Burning the candle at both ends?"
"You could say that. I feel like we're almost done, but my sleep has been suffering for it" he admitted, rubbing his eyes in a vain attempt to wake himself up. "So, what's up?"
"Got a quest for you and your misfits. New dungeon was discovered, Feldart doesn't want to bother, so you've been volunteered. Get to sleep EARLY tonight, and let the girls know." She handed him over the paperwork then.
Kazuma looked the mission over, reading it once. He paused, having assumed he had misread it before going over it again as a giant grin overtook his face. "Did I mention you're the best boss ever?"
"You might have, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded. Remember, get some sleep" she reiterated, leaving him to the last bit of his shift.
The reason Kazuma was so excited? The pay for the job wasn't all that great, but the catch was that they had first claim to any and all loot they found inside. "So long, cursed debt" he said under his breath before letting out a yawn, trudging over to 'nurse office' to let Aqua know they had a job.
