“But we just don’t have enough money. We can’t afford to be late in paying our employees.

Someone will go running to the Labor Standards Inspection Office, and the rest will be like mice
fleeing a sinking ship... ah, excuse me. I wasn’t trying to imply that you would flee, Moffle-san,”
Ashe apologized, as she noticed Moffle making a face. “...Forgive me. It’s likely that we should
have kept this to ourselves. If rumors get out, it will make things even worse.”
Ashe was right. Even if it was a half-assed, failing amusement park, it couldn’t afford to be late
in paying its employees. Even rumors about that happening would be a huge blow; they’d be
finished. It would invalidate all the hard work they had done in March.
“Okay, I hear you,” Seiya admitted. “But we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Consider this
a top secret matter that we’re trusting you to keep to yourselves. All right?”
“......” At Seiya’s words, the group fell silent. Perhaps that phrase—“we’re trusting you”—had
united them in purpose.
“So I want to talk this out with everyone here,” Seiya continued. “What we need is 25 million
yen, and we need it in the next two weeks. I’ll take any ideas you have.”
Hearing this exact number caused the group to sink even more heavily. That went far beyond
anything they could scrounge up with horse racing tickets or pachinko jackpots.
“Any ideas at all. If you think of something, just throw it out there.”
Macaron tentatively raised his hoof. “Um... we could all play pachinko.”
“No. Anything else?”
“Mii. We could all bet on horses.”
“No. Get away from gambling. Anything else?”
“Moffu. We could all rob convenience stores.”
“No,” Seiya scoffed. “Even if we stole 50,000 from each, we’d still have to rob 500 stores.”
“Then how about robbing a bank?” Moffle inquired.
“No. Get away from robbery.”
“Moffu. Pyramid scheme?”
“Come on,” Seiya said exasperatedly, “nothing illegal. Anything else?”
“We could open an adult theme park!”
“Against adult entertainment business laws. Anything else?”
“Sexy doujins?”
“Only a small number of us could sell, and we couldn’t make 25 million off of it.”
“Sexy figurines?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?”
“Hug pillows?”
“Get away from sex stuff.”
“Meet-and-greets?”
“You think anyone would want to meet or greet you?”
They spent about an hour like that, throwing out half-hearted ideas, but nothing ingenious was
forthcoming.
“Seiya... no one’s going to come up with a way to earn 25 million yen on the spot, fumo.”
Moffle said with an exhausted expression.
“Hmm... Well, I knew you wouldn’t.” Seiya responded flippantly.
The whole group let out a groan.
“Then why did you ask, mii?! I’m awful at money stuff, mii!”
“Isn’t it your job to come up with these things, Kanie-san?!” Ashe demanded.
“Just give us an amazing miracle like last month!”
They yelled at him one after another. Seiya’s expression curdled at their presumptuousness.
What do they expect of a high schooler making 850 yen per hour? Incidentally, 850 an hour was
Tokyo’s local minimum wage. Seiya would have been happy to work for nothing, but as a
matter of principle, he felt he at least had to take that much. He’d like to give them a piece of
his mind about that, but he opted not to—If he told them “don’t put so much pressure on a kid
like me” now, no one would ever listen to him again.
“Kanie-kun.” Isuzu sat down next to him, tugged on his sleeve and whispered in his ear.
“What?” he whispered back.
“Shouldn’t you tell them about the Malmart thing?”
“I’d better not,” he replied quietly. “I really do want any ideas I can get from them, and I also
want them to feel some responsibility for what happens.”
“I see...” Isuzu murmured. She moved away and went back to taking the minutes on her laptop.
“Ah! That’s right, ron!” Macaron stood up abruptly, hitting the table with his hoof. “Dornell’s
cave! Dornell’s cave!”
“Ahh... I’d forgotten about that, fumo.” Moffle tilted his head as if remembering something.
Nobody else in the conference room seemed to know what they were talking about.
“What’s that?” Seiya inquired.
“It’s a cave in the second park. It’s mostly been forgotten, but we park veterans still tell a few
legends about it, fumo.”
The second park was a large plot of land to the south of the highway, separate from the park
that Seiya was currently running. When the bubble had burst in the early 90s, there had been
plans to build a second park there, but money troubles had caused the plans to be shelved. The
land was still there, but mostly untouched.
All it contained was the large stadium which they’d used the previous month. In other words,
the “second park” was a park in name only, yet the cast had grown accustomed to referring to
the southern plot that way.
“So, what is this cave?” Seiya wanted to know. “An attraction of some kind?”
“It’s no attraction, fumo. There’s a tunnel deep in the forest there. It’s said to have been there a
long time now... it even predates the ‘Amagi Playground’ days, I’d reckon.”
“Amagi Playground” was the current park’s predecessor: Built in the Taisho Period and enjoyed
by people around Tama Ward, it had closed in the early 1970s. Then during the 1980s, Maple
Land funded a renovation and reopening, and it became Amagi Brilliant Park, which it remained
to this day.
“What does this cave have to do with our money troubles?” Isuzu asked.
Moffle’s gaze became distant. “Quite a while back—this was over ten years ago, fumo—we had
a Fairy of Flowers named 〈Dornell〉 in our cast—”
“That’s a rugged name... It sounds like a mobile weapon.”
And he’d put it in brackets, too, like 〈Arbalest〉 or 〈Laevatein〉.
“Don’t interrupt, fumo! ...Now, one summer night, 〈Dornell〉 got drunk and ventured out
into the second park, fumo. No sinister motive behind it; just a test of courage of sorts, I
believe... He took a few mascots with him, and they headed for the cave deep on the grounds.”
“Incidentally, Dornell was the Fairy of Flowers two generations before mii.”
“I appreciate the footnote, fumo. But when they went into the cave for their test of courage—”
“Could you get to the point,” Seiya urged him.
“Now, hold on, fumo. This is going to sound like a fish story unless I give the proper buildup to
—”
“Just get to it,” Seiya demanded.