It’s late spring and it’s already a little too warm.
My twins, who have recently learned to stand up on their haunches, grabbed me by the hem of my jacket, and I was stuck at the front door.
「Aba!」
「Uuuu!」
「Hey hey, Noah, Lacus, father has work to do so don’t hang on him.」
「That’s right. Just stay here with grandma」
The twins are looking at me with sparkling eyes, both of them are sucking the hem of my jacket as if it’s a pacifier.
「Sorry, dad has to go to work……」
It’s great that they are fine with it but……now I have to change my jacket.
「Mion, grab a new jacket for my husband」
「Understood」
I took off my jacket and Laura-san lifted up the twins, wrapping them in as they were.
The babies have been gaining weight and it is getting hard for me to carry both of them in my arms.
I’d like to think that I’m not particularly weak and that it is wrong to compare the powerful muscles of an ex-military officer with my researcher body.
Especially in the last few weeks, the twins have been weaned off baby food and perhaps because they eat three or four meals a day, they have grown up like a field horsetail or a bamboo shoot.
-0-
Speaking of growth, the same is true for the ranch we recently built underground.
The eggs of the chickens in the incubator have begun to hatch one after another and the chicken coop is now overflowing with yellow chicks.
Spring is the season when both animals and people grow up rapidly.
In the midst of all of this, this woman has been growing up rapidly, not in terms of body but as a practical person.
I’m talking about my slave’s boss, Chicken.
「We don’t have enough baths.」
「Bath?」
I replied like a parrot to Chicken in front of the former MSG Headquarters, which had been demolished for reconstruction and turned into a beautifully cleared site.
I’ve been here today to magically solidify the foundation of this place and I’ve just left there for a break to talk with this girl.
「Baseball is very popular these days, right? A lot of tourists come here for that……」
「Tourists? How?」
This is not Japan where you can go anywhere by train.
In this world, commoners are not allowed to take the train and in the first place, it is very dangerous to go outside the city, which is overrun by demon beasts.
「I’ve heard that they are steadily coming here in the country’s horse-drawn carriages.」
「Horse drawn carriages only travel every three days, right? Also, not everyone will get off here.」
「The public bathhouse is already very crowded because people who come here from horse drawn carriages leave the caravan. People come here for honeymoons, silver weddings, heartbreak trips, or even pleasure trips no longer leave. Thus, the bathhouses get very crowded.」
「How about the inns?」
「Some of the inns are run by us and people who own houses with extra rooms are taking advantage of it to earn some extra coins……however, there’s not enough baths.」
「I don’t think I can do anything about the baths either.」
I’m not the kind of guy that will get an idea with a bang of a hammer.
Torquiva has already grown from a farming town in a sense. There is no longer vacant lands and the percentage of vacant houses is low.
There’s no way I can do something suddenly even if you ask me.
「That’s why I thought we should increase the number.」
「Increase? How?」
Chicken, wearing a blue suit that looked like it was cut out of the sky, pointed at our five-story apartment building and smiled bitterly.
「We will expand existing public bathhouse like that building.」
「No one’s going to sell us an existing bathhouse.」
Public bathhouses in this city, where house baths are still scarce, are a business that would not operate at a loss.
Naturally, no one would give it up so even though we’ve been acquiring land for some time, we had yet to buy a public bathhouse.