When Book left the Magical Device Workshop, it was already completely dark.
Book took off the breathing filter mask on his face and drew a deep breath of the fresh air outside the workshop. Well, it was not actually that fresh. Although the workshop claimed that all exhaust discharged from the facility underwent strict magical purification and had no effect on the human body, Book felt, based on his own experience, that the workshop might not have been telling the truth.
The filter masks they issued to workers were not particularly good quality. For the sake of his health and safety, Book had not used the workshop's masks and had instead bought better ones with his own money, sacrificing part of his monthly wages for them. His coworkers thought he was wasting money on something useless. Wouldn't that money be better spent on anything else? Book merely smiled at such remarks. He thought that earning a little less was fine. Better that than having a life to earn money but no life to spend it.
Recently, the workshop's hours had been extended again. They now had to work fourteen hours a day. With war against the Devil Race imminent, every workshop capable of producing military supplies had been converted from civilian production to military production, expanding capacity as much as possible in preparation for war.
Other than being more exhausting and paying a little more, the war against the Devil Race did not feel real to Book at all. Even though he was already working on the front lines of military supply production, he still felt that war was very far away from him.
He had never even seen a Devil Race member—or rather, he had never seen one that looked like a Devil Race member.
When Larven City had