Literature / Lazy Dungeon Master

The initial crew and their benefactor, Haku.

“Hey, hurry up and massacre those bandits!”

“No way, I don’t want to work…”

Spending my daily life in leisure, that was my pastime—until I was summoned into another world and met a blonde loli introducing herself as Dungeon Core No. 695.

“Save my dungeon. By the way, if the dungeon core is destroyed, you’ll also go down with me as the dungeon master.”

A dungeon with a single room. Moreover, one already controlled by bandits. This is a [Checkmate] no matter how you look at it. Guess there’s nothing to do but somehow get out of this situation so that I can [Not Work]!!

Lazy Dungeon Master, also known as I Absolutely Don't Want to Work as a Dungeon Master Until I Indulge in My Laziness (Zettai ni Hatarakitakunai Dungeon Master ga Damin wo Musaboru Made) is a Japanese light novel series written by Supana Onikage and illustrated by Youta. It began serialization online in April 2015 on the website Shousetsuka ni Narou. It had been picked up by OVERLAP and became a light novel with slight differences between them (although the Light Novels have regularly received extra content starting with the third volume). A manga adaptation with art by Nanaroku has been serialized online via Overlap's Comic Gardo website since 2018.

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Tropes:

• Affably Evil: The Saintess follows the Holy Kingdom's belief that destroying dungeons is a must and she's rather pushy about it, but her politeness towards Keima is genuine. She later suspects that he's one of the managers of the Cave of Greed, but stays quiet about it.
• And I Must Scream: At one point, Haku manipulates an evil hero into raiding the Cave of Greed so that Keima and Rokuko can use the opportunity to assassinate him. The problem is this hero's cheat ability is Super Healing, which lets him regenerate from nearly any wound and even prevents exhaustion and the need to sleep. How do you take out someone like that? Keima traps him in a respawned dungeon wall, which is then sealed away where no other adventurers could ever rescue him. He's still alive, as he's so scared of death that he keeps continually using his ability to keep himself alive and healthy despite being literally unable to do anything else, but that just makes him an excellent source of continuous DP collection for the dungeon.
• Born Lucky:
  • Rokuko, at least on the Dungeon's gachapon. She gets very good draws from it. The first time she rolls in the story, she gets Keima, who becomes her Dungeon Master and completely turns her life around. The second time, she gets a Phoenix Egg. Draws she makes that aren't specified are still implied to be good value for money as opposed to being junk.
  • A hero, Wataru, has the Super Luck ability as his 'cheat'.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Keima would like nothing more than sleep most of the day away, but he is also the brains behind the Cave of Greed.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Leona admits that her only motive is to amuse herself For the Evulz and seek glory as a horrifically evil Final Boss.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Ittetsu is enraged that Keima and Rokuko accidentally dug into his dungeon, but after losing a Dungeon Battle, he becomes a friend who sometimes offers advice.
• A Dungeon Is You: Keima has been turned into the Dungeon Core.
• Ecchi: Illustrations in the light novel sometimes show the females under-clothed.
• Enemy Mine: Keima manages to arrange one with the slime wolf, Rin, in order to keep the Saintess from destroying the dungeon. Unfortunately, the Saintess manages to temporarily convince Rin to help her instead.
• Exact Words:
  • Thanks to the existence of lie detecting magic, almost everyone knows how to say things that are technically true while hiding their true intentions.
  • After Keima met the first victory condition in his battle against Ittetsu, he failed the second condition to touch the dungeon core on the lowest floor. Ittetsu managed to trick him by making the last floor a warehouse while placing the core on the second-to-last floor.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Despite her unabashed evil, Leona won't waste food due to her Japanese values.
• Fantastic Racism: Among Dungeon Cores, there's discrimination against human-shaped Dungeon Cores, since most cores are often shaped like animals or magical beasts. Dragon-shaped Cores basically look down on everyone.
• Faux Affably Evil: Leona combines this with Laughably Evil due to her whimsical personality, her penchant for meta-jokes, and her sociopathy
• The Fundamentalist: The Holy Kingdom fervently believe in the Light God's decree to destroy every dungeon in existence, more so than the adventurers who spare less threatening dungeons.
• Goroawase Number: Keima named Dungeon Core No. 695 as Rokuko with this in mind.
• Happiness in Slavery: Downplayed, but Niku actually is pretty happy as Keima's slave (it's certainly a step up from a bandit's abused sex toy that was this close to getting her ears and tail mutilated to make her look more human), and Ichika, nee Sorin, was glad to get rid of her gambling debts, and since Keima uses the dungeon's DP to create food from his world, which Ichika has never tasted before, she's perfectly happy staying with him since it means she gets to try out new and delicious food all the time. She's even more determined to stay his slave once he invents slot machines.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Deliberately invoked in-story by Keima to save Niku. He essentially convinces himself that as a slave, Niku is not a person but an object, and as an object counts as an item (specifically, a hug pillow), which the dungeon menu can claim. This manages to last long enough for him to teleport Niku away from a fire that was about to kill her. Afterwards, he never treats Niku as anything less than a person, though he occasionally sometimes thinks of her as a hug pillow in his narration. Fortunately, she's fine with being his hug pillow.
• Knight of Cerebus: The moment Leona shows up, everything goes to hell. She has a Super Appraisal skill that instantly sees through Keima's status as the dungeon master, meaning he's no longer as safe as he was in the previous arcs. She outright admits to wanting to be the greatest evil Final Boss and Haku fears her ability to corrupt others. Worst of all, her DP fluctuates from 0 to 124800, meaning she's more than a hundred times stronger than Rin.
• Language of Magic: The incantations needed to activate skills and spells. Notable in that no one but Keima even realizes there IS one, since everyone else learns the incantations by rote memorization, and don't even know it is a language.
• Magical Incantation: All skills need one to activate, which are learned through memorization. Everyone assumes they are just random nonsense words. Keima, who can understand the Language of Magic, hears them as very straightforward commands to do Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Mundane Utility: Keima uses the [Create Golem] skill as a crafting skill by essentially creating golems that aren't supposed to move. Using it in this way, he has created an Inn Golem, a House Golem, Floor Golems, Window Golems, etc. These are essentially golems in the shape of a house, inn, window or whatever mundane object or structure he might need. However, just because they are golems does not stop them from being a fully functional house, inn or window. He also abuses the command functionality of golems to (re)create relatively complicated machinery like analog clocks, cash registers, slot machines, and even vibroswords.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Haku convinced Rokuko to only summon goblins and keep the dungeon at a level suitable for beginners, believing this would keep the latter off the radar of dungeon-destroying heroes. Unfortunately, this also means Rokuko lacks the DP income to properly defend herself against intruders like the bandits.
• Nominal Importance: As a result of dungeon mechanics, the very act of naming any monster marks them as more important compared to their nameless brethren, which grants them a variety of perks. Even rats produced by the dungeon gain intelligence when Keima accidentally gave them names.
• Omniglot: The 'cheat' ability Keima has, though it takes him a while to realize it. He can understand any written or spoken language. While at first only seeming like a convenience so he can understand this world's denizens, it turns out it also lets him understand the Language of Magic, meaning he can essentially create new spells, something that normally takes people absolute mastery and decades of research. Unfortunately, this mastery does not extend to this world's slang terms. Keima inadvertently named his slave Niku, a.k.a the Japanese for "Meat", after a derogatory slang term for a sex slave and/or living shield, since that's all she was ever called by her former masters.
• One Cast Member per Cover: For both the light novel and manga, every volume cover has a girl. Only the main heroine Rokuko appears on multiple covers.
• Power Levels: DP, or Dungeon Points. Used to buy items from the Dungeon Menu, Dungeon Cores use it as a de facto currency between themselves. You get an amount per day depending on the size of your dungeon, the number and strength of monsters and people within your dungeon, and certain situation-specific multipliers like whether someone is restrained or locked into a room, as well as a small one-time payoff when an intruder is killed or a corpse is absorbed by the dungeon. Haku has amassed a truly staggeringly huge amount of DP by essentially making her dungeon the foundation of a enormous capital city of an empire, meaning she makes more DP per second than the bottom two-thirds of dungeon cores make in a year... combined. She is only ranked fifth in DP among the Dungeon Cores.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The manga adaptation removes a great deal of objectionable content. For example, Meat (Niku) being repeatedly sexually abused on-screen would certainly not go over well. In fact, a second, considerably older, Sex Slave was placed among the bandits to be exploited by Melon Vomit to illustrate the bandit's depravity. Although, these specific changes were first made to the Light Novels (which don't even explicitly confirm that Niku was ever sexually abused), which are otherwise just as dark as the Web Novels.
• Red Baron: The names of the dungeons.
  • Rokuko's dungeon was known as "Ordinary Cave" due to being a single room dungeon. After Keima and Rokuko changed it during the bandit occupation, the dungeon battle with Haku and after installing a trap to imprison someone when they greedily refused to return a magical sword, it is renamed as the "Cave of Greed".
  • Haku's main dungeon is known as the "Ivory Labyrinth".
  • Ittetsu's dungeon is known as the "Flame Cavern".
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: With liberal exploitation of the Create Golem spell and golem workers, Keima is able to build an inn in a matter of hours to Ichika's shock. Even the remodelling gets done quickly when Ichika points out it is missing amenities.
• Scam Religion: The Beddhist Church, although this is more benign than most examples, as Keima is at least upfront about it being a complimentary religion without any Gods, and it isn't directly harmful to its members in any way.
• Schmuck Bait: One of the traps Keima makes in the Cave of Greed is a small room with a magic sword in a pedestal. Removing the sword causes the room’s only entrance to close. The only way to open it again is to put the magic sword back. The first adventurers to discover the room nearly starve to death trying to leave with the sword.
• Semantic Superpower: The Dungeon Menu works like this to a degree. It can claim any unattended item in the dungeon. However, the person using the interface must see whatever it is as an item for the interface to register it as an item. So, if you see slaves as an item...
  • The Dungeon Menu seems to draw items directly from a person's mind. While it seems to have a 'pre-loaded' selection of things, if you're aware of objects like foods that isn't in its selection, it adds them, along with a corresponding DP value.
  • It also works with misnamed items. When Keima presents a kind of bread to Rokuko and tells her it's Melon Bread, it becomes listed as Melon Bread in the DP selection Menu even though it still manifests as something else. However, telling her he made a mistake and it wasn't actually Melon Bread also 'corrects' the menu.
• Simpleminded Wisdom: One of Keima's dungeon riddles starts with "the answer is simple" followed by a question. This riddle tends to be difficult for those who overthink while being easier for the simple-minded.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: There's a strong disincentive to free slaves, as it's very expensive to have a slave collar removed. Furthermore, slave collars come with an Explosive Leash that will kill any slave that tries to remove it. The worst part? Taking ownership of a slave requires the new master to put his mana into the collar, and then test the collar's effectiveness by strangling the slave. Oh, and the slave-master can order the collar to strangle the slave at will, for any disobedience, real or imagined.
  • For beast-kin slaves, especially those from the slums, it's infinitely worse! Even if they survive being in the slaver market, they can only expect the one who buys them to give them a nice taste of hell. No wonder Niku is so thrilled to live with Keima, who treats her like a person and openly treasures her.
  • Then there's the despicable Dragon Suzuki, who not only abuses his (naturally female only) slaves both physically and sexually, but he'll also casually murder them, as well as use them as living pawns for his amusement during his dungeon raids despite his Super Healing cheat ability making it completely unnecessary. Fortunately, Keima and the others are able to separate him from most of his slaves without killing them before dealing with him directly. The one they failed to save is eventually given a second chance as a [Cave of Greed] dungeon employee upon being summoned as a ghost via Rokuko's usual insane luck with the gacha.
• Straw Hypocrite: The side stories reveal that the receptionist is a pedo, despite her constantly fearing that Keima is one.
• Stock Lateral Thinking Puzzle: Keima manages to stall No. 89 with one during the dungeon battle with a riddle that very literally gives its own answer in the first sentence followed by a question that seems difficult, but is completely irrelevant. When one of her underlings finally solves it, the puzzle gate is revealed to have been a Red Herring the whole time.
• Summon Everyman Hero: Keima Masuda (Masuda Keima) was summoned to the world by Dungeon Core No. 695 when she spent DP for a gachapon to summon a monster to defend her but got him.
• Supernatural Suffocation: Keima's favorite technique for killing powerful monsters in Dungeon Battles is to create a horde of small creatures and control some of them to climb up the monster's body and jump into its throat.
• Swiss Army Super Power: The [Create Golem] skill essentially becomes this for Keima. At first he just used it to create standard humanoid golems. However, after making a 'Clock Golem' for Niku as a gift, he made the mental breakthrough that ANYTHING with any sort of moving part can be made as a golem, and that golems can be made of any material. This led to the development of his Clothes Golems, Magic Sword Golems, and Wall Golems, allowing him to equip the [Cave of Greed] with monsters, traps and rooms well above what they would have been able to stock it with using DP. This is in addition to using the skill as if it were a building and crafting skill.
• Took a Level in Badass: Keima notices that Rokuko is slowly becoming smarter, especially when it comes to dungeon design. This is implied to be a side benefit of her increased DP income.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior:
  • Niku sometimes lapses into this. However, in an aversion of the usual Freudian Excuse of it stemming from her once having been a Sex Slave, more often than not it is because she's beastkin, whose cultural practices, instincts and physiology can be a little different from humans.
  • In her POV Extra chapter, Niku's internal narration makes it very clear she'd be okay with being intimate with Keima, though this is implied to be a sign of her affection.
• You Are Number 6: The Dungeon Cores are numbered and rarely have names unless their Dungeon Master gives them one. Their dungeons, however, are named by the populace.
  • No. 695 is named Rokuko by Keima using Japanese pronunciations of the individual numbers. 6 = ro, 9 = ku and 5 = ko.
  • No. 89 is named Haku. Her original Dungeon Master named her for her hair color, white. She later learns that her name could also mean her number. Haku means "white". 8 = ha and 9 = ku.
  • No. 112 is named by his Dungeon Master Redra as [112] in draconic. He is called Ittetsu by Keima using Engrish.
• Villain Protagonist:
  • Keima is anything but heroic. His only redeeming feature is his very Pragmatic Villainy that actually tends to help others far more often than not.
  • The same could also be said of Haku, as she openly invites assaults on other dungeon cores as a means to help keep herself and a select group of allies (such as Rokuko) safe. Furthermore, she uses her vast influence to manipulate adventurers with false information about dungeons that could get them killed, such as the myth of safe zones.

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