Outbreak Company: Volume 2 Read online

  Chapter One: Good Morning, Alternate World!

  My little sister looked up at me with puppy-dog eyes.

  “Can I... sleep with you?”

  For a second, my mind went completely blank. Her moist eyes were at once shy and inviting. Her hesitation showed in the trembling of her pale red lips and white cheeks.

  Only the most pure, the most unblemished of young women could have gotten away with this—it was basically their Secret Ultimate Technique. An instant kill. No man could resist it. No man would want to. I knew that, and yet half-reflexively, I tried to push back.

  “D—”

  Don’t be an idiot. What are you talking about?

  But I couldn’t even bring myself to say the words. My tongue, as if trapped by magic, refused to move.

  And then the little girl, clutching her pillow, went on, “I can’t sleep... Can’t I please stay in your bed...?”

  It was perfect. What else would a little sister carry when she came to her big brother’s room in the middle of the night? I simply couldn’t see any way out. Instead I just stood there, goggling.

  Dear sister, when did you get so... mature...?

  “Big Brother...” Her voice was pitiful and pleading. My resolve to turn her down instantly evaporated. She sprang those two words like a trap that left me with no escape.

  Big Brother, she’d said! Of course, she could have thrown in a nice curveball, called me “Elder Brother” or even just “Bro” or something. But sometimes the tried and true is best. I saw her killer technique coming from a mile away, and I still couldn’t defend against it. It was all I could do just to roll over so my back was to her and face the wall.

  “Eh heh heh.” She seemed to take my silence for acceptance. With my back turned, I couldn’t see what my little sister was doing. But I could intuit that she was laughing to cover her embarrassment and then climbing into my bed.

  “Big Brother...” Her whisper seemed to brush against my back.

  Dammit. I could see it now—see the trap I had fallen into.

  I knew how these scenarios played out. Sure, you get into bed together, but you don’t go right to being in each other’s arms. Maybe there’s an embrace, but it’s from behind. You’re in a narrow bed together, so you wrap your arms around the other person, feel their body heat. And then, when the time is right, they turn over. You realize you’re looking at each other from a distance so close you can feel each other’s breath...! It seems coincidental, yet inevitable. That’s what’s important. The touch of awkwardness is the ultimate testament to the girl’s purity. By turning my back to her... I had only played right into her hands!

  I didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything. The silence hovered between us. But I already knew how this was going to go. After a moment’s hesitation, she would say something reluctant yet resolute, like, “This really isn’t right, is it?” or, “But Big Brother, I really...” All followed by her big confession! That was the way it was supposed to go—it was practically tradition. I waited for the moment when I would “accidentally” find myself face-to-face with her. Waiting was all I could do.

  And then...

  “Um... Say... Big Brother?”

  “Yeah, what?” I tried to sound nonchalant. My heart had decided to pound as hard as it could. The sound of blood rushing around my body was deafening in my ears. Wasn’t there some way I could bring my pulse down? And then she said it.

  “B-Big Brother, could... could I...”

  “What? Could you what?” My voice was shaking. I was boiling with heat (not that I knew what that meant).

  “Um...”

  I could feel her breath against my earlobe. She was so close, and her breath was so soft. Ahh...

  And then she said...

  “Could I tie you up?”

  ...............saywhat?

  I instinctively looked at her, and my sanity returned.

  “Wait a second,” I groaned, “who are you?!”

  It’s true, I had a little sister. She was two years younger than me, sassy as hell, and she thought about as much of her older brother as a cowboy does of the snake in his boot.

  With parents like ours—our father a light-novel author and our mother a former writer-designer-programmer for ero games—you might expect that us kids would be 110% brainwashed otaku. But there’s another possibility, which is that as a form of rebellion, a kid might totally refuse any and all things geeky.

  In our house, I was the brainwashed one while my sister was the rebel. She didn’t much get along with any other member of the family, especially not me. Unlike our parents, whom she had to rely upon financially and legally for the time being, there was no disadvantage to her if she ticked me off. I hated how calculating she was about it. She didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Mom and Dad with her rebellious behavior, so she let it all out on me.

  Anyway, forget all that. The girl in front of me was definitely not my little sister.

  For starters, my little sister didn’t have silver hair. And her eyes weren’t green. In fact, this girl obviously wasn’t even Japanese. Jeez, self! Couldn’t you have noticed that a little sooner?!

  But, having been caught up in the utterly textbook sleeping-with-little-sister event, I hadn’t even taken that first, simple mental step.

  You’re stupid beyond belief, Kanou Shinichi! I’ve disappointed even myself this time! But forget about that, we’ve got bigger problems!

  “Big Brother, how could you?”

  Despite my self-proclaimed little sister’s wounded words, she was wearing a smirk. For some reason, her face appeared to be illuminated from below. It wasn’t quite clear where the light was coming from, but thanks to it I could see her sharp yet lovely features. And I could see she looked about as friendly as a Demon King.

  “How could you forget your dear little sister?”

  Suddenly the girl calling herself my little sister was standing proud on top of the bed, holding something in each hand—Ropes? Whips? I couldn’t tell—and looking down at me eagerly. Her features were well-balanced, but a youthful pudginess remained here and there—she was less pretty than cute.

  So, let’s summarize. A girl calling herself my little sister was standing above me with some kind of S&M accessory in each hand. She was definitely no little sister of mine.

  What kind of ero game was this?! Was she some crazy yandere type? Was this a one-way ticket to a bad ending? What kind of terrible fate would I bring down on myself if I didn’t consider my choices very, very carefully?

  All this was going through one corner of my mind, but the rest of me reflexively shouted:

  “Forget?! Forget what?! I don’t have any little sister like you!”

  “Aw, that hurts,” Self-Proclaimed Little Sister said, but all the same she advanced on me, tugging at her ropes in a way that produced a very distinct cracking sound.

  For what reason does she appear so practiced in these mannerisms? And... am I so scared that my internal monologue is using formal vocabulary?

  “So, what am I to you, Big Brother?”

  “I can’t answer that! No, wait— Stop!”

  “Well, fine,” she said, puffing out her cheeks. Okay, that was a little cute.

  No, stop! This is no time to be getting all moe!

  “From this day forward, you can consider us your queen.”

  “W-Wait, whaaaaat?!”

  How the heck did that work? For that matter, why was she suddenly talking so differently?

  “We are automatically promoting you from Big Brother to Pig.”

  “H—How is that a promotion? No, hold on! Those ropes, they—they chafe!”

  “You are one noisy pig. Don’t you know pigs say bonk bonk?�
��

  “No, they don’t! They say oink oink!”

  “But bonk bonk is such a good sound. It lets everyone know you’re a pig, including you.”

  “Don’t try to twist reality just for human convenience! You should be kind to the earth! And to me!”

  “Shut up already, you obnoxious pig!”

  What the heck is going on here?

  Before I knew it, I was tied up and rolling around on the bed. She was so quick. Impossibly quick. For that matter, why hadn’t I been able to resist?

  “You’re only fit to be made into cup ramen, but we haven’t killed you yet. You can show your gratitude by kissing our foot as we awaken you with it!”

  With that, Self-Proclaimed Little Sister—who I guess was now my silver-haired queen—raised her foot. There was a huge rumbling sound from somewhere, and she brought her foot down at me...

  ...and I woke up screaming, “BOOOOOOOOOOOONK!”

  Let’s be clear. I don’t mean woke up as some weird fetish euphemism. I just mean I was sleeping, and then I wasn’t.

  “Oh... Oh, God...” I sat up in bed, breathing hard. That had been a terrible dream in any number of ways.

  For starters, a little sister who comes into her big brother’s bedroom saying, “I can’t sleep. Can I get in bed with you?” is a creature that only exists in fiction. She isn’t physically possible, just the product of fevered adolescent fantasy. And we humans are buffeted back and forth between such phantasms and reality, and in the process, we grow up... (I’m too shaken to know what that means.)

  “Um...”

  “Anyway, Shizuki never called me ‘Big Brother.’ Come to think of it... What did she call me? Huh? It’s almost like we went three years without having a real conversation...”

  “Um, Master?”

  “N-Not that it would bother me not to have talked to her for three years! Er... Ugh, no, that’s just tsundere-ish self-deception. But seriously, I can remember it like it was yesterday—the times when Shizuki would follow me around, or cry when I had to go off to elementary school... Wait a second, I know it wasn’t yesterday, but how long ago was that?”

  “Master, um... Breakfast is ready...”

  “Yeah... We haven’t had breakfast together in so long...”

  It was only after this whisper had escaped me that I finally registered that I wasn’t alone in my room.

  “Master...?”

  At last, I saw the maid standing there. She was an absolute beauty, but her flaxen hair and indigo eyes pretty much screamed, not Japanese. Not least because when a Japanese girl puts on a maid outfit, it’s hard to avoid the impression she’s just doing cosplay, but this girl... It looked so right on her. The design of her dress was a little different from what you might call a true Victorian-era maid outfit—it left her pale shoulders exposed, and the hem of her skirt was a little short, coming to just above her knees. But it was a testament to her maid-liness that it still didn’t look even a little bit silly on her.

  Her outfit alone made her beautiful enough, but it was her confused, slightly lost expression that put the adorable icing on the cake.

  Her name was Myusel Fourant, and she was my maid.

  A shut-in otaku with a personal maid-san? It’s enough to make you want to know what kind of ridiculous ero game I was in. I’ve got to say, for a long time I was sure it was a dream, too. I was pinching myself every morning when I got up.

  Myusel seemed startled to see me shaken; she treated me as gently as a convalescent. But actually, it had been nearly four months since she had been assigned to look after me. We were pretty used to each other by now.

  Incidentally...

  The room I woke up in was super fancy, very different from the bedroom in my dream. Furnishings were minimal, just some lamps, but a huge, canopied bed sat in the middle of the room, a proud waste of space. There were, of course, no desks or bookshelves. This room was for sleeping and sleeping only—hence why the bed was the protagonist of the interior decor. But you mustn’t think this was merely a display of excess. Oh, no! The mansion I was in had so many rooms that if I didn’t specialize them like this, I would never have been able to use them all up.

  Anyway, never mind.

  “Um... Myusel?”

  “Yes, Master?”

  “How much did you hear...?”

  “Um,” she murmured, tilting her head like a little bird. Gaaah! Every little gesture she makes is just so cute! “From about the part where you said ‘Who are you?!’ I guess.”

  “Yikes! I said that out loud?” I was afraid my sleep talk had given away the contents of my nightmare.

  “So I answered, ‘It’s Myusel,’ but...”

  “It didn’t occur to you that I was talking in my sleep?”

  “Oh. Was that all it was?” Myusel said, a relieved look on her face.

  Wait a second—does she think I don’t know her name or who she is yet?!

  “Myusel, would I ever ask you who you are? We’ve lived in the same house for how many months now? Even my memory isn’t that bad.”

  “Oh, no, that’s not what I meant,” Myusel said, shaking her head vigorously. Her long hair bobbed from side to side in time with the motion. When we had first met, her hair had been tied in twintails on either side of her head, but now she was wearing ponytails instead, leaving her pointy ears completely exposed.

  Myusel, to put it bluntly, was not human. She had mixed blood, and her ears were the proof. Myusel had something of an inferiority complex about her heritage, and usually didn’t like people to see the reminders that were stuck perpetually to her head. She had lived her whole life until very recently keeping them hidden, in fact. The environment she’d been living in had made it necessary.

  But the environment she’d been living in hadn’t been my house. Once she realized that I wasn’t going to hold her birth against her, she frequently started wearing ponytails around the mansion. Unlike twintails, ponytails generally keep the hair from covering the face when you look down, so they make it easier to do things like cooking and laundry. Setting aside the practical benefits, though, the ponytails were also a sign of how much she had relaxed around me and the others who lived in this house. The thought gave me a little burst of pride.

  “You said I should be kind to the earth, and kind to you, so I wasn’t sure how best to call out to you...”

  “Um, that was just sleep-talk, too.”

  As I spoke, I climbed out of bed. As I said, it was an elegant canopied thing, the sort of bed you might normally picture a princess sleeping in. It was practically a symbol for “noble” or “rich guy.” Sleeping on it was nothing like trying to get a night’s rest on the steel-frame bed you bought for 19,800 yen at the store. If I could have sold just this one piece of furniture and exchanged the proceeds for Japanese yen—well, the thought of how rich I would have been was practically enough to keep me awake at night.

  “Er, anyway. You were saying something about breakfast?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s ready.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right there.”

  “Certainly,” Myusel said with a deep bow. She did an about-face and left my room.

  The first time we had met, Myusel had tried to help me change my clothes. It was only natural to her; she saw it as part of her job. But I insisted that helping me get my clothes on in the morning was not on her list of duties, and now she was careful to leave the room whenever she sensed I was going to change.

  Yes, sometimes I had to put on outfits that were hard to get into all by myself, and then I would let Myusel help me. But first thing in the morning... Like any young man, the lower half of my body started the day off very, uh, energetically, and I didn’t necessarily want her to see that.

  I let out a breath as I opened the curtain. The bright light of the early sun poured into the room like an avalanche.

  Over the past four months, I had grown accustomed to what I now saw outside the window. There was a verdant forest and an impossibly clear sky. The li
ttle shapes that flew overhead weren’t birds, but small wyverns, purpose-bred and trained as mounts for knights.

  In case you hadn’t guessed, this wasn’t modern Japan. I was in one of those “other worlds” that normally only existed in anime, manga, and light novels. Around here, we called it the Holy Eldant Empire.

  AD 201X: the Japanese government makes a discovery that can safely be called unprecedented in human history. To be precise, it wasn’t the government that made the discovery so much as one of the volunteer patrols and local police groups working their way through Aokigahara, the forest at the foot of Mount Fuji. But that doesn’t really matter, because this was the find of the century.

  They discovered a hyperspace tunnel, a portal to another world. Right there in the middle of the “Sea of Trees.”

  How long had it been there? And why? How exactly did it work? We still didn’t know the answers to any of those questions. The government, aware of what a huge deal this discovery would be if it were made public, decided to keep it strictly under wraps. That meant there was no real chance to do large-scale research on the hyperspace portal. Only a few people, sworn to utmost secrecy, were involved in figuring out what exactly was going on.

  On the other side of the hyperspace portal was a human nation with a whole lot of space, not to mention its own culture. When the government found that out, it established a front organization called the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau and opened relations. But things didn’t go exactly as planned.

  Since the Holy Eldant Empire had magic, telepathic communication was established without too much trouble. The problems started after that. We were dealing with an imperial system, essentially an absolute dictatorship. The intellectual and cultural level around here was effectively medieval. Liberty? Equality? Fellowship? What are those? Are they tasty? The gulf between these people and modern Japanese sensibilities was so wide that it seemed unlikely we were going to get along.

  The need for secrecy made it hard to recruit new personnel. Plus, it so happened that our country was busy with a transfer of power of its own. The Japanese government basically got impatient with the slow progress in relations with the Eldant Empire and started to get bolder in its tactics.