Outbreak Company: Volume 8 (Premium) Read online

  Chapter One: A Royal Replica?

  I ran for my life through a murky abyss.

  I pumped my legs, dashing as hard as I could. Running was everything.

  I had no idea where I was, or what direction I was heading in. Running was absolutely all I knew. Maybe it would have been better just to stand still. But I was terrified by the thought of doing nothing at all.

  “Huff... Puff...”

  I couldn’t keep this up forever, though. It wasn’t long before I reached my limit. The fatigue was like a weight on my legs, threatening to make me stumble and fall—but I managed to plant my hands against an earthen wall and at least stay upright. I finally decided to stop for a moment. The instant I did so, I broke out in sweat all over.

  “Pant... Pant... Uh... RX-78! RX-78 NT-1! RX-79, RX-79 Ez-8, RX-78GP01, RX-78GP02A, RX-78GP03S, RX-178Mk II, MSZ-006, MSZ-010, RX-93v, RX-0, F91...!”

  To calm my ragged breathing, I recited the identification numbers of mechs from an anime set in a certain Universal Century. Finally, I had a chance to take in where I was.

  I was in a cave... No, more of a tunnel. I was closed in by an overwhelming amount of earth and rock on every side. Obviously I couldn’t see the sky, and there were no windows. Thanks to the lights lining the wall at regular intervals, I wasn’t trapped in total darkness, but they were barely bigger than Christmas tree lights, so it was all relative. The tunnel in front of and behind me faded quickly into darkness, and I could hardly see anything at all.

  Where had I come running from? How had I gotten here? I’d already lost track. I did remember, though, several forks in the road on the way.

  Yes: this tunnel was practically a maze. And I was in a lot of trouble...

  “Maybe this is what it would be like being trapped in an anthill,” I mused by way of escapism. But that quickly led me to imagine giant bugs careering out of the darkness, and I shivered. A massive monster chasing the protagonist through a tunnel is the most stereotyped of stereotypical scenes.

  Stop it. You’re jumpy enough just being alone, don’t make it worse on yourself.

  You’ve got to calm down, Kanou Shinichi!

  I had to chase the frightening thoughts out of my overeager imagination.

  I’ve got it. I’ll think about something fun.

  Yes! Fantasy. That’s what you need at a time like this.

  If I’m going to be chased, maybe it could be by, say, a beautiful girl. “Wait for me, Shinichi-kun!” she’d say as she came tearing after me.

  I was pretty impressed with the image in my head. Not to brag, but I’ve been training my imagination for a pretty long time now, and it was capable of some serious feats.

  The girl chasing me exclaims, “You’ll never get away again! ♪” and grabs at me. Clutch. Mm, it’s a good feeling. It’s just adorable the way she looks shyly at the ground. The only downside is that then I can’t see the cute little expression on her face.

  I bend down, try to get a look.

  That’s when she takes the carving knife she was holding behind her back and jams it into my chest, smiling as she looks up and says, “Now we’ll be together forever! ♪”

  “Hey, that’s not how it’s supposed to go!” I exclaimed, reining in my rampaging imagination. What was I going to get out of going down the yandere path?

  “Eh... I guess it’s not going to do me any good, standing here and playing pretend.”

  I heaved a sigh and looked once more into the inky blackness in front of me.

  As I said, when you’re lost, it’s usually best just to sit tight and wait for someone to come find you... but I wished I could have waited somewhere a bit less claustrophobic. I decided to keep walking until I found something that wasn’t a constricting tunnel.

  I worked my way forward, taking turns pretty much at random. I had nothing but my intuition to guide me—but eventually, the darkness ahead seemed to lift ever so slightly.

  It was a light. And not one of the minimal lights along the wall, but something large enough to fill an open space and then leak into the tunnel.

  “Yes! An exit!” I exclaimed.

  To be fair, I didn’t know whether it was really an exit—whether it led to the surface. But if it at least got me out of this tunnel, that would be a load off my mind.

  I burst into the light, grinning with relief and joy.

  “Urk...”

  The light was stronger than I’d realized; with my eyes used to the darkness, I was almost blinded. I put a hand up to shield my eyes and waited a few seconds for them to adjust.

  “Huh...?” I said stupidly.

  In front of me was a monster.

  It was giant, bizarre. It seemed to be covered in layers of folded steel, like dark-gray armor. It was the size of a small truck and looked awfully heavy. Its back legs were gigantic, and on its front legs grew short but sharp claws.

  And were those wings folded on its back?

  It had a long neck that culminated in a head covered, like its body, in hard skin. Prominently displayed on the head was a big, serrated mouth, like a crocodile’s.

  It was plenty scary, let me tell you. It was just sitting there, like a boulder, but that was more than enough to terrify this onlooker.

  “Oh... sh—”

  As I stared at it and gibbered inarticulately, it started to move.

  It gave one great shake, then its neck stretched out like a snake.

  And then—

  “There you are!”

  “Hagh?!” I screamed when I heard a voice from behind me. A voice that sounded far more cheerful than any voice should have sounded down here.

  “We were looking all over for you, Sensei!”

  I spun around and saw a diminutive young woman coming up from behind me. Just for a second, I thought she was a child.

  But then I recognized her. I ought to—I saw her every day.

  She was one of my students.

  “Sensei!” she said, looking up at me. “I thought I told you not to go wandering around on your own.” She puffed out her cheeks at me, making her look younger—and cuter—than ever.

  She kept her hair cut short (sort of reminding me of a kappa), and the hair ornaments she wore above each ear definitely did look good on her. That is to say, she made a pretty elegant impression—until you noticed the work gloves and boots she was wearing, which looked awfully rough, covered in leather. The overall look said barbarian warrior. I’d seen her holding a halberd before, and while seeing a small person with a big weapon is perfectly common in manga and anime, it was still kind of surreal to witness it in real life.

  “Ah... Mistress,” the terrifying monster said.

  No... wait.

  On closer inspection, this thing was man-made. It only looked like a monster. It was like a big, mobile statue.

  It was the False Dragon. The Faldra, for short. A pretend dragon animated with magic.

  You could almost call it a robot—something the ever-industrious dwarves had whipped up. I had seen it before, but—huh? The details looked different somehow. I stood there, staring at the thing and mentally comparing it to the way I remembered it.

  “Don’t call me that,” the girl said with a slight frown.

  The girl’s name was Romilda—Romilda Guld.

  You might have guessed that she was my student by the fact that she called me Sensei. She was a dwarf girl, one of the so-called “demi-humans” who live in this world. Her family, the Gulds, are apparently a big name among dwarves, so despite how she might look, she was indeed the kind of person who might normally be called “mistress.”

  Also, for some reason she was holding a birdcage in her left hand. Inside, a small, white bird sat
placidly on a tree branch.

  “Right, v’ry sorry,” a dwarf man said, sticking his head out from behind the Faldra.

  All dwarves are short, but unlike the women, who tend to look childish, male dwarves grow beards at a young age, causing all of them to look permanently like grandfathers. That can make it awfully hard to tell how old a dwarf is. Was this guy Romilda’s age? In midlife? I had no idea.

  “Anyway, listen, Sensei,” Romilda said, putting her hands on her hips. “We looked all over for you. Our underground workshop is awfully big. Even dwarves sometimes get lost when they first come here.”

  “...Right. I’m sorry.” All I could do was offer a lame apology. And I thought I was supposed to be the authority figure here. Pitiful.

  Still, finding someone I recognized in this underground labyrinth of a facility was a huge relief.

  My name is Kanou Shinichi.

  Now, this is going to sound crazy, but just hear me out.

  This alternate world is being targeted—by the Japanese government!

  .....................

  Sorry. I’ll try to start at the beginning.

  The beginning beginning is that a strange “hole” was discovered in Mt. Fuji’s “Sea of Trees,” the famous suicide forest. It turned out to be what scientists called a hyperspace wormhole, and believe it or not, it led to another world.

  Not just any other world, either, but the exact sort of place you would find in a fantasy light novel.

  We’re talking about a Middle Ages Europe-style nation, complete with an empress who wields absolute authority. Great, as far as it goes, but there’s also dragons, and instead of science they have magic, along with all kinds of other stuff that’s hard to wrap your head around if you grew up in our world.

  This is definitely the biggest discovery of the century—no, probably in of all human history.

  But the Japanese government never told the rest of the world about it. They stamped it Top Secret and launched their own investigation of the place. They didn’t want anyone else to know that Japan was connected to a new world.

  I mean it is, after all, a totally new place. It’s full of life-forms we’ve never experienced, cultures and resources we know nothing about. If Japan could keep this all to itself—more to the point, if it could hoodwink the inhabitants of this place into giving Japan control of all this—then the country stood to make a lot of money. So Japan’s VIPs set out to initiate exchange with the country on the far side of the wormhole—the Holy Eldant Empire—with yen signs in their eyes.

  Here’s the upshot: they were able to make overtures, but they never really became friends with this place.

  The wormhole, allegedly, isn’t very stable, and it’s small to boot, so bringing through a large amount of anything all at once isn’t feasible. Not to mention that any major movement of resources would catch the attention of other Earthly countries. Hence Japan found itself limited to small items and a constrained number of personnel. That led to the decision to try to gain the Eldant Empire’s trust based on cultural exchange.

  And cultural exchange, in Japan, means traditional culture. So they tried pottery, they tried textiles, they tried whatever was refined and elegant and uniquely Japanese, but the people of this new world just weren’t biting. Who knows—maybe it was just the climate? Whatever it was, the Eldant people weren’t very interested in anything Japan had to offer.

  The Japanese government, getting desperate, started casting around for anything that might get the new country’s attention, traditional or not. In the end, the thing that got the best reaction, if you can believe it, was otaku-esque entertainments—manga, anime, games, that sort of thing.

  The government immediately made that stuff the core of its exchange.

  The only problem was—they didn’t have anyone who knew quite what they were doing when it came to this stuff. From time immemorial, the mix of bureaucrats and popular entertainment has virtually always meant a lot of wasted money and almost no visible effect. These programs are all too often the very epitome of wasteful government spending.

  And to their credit, maybe they knew it, because the suits looked for someone other than themselves to run the show.

  That’s right: they decided to get a citizen who knew something about otaku culture to come over and coordinate things. Considering how secret this all was, they felt it would be best if this citizen were someone who could disappear off the face of the earth without causing much of a stir.

  On those criteria, they picked... me.

  In the beginning, I swallowed the “cultural exchange” talk hook, line, and sinker. I was eager to use my otaku knowledge to build bridges between Japan and the Eldant Empire, to bring the people of this other world entertaining books and shows. “Otaku evangelism”? I was all over it.

  But it turned out they were just using a naïve, stupid kid for their own ends.

  What the Japanese government actually wanted was to invade this other world using culture.

  It was something like what had frequently happened with religion in Earth’s past: you didn’t have to have tons of resources or armies of people; there was a quiet, economical way to approach the issue—invading people’s hearts. The idea was to soften them up using Japanese entertainment products so that they would then listen to what we wanted. The most subtle invasion of all.

  When I learned all this, I rebelled against the Japanese government. They responded by sending a special ops squad to eliminate me, then sending someone to replace me, and... Well, let’s just say a lot has happened. But with the support of the people I’ve grown close to in this other world, I’ve managed to survive all the infighting to reach this point.

  I won’t say I never miss my life in Japan. I do, sometimes. But still, I’ve somehow managed to get to where I am, no longer an invader, but a true evangelist, still preaching the good word of otaku culture in this strange new world.

  Romilda ushered me into another room. We were still in an underground workshop, so there was still earth and rock on every side, but the room itself was so big you could have held an impromptu soccer game in it. It was filled with diminutive figures—dwarves bustling this way and that. I could hardly believe how isolated I’d felt just a few minutes earlier; this place felt packed.

  “Shinichi-kun!” Someone in the room, seeing us come in, rushed over to me. “I was so worried.”

  A bespectacled young woman put her hands on her hips as she stopped in front of me.

  Koganuma Minori-san.

  I’ve never specifically asked how old she is, but I’d have to guess early twenties. Maybe I’m not one to talk, only being in my teens myself, but she had a baby face that still had a youthful roundness and softness in places; add to that her large-ish, round glasses, and the overall effect was cute—very cute. She kept her long black hair swept up in a bun that wouldn’t interfere with her work, but that had a kawaii-ness all its own.

  Then again, her uniform-clad bust made itself inescapably evident... Now that’s a gap you could get seriously moe over.

  Minori-san was our resident WAC, a member of the JSDF—and my bodyguard.

  “I turn around and you’re gone? You scared me to death.” She sounded half relieved and half scolding.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, deciding that excuses wouldn’t be worth much right now.

  “You just got so excited at the whole idea of a giant underground facility,” someone else said instead, “that you started taking pictures of all the neat stuff with your cell phone, and before you knew it everyone was gone. Am I right?”

  This teasing assessment came from someone with long hair and a Gothic Lolita outfit, a striking beauty. It seemed like they’d deduced what had happened just by glancing at me.

  This person’s name was Ayasaki Hikaru-san.

  Things always seemed... how do I put this? Different around Hikaru-san.

  The Japanese government had originally sent Hikaru-san as my replacement—versed in otaku culture,
of course, but also a serious cosplayer, with the special air of someone who spends their time making it look like characters have jumped right out of the pages or screens of manga, anime, or games. Hikaru-san specialized in gorgeous young female characters; this was the sort of person you looked at and thought, I’ll bet they don’t even go to the bathroom. Totally pure.

  There was just one eensy-weensy little catch to Hikaru-san’s hobby, which was that despite all the great girl characters Hikaru-san portrayed, he was a guy. A cross-dresser, if you will.

  “...Very sorry.”

  He was also exactly right about what had happened, and all I could do was apologize again.

  “Well, at least we found you again,” Minori-san said, “thanks to Romilda and her friends. Thank you all so much.” The dwarves bowed.

  “Not at all,” Romilda said with a slightly frantic wave of her hand. “It’s no big deal. As complicated as this place is, everyone gets lost sometimes. Even dwarves, when they’re new here.”

  It was nice of her to cover for me like that.

  What a sweet girl... Sensei is very happy.

  Meanwhile, the bird Romilda was holding began to protest the waving with little chirps.

  “Hey,” I said, “I’ve been wondering—why have you been carrying that the whole time we’ve been down here?”

  Romilda looked confused at first. “Carrying what? Oh, you mean this?” She held up the birdcage.

  She certainly didn’t show up to school with a birdcage every day. That meant she had brought it along specifically for our trip to this underground facility.

  “You have to bring one of these when you come down here,” she said. “It lets you know if you get too close to anything dangerous.”

  “Oh, that makes sense,” Minori-san said with a nod.

  “It does?” I asked.

  “Shinichi-kun, you’ve never heard of this?” Minori-san smirked a little. “Miners always used to take canaries into the coal mines with them. I mean in Japan, not Eldant. Down into the tunnels. Dangerous gases would affect the bird before they hurt humans, so if anything happened to the canary, it was a sign there was trouble. A living gas detector, sort of.”