Outbreak Company: Volume 3 Read online

  Elvia Harneiman. A self-described wandering artist—and, as we’ve established, a werewolf; in other words, half-beast.

  In this other world, beast people were treated as being among the “humanoid races.” That is, Elvia’s cutely drooping ears and adorably fluffy tail were no more remarkable than a difference of skin color would be back on Earth.

  Her words and actions, her understanding of what constituted common sense, weren’t that far removed from those of a human; she really wasn’t so different from us. “Beast person” she might have been, but that mostly just meant she had ears and tail (not that those aren’t very important moe points!). I had completely let down my guard.

  I had forgotten that being a beast person meant that yes, she was half person, but she was also half beast.

  Elvia had explained to me once that beast people had to learn skills that allowed them to sublimate their strong hunting instincts into things they could really get absorbed in. If they followed their instincts to their natural ends—the hunting of everything from livestock to humans—civilized society might not last very long.

  In Elvia’s case, she learned to draw. In the sense that this involved following something with your eyes, thereby taking it into yourself, it had an obvious resemblance to hunting. It was probably similar to what a human felt when tracking prey with a rifle, or for that matter taking candid shots with a camera.

  But all of this only dealt with the hunting instinct. There were, uh, other instincts that a little bit of artwork couldn’t address.

  “Elvia! Elvia!” I kept shouting her name, hoping it would return her to sanity, but it was as if she couldn’t hear me.

  Of course, unlike when a man forces himself on a woman, a woman trying to force herself on a man needs the—well, the participation of a certain part of that man.

  But woe was me: some small amount of hesitation aside, as a healthy teenage guy, when a girl got this close to me, that part of me definitely wanted to participate. Plus, Elvia was plump in all the right places and thin where a girl should be thin. She was extremely—I mean, she had the sort of body that naturally caused the little guy to sit up and take notice. She had a pretty nice face to boot, and anyway, we were talking about getting with a real, live wild thing here. Not an opportunity you’d ever get in Japan.

  Add on to all that the classic extenuating circumstances: “I’m in heat! And because I’m in heat—I mean, I would never normally do this, I’m not that sort of girl, but what the hell, I’m in heat!” I hate to say it, but I could hardly call myself an otaku if I didn’t rise to the occasion.

  All that’s to say that even though I personally didn’t necessarily want this, the rest of me was all set and ready to go.

  “Hooo... Hooo...”

  Elvia impatiently tore off her underwear. She had already shredded my pants, and I was only wearing my own thin underwear. With her strength, Elvia could have ripped through a pair of made-in-Japan synthetic fiber pants with no trouble.

  Kanou Shinichi... your chastity is in danger!

  Farewell, my purity, which I’ve guarded lo these seventeen years!

  Er... Actually, I guess I wasn’t exactly going out of my way to protect it.

  As my heart pounded and these thoughts raced through my head—

  “Master?”

  —a girl suddenly peeked in the door.

  She had long, flaxen hair tied in two tails, and she was awfully cute.

  Twintails are often treated as shorthand for a snarky tsundere girl, but this girl was just the opposite, an open and mature and very modest maiden. Plus, she was wearing a frilly headdress that pretty much announced she was a maid, her willowy body ensconced in a dark one-piece dress accompanied by a white apron (also frilly).

  “Myusel?!”

  Myusel Fourant. That was her name.

  As her appearance suggested, she was the maid of this household, and my personal caretaker.

  I looked at her imploringly. “Help m—”

  “M-Master...”

  Myusel, however, seemed frozen with shock as she took in the sight of me and Elvia. Her big emerald eyes, open so wide they looked like they might fall out of her head, were filled with a torrent of emotion.

  “...Oh.”

  I realized how this must look: Elvia, all but buck naked. Me, wearing one measly pair of underpants. And then Elvia straddling me—okay, not my crotch; she was perched a little higher up than that, but not much. And then add in the little detail of her saliva dripping from my face and neck. Frankly, it would be stranger not to misconstrue what was happening.

  Still, I couldn’t keep myself from exclaiming, “Th-This isn’t what it looks like!”

  Crap! That always means it’s exactly what it looks like!

  It was just the sort of thing that would make someone assume I was lying—but since it actually wasn’t what it looked like, what else was I supposed to say?

  “This—This is all a misunderstanding! I—”

  Myusel continued to stand there, displaying no reaction to anything I said. In that sense, she was a lot like Elvia, although one of them was frozen and the other was boiling over.

  Then a calm voice came from behind Myusel. “Men are all the same.”

  Another girl emerged from behind the maid. She had black hair pulled into a bun, keeping it neat and rather pretty. She didn’t have the flash to really draw people’s attention, but she did have a certain calming effect, a warm fuzziness to her.

  I had never asked her how old she was, but I would’ve said maybe in her early twenties. The glasses she wore, combined with her baby face, could make her look like a teenager from the right angle—in fact, I would say they usually did. But you couldn’t miss her chest—the two great round bulges that pushed up her uniform screamed “Grown-up!” without saying a word.

  Koganuma Minori-san. She was Japanese, just like me; as a matter of fact, she was a WAC with the Japan Self-Defense Force, living here as my bodyguard. A gallant older woman charged with protecting me, she carried a 9mm handgun and a 9mm machine gun in case there was any trouble. At least, that was how it was supposed to go.

  “M-Minori-san!”

  “Shinichi-kun, is this what you meant when you said you were going to go ‘check on’ Elvia? Just what is happening in here?”

  “What’s happening? What’s it look like?!”

  “Oh, I know what it looks like.”

  “I mean—no, this isn’t what it looks like! I need help!”

  “Gosh, and here I thought you two were getting along so well.”

  “What’s with the banter?! Help me already!”

  From the moment she had announced “men are all the same,” it became obvious that this was not someone I was going to be able to rely on in the last extremity. She was going to react to what was in front of her, and not well—if anything, she seemed to be enjoying the fact that I was in trouble at that moment.

  “So you want me to help you?”

  It only took me a second to respond, “O-Of course I do!”

  “Ooh! I heard the hesitation in your voice!”

  “This is no time to be clever!” I said, practically crying.

  Truth be told, it wasn’t as if I had an aversion to Elvia, or for that matter to fooling around, but the last thing I wanted was for my very first time to be observed by Myusel and Minori-san.

  “Okay.” Minori-san nodded, then suddenly crouched and picked up something next to her. She must have brought it with her—had it ready to go.

  It was a bucket, the kind you would use for drawing water.

  Inside, of course, was—

  My face twisted in alarm. “Hold on—Minori-san!”

  “This is the best way to deal with an animal in heat,” she said with a bright smile. Then, with a shout and not a moment’s hesitation, she dumped the brimming bucket of cold water right over me and Elvia.

  Gosh...

  It was a few minutes later.

  “Gee, I’m real sorry abou
t that,” Elvia said.

  She had regained her sanity pretty much right away.

  We were sitting in the dining area of our house. It had a fireplace and a sofa and a big grandfather clock. It was pretty much the stereotypical “Western mansion” look. Pretty different from the average modern Japanese living space. The sheer size of it was remarkable—close to twenty mats. There was furniture here and there so residents could relax. It looked less like a living space and more like what we might consider a reception room.

  But, moving on.

  After dousing us from head to toe with freezing water, Minori-san had forcibly moved me and Elvia to this room. Myusel brought some towels so we could dry off, then she brought a change of clothes. Only after that was I finally able to relax a little.

  Elvia was in her usual outfit, with her belly button and shoulders on full display, but she had calmed down a bit now, and that seemed to blunt the striking eroticism she’d had earlier. That, in turn, allowed the smallest member of our group to relax, too.

  However...

  “When it gets to be that phase of the moon, I just can’t stop myself...” Elvia was shrinking into the couch, looking very apologetic.

  “‘That phase of the moon’?” So was that, like... You know? That thing in The Diary of Anne Frank? I mean, okay, forget the diary.

  Come to think of it, when my little sister got hers the first time, our mom made this special red rice. I had no idea why and kept prying and snooping until she clotheslined me. In my young heart, I couldn’t understand why I deserved more than a little smack. But forget about all that.

  “You know, you did seem a little different in there.” This came from Myusel, who was considerably more at ease now.

  “Uh, yeah. Sorry ’bout that.” Elvia scratched the back of her head in embarrassment. “It just started for me, so it’s all...”

  “Ah, is that why you have trouble controlling it?”

  “Sorry again. I’ll clean up the fur later.”

  “Setting aside the smell—fur?” I asked, frowning.

  Now that she mentioned it, Elvia’s body did seem unusually furry.

  “Lycanthropes have it rough that way, don’t they?” Myusel said, as if this all made perfect sense to her. I still hadn’t quite put all the pieces together. I looked back at Minori-san, but she only shrugged. Even though she had been in this world longer than I had, she didn’t seem to be any more knowledgeable than me about this.

  “Uh... Elvia? I have to admit, this isn’t quite clicking for me.”

  “Oh... You’re an off-worlder, aren’t you, Shinichi-sama?” She seemed to see what the problem was. She scratched her cheek. “You don’t have werewolves where you come from, do you?”

  “In legends and myths, sure. But they don’t actually exist... I’m pretty sure.”

  “I can see why you wouldn’t know about this, then,” Elvia said with a nod. Then she continued, “The lycanthropes, the tribes that are half beast? Once a month there’s a time when we kind of... go back to our roots, I guess you could say. Become more beast-like.”

  “You mean like at the full moon?”

  “Yeah, right. That’s it,” Elvia said happily. “It differs a little from person to person—some of us get hairier, or some people smell worse, and others, maybe their ears or tails grow longer, or they get more muscular and powerful. That sort of thing.”

  “Does anyone ever transform?”

  After all, a wolf man transforming on the night of the full moon is sort of the original werewolf legend. On Earth, a werewolf is usually someone who’s normally human, but turns into a wolf on nights when the moon is full. But Elvia had her animal features, her ears and her tail, all the time. Then again, maybe I was being misled by the way beast people in this world perpetually occupied that liminal space between human and animal; maybe it was causing me to arbitrarily imagine that werewolves here never transformed.

  Still, it seemed that phases of the moon did influence werewolves here and have physical effects on their bodies. It might not quite qualify as “transformation,” but...

  “Yeah, it’s pretty rare for someone’s whole bodily structure to change,” Elvia said.

  Huh. So that meant it did happen sometimes. That would definitely count as transformation. The fact that even those sorts of changes fell under the rubric of “individual differences” was... I don’t know if it was awesome, or kind of lazy. Was this all dictated by genetics or what?

  “So... How do I put this? The more beast-like we become, the stronger our appetites get. The desires kind of well up from within us, and we can’t ignore them. Again, just how forceful they are varies, but in my case...” She smiled, embarrassed. “Well, ‘that phase’ only just started for me...”

  “Hang on a second,” I said, astonished. “I guess I never asked, but Elvia, how old are you?”

  Doesn’t a girl usually get her first period somewhere around middle school? I knew Shizuki, at least, was in sixth grade when it happened.

  “The average age in Japan is twelve or thirteen,” Minori-san broke in. “But some girls need that red rice as young as eight years old, and others have to wait until their late teens, you know. Besides, who’s to say that it would work the same way for Elvia as it does for humans?”

  Although both of our worlds evidently used euphemisms that amounted to the same thing, they seemed to point to opposite phenomena. Usually, human women experienced blood loss accompanied by pain or fatigue. But Elvia and the beast people apparently experienced heightened physical abilities.

  “I’m fifteen,” Elvia said shyly.

  Yikes.

  To see Elvia, who usually had no trouble walking around with half her body exposed, all embarrassed like this was oddly intriguing.

  “Wait a second, fifteen?” I had assumed she was at least my age, if not older. Hadn’t we first met because she came here to spy for the kingdom of Bahairam? Even granted that she may or may not have been fully aware of her role, I had never imagined Bahairam would stoop to sending kids to do their dirty work. I had assumed she must be at least eighteen or nineteen. Besides that, maybe having Minori-san around had given me an unconscious bias toward the idea that just because someone looked really young didn’t mean they weren’t a proper adult.

  Now that I thought about it, though, during Japan’s civil wars in the sixteenth century, the coming-of-age ceremony often took place at around fifteen years old. The idea that eighteen or twenty was the age at which you became an adult was something established by the post-World War II civil code.

  “Anyway, like I said, I... I’m just not used to it yet...” Elvia seemed to shrink even further as she spoke. In other words, because “that phase of the moon” had just begun, she didn’t yet know how to deal with the increased desires and instinctual behaviors that accompanied it.

  “What you’re saying is, you jumped on Shinichi-kun purely out of instinct,” Minori-san said. Well, that was a succinct summary.

  Elvia nodded. “I’m very sorry. It’s not just hunting and stuff... Certain other desires get stronger, too...”

  “No way,” I murmured. What a fantastic instinct! She was actually in heat! In other words—

  “That stuff makes you too frisky!”

  Imitating Ohtsuka A**o’s rasp was awfully difficult.

  Sorry. Never mind.

  When I questioned Elvia a little further, I found out that she had first experienced “her phase” about two months before, but that she had somehow managed to keep it under control the first couple of times, hiding it from us. That had the effect, however, of making her feel a little bit unhappy all the time. And today it had finally gotten away from her.

  “But do you get so out of control that you’d do it with just any guy?” I asked. I didn’t know how werewolves felt about love, but if your instincts drove you to do it with someone you didn’t even know, then when you finally came to, you might discover your first time had scarred you for life.

  I did recall Elv
ia saying something about how since I had saved her life, she wouldn’t necessarily mind if I jumped her. Did that suggest werewolves weren’t super uptight about chastity?

  “Oh, uh, that—” Elvia gave an ambiguous smile and couldn’t quite seem to look at me; she was blushing. “That isn’t... That’s not necessarily the case.”

  “Oh ho!” Minori-san leaned in at this. “So you won’t do it with just anyone, but you’d do it with Shinichi-kun?”

  Elvia was silent.

  Hey, that’s no fair! She was usually so easygoing, or kind of rough around the edges—and now of all times, she decided to be coy? What happened to “it’d be okay if you jumped me”? How out of character was this?!

  Thoughts like that were racing through my mind, and my heart was going every bit as fast.

  “Ohh. Uhh... Hmm.”

  “What’s with the look?” I said.

  Minori-san had turned to me, transparently enjoying herself. And here I thought she was only into yaoi! “You’re one popular guy, Shinichi-kun. I guess everyone has their moment in the sun, huh?”

  Uh-huh. Isn’t a moment in the sun supposed to give you a nice tan? Elvia pouncing on me this morning was more like a sunburn. Whatever.

  “Huh. Is this what it means to be ‘popular’?”

  I thought that usually implied more than one girl was interested in you. I didn’t think Elvia alone qualified as me being “popular.”

  “Think of it this way,” Minori-san said. “You live in a house with a maid-san and a beast girl. You’ve unlocked the Beginner Harem achievement.”

  “Yeah, sure. And which game is that in?”

  What did she think this was, some kind of ero-game?

  “Again, I’m really, really sorry,” Elvia said. According to her, this “phase of the moon” stuff only afflicted lycanthropes; humans didn’t experience the same thing. Given that society here put humans on top and looked down on demi-humans, the goal became to be as much like a human as possible—and so something like the “phase,” which only affected demi-humans, was considered very embarrassing.

  “Because of the way it makes us more beast-like,” Elvia explained.

  “It certainly does that,” I said with a wry smile. “But I mean, you are a ‘beast’ person, right?”