Outbreak Company: Volume 8 (Premium) Read online

  “Ahh...” Come to think of it, I had heard something like that before, somewhere.

  “This workshop has been around for more than a generation, so there shouldn’t be anything too dangerous around here,” Romilda volunteered. “But there’s still expansion work taking place in some of the far reaches, so we’re supposed to keep birds with us. You remember the little hut at the entrance? That’s where they live.”

  “Oh, I see...”

  “Us dwarves are all used to being in underground workshops like this, but you can never assume it’s safe. Mining and manufacturing use large-scale magic that can cause accidents. We have lots of stuff ready to go in case of an emergency.” Romilda smiled. “Like magical bombs.”

  “Bombs?!”

  That sounded a lot more likely to cause an emergency than solve one, in my opinion. I could see using something like that to open a new tunnel, for example, but once you were underground, setting off a magical bomb seemed like an invitation to be buried alive.

  “You have to fight rampaging sprites with other sprites,” Romilda explained.

  “Like bombing out a fire, I guess...” I said.

  Even back on Earth, there were things you couldn’t fight just by throwing water or fire retardant on them, like grease fires. Sometimes you literally used a bomb to put out the flames. The wind created by the explosion would douse the fire while also blowing away fuel the inferno might use to continue to grow.

  “To be fair, we’ve never had a serious enough accident here to have to use the magical bombs,” Romilda said with a shrug.

  “Best to be ready, though. Forewarned is forearmed. Or... fore-prepared, or... something.”

  “Right.”

  “This place is seriously huge, though,” I said, trying to picture the scale of the underground area based on the tunnels I’d gotten lost in. They called this place a workshop, but it seemed big enough to be a city. Romilda said it’d been operating for more than a generation, and they were still building it out...

  “We’re the biggest workshop in Marinos,” she told us proudly. The owner of the facility—the “boss” who oversaw all the dwarves working down here—was her father. That was why she could talk about we. “We make everything from weapons and armor to candlestick holders and eating utensils.”

  “Huh, wow...”

  Marinos was the capital of the Eldant Empire, and the way Romilda talked made it sound like there were other, smaller workshops around here as well. I knew Eldant Castle had been built by hollowing out a mountain; the rock was probably plenty thick around here. But still, this was incredible.

  “Anyway,” Romilda said, turning aside, “this is what I wanted you to see, Sensei.”

  I was down here in the first place because Romilda had invited me to see something in this underground workshop. And there it was, lined up along the wall on the far end of this big room.

  A whole collection of strangely shaped things. Ten of them, at least.

  They were just like the thing I’d seen earlier—big bodies covered in tough-looking, dark-gray plates. Four extremities, a head, wings, a tail... They were obviously modeled on a living thing, but they had none of the softness of a real living creature.

  “The Faldras...” Romilda said.

  Faldras—short for false dragons. As you might guess from the name, these things were designed by the dwarves to look like dragons. Just as big as the real thing. Romilda’s dad made the first one, at our request, for a movie we were producing at the time. Originally, it only had to look like a dragon—but then Romilda and her elf buddy Loek, perhaps inspired by all the otaku stuff they were seeing from Japan, went ahead and used magic to make the Faldra move. It even transformed, like some sort of mecha.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Are these all...?”

  I thought of how the Faldra I’d encountered in the other room had moved.

  “Yep!” Romilda said.

  Apparently, all the Faldras here were mechs.

  “Geez, look at ’em all.”

  One Faldra by itself was imposing enough; ten of them lined up together was I’ll-do-whatever-you-want territory. It felt like I had wandered into a nest of monsters I knew nothing about.

  It was perfectly natural that the details should look different. The other one I had seen was a prototype, while these were the mass-production models.

  “We’d like to make some improvements, and we want our teachers’ opinions.”

  “Why ours?” They already looked finished to me. What kind of opinion could I possibly offer? “I mean, I’m happy to share my thoughts, but...”

  “What exactly are you planning to do with all these?” Minori-san asked, sounding a bit wary herself.

  “Dad thought maybe we could make a bunch of them and, you know, have the army use them.”

  “The army... You mean they’re weapons.” My eyes were wide.

  “We did use one once.”

  “We did? Oh, you mean when I was kidnapped by Bahairam.”

  When I had been kidnapped by the Kingdom of Bahairam, Romilda and several of my friends had come to the rescue aboard the Faldra—which had then gone toe-to-toe with a Puppet Wyrm, Bahairam’s brand-new “living weapon.” Although to be fair, our mech ended up running out of magic before the end of the fight. It was Minori-san who finished the job, using an RPG she’d carted along.

  Still and all, though, the Faldra had certainly proved its ability as a fighting machine.

  And hey, they didn’t have to use it for fighting. It could lift heavy objects or dig trenches, transport materials—there were all sorts of uses for something like that. I mean, back on Earth, we were all about building robots because of all the things you can do with them, right?

  “But that was really something you and Loek achieved together, right?”

  Dwarves are superb users of magic dealing with ores and minerals. That’s why they could use magic to move the Faldra, which was essentially a big lump of metal. But when it came to the wings, getting it airborne and everything, that was beyond them. That was when they needed the help of wind magic, which is the specialty of the elves.

  “Well, uh...” Romilda didn’t quite look at me. She puffed out her cheeks a bit, annoyed. “I guess that disgusting, pervy elf did help me out a little. I can’t deny that.”

  “Worried about the past, Romilda?” I smiled. “There’s no real reason for the elves and dwarves not to get along now, is there?”

  If fantasy stories the world over have taught us anything, it’s that elves and dwarves don’t like each other very much—and that seemed to hold true in Eldant as well. In the classroom of the otaku training center—er, school—that I ran, this was exemplified by the “young mistress” Romilda and the “young master” Loek, leaders among the dwarves and the elves in my class, respectively.

  They fought, and fought often. But it didn’t seem like they hated each other from the bottoms of their hearts—they proved that when they worked together to come rescue me. And recently, I thought I’d been seeing them with each other quite a bit.

  The origin of this animosity between elves and dwarves existed only in legend now—more to the point, it stretched back before humans had put themselves at the top of a centralized, authoritarian nation-state. In other words, elves and dwarves, especially younger ones like Loek and Romilda, had no real reason to go out of their way to get into arguments with each other.

  “How about we stop worrying about how I feel about elves and think about how that stupid idiot—” Then Romilda stopped and let out a sigh. “Well, Sensei, you’re not wrong that the whole fighting-with-elves thing is more like heritage now than anything. Even my dad is hoping that working with elves on this Faldra project might raise people’s opinions of demi-humans all around.”

  Humans were capable of using wind and earth magic, yes, but only to a pretty limited extent. When it came to the sort of complicated, precise magic required to control a Faldra, you couldn’t beat elves and dwarves working
together.

  As things stood, though, elves and dwarves were both just grouped under the catch-all term “demi-humans,” and were considered a rung below humans on the social ladder of the Holy Eldant Empire.

  The difference in status wasn’t absolute, and such people had several ways of rising in the world.

  The simplest was to join the military—do something noteworthy, and you might even be respected as much as a human.

  “Hence the weaponry, huh...”

  Okay, so the word weaponry did sound a bit like trouble waiting to happen. But I thought it was a good thing the dwarves were specifically trying to move themselves up in the world. And if it happened to help bring the elves and dwarves closer, so much the better.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I can definitely see how you could get some use out of a Faldra, especially for defense.”

  “Yeah, right?” Minori-san said with a sly grin. Who would know more about using weaponry for defense then a member of the JSDF?

  “So, Sensei,” Romilda said. “You have any thoughts or comments or anything?”

  “Thoughts, huh...” I crossed my arms and looked up at the Faldras. “When it comes to robots, to mobile weapons platforms, armored is the word.”

  “Are-mored?”

  “You know, reinforced this and strengthened that. If you’re gonna have a second cour, you need to make some changes! Keep things from lagging midseason, right?”

  “Uh...”

  Apparently I was talking over Romilda’s head. She had seen some robot anime, but she probably hadn’t really watched it from the perspective of what you do in a second season, or how new robots show up because sponsors want to sell toys, that sort of thing. Most of the anime and tokusatsu stuff we had at the school was on DVD; it didn’t have commercial breaks. These kids might not even have known what a sponsor was.

  “Or, you know, Mk II.”

  “Mark Too?”

  “A new version, the original concept polished to a sharp point! Like, now it can fly or something. Stick on a bunch of Vernier thrusters or apogee kick motors or whatever! More tech means more eyeballs!”

  “Er, Sensei, the Faldra can already fly...”

  “Oh, that’s right.”

  “Shinichi-kun,” Minori-san said with a sigh, “can we at least try to be serious, for her sake?”

  “...Yes, ma’am.”

  Sorry. My fault.

  I kind of forgot we weren’t selling viewers plastic models of the hero robot.

  “But we have been talking about adding transformation capabilities,” Romilda said. “So it can fight in humanoid form like before!”

  “Ooh, me like!” Every man dreams of a humanoid robot. Mm-hmm. “Plus its combat power’ll go up!”

  That’s how transforming mechas work, right? The flying form is for mobility, and the humanoid form is for making the most of its fighting prowess.

  But then Minori-san said coolly, “I’m not so sure about that. The first time you do it, it’ll probably surprise the opponent enough that they might not attack until you’re done transforming. But after that, they’ll probably hit you in the middle of the transition.”

  “As if!” I exclaimed. “It’s against the rules to hit a robot while it’s transforming!”

  “Whose rules?” Minori-san said with a grim smile. “An opponent who deliberately puts themselves in a completely defenseless position like that is just begging to be destroyed.”

  “I see. No good, huh?” Romilda’s shoulders slumped.

  “Well, it depends on how you’re transporting them,” Minori-san said. “Think of them like tanks. As long as they don’t rush to the battlefield in flight form and then try to transform right in front of the enemy, it’d be okay.”

  “Oh, yeah, I see.”

  Even tanks didn’t get to the battlefield under their own power; they were often loaded on trailers to move them around. Really, tank treads were designed to grip uneven surfaces. A normal wheeled vehicle would generally be more effective on a proper road.

  But then, of course, when you brought tanks to a combat zone by trailer, you didn’t sit there and unload them right in front of the enemy. You had to decide how to handle things based on the situation.

  “I think there’s a more pertinent question,” Minori-san said, “of whether humanoid weapons are even really practical.”

  “Gosh, Minori-san, you go right for the jugular...”

  “Weapons systems don’t have jugulars.”

  “In the image of humanity, in the image of God—if you wish to know what drives these impulses, seek within the human heart.”

  This oddly chuunibyou-esque line came from Hikaru-san, who had simply been looking at the Faldra and listening to our conversation up to that point. As usual, his declarations were hard to parse, at best. But he came at things from a perspective I didn’t usually take, so I tried not to hold it against him.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think of humanoid robots in anime and manga as essentially an extension of sculpture or carvings. Making gods who look like men, humans’ throbbing desire to leave images of themselves behind—all of it goes back to human psychology.” Hikaru-san spread his arms wide in a theatrical gesture. It was overdone, for sure, but it fit so well with his personality that I found it hard to be snarky about it.

  “Think about the golem in Hebrew mythology, among others—whenever these things are used as weapons, it’s about more than just simple destructive power, or even efficiency of labor. It harkens back to an instinctual fear people have of things that look like themselves but are much bigger.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Minori-san said. “The best way to deter an attack is through intimidation.”

  “I’m glad you know what he’s talking about, because I’m not sure I do,” I said.

  Hikaru-san sighed and explained, “If the people of this world were suddenly confronted with a tank or something, they probably wouldn’t be as frightened as you or I would. We know how much firepower a machine like that has, so we know to be afraid of it. But think about what people in this world know. They know how big a person is supposed to be. So when they see something that looks human, but is vastly bigger than they expect, they’ll instinctively be afraid of it. Long before they have any idea how powerful it is in battle, see?”

  “Ahh...”

  Come to think of it, I felt like I had heard a similar explanation in some old robot anime I’d seen a long time ago. Something about how the effect of humanoid weaponry had as much to do with its psychological impact on people who saw it as its actual combat power.

  “You’re saying that instead of using it as an actual weapon, you have it act sort of like police equipment.”

  If the Faldra could be effective just by standing there, without actually having to injure or kill anybody, I thought that would be the best of all worlds.

  “But if that’s how you’re going to use it, wouldn’t it be better to have it look as human as possible?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Hikaru-san said.

  “Sort of like it was about to attack,” I said, thinking of a manga that shall remain nameless.

  Just picturing some titanic creature having a little peek at your house from across the street was beyond scary. It was more like... reality being pulled out from underneath you. Actually, maybe that was why they made Ult**man kind of featureless and symbolic.

  “I think all that would be less scary than sort of... sickening,” Hikaru-san said. “I don’t know much about the magic around here yet, but trying to get an expression to work—to move the eyes and lips and everything—seems like it would be a lot of trouble. But then if you tried and didn’t get it right, I think it would make the thing look more artificial and less scary.”

  “This is tough,” I said.

  As we talked, I took a few steps forward to get a better look at the mass-production Faldras.

  They were lined up side by side, and I guess they weren’t finished yet, because two or
three dwarves were working away on each of them. It’s not easy to guess the age of a dwarf guy, but it seemed like the workers ran the gamut between the young and the old. Grizzled laborers made up the bulk of the ranks, obviously, but once in a while it was possible to spot someone who clearly looked like a young woman.

  Then I stopped, puzzled, my attention drawn by one particular dwarf.

  Or rather, not the dwarf so much as the work they were doing.

  I could see short, neat gray hair peeking out from under the black hat covering the worker’s head. At first it looked like a guy, but the structure of the facial features led me to think it was probably a woman.

  Like Romilda, her outfit was relatively revealing—short tank top and hot pants, midriff completely exposed—but her skin tone was darker, and her toned, muscled limbs kept the effect from being too erotic.

  One of the Faldras sat placidly before her, and I could see clay figurines working both inside and outside it.

  These were magical puppets the dwarves could create. The two outside were on the large side, while in between the slats of the armor I could see one within. They were all moving at once, all working. The one inside must have been fiddling with the Faldra’s internal equipment. The girl was the only person near this Faldra. Meaning...

  Is she controlling all three of those dolls at once?

  All three of them different sizes, and all doing different tasks—simultaneously.

  I wasn’t sure, but that seemed awfully difficult.

  “What are you looking at?” Hikaru-san had noticed me staring.

  “Oh, just...” I pointed out the girl and the figures she was controlling.

  “Ahh,” Hikaru-san said, looking over himself. “You saw a cute loli girl, so you were sexing her up with your eyes.”

  “Hey, don’t say that where people could hear you!”

  Though I don’t deny she was cute!

  I mean, her face, sure, but the way the area around her belly—no! No no no no! Different subject!

  “You see how she’s controlling three of those clay dolls at once?” I said.

  “Huh, yeah, she’s good.” Hikaru-san at least had the good grace to be genuinely impressed.