Outbreak Company: Volume 13 Read online

  Elves and dwarves. The fantasy demi-human races par excellence, renowned for, among other things, not getting along very well. It wasn’t so much that there was some deep ancestral hatred between them, just that they had different lifestyles, and different opinions on a lot of subjects, and it was hard for them to agree about much of anything.

  Here at my school, there were frequent disagreements between the elves and the dwarves, and Loek and Romilda were usually leading their respective factions. They could often be seen bickering with each other on behalf of their cohorts. That sort of thing had been going on for centuries, and I didn’t expect it to change overnight. But I thought recently I’d been hearing just a little less about fights starting for fatuous reasons like “She’s an elf, and I hate elves,” or “He’s just a dumb dwarf, that’s the problem.” If anything, there were increasingly more arguments about me, and about otaku stuff—anime and games and manga, and differences of opinion thereon.

  Not to mention that when it came to Loek and Romilda... Well, for all the fighting, I also saw them together a lot. It was enough to make me think that maybe they were actually really close friends. Some say the more you fight, the closer you are, because you know you can say anything to each other.

  Er, but getting back on subject.

  ““Sensei, which one will you choose?!”” Loek and Romilda both demanded. I turned my eyes to the laptop screen, more than a little worried. Two 2D women gazed back at me from the 13-inch LCD. Miu and Ruka. The screen, of course, was showing a gal game. Several other people in the classroom besides me had laptops of their own open, with the same game playing on each. It might look like we were just screwing around, but this was an important lesson in real Japanese otaku culture. (No, seriously.)

  “S-Sensei!” someone exclaimed. It wasn’t Loek or Romilda, but one of the other students, someone playing the game on another computer. I looked over to them—they weren’t an elf or a dwarf, but a human, and they were looking very conflicted. I wouldn’t say despondent, but certainly like they didn’t know what to do and needed some help.

  “Something weird happened to my Affection with Ruka when I picked Miu’s lunchbox!”

  This got some excited murmuring from the other students.

  “If you choose Ruka, Miu starts acting really strange!”

  “Is this that thing? You know, a yandere?”

  “I can’t stand it, this feels like a lose-lose choice!”

  “Sensei, what’s the best strategy here?”

  The student body, distraught and looking for guidance, turned to me.

  “Er... well... I...”

  Normally, I would have been able to answer them with confidence. Not to brag, but I’ve completed over a hundred gal games in my time, and have left many hundreds of women heartbroken in my wake. I’m a battle-hardened veteran of love (in two dimensions, anyway)! My vast experience allows me to evaluate a girl character’s traits at a single glance, predict what will happen in a given scenario, and use the eye of my heart to discover the perfect strategy hiding behind the monitor. It should have been easy. But...

  “Wellll...”

  I was trying to buy time. Who should I pick? How was I supposed to know...?! To choose just one girl out of all those who loved you—what did that mean, but to abandon all the rest? To throw away the many possible happy, lovey-dovey futures that might have awaited you with them?! No—to dismiss the affections of a beautiful girl who cared about me—even if she was only two-dimensional... It was the height of caprice...!

  Such a thing was repugnant! I couldn’t! No, I just...!

  “Sensei...?” The students were looking at me worriedly. But I just couldn’t spit back an answer at them like I usually did.

  Before I had anything to say to them, the bell rang for the end of class.

  “Ahh............”

  Literally saved by the bell. I stopped at the choice-select prompt and saved my game. I looked around at the students and tried to force a smile. “O-Okay, I guess that’s it for now...”

  It might have been class and the exercise might have been serious, but we were still playing a video game. The students were enjoying themselves too much to talk about anything else, even during break. So there was a lot of...

  “Do you think you really have to choose one of them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean maybe you could skip Miu and Ruka and go down the Mary route instead!”

  “No matter how you cut it, Mary doesn’t have as many flags as the other two, does she?”

  “That’s exactly why you should do it! Focus on Mary and you find out just how far this game can stretch.”

  “What if you focused on all the characters equally and built up a harem?”

  “Ooh, that’s a great idea!”

  The students—okay, mostly the boys—were all chattering away about it. Humans, elves, and dwarves alike were passionate about the subject. Normally the sight of all of them having a lively conversation together would have brought a smile to my face, but today, somehow, it wasn’t happening.

  “All of the characters at once? What’s wrong with you?” an elf girl demanded in exasperation.

  “Yeah,” a dwarf girl added. “That’s basically the same as admitting that you’re too flippy-floppy to choose anyone at all.”

  .................................

  Ow, th-that hurts! That hurts me right in the heart!

  “There is no harem ending. This guy isn’t a noble or anything.”

  “Trying to hang on to all those girls even though he’s a worthless lout. What a monster.”

  “It would probably end up with him getting stabbed.”

  “Yeah, one of the heroines turns out to be a yandere.”

  .................................................................................

  “Heeeeeeeeeeeeek?!” I screamed without meaning to, drawing the attention of the entire classroom.

  “Sensei...?” Boys and girls both were looking at me with concern. Their naïve, open faces were just that—they were only looking at me in surprise because I’d suddenly screamed. It didn’t mean anything more than that, nothing at all, and yet their conversation kept playing in my mind, looping like bad background music—or should I say, ricocheting around like a bullet, piercing me again and again.

  Could it be that they were all just using the game as a cover to attack me? Maybe this place only seemed like a classroom, but it was secretly a place for class trials, and I was looking at a death sentence?

  “Um, Sensei?” Romilda raised a hand and stepped forward as if to speak on behalf of the student body. To me, it looked like she was coming to make an arrest...

  “I—I’m sorrrrryyy! Forgive meeeeeeeeee!”

  “Sensei? What’s the matter?” Loek sounded just as perplexed as Romilda when he saw me crouching on the floor with my hands over my head. But I didn’t have the slightest capacity to respond to them. I just kept revisiting that morning’s nightmare...

  Meanwhile, the two of them started arguing.

  “Romilda, what did you do to Sensei?”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything!”

  The other students watched from a distance. Finally...

  “Excuse me,” someone said, coming into the classroom. “Shinichi-san, may I have a... moment...?” The voice trailed off, probably because the owner saw me clutching my head.

  I looked up shakily to see someone with long black hair, an elaborate Gothic-Loli costume, and looks to rival the gorgeous dress. Ayasaki Hikaru-san. At first glance, ten out of ten people would have said this was a woman, but ten out of ten people would have been wrong. Hikaru was a guy who liked to dress up as a woman.

  “What are you doing down there?” He came into the classroom, his black hair flowing behind him.

  Loek answered for me. “We were playing this gal game in class, and all of a sudden...”

  “A gal game?”

  “Here, this one,” another student
said, indicating the computer screen, which was still showing the game. Specifically, still showing that impossible conundrum of which lunchbox to choose.

  “Ah,” Hikaru-san said with a glance at the screen. “Just leave him.”

  “Huh? But—”

  “It’s his own fault.”

  “Hyaaaarggh! Don’t... Don’t look at me like that!”

  I had hoped Hikaru-san might rescue me, but instead he dealt the coup de grace, sending a fresh wave of agony through my heart.

  The bell rang for the end of fourth period. In other words, the beginning of lunch break.

  With class over, I booked it out of the classroom. I just... couldn’t quite stand being in there. I had set things up so we had four straight hours free to work through the gal game material. Those things take time to play, and we didn’t have anywhere near enough laptops to send each of the students home with one. Even if we did, they didn’t have electricity! The only solution was to play a portion of the game here at school.

  As I’d sort of expected, the kids went wild for it, so much so that they were even “studying” it (by which I mean playing through it) on their own during breaks. Obviously, everyone couldn’t all play at once, so one student would work the controls while a gaggle of others looked on, with the natural result that the classroom overflowed with arguments about the game. We should bump our Affection with Ruka. No, this is the branch that takes us to the Miu ending, we should take her on a date! And so on and so forth.

  For me, at that moment, listening to those debates was heart-rending. And that was what led to me practically fleeing the classroom.

  “Sigh....................................”

  The moment I was out in the hallway, I let out a huge sigh. I wished I could find my past self, the one who had thought it was a good idea to do gal games in class, and beat him up.

  “Rough morning, Shinichi-kun?”

  In direct contrast to my bleak mood, the voice that called out to me was downright cheerful. I looked up to see a girl coming down the hallway. “Minori-san...”

  She was giving me a sympathetic smile, her eyes narrowed behind her glasses. She had a baby face, still round like a child’s, but she was 100% a grown woman—a public servant, at that. The JSDF uniform she wore—let’s just say the chest was part of what screamed “adult!”

  Koganuma Minori-san. A WAC (that’s a lady member of the military) and Hikaru-san’s and my bodyguard.

  She came up to me. “Class as bad as all that?”

  “Er... Well...” I found myself trailing off. It was just really hard to explain. If I said the wrong thing, I could end up pouring salt in my own wound. Especially when I pictured how Minori-san would react. But it turned out not to matter.

  “Finally started to comprehend your situation, Shinichi-san?”

  When had he gotten there? The shockingly good cross-dresser, Hikaru-san, showed up behind Minori-san, obviously enjoying himself. Actually, the way he was kind of peeking around from behind her was legitimately cute. I knew for a fact what he had between his legs, yet I still couldn’t help feeling like a very weird door was about to open when I saw him. It made him someone to be reckoned with. The fact that he didn’t seem the least bit, y’know, interested in men despite his outfits made the whole thing thoroughly confusing to me.

  But back to our subject...

  There was me, Kanou Shinichi.

  The WAC, Koganuma Minori-san.

  And my assistant, Ayasaki Hikaru-san.

  The three of us were employees of Amutech, a so-called “general entertainment company” established to spread Japan’s otaku culture here in the Holy Eldant Empire, a nation in another world. This school helped us disseminate that culture, and even teach some Japanese language, to the local children, in hopes of deepening the connections between our countries. (Okay, so it was originally intended to be the front line of a cultural invasion, but let’s bracket that for now.)

  And we were teachers at this school. Specifically, we introduced manga and anime and games and light novels to the young people of this world. Sort of like making learning fun, right? But because (for better or for worse) a lot of otaku stuff relies on certain clichés or stereotypes, you have to build up a body of knowledge before you can get the most out of it.

  “So how’s it feel, being the protagonist of a gal game?” Hikaru-san said gleefully.

  “Lay off,” I said with a frown.

  This seemed to tip Minori-san off as to what I had been sighing about. But rather than comfort me, she saw fit to join Hikaru-san in his merriment.

  “It must be rough being so popular, Shinichi-kun.”

  “I’m not p—”

  Popular, I was going to say, but I stopped in midsentence.

  Even I couldn’t completely ignore it. Two different girls were in love with me, or so it seemed. In Japan, it’s almost proverbial to say that everyone has a “moment in the sun”—we call it moteki, the time when a person becomes popular with the opposite sex. I had been well on track to becoming a wizard (by which I mean a thirty-year-old virgin), so I had no idea if this was the fabled time of my irresistibility to women, or if the entire thing was some big misunderstanding.

  And by the way, both these girls were completely beautiful.

  But me, I’d confessed my feelings to my oldest friend, convinced there was something there, and she’d shot me clean down because I was an otaku. So I had all but given up on the idea that some sweet, cute girl might like me. It had led, in fact, to me not just living but trumpeting my otaku lifestyle after I arrived here in Eldant.

  And now I was suddenly popular? This had to be some sort of sick joke.

  On top of that...

  “Shinichi-sama!”

  Suddenly, somebody called my name. And they didn’t address me as Sensei, or Shinichi-kun, or even Shinichi-san. No, they went the full -sama, and only a few people in this world called me that.

  I jumped involuntarily, and slowly turned around. Coming down the hallway at a brisk trot was a lovely young woman wearing a one-piece dress perfect for going out.

  “Myusel...?!”

  At the sight of the flaxen-haired, twin-tailed beauty coming toward me, a sweet smile on her face, my heart went into turbo mode.

  Myusel Fourant: the maid at my mansion and also a half-elf. And also, one of those two girls I mentioned who was in love with me. She’d picked up a fair amount of Japanese, so she sometimes taught at the school. I was pretty sure she hadn’t been scheduled to teach today, though.

  “Y-Yeah, what’s up? I thought you weren’t teaching today.”

  “No, sir. I’m not, but...” She came to a halt in front of me, her long eyelashes floating over her large, violet eyes, which looked demurely at the ground. “I thought you might like lunches. Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama, and...”

  Myusel was carrying some kind of bag. I guessed there were bento boxes inside. She glanced at Minori-san and Hikaru-san, then shyly, hesitantly, pausing to look down at the ground for an instant before looking back up, looked at me, a flush in her cheeks. “...And you, Shinichi-sama.”

  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

  No! Those eyes! That face! If you look at me like that, why I might—I might just take off!

  My heart was pounding like it was playing a rhythm game that had suddenly launched into hard mode, bam-bam-bam-bam-bam! But I managed not to look away from Myusel.

  Man, was she cute. I mean cute. Cute to beat the band. (It’s so important, I said it three times.) Those big eyes. That flat nose. The soft-looking cheeks, delicate lips, and the perfect contours of her figure, which was rounded exactly where it needed to be even though she was so slim. All of it just perfect.

  Now, of course, all those great looks would be for nothing if she turned out to have a terrible personality—but thankfully, Myusel’s heart was every bit as good as the rest of her. She lacked a certain confidence on account of being a half-elf—but she was refined, thoughtful to everyone, yet surprisingly
stalwart when the moment called for it...!

  How could someone be so totally freaking perfect?!

  And more to the point, how could a girl like that care about a guy like me? I mean seriously be interested in him as a member of the opposite sex?! I just didn’t know what to do with that information. It wasn’t like I could just be like, “Well, all right then!”, run into the bedroom with her, and shove her down. But we were living in the same house, which made the idea of going on dates or exchanging diaries seem kind of weird. And in this particular alternate world, I could hardly invite her out to the movies.

  I completely lacked what you might call “experience points” in this area, leaving me totally unable to respond.

  “Thanks, Myusel.” Seeing that I was too frozen with self-consciousness to react, Minori-san answered instead, smiling.

  “Seeing as she went to all this effort, let’s all eat together,” Hikaru-san added, then looked at me with what I thought was a nasty grin. He could probably barely contain his amusement at how freaked out I was. For a while there I had been under the impression that I’d managed to make an ally out of an enemy, but now I was starting to wonder if maybe Hikaru-san was just fundamentally sort of a black-hearted person.

  “You join us too, Myusel,” he said. “I’m sure if we each give a little of our lunch, we can scrape together enough for one more. How about it?”

  “Wha? Oh, all right.” Myusel nodded happily. We were just about to go find somewhere to eat when—

  “Shinichi!” a high-pitched female voice called out, and I froze again.

  That voice... I... I know that voice...!

  “Oh! It’s Her Majesty,” Minori-san mumbled.

  I didn’t want to turn around—no, I didn’t, but neither could I not, and so with my head full of a crea-a-a-a-a-k like a rusty robot standing up, I slowly looked behind me.

  “Petralka...” I said, but my voice came out as something of a groan. Followed—or rather, scrambled after—by her knight-bodyguards, a diminutive girl with long, silver hair made a beeline for us. This was Petralka an Eldant III, Empress of the Holy Eldant Empire, where we were now living—in other words, the highest power and absolute monarch. She was adorable to look at; if someone told you she was in elementary school, you might believe them. Her features were as sweet as an angel’s, holding the promise of true beauty in the future. “Wh-What are you doing here...?!”