Outbreak Company: Volume 14 Read online

  It really was my fault, I felt. My spirits had been so high—or at any rate, when I looked back I could see how weirdly excited I had been—that it had led me to the unconscionable act of raising a hand against Shinichi-sama, even if it was at the instigation of Her Majesty. We weren’t striking Shinichi-sama personally, but rather the forbidden armor he was wearing, all in hopes of getting him out of it. But still... Her Majesty was one thing, but I, a mere maid, and Elvia-san, our household artist, had physically attacked our very master. Shinichi-sama himself had probably never expected us to do such a thing—of course it would have been a shock.

  “Um... I...”

  “I guess ’s all my fault...” Elvia-san said, her tail drooping.

  “No. There’s one person at fault here, and it’s Shinichi-san,” Hikaru-sama said coolly. “He’s a yutz, he doesn’t know what he wants, and this is all his fault. Elvia, Myusel, you don’t have anything to feel bad about. Frankly, I’ve been wanting to smack him myself.”

  “Uh...huh.” Elvia-san and I looked at each other.

  Hikaru-sama took a sip of tea and continued, “But even so, we can’t leave him like this.”

  “At the very least, we need him to do his job,” Minori-sama said, crossing her arms. “I know how busy he’s been, and I was leaving him alone because I thought this might be a nice break, but... You’re right. He can’t live in his room. It’s a pain in the neck, not being able to see him or even talk to him.”

  “It’s like he thinks he’s in the Heavenly Cave,” Hikaru-sama said, his voice thick with sarcasm. “Although he’s got the gender backwards.”

  “Heavenly Cave? Whazzat?” Elvia-san asked. This expression, ama-no-iwato in Japanese, was completely new to her—and to me, and Her Majesty, and Minister Cordobal. We looked at Hikaru-sama for an explanation.

  “It’s a Japanese myth,” he said. “There was this goddess who got upset because of some unpleasant stuff that had happened to her. She shut herself up in her room and refused to come out, or so the story goes.”

  “That does indeed sound like Shinichi.” Her Majesty, teacup in hand, pursed her lips.

  Minori-sama gave a shrug. “It sure doesn’t help that he’s got experience doing this. He’s weirdly, like, talented at being a shut-in. You know his parents smashed through his door with a chainsaw to get him to come out last time? That’s what I heard, anyway. Now I believe it. Plus, the rooms around here have those magical locks on them.”

  Just as Minori-sama said, each room of this house was equipped with a magical lock; if you didn’t have the key, the door would never open, no matter what you did. I had a backup key for each room, but when the door was also locked from the inside, there wasn’t much I could do. It would always be possible to use force: undo the magical lock with my backup key, then destroy the door—the entire wall, if necessary—to gain access to Shinichi-sama’s room. But I hesitated to do that, knowing it would only hurt Shinichi-sama worse.

  “Unfortunately, even if we bust in there, it won’t solve the root problem,” Hikaru-sama said, as if he had been reading my mind.

  “Yeah, we’ve got to get him to come out of his own free will. It really is like the Heavenly Cave.” Minori-sama didn’t seem to have any fresh ideas, either, and she trailed off into grumbling. A moment later, though, she exclaimed, “Oh!” and clapped her hands. “You know what they say—when pushing doesn’t work, try pulling.”

  “Meaning?” Minister Cordobal asked.

  “We send you into Shinichi-kun’s room, Garius-san. How about it?”

  “Me?” Minister Cordobal gave her a quizzical look.

  “That would bring Shinichi-kun rushing right out!”

  For some reason, this seemed to make Minori-sama very happy. The minister was oddly warm towards the idea, too, to judge by the amused look on his face as he nodded and said, “I see, I see.” Then he added, “Wouldn’t that be opening a rather different door?”

  “Let it open!”

  “If mistrust of women is what’s keeping him in there, it’s not a great solution,” Hikaru-sama said with a dry smile. “Anyway, getting in won’t be easy.”

  “How about breaking the door down, or crawling in through the air duct?” Minori-sama suggested.

  “You think these medieval-style houses have air ducts? And I vote no on busting the door down, too. We might get him out of the room for a moment, but he’d only find another one,” Hikaru-sama replied.

  “Boo.” Minori-sama looked disappointed, but she didn’t pursue the subject, or try to press her idea of sending the minister in. “If nothing else, I guess it’s not as bad as the last time he went shut-in around here.”

  “Wait, there was a last time?” Hikaru-sama said. “Here in Eldant?”

  “Oh yeah, I guess that was before you got here.”

  I remembered that time, myself. It was just shortly after Shinichi-sama had arrived in Eldant. He had started referring to himself as an “invader” sent from Ja-pan. The idea seemed to distress him very much. All this had been well before Hikaru-sama had come here.

  “To be fair, I think it’s just Myusel, Her Majesty, and Elvia that Shinichi-kun is terrified of, so if we really have to get in touch with him, I could do it. But I don’t think I could manage much just arguing with him through the door.”

  “And you can’t just stand outside that door forever.”

  “It would be nice if we could at least phone him, but there are no phones around h— oh.” Minori-sama clapped her hands as if she had just thought of something. “There’s no phone lines, but there is wireless LAN.”

  “That’s right, an experimental network was introduced for this house and the school, wasn’t it? Although we’ve only been using it to back up the computers.”

  “We could use a messenger program on there to fill in for a telephone.”

  “That just might work...”

  Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama were nodding at each other. I could only understand that they were talking about some sort of device from Ja-pan. “Wy-erless” and “meszenjers” didn’t mean much to me. Or any of the other locals in the room with me. All we could do was blink at each other.

  The sky above was rosy, and the girl’s eyes were moist as she looked at me.

  “Uh... Um...” She seemed to be getting up her nerve. Was it the twilight that made her cheeks look so red, or...? “This might be my last chance to say anything. So I’m gonna say it. For real.”

  Oh ho! And what might she have to say to me? I proceeded delicately, aware of the pounding of my heart.

  She glanced down ever so slightly. “I... You know, Shinichi-kun, I’ve always...”

  “Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn straight! Here it comes!!” I pounded the fist of my left hand into the open palm of my right. The shy voice I could hear through my speakers, that flushing face I could see on my display. There was nothing more touching than the sweet befuddlement of a girl about to confess.

  Ahh, the route is complete!

  I had worked my way through one obnoxious branch after another, save-scumming along, and now all my effort would finally bear fruit...! I had effectively cleared this game’s transfer-student path. The old-friend and kouhai routes were the first things I took care of; all that was left was the sempai path, notorious for being the most difficult in the game. I guess to end up with Sempai, you had to clear the transfer-student path first, then shoot her down on your next playthrough.

  Meaning, in short, that this game didn’t allow a harem ending. Sure. Fair enough. Harem play, that was no good, right? No loyalty to your girl. Yep, uh-huh.

  Pretty sure I feel a whole bunch of prickling in my heart right now, but I’m gonna ignore it!

  “Ah, being a shut-in is great... And 2D is perfect...!” I clenched my fists in front of my chest, giving a rapturous sigh.

  I’d been so busy with so many things recently that I hadn’t had time to just sit down and really play through a gal game. It led to a pile of about a dozen games in my room that
I had managed to import from Japan, which was great and all, but which I hadn’t even cracked open the packaging on. Since I finally had a few minutes, I had opened one up and started in on it, only to be reminded how much fun it was.

  “And they don’t hit you! And since it’s all branching paths, there’s never a moment where the main girls look at each other and turn the place into a battlefield!”

  What a wonderful thing, two dimensions!

  I was up to my neck in moe at the prospect of the confession by the girl on the other side of the screen, but as a battle-tested “gal gamer,” I knew that the first thing to do was keep a cool head. We were probably about to get into an avalanche of kiss scenes, but in order to be able to come back and enjoy this delicious moment in “memory mode” any time I wanted, it was imperative that I create a save.

  Call up main menu. Click Save.

  And that was when I noticed the flashing icon off to one side, outside the game window. Some kind of alert.

  “What’s this thing?”

  I really doubted it was a virus or anything. I clicked on the icon.

  A new window opened—an oblong chat window from a messenger application. This app let you talk one-on-one with people. It came preloaded on the machine, so it was no surprise it was there, but I had never paid it much mind. Messenger apps don’t do a lot of good with no internet.

  So why was I seeing it now?

  The window indicated somebody was inviting me to chat.

  “Oh,” I said when I saw the username: Minori_K. “Minori-san?”

  That’s right—we’d had wireless LAN installed in the mansion as well as at the school not too long ago. There was too much interference trying to run a wire through the hyperspace wormhole, not to mention the risk of virus infection and information leakage, so there was no direct network connection between this world and Japan. Matoba-san—the bureaucrat who served as go-between for our company, Amutech, on this side of the hole and the Japanese government on the other—had to travel back and forth frequently because it was the surest and safest way to do things.

  But that was only a problem where hyperspace wormholes were involved. On the assumption that something with a far more limited scope—something purely within the territory of the Eldant Empire, for example—would work just fine, we had recently laid some test wire. It was great for forwarding school papers and keeping records, and best of all, it finally let us indulge students’ demands to try the networking functions on systems like the 3TS.

  At the moment, our “network” only really consisted of three places: this mansion, the school, and the JSDF garrison, all connected by optical fiber. We just had a server and a wireless access point in each building. That meant we’d had access to the messenger program for a while now, too, but since we all saw each other around the house, there wasn’t much cause to use it.

  “But I guess with me being a shut-in now and all...”

  When I opened the chat window, there was just one sentence:

  “How about you come out of there already?”

  It was just words on the screen, but I could practically see Minori-san rolling her eyes as she typed at her keyboard.

  I responded with about the shortest possible answer:

  “No.”

  The words “Minori_K is typing” appeared and disappeared a few times, then another sentence finally showed up. I guess Minori-san had been kind enough to wait by her computer until I responded.

  “Everyone’s worried about you.”

  “Liar!” I replied, attaching a picture of a girl in a white one-piece holding a hatchet. “I know what you’ll do if I come out of this room. You’ll all point and laugh at me!”

  “No, we won’t.”

  “Then you’ll all hit me! My own father never hit me!” To this I attached a picture of a certain pilot.

  “What, really? Never?”

  “Hey, I was just trying to make a G*ndam reference! No fair taking it so seriously!”

  “I was never that into the original series. I was all about Wing.”

  Well, she was a fujoshi.

  “Got smacked by my mom a few times, tho. (Also by my sister.)”

  “Yeah, and by Her Majesty the first day you met. I guess there’s just something really smack-able about you, Shinichi-kun.”

  “Smack-able!”

  “Or maybe it’s, like, your destiny or something.”

  “Feeling a lot of despair, here!”

  And so on and so forth. After a bit more of this maybe-meaningful-maybe-not chitchat, I finally concluded:

  “Anyway, I’m not coming out of my room! No way, no how!”

  I thought that would be the end of it, but after a moment, another sentence appeared:

  “Fine, then.”

  Then her status icon changed to “Away.”

  I guess she had finally given up.

  “Phew...” I closed my eyes, and felt a huge smile spread across my face. “I won!”

  I mean, even I didn’t really know what I had won, or how, but whatever.

  “Back to work!”

  I made sure I had my save point, then continued to attack the transfer-student route in my game.

  Minori-sama sighed as she leaned away from her ‘lap-top com-puter.’ We had moved from the dining room into the living room, and had been trying to use the ‘meszenjer’ to contact Shinichi-sama, as we had discussed earlier.

  “What happened?” Her Majesty demanded, leaning forward from her place on the sofa.

  “Nothing happened,” Minori-sama said, shaking her head. “I couldn’t get him to come around.”

  That caused Her Majesty to sigh as well, clearly just as dispirited as Minori-sama. I thought she must also have felt some responsibility for Shinichi-sama’s being shut up in his room.

  “If he was going to come out just because you sent him some texts via instant messenger, I don’t think things would have gotten this bad in the first place,” Hikaru-sama said calmly. He seemed to have expected this outcome. He sipped his tea, looking quite fresh as he said, “I think using the messenger app is a good idea, though. Sometimes it gives you a sort of psychological cushion. Like, it can be a little easier to say what you’re really thinking when you can do it through text.”

  “Maybe?” Minori-sama said.

  “Let’s not write off talking to him this way.”

  “These Ja-panese thingamabobs are really useful,” Elvia-san said, eyeing the ‘lap-top’ with curiosity. She had seen and even used such a device several times, but this was the first time she had seen it used in quite this way. I suppose I wasn’t one to talk: I was no more familiar with this ‘instant meszenjer’ than she was.

  “This means we can make minimal contact at least, I guess,” Minori-sama said, sinking into the sofa. Another sigh. “The question is what we do from here. What’s the next step?”

  “Yeah, it’s not like there’s best practices for dealing with shut-ins,” Hikaru-sama said, clearly troubled.

  If the two of them couldn’t think of anything, then the rest of us here were as good as useless.

  I was just about to heave a sigh myself when I had a thought. “Um, Hikaru-sama,” I said experimentally. “The god in the story of the Heavenly Cave that you told us—did she stay in there forever?”

  “Nah, they got her out of there in the end,” he said with a smile. “The story goes that the other gods threw this huge party right outside the cave. They sounded like they were having so much fun that the goddess peeked out of the cave in spite of herself, and...” Hikaru-sama stopped in midsentence, as if he’d had a thought. He put one of his fingers to his chin, so delicate you could hardly believe it belonged to a man, and cocked his head. “You know, the Heavenly Cave makes a pretty good metaphor. That just might work.”

  “What might work?” Minister Cordobal inquired.

  Hikaru-sama held up one finger. “Having a crazy good time.”

  “I get it,” Minori-sama said. “Have so much fun out here t
hat Shinichi-kun won’t be able to help wanting to be part of it.” She nodded eagerly. “Make it as lively as possible...”

  “You’re talkin’ about a party!” Elvia-san said, holding her hand up. “Everyone drinkin’ and eatin’! And eatin’ and drinkin’!”

  “That’s how we always act at meal times, though,” Minori-sama said. “And sure, there’s usually drinking at parties, but we can’t go giving alcohol to minors...”

  “Minors? To whom do you refer?” Her Majesty looked around pointedly. Elvia-san and I both shook our heads.

  “Well, Your Majesty and Myusel and Elvia are all... I get it, we’re in Eldant, aren’t we?” Minori-sama shrugged.

  In point of fact, the age of majority in the Holy Eldant Empire was sixteen years for most purposes. So myself, Her Majesty, and Elvia-san were all adults, and by the local standards, Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama were both very much of the age of majority as well.

  “In Japan, you’re not allowed to drink until you’re twenty,” Hikaru-sama explained. “But I guess this is Eldant and there’s no reason we should worry too much about that.”

  “It is quite possible to have a party without alcohol,” Her Majesty said, standing up from the sofa. “Leave it to Garius and ourselves. We will throw a party the entire nation will—”

  “I don’t think we need to go that far,” Minori-sama said. “If it gets too big, it’ll defeat the point. We need to be able to wave it in Shinichi-kun’s face. Ideally, we could do it in the hallway, right outside his room.”

  She was right that if the objective was to make the goings-on irresistibly fun for Shinichi-sama, there would be no purpose to holding a gathering somewhere far from his room. This mansion was on the outskirts of the capital. In the castle, we could make as much noise as we wanted, and I highly doubted it would carry this far.

  “I mean, it doesn’t have to be in the hallway exactly,” Hikaru-sama said.

  “Yeah,” Minori-sama added, “I could send him pictures of all the fun we’re having via instant messenger.” The two of them nodded at each other. “Of course, that would mean being close enough to use the wireless LAN, so we would either have to do it here in the house, or at school. Or at the garrison, I guess.”