Outbreak Company: Volume 3 Read online

  I wasn’t sure why she was making such a big deal about it all of a sudden. Beast girls going into heat; wasn’t that pretty much par for the course?

  Elvia looked at me and said, “Doesn’t it... bother you?”

  “Doesn’t what bother me?”

  She blinked in surprise. “You know, the way I’m... different from a human. With the ‘phase’ and all...”

  “No way! I love it!” I said, flashing her a thumbs-up as if to say Way to go!

  Yes, I had been pretty surprised when she knocked me over all of a sudden, but checking the goes-into-heat box only raised Elvia’s moe level in my eyes. True, one could ask what good it did to raise that level, but let’s forget about that.

  “I think it’s... forceful,” I said, “but it doesn’t creep me out or anything.”

  Elvia looked at me blankly. Had I really said something that surprising?

  “Just communicate with us,” I said. “There’s a bunch of different ways we can handle this. Like, just let us know when your... urges are at their strongest, and I can make sure to keep clear of you. Stuff like that. If you have to keep getting buckets of ice water dumped over your head, you’re gonna catch a cold one day.”

  “Shinichi-sama...”

  Elvia’s expression, which had been stiff with caution and fear, slowly melted into a beaming smile. Wow, cute. As an otaku who prided himself on having wide and generous interests, I was all for kuuderes and tsunderes and whatever, but there was definitely a lot to be said for a bright, earnest smile like that.

  “You’re not just gonna let this slide, are you?” Minori-san said with a pat on the shoulder—Myusel’s shoulder. The maid had ended up as something of a passive observer in this conversation.

  “Oh, uh, no, ma’am. I’ll do my best,” she said reflexively, as if snapping out of a stupor. Then she said, “Wha? Oh—you—you mean me?” She looked around, only now taking the situation in.

  “Who else would I be talking to?”

  “Oh, no, I just—” Myusel looked at the ground, blushing right up to her pointy ears.

  Incidentally, Myusel was of mixed blood, half human and half elf, and it was a bit of a sensitive issue with her. She didn’t worry too much about us seeing her ears around the house, but when we went outside she always arranged her hair to make sure it covered her ears. She might face discrimination if people knew she was a half-blood.

  “If I may,” interjected the conversation’s second passive observer, “is it all right to take this back outside?”

  Passive Observer No. 2 indicated the bucket Minori-san had used to douse us. This newest speaker didn’t sound like he had had any real interest in the conversation up to this point—although I admit his face and voice weren’t the easiest to read.

  Brooke Darwin, our groundskeeper, and also the person in this room that someone from modern Japan would consider most obviously “not human.”

  That was because he was a lizardman. He had a long, almost conical head, scales all over his face and body, jaws that looked like a gouge in his face—and then there was the tongue that slipped thoughtfully in and out of his mouth. He gave an unavoidably reptilian impression; despite his height, he looked very much like a lizard that had started walking on two legs.

  Even in this world, where demi-humans weren’t an unusual sight, lizardmen stood out. They were often treated as separate even from other beast people.

  I kind of assumed Elvia wouldn’t try to get with Brooke even if there weren’t any other guys around. Biologically, they just seemed too different.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s fine. Thanks,” Minori-san said.

  On that note, it sounded like Minori-san hadn’t actually known about Elvia’s being in heat. She just knew there was some kind of commotion—when I screamed, she went and got the bucket from Brooke on the premise that it would be helpful no matter what was going on. “At the very least, stun guns are more effective when someone is soaking wet, right?” she’d said. She was one scary lady.

  “I’ll excuse myself, then,” offered Brooke, heading out of the dining area.

  As I watched him go I remarked, “Different races really do have different concepts of what’s embarrassing, don’t they?”

  I was just kind of thinking aloud, not especially looking for agreement or anything, but Minori-san said, “Maybe you’re right. You know how much values and perspectives can differ just from country to country or even era to era. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising if things look different to someone who’s a completely separate form of life.”

  “Come to think of it, what’s the deal with reptilian senses, again? They have pit organs or something, right?”

  Pit organs are a special biological feature of some reptiles that allow them to sense infrared radiation. This allows them to “see” prey animals like birds and mice, whose body temperatures are always higher than the ambient. Or something like that, anyway. Basically, it’s like they have special eyes for seeing things on the infrared spectrum. It wouldn’t be surprising to discover the world was a different place for them.

  “I thought that was only snakes,” Minori-san said with a puzzled look. “I feel like lizards don’t have pit organs. Anyway, I don’t know if lizardmen are actually closer to lizards or snakes, or if they’re something else altogether.”

  True enough. The name “lizardmen” came from their lizard-like appearance, but that didn’t mean everything we knew about reptiles from our world would apply to them. If that were the case, then how could there be dragons here? If we proposed that one pair of feet had evolved into wings instead, we would end up having to classify them along with six-legged creatures like insects.

  “I feel like we and Brooke understand each other fairly well, but I wonder if that’s just my misperception,” I said.

  There were still plenty of things I didn’t quite get about his facial expressions and speech, but he was a hard worker and didn’t seem at all like a bad guy. He and some warrior friends of his had even helped me out of a very tight spot not long ago.

  Since we were all living in the same house together, I thought it would be nice if we could all get along as well as we were able.

  Then, however, I felt Minori-san’s hand on my shoulder. “Shinichi-kun,” she said, “I understand. If you truly intend to walk down that difficult path—heh heh heh! I’ll give you all the help I can.”

  “Um... What are you talking about?”

  This sounded bad.

  Minori-san, her eyes shining behind her glasses, exclaimed, “I’ll do everything in my power to help write the Shinichi/Brooke story!”

  “Whoa, just hang on, now...”

  “Say, Shinichi-kun, do you prefer to be the bottom?”

  “Don’t you ever think about anything else?!”

  “Never!”

  “Oh my God, you actually said it!”

  I felt like Minori-san had gotten a little less restrained in her behavior recently. Since we knew she was a fujoshi anyway, maybe she’d decided to lean into it...

  “How can a guy and a girl so totally fail to understand each other... Even when we’re both human?” I sighed.

  A man and a woman. Two people from different countries. Two people from different planets. And here, people from different races. It would be best if we could all understand each other—but maybe complete mutual comprehension was just too much to hope for.

  God knows it wasn’t happening here.

  The Holy Eldant Empire—that was the country the Japanese government had made first contact with after discovering this parallel world. And the name wasn’t just for show: this was an honest-to-goodness totalitarian state with an empress at its head.

  What about the name Eldant? It didn’t just refer to the country. It was also the empress’s family name... as well as the name of the castle she lived in, smack in the center of Marinos, the national capital. Personally, I found the whole nomenclature kind of overcomplicated, or least confusing. As a matter of practice, though,
people rarely addressed the empress by the name “Eldant.” Instead they called her “empress” or “Your Majesty.” I guess it’s not so different from how God doesn’t have a name in the monotheistic religions on Earth.

  There was only one empress around, so referring to her with a common noun wasn’t a problem, I supposed. When the word “Eldant” did occur in daily life, it was usually to differentiate this country from others—in which case people usually said “the Holy Eldant Empire”—or to refer to the ruler’s place of residence, in which case one would say “Holy Eldant Castle.” Then again, a lot of people just referred to “the imperial castle.”

  Anyway.

  “Some things never change,” I murmured as I walked through the halls of Holy Eldant Castle.

  Architecturally, this castle resembled something out of the European Middle Ages, but the scale and construction were unlike anything I’d ever seen. We often describe big buildings as being “the size of a mountain,” but in the case of this castle, it was probably literally true. When I stood outside my mansion and looked in its direction, the castle rose up against the horizon like a feature of the terrain. Like an actual mountain peak.

  I was just wondering how they had ever built such a gigantic structure when—

  “What never changes?” Minori-san asked. She was walking just behind and beside me.

  “Oh. Just the way this place overwhelms you.”

  “It sure does, doesn’t it?” I didn’t have to look back to know that Minori-san had a wry smile on her face. We had visited this castle dozens of times, and yet we still knew only the smallest corner of it, maybe not even a tenth of the entire building. You could probably have fit a fair-sized town in the space consumed by this place.

  “And when I noticed this floor for the first time,” I said. “Man, talk about the shivers.”

  I looked down at my feet. The floor was made of beautifully polished marble, but despite slight variations in color and pattern, no matter how hard you looked, you couldn’t see any seams. At first, I hadn’t understood the import of that—it hadn’t even really registered with me that the seams were missing.

  “Yeah,” Minori-san said. “To think, this whole place is made out of a single piece of stone.”

  Yep.

  Believe it or not, Holy Eldant Castle wasn’t made of bricks or stones piled on top of each other. They took a single humongous mountain and carved the castle out of it. This place wasn’t “as big as a mountain.” It actually was a mountain.

  Of course there were no seams in the floor. It was all of a piece.

  Obviously, this wasn’t work you could do with axes and shovels. You probably couldn’t build this place in a thousand years that way.

  Magic was the key.

  The Holy Eldant Empire, you see, was home to wizards, some of whom were accomplished in the civil-engineering magics. It was their powers that had carved this castle from a mountain. The building looked like it could stand forever, as indeed it adorned the country’s capital even now.

  Now, when I talk about stone architecture, you might think of someone who lives in a cave, or maybe those mountain temples in Tibet. This place, however, looked a lot like a Middle Ages European castle. That was why I had remained oblivious to the construction method (such as it was) for so long.

  “Every time we come here, it’s like... I feel like I’m going to meet the VI-est of VIPs. It’s pretty intimidating.”

  As General Manager of Amutech, I made periodic visits to Holy Eldant Castle. The mansion I was living in was officially owned by Amutech, but we were actually borrowing it from the Holy Eldant Empire—from the empress herself, as a matter of fact. Actually, the Eldant Empire had fronted part of the capital for Amutech, which was technically a part-public/part-private enterprise. That meant the empress of the Holy Eldant Empire was, in a manner of speaking, my employer.

  Hence, I was obliged to provide her with occasional updates on how business was going. Every time I showed up at the castle, though, I was seized by a sort of anxiety, a feeling that maybe I wasn’t quite the right guy for the job. Or maybe more like simple disbelief that I—me!—was going to talk directly to an empress.

  She had godlike powers, almost literally. This castle represented just a fraction of her authority. It would be weirder not to be a little ill at ease walking through it.

  “As scared as you act in the hallway, you always seem pretty cool when we’re actually talking to Her Majesty,” Minori-san said.

  “Yeah, well... I guess,” I said with a bit of a grin.

  At last, we rounded a corner of the hall and—

  “Ah, you made it.”

  At the end of the corridor (way, way at the end of the corridor) stood a man with a knight to either side of him. At first glance, he looked like a salaryman in the most dead-end job imaginable: the neatly parted, salt-and-pepper hair; the narrow, perpetually almost-smiling eyes; and the whole kind of melancholy bureaucrat look. But this was one book you couldn’t judge by its cover.

  It was possible the man’s entire appearance was an act, concocted to meet the needs of his current position. He was certainly capable of that.

  He was Matoba Jinzaburou, chief of the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau, a governmental organization. Practically speaking, however, he was the government’s man on the ground when it came to interacting with this alternate world; he took care of red tape for Amutech, requisitioned any resources we needed, and handled a variety of other niggling but necessary jobs.

  That effectively made him my coworker. But was he my friend? That’s a little harder to say. The government and I disagreed, after all, about what exactly we were doing in the name of “cultural exchange” here in the Holy Eldant Empire. Disagreed so vehemently, in fact, that they had sent a special ops squad to try to kill me.

  And Matoba-san, of course, was more or less on their side. That meant it would be dangerous to trust him completely. I grant that, unlike the high-level politicians and bureaucrats I knew of, Matoba-san had said and done some things that suggested a measure of fondness for me. He wasn’t exactly putting me ahead of his bosses; I suspected he just thought that this was the way to make the fewest waves.

  But whatever the case, while I couldn’t put my complete faith in him, that didn’t necessarily mean I had to view him as an enemy, either. It was, as they say, complicated. It also meant that talking with him could be a tiring affair.

  “Oh, you’re back?” I said as we approached him.

  Matoba-san had briefly left this world to return to the one I had come from—that was to say, Japan. When the special ops team sent to eliminate me (on the grounds that I had “gone rogue”) failed in their mission, Matoba-san went back with them to make a full report and settle things in Japan.

  It’s worth pointing out that the Eldant Empire was also aware of this special forces operation, as well as what the Japanese government had really been planning. That meant that the two knights with Matoba-san, who appeared to be protecting him at first glance, were probably there to keep an eye on him. The Empire’s response when they had found out about Matoba-san’s true work had actually been pretty measured; they could easily have grabbed him and thrown him in jail. The revelations could have led to the collapse of international relations and even an all-out war.

  Granted, all-out war might be a little difficult through a hyperspace tunnel so narrow you couldn’t fit a car through it.

  “Well, be things as they may, I am the contact point for this project,” Matoba-san said with a grim smile.

  When Minori-san and I caught up to him, he started walking along. He and his guards kept about a half-step behind us. Our footsteps trailed us, echoing off the hard stone of the hallway.

  “Ahem. On the subject of the disposition of the Japanese government,” Matoba-san said, as if he had just remembered it.

  Here it came. I mentally shrank back. This was the million-dollar question.

  The bigwigs back home, the politicians an
d everyone, had already tried to have me killed once. It was well known that they didn’t change their minds easily. I guess it’s not just politicians and bureaucrats—lots of people who hit forty or fifty years old are taken with a strange kind of self-confidence that makes it hard to admit when they’re wrong. It leads some people to irrationality and extremism in the attempt to defend their views.

  The point was, I hardly expected them to humbly apologize at this late date.

  “For the time being, the government has decided to acquiesce to your fit of pique.”

  “Gee, I’m so happy I could cry,” I said, laying on the spite. Sure, they were happy to go along with it—after they had failed in assassinating me.

  But then Matoba-san went on, “As a matter of fact, your efforts here are rather highly regarded. Although they have yet to produce concrete profit, the goodwill you’ve created amongst the populace has its own value. I admit that the very regrettable misunderstanding of earlier did result in some tension between our nation and the Holy Eldant Empire, but—” Matoba-san glanced at the knights just behind him. “We cannot ignore the distinct possibility that your work here may, in the future, produce significant profits for Japan. Such was my superiors’ decision.”

  “............Meaning?”

  “If things continue this way and we procure a good means of trade, every export Japan creates could find an entire nation’s worth of new consumers. Domestic demand could double.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  You didn’t have to impose unequal treaties or deliberately swindle people to make plenty of money on commerce. And in me, the government already had a pipeline to the Eldant Empire. Most likely, they figured getting rid of me at this point wasn’t the smartest play.

  After all, like I mentioned earlier, the Eldant Empire already knew all about what Japan was up to. If I were to disappear, the Empire’s mistrust of Japan would certainly grow, and that might well make exchange impossible. It would definitely make the whole situation a lot hairier, if nothing else.

  “What you’re saying is that for the moment, I don’t have to consider myself in immediate danger of my life, is that right?” Still feeling the sarcasm roil within me, I deliberately used the most bureaucratic language I could come up with.