Outbreak Company: Volume 10

by Ichiro Sakaki

  They were all dressed in perfectly ordinary clothes, almost like they didn’t care if a wandering patrolman spotted them. Their shirts and pants were all the sort of thing you could find year-round at any bargain clothing shop. Over their clothes they wore windbreakers, parkas, jackets, coats. All kinds of things, none of them suited for the same season—but there were plenty of dark colors, probably to make it easier for them to blend into the night.

  They had one more thing in common: all of them had their right hands in their pockets, like they were holding onto something so they could pull it out at any time.

  Each of them approached from a different direction, then stopped when they got close to my house. They looked to make sure there was no one else around, then collectively pulled their hands out of their pockets. They were all wearing thin gloves and carrying stun guns, along with—

  “Ooh! Those are Type 64 silenced pistols! I didn’t know they were still using those.”

  Two of the men were carrying weapons that brought an innocent joy to my dad, the light-novel author Kanou Shougo.

  “What are you talking about?” I said, turning toward him. My dad was a gun nut who knew all sorts of obscure trivia like this.

  “It’s a silenced handgun used for special operations. The unique thing about it is that it’s designed with the suppressor, the part that makes it shoot quietly, built right into it. It dates from the Vietnam War, and I thought they stopped using them after they introduced the Type 67. Maybe they never bothered giving new ones to people stationed in a quiet country like Japan.”

  “Huh,” I said, my answer reflecting my deep indifference to all of that.

  My mind, meanwhile, went straight to the two (probably, maybe) Chinese women who had attacked us in Akihabara. Were these men here because the women had failed and someone—their superiors, their country?—was ready to resort to more certain and more violent means?

  This was all turning into a major pain.

  “They fire small-caliber, subsonic rounds, so relatively speaking they’re not that powerful. I think.”

  “And what, that’s supposed to make us feel better?” I sighed and looked back at my computer screen. The 27-inch liquid crystal display had several windows open on it, showing the approaching men from a variety of angles.

  We were in my mom’s room, by the way, and this was my mom’s computer. The six-mat room I called my own wasn’t exactly cramped, but with me, Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia in there—and then adding my mom, my dad, and my sister Shizuki, it would have gotten awfully cozy. In fact, I figured it would turn into a bit of a sauna, even without the heat on...

  “Are these people after you, Master...?” Myusel asked in a whisper.

  Elvia, perplexed and equally quiet, pointed to something on the screen. “What’ve they got in their hands here?”

  “Those are guns, like Minori-san’s weapon. And the rest of them have stun guns—I assume.”

  “Skun gans?”

  “Stun guns. They deliver a strong electric shock—uh, like a portable lightning bolt. They can knock someone out.”

  “So it’s like a magic item for lightning attacks?” Myusel asked.

  “I guess you could think of it that way,” I said, and then I looked back toward my mother, Kanou Sakiko, who had been silently working at the computer. “Listen, Mom...”

  “What?” Her hands were flying across the keyboard; she didn’t even look at me. I had no idea what she was doing...

  “Why do you even have this?”

  “This” was the optical devices that were currently displaying real-time feeds on our screen—in other words, security cameras.

  “Because we bought it, obviously.”

  “Back before they raised the consumption tax,” my dad offered. What a mundane reason.

  “I mean, why does a private household even need security cameras?!”

  One camera I could understand. But we had so many, it was crazy. There must have been at least eight separate cameras sending us the views we were looking at now.

  “Ahh, you just can’t be too careful these days,” my dad said.

  “Things happen sometimes,” my mom added, still tapping away on the keyboard. “Frothing fans of your father show up, and the police have to get involved. You must remember, Shinichi.”

  “Oh...” I vaguely recalled something like that happening once every three or four years.

  “And there’s a young woman in the house,” my dad said, and then he and my mom shared a “Right?!” look.

  Shizuki (the young woman in question) didn’t say anything. She wasn’t the least bit amused by this overprotectiveness, but since it was explicitly for her benefit, she couldn’t exactly object, either. She just stood there looking annoyed.

  I guess nowadays there were security cameras on half the street corners, and with cameras getting cheaper even as their resolution got better and better, there was no real reason a private residence shouldn’t have a system like this.

  “Your mom and dad worked hard to make this happen,” my mom said.

  “We buried some of the cameras in walls and made covers for others so they’d be hard to see.” My parents were both smiling beatifically.

  “That sounds less like hard work and more like an arts and crafts project,” I shot back immediately.

  If you were really worried about security, the smart thing to do was to put a camera right out in the open, like, Hey, here’s a camera! Once you started hiding them, you got into creeper territory real quick.

  I hadn’t even noticed the equipment myself, so it must have been really well hidden. Reflecting on my parents’ already dubious personalities, it wasn’t hard to imagine them gleefully pursuing the project together. Otherwise how would they have ended up with such high-res cameras in places full-fledged secret agents wouldn’t spot them? Then again, the spooks probably didn’t even imagine a private home would have a setup like this.

  The image we were looking at was so sharp that we could pick out the type of handguns they were using even though it was the middle of the night. I wouldn’t have put it past my parents to have installed infrared sensors, too.

  “Well, we looked at the options and just wanted to try some different things.”

  “Not to mention, decommissioned military night-vision equipment is starting to make its way onto the market.”

  “The market for who? Other than you, I mean...”

  I turned away from my parents, who still seemed inordinately proud of themselves, and looked at the agents on the screen again. A moderately crazed reader was one thing, but I have to say I never expected Chinese (???) secret agents to show up at my house.

  Neither, it looked like, had my parents...

  “This is like a plot twist out of a light novel, eh, Mom?” my dad said.

  “They do say truth is stranger than fiction.”

  “You’re recording this, right? I might use it for one of my books sometime.”

  “In HD, dear.”

  When I heard my parents bantering back and forth in spite of the nerve-racking situation, I felt some of the tension drain out of my body. I wasn’t sure if they didn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation, or if they were simply made of sterner stuff than I’d been giving them credit for. Either way, I owed them an awful lot...

  “Uh... hey.” Shizuki was the only one who didn’t seem to quite follow what was happening. She sounded less scared than just sort of put out. I guess that was understandable. Try telling a random high school girl that a Chinese assault squad is knocking at her door—it wouldn’t seem real. “I don’t exactly get it. Who are these people? Are those real guns?”

  “Uhhh...” I thought as quick as I could to come up with a story. “You remember I said Petralka was a princess, right?”

  “Uh-huh...”

  “Well, people from the country of, uh, pandas want to kidnap her while she’s here. I could tell you why, but there’s a bunch of, you know, international relations stuff involve
d.”

  Shizuki didn’t answer, but only stared at me. To her, I was just her no-account shut-in otaku of an older brother, and she probably had trouble believing I was really caught up in anything on that scale.

  “Myusel,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder where she stood beside me.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “If push comes to shove, I’m trusting you with Shizuki and Petralka.”

  They were the only two among us who had no way of their own to fight. Er, well, my dad probably didn’t, either. I really doubted the “correspondence karate course” had taught him anything that would help against professional brawlers, but—well, women and children first, right? Myusel’s wind magic should allow her to deflect bullets and maybe land a hit on the enemy.

  “Yes, sir...!” She clenched both fists and nodded at me... but then she hesitated for a moment. “Er, Master... You...”

  “I can fall back on what you taught me, Myusel,” I said, keeping my voice down. I had to be careful not to mention magic in front of my parents and Shizuki.

  Our talk was interrupted by Elvia, looking at the screen, who exclaimed, “It looks like they’re gonna come in any minute!”

  I glanced over and saw she was right: the men had gathered at the back door of the house and seemed to be touching it. Maybe they were trying the lock.

  “L-Listen, I think we should call the police...” Shizuki, who at least understood that this was no laughing matter, was getting out her phone.

  But I shook my head. “If that were a good idea, Matoba-san... I mean, the Japanese government official I talked to, he would have already alerted the local authorities.”

  He’d had the good grace to let me know when he found out my security detail had been neutralized, but that meant the police probably weren’t on their way. I assumed they hadn’t been given any details of my presence in the area for security reasons, and maybe some assemblyperson who was friendly with the Chinese was even leaning on them to stay out of it. I had no way of knowing.

  There was also a pretty good chance our cell signal was being blocked. They didn’t seem to have cut our landline, presumably because it would have drawn attention to them by affecting the entire neighborhood; even the phone company might have noticed that there was an outage.

  So maybe we could have called the cops and told them we were being robbed or something, but it was too late now. By the time the police got here, it would all be over. That was how fast the agent(-ish) men were working.

  “But... what do we do?” I wondered aloud.

  It looked like our only choice was to fight them ourselves. But could we possibly?

  Our opponents were obviously professional fighters. This wasn’t like facing down the JSDF special forces in Eldant. We’d had our own trained brawlers then—the knights of the Eldant Empire. We’d had Garius and Brooke. But now? Myusel, Elvia, and I were the only ones with any ability to fight at all. My mom, maybe a little. But even if she could handle herself in hand-to-hand combat, I just didn’t think a housewife had much chance confronted by enemies who not only knew martial arts but had ranged weapons and stun guns. Myusel’s and my magic gave us ranged abilities the agents didn’t know about, and I doubted they were aware of Elvia’s superhuman physical strength, either. Those things would probably offer our only opportunities.

  But how could we actually use them?

  At the moment, we knew everything about the agents—what they looked like, where they were, what they were doing. We could use that information to launch a surprise attack. In this house, though, what was the best place for that? How should we set it up?

  “...Man, digital equipment is really something else these days,” I said.

  I couldn’t believe the image was so clear. We could see more than just their faces; we could make out the actual weapons they were holding. If what my parents had been saying was true, you could even record at this resolution. Considering that apparently any Neanderthal of a DIY handyman could hide the things so well that even trained agents didn’t notice them, it looked like there was hardly anything to complain about with the cameras.

  “It’s like watching a movie,” I added, inspired by the unreality of the moment and the pristineness of the image. It looked so good I practically wanted other people to see it, too.

  .........Wait, hang on.

  “That’s it.”

  “Shinichi?” Petralka looked at me in surprise. Ahh, the sweet befuddlement this empress shows me sometimes it’s just so cu—okay, not time for moe now!

  “Yes, that’s it. That’s what we’ll do.” I looked at her with one of those smiles you get when you have a wonderful, awful idea.

  “Have you thought of something?” Petralka pressed. I nodded, then reached for the mouse and keyboard. My mom looked like she was about to object, but then she just silently moved aside.

  “We’re online, right?”

  “Yeah, but you can’t call 110 from the internet,” my dad said. “Given most telephone landlines and internet cables are buried underground these days, they probably can’t cut just ours.”

  He was right. But we would teach those people (probably) from that panda country what a mistake it had been not to try.

  “This is just such a good-looking image, I said,” pointing to the screen. “I want everyone in the whole world to see it.”

  The agents went around the back of the house and began by infiltrating the garden. They double-checked that the lights in the house were off. Then they placed some sort of cloth or something against the window of the living room, which faced the garden, and smacked it with the guns they were carrying.

  Ahh, okay. They were causing a partial break in the glass there.

  My dad had told me once that in real life, it’s very hard to make a nice, round hole in a piece of glass like you might see someone do in manga or anime. It’s not like using an X-Acto knife to cut a circle in a piece of paper. It’s not like in the movies where they scratch a circle in the glass, then slap on some special tool that pops out a segment.

  No, the agents were using some kind of sticky covering to dampen the sound and minimize scatter while they broke the window. No one would hear them and they would be less likely to end up with a bunch of broken glass all over.

  None of us spoke.

  One of the agents reached through the hole in the window, undid the crescent lock, and then they all came tramping in without even taking off their shoes.

  At that moment—

  “Oof!”

  The lead agent stumbled backward with a short, sharp exhalation.

  The kick that came flying out of the darkness had taken him square in the face. Even a professional fighter like him couldn’t defend against such a sudden attack; he fell spectacularly onto the floor and stopped moving. Out cold, I guessed.

  The other agents shouted, softly. Definitely not in Japanese. It really did sound kind of like Chinese to me. The excited tones suggested they were saying something like, “What the hell just happened?!”

  “Hrgh!”

  While they were whispering to one another, another agent was attacked. This one found a leg swept out from under him, costing him his balance, before a rising uppercut caught him in the solar plexus. He rose nearly a meter up in the air before collapsing to the ground with a dull thud like his comrade.

  There was another excited burst of the foreign language. The remaining agents took a step back, guns at the ready as they tried to ascertain who or what was attacking them.

  She didn’t pursue them, though—I had warned her not to do anything reckless—but crouched on all fours where the agents weren’t likely to spot her.

  It was Elvia.

  The living room was dark, obviously—but Elvia had strong night vision, and could even locate her opponents by smell, so a lack of light was no problem for her. Even a glancing blow from her beast-person muscles, so much stronger than a human’s, was more than enough to knock a man out.

  Of course, the ag
ents had snuck up to the house without any light; their eyes were adjusted to the dark. They finally located Elvia, who looked like a wolf prepared to spring on her prey at any moment. The agents looked at each other, but they had their composure back now. They leveled their guns at Elvia.

  They didn’t fire immediately, maybe because killing wasn’t their objective.

  “You come with us!” they ordered in heavily accented Japanese.

  Elvia, obviously, wasn’t about to just meekly go along with them—she probably didn’t even understand them that well. She just growled quietly, like an animal.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said, and suddenly the area was flooded with light.

  I had really just flipped the nearby light switch from my place by the wall, but the agents, suddenly assaulted by the bright light, took a startled step backward, holding their hands up to shield their faces.

  It was only a second, but it took their eyes off Elvia and made them move their guns just a little.

  She didn’t let the opportunity go to waste. Elvia kicked off the floor, leaping at them. The agents tried to respond, but they probably didn’t have a lot of experience with an “animal” attacking from below waist level. They couldn’t get a good aim. Elvia knocked one of them over, and he hit his head on the floor. She drove a fist into his solar plexus, and the agent went unconscious without a sound.

  That made three.

  That was all our little ambush was going to get us, though.

  “Do not move!”

  Pew! I guess a silencer doesn’t actually silence a gunshot completely. Suddenly there was a hole in the wall. A warning shot. Even Elvia couldn’t move faster than a speeding bullet. She froze where she was.

  “If you will behave, we do not kill you. You come with us, Kanou Shinichi.”

  A classic threat. But I didn’t answer. I just nodded, smiling.

  The agent didn’t seem to like that. “You come with us!” He sounded more agitated now. Even a civilian like me could practically hear the murderousness in his voice—but I was also aware of my lips turning up in the biggest grin I had ever grinned. Uh-oh. I just couldn’t hold it in. I didn’t have a mirror, so I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I was smirking like the last boss of some video game.