Outbreak Company: Volume 8 (Premium)

by Ichiro Sakaki

  My understanding was that controlling even one clay doll wasn’t an easy task. It wasn’t like you just created the creature, and then it did work for you on its own. You had to pay attention to and dictate its every move. That meant that controlling two clay dolls at once would be like trying to write totally different letters with your right and left hands. It was borderline impossible for most people, even for dwarves.

  And she had three of them going at once. I couldn’t imagine how she was controlling them.

  “What’s going on?” Minori-san and Romilda glanced over at us.

  “Hey, Romilda,” I said. “Controlling three clay dolls at once—that would be pretty hard, right?”

  Romilda looked like she thought this question came out of the blue. “Er... Yeah.” Then she saw who I was looking at and nodded. “It’s not normally possible. I certainly can’t do it. That girl—Lauron Selioz is her name—she’s an exception. You might even say she’s a genius, at least when it comes to controlling clay dolls.”

  Romilda sounded as pleased as if she were talking about herself.

  “Even experienced clay-doll users can almost never control three at once—and she’s only my age. Most of us, even if we can make that many dolls, we don’t have anything like Lauron’s precision. Plus she’s a hard worker.”

  “Wow...”

  And that was coming from the daughter of the guy who ran this workshop. I guess this Lauron girl really was something else.

  My admiring ruminations were interrupted by a voice shouting Lauron’s name.

  “Hey, Lauron!”

  I saw a male dwarf bounding toward her. Lauron, though, didn’t seem to react.

  “Lauron!” he shouted right in her ear, and then finally, as if waking from a dream, she blinked and looked over at him.

  “Yes...?”

  “I told you to leave that for later and do that one, over there!”

  “Er... But... the schedule for today says this one...”

  “Don’t you remember? I said this morning: Radol’s been out sick since yesterday, and we’re running behind on the exterior of prototype number 3! Go help Garaham!”

  “But...”

  “No buts! Don’t I keep telling you to be more flexible?!”

  Lauron was pretty much fixated on the work in front of her throughout the conversation, and the other dwarf didn’t seem happy about it. She muttered a few more things that seemed like excuses, but finally she dragged herself over to the other Faldra and got to work.

  Our group watched the exchange silently.

  “Uhh... Look,” Romilda said with a strained smile. “Sh-She’s normally really awesome, I swear. Today someone got a little angry at her, that’s all. It’s just...”

  “No, uh, I get it,” I said, nodding. “She does look really sharp.”

  Long story short, apparently she was a master among dwarves when it came to controlling clay dolls, but maybe not when it came to compromising. Well, it was hardly unusual for geniuses to be very specialized.

  “So, about your thoughts or ideas...”

  “Oh, right.”

  Prompted by Romilda, we put aside any concerns about the girl called Lauron and resumed our walk through the workshop, discussing the mass-production Faldras and the best ways to improve them.

  The Holy Eldant Empire.

  That’s the complete, official name of the place where I’m living now. It’s connected to Japan via a hyperspace tunnel known as the “hole.” (Because I was in a drug-induced sleep when they dragged me over here, I don’t know where in Eldant the hole is.)

  I’m living in the country’s capital, Marinos, as general manager of an other-world-first entertainment company. The area around Marinos is rich with natural beauty; the plains are peppered with forests and little hills. And sitting right in the middle of it all—right in the middle of the Eldant Empire, really—is a castle town.

  It all looks pretty Middle-Ages European. There are big houses and small ones all packed in together, and the main roads are lined with flagstone; for a kid who never so much as went on an overseas vacation, this place feels extraordinary enough to last me a lifetime.

  And the most extraordinary thing of all has to be Holy Eldant Castle.

  It’s big. I mean huge. That’s the first thing you notice. It looks less like a building than a geographical feature, like a mountain. It was a mountain, in fact, originally: they hollowed it out to make the castle. It’s bigger than any building I’ve ever been in; you feel impossibly small just standing near it.

  Then you go through the front gate (big enough to make you think maybe it’s for giant robots), and... well, I’ve been there a lot, but it makes me nervous every time.

  “And that’s all I have to report.”

  We were in one of the audience chambers deep inside that very castle; in other words, in one of the rooms reserved for meeting with Her Majesty the Empress, the owner of the building. We were in the smallest of the audience chambers, but it still would have been big enough for ten or twenty people to comfortably hold a meeting.

  The three of us stood in a single row.

  A little bit in front of and just above us, the empress sat on her throne.

  A silver-haired, lovely little g—I mean, young woman. The color of her hair and eyes, and even the cast of her facial features, clearly communicated that she was swimming in a different gene pool from the Japanese. To put it bluntly, she was absolutely beautiful, the very picture of a fantasy princess. She looked like the work of a master dollmaker, and her miraculous cuteness made men and women alike want to give her a big hug.

  Of course, if you tried to do that to her, heads would roll... literally.

  This was Her Majesty the Empress, Petralka an Eldant III.

  She practically looked like a preteen—heck, she wouldn’t have seemed out of place wearing an elementary-schooler’s backpack—but she was, I was told, sixteen years old. She was also very touchy about how young she looked, and you could get in major trouble by pointing it out.

  “Mm. Fine work.”

  Petralka nodded graciously when I finished my report about the activities of our company, Amutech, and the associated school.

  Up to this point, though, I’d been giving a more or less formal report. After that, we usually slipped into a more relaxed chat.

  “Let’s see, what else was there... Oh, I know. I went to one of the dwarves’ underground workshops the other day. Romilda’s place. Guld Foundry, I guess.”

  “Oh...?” Petralka nodded, interested. “That’s the largest workshop in Marinos. We are sure it’s quite impressive. But why so suddenly?”

  “Romilda said she wanted to show me something. You know the Faldra? I guess the dwarves have been working on an upgrade.”

  “Hmm...?”

  “They’re prototyping a mass-production model now. They think that if the things get into military use, it’ll be a new way for the dwarves and the elves to help the empire.”

  “I see...” The affirmation and the nod came, not from Petralka, but from the young man standing beside her throne. He had long, silver hair, just like her, and his attractive features showed a certain resemblance, too. It was enough to make you think they were related by blood—perhaps even that they were brother and sister.

  This young man was the beautiful knight, Minister Garius en Cordobal. He was a relative of Petralka’s, and he held an important position as an imperial advisor as well. His designation as knight referred to his actual job, and was separate from the title of nobility—he was the commander-in-chief of the entire military. And from what I had heard, he was as accomplished with the pen as with the sword.

  He looked like he had jumped right out of some otome game, an over-spec’d hunk of a perfect man who would get any girl excited... The only thing being, he didn’t seem very interested in that sort of thing. I think he preferred boys over flowers, if you know what I mean.

  I sometimes caught him shooting weird little looks in my direct
ion: I couldn’t let my guard down. Not that he seemed like a bad person, but that didn’t mean I wanted rose petals flying around us or whatever. Minori-san, who had a BL fixation and did want to see us like that, made a mountain out of every molehill she could find, and I wished she would leave us alone.

  Anyway...

  “This could be interesting,” Garius said, tapping a finger against his chin. “The military considers it a matter of utmost importance to secure combat power matching that demonstrated by Bahairam’s puppet drake. Your Faldra has at least proven itself in that regard.”

  Garius was talking about the same thing that had come up in my talk with Romilda the day before—the way the Faldra had fought with the puppet drake in Bahairam when Romilda and the others came to rescue me.

  “Yeah, but it stopped moving halfway through.”

  Dragons, apparently, were part sprite themselves—in other words, they metabolized magic. Use magic near a dragon, and the critter would just absorb it, and your spell would fizzle out. It also meant that the magic-powered Faldra ran out of juice in a hurry when it was at close quarters with a real dragon. And we happened to learn this right in the middle of an actual battle, which wasn’t fun.

  “It would be useful even as a deterrent,” Garius said. “The fact that a Faldra once defeated a puppet drake would carry considerable weight.”

  Ahh. I knew this guy was smart.

  He wasn’t necessarily thinking about winning a toe-to-toe contest. All they needed was something that put Bahairam on notice: Hey, guys! We’re not afraid of that fancy new weapon of yours—because we’ve got this! That might be enough to make them think twice about taking any military action, and that would justify the Faldras all by itself.

  It didn’t seem like Eldant had traditionally used these kinds of tactics—what you might almost call psychological warfare. But Garius, in his own way, seemed to be figuring them out as he worked with us.

  “Those dwarves are quite clever, aren’t they?”

  The note of agreement was sounded by another man, standing on Petralka’s other side—an older man with white hair and a white beard. Prime Minister Zahar.

  Look, I know what you’re thinking. The moment you hear the words “Prime Minister,” you picture a scheming fox who wants to take over the kingdom, or some intimidating final-boss type, or a clever plotter who prefers to run things from the shadows... Not a good impression.

  I understand. But it’s just a product of too many games and anime and manga—a bias, if you will. As a matter of fact, Prime Minister Zahar came across like a hard-working middle manager. He had single-handedly shattered my preconceptions about men of his station.

  He was Petralka’s advisor on political and economic matters, and also helped educate the still-young ruler. He was sort of like a grandfather to her.

  When the Japanese made first contact, it was Zahar who chose to engage them in dialogue rather than immediately trying to fight. So as much as he might look like a frail old man, he was actually intelligent and rational.

  “It would work on more than just Bahairam,” he said. “It might help cow rebels within our own country.”

  As we’ve discussed, the Faldra looked like a dragon, even if it was a fake one. It even had a specially crafted “skin” of cloth that made it, from a distance, look exactly like the real thing. And in this world, everyone knew that nothing was higher on the food chain than a True Dragon. If someone who didn’t know better was confronted with a Faldra, they would run away in terror, or otherwise just fall to the ground, praying to get out of it alive.

  “Hmm. Was the Faldra not able to take the form of a giant? Then perhaps it could serve for domestic security—or perhaps the castle specifically...?” Garius murmured, deep in thought. “So many unpleasant things have been happening lately...”

  “Like the Assembly of Patriots...?” I whispered.

  “Correct.” Petralka and her advisors smiled bitterly.

  The Assembly of Patriots was a group who didn’t look kindly on the otaku culture Japan was bringing in. They were, in their own way, worried about the future of their country—making them patriots of a sort, I guess—but the problem with them was that they quickly turned to violence to get what they wanted.

  “The Patriots are not the only rebellious faction in this country,” Petralka said. “We must carefully consider how to improve public safety so such an incident never happens again.” She sighed. “But we’re afraid that...”

  “It’s not going to be easy, huh?”

  You’ve heard of having a viper in your midst? A Judas at your table? One of the dangers of domestic anti-government factions was that they could so easily blend in with innocent civilians. An enemy army was one thing: you just pointed your own army in the right direction and set them loose. But the enemy within your own borders—first you had to find him, figure out who was the foe and who was just another citizen.

  “Magical items are especially dicey,” Petralka said, leaning on the armrest of her throne. “Citizens who are less than content, but not angry enough to openly rebel—when the army suddenly drops a huge, threatening magical weapon right in front of them, anger may quickly turn to defiance.”

  Ahh. In other words, people might not fight a battle they don’t think they can win, but show them a weapon with enough power to make them think they can win, and you can end up fanning the flames.

  “Fire-based magical weapons are especially... easy to understand.”

  “You mean like Imarufe Bisurupeguze, the Consuming Flame?”

  This was a magical weapon the Assembly of Patriots had used to threaten the empire when they took over the school. When activated, the fire sprites inside would come rushing out all at once, causing an explosion—in basic terms, it was a big old bomb.

  “No special aptitude is required to use them,” Petralka said.

  “Yeah, I think I remember all you need is a card and an incantation to set it off, right?”

  “Correct. The user need not even be a spellcaster. One simply inserts the card and recites, ‘In the name of justice, I invoke this great power!’ and then—”

  “Your Majesty!” Prime Minister Zahar tried to interrupt Petralka, sounding panicked. “Don’t speak those words so lightly...”

  “We very much doubt our voice will carry to the underground storage chamber. And even if it should, the card is not inserted, is it? Nothing’s going to explode.” She sounded perfectly confident.

  “You keep one of those in the castle?” I asked.

  “Considering this is the most well-protected place in the nation, yes. But to all things there is a limit.”

  “Whatever the case,” Garius said, bringing us back to the subject, “there’s no end of domestic difficulties. In light of Her Majesty’s kidnapping by the Assembly of Patriots, there’s been a flood of overeager would-be imitators.”

  “Yikes...”

  In other words, that one incident let everyone know that Her Majesty the Empress wasn’t an inviolable deity, that she was just a girl who could be kidnapped or even killed. And that thought was enough to fire up every anti-government rebel in the country.

  “We’ve been trying to devise the best way to safeguard the Empress’s person, but so far...”

  “There have, however, been several suggestions,” Zahar said with a glance at Garius.

  “What kind of suggestions?” I asked.

  “The most convincing thus far is to make a body double for Her Majesty.”

  A body double? Like the kagemusha, the official imposters feudal daimyos used to have?

  Of course, that word brings to mind an old movie about a kagemusha who served the Sengoku-era general, Takeda Shingen, but body doubles are hardly limited to Japan’s warring states. Having a stand-in at a crucial moment happens all the time in novels and movies. I mean, there’s even that legend that it wasn’t Jesus Christ crucified on the hill of Golgotha, but his younger brother Isukiri, with the Lord himself escaping to Aomori.
r />   “You mean she hasn’t had a royal double in the past?” Hikaru-san asked, puzzled.

  Now that he mentioned it, it was strange. Wouldn’t an absolute monarch normally have some kind of stand-in?

  “The subject has come up before, but we could never find someone who fit the part,” Garius replied.

  There’s a saying that holds that somewhere in the world, there are three people who look like you—I guess the trick is finding them. I mean, Petralka was strikingly beautiful; it wouldn’t be so simple to find someone who could pass as her.

  “In addition... You recall the moo-vee we made?”

  “The movie? What about it...?”

  “On account of that production, Her Majesty’s face became widely known among the populace. A double who didn’t closely resemble her would quickly be discovered.”

  “Ahhh...”

  So that was it. At a Middle-Ages level of technology where information didn’t spread quickly, or was badly distorted when it did, a body double or kagemusha didn’t have to look absolutely identical to the person they were replacing. Even when it came to someone important, like a king or a general, there wouldn’t be that many people who had met them in person. And even if they had seen their faces, it probably would have been just one time, at a distance.

  Because of the technology we’d brought in, though—because of the movie we made—whole crowds of people had seen Petralka in glorious close-up on a gigantic screen.

  Well, darn.

  Had I inadvertently made finding a royal double way more difficult than it should have been?

  “Come to think of it... There were those leaflets with Petralka on them in Bahairam, too. I mean, they were basically just pictures, but...”

  “What...?” Garius said, furrowing his eyebrows.

  Oops. Should I not have said anything?

  “I see...” The knight nodded, but his face was... dark. “So it’s spread all the way to Bahairam. Hrm. I suppose I should have anticipated that.”

  The pictures had been made in Eldant by someone who respected Petralka, but as they got more and more popular, they naturally found their way into foreign countries—including hostile ones. This whole experience was new to everyone involved, and even Garius and Zahar hadn’t considered this possibility.