Outbreak Company: Volume 7

by Ichiro Sakaki

“Hang on, wait a second!”

  “I can’t!”

  An instant later, Elvia had grabbed onto my great, round watermelon head just like she had the ball earlier.

  “E-Elvia—hrgh?!”

  The soft, pale thing that filled my vision had to be Elvia’s thigh. Compared to Myusel or Petralka, her skin was a little more tan, a darker color, but this particular spot, perhaps because it was normally covered by her shorts, was almost white.

  That’s right—my head was now clutched firmly between Elvia’s thighs. And the thing touching the back of my head—was that Elvia’s chest?

  Ahhhh.

  How can a situation make me so happy and so embarrassed at the same time?!

  I can’t help feeling that having a girl’s chest and thighs pressed up, you know, right against my head is, uh, not very good for my upbringing as a decent young man, but—

  “How scandalous! How... outrageous?”

  Suddenly, I thought I saw a flash in the corner of my vision, like something catching the sunlight.

  What could it be? It was over in the woods—and I didn’t think there was anything especially reflective in there.

  “Minori-san!” I called to the WAC just beside me. “I think I saw a flash over there...”

  “Nice try, but you’re not getting away that easy, Shinichi-kun,” she said.

  “No, I swear—”

  But Minori-san, probably assuming this was a scheme on my part to get out of this, ignored everything else I said and prepared for “watermelon busting.”

  “All right,” she said with a cheerful smile, “who wants to go first?”

  “I wanna try it!”

  “You, Elvia? All right, first we blindfold you.” Minori-san wrapped a towel she’d brought around Elvia’s eyes.

  This was bad. If Elvia with all her physical strength were to hit me, especially on or around her “phase,” my head really might split open like a fruit, no matter what she was hitting me with.

  No, wait, Shinichi. It’s all right. You’ve nothing to fear.

  Elvia was a beginner at watermelon busting. It wouldn’t be that easy for her to figure out where I was. What I needed to do now was not inadvertently give away my position by groaning or something, but instead to remain as quiet and inconspicuous as a stone by the roadside, and wait for Elvia to miss me...

  “Okay, spin, spin!” Minori-san called out, spinning Elvia around. Now she wouldn’t even know which direction I was in.

  That’s right, there had never been any reason to feel—

  “Shinichi-sama!” Elvia exclaimed, confident despite the blindfold. “I might be blindfolded, but I know you by your scent! Ooh, you’re gonna be so busted!”

  “No, stoooooooooppppp!”

  I might die here by this lake today.

  That was the realization that fueled my desperate scream.

  Amidst the thick, dark underbrush hid two men in camouflage.

  This wasn’t the sort of camouflage that had come to be a fashion statement, a simple pattern of mixed green and brown and black. This was far more than color... The men hardly looked human.

  They wore cloth that appeared plant-like, covered in a profusion of thread, as if the uniforms themselves were some kind of vegetation. So-called “ghillie suits.”

  Of course, they wouldn’t wear such serious disguises without making sure everything else was on the same level. Their faces were daubed with camouflage paint, and their scopes, which could all too easily catch the light, were kept covered unless they were in use.

  From even a slight distance, the men vanished completely into the foliage. In fact, someone could be standing right next to them and not notice the men as long as they didn’t move.

  The two men were currently observing their target.

  This was, of course, a preliminary step. When they had an opportunity, when the time was right, the men were authorized to proceed with the operation. Everything they carried and wore was for that purpose.

  It was quite some distance from the bushes where the men waited to the lakeside. The cheerful shouts of the girls playing in the sand didn’t even reach them. What tickled the men’s eardrums was nothing more than an occasional sibilance of leaves in the wind and the calls of birds in the trees.

  The man crouched on the left, watching Shinichi and his friends through a powerful scope, muttered, “Awfully carefree, aren’t they?”

  What the man saw through his scope was a girl with a wooden club working her way over to a boy wearing a watermelon hat. The boy was buried up to his neck in the sand, completely immobilized. The girl, who had ears and a tail like a dog, proceeded straight toward him despite the fact that she was blindfolded, and brought the club down.

  The club missed the boy’s head, gouging into the sand.

  “Lucky kid,” the man grunted. “Got away with his head in one piece.”

  The whole group was playing innocently, completely unaware of him and the other man watching them. They obviously didn’t suspect anything. Even the knights who would normally be guarding them were wearing swimsuits and had even joined the circle.

  “Let ’em have their fun while they still can,” said the man beside him, his spotter, who was looking through a large spotter scope. “Playtime’ll be over pretty soon.” His voice was totally emotionless. “I’ll bet they’d never dream they’re being targeted from here.”

  Wrapped in their camouflage clothing, melting into the vegetation around them, the men were now little more than machines focused on their mission.

  “By the time they notice us, it’ll be too late,” the spotter said, not taking his eye from his scope.

  “You’re right about that,” his companion replied. “Now, enough chatter. It’s time to get down to business.”

  He focused once more on tracking his target with his scope. The spotter resumed watching as well.

  In the end, I survived the nightmare game of watermelon busting without anyone actually cracking my head open.

  I mean, do you even usually use a word like “survived” for watermelon busting? When did it become such a dangerous activity?

  “That was not pleasant,” I groaned. Elvia had dug me out of the hole, and now I was wobbling my way over toward a big beach umbrella Minori-san had set up. I hadn’t moved at all during that game, not one finger, but I was tired down to my bones.

  As I sheltered under the huge umbrella, Myusel gave me something to drink. Granted, in a world with no coolers or refrigerators, it wasn’t an ice-cold, refreshing soft drink, but still.

  “You looked like you were having so much fun, Shinichi-sama.”

  “I did? When?”

  Personally, I had been battling fear of severe brain damage the entire time, but I guess to Myusel it had looked like I was enjoying myself.

  “Wait—whoa!”

  I casually sipped the tea Myusel gave me, and my eyes went wide. It was cold. Obviously much colder than the surrounding environment.

  “What’s the story here? This is cold.”

  “Oh, I used magic...” Myusel sounded a little bit shy.

  “Cooling magic? Do you know that sort of thing?”

  I knew she could use fire magic, and wind magic, and healing magic, and that unlike me—someone who was still learning the ropes—she could apply them in a variety of ways. But...

  “No, sir. Minori-sama taught me...”

  Myusel said she had put the pot of tea in a larger container, filled the container with water, and then hit the water with carefully modulated wind magic.

  That’s right: vaporization. When water evaporates, it takes heat from the surrounding area with it. By using wind to lower the humidity level of the surface of the water, the water would naturally start to evaporate, and the water that remained would be colder. Which, of course, would cool the teapot as well.

  “So you continuously used wind magic, keeping an eye on the strength the entire time?”

  “Yes, sir,” Myusel said with a nod. “I so wan
ted you to be able to enjoy a cold drink...”

  “What consideration!” I exclaimed. This was a truly sweet and kind maid-san. “But Myusel, part of the reason we came here was so that you could have some time off, too. Don’t overwork yourself, okay?”

  Using so much magic, controlling the intensity all the while, had to be tiring.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir. Very much!” Myusel smiled. “I did some aquatic training while I was in the military, but I’ve never come to the water just to enjoy myself like this. And...”

  “And... what?”

  Myusel couldn’t quite look at me, but she smiled and said quietly, “It’s... my first chance to go somewhere with you, Shinichi-sama.”

  My breath caught in my throat, and I could feel my heart pound.

  True, it was our first trip together, if you didn’t count the excursion to Bahairam when I got kidnapped. But just having an adorable half-elf maid shyly use an expression like “my first” was enough to make me desperately moe.

  Argh! My chest hurts! I think I’m going to die of moe!

  O white-bikini’d goddess (Shinichi vision)! Do you mean to strike me down with moe?!

  And so on and so forth, me working myself into a lather over Myusel’s cuteness.

  “The two of you seem quite happy together despite the imperial presence.”

  I didn’t know when Petralka had gotten there, but she didn’t sound very pleased.

  “Y-Your Majesty!” Myusel said, jumping back from me as if she’d been shot. “I— It wasn’t my intention to—”

  “We think you appeared to be having fun.”

  “Uh... Petralka...?”

  “We think you appeared to be having fun!” Petralka growled, less at Myusel than at me. Her Majesty was angry—in a full-on sulk, in fact.

  Myusel looked like she might weep, and as for Petralka, she continued to give me the glaring of a lifetime. What did she want from me?

  “Um... What is it you want me to do?”

  “You ninja-poop!”

  “Ninja-poop?!”

  “Or should we say, ‘Strike your head against the corner of a tofu square and die!’? Not that we know precisely what ‘tofu’ is.”

  “Petralka. I think the word you’re looking for is nincompoop.”

  “Hrm,” Petralka said, crossing her arms. “We are not sure, but in any event, you are a ninja-poop.”

  “You’ve picked up some awfully strange Japanese...”

  “We are given to understand that it describes a man who cannot see what’s going on around him, is that not true?”

  “Er... Well, basically, yeah.”

  But why would she call me something like that just because I was a little slow to notice she’d walked over?

  Whatever the case, I was fretting over how to handle this situation when...

  “Hmm...”

  Minori-san, who had disappeared for a few minutes after the watermelon busting was over, wandered back to us. I’d figured she had some sort of errand to handle, but maybe not.

  “Minori-san?”

  She had a strange look in her eye. It was... hard. Like, normally she seemed so soft and gentle, but now there was a tension in her expression. Often, this look meant that she was in her “JSDF soldier” mode, that she was thinking about her job.

  Could that mean there was danger nearby?

  “Minori-san?” I asked again. “Did something happen?”

  “Shinichi-kun,” she said, “you said earlier that you saw something flash in the forest.”

  I thought back to the light I had seen out of the corner of my eye just before the watermelon busting began. “Yeah, I did...”

  I had also been totally ignored, so I hadn’t given it much thought after that.

  “It just bugged me a little, and I went to have a look,” Minori-san said.

  “Did you learn anything?”

  “Not much to speak of. There was no sign that anyone had been there...”

  “Really? Nothing at all?”

  Minori-san crossed her arms in front of a chest larger than anything you would expect from someone so baby-faced and tilted her head in puzzlement.

  Ooh! The placement of her arms emphasized the valley between— No! This wasn’t the time to be getting excited about that.

  “I’ve had the same basic combat training as every other soldier,” she said, “but I’m a lot less knowledgeable when it comes to things like guerrilla warfare and special operations.”

  That brought back memories of the special forces squad that had tried to kill me on one occasion.

  “Rangers and the like are specialists at those kinds of things, so if someone with those qualifications were to be engaging in operations, I probably wouldn’t find them.”

  Rangers were soldiers who had completed the Ground Self-Defense Force’s Ranger Courses and were entitled to wear the Ranger badge. They learned every conceivable form of combat and shooting, and polished their skills to an exceptionally high degree. The training included field fortifications, infiltration, air drops, waterborne infiltration, swimming while armed, emergency exfil, and every kind of fighting: in forests, at night, in the mountains, in the snow, in urban close quarters, and on and on. In other words, they were the JSDF’s elite of the elite. So naturally, special-ops commands tended to be Ranger parties.

  “So... Does this mean we’re being targeted again?!”

  I remembered all too well when the JSDF, who I had thought were on my side, came after me—with a commando unit, no less. Since that event, there hadn’t been any obvious interference from the Japanese government. The prime minister had changed, and I thought their approach had gotten calmer, or at least more subtle. Maybe I was being naïve.

  “I don’t know yet,” Minori-san said. “They might be from Eldant, or Bahairam, or some other country. Although I doubt anywhere around here would use sniper rifles.”

  “Sniper rifles?!”

  “This is just a hunch, but I’m betting the light you saw was the reflection from a sniper scope lens. And you were targeted by special ops once before. If the higher-ups’ feelings haven’t changed, we shouldn’t be surprised if we find ourselves looking down the barrel of a sniper rifle.”

  “So you mean some army force is after me again?!”

  “We’re not at home, we’re not even in Marinos. Our security would naturally be lighter. Maybe they figured this was their chance.”

  “But that’s ridiculous...!”

  “I hope we can laugh it off like that,” Minori-san said. I could see her eyes behind her glasses, and I could tell that she was now really and truly the soldier, Koganuma Minori.

  One male knight walked through the dim forest.

  He was one of Garius’s direct subordinates, a distinguished and discerning man even among knights. There were more than a thousand knights in the Holy Eldant Empire, but not even a hundred of them reported directly to Garius. This man was still young, but his family background was impeccable, and he could expect to one day have a hundred or two hundred knights of his own reporting to him. In other words, an elite.

  He didn’t speak as he walked through the woods. This forest was a fair distance from the lake, and the voices of Petralka and the others didn’t reach him. In fact, silence reigned around him.

  The knight had received orders from Garius not to let anyone into the area near the lake.

  The orders weren’t for this man alone, of course. There were more than thirty hand-picked knights patrolling the area, protecting it from any outside threats.

  Garius judged that having a bunch of stern-looking men in full armor wandering around would make it hard to relax, and so he had chosen to station the empress’s royal guards as a second line of defense.

  From the capital, the lake was a long ride even by bird-drawn carriage, and only fishers and woodspeople lived in the area. They had all been strictly ordered not to leave their homes for the day.

  This al
l might be considered paranoia, but the time the empress had been kidnapped by the Assembly of Patriots still cast a long shadow over the empire’s thinking, and Garius and the other ministers expended no small amount of effort on protecting their leader.

  The knight walked wordlessly through the forest.

  There wasn’t a sound around him.

  He had stuck cloth to the seams of his armor to mute any clanking of metal, and the leaf mold on the ground absorbed even the sound of his footsteps. The only noises to speak of were the occasional twig snapping under his boot, and the twittering of songbirds—nothing else disturbed the quiet.

  The canopy blocked out the strong sunlight, and although shafts of sun broke through in places, for the most part the woods were dark.

  “Sigh...” the knight exhaled, and then suddenly he stopped walking.

  Wasn’t this whole thing futile?

  He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t stop the thought from occurring to him.

  Nothing was happening. He was just walking back and forth around the same little spot. The work was mundane, boring, a far cry from the glorious life he had expected as a knight.

  “No,” he told himself after a second, shaking his head. “This is part of a knight’s duty. The honorable work of protecting the person of the Empress. I will not neglect it.”

  If nothing happened, that was a good thing. If all their patrolling ended in no more than tired legs, it would show that they really had done their job to protect Her Majesty.

  Having thus reconsidered his situation, the knight focused afresh on the space around him.

  A second later, though, he gasped as someone or something reached out from behind him, clapping a hand over his mouth.

  Were they being attacked?!

  But he hadn’t sensed anyone—he, a knight. He had a fair amount of confidence in his martial abilities, regardless of the discipline. He could use sword and bow. He knew horseback riding. Even hand-to-hand combat. He knew that against anything less than a professional opponent, he could emerge victorious without even drawing his blade.

  And yet he had so readily allowed this person to get behind him, which in combat was equivalent to begging for death.