“Deliberately feeding them misinformation,” Garius mused.
“Right. Wouldn’t that give us a chance to manipulate them?”
Say we were to have Elvia report that a particular part of the border was lightly defended. The enemy would charge in—but of course, we would have a major force waiting there.
“Mm,” Garius muttered. “It’s certainly possible. Rather underhanded, but... undoubtedly more beneficial than simply killing her.”
“Undoubtedly. Definitely more beneficial.”
“But would this ploy work more than once?” This time it was Prime Minister Zahar who spoke. “Once the enemy discovered that their spy’s information was unreliable, that indeed acting on it only brought them to grief, they would never trust her again.”
“No,” I said with a shake of my head, “they wouldn’t.” The important thing here was to smile as knowingly as possible—like one of those corrupt merchants working with an evil official in a samurai drama. “And that’s exactly the point.”
“...I’m sorry?” the Prime Minister said.
“If such a worthless spy were to go back to her home country, she would be executed immediately, wouldn’t she?”
The minister and the knight looked at each other for a moment. Then Garius looked back at me. “Kanou Shinichi. You—” Just for a moment, fresh astonishment colored his handsome, pale face. Then he began to smirk. “I see. Yes, very interesting. We take her in, bring her to our side.”
Yep. That’s what I was going for.
If Elvia’s report was the reason her country ended up getting mauled—well, what spy could go home then? And with nowhere to go except the place she already was, she would have to protect her newfound homeland.
“And you certainly couldn’t keep her anywhere that had anything to do with the military,” I said.
“That’s true.”
“And as it happens, my place really doesn’t have anything to do with the military.”
It wouldn’t do us any harm if Elvia let slip a few tidbits about what was going on at Amutech. If anything, keeping an eye on her in a place where she couldn’t get any military information would neutralize her, and as long as she kept sending word back home, there wouldn’t be any more spies.
“Anyway,” I went on, “art is important in otaku culture.” In manga and anime obviously, but even in games and light novels. “It looks like she can draw. It might be helpful to have someone like that around.”
“Hmm.” Garius and Zahar looked at each other again.
Petralka finally broke her silence. “Shinichi,” she said, “we hope you’re not trying to protect this Bahairam spy.”
“Huh? Uh, oh, uh, why—why would you hope that?” I said, trying to look curious and innocent at the same time. “I’m just, you know—trying to be reasonable and do the... the best thing for the kingdom.”
This was bad. I sounded nervous; it was going to give me away.
“Reports inform us that this spy is a young woman.”
“Uh, now... now that you mention it, I guess she is. Fancy that!” I felt sweat start to trickle down my armpits. “Fancy that”?! What are you thinking, Kanou Shinichi!? You’re acting super suspicious! She’ll figure you out for sure!
As I stood there cursing my slow wits, Petralka narrowed her eyes and said, “And is this young woman, perchance, well-endowed?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you trying to protect her because of her large breasts?”
“What, you’re still upset about that?” I blurted, but then quickly shook my head. “I mean, no! No, she isn’t and I’m not!”
This conversation was definitely not going the way I had expected. I remembered Petralka once expressing some jealousy that Myusel’s chest was larger than hers. I had wanted to tell her that not all guys go for big boobs, and that in her case, a huge rack on that tiny body would look really weird anyway—but it would only have made her mad, so I had swallowed the words.
“Anyway,” I said, “her breasts aren’t the important thing about her!”
“Oh no?”
“No! It’s those animal ears and that animal tail—they’re moe beyond belief!”
Petralka looked at me silently. The temperature in the room seemed to plunge.
“I mean, uh, never mind!” I said, holding my hand up as if I were swearing in a court of law.
The truth was, I had been so taken with Elvia’s ears and tail that I hadn’t paid much attention to the rest of her. Looking back on it, I guess she had a pretty good chest. I thought. I’d have to check later. When it came to werewolves, I definitely pictured someone slim. Shapeliness was more moe than sheer size.
Waitwaitwaitwaitwait.
“The point is,” I said, clearing my throat, “I want you to give her into my custody. If things really turn bad, just take her back and torture or execute or whatever her then. But I really don’t think she’s going to be much of a problem.”
“Very well.” I was surprised how readily Garius agreed. Maybe it had to do with those one-eyed owls Minori-san had pointed out. Maybe Garius was thinking that if we and Elvia were in the same place, it would be that much easier to keep an eye (literally, I guess) on all of us. “If it’s that important to you, Kanou Shinichi, then I believe we can release the spy into your care. If Your Majesty agrees?”
“...Hrm. Well.” Petralka didn’t look very enthused, but she didn’t have any concrete reason to object, either. And with the two of them in favor, Zahar wouldn’t argue.
“Awesome!” I whispered to myself. I had scored an illustrator.
“So there you have it.” We were in the dining room on the first floor of the mansion, which we also used for meetings. I was speaking to Elvia, whom we had brought home with us. “There was no definite proof that you’re an intelligence agent, so you’re being let go.”
“Phew! Thanks for your help!” Elvia said, scratching the back of her head even as a huge, bright smile blossomed on her face. At the same time, her ears were twitching. Man, did I want to touch those ears. “I thought they were gonna have me killed for sure.”
“Well, uh, not to put too fine a point on it, but... they were.” I smiled sadly.
Incidentally, it being dinnertime, Myusel, Brooke, and Minori-san were all here in the dining room with us. Since Minori-san had seen everything that went on at the castle earlier, there was nothing left to surprise her, although she still looked a little exasperated. Myusel, however, looked shocked. As for Brooke—well, he didn’t say a word or move a muscle, which made him hard to read, but I figured he was probably surprised, too.
I decided I needed to twist the knife just a little further. We couldn’t have her getting overconfident and spying on us again.
“This is definitely a gray zone,” I told her.
“What’s a gray zone? Are you talking about the color of my fur?”
“No, I mean we didn’t prove that you’re an intelligence agent or a spy, but normally that just means they’d lock you up until they knew for sure.”
“Guh?!”
This obviously left Elvia deeply shaken. Don’t tell me... Did she really think she had gotten off scot-free? Maybe she wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer...
“I—I swear I’m not either of those things!” she said, looking at each of us desperately. “I’m not a spy or an—an intelligence agent! I don’t have anything to do with the kingdom of Bahairam!”
“Huh,” Minori-san and I said, looking at each other. Neither of us had mentioned the name Bahairam in front of Elvia.
On that note, the Eldant Empire was involved in border skirmishes with a total of three different nations, so suspicion of spying didn’t necessarily directly equate to suspicion of being an agent of Bahairam. Garius had simply figured Bahairam was the most likely culprit in this case based on a number of different things.
“And,” Elvia went on, “nobody ever said anything to me about drawing pictures of things that look like military secrets
from every possible angle and sending them to them!”
Okay. It’s... It’s time to shut your mouth. For your own sake.
It looked like Elvia had a bit of the klutz about her. Animal ears and clumsy? Score.
Someone who leaked worse than a sieve in a rainstorm didn’t seem like the sort of person you would want to do your spy work—but like Minori-san said, maybe these spies were considered disposable, so nobody cared if some loose lips got in the ranks.
“Ah, whatever,” I said. “You were drawing pictures, right?”
“Yes, but I swear they weren’t anything—”
“I happen to need an illustrator right now. And I’d like to hire you.”
“...Huh?” Elvia looked at me blankly.
“You were sketching this mansion because you were interested in it, right?”
“Th-That’s right, but...”
“Well, I’m inviting you to live here with us. In exchange, you prioritize work for me. You’ll be our in-house illustrator, essentially.” I had to make sure I wrapped this conversation up before Elvia said anything else incriminating.
The beast girl gave me a strange look. Then she looked at Minori-san, Myusel, and Brooke in turn. She saw that none of them shook their head at the idea, and so her mystified gaze came back to me.
“C-Can I really?” The hesitant way she asked was oddly cute.
“Let me tell you something about us,” I said.
I wanted to create a dictionary to help spread the Japanese language, but since so few people could read around here, that wouldn’t be enough to make otaku culture popular. The perfect solution would be something like a picture book, or one of those illustrated children’s dictionaries. The people of the Eldant Empire were already used to seeing pictures on signs and such; a book like that would probably be very approachable for them.
What was more, it wouldn’t do to just import every vaguely otaku-ish item I could think of. Even in our own world, a movie or game might get an R or an X rating based on its content. Or think about how in some countries the blood in fighting games is red, in others it’s green, and in still others it has to be taken out entirely.
If we were going to make similar alterations to the content we brought the Eldant Empire, we would need someone who could draw.
I heard once that there were certain countries where there was particular concern about sexual mores, to the extent that there were artists who specialized in drawing bikinis on the naked girls in anime and manga shower scenes, for example.
“The only condition is, you can’t go out on your own. Okay?”
Since it was now obvious that Elvia was a spy for Bahairam, we couldn’t let her into too many Eldant facilities, especially the military ones, even if we decided it was okay for her to see the inside of our house. If she was discovered sneaking around again, there would be no avoiding the death penalty. If we were going to take her outside, we would also have to make our own preparations to feed her false information.
“Er... Sure. Got it.” She nodded. It looked like she had finally gotten it through her head that if she refused, the only things that awaited her were a jail cell, unspeakable torture, and the hangman’s noose, in that order. I felt a little bad for her, but I would be pleased if she was thankful to at least have her life.
“I look forward to working with you,” I said to the still somewhat-perplexed beast girl.
Chapter Three: Run Silent, Run Deep
Cause and effect.
Since the two are so often directly connected, we come to expect that they’ll always go hand-in-hand. If you press the switch, the machine turns on right away. If there’s a cause, the effect will be immediately apparent. Or so we tend to think. But that’s not how it actually is.
Most changes are small, so small that we can’t see them. A plant growing, for example. Sprouts shooting up, flowers blossoming—those may involve explosive changes at the cellular level, but those changes are much too small for us to observe by just sitting and watching. We only tend to notice changes in plants after something major has happened—when it finally becomes visible to us, we’re really being thrown into the middle of things.
So I believe there must have been signs. It’s just that they were too small, and I didn’t see them until they became something big.
“What the hell are you talking about?!”
The shout smacked me square in the face the moment I opened the door to the classroom.
“Why, you insolent—!”
“Look who’s talking!”
More than one voice was shouting. The yelling started a general buzz in the classroom, the air growing tense. This was bad. I didn’t know exactly what was wrong, but I could tell it was trouble. Acting on an almost instinctual danger sense, I jumped into the room.
“Will somebody tell me what’s going on?!”
It had been about five months since I’d started the school, and classes as such were going smoothly. A little too smoothly, in fact. I was nervous. The students were picking up otaku culture—or rather, Japanese and the other related foundational stuff we were teaching—very quickly, helped by the personal computers we had put in the self-study area for free use. With Matoba-san’s help, we had brought in large-volume hard drives chock full of anime, which the students were enjoying along with manga and even light novels.
One corner of the classroom was home to some figurines—mostly capsule toy-sized stuff, brought in as “samples”—which people could freely pick up and look at.
My only real complaint about the environment was that we had no internet yet, but that was understandable. Everything else was great.
On top of that, we got a flood of applications from nobles who wanted their children to attend the school. Maybe they had heard about it from our first generation of students. The upshot was that instead of waiting for the next school year, we started taking new students right away, and the school’s population doubled to more than a hundred pupils, with another hundred still waiting to get in.
At this moment, however, there was an almost unbearable tension in the classroom.
“I’ve put up with this until now! But I can’t do it anymore!”
“You took the words right out of my mouth!”
Right in the middle of the large-ish room, about twenty students had made a circle with their chairs. Half of them were elves and half were dwarves. Double that number of humans were watching from a distance.
Elves and dwarves, as I had learned from personal experience, didn’t get along very well. Left to their own devices, their arguments frequently devolved into fistfights. Minori-san and I had scolded them sternly for that sort of thing, and the number of fights had gone down recently, lulling me into a sense of security. A false one, it now seemed.
After all, if they couldn’t blow off some steam every once in a while, the mutual unhappiness was eventually going to explode.
“Crap...!” I was about to rush into the middle of the circle. But just then, one of the elves jumped up, practically knocking over his chair.
“I’m telling you,” he shouted, “Save Me, Big Brother! 4 is the most complete entry in the entire series! The graphics are sharp, and it’s got all kinds of different kiss scenes. And all the gameplay elements involved put it on a different level from almost every other gal game!”
The speaker was an elf wearing what amounted to coke-bottle glasses. (Where did he get those? Those weren’t even common on Earth anymore.) What was with the visuals here?!
“The graphics, he says! Those graphics are average at best!” Now it was one of the dwarves shouting, a blue vein bulging on his forehead. “Have a look at the pack-in figure from the limited first edition of GS3 Soft’s Onee-chan Sword! She has a brassiere made out of pearl, a sword with a completely convincing metallic texture—and the smoothness of her skin approaches art!”
“Average?!” another elf bellowed. “You wouldn’t know graphics if they bit you in the neck! Cloud is life! Everything necessary t
o existence can be found in it! I’ve—I’ve learned so much from that game!”
“Say what?! I suppose two-dimensional characters are appropriate for someone whose life is as flat as yours!”
“Hah! A mud-dweller like you could never appreciate such a subtle and refined story!”
“Just you say that again!”
“Oh, you wanna go?!”
Um... You guys...?
As I stood open-mouthed, another dwarf broke into the conversation. “That’s enough, both of you!” This new speaker was probably just a teen, but his long beard made him look like an old man already. But never mind his age—what mattered here was that someone with a cool head had shown up. I felt a rush of relief.
Naturally, it didn’t last long.
“Gal games?” the dwarf snorted. “Figures? Good lord. Boooooring.” Wait, wasn’t he supposed to be helping them make up? “If you have to argue, why not pick a more honorable topic, as we do?” he said confidently. Anyone else in that situation might have been looking down their nose at their listeners, but since dwarves were so short, he actually had to look up at the elf. It was sort of funny. “I refer, of course, to the Loli-Dwarf Protection Council!”
“That bunch of pedophiles?!” the elf exclaimed.
“Watch your language! Dwarf women all look forever young. Their small statures mean that even in adulthood, they hardly appear to be teenaged. They are eternal lolis! Angels among us! It’s the duty of gentlemen like ourselves to make sure they aren’t preyed upon by those with twisted predilections!”
“Oh, quiet! You realize that ‘gentleman’ isn’t a synonym for ‘pervert,’ right?”
“Hah! Ha ha ha! That word is practically a badge of honor for us!”
And on and on it went.
With a lukewarm glance at the gentleman-pervert loudly declaiming his views, I backed up a few steps and quietly closed the door.
Okay, I knew I wasn’t in any position to judge any other otaku. But... But this...
Elves and dwarves arguing passionately about ero-games? What was even going on here?
Anyway, I think you guys need to start by apologizing to Professor Tolkien and Mizuno-sensei!
Outbreak Company: Volume 2 Page 6
