Outbreak Company: Volume 2

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “As soon as he gets home, he locks himself in that room...”

  It was Myusel, sounding worried. I was happy to know that she was concerned for me, but the way I was feeling right then, even that considerateness felt like a burden.

  “What in the world is wrong with the master...?”

  “Search me,” Minori-san said.

  Obviously, she couldn’t divulge what she knew. What was she going to do, just tell Myusel that I was part of the first wave of an invasion and I was currently feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of what I had done?

  A second later, I picked up the tapping of shoes coming closer.

  “Bureau Chief Matoba,” Minori-san said, helpfully informing me of the shoes’ owner.

  Matoba Jinzaburou, head of the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau—and the one responsible for the current plan of cultural invasion.

  “It seems things aren’t going well,” I heard Matoba-san say. He sounded painfully calm, as if none of this really concerned him.

  “I’m sorry, Myusel, but could you leave us alone for a while?” Minori-san asked. I heard Myusel reply “Yes, ma’am,” and then the sound of her footsteps growing distant. It sounded like only Minori-san and Matoba-san were left outside my room.

  “This is not a good thing,” Matoba-san said.

  “I’m—I’m not sure it’s really that big a deal...” Minori-san said, trying to cover for me. “Emotional volatility is pretty common in boys his age.”

  “That might have held water before,” Matoba-san said with a sigh, “but at this point, I doubt the higher-ups will brook any delay in their plans. After all our efforts, we’ve managed to produce a small group of people addicted to otaku culture. A strong early result. Next, one would expect us to secure the foothold we have and then expand from there.”

  In other words, to make more addicts—scads of them.

  The spread of otaku culture was going more smoothly than we could have dreamed, and I got the distinct impression that the Japanese government was feeling pretty good about it. We had been granted an increased budget, whatever expensive supplies we wanted. That included a projector for showing anime—the latest model—to say nothing of some computers.

  But of course, if they were throwing that much money at us, it meant they expected us to do something with it. They wanted measurable results. Something they could assign a number to, proof that the plan was working.

  “Some have suggested that if he won’t help us, he be replaced with someone else.” I caught the threatening undertone in Matoba-san’s seemingly casual remark. I knew all too well that if they had to replace me, it wasn’t going to be with a Sorry for the trouble, have a good life. No, they would have something else in mind...

  “Wait just a second!” Minori-san said, sounding a bit shaken. “The present situation is... It’s part of Kanou Shinichi’s work. A function of his talent, you might say.”

  Matoba-san didn’t answer. On the other side of the door, I laughed noiselessly.

  Talent, huh?

  My talent as an otaku. My talent for invading other worlds. My talent for destroying culture.

  The truth was......... I was the worst otaku ever.

  “If you’re absolutely certain that someone else could do his job as well as he does, then fine. But sir, you should know as well as anyone that you can’t just change him out for some other random nerd! He’s gained the trust of the Eldant Empire!”

  Apparently Minori-san was really committed to protecting me. Yet at that moment, it actually didn’t make me happy. I couldn’t shake this feeling that even Minori-san had been duped.

  “If they try to hurry things too much, it’ll only end up causing everything we’ve done to go to waste. I think he could use some time to... to rest, or recuperate, or whatever you want to call it. So—”

  “Koganuma-kun,” Matoba-san said, wresting control of the conversation back from Minori-san. “That decision is for my superiors to make.”

  Silence. Even from the other side of the door, I could tell Minori-san was lost for words.

  Matoba-san, however, wasn’t. He went on calmly: “I hope you won’t misunderstand.”

  “Misunderstand what, sir?” Minori-san asked in a barbed tone. She was by definition on the government’s side, but as an otaku herself, she couldn’t have been entirely happy about what the government was trying to do.

  “Please realize, I’m not speaking as the chief of the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau here. This is my own personal assessment,” Matoba-san began. “But despite everything that’s happened, I still like the boy. As such, I would be glad if he continued to serve as the general manager of Amutech—making his best effort in the position, of course.”

  Yeah? And why was that? Why in the hell would I believe that now?

  For that matter, even if Matoba-san was telling the truth—so what?

  “I imagine you can hear me, Kanou Shinichi-kun,” Matoba-san called through the door. “You haven’t much time. Unlike your honored parents, the people over my head are neither patient nor especially merciful. I promise you they won’t abide a shut-in for very long. We’re not asking you to kill anyone, are we? You only need to keep on spreading otaku culture. That’s all.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to hear another word from Matoba-san—I grabbed a nearby blanket and tossed it over my head.

  There was one very simple, very obvious matter I had to attend to.

  No matter how much one might want to shut himself away in his room, it just isn’t possible to live one’s entire life there. Myusel was kind enough to set my food outside my door, but of course, what goes in, uh, must come out—and even I couldn’t bring myself to do that in my room. Heck, I didn’t even have a plastic bottle.

  That was how I found myself checking that neither Minori-san nor Matoba-san was outside my room, then creeping out, walking gingerly to quiet my footsteps. It was past midnight already, and the house was wreathed in silence. I moved down the stairs, heading for the first-floor toilet.

  But then I stopped. A giant shape loomed up out of the darkness. It was in a lump on the floor, a surface I generally expected to be flat. Hidden by the blackness of night, it was really pretty creepy.

  “...Brooke.” I sighed and called out to the lolling lizardman. “Please don’t sleep on the floor in the dark. Someone’s gonna step on you.”

  “V’ry... sorry, sir... Please, don’t... don’t hesitate t’ step on me.”

  Coming from a young woman, those words might make me wonder if she had some very strange preferences, but coming from Brooke—really, here in Eldant as a whole—I knew they meant something different.

  “Hey... Brooke.” I crouched down, calling his name again. “You say getting beaten is just an occupational hazard, but doesn’t that ever bother you?”

  No matter how tough they might be, I was sure no one liked getting smacked around as a matter of course.

  Brooke heaved himself up, crossing his arms and looking a bit at a loss. “Ahh... ’Fraid I don’t understand much what you’re talkin’ about, sir.” After a second, he went on. “Lizardmen don’t... rank very high.... in any country.”

  “Huh. Now that you mention it, I guess you’re right.”

  I had spotted some lizardman kids at the training grounds, but there were none enrolled at my school. Elves and dwarves might have been lower on the totem pole than humans, but that was in terms of average treatment as an entire race. There were definitely elves and dwarves in this country who had managed to work their way up and earn a fair amount of respect, and a lot of them were sending their kids to our school.

  Lizardmen, on the other hand, would find there was only so far they could go, even if they tried to make their own way in the world. Their fundamental position was so low, in fact, that even if one of them achieved a degree of success, they still couldn’t send their kids to the school.

  “Even in the... ‘otaku goods’ you’ve brought us, Master... li
zardmen... are the villains, oft as not.”

  “Huh? Oh... Yeah. I guess... I guess you’re right...”

  Maybe it had something to do with their mean looks, but lizardmen tended to be the most recognizable members of the bad guys’ gangs.

  Feeling a little sick, I stopped talking. The corners of Brooke’s mouth rose ever so slightly. I knew it was a smile, but it was still a little spooky.

  “You’re a most unique person, Master,” he said after a moment.

  “I—I am?”

  “I don’t mean t’ sound like I’m... complaining, sir. Not at all. I grant maybe... we lizards aren’t best pleased... t’ be treated so ill. But it’s not... like we don’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Perhaps you didn’t know, Master... once, long ago... the lizardmen used t’ be the... the mortal enemies of humankind.”

  “Wait, they were?!”

  Brooke briefly recounted the history of his race, to my mounting astonishment. Unlike the other races, the lizardmen were reptiles—meaning they were cold-blooded; they were even born from eggs. They also didn’t feel pain as keenly as the other races, and had big, powerful bodies to boot.

  Maybe it only made sense that these biological differences would have caused the lizards to produce a fundamentally different set of values from the warm-blooded races—the soft-skinned humans, elves, dwarves, and werewolves. Lizardman morality wasn’t completely different from the human equivalent, but it was definitely distinct.

  For one thing, the lizardmen liked killing.

  They had serious inborn offensive capabilities, and they took joy in attacking and killing things. For them, it wasn’t just about catching their next meal. Big group hunts were a major part of their culture and indeed something they did for fun.

  “I see,” I said. “Like the way humans go hunting or fishing...”

  Hunting in modern Japan—not all of it, necessarily, but a certain percentage—is basically a hobby for the hunters, not an absolute necessity for survival. You end up with people who argue that killing other living things for your own enjoyment is cruel, and others who say it’s cultural and should be preserved.

  Anyway.

  When hunting is a matter of culture and interest, it naturally becomes more complex and sophisticated. In lizardman culture, stronger opponents were preferred. Ideally, prey at least as intelligent as themselves, who could use weapons and tools. In other words, elves, dwarves, werewolves—and humans.

  They especially liked to hunt that last race. Humans were slower than werewolves, weaker than dwarves, and less magically adept than elves—individually, they were the weakest race of all.

  For many long years, the lizardmen enjoyed their human hunts.

  Precisely because humans are so weak alone, however, they form groups, using the abilities they do have to the fullest. When it comes to battle, humans get together, using complex strategies and tactics to elevate their collective fighting abilities far beyond what any one of them could do alone. When these advanced human organizations—in other words, nations—collided with the lizards’ large-scale hunts, a huge interracial war broke out.

  And who came out on top in that conflict? Take a guess.

  The cold-blooded lizardmen weren’t well-suited to a long war. They lost battle after battle—in winter, when they were too cold to move readily; in early morning and late evening, when their mobility was at its lowest. Too many lost battles amounted to a lost war, and they were absorbed into human society as slaves, or so Brooke told me.

  “Slaves...?” I could only goggle.

  Scratching the back of his head in embarrassment, Brooke said, “After centuries... of pillage and... looting, what else... would they do? Anyway... we may have loved blood, but now we... we don’t quite have the edge we used to. Our modern position... has taught us the virtues of... living peacefully... And so I’m... quite satisfied with things as they are.”

  “You... You are?”

  Even as I asked, I thought back to the conversation Elvia and I had had earlier. There were those who had been forced to change their traditional ways of life in order to be a part of human society, but that didn’t mean their lives now were nothing but tragedy, crying out to be changed—at least, apparently.

  “Master.” Brooke was whispering and looking from side to side as if he wanted to make sure no one was there. “This is something I could only say to you, but... as luck would have it... I’ve received word from... the Tribal Council... that some of our kin, ones who live... apart from human society... go on raids, like in... the old days...”

  I didn’t answer. Elvia had said something much the same. I suspected there were similar enclaves of elves and dwarves, as well.

  “Even we lizards aren’t... all carved from a single stone... Some aren’t content with our present station... and choose to live as we did before... Just a few. But because we already know... life with the humans... the Tribal Council considered what those lizards... were doing, and declared... that we would abide our current situation...”

  I still didn’t say anything. Had they found it a painful decision to make? Or were they simply running away? I didn’t know. But...

  “Right, then... I’m going t’ make a li’l fire outside... and get some sleep... G’night, sir...”

  “Yeah... Sure. Good night.”

  I watched Brooke shuffle away with his head down. There was a heaviness in my heart. Even after I came back from using the toilet, it still hadn’t gone away.

  Something was nagging at me. I couldn’t put it into words, but I felt like I had brushed up against something I should grab onto. As if in an effort to settle what exactly it was, I headed back, not to my own room, but to where Elvia was staying.

  “Elvia,” I called quietly.

  When I came in, there she was, hunched over her art books as always, her hands working silently but furiously. This time, though, I was glad to see that she seemed to notice me come in right away. “Shinichi-sama,” she said. Her tail wagged a little, but she didn’t look back at me.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I just can’t seem to get this right. Do I not have the right supplies or something?”

  This time she looked at me, indicating a book of illustrations lying in front of her. It was open to a page entitled “Coloring with Photoshop.”

  “Oh... Well, uh, I won’t say it’s impossible to get colors like that using a brush, but it’s pretty darn hard.” I smiled apologetically. “I guess you could get a similar effect with an airbrush, but they did those colors using a computer.”

  “What’s an... ayr-brush? And a com-pyoo-ter?” She cocked her head, confused by these new words.

  Our magic rings essentially allowed us to communicate telepathically, but there was one fundamental problem: if the other person had no concept corresponding to a word you used, the ring wouldn’t be able to translate it; it would simply come across as a floating piece of vocabulary.

  Computers were a concept that hadn’t existed in this world until I had brought some over, and airbrushes still didn’t. Elvia, meanwhile, had spent all her time with her books and, as far as I could tell, hadn’t even touched the computer we had installed in the mansion.

  So I could use the word, but she didn’t know it; and she could look at the book, but she didn’t understand what she was seeing.

  “It’s—you know the box on the wall in my office? It lets you create illustrations digitally, connect to the net—well, it would, if we had the net.”

  No sooner had I said this than something which had been only a vague conception in the back of my mind took on a concrete form.

  Yes. Net. Internet!

  Think... China, for example. There’s a country that gives the impression of having absolute control over the flow of information, but it isn’t actually an airtight system. The internet itself is too amorphous and huge for them to be watching every corner of it; there has to be a way out somewhere.

 
As a result, as the internet became more widespread in China, people started to gain access to information that they hadn’t had before. I don’t think the fundamental nature of the Chinese state or people changed because of that—there are still plenty of people who believe only what the government tells them, just as there have always been; and for every person who hates Japan, there’s probably someone who decided Japan was all right.

  But either way, it was their own free choice.

  “So that’s it...”

  I thought I saw the first ray of light piercing my personal darkness.

  I went back to my office and tried to organize my thoughts.

  A ray of light was nothing more than that. In order to escape the darkness, you had to walk toward it, one step after another.

  I tapped away on my keyboard. My thoughts appeared on the screen of my PC—I was just making a list, but even so, taking some vague ideas I’d had and trying to put them into words made them a lot more concrete.

  You know, I thought I remembered my light novel-author dad saying something similar once. While it was all in his head, he told me, it was just fantasy. And as long as you did nothing but mull over those ideas in your mind, you would never escape the realm of fantasy. Your thoughts only took on form when you entrusted them to some kind of tool that would communicate them to others, be it words or art or music. It didn’t matter if you were just writing a note or shooting the breeze—getting an idea out of your own brain and into the world was the true first step to creating something.

  What was I trying to create?

  It was...

  “Um... Master...?”

  The trembling voice that called out to me was not very loud, but I had been so focused on my typing that it took me by surprise. I jumped a little and looked back at the door to the room.

  “Myusel...?”

  It was awfully late already. Never mind Elvia, whose power switch seemed to be permanently on, and Brooke, with whom it was always hard to tell if he was awake or asleep. I had been sure Myusel would be sleeping by now.

  “You’re still up?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir. Um... May I come in?”