Outbreak Company: Volume 2

by Ichiro Sakaki

  Okay. Looking good.

  I was just starting to feel confident when—

  “Wait, Kanou-kun!”

  —there was a shout from the audience chamber door. I turned and looked—and there was Matoba-san.

  “That’s going too f—”

  “Why is that?” I asked, interrupting him.

  I knew, of course, why he would oppose what I was saying. For the Japanese government to take advantage of Eldant’s resources, first they had to brainwash the place with otaku culture, make it their puppet. If the empire were to take control of the industry before that happened, the Japanese government would be out of luck.

  “What, exactly, is going too far?” I pressed.

  “You...” Matoba-san was actually lost for words. At last, with a sour expression, he said, “.........You overstep your authority.”

  Obviously, he couldn’t threaten me outright with the empress and all those nobles in attendance.

  Take that. I felt a nasty little rush as I smirked at the silent Matoba-san.

  “My authority has nothing to do with it,” I said. “The Eldant Empire would be doing everything. I only offered a suggestion.”

  There was no chance now of stopping otaku culture from having an influence on the Eldant Empire. And unless the Japanese government decided to seal off the hyperspace tunnel for some reason, well, it would eventually spread to the rest of this world. I could struggle and fight all I wanted; it wouldn’t change that.

  We’re not just talking about otaku stuff—when culture is accepted by a large number of people, then it spreads, goes everywhere. There’s no arguing with it. Sure, governments have tried from time to time, but that’s how the world works.

  If the people receiving the culture have a choice—if it’s not being forced upon them or withheld from them—then that’s enough. Maybe I could help create an environment where the people of the Eldant Empire, and indeed of this whole world, could choose for themselves. Eventually, otaku stuff would be subsumed, become part of this world’s native culture. After all, what got brought on board and what didn’t was partly a function of the culture and history these people already had.

  “We see. Very interesting,” Petralka said, leaning forward on her throne.

  She seemed to buy into what I was saying, as did Garius. I suspected Prime Minister Zahar, who had always been in favor of cultural exchange, would be on my side as well. And with the empress’s two most powerful advisors in agreement, and the other nobles seeing something to gain, it was going to be almost impossible to stop this from happening.

  Which meant, of course, that now I was pretty much useless. My mission had been to “spread otaku culture,” and it looked like I had just done it.

  Matoba-san couldn’t very well get rid of me publicly. But...

  At that moment, it struck me. I saw that all expression had vanished from Matoba-san’s face, which until now had always had that pasted-on smile.

  And I knew what that meant.

  Chapter Five: Operation Assassination

  23:00 local time...

  In the Eldant Empire, which tended to start and end the day early, this was smack in the middle of the night.

  A curtain of darkness had fallen over the world. A group of men snuck through the bushes, crouching low. The goggles they wore looked crude and out of place, but were equipped with night vision. With their camouflage uniforms and the equipment that covered half their faces, it was hard to make out who they were.

  Their square jaws looked awfully tough, and their muscled bodies were covered in black battle uniforms along with bullet- and blade-proof vests. They were wearing helmets—black too, of course. They practically screamed night raid.

  They were the Central Readiness Force of the Ground JSDF—a special operations unit.

  Much like America’s SOCOM, this was a special unit composed of elite soldiers that essentially reported directly to headquarters. They were the part of the JSDF that specialized in counterterrorism and guerrilla warfare. In other words, covert killings were well within their mandate.

  None of their equipment bore any unit insignia, of course. Those had been deliberately left off. It was obvious why. Let’s just say they hadn’t gotten royal permission to come in-country.

  It was sort of silly, actually. They were the only ones in the Eldant Empire to possess equipment like this.

  The troops moved forward, using hand signals to communicate. They were heading for the employee housing of the parallel-world-first general entertainment company, Amutech. They had already confirmed the location of their target—namely, Kanou Shinichi. The lights in his bedroom had gone out almost an hour ago, and no other lights were to be seen anywhere in the house. Presumably, everyone in the mansion was asleep.

  The squad leader didn’t speak a word, just rested his hand on his shoulder, signaling. One by one, the soldiers advanced on the target house.

  Then one of the soldiers looked up, as if he sensed something. He stiffened—there, in the branches above him, was some kind of round shape. No doubt the thing showed a pale green on the other side of his passive infrared night vision goggles. It was some kind of small bird of prey, no larger than thirty-seven centimeters.

  An owl.

  But it was clearly not the same creature the JSDF trooper knew from his home world. It had no eyes on its head, just one lolling oculus in the center of its stomach. As far as the soldier could tell, the thing defied common sense. He might well have called it a monster.

  “......Ugly little freak,” he muttered. In principle, unnecessary talk was verboten during an operation, but maybe it was simply impossible not to remark on the creature. The men in this unit might be the elite of the elite, but they had never fought in an alternate world, nor even practiced how to operate in one. Most likely, it had only been a few days earlier that they had even learned of the existence of this place.

  Quiet as shadows, the soldiers circled around to the back entrance. The captain pulled a key out of a bag and unlocked the door, and then in they came, not one of them making a sound.

  True, most special-ops forces you see breaking into houses in movies are a little more violent—blowing up walls and piling into rooms and stuff—but that’s when the enemy is expecting them and speed is of the essence. If your targets aren’t on the lookout for you, you want to keep it that way as long as you can, until you’re right up close.

  Real pros use their weapons as little as possible. Minimize casualties, maximize effect: that’s the working rule for a special force.

  The troopers arrived at the bedroom they were targeting and lined up on either side of the door. They nodded silently at each other once more, then one of them grasped the doorknob.

  An instant later...

  “Hrk?!”

  ...the door flew open inward by itself. The trooper was thrown completely off-balance; he probably hadn’t expected anything like this.

  The room lit up like a light switch had been thrown. And there in the very manorial room—

  “Welcome home, Master!”

  —were thirty or so maids.

  Not classic Victorian maids, though—these ladies were dressed anime-style, more of a French-maid vibe. Frills and lace everywhere, skirts that only went down to the knees, outfits that emphasized their chests. White knee-high socks covered their slim legs, and they wore headdresses that were as frilly as everything else they had on. The youngest of them was only right around ten years old, while the oldest seemed to be about in her early twenties.

  Then there were the pointy ears that stuck out from under their hair, the proof that they were elves.

  “Welcome home, Master!”

  They spoke in that special, saccharine tone that maids have—what we might think of as an “anime voice.” Not to mention, our illegal-immigrant friends—namely, the JSDF troopers—weren’t wearing magical translator rings (those were issued by the Eldant Empire), so the words the girls were saying must have sounded awfully strange
to them.

  “The hell...?!” one of the soldiers growled. The prohibition on chatter seemed to have gone out the window.

  In response, the Beautiful Maid Brigade cocked their collective heads. They didn’t seem to know quite what to make of the special-ops force that had burst into the room.

  “I get it. It’s that otaku,” the squad leader said venomously. “So he was using government money to surround himself with women... Where is he now? Having his fun?”

  The man was obviously confused, but he knew there was a serious otaku in here, so maybe he figured it only made sense that the mansion should be home to all kinds of bizarre, possibly depraved amusements.

  The captain turned to his unit and nodded again. “Just ignore the girls. Check if the target’s in the bed.”

  “Roger.”

  With that brief answer, one of the men in black began pushing his way through the sea of maids, his footsteps loud—he was almost on the target now, there was no need to be discreet—and advanced into the room.

  The surprised maids watched the unit move forward; meanwhile, the girls were discussing something amongst themselves. Of course, the JSDF men had no idea what the maids were actually saying. Most people might have guessed, though, that it was something like, “Who are these people?” or, “Goodness, what trouble.” Several of the maids grabbed onto the soldiers, trying to stop them from moving.

  The troopers seemed somewhat confused.

  They were members of the military of Japan—a country that was, for better or for worse, largely peaceful. They had all been raised with the belief that women and children were weak and should be protected. Yes, they had heard the stories from the Vietnam War—episode after episode where American troops had tried to help children, only to have the kids throw hand grenades at them and kill them. But it was very hard to immediately think enemy when confronted with such sweet-looking people.

  “Clear ’em out,” the captain ordered coldly.

  There was an instant’s hesitation on the part of his men, but then they nodded and pulled pistols from the holsters on their belts. They looked weirdly toy-like; they weren’t the JSDF’s standard-issue 9mm handguns, but some kind of taser. One assumed they had been sternly warned to cause as few casualties as possible, other than the target himself, of course. Too many Eldant deaths would make future diplomacy a lot harder.

  Men and maids looked at each other in perplexity. One of the soldiers had turned his taser toward a young woman, but she only smiled and grasped his wrist gently with both hands. The Eldant Empire had no knowledge of guns, so it made sense that she wouldn’t identify it as a weapon. Perfectly normal behavior.

  What came next? Not so much.

  “Hah!” The maid let out and exhalation of breath bordering on a karate yell. And then the JSDF soldier found himself flying over the shoulder of an opponent half his size.

  “Hrgh!”

  The man was caught unawares, leaving him no opportunity to breakfall; he hit the ground hard and, with a grunt, went out like a light. The other elf girls ran toward him, pulling out rope they had hidden in their skirts. The rope moved on its own, like a snake, tying the man up in the blink of an eye.

  “Wha—?!”

  What had happened? The JSDF trooper’s mind probably only went blank for second. Just a second. But a whole second. In a constantly changing situation that demanded nonstop reappraisal and judgment, that was a crucial blank.

  The maids took advantage of this exceedingly brief period to do what they had to do. The JSDF soldiers were tough, and had every kind of technological advantage. The maids grabbed them and threw them, or hugged them from behind and tied them up. The blade- and bullet-proof vests were no use against strangleholds, or impacts to the entire body. That youngest maid grabbed one of the soldiers; he gave a low moan and bent his head back. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but he could probably hear the sound of his own body being choked and crushed—squish-crunch or some similarly unpleasant noise.

  In an eyeblink, half the soldiers were unconscious and out of commission.

  “Wh-Wha—?!” Seeing his men go down one after another, the captain brought his gun to bear. By now, he had probably figured it out: the Maid Brigade wasn’t just some otaku’s pervy little indulgence. They were a trap, set specifically to take care of the special operators.

  “You have permission to fire! Shoot! Shoot!” Apparently, he had decided they didn’t have time to patiently knock out their opponents with the tasers. His unit clicked the safeties off on their suppressed Type 89s and took aim at the maids.

  There was a gunshot. Then another, and another.

  Spent shell casings arced through the air in time with the series of muffled explosions, jangling to a halt on the floor.

  Steel traveling faster than the speed of sound hit the maids, pierced their willowy bodies, driving itself cruelly into flesh, shattering bone, as the targets collapsed to the floor...

  “Th—”

  Gotcha. You can assume that’s what the soldiers expected to happen.

  The reality, though, was totally different.

  “This can’t be!”

  They stopped firing after expending half the ammunition in their clips. The soldiers’ faces were largely hidden by their goggles, making their expressions hard to read, but astonishment and confusion were most likely the order of the day.

  Every single one of the maids was just standing there, perfectly calm and normal.

  The elf girls had all stretched their palms out as if they were shields. A sort of barrier emitting a faint light stood between the elves and the operators.

  “Are they using... magic?!” The captain’s voice was drowned out by the maids, who let out another barrage of karate shouts and fell on the soldiers again.

  “Bwahahahahahahahaha!”

  A laugh that could reach the ceiling bellowed through the room. And who should it be gazing into a crystal ball and cackling like a final boss but Petralka?

  Uh... Actually, I’m a little weirded out by how well that laugh suits her. And that fan in her hand? Total bad-girl look.

  “Hah! They are so predictable! Predictable to a fault!” she said, starting to slap the armrests in her mirth. “They came to finish you off, Shinichi, just as we expected. It seems human minds think alike, no matter which world they come from!”

  We were actually right there in the mansion, but we were camped out in a storage room that I rarely went into. Now we were using it as an impromptu command center, and things looked a little different from usual in here. All the crap had been carried out or shoved up against the wall, leaving a big open space in the middle of the room. A blueprint of the mansion had been unrolled, and about fifty wooden pieces were arranged on top of it.

  Fifteen of them were red, thirty were blue. But there were five that were white. These colors referred respectively to the JSDF, the Maid Brigade, and—yes—us.

  Normally, you only see maps and playing pieces like this for large-scale operations. I had some doubts as to whether all this kit was really necessary for one fight in one mansion, but, eh. I kept them to myself. Three big crystal balls resided against one wall, broadcasting to us, via magic, everything that was seen by our enchanted sneaks, the one-eyed owls.

  Petralka was lounging in a high-backed chair that she had put where she could see all three crystal balls at once, looking quite pleased. Beside her were Garius and the commander of the royal guard, whom we had borrowed from the castle.

  This particular commander was a woman, and the royal guards she commanded were none other than the maids who were currently beating the hand-picked forces of the JSDF silly.

  Given that Petralka was a young woman, the soldiers who served and protected her in the castle were women as well. Many of them were demi-humans (as you’ll recall, both male and female demi-humans often had military experience), and in fact, I gathered that the maids who had been serving us on the terrace the other day had also been among the empress’s
personal guard.

  It was my understanding that these female soldiers had been requested because constantly having burly armed men at your side tended to spoil a mood. I knew that elves were usually good at magical warfare, and when it came to dwarves, even the women had enough power in their small statures to overcome a full-grown human man. They were ideally suited to attend an imperial or noble personage without having to constantly carry a weapon.

  Plus, the maid thing definitely got people to lower their guard. Despite the way they looked, the members of the Maid Brigade were all adults. And the dwarven soldiers may all have seemed like little girls from a human perspective, but I heard some of them had several kids!

  “Even so, I bet they never pictured themselves getting done in by a bunch of maids,” I murmured. It’s not the sort of thing elite military units tend to train for.

  Beside me, Myusel cast her eyes sadly at the ground. “I can’t believe people from Japan really came to kill you. And so many of them... Brooke-san and I alone could never have protected you.”

  Wait, so she had been planning to try to protect me if anything happened? I felt kind of good about that, and kind of bad...

  “Minister Cordobal,” I said, addressing Garius, who stood with his arms crossed beside Petralka, keeping a close eye on the situation. For what it’s worth, the idea for this strategy had come mostly from Petralka, but given that Garius had actual battle experience, he was the one who assumed command.

  “Yes? What is it?” he asked, not looking away from the crystal balls.

  “Why are you doing all this for me? Getting your military involved and everything? I’m just—”

  I left off there. But the silver-haired knight glanced back at me, an incongruous smile on his face. I felt like he could see right through me, see everything.

  “Truth be told, Shinichi, I myself had an inkling of what the Japanese government was aiming at.”