Outbreak Company: Volume 2

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “...Er. Sure. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” I actually felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders when I heard that. Garius and Prime Minister Zahar were pretty sharp customers. I had found that they, at the very least, weren’t so attached to old ways of doing things that it caused them to misjudge a situation they were faced with. I shouldn’t have been surprised if they of all people had spotted what was lurking in the shadows of the Japanese government’s sweet talk about “cultural exchange.”

  “But that just makes me more curious...”

  Why go out of their way to help me, then?

  “That question would be better answered by Her Majesty,” Garius said. I looked from him to Petralka.

  “Mm. True enough,” the empress said. She assumed a thoughtful look, frowning slightly and making a noise in the back of her throat. “How shall we put this? Garius may be able to fathom all this, but personally, we find ‘invasion by otaku culture’ to be rather difficult to understand. The spread of new culture always leaves the rubble of the old in its wake, does it not? The idea of using such a force as a tool of invasion is impossibly vague. We have trouble feeling that it’s quite real.”

  “I... I guess you could be right about that.”

  That was exactly what made cultural invasions so terrifying. There was as good a chance as any that by the time people realized what was going on, it would all be over.

  “Neither is it the case,” Petralka went on, “that we in the Eldant Empire mindlessly accept all that we are given. When new culture is absorbed, it is planted in the seedbed of what is already there, until it blooms afresh as a combination of old and new. Our empire is a place of many races, and its traditions are not to be manipulated so easily.”

  She looked, frankly, triumphant—and I smiled at her. “You’re sure right about that.”

  It actually wasn’t that different from Japan. There were times in history when Japan was behind the cultural development curve. It sent emissaries to Sui and Tang, China to learn about foreign culture and bring it back. In fact, they went so far as to proactively seek out foreigners who had left their home countries for one reason or another, especially those with special skills, like engineering.

  Had Japan stopped being Japan at that point? Had it turned into a little piece of China? Of course not.

  The Eldant Empire was the same way. From a certain perspective, Petralka and the others could prevent the culture we brought in from being invasive. As long as the empire handled it with self-awareness, otaku culture would lose its effectiveness as a weapon of invasion.

  All of this was more or less the same conclusion I’d reached.

  “However,” Petralka added with a severe look, “acceptance is viable only when the purveyor of the new culture adopts a humble attitude, as you have done, Shinichi. When instead the ambitious seek to impose their will upon us, culture is arbitrarily distorted, and of course the commoners’ thinking is defiled along with it.”

  That was cultural invasion, indeed cultural pollution. Controlled, not free. Perverted because someone was trying to manage it.

  Culture should, fundamentally, be free—that was why I had deliberately decided not to try to force anyone to adopt what I was introducing. The people who liked it would take it, and those who didn’t could leave it. That was all. But in a way, that was everything.

  “Shinichi,” Petralka said with a smile. “That is why we—the empress, the Eldant Empire—chose you to be the one who brought us this new culture.”

  I was silent. Maybe the previous day’s audience had been a test—a test for me, to find out whether or not I was really an invader in the Eldant Empire.

  “This is strange,” the guard commander muttered. “Observers six and ten are blind. There were supposed to be fifteen enemies, but I only count eleven tied up.”

  This provoked an immediate reaction from Garius. “No! Check all the Observers, immediately!”

  More than twenty of the magical creatures had been positioned inside and outside the mansion, broadcasting what they were seeing to us. Even if one of them went down by some accident—caught by a stray bullet, for example—there was no way we should have lost track of the entire JSDF unit.

  Meaning...

  “Huh?”

  There was a clatter as something fell at my feet. It was on the large side, like a 500-milliliter bottle of cola. I reflexively looked in the direction the object had come from and saw that the door to the store room—the door to our little think tank—was slightly ajar.

  “Crap!”

  I went stiff; Garius was bug-eyed with shock.

  About a second later, the tear-gas grenade blew, filling the room with white smoke.

  I suppose I should be grateful for the special ops guys’ restraint. If that had been a regular hand grenade, or maybe an incendiary bomb, we would have been blown to smithereens. But instead, the soldiers stayed faithful to their stated objective of killing no one except the target (me, in case you forgot) and otherwise keeping casualties to a minimum. True, the guys ambushed by the Maid Brigade eventually opened fire, but still.

  The room filled with a white haze. My eyes, my nose, the inside of my mouth—every exposed surface felt like it was being stuck full of needles. My eyes were running with tears—I knew I needed to be able to see clearly, but it was a biological response that I couldn’t control. So my vision blurred, and I lost track of what was what. And that was before the violent coughing started.

  My ears, at least, still seemed to be working; I could hear someone else coughing, too. At the moment, though, I didn’t have the slightest idea who was. Myusel? Petralka? Garius? The lady commander? No idea. No time to care, either. Tear gas may be a parade example of a non-lethal weapon, but it’s not pleasant, not by a long shot. I thought I even remembered reading somewhere that a person with a weak respiratory system could die from inhaling it.

  If we got any more gas in this room, we were going to be out of options.

  “The window!” I heard Petralka shout. “Open the window!”

  She had seen me use the fire extinguisher during that terrorist attack, and she must have figured tear gas was something similar. An instant later...

  “Tifu Murottsu!”

  I heard Myusel’s voice, accompanied by the punch of a wave of magic. The window, frame and all, was blown away with a wumph. I could just make it out through my tear-streaked vision. When it occurred to me that the incantation for this spell took close to a minute, I realized Myusel must have been preparing this magic since the moment I had first cried out on seeing the tear gas canister.

  The impact flushed the gas out of the room. Myusel had both her hands out in front of her, her eyes streaming with tears, no doubt from the gas.

  But there was no time for a sigh of relief. A dark shape loomed in front of me. I took a step back.

  It was a JSDF soldier wearing a gas mask.

  From the “Protect Gear” of The Red Spectacles to the soldiers of Fallout to the stormtroopers of Star Wars, this sort of equipment has always been played for how intimidating it is up close. It looks so nearly human that its inhuman elements are somehow heightened.

  I gulped. He was so close I could have reached out and touched him. Plus, he was holding a 9mm handgun.

  If he decided to shoot me, there was no way he would miss. I was sure he was well-trained, too. I went pale, feeling like my consciousness might be sucked down that yawning black barrel. It’s kind of embarrassing—but in this case, it also saved my life.

  I collapsed to my knees.

  There was a huge roar inches above my head. You could hardly have fit a sheet of paper between me and that bullet; I felt the air tremble as it went by. Absolutely terrifying me, of course.

  “Master!” Myusel shrieked. Then, “Tifu Murottsu!”

  She invoked the spell again (just as a note, I gathered that when you cast the same spell twice, you could significantly shorten the incantation), and the soldier was blown backward. He
tried to fire a second time, but the shot went off in some random direction, smashing through the wall and scattering debris.

  There was still no time for a sigh of relief. I looked up to see another soldier, not three meters from me.

  “Shinichi!” Petralka shouted. At the same moment, something came flying by.

  It was a knight. The knight. Garius.

  He had his blade out as fast as if he were in a duel, and cut at the soldier. The sword as such was stopped by the blade-proof vest, but the momentum of the attack from such a short distance meant there was bound to be some force behind it. The trooper was thrown off-balance—and a second later, a morning star buried itself in his head.

  It was the female commander.

  Normally a weapon like that would crush the skull and snuff out the victim’s life. This JSDF man could thank his helmet that he would wind up with nothing more than a concussion. There was no visible blood, but he slumped to the floor and stopped moving.

  But there were still two soldiers left.

  “Drop your weapons!” they cried.

  They had gotten the wall behind them, and they were carrying Type 89s.

  The Type 89 is a high-tech assault rifle the JSDF is pretty proud of. Just flip a switch, and it spits out 5.56mm bullets like a machine gun. Almost irresistible for spraying a room with suppressive fire.

  These soldiers had two of those guns, and they were both pointed right at me.

  Petralka and the others, of course, couldn’t understand exactly what the soldiers were saying. But under the circumstances, it wasn’t hard to guess what they meant.

  Everyone froze. Neither Garius nor the commander, however, laid down their arms.

  “Weapons down, I said!” one of the soldiers shouted.

  But me? I was looking out the now-absent window.

  “Guys,” I said, “I think you’re the ones who’d better put down your weapons.”

  An instant later, two arms were protruding from the wall beside the soldiers.

  I don’t mean figuratively or metaphorically or whatever. Just, suddenly a couple of scaly, blue arms with huge claws had punched through the wall.

  The astonished soldiers were too slow to react. Even as they cried out, one hand grabbed each of their necks—firmly. I told you, right? Bullet- and blade-proof vests can protect you from, well, bullets and blades, but there are plenty of other ways to attack a person. Those vests didn’t come up to their necks, anyway.

  “Hrgh... Gah!”

  From where we previously had three windows, we now had a collection of lizardmen piling into the room. There were almost a dozen of them. They quickly moved to surround the JSDF soldiers and confiscated their guns.

  “Master.” One lizardman, even bigger than the others, emerged from the middle of the circle. It was Brooke. “Please forgive the delay.”

  The two soldiers had already been virtually stripped of their weapons and equipment. But Brooke nodded, and almost as if to add insult to injury, the lizardmen pulled something new in through the window.

  Two people, tied up with rope: Matoba-san and Minori-san.

  “Dammit...” Maybe the soldiers had finally resigned themselves to their situation, because they put up their hands helplessly.

  Then...

  “Koganuma-kun.” Matoba-san glanced back at Minori-san. Despite the fact that he was tied up, he didn’t look remotely upset or nervous. In fact, he had a sort of dry smile on his face. “I’m sure someone was supposed to be keeping watch in the direction our lizard friends attacked from... Wasn’t it you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Minori-san said nonchalantly. “I have no excuse. I was keeping watch, but... well, it’s like you say, Bureau Chief, sir. They’re lizards. They’re hard to detect with infrared night vision.”

  Incidentally, I didn’t think that was true. Yes, lizardmen were cold-blooded, their body temperature dropping when the ambient temperature went down. But I assumed the night vision equipment employed by JSDF—the special forces, no less—was third-generation passive stuff. That means it would use black-body radiation to detect the infrared rays emitted by all physical objects and turn them into visible light. It couldn’t give you full color, but it wasn’t any worse than watching a black-and-white television. The other guy wouldn’t be invisible just because he was cold.

  On top of that, lizardmen really had variable body temperatures; biologically they could be considered ectotherms. By staying in a warm place, they could build up body heat to a fair extent and preserve it for longer than you might think. It’s the same sort of thing turtles and lizards do when they bask in the sun. I knew, of course, that Brooke built his campfires for much the same reason.

  And on top of that, even if lizardmen really could “blend in” on night vision equipment by assuming the ambient temperature—well, Minori-san had been in the Eldant Empire for months. She, if anyone, would have known they could do that.

  It was clear that Minori-san, much to my benefit, had purposely ignored the approaching lizardmen.

  Matoba-san, that half-smile still on his face, gave a sigh.

  “Well, isn’t this something,” Brooke said, pounding his own chest. “Doesn’t need magic, you don’t have to start a fire, and it’s lighter than a hot-water bottle.”

  Then he held something out. It was a disposable hand-warmer.

  That’s right: Brooke and his friends had used these to get themselves a little heat and allow themselves to move more quickly. I had actually had Minori-san get them for me from the JSDF in the first place.

  “Kanou Shinichi,” Matoba-san said after a moment. “It seems we must admit defeat, for the time being.”

  I didn’t speak.

  “So, then. What precisely do you plan to do now?”

  “I have a request for you. All of you,” I said.

  Obviously, Matoba-san & co. were in no position to refuse.

  I took a deep breath and looked up. Behind me stood Petralka and Myusel, Brooke, Garius, and lots more besides, from the Maid Brigade to the captured JSDF soldiers, along with Minori-san and Matoba-san. Their collective gaze was fixed on me, and on the communications device in front of me.

  The communications device was already powered on; a staticky sound, like sand being poured over metal, came from the speakers.

  We were at the Eldant training camp—i.e., the place the Japanese military was renting part of, and also where the special ops guys had been temporarily based when they were sent over to assassinate me.

  That’s right: the object in front of me was a digital communication device with encrypting functionality. The special operations unit had brought it over here to help them keep in touch with their superiors.

  “It seems you’ve connected.”

  The static suddenly resolved into a voice, a distinctly serious male voice that definitely sounded like some old guy with an awful lot of authority. If I may elaborate, he sounded like someone who was very used to looking right down his nose at people and chewing them out, twisting the screws with just a word or two.

  The guy on the other end of the line was the big cheese responsible for running the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau. Yet I didn’t even know his name. I didn’t especially want to know, either, because if it turned out to be the prime minister or something, I would probably get so intimidated that I would trip over my own tongue.

  “Good to meet you,” I said as soberly as I could. “My name is Kanou Shinichi, and I run the general entertainment company Amutech. Well, perhaps I should add a qualification: for the time being...”

  No sooner had I said that than there was a loud scoff. It sounded like there was more than one person on the other end of the line.

  “This is treason, plain and simple!”

  “You don’t understand the importance of your work.”

  “If you apologize immediately and do as we say, you may yet be pardoned.”

  And so on and so forth...

  I couldn’t help smiling. Did these gu
ys know they sounded like half-baked villains? I practically expected one of them to say “I’ll give you half the world” or something. They might be politicians, but when it came down to it, they were still only human.

  Their wheedling and threatening sounded like it could’ve come from one of the stupider moments on the floor of the Diet. Heck, it probably had. These guys pretty much talked this way for a living, right?

  Finally—

  “Pipe down for a moment. Let me be our spokesperson.” It was that first voice I’d heard. The other speakers immediately went quiet. “Now then,” the voice said, “Kanou Shinichi.”

  “Yes?”

  “As you can hear, we’re very concerned about the way you’ve gone rogue. We dearly want you to come home.”

  The voice spoke slowly and deliberately; he was choosing his words carefully. I glanced at the JSDF soldiers behind me.

  “Well, you’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

  “I believe there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. Our only interest is that you, the one who has achieved so much in promoting cultural exchange, should make it back to Japan safely. After all, there’s no telling what might happen in some other world.”

  He was beating around the bush, being ambiguous—classic politician.

  “Listen to me, now. We have only your best interests in mind. We’ve had reports that you’ve been neglecting your duties for some days now. Some of us are worried that being sent to an unfamiliar environment so suddenly has had an adverse impact on your psychological state. Come home. We urge you to see a specialist, someone who can evaluate and treat you.”

  So were we just going to pretend the assassination attempt never happened?

  “I’m not biting. Say I come wandering back home—then what? Some unfortunate accident?”

  Maybe one of the soldiers’ guns goes off unintentionally. Maybe a rampaging truck runs me over. Maybe I get stabbed in a random act of violence. Or how about something more prosaic? A very unpleasant bout of food poisoning. A medical mishap that results in my untimely demise.

  “I see you’re the suspicious type.”