Outbreak Company: Volume 12

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “We’re home!” we said.

  “Welcome back.” Myusel was waiting for us in the foyer, as she always was. “Master, Hikaru-sama, Minori-sama. You’ve had a long day.”

  “We’re doing okay, Myusel. Anything unusual happen while we were away?”

  “No, nothing,” she said with the tiniest of smiles. Again, just like always. And yet... “Dinner is ready. You can go straight to the dining area.” She gestured toward the dining room.

  “Well, now,” Hikaru-san said. “A little early.”

  He was right; we usually ate a little later, after we’d had a chance to go to our rooms and collect ourselves. It wasn’t like there was a schedule for dinner, but Myusel always had it ready at about the same time. Maybe she’d just been running a little early today?

  “Okay, sure, sounds good. I’m definitely hungry.”

  Maybe she even had a special reason for wanting dinner ready early. Maybe she’d gotten her hands on some interesting new ingredient she was eager to try. There wasn’t really anything equivalent to a refrigerator over here, so anything that would normally need refrigeration, you had to use quick. It was possible to preserve ingredients by freezing them with magic, but apparently that kind of magic was pretty tricky, and Myusel didn’t know how to do it.

  “Sounds like a plan. Thanks, Myusel,” I said.

  “Not at all.” She nodded and smiled, then turned on her heel. I watched her walk calmly down the hallway. She looked exactly like normal, but... What was it? I had a weird feeling I couldn’t shake. I couldn’t have said why, exactly, but she seemed just a bit off. Something gave me the willies.

  “Myusel...?” I had called her name almost before I knew what I was doing.

  She stopped and looked at me. “Yes, sir?” She gave a tilt of her head as if to say, What is it? Such a sweet, innocent gesture, like a tiny bird; it sure looked like Myusel. So what in the world was this weird vibe I was getting? Hikaru-san and Minori-san were looking at me quizzically; they didn’t seem to think anything was off about Myusel. I shook my head, starting to think that maybe I was the one who had something wrong with him.

  “Er... Never mind. Sorry, forget I said anything.”

  “Of course,” Myusel said with a smile, and headed toward the kitchen. I watched her walk away.

  Minori-san edged up to me and whispered, “Whatsa matter? Huh, Shinichi-kun?”

  “Uh, well...” I had to stretch to find the words. “Something just feels... weird. Myusel... It’s like I don’t even know her.”

  “Oh, please,” Hikaru-san said, obviously annoyed. “Don’t tell me you’re feeling guilty.”

  “Why would you think I’m feeling guilty?”

  “Because a person with a prickly conscience starts to think even the most normal expressions and gestures of the people around them look different somehow.”

  “I haven’t done anything to feel—”

  But before I could finish my sentence, it struck me. The reason Myusel seemed so strange: she was too normal.

  The last few days, Myusel hadn’t quite been herself. I had gotten the distinct impression that she was worried about what was going on between me and Petralka. She had been doing and saying things to communicate that she cared about me, even if the net result was to make her seem a bit anxious and unsettled.

  But now, all that was gone. I felt like some kind of rug had been pulled out from under me.

  “Uh, never mind, I’m sure you’re right. It’s all in my head,” I said.

  “Ahh, ready to admit that your guilt is eating you alive?”

  “I’m not admitting anything!” I howled, but Hikaru-san just smirked.

  When we got to the kitchen, our noses filled with the delicious aroma of food. The long table was crowded with dishes. They must have been very fresh, because in addition to the enticing smells, several of the plates were still steaming. Whatever else might be going on with her, Myusel obviously hadn’t lost her knack for cooking.

  I’d heard that one of the keys to being a good chef was the ability to run your kitchen efficiently. If you just made one thing, then another, the first dish would be cold by the time the last one was ready. You had to know how to apply a limited number of cooking utensils and a finite amount of time to get the best results.

  In any case, when Myusel had said dinner was ready, I hadn’t realized she meant all set out and looking gorgeous, too.

  “Gosh, she’s really ahead of schedule,” Minori-san whispered to me as we sat down.

  “Myusel?” I asked, perplexed. She was standing against the wall of the dining area. “What’s wrong?”

  “What...?”

  “Everything’s set, right? Go ahead and sit down.”

  Maybe she was waiting for the others—for Elvia, Brooke, and Cerise. Maybe. It was certainly true that I didn’t see our voracious beast girl anywhere, and she was usually the first to come running for dinner. But Myusel, besides making us food, kept the whole huge house clean, washed seven people’s worth of clothes, bedsheets, and so on, and handled all the other little things that had to be done in the mansion. She’d never complained to me, but it wasn’t light work. She must have been tired. I was sure no one in this house would be upset if she went ahead and sat down.

  Huh? Wait...

  There was so much food set out that at first I hadn’t noticed it. But was this just for three people? On closer inspection, I realized only three places had been set with utensils. There was no spot for Elvia, Brooke, or Cerise, let alone Myusel herself. So she wasn’t expecting anyone but me, Minori-san, and Hikaru-san to eat? But it got even stranger.

  “Yes, sir...” Reluctantly, Myusel sat in an open chair. But there were no place settings, so she had nothing to do there.

  “Myusel, are you... feeling all right?”

  “Er? Yes, sir, I’m fine.”

  “Yeah? Good...” I said, but the uneasy feeling I had just kept getting worse.

  That was when Elvia came bounding into the dining area, exclaiming, “Man, am I hungry! Can I get a little preview bite of—” But she stopped, surprised, when she saw the dining room table. “Already good to go? Wow, you’re killing it tonight!”

  Elvia didn’t have what you would call the best fuel efficiency in the house, and she often showed up in the dining room or kitchen, pestering Myusel for a little something to eat before dinner. But her reaction proved that Myusel hadn’t told her dinner was ready. And it would hardly have mattered anyway, because her place wasn’t set with a knife or fork. So... had Myusel not expected Elvia to join us for dinner? Why not?

  “Gotta say, I wouldn’t mind having dinner at this time every day,” Elvia said, flopping down into a chair and looking around eagerly, sniffing the aromas of the food. She always liked to start by smelling what she was going to eat; it reminded you that she really was a werewolf, part beast.

  At length, though, she looked around in confusion. “Huh?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, uh...” Elvia’s gaze went from me to Myusel, then to the wealth of food on the table. “There’s just this... kind of weird smell...”

  “Weird smell?”

  “Where from?” Hikaru-san asked.

  “Ummm...” Elvia slowly pointed at the food on the table.

  Hikaru-san, Minori-san, and I looked at each other. We hadn’t smelled anything unusual. We each focused on the odors around us, but there wasn’t anything I would have called “weird.” I guess you had to be a beast person to pick it up. Or maybe she was just imagining things? But...

  “Is somethin’ the matter?” As we all sat there sniffing our food, Brooke and Cerise wandered into the dining area.

  “Maybe? Elvia says there’s a weird smell...”

  “A smell?” Brooke echoed.

  “Brooke!” Cerise shouted, suddenly alert. I had never heard her raise her voice before. She had been about to sit down, but had frozen in place, as if she had realized she’d been about to spring a trap. Brooke, too, st
opped—and then he abruptly reached out for the food on the table. He didn’t say anything to us; didn’t make any sound at all, in fact. But these obviously weren’t the actions of someone who was just too hungry to restrain himself. For starters, Brooke didn’t even like the same food we did.

  “Impossible...” He brought the food to his nose and inhaled deeply. Then his long tongue emerged from his toothy mouth, and he licked it.

  “Brooke?”

  “Master, I must ask you to get away from the food—away from this table,” he growled.

  “What...?”

  “Do it, all of you,” Cerise said, her voice hard.

  Our resident lizardman couple rarely showed much emotion. Or maybe more accurately, they were just biologically so different from humans that they showed emotion in entirely different ways. So to me, Brooke and Cerise often looked sort of expressionless. But now, their agitation was obvious. It practically radiated off them—they were serious like I had never seen.

  “Wh-What’s going on?”

  “This food is poisoned,” Brooke said.

  That just about blew my mind. “P-Poisoned?!”

  Poisoned, like, poisoned? Like, eat it and die? No, wait. There were lots of kinds of poison. Not all of them killed you... at least not right away. But if it had Brooke and Cerise this excited, then it was no small matter.

  “Wh-What about you, Brooke?! Are you going to be all right?!”

  “It won’t work on me,” he said confidently.

  “Because it’s a lizardman concoction,” Cerise added. “An old draught we used to use when we were fighting the humans.”

  A lizardman poison? Was that similar to what a venomous snake produced? Or was it, like, a secret recipe for a poison passed down among the lizardmen? Either way, it worked against humans—and was potent enough to have been used in war. The chances that this was the kind of poison that killed you immediately were starting to look pretty good.

  “But it works very well on humans, and anyone built like a human—elves and werewolves, say,” Brooke went on. “One lick of that food could be perilous. Don’t touch it.”

  “We have to assume the poison is on all the food,” Cerise said.

  I nearly choked. I could hardly believe it—didn’t want to believe it—but why would Brooke and Cerise lie about something like this? Poison on all the food, though—you couldn’t taint all the food by sprinkling some poison around when no one was looking. Or even by slipping one bad ingredient into a bunch. Which meant...

  “This poison... Myusel...?” The astonished whisper came from Elvia.

  All of us looked at Myusel. She had been sitting silently on looking at the food, but as our collective gaze fell on her, she stood up and shook her head emphatically. “N-No! I s-swear it wasn’t me!”

  “It... It wasn’t...?” Of course it wasn’t. Myusel would never do something like this. It was unimaginable, impossible. But then... who?

  “Master!” As I stood there dithering, Myusel threw herself at me, burying her face in my chest.

  “M-Myusel?!”

  “Please believe me! I would never...”

  “Whoa, hey, I—?!”

  Er, uh, Myusel? With you being so... so close to me and all, my galaxy is in danger of this and that and/or/but it’s a veritable ecstasy, right? And I don’t know if this very tense, very difficult time is the right moment for that...

  “Master...!” Myusel looked at me beseechingly. Her lavender eyes swam with tears, her pale cheeks were flushed, and she looked truly desperate. I couldn’t deny that there was a certain sexiness to—geez, I really am a lost cause, aren’t I?!

  “Please, please believe me, I beg you! I would never try to poison the master I love...!” I could feel her hand creeping around toward my back... My back?

  I took Myusel by the shoulders and shoved her away.

  “Mas—”

  “Who... are you?”

  “Wha...?” Myusel’s brimming eyes got even wider. Like she couldn’t believe I was asking that. Couldn’t believe I would ever ask such a thing. Her face was frozen in a mixture of horror and despair, as if she had been betrayed by the one person she thought she could trust.

  No. Something was wrong. This wasn’t Myusel. Whoever was talking to me now, it wasn’t the Myusel I knew.

  “I—I’m Myusel Fourant...”

  “No, you aren’t,” I said.

  Myusel had never been so calculating. She wasn’t capable of it. Desperate as she might be to convince me of her innocence, she would never suddenly throw herself on me, wrap her arms around me. And she would absolutely never refer to me as “the master I love.” Not even when she might have gotten away with it, and certainly not here. If she’d been able to say such a thing, then she wouldn’t have had to stand around awkwardly with me the other day. But as it was, hyper-conscious of her birth and her station in life, she couldn’t even bring herself to say that she liked me.

  “I knew something was wrong here,” I went on. “The moment we sat down, I wondered why there was only human food on the table.”

  “What...?” Myusel—or whoever it was pretending to be Myusel—froze with surprise.

  “Werewolves and lizardmen, they don’t like quite the same things as humans. So Myusel always makes something special just for each of them. But today, all the food on the table was for humans to eat. You didn’t even set places for Elvia, Brooke, or Cerise.”

  It only made sense. Of course this imposter wouldn’t know that in our household, everyone ate together: masters and servants, regardless of who or what you were. That was why “Myusel” hadn’t sat down with us, but had stayed waiting by the wall. It was what she would do if this household was like every other mansion in Eldant. But it wasn’t.

  “Master...” She gazed at me, and she really did look just like Myusel. If she were to stand still, without saying anything, I would never have been able to tell her from the real thing. Or... what if she was the real thing, but under someone else’s control?

  “Shinichi-kun!” Suddenly, Minori-san grabbed me from behind by the collar.

  “Hrgh?!” I choked a little—as a flash of silver light whipped in front of my eyes.

  I almost choked again, this time because I realized the flash was a knife that Myusel had swung at me. I sat where I had fallen on my behind on the floor, numb, hardly able to believe what I was seeing.

  “Pfah.” Myusel gave a disappointed cluck as the knife swept through empty air where my neck had been an instant before.

  A “disappointed cluck”? Myusel? What? What was going on here? Where had she even been hiding that knife? Okay, forget that. More importantly, most importantly: Myusel was trying to kill me? But this Myusel wasn’t Myusel, so—arrgh, none of this made any sense!

  “Get up!” Minori-san tugged again, this time on my arm, dragging me to my feet. She moved in front of me protectively. Hikaru-san stood flanked by Brooke and Cerise, who looked ready to fight. Even Hikaru-san looked a little queasy about this turn of events.

  “Myusel!” Something moved on the edge of my vision. It was Elvia. She was flying toward Myusel. “Take this!” Myusel stabbed at Elvia with the knife, but the beast girl ducked low in a dodge, then smacked Myusel’s right hand from below, sending the knife spinning through space until it buried itself in the ceiling. “The hell’s wrong with you?!” Despite her confusion, Elvia grabbed Myusel’s wrists to restrain her.

  Myusel, though, ignored her immobilized hands—she brought up her right leg and launched a kick at Elvia. The attack showed an agility—and a ruthlessness—that could never have come from the real Myusel. Her skirt billowed up, blinding Elvia. It allowed the kick to connect with the werewolf’s solar plexus.

  “Gah!” With a sharp exhalation, Elvia let go of Myusel’s hands and stumbled backwards. Without missing a beat, Myusel pointed her palms at Elvia and exclaimed, “Tifu murottsu!”

  She must have had the spell ready to go from the moment Elvia caught her wrists. A massive gust
slammed into Elvia, so fast and so powerful that even her beast person reflexes couldn’t help her. She was slammed against the wall, hard.

  “Hrgh...”

  “Elvia!” I exclaimed. I was about to rush over to her, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw Myusel’s hands again, this time pointed at me.

  “Tifu murottsu!”

  It might have been low-level magic, but if it was good enough for the military to teach as an attack, then it was nothing to sneeze at. I was already a little off balance, and like Elvia, the blast of wind sent me flying. I (along with a nearby chair) hit the wall, and I collapsed to the ground, the air knocked out of my lungs.

  “Ergh... gah...” My back hurt. My chest hurt. It was hard to breathe, and my head was spinning. I tried to run through a checklist of body parts to make sure I still had everything, but I could hardly think clearly enough to do it. I looked at the room through a haze of red. Minori-san had been thrown into a corner. She must have taken the brunt of the magical attack trying to cover me. The caster of Tifu Murottsu has some control over exactly how powerful it is, but Myusel obviously wasn’t holding back. Otherwise it wouldn’t have gotten both of us.

  “Myusel!” Brooke cried, still standing guard over Hikaru-san. He made to tackle her like Elvia had done, but stopped when Myusel took a couple of long, quick strides over to me and put a foot on my neck. The message was obvious: Move, and I break his neck.

  Myusel’s foot was crushing my throat now. Her eyes as she looked down at me were terrifyingly cold.

  Ahh, my Queen, thank you for this reward......... Er, nope! Not the time!

  This was bad. This was very, very bad.

  “Myusel...” I gasped between labored breaths. “I can... see your panties, y-you know...”

  Not the time for that either! What am I even saying?!

  And Myusel didn’t even react! They were, like, right out there!

  Almost emotionless, Myusel reached towards the table, picking up a knife from a place setting. It was just an eating utensil, nowhere near as sharp as the one that was currently residing in the ceiling of the dining area—but with enough force and in the right place, it would be more than enough to kill a person.