Outbreak Company: Volume 12

by Ichiro Sakaki

  As if to make sure it would work, Myusel first stabbed the knife into some of the nearby food. If that poison could kill you by licking it, it could sure kill you if it got in an open wound. Now I was really frightened. She truly meant to kill me, and she knew what she was doing.

  “Myus—”

  My maid looked down at me, expressionless, the way you would look at a rock on the side of the road. I could feel tears running from my eyes. I didn’t want to see Myusel this way. The Myusel I knew might quail sometimes, might not have a lot of self-confidence, but she was always dedicated to whatever she was doing, she was always supremely kind, and more than anything else, she had the cutest smile in the world. She didn’t have it in her to stare that empty, cruel stare at anyone.

  I didn’t want to die. I really didn’t. But even more than that, I grieved at the thought that the last thing I would see would be Myusel staring at me with those unfeeling eyes.

  “Myusel...” I gasped her name, my voice scratching. I thought maybe, just maybe, I saw her shoulder twitch. Or maybe I was imagining it. And then...

  Everything was hazy, like I was trapped in a dream. I could see and I could hear, but it was a tremendous effort to try to think or do anything about what I saw or heard.

  What was I doing?

  Even asking that question took an agonizing amount of time. Everything I saw was fuzzy and out of focus; everything I heard was a meaningless babble of sound, so that I hardly knew what was going on. All I heard was...

  “Myusel...”

  That one word. Myusel. My name. And calling it was... who?

  Ever so slowly, I felt things come into better focus. Gradually, the haze parted, as if I were drifting up from the bottom of a lake.

  I blinked.

  Shinichi-sama. My honored master. The one... the one I served. The one who was more important to me than anyone else.

  But... why? Why was Shinichi-sama fallen at my feet? In fact, it felt like his neck was under my foot. As if I were stepping on him...

  For that matter, what was I doing with this... knife? I was holding it in an icepick grip, but why? We did seem to be in the middle of dinner, but this was the wrong way to hold a knife for eating. It was as if I were about to bring it down and stab something... or...

  Stab. With a knife.

  But what? Who?

  Shinichi-sama............?

  Kill him, I heard someone say in my mind. Kill him, Myusel Fourant. Kill him now, and he will be yours forever.

  Shinichi-sama... would be... mine... for... ever.

  Mine. Forever.

  That... That sounded very good to me.

  Do it! Finish him, quickly!

  But, that was a bad thing. Kill Shinichi-sama? That was not good. I couldn’t do it. I absolutely......... absolutely couldn’t.

  Kiiiillll hiiiiim.......!

  No. I couldn’t.

  The hand holding the knife began to tremble, as if revealing the turmoil within me. Kill Shinichi-sama? I could never...

  Fine, said the voice in my head. In that case: raise your right hand.

  Yes. Yes, of course.

  And then bring it down as hard as you can.

  Yes, I understood.

  I raised the hand with the knife, as I had been instructed. Then I would bring it down. It was simple. I would bring it down on—

  On Shinichi-sama. I caught my breath.

  “No...!” I used my left hand to grab my right, which felt as if it didn’t belong to me anymore. It was pressing down so hard, though, that I couldn’t restrain it; the knife reached Shinichi-sama... “St-Stop this!”

  Bam! A sound like a thunderclap rang in my ears. At the same time, I felt a sharp pain shoot through my hand. I stumbled and collapsed beside Shinichi-sama, and the knife I’d thought I had such a firm grip on went tumbling through the air and landed on the ground.

  The pain seemed to drive something out of me; the haze that had been clinging to my brain suddenly dispersed.

  I grasped that I had been shot with a gun. More accurately, it wasn’t me, but the knife, that had been shot. I felt a mingled numbness and pain from my hand, but no trickle of blood. Minori-sama, she must have...

  I caught my breath: everything suddenly snapped back into focus. The kaleidoscope of meaningless pieces slammed into coherence. I realized what I had been about to—

  “Shinichi-sama?!” I turned to Shinichi-sama, who was lying beside me. I moaned when I saw the little scratches on his face, his cheeks. “No—Shinichi-sama?!”

  Had I—had my hand, with the poisoned knife...?

  “Myusel...?” Shinichi-sama said my name. “You’re... You’re back... Good...”

  “Shinichi-samaaaa!”

  He was going to die! There had to be something I could do. There had to.

  The poison—maybe I could remove the poison.

  I leaned against Shinichi-sama and put my lips to the wounds on his cheek. I began to suck out the blood. I could taste the sharp tang of it as it entered my mouth; I spat it out, then took another mouthful and spat that out, too.

  “Myus...”

  I didn’t answer. When I had been in the military, they had taught me the very basics of how to deal with poison. Whether a poison would be lethal or not was a question of quantity. There was a lethal dose of every poison, a minimum amount that had to be present in order to do its deadly work. Less than that, and not only would it not be effective: properly diluted, some poisons could even have medicinal applications, they had taught me. If I could suck out enough of the poisoned blood, I might be able to bring it down below the lethal threshold. That was all I could hope for now.

  And so I...

  “Myusel.”

  Somebody was calling my name from behind me, taking my shoulders, as I kept sucking at the wound, spitting out the blood, again and again.

  “Myusel, you’ve done your part. Move aside, please.” It was Cerise-san, who pulled me away from Shinichi-sama. “This will do more good.” She handed me a bowl. There was a red liquid in it, almost like blood... “It’s my blood. It should help neutralize the poison.”

  “The poison doesn’t work on us because our blood naturally neutralizes all poisons. And being that toxin came from the lizardmen to begin with...”

  I had no time to listen to Brooke-san’s explanation. I took the bowl from Cerise-san, sipped the blood, and then...

  Then I put my lips to Shinichi-sama’s and let it out into his mouth.

  Work. Please, work. Shinichi-sama, don’t die. I’m begging you, don’t leave us.

  That was the only thought in my mind as I held tight to Shinichi-sama. Perhaps it was the effects of the poison that caused him to begin spasming gently.

  When I came to, I found myself on one of the living room sofas. I guess only enough of the poison had gotten into my blood to put me to sleep instead of killing me. I didn’t know much about poisons in this world, let alone poisons that came from lizardmen, but Myusel had sucked out much of it and Cerise had given me her blood with its toxin-neutralizing qualities—and this stuff still knocked me clean out for a while. It had been serious, fast-acting stuff. I trembled to think what would have happened if I had actually eaten any of that food. Talk about your narrow escapes.

  I looked around as things came back into focus, and there was my maid beside the sofa, in a posture of abject apology.

  “Um... Myusel?” I said. “What... What are you doing?”

  “M-Master, I... I...” Myusel wouldn’t even look up; she kept her face pressed to the floor. She seemed to feel she didn’t have the right to look at me. I knew she was trying to apologize, but I was starting to feel guilty myself just looking at her. “...I’ve done... the most terrible thing...”

  Presumably she meant the whole trying-to-poison-us thing.

  “What the heck happened?” I asked. It did appear to be Myusel herself, and not some imposter, who had poisoned the food and then tried to stab me. I also remembered, however hazily, Myusel trying to
get the poison out of the wound on my cheek and then helping me drink Cerise’s blood. So it didn’t seem like she had just snapped and decided to murder me.

  ...Er, wait.

  Ahem. Uh.

  I also seemed to remember she had gotten Cerise’s blood into my mouth by putting it into her mouth and then...

  So, uh, ahem, well, was this... was it sort of... my first k-k-k—

  Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?!

  Was it?! And with Myusel?! Had we really—?!

  I mean, I wasn’t unhappy that it was with Myusel—in fact, that was great, but—arrgh, dammit, thanks to that poison, I could hardly even remember what it had felt like! That was no fair! And it didn’t even taste like lemon, it tasted like blood! Yes, poison-neutralizing blood for which I was very grateful to Cerise, but still! I wanted a do-over!

  As I was busy mentally crying out to some god somewhere:

  “Myusel...” Minori-san crouched down next to Myusel, who was still trembling so hard you could hear her teeth chattering. “It’s okay. We know you would never try to kill Shinichi-kun.”

  That finally got Myusel to at least raise her head. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying.

  “We know it wasn’t you, so tell us,” Minori-san said. “What happened?”

  “What happened...” Myusel blinked her moist eyes and tried to think. Finally she said, “J-Just outside the mansion, I met a fortune-teller... She said she would tell my future using her crystals. She said to look into the crystals, and then...”

  “Some kind of hypnosis, maybe. Or mind-control magic?” Hikaru-san said. He was standing behind Minori-san, his arms crossed. “If there is such a thing.”

  Yeah... Magic. Magic that would let you control someone’s mind or spirit. That would explain why Myusel, the real one, had suddenly tried to murder me. She was doing it against her will; someone who wanted to get at me had made Myusel her tool.

  “That’s a good question. I’ve seen Tifu Murottsu, of course, and I’ve seen people start fires with magic, but I’ve never seen any kind of mind-control spells. Does that sort of thing even exist? Come to think of it, don’t the magic rings prove that there is magic that can interact with a person’s brain?”

  “Magic for the domination of someone’s heart or mind is not much known in Eldant...” The comment came from Brooke. “But I have heard that a tradition of such magic exists in the Kingdom of Zwelberich. It’s said they use it to control their demi-human slaves.”

  “Control their... demi-human...”

  We already knew that discrimination against demi-humans was rampant in Zwelberich. But discrimination like that always ran the risk of making the subjugated people so angry that they finally rebelled. I guess Zwelberich used mind-control magic to keep that from happening. For those slaves, it must have been like being chained and bound without any physical restraints at all.

  “So Zwelberich...”

  “Hold on,” Minori-san said. “We don’t know that they’re behind this. This was an extremely sophisticated assassination attempt. We can’t jump to conclusions just based on what we think. All the more so if it involves politics from this world. One wrong move, and this could turn into an international incident between Eldant and Zwelberich.” Minori-san took Myusel by the arm and hauled her to her feet. “First things first. Let’s go to the castle. If someone is really out to get you, Shinichi-kun—if they commit a large number of troops, or set the mansion on fire, or who knows what—then I won’t be able to protect you alone. The castle is a well-defended, public place where I have to assume they won’t want to try anything if they don’t have to.”

  “Good idea. I’ll... I’ll go get ready.” Still finding it slightly difficult to breathe, I forced myself up off the sofa.

  So that was the story. Brooke ran to call us a bird-drawn carriage, into which we duly climbed and headed for the castle. “We” included me and Hikaru-san, as well as Minori-san and Elvia for bodyguards. Myusel was there, too; we would need her to explain what had happened. Not to mention that now that the assassination had failed, there was a chance Myusel herself would be targeted, to keep her from telling anyone what she knew.

  “I hope Brooke and Cerise will be okay,” I said quietly. I felt the carriage rocking softly under my feet. Partly because you could only fit so many people in a carriage, and partly out of concern that the culprit might come back to the mansion, we had left Brooke and Cerise to guard the house.

  “They’ll be fine,” said Minori-san, who sat beside me with her gun at the ready. She probably figured you never know when the next attack might come. At her feet sat a suitcase with a 9mm machine pistol, smoke bombs, and a variety of other toys. The suitcase itself was bulletproof and could be used as a shield. She looked like she was ready to go to war.

  As for me, I sat between Minori-san and Myusel, with Hikaru-san and Elvia sitting on the bench across from us.

  “Considering our would-be assassin used a poison that doesn’t work on lizardmen, I don’t think she was ever after Brooke or Cerise. She didn’t even know that masters and servants eat together in our house—I don’t think she could have imagined it.”

  “So you think she was from the Kingdom of Zwelberich?”

  “Even in Eldant, it’s not exactly normal for everyone to eat together like that, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Myusel confirmed, shaking her head.

  “You see? That alone doesn’t prove anything. Even the mind-control magic—technology crosses borders easily enough. And we still don’t have any actual evidence.”

  “I... I guess you’re right.”

  Maybe it seems obvious to say, but mind-control magic didn’t leave any physical traces, so we had nothing to submit as evidence. Myusel had said she had been under someone else’s control, but we had to take her at her word, along with the tremendous deviation from her normal behavior. If someone countered that Myusel had decided to kill me of her own volition for some unknown reason, though, we would have no objective way to refute the claim.

  “I assume the culprit had a story in mind,” Minori-san said. “She probably planned to make it look like the demi-human servant finally got sick of her master’s abuse and decided to kill the humans. Lucky for us, we had Elvia to sniff out that poison.”

  Myusel didn’t say anything, but I saw her shudder. She had been the one who made the poisoned food, so maybe she felt like that was a jab at her.

  “Myusel... It’s okay. It’s not your fault,” I said. I hesitated for a moment and then—summoning up extra courage because I was a nasty otaku whose number of years without a girlfriend was exactly equal to his number of years alive—I took her hand.

  “Shinichi-sama...” Myusel looked at me, her eyes damp. Her smile never failed to bring me joy, but this misty-eyed expression—how could I not get moe about this? It was so sweet, and I felt my heart start pounding.

  But, uh, never mind that...

  “You suppose this person didn’t know about Elvia?” Hikaru-san said, looking curious.

  I could see where he was coming from—if our attacker had known there was a werewolf in the house, they wouldn’t have used a poison that could be detected by its odor. It seemed like Elvia didn’t even have an especially exceptional sense of smell by werewolf standards.

  “Who, me?” Elvia looked almost as perplexed as Hikaru-san.

  “Or maybe they misjudged just how good a werewolf’s nose is,” Minori-san said. If the culprit was someone with a low view of demi-humans, it might make sense for them to underestimate demi-human abilities. “Or maybe it’s because Elvia isn’t officially a servant in our household.”

  “Ah, I see,” Hikaru-san said.

  Myusel, Brooke, and Cerise-san were all, on paper, employees of the Eldant state, posted to our house as servants. If the assassin had been looking at employment records while planning her strike...

  “Eldant couldn’t exactly just hire on a former Bahairamanian agent,” Hikaru-san said. “So she wouldn’t be in the paperwo
rk.”

  We had managed to win Elvia over to our side, but in principle, she was still an active spy for Bahairam. Call her a double agent of a sort. That had benefits for Eldant, too—or anyway, that was how I’d explained it to Petralka and Garius to get them to go along with it. The effect was that Elvia lived in our mansion, but she didn’t exist in the official records, any more than a stray dog or cat we’d taken in.

  “Well, I’m sure glad she was there,” I said.

  “Aw, you’re makin’ me blush,” she said, giggling a little and scratching the back of her head shyly.

  “The point is, the attempt to poison us failed,” Minori-san said. Her voice was flat, almost like she was reciting from memory. “So the killer went after Shinichi-kun, hoping to at least take him out. If she could do that and then shut Myusel up somehow, she still might be able to make it look like a demi-human maid who’d tried to kill the master she resented. The maid tries to poison the man and fails, and knowing that there’s no escape, she takes herself with him and everything is over... I’m sure that was Plan B.”

  “What was important to this criminal was to make it look like an inside job,” Hikaru-san said. “She could have picked Brooke or Cerise to do it, but she chose Myusel... Maybe she was angling for a love affair gone wrong?”

  “L-Love affair...?” That was awfully blunt!

  “Goes something like this: Myusel and Shinichi-san are an item, but the difference in social status between them means nothing can come of it. They can never publicly proclaim their love, never get married. So one or both of them settles on a suicide pact.”

  “But why would I—why would she—? Who even benefits from that crazy story?” I said. Personally, I thought the abused-servant-gone-berserk thing was more than sensible enough.

  “Why don’t we ask Her Majesty?” Hikaru-san said.

  “What...?” Petralka? Why would we ask her? Did this have to do with the whole thing about Petralka seeing me as a man? I mean, not that I thought she did, but if she did, hypothetically...