Outbreak Company: Volume 3

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “...And that’s the story,” I told the students. “We’re going to have a friendly match, a bit of a competition... Well, we haven’t settled on what to call it yet, but it’s going to happen.”

  You want to share good news right away, right?

  The basic rules of soccer are easier to remember than those of, say, baseball, but there’s still a lot you have to know to have a proper game. I was hoping to get the students on board right away so that they would start studying up on the rules.

  All I saw in front of me, though, was a sea of blank faces.

  Really, it only made sense: I’d told them there was going to be a match, but what were they supposed to do with that information? A lot of them probably didn’t even know what soccer was—or what sports were, for that matter. Well, I could introduce the concept gradually.

  One person raised his hand as if on behalf of the entire group. “Sensei...” It was, of all people, the elf boy who had been fighting with the dwarf girl earlier. His name was Loek, as I recalled. I could hardly claim to remember all the students’ names and faces, but I made sure to check who this guy was when I was making a note of the fight he was involved in. It looked like he was a pretty big deal with the elves in the classroom, and his reading and writing scores in Japanese were on the high end. You might call him the “student council president” type.

  “Are you saying we’re going to participate in this ‘soccer’?” Loek asked.

  “That’s right.” I nodded. “Basically, our school is going to be hosting.”

  Strictly speaking, it would be the General Entertainment Company Amutech that would be putting on the event, but since Amutech and the school were basically indistinguishable from a personnel perspective, there wasn’t much point in being fussy.

  “But Sensei.” Someone else put their hand up—the dwarf girl who had been the other half of that fight. Romilda, was it? Apparently she was the daughter of one of the dwarf families who had contributed to the building of Holy Eldant Castle, and that made her something unusual—a dwarven noble.

  “From what you’ve said, Sensei,” Romilda went on, “a soccer team is made up of eleven people, right?”

  “That’s right. That’s where we get the Eleven in Inzauma... er, well, you know.”

  “Yes, but there’s more than fifty students.”

  “Ahem. Yes. That is a problem.” I nodded again. “One possibility is to select eleven students from the school. However, I’d like everyone to be able to take part, so I’m thinking more along the lines of having the school field four separate teams.”

  The students muttered and looked around the classroom.

  “That would mean one elf team, one dwarf team, and two human teams. I think, given that some people might feel they just aren’t suited to sports, or someone might get sick or injured and not be able to play, we could go with twelve to fourteen people to a team. That should leave us with four squads.”

  The chatter amongst the students increased.

  Really, I had wanted to have people from all the different races on each team, but on reflection I decided that wasn’t feasible right now. Just imagine elves and dwarves on the same side: there might not be any team left after a while. I was afraid we would find the friendly had gone out of our friendly match.

  “So I guess that sort of makes it a three-way battle between elves, dwarves, and humans.”

  The students remained confused, and I could see why. I had always been against anything that smacked of racial hostility or discrimination in my classroom, and Minori-san had backed me up on that. The students seemed to have grasped, perhaps in spite of themselves, that their teachers weren’t very happy about bickering between the races. So it was only natural if they were a little surprised to hear me talk about something like a “three-way battle” between the different races.

  “Just to be clear,” I said pointedly, “this is a nice, clean competition with no mean-spiritedness. A fair fight. Forget social status, forget everything. Anyone can win. Give it everything you’ve got—it would be disrespectful not to.”

  I was concerned that, in light of their differing social statuses, the elf and dwarf teams might hold back against the humans. Then our tournament wouldn’t help build friendship; it might even foster resentment.

  “Remember, though, a sports game isn’t an actual fight. Punching, kicking, and violence aren’t allowed—nothing that would hurt another player. You have to obey the rules if you want to win.”

  There was hardly a peep. The students appeared to be thoroughly baffled. This wasn’t the way to get buy-in. So, with a hint of desperation, I sweetened the deal:

  “Oh, say, there’s one other thing. The empress herself will be watching this game. An exhibition before the throne, you might call it. I’m sure Her Majesty will notice whoever wins... and incidentally, the winning team also gets a batch of the newest merchandise from Japan.”

  There was a collective intake of breath, and the students’ eyes began to shine.

  “Do you mean like a 3TS or PLP?!”

  “Huh?” Those were both names of handheld game systems, but I was surprised to hear them out of the blue like that.

  “What games do they come with?”

  “I hear you can play Monster Buster 2 on the PLP!”

  “Oh, uh...”

  For a second, I wasn’t sure what to say. The 3TS and the PLP didn’t currently exist in the Eldant Empire. We had a couple of PCs and a couple of game consoles at school, and the students could play games during their free time, but I didn’t think they had ever seen a portable system. So how could they be asking for them?

  It had to be because devices like those were routinely depicted in manga and anime and novels and games set in modern Japan. If you looked at how the machines were shown as being used, it would be easy enough to deduce that they were video game consoles. It was just a short hop from that to the desire to actually see and use one yourself.

  So you have something that they knew about, but couldn’t get their hands on; something that would allow them to play games not just at school, but at home. Sure, anyone would want that.

  Wait a second, though... There had been next to no reaction to my announcement that the empress would be watching the game, but drop in something about some new Japanese stuff, and everyone went crazy. I decided it was less the students themselves than their parents who were eager to cozy up to the throne. The kids just liked otaku culture. They were less interested in the power and authority it might bring them in the future and more in how diverting it could be.

  I glanced at Minori-san. “Would it be... possible... to get enough for everybody?”

  As you might guess from my conversation with Matoba-san the other day, after the whole trying-to-kill-me thing, relations with the Japanese government had cooled, and it wasn’t clear yet if they would continue to ship me whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. So far, as long as I had gone officially through Matoba-san, they had sent me my stuff, but if I suddenly asked for eleven handheld game devices and software to go with them, it was hard to imagine a positive response.

  Minori-san, however, gave me a sort-of smile and said, “We’d have to check with Matoba-san, but I don’t see why not. We’re not talking about millions of yen, and for better or for worse we’re on the state’s yen. If anything, I think batteries would be the bigger problem here...”

  “Oh yeah...”

  Electricity was a rare and precious thing in the Holy Eldant Empire. For the time being, we were getting by on some solar panels and wind power, along with a small gasoline-powered generator. Now we were proposing bringing handheld game consoles to a place with no outlets. The school had plugs, so students who were attending every day wouldn’t have any trouble, but other people would use up the batteries sooner rather than later and be left with a fancy paperweight.

  We had toyed with the idea of having mages use lightning magic to create and store electricity, but the lightning handled by wizards tended
to be closely related to the natural phenomenon—not something you did halfway, or whose voltage and current could be easily modulated. Hitting a battery with a lightning bolt was as likely to incinerate it as charge it. Minori-san and Matoba-san had shut down this idea of mine on the grounds that it was too dangerous.

  “But we have a little spare electric production capacity, don’t we?”

  They were just handheld games, after all. If we drew down the amount of time that students were using the PCs and game machines, there would be plenty of juice.

  When I saw Minori-san nod, I turned back to the students.

  “Okay. If you guys win, that’s the prize.”

  “All right!”

  “Woo-hoooo!”

  There was whooping and cheering, and one student even broke out dancing. A little jig evidently didn’t suffice, because they started swinging their arms wildly. It was like they were so full of joy they didn’t know what to do with it all. Like a kid who found out you were going to buy him exactly what he wanted for his birthday.

  When I stopped and thought about it, I realized that no one in the room was older than twenty—from the Japanese perspective, they really were kids. Their celebrations struck a chord. Yes, they looked like the inhabitants of a fantasy world to me, but at bottom, it seemed like kids in this world weren’t so different from kids in mine.

  “You sure this is all right?” Minori-san whispered to me as I looked out over the student body, who were now thoroughly into this.

  “Am I sure what’s all right?”

  “I just don’t think this is really going to help improve relations between the races.”

  “Au contraire, Minori-san,” I said, waving a finger at her. “There are some things people can only learn about each other when both sides are giving their utmost for a cause! Come on, you know this! ‘Hey, not bad.’ ‘Yeah, you too.’ A grudging but friendly respect! Isn’t that what sports are all about?”

  Minori-san looked at me silently, and it almost seemed as if she didn’t like what she was seeing.

  “Shinichi-kun?” she sighed at last.

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t play a lot of sports, do you?”

  That is correct. No sports.

  I didn’t say anything out loud, but internally my answer was unambiguous. A home security guard doesn’t play sports by definition, right? I guess I’d had a stepladder in my room that I occasionally did stepping exercises with...

  “So you don’t think you might have an... unrealistic image of what sports really are?”

  “What do you mean? What’s unrealistic about my image?”

  “Well, for example, this idea that all athletes are outgoing, upstanding nice-guys.”

  “.............Er.”

  Weren’t they?

  “Or your belief that if both sides just do their best, it doesn’t matter who wins or loses.”

  “...............Um.”

  “You know people have been hurt and even killed over sports-related grudges, right?”

  “Maybe... But...”

  “Even your precious soccer. You know about hooligans and soccer riots, don’t you?”

  “.....................Y-Yeah, but th-that’s the audience, not the players!” I blurted, aware of my ever-tightening expression.

  It was true; my mental picture of athletics was heavily informed by the way they were depicted in manga and anime and games. I had definitely never played any sports and only rarely watched them on TV.

  “W-Well anyway, I think it’s at least worth a shot!” I said forcefully. “Even if it doesn’t work out quite the way we want, I don’t think it can make things any worse than they already are.”

  Plus, I mean... sports is sports. Yes, it’s a sort of battle, but a regulated one. The two teams might run straight at and maybe even straight into each other, but there were rules; it was a lot more peaceful than just fighting. How could it be a problem? If it looked like things were going to turn into a straight-out brawl, players could be shown the yellow or red cards and ejected from the game.

  That, at least, was what I believed at the time.

  Classes were over, and I was standing in the foyer of the school, waiting for Minori-san to get back from the bathroom.

  “Shinichi-sama!”

  I turned to see Elvia and Myusel just outside. Elvia was in her usual clothes, but Myusel was dressed to go out. A maid outfit is really a sort of work uniform, not something you wear outside the house. I know manga and anime often show maids in their uniforms 24/7, but that’s just because it’s convenient for the animators, or because it’s being done as a sort of shorthand.

  Anyway, Myusel’s going-out clothes were no less pretty or cute than her uniform. She had on a dress with a high neckline, simple and not too revealing—but that was the charm of it.

  Incidentally, it was Elvia who had called out to me. Myusel normally called me “Master” in public.

  “We brought the balls!”

  I saw a pile of large-ish cardboard boxes behind Elvia. Presumably, they had brought them here from the mansion by carriage.

  Oh, that’s right. I almost forgot to mention: several days before—specifically, the same day as the commotion on the practice field—I had requisitioned thirty soccer balls from the Japanese government. They must have arrived today. As necessary supplies for Amutech’s work, they would have been shipped not to the JSDF garrison, but directly to our house. And then Myusel and Elvia had been considerate enough to bring them here.

  I had intended to bring soccer to the school whether or not we went ahead with the competition. I had hoped that this “substitute for war,” as Minori-san called it, would help the students let off some steam and maybe reduce the frequency of trouble in the classroom.

  I wasn’t trying to win the World Cup or create a J.League-worthy team, here, so we could cobble together goalposts and nets from locally available materials. Making soccer balls from scratch, though, seemed like a bit too much, so I requested some be brought here instead.

  “Thanks,” I said, going over to them. “But Myusel, why are you here?” Normally, this sort of thing would be Brooke’s domain. Not that unloading air-filled globes was physically demanding...

  “Brooke-san said he had something to attend to,” Myusel replied, a rare wry look on her face. “He said he was expecting... a visitor, I believe?”

  “Huh...”

  Seeing Myusel with that expression was strange enough, but for Brooke to have some kind of social engagement... That was even stranger. When the JSDF special forces attacked the mansion, Brooke had brought some lizardman warriors to our aid. Other than that, though, I had never seen him so much as talk with anyone outside the house. I couldn’t picture what kind of friends he might have.

  “And so... Well, so, Elvia-san and I...” Myusel didn’t quite seem to know what to say. “I stood guard, and Elvia-san did all the hard work of loading and unloading the cargo by herself...”

  Elvia scratched her cheek.

  “Say what?” Myusel was guarding... Elvia? Why?

  No sooner had the question crossed my mind than, combined with Elvia’s embarrassed gesture, I made the connection: soccer balls and her reaction thereto.

  “You mean...”

  “Yes, sir.” Myusel nodded. “Things didn’t go... completely smoothly at the mansion.”

  “Ah,” I sighed, picturing the imbroglio at the training grounds. No doubt the arrival of a mountain of soccer balls had set Elvia off, and Myusel and Brooke had had their hands full trying to hold her back. Elvia had told me that her “phase of the moon” should end soon...

  “You know,” I said, turning to Elvia, “I never asked, but what’s the deal?” I’d been so wrapped up in my plan for “friendship through soccer” that I never got a chance to question the beast girl about her behavior. “Do you like balls that much, Elvia?”

  “I’m not sure it’s a question of ‘like,’ exactly,” Elvia said, cocking her head. “Most of us
beast people get the ‘phase’—well, I mean, most of us wolf-types. Tiger- and bear-types, too. Not so much lizardmen. But anyway, our bodies are influenced by the waxing and waning of the moon.”

  “Right. I got that much...”

  “Well, we worship the moon, especially the full moon, as a god.”

  “You worship the moon?”

  When I thought about it, it wasn’t that surprising. Even on Earth, most mythologies deified the sun and moon. It was a sign of how important those heavenly bodies were in people’s lives. The moon, which grew more or less full depending on the day, could almost appear “alive,” and the way it affected women’s biorhythms on a monthly basis made it especially personal.

  The sun and moon in this world didn’t seem so different from those in my own. The moon came out at night, and waxed and waned day by day. For that matter, the length of a year, a month, and a week all seemed to be roughly similar to Earth’s, too. I didn’t know if this world occupied a different planet or what, but the similar environment had helped foster cultures that were alike enough to understand each other. A totally different environment might have led completely alien creatures to evolve here, like in an SF drama. There might never have been any humans at all.

  “Yeah, although the Eldant Empire and the kingdom of Bahairam both treat it like a sort of evil cult.”

  “Really?”

  Like, as if they were offering living sacrifices to their dark god, Ba’ll?

  I suddenly got this image of Elvia prostrating herself in front of a production model Mob*** Suit and chanting nonsense syllables. As if.

  “They say it’s disrespectful to Her Majesty,” Elvia said with a halfhearted smile.

  “Ah... Now I get it.”

  Even I could see the connection here. There was no separation of church and state—this was the Holy Eldant Empire, after all. It was hardly unusual for rulers like kings and emperors to proclaim to their subjects that they were the descendants of the gods, as a way of ensuring the authority of themselves and their families. The worship of some other god in a country like that wouldn’t be warmly received.