Outbreak Company: Volume 3

by Ichiro Sakaki

  Back up. Why was he flying?

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking the question aloud.

  “Masato-samaaa!”

  “Ikki-kunnn!”

  Romilda and her friends didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the quibbles I felt; they were squealing like, well, schoolgirls. Well, except for the boy dwarves. They looked less thrilled.

  “I’m glad they’re using the materials,” I said, “but what good is watching Prince of Soccer actually going to do them?”

  “Huh? It’s fun,” Minori-san said, surprised.

  “Yeah, but think about it!”

  I understood that it was about more than the cute-guy characters. But still, watching those kinds of outrageous soccer battles—call it Apocalypse Savior Soccer Legend—wasn’t actually going to contribute much to their knowledge of the game.

  Once the program started in earnest, though, even the guys seemed riveted to the screen.

  “I guess it’s not quite what I intended, but if everyone’s having fun, then fine...”

  After all, one of my objectives with this competition had been to help them understand the virtues of sports stories.

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” Minori-san said with a nod.

  But there was another factor, something neither of us had thought of at the time.

  Minori-san’s and my view of these series was based on—you might say constrained by—what was considered common sense in Japan. But the people of the Holy Eldant Empire didn’t share those assumptions. I didn’t realize it then, but they were getting some awfully strange ideas about soccer.

  Construction of the stadium for our competition had begun in earnest. Unlike the fields we had built for people to practice on, this one didn’t have to be completed until practically the day of the tournament, so it had been left till last. A soccer field as such isn’t too complicated, but add spectator seating and a special viewing box for the empress, and you wind up with something that calls for a little planning. Just one more reason it couldn’t be built overnight.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Minori-san and I had dropped in to see how things were going, and I was surprised by what I found. I had been picturing, you know, a construction site: authorized personnel only, workers coming and going as the walls and stands went up bit by bit.

  But that’s not what this was. Not at all.

  “Niatoum iruguna! Quake, O earth!”

  No sooner had this spell been chanted than the ground began to shake. You know how in manga you’ll see the sound effect go-go-go (ruuumble)? This was that exactly. But it wasn’t a sound that you heard; it was a vibration you felt throughout your whole body.

  A whole bunch of dwarves were in the middle of it all. They had their hands together as if in prayer, the veins on their foreheads bulging so much that I could see them even at this distance as the dwarves struggled to control the magic. The spell sounded more like a challenge to battle than a magical incantation, but this was the sort of magic dwarves specialized in.

  “That’s awesome,” I said, not trying to hide how impressed I was. As we watched, a wall began to rise up directly from the ground. I don’t mean metaphorically or anything. I mean literally. As if it had just been buried there all along, waiting to be brought to the surface. “It looks just like the gladiatorial arena from VOT**S.”

  I was on the edge of a nerdgasm, but unfortunately Minori-san wasn’t big on robot anime, and she didn’t answer me. She didn’t know what she was missing. The banter between Chi**co and Ypsi**n was totally yaoi...

  Okay, okay. Never mind.

  The elves might deride the dwarves as “hole-diggers,” but a lot of dwarves made their living as miners, and so had a talent for physical buffs—necessary in such harsh environments—and “civil-engineering magics” that made the work easier. Manipulating earth and stone with magic, fashioning it into whatever shape, was sort of their specialty.

  In fact, come to think of it, Romilda’s ancestors had been among those who built Holy Eldant Castle, hence the family’s treatment as something like nobility. I guess if you want to hollow out a mountain and use it as a house, you’d better have magic on hand.

  “I gather they have to finish the details by hand, though,” Minori-san said.

  It was true: what the dwarves produced out of the ground was less a wall proper than the basic ingredients for one. It was a lump of earth in roughly the shape of a wall. It would have to be leveled, squared off, and polished, and that would require either work by hand or a different kind of magic. It didn’t look completely stable yet, either, so some mortar would probably have to be added to keep it steady.

  In a word, the dwarves’ magic allowed for the rough fashioning of things from the earth or fine detail work, but there wasn’t much middle ground. That was why there were JSDF soldiers waiting right next to the dwarves, armed with sandbags. They would place them at the foot of the wall to keep it standing, after which mortar could be added. Disaster relief being a specialty of the Japanese armed forces, this was something they were good at.

  “Isn’t that nice?” I said. It was pleasant to see two groups of people both helping out with what they were best at. People helping each other is a standard trope in sports series, but to actually see it with my own eyes was a new experience. In Japanese, it’s proverbial that the kanji for person, 人, is actually a picture of two people leaning on each other. So this is what they meant! (Big smile.)

  And so I stood looking deeply pleased, even though I hadn’t done anything to speak of.

  “Shinichi!”

  I looked up at the sound of my name to see the knight Garius as well as Empress Petralka, followed by a selection of servants and attendants. They must have come to see how things were going.

  “Pe—I mean, Your Majesty.”

  At my house or in the audience chamber, when it was just us and maybe Garius and Prime Minister Zahar, I called the empress Petralka. But in public or anywhere else where people might misunderstand, I addressed her formally as Your Majesty.

  I would have to take a lesson from Myusel and just call her Petralka (ahhh) in my heart, then speak the words “Your Majesty” aloud. To think a time might come when I would turn into a moe character myself—my passion burns bright! ...Ugh. Saying it about myself makes me feel a little ill.

  Okay, never mind.

  “All hands, cease your work!” Garius called out from behind Petralka. “Her Majesty the Empress is in attendance! Bow your heads!”

  In an instant, the dwarves came to a hurried stop and froze where they were. The half-formed wall must not have been quite stable, because it crumbled, nearly burying the JSDF unit nearby.

  Petralka gave a gracious wave of her hand. “Well and good. Continue the work.”

  This caused another knight to bellow, “Her Majesty commands work to continue! You may offer your thanks, everyone, and then resume your business!”

  Boy, what a lot of hassle just so the empress could take a quick look. If she checked on progress too often, the work might never get done.

  “It seems the construction is coming along nicely,” Petralka said, walking over to me.

  “Yes, thankfully,” I replied. “Everyone is really working hard.” To be blunt, I hadn’t done anything at all. The ones doing all the work were the dwarves on the Eldant side and the JSDF on the Japanese side. I didn’t have so much as a blueprint on me. All I could do was watch from the sidelines and cheer encouragingly.

  “That’s good to hear.” Petralka seemed quite satisfied.

  I saw Garius approach not me, but Minori-san, and hand something to her. I looked at them in confusion. What was that? It seemed to be some sort of book...

  “Er... Minister Cordobal?”

  “Ah. Pay it no mind, Shinichi,” Garius said, waving me off. “Merely returning something I had borrowed.”

  “You? Borrowed?” What kind of book could a knight like Garius have borrowed from Minori-san?


  Unless............... No way.

  “Oh, just some manga,” Minori-san said. But as I got a look at the book in her hand...

  “J-Just a second there, Minori-san...”

  The book had a flowery, girlish cover, but an opened page showed nothing but men. Two naked men, specifically, sprawled out on a bed. Granted, they were so pretty that they could practically have passed for women, but they were definitely both dudes.

  No question about it: this was 100% pure yaoi stuff.

  What had that WAC been up to when I wasn’t looking?!

  “I thought Minister Cordobal might like it,” Minori-san said, smiling.

  “What do you mean, you thought he might like it?”

  So she had just foisted some soft-core man-on-man action on him?!

  I admit: the minister Garius en Cordobal did sometimes look at me with a strange gleam in his eye. I was grateful that he had shown such fondness for me since our first meeting, but could that fondness be... you know, something more? The thought set me on edge.

  Garius, however, smiled gently and said, “Worry not, Shinichi.”

  As if to emphasize his point, he took his gloved hand and set it on my... shoulder? A shoulder is normally where you place a reassuring hand, right?

  Agh! Th-That’s my neck! Stop stroking my neck!

  “Far be it from me to force myself on anyone who doesn’t... ‘swing my way,’” he cooed.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re even talking about!” I exclaimed, completely forgetting my formality. How was this supposed to keep me from worrying?!

  Where did he even get a line like that? That’s not yaoi stuff, that’s like from a straight-up gay manga! Please tell me Minori-san hadn’t gone that far!

  I knew that Minori-san and some other members of the JSDF were importing manga and novels for personal use, above and beyond the stuff I was bringing in for business. It wasn’t exactly my place to say, but maybe it was time to think about the order in which things were being brought in.

  “Hrm! Shinichi!” Petralka shoved her way over to me and jabbed a finger in my chest so hard I could almost hear it. “We hate you, Shinichi! We despise you! Oh!”

  “Say... Say what?” The sudden outburst left me completely flabbergasted. We had been having a perfectly normal conversation until a minute ago, and now, completely out of left field... this? And what was with the weird little exclamation at the end there? Oh! Was it an artifact of the translator ring, some word it couldn’t bring across?

  Seriously, though, what was this all about?

  “Is... Is that right?” I said lamely. When the empress bursts out that she hates you, how are you supposed to respond? I mean, if you had asked me, I would have guessed that Petralka was closer to liking me than hating me. Was that impression just another product of my overactive imagination? Given that pretty much my entire romantic history consisted of confusing the affection of an old friend for amorous interest, confessing my love for her, and being shot down, maybe I wasn’t a very good judge of these things. “Uh......”

  Having said all that, hearing someone say to your face that they hate you still hurts. I quailed inside, but resolved to keep a smile on my face. Smile with your mouth and cry in your heart. I wanted to think I had grown up at least enough to do that. Yeah...

  “Have I done anything to displease you, Your Majesty?”

  “Er—” Suddenly, Petralka seemed to be on the back foot, almost as if she was the one who was shocked by the whole conversation and not me. What was going on here?

  “How foolish! Of course not!”

  “I’m sorry, Your Majesty? In that case...”

  In that case, what the heck? I wracked my memory, trying to think of any reason Petralka might have taken a dislike to me.

  “Is this because the ●● and ×× that I enjoy in the night creep you out?”

  “●●? ××?” Petralka blinked.

  “Oh, er, uh, well, you know what wide-ranging tastes I have, and, uh, I’m not a stranger to ero games, see. And I just wondered if tentacle-games might be, you know, and they have— well, there’s a certain charm there. And look, I know it might not be exactly right, me playing 18+ ero games, but we aren’t in Japan anymore, right? It’s Eldant laws that apply here.”

  “Shinichi,” Petralka said, studying me intently. “What is it you’re doing at night?”

  “Oh... Wasn’t that what you meant?”

  “No! It’s just— Aargh!” The empress had gone red with anger. “Y-You don’t... You don’t have to take everything so seriously!”

  “Guh?”

  “How could we possibly hate you?!”

  “Yeah, I was wondering—”

  You took the words right out of my mouth, Petralka.

  “You’re supposed to be the evangelist of otaku culture around here—so why can’t you see it?!”

  “See what, already?”

  “It’s—argh!—you know! It’s a... a tundra thing!”

  I was completely silent for the better part of ten seconds. In that time, I finally put two and two together.

  “Your Majesty...”

  “Yes, what?”

  “You mean tsundere.”

  “Hrm? Is that different?”

  “Completely.”

  Although admittedly, tundra would describe the state of my heart at that moment.

  Whatever the case, it looked like Petralka had discovered the concept of a tsundere in some anime or manga and decided she would try it out for herself. And apparently the classic tsundere line “I don’t like you at all!” had gotten lost in magical translation and had simply become “I hate you!”

  Japanese can be a tricky language: there are a lot of ambiguous expressions and usages. Maybe it was just lost on Petralka that to not like someone and to hate them weren’t necessarily the same thing. Why she had felt compelled to try being a tsundere herself remained a riddle wrapped in an enigma as far as I was concerned, but we could worry about that later.

  “Hrm. It seems otaku culture is indeed a thing of depth and mystery,” Petralka mused.

  “Even so, Your Majesty,” Garius said.

  Er... Excuse me? Things with both of my imperial buddies were turning really strange. And here I had been thinking that Garius at least was a bit more of an impassive, neutral observer...

  “Minori-san,” I said to our resident rotten (and getting rotten-er by the day) WAC. “Is it just me, or do I have a creeping sense of anxiety about this?”

  “Trust me,” she said, smiling innocently, “you’re imagining it.”

  When we got back to the house, we were taken aback by what we found. Specifically, what we found out back.

  Myusel had looked a little troubled, a little hesitant, when she came to pick us up. When I asked her what was wrong, she led us around back. And there...

  “Brooke,” a voice pleaded. “Can’t we—Can’t we begin again, just one more time?”

  Oof. That’s a line straight out of a romantic drama if I ever heard one. I never thought I would actually catch someone saying it for real.

  I could see two figures behind the house. One of them was Brooke. Facing him was the pale-skinned lizardman, the one he had called his wife. She was aiming her question at Brooke, but he didn’t respond. In fact, he wouldn’t even look her in the eye. His own wife!

  “Answer me, Brooke. Don’t you love me anymore?”

  But Brooke remained silent.

  You could take this for a conversation out of just about any strained marriage, if you didn’t see the two lizardmen who were holding it. Each of them was at least a head taller than me and covered in rough scales. It was surreal, to say the least.

  Brooke’s wife faced her silent husband, waiting patiently for an answer. But ultimately, Brooke said only two words.

  “Go home.”

  He turned and began to walk away, despite his wife’s attempt to stop him. He didn’t seem to have noticed us in the shadows of the building.

  Fo
r a long moment, Brooke’s wife looked after him, but then she seemed to resign herself; she, too, turned to leave. In fact, as it happened, she turned right toward us.

  “Oh...” For the first time, she realized we were there. I still couldn’t read exact expressions on those scaly faces, but the slight tilt of her head suggested reluctance. She stopped square in front of us. “I’m very sorry for intruding,” she said with a bow of her head. She may have looked like a bipedal lizard, but her diction and manners suggested a very fully formed person.

  “Don’t worry. You’re not intruding,” I said. Seeing Brooke ignore her once—well, things happen. But this was twice now, and it was starting to bother me. “So you’re, uh, Brooke-san’s wife, huh?”

  “Yes. My name is Cerise.” She gave another respectful nod. “The bonds among my people are not precisely the same as those humans share, but in the language of your tribe, it would be reasonable to call me Brooke’s wife.”

  “Huh...”

  That seemed like an awfully roundabout way of saying it, but all right. Lizardmen were more visibly different from humans than most of the races here, so maybe these sorts of qualifications were inevitable in talking about their society.

  Interestingly, in nature, it’s actually pretty rare for specific individuals of opposite sexes to commit themselves to each other like humans do in marriage. If your goal is to perpetuate your genes, then your best chance is to bear children with a different partner every chance you get so your descendants have plenty of variation.

  But anyway, forget about that for now.

  “It looked like you and Brooke were talking about something... kind of.”

  “Yes. This was initially about getting in touch with the Tribal Council...”

  Cerise told us that Brooke occasionally contacted the Tribal Council, a group of lizardman leaders. Usually he did it by giving a message to some acquaintance of his who happened to be in town. Given the low literacy rate among lizardmen, such a communication network was a necessity.