Outbreak Company: Volume 3

by Ichiro Sakaki

Normally you think of such networks as using the same people to carry messages both back and forth, but apparently this time the reply had been entrusted to Cerise.

  “The Tribal Council is inclined to participate in the match before Her Majesty,” Cerise informed us.

  I thought back to when I had asked Brooke to form a lizardman team. He hadn’t seemed very enthusiastic, but it was clear that he had still done what I asked.

  “There’s a hope that if we do well, it may raise the status of our kind,” Cerise said.

  “Right. I had the same thought,” I said.

  Humans and demi-humans of various races lived and worked side-by-side in the Eldant Empire, but lizardmen remained on the bottom of the totem pole. Maybe that made sense, given that they had once been the enemies of the other peoples—but that had been more than a century ago, and personally I had never known Brooke to be anything but a diligent worker who helped me out whenever I needed it. Granted, I wouldn’t want to tangle with him in a dark hallway, but...

  “You,” Cerise said, nodding at me. “You’re a human. Why would you be interested in the welfare of the lizardmen?”

  “Er... That’s not an easy question to answer,” I said, scratching my cheek. I just felt like if someone was being discriminated against, I wanted to do what I could to raise them up in the world and get them equal rights. But I could only think that way because I had been born in the nice, peaceful country that was modern Japan.

  “It’s because I’m not from this world,” I said. “It looks like lizardmen and humans were enemies once, but I don’t have any personal or cultural memory of that. Brooke works at my house, and he seems like a really decent person. He helps me out a lot. It’s just kind of natural for me to hope that he and his people could be treated a little better around here.”

  Cerise was silent. From the way her tongue slid in and out of her mouth, however, I guessed she was surprised. Just like I couldn’t readily tell different lizardmen apart, Cerise probably didn’t know me from any other human—in other words, any of the others who happily discriminated against her. Maybe that made it difficult for her to believe what I was saying, as if I had thrown up my palm and declared the exact opposite of everything she had expected. It would be confusing.

  That was when Myusel interceded on my behalf. “That’s the sort of person Shinichi-sama is. He’s done a lot for me, too.” She gingerly raised a hand to her hair, pulling it back to reveal her ears. She hated for strangers to see her ears. But either because of some change of heart, or to back me up, she was willing to endure the ignominy.

  “You’re—”

  “Yes. A half-elf.” Myusel nodded.

  Now Cerise was definitely a bit surprised. She stood there, not saying anything, until finally she managed, “Shinichi-sama... That’s your name, isn’t it?” She sounded hesitant. “You are... a most unusual person.”

  “Yeah, I hear that a lot.” I grinned. From Myusel and Brooke, among others. I didn’t think it was because I was particularly special or anything. Anyone born in modern Japan and brought over here would fit the description. Anyone born and raised in a world where freedom and equality were matters of course.

  Cerise went quiet again, studying me. Then she said, “I see. You are also the reason Brooke went so far as to contact the Tribal Council for help.”

  “Huh?” It was my turn to be surprised.

  I suspected she was alluding to the assassination attempt. Brooke had brought several lizardman warriors, presumably in the hopes that they might be of some help lest I be kidnapped or killed. He had been so nonchalant about telling me that he had contacted the Tribal Council that I had assumed it was a normal thing to do, but...

  From what Cerise told us, it was rare enough for Brooke to get in touch with any other lizardman, let alone the Council. Apparently, the assassination attempt was the first time they had actually been able to pinpoint his location. It was also what had led to Cerise coming here.

  Wait...

  Pinpoint his location? So he had been, like, a runaway until now? A missing person? How and why had that happened? Could it be that Brooke didn’t really get along with his own kind? And if so... had he deliberately given himself away, contacting the Council for my sake?

  “Brooke...”

  I owed him even more than I’d realized. I wanted to find some way to repay him.

  “The Council says that over the next several days they will find eleven participants and send them here to you,” Cerise said.

  Lizardmen generally slept outdoors. As long as they had someplace dry, they could just dig a hole and go to sleep. They could draw on geothermal energy, according to Cerise, so there was no need for us to prepare a place for the visitors to sleep.

  “Eleven participants?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Er... What about Brooke?” I had expected him to be among the eleven. “Oh, or do you mean eleven people including a backup?”

  “No. Brooke will not take part,” Cerise said firmly. “Even though the Tribal Council asked him—our hero—to do so.”

  “Brooke... Your hero?” That seemed to come out of left field. “Wait a second... Brooke is actually a pretty big deal among the lizardmen, isn’t he?”

  After a moment of what seemed to be hesitation, Cerise nodded and said, “Yes, he is.”

  She told us the story: once, Brooke had been a general of his people and had achieved a series of military victories that greatly improved the lizardmen’s position. The lizardmen had always been fighters, but Brooke was strong even by their standards, and so earned their respect.

  That, however, made it seem like he might have been better off staying with his own people, remaining in the military. Why leave all that to serve a human as a gardener?

  “I mean, why would he...”

  But Cerise didn’t answer my question. Maybe it was a hard one to answer. Maybe it had something to do with Brooke’s refusal to acknowledge his wife.

  “I think I must be going for today,” Cerise said. She bowed to us and walked away.

  “She’s really something,” I said as we watched her go.

  “Yes, I think so, too,” Myusel said.

  “Brooke didn’t seem to want anything to do with her,” I said. “I wonder why.”

  Myusel shook her head silently. It looked like it didn’t make sense to her, either.

  “Shinichi-kun,” Minori-san said, finally speaking up. “I don’t think you should be nosing around in people’s private lives. Especially not lizardman lives. They’re so different from us that you might think you’re doing the right thing but end up causing new problems.”

  “Yeah... You’re right,” I said, nodding. But deep inside, I wasn’t quite sure.

  I am not very smart.

  Oh, sure, I have a pretty good amount of otaku knowledge—but not much else. And frankly, after a certain point, I don’t think hoarding knowledge does you much good. There’s a baseline level of information necessary to think and make decisions, but it’s not like you’re going to become a specialist in every field, and in an age when we can quickly look up just about anything we want on the internet, volume of trivia alone isn’t anything to be proud of. If intelligence has to do with the number of facts you can cram into your brain, then computers are way smarter than humans.

  So what do I consider real smarts? I think smart people are those who can quickly make use of the knowledge they have. People who can extrapolate from what they already know. They’re the ones who can tell what’s going to happen, and the ones who can do something about it.

  I don’t really see myself as that kind of person.

  So what am I getting at with all this? Well, uh...

  I was standing there, absolutely dumbfounded.

  It was just another day, and classes were over. The students, as usual, were on the soccer fields beside the school, practicing for the imperial exhibition. I was watching the elf team. Led by Loek, the moe-loving elf who had fought with the dwarf girl
Romilda, the team had divided up into groups of five and were having a practice match.

  “Graaaaaaahhhhhhh!”

  I stared stupidly as one of the players let out a very un-elf-like yell and gave the ball a vicious kick.

  And that was fine. That much was fine. The problem was—

  “Cry out, O magical globe!”

  —as the elf shouted, the ball burst into flames. I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean whoosh, fwoosh! Fire.

  What the heck was going on here?!

  “Retosabunogarudo raripusu!” the elf added.

  The ball took a corkscrew path, burning all the while, and went hurtling toward the goal. It seemed less like a soccer ball and more like a cannonball, or maybe a falling meteorite.

  “Haaaaaaaaaahhhhh!”

  The goalkeeper was evidently charged up, because he gave a huge shout and took a defensive posture, arms crossed in front of his body like he was going to do a karate X-block. No way he thought he was going to stop that rocket ball like that, right? It would have been hard enough even if the ball wasn’t actively on fire. Instead of standing there like he was going to do some anime-style finishing move, shouldn’t he be getting his hands out to catch it?

  Even as I was thinking all this, though, the goalkeeper gave another mighty shout, dropped his arms to his sides, and thrust his head forward. What the heck?! It was like he was deliberately going to head a burning ball! But if he met that thing face-first, it wasn’t going to end with some cute little “Yowch!” or “That’s hot!”

  “Tinifuini eruou!”

  Right in front of the elf’s face—almost literally before his eyes, so to speak—a translucent barrier appeared. The ball, still on its spiral course, slammed into it. The barrier bent, distorting the look of the scenery around it, but it didn’t give way.

  The ball was thrown back with almost as much force as it had been kicked forward. The flames were extinguished by their contact with the barrier, but the speed of the ball alone was enough to kill someone.

  “I’ve got it!” a different elf shouted, flying forward. Again, I’m not speaking figuratively here. What was this guy, the South Dipper Human Cannon?! Without so much as a running start or even bending his knees, the elf flew through the air and headed the ball.

  That sent it back toward the goal, but it went out of bounds at the last possible moment.

  “Dang! So close!” all the elves exclaimed. For some reason, they all snapped their fingers as they spoke.

  Okay, wait. Hang on. Where did these kids learn to play like this?! All this ridiculous Shaolin So***r-type supernatural stuff? I was very nearly going to ask the question aloud when it dawned on me.

  Magic.

  A close look revealed that the elves were all chanting as they ran around the field. Maybe not the person who was actually kicking the ball, but everyone around them—all their fellow players—were helping them, intoning spells that changed the direction of the wind or created a burst of flame or buffed the speed of the ball or the players’ own agility.

  “They’re...”

  “Yep,” Minori-san said from beside me. With a touch of frustration she added, “Maybe we should have seen this coming. All that Inazuma El**en, all those series with outrageous, impossible stuff in them—if you don’t know anything about soccer, why wouldn’t you think that was the way the game was played?”

  “Even if you did—you couldn’t actually do it!”

  Shout and pose all you wanted; you couldn’t do a Spirit B*** or a Kameha**ha, or use the devastating ancestral technique passed down by your forefathers, or activate some latent special ability.

  Not, at least, in my world.

  “Magic,” Minori-san said.

  I could only nod.

  Yes: magic existed in the Eldant Empire; indeed, everywhere in this other world, and the elves, flush with magical power, were especially good at it. They had taken those absurd cartoon soccer battles to heart and re-created them using magic.

  In Japan, it’s pretty common to see books that take otherwise difficult or arcane subjects, fit them in a narrative framework, and present them in manga form for easier digestion: Japanese History through Comics, Learn Bookkeeping and Accounting the Manga Way. That sort of thing. The kids had just picked up their knowledge of the game from anime and manga more than from the rule books Minori-san and I had brought them. And they had been consuming the most outrageous series available.

  That meant...

  “Um... I’m gonna go check the other fields,” I said, and hurried to the next one over.

  Our soccer fields were open-air; they didn’t have roofs over them. They did, however, have walls to keep our limited supply of balls from disappearing off the field. Hence, if you weren’t looking down from above, you wouldn’t know what was happening on the field unless you actively went inside and looked.

  These walls, just like the ones I had seen going up around the stadium for the tournament, had been built by dwarven magic. Just as that suggested, I found the dwarf team practicing on the next field.

  They say those of a feather fight together, but like the elves next door, the dwarves had assigned one person to be referee and divided the rest into two teams of five.

  “Get in there!” A dwarf ran along, kicking the ball. He was pretty nimble despite his small stature. Dwarves and elves might both be faerie-type peoples, but dwarves clearly were on a different level of physical ability.

  I was at least relieved to see that the ball wasn’t on fire or anything. It was nice, normal, kick-the-ball soccer.

  “You think I would let you do that?!” A dwarf girl—it was Romilda—uttered a line that sounded like it belonged to some mecha anime, then slammed her hands against the earth.

  No way, I thought.

  “Eruou iruguna!!” Romilda howled.

  With a wumph!, a wall burst out of the ground right in front of the dwarf who was dribbling the ball. As I’m sure you realize by now, I’m still not being metaphorical: this was an actual wall. The spell sounded somewhat familiar—it was probably a reduced version of what the dwarves had used to build the stadium.

  “Nice try!” The kicker nimbly dodged the obstacle.

  Romilda, however, shouted, “Hit it, everyone!”

  “Yah!” In response, the dwarves on her team all put their hands on the ground.

  Wait a second... Weren’t we supposed to be playing soccer? But there was no time for me to interject as—

  “Eruou iruguna!”

  “Eruou iruguna!!”

  “Eruou irugunaaaa!!!”

  Wham! Wham! Wham! Walls began popping up everywhere, surrounding the guy with the ball.

  “I think I remember Fullm***l Alchemist having a fight scene like this,” I murmured in a daze. But now the dwarf with the ball was shouting.

  “You’re not gonna get away with this! Ekansu gunigiddo!”

  There was a huge bang, and the dwarf disappeared from within the walls.

  No... Not disappeared. He fell, into a hole that had suddenly appeared beneath him. Heck, fell? He practically flew. Dwarven magic had always been about manipulating the earth, making walls out of it and stuff. It was only natural that they would have a network of tunnels and secret spaces under the ground, layer upon layer of them. The dwarf boy had used his magic to simply dig straight down to them.

  “Where’d he go?!”

  “And where’s he going to come back?!”

  The dwarves formed a half-circle around the goal.

  “Right here!”

  “Noooo!”

  The dwarf with the ball popped back up to the surface inside the goal.

  “How did that happen?!”

  “Wait, wait! The rule book says you can’t dig a tunnel into the actual scoring area,” Romilda insisted.

  “It does not!” I found myself exclaiming.

  There was a shocked silence as the dwarves finally and suddenly registered my presence. They stopped their game and came over to me.

&nbs
p; “Sensei!”

  “Sensei!”

  “What do you think? How are we doing at soccer?” Romilda, her face shining, asked on behalf of the group.

  “Well, uh, that’s a good question,” I said, scrambling for the right words. “What... game exactly were you playing?”

  “What do you mean? We were playing soccer.”

  Now I stood silently; what could I say? I mean, I guess that was soccer... of a sort. At least, it definitely wasn’t American football or baseball or dodgeball or anything. The field, the ball... everything met the official requirements for soccer. And yet...

  “Magic?! You can’t use magic!”

  “What?!” the dwarves asked, eyes wide. “W-We can’t?!”

  “But it doesn’t say anywhere—”

  “Of course it doesn’t!” I said, practically shouting. “It’s a sport, and—”

  That was as far as I got when I remembered: the Holy Eldant Empire had no concept of sports. Or rather, they thought of such things very differently. On Earth, where there was no magic, we naturally thought of these games as contests of physical abilities. But in this world, maybe it only made sense that the contest should extend to magical ability as well.

  Even in my own world, we used tools and high-functioning equipment that strictly went beyond the human body. Marathon runners have watches; in soccer and baseball, people use spiked shoes or footwear with special shock-absorbing gel. Even in swimming, which may seem like the purest test of human capability, participants can use swimsuits that reduce water resistance. It was up to the international sporting bodies in charge of these competitions to determine what was “unfair” and what wasn’t.

  But there weren’t any international sporting bodies here. There was only me.

  “Sensei?” Romilda and the others were looking at me, concerned. They were only trying to do their best, and here I came, shouting that they were getting it all wrong. They didn’t have any ill intent, and I’m sure they didn’t mean to disrespect soccer or anything. But still...

  “Okay. Uh,” I mumbled, struggling with a vague sense of guilt. “Magic isn’t allowed in soccer. I’m real sorry. My world doesn’t even have magic. That’s why it’s not in the rule book.”