Outbreak Company: Volume 14

by Ichiro Sakaki

  People who hate reptiles tend to really hate them, and I’m not saying they’re my favorite thing in the world, but when you get a good look at those gemlike black eyes, they’re really pretty cute. I gather reptiles actually make up a pretty substantial proportion of the pet industry.

  My wife is especially fond of frogs, but I guess she has a thing for reptiles, too, and once she even had a Sudan plated lizard as a pet. As a matter of fact, I first got the idea for a story about Brooke’s kid when my wife said, “I’ll bet lizardman kids would be really cute.”

  Incidentally, in my mind, Man’ya resembled a certain blue-skinned character from one particular anime about a rat kingdom, but I’m curious what Yuugen-shi will come up with. (I had to write this Afterword before the finished illustrations were ready.) I guess, strictly speaking, I don’t even know if Man’ya will show up in the illustrations. She’s a loli character, true, but she’s also a lizardman...

  On that note, I hear that America has this special over-18 genre specifically involving dragons... so does that mean there are people over there who would be way moe for a loli lizardman? (One who likes to bite, if you know what I mean.) I’m sure there must be such a person, somewhere in this vast world of ours! ...But maybe not two such people.

  Anyway, I digress. The story about Shinichi going full shut-in is a pretty old one too; it’s one of a few different story ideas I came up with back when the anime was running. One of the anime’s original episodes features Petralka becoming a shut-in; maybe that influenced this concept. Unlike the anime, though, there was nothing cute about his being a shut-in here, and it didn’t amount to much. So I fiddled around with it a bit, and it ended up forming a sort of epilogue to the forbidden armor story. It worked out pretty nicely.

  And so but anyway.

  That would make the newest of these three short stories—the episode I came up with specifically to add to the other two stories to get a whole short story collection—the one about Hikaru’s “sex change.” I’d been entertaining the idea of a story involving Hikaru and Elvia since around Volume 8, but I never really meant to write it out as a full “episode”; it was just one of those back-story things in my head. But with the battle scene in Volume 12, the editor sort of noticed where I was going. There was a request: “We’d really like to see Hikaru turn into an actual girl.” And bam, there was my short story collection.

  Incidentally, regarding Hikaru’s first person narration: initially I was going to do it in polite speech, the same as the way he talks (so all my dear readers could easily accept this change), but it just didn’t sound quite right, and so it ended up the way it is now, in plain form. I wonder how my readers will take it.

  Anyway, here we are. If everything goes according to plan, Outbreak Company has, let’s see, three volumes left. I’ve already sketched out the plot from here to the final book—heck, I even know what I want Shinichi to say right at the very end.

  I hope you’ll be there to find out what it is!

  Sakaki Ichiro

  7 Nov 2015

  Sign up for our mailing list at J-Novel Club to hear about new releases!

  Newsletter

  And you can read the latest chapters (like Vol. 15 of this series!) by becoming a J-Novel Club Member:

  J-Novel Club Membership

  Copyright

  Outbreak Company: Volume 14

  by Ichiro Sakaki

  Translated by Kevin Steinbach

  Edited by Sasha McGlynn

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 Ichiro Sakaki

  Illustrations by Yuugen

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Japan in 2015 by Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo.

  Publication rights for this English edition arranged through Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

  J-Novel Club LLC

  j-novel.club

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Ebook edition 1.0: June 2020