Outbreak Company: Volume 13

by Ichiro Sakaki

  Minori-sama turned to the rest of us. “Anyway, Myusel, Elvia. Now that you’ve been completely put off by Shinichi-kun and cooled down, listen to me for a moment. I know you’ve been fighting over him, but even if one of you somehow won this battle, that wouldn’t automatically make you Shinichi-kun’s ‘number one.’ You know that, don’t you?”

  There was nothing we could say to that. When she put it that way, it was obvious enough. If anything...

  “If anything, I know Shinichi-kun should have just picked one of you to begin with, and then we could have avoided this whole mess.”

  “Yeah, I hate seeing carnage like this, but having a bunch of girls fight over me, it’s pretty moe by definition, you know? This ‘forbidden armor’ is already hot-looking enough on you girls, but when you start going at it, it’s like, mrrow! A whole new level of hot. What if instead of punching each other, you were using, like, joint locks and stuff, so you got pressed up against each other, and then maybe Elvia’s boobs and Petralka’s boobs would be like squoosh! up against each other, and man, what I wouldn’t give to be right in between them, just thinking about it makes the blood rush to my $#@! ... is not what I really mean! Arrrgh, somebody stop meeee!”

  “Shinichi...”

  To my surprise, it was Her Majesty who took a step forward.

  “Huh? What? Petral...ka...?” Maybe he could feel that something was different, uncalm. Shinichi-sama just frowned.

  “We shall stop you,” Her Majesty said. She was smiling. But I could see, at the edges of her august face, her honored cheeks twitching.

  An instant later, the “arm” of Her Highness’s armor launched itself at Shinichi-sama’s face.

  “Hrfh?!”

  Of course, there was a screen there, so she wasn’t going to actually hit Shinichi-sama. Nonetheless, he leaned away—but his hands and feet were still frozen to the spot, and like a puppet collapsing, he went down with a thump. Obviously, he had no chance to catch himself.

  “If it breaks, we believe you will stop,” she said.

  “Uh...?”

  “There are no finger holds or the like to allow us to tear it off of you, so we believe the process will consist of beating you mercilessly until something breaks and a vulnerability appears. Though the armor itself may be destroyed in the process. We suspect.”

  “Hey... Wait...”

  “Let me help, Y’r Majesty!”

  “Mm. We would welcome it.”

  Her Majesty and Elvia-san climbed on top of the fallen Shinichi-sama.

  “Wait, hold on, you’re gonna break it! You’re gonna break it and me! Ow, ow, ow! M—Myu—!”

  As the other two pounded on him in every way they could think of, Shinichi-sama looked desperately at me.

  Ahh. My poor Shinichi-sama. I’ll help you—

  “Your Majesty. Allow me to help you.” I discovered my mouth saying. “Shinichi-sama, just hang in there for a few minutes.”

  “Wha? What? Noooooo!”

  For a while, Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama watched him shake his head furiously behind the transparent screen. Finally, Minori-sama advised, “Try not to kill him, okay?” Then she and Hikaru-sama went and sat on a bench in the garden, apparently to watch.

  “Ah, not there! That’s off limits! Ahh! Ow! Minori-sa—! H-Hikaru-san, you too?! Somebody help meeeee!”

  And so, with Minori-sama’s blessing, we swarmed Shinichi-sama and set about the work of pounding his forbidden armor to scrap.

  The dust finally settled.

  Once the girls had lost interest in “winning” me, they no longer viewed each other as “interference,” and the forbidden armors popped off face-palmingly quick. They returned to their original spherical shapes, Lauron and Romilda’s dad returned the spheres to a set of newly built boxes—with chains on them this time—and they were deposited back in the castle storehouse.

  Then there was the one I had been wearing, which Petralka, as good as her word, had broken apart. It went in its box still smashed. It didn’t look like it was ever going to function again, but we figured you couldn’t be too careful. I wondered when, or if, the forbidden armor would ever see the light of day again. Personally, I thought they could just stay in that storage room until the end of the world. They had really caused me a lot of trouble.

  So there I was...

  “Shinichi-sama, how are you feeling?”

  “Shinichi, say something. We can get you anything you like.”

  “Shinichi-sama, I’ll draw y’ a picture so you won’t get bored, any picture at all!”

  I was curled up in bed, the sheets pulled over my head, my bed surrounded by three girls. Myusel. Petralka. And Elvia. All three of them seemingly enjoying themselves.

  But as for me, I didn’t say a word. Feelings-wise, I was like a newbie adventurer down in some dungeon who had run into a monster that was way too powerful for him, and was trying to guts it out. If I made any sound, if I so much as moved, it would notice me.

  “You think he’s asleep?”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  “Then perhaps we shouldn’t bother him...”

  With that, I felt the three of them getting farther away.

  “Ah, Myusel. Our tiny stomach is empty. Make us something.”

  “Yeah, I’m hungry, too!”

  “Of course, what would you like me to make?”

  “Some kinda sweet treat!”

  “This would be a nice opportunity to take some tea in the garden.”

  “I’ll get everything ready, then.”

  The voices, and accompanying footsteps, receded down the hallway. Somehow the girls seemed even closer than they had before. Even after I couldn’t hear them anymore, I stayed under the covers, counting to a hundred, just to be safe. Finally—

  “Phew!” I poked my head out. Operation: Pretend to be Asleep had been a success.

  Just as I was sitting up with a sigh of relief, though:

  “Look who’s afraid of women now.” I twitched. The voice sounded faintly amused. I looked over and saw Minori-san standing in the doorway Myusel and the others had just left through, smirking at me. “Not even going to let them see your face? Her Majesty especially—I’m sure she has to argue with Garius-san every time she wants to come over here.”

  “Yeah, well... Yeah. You’re right.” I heaved a sigh.

  “’Course, I guess if I had been turned into a punching bag by a bunch of girls who had been arguing about who loved me the most until a moment before, I’d probably be scared of women, too.” She shrugged and came into the room. “Then again... ever heard the expression you reap what you sow?”

  “...Uh-huh. And I don’t have a response to it.” I hung my head, thoroughly chastised.

  Incidentally, I was currently unable to walk around freely. Every muscle in my body ached—not because of the pounding, but, I suspected, because of how I had basically tried to act like a Hollywood action star while wearing the forbidden armor. Oh, and I did also have, like, three dozen bruises. Between wet compresses and the bandages wrapped all over, I pretty much looked like a mummy from the neck down. These were all wounds I’d sustained when Myusel and the others ripped the forbidden armor off me.

  You know, I think a few of those punches were “just for good measure”... Still, I understood perfectly well that I was in no position to complain.

  “Turns out it’s tough to have a harem in real life,” Minori-san teased.

  “I don’t have a harem.”

  At least, I didn’t mean to.

  “Oh! So you’ve picked one of them, then?”

  “Hoo hoo hoo,” I laughed, more than a little desperately. “Of course I... haven’t.”

  “Ah.” Minori-san, staring down at me from behind her glasses, stopped at the foot of my bed. “Anyway, I guess all’s well that ends well, at least for Myusel and her friends.”

  She was right about that. As the conversation earlier had suggested, Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia were better friends now than they ha
d been even before they put on that armor. There had been a certain distance between Petralka and Elvia in particular—maybe that was only natural when one of you was an empress and the other was a former spy from an enemy nation—but now they seemed happy as clams together.

  “I guess those who fight together, stay together,” I said.

  “You don’t think it’s just because they have a common enemy now?” Minori-san replied.

  “Common enemy?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do they? Who is it?”

  Long pause. Big grin. A finger pointing toward my face.

  ...................Uh, well, I definitely did get beaten up by all three of them together! Hey, isn’t Minori-san supposed to be my bodyguard? Where was she when I needed help? It was a little late to be worrying about that, though.

  “Okay, that’s a joke, sort of. But maybe it’s a good thing that the forbidden armor got everyone’s real feelings out in the open. Cleared the air, so to speak. Helped everyone say the things they could never say before. It’s not like you all hated each other. And nothing deepens a friendship like honesty, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right...”

  When we had put the suits back in their boxes, Garius, among others, had suggested the possibility of putting a more definitive end to them—dumping them in the sea or throwing them into a volcano, for instance. The person who put a stop to that idea was one of the very victims of the armor—Petralka. Garius had discreetly informed me as much when he came to visit me at my sickbed yesterday. The logic, he claimed, was that it was the forbidden armor that had allowed Petralka to get closer to Myusel and Elvia, so it hadn’t been all bad. As such, she wanted it to be retained at the castle for the time being rather than thrown away.

  “I’m curious what the heck those things actually are, though.”

  Straight-up power armor that looked like it had walked out of an SF series someplace? A voice in your head when you wore it that sounded like onboard AI? The voice seemed to function a bit like the magic interpreter rings, but it sounded less like there was some sort of spirit stuck in the machine than as if it were the machine itself that was talking.

  With these thoughts in my head, I looked over at Minori-san... She didn’t say anything, but she looked uncommonly serious.

  “Minori-san?”

  “Huh? Yes?” She blinked like she was waking up from a dream.

  “Something the matter?

  “What would be the matter?”

  “I don’t know. You just looked like you were thinking really hard.”

  “Oh..................... Yeah, I guess.” She nodded, but her expression was ambiguous. “Shinichi-kun, did you get a good look at the forbidden armor when it was still in its box?”

  “Huh? Not really. When I put mine on, I was too busy freaking out.”

  “Mm. Okay, then do you remember Garius-san mentioning that it looked like there were some Japanese characters on the armor?”

  “......Oh.”

  Come to think of it, he had said something like that, hadn’t he? That was the whole reason he had brought the armor to our place to begin with. So-called letters or characters are really just symbols; people in two different worlds could have come up with similar looking systems by chance. It wouldn’t be that surprising. So I hadn’t given a lot of thought to the hypothesis that the writing was Japanese.

  “I took a few pictures,” Minori-san said, and produced her phone. “The characters are too faded to read for the most part, but they definitely do look sort of... earthly.”

  I blinked and waited for her to say something else. What was she suggesting? The forbidden armor was ancient, and it came from this world. But it had characters on it that looked like they came from ours. The armor looked and acted like something out of a sci-fi story. So...

  “W-Well, I’m probably just imagining things,” Minori-san said.

  “Y-Yeah,” I agreed. “Probably.”

  Minori-san and I deliberately ignored the conclusion forming in our minds. Instead, we smiled at each other. Weakly.

  (つづく)

  To be continued...

  PDWS X03AD-F Iron Crab F

  Height: 190-220 cm (unfolded)

  Width: 128 cm

  Weight: 89,000 g

  Power Source: Variable hybrid system (micro gas turbine engine + superconductive battery—power source selection automatic by situation)

  Armament: Extending Claw Hands (2)

  2.3 mm Reflective Lasers (2) (Launch port may be set via multipurpose field)

  Defense: Multipurpose field (variable)

  Material: Stainless steel, plastic-based nanomaterials, metallic nanomaterials, etc.

  A personal defense weapon system (PDWS) created at the behest of the national defense agency. To the bitter end, the Iron Crab was in danger of being beat out by the X-05 “Shell Person,” another PDWS concept. However, revelations of embezzlement by people involved with the PDWS competition itself, along with manifest operational-level problems at the prototyping stage, led to the indefinite suspension of the entire PDWS development program.

  Records indicate that twelve prototype units were prepared including spares, to allow testing at the squadron level, the smallest operational unit.

  PDWS were initially developed not as weapons for soldiers in the field, but as survival tools for civilians who might have to protect the home front in the event of total war. They were envisioned as serving users who had not received combat training.

  To enable the wearer to survive even in environments where bio-contaminant weapons have been deployed, there is an airtight multipurpose field, along with a semi-autonomous AI. The PDWS may be considered a tiny, mobile shelter.

  This model is designated F for female, indicating it is for use by women; the presence of biological-waste removal systems necessitated separate models for men and women. Most of the components of the two units are identical, so that in emergency mode (indicated for temporary use), a male may use an F model.

  The unit is expected to be stored in a private residence, and so is designed to fold into a compact form for storage, light enough that a single person can lift it if need be. Built to be light despite apparent toughness, the construction includes extensive use of self-repairing nano-polymers.

  Defensive capabilities are provided primarily by the multipurpose field, rather than by actual armor. The field does not simply provide defense, but is a support structure for the entire unit, helping to enable its movement. Hence, despite its relatively small contact surface area, the Iron Crab is both highly mobile and completely stable.

  Further, to enable continued survival where procurement of supplies may be impossible, the unit is not equipped with fixed weapons utilizing consumable ammunition, but rather mounts lasers and variable-form anchor mechanisms for mid- to long-range combat.

  The two “arms” conceal work manipulators that could in principle be used to operate virtually any extant weapon (based on mode selection and thought control, the arms may operate independently from wearer’s arms); however, the mechanisms are intended primarily to facilitate heavy labor for rescue or transport, and the claws themselves are recommended if the arms must be used as a weapon.

  Afterword

  Hullo, light novelist Sakaki here, bringing you Volume 13 of Outbreak Company: The Power of Moe.

  .........

  Mecha girls, amirite? That contrast between soft skin and hard metal. The armor is supposedly there to protect her, and yet it’s as if she’s bound by the metal, and it only makes the girl herself look even softer! Wonderful, right?! (Note: the opinions of the author represent only those of a single, trash human being.)

  ...Uh, I think I wrote something similar in the afterword to another magazine from a company that shall not be named, but I swear I’m not obsessed with this or anything. I mean, I’ve always liked mecha girls, but I was never blessed with an excuse to do a story about them (grin).

  You do light novels for
fifteen years, and then you realize the trends have taken a decisive turn away from you.

  I never imagined at first that Outbreak Company would be my chance to do a mecha/armored girls storyline, but as a hallowed otaku genre, maybe it was only a matter of time until they showed up. We did already have a transformer in these pages, after all. (I’m talking about the Faldra.)

  So anyway, this volume ended up being about mecha girls, or armored girls if you like, and they turned out to have a real battle. You know. War is hell.

  I guess in a harem comedy, where the whole point is to have a bunch of beautiful girls surrounding the MC, a battle like this is technically forbidden (if you will), but even I, the very author of the series, was starting to get pretty tired of Shinichi’s obliviousness, so I decided to allow this.

  By the way, I worked in some subtle foreshadowing (or maybe not-so-subtle, if you’re alert to these sorts of things), so I’m very curious how my readers will react.

  I’m thinking the next volume is finally time for that short story collection, before we get properly started on the final phase of the series, but, well... let’s see what happens. Hope to catch you in the next volume!

  Ichiro Sakaki

  1 Jun 2015

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  Copyright

  Outbreak Company: Volume 13

  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