Outbreak Company: Volume 5

by Ichiro Sakaki

  I obviously had no such spells of resistance, so instead I chanted my usual Tifu Murottsu. The cloak, however, increased it to dozens of times its usual power, strong enough that when my spell collided with the beam of light, it caused an explosion and even deflected the attack to the side.

  “Just chop her up already!” The soldiers seemed to have realized that magic wouldn’t stop me, so they drew their swords instead.

  “Sirs,” I shouted, “if you don’t want to die, then move aside!”

  To illustrate my point, I made use of the weapon Minori-sama had lent me.

  The “Mini-mee Em Too For Nyne Squad Auto-matic Weapon.”

  The steel tube nearly jumped out of my hands, golden metal cylinders flying from it along with a series of roars. The cylinders slammed into the ground around the feet of the Bahairamanian soldiers, leaving gouges in the dirt and kicking up hot, sharp rocks.

  The soldiers almost stumbled as they came to a screeching halt.

  The power of this Ja-panese weapon was astonishing. It was tremendously heavy, so much so that it had been challenging for me even to carry it with me, but now I saw how worthwhile that effort had been. All by myself, I had halted a group of a dozen Bahairamanian soldiers.

  “It hurts to get hit with this!” I shouted. “It hurts very much! You’ll die!”

  Clutching the Mini-mee, which was still spitting fire, I dashed forward. The soldiers were kind enough to be worried about this.

  “Yikes!”

  “Stay back!”

  “Eeyyargh!”

  The little flakes of fire had struck some of the soldiers in the leg. They screamed and bent double, but I ignored them and continued my advance.

  I found that Elvia-san, still carrying Shinichi-sama, had jogged up beside me.

  “Now’s our chance!” I shouted.

  “Got it!”

  We used the Mini-mee to keep the soldiers at bay, making our way to where the Faldra was defending itself with great sweeps of its tail and wings.

  “Sensei!” Loek-sama and Romilda-sama were grinning from the back of the monster. “Are you all right, Sensei?”

  “Loek?” Shinichi-sama said. “Romilda? You’re here, too? Hang on, this can’t possibly be the dragon we used for the—”

  “Uh-huh!”

  “We did a little work on it, so now it moves with magic!” Loek-sama and Romilda-sama looked very pleased with themselves.

  Then they chorused: “‘It’s so crazy it just might work!’”

  “What are you, the scientists on some space battleship?!” Shinichi-sama demanded. But he sounded genuinely moved as he muttered, “I guess I’ve rubbed off on you.”

  “Enough quoting, everybody hop on!” Minori-sama shouted, running up to us. “Hurry! We can’t wait around until reinforcements get here!”

  We scrambled onto the Faldra’s back.

  At that moment, there came a roar unlike anything I had ever heard. We looked back and saw thick black smoke billowing from the ceiling of the largest building in the area, the one that stood on the edge of the premises.

  “Wh-Whazzat?!” Elvia-san exclaimed. “What is that?!”

  “That’s...” Shinichi-sama’s face was tight, as if he already knew something about that building. “...a dragon!”

  Something blew the roof of the building clean off. Then we saw it. It was, indeed, a dragon.

  It was huge, dozens of times bigger than any wyvern, two or three times the size of even our Faldra. It ascended into the air with lazy flaps of its wings. And in its forehead was—

  “Puppet drake!”

  Minori-sama was right: one of the “spikes” used to make puppets was pounded into its head.

  This thing was a weapon. Bahairam’s weapon.

  How could we have been so oblivious? If this was a research facility dedicated to puppet magic and technology, then of course there could be a puppet drake here. Although granted, given our understanding that the puppet drake was still a work in progress, there was no reason we should have expected to suddenly have to face one in combat.

  GRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

  The monster opened its jaws and let out a resounding roar. Its cloudy eyes searched this way and that—and then a second later, it was flying toward us.

  “Skyward! Double-time!”

  “On it!”

  At Minori-sama’s urging, Loek-sama, Romilda-sama, and I started using our magic to make the Faldra fly. Wind sprites swirled beneath its outstretched wings, lifting its huge body into the air.

  But then Elvia-san shouted, “Look out!”

  The puppet drake opened its jaws, fire sprites gathering in its mouth. It looked a lot like the spell the mage had used earlier—only much, much bigger.

  “Fire breath...!”

  “Dodge! Circle right!” Minori-sama shouted. The Faldra wheeled around to the right. I was desperately clutching at the handholds on its back when—

  BLAM!

  The dragon’s fire breath flew through the air, scorching the Faldra’s side. The attack flew past us, landing in a field with a tremendous explosion and a flash. The blast was so powerful we could feel the shockwave even at this distance. If it had hit us head-on, we probably wouldn’t even have left corpses for them to recover.

  Things were only marginally better now: the Faldra had dodged the attack, not escaped unscathed. The glancing blow from the fire breath had caused patches of the mech’s leather skin to burst into flame.

  “That’s hot!” Elvia-san shouted.

  “There’s fire there! And there! And there!” Shinichi-sama babbled, pointing to one place and another. At this rate the flames would soon consume us as well. With the Faldra itself literally going up in smoke, an airborne escape was looking less and less likely.

  But then Loek-sama suddenly shouted to Romilda-sama, “Romilda, scuttle the exterior covering!”

  “Right!” Romilda-sama shouted back, and suddenly the “skin” fell off the Faldra as if it were shrugging off a set of clothes.

  “Whoa!” Shinichi-sama exclaimed. It was certainly a startling sight. Without the leather, the Faldra looked altogether different. It appeared less like a dragon and more like a suit of armor in the shape of a dragon. The Faldra was formed of overlapping layers of metal, which scraped over each other to produce the creature’s unique sound. It looked very tough and brought to mind a dragon’s skeleton.

  What was more, a green light glowed from between the plates. There was probably a magic gem or something buried deep inside the Faldra to enable it to move. Broadly speaking, it might be something similar to the ore used in my battle dress. The glow indelibly marked out the Faldra as something other than a living being.

  With the Faldra revealed in this way, there was a lot of shouting:

  “Whoa! Whoa, whoa! That is awesome!”

  “Isn’t it? Isn’t it just great?”

  “We’re so glad you understand us, Sensei!”

  Specifically, shouting between Shinichi-sama, Loek-sama, and Romilda-sama.

  “I sure wish you could’ve had this set up in time for our movie!”

  “That’s what sequels are for, Sensei!”

  “Can we save the box office chatter for after we get home alive?!” Minori-sama bellowed.

  “Here it comes!”

  “Yikes!”

  Having missed us with its fire breath, the puppet drake was now rocketing through the air in our direction, as if to deliver a body slam. Loek-sama and I directed the wind we were controlling so that the Faldra lurched upward and avoided it. The puppet drake’s claws grazed the Faldra’s wings, sparking and screeching as they dragged along. But then the creature was past us.

  “Oh crap! Down! We’re going down!”

  “Stay calm, Sensei!” Loek-sama instructed. However...

  “Erk!”

  “Eek!”

  Loek-sama and Romilda-sama both cried out almost simultaneously. With a jerk, we stopped moving. When we look back, we saw that the puppet drake h
ad the Faldra’s long tail in its mouth. It must have grabbed hold as it went by us.

  The puppet drake twisted in midair, dragging the Faldra along.

  “Gaaahhhh!” All of us let up a cry. Our mount flew toward the earth like a hammer...

  “You think you can get away with that?!” Loek-sama and Romilda-sama cried in unison. A tremendous blast of wind caught the Faldra, but even that wasn’t enough to stop its momentum; its front legs dug into the ground.

  I was used to seeing Loek-sama and Romilda-sama fight all the time, but somehow they were in perfect harmony at this moment.

  “You let us go!” Minori-sama cried. I had given the Mini-mee back to her, and she used it now to spit little shards of fire. They impacted against the puppet drake’s face and the spike in its head, and it backed away with an earsplitting shriek. Thankfully, that meant letting the Faldra go.

  “I—I thought we were done for,” said Elvia-san, pale. She was the only one of us not strapped in on the Faldra’s back, so there had been a real danger of her being thrown off.

  “Looks like escape isn’t going to be that easy,” Minori-sama said.

  Clearly. That puppet drake could probably run us down if we tried to take to the sky, not least because our dragon was weighed down with six separate people. Even if the two monsters had basically the same airspeed, ours would be at a disadvantage.

  If we couldn’t run, that meant we would have to fight. But our opponent was impervious to magic, which left us effectively powerless—or so I thought.

  “Minori-sensei!” Loek-sama said. “Leave this to us!”

  “Huh?”

  Minori-sama was more than a bit flummoxed by this request. But even as she sat blinking, Loek-sama and Romilda-sama nodded at each other, then shouted together:

  “Ultimate Transformation!!”

  “Ultimate Transformation!!” Loek and Romilda shouted, their voices almost in harmony. “GO! Faldra—standing mode!”

  “Whaaaaat?!” I found myself shouting.

  Transformation? As in, change? As in variable, modular, multiform—

  And when you say transformation, that can only mean...

  “Wh-What?! What’s going on?! Minori-san looked as surprised as I was; apparently this ability was new to her, too. More to the point, was this stuff even possible with magic, no matter how strong you were? Way to go, Loek and Romilda!

  The green glow coming from inside the dragon-like thing—the Faldra, as they called it—began to get stronger. In the blink of an eye it had encompassed us and continued to expand, forming something. The armor plates separated and began sliding around, some of them turning backwards or spinning in place. The dragon disappeared, and in the green light of that magic the Faldra took on a new shape.

  With us still on board.

  “Whaaa?!”

  This was one crazy transformation! Wouldn’t this be pretty hard to do with the toy? But then again, maybe Ban**i’s prodigious transformer-toy technology could manage it?!

  “Wait...!”

  For some reason, I was in the driver’s seat.

  Wh-What was I talking about? What had been done to me? I felt like I was going crazy... It sure wasn’t anything as simple as hypnosis or high-speed; it... (blah blah blah).

  Seriously, this happened so suddenly that I thought I was going to go into some Sta*d-user-esque monologue, complete with elaborate ASCII art.

  “What in the world...?”

  Even as I asked, though, I had a certain idea. We had just gone from flying on the back of this thing to riding in the middle of it.

  True, having the pilot sit right out in the open air pretty much screamed “Here’s my weak point,” so a transformation only made sense. Plus, because everything that had been tucked inside the dragon was now on the outside as armor, the Faldra was considerably larger than it had been while flying. That was why all of us were able to fit comfortably inside.

  Okay, with six people, comfortably might have been a stretch. A glowing green stone was positioned directly above my head where I sat in the pilot’s seat, and it was a little claustrophobic.

  “Woo-hoo!”

  “It worked!”

  Loek and Romilda were both overjoyed. As for Myusel, Elvia, and Minori-san, they just looked relieved.

  Which was reasonable, I guess.

  Incidentally, just in front of us was something like a screen, a half-sphere perhaps also made possible with magic, on which was displayed the view outside. There were some small crystal-like things near my hands, on which were what appeared to be the figure of the Faldra’s “standing mode.”

  I guess you could say it looked pretty good. It was a humanoid figure covered in dark, steel-colored armor. There must have been more than one magic stone, because in addition to the big main one in the chest, a green glow came from the shoulders and hips as well.

  Although they referred to this as the “standing mode,” the Faldra didn’t exactly stand the way a normal human would. Instead, its legs came to pointy tips that seemed to dig into the earth. But that also gave it an impression of lightness, like a blade held at the ready.

  Wow. Cool...!

  Gun**m and the tradition of “realistic robots” it inspired were all well and good, but I could definitely get moe for the sort of all-together-now, power-of-friendship combo robot that everyone piloted together. I would definitely have to make sure everyone struck a pose when we did our special move!

  I was just basking in the excitement of all this when Minori-san shouted, “The drake! Where’s the puppet drake?!”

  Oops. I forgot.

  It seemed like Loek and the others had too, because there was a lot of “Huh?” and “Oh” and “Hmm...”

  We moved the screen in front of us, searching for it.

  Then Minori-san shouted again: “To the right!”

  Romilda brought up the Faldra’s right arm, which also moved its vision to that side. And there was the puppet drake, smack in the middle of charging right at us.

  “Hwah?!”

  There was a clang as it hit us. The shock threw the cockpit into disarray. Elvia and Myusel tumbled on top of me, and scandalously, there I was with someone’s soft boobs and someone else’s soft butt right in my face, in my face, in ahhhh

  “Here it comes again!” Minori-san said, bracing herself against the walls and floor of the cockpit. Each of us tensed against the inevitable impact—but then...

  “Yah!” Romilda exclaimed, and the puppet drake slid underneath us.

  No—she had caused the Faldra to jump and avoid it.

  “Can we just clarify who’s controlling this thing and how?!”

  Squad-robot pictures usually involved everyone striking poses while they fought. (Not that there was any reason that should have made a humanoid fighting weapon move.)

  “It basically works like a clay doll,” Romilda said.

  Clay doll? Was that—you know? The exo-skeleton-like things the dwarves had conjured up during the soccer tournament? That made sense: the dwarves were masters at working with the earth, or more generally with inanimate objects, so it was only logical that the Faldra with all its armor would operate on a similar principle.

  Though if you wanted to know what exactly that principle was, I couldn’t begin to tell you.

  “So it moves where I tell it to!” Romilda concluded.

  “And it flies where I tell it to!” Loek piped in.

  “How is flying relevant right now?!”

  “What do you mean? The Faldra can only stand on two legs like this because it’s supported by wind sprites...”

  Ah, so even though the Faldra was walking around on two legs, it was wind magic that supported it whenever it seemed like it might fall over. That’s why it could respond with such astonishing lightness to Romilda’s intentions.

  “Everyone hold on tight!” Romilda shouted, and then the Faldra ran forward. Of course, as Loek had explained, it was supported by wind magic as it went, so it looked as much like it was f
loating as running.

  “Throw a punch, Romilda!”

  “Right!”

  Loek and Romilda piloted the Faldra in perfect harmony, without a trace of their usual acrimony. The Faldra’s fist glowed a magical green for an instant, then flew toward the puppet drake. You’d think those joints would be really fragile, but maybe that was a defensive spell I’d seen, because they slammed into the puppet drake’s face with an audible crash but no sign of breaking.

  Roooooaaaarrrr!!

  The puppet drake rose up slightly and howled, whether from pain or anger I wasn’t sure.

  “Launch a kick, Romilda!”

  “Right!”

  As Romilda shouted enthusiastically, the Faldra rotated its blade-like leg, throwing a kick diagonally at the puppet drake’s head. As I expected by now, there was a magic gem in the Faldra’s hip, or kind of in its shin, which glowed green, ensconcing the entire body in that defensive magic.

  This boom! was even louder than the punch. Several of the dragon’s scales shattered, and we could see startled sprites letting off sparks and lightning bolts around it.

  Awesome! This Faldra was so strong!

  Or was it Romilda who was so powerful? Hmm.

  At the moment, though, it was an academic question.

  Rooooaaarrrrrrrr!!

  This time the puppet drake was even noisier. It made a half-turn, then lashed out with its long tail as if it were a whip.

  “Anti-impact defense!” Minori-san cried out.

  “Got it!” Myusel responded.

  Almost simultaneously, a whirlwind enveloped the Faldra’s left arm. It was an instantaneously-created layer of pressurized air that acted like a shield, deflecting the dragon’s tail and neutralizing its power.

  The dragon next tried to take a bite out of the Faldra, then scratch at it with its claws, but we deflected or dodged each attack.