I never noticed the shadows closing in on us as we hobnobbed around Akihabara.
First the Chinese (probably, I think) spies. They pretended to be employees at a maid café in order to kidnap me, but it didn’t work.
The next attack came from the Russians (apparently). Incredibly, they succeeded in abducting my bodyguard Minori-san.
The rest of us, though, were approached by people from the American army who pretended to be our friends—and then tried to kidnap us.
Obviously, the rest of the world knew about us and was paying attention. They knew we could tell them something about the big secret Japan was clearly hiding.
Using every trick we had—from magic to Elvia’s superhuman physical abilities to a passing otaku’s itasha—we somehow made it safely back to my house, but we still didn’t have Minori-san. We didn’t know what to do.
Her superior, Matoba-san, had advised us to let the Japanese government handle Minori-san while the rest of us went back to Eldant—but you might remember what I said about trusting the government.
And then...
Back in my living room.
“I wonder... if Minori-sama’s all right...”
We sat around the table looking at each other. Specifically, we each had one arm stretched out on the tabletop, our hands placed on top of one another. It looked like we were about to give a cheer at a sports game, or maybe participate in some bizarre ritual—but there was a perfectly good reason for it.
Magic rings.
The quickest way to communicate with Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia, who were after all from another world, was to use magic devices that could communicate thoughts. Myusel and Petralka knew a certain amount of Japanese, but as the talk got more complicated, these translator rings saved us a lot of time.
In general, though, magical items didn’t work in an environment where there was no magical energy in the atmosphere. Strictly speaking, the rings worked based on the magical energy emitted by a person’s body, but without a medium to travel through, there was no way for the magic to communicate with the person you were trying to talk to. In a confined space, we could have opened a bottle of sprites and used the magical energy to talk just as if we were in the other world. But we only had so many of those bottles, and we wanted to save them when we could.
So instead we sat with our hands joined, literally communicating by touch. This would allow the rings to work even without sprites in the atmosphere.
“What if they’re doing something terrible to her?” Myusel grimaced, apparently envisioning what that “something terrible” might be. She usually looked like a sweet, smiling angel... but circumstances had made my maid look very grim indeed. It made me realize how hard she must have been working to look upbeat when she had come to cheer me up earlier.
How noble, how heroic...
“She will be all right... or so we would like to believe,” said Petralka. She looked less grim than flummoxed, unable to come up with a plan to get around this deadlock. She was so pretty, even her frown was cute.
“Y-Yeah, she’s gotta be, right?!” Elvia sounded a little too eager; maybe she was trying to help lighten the mood. She looked at me almost pleadingly and said, “Th-The Ja-panese guv-erment will save her! Won’t they?”
I didn’t answer.
“Shinichi-sama?!” Her eyes started to look like a dog’s being abandoned by its owner.
I just couldn’t bring myself to blithely say, “Sure, it’ll be fine!” After all, I’d brought Myusel and Elvia along exactly because I didn’t trust the Japanese government to take care of things. Like I said, I wasn’t their favorite person.
I had been getting some results in Eldant, true, but there was that squad of trained killers they had sent after me. And the time they pretended not to notice when I was abducted by the neighboring kingdom of Bahairam. And the person they sent as my “assistant” whose real job was to replace me.
Of course, I was the one the government had a grudge against, not Minori-san. But as my bodyguard, Minori-san had spoken up and acted in my support more than once. Would Japan go out of its way to save her? I hated to say it, but I wasn’t sure.
If there’s one thing we know, it’s that nation-states won’t hesitate to ruthlessly sacrifice a single individual if that person is inconvenient to them. Fiction and history alike are overflowing with examples. And Minori-san was in a unique position. If what the American agent had said was true—if she was officially already dead—it had to be because that was what best served the interests of secrecy. In a word, the government could pretend she didn’t exist, and no one would be the wiser.
If there was one sliver of hope, it lay in the fact that Minori-san was privy to state secrets. If she started talking, the world Japan had gone to such lengths to hide would be out in the open. The government might rescue her just to keep their secrets safe.
Then again, it might be easier just to kill her...
My mind flashed back to the “medical exam” we’d undergone when we came over from Eldant. They had taken blood from all of us except Petralka—meaning they had stuck us all with a hypodermic needle. What if they had injected us with some slow-acting poison, or bacteria that didn’t show symptoms until later? It would be like a time bomb, reaching its most deadly effectiveness only after a set amount of time. Maybe you had to take regular antidotes, or a vaccine to counteract it. That would certainly be a logical way to protect your secrets. Maybe it was a sort of insurance—even if they hadn’t expected exactly what happened, it was something that would ensure we had the good grace to die if we ran off where the government couldn’t get us.
“Shinichi-samaaa...” Elvia was obviously deeply distressed.
This was bad. She really wanted an answer—or maybe she could see from my face that my thoughts weren’t going anywhere good. Heck, with her nose, maybe she even detected some subtle change in my smell.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, glancing around at everyone. “Whatever else... I’m not sure I can bring myself to just go home to Eldant and leave Minori-san here.”
“That is obvious enough by now,” Petralka said, frowning. “You are a fool in the strangest ways, Shinichi.”
“Er... Petralka?”
“Had it been Myusel or Elvia who had been kidnapped, you would be no more likely to simply shrug and go home.” She sounded a little exasperated.
I was lost for words. This meant that she... she trusted me.
Gee, that made me kind of... happy.
But then Petralka said, “So tell us—what exactly do you plan to do?”
“About that,” I said, looking straight at the adorable empress. “First of all, I want at least you, Petralka, to go back to Eldant.”
“What?” Petralka didn’t look happy to hear that.
Dang, I knew that would make her angry. But...
“We’ve got who knows how many countries after us. I hate to be so blunt, but you would be the biggest prize for any of them—and the biggest problem for us if you got kidnapped.”
“Ahem...” Of course, Petralka knew that perfectly well.
“They could get me or Myusel, or Elvia, and it wouldn’t make that much difference to the big picture. But you, Petralka? What then?”
I was, in the end, a Japanese citizen. Myusel and Elvia both came from the other world, but they were ultimately ordinary people, too.
But Petralka was different. Completely. She was a head of state. An absolute monarch. And the way they viewed people like her in the Middle Ages wasn’t like today’s world of democracies and communist regimes and whatever else. I had no doubt that the Eldant Empire had tens, maybe hundreds, or thousands, of people who would gladly lay down their lives for their empress.
If that empress were to be captured by a foreign power, how would the Holy Eldant Empire react? If we weren’t careful—heck, even if we were careful—it might lead to all-out war.
“Let us worry about Minori-san, Petralka, and you—”
“No.” She stuck out her
lip and looked away. Sure. This of all times was when she chose to act her age. Or younger.
“Petralka...”
“No, no, no!” She shook her head like she was throwing a tantrum. “We shall not countenance going back alone under these circumstances!”
“But listen—”
“If we are to leave, then you, Shinichi, must come with us. And so must Myusel, and Elvia—and Minori! We will accept nothing else! And what’s more...” She glanced down for an instant. “What would we say to Garius if Minori alone did not return...?”
“Huh...?” I said.
Minister Garius en Cordobal—why would she bring him up right now?
He was Petralka’s cousin, an important advisor within the Eldant Empire. He led the knights of the realm and effectively controlled most of the country’s military. Did he see Minori-san as special somehow? Wait—what? Were they, like... you know? Had I just never noticed? I mean, I knew she lent him a lot of books, but—
“How could we tell him that his precious sister in yaoi, the one who knew his heart, was gone?”
“Oh. That.”
In addition to being a minister, Garius was also, uh—you know. He was a guy, but he liked guys, which apparently gave him something in common with the fujoshi Minori-san. I might have expected it to be exactly the opposite—but apparently not.
“Even we have never seen Garius look so happy as when he speaks of yaoi with Minori,” Petralka said.
“...Is that right?”
I suppose that’s how it gets when you, you know... share an interest with someone. Even if it is an interest I think I’m going to stop talking about right now.
“Thus, we refuse to return home alone.” Petralka put a hand to her modest (a word I choose for political reasons) chest, tapping it with her fist. “We shall go to rescue Minori. It is, after all, a ruler’s duty to look after her subjects.”
Ahh. So Petralka saw Minori-san as practically one of her own people now. That made me kind of happy, too.
This adorable empress called us her friends, without the slightest hesitation or doubt. We, who had once been part of a plot to culturally invade her country.
“It looks like we’re up against at least one army unit, though,” I said. I wasn’t sure if they had intelligence agencies or subversive operators in the Eldant Empire, so I used a broader expression. I guess it wasn’t that far off, insofar as it described people who used guns and skirted the law to support their nation behind the scenes. “Rescuing her is easy to say and all...”
“We need only use magic, needn’t we? And we have the strength of a werewolf, as well.”
“That’s right,” Myusel said as Petralka looked at her.
“Yes’m!” Elvia added as the royal gaze turned to her.
It was true that Myusel could use some magic—even I knew one spell—and that we still had a bit of leeway in our sprite supply. They weren’t very good for ranged attacks, but a rescue operation was likely to involve a lot of close-quarters fighting.
Elvia’s physical abilities, meanwhile, were something we were likely to rely on extensively. Someone who pulled a gun might have an advantage, but in hand-to-hand combat, no one could top her. And again, she would be helped by the amount of close-in battle there would probably be.
The only certainty was that it was very uncertain, but it was a start.
“But there’s the little matter of where she is...” I said.
Fighting power was no good if you didn’t know who or what to fight. And at the moment, we had no idea where Minori-san was. All we knew was that some Russian agent had abducted her in the hurly-burly of Akihabara, and to be honest, we didn’t even know if that was true; it was just what the Americans had told us.
“So where do we look?” I concluded.
“Hrm,” Petralka grunted. Maybe she hadn’t thought that far. “We may simply have to start searching, but we personally are not familiar enough with Ja-pan to have much confidence about what to do.”
“I’m from here, and even I’m lost without any clues. Hey, how would you search if we were in Eldant?”
“By magic, principally.” Petralka looked troubled. “But—”
“You need sprites or a magic stone to use magic at all in this world,” Myusel said, picking up Petralka’s thought. “But those cover such a small area that finding Minori-sama could be next to impossible...”
“Right, sure...” I said.
Even if we had a spell that could find Minori-san, it wouldn’t do us much good in Japan. The lack of magical energy to conduct the spell through the air would severely limit its range. No way we could use anything that would let us find one specific person in a large space. Could we possibly narrow down the search area even a little?
“Maybe Elvia could track her scent!” I said. “Or... maybe not.”
Elvia was shaking her head even as I spoke. “I know Minori-sama’s scent, but...”
“I know, she must have traveled by car,” I said.
And with all the people who came through Akihabara at any given time, Minori-san’s specific odor was probably long gone by now.
“Hmm,” we each muttered. It was starting to look like we were out of options. But then...
“Um, Shinichi-sama...” Myusel seemed to want to offer an opinion. “What about... you know?”
“What?”
“It was in a manga you let me read once. Something from this world that allows you to know a person’s location. Uh, the name had three characters, but they weren’t kanji, katakana, or hiragana.” She began to write in the air with her free hand.
“Jee... pee... oh! You mean GPS?”
Her face lit up. “Yes, that’s it! In the manga, it sounded like it could locate someone for you...”
“Why did you not mention such a useful thing sooner?!” Petralka demanded.
Myusel shrank back. “I—I’m sorry...”
“Er... worry not.” Petralka scratched her cheek uncomfortably and looked away.
“Well, I think it’s great that y’ remembered it.”
“Er, yes, thank you.”
“At any rate, Shinichi, could we not use this zee pee ess—”
“I’m sorry, but... I’m afraid we couldn’t.” Petralka looked so hopeful—but I had to shake my head. “I had the same thought, for a moment. But if we could track her cell phone’s GPS, the government would have located her ages ago. And anyway, if a bunch of civilians thought of this, what about the people who captured her? Any trained agent would have destroyed her cell phone the second they got their hands on her.” There was a moment of silence. The others looked at each other, not quite following me. “Uh, so what I mean is—GPS is—it’s like these magic rings. If you don’t have a special tool with you, it can’t track you.”
That was pretty imprecise as explanations went, but I didn’t have time to try to tell them about how man-made satellites communicated with base stations on Earth to triangulate a position.
“Anyway,” I said, “tracking someone by GPS isn’t normally something a private individual can—well, okay, so my mom traced what I was doing once using a GPS log.”
My mom had been an ero-game designer, drawing X-rated pictures of beautiful women. Sort of as part of this vocation, during her student days she had picked up some coding skills, and used them to pitch in when her perennially shorthanded studios needed a programmer.
She acquired a bit of a talent for hacking, too. I don’t mean the “super-hacker” stuff you see in manga or whatever, where someone breaks into a military facility’s network to launch ICBMs. Come to think of it, I’ll bet nukes aren’t even connected to the network. But never mind.
“Shinichi, your mother is capable of using this ZPS?”
“Maybe, but again, if Minori-san doesn’t have a special tool with her, we won’t be able to find her. The only thing you can track is the location of the tool, not Minori-san herself.”
The four of us were looking dejectedly at each other when—
— ♪
My cell phone jingled from my pocket. The sound was the theme song from the Rental☆Madoka movie, meaning this wasn’t a mail or a Twitter notification—someone was calling me.
I glanced down at the screen to find Matoba-san’s name.
“It’s from Matoba-san,” I told the others, and then I answered and put the phone to my ear.
Maybe he had new info about Minori-san. Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia all had the same idea; they watched me with bated breath. But the voice we heard from my phone was... ragged.
“Shinichi-kun, are you at your house?!”
I had never heard him sound like this before. For that matter, I had hardly known him to get upset before.
“Huh? Y-Yeah, so?”
What was going on?
“All right... Shinichi-kun, stay calm and listen to me.”
“Okay...”
I felt my back stiffen. I didn’t trust Matoba-san completely, but I didn’t think he’d try to lead us into a trap, either. And that meant...
“The regular check-ins from the Public Security division assigned to your house have stopped.”
“Huh? You mean—”
“Most likely, someone or something neutralized them and is very close to your house right now. Be on the alert.”
“......Wait...”
What the heck?!
How was I supposed to be on the alert? What for?!
But Matoba-san hung up before I could ask. Silently, I took the phone away from my ear, staring at the words Call ended on the screen.
“Shinichi?”
“Master?”
The look on my face obviously didn’t inspire confidence in my friends. Elvia was leaning forward too, waiting for me to say something.
All I could manage was: “What are we gonna do?”
It was the deep of the night—sometime after 3 a.m. Normally, I would have been asleep by now.
Dark shapes approached the Kanou household, careful to slip through the shadows left by the city lights.
That’s right: shapes. Not just one. Eight all together.
They were all men. They looked Asian—you could be forgiven for thinking they were Japanese, but as a Japanese myself, I just didn’t think they looked like my fellow countrymen. Something deep in my genes told me something was off. If I had to guess, I might have said they were Chinese.
Outbreak Company: Volume 10 Page 2