Outbreak Company: Volume 10

by Ichiro Sakaki

  I was looking at the ground, but my shoulders had started to shake. The agent must have taken me for terrified—so it took him a moment to realize that the sound I was making was suppressed laughter.

  “What is so fun—”

  “Hey.” Still grinning, I held up the thing I had been holding in my hand this whole time. “You know what this is?”

  It was a perfectly ordinary smartphone, the one I used every day.

  Specifically, its screen.

  I had one particular app open. And the agent was right there on the screen for all to see.

  Let’s turn back the clock just a little, to the moment when the Chinese agents were breaking through our fence and moving into the garden.

  “...There.”

  Sitting at the keyboard of my mother’s computer, tapping away on the keys, was... Shizuki. On the LCD screen was the Twitter client, with which I was so familiar. Shizuki was tweeting away.

  “Spread the word.”

  She was tweeting out using her own Twitter account, and we hoped her friends would pick up on the post and retweet it far and wide, until it was all over the internet.

  I guess there were plenty of high school girls still awake even at this time of night, because the chime indicating we’d been retweeted just kept dinging. It started to sound like a machine gun. Shizuki put a similar message out on LINE, then opened a browser window and started posting on social networking services. She was trying to get the message to every friend she had. Each post ended the same way: Spread the word.

  “Wow,” I breathed. That was the power of high school girls on Twitter, LINE, and the like. Shizuki’s short post, photo, and the URL she’d included were speeding around the world. “I know it was my idea, but... I’m still kind of amazed. And honestly, kind of scared.”

  “This?” Shizuki said, not even looking at me. “This is nothing.”

  That explained why even the most insipid post could set Twitter on fire. Once the retweets started, there was no stopping them.

  “Thanks,” I said. “This is a big help.”

  Despite my sincere words of gratitude, my sister still didn’t look at me. “...Whatever. Anyone can throw a web link out there.” Still, I thought I caught a hint of bashfulness in her tone. Aaargh—she really was a tsundere. It was adorable.

  I knew better than to voice those thoughts by this point, though, so I kept my mouth shut.

  At any rate, I was starting to feel like things might turn out all right. I grinned at the ongoing stream of dings and retweet notifications. The Twitter client was still open on the screen, along with a tweet:

  tfw pandaland secret agents try to break into ur house lololol

  The post also included a link... to a live video stream.

  Back to the present. I was grinning evilly as I showed the agents my cell phone, which was displaying an ongoing livestream.

  “You know about Ni** Nama?”

  The agents didn’t respond, but I was sure they were listening to me. Speaking slowly so they would be certain to understand me, I said, “Right this minute, we’re broadcasting live around the world.”

  From just over my shoulder, a security camera we’d hastily set up was recording the agents’ every move and sending the video straight to the web.

  They looked shocked.

  “Man, this is something else. We’ve already got over ten thousand viewers. And more comments than I can count!” Even as I spoke, the number of viewers was shooting up. I actually had the comments hidden because they were coming so thick and fast they nearly blocked out the video. “Electronics today are just amazing, huh? Great pictures, instant communications. Just like this.”

  It actually wasn’t just the live feed we put online. We’d also shared the security camera footage of the agents working their way up to the house—but I didn’t feel I needed to give them all the specifics.

  The agents looked at each other, panic evident on their faces. They may not have spoken perfect Japanese, but they had been posted to this country and there was a good chance they understood perfectly well what I was saying. Livestream sites and Twitter-type services had gotten pretty popular in China, too, recently.

  If nothing else, they definitely got that they were in a tight spot.

  Incidentally... other than myself and Elvia, I had everyone else stay hidden in the room on the second floor. After I charged Myusel with protecting Petralka and my family, Elvia and I went down to meet the agents. Between Elvia’s physical abilities and my magic spell, I hoped we could make something work.

  I faced my phone back towards me again and set comments to show. Bam! A zillion words filled my screen.

  “Is this for real?”

  “Clickbait!”

  “It’s the real thing, man”

  “That was a silenced pistol shot!!”

  “Reported”

  “rptd”

  “Reported”

  ...............

  These and similar posts were flying across the screen.

  “I don’t know if you’re here to kill us or kidnap us or what,” I said, turning the screen back toward the agent. “But are you sure you want to do it in front of all these people?”

  “Grr,” the agents growled. I smiled triumphantly.

  Inside, though, I was shaking and sweating. Please go away please go away I’m begging you please go away...!

  If the agents decided things were too stacked against them here and left, great. We wouldn’t have to fight them. But if they decided they were in too deep already—well, they were still the ones with the guns. And so far they hadn’t put them down.

  I stood silently. It was looking like I’d bet wrong. I pulled out my sprite bottle and started chanting my spell under my breath. Elvia stood to cover me.

  Bad bad bad bad!

  Three people unconscious on the floor, five more with guns pointed at us. Just the two of us to fight back. If they were willing to kill one of us and kidnap the other, then the odds weren’t in our favor. However strong Elvia might have been, fighting five armed men at point-blank range was too much even for her.

  Just as I was doing these frantic mental calculations, though—

  “Oh.”

  —I let out a stupefied mumble.

  The reason was the shadow I saw coming up from behind the man. It was—

  “Grgh!” One of the agents went down with a small shout. The others spun around to find a young man with a shovel standing behind them.

  “Reito-san?!” I exclaimed.

  Ariga Reito. Owner of the Rental☆Madoka itasha. With his black shirt, fingerless gloves, and overlong hair, he might as well have been carrying a sign that said I’m an otaku, nice to meet ya.

  He was the one who had helped rescue Myusel and Petralka when they had been nearly kidnapped in Akihabara. He didn’t know much about what was going on, but after he parked his car at my house, he decided to stick around because he thought it looked like things might turn interesting. (I found the logic a little hard to follow.)

  Er... I’m very sorry, Reito-san. I had completely forgotten about you.

  “T-Take that!” Reito-san said, brandishing the shovel over the fallen agent.

  The tool had come from our garden. Reito-san had grabbed it, snuck up behind our attackers, and smacked them with it. A shovel was a superb weapon, capable of taking off someone’s head when used properly. And with its solid metal spade, it could stop a projectile more reliably than a bulletproof vest.

  “Why, you...!” One of the agents leveled his gun at Reito-san. One eyeblink later, though, Elvia was on him. She grabbed his wrists and forced him to the floor. That obviously didn’t render him unconscious, though, and he kept struggling. The gun went off once, then twice, the bullets ripping into the walls and ceiling. Reito-san and I both dove for cover.

  Then one of the agents shouted something in Chinese (probably). It must have been some kind of signal, because the others suddenly started behaving very differently. The guy
Elvia had a hold on tossed his gun away and kicked her in the stomach, gaining himself some distance from her. She might have been strong, but she was light, making it easy to fling her off. She never hit the wall, but landed on all fours, never in any danger.

  “Elvia, are you okay?”

  “Oh-kay!” she shouted. Apparently she had picked up at least that much Japanese.

  Even so, she tottered a little; it couldn’t have been pleasant to get kicked in the stomach.

  The agents were shouting again, taking the opportunity to pick up their fallen comrades and weapons, after which they beat a hasty exit towards the garden. Elvia instinctively made to go after them.

  “Stop, you don’t have to chase them!” I said, grabbing her as she went speeding past. “If they retreat, we win! Remember?”

  “Oh yeah...” I guess the excitement of battle had driven that fact out of her mind.

  Elvia blinked like she was coming out of a trance, and then with a long sigh I felt her go limp. She may have been a werewolf, but she was still a young girl—she was probably scared.

  “But why did they suddenly...?”

  “Maybe ’cause half of ’em got beat up?” Reito-san offered. “I’m betting they’re Chinese. The last thing they would want is to be picked up by the Japanese police. They probably decided they wouldn’t all be able to get away if any more of them got knocked out.”

  “Yeah... That makes sense.” It would be pretty hard to move carrying two or three people your own size. And they didn’t want their unconscious friends captured alive.

  “Anyway, what the heck was all that about?” Reito-san said, tossing the shovel back into the garden. “I was out there in my car when I saw some weird guys come in, so I just kinda followed them. I was watching from the garden when all of a sudden you guys jumped them...”

  “Ha ha ha, haaa...” Not sure what to say, I tried to just laugh it off.

  Reito-san, though, helpfully came up with a misunderstanding of his own. “Hey, were you guys filming a movie or something?! I didn’t crash your set, did I?!” He looked around, trying to find a camera.

  Come to think of it, in this world, we—especially Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia—were supposedly involved in a canceled fantasy film.

  “Did I at least look cool?! Did the whole world see me doing my thing? Is there a Hollywood debut in my future? Shoot, I gotta practice my autograph!”

  “Well, I think you looked great.”

  Not in a movie, granted, but on a live video streaming site.

  Reito-san continued to be weirdly excited about the whole thing as I just looked at him.

  “Ah, Shinichi-kun, so you’re all right.”

  Matoba-san had appeared almost as soon as the agents had vanished. It was almost like they were handing off to each other—but even I thought that was a little too much conspiracy-think. Matoba-san probably wasn’t involved this time. Otherwise, why would he have warned me in the first place?

  He had his hair parted to one side as usual, and was wearing a drab suit, as usual. He was, as ever, the very embodiment of what people thought of when they heard the word bureaucrat. Which made a certain amount of sense, considering that’s what he was—Chief of the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau, an organ of the Japanese government. He was also, as a matter of fact, my direct superior at Amutech.

  He wasn’t a bad person, exactly, but he wasn’t really good, either. He was nice enough to me, but I wasn’t completely confident I could trust him when the chips were really down.

  But anyway...

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  As I showed Matoba-san to our living room, I gave him the short version of how we had driven our attackers off. The posts on Twitter, LINE, and social media, along with the video streaming site.

  “I see,” Matoba-san said, impressed, a slight smile coming over his face. “You might say I expected no less from you. You always were a quick thinker.”

  Matoba-san was hard to read—he could look like the most innocent thing in the world, all the while calmly plotting some awful scheme. So I wasn’t sure if he was really that impressed with me or not.

  “I understand the broadcast is over now,” he said, “but is it possible someone might have recorded it and could put it up on YouTube, say?”

  I could see Myusel cleaning up the muddy footprints on the floor and rearranging the furniture that had been shoved around in the fighting. My family was helping her, as for some reason was Reito-san. I shrugged.

  Once something goes up on the net, taking it down is virtually impossible. All those guys’ faces could be floating around cyberspace more or less for eternity.

  “I doubt your new friends will find much refuge,” Matoba-san said with a sad smile. “I suspect their country will disown them. Suddenly they’ll find themselves stateless vagrants. As a government employee myself, I feel a bit sorry for them.”

  “Do you, now?”

  Honestly, whatever happened to those guys didn’t much matter to me. When you force your way into someone’s house with a gun, you pretty much deserve what you get: internet infamy, national abandonment, whatever.

  The point was, we had managed to survive the crisis. Only once I was talking with Matoba-san did I feel like we had really and truly done it. At last, I let out a sigh of relief.

  Chapter Two: Operation Rescue Minori-san

  It was morning by the time we finished straightening up the living room. I wasn’t too sleepy, though—maybe it was the few winks I had managed to catch, or maybe it was just the excitement—and I proceeded immediately to hold a strategy meeting with Myusel in my room.

  “These are all the sprite bottles we have left...” I looked at the row of palm-sized ceramic jars. They looked strangely like bullets. I guess, in the sense that they allowed us to fire off our magic, they sort of were. “As for the magic stones, we should probably have as many on us as we can.”

  “Shinichi-sama, there are still more.”

  From my gun-nut father’s stash of airsoft equipment we’d gotten a field vest with plenty of pockets, which we’d stuffed with all the sprite bottles they would hold. Our fingers, meanwhile, were bedecked with magical stones, which we treated like accessories. There were still bottles and stones we weren’t able to keep directly on us; these we put in a backpack also procured from my dad’s stuff.

  Once we were outfitted with every magic-supplying item we could manage, we discovered it was all pretty heavy.

  “Is... Is this all of it?” I mumbled, looking around the room—and that was when I noticed the door was slightly ajar. Myusel had spotted it before I had, and was staring intently in that direction. And then...

  “...Oops.”

  Our eyes met hers.

  “What’re you peeping at?” I said.

  “I’m not p-peeping at anything!” Shizuki said from the crack in the door, through which she was clearly peeping. “The door just happened to be open! I just wanted to make sure my big brother wasn’t doing anything weird to Myusel-san, alone in this room together...”

  “If you want to know what’s going on in here, then just come right in!” We weren’t doing anything wrong, and didn’t have anything to hide.

  Er... except I guess it would be tricky if she asked what the bottles or the rocks were for. I still hadn’t used magic in front of my family. If worst really came to worst, I didn’t think I would be able to pass it all off by muttering about state secrets.

  “It’s creepy to have you just peering in there,” I added. “It’s like some kind of horror movie.”

  “You’re one to talk about creepy, you nasty otaku!” Shizuki exclaimed.

  I let out a sigh, then looked down and went back to my preparations. Maybe I should bring the stun guns the agents had dropped? Or maybe it would be better not to fool around with weapons I didn’t really understand. Hmmm.

  I kept mulling it over, but Shizuki didn’t go anywhere; she just stood at the door watching me.

  “What do you wa
nt?” I finally asked.

  “Huh? I, uh, I just...” She couldn’t quite come up with anything. Why was she here?

  After a moment of what seemed to be intense thought, Shizuki looked first to the right, then to the left, then up, then down... anywhere except at me. She crossed her arms, obviously deeply uncomfortable, but finally she said softly, “I guess I... misjudged you. A little.”

  “What...?” I said dumbly. I was completely shocked to hear her say that, when just a minute ago she had been accusing me of being a “nasty otaku.” So shocked, in fact, that I thought I’d misheard her. “C... Come again?”

  “I mean the way you chased off those, like, spies from China or wherever. I always thought you were just a good-for-nothing otaku, but...”

  I wasn’t sure whether it was worse to be a nasty otaku or a good-for-nothing one... but I guess it wasn’t exactly worth worrying about at that moment. More than anything, I was just stunned to hear Shizuki say that. She was practically complimenting me.

  Hoping to act the part of the cool, composed older brother, I put a sort of wry smile on my face. “The truth is, I didn’t do anything. It was Mom and Dad’s security system that even gave us anything to put on Egao Video. And you were the one who helped spread it all over the web.”

  Shizuki didn’t say anything, so neither did I.

  I counted the bottles and stones in the vest and backpack one more time, made sure we hadn’t forgotten anything, then zipped everything up. “Okay,” I finally said.

  Myusel appeared to be ready, too; we looked at each other and nodded. We seemed to be thinking the exact same thing, without saying a word to each other. It made me happy somehow.

  I was just savoring that little thrill when...