Outbreak Company: Volume 8 (Premium)

by Ichiro Sakaki

Where the heck am I?

  I had no idea, let alone any sense of how to get back to the room I’d come from.

  I was completely and totally lost.

  I remembered the same thing happening at the workshop and realized to my chagrin that getting hopelessly lost was becoming something of a routine with me. I wasn’t even especially bad with directions, but here we were. The castle was just too big for me. I was amazed Petralka and the others could get around without getting lost.

  I was looking around, hoping I would find someone I could ask for directions, but unfortunately I didn’t see anyone. The twists and turns of the hallways made it hard to see very far, and a palpable silence reigned in the corridors. It was enough to make you wonder if the building was actually abandoned. You got the impression that the castle was too big and the number of guards too small.

  “Hmmm...”

  Would just walking around at random get me back? No... Walking around at random was part of what had gotten me lost at the workshop. I’ve been told that the best thing to do if you’re lost is to stay where you are, so I resolved not to move and just wait until everyone noticed I hadn’t come back and came looking for me.

  Then again, the castle was a closed environment. If I walked enough, maybe I would wander into a part of it I recognized? The simplest way of solving a maze is to put your hand on the wall and never let go, and just keep walking. I had read somewhere that eventually, you would get to an exit. Although considering it was a bit of a needle-in-a-haystack method, it seemed like it could take an awful lot of time.

  I was reflecting on these things as I wandered through the castle, when suddenly I found myself in front of a huge door.

  “Huh...?”

  It was really big, and looked sturdy to boot. Probably pretty thick, I had to imagine. It looked even more impenetrable than the doors to the audience chamber, though it was noticeably free of decoration. This door didn’t need a Do Not Enter sign: it pretty much was one. What in the world was behind it?

  Could I have found the Eldant treasury?! But it was awfully plain for that...

  “Who’s there?!”

  “Hagh?!”

  I had only casually rested my hand on the door when I was caught by an angry shout. I turned around to find two soldiers in light armor, swords at their hips, one to the left and one to the right as if to keep me pinned. Each was reaching for his sword already, clearly prepared to kill.

  What was going on here? Had I stumbled into some real trouble? Tripped some kind of trap?!

  “Get away from the door!”

  “Huh? Oh, yes, absolutely!” I pulled my hand back and all but jumped away from the door.

  The soldiers didn’t look entirely satisfied, though; they kept watchful eyes on me as they approached.

  The soldier to my right growled, “Listen, filth, what do you think you’re—”

  But the guy on the left stopped him. “Hey, hold on, this kid—I mean, this man is...”

  And then an instant later someone was bellowing at the top of their lungs: “What is going on here?!”

  I looked down the hall to see a silver-haired girl approaching at long strides. Behind her came two bodyguards.

  “Your Majesty!” the soldiers said, bowing hurriedly.

  “P-Petralka...”

  “We go out of our way to conclude quickly, and this is what we find? What is this?” she demanded of the soldiers.

  “M-Majesty, this kid, he—”

  “Kid?” Petralka narrowed her eyes. “He is a distinguished and important guest of our empire—and you call him ‘this kid’?”

  “N-No, Majesty! Th-This honored personage had his hand on the door of the storeroom, so—”

  Both of the soldiers were shaking in their boots in front of Petralka. Most likely, they were charged with protecting whatever was on the other side of the door, and had come rushing from some nearby guard post when they saw someone they didn’t recognize going past. In other words, they were just doing their job. That they didn’t recognize me was just a bit of bad luck on their part. Honestly, I felt kind of sorry for them.

  “Er, Petralka, these men were just—”

  “We know.” Petralka sighed, then spoke to the two soldiers. “We praise your faithfulness to your duty. But we wish you would judge with cooler heads.”

  “Y-Yes, yes, Majesty!” The men kowtowed.

  Petralka gestured me over to her. “Shinichi, this is a place you must not approach too lightly.”

  “No?”

  “First, back away.” She took me by the wrist and pulled me away from the door. With no particular reason to resist, I let her tow me along but... B-But Petralka-san, your hand!

  Her hand grasping my wrist somehow managed to make my face feel hot. As someone whose years of not having a girlfriend were precisely equal to his years of being alive, I found myself a little bit excited just holding hands with a girl like this. Especially one as cute as Petralka.

  “G-Gosh, I’m sorry, I got lost...”

  “We understand perfectly well that you didn’t come here on purpose,” Petralka said as we walked. “But you must not come near this place, even accidentally. No good will come of it.”

  “What’s in that room, exactly?”

  From Petralka’s tone, it didn’t sound like a treasure chamber. I knew it would be better just to let the subject drop, but I couldn’t resist my curiosity.

  Petralka thought silently for a moment, probably trying to decide whether she should tell me. “Er, if you can’t say, that’s all right...”

  “No, we do not mind if you know, Shinichi.” She nodded back over her shoulder at me—no, not at me, but at the door behind me. “That is a storeroom.”

  “So it is a treasure chamber?! Is it one of those rooms heaped with gold and jewels and stuff?!”

  “No, it isn’t,” Petralka said, coldly interrupting my ridiculous flight of fantasy. “That room holds something very, very dangerous.”

  “Very dangerous...”

  “We believe it came up in conversation recently. Imarufe Bisurupeguze, such as the Assembly of Patriots had.”

  “Th-That’s where it is?”

  You know, I did remember somebody saying they had one of those here at the castle. So that was where they kept it.

  “But didn’t you say it was in the basement or something?”

  “Strictly speaking, beyond that door is a staircase that leads down to the storage room. Of course, it’s so closely guarded that in principle it should not be possible to steal it. But if you wish to avoid undue suspicion, you would do best to keep your distance.”

  “R-Right...”

  It sounded like it was on par with the armory of a military base, or the room where they kept seized enemy weapons. Who could blame them for being suspicious of unauthorized personnel who got too close? An unwary visitor might even find themselves caught in some trap meant to stop any burglars.

  “It is quite lucky that we happened to be passing by at the right moment.”

  “You’re telling me... And I really appreciate it, by the way.”

  If Petralka hadn’t showed up, that might have turned into quite the little incident.

  “Regardless, Shinichi, how did you come to be so lost?”

  “Oh, uh—I went to do my business. I was trying to get back to the room we were using, and couldn’t find the way.”

  “Mm,” Petralka said, still holding my hand—all I could see was the back of her head, but I could hear the grim smile in her voice. “That room is in the opposite direction from here.”

  “Oh...”

  So I had gotten completely turned around. I decided I had better resolve to stop just walking when I got lost.

  “Hey, Petralka, I get it, I’ll stay clear of that room, so stop—stop pulling...”

  Petralka was silent. She never loosened her grip; in fact, she squeezed tighter and picked up her pace.

  Finally she said, “Ye gods! Shinichi, you are the most oblivious...”<
br />
  “Huh?”

  “The moment we are not constantly at your side, you become lost!”

  Er, okay, so yes, I did lose my way in the underground workshop, too. But to hear it put like that—it made me sound like some kind of child, and it was kind of embarrassing. Actually, although I still couldn’t see Petralka’s expression, I got the sense she almost sounded like she was... enjoying this? Happy about it? Maybe I was just imagining things.

  Whatever the case, it didn’t look like she was going to be letting go of my hand anytime soon.

  “And how are things?” she asked.

  “Wha?”

  “We will need more than ‘wha.’ We mean Lauron. She seems to be quite capable.”

  I belatedly caught on that Petralka was changing the subject. It looked like she was done with whatever had called her away, and she was going to take me back to the practice room. Which I was sure grateful for, but—

  “Ahh...”

  I didn’t quite know how to answer her question.

  Yeah, Lauron wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.

  But... Just think about...

  I pictured Lauron’s crying face. If anyone was at fault here, it was probably me for misjudging her personality and abilities.

  There was no question of her immense talent, but she was imitating, rather than emulating a model as we had hoped. And she did it by feel, not logic, so that even she wasn’t sure of the difference. Maybe that was why she kept wondering what was wrong with her, why she felt we were attacking her.

  As long as she had Petralka there to imitate, she could copy everything perfectly. But she couldn’t do more than that. That meant to have the doll be really convincing, Petralka would have to be nearby at all times—which would defeat the point of a double.

  What to do, what to do?

  “Shinichi?” Petralka was perplexed by my silence. At the same moment she spoke, though, she stopped moving.

  I looked—and saw a familiar door in front of us. Our training room. I could just catch Hikaru-san’s voice from inside.

  Phew! We’d made it back.

  As I was breathing this internal sigh of relief, though, I saw Petralka glance at our hands. She was still holding mine. There was a beat before she let me go. It felt almost like she was hesitating—regretful? No, I had to be overthinking it.

  As Petralka opened the door, she called out, “We are back. How are things g—”

  “All I’m asking,” a voice exclaimed—at first I wondered whose, but then I realized it was Hikaru-san’s—“is why you can’t do it!”

  Hikaru-san was standing in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips, shouting at Lauron. His voice contained a frustration I’d never heard from the seemingly unflappable young man.

  Uh..........................................oh.

  “Surely you could do it if you’d just think about it a little bit, right?!”

  “Okay, Hikaru-kun, calm down...”

  “You’re, uh, scaring Lauron-san...”

  “Waaaaahh!”

  “Lauron, Lauron, Hikaru-sensei isn’t really yelling at you, you know—”

  Hikaru-san was shouting, Minori-san and Myusel were trying to calm him down, Lauron was a teary mess, and while Romilda tried to comfort her, all Loek could do was stand there and watch the whole thing in shock.

  Damn.

  I had hoped that while I was using the toilet, everyone would just take a collective deep breath, get their heads about them—but it turned out to be exactly the opposite.

  I gave a very long, very deep sigh.

  Petralka turned to me, her eyes wide. It must have been a pretty surprising thing to walk in on. “What in the world is happening here...?”

  Well, uh, Your Majesty, it’s pretty much what it looks like...

  Man, I hate to think about where we go from here.

  For the moment, I just looked at Petralka and shook my head in surrender—then I waded in between Hikaru-san and Lauron to see if I could patch things up.

  Chapter Three: Her Own Rules?

  It was another average day, when about ten students came up to me after lessons were over.

  “Shinichi-sensei!”

  The group looked to be roughly half boys and half girls... but all dwarves.

  “Y-Yeah, what’s up?”

  This wasn’t the first time I’d been surrounded by students, but it was unusual for them all to be dwarves. Especially dwarves all looking at me with a hopeful gleam in their eyes.

  I knew they were after something, but this felt a little different from the times when they were after some new manga or anime. I blinked a few times. Then the students started peppering me with questions.

  “How’s Lauron doing?”

  “Is she killing it?”

  Only then did I understand why the crowd was all dwarves.

  “Lauron? Wait, you guys know?”

  Lauron wasn’t a student at the school, and on top of that, her work was supposed to be top-secret—had Romilda blabbed about it? I didn’t see her among the dwarves packed in around me.

  I took a second look, and discovered Romilda standing a short distance away, giving me an apologetic shrug.

  Ahh...

  “Romilda said it was top-secret, and she wouldn’t tell us anything about it,” one of the students said, pouting. It was one of the boys, by the way, so he looked like an old man. Have you ever seen a bearded old guy pout? It’s both funny and kind of surreal. But never mind that.

  “So none of you know what Lauron is actually doing?”

  “No idea.”

  “But we heard she was picked for something very important!”

  “Okay, I see.”

  Apparently, Romilda had managed to keep the details to herself. It was understandable: craftsmen from her own father’s workshop had been summoned to be part of a project that might go so far as to influence the nation’s diplomacy, so it was only natural that she might want to brag about it a little. And Lauron’s own family and acquaintances would no doubt notice that she was being called to the castle on an almost daily basis. I guess I should’ve expected people to find out that much. If anything, I could be grateful that Romilda had held back about the most important parts of the operation.

  “We know Lauron, so we know she must be working hard,” one girl said.

  “Yeah, maybe too hard,” another added. “I hope she isn’t hurting herself.”

  The dwarf boys (it still felt kind of funny to call them that) all had similar expressions on their faces, all clearly concerned about Lauron. Some of this might have sprung from the simple fact that one of their own had been given an important task that could benefit the social standing of every dwarf. But I sensed that it was more than that.

  The fact that they were asking whether she had overworked herself was proof enough.

  “So how is she doing, Sensei?” Concern and curiosity mixed in the students’ questions. I could have simply shut them down in the name of security, but...

  “Well... hmm.” I smiled awkwardly. “She’s working hard, that’s for sure. Sorry, I can’t share any details with you, but I can tell you she’s doing a job that only she can do. It’s not easy.”

  “Huh...” The students all looked at each other, confused.

  I really wanted to be able to say more, to reassure the kids who were worried about Lauron. But confidentiality was confidentiality, even for the guy who had come up with the plan. I couldn’t go telling everyone about what was happening. That would be bad for Petralka, among other people.

  “I know you’re all worried,” I said. “Trust me, I’m being careful not to overwork her.”

  “Okay!” The dwarf girls finally smiled.

  ...Anyway.

  It had been a full ten days since Lauron had started her “training.” The situation, though, was the same as ever. She was completely capable of making the doll act like a living human being. She could make it appear exactly like Petralka. But without Petralka herself
there to provide a model, Lauron suddenly became unable to make the doll work. And maybe the way Hikaru-san had upbraided her had left her with some kind of trauma, because when she did try to make herself work the puppet with no one to imitate, its movements would get less and less precise, until at last she couldn’t move it at all and she burst into tears again.

  Things couldn’t go on like this, and I had come up with a number of ideas to break the impasse.

  For example, I thought about how Petralka was the empress; in other words, a member of the royal family. That meant that beyond simply impersonating Petralka herself, the puppet would have to be able to act like a noble well enough to deceive anyone watching—so I considered starting with upper-class manners.

  To that end, I had Prime Minister Zahar make a list of the bare minimum someone would have to know to abide by good noble manners, and resolved to teach them to Lauron.

  She was able to memorize every single one, and with startling speed. She learned them so accurately that if I were to read off Zahar’s list and get something wrong, she could immediately correct me.

  But... that was it. She wasn’t actually able to put them to use.

  Is this, like... hard-headedness? Or what?

  I found myself thinking of a certain type of computer game. It’s a genre where you program instructions into a robot and then make it fight. Players don’t control the robots directly, but instead make a sort of flowchart that says, “If this happens, do this,” so that the robot can respond to varying situations. That’s what makes those games interesting, but of course, if your program has any holes in it, the robot might get stuck unable to move, or go around and around in circles, or come up with some other unhelpful thing to do.

  There’s an inflexibility that runs through those games: you have to give detailed instructions for the robot to work. Very careful, very precise, so that it can replicate movements. Like a machine.

  If you just said, “Do whatever,” it might say “I don’t understand” or “I can’t,” and start crying.

  And that led me to...

  “...sniff... Ohh... Waaah...”

  Lauron’s weeping echoed through the room once again. Faced with her sitting in the middle of the room and wailing, I felt like I was somehow bullying her. Heck, from her perspective, maybe I was.