Outbreak Company: Volume 7

by Ichiro Sakaki

  Sometime later—I had no idea how much time had passed—I thought I heard a sound. “Hm?” I murmured. “What was that?”

  It wasn’t anything natural. Hikaru-san must have heard the sound too, because the despair on his face was briefly interrupted by curiosity.

  The sound was coming closer.

  No, wait.

  This wasn’t just a “sound.”

  “If I could do something like that ♪ wouldn’t that be great? ♪”

  It was Minori-san and her troupe, singing another song.

  “Is that... Dora*mon?”

  She was singing the theme song to an anime beloved by people all over Japan, something anyone from that nation would recognize immediately.

  “Holes here, holes there, holes everywhere ♪”

  “Huh...?”

  “I hope, I hope, they all come true ♪ I hope they come true with that wonderful butt ♪”

  Wait, what?!

  “How I’d love to put it in that cute little butt! ♪”

  “Right! YAOI HOLE!”

  The window was too far away to see for certain, but the way the singing faded in and out made it sound like Minori-san was marching everyone around the shed.

  Hang on—who was it that had answered “Right!” in that Do**emon voice?! It was really weird because it sounded just like him! I actually had this sudden image of a future robo-cat pulling a Yaoi Hole out of his pocket—talk about your hair standing on end!

  “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! ♂ I just love it! ♪”

  “That’s not how it goes, and you know it!” I exclaimed reflexively.

  “Shut up, idiot!” Hikaru-san whispered fiercely, but the damage was done.

  “S-Sorry...”

  But I mean, those lyrics were just too... You know? They were like a test of how long I could hold myself back—how was I supposed to listen to that and not say anything?!

  Okay, granted, we had other problems right now.

  A sudden, chill silence fell all around us. Maybe they hadn’t heard me, so they went away someplace?

  As hopes go, it wasn’t much, but I clung to it. Until the instant—

  Bam!

  The instant someone pounded on the door, hard. And not just the one time. Not even twice. It was a flurry of blows. The first few were searching, sporadic. But somewhere around knock number ten, it became a constant stream, bambambambam!

  It wasn’t just the door, either. It seemed like every side of the shed was being pounded on from the outside.

  “Heeek?!”

  I was pretty sure I knew how people in zombie apocalypses felt now. This was really and truly the end. We were surrounded. There was nowhere to run.

  “Ahhh...” Trembling, I drew up to Hikaru-san.

  “Shinichi-kuuun? Hikaru-kuuun?” It was Minori-san. She sounded weirdly... pleasant. “We know you’re in there, okay? Just come on out!”

  Under her sweet voice we could hear the doorknob rattle as she turned it hard enough to break it off. Almost as if in harmony, the pounding on the door and walls continued. I was terrified, sure that she would bust open the door, or that one of the walls would give way.

  This was it. This was all she wrote.

  “Eeeyaarrrghhh!”

  Screaming, Hikaru-san and I jumped out from our place by the wall and flung all our body weight against the door, our last bulwark. This was no time to be hiding. Not if there was one single, solitary thing we could do to keep that door from opening.

  Bambambambambam!

  Now that we were leaning against the door, the impacts rattled directly into our bodies.

  What were we going to do?! Was there any possible way out of this situation?!

  I tried desperately to think through the chaos in my brain.

  But at that instant, I heard another sound.

  A gunshot?

  “Huh...?”

  I felt a sort of floating sensation.

  The smack that came a second later clarified what had happened. The door’s hinges had cracked, and the weight of our bodies against the door had pushed it outward, sending us tumbling outside.

  In other words...

  “Eeyikes!”

  The momentum carried Hikaru-san and me along the ground.

  “...Yow...”

  It took a second to register.

  I was lying faceup on the ground.

  And Hikaru-san was all but on top of me.

  Almost as if he were pushing me down...

  “Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhh!!”

  I heard some kind of howl—or was that a cheer?—split the air.

  “Huh? What?”

  Before we could blink, Hikaru-san and I were surrounded by fujoshi.

  Minori-san was there. And Myusel. And Petralka. And Elvia and the knights. And even...

  Yes, Garius too. To be fair, he didn’t shout. But that kind of made him even scarier.

  Wait, had Petralka and everyone been away from the castle this whole time?

  That was some brainwashing. O fujoshi, greatly to be feared!

  Wait, I don’t have time to be awestruck by something like that!

  “Ah... Ahhh...”

  I could feel their gazes drilling into me.

  Stoppit. I’m scared. Don’t look at me...!

  Minori-san took a step forward, away from the circle of cheering women. She stopped just beside me and Hikaru-san. At that exact moment, the light caught her glasses in just such a way as to hide her eyes.

  But then she raised both hands with gusto, like a conductor beginning some piece of classical music. Like she was going to catch a falling sky.

  And she said...

  “I shall forgive all!”

  “Huh...?”

  Our eyes turned to dots at her impassioned proclamation.

  A cloud rolled lazily over the sun. It cut the light just enough that we could see Minori-san’s eyes again. She looked a little bit... better.

  I caught my breath. She looked a little like, you know, how you feel after... you know. Like she was enjoying the afterglow.

  And everyone else—Petralka and Myusel, Elvia and everyone—had the same sort of expression on their faces. At the very least, they didn’t have the crazy spiral eyes anymore. I was no longer worried that Minori-san and her friends were going to tear us apart.

  Could it be we were... safe?

  Hikaru-san looked down at me, and I looked up at him.

  “The two gaze into each other’s eyes!” Minori-san intoned, her hands raised to the sky like an opera singer bursting into an aria. “All creation grows dim and distant! They’re alone in their own world! Hot, blazing, burns the passion that flows between them! Though covered in mud, they are still—indeed, its besmirching touch makes them all the more—beautiful!”

  “Uh. Minori-s—san? I think—”

  “Photo time!!”

  The next thing I heard was a cascade of digital camera shutter sounds. Minori-san had whipped out a camera from who knew where and started taking pictures of us. She switched from one angle to another with the speed of a pro photographer, so fast we didn’t even have time to butt in with a smart remark.

  “Hoo hoo! Ufu-fu-fu-fu-fu-fu!”

  The sound of the shutter mingled with her unnerving laughter. Hikaru-san and I, both utterly exhausted, couldn’t fight, couldn’t run, couldn’t do anything at all.

  Day eight.

  The long-awaited day of the delivery.

  Minori-san came home clutching a cardboard box that presumably included the infamous BL book (Super-M Spectacles, was it?) and smiling like there was no tomorrow.

  I happened to run into her in the front entryway. “Finally! I thought I was going to die!” she announced, even though I hadn’t said anything. I guess she really was happy about that book.

  “You thought you were going to die?” I said scornfully. Just the memory of the outfit Minori-san had forced me to wear for the past three days was enough to paralyze me with the heebie-jeebies. If I had
a time machine, the first thing I would do would be to erase—not the data, but that whole disgusting past experience.

  Incidentally, Minori-san’s little photo session with me and Hikaru-san the day before must have finally sated her, because afterwards, she seemed to regain her sanity. Shortly after that, all our brainwashed (?) friends went back to normal, all at once. They had simply been captive to the force of her passion.

  “I really was! That’s why I had you dress up like that.”

  “Well, next time you feel that way, I hope you’ll pick dying instead.”

  Hikaru-san, probably having reached the limit of his endurance, was in bed with a fever today. I wasn’t sick, but my body felt impossibly heavy.

  “Aww.”

  “C’mon, don’t give me that look.”

  “It’s okay, don’t worry,” Minori-san said. “I’ll be able to look at yesterday’s photos and get all moe.”

  The way she puffed out her cheeks was so adorable—what was I supposed to do?

  “Jeez, stop it already!” I found myself exclaiming.

  In response, Minori-san gave me a surprisingly languid smile. “I’m so glad you both came around. You even ended up posing for me and everything.”

  “You pulled your gun on us.”

  “What? No, no, I just happened to be holding it.”

  “That’s the JSDF for you... Always an excuse.” I gave a long, long sigh. Then I said, “Huh. You know, you got a shot of us looking like we were into each other, but never one where we were really about to, like, get hot and heavy.”

  And thank God for that.

  Knowing Minori-san, I’d been afraid she might force us to do something that would require a mosaic in the final photo, but thankfully, Hikaru-san and I never got closer than nose to nose. ...Not that I was thrilled about that.

  In other words, we never crossed the final frontier.

  “Of course,” Minori-san said with a smile. “The beauty of BL is the fade to black.”

  “Really?”

  “The moment before the kiss is the one that lets your imagination really take flight.”

  “...Huh. Huh.”

  “And...” Minori-san looked into the distance for a second. “There’s more to love than shoving your bodies together. Sometimes love is most perfect when you never touch at all.”

  “Gee, I... I feel like that’s really profound, but on second thought, it’s not profound at all.”

  Minori-san stood there with a beatific look on her face. There was nothing I could do but tiredly roll my eyes.

  And that’s the story. The tale of the week that would go down in history as the Seven Days of Rottenness, a memory of fear and shame to Amutech’s employees.

  And it left us with a lesson:

  Thou shalt not take BL from Koganuma Minori.

  （つづく）

  To Be Cont’d...

  Afterword

  Hullo, light novelist Sakaki here, bringing you Volume 7 of Outbreak Company: The Power of Moe.

  It’s a collection of short stories, just as I said it would be in the afterword to the last volume. And Minori-san is finally, finally on the cover. I guess she’s a half-step removed from the other girls who surround Shinichi (the protagonist), which makes it hard to really make her the center of a story—and consequently, hard to get her on the cover.

  You might be interested to know that the stories in this volume are arranged chronologically, with only “Seven Rotten Days” taking place after Volume 6, while the others take place before Volume 5. That’s why Hikaru-san only appears in the final story.

  Personally, I’m not ideally suited to finding the best way to motivate a fujoshi-centric plot like the one in “Seven Rotten Days,” so I once again turned to my assistant, who’s a woman, for help. To get a BL story going with things like the hands of the clock, or the ceiling and the floor, though... The power of a fujoshi’s imagination is truly a terrifying thing to behold. Do they have no limits...?

  Oh, also—the other day, I got to attend the ADR session for the first episode of the Outbreak Company anime. Anime tends to be done on a very strict deadline (and budget), so often you have no idea how it’s going to turn out until it’s come out of the oven. But this first episode felt pretty much the way I’d imagined it. The director and the actors had great timing, and me and Yuugen-san, who was there too, spent most of the time in hysterics.

  This anime has been graced with a top-flight cast; the actors for Shinichi, Myusel, Petralka, and Minori have all played leading men and women before. So maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that they’re so good—just personally, though, I thought Matoba was especially great (hehe). Kind of like, Ooh, yeah, that’s how a nasty bureaucrat with ulterior motives should sound.

  Okay, next time we return you to your regularly scheduled main plot, but I’m also planning to write a bad manzai comedy sketch as a supplement to the anime, do a script book for the drama CD, and so on, so there’s lots to look forward to.

  Right-o, see you next time!

  Ichiro Sakaki

  31 July 2013

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  Copyright

  Outbreak Company: Volume 7

  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 © 2013 Ichiro Sakaki

  Illustrations by Yuugen

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Japan in 2013 by Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo.

  Publication rights for this English edition arranged through Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

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  Ebook edition 1.0: January 2019