Outbreak Company: Volume 11

by Ichiro Sakaki

She caught her breath, startled by the unexpected voice.

  Then the beast girl with the towel in her hand saw me and Hikaru-san. We had been standing there, trying not to breathe. I’m pretty sure she hadn’t expected to run into us in the middle of the night, least of all smack in front of the changing room. “Elvia” was completely alert now. Her expression seemed to ask, Why? How?

  But we wanted to know the same things.

  “Little late for a bath, isn’t it?” I asked, grinning.

  “Elvia” was lost for words for a second, but then she swallowed once and got herself together. She nodded firmly. “Yes, it is.”

  “Ohh. It is, is it?”

  “Indeed it is.”

  Then we lapsed into silence.

  The moment was intensely awkward, but “Elvia” never lost her composure. Compared to how she usually was, she was way too cool, almost like a different person.

  I kept up the not-saying-anything game, but “Elvia” finally demanded, “Is that all you wanted?” Then she stepped to one side to push past us, almost like she was trying to flee.

  “Hey, hold on.”

  “Yes, what?” she asked dubiously, glancing back over her shoulder.

  “Aren’t you gonna take a bath?”

  She went quiet again.

  I couldn’t say what Hikaru-san thought of her, but he did go up to “Elvia,” put his hands on her shoulders, and gently turn her around. “Now, that won’t do, Elvia. You mustn’t shirk your duties.”

  “Er...”

  “Wha...?”

  A sound of surprise came at Hikaru-san’s words: one from “Elvia”—and one from me.

  Uh, Hikaru-san? I don’t remember this being part of the plan...

  “It’s your job to wash Shinichi-san’s back, remember?” he said calmly.

  “What?”

  “I know I agreed to cover for you, but that was only while you were in Bahairam. Now that you’re here again, I’m turning his back back over to you.”

  “His back... back...?” the beast girl asked cautiously.

  “Certainly. Of course, it’s sort of a figure of speech—but I’m sure you know that by now.”

  “Meaning...?”

  “Well, you do the front, too.”

  He spoke before I could get a word in edgewise.

  Just a second. The front? What front?

  I mean, I thought I knew which front he meant, but was my mind in the gutter or did the way he put it sound super, super dirty? I had to admit, just imagining Elvia washing my back was extremely hot, but...

  Well, at least now “Elvia” would cry uncle and we could all just—

  “I see. Let’s go, then.”

  “...Guh?” I looked over in surprise to see “Elvia” looking very determined. “No... Hold on, I...”

  She didn’t give me a chance to make excuses, but grabbed my hand and dragged me into the changing room. I tried to resist, but her grip was like iron—she probably could have crushed an apple in that hand. I had no choice but to follow her.

  “Wha... Whaaaaaaaaat?!”

  I looked to Hikaru-san for help, but he just gave me a friendly wave and showed no sign of doing anything to intervene. In fact, he was clearly enjoying this.

  What was going on?! How could he do this, after he had acted so offended when he heard about me getting jumped by Elvia?!

  “Hikaru-sa—”

  Still I tried to call out for help, but the door slammed shut, cutting me off from him.

  Now there was no way out, and little chance of help. I was trapped...!

  “U-Um...!”

  My only hope now was to talk down “Elvia” herself.

  She let go of my hand. I turned toward her and—

  “Uh, listen, this—aaaaahhh?!”

  The rest of my words disappeared in the face of the pair of massive boobs that greeted me, as irrefutable as if they had a ba-duuum! sound effect above them. Considering how quickly you can whip off a tube top, maybe I should have expected this, but...!

  “Uh, okay, so listen, okay, this...”

  As I babbled, “Elvia” ripped off the rest of her clothes and threw them aside. In other words, she was standing there just like the day she was born—or to put it even more concisely, she was stark n-n-n—!

  “What are you doing? Er, oh, I guess undressing is part of your duty.”

  I stood there, frozen stiff. Elvia nodded as if to herself—and then set about undressing me too.

  How did this happen...?

  I was seated on a little wooden stool in the bathing area, staring as hard as I could at the wall in front of me and distracting myself by trying to count by prime numbers.

  I was absolutely, completely cornered.

  I had a towel around my waist, and there was a wall in front of me. But behind me was “Elvia,” buck naked, not even a towel. I had nowhere to run; it was never going to be that easy. A wall ahead and a wolf behind, you might say. Of course, had I wanted to, it would have been so easy to see—and be seen. See what, exactly? Everything, including “what.”

  This was a situation I’d encountered in two dimensions plenty of times, but when I found myself actually thrown into the middle of it, boy, was I panicked and confused. I could hardly think. I’m not exactly the hardiest guy out there, and with this level of stimulation, I didn’t know my how from my where from my who was doing what.

  This was the first time something like this had ever......... actually, no, it wasn’t.

  Back when I had been kidnapped by Bahairam, my minder, a girl named Clara, had gotten into the bath with me. Come to think of it, she had hugged me from behind, and I hadn’t been able to think any more clearly than I was now.

  Seriously, what was the story with Bahairam’s views on shame and chastity? Or were beast people just special that way?

  “I’ll begin, then.” The beast girl behind me sounded as stiff as if we were starting a duel, not a bath.

  No... wait. Begin? Begin what? Just washing my back, right? That’s all, right?

  “Heek!” My confusion was pierced by the sense of something soft pressing against my skin.

  Wasn’t she going to use a... cloth to wash my back...?

  I could feel soap. Had she applied it directly to her hand...?

  “W-Wait just a secoooond!”

  Doesn’t washing someone’s back just involve running water over them?! Oh yeah, Hikaru-san mentioned both back and front—wait, not the point! What about a towel?! Maybe her country had a tradition of washing with hands instead of towels?! Even when you were washing someone else?! Was this some you-know-what-kind-of shop?!

  My brain was already heated so hot it was shaking. (Meaning unknown.) Just having a naked girl this close to me was almost more than I could bear—having her sudsy hand on me, even just on my back... It’s sort of tickled, but it also felt really naughty.

  Arrgh. No, no, noooo, I’m gonna......!

  “Ah... Ah, ma... maybe we could...!”

  I had to stop “Elvia” somehow, but my brain was such mush that I could hardly get any words out. Calm down, just calm down, self! At times like this, just name Prepure generations! Yes! Uhh... First Black, then White, then Luminous, Bloom, Egret, Dream, Rouge, Lemonade, Mint, Aqua, Peach, Berry, Pine, Passion, Blossom, Marine... argh, what’s after that?!

  “T—Time out! Seriously, wait...”

  I stood up abruptly, hoping to at least get myself away from the sensation of the hand on my back. But instead I lost my balance. Just as I was about to catch myself, I stepped on a piece of soap—and went tumbling.

  What a clichéeeee!

  The words never had time to make it out of my mouth. “Eeyikes!” I exclaimed, falling over. I twisted, just trying to do something—but there was no going back, and I found myself tangled up with “Elvia,” square on top of her.

  Just to recap: I was naked. “Elvia” was naked. Even my towel had abandoned me... meaning there was nothing, not even a sorry piece of cloth, between us to keep o
ur skin from touching, to keep the soft, warm softness from softly...!

  Neither of us said anything.

  Even “Elvia” couldn’t help being a little surprised by this turn of events; she looked up at me with a hint of a frown. I could only look back, still totally flummoxed as to what to do.

  You could have heard a pin drop in the bathroom. Well, maybe I couldn’t have. My head was painfully full of the pounding of my heart.

  “Elvia,” meanwhile, squeezed her eyes shut as if getting ready for something she knew was coming.

  Ahhhhh.

  Bad news. This was such bad news. Physically and mentally, I was at my limit. My limit! My limit, you hear?! I’ll say it once more: at my limit!

  Absolutely, bouncing up against, explodendingnomore (too intense; transmission garbled). As the denpa song of the turbulence in my brain went on, I thought for some reason I could hear Elvia shouting something.

  “Big Sister!”

  The door came flying open. I looked up at the familiar voice to discover a girl running straight for me. She was small-built and had pointy, cat-like ears on her head and a fuzzy tail growing out of her behind.

  The blood drained from my face.

  What was this hell I was living?!

  “C-C-Clara?!”

  Clara Belberith. Weretiger and member of the Bahairam military.

  What was she doing here?!

  Actually, when I thought about it, it made some sense. She must have been hidden in a shadowy corner of the changing room, keeping an eye on us. She was never far from the “big sister” she adored.

  This was extra, extra bad. In a totally different sense from before. I figured all Clara could see was that I had shoved her sister to the ground in the bathroom. I shivered to think what conclusions she would draw.

  “This is all a misunderstanding...!”

  I didn’t really have time to be shouting things like that. With the speed of a wild animal, Clara covered the distance between me and “Elvia”...

  “How could you? Leaving me out of this!”

  “...Uh?” I grunted.

  The next instant, believe it or not, Clara started pulling off her own clothes.

  No, wait! I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve said that already, but really, wait! What’s going on with you?! Aren’t you going to ram me off your “big sister” and save her?! Oh crap, I forgot—there’s one other person she likes almost as much as her big sister, and it’s me! She told me—ahhhhgh?!

  “Clara, you’ve got this all wrong, please stop stripping!” I wailed. If she jumped on my back and I ended up crunched between two beast girls, I would finally I would I would ahhhhhh! “So you really aren’t Elvia, are you? You’re Amatena!”

  “Clara!” “Elvia” exclaimed from beneath me.

  Clara snapped to attention and stopped pulling her clothes off. Ahh! Now that’s an older sister! “Elvia” sat up slightly and said, “You fool! You gave us away!”

  “You think she blew your cover?!” I put my hands to my head. Amatena genuinely seemed to think we hadn’t noticed anything until that moment. “Look... Amatena, Clara.”

  Thanks to the sheer ridiculousness of it all, I was able to get my head straight for a moment. I let out a sigh and looked at “Elvia”—or rather, Elvia’s older sister Amatena and her subordinate Clara.

  “Could you maybe start by just telling me what’s going on?”

  It took about half an hour after that. It was well after midnight, but a lamp gave us light in the living room. Standing smack in the middle of which was Minori-san, her hands imposingly on her hips. Sitting uncomfortably in front of her were Elvia, Amatena, and Clara. Also, incidentally, myself and Hikaru-san. We hadn’t been given a choice in the matter.

  “Okay, I’d like to start hearing some explanations,” Minori-san said. She was smiling, but you could almost see the vein bulging in her forehead, like in a comic book. I was a little worried about her blood pressure.

  Uh-oh. Minori-san looks pretty darn angry this time.

  The commotion in the bathroom had brought Myusel and Minori-san running not long after Clara had joined the fray. Minori-san, who had gone one-on-one with Amatena before, was understandably serious about controlling the situation. Specifically, she’d pulled her gun and informed the beast girls that if they didn’t follow her orders, she would shoot. Amatena and Clara had seen Minori-san and Myusel use firearms when they rescued me from Bahairam, so they were well aware of how powerful the weapons could be. Somewhat to my surprise, they turned meek as lambs.

  Amatena and I (completely naked) and Clara (half naked) were at least permitted to put on our clothes, but after that Minori-san marched us straight to the living room. Hikaru-san, whose proximity to the events made him a suspect, was given the same treatment. Then there was Elvia, who couldn’t possibly be innocent in all this. So Minori-san had Myusel call her in, and here we were.

  All of us were silent, completely overwhelmed by Minori-san’s anger. To my surprise, the first person to speak was Elvia.

  “Uh—Um, uhhh...”

  “Yes? You have something to say to me, Elvia?”

  “I, uh, I’ve been secretly hiding Big Sis Ama and Clara here at the mansion! I’m very sorry!” She threw herself face first on the ground, so hard that her head clonked against the floor. It sounded pretty painful.

  Minori-san regarded Elvia with an almost sleepy look, then finally said, “And?” She gave an exaggerated sigh.

  “Uh? I—er, I’m not sure what...”

  “We figured that out ages ago,” Minori-san said, sounding bored.

  “Wha?!” Elvia was shocked, shocked. Amatena and Clara looked at each other, equally surprised.

  “Shinichi-kun and Hikaru-kun and I all knew already. You were acting so strangely, how could we not have?”

  Yes, we’d known that Elvia was hiding Amatena somewhere. To be more precise, we had strongly suspected—but it turned to certainty when we saw that photo Loek had taken. The only thing that actually surprised us was that we hadn’t realized Clara was even here.

  “You’re much easier to read than you think you are, Elvia,” Minori-san said.

  “Urgh...” She sounded a little taken aback to hear it put so bluntly.

  Then Minori-san sighed again and looked at me and Hikaru-san. “More importantly... Shinichi-kun, Hikaru-kun.”

  “Y-Yes’m?” I said, my voice going up an octave. Hikaru-san was frowning.

  “We talked about this, remember? I said Elvia was hiding Amatena, and Amatena was probably pretending to be Elvia, and that we should wait and see how things developed... right?”

  “Yes...”

  “All right. So how did things develop quite like this?” She crossed her arms and stared us down, and we both wilted under her gaze. “I was worried that Amatena or Clara might attack one or both of you if they were discovered.” Both of them were beast people, with physical abilities that vastly outstripped our own. They were also both trained soldiers. In other words, they wouldn’t hesitate to use violence—and it was likely to be very, very violent if they did. I assumed they could easily kill either me or Hikaru-san barehanded if they wanted to. I had my doubts whether even Minori-san, who was an experienced martial artist, could beat them in a one-on-one fight.

  “That’s why I was going to do a nice, gradual investigation of this.”

  “Sorry...” I knew Minori-san was only angry because she was worried about us. I felt there was nothing I could offer but an apology. “I’m the one who suggested we ambush Amatena,” I said, deciding that honesty was the best policy.

  We had done it almost as a lark—knowing we would probably never get another chance to see Amatena pretending to be Elvia. She was always so serious, it seemed like it might be fun to tease her... Seemed like.

  Honestly, I didn’t really think of Amatena as a citizen of a hostile country. For one thing, she was helping us to smuggle in otaku goods... but she had been ready to pound a spike into my head at one
point. Minori-san was probably of the opinion that we couldn’t consider her an unqualified ally, and she was right about that. Who worked with you and who tried to kill you could shift with changing circumstances. Amatena had snuck into our mansion, and there were no guarantees she wasn’t an enemy again. We couldn’t completely trust her until we had a much better grasp on the situation.

  “And I kind of... egged him on,” Hikaru-san confessed, raising his hand. “I wanted to see this identical sister Elvia had... And as for who it was that caused Shinichi-san and Amatena-san to end up in the bath together... er...” Hikaru-san stumbled over the words for a moment, then went on, “I just... thought it would be funny to see Shinichi-san freak out.”

  “And what did you plan to do if Amatena had a weapon hidden on her?”

  Hikaru-san didn’t have an answer for that.

  “Or if she had tried to kill Shinichi-kun, since her cover was blown anyway?”

  Well, in that case, I would have just been dead.

  “...You’re right. I’m really sorry.” There was no hint of Hikaru-san’s usual confidence or condescending self-assurance as he apologized.

  Hikaru-san had heard the story of my kidnapping, I assumed, but he hadn’t witnessed it. The very existence of Bahairam as an enemy nation to Eldant was probably something he only knew by reputation. So he probably didn’t fully appreciate how dangerous Amatena could be as an enemy—what might happen to us if she really got serious.

  Minori-san glared at us for a moment longer, then said, “Thankfully, at least things didn’t get any worse than they did.”

  I guess she figured scolding us more wasn’t going to do any good. Her shoulders slumped and she looked away from me and Hikaru-san—back at the Bahairamanians.

  Elvia was understandably subdued, and even Amatena and Clara were behaving themselves. Maybe they were waiting for Minori-san to let her guard down—or maybe they’d never intended to attack us. Given how things had gone, I had to think it was the latter.

  “Amatena Harneiman and Clara Belberith, as I recall.” The two of them nodded silently. “What would two operatives from the Bahairamanian military be doing here? What’s your objective? The specifics, if you please. I can’t rule out the possibility we may have to hand you over to the Eldant authorities.”