Outbreak Company: Volume 14

by Ichiro Sakaki

  The point is, even just collecting fallen leaves entailed fairly significant labor. It didn’t help that I wasn’t used to the work, and that I had recently spent a couple weeks locked in my room, leaving me even physically weaker than usual.

  “Myusel does this every day?” I muttered. I really had to hand it to her. Until Cerise had come here, she’d been completely on her own doing all the cleaning, laundry, and cooking, everything that made our lives run smoothly. And on top of all that, she had been an occasional teacher in our school. I always knew that if you translated a homemaker’s work into an hourly wage, it would be a substantial amount of money... But Myusel didn’t even have a washing machine, dishwasher, or vacuum.

  I had a thought: “You know, I could afford those things.”

  As General Manager of Amutech, I did draw a salary, which was deposited regularly in my bank account. When I wanted some bit of merchandise from Japan for personal reasons, the amount was withdrawn from my account, but for the most part, I didn’t spend a lot of money over here, so it was just piling up.

  I start to think about how much easier Myusel’s life would be with a refrigerator, a washing machine, dishwasher, and maybe a cordless vacuum. I would have to find one simple enough for her to use; maybe it was time to requisition a catalog. If I picked my moment carefully, I might be able to get a discount on an outgoing model, or find something newer on sale. There were plenty of great deals I could—

  “Wait.”

  Picking out household appliances? Wasn’t that what newlyweds did?

  My face flushed as I remembered what Myusel had said earlier, and I went back to cleaning.

  “Hm?” I stopped when I spotted something that was definitely not a leaf or grass in the bushes. It almost looked like... a ball. A little smaller than a soccer ball, I figured. It was speckled brown and dark green. Buried in the dirt and grass, I could easily have overlooked it. If I hadn’t been poking around looking for stuff to throw away, I might never have noticed it.

  Did that mean it was... camouflaged?

  “What is that, a rock? No, couldn’t be.” It might look like a stone from a distance, but on closer inspection, it was too smooth and round. The surface curved cleanly, no points or angles to be found anywhere.

  I gave it a gentle poke with my broom, but it didn’t so much as budge.

  What the heck was it? I shifted my broom so I was holding it in the same hand as the bag, set the dustpan on the ground, and gradually moved my right hand a little closer to the thing. I touched the surface.

  “Huh...?” You couldn’t tell by looking, but it was actually gritty to the touch. Were these... scales?

  “Gyoo!”

  “Eeyargh!” I shouted as severe pain lanced through my outstretched hand. “Oww! Ow ow ow!” I tried to draw back, but I couldn’t. Half the palm of my right hand had been swallowed. The thing had bitten me. Its mouth looked like a jagged line.

  “What?! What the heck?!” I cried, pulling my hand back forcefully, afraid the thing was going to bite my fingers off. It was too firmly attached, though, and wouldn’t come loose. Instead it sort of hung from my hand. It was awfully heavy, but I waved my hand wildly with strength born of panic. “Gaaahhhh! Somebody help meeeee!”

  Not to brag, but I have a very low tolerance for pain. I can’t even watch gory movies. They’re as bad as if I were getting hurt myself. So now I just squeezed my eyes shut and struggled as I bellowed for help. Of course, I dropped the broom and bag in my other hand when I got bit.

  “Shinichi-sama?!” Myusel said, shocked. I opened my eyes and turned toward her just as she was running up to me. I thought I’d told her to rest in her room—oh yeah, her room was near the back door of the house. She must have heard me shouting. Anyway, I was sure grateful.

  “M-Myusel, help me! This thing...!” I blubbered. I felt pathetic, but it hurt, and I was scared.

  Myusel, though, stopped cold with a look of shock.

  “Help, get this thing off me...!” I was too busy being panicked to notice the change in her demeanor. I thrust my entrapped right hand toward her. Seriously, this hurt bad!

  “Right, y-yes, sir.” Myusel reached out and tugged on the thing. And to my surprise, it calmly let go of me.

  “Yikes!” With a cry worthy of a bumbling side character, I fell on my butt. I took a quick survey of my hand to see if I still had all my fingers, and I was happy to discover they were all present and accounted for. But there was a series of small holes in a line along my palm and the back of my hand. They were oozing... blood?! Was that blood?!

  These were definitely bite wounds!

  “U-Um, Shinichi-sama!”

  “Ahhhhhh!” There was a new, prickly pain, very different from when I had been bitten, that spread across my hand. None of the individual bite wounds were very large or deep, and it wasn’t critical to stop the bleeding or anything, but...

  “Shinichi-sama...”

  “What? What is that thing? What’s a dangerous monster like that doing around here?!”

  “This thing... No, this child—it’s a lizardman infant.”

  “Say what?” I blinked, almost forgetting my discomfort as I looked at the thing Myusel was holding.

  The surface was still a dapple of burnt brown and dark green. But it wasn’t a sphere anymore. It had arms and legs—even though they were very short—and even a tail. They must have been folded in earlier. It looked almost like... a stuffed dinosaur or lizard. Except for the scales.

  “A lizardman...?”

  “Gyoo!”

  The tiny reptile (or anyway, reptile-like person) flailed its little arms as if trying to get away from Myusel. Actually, “tiny” was purely relative: it was obviously bigger than your average lizard.

  “But that means...” I leaned in for a good look at the child. I guess I was looking for family resemblance to Brooke or Cerise.

  “Gyoo!”

  “Naaaaghhhh!”

  I had leaned too close and ended up with a bitten nose.

  It sat in the sun shining through the window of the small building: a soccer ball split clean in half, like you could practically see a ba-dum! sound effect above it.

  Except it wasn’t a soccer ball. It was a lizardman egg.

  “So... that’s a lizardman’s egg?” I asked, studying it closely.

  There was a rush mat on the floor, on which rested five other eggs that hadn’t yet hatched.

  “It does look just like a soccer ball.” I guess if you measured really closely, it probably wasn’t regulation size, and it didn’t have the official black-and-white pattern. It had what was probably camouflage instead, to conceal it from predators. But it definitely gave off a soccer ball vibe.

  “But it’s not,” Minori-san said from just behind me. “So Elvia, hands off.”

  I shared her concern—it seemed like it would be all too easy for Elvia to forget herself and jump on the egg—but the beast girl replied with surprising composure, “I’m not gonna touch it.”

  “Really?” Minori-san asked. “Even though it’s almost exactly the same size and shape as a soccer ball?”

  “Yeah, but it smells,” Elvia said, her nose twitching.

  “Smells...?”

  “Yeah. That odor says bad news if you grab it.”

  “Huh...” Minori-san said, cocking her head. I was surprised, too, but on second thought, I guess it was only natural—literally.

  Werewolves in general, not just Elvia, got very excited when they saw something round. If they went and mindlessly attacked any lizardman eggs they saw, werewolves and lizardmen would have been mortal enemies before you knew it—in fact, it would practically have been a predator/prey relationship. We’re not talking about the sort of general annoyance that elves and dwarves felt for each other—this would be a struggle for survival. A bloodbath the minute they saw each other.

  But Elvia claimed the smell of the egg told her to stay away. If that was true of all lizardman eggs and all werewolves, then whatever th
at odor was, it was preventing war between the two peoples.

  All very interesting. Maybe I was overthinking it, or maybe this was specifically the egg’s way of telling any werewolves, I’m not your beloved moon, stay away from me!

  I suddenly found myself wondering who would win in a fight: a lizardman or a werewolf. I guess it was sort of like asking which was better, judo or karate—not a very meaningful question. Who won would depend so much on circumstances and individual qualities, not to mention a bit of luck, that you could hardly say one would always prevail.

  “I’ve never seen a lizardman egg before,” Myusel said, gazing at them with interest. “Or infant, either.” She turned back to look at Cerise, standing beside Minori-san and cradling the newborn gently. The same one that had been chewing on my nose shortly before.

  After the nose-biting incident, Myusel and I had hurriedly sought out Brooke and Cerise. We had no specific proof that this was their child, but it seemed like the obvious conclusion—and anyway, we sure had no idea what to do with it.

  Cerise, we found right away. She seemed awfully surprised when she saw Myusel holding the baby. Lizardman faces don’t show emotion quite the way humans are used to, but by now even I knew that little details like the speed with which their tongues flicked in and out could indicate when they were startled. The biggest evidence, though, was the way she breathed, “But why...?”

  But why what, we didn’t know, but we explained the situation to her and she brought us to the little annex where she and Brooke lived. That was where we saw the six eggs, one of them split open.

  “Why just one?” Cerise murmured. She seemed very perplexed.

  “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”

  “Well...” After a moment’s hesitation, Cerise explained to us. “As you know—as you can see—we lizardmen reproduce by laying eggs. How long it takes to hatch varies by season, but early hatchings are extremely unusual. I expected to wait at least another ten days...”

  Lizardmen, apparently, laid eggs in pairs. So this meant Cerise had laid three pairs of eggs in a row. And somehow, not one of us had noticed.

  Obviously, lizardman babies don’t grow in a womb, so they aren’t like humans where a mother’s belly gets bigger and bigger as the child grows, so much so that it starts to impact her daily life. Cerise could keep working just like normal. Maybe the reason she’d been absent the last few days was because she had been tired from laying eggs. It was why Brooke had told her to take off.

  Come to think of it, Brooke had asked me at one point if it would be all right if he and Cerise had a child. This was evidently the result. I’d felt the topic was delicate enough that I hadn’t asked for details, but had said it would be fine.

  “I wonder if that could be the reason?” Minori-san said now, pointing to a window. Sunlight poured through it. It was a sort of skylight, but the glass around here wasn’t like the industrially manufactured, consistent stuff I was used to in Japan. The thickness of any given pane of glass could vary widely, and sometimes the material was warped. Here, it almost acted like a lens, focusing and heating the light that came through it.

  “I vaguely remember hearing that how long it takes an egg to hatch can be affected by temperature,” she said.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh. There’s a numerical relationship between temperature and incubation that’s consistent across a species. Like, if it takes a month to hatch an egg at 25 degrees, then the number is 750. At 20 degrees, it would take forty days, but at 35 degrees, it would be just twenty-five days. I think the sunlight from the window must have been hitting just the one egg.”

  “It’s possible,” Cerise said. “Brooke and I aren’t here during the day, so we didn’t notice.”

  So, to sum up: a warped pane of window glass had acted like a lens or prism, focusing the light and producing an effect that even Brooke and Cerise hadn’t anticipated—but only on one egg. I guess we could count ourselves lucky it hadn’t ended up fried. It’s one thing when glass bends or splits light, but when it focuses it on a single point, that point can get very hot. If the temperature had gone up to fifty or sixty degrees, the point at which proteins start to degenerate, this baby might not have been born at all.

  “So this little one was born first, and decided to have an adventure in the yard,” Minori-san said, glancing at the child Cerise was holding. “Which is where Shinichi-kun found it.”

  “Yeah, and had no idea what it was. It was all... round.”

  “That’s something we do to protect ourselves from enemies while we’re resting,” Cerise said, as the infant in her arms gave a big yawn. Rows of little fangs were already growing in its mouth. The twenty-odd puncture wounds in my hand were a testament to the nastiness of that creature’s jaws. Ugh, just remembering it made my hand hurt again... Even if Minori-san had disinfected and bandaged it with supplies from a first-aid kit. My nose had suffered less thoroughly and got by with just a Band-Aid. It might be a baby, but it was also a lizardman... and I guess they grew faster than humans.

  There were lots of animals, even other mammals like horses and deer, whose infants were capable of walking within an hour of being born. Maybe humans were just behind the curve.

  “Still, Cerise, you should have let us know your eggs were going to be hatching,” I said with a half-smile, and she looked apologetic.

  “I’m quite sorry about that. As I said, I thought I still had a while until they hatched, and I intended to inform you properly then...”

  She seemed to be set on not getting any special attention or treatment from us.

  You might recall that the reason Cerise and Brooke had lived apart for a while, or been separated or whatever you want to call it, was because their eggs had been broken without hatching. In their minds, they probably felt it was too early to tell anyone about the eggs until they were safely hatched. They didn’t want to celebrate prematurely.

  “Well, whatever the case, I’m just glad this little one is safe and sound,” Minori-san said, smiling.

  “You’re right about that,” I said. The first of the eggs had hatched with minimal fuss. My eyes met those of the child Cerise was holding, and I found my mouth softening into a smile. There were obvious differences between human and lizardman babies, including the fangs, scales, and general appearance, but it had that sort of SD cuteness. It did look just like a tiny version of Brooke and Cerise, and it was actually really charming.

  Not only that, but when our eyes met, the baby waved its tiny arms and legs in response to me.

  Wow, that’s so sweet! Without really thinking about it, I reached out to give the child a pat. I was sure it had just been surprised before. Not to mention the whole poking-it-with-a-broom thing. But right now, we were all nice and calm, and I was sure it would be fine—

  “Gyu!”

  “Nrgh?!”

  —or not.

  The innocent flailing suddenly became animal speed as the child latched onto my fingers.

  “M-Master!” Cerise quickly grabbed the child’s mouth so it couldn’t bite down any further. That meant I at least escaped with all my fingers intact (again), but boy, those tiny teeth really bit deep. This was a hunter, latching onto prey so it couldn’t escape.

  At that moment, the door of the little house came flying open. “Cerise!” Brooke rushed in. Of course, his face looked substantially like it always did, but from his body language you could tell how and agitated he was. He was holding a scythe, presumably something he used to cut grass while doing the groundskeeping. “I—I heard one of them was b—”

  He saw the child in Cerise’s arms and couldn’t say another word.

  It was perfectly understandable that he, the father, would be in a tizzy on hearing that one of his eggs had hatched earlier than expected, but Brooke was completely frozen to the spot.

  “Born.........................”

  He looked at us blankly. Specifically, looked at me, and at the baby lizardman currently bitin
g down on my fingers.

  “Master.” Cerise forced the child’s jaws open so I could finally free my hand, which I gratefully pulled back. During the entire thing, Brooke was completely silent. Everyone in the small house, with its nervous air, looked at him—and finally he slumped to the ground right where he was.

  Huh?

  What was with him? I had been sure he was going to take the child in his arms in a fit of joy. Maybe the emotion had just overwhelmed him?

  “Master...” Brooke said, his voice uncommonly soft.

  “What?” I asked, going over to him. I noticed Hikaru-san arriving through the open door. He was out of breath; probably from running after Brooke who had raced over when he heard about his child.

  But anyway...

  “Me, I’m... a father.”

  “You sure are. Congratu—”

  “And being as I’m a father now...” For some reason, he lifted the scythe in his hands.

  Uh, um... This was a very small room for such a big weapon...!

  “...let the responsibility for my child’s misbehavior be on—me!”

  “Stop! Halt! Don’t! Elvia, stop him!”

  “On it!”

  Before Brooke could bring the scythe down, Elvia grabbed his arm. But it was all she could do to hold on; there was no hope of wrenching the weapon away from him. They were almost equal on strength, Brooke’s arm trembling as Elvia dangled from it.

  “Do not stop me, wolf! Master, please, let this be settled with one arm of mine!”

  “No! You really don’t have to settle anything!” I cried.

  I said I couldn’t stand gory stuff!

  The relationship between me and Brooke was ultimately one of master and servant. I could see what was going on here: the servant’s child had injured the master, and now Brooke thought someone had to pay for it. That if he sacrificed an arm, I might be satisfied. But that was going too far! Even the you-know-whos settled grievances with just one finger! And apparently even they were modernizing in a hurry these days and chopping off fewer fingers than ever! Okay, not really relevant.