Outbreak Company: Volume 14

by Ichiro Sakaki

  Minori-san nodded, satisfied that I was who I claimed to be.

  “The other Hikaru-sama ain’t wakin’ up, though,” Elvia said, coming into the room.

  Elvia Harneiman was our resident werewolf girl. The bushy tail and floppy ears proved it. When she wagged that tail like a happy puppy, you could practically feel your mood improving. But anyway...

  “I tried shakin’ him, I tried ticklin’ him, but nothing works.”

  Elvia had remained in my room to keep an eye on the sleeping “Hikaru,” just in case anything changed. Apparently she’d also tried to wake him up, to no avail. He was still breathing, though, so at least we knew he wasn’t dead.

  This was making less sense by the moment.

  “Does Eldant have some kind of magic that can turn a man into a woman overnight?” Shinichi-san asked.

  “Not that I’ve ever heard of,” Myusel replied.

  “Figures,” Shinichi-san said, and shrugged. I guess he was just asking to be sure. He didn’t think magic like that actually existed. Personally, I agreed. Anyway, I guess in this particular case, it would be “magic that can create an exact but opposite-gendered double of someone overnight.”

  “How about an illness that might do this?” he ventured.

  “No, I’ve never heard of that, either,” Myusel said, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “So far we don’t even know if this just happened, or if it was somehow artificially induced,” Minori-san said, crossing her arms.

  “It seems like a natural phenomenon to me,” Shinichi-san said.

  “I agree,” Minori-san replied, “but if it isn’t natural, then that means someone did it deliberately, right? Someone with a reason to want to turn Hikaru-kun into a woman.”

  “It—It wasn’t me!” Shinichi-san said, maybe a bit too emphatically.

  “And it certainly wasn’t me,” Minori-san said, much cooler.

  “I mean, I admit Hikaru-san seems sort of wasted on the male gender.”

  “Dummy. It’s perfect because he’s a guy!”

  “That’s just your twisted view of things, Minori-san.”

  “Hmmm...”

  “What’s even weirder about this whole thing is that the guy Hikaru-san is still here, but now we have a girl Hikaru-san, too. Maybe someone does want to turn him into a girl for some reason, but why make a second one of him to do it?”

  “That’s a good point...”

  The two of them both made concerned noises. Gender-change storylines aren’t that uncommon in manga, anime, and games. It was a time-honored trope, in fact. But most of them also focused on the action: “suddenly, a guy becomes a girl!” Or vice versa. Most swept questions of why or how under the rug.

  Whatever. The point was, we still had no idea why my consciousness had found itself in a woman’s body.

  “Oh...” Myusel said, looking at us.

  “What is it, Myusel?”

  “We have visitors... I’ll go answer the door.” She left the room. With her elf senses, she had much better hearing than any of us humans. I hadn’t even noticed anything, but she had picked up on someone coming to the house—maybe she’d heard the carriage pulling up outside or something. But who could it be so early in the morning?

  I was considering the possibilities when I noticed Elvia intently studying my face.

  “What, have I got something in my teeth?” I asked, looking her in the eye, and she quickly shook her head, a bit chagrined.

  “Uh, no, uh...” She couldn’t quite seem to find the word at first, until finally she came out with: “I was just thinkin’, boy or girl, you’re awful pretty either way, Hikaru-sama.”

  I found myself at a loss for how to respond to that. I’d been hearing things like “He’s so cute for a boy” or “He’s too pretty to be a boy” ever since I could remember, so you wouldn’t think this would have surprised me so much. But for some reason, Elvia’s words really left an impression.

  I blinked. Then I sighed. “Is this really the time for that?”

  “Uh, oh, right. Sorry ’bout that.” Elvia smiled, a little embarrassed, and scratched her head. She really didn’t have much of a filter. I guess you could say she wore her heart on her sleeve in a big way.

  “I’ll grant, if one of us had to get turned into a girl, better me then Shinichi-san,” I said, glancing at him. “He would probably be falling apart by now.” Then there were the clothes to consider—and the underwear. At least I was ready to go with appropriate attire. “Or maybe he would do like those MCs in manga who get sex-swapped and check himself out in the mirror. Get all hot and bothered over his own naked body.”

  “I would not! Never! No way! ...Probably.”

  I wasn’t sure about that last bit. Neither was Minori-san, who laughed; even I couldn’t resist a bit of a smile.

  At that moment, Myusel came back.

  “Um, Shinichi-sama?”

  “Yeah? Who was it, Myusel?”

  “Um, yes, well... Her Majesty is here.”

  “What?!” Shinichi-san did a double take. Minori-san and I were as surprised as he was. It was true, the empress sometimes dodged her official duties long enough to come hang around with us, but she had never shown up so early in the morning. In fact, we usually went to see her before school. Was there some kind of emergency? I was still trying to figure it out when Her Majesty marched in, accompanied by her knight-bodyguards.

  “Excuse us for arriving so early and so suddenly,” she said, glancing around at us. “But something most serious has happened, and we wished to ensure you were all immediately informed.”

  “Something serious?” I asked on behalf of the group, as Myusel ushered the empress to a spot on the sofa.

  “You remember the object you saw yesterday?”

  “The coffin thing with the slime in it?”

  “Indeed. When we inspected it this morning, the contents were missing.”

  “What?!” we exclaimed, and looked at each other. So that mysterious gel that had been in the “coffin” was gone? That meant somebody must have taken it, or else...

  “We simply do not understand it,” the empress said with a frown, her confusion evident on her face. Minister Cordobal wasn’t with her this morning; I assumed he was busy investigating what had happened. If the thief had kept the goo somewhere in the castle, it would already be the crime of the century, but if they were out running around somewhere with it, then things would be even more complicated.

  “I’m sorry to hear it, but why did you think we needed to know first thing?” I asked. This was clearly a big deal, of course, but surely we didn’t need to be among the first to be told. Heck, she could have just informed us when we showed up to make our report before school.

  But Her Majesty replied, “Close inspection revealed damp tracks, as if the gel had crawled out of the container.”

  “Crawled out?”

  “It could perhaps have simply left a mark when it was removed by some thief, we supposed.”

  True enough: some damp tracks weren’t enough to warrant the assumption that the gelatinous stuff was moving around under its own power. But Her Majesty told us that, while there hadn’t been anything to suggest anyone had entered the room where the coffin was being kept, more “tracks” were found in the crack between the door and the floor, as if the gel had slithered through.

  “So maybe it really was a Slime?” Shinichi-san ventured.

  “It is too early to come to that conclusion,” Her Majesty replied. “But it remains that traces of its movement were discovered. When we followed them, they appeared to lead in the direction of this mansion. There are a few other houses in this area. Provided the thing has not become lost in the woods, we fear it may have come to your residence, Shinichi.”

  “Huh...” Shinichi-san nodded. “But we haven’t really seen anything unusual... I don’t think...” He looked around at us. No, we hadn’t seen any mysterious, autonomous gelatinous substances. It could be hiding somewhere, of course—
it could probably expand and contract at will, the better to hide under a floor or behind a door. But if it was here, it hadn’t done us any harm yet.

  “Very well, then,” Her Majesty said, obviously relieved. Then an edge entered her voice. “That being the case, Shinichi, we will proceed directly to Guld Workshop. You will come with us.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because we have no other clues to that thing’s true identity.”

  We had already been to the workshop the day before looking for clues, but Her Majesty thought we might have missed something, and wanted to look again. She also planned to talk to dwarves who had actually excavated the coffin.

  “Uh, but we haven’t even had breakfast...”

  “You will not die for lack of breakfast.” Her Majesty got up off the sofa and took Shinichi-san’s arm too firmly to be ignored. He definitely had a soft spot for the adorable tyrant, because he let himself be dragged out of the living room. Minori-san stood up, too.

  “I’ll go, too. And Hikaru-kun, I think you’d better stay home from school today.”

  “Yeah, I think that’s a plan.” I didn’t think I would make it through anything like a normal day in this body.

  “Hey, y’ think we should’ve mentioned the deal with Hikaru-sama to Her Majesty?” Elvia asked. The empress didn’t seem to have gotten the slightest inkling that I had turned into a girl. Maybe that was a measure of how convincing my daily appearance was. Would it be wrong of me to feel slightly pleased with myself?

  “There’s no need to give her more to worry about,” Minori-san said, picking up her suitcase—the one with the 9mm machine gun in it. “Myusel, could you go to school today to fill in for Hikaru-kun?”

  “Y-Yes, ma’am. Oh, um, I’ll pack breakfast into bento boxes for you.” She hurried out of the room. She was sweet enough to envision everyone eating in the carriage on the way. She had used some breakfast ingredients in dinner the previous night, so she could slap them together with some bread to make a few meals in a pinch.

  “Sorry. And thanks,” I said, bowing my head. Minori-san left, heading after Shinichi-san and Her Majesty. Elvia and I followed her out to the hallway and watched her go.

  Breakfast involved those of us left in the house—me, Elvia, Brooke, and Cerise—eating what Myusel had prepared. Afterwards, it was business as usual. Brooke went to do the gardening, Cerise went to do some housework, and Elvia went back to her room. As for me, I found myself with some time on my hands, and eventually I just went back to my room, too.

  I heaved a sigh as I settled into my space. Without Shinichi-san, Minori-san, or Myusel here, the mansion seemed awfully quiet. Brooke spent most of his time outside, and Cerise was doing some outdoor cleaning, so it was really just me and Elvia in the house at the moment. And with her cooped up in her room drawing most of the time, it was only natural for the place to seem kind of empty.

  I finally picked up a novel I was in the middle of, but somehow it didn’t feel quite right, and before long I closed it again. I couldn’t seem to settle down. If it turned out I couldn’t go to school at all as long as I was in this body, then Myusel would have to fill in for me teaching. There were a few things I could do at home in my capacity as an Amutech employee, but to the extent Myusel was taking over my teaching duties, maybe I would have to take over her housework, at least some of it.

  I let my eyes wander around as I thought, when suddenly I spotted the mirror on the wall, a full-length thing I’d brought from Japan. I never left my room without checking myself in it. Any cosplay costume, not just a woman’s outfit, is delicate: the illusion can be ruined by the smallest things. I wanted to make sure my hair looked right, obviously, but I also checked for any accessories out of place, the slightest trace of mustache, the quality of my skin, and anything else that could conceivably make people feel something was off. If anyone questioned what they were seeing, I had failed.

  Therefore, any time I was going to go out in public, anywhere people might see me, I would always look at myself from a third-party perspective. It had been a habit of mine even back in Japan.

  Now I looked at the mirror, and saw myself: Ayasaki Hikaru. At a quick glance, I was all I saw; I looked just like I always did when I was wearing women’s clothing. But hiding beneath the outfit was an actual woman’s body. When I stripped down to my underwear, that was readily apparent. Not just the bulge of my chest or the lack of a bulge between my legs, but more subtle things, too. Even the exact shape of my bones seemed ever so slightly different. When I looked back at my other self, the male body still sleeping on the bed, it brought home to me even more powerfully that I was in fact a woman now.

  I don’t mind saying that I was always confident in my ability to cross-dress convincingly. I worked hard to make my language gender-neutral, so I could seem more girlish, and I had always paid close attention to the curves of my body. You had to be more than just slim to be a believable girl; you had to be careful no one part of you got more muscled than it should. I was diligent about my makeup, of course, and I shaved my mustache fastidiously so the pores wouldn’t open and show black.

  And yet, for all that effort, when I was confronted with a real woman’s body, it became glaringly obvious that I wasn’t one. Take those curves, for example. Now that I had a woman’s body, there was more plumpness—not fat, but everything, the chest naturally, but also my butt and thighs, my arms, and even my fingers, were more fleshy, without the hardness of muscle. I guess this is what it really meant to have soft skin. Honestly, as I ran my fingers along my arms, they felt nice even to me.

  I stood there for a moment, massaging my arms. It probably would have looked pretty weird if there’d been anyone to see. But there wasn’t; I was the only one there. Maybe this would be the perfect opportunity to get to know a woman’s body, to learn something about them for future reference. It would make my costumes even better when I got back to my male body.

  There was my swelling chest, the ultimate symbol of womanhood. There was the way the curve of my body puckered in slightly from just below my side down to my navel. And then, between my legs, there was...

  “........................”

  It would be a lie, of course, to say I had never seen one before. Anyone who could do an internet search had a vast wealth of such things at their fingertips. You could even check out the videos on overseas websites, places where they didn’t censor them like they do in Japan. I had seen my fair share, partly as research when I was trying to get my “look” right, and partly out of a more unabashedly animalistic interest. I was, as I think I’ve made clear, a man, with a man’s desires.

  So even though I knew I was looking at my own body, I couldn’t keep my heart from picking up the pace when I saw all the gentle curves of my naked form.

  Argh. I guess this means I can never laugh at Shinichi-san again. I reflexively looked at the floor, away from my mirror. But I could still see my own chest in my peripheral vision. I told myself not to pay any attention to it, but that was never going to happen.

  “Huh...?”

  It was in trying to look away from myself that I noticed it: situated in the cleft between my breasts, the smallest of red lights was shimmering. But it wasn’t coming from my skin. In fact, it seemed like it was emanating out from somewhere deep in my chest. As if something buried there were shining.

  I took a step closer to the mirror, staring hard at the light in my chest. Whatever it was must have been shining pretty brightly to be visible through my skin; it looked like a sphere about the size of a golf ball. In fact, it looked oddly familiar.

  “It’s from that coffin...”

  Yes, that was it. The gelatin in that coffin-like container had had a similar small object floating in it. Obviously, I couldn’t see the pattern or color well enough to be sure it was exactly the same thing.

  “What in the world...?”

  What was going on here? I put a hand on the mirror, leaning my face as close as I could to the thing. Just then�
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  “Hikaru-sama!”

  “Eeek?!” I shrieked as the door came flying open. “Wha—Wha—Wha—?”

  I turned to find Elvia standing there. The easygoing beast girl wore the same innocent smile she always did. Leave it to her to come bursting into a person’s room without knocking and never realize she’d made a faux pas.

  “Wh-What are you doing in here?”

  “Huh? Oh, I just thought, hey, Hikaru-sama got turned into a girl. Wonder if he’s all right?” she answered brightly. She sounded completely sincere.

  “No! I mean, what about the lock...?!”

  When we closed our doors, a magical lock was activated that was supposed to make it impossible to open the door from the outside. At the very least, Elvia shouldn’t have been able to just come waltzing in.

  “How did you get past the lock?” I exclaimed, meanwhile almost subconsciously moving my hands to cover myself. Elvia, seemingly oblivious, stared directly at me. Assaulted by a sudden wave of embarrassment, I twisted, trying to hide from her, attempting to make myself as small as possible.

  “Oh, I borrowed the key from Myusel,” Elvia said, scratching her head shyly.

  Ah, yes: Myusel had backup copies of all our keys, so we didn’t have to go walking around with them. That helped reduce the risk of dropping them somewhere outside the mansion. It was all very logical.

  Meanwhile, Minori-san, the Amutech bodyguard, was with Shinichi-san. Which meant at this moment, I had no one to keep me safe if the need arose—no one except Elvia. I guess Myusel had given her the key in part because she knew Elvia was my best ally under the circumstances.

  “Okay, fine, but you shouldn’t just come bursting into a person’s room! Y-You could at least knock first!”

  “Sorry ’bout that.” Elvia bowed her head, but she still didn’t seem to feel particularly guilty. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as I reached desperately over to my bed, grabbing my clothes and holding them in front of me to cover myself.

  I know, I know. Elvia didn’t mean any harm. In fact, as she herself said, she’d had my best interest at heart. But it was just tremendously embarrassing for anyone to know I’d been examining myself naked in the mirror. I couldn’t look at her. Did she think I was some kind of sex-crazed pervert now? Not to mention, I wasn’t wearing a thread of clothing, and I just didn’t want her to see me that way.