Prologue: Breakthrough

Deep in the forest primeval walked a company of men.

It was just past noon, yet the place was dim. Not dark, exactly, but like a thin film had been laid over everything. The bright sunshine that might otherwise have washed over everything was blocked out by the layers of gnarled tree branches. Only a dappled haze found its way past the leaves.

It was trees, trees, trees, as far as the eye could see in every direction. The stripes of light in all their different sizes acted like an optical illusion, distorting the sense of distance. If you turned around, you would be hard-pressed to tell which direction you had come from just seconds before. The steel spikes pounded here and there and the rope running between them were the only signs of human hands in this forest, and the men clung to them like a lifeline.

Aokigahara Forest. A dense wood located at the foot of Mount Fuji, popularly known as the “Sea of Trees.” From time immemorial it had been a favorite place for suicides, and it was sometimes said to be haunted: once you went in, people claimed, you never came out. In reality, though, it was a tourist spot, with a walking path and everything. There were parks and campsites nearby, and plenty of people came for a simple stroll in the woods.

Because of the amount of iron ore in the area, people claimed that magnetic compasses didn’t work, or that electronic devices would go haywire. But the truth was that compasses would just be slightly off, not unusable, while modern electronics were too advanced to be affected by the relatively weak magnetism in Aokigahara. These details had been used for dramatic effect in books and movies so often that the notion of a “haunted forest” had taken on a life of its own.

“Jeez,” Fujita Keisuke muttered in exasperation, “today’s tourists aren’t afraid of anything.”

There was something white at his feet. A used contraceptive device—a rubber condom.

“Who comes all the way out here just to do... that?” Someone, obviously. They were well off the walking path, but here was the evidence.

“Some kids, probably,” one of the guys walking beside him said easily.

Work was work, but this was one depressing job. Keisuke tossed the condom into the trash bag he was holding and heaved a sigh.

Keisuke and the others had removed their familiar navy-blue uniforms, instead donning vests and gray work suits. Each wore a hat on his head. They had thick gloves, of course, and climbing boots. Each also carried a lamp, a sturdy nylon rope, a canteen, and other supplies on the belt at their waists. They had a pouch made of synthetic fiber in which resided a compass, a map, and a portable radio.

The words “Yamanashi Prefectural Police,” the organization to which Keisuke belonged, were embroidered on his vest. Only Keisuke and the guy beside him were wearing vests; everyone else was wearing a neon armband instead.

They were a patrol unit. The Sea of Trees being famous as a place to commit suicide, people came from all over Japan in order to kill themselves there. After all, while Aokigahara might be a perfectly civilized tourist location, it was also a vast forest of ancient pedigree. If you left the path with no equipment, no knowledge, and no experience, there was a good chance you really wouldn’t come back.

Hence patrol units were formed, comprising both members of the local Yamanashi police force and volunteers from all over the country. They conducted regular sweeps of the woods hoping to find and prevent potential suicides, or at least discover the remains of those who had gone through with the act.

The job as such had existed for a long time now. But recently, the work of the patrols had come to include picking up garbage.

Inevitably, when people are told something is dangerous, it will make some of them even more eager to see it. Some people deliberately left the main path as a perverse test of courage, so the patrols would find empty cans or cigarette butts strewn here and there in the woods. As if that weren’t enough, there were even some people who came to dump industrial waste away from prying eyes. Aokigahara Forest got filthier every year.

“This place would stay cleaner if it really were haunted,” Keisuke groused.

His colleague nodded. “No kidding.”

That was when they heard the scream. Keisuke and the others spun around.

“What was that?!”

Civilians participated in these patrols on the understanding that they were responsible for themselves, and in general most of them were used to mountaineering or foresting. But still, if anything happened to one of them, people would no doubt hold the police accountable. Keisuke and the others hurried in the direction of the sound.

“It’s Kawamura-san! He—”

“He fell! He fell!”

The other volunteers were clustered around where the person who had screamed—a man named Kawamura, apparently—had fallen. Some of the people were pointing their portable lanterns at the ground, while somebody else was quickly lowering a rope.

“Took a slip, did he?” Keisuke pushed through the crowd of civilians to get a look at the scene.

“What the hell...?” one of the other police officers muttered in his ear.

A fissure yawned in front of their eyes. Twenty meters long, it was almost three meters across at its widest point. The conical shape and the leaf mold along the edge gave it the impression less of a trench than of a hole.

How deep was it? They couldn’t tell. The crack didn’t go straight down, but appeared to slope, so the light from their lanterns didn’t reach the bottom. It was impossible to say just by looking how deep it might be. Neither, of course, could they confirm the safety of whoever this Kawamura was who had fallen in.

Most likely, this cave had already been present in the bedrock. Something had caused the ceiling to collapse, taking the former surface—leaf mold and all—with it. In effect, a booby-trap, though one planted by Mother Nature and without malice aforethought.

“Heeeey!” Keisuke called. “Are you okay?”

There was no answer. Was it so deep that Kawamura couldn’t hear him? Or...

Despair quickly settled over the volunteers. “At that depth, he must have...”

But Keisuke shook his head, lowering a rope. “It’s too soon to give up hope. I’m going to have a look.”

He fastened the lifeline to himself, tying the other end to a sturdy-looking tree root. He had been in the mountaineering club in college and was still something of an outdoorsman, so this was all familiar to him. Once he was confident the rope was securely attached to the root, he nodded to his colleagues and began to move gradually over the cliff and into the crevice.

“Hmm.”

The gradient of the wall was gentler than he had thought. Supported by the rope, Keisuke walked backward, heading downward at a tilt. The easy angle meant there was a good chance Kawamura was still alive.

Keisuke worked his way down, periodically calling, “Heeey! Are you all right?” But there was still no reply.

At length, he estimated he had descended nearly twenty meters. This hole was deeper than he had expected. He was just starting to think maybe he should report back when a strange feeling overtook him.

It was as if he were floating underwater. His feet slipped. This was because the rock face, which his boots had bitten into with such assurance just a moment before, was suddenly floating. He didn’t know why. The rope was slack. Suddenly, Keisuke felt as if he had no body weight—no, that wasn’t it. It was as if the world had been turned upside down...

“Whoa!” he shouted, confused. His hands clawed at empty air. His body spun. He was falling... up?

“Ahhhh!”

He had completely lost any sense of direction. But then he felt himself being spit out of something. Something soft caught him. He rolled two or three times, then registered that the ground was completely covered in grass.

He lay there, blinking. A wide, grassy field spread out around him. It was green off into the horizon—and for all he knew, it was green to the horizon after that, too. The whole place was awash in brilliant sunlight, and a gentle breeze was eddying past. It practically begged him to settle in and relax.

“...Wait,” Keisuke said dumbly. Hadn’t he been headed for the bottom of a hole just a moment ago?

He sat up frantically to find a middle-aged man sitting right nearby in the grass, just like he was. Judging by his outfit, it was the Kawamura who had fallen earlier. He was looking at the scenery with the same dumbfounded expression as Keisuke.

This wasn’t possible. A place so vast and open couldn’t exist underneath the Sea of Trees.

“It’s inconceivable,” Keisuke said under his breath. Where in the world were they?

Unconsciously, he began looking around for the familiar peak—the top of Mount Fuji. But no matter how he searched, that most famous of Japanese mountains was nowhere to be found. Flummoxed, he turned around.

And then he froze, speechless.

For a second, he didn’t understand what it was. Or rather, he knew, but some kind of deeply ingrained common sense refused to let him believe it was real. Because it couldn’t be. The only place it existed, he thought numbly, was in myths and legends and stories. And yet...

“A d—” he groaned. Beside him, Kawamura noticed his strange expression and turned as well—and then he froze, too.

“A d—”

The thing that had pinned the two men in place was a gigantic blue creature. Even with its wings folded and its limbs beneath it, it was as big as a house. It was breathing gently, producing a fetid wind that rustled the grass. Did we mention it was massive?

“Dragon?!”

As if in affirmation, the impossible creature opened its mouth wide, its jaws full of fangs.

Still clinging to the wall, the maid hesitantly began to speak.

“Re... Retosamu?”

What was that? What had she said?

“E... Efasu uoi er, Retosamu?”

I stared blankly at her, so the maid repeated herself... I think. If a rising intonation at the end of the sentence indicated a question, then she was asking again.

It wasn’t Japanese; that was for sure. The pronunciation suggested it wasn’t English, either, but what, then? It didn’t seem to be German or French or Chinese. It didn’t really matter, because I didn’t have the foggiest idea what she was saying, in any case.

“Well, this is trouble,” I muttered. I finally had a chance to meet a real-life, in-the-flesh maid, and I couldn’t even make small talk.

I know, I know. Some people might say, “Whatever! First worry about the important stuff, like asking where you are!” Do these people have no dreams? How boorish would you have to be to focus on any of that? I was meeting an honest-to-God, three-dimensional moe character. Before this miracle, every other concern was like a molehill before a mountain!

“Retosamu,” the maid said, sounding at a loss. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one frustrated by the inability to communicate.

Suddenly, she nodded as if remembering something and began hurriedly patting her uniform. For a second I wondered what she was doing, but then I realized she was looking for something somewhere in her clothes.

“Sou tei!”

A smile crossed her face, and she pulled some kind of box out of her pocket.

She began walking toward me hesitantly and showed me what was in the box, which opened from the middle, like a clam.

It was a small silver ring.

“Huh? What’s this?”

The ring looked a little too big, like maybe it wasn’t made very well—but the surface was covered with tiny carved letters.

Just like the kind of magic ring that so often appears in anime, manga, and games.

I wondered what kind of letters these were. It wasn’t the Roman alphabet, and of course, it wasn’t Japanese writing, either. I’d seen the Hebrew alphabet, too—aleph and zayin and such; it shows up pretty regularly in fantasy manga and anime. But it wasn’t that, either.

“Retosamu, regunifu ruoi shisu ete tsupu.”

The maid held the ring out, then looked at me expectantly. Was she telling me to put it on?

I hesitated somewhat to just equip an unfamiliar item. It didn’t feel right. How often has someone put on a magic ring just to be immediately under its control? I mean... I know that hasn’t literally happened, but still.

But then—

“Retosamu.”

The maid pointed to her own hand. On her left ring finger, she had a ring that looked a lot like the one she was holding out to me. She took it off, handed it to me, and instead put the ring she had offered me on her own hand.

What was going on here?

It seemed like she was trying to show me the ring was safe to put on, sort of like how someone might eat a bite of food to prove it isn’t poisoned.

But it was also kind of like the way a couple exchanges rings when they get married, and that left me a little embarrassed. Now I was reluctant for a whole new reason...

“Retosamu...?”

She spoke again, a look of anxiety on her pale face. Holy crap, is she cute!

But that very cuteness made me feel guilty. The maid didn’t seem sure what to do if I wouldn’t put on the ring.

“Aw, fer... Okay, I get it.”

I’m a man. And an otaku, too. To have an ideal woman like this maid turn such pleading eyes on me couldn’t fail to move me. My heart burned with the moe-ness of it all, urging me to hurry up and put on the ring.

“All right, here goes...”

With much fear and trembling, I put the ring on my finger. There was no flash of light or explosion, nor did it suddenly start burying itself in my flesh. It just slipped on.

“Like this?” I asked.

“Yes! Can you understand me now, Master?” (Sei shisu moufu donatosuredonu uoi naku, Retosamu?)

“Hwah?!”

I let out a whoop of surprise. All of a sudden I could understand what she was saying.

And it wasn’t like she had spoken Japanese. She was still speaking that weird language, but I heard the Japanese meaning in my head, almost overlaid with hers, like a simultaneous interpreter.

How the heck does this work?

Okay, wait. Never mind that for now. What had she just said?

Master? Who was that? Did she mean me?

“Yesss!”

In a fit of emotion, I looked up at the ceiling and sighed.

Master! Master! MASTERRRRRR! Listen to the sweet sound of it! Normally a maid calls her employer “sir”—but to be called “Master”! What a feeling!

Thank God I’m alive! If I’d had a time machine, I would have gone back to myself a year ago and told him, “Be glad you’re alive! Just hang in there, one day a maid is going to call you ‘Master’!”

This and other sundry joyous thoughts went through my head, but after a while I could no longer ignore the unresolved situation in front of me.

I.e., What was going on here?

Where was I, who was this girl, and how did I end up like this?

“Hrmm...”

Wracking my brain cells, which didn’t really want to work that hard because of a dull ache, I went back through my memories.

I recalled that I had been looking for a job in Akiba, the otaku haven in central Tokyo. I was there for an interview. I was pretty sure there was a break, during which time I got an oolong tea from a drink machine.

I remember drinking it, and then... nothing.

Huh? That didn’t explain what I was doing here at all.

“Master...?”

When I stood frozen for too long, the maid spoke again, sounding worried. I still didn’t know the details of her language, but apparently the word Retosamu, which she’d used several times, meant Master.

“Oh, um.” I looked at her. “Sorry, can I ask you something?”

“Certainly. Anything at all.” She nodded, seeming relieved—even happy—to finally have a conversation going.

“For starters, who are you? What’s your name?”

“I’m Myusel—Myusel Fourant.” She gave me an adorable little bow.

“Myusel...” What a sweet name. It fit her. I was just trying the name out, but she seemed to think I was calling her, because she said, “Yes?”

“Um... What’s your social status, exactly?”

Notwithstanding the wave of ecstasy that transfixed me the first time she called me Master, I was hardly enough of a hopeless jerk to be all, Yes, I am your master!! Like a maid would just pop out of thin air and serve me? Come on.

“I will be seeing to all your needs from today forward, Master.”

“Okay, but... Who’s this ‘Master’? Who are you talking about?”

“...I’m sorry?” Myusel blinked. Then she said apologetically, “Oh... Would you rather I called you something else?” She ducked her head slightly. “Kanou... Shinichi-sama.”

Kanou Shinichi.

That was my name, all right. In other words, the “master” this girl kept referring to was... me!

“I’m your... master?”

“Yes, sir.” Myusel looked perplexed, as if wondering how I could find this so difficult.

This made no sense! What the heck was going on here?!

“Okay, so... So...”

Let’s forget why I’m her master for now. I decided to try to find out where I was instead. I tried again to remember, but once more I found my memories stopped cold in the otaku mecca, Akihabara. Wherever I was, assuming I didn’t have a second personality or some kind of amnesia, I hadn’t come here of my own free will.

“Where... are we?”

“In the Latatos Forest on the edge of Marinos, capital of the Holy Eldant Empire.”

The answer came—well, not from Myusel. I looked around in surprise to see who had spoken, and found a woman standing there.

She was young, wearing a dark green outfit—a military uniform. But it wasn’t a combat uniform, just the sort of thing you would wear around the office. What the armed forces might call a work uniform. Jacket above, tight skirt below. Special job and rank insignia on the collar, even a necktie.

What really caught my eye, though, wasn’t the uniform, but the person wearing it.

Specifically, her chest.

It... It’s huge!

That was the first thing I noticed. Not the necktie, not the job insignia or the badge of rank—it was all about those two towering hills...! She was an F cup for sure, maybe even a G. Incredible. When I thought of the juicy white peaches concealed under the highly regulated costume called a uniform...! She couldn’t have hidden the plumpness of them if she’d tried, and I was instantly lost in them. Who knew such massive breasts actually existed! Did this mean not all of those photos of pop idols were photoshopped?! Amazing! La**ta really does exist...! (I was starting to grow incoherent from sheer excitement.)

“Are you all right...?” the woman asked dubiously, as I stood there with my eyes frozen on her chest. “Can you hear me, Kanou Shinichi-kun?”

“Huh? Oh... Yeah.”

Hearing my name snapped me back to reality. With tremendous effort and no small regret, I was able to stop my leering and look my conversation partner in the face.

Her chest might have been the first thing I noticed, but her face was lovely, too. I suspected she was in her early twenties. Her hair was short. Or—judging by the fact that I couldn’t see any hair near her collar, I guessed it just looked short from the front. Most likely, she had it done up in a bun or something in the back.

Her features were well-formed, but had just a hint of vulnerability, a feminine softness to them. She was wearing glasses, which took the edge off of everything, giving the impression of a sweet, round face. I guess you could say she was one of those archetypal characters who made you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

She was, though, still wearing a military uniform. Unlike Myusel, she was also obviously speaking actual Japanese, and her features were unmistakably Asian. So I assumed she was a member of the Japan Self-Defense Force—what you might call a WAC. (It stood for “Women’s Army Corp,” but basically meant a lady soldier.)

“Your surprise is understandable,” she said with a smile. “But you’d better calm down. Otherwise, this won’t last.”

“Is... Is that right?” I found my expression frozen from shock. “I see... So it won’t last... I’d heard how easily they sagged, but... I understand. I’ll calm down. I will absolutely calm down. If by calming down I can preserve humanity’s most precious treasure, I will calm down as much as it takes! You can count on me!” I clenched both my hands into fists as I made this emphatic declaration.

I drew closer to her, saying, “A maid and a half-elf! Fantastic! I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say my entire life has been leading up to this moment!”

“.........Huh? Huh?”

“Myusel! Myusel, show me your ears again!”

“What? Er—y-yes, sir...”

Unable to resist my insistence, she took one hand away from her head, revealing her ear. It was the quintessential fantasy-elf ear.

“Whoa...! A real elf ear...!”

It was something to admire. Myusel, however, didn’t seem to understand why I was so happy.

“M-Master...” she said, turning red.

“Oh, sorry about that. Thanks.” I took a step back. Now that I thought about it, I realized any girl would be embarrassed to have someone checking her out at close range like that, whether it was her ears or whatever.

“Still, that’s incredible,” I said. “I’ve seen something truly amazing today.”

Myusel only looked more confused as she said, “You—You aren’t angry?”

“Huh? Why would I be?”

“I mean... because I hid the fact that I’m a half-elf...”

“Why would that make me angry?”

Myusel seemed lost for words.

In the back of my mind, something clicked. “I don’t know much about this place, but is it that half-elves aren’t very well-liked? By humans, or elves, or both?” That’s a familiar enough trope in fantasy.

“...Yes, sir.” Myusel gave a small nod.

Even saying “aren’t very well-liked” was putting it gently, an expression I used to spare her feelings. Most likely, there was outright discrimination. So much that being born with mixed elf blood would be reason enough to be persecuted.

Myusel’s discomfort only confirmed my hypothesis. She was used to being abused and hated.

“Um... Myusel-san?”

“...Wha? Oh.” She looked zoned out for a second, but then hurriedly said, “Master, please, don’t add an honorific to my name!”

“Huh? But... Hey, Myusel-san, how old are you? Aren’t you older than me?”

In fantasy stories, elves always live a long time. So even if Myusel looked like she was just in her late teens, it was entirely possible she was much older than me.

“How old am I? I’m six—sixteen, sir...” She sounded downright nervous.

“Oh. Younger than me, huh? Well, okay, then. I’ll just call you Myusel.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But Myusel. Let me be clear about one thing.”

“Y-Yes, sir?”

“I’m very happy that you’re a half-elf. Frankly, I wonder what I did to deserve it!”

“Huh? Huh...”

“So I promise I won’t get angry about you being a half-elf, or upset, or anything. Okay?”

For an instant, Myusel looked at me silently. Then she said, “Thank you very much, sir,” and bowed deeply again. When she did, her pointy ears peeked out once more.

I crossed my arms and muttered, “It looks like I’ve got a lot to learn around here.”

If I were surrounded by silicon-based life forms, or octo-astronauts or something, like in an SF story, where it was hard to find commonalities with humanity, it would put me on notice that what was normal or valuable to them might not be what was normal or valuable to me. But with people who looked like regular humans and lived in a familiar medieval European-type fantasy setting, it was easy to be misled.

“I only just got here, and I only learned what’s going on even more recently than that. Myusel, what did they tell you about me?”

“They said you were a very, very important visitor to the Empire, and that you were going to live here for a while, and that Brooke-san and I were to look after you.”

“Brooke-san?”

I blinked. This was new.

“I’ll introduce you later. Right now, I need to check the grounds and do some cleaning...”

So apparently, I had another servant assigned to me. That meant there were four people living in this mansion. Me (the master), my bodyguard Minori-san, the maid Myusel, and Brooke-san. (Having no idea what kind of person this was, I thought of them with -san for the time being.)

The house seemed too big for four people, but Minori-san claimed it was small by the standards of Eldant nobles. Yes: nobles. As a guest of state, I was considered on par with nobility.

“Do you know what I’m here to do?”

“You’re here to ‘promote commerce’ between the Empire and ‘Japan,’ so that both of our nations can ‘mutually flourish.’” She sounded like she was reading off a cue card. I suspected she was just parroting what she’d been taught, without any real idea of what most of the words meant.

“Yeah,” I nodded with a dry grin. “Commerce. Right.”

“You came from a far-off country, didn’t you, Master?”

“Yeah, I did.” Well, I didn’t know how far it was, but she was right that it was another country. “A far-off world, actually.”

“World...?” Myusel cocked her head. The gesture had the innocence of a little bird, and I had to struggle to suppress the flood of moe feeling that welled up in my heart.

“Not another country?” she asked.

“Yes, another country. In another world.”

She seemed to be giving this serious consideration.

Ahh. Now I understood. Minori-san and Matoba-san had both told me that there was effectively no leisure industry in this country. Magic aside, in a world with medieval technology, where the printing press didn’t exist, books would be a valuable commodity. Nobles might have them, but they would be unobtainable for the common people. The way commoners enjoyed stories would be by telling them to each other—like parents telling fairytales to children, or a poet or bard to his apprentices. Everything would be subject to the imperfections and limitations of the oral tradition.

For that matter, what was the literacy rate around here? In any event, under the circumstances, they might not have even had a concept of ‘other worlds.’ This was a tried-and-true plot device to an otaku like me, but it might have been totally unfamiliar territory for Myusel. It was much like how medieval and modern peoples didn’t know that there was such a thing as “space” once you got past the sky.

“I’m very sorry,” Myusel said with a disappointed—almost fearful—expression. “I’m a fool with no real education...”

“No. It’s totally natural not to understand. I’m sorry.”

“You mustn’t be!” Myusel said, shaking her head furiously. I could see her pointy ears as she did so, shaking along with her head—the whole impression was like that of a cat or dog flicking its ears. Gaaah, this girl is sooo cute!

“If only I had some kind of picture that could explain it...” I played around with the smartphone in my hand, looking for something appropriate. And then I noticed it.

Network unavailable.

I was only just realizing, but it probably should have been obvious. This was another world. There wouldn’t be any cell phone carriers anywhere. Although if the passageway really was connected to Aokigahara Forest, maybe I could connect if I got close enough to it.

“Aww, dangit! I have to go without internet, too?!”

This meant I couldn’t go to the news sites I always checked, or the forums I always lurked on, to say nothing of all the online games where I had accounts. This was a problem. I had to get them to set up an antenna or do something, or I was going to suffocate from lack of information.

As I was thinking all this, Myusel was looking at my hand in befuddlement.

“Master... What’s that?”

“Huh? Oh, this? It’s my... Well, it’s a magic item from my country.” I smiled and showed her the memo pad screen I’d been writing on earlier.

“Are those... letters?”

“Yep. My country’s language.”

Myusel stared at my smartphone, eyes wide. She looked so earnest...

“What is it?”

“Oh, no, forgive me.” She quickly bowed her head. “I was just amazed that you use such complicated letters, Master...!”

“Huh? Oh, uh, I guess.”

She had been looking at the Japanese sentences. In other words, lines with complicated kanji characters in them. Having been born and raised with this system of writing, I’d never thought too much about it, but cultures that used this many types of letters at once were pretty unusual on Earth. The English alphabet only has twenty-six letters. Japanese is said to have “fifty sounds,” but there are twice that many characters in kana syllables alone. Add in kanji and you have many, many times that number of characters.

How many? Suddenly curious, I checked my phone’s dictionary. It said the basic number of kanji for literacy was around three thousand. But the most accomplished readers might know in excess of ten thousand characters. As far as I could tell, only the “kanji countries” used this many characters to write. And it seemed like only Japan and Korea made things even more complicated by adding syllabic characters.

...I could see why foreigners might think we were crazy.

“I guess you guys don’t use too many letters around here?”

“Oh... I’m sorry.” Myusel looked down. “I can’t... read or write...”

“...Oh.”

Come to think of it, another distinctive quality of Japan is its unusually high literacy rate. Visiting foreigners are sometimes surprised to see homeless people reading the newspaper. Or anyway, that’s what I heard on the net someplace.

Now I got it. From the perspective of someone who can’t read or write at all, a guy reading and writing using complicated combinations of characters might look a lot smarter than he was. Maybe the way someone who spoke five different languages would look to me.

“Hmm, paper, paper...”

I went back to my desk and opened the drawer. There were several sheets of somewhat rough paper inside. Maybe paper production technology wasn’t as advanced here, either, because it looked pretty crude compared to what I was used to. But of course I could still write on it.

I took out a ballpoint pen, which, like my smartphone, I’d had on me when I got here, and began to write at the top of the paper.

A-i-u-e-o. Ka-ki-ku-ke-ko. Sa-shi-su-se-so. Ta-chi-tsu-te-to. Basically, the hiragana syllabary. I wrote the characters as neatly as I could at the top of the page, then handed it to Myusel.

“Here.”

“...Eh?”

“Call it a symbol of our friendship. Er... Maybe it’s a little cheap for that, but...”

“Wha? Y-You’re... giving it to me...?!” Her eyes were wide.

“It’s a chart of ‘hiragana.’ It’s the most basic way of writing in my country; it’s simple, but everything starts here. I’ll teach you the sounds they make later.”

Then I had a thought. I grabbed the paper back and wrote Myusel on it in hiragana.

“This is how you write your name in my language. You can find the characters on the chart later.”

“...Master...!” she whispered, sounding overwhelmed. She held my hiragana chart as if it were some kind of priceless award, the first one she’d ever won in her life.

At first I thought it was a little silly, but I soon thought better of that. If printing technology wasn’t very developed, then books and the like must largely have been hand-copied manuscripts. So, naturally, they would be valuable artifacts that only nobles and some rich people were able to get a hold of. And a chart of characters from an entirely different world? All the more so.

It might just be a sheet of paper, but Myusel must have felt she’d received something wonderful.

For a while, she simply stared at the chart—but gradually, a happy smile began to spread across her face. Her happiness seemed to come less from the fact that she’d been given something valuable, and more from the simple fact that she’d been given a gift. She held the paper to her chest as if clasping a treasure. And then she said, in a voice so quiet it was barely audible:

“Th-Thank you very much.”

Her cheeks were rose-red, perhaps from the excitement, and her smile was shy.

Whoa. Hold on now, I could get seriously moe for this. I never thought I would feel so moe for a three-dimensional girl. She’s so dang cute, I think I feel a tightness in my chest...!

As I stood there, getting swept up in a rising tide of moe-ness, Myusel said, “Oh!” as though something had just occurred to her.

“It looks like Brooke-san is home.”

“It does?”

Apparently, those large ears weren’t just for show. I hadn’t heard anything at all, but she had picked up the sound of someone getting back.

“I’ll bring Brooke-san in.”

“Oh, uh, sure, please do.” I nodded. Myusel went scurrying out of the room and—

“Oh.”

Fell flat on her face.

“Yikes!” She had taken a serious tumble, but before I could so much as ask if she was okay, she had jumped up, given me a panicked bow, and set off again.

Hmm. She was awfully clumsy. And it wasn’t calculated; it was completely natural. She was the maid who was going to be looking after me, which meant that at least as long as I lived in this house, we were going to be seeing a lot of each other. Plus, I was her “master,” which meant that unlike my classmates or my old friend, at least she wouldn’t mock me as an otaku, look down on me, or respond to my heartfelt confession of love with a flat “No way.”

“Heh heh heh heh heh!”

I knew it wasn’t exactly right, yet a happy grin spread over my face. This meant...

“Master?” A knock came at the door. “I’ve brought Brooke-san.”

“Sure, please come in,” I said, trying to sound as easygoing as I could.

I wondered what kind of person Brooke would turn out to be. Another elf? Was the Holy Eldant Empire a country of elves?

Wait, hang on. This was a different world. I couldn’t assume that what seemed obvious to me would be obvious to the people here. Meaning “Brooke” might be a beautiful woman! After all, it sort of sounded like a man’s name, but this was another world, and maybe they named their gorgeous women Brooke here. And if it turned out “Brooke” was a last name, then who knew? All these thoughts were running through my head as the door opened.

“’Scuse me,” a voice said. “I’m Brooke Darwin, your manservant. I’m a gardener, for the most part, but you can count on me for any sort of manual labor.” This deferential self-introduction came from a huge humanoid figure. Wait... Humanoid?

I felt the blood leave my face, the way it would have if I’d gotten too close to a wolf or tiger at the zoo. I thought all the cartoons and illustrations had desensitized me, so this shouldn’t have frightened me, but seeing the real thing up close—how huge it actually was, the way everything about it screamed carnivore...

Standing beside Myusel was a creature at least two meters tall. He wore a tunic, dirty and torn in places, and pants that were in no better condition.

That would have been enough to freeze me in place. The real issue was that although this creature was humanoid, he wasn’t human. His face, neck, arms, and all the skin that I could see, right down to the feet poking out of his trousers, was covered in blue scales, and he had a missile-shaped head. In other words, just like a snake.

In front of me, so close he could practically breathe on me, was a creature of the type popularly known as a lizardman.

You didn’t have to look to “giant monsters” like Godzilla or Gamera: a two-meter-tall snake-thing was more than big enough to look like he could pick me up and eat me. Frankly, I was surprised my pants were still dry. I’m not ashamed to admit I wanted to run away as fast as I could, but the lizardman was standing between me and the only exit.

“Master?”

Myusel was looking at me strangely. She didn’t seem at all unsettled by the thing standing next to her.

“...I forgot.” This was another world. Things that were obvious to them might not be obvious to me, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, no matter what happened. A lizardman gardener? Not surprising. Totally normal. Maybe?

“My greetings t’ you, Master.” The lizardman—Brooke—bent down to look me in the eye. A forked red tongue darted in and out of his mouth, another little detail to give me the willies.

Yes, he was scary, but...

“P-Pleased to meet you,” I said, somehow managing a smile.

“If it’s all right, perhaps I’ll take you up on your offer.”

“If you don’t mind having me for a teacher,” I said. Yeah, it was a bit theatrical. But then, so was the moment.

Wait—damn! Was I playing it a little too cool? I wasn’t used to these things. Anxious, I glanced at Myusel. But the half-elf girl was looking down intently at the hiragana chart, an expression of happiness on her face.

Afterword

Hello, hello. Light novel author Sakaki here.

I’m an itinerant author, plying my trade at one publisher and then another. This book is my first work for Kodansha. Which only makes sense, since it’s one of their launch titles (hah).

So, on the subject of this book, Outbreak Company: The Power of Moe. I’ve actually had the basic idea for the story in my mind for quite some time. I was wracking my brain to come up with some sort of fantasy setting, and since I’m a little twisted myself, I didn’t hit on your regular swords-and-sorcery adventure. Instead I started to wonder: What would be the strangest way to approach a fantasy world?

Ever since I started writing novels, dragons have been basically boss characters in fantasy settings. But I thought to myself that if a dragon showed up today, the army would just shoot it full of rockets and that would be the end of it. So I thought about telling the story of a dragon who found himself in the modern world.

With that in mind, I started to think of things that would seem strange in a fantasy setting, and one of the things that drifted through my head was “a company.” Wouldn’t it be weird, I thought, if you had a company (maybe even a publicly traded one!) staffed by elves, dwarves, lizardmen, and the like? And wouldn’t it be even weirder if that company’s specialty was manga? The ideas kept flowing and ultimately resulted in this book.

Both our modern world and the annals of history attest that when people and cultures encounter something totally unprecedented, near-chemical changes take place, often in very unexpected ways. How would the entertainment of our own world fare in another? I suspect it would be transformed in surprising ways. I hope my readers will follow these changes with interest, just like the main characters do.

Ichiro Sakaki

27 Oct 2011