Chapter One: Good Morning, Alternate World!

My little sister looked up at me with puppy-dog eyes.

“Can I... sleep with you?”

For a second, my mind went completely blank. Her moist eyes were at once shy and inviting. Her hesitation showed in the trembling of her pale red lips and white cheeks.

Only the most pure, the most unblemished of young women could have gotten away with this—it was basically their Secret Ultimate Technique. An instant kill. No man could resist it. No man would want to. I knew that, and yet half-reflexively, I tried to push back.

“D—”

Don’t be an idiot. What are you talking about?

But I couldn’t even bring myself to say the words. My tongue, as if trapped by magic, refused to move.

And then the little girl, clutching her pillow, went on, “I can’t sleep... Can’t I please stay in your bed...?”

It was perfect. What else would a little sister carry when she came to her big brother’s room in the middle of the night? I simply couldn’t see any way out. Instead I just stood there, goggling.

Dear sister, when did you get so... mature...?

“Big Brother...” Her voice was pitiful and pleading. My resolve to turn her down instantly evaporated. She sprang those two words like a trap that left me with no escape.

Big Brother, she’d said! Of course, she could have thrown in a nice curveball, called me “Elder Brother” or even just “Bro” or something. But sometimes the tried and true is best. I saw her killer technique coming from a mile away, and I still couldn’t defend against it. It was all I could do just to roll over so my back was to her and face the wall.

“Eh heh heh.” She seemed to take my silence for acceptance. With my back turned, I couldn’t see what my little sister was doing. But I could intuit that she was laughing to cover her embarrassment and then climbing into my bed.

“Big Brother...” Her whisper seemed to brush against my back.

Dammit. I could see it now—see the trap I had fallen into.

I knew how these scenarios played out. Sure, you get into bed together, but you don’t go right to being in each other’s arms. Maybe there’s an embrace, but it’s from behind. You’re in a narrow bed together, so you wrap your arms around the other person, feel their body heat. And then, when the time is right, they turn over. You realize you’re looking at each other from a distance so close you can feel each other’s breath...! It seems coincidental, yet inevitable. That’s what’s important. The touch of awkwardness is the ultimate testament to the girl’s purity. By turning my back to her... I had only played right into her hands!

I didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything. The silence hovered between us. But I already knew how this was going to go. After a moment’s hesitation, she would say something reluctant yet resolute, like, “This really isn’t right, is it?” or, “But Big Brother, I really...” All followed by her big confession! That was the way it was supposed to go—it was practically tradition. I waited for the moment when I would “accidentally” find myself face-to-face with her. Waiting was all I could do.

And then...

“Um... Say... Big Brother?”

“Yeah, what?” I tried to sound nonchalant. My heart had decided to pound as hard as it could. The sound of blood rushing around my body was deafening in my ears. Wasn’t there some way I could bring my pulse down? And then she said it.

“B-Big Brother, could... could I...”

“What? Could you what?” My voice was shaking. I was boiling with heat (not that I knew what that meant).

“Um...”

I could feel her breath against my earlobe. She was so close, and her breath was so soft. Ahh...

And then she said...

“Could I tie you up?”

...............saywhat?

I instinctively looked at her, and my sanity returned.

“Wait a second,” I groaned, “who are you?!”

It’s true, I had a little sister. She was two years younger than me, sassy as hell, and she thought about as much of her older brother as a cowboy does of the snake in his boot.

With parents like ours—our father a light-novel author and our mother a former writer-designer-programmer for ero games—you might expect that us kids would be 110% brainwashed otaku. But there’s another possibility, which is that as a form of rebellion, a kid might totally refuse any and all things geeky.

In our house, I was the brainwashed one while my sister was the rebel. She didn’t much get along with any other member of the family, especially not me. Unlike our parents, whom she had to rely upon financially and legally for the time being, there was no disadvantage to her if she ticked me off. I hated how calculating she was about it. She didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Mom and Dad with her rebellious behavior, so she let it all out on me.

Anyway, forget all that. The girl in front of me was definitely not my little sister.

For starters, my little sister didn’t have silver hair. And her eyes weren’t green. In fact, this girl obviously wasn’t even Japanese. Jeez, self! Couldn’t you have noticed that a little sooner?!

But, having been caught up in the utterly textbook sleeping-with-little-sister event, I hadn’t even taken that first, simple mental step.

You’re stupid beyond belief, Kanou Shinichi! I’ve disappointed even myself this time! But forget about that, we’ve got bigger problems!

“Big Brother, how could you?”

Despite my self-proclaimed little sister’s wounded words, she was wearing a smirk. For some reason, her face appeared to be illuminated from below. It wasn’t quite clear where the light was coming from, but thanks to it I could see her sharp yet lovely features. And I could see she looked about as friendly as a Demon King.

“How could you forget your dear little sister?”

Suddenly the girl calling herself my little sister was standing proud on top of the bed, holding something in each hand—Ropes? Whips? I couldn’t tell—and looking down at me eagerly. Her features were well-balanced, but a youthful pudginess remained here and there—she was less pretty than cute.

So, let’s summarize. A girl calling herself my little sister was standing above me with some kind of S&M accessory in each hand. She was definitely no little sister of mine.

What kind of ero game was this?! Was she some crazy yandere type? Was this a one-way ticket to a bad ending? What kind of terrible fate would I bring down on myself if I didn’t consider my choices very, very carefully?

All this was going through one corner of my mind, but the rest of me reflexively shouted:

“Forget?! Forget what?! I don’t have any little sister like you!”

“Aw, that hurts,” Self-Proclaimed Little Sister said, but all the same she advanced on me, tugging at her ropes in a way that produced a very distinct cracking sound.

For what reason does she appear so practiced in these mannerisms? And... am I so scared that my internal monologue is using formal vocabulary?

“So, what am I to you, Big Brother?”

“I can’t answer that! No, wait— Stop!”

“Well, fine,” she said, puffing out her cheeks. Okay, that was a little cute.

No, stop! This is no time to be getting all moe!

“From this day forward, you can consider us your queen.”

“W-Wait, whaaaaat?!”

How the heck did that work? For that matter, why was she suddenly talking so differently?

“We are automatically promoting you from Big Brother to Pig.”

“H—How is that a promotion? No, hold on! Those ropes, they—they chafe!”

“You are one noisy pig. Don’t you know pigs say bonk bonk?”

“No, they don’t! They say oink oink!”

“But bonk bonk is such a good sound. It lets everyone know you’re a pig, including you.”

“Don’t try to twist reality just for human convenience! You should be kind to the earth! And to me!”

“Shut up already, you obnoxious pig!”

What the heck is going on here?

Before I knew it, I was tied up and rolling around on the bed. She was so quick. Impossibly quick. For that matter, why hadn’t I been able to resist?

“You’re only fit to be made into cup ramen, but we haven’t killed you yet. You can show your gratitude by kissing our foot as we awaken you with it!”

With that, Self-Proclaimed Little Sister—who I guess was now my silver-haired queen—raised her foot. There was a huge rumbling sound from somewhere, and she brought her foot down at me...

...and I woke up screaming, “BOOOOOOOOOOOONK!”

Let’s be clear. I don’t mean woke up as some weird fetish euphemism. I just mean I was sleeping, and then I wasn’t.

“Oh... Oh, God...” I sat up in bed, breathing hard. That had been a terrible dream in any number of ways.

For starters, a little sister who comes into her big brother’s bedroom saying, “I can’t sleep. Can I get in bed with you?” is a creature that only exists in fiction. She isn’t physically possible, just the product of fevered adolescent fantasy. And we humans are buffeted back and forth between such phantasms and reality, and in the process, we grow up... (I’m too shaken to know what that means.)

“Um...”

“Anyway, Shizuki never called me ‘Big Brother.’ Come to think of it... What did she call me? Huh? It’s almost like we went three years without having a real conversation...”

“Um, Master?”

“N-Not that it would bother me not to have talked to her for three years! Er... Ugh, no, that’s just tsundere-ish self-deception. But seriously, I can remember it like it was yesterday—the times when Shizuki would follow me around, or cry when I had to go off to elementary school... Wait a second, I know it wasn’t yesterday, but how long ago was that?”

“Master, um... Breakfast is ready...”

“Yeah... We haven’t had breakfast together in so long...”

It was only after this whisper had escaped me that I finally registered that I wasn’t alone in my room.

“Master...?”

At last, I saw the maid standing there. She was an absolute beauty, but her flaxen hair and indigo eyes pretty much screamed, not Japanese. Not least because when a Japanese girl puts on a maid outfit, it’s hard to avoid the impression she’s just doing cosplay, but this girl... It looked so right on her. The design of her dress was a little different from what you might call a true Victorian-era maid outfit—it left her pale shoulders exposed, and the hem of her skirt was a little short, coming to just above her knees. But it was a testament to her maid-liness that it still didn’t look even a little bit silly on her.

Her outfit alone made her beautiful enough, but it was her confused, slightly lost expression that put the adorable icing on the cake.

Her name was Myusel Fourant, and she was my maid.

A shut-in otaku with a personal maid-san? It’s enough to make you want to know what kind of ridiculous ero game I was in. I’ve got to say, for a long time I was sure it was a dream, too. I was pinching myself every morning when I got up.

Myusel seemed startled to see me shaken; she treated me as gently as a convalescent. But actually, it had been nearly four months since she had been assigned to look after me. We were pretty used to each other by now.

Incidentally...

The room I woke up in was super fancy, very different from the bedroom in my dream. Furnishings were minimal, just some lamps, but a huge, canopied bed sat in the middle of the room, a proud waste of space. There were, of course, no desks or bookshelves. This room was for sleeping and sleeping only—hence why the bed was the protagonist of the interior decor. But you mustn’t think this was merely a display of excess. Oh, no! The mansion I was in had so many rooms that if I didn’t specialize them like this, I would never have been able to use them all up.

Anyway, never mind.

“Um... Myusel?”

“Yes, Master?”

“How much did you hear...?”

“Um,” she murmured, tilting her head like a little bird. Gaaah! Every little gesture she makes is just so cute! “From about the part where you said ‘Who are you?!’ I guess.”

“Yikes! I said that out loud?” I was afraid my sleep talk had given away the contents of my nightmare.

“So I answered, ‘It’s Myusel,’ but...”

“It didn’t occur to you that I was talking in my sleep?”

“Oh. Was that all it was?” Myusel said, a relieved look on her face.

Wait a second—does she think I don’t know her name or who she is yet?!

“Myusel, would I ever ask you who you are? We’ve lived in the same house for how many months now? Even my memory isn’t that bad.”

“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant,” Myusel said, shaking her head vigorously. Her long hair bobbed from side to side in time with the motion. When we had first met, her hair had been tied in twintails on either side of her head, but now she was wearing ponytails instead, leaving her pointy ears completely exposed.

“C-Cross-dresser...?” The students, as well as their servants, were thoroughly flummoxed. Our magic rings, our “interpreters,” essentially worked via telepathy; they didn’t allow us to actually understand each other’s languages. So when they heard the term “cross-dresser”—which was actually a complicated pun in my native Japanese—there was a good chance the rings simply couldn’t translate the full meaning of the term. The class got only the dimmest idea of what was being said, and it left them confused.

That was fair enough. But Minori-san, apparently oblivious to the reigning confusion, continued to shout in military fashion, “Pay careful attention to intonation! Cross! Dress! Er!”

“Cross! Dress! Er!”

“Next! Absolute territory!” Geez! I knew that that was slang for the skin that showed between a girl’s high socks and her skirt, but how was anyone here supposed to know that?

Nonetheless, the students dutifully repeated, “Absolute territory!”

“One more! Yandere!”

“Yandere!”

The students were completely in her thrall. I looked out at the crowd of humans, elves, and dwarves all chanting various otaku words. It was utterly surreal.

“She’s an even worse otaku than I am, isn’t she...?!” I muttered, but my voice couldn’t be heard over the shouts of “Cross-dresser!” and “Absolute territory!” I sighed deeply, but they didn’t hear that, either.

Chapter Three: Run Silent, Run Deep

Cause and effect.

Since the two are so often directly connected, we come to expect that they’ll always go hand-in-hand. If you press the switch, the machine turns on right away. If there’s a cause, the effect will be immediately apparent. Or so we tend to think. But that’s not how it actually is.

Most changes are small, so small that we can’t see them. A plant growing, for example. Sprouts shooting up, flowers blossoming—those may involve explosive changes at the cellular level, but those changes are much too small for us to observe by just sitting and watching. We only tend to notice changes in plants after something major has happened—when it finally becomes visible to us, we’re really being thrown into the middle of things.

So I believe there must have been signs. It’s just that they were too small, and I didn’t see them until they became something big.

“What the hell are you talking about?!”

The shout smacked me square in the face the moment I opened the door to the classroom.

“Why, you insolent—!”

“Look who’s talking!”

More than one voice was shouting. The yelling started a general buzz in the classroom, the air growing tense. This was bad. I didn’t know exactly what was wrong, but I could tell it was trouble. Acting on an almost instinctual danger sense, I jumped into the room.

“Will somebody tell me what’s going on?!”

It had been about five months since I’d started the school, and classes as such were going smoothly. A little too smoothly, in fact. I was nervous. The students were picking up otaku culture—or rather, Japanese and the other related foundational stuff we were teaching—very quickly, helped by the personal computers we had put in the self-study area for free use. With Matoba-san’s help, we had brought in large-volume hard drives chock full of anime, which the students were enjoying along with manga and even light novels.

One corner of the classroom was home to some figurines—mostly capsule toy-sized stuff, brought in as “samples”—which people could freely pick up and look at.

My only real complaint about the environment was that we had no internet yet, but that was understandable. Everything else was great.

On top of that, we got a flood of applications from nobles who wanted their children to attend the school. Maybe they had heard about it from our first generation of students. The upshot was that instead of waiting for the next school year, we started taking new students right away, and the school’s population doubled to more than a hundred pupils, with another hundred still waiting to get in.

At this moment, however, there was an almost unbearable tension in the classroom.

“I’ve put up with this until now! But I can’t do it anymore!”

“You took the words right out of my mouth!”

Right in the middle of the large-ish room, about twenty students had made a circle with their chairs. Half of them were elves and half were dwarves. Double that number of humans were watching from a distance.

Elves and dwarves, as I had learned from personal experience, didn’t get along very well. Left to their own devices, their arguments frequently devolved into fistfights. Minori-san and I had scolded them sternly for that sort of thing, and the number of fights had gone down recently, lulling me into a sense of security. A false one, it now seemed.

After all, if they couldn’t blow off some steam every once in a while, the mutual unhappiness was eventually going to explode.

“Crap...!” I was about to rush into the middle of the circle. But just then, one of the elves jumped up, practically knocking over his chair.

“I’m telling you,” he shouted, “Save Me, Big Brother! 4 is the most complete entry in the entire series! The graphics are sharp, and it’s got all kinds of different kiss scenes. And all the gameplay elements involved put it on a different level from almost every other gal game!”

The speaker was an elf wearing what amounted to coke-bottle glasses. (Where did he get those? Those weren’t even common on Earth anymore.) What was with the visuals here?!

“The graphics, he says! Those graphics are average at best!” Now it was one of the dwarves shouting, a blue vein bulging on his forehead. “Have a look at the pack-in figure from the limited first edition of GS3 Soft’s Onee-chan Sword! She has a brassiere made out of pearl, a sword with a completely convincing metallic texture—and the smoothness of her skin approaches art!”

“Average?!” another elf bellowed. “You wouldn’t know graphics if they bit you in the neck! Cloud is life! Everything necessary to existence can be found in it! I’ve—I’ve learned so much from that game!”

“Say what?! I suppose two-dimensional characters are appropriate for someone whose life is as flat as yours!”

“Hah! A mud-dweller like you could never appreciate such a subtle and refined story!”

“Just you say that again!”

“Oh, you wanna go?!”

Um... You guys...?

As I stood open-mouthed, another dwarf broke into the conversation. “That’s enough, both of you!” This new speaker was probably just a teen, but his long beard made him look like an old man already. But never mind his age—what mattered here was that someone with a cool head had shown up. I felt a rush of relief.

Naturally, it didn’t last long.

“Gal games?” the dwarf snorted. “Figures? Good lord. Boooooring.” Wait, wasn’t he supposed to be helping them make up? “If you have to argue, why not pick a more honorable topic, as we do?” he said confidently. Anyone else in that situation might have been looking down their nose at their listeners, but since dwarves were so short, he actually had to look up at the elf. It was sort of funny. “I refer, of course, to the Loli-Dwarf Protection Council!”

“That bunch of pedophiles?!” the elf exclaimed.

“Watch your language! Dwarf women all look forever young. Their small statures mean that even in adulthood, they hardly appear to be teenaged. They are eternal lolis! Angels among us! It’s the duty of gentlemen like ourselves to make sure they aren’t preyed upon by those with twisted predilections!”

“Oh, quiet! You realize that ‘gentleman’ isn’t a synonym for ‘pervert,’ right?”

“Hah! Ha ha ha! That word is practically a badge of honor for us!”

And on and on it went.

With a lukewarm glance at the gentleman-pervert loudly declaiming his views, I backed up a few steps and quietly closed the door.

Okay, I knew I wasn’t in any position to judge any other otaku. But... But this...

Elves and dwarves arguing passionately about ero-games? What was even going on here?

Anyway, I think you guys need to start by apologizing to Professor Tolkien and Mizuno-sensei!

I mean, sure, I was the one who had left them manga and anime and games and said they could check out whatever they wanted. And yes, I was the one who insisted that as long as we were going to all this trouble, we ought to have the original, uncensored versions, and brought in the 18+ editions of everything instead of the clean ones.

But still, I think you’re all growing up too fast!

“This is awful...”

Could this be—you know? Like when you bring drugs into a place that’s never had so much as a vaccine, and it works too well?

“I feel like this has all kind of blown up since I got here.”

Now that I thought about it, medicine usually came with dosage instructions. The math wasn’t simple, though—just because you cut the dose in half didn’t mean the effect would be half as strong. Or sometimes, if you didn’t use at least a certain amount, you wouldn’t get any effect at all. The other side of that coin was that sometimes, if you took more than the prescribed dose, the effect would be massively amplified.

That’s right: this was basically an allergic reaction.

“Yeah, right...”

I zipped down the hallway to the next room—the self-study area and library—and peeked in. This was where we kept the computers with all their data, not to mention piles of manga and anime and DVDs just like I had at home, along with a mountain of light novels I had planned to introduce once the kids could read enough Japanese. Since a lot of anime start out as light novels, I thought we could read something related to a series they had already seen as a way of getting them involved.

How naïve I had been.

“Yikes...”

Smack in the middle of the library I saw a student with a treasure trove of dictionaries around him, scribbling something on a sheet of lambskin paper. I recognized his curly golden hair. He was the son of a noble family and had been especially quick to pick up the language; he could already read and write Japanese at a middle-school level.

“Um... Hello?”

No answer. He stayed silent as the grave. Or rather, he remained totally absorbed in whatever he was doing. He didn’t even seem to know I’d come in.

I crept up behind him and looked over his shoulder. To his right was the sheet of paper; on the left was a book being held open by a wooden frame.

It was a light novel.

“Wait a second...”

It looked like this boy was working on translating the light novel. Obviously, that wasn’t something I had assigned. He had decided to do it himself. I suspected he was working on something that hadn’t yet received an anime adaptation, or a series where he wanted to know what happened.

His fixation—his passion—was intense.

Actually, I thought I had heard that in Taiwan or someplace, there was some otaku who had learned Japanese just because he wanted to be able to read light novels in the original. This was the same sort of thing. Japanese people in Japan already have access to their country’s profusion of entertainment, so they don’t hunger for it like this.

I directed my gaze farther into the room. There was a big desk there, and ten or twelve boys and girls had their notebooks open and were talking about something. The group was diverse, with three or four people each representing humans, elves, and dwarves. It seemed like some sort of study session...

“Ah...”

After observing them for a few minutes, it struck me. I detected a pattern in their conversation. Age and other factors notwithstanding, all of the human children were giving off a sort of “sempai” vibe toward the demi-humans. They were looking down their noses a little and acting a bit entitled. I guess even kids find it hard to break out of the habits they’ve been taught for as long as they’ve been alive.

But still... They’re all sitting at the same table, aren’t they?

Alessio of the assembly of patriots would no doubt have considered this sight to be an undermining of culture. Even if the extreme nature of his views was unique to terrorists, there were plenty of conservatives who thought along similar lines. The children they brought up would think the same way. From that perspective...

“...I guess it’s a step in the right direction,” I murmured to no one in particular. Then I left the library.

I wondered if there were any other changes I hadn’t noticed. With that thought in mind, I looked out the hall window. I could see everything behind the school building. Surrounded by a short earthen wall was a flat area where we had planted some grass—in effect, a schoolyard.

This was another of my ideas. There was no special need for outdoor classes if we were only going to teach otaku culture, but eventually I wanted to introduce manga about tennis and baseball, and when that happened I wanted the students to be able to play sports themselves.

Not that we had any tennis courts or baseball diamonds yet. All we had was some grass and a few trees growing inside the mud wall. We hadn’t even planted the trees ourselves. They had already been there; we just built around them.

One tree, right in the middle of the yard, was especially big. I could see close to a dozen people gathered in its shade. They were focused on an elf boy. He had a light-colored, loose-fitting cape draped over his shoulders, and he was clutching a stringed instrument, about the size of a small guitar, to his chest. He was pretty obviously a bard. Come to think of it, Myusel had mentioned to me that with their long ears, elves had a uniquely sharp sense of hearing and affinity for sound.

I could hear a gentle melody coming from the instrument. And then a clear voice, rolling along with it.

“Tejas had always been slender; to be blunt, she had the body of a virgin child. It left clothing loose upon her, so that when she put on an apron, it would slip to the left or to the right with her every movement. Her pale skin would thus be exposed; yes, there was even the promise of the cleft of her chest, the hint of which many a time drove lusty young men near to madness...”

I mulled over what I was hearing.

“Of course,” the bard went on, “if her skirt came up as it had earlier, all was plainly visible. ‘I’m not quite sure where to look...’ ‘I see!’ Tejas nodded. Indeed, she seemed quite experienced at this. ‘It gets you hot and bothered, doesn’t it?’ ‘Don’t say that!’ ‘You have a bokki, don’t you?’ ‘You can’t get away with saying that just because you used Japanese!’ ‘By the way, in English, a bokki is called an erection! ☆’ ‘And I do not!’ ‘Then there must be something wrong with you, Master!’ Tejas said to him...”

Wait—was he reciting a light novel? In song?

Don’t get me wrong. I adored light novels myself, from moe harem stuff to serious-downer battle pieces. But what the heck was a bard doing reciting them to the accompaniment of his... his lute or whatever?!

Even as this torrent of would-be interjections went through my mind, though, it dawned on me: he was imitating me. How many times had I shown some anime DVD to the students while adding my own explanations?

The magic rings we were all wearing allowed people who didn’t speak the same language to communicate essentially by telepathy, but it didn’t work if one of the participants was an inanimate object. You could put a ring on a DVD player, but it wouldn’t translate the Japanese into Eldant. So I would always sit by, explaining what the words and pictures meant, like the intertitles in an old silent film.

It looked like the young elf guy had taken a light novel that got turned into an anime, copied the soundtrack by ear, and then adapted the translation done by that kid I’d seen in the library.

Uh... Hmm.

“This... is good, right?” I said to no one in particular. I scratched my cheek.

True, I had planted the seeds. But to my surprise and, now, my belated anxiety, they had sprouted in forms I had never expected.

When I got back to the mansion, I found Myusel running around, looking very busy. She was pretty much solely responsible for taking care of the inside of the house, so there was always plenty to do, but still, I didn’t think she normally seemed this overworked. I wondered what was going on.

She didn’t even seem to notice I’d come home. That made me feel a little lonely, in a way. Hearing her say “Welcome home, Master” was an important way of replenishing my MP (by which I mean Moe Points).

“Myusel?”

“Oh... Master,” she said. She turned to me, still holding a huge basket with both hands. Then maybe she tripped on something, or maybe she just lost her balance, but whatever the case she took a terrific tumble. Just, bam.

“Eeek!” The contents of the basket spilled all over the hallway, and Myusel went down hard.

“Ahh! I’m— I’m so sorry!” I hurried over to her. Luckily, it looked like it had only been cloth in the basket, and it helped soften her fall. Anyway, she didn’t seem to be injured as far as I could see.

“Are you okay?!”

Chapter Five: Operation Assassination

23:00 local time...

In the Eldant Empire, which tended to start and end the day early, this was smack in the middle of the night.

A curtain of darkness had fallen over the world. A group of men snuck through the bushes, crouching low. The goggles they wore looked crude and out of place, but were equipped with night vision. With their camouflage uniforms and the equipment that covered half their faces, it was hard to make out who they were.

Their square jaws looked awfully tough, and their muscled bodies were covered in black battle uniforms along with bullet- and blade-proof vests. They were wearing helmets—black too, of course. They practically screamed night raid.

They were the Central Readiness Force of the Ground JSDF—a special operations unit.

Much like America’s SOCOM, this was a special unit composed of elite soldiers that essentially reported directly to headquarters. They were the part of the JSDF that specialized in counterterrorism and guerrilla warfare. In other words, covert killings were well within their mandate.

None of their equipment bore any unit insignia, of course. Those had been deliberately left off. It was obvious why. Let’s just say they hadn’t gotten royal permission to come in-country.

It was sort of silly, actually. They were the only ones in the Eldant Empire to possess equipment like this.

The troops moved forward, using hand signals to communicate. They were heading for the employee housing of the parallel-world-first general entertainment company, Amutech. They had already confirmed the location of their target—namely, Kanou Shinichi. The lights in his bedroom had gone out almost an hour ago, and no other lights were to be seen anywhere in the house. Presumably, everyone in the mansion was asleep.

The squad leader didn’t speak a word, just rested his hand on his shoulder, signaling. One by one, the soldiers advanced on the target house.

Then one of the soldiers looked up, as if he sensed something. He stiffened—there, in the branches above him, was some kind of round shape. No doubt the thing showed a pale green on the other side of his passive infrared night vision goggles. It was some kind of small bird of prey, no larger than thirty-seven centimeters.

An owl.

But it was clearly not the same creature the JSDF trooper knew from his home world. It had no eyes on its head, just one lolling oculus in the center of its stomach. As far as the soldier could tell, the thing defied common sense. He might well have called it a monster.

“......Ugly little freak,” he muttered. In principle, unnecessary talk was verboten during an operation, but maybe it was simply impossible not to remark on the creature. The men in this unit might be the elite of the elite, but they had never fought in an alternate world, nor even practiced how to operate in one. Most likely, it had only been a few days earlier that they had even learned of the existence of this place.

Quiet as shadows, the soldiers circled around to the back entrance. The captain pulled a key out of a bag and unlocked the door, and then in they came, not one of them making a sound.

True, most special-ops forces you see breaking into houses in movies are a little more violent—blowing up walls and piling into rooms and stuff—but that’s when the enemy is expecting them and speed is of the essence. If your targets aren’t on the lookout for you, you want to keep it that way as long as you can, until you’re right up close.

Real pros use their weapons as little as possible. Minimize casualties, maximize effect: that’s the working rule for a special force.

The troopers arrived at the bedroom they were targeting and lined up on either side of the door. They nodded silently at each other once more, then one of them grasped the doorknob.

An instant later...

“Hrk?!”

...the door flew open inward by itself. The trooper was thrown completely off-balance; he probably hadn’t expected anything like this.

The room lit up like a light switch had been thrown. And there in the very manorial room—

“Welcome home, Master!”

—were thirty or so maids.

Afterword

Hello! Light novelist Sakaki here.

I’ve got Outbreak Company Volume 2 for you.

Incidentally, this is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, organizations, or events is purely coincidental.

For example, say some of the political goings-on in this book seem sooooort of somehow like something in real life to you. It’s just your imagination. I’m definitely not trying to pick any fights here (heh).

Okay. With that out of the way, I can be confident my book won’t get banned......... probably.

But anyway.

Outbreak Company is one of those “alternate world” stories. And no alternate-world light novel (swords-and-sorcery tales being the exemplars) is complete without illustrations.

For that matter, that’s probably true even of non-alternate-world light novels. I mean, having pictures is kind of part of the definition. (Okay, I know not everyone will agree with me on this.)

It’s just... How do I put this? The amount of information that can be communicated instantaneously by a picture, the atmosphere that can be established by eleven pictures, just can’t be achieved in linear text.

You can offer a detailed description of something, sure. That increases the quantity of information available. But the simple reality is that it doesn’t have the instantaneous impact of a picture, that “bam!” quality. A text is ultimately a collection of the symbols we call words, which are used to help create an image in the mind of the reader. It takes time and effort.

But if instead you can show even a single picture of this alternate world, that’s going to have a lot of influence on the reader’s conceptions.

Not to mention, the market is flooded with light novels these days. When potential readers pick up your book and say, “Oh. Another isekai thing,” it’s not an exaggeration to say that the pictures may be what sway them to read one more alternate-world fantasy.

In that sense, having an artist who can draw evocative illustrations can be a matter of life and death for a book like this one, and whether or not that artist is good at getting the details, the little things, right can have a huge impact on the impression the book leaves on readers. It can actually change how deep the world is perceived to be.

I’ve got Volume 1 next to me as I write this, and I can only say, with the above in mind, how grateful I am to have been able to work with Yuugen-shi* as my illustrator. They make the characters moe, no question, but they don’t stop there; they incorporate them into real scenes, atmospheric moments. It’s a surprisingly uncommon talent.

Uncommon it may be, but as moe is so situation-dependent, it really is a crucial part of true “moe art.”

Actually, from a philosophical perspective, it’s pretty close to what Shinichi says about Elvia’s art in this book.

I’ve been awfully lucky in terms of the illustrators I’ve gotten to work with for my books, and this series is no exception. I’m probably more eager than anyone to see as many of Yuugen-shi’s Outbreak Company pictures as possible.

On that note, I’ll get right on plotting for the third novel. In addition to the obvious main characters, Elvia and Brooke seem pretty popular, so I’d like to come up with something they can get involved in.

I hope you’ll pick up Volume 3 when it comes out.

All right, then! See you in the next volume!

Ichiro Sakaki

25 November 2011

*Note: -shi (from the kanji meaning “master”) is an honorific often attached to the names of artists and craftspeople.