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.

Myusel, to put it bluntly, was not human. She had mixed blood, and her ears were the proof. Myusel had something of an inferiority complex about her heritage, and usually didn’t like people to see the reminders that were stuck perpetually to her head. She had lived her whole life until very recently keeping them hidden, in fact. The environment she’d been living in had made it necessary.

But the environment she’d been living in hadn’t been my house. Once she realized that I wasn’t going to hold her birth against her, she frequently started wearing ponytails around the mansion. Unlike twintails, ponytails generally keep the hair from covering the face when you look down, so they make it easier to do things like cooking and laundry. Setting aside the practical benefits, though, the ponytails were also a sign of how much she had relaxed around me and the others who lived in this house. The thought gave me a little burst of pride.

“You said I should be kind to the earth, and kind to you, so I wasn’t sure how best to call out to you...”

“Um, that was just sleep-talk, too.”

As I spoke, I climbed out of bed. As I said, it was an elegant canopied thing, the sort of bed you might normally picture a princess sleeping in. It was practically a symbol for “noble” or “rich guy.” Sleeping on it was nothing like trying to get a night’s rest on the steel-frame bed you bought for 19,800 yen at the store. If I could have sold just this one piece of furniture and exchanged the proceeds for Japanese yen—well, the thought of how rich I would have been was practically enough to keep me awake at night.

“Er, anyway. You were saying something about breakfast?”

“Yes, sir. It’s ready.”

“Okay. I’ll be right there.”

“Certainly,” Myusel said with a deep bow. She did an about-face and left my room.

The first time we had met, Myusel had tried to help me change my clothes. It was only natural to her; she saw it as part of her job. But I insisted that helping me get my clothes on in the morning was not on her list of duties, and now she was careful to leave the room whenever she sensed I was going to change.

Yes, sometimes I had to put on outfits that were hard to get into all by myself, and then I would let Myusel help me. But first thing in the morning... Like any young man, the lower half of my body started the day off very, uh, energetically, and I didn’t necessarily want her to see that.

I let out a breath as I opened the curtain. The bright light of the early sun poured into the room like an avalanche.

Over the past four months, I had grown accustomed to what I now saw outside the window. There was a verdant forest and an impossibly clear sky. The little shapes that flew overhead weren’t birds, but small wyverns, purpose-bred and trained as mounts for knights.

In case you hadn’t guessed, this wasn’t modern Japan. I was in one of those “other worlds” that normally only existed in anime, manga, and light novels. Around here, we called it the Holy Eldant Empire.

AD 201X: the Japanese government makes a discovery that can safely be called unprecedented in human history. To be precise, it wasn’t the government that made the discovery so much as one of the volunteer patrols and local police groups working their way through Aokigahara, the forest at the foot of Mount Fuji. But that doesn’t really matter, because this was the find of the century.

They discovered a hyperspace tunnel, a portal to another world. Right there in the middle of the “Sea of Trees.”

How long had it been there? And why? How exactly did it work? We still didn’t know the answers to any of those questions. The government, aware of what a huge deal this discovery would be if it were made public, decided to keep it strictly under wraps. That meant there was no real chance to do large-scale research on the hyperspace portal. Only a few people, sworn to utmost secrecy, were involved in figuring out what exactly was going on.

On the other side of the hyperspace portal was a human nation with a whole lot of space, not to mention its own culture. When the government found that out, it established a front organization called the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau and opened relations. But things didn’t go exactly as planned.

Since the Holy Eldant Empire had magic, telepathic communication was established without too much trouble. The problems started after that. We were dealing with an imperial system, essentially an absolute dictatorship. The intellectual and cultural level around here was effectively medieval. Liberty? Equality? Fellowship? What are those? Are they tasty? The gulf between these people and modern Japanese sensibilities was so wide that it seemed unlikely we were going to get along.

The need for secrecy made it hard to recruit new personnel. Plus, it so happened that our country was busy with a transfer of power of its own. The Japanese government basically got impatient with the slow progress in relations with the Eldant Empire and started to get bolder in its tactics.

As a result, the government decided to give the relationship a little push by focusing on the traditional Japanese export that the Eldant people had seemed to have the best reaction to: otaku stuff, like anime and manga.

The two governments agreed to co-sponsor Amutech, the first “general entertainment company” in this alternate world. Tokyo decided to leave running the place to someone who actually knew something about otaku culture. Amutech conducted interviews in the otaku mecca of Akihabara, with the intention of kidnapping some qualified nerd and making them the company’s general manager.

Enter: me.

That’s right. The otaku they found, abducted, and dragged bodily to this alternate plane of existence was yours truly, Kanou Shinichi.

I mean, geez...

I took the stairs from my bedroom on the second floor down toward the dining area on the first. Sunlight was slathered across the landing through the big picture window, casting everything in the mansion in a sort of high relief. It was pleasantly warm in the sun, and all the parts of the house that were in shadow were just a bit cool. Unlike modern Japan’s well-insulated houses, in brick buildings like this one the same room might be warm in one place and cold in another.

I hummed tunelessly as I walked along. “Wonder what I’m gonna get today? ♪”

Myusel was an excellent cook. I was the sort of person who firmly believed that breakfast was rice or it was nothing, but over the course of my time in Eldant, I had found the food she made so delicious that I had even started to consider betraying my own principles. Sometimes she would come up with things that my modern Japanese palate found surprising—such as boiled eggs covered in honey—but if I could let go of my prejudices long enough to try them, I often discovered they were delicious.

Not to mention, Myusel seemed to be taking close note of my reactions and changing the way she cooked to suit my tastes, so the food had only gotten better and better. If I paid enough attention as I ate, I could tell that even a repeat dish had been changed in subtle ways so that I would like it better.

That explains why I was so happy as I waltzed on over to the dining area. It also explains why—

Bloing.

— I failed to look where I was going and stepped right on the thing.

Whatever I had stepped on, it definitely didn’t have the same consistency as the floor. I looked down at my feet to find something like a very long feeler stretched out across the hallway. It must have been more than two meters long, maybe even three, from end to end.

It seemed like... kind of a lump, just hanging out there. Whatever the feeler was attached to, it was hidden in the shadows, so I couldn’t get a good look at it. But its head was obviously too big to be human; it looked like it could probably open its mouth wide enough to swallow a small child.

I reflexively went stiff and pulled my foot back. “A m-m-m-monster!” But then I made a mystified sound. I thought I remembered something like this happening before.

The weird thing on the floor didn’t move. I took about three steps back, just for safety, and calmed my pounding heart. Then I took a fresh look at the “feeler.”

“Brooke?!”

“Ahh... Mas...ter...?”

The huge, reptilian head raised itself with a great effort. Standing there was the mansion’s manservant, Brooke Darwin.

Like Myusel, he was one of the servants who had been brought to work at this mansion when the Holy Eldant Empire lent it to Amutech.

“Good... mornin’ t’ you,” he said quietly. He sounded out of it—or, well, I guess he was just tired.

Brooke was a lizardman. Normally, lizardmen walk on two legs, but their skin is covered in blue scales, they have long, narrow faces, and they lack eyelids. And then there’s the tails that snake from their waists, more like something you’d find on a dinosaur than a lizard.

Admittedly, since Brooke was just lounging around on the floor, his tail didn’t look very threatening, but I would say that made it at least 30% weirder.

“What’s going on, sir...?”

“That’s my line!” I put a hand to my chest, where my heart was still going a little fast. I knew now that he was neither hostile nor a monster, but running into a gigantic reptile in a dim hallway was still kind of unsettling.

In any event, it was his tail I had stepped on.

“What are you doing, sleeping on the floor?” I asked. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Ahh... Just fine...” Brooke got slowly to his feet, sounding oddly apologetic. “Please remember, I am... a reptile...”

“I’m not forgetting, believe me.”

“At night, and in the morning... my body temperature drops... and I just get so sleepy...”

“Oh, is that all?” Now that I thought about it, I realized that I often didn’t see much of Brooke in the morning.

For the most part, Brooke took care of the external appearance of the house, looking after the garden and such, so he wasn’t indoors much. That left me unsure about his daily routine—how exactly he went about life between getting up and going to bed. There had been plenty on my plate the last four months, and I hadn’t really had time to wonder about it...

“You see, sir...? At night, I’ll... make a fire behind the house and warm myself for a few hours... But sometimes... it’s not enough... The floor by the window warms up in the sunlight nice and early... so sometimes I just find myself... lying here...”

He was basically trying to absorb as much sun as he could. Lizardmen might have evolved to walk on two legs, but apparently they couldn’t escape their fate as cold-blooded animals.

“I get it. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to step on your tail.”

“Aww, ’tis nothin’... Please, step on it all you like...” He sounded like he might go back to sleep at any moment.

“No, no, no! You know I’m not like that!”

Brooke could be intimidating at first glance, but he was actually very easygoing, and a hard worker. But he also considered it to be part of the job description of a demi-human servant to accept random acts of physical abuse from their master—usually a noble or someone similarly wealthy. So he didn’t fight back if he was hit. Granted, as a reptile, he may not have felt pain as acutely as some of us more fragile animals.

“Wait a second... Brooke, are you here because you were on your way to the dining hall?”

If all he wanted was to collect heat, it seemed like it would’ve been more effective to lie somewhere outdoors. He was probably in the shadows now because the sun had moved, causing the angle of the light to change. I suspected he had been here like this for at least three hours.

“...Hmm... Now that you mention it, I suppose I was,” he said.

Normally, a master and his servants would never eat at the same table together. That was considered obvious by people like Brooke and Myusel. Lizardmen, in particular, were seen as even lower than other demi-humans, and also preferred slightly different food, so they often ate at a different place and time from everyone else.

Then there was me. As general manager of Amutech, I ranked on par with a human noble in the Holy Eldant Empire. That meant that there was a pretty serious difference in social status between me and my maid and manservant.

For all those reasons, Brooke had simply assumed that he would take his meals alone. I, however, suggested that he join us for breakfast. We all lived in the same house together, after all, and it seemed both inefficient and kind of lonely for everyone to eat separately. I understood that being apart for meals was considered right and proper in this world. But I was born in Japan on the cusp of the twenty-first century. Plus, my parents were a light-novel author and a former ero game writer-designer, making me 110% otaku, plus I was a former shut-in and NEET. I really couldn’t have cared less about differences in social status or class or whatever—in fact, I was actively against them. And as such, I wanted to make sure I spent time with Myusel and Brooke as much as possible.

Then again, looking at Brooke as he lay indolently on the ground, I realized maybe breakfast was a bit of a reach for him. The mornings would only be getting colder, making it all the more difficult for him to get around. Maybe we could have breakfast a little later in the day or something. I’d have to think about it.

“Okay, Brooke, come on. Get up.”

“Yessir...” He stood, swaying slightly. He really did look extremely tired, and I felt a little bit bad for him... But at the same time, it was dangerous to have him just splayed out in a random hallway. I didn’t want him to get hurt being stepped on, or anyone else to get hurt stepping on him.

I took his hand, mindful of his claws, and began to lead him toward the dining room.

“Good morning,” I said as I came into the dining area.

Although we were technically renting this house—which was also the home base and main office of General Entertainment Purveyor Amutech—from the Holy Eldant Empire, for practical purposes I was the owner. I would have been within my rights to speak a little less politely. If I had come in and just said “Hey, all,” nobody would have complained. But when the person you’re talking to has a couple years on you, that makes it harder to be too casual.

“Good morning, Shinichi-kun.” The girl at the table gave me an easy smile. She had well-balanced features, but I’m not sure I would have called her beautiful so much as very cute. She was kind of baby-faced. And there was something very approachable about her, like she had forgotten to keep aging ever since she reached her teens. One glance at the two mountains on her chest, though, made it obvious she was no little girl.

In fact, she was older than me. Despite her appearance, she was a member of the most powerful military organization in Japan—the Japan Self-Defense Force, or JSDF. She was what you would call a WAC, a female soldier. And she was on active duty, a fact you could tell from the suitcase that was constantly at her feet. It contained a 9mm automatic pistol.

This was Koganuma Minori-san, and she was the bodyguard the Japanese government had assigned to me.

“G’... G’mornin’...” Brooke drowsily greeted Minori-san and Myusel, the latter of whom came rushing over, probably aware of what was affecting Brooke. I was grateful; I couldn’t hold the lizardman up on my own much longer.

“Are you all right, Master?” Myusel asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I grunted, “but it would be great if you could help me out here.”

“Right!”

The two of us managed to get Brooke to a chair, then we took our own seats. Myusel had already set breakfast out on the oval table. There was bread piled in a basket in the middle, and a plate of food was waiting for each of us. On Brooke’s plate, and his alone, was raw meat with some salt and pepper on it, along with some unpeeled fruit. This was not, obviously, because Myusel didn’t like Brooke. Nor was it poor cooking on her part. This was just the way the lizardman liked his food.

“Bon appétit!” I said, clapping my hands together in the Japanese style. Minori-san did the same, then Myusel and Brooke copied us—and then we started to eat.

Our fellowship consisted of:

The master of the house (male, human).

His bodyguard (female, human).

The maid (female, half-elf).

And the manservant (male, lizardman).

To have all of us sitting and eating at one table together made our breakfast perhaps the most unique in the entire Eldant Empire. More than a few people might have raised an eyebrow to see us, but I enjoyed lively meals. During my shut-in days I had eaten each and every meal alone, which gave me a special appreciation for this company.

What’s more, we’re relatively unguarded when we eat, much like when we sleep. It’s easier to relax. Myusel ate carefully, tasting every bite, while Minori-san couldn’t shovel the food in fast enough. Brooke was sleepily eating his fruit. The sight of them was oddly endearing.

“By the way, Shinichi-kun,” Minori-san said, grabbing some bread from the basket. It was her fourth piece. She really knew how to eat. Yet she didn’t show any sign of gaining weight. Where did it all go? Were her giant boobs the result of her copious consumption?

Anyway. She went on: “What’s your plan for today? Are we sticking to the schedule?”

“Oh... uh, yeah. No change,” I said, pulling my smartphone out of my pocket and checking the schedule.

Obviously, there were no cell phone towers around here, so I wasn’t getting any service as such. But the JSDF had set up a series of medium-range antennas at the house and around the castle town so that me, Minori-san and the other JSDF people, and the handful of other Japanese who had come here could keep in touch.

On that note, even wired communication with Japan had been static-y and inconsistent at first, but the military and the government had tried this and that, and now claimed they would soon be able to get us phone lines and internet.

That would certainly open up my options. Online games would be available, image collections, sprawling online forums. Granted, there might be some restrictions in the name of secrecy...

“We’ll pay our usual visit to Her Majesty at the castle,” I said, running my finger along the screen. “Then head over to the school for class.”

“Got it,” Minori-san said, nodding as she checked her own cell phone. By sheer luck, she and I happened to have the same model. It was a “G”-series “tough phone” that claimed to have military-grade durability. In Minori-san’s case, maybe that made sense. I’d bought mine just to amuse myself.

“Oh, Myusel,” I said, turning to the maid next to me. “Her Majesty said you should come, too. She wants you to get a checkup.”

“Oh, okay.” Myusel nodded.

Almost three months before, Myusel had been badly wounded in a particular series of events—she had been stabbed in the stomach protecting the empress of the Holy Eldant Empire. She had been rushed to the royal hospital for treatment and had recovered, but since her release, she continued to go back once a month or so to make sure she was still doing all right.

“Okay,” Minori-san said. “We all know what we have to do today, then.”

We arrived at the imperial castle of the Eldant Empire. It was the single biggest building I had ever seen in my life. Not the tallest, mind you. There were plenty of buildings in Japan that reached higher in the sky. But the presence of this place, the scale—no place I knew gave more of an impression of the soundtrack going ba-buuum! when you saw it.

I don’t think it was just the sheer size, both inside and outside, that contributed to this impression. It was the way the colors and shape of it practically cried out, An important person lives here! Minori-san told me this used to be a mountain and that the castle was fashioned from it using magic. That might have explained why it seemed to be all one big, single piece.

Nonetheless, after coming here regularly for four months, I was slowly getting used to it. The armored guards, the opulently appointed hallways—they didn’t exactly feel like my own home, but maybe like the home of a friend. Which, actually, this was.

By which I mean...

“Ahem.” There was a cough.

I stood in front of the thick oak door. The royal guards on either side bowed to me.

“Kanou Shinichi, general manager of Amutech, and his party including Koganuma Minori and Myusel Fourant, hereby present themselves to offer their morning greetings to Her Majesty and make their customary report. We humbly request to be allowed entrance.”

I used to stumble my way through this ritual, but now I pretty much had it down.

In case you’re wondering, the words we were speaking to each other were being helpfully interpreted by magic rings that we each wore, which allowed us to communicate telepathically. I had gone through this routine so many times, though, that I could practically have given my greeting in the Eldant language.

The two guards announced our arrival in unison. “Kanou Shinichi-sama, Koganuma Minori-sama, and their company have arrived!”

Minori-san, who was there as my bodyguard, and I returned the soldiers’ bow. They each pulled on huge metal rings, opening the door.

For what it’s worth, Minori-san was obviously an outworlder, and therefore outside the local system of ranks and classes; that was why she was treated with the respect due a knight. Myusel, who stood on my other side, however, was just a commoner, and the knights didn’t bother bowing to her.

It was moments like this that made me acutely aware of how stratified society in the Holy Eldant Empire was. To Myusel, it was just par for the course, and she showed no reaction to being ignored.

But let’s forget about that for now.

“Thank you,” I said, bowing to the guards and stepping onto the room’s red carpet.

There were several audience halls in the Eldant castle. For example, there was one for when all the ministers and ambassadors and dignitaries were present, and another for when Her Majesty was seeing just a few people for a report or a personal greeting. This meant the audience chambers came in different sizes, with the size corresponding to the use.

We were in the smaller, more private one, of course. But the room was still large enough to comfortably house a tennis court. And at the far end...

“It is good to see you, Shinichi. Myusel and Minori, as well.” Lounging on the throne was Her Imperial Majesty herself, the owner of this whole giant castle.

“Your Majesty, how good to see you in fine spirits,” I said with a bow. Minori-san, to my left, and Myusel, to my right, offered their respects, too.

“Hmph. We see even you’ve managed to learn a thing or two about etiquette,” the ruler said with a smile. No matter how you sliced it, she looked awfully young—not that you could say that to her, unless you wanted to royally tick her off.

This was Her Imperial Majesty Petralka an Eldant III, and despite how she looked, we were only three years apart. But she looked really young and really adorable. Her elegant dress and the tiara on her head conspired to make her look like a doll. She wouldn’t have seemed out of place sitting in a glass case somewhere.

By the way, Her Majesty Petralka’s eyes were green, and her hair was silver. I.e., she was the self-proclaimed “little sister” from my dream this morning.

Admittedly, she was pretty much the embodiment of the “sassy little sister” character, so it’s possible my deep subconscious had just substituted her for my own annoying sibling. But hey, setting aside the fact that I was basically woken up by some bizarre fetish, good job, subconscious. It was a hundred times better than waking up to a dream about Shizuki.

“Myusel,” Petralka said. “How is your health?”

“Very good, I’m grateful to say,” Myusel said, bowing deeply once more. “And I owe it all to Your Majesty’s kind and generous—”

“Th—The people must know that they can trust their ruler to be fair-minded in all things,” Petralka said before her praise could grow anymore fulsome. “We simply cared for you as we would for any of our subjects.”

I think I mentioned that Myusel was wounded protecting Petralka. I found it very interesting that in such a stratified society, this one point seemed very fair. Maybe it was just Petralka. She had pretty much hated Myusel at first, but now the two more or less got along. The profound difference in their social status meant it would be wrong to call them friends exactly—especially in the castle, where other people would be watching—but apparently, they were close enough that when Myusel was released from the hospital, Petralka asked her to stop by for tea. Even the fact that Myusel, a commoner, was treated in the royal hospital, which was normally reserved for imperials and nobles, was itself a sign of how Petralka felt about her.

I came from modern Japan, where having a tea party didn’t seem like that big a deal, but from the perspective of the Eldant nobles, who all desperately wanted to get even a little bit closer to the empress, Petralka’s attitude toward Myusel would have been something to be deeply jealous of. Not that Myusel herself seemed especially aware of this.

“And you, Shinichi. Is your work proceeding smoothly?”

“Yeah, no problems to speak of,” I said. “Wait... I submit a report every day. So you already know what’s going on, right?”

“I do, but...” A shy look came over Petralka’s sweet face.

Her Imperial Majesty the Empress was deeply interested in otaku culture. It was her backing that had allowed Amutech, the company of which I was general manager, to create a school to help establish the baseline of education that would be necessary to spread otaku culture.

As I, a former NEET and shut-in, knew very well, manga and anime were an excellent pick-me-up. The empress had duties to attend to, and couldn’t easily go anywhere because she would have to take a contingent of bodyguards and her arrival would cause such a stir. For her, works of fiction that could help her feel better in just an hour or so would probably be a great comfort.

“There was that... incident,” Petralka continued. “Garius is rather concerned.”

“As well I might be.” The words came from a silver-haired hunk standing next to Petralka’s throne. He basically looked like the embodiment of the perfect knight. This went way beyond “hot”: his features were arranged just so, his hair as long as a girl’s. Like Petralka, he seemed less like a flesh-and-blood human than some delicate piece of art, so perfect it was almost scary.

He was Garius en Cordobal. A relative of Petralka’s, and a knight, and a minister in the government on top of that. Despite his youth, he was at the top of the totem pole.

“Your Majesty, you are the Eldant state itself,” Garius said. “We knights strive to root out evildoers wherever they may dwell, but I must beg you to care for your own person as well.”

“Yes, we know,” Petralka said, sounding annoyed.

Garius, too, was referring to the incident in which Myusel had been injured. A terrorist organization had taken over our newly completed school, and Petralka had been taken hostage. For the empress to be captured by an anti-government faction was unheard of—I gathered that many elements of the government, not least the royal guard, had been deeply shaken. I didn’t know the specifics, but I knew there had been an inquest into who was responsible, and a number of people among the royal guards and those responsible for security were severely punished. Now, I was there, and I don’t think anyone could have stopped that attack. But it sounds like some people weren’t going to be satisfied until someone was held responsible. It was just that big a deal.

But whatever the case, since that day, Petralka had barely been able to leave the castle without a battalion of knights surrounding her. I saw it just once myself, and the sight reminded me of some old Japanese warlord traveling with their entourage. The way some royal knights rode ahead forcing everyone to kneel down so as to ensure no troublemakers could get close looked almost comedic to me.

Now, of course, it was impossible for Petralka to sneak away to visit my mansion or school. I went to the castle once every three days like this because it was so much harder for her to come to me.

But getting back to the present...

“Honestly, I’m a little surprised,” I said. “How do I put this? People are really picking it up fast.” As I spoke, I pictured my students in the back of my mind. I wasn’t trying to be flattering. The students at my school were soaking up the basic knowledge we offered astonishingly quickly, like sponges. There were even several people who could hold basic conversations without the rings—in other words, who had learned actual Japanese.

“Mm. Indeed. All of our subjects are exceptionally intelligent,” Petralka said.

Admittance to the school wasn’t limited to the children of the nobility, but even so, no matter what race you came from, only families with a certain amount of spare resources could afford to send their children to study. There wasn’t much we could do about that.

Dry land soaks up water, as they say. Eldant was in a state of near war with its neighbor. There were no full-on attacks, but there was an ongoing series of border skirmishes, leaving the Eldant Empire without much room to develop culture. The whole populace, nobles as well as commoners, were starved for entertainment.

And then, in comes Japan’s highly developed amusement industry—developed in the peaceful half-century after its own war—and the people were taking to it like ducks to water. Students learned eagerly about modern Japan; they wanted anything that would allow them to have a wider and deeper experience of the entertainment we were bringing in. But...

“Hm? What’s wrong, Shinichi?” Petralka looked at me questioningly.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“We thought we saw a cloud pass over your face.”

“Oh—Oh really? No, I’m totally cloudless. Er... well, not quite, but I’m fine, you know?”

As the general manager of Amutech, I should have been elated at how things were going. But...

“You outlanders seek to destroy our traditional values! You damnable invaders!”

That was what Alessio, leader of Bedouna, a.k.a. the “assembly of patriots,” a.k.a. the terrorists I keep referring to, had said to me.

Sometimes, you’re doing what you think is right, but it’s hurting someone else in some way. I couldn’t shake the thought that in that sense, what I was doing and what Alessio had done weren’t that different, even if one of us was maybe a little more self-aware than the other.

I suspected I was just overthinking it, but I didn’t have any way of disproving what Alessio had said. It was the Japanese government that had decided to operate Amutech. I was just some schlub they had made general manager.

“Anyway, uh, don’t worry about it,” I said. “Everything’s fine. If things go too smoothly, you just start to worry more!”

“Is that so?” Petralka said with a wry smile. I had apparently managed to convince her that things were really okay.

But I could see Minori-san looking at me out of the corner of her eye. Searching. Doubtful. Pitying. It bothered me a little.

The weather was perfect. We were on top of a hill. The dense grass was soft as a carpet, so pleasant that I wanted to just throw myself down and lie there. In the distance, I could see craggy mountain peaks, and the clear sky seemed to go on forever. It was starting to get a little chilly, but the crispness of the air felt good. Why, I could practically have burst out yodeling right then and there.

But there was one thing that reminded me that I wasn’t standing in the Alps or something. The airborne lifeforms here went beyond just birds. At that moment, I could see sprites that looked like some kind of flying fish soaring through the air, as well as wyverns, the dragons that served as the mounts of the royal knights.

“Seriously, though...”

After dropping off Myusel at the hospital in the castle, I made for the “otaku training center” on the outskirts of town—that is, the school I had established to facilitate cultural exchange. I traveled by this world’s favorite form of land transport, the bird-drawn carriage.

“...I can’t believe I’m actually in a position to teach something to people,” I whispered to the sky.

I had been a school non-attender where I came from, and now I was a teacher? Was this some kind of joke? Despite my misgivings, there was really no choice. My job title indicated that I was a merchant bringing Japanese otaku culture here to the Eldant Empire. If I wanted to move my goods, I would have to do more than just bring them over and leave them here. I would have to get the word out—and I would have to establish an infrastructure that would allow my products to realize their greatest value.

That was what the school was for, and that was why I was a teacher. But still...

“It’s been three months already. Aren’t you about used to it?”

The comment came from Minori-san, standing beside me. But this was the one thing I couldn’t get used to.

We went through the main gate, through the foyer, and then into the school building proper. It looked so good inside, you would never have guessed it was a converted warehouse. All I could say was, dwarves were some dedicated demi-humans, and they knew how to do good work. Nothing looked half-baked or improvised, like a movie set. There were no seams, no unnecessary gaps, no posts in the way anywhere. You would think this place had been planned as a school building from the ground up.

“Good morning!”

I opened the classroom door and came in, and found fifty students already there. They were all in their teens, or at least close to that by human standards. But they were from all kinds of different races. About half were human, but the other half included elves and dwarves. Sitting along one wall a short distance away was a group of adults that numbered almost as many as the students.

These were the students’ “minders.” Basically, their servants. As I mentioned, most of the students at my school hailed from the nobility, or at least the more affluent commoner households. The families of farmers and skilled workers, where kids were usually expected to help out as soon as they could, didn’t have the leeway to send their children to school.

A lot of noble families, though, believed that a familiarity with otaku culture would help their children get ahead in the world—not to mention the fact that the empress seemed to be crazy for it. So there were a lot of well-heeled young masters and mistresses in my tutelage—and of course, they never showed up alone.

But anyway.

Within half a day of issuing my initial call for students, I had filled up all fifty slots in the class. We weren’t teaching otaku culture yet—we had to start with more basic things than that, like Japanese language and all the different kinds of knowledge that went along with it.

Personally, I wanted everyone, regardless of race or class, to be able to get involved in otaku culture. But it also seemed easiest to start with people who already had a baseline level of education and see how things went. Not to mention, the more people I got on my side with political and financial authority (Petralka was a good start), the better.

And yet, I still found myself heaving a sigh. What upset me wasn’t specifically the fact that the students ignored me and didn’t return my morning greeting. They couldn’t have managed it if they’d wanted to. They were too busy glaring at each other.

Today looked like yet another day of very bad classroom relations.

“Argh, I can’t stand the smell anymore! They stink from being outdoors!” exclaimed a girl in a dress worked with elaborate gold and silver embroidery. “I can’t believe I’m in the same room with dwarves! It’s bad enough being near them outside, but indoors the stench is unbearable!”

“I heartily agree with you, milady.” A young man who appeared to be the girl’s butler stepped away from the wall and stood next to the young woman. The butler was fair-skinned and slim, and his ears were obviously pointy—in other words, he was an elf. “Sons of merchants they may claim to be, but their roots are in the earth. I gather they’re quite talented at finding gemstones and putting up buildings, but everything they touch stinks of mud.”

“What’d you say?!” A dwarf boy (at least, I think he was just a boy, even though he had a beard) jumped up, unable to take the humiliation any longer. He pointed at the elven butler and shouted angrily, “You elves have no pride, and I won’t sit here and be mocked by you!”

“Pride? This when dwarves let themselves grow so fat that I can’t imagine how they ever respect themselves. Ah, you’re too terrible to look at!”

“Shut your mouth! You forest apes aren’t good for anything but cutting down trees! You’re so pleased with your magic, but what good has it done you? If you hadn’t let the humans domesticate you, you’d be no better than animals now!”

“S-Such an affront I have never endured! We prize harmony with nature.”

“Harmony? Hah! You mean you prize lounging around in the woods!”

And on and on it went. The argument spread like wildfire among the other elves and dwarves in the room, be they servants or pupils. They were beyond even just being personally insulting; this was about entire races to them. I thought I sensed a vicious cycle: hatred begat hatred. I know elves and dwarves are usually antagonists in fantasy worlds, and it looked like the demi-human races of the Eldant Empire were intent on carrying on the tradition.

“Aw, for crying out loud,” I muttered, clutching my head. This was hardly the first time this had happened. These kinds of fights seemed to break out on a daily basis. It was bad enough that the younger people argued like this, but often the anger would spread to the adults as well, until the furor made it virtually impossible to conduct class. If Minori-san or I, both of whom had been invested with Petralka’s trust, imposed ourselves on the situation, things would quiet down, but only temporarily. The sparks were always there, and the next explosion was just a matter of time. It was all too common to hear students exchanging barbs before or after class.

“They get along about as well as cats and dogs, don’t they?” Minori-san said from beside me.

I could only sigh at the scene. “Equality might be a stretch, but I was hoping that by studying together they might at least learn to be a little less prejudiced...” I guess old habits died harder than I thought.

But even knowing that, it was too late now to schedule separate classes for the different (ahem) classes. Still, there was no question that things were getting so bad in here that I would soon lose all semblance of control.

Seriously, what am I going to do?

I honestly didn’t have the courage to try to jump into the middle of this. It was time for my last resort.

“Minori-san.”

“Yes?”

“Let’s show them how you do it in the military,” I said, clenching my fist.

We had always planned on having Minori-san in the classroom, chiefly because we just didn’t have enough people to handle all the teaching duties. I wasn’t sure how she would do with high-level otaku instruction, but she could certainly teach the basics of daily life.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean channel your inner Sergeant Hartman!”

“You mean abuse the students until they’re no longer able to laugh or cry? I guess I could.” She smirked. Then she stepped up to the lectern in front of the classroom.

“All right, you maggots!” she bellowed. “Class is starting! Quiet in the ranks!”

That’s a WAC for you. Her daily workouts had given her serious lung capacity, and she was putting it to good use. Her voice cut straight through the arguing. I usually thought of her as pretty easygoing, but when she raised her voice like that I found myself unconsciously straightening up.

The adults shut their mouths and looked at her, and the kids followed a second later. The room suddenly fell silent.

Wow. That’s really something.

What a lady! She looked so laid-back, but when she decided to get tough, she was really tough. Way to go, Minori-san! It must be those giant lungs that make your chest so big!

Such were the slightly sexual-harassment-ish thoughts of admiration running through my mind. Minori-san, for her part, was nodding in satisfaction at the students.

“That’s better,” she said. “He”—she pointed at me—“is Kanou Shinichi, the principal of this school, and I am his assistant. He’s not your only instructor—I’m going to be at this lectern, too, and I warn you not to forget it.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am,” said one of the students. Then the rest of them chorused the same thing, their heads low. You would hardly have taken them for a group that had been at each other’s throats just moments before. Minori-san had taken control of them in a way you could only do in a feudalistic society. Then again, dictatorial control was a tenuous thing. One wrong move, and you might end up like a certain northern neighbor. It was a scary thought.

“Okay, first we’re going to teach you some basic vocabulary that will aid in your comprehension of otaku culture.”

Suddenly Minori-san was starting the lesson. Wait... Basic vocabulary? Did she mean, like, moe? But heck, even the word otaku was pretty ill-defined. It seemed like a difficult subject to just jump into. Or was she talking about stuff like archetype and two-dimensional?

Minori-san clasped her hands behind her back and said, “Everyone, repeat after me.” She was standing ramrod straight. It was pretty impressive, actually.

I was slightly disturbed by the prospect of starting with rote repetition; it felt a little bit like we were flirting with brainwashing. But I guess we sort of had to take the Spartan approach—if we didn’t take a firm hand, the students (and their attendants) would be so busy arguing with each other that they would never spare us a thought.

There’s a school of thought that says you have to start with outward form, and from that perspective, beginning by cramming them full of vocabulary was certainly one way of going about things.

“All right then, lesson one,” Minori-san announced, her eyes growing wide behind her glasses. And then, with great gravitas, she intoned, “Total bottom!”

I just about fell over.

What the hell kind of words does she think we’re teaching around here?!

Children are curious creatures, and one of them immediately raised his hand and asked, “Teacher, what does ‘total bottom’ mean?”

“It means one who bottoms—totally! It indicates that you desperately wish to be made love to by the people around you. But note! This word pertains only to men, chiefly those who are pene—”

“Minori-san, stop! Hold it right there!” I broke in.

“Yes, Shinichi-kun? What is it?” She looked genuinely mystified. It was adorable! So adorable I couldn’t believe she was older than me. But never mind that!

“We’re talking to kids, here,” I said. “Let’s leave off the yaoi talk. You know, the... R-rated stuff.”

“Shinichi-kun, I thought you brought over some ero games?”

“Hey, those are for my personal—wait! I mean, don’t you think they’re a little young for this stuff?!” I was definitely starting to sweat now. I thought I’d been really sneaky bringing in the over-18 stuff, so Minori-san and Myusel wouldn’t know about it. How had she found out?!

“...Fine, then,” Minori-san said, looking distinctly disappointed. I had heard there were actually a lot of otaku in the JSDF, but this...

“All right, let’s try something else,” Minori-san said, turning to face the students again. “Cross-dresser!”

“Gaaaaah!” I thought I might claw my way right through the chalkboard. I had thought she might be—but then I’d hoped perhaps not—but it turned out she really was...!

“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.