Chapter Three: The Capital In Flames

There’s something that’s always bugged me in certain games. You know when you’re fleeing a bunch of zombies through a ruined cityscape, and you see a space you think you might just be able to squeeze through? But somehow, the game never gives you the option to even try to worm your way past the rubble or climb the metal fence or whatever. I get that they’re trying to make it more game-like by forcing you to solve puzzles or get through mazes, but the more realistic the graphics for the world and characters get, the more these “game constraints” grate.

It’s like, if I’ve got a hand grenade, shouldn’t I be able to blow through that wall? If the door is locked, why can’t I just shoot it with my Magnum? That sort of thing. To be fair, more and more games are trying to offer exactly that—the ability to destroy anything on screen or otherwise interact in realistic ways with everything you encounter—but those are usually a slightly different genre, too.

But whatever. The point is, when you run into those sorts of situations in a video game, you just have to shrug and say, “Welp, sometimes games are that way.” Then you give yourself a mental pat on the back for knowing that if you were really in that sort of situation, you would find much smarter and more efficient ways to deal with it.

Anyway.

“Eeyowowow!” I exclaimed, dancing away from the crumbling rubble.

“Shinichi-sama?” Myusel asked from behind me, concerned.

I came to a halt after a few steps and sighed. “This’ll never work.”

I was staring down a pile of debris as big as a sizable hill. It was smack in our path, no way around it. Now that’s the sort of thing you’d see in a game. And clever me, I thought, I’ll just climb over it. But of course, a pile of rubble is nothing like a proper building. It’s just that: a pile. It isn’t necessarily “put together” very well, and it doesn’t always have convenient hand- and footholds for the enterprising main character.

And even if you can’t tell just by looking, sometimes it isn’t very stable, either.

All of which is to say that the moment I put a hand on the mountain of rubble, it started rumbling and collapsing, and a box-sized piece of stone that had been balanced at the very top came tumbling straight at me. If I hadn’t dodged it... well, it’s not like I would have wound up flat as a pancake, I guess, but I wouldn’t have gotten away unscathed, either.

I knew what I would have done if this were a fighting manga. I would have just picked a nice spot and smacked it with my fist, vaporizing the rubble and opening the road. But if a former home security guard like me tried something that silly, it was the bones of my hand that would have been vaporized.

Point is, this was not a good situation. It was way too dangerous to scramble over the pile of debris—even by myself, let alone with Myusel in tow.

“Looks like we can’t go this way...” I said to Myusel, feeling oddly defeated. “And here I was hoping we could just make straight for the place.” I looked at the great, looming thing I assumed was the Dragon’s Den—was that some sort of hill behind the building?

Going straight to any place in the Third Capital was obviously a dicey proposition now, what with buildings collapsed or collapsing and pillars of fire closing off other pathways. If anything, it was almost like a dungeon. Not exactly, of course; not with the sky still open above our heads. That was part of what made it so dangerous to try to climb over that rubble. And the buildings that still stood looked so badly abused that it seemed like a good kick might bring them crashing down.

“Shinichi-sama,” Myusel said anxiously, “I don’t think we should try to force our way through here. We should look for somewhere easier...”

That seemed like the best idea. But I had to admit, I had sort of been hoping to put all that gaming experience to good use—the survival skills! The head for risk management!—and just maybe make a good impression on Myusel in the process. So much for that. And now that I thought about it, Myusel, with her military experience, was probably better equipped to deal with this situation than I was.

“Huh, oh well. Uh, let’s see...” Myusel and I looked around until we spotted a pathway with a minimum of rubble on it. “This way looks passable.”

Of course, there was always the possibility of a building coming down on our heads as we went by, but in any event this was the only place where we could drive straight ahead. “Let’s try it,” I said. “Carefully.”

“Right.”

I took a few steps forward—and then immediately stopped cold. I had the distinct feeling of someone’s hand touching mine. Not hard enough to call it a push or a pull, but noticeable. Whose hand was it? Well, in these circumstances, it could only have been one person.

“Er, uh, Myusel?”

“Oh, I—I’m sorry,” she said, pulling her hand back. “I, uh, that is, I thought holding hands would be the... the safest thing to do. I suppose...”

“U-Uh, yeah. Of course. Good idea,” I answered. She was red, and I could feel my own face flushing. We were just holding hands! It was a matter of safety! Yeah, that was it. This was definitely the plan. Or so I kept telling myself as I reached out to Myusel again.

“Well, l-let’s give it a shot...”

“Yes, sir.”

Part of me felt genuinely exasperated with myself, like, How can you do a romantic-comedy routine in the middle of an apocalypse? But hey, what else did I expect from me? I might not get out of this alive, and I wouldn’t want to have any regrets. It would just be uncool—downright pathetic, in fact—to be staring into the Great Beyond thinking, If only I’d taken Myusel’s hand!

Okay, so you could argue that what was really happening was that in moments of crisis, the ancient impulse to leave offspring asserts itself and heightens the sex drive. But it was hardly like I was going to jump her right then and there. So who could begrudge me a little hand-holding?

All that was going through my mind as Myusel and I worked our way, ever so cautiously, down the road between buildings.

That was when I exclaimed, “Hey!” There was somebody at the other end of the street. Sitting in front of a pile of rubble, no less, it looked like. At first I thought it must be a dead body, but then I was sure I saw it move.

“Shinichi-sama...”

“Yeah.”

Myusel and I worked our way toward the figure, going as fast as we could without starting any avalanches from the buildings to either side. When we got close enough, we crouched down to look, and discovered the figure was a middle-aged man. He seemed to be conscious; he raised his head unsteadily to look at us.

“Were you both too late, too? Too late to escape...?” he asked, his face a mask of terror. His slightly pointy ears and seemingly small stature led me to guess he was a dwarf. Most of my Bahairamanian acquaintances were beast people, so this was sort of novel.

Anyway, Myusel and I looked at each other. The man’s question implied that he was a Bahairamanian who hadn’t been able to escape this city in time to avoid this catastrophe. And he thought we were residents of the Third Capital like he was. That obviously wasn’t true, but at the same time, Eldant and Bahairam weren’t on the best of terms. We couldn’t exactly just admit, “Naw, we’re from the Eldant Empire.”

Before Myusel could accidentally say anything careless, I said the first thing that came into my head: “Uh, no, we were just outside the Third Capital.” I didn’t know that city’s geography, and I hadn’t witnessed the moment the catastrophe struck. It didn’t seem likely that I was going to be able to pass for someone who lived here. “We’re merchants who came here to trade with Bahairam,” I added. “But we got separated from our caravan.”

Since we knew from Myusel’s mother’s activities that merchants came and went in Bahairam all the time, this wouldn’t sound suspicious. The Eldant make of Myusel’s and my magic rings could potentially be a problem, but I thought my story would do for now.

“We wondered what in the world had happened to them and came in here to check things out.”

“Ah, so you missed each other...” The man smiled, half amused and half pitying.

“What do you mean by that?”

“The military evacuated this city along with everyone who was able to go with them. I was late, because... well, a lot of reasons.”

This was the man’s story: he lived alone, and an injured leg meant he couldn’t walk very quickly. The convoy of citizens fleeing the city had left him behind. As he shambled along, new pillars of flame had emerged, more buildings had collapsed, and eventually he had been trapped.

And then there were the dragons.

“After they showed up, a whole bunch of ’em, the army didn’t come back.”

“Did you say dragons?” I thought of the monster that had attacked us on the puppet drake. I guess we hadn’t been their only targets. Apparently, they had gone after the Bahairamanian military and even its civilians. The way the man talked about it, though, it sounded like these monsters had come completely out of the blue, like he had never seen hide nor hair of them in all his time in the Third Capital. Which would mean...

“Um, I can give you some first aid, if you want,” Myusel said, looking at the man’s foot. He was wearing sandals and didn’t appear to have any socks. She could look right at his foot. A nasty shard of rock was lodged in the man’s ankle. It wasn’t bleeding to speak of, but it looked immensely painful.

“Sure, good idea, Myusel. You mind?” I said to the man.

“It’d be a help, that...” The man looked troubled, but nonetheless, Myusel crouched down beside him.

She got a grip on the shard of rock. “This will hurt for a moment. Bear with it, okay?” Then she braced the man’s foot with her other hand and started to chant a spell. The incantation was surprisingly lengthy, nothing like the Tifu Murottsu spell I was so used to.

“Teiru Guniiraa,” she intoned. A pale light began to shine where her hand was touching the man’s ankle. “Here I go.” And then she pulled the shard of rock from his foot.

The man braced himself against the inevitable pain, but it must not have hurt as badly as he expected, because he looked almost surprised. “My... Is that magic?” he murmured. Even with the rock removed, the wound wasn’t bleeding. In fact, it was closing up, a membrane appearing over it.

“Yes, sir. It’s the simplest of healing spells,” Myusel said, sounding embarrassed. Come to think of it, she had told me that she’d learned just two spells during her time in the army. One was the familiar Tifu Murottsu. I guess the other was Teiru Guniiraa.

It would make sense: Tifu Murottsu could serve for both offense and defense, while Teiru Guniiraa would allow soldiers to heal wounded companions. Good things to know in the military, and the absolute minimum to enable each person to look out for themselves.

“I assume it doesn’t hurt too much now,” Myusel said. “But I have to warn you, this spell is intended to anesthetize pain and stanch bleeding, not heal injuries. The wound may look like it’s closed, but it’s only superficial. The spell can’t knit bones or cure internal injuries. You’ll still need to be very careful.”

“Thank you. No, this is plenty. Say, young lady, you wouldn’t happen to be an elf?”

“Sir—?”

“Nothing. I just never expected an airhead—erm! Pardon me. I mean an elf, to use healing magic on a dwarf like me.” The man smiled sadly.

“Airhead.” I’d heard that a few times before—it was a favorite insult when dwarves were describing elves. I didn’t think elf brains were actually any lighter than anyone else’s; instead, the taunt seemed to derive from an association with elves’ proficiency with wind magic, or perhaps the way they looked so light moving through the air. Incidentally, when elves wanted to insult dwarves, they liked to call them “stubborn as stone” or simply “moles.”

“It’s true, sir. I’m a half-elf.” Myusel looked at the ground.

My understanding was that the elves didn’t recognize half-bloods as among their own. For better or for worse, they took great pride in their bloodlines. But unfortunately, such pride all too easily led to discrimination against and even persecution of half-elves. Myusel’s identity wasn’t an easy thing for her to admit—she had found it hard even to tell me at first.

“Ah, ah. I can see I oughtn’t to have asked. I apologize.” The dwarf man got slowly to his feet. Myusel’s magic had clearly done him some good, because a few exploratory steps showed he wasn’t in any particular pain now. “Incredible. At least I can walk now,” he said. But then he stopped. “Hold on. If you’re here, does that mean it’s possible to walk out of here?”

“Uh... Possible might be a strong word,” I said evasively. I could hardly explain we’d come here from Eldant on a puppet drake at the request of a Bahairamanian military officer, then been attacked by a wild dragon and used magic to save ourselves. It would take forever and it would probably lead to all sorts of trouble. “With things collapsing left and right, I can’t be sure the way we took to get here is still open.”

“That’s good enough. Rubble we can move with magic—with a Clay Doll, if we need to. Now that I don’t hurt anymore, I can use my magic,” the man grinned.

Dwarves were especially accomplished with magic involving metal and earth. I had even seen them produce three-meter-tall golems with nothing but some dirt. If anyone would be able to deal with a little rubble, it would be a dwarf. I wasn’t so sure about the pillars of fire, though.

“Doesn’t matter,” the dwarf said. “I just want to get as far away from there as possible.” He cast a baleful glance towards the hill—the hill at the center of the Third Capital. In the direction of what I assumed was the Dragon’s Den.

“Those dragons must’ve come from whatever it is the army’s got over there,” the dwarf went on. “Rumor is they breed dragons in that building. But it’s too secret or something, and they don’t let us civilians anywhere near it. Which makes a person think...” It almost sounded like he was complaining—about the military, and especially about the unit that oversaw the Dragon’s Den. Amatena had mentioned they were a special division, and that they wielded a lot of influence here in the Capital.

This man told us that it was a unit of the regular military that had evacuated the populace earlier, while the special group assigned to the Dragon’s Den had been nowhere to be seen even after the trouble started.

“Murdered by their own dragons, every one, I have no doubt,” the man spat.

“Hmmm...”

In other words, this man’s take was this: the special military unit was breeding dragons in the Dragon’s Den, but there was some sort of accident or mistake and the dragons got loose and went wild, leading to the way things were right now. I guess the assumption would be that the pillars of fire were caused by dragons underground... or something. My impression was that this explanation didn’t quite fit the facts. The idea of underground dragons felt especially weird. But anyway...

“The Dragon’s Den is actually where we’re heading,” I said.

“Come again?”

“Our friends are supposed to be there.”

When I said friends, I meant Myusel’s mom, but if Minori-san and the others had survived, I assumed they would have headed for the Dragon’s Den. So it worked both ways. Not that it mattered to the dwarf.

“Then your friends are dead!” he cried. “Escape with me, kids! I won’t think any less of you! Just show me the way out of here!”

“No, we—” I looked at Myusel. She was biting her lip and staring at the ground as if she was trying very hard to fight something. Maybe she was thinking of her mother. I could hardly say, You’re right, sounds dangerous! Let’s get out of here! Instead I said, “I’m sorry. We just have to get to that building and try to help them.”

“Ahh, cripes... But I understand.” The man braced himself against a wall and hefted himself to his feet. The leg Myusel had treated he put gingerly on the ground, then when he was satisfied it could bear his weight, he worked his way stumblingly in the direction we had come. Then suddenly he stopped and looked back at us over his shoulder. “Thanks for the help. I apologize, but I can’t be going with you.”

“Uh, sure...” I stole a glance at Myusel, then nodded at the man. “Be careful. Lots of stuff around here that could fall down any time.”

“Yeah, I’ll be careful. And you do the same.” And with that, the man shuffled off down the road and was gone.

“Uh, um, Shinichi-sama...”

Before Myusel could finish whatever she was about to say, I broke in: “C’mon, we’d better get going, too. To the Dragon’s Den.” I went on: “Look, there’s no guarantees we could get out of the Third Capital now even if we tried, and besides, your mom said I would be able to do something about this. We have to go.”

Myusel looked at me, her eyes full. Yipes. S-So cute... I’d seen her on the verge of tears before, but it didn’t stop me from admiring anew how cute she was with those brimming eyes.

And so, burning with moe, I took Myusel’s hand.

“Oh...” she said.

“Let’s go. All right?” I said, and then I tugged on her hand, leading her away.

When we first saw the crowd of figures, we’d assumed they were citizens of the Third Capital, or maybe soldiers. It was an obvious assumption, right? When there’s a major disaster, people try to evacuate or otherwise flee, but some of the populace might not make it out, or certain public servants might see fit to remain at their posts. Perfectly normal.

But we learned shortly that this was nothing so simple.

“Why are they all naked?!”

We discovered that not one of the figures was wearing a scrap of clothing. There were close to fifty of them by my count. Werewolves and weretigers, along with lizardmen, elves, and dwarves. And all of them young women. But the most disquieting thing was that none of them showed any sign of embarrassment, but only gazed blankly at us.

Then I realized: there were no humans here. I glanced around the crowd again, and I was right: everyone present was what they called demi-humans in Eldant. Allegedly, all peoples were considered equal under the father-ruler here in Bahairam—in other words, it was the exact opposite of the Kingdom of Zwelberich, whose prince had once proposed marriage to Petralka—so it wasn’t that surprising to see a large number of demi-humans. But was this a coincidence? Or something more nefarious?

“The heck is this?” Hikaru-kun said with a frown. “They’re all naked. Don’t try to tell me they were all caught taking a bath right when the catastrophe hit.”

“I assume they’d at least cover themselves, then. Or maybe Bahairamanians aren’t worried about being seen without clothes?”

“Where in the world would you get that idea?” Amatena said with a touch of irritation. “I know our traditional clothing shows a good deal of skin, but no one in their right mind in Bahairam would go traipsing through the streets naked!” She did shoot a glance at Elvia, who routinely dressed in things that exposed her midriff.

Okay, fine. But then who were these people?

“There are elves and dwarves in this crowd, it looks like. So I don’t think this has to do with ‘that time’...” I said. Beast people, especially werewolves and weretigers, had a time each month when they essentially went into heat, a phenomenon that had previously led Elvia to attack Shinichi-kun. But I had never heard of elves, dwarves, or even lizardmen experiencing anything like that. Then again, we were all women here—except Hikaru-kun, and he looked like a woman—so maybe these demi-humans had no impulse to attack us, even if they were in heat. The chances of every single one of them being a lesbian seemed pretty small.

“Look at ’em,” Elvia said uneasily. “Those eyes... They look so empty.”

She was right: everyone we could see looked expressionless, their eyes dim. They didn’t appear to be suppressing their expressions, the way Amatena and Clara sometimes did. It was like their emotions were simply missing. I’d seen Elvia in the grip of her “time” firsthand, and the insane glint in her eyes was as far from the look on these people’s faces as you could get.

These completely naked people—okay, that’s a mouthful; let’s just call them “the nekkids”—surrounded us and gradually began to close in.

“Minori-san...” Hikaru-kun said nervously, but I had already noticed. “I know,” I said. Specifically, I had noticed that things were not looking good for us. The nekkids didn’t seem hostile, let alone like they wanted to kill us, but I was pretty sure they weren’t coming up to shake our hands in friendship, either. It made me think of one of those zombie movies where the monsters were closing in. The nekkids weren’t rotting on their feet, to be fair, but the situation seemed similar. In any event, it wasn’t very comfortable. I’m not used to thinking about average people as my opponents in a fight. Frankly, it’s easier when they come at you with obvious intent.

Nonetheless, I shifted my grip on my Type-89. I’d swapped in a new thirty-round clip after using up some of my bullets during our air battle, but even so, I wasn’t confident I could handle a crowd this big. For that matter, I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to shoot at unarmed, naked opponents. I didn’t even know if shooting these people would actually stop them.

“Uh, Elvia?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“When I give the signal, you grab Hikaru-kun.”

“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?” Hikaru-kun objected. But I didn’t have time for a Q and A. The nekkids were almost on us.

“Make sure you close your eyes, too,” I added. “Amatena, Clara, same goes for you. I’m going to use something that should blind and deafen them. Hopefully that will stop them long enough for us to get away.”

“Understood,” Amatena said. I was glad she was quick on the uptake. Elvia and Clara seemed to see what I was getting at, too. Elvia picked up Hikaru-kun in her arms and nodded to me, and then I slung the flashbang grenade whose pin I had already pulled into the crowd.

“Three, two, one—now!” I shouted, and squeezed my eyes shut. The next instant, there was a huge light and a tremendous noise from the grenade. I immediately opened my eyes again, then started running with my Type-89 still in hand.

I had to shove my way past several of the nekkids, pushing or even kicking them down to break through the encirclement. That was my plan, anyway. I was prepared to shoot some people in the hands or legs if necessary.

But then I felt someone grab my hand from one side. “Wha?!” I exclaimed, shocked. I looked over to see one of the nekkids; she looked like a weretiger.

The flashbang didn’t do anything?!

I was probably more startled by this than I should have been, but I quickly understood. The naked tiger girl I was looking at had her eyes closed. In fact, so did the others. I wasn’t sure if it was simply luck that she had managed to take my hand, or if she had sensed where I was.

The weretiger opened her eyes. They still showed no hint of emotion, but were astonishingly clear. Almost like they were made of glass, like something you might find in a doll.

“Minori-san!” I turned toward Hikaru-kun’s panicked shout to find other members of the nekkids attacking him, Elvia, Amatena, and Clara.

“Sh—!” I slammed the stock of my weapon into my opponent’s chest. Her grip loosened, and I whipped my hand in a Z shape to escape her grasp. This was the basic way of escaping someone else’s grab, working against their joints to free yourself. It was great, as long as they didn’t know kenpo or something themselves.

Then I made to go help Elvia—but an instant later, I found two of the nekkids dive-bombing me from the side.

It was the weretiger, along with another young woman who looked like a werewolf. I used my Type-89 like a club, beating them back. First I jabbed the wolf girl to my left with the muzzle of the gun, then slammed the stock into the weretiger.

Or at least, that was my plan.

“Erk?”

The weretiger dropped to the ground, dodging my blow in a spectacular display of agility. No sooner had I registered her maneuver than, instead of standing up, she planted her hand on the ground and spun, trying to sweep my feet out from under me. I just managed to jump over her leg, but while I was still in the air, the wolf girl got her balance back and grabbed me. I was dragged to the ground.

“Hrgh!”

The wolf girl shimmied around my arm in an instant, climbing onto my back. I could do nothing to resist. I don’t want to brag, but I consider myself a fairly accomplished martial artist. My father taught me when I was young, and then I went through the JSDF’s practical combat training, so I was confident I couldn’t be taken by some rando off the street. I had even managed to go more or less toe to toe with Amatena once. This despite the fact that, as a werewolf, her physical capabilities were vastly superior to mine. And yet this naked werewolf and tiger girl had me completely helpless. Granted it had been two on one, but I still would have expected to put up more of a fight.

I see. They’re...

Not thinking anything. No wonder they weren’t embarrassed about being naked. They might not quite be in mushin, the state of “no mind” that martial artists sought to achieve, and this wasn’t some Buddhist accomplishment of non-self. But it was similar. These people here were having no extraneous thoughts. Maybe they didn’t even have a sense of who they were. So all their movements were completely efficient, totally spontaneous, quick and close—they were almost like machines. That was why I had so much trouble reading them. It was like fighting robots; they hardly even seemed to breathe.

They sure knew how to do a joint lock, though. What the hell was going on? It was just conceivable there was a counter to the situation I was in, but...

“Minori!” Amatena and Clara saw I was in dire straits and came rushing over, but they were each promptly grabbed by a nekkid and shortly found themselves on the ground, just like me. Then it was Elvia and Hikaru-kun’s turn to be attacked. Nekkids grabbed Elvia’s arms and legs, holding her fast.

“Hikaru-sama!” She physically flung him away. Maybe she realized she couldn’t escape, and was hoping that at least he could. With a werewolf’s physical strength behind the throw, Hikaru-kun found himself lofted easily through the air, but then...

“Elvia!” To my surprise, he spun in midair. He landed neatly on the ground, squaring off with the nekkids who moved to attack him. They grabbed him, but Hikaru-kun shoved them bodily away, fighting back toward Elvia.

“Hikaru-sama...?!” Elvia said, shocked. She was no more surprised than I was. Hikaru-kun didn’t have any martial arts moves or fancy tricks, but he pressed on with a speed and strength belying his delicate appearance, carving a swath through the nekkids to get to Elvia. I could only marvel and wonder where he found that sort of power in that petite frame of his.

But of course, his strength wasn’t limitless. Just like with Amatena and Clara, the nekkids simply piled after him, one after another, until ultimately Hikaru-kun was dragged down just like the rest of us, his arm twisted behind him.

That was it. They had us all.

“Hrk...” I bit my lip. We might have been able to hold our own against one or two of these people, but with something like fifty of them all ranged against us, escape was going to be all but impossible. And since they had all four of my companions essentially hostage, I couldn’t do anything reckless. I didn’t know if the nekkids really understood what a hostage was—but since I hardly knew what they were thinking at all, it was impossible to know what they might do. You couldn’t be too careful against opponents like that.

If nothing else, I was being reminded of one very important lesson: battles can be decided by sheer numbers.

Still, I couldn’t help noticing something. Other than the ones who were specifically holding us down, twisting arms or whatever else, the nekkids kept their distance, forming a large circle from which they gazed down at us. There was no sign of gloating triumph in their expressions, but neither was there contempt for their defeated foes. The only thing I could see in their eyes was us, reflected in their glassy expressions. What was going to happen to us? What were they going to do to us?

“Are you going to kill us?” I asked experimentally. I was hoping for a negative answer, naturally, but all I got was silence. Not one of the nekkids said anything about what they would or wouldn’t do.

The closer we got to the Dragon’s Den, the more like a maze the town became. Pillars of flame sprouted everywhere, heating up the surrounding areas. We obviously steered clear of the pillars themselves, but the updrafts they created caused roaring winds, and some of the rubble had begun to warp and bend in the heat. All of which meant there were precious few places we could safely press ahead. I got the distinct impression that even just walking around town was inherently dangerous.

To top it all off, there were more pillars of flame surrounding the Dragon’s Den than anywhere else. In some places, they appeared spaced at regular intervals, like a wall. In others, you could get within three hundred meters of the Den before being forced to take a major detour. I was starting to think that that dwarf had been right: whatever was causing these things seemed to be in that building. Although I sort of doubted there was a dragon buried underneath each pillar.

I had a striking thought: was it possible there was an oilfield under our feet? Come to think of it, the whole reason the Japanese government had wanted to invade this other world had been the possibility of procuring heretofore untouched subterranean resources, mineral deposits, that sort of thing. At least during the time I had spent in Eldant, I hadn’t seen anyone using coal or oil, and of course there was no electricity. So I guess it was still possible that there were hundreds or thousands of years’ accumulation of fossil fuels still resting just beneath the surface of this world. Maybe enough to completely change Earth’s energy situation. Of course that would get the government’s attention.

Whether or not you could prove that stuff was there was another matter.

“How about we take a break?” I said to Myusel, looking up at the sky. The pillars of flame made everything warm—downright hot, in fact, so that just walking along was enough to work up a sweat. And even though the sun had gone down, the flames still made it seem bright as noon. At least there was light as we tried to scramble over the piles of rubble.

“In fact, I think some sleep would be a good plan,” I said, wiping away some sweat with my sleeve. “I’m worried about your mother, but if we exhaust ourselves getting to her, we won’t be able to do anything when we reach her.”

“That’s true. You’re right,” Myusel agreed. So we found a building that looked a little less damaged than the others and took refuge inside. We didn’t have to get out of “the elements” as such, but we needed something that would help block the heat of the flames. It also might keep us safe from dragon attacks. I hadn’t seen the creatures overhead since they had hit our puppet drake, but you could never be too careful.

Myusel and I sat down beside each other, leaning against a wall. It was a relief just to get into the shade, away from the crackling heat of the flames, even if it was probably still at least forty degrees. Or maybe it was the oncoming night that made things feel cooler. I didn’t really know.

I let out a long sigh.

“Shinichi-sama...” Myusel said, and when I looked over she offered me a canteen.

“Oh, thanks...”

Between being seated in the saddles and definitely not expecting to be attacked in midair, neither Myusel nor I had been carrying much on us. We each had one small canteen of water, but we had already drunk mine dry earlier in the day. If we couldn’t find a source of drinking water, things might turn ugly.

I was just putting Myusel’s canteen to my lips when it struck me: was this, you know... an indirect kiss? For that matter, Myusel had been drinking from my canteen all day. I hadn’t thought too much about it, because it was my canteen and I was just about overwhelmed with the heat anyway, but she had already...

“Shinichi-sama?” Myusel was looking at me curiously. Nothing about this seemed to bother her.

“Oh, uh, yeah, nothing,” I said, then awkwardly took a sip from the canteen.

The bittersweetness! Is this the flavor of an indirect kiss? ...was obviously not my reaction, because it tasted just like any other water. But now that I’d thought about it, I couldn’t stop.

“S-So it sucks that most of our baggage was on the puppet drake, huh?” I said quickly, trying to distract myself and keep my mind from getting even deeper into the gutter. “I hope Minori-san and the others are safe.”

Even with as fast as we’d left the house, we had still managed to amass a pretty good quantity of weapons, water, and provisions. But there was no telling what had survived that initial attack.

“Yes, I’m worried about them...” Myusel said, casting her eyes down.

D’oh! I realized my mistake. Myusel continually seemed to feel both grateful and apologetic that all of us were going to Bahairam specifically to help her mother. I had tried to tell her that it was really okay, but she wasn’t the sort of person to just go “Oh! Well, all right then!”

“Hey, they’re a tough bunch! I bet they’re fine! I’m probably the weakest link around here!” I was trying to make Myusel feel better, but I mostly succeeded in making myself feel worse. Minori-san, Amatena, and Clara were all basically active-duty military, and even Myusel had been in the army once. Elvia was way stronger than me. As for Hikaru-san, it was easy to underestimate him because he looked so slim, but he did a lot of physical exercise to stay in that sort of shape. He might not be very muscular, but I’ll bet he had plenty of stamina. Heck, I’d seen the way he had pulled Elvia back up onto our puppet drake. That must have taken some real strength. Where’d he keep all the muscles on those beanpole arms?

Pathetic. That was the only word for how I felt at that moment.

It wasn’t like I doubted Falmelle-san’s gift of prophecy, but I couldn’t imagine what good me showing up at the Dragon’s Den was going to do.

“Shinichi-sama...” Myusel leaned against my shoulder.

Wait... She what? She did?!

We were suddenly so close! I mean, our degree of contact just shot up! Was she trying to say Hold me, embrace me?! Was this some subtle subliminal signal?! Myusel’s hair brushing my cheek was—ahhh it tickled and smelled good, and I—I—I was—!

“Myusel...!” I squeaked. But then I looked over at her. She must have been past her limit, because there she was, leaning against me, breathing softly—asleep. Maybe she hadn’t leaned into me on purpose. Maybe she just slid as she pretty much fell unconscious.

“Oh... Yeah.” I let out a sigh as I gently took Myusel’s shoulders and guided her slowly to the ground. I arranged her own pack under her head as a pillow, and then I let go of her. She must have been really wiped; she didn’t seem to even notice me moving her.

I lay down next to her, putting my jacket over some random debris for a pillow. Okay, so it was a little lumpy, but it was better than nothing.

Now that I thought about it, this was the first time I’d ever slept alone with Myusel.

“.........Yoiks.”

The idea once again threatened to send my mind to some pretty unseemly places.

“I want your child, Shinichi-sama... Your baby...”

Oh, maaaaaan......

“Grr... No! Stop!” I grabbed my right hand with my left before it could creep down to something way less chaste than Myusel’s shoulder, struggling to ride out the bout of chuuni-ism.

To be fair, I couldn’t imagine Myusel saying anything quite that direct. I wasn’t sure she was capable of it. But one day—especially with Myusel and Hikaru-san trying to hurry things along—I was going to have to choose someone, or... whatever. Somehow, I was going to have to sort all this out. And when I thought about it calmly, I knew that the possibility that the person I would choose would be Myusel was very, very high.

But when I let myself think about The Future, I found there were a lot of questions. Like, if Myusel and I got married, where would we live? In this world, or Japan? Myusel had asked me once, long ago, to take her with me if I ever went home to Japan. She’d actually been there once now. Could we both be happy over there?

Obviously, Myusel didn’t have a family register or even a residence certificate, so getting married might actually prove kind of tricky. Then again, it would be perfectly feasible to have a de facto marriage, and just not bother with the bureaucratic red tape...

“I want your child, Shinichi-sama... Your baby...”

................

Nope. Uh-uh. Done with that. No more flashbacks allowed.

With this quip at my instinctive desire to relive the scene, I mostly managed to regain my rationality. I was already in the middle of a crisis. The last thing I needed to do was waste all my energy on pointless fantasies.

But then again...

“If we did have a kid, I wonder if it could get Japanese citizenship.”

For better or for worse, under Japanese law, there were a variety of social and civil services that would be impossible to access without nationality, and that would make life way harder for the little tyke. At the same time, Japan hadn’t even officially acknowledged the existence of this other world, so we would have to come up with some story about where Myusel was from.

But if we had gotten to that point, it would probably mean I was no longer General Manager of Amutech. And if that was the case, the Japanese government wouldn’t have any motivation to make any special exceptions to help us out. Or, who knew? Maybe someday the government would go public with this world and allow people here to move or naturalize. If they didn’t, well, Myusel and I might manage somehow, but any kid of ours would have a real rough time of it.

“Argh...” I sighed again. I seemed to remember hearing once that love was when two people were happy together; marriage was when everyone else acknowledged it. For me and Myusel, that “everyone else” was basically an international incident waiting to happen. It all felt like too much for me to deal with by myself. Seriously, I had no idea what I was going to do.

I looked at Myusel, whose sleeping face looked like she didn’t have a care in the world. And then, hoping to get some rest myself, I closed my eyes.

“Shinichi.”

I opened my eyes to find myself confronted with pale skin. “Huh...?” The first thing I saw was an abdomen, almost perfectly smooth, only disturbed by a cute little belly button. I let my eyes wander upward, to discover, uh, well, let’s call it a pretty chest, with two slight swells—only slight, even with arms crossed to emphasize them. Above that was a slim neck and a heart-shaped face, as sweet as all the rest.

“P—Petralka?!”

“Mm,” the Eldant empress said, nodding. As you might have guessed by now from my description of her bellybutton and whatever else, Petralka was naked as the day she was born, except, for some reason, for her tiara. She stood in front of me, proud and... well, tall would be a misnomer, but...

As for me, if you were wondering, I was lying flat on my back. Plus I found it kind of hard to move my arms and legs—was I tied up or something? What in the world was going on here?

“H-Hey, what is this? Petralka, what—”

“Listen to us, Shinichi,” she said portentously. “We learned this from one of your ‘zines.’” And then she showed me a doujinshi (where had she even been keeping it?)—the kind you get by the wall of the East Building on the last day of Comiket. An especially nasty, filthy one at that.

“One of ‘my zines’? Hold on...” I’d never shown Petralka or the others the smuttiest parts of my collection... had I?! Where the heck had she gotten it from?!

“We believe the phrase ‘fait accompli’ has been thrown around a good deal lately.”

“Fait accomp— Hold on, you can’t mean...?!”

“We are now going to create a fait accompli of our own.”

“You make it sound like you’re going to make dinner or something!”

“Three-minute fait accompli! Just add water!”

“Oh, man! It sounds so sad when you say it that way!”

“Or four or five minutes, who cares?! Help us prepare the fait accompli!”

And then Petralka jumped on top of me.

Whoooooaaa! That’s—I mean, she’s jumping me figuratively and literally!

Some people say that if a guy doesn’t want to do it, he can’t actually get “jumped.” In fact, apparently Japanese law doesn’t even account for rape committed by women. But, listen, if you’re a guy and a beautiful, naked woman jumps on top of you, let’s just say your body reacts on its own. Whether you “want” to do it or not doesn’t really factor into it.

I know I tend to focus on how young and underdeveloped Petralka looks, but it’s not like there’s nothing there, and that oh-so-smooth stomach ran up to a cozy-looking chest, and on that chest there were two pink—aaaghhhh! What am I even doing, wasting time on narrative description at a moment like this?! Anyway, just stay calm—stay calm, my Dohatsuten! (What does that even mean?!)

“Making your fait accompli, step one,” Petralka said, and then she pressed her lips against mine.

Yikes, yikes, yikes!!!

Her tongue, soft and wet, traced its way along my lips, felt its way across— gah! When did Petralka get this... skilled?! Was she skilled? Was she secretly one of those people who could twist a cherry stem into a knot with her tongue?!

“We shouldn’t! We can’t! I’m telling you!” I practically shouted, notwithstanding the way my pulse raced to feel her skin against mine. “We can’t, Petralka! We can’t do this!”

And to my surprise, Petralka simply leaned away. She was still sitting on top of me, but now she was looking me squarely in the eyes. Her own large, round eyes were suddenly damp.

“Huh?”

“Are we so unpleasant to you, Shinichi?” she asked. Suddenly she was crying. I wasn’t sure whether to think of her as erotic or adorable or tsundere as hell, or—okay, not the time.

“Even at this moment, like this, can you not love us?”

“Whoa, hang on...”

I definitely hadn’t expected her to burst into tears, and I had never imagined she would be quite so direct about her feelings. But let’s be fair: she might have been an empress, but she was also a girl, a fact I knew very well. So I guess saying I had “never imagined” this might happen was really just an excuse. But it wasn’t like I was going to suddenly say, “Oh! I didn’t realize!” The best I could manage was total bewilderment...

“Petralka...”

“We... We truly—” She covered her face with her hands.

I could hardly look at her. “I’m sorry, Petralka. I...” But then I realized I wasn’t sure what to say. I felt sad enough that I could have started crying myself.

Then, suddenly, a face popped up from behind Petralka. “Shinichi-sama?”

“Huh? Elvia?”

“I wanna make a fait accompli, too!”

She was just as naked as Petralka, practically looking like there could be a “bo-yoiiing!” sound effect hanging by her chest. Her tail was wagging furiously behind her.

“Hang on a second. Elvia, what are you doing here?”

“Oh, she isn’t the only one.”

“Oh, no, she isn’t.”

I found Amatena and Clara approaching from either side.

Seriously, hold on a second. What were they doing here? And why was every single one of them naked?!

So they were the ones holding me down! Elvia had my feet, Amatena was holding my right hand and Clara my left—and Petralka was still on top of me. No wonder I couldn’t move! Wait... what was even happening?! Was this the curse of the harem?! Was this what I got for taking the harem route in too many gal games?! (Transmission scrambled) Or was this some side effect from reading too many light novels about protags with way too many potential girlfriends? Too much late-night anime? Like, the heroine is a red-haired fire user and within ten minutes of meeting her he’s somehow stumbled into seeing her changing? Wait, but my light-novelist dad told me that was just a way of getting information across, or seeking dramatic efficiency or something, that it just kind of turns out that way—wait, is that even relevant?! (Transmission even more scrambled)

I became increasingly aware of the girls’ skin, their warmth, each distinct and yet all running together. I, uh, probably don’t need to say what was happening between my legs.

“Y’ mean you don’t want a girl in heat?”

“Are you saying you don’t want a bush-tailed soldier?”

“Do you not want a weretiger soldier?”

Uh, those weren’t questions I could answer easily. And, uh, why were Amatena and Clara here, anyway? Sure, Clara had kissed me on the cheek once, and Amatena, I mean, I thought we were friends, but still...

“We will now commence the creation of a fait accompli,” Amatena said grimly, like she was announcing the beginning of a surgical procedure or something. Clara, Elvia, and Petralka all nodded. And then...

When I opened my eyes, I found myself staring at the ceiling of a ruined building. “Yes! It was a dream, of course it was! I knew that!” I exclaimed, a little desperately. This wasn’t the first time I’d had a dream quite like that, and I was starting to wonder if it said something about some very deep-seated worries. Then again, maybe it was nothing any healthy guy in his teens wouldn’t have felt if he was cornered by a bunch of cute girls all saying they liked him.

“Are you really that eager to see a naked girl, Kanou Shinichi?!” I demanded of myself, trying to sound extra stern, but... yeah! Yeah, I wanted to see a naked girl. That’s the sort of thing an energetic teenage guy is interested in, right? You know, the smooth, pale skin, the little bump of her belly button. That’s sexy enough, but when you add the softness...

That’s when it struck me. I was supposed to have woken up from my dream already, right? I was sure I had. So what was I doing looking at a girl’s belly button, her stomach, the chest above it and the (omitted) below it?

I sort of choked and sat up, but that just brought my face that much closer to whoever it was standing and looking down at me. Seriously, who was this person?! The sun was at their back and I couldn’t make out their face.

“Huh? Wha? Wh-What’s going on here? Is it all happening again? Am I stuck in some sort of loop?!” It was an overwhelming situation, and it was starting to break me. In fact... The girl looking into my face—was she licking her lips? Like, as if she was saying, That was tasty?

No way... It couldn’t be. Did she do something to me while I was asleep?! Was that why Petralka’s kisses seemed so real in my dream?!

That was when Myusel sat up beside me, rubbing her eyes. “Shinichi-sama...?” She looked at me, blinking... And then she froze with an expression of shock. Well, naturally. We try to catch some shut-eye in an earthquake-shattered building and wake up to find a naked girl standing and watching us?

“Shinichi-sama...!” Myusel said again. She wasn’t just looking at the girl standing right in front of me. She was looking past her. Which had to mean...

I deliberately forced myself to look away from the pale, naked body of the girl, following where Myusel was looking instead. And that’s when I discovered several other figures in our building as well. And all of them... naked.

“B-But why?! And who?!” Until this moment, the only other person we’d seen anywhere had been that injured dwarf. So where the heck had all these people come from? And why were they all naked?!

When I looked again, I realized they were also all girls. Three of them appeared to be werewolves, one was a dwarf. The dwarf was the one looking down at me.

The other naked girls—the werewolves—moved quickly to surround me and Myusel.

“Er, uh, can’t we talk?” I said.

The werewolf girls silently reached out and grabbed Myusel’s and my hands with something like disinterest. They didn’t level weapons at us, didn’t shout. But it was still pretty clear we were coming with them. And that was intimidating. I had no idea what they were going to do with us.

“Shinichi-sama!” Myusel cried, her face stiff, and then she began to intone Tifu Murottsu. But as soon as she did, one of the werewolf girls punched her in the stomach, landing a blow to her solar plexus with terrifying precision. “Hrgh!” Myusel gasped and doubled over in mid-chant.

“Myusel?!”

Shit! I didn’t know who or what these people were, but they understood magic. And they knew how to deal with people trying to use it. Attacking someone trying to prepare a spell was the single most basic countermeasure. As in fiction, so here in reality.

“Myusel, are you okay?!” I rushed over to her. She was still gasping; that must have been a serious punch. I held her in my arms and turned once more to the naked girls. They made no move to attack me—maybe they thought I couldn’t use magic. In fact, they hadn’t even done anything when I had brushed their hands away to go over to Myusel.

Were they... not enemies? Or...

I glanced down at my feet. I hated to leave behind the belongings we had used for pillows, but there was no time to grab anything.

“Grr—!” Still carrying Myusel in my arms, I turned away from the mysterious girls and started running. I didn’t expect to get far, but I kept telling myself I just had to try.

I sat in the mansion’s living room and sighed. I’d come from Japan to bring Shinichi-kun and the others up to date on the outlook and intended future direction of the Japanese government’s policy, but seeing as they were out, I had nothing to do. Deliver only the message—to the extent possible, do nothing else had been my strict instructions from above. And so all I could do was sit and wait for them to get back.

“Tea, sir?” said Cerise, a member of the lizardman family left to watch the house, as she set a cup of tea in front of me. She looked at first glance like nothing more than a bipedal lizard, but I was given to understand that she came from a highly placed family in her own society, and there was an unmistakable air of refinement about her.

“Ah, thank you kindly,” I said, making sure I smiled. She offered tea to Captain Satou, sitting beside me, as well, then bowed and left the room. I could hear shouting from her children, who were waiting in the hall, and then all of their voices growing distant as they walked away.

“Lively bunch,” Captain Satou said with a half-smile. “My older brother and his wife had a place like that, lots of kids.”

“Indeed...” I nodded noncommittally.

Eldant garrison duty was as secret as assignments got, so the JSDF tried to pick soldiers with a minimum of family relations, as the enlistees would be declared officially dead. Captain Satou was single himself. He did not personally know what it was like to be a parent to a house full of children. He had come voluntarily to his current position, but at times I glimpsed in him a real interest in these domestic moments.

I didn’t fault him for it. I myself was single, no wife or children. “Captain Satou,” I said, taking a sheaf of papers out of my bag. I don’t know why I decided to do this at this exact moment. Maybe because I had always intended to show him these materials at some point, and we happened to have nothing to do right now. Yet it would be difficult to say that was my whole reason.

“May I ask what you think of this?” I pointedly took off my magic interpreter ring, making sure he saw me do so. He grasped my intention immediately, removing his own ring as he reached out for the papers. “May I, sir?”

“Please.”

“Thank you.” He scanned the papers I handed him intently. Slowly his square face adapted an expression of shock. “Sir, what... what exactly are you getting at with this?”

Despite the question, I assumed he understood perfectly well. It was simply hard to believe—so hard he didn’t want to believe it. He hoped his understanding was mistaken, and wanted me to reassure him. But I could do no such thing.

“These materials,” I said, “appear to indicate that this ‘other world” may not be so ‘other’ after all. And that undue involvement with it could, at the worst, have immensely destructive consequences.”

Captain Satou’s face darkened. But he said nothing more, just sipped at Cerise’s tea.

I, Kanou Shinichi, am a proud former home security guard.

What I’m really saying is that I didn’t get out and exercise much, so (forgive me if this seems obvious) I had something less than average strength and endurance. And it wasn’t like I was an anime MC who would just suddenly discover he secretly had the strength of ten men when a crisis loomed.

“Huff... Huff... ... Puff...”

“Shinichi-sama...” Myusel, who was still in my arms, sounded concerned, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to answer. I was too busy catching my breath. Myusel was hardly big or heavy, but she was still a good forty—or was that fifty?—kilos. Having to carry her while running as fast as I could from our pursuers meant I was basically carrying twice my normal body weight and trying to go twice my normal speed. My heart and lungs were working a lot harder than normal. You know how in anime they’ll shout stuff like “******* rate just passed two hundred percent!”? I always wanted to shout back, “Two hundred percent?! What the heck does that even mean?!” But, well, now I sort of felt like I knew.

The naked girls were still chasing us. I didn’t have time to look back and check, but every once in a while I would see a flash of pale skin out of the corner of my eye. Which also made it obvious just how close they were to catching us.

This was bad. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know who or what those naked girls were. Bahairamanian citizens would make the most sense, but then why were they naked? And why wouldn’t they say anything to us?

So... Should we stand and fight? I had some compunctions about fighting naked girls—unarmed naked girls at that—but they had attacked Myusel, and there was no telling what they would do to us if they caught us, so maybe now wasn’t the time to be getting all gentlemanly. I knew a little magic myself, and if I could avoid getting hit while I chanted like they had done to Myusel... well, maybe I could swing something?

It was a nice thought. It was also the moment a massive shadow swept overhead.

“Dragons!” Myusel groaned.

She was right—dragons, in the flesh. Probably the same ones that had attacked our puppet drake. Three of them, swooping overhead. Just when I thought they might leave us alone, they all pulled one-eighties, turning circles tighter than a fighter jet’s, and came back toward us. Wait—but that meant...

The biggest one landed on the building nearby. It appeared to settle almost as gently as a feather, but the structure collapsed from its sheer weight. And then I noticed two more buildings go down, one to either side. In other words, three dragons were waiting for us up ahead. And the girls were coming up behind.

“We... We’re surrounded!” I wailed, and came to a stop.

Was this just coincidence? No, it couldn’t be. The girls and the dragons had worked together to corner us. They must have had some kind of telepathic communication. But how? Puppet drakes I could understand, but how could they communicate with wild dragons?

I stood bewildered as one of the girls came up to us...

“Hey!” I exclaimed as she wrenched Myusel out of my arms. “Myusel!”

“Shinichi-sama!” She struggled, but she was just no match for a werewolf’s strength. The girl drew her fist back. Maybe she was hoping to punch Myusel again, force her to settle down.

“N-No, dooooon’t!” I cried. I didn’t expect it to count for much, but I couldn’t hold it in. “Stop that!”

Hitting a girl in the stomach—that’s just awful! That’s where babies are kept! Er, although I guess if the girl were to respond, “Okay, but I can punch her in the face, right?” or, “Okay, but it’s fine to punch a man in the stomach, right?” well, I’d be a little bit stuck.

But then the werewolf girl stopped moving. Just for an instant, she turned her expressionless face toward me. “Language detected: Japanese. Stop—imperative; a command to immediately cease current activity.”

“Huh?” My eyes went wide. And not just because the wolf girl had suddenly talked.

“Request from Type Three authorized personnel. Acknowledged.”

But because she was speaking Japanese.

That’s when it really sank in for me: she didn’t have a magic interpreter ring. So how was it she was able to telepathically communicate with me? I had learned a bit of Eldant myself by now, but that clearly wasn’t what this girl was speaking. She had been talking to me in my own native language. Japanese. She’d said it herself.

But why? How?

“Does this mean you’ll... listen to me?”

“Affirmative.” The werewolf girl nodded, and then so did the others. Heck, was it just my imagination, or did even the dragons bob their heads? “We will obey you within the parameters of the authority of a Type Three authorized person.”

“Obey...?” The word sounded weirdly erotic coming from her—I mean dangerous—I mean... weird all around. “Um, so, uh... Will you let Myusel... I mean, that girl. Will you let her go?”

“Understood.” The werewolf holding Myusel put her down. She scrambled over to me, practically throwing herself at me. I’m a little ashamed to say it forced me back a couple steps, but at least I was able to catch her.

“Shinichi-sama!”

“Yeah, it’s all right. Or at least it kinda... seems all right, I guess...” Even I didn’t really know what I was saying, but the point was it looked like these girls were going to listen to me if I asked them to do something. On that subject, what was a Type Three authorized person? And when had I become one?

“So, just to be sure, you’ll listen to what I say, right?”

“Affirmative.”

“Okay, then...” I didn’t know exactly what they would or wouldn’t do, so I decided to do a little test. “Raise your right hand.”

Without so much as a questioning look, the girls all raised their right hands. There was a rush of air as even the dragons lifted their right wings and forearms off the ground. That just about did me in.

“Raise your left hand,” I said. The girls raised their other arms like they were doing a collective banzai cheer. “Leave your right hand up.” The girls shifted a little to keep their balance, but maintained the pose. “Don’t put those left arms down.” Even the dragons looked like they were cheering.

“Okay, right arm down. Left arm down. Now raise your right arm without raising your left arm.”

Bam, bam, bam; the girls and the dragons did everything I asked. It was a truly surreal moment.

“Okay, next. Turn around three times and say ‘Arf!’”

“.........Arf.”

Without a hint of hesitation, the girls spun three times, then collectively arf’ed. And so did the dragons. They didn’t add “arf” as such, but did give gong-like roars.

Now there was no question. Both the girls and the dragons were prepared to do pretty much whatever I said.

“Geez... Uh, what’s going on here?” I mumbled.

“I’m sure I haven’t any idea...” Myusel said, looking as confused as I felt.