Chapter Two: When an Armor Meets an Armor Coming Through the Rye

When I opened my eyes, I was staring up at the ceiling of my familiar room in the mansion.

“It really worked...”

I felt a slight lethargy, like I was waking up from a long dream. I was tempted to just let my eyes flutter closed and go back to sleep, but then I remembered why I had come back in the first place, and made to jump out of bed.

But my body wouldn’t move.

“Wha?”

I could move my neck; I had a look around and realized that there was furniture piled on top of me, pinning me down. They were balanced just so, so that my body wasn’t crushed beneath them—silver linings, I guess. But my hips and legs were trapped, and I couldn’t get out of bed. What in the world had happened? My room had been in order, perfectly normal, back when we left for Bahairam. It was like there had been a giant earthquake or some—

“The reactor’s energy release!” I exclaimed, remembering what the doll-woman Theresa had said. The reactor the Bahairamanians had fiddled with so much that it ended up going rogue. An early-stage safety measure had involved the release of overcharged energy. That prevented the reactor itself from blowing—at least temporarily. Meanwhile, the energy surge caused a seismic event. And that seismic event—that earthquake—must have reached Eldant.

For the most part, earthquakes didn’t happen in Eldant. At least, that was what I had been told. So the buildings around here weren’t built to cope with them, and the furniture wasn’t secured in place to prevent it shaking around. Or falling. Such as directly on top of me, sleeping in my bed.

“Just lucky I wasn’t crushed to death...” I whispered, feeling a chill at the very idea. If my real body was crushed—if I were to actually die—I wondered what would happen to me. Would my consciousness be erased, causing my avatar to “die,” too? Would my consciousness take up permanent residence in my avatar? I guess, given that Theresa was using the same sort of surrogate body I was, and her real form must have died ages ago, it was more likely the latter.

“Okay, academic point, anyway. This is bad. I have to do something.”

I wasn’t dead yet, sure, but if I just lay here waiting for someone to come find me, it would defeat the point of having deliberately come back. We didn’t have that kind of time. I had to get out of here somehow, and make my way to the castle.

“Hrrgh...”

First I tried just shoving the furniture away with my hands, which were free, but all the furniture around here was absurdly expensive, which was to say it was made of heavy hardwoods. It wasn’t going anywhere just because I gave it a little push. Besides, with my hips pretty much pinned down, I couldn’t generate any power. I was so weak compared to my avatar form that if things hadn’t been so desperate, it might have been funny.

“Shit. What do I do...”

I was starting to panic. The others had entrusted me with their one sliver of hope, and I was letting them down. I would never be able to face them again.

If this had been a manga or a novel or something, the fearless hero would probably have grabbed a convenient knife or letter opener or something lying around and chopped off his own legs to get free. I mean, it happens every once in a while in these stories, right? But I didn’t have any bladed objects at hand, and anyway, I didn’t think I had it in me to chop off a limb.

Okay, so what now? If only I had a lever or something to help me move the furniture. I looked around and...

“Gi?”

“...Hey.”

...found myself looking right into a child’s eyes. Not Man’ya’s, it was... what was their name again? Anyway, it was one of Brooke and Cerise’s kids. They had a lot of them, and I hadn’t learned all their names yet, let alone how to tell them apart.

But in any event, the kid was watching me wrack my brains where I lay on the bed. They were still really young, and probably didn’t quite get what I was doing. If I remembered correctly, though, lizardmen children (who developed fast) could carry on basic conversation at one week old. So in the calmest tone I could manage, I said to him (I thought it was a him—I was pretty sure): “Um... Could you call your mom or dad?”

“Ugi?”

“Brooke-san and Cerise-san. Call them. I kind of can’t move.”

“Ochay.” The lizardman child nodded assiduously and left the room surprisingly quickly. Now that I thought about it, I realized I didn’t know if Brooke and Cerise were at home, or if they were even safe. But I couldn’t imagine they had left the kids in the mansion by themselves. Whatever the earthquake had been like here, it hadn’t been enough to bring down the entire house, so there was a good chance they were okay.

I’m not religious, but I was practically praying for those three minutes I had to lie there waiting. Until finally:

“Hikaru-sama!” First Brooke, then Cerise, followed by Man’ya and a gaggle of other children poured into the room. “I thought sure you’d gone out with the Master and the others!”

“Yeah, but it was just my ‘doll’ body. Could we start by getting this furniture off me? I can’t move.”

“Yessir,” Brooke said, and then he and Cerise lifted the furniture easily off me. I remembered what Theresa had said: that werewolves and lizardmen were genetically engineered organisms created for combat applications. Of course they would have exceptional physical abilities and strength.

“Thanks, that’s a relief,” I said, checking myself over. I made to get out of bed again, and— “Oops.” I slumped to the floor as my legs gave out. I guess the pressure had been more than I had realized. I couldn’t feel my legs or feet at all. Thankfully they were nowhere near turning necrotic from blood loss, but they were numb, like when you have to sit seiza for a formal occasion, and then your legs go to sleep from being tucked under you for so long.

“Hikaru-sama?” Brooke and Cerise quickly came to either side of me to hold me up.

“Thanks again. My legs just went a little numb...”

“Are y’ all right, sir? We can summon a doctor...”

“No. But there is something else I need.” I looked up at Brooke, who towered over me. “It looks like I won’t be able to walk very well for a while, but I need to get to the castle right away. Could you get a carriage ready for me?”

“Is it that urgent, sir?” Brooke asked, his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth.

“Yeah. Every second counts. The world could be in danger—lots of people could die in Eldant and Bahairam.”

In fact, lots might be underselling it by quite a bit. Worst-case scenario, every humanoid life form in this world, including the demi-humans, could be wiped out. But I didn’t have the time to explain all that. I felt bad, but I didn’t have time to try to get Brooke and the others to understand what a nuclear weapon was or how much bigger than one this explosion was going to be if it happened. I wasn’t even sure they could understand.

For a moment, Brooke seemed to chew over my words, his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth. Finally he said: “Well, might be quicker fer me to take you than a carriage, then.”

“Huh?”

“Cerise, watch the children. I shall take Hikaru-sama to the castle.”

“Yes, of course.” Cerise nodded and let go of me. At the same moment, Brooke lifted me up with a quick, easy motion, and set me on his back.

Brooke was never dressed very heavily, and I could feel the bumps of his scales against my skin—but strangely, it wasn’t rough; it felt cool and pleasant.

“Here, dear,” Cerise said, tearing a strip from my sheets and passing it to Brooke, who wrapped it around us two or three times, securing me to his back. They did all this as naturally as if they had planned it all along. I was shocked how smooth and coordinated they were. And then...

“All right!” Brooke flung himself—not out the door, but out the already broken window, so fast it seemed like he might leave his skeleton behind. “I’ll go ’s fast as I can, sir. If it gets too uncomfortable back there, say the word!” Brooke was already running full tilt as we hit the ground.

That’s right... He was a hero of the lizardman people... I thought suddenly. Brooke used to be a soldier—part of the military. So he knew how to handle himself in a crisis; he could be quick and decisive. And Cerise, the woman he married, was probably the same way. It was incredible: I couldn’t think of another word.

The scenery turned to a blur as it flew by. Maybe we weren’t going as fast as a car, but at least as fast as a bicycle—I estimated we must have been doing thirty or forty kilometers per hour. If Brooke could keep this up all the way to the castle, we would get there in less than thirty minutes. We might actually be in time.

At least, in time to try to explain things to Her Majesty and Garius. Whether they’ll actually hand over the armor...

That was another question.

They say it’s harder to wait than to be waited for. I’d had no idea how rough it would be knowing time was so short but having nothing I could do. Knowing that running out of time would mean total annihilation—full party wipe, our adventure ends here—for those of us sitting in this facility at the very least, didn’t make it any easier. Besides, we weren’t exactly feeling like playing word games or tic-tac-toe to pass the time. If only there’d been some kind of actual work we could do.

I let out a breath. At the moment, we were in the “hall” that was the main entryway of the Dragon’s Den, waiting for Hikaru-san to get back or for the forbidden armor to arrive. In addition to our usual group, the people from the Faugron trading caravan were here, along with a number of Bahairamanian citizens who hadn’t managed to escape the city. It was a pretty big crowd, but it was an even bigger space, so it didn’t feel cramped. In fact, we all sort of had room to ourselves, our own places to sit on the floor.

“Wonder if Hikaru-sama’s doin’ all right,” Elvia said quietly. But those of us near her—me and Minori-san, and of course Theresa—didn’t say anything back. What could we say? We had no way to know how he was doing. We just had to believe in him and wait.

Elvia, for her part, probably wasn’t really expecting an answer. But I understood how hard it was just to sit and wait.

As for Amatena and Clara, they weren’t in the Dragon’s Den with us. They had ventured out to see if there was anyone at all left in the Third Capital. They knew the geography, and as a werewolf and weretiger, with the exceptional physical abilities that entailed, they might be able to reach places I could never hope to go.

And Myusel? She’d been inseparable from Falmelle-san for a while now. They were sitting facing each other, over near where the other members of Faugron & Associates were seated.

“Have you gotten a little thinner?” I could hear Falmelle-san ask.

“Wha? Oh, er, m-maybe. Maybe I have.”

“Elves don’t put on weight easily. If they don’t take care, they can find themselves dangerously thin,” Falmelle-san said with a bit of a smile.

Interesting fact. I guess once in a while you meet a human who has the same problem, but if all the ladies out there who were struggling to diet, their joys and sorrows dictated by the swing of a single kilo, heard that, the jealousy might drive them crazy.

“Are you eating properly?” Falmelle-san asked.

“Yes, of course. Ahem... but a woman’s fortieth kilo is sheer indulgence,” Myusel said with a blink of her eyes.

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

.........Wait, was that still a thing with her?!

“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?” Falmelle-san said. I guess for one thing, she didn’t know what a kilogram was.

“I guess it means it’s better to be thin... And that I’m still not thin enough.”

“Did Shinichi-san say that to you?” I caught her shooting a glare in my direction.

Um. Ahem. No, not specifically, but... uh, if the question is, who came up with a totally untenable number when asked about the ideal female body weight? Then, uh, that would be me. I’m very sorry. I’m just an otaku who can’t tell the difference between two dimensions and three...

“Oh, no...” Myusel was kind enough not to pin the blame on me, but Falmelle-san already looked convinced that this was something I had said to her daughter. She continued to look at me reproachfully for a while, but then I saw her put her hands on Myusel’s cheeks and say, “Don’t do anything crazy just to lose weight. Believe me, it’ll be worse in the long run.”

“Yes... Of course.” Myusel was looking at the ground, but she also seemed happy.

Falmelle-san’s expression softened when she saw the look on her daughter’s face. “I told you it wouldn’t be easy. But you can’t give 100% all the time. You’ll wear yourself out.”

“Yes...”

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

It was, like, this really sweet heart-to-heart between mother and daughter, but also I couldn’t shake the sense that I was being severely attacked. Falmelle-san sounded like a mother worried that her daughter was wasting away because of the girl’s no-account husband.

From what Falmelle-san was saying, it sounded like elves could all too easily lose dangerous amounts of weight due to psychological stress, and even though she was technically half human, Myusel totally looked all elf, and so I guess what I’m saying is that probably I really am the one at fault here, sorry, thank you, I’ll be good.

...Elves.

An artificial race. Created.

BOUs, right? Bionic Organoid Units, I think.

According to Theresa, elves and dwarves were BOUs that had been developed to have particularly effective access to magic—or rather, to the cloud network of nanomachines. (Around here, people referred to the nanomachines as “sprites,” though.) In other words, they were the operators, the system engineers.

Hmmm...

It made a twisted sort of sense, but I had to wonder what Myusel thought of learning that she and everyone like her were created beings.

I guess it was possible she didn’t think anything about it. I mean, pretty much every human society has had some kind of story about being created by God or the gods. In a time before the theory of evolution, it probably made a lot more sense than the idea that we just arose in a natural process.

Just as I was thinking all this, my eyes met Myusel’s as she glanced over in my direction. I gave her a questioning look. What was going on?

She averted her eyes for a second, with an expression that wasn’t quite any one thing. She wasn’t embarrassed. Even I could tell that. This was how she behaved when she was worried or fretting about something. She sat staring at her own knees, until Falmelle-san whispered something to her and she stood up, walked over to me resolutely, and sat down again beside me. “U-Um, Shinichi-sama...”

“Oh, uh, yeah?” After our last conversation, I was a little nervous talking to her again.

But Myusel, still not quite looking up, said almost in a whisper, “Um... how do I put this... I... ahem...” She was trying to find the words, or pick them carefully or something; in any event, she was clearly struggling, but she slowly gained momentum: “I was wondering, Shinichi-sama... what you thought...”

“Huh? Uh, y-yeah, I... I guess I’m sorry.” I decided to start by apologizing.

“Wha...?” Myusel said, blinking at me.

Oops. Was that not what she meant?

“I mean, you were talking about how it’s my fault you’ve lost weight, right?”

“Th-That’s not what I’m talking about! No, I mean...” She fixed her eyes on her knees again. “The fact that... we’re... all artificial creatures...”

“Oh! You mean that.” I was actually almost relieved. “What do you mean, what do I think about it?”

“Well, I mean... How does it make you feel?”

“I guess my first reaction was, Oh. Huh.”

After all, it made sense, more or less. Elves, dwarves, lizardmen, werewolves, weretigers... as an explanation for all the different types of demi-humans around here, it pretty much worked. But...

“Sigh...” Myusel listened to me, the expression on her face still ambiguous. Maybe that wasn’t the answer she was looking for.

“What about it?” I asked. Something was obviously eating at Myusel. It must have been painful for her and the others to learn that they were man-made... Or was it?

“You don’t feel... sickened, or... disgusted?”

“Huh? About what?”

“That we’re... all really just dolls...”

“Guh? ...Oh! Ohh! Okay, I get it!” I nodded, finally connecting the dots. The demi-humans around me hadn’t been created by the gods, but by human beings. Myusel wondered if that wouldn’t make a human regard them the same way they would a doll, or any other inanimate object. And actually, come to think of it, I seemed to remember some old fantasy literature in our world took the view that fairies were sprites and had no souls because they weren’t created by God. In that sense, they weren’t any different from dolls.

Souls. Souls...

“Myusel.”

“Y-Yes?” She sat up straight at the forceful note in my voice.

“What do you take me for?”

“Wha? What do I take—you, Shinichi-sama? I’m sorry?”

“Moe takes many forms,” I said, clenching my fist. “Robo-girl moe, artificial-person moe, ball-jointed-figure moe, and so many more! They may not be mainstream, but each has its hidden depths and its ardent fans!”

“Er... What?”

“It doesn’t matter which element you are!”

“Um... Er...?”

“So you’re man-made, so what? Read my lips: dolls can be perfectly lovable, too! Mwah!”

There were plenty of shows and series starring figure-sized heroines, right? Heck, Hikaru-san spent all his time cosplaying as a doll-girl character. One could even swear love to a body pillow!

As far as I was concerned, be she a doll or be she an artificial human, if she looked anything like a normal girl, then there was no problem at all. In fact, I would go so far to say that I could hardly understand what the problem could possibly be!

“Anyway, it’s just a little genetic improvement,” I said, although even I realized that wasn’t entirely rational. “I guess if your body was made of celluloid or steel or something, that might be an issue, but...” (I refrained from saying exactly how it would be an issue.) “But it isn’t, is it? And you’re half human anyway, so that would make you not more than half artificial, right? You’re not even really the artificial one, are you? That was some great-great-great-great-great ancestor of yours or whatever, right? Don’t sweat it!”

“So, um, are you saying...” Myusel blinked several times, but looked at me. “You’re saying you’ll allow me to continue to serve by your side, sir?”

“Allow you? I don’t know what I’d do without you!” I said, and finally Myusel smiled.

“Y-Yes! Of course, sir!”

“That’s what I think, anyway. And you can tell your mom I said so.”

“Yes, sir!” Myusel said happily, and then she stood and rushed back to Falmelle-san, who was looking at me with a sort of half-smile. Oh yeah... I guess elf hearing was especially sharp. I didn’t know exactly how much she’d heard of what we had said, but at least she didn’t look angry, so maybe I’d earned a few points in her book.

Now Elvia, who had been silent throughout the entire conversation, spoke up. “W-Well, Shinichi-sama,” she said, crawling over to me on all fours like a dog. Her tail was drooping, though I didn’t quite know why. “What about werewolves? Are they okay?”

“Seriously, okay with what?” I said, smiling a little.

“I mean, I’m not half anything. I’m all werewolf!”

“Yeah. So?” I asked, trying to make sure I understood.

“So, that doesn’t make y’ feel sick? You can still get, y’ know, moe about it?”

“Plenty moe. I think I’ve told you that. Don’t you remember?”

It was right about the time Elvia had come to our mansion, as I remembered. There’d been a little, uh, well, I don’t know if you’d call it a “lucky” accident or what, but I ended up tangled up with Elvia. She’d asked me if she didn’t disgust me then, too, and I’d been pretty emphatic that she definitely did not. I don’t want to brag, but every month when Elvia gets her “phase of the moon,” it’s all I can do not to let myself get swept away with her momentum.

“’Course I remember that,” Elvia said, looking a little shy. Ah! Slightly Shy Elvia: truly a bracing experience. I could have three square meals a day of this.

Er, but, moving on...

“It’s just that, back then, y’ didn’t know that I was artificial or whatever it is...”

So that was bothering her, too. But to be honest, whether I could get moe about someone, whether they could be a romantic interest or, dare I say it, even sexually arousing—it was really a question of what they looked like, not whether they were artificially created or something. Honestly, character background details like that didn’t really bother me.

Or maybe I was just a weirdo. Who knows?

“I don’t care if you’re a werewolf, an elf, a dwarf, a weretiger, or whatever—it’s all the same to me. I guess maybe I’m not so sure about lizardman moe, that’s sort of tough from my perspective.” But even there, I’d heard that in America there were people who were into “dragon moe,” so much so that it was its own genre. There were supposedly movies of dragons, like, screwing cars or something. So hey, maybe depending on your culture and your personal tastes, you might be into lizardmen. That’s cool.

“Anyway, look. The point is, just because you and Myusel turned out to be artificial life forms, I’m not going to be all ‘Ugh! Yuck! Get away from me!’ That would be dumb and mean. Things can stay just the way they have been. Heck, I’d be in a lot of trouble if my resident artist decided to quit now.”

“Naw, that’s not what I...” Elvia shook her head as if chasing a thought away. “But never mind! It’s all good,” she said, and smiled. I guess I’d gotten through to her.

Then, though, Elvia looked off into the distance and said, “Man, Big Sis Ama and Clara sure are taking their time! I’m gonna go have a look outside!” She jumped up and dashed for the entrance of the big hall.

Well, if nothing else, it looked like I had helped Myusel and Elvia reconcile themselves to the revelation that they were the descendents of the BOUs. I guess when you get right down to it, most people aren’t that interested in hypothetical questions about the fate of the world or what will happen in the future, so much as they are in their actual relationships with other human beings.

I could sympathize with that. Remembering the way my old friend had shot me down, and how that experience had led me to become a shut-in, I could definitely sympathize. You start with your family, your friends, your allies, your lover, and somewhere past all that is that thing called the wider world. But first you have to reach out and connect with the people you know. That’s important. You can worry about the world later. It’s no use getting on your tippy toes and trying to see far away if the ground under your feet isn’t stable.

“That was some talk...” someone said from beside me, snapping me out of my thoughts. It was Minori-san, standing next to me with her arms crossed. “...is what I’d like to say, anyway. But I don’t think that’s really the problem you need to be dealing with.”

“I’m trying very hard not to think about it,” I said with a sigh.

That’s right: it wasn’t about artificially created this or genetically manipulated that. Let’s be real for a minute: if I committed to Myusel, got married to her, none of that would really be a major issue, at least not for me personally. It looked like we could even have a baby if we, y’know, tried. Would the kid be human, or elf, or—? It didn’t really matter.

What did matter?

“A time paradox...” I said.

“Definite possibility,” Minori-san agreed, frowning.

Yep. If this “other world” wasn’t actually another world at all, but was in fact the future from the perspective of our twenty-first-century world, what then? What if we hadn’t traveled from one world to another, but one time to another? That could cause all kinds of problems.

The past and the future. Two things that normally never meet, encountering each other. Who knew what that could do to causation? Effects could end up coming before causes. Interference in the past, from the future, could end up changing the future itself. The smallest things could echo through time until they became world-ending catastrophes in the unimaginably distant future...

Heck, I could be here the rest of my life listing examples of those kinds of complications from time-slip sci-fi stories. You know how they say a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the country can cause the weather to change on the other? Same idea. Change the tiniest of details, and the change ripples out like toppling dominoes, until the effects could put the whole world in danger.

Like say you went into the past, and there was this mosquito. And even though you normally kill mosquitoes without a second thought, this time you don’t. Maybe that mosquito goes on to be eaten by another bug—say a dragonfly—that would have starved, but survives instead. And say a little boy then chases that dragonfly—which he wouldn’t have done if it had starved to death—and hurts himself. That injury causes his parents to argue over whose fault it was that the boy got hurt, until they can’t live with each other anymore. They get divorced, which causes the boy to go bad. And where he was once on a path to grow up, go out into the world, and become a politician who changed the world, instead he becomes a NEET who never gets a job or even graduates from school. And then the war that would have been avoided if the boy had grown up and been able to put his intelligence to work as a politician starts instead, and then.........

See? Small things, big consequences, no way to stop them. War, tragedy. No way to know.

“Then again, on Dorae**n they argued that even if things take a different course, they wind up at the same future.”

What could be a more extreme example of future interference with the past than a robot cat going back in time to live with the ancestor of his future owner? The manga was never really clear on the implications of all that stuff for the time-space continuum.

“Some people argue that the flow of time has a sort of built-in buffer. That it can absorb small amounts of interference,” Minori-san said.

“Yeah, or like in some recent time-travel stories, where they say that because the world splits off into a separate timeline from the point of the interference, there are no time paradoxes.”

“But that just means an infinite number of parallel worlds, right?”

“Er... Yeah, I guess so.”

“Think that’s safe?”

I didn’t say anything. How was I supposed to know? Anyway, the split-timelines hypothesis was just one theory among many, and it wasn’t like there was any proof one way or another. It was even possible that interference with the past could cause something to disappear from the future entirely, to never have existed. It could suddenly turn out, for example, that Myusel had never lived. Not like she was dead, but like she had never been born. And then we’d be stuck in that reality! Just thinking about it gave me the shivers. We sometimes speak of dead people as being “gone.” But this would be “gone” in the truest sense. No trace anywhere.

“I guess it’s a little late to worry about this stuff, seeing as we’ve been just doing whatever right up until now,” Minori-san said.

Well, that was true enough. We were in deep in this distant future. In our defense, we were going to the future, so whatever we did wasn’t interference with the past. But as long as the two were connected by a hyperspace wormhole, it was impossible to be sure our world would be completely unaffected. Just think: some sprites, some “magical power,” had already leaked over to Japan. Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia had all gone to Japan with me, and we’d gotten involved with the U.S. Army and the JSDF and everything.

Who knew what that might do?

Lizardmen really were built for war: Brooke carried me on his back at a speed far faster than I could ever have reached even going absolutely flat-out, a speed he kept up as we reached the castle town. I had never seen him race like this before. He looked so much like a lizard that I had simply assumed he did everything slowly. Maybe Shinichi-san and the others had an inkling he could do this, having seen him play soccer once, back before I got here.

“Oh, no...” I gasped as I saw the capital. Holy Eldant Castle was carved from a hollowed-out mountain, and the town that had grown up around it naturally involved traditional-style structures that took the form buildings do at the foot of a mountain. And being the capital of the empire, it was a big place with lots of people. One of the thriving metropolises of this world. And now...

“Fair bit of destruction here,” Brooks said.

I would say one out of every three houses in the city had visible damage. Not just cracks, either: some were almost completely destroyed, with just a few pillars or a wall still standing. If there had been anyone inside those buildings, they would certainly have been hurt. Maybe even killed.

The castle had to be in an uproar. Would Her Majesty, Minister Cordobal, Prime Minister Zahar, or anyone with any authority even meet with me at all? If not, I wouldn’t have time to wait around. I would have to try to steal the forbidden armor instead, but then there would be a new problem: how would I get it back to Bahairam? Even Shinichi-san’s single suit occupied a wooden box far too large to carry. I wasn’t going to be bringing it back by hand—and that was before we even got to the problem of the massive mountain range that divided Eldant and Bahairam.

I felt like I was quickly thinking myself into a corner. I would have to come up with some other way. But how many other ways were there?

Suddenly someone shouted, “Hikaru-san?!”

I knew that voice. It had to be...

“Wha?! Your Majesty?!” I turned and spotted Petralka leaning out of a carriage advancing at a stately pace down the street. She must have been on a quiet, unofficial tour of inspection. I saw a hand that looked like Minister Cordobal’s reach out and pull Petralka back in, but it was too late. Everyone around made a beeline for the carriage. “Brooke,” I said, “go for that carriage!”

“Yessir!” Brooke said smartly, and then I heard a whack! and he took a massive leap. With me still on his back, Brooke flew over the heads of the crowd assembled around the carriage, landing smack on top of it. The startled driver reached for a sword lying by his feet, but Petralka called out: “Stay your hand! They are friends!” The driver didn’t look completely convinced, but he left the sword alone.

“Your Majesty! Just who I wanted to see!” I said as Brooke helped me scramble down from his back.

“What do you mean? What is it you’re doing? Hikaru, did you not go with Shinichi and the others?”

I was suddenly the focus of attention of royals and commoners alike. “I’ll explain everything, Your Majesty—just please, get us to the castle!”

So there we were, deep underground in the Dragon’s Den, the most important facility in Bahairam’s Third Capital. It was a factory for producing living weapons, first built centuries—maybe millennia—maybe even tens of thousands of years ago! Er... Well, when I say “ago,” I mean from the perspective of this world. From the perspective of the world I come from, it would have been the future.

Ugh, this was getting so complicated! But anyway...

Near a wall not far away from us, a group of people was having an anxious conversation.

“What are we going to do?”

“That Theresa girl, we don’t know anything about her...”

“Yes, and that boy—President Faugron seems to know him, but who in the world—”

“They say he’s the owner of the mansion where her daughter works...”

And so on and so forth.

A pretty good number of people were crammed in here, all would-be evacuees. The Third Capital was currently covered in pillars of flame, very hot flame. It was so warm out there you could easily get heatstroke if you weren’t careful, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, most of the buildings that were still standing were in real danger of collapsing.

Many of the people with us were part of a trade caravan from Faugron & Associates. The next most populous group, though, were inhabitants of the Third Capital who hadn’t managed to evacuate—in other words, Bahairamanian citizens. There were more of them now than there had been when my friends and I had first arrived. Amatena and Clara had been out in the city streets, along with a group of the “nekkids” under Theresa’s control. The two beast girls were back already, but the nekkids and a detachment of dragons continued to patrol the city.

A number of the Bahairamanians wore military uniforms; according to Amatena, they were members of a group called the Undertakers. Supposedly, they had been given that name because when the Dragon’s Den was first discovered, people had postulated that it was some sort of tomb. For the most part, we hadn’t explained to them what was actually happening here right now. Minori-san was concerned that if we said the wrong thing to the wrong person, panic could all too easily break out. So as far as they knew, we were just interlopers who had shown up for no particular reason and were now hanging around doing nothing special.

“Um, so... Theresa-san?” I said to the doll-like person currently leaning against a wall with her arms crossed.

“Yeah, what?”

“There’s got to be more to this facility than just what we’ve seen. How big is it?”

“Hmm.” Theresa placed her palm against the wall, which obligingly projected a map of the entire Dragon’s Den. “We’re in this area. The BOU production plant I showed you earlier is here. And the levels go like this...” She spun the map like a 3D object as she explained.

“Huh? So there are rooms around here, too?” In addition to the open area near the entrance, where we were, I saw several other chambers on the same floor.

“Those areas caved in on account of the seismic activity,” Theresa said. “Or the passages leading to them are otherwise blocked off. Can’t access them via the administrative system.” The areas she indicated flashed red on the projection. It represented a pretty good amount of space, but according to Theresa it was mostly lodging for facility personnel. It didn’t contain any really important functions, and she didn’t seem too worried about it being caved in.

“Don’t tell me...” I said. Maybe it was just because I had nothing to do and too much time on my hands, but I was having all sorts of thoughts, none of them very good. Maybe it was human psychology: imagine the worst possible thing and then tell yourself, “Well, at least it’s not that.”

The Undertakers... The special Bahairamanian military unit charged with protecting this facility. From the fact that several of them were still here with us, it seemed reasonable to think that when the crisis had occurred, they were the ones who had needed the longest to evacuate the city. I mean, if the earthquake hadn’t convinced the average citizen to get out of there, the spontaneous eruption of pillars of fire probably did the trick. But the Undertakers weren’t just smack in the center of the city, they were also responsible for a hugely important, totally secret base. It wouldn’t be that easy for them to leave their posts... would it?

Or did I have it backwards? Would they have been the first to go, exactly because they were at the center of it all and knew what was really going on? But if I was right...

Why aren’t there more of them here? What if there are? Maybe, terrified of the unfamiliar BOUs had emerged from the depths—the nekkids—they had tried to hide somewhere. And if they happened to see us just sitting here, what would they think?

And fancy I should be having that thought right at that moment, because:

“Hey, what the—who the hell are you?!” one of the Faugron people shouted. I turned and, to my surprise, saw about a dozen Bahairamanian soldiers armed with swords. They definitely hadn’t been there before. Did this mean I was actually right? Had there been more Undertakers hiding near the personnel lodging?

“Stay back! Hands at your sides, you Eldant dogs!” The soldiers—Undertakers?—had their swords out and were trying to take control of the situation. “We’ll never let you have the Dragon’s Den!”

I saw that several of them were holding wooden boxes of some sort. They looked perfectly ordinary, but somehow they nagged at me. The swords made sense, but what were those boxes about? Not rations or water, I presumed. There wouldn’t be any point bringing those things into a fight. Weapons, then? But if so, they wouldn’t want to leave them in their containers.

“Damn Eldant fools! This place belongs to Bahairam!” shouted a middle-aged human man I took to be their captain. He seemed to understand that we and the Faugron people were from Eldant...

“Hrm?” It wasn’t any of us in the Eldant contingent, but Theresa, who reacted. “It belongs to who?” The rightful administrator of the facility narrowed her eyes and stepped forward. “You won’t let them have it? Newsflash, jackass: it’s not yours to give.” She advanced on them with forceful strides, speaking to the Bahairamanian soldiers who were trying to reach the staircase deeper into the facility. “It never was.”

“Silence! This is a military asset of the Kingdom of Bahairam!” the soldiers insisted, even as they backed away.

“Pfah! You think we’d let the likes of you have this installation?” one of the soldiers holding a box exclaimed, and then he opened the lid of the container and pulled out what was inside.

“Nyyagh!” I said. I know, weird noise. But I recognized what he was holding. “Imarufe bisurupeguze! The Consuming Flame...!”

A magical weapon that was essentially a bomb. It was the same thing that had been used in a terrorist incident on Eldant soil early in my time here. Huh! So Bahairam had been supplying the terrorists. A common ploy for destabilizing an enemy country from within.

Okay, who cared about that now? There was only one salient fact from that encounter: that bomb had been powerful enough to blow up our entire school. If one was set off underground...

“Stop! They’re not Eldant soldiers!” Amatena said. But the captain shouted, “Quit your yapping, you traitorous bitch!” so forcefully that spittle flew from his mouth.

Uh-oh. This didn’t look good. They weren’t in a state of mind to listen to reason.

And then he went on: “We Undertakers serve the father-ruler directly with pride—you’ll never convince us to work with an enemy nation!”

“Wha...” Amatena didn’t have a comeback for that. Apparently these Undertakers had been watching us from the shadows, or otherwise a few of them had been and had then reported to comrades hiding out near the collapsed corridors. If nothing else, they knew that Amatena and Clara appeared friendly with me, Myusel, and others who looked, to them, like we were part of the Eldant army.

“We’d rather blow this place to kingdom come!” the soldier said. The Bahairamanians probably couldn’t abide the idea of the Dragon’s Den, packed with military secrets, falling into the hands of the enemy. So they had these magical bombs on hand, ready to wipe everything out if push ever came to shove. They’d had the bombs ready to go, stored here for exactly this moment.

I had no idea whether the weapon could completely destroy this massive, ancient (or whatever) facility, but it was certainly the definitive way of discharging their responsibility as overseers of a super-secret military installation. Then again, with a rogue reactor about to take out potentially the entire world, maybe the bomb was overkill.

Not to mention, they had three of those boxes, each of which probably contained an imarufe bisurupeguze. Backup, I guessed: even if your opponents managed to do something about one of the bombs, they would probably never be able to neutralize all three at once.

“As if we didn’t have enough problems,” Minori-san groaned, her machine pistol in one hand. She was a good marksman and would probably be able to pick off one or two of the soldiers, but not all of them. Not before they set off the bombs.

What should we do?

Tormented by the mounting panic, I looked around, but unlike the time with the terrorists, there were no fire extinguishers around, and I didn’t have time to set the alarm on my cell phone. Not only couldn’t I distract our enemies, if I accidentally antagonized them any further, they might well trigger the bombs.

“Stay back, Eldant dogs!” The Bahairamanian soldiers held the bombs proudly, as if they could imagine nothing more heroic than to destroy themselves in the fulfillment of their duty.

The world is going to be destroyed.

Normally, that would sound like a joke, right?

For better or for worse, in this land where, other than the magic, civilization was pretty much on par with the Middle Ages, it could be tough to even define what “world” meant. I didn’t think they believed that the world was supported on the backs of two elephants standing on a turtle or anything like that. But they also didn’t know about Earth as a planet; they didn’t understand the atmosphere or atmospheric cycles. All kinds of things like that. So talk about “nuclear winter” or “gradual destruction through climate change” wasn’t likely to get through to them. Frankly, it might be quickest just to imply that the world was going to go bam! and be gone.

Our own myths and religions were full of visions of the end of the world, from the Last Judgment and the Book of Revelation in Christianity, to mappou, the era of decline envisioned by Buddhism, and even the “twilight of the gods” from Scandinavian myth. It seemed to suggest that picturing the end of the world was something that came quite naturally to humans. So maybe the best bet was not to sweat the details, but just to communicate that the end was coming.

Thinking all this over, I decided I would try something like: “This thing down in an underground facility in Bahairam is out of control and could blow up the entire world, and it caused that earthquake, too,” and see where that got me. If that didn’t do the job, I could try something more mythological or religious in tone.

But to my shock, Petralka an Eldant III promptly asked me: “Are we dealing with one of those... noo-clear bombs? Or a ‘reaction weapon’?” I didn’t know she knew words like that.

“Er... Your Majesty?”

“Are these not the types of things that normally threaten a world with destruction? A ‘wave motion gun’ or ‘super laser’ may do so as well, but these are usually fired from some sort of space battleship, so they would not be underground. Are we wrong?” She looked weirdly proud of this knowledge.

“Oh... Well, I guess this’ll make my job easier, anyway,” I said, a bit bewildered.

“We have observed many such tropes in your anime and manga, you see,” Her Majesty said, crossing her arms.

Oh. Uh-huh. Fine. That was fine.

On reflection, even people from my world threw around talk about nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction, but very few of us really knew from experience what any of those things were like. The closest we’d come was maybe seeing them on the news, or otherwise in fiction. And yet that was more than enough to communicate to us how terrible these weapons would be.

Plus, in fiction, weapons of mass destruction tended to serve a dramatic purpose; they were always easy to spot, and sometimes their destructive power was shown in an exaggerated detail. I mean, some anime would describe a weapon as a “tactical nuke” but then show destruction much, much more extensive than that.

I guess that would make the discussion even easier, then.

“Do you speak of those weapons that produce a mushroom-shaped cloud over the land?” Garius piped up.

“All is reduced to ash in an instant—terrifying indeed!” Prime Minister Zahar added.

“Personally, I found the geoid warhead in **cke the Superman to be equally disturbing,” Garius said.

“You do traffic in the most obscure knowledge, Minister Cordobal. Me, I thought the co**ny drop was rather—”

And on they went. I could only listen in astonishment. Even Prime Minister Zahar had seen Gun**m? No, wait, not the point.

In any event, I’d sure never expected otaku culture to come in helpful in quite this way. There was no way Shinichi-san had envisioned this, either, but I was awfully grateful to him now for evangelizing as hard as he had. Ironically enough, it even made me a little bit glad for the Japanese government’s plan to use anime and manga to culturally invade or brainwash or whatever this place. They had one thing right: when it comes to trying to get people to understand brand-new concepts, a few good stories can be more effective than a mountain of description or documentation. Break it down into episodes, and the ideas naturally get into people’s heads, whether or not they’re really focused on the details.

Y’know, I’m starting to see why so many religions begin with myths and storytelling... It was just effective.

“All right, anyway. Something roughly like that sort of thing is going to explode, and we need the forbidden armor to stop it. I need you to get the armor out of storage and transport it to the Third Capital in Bahairam. Please.”

We should have plenty of time. I thought I had made my desperation clear to Her Majesty.

But there was a frown and an: “About that...” The response came not from Her Majesty, but from a concerned Minister Cordobal. “It so happens that we received a report not long ago.”

“A report, sir?” I asked.

“Yes, from our spies, and some scouts who were setting up operations on the border. They tell us the Bahairamanian military is deploying to a number of locations spanning the area from the border with Eldant to the Third Capital. And not on a small scale.”

I was taken aback for a second—but when I thought about it, it made perfect sense. The Third Capital was already an important military base for Bahairam. They would hardly just abandon it. So naturally, they would immediately move to take it back. At the same time, though, the earthquake would have damaged areas all around both Bahairam and Eldant. And I suspected the Bahairamanians weren’t soft enough to turn their back on their enemy just because there was a crisis going on. If anything, I assumed the hawks in the kingdom would see this as a perfect time to attack. At the very least, they would be on the alert for any invasion from the Eldant side.

In other words, what Garius was saying was...

“If we make an ill-considered move into Bahairamanian territory now, it will be construed as an invasion. They’ll certainly strike back, and they’ll have a perfect casus belli for doing so. In fact, I presume they would be more than happy to throw as many of their forces at us as they could spare.”

He was right. Bahairam would claim Eldant had provoked them, and there would be no way to prove them wrong. Eldant and Bahairam had been enemies for a very long time, but in recent years the dispute had been confined to border skirmishes. If they even thought we were sending a military unit into the Third Capital, those smoldering cinders would burst into flame. To Bahairam, it could only look like Eldant was taking advantage of their misfortune to launch a preemptive strike.

I guessed we couldn’t exactly talk them down. My assumption was that in Bahairam, the existence of a facility as secret as the Dragon’s Den wasn’t even officially recognized.

Prime Minister Zahar, meanwhile, groaned and added: “The Bahairamanian military is currently trying to retake possession of its own capital. I can’t imagine other nearby nations would countenance a third party getting involved—least of all us.”

Obviously, Eldant and Bahairam weren’t the only countries in this world. Power structures and diplomatic relations among the nations here were just as complicated as they were back home. So anything that appeared to be an unprovoked attack by Eldant on Bahairam would certainly worsen relations with other nearby countries. And the chances of getting all those countries on board by explaining that an annihilation reactor in Bahairam was about to explode and that was why we were doing it seemed awfully slim...

“Is there nothing we can do, Garius? Zahar?” Petralka demanded. Her Majesty adored Shinichi-san, and she must have wanted to get the forbidden armor to him as quickly as possible. I was grateful to know she felt that way. But just because she was the Empress of the Holy Eldant Empire didn’t mean she could do whatever she wanted, no matter how she felt.

Her two advisors made some uncomfortable noises, but didn’t offer anything concrete. I took a pocket watch out of my pocket and looked at it. I didn’t know quite how long it had been since I cut the connection with my avatar, but I knew we didn’t have much time. If we were going to act, we had to do it as soon as we could—there was no more time to mull it over.

“We’re talking about the end of the world, here,” I said, in an attempt to give Her Majesty a little push. But Minister Cordobal replied, “We understand that, but open war with Bahairam, or interference by the armies of some other nation, would make it that much more difficult to deliver the forbidden armor to the Third Capital.”

I knew he was right. But then he seemed to have second thoughts. “No,” he said with a sigh. “Whatever may happen, if this reactor or whatever it is does explode, the outcome will be the same in any event. I suppose we must do whatever we can.”

“That is indeed how it looks, isn’t it?” Prime Minister Zahar said, drumming his fingers on his knees. “Very well. I shall have bird-drawn carriages prepared as promptly as possible to send special envoys to our neighbors. They may not be in time, but if we can have someone on the ground, we can at least try to give some excuse later. Those countries we can reach by magical means of communication, we’ll do so, on my authority as prime minister.”

“Good, do it,” Minister Cordobal said. “I’ll prepare a supply regiment and organize an escort.” Then he nodded at me. “Sound good to you, Hikaru?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you very much.” I let out a sigh of relief. It looked like things were finally getting moving.

But the hard part was just beginning. We were going to have to break through the Bahairamanian military’s line, get the forbidden armor to the Third Capital, and do it all as fast as humanly possible. Would we be in time? Would we even reach them?

There was no way to know.

The Undertakers: the unit of the Bahairamanian military charged with protecting these ancient ruins. They’d probably been hiding in some corner of the Dragon’s Den, just waiting for us to let down our guard. For better or for worse, they were inhabitants of this other world, and didn’t understand anything we were saying. Nothing Theresa had explained to me would have gotten through to them.

Or maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. They were ready to blow the Dragon’s Den sky-high rather than let another country’s military—which they thought was us—have it. It made sense, from a military perspective. Very admirable sense of responsibility in a soldier. But it was still a misunderstanding, and a very problematic one for us at that.

If only there was some way to distract them, then I could—I could—Uhhhh...

Arrrrrgh, I wasn’t getting a single idea! This was no time for such a ridiculous argument. The world might be ending—but I wasn’t sure I could get the Undertakers to understand that, and even if I did, maybe they wouldn’t believe me. They saw us as enemies, after all, and why would you listen to an enemy? They were just going to blow us all up anyway.

I was desperately trying to get an idea going: maybe Myusel and I could use Tifu Murottsu to blow the bombs out of their hands with a gust of wind. To cover our incantations, I could get Elvia—no, Amatena and Clara, maybe, to start a conversation with them...

But then one of the Undertakers, in a voice thick with desperation, ordered us, “Don’t move!”

I was feeling so out of it that I didn’t think I was going to move, or really do anything at all, but maybe Minori-san or Elvia had been quietly getting ready to strike when they least expected it. Slowly, so as not to antagonize the owner of the voice, I turned—and was shocked. “Huh?!”

“Shinichi-sama!”

When had this happened? A lizardman who looked like he must be one of the Undertakers had Myusel’s arms pinned behind her back and a dagger at her throat. I recognized his protruding, fast-moving eyes—the Eleamachi tribe!

The Eleamachi were the secret assassins who had been dispatched to track down Amatena and Clara when they’d first fled to my mansion. They were lizardmen like Brooke, sort of, but they didn’t quite look like him—more like two-legged chameleons. And they could hide themselves just like chameleons—even better, in fact. They could change the color of their skin to match their surroundings as fast as a cuttlefish. It almost looked like a magic trick. It was nearly impossible to draw them into a straight fight if they didn’t want one. The camouflage was almost perfect. They could be standing right in front of you and you would barely notice.

Long story short: no wonder they had been able to take Myusel hostage.

“I repeat: Don’t move, and keep your distance,” the middle-aged man said. He’d been shouting before, but he didn’t need to now.

Huh? Wait, why would he say that?

If they wanted to set off the imarufe bisurupeguze, the magical weapons, why not just do it? Why bother taking Myusel hostage? For that matter, why bother showing themselves to us at all? It could only mean...

Keeping Myusel close, the Undertakers backed away, converging on a single spot. The entrance to the tunnel that led down into the facility.

Maybe they want to set off the bombs deeper underground, to make sure they bury the whole place...

I didn’t know how tough the Dragon’s Den was, but it had been here for centuries, maybe even millennia. I doubted even three imarufe bisurupeguze together could destroy the entire thing. I also didn’t know if imarufe bisurupeguze worked exactly like conventional bombs, but typically, the force of an explosive travels upward. So setting off a bomb here might blow off the top of the Den’s hill, but would probably only succeed in leaving the facility exposed.

“Don’t move—that goes for all of you!” The Undertakers weren’t threatening us this time, but Falmelle-san and her employees. They were all elves, powerful users of magic, and wind magic at that. They probably looked like a bigger threat than we did. Then, too, if they’d been watching us for a while, they probably knew that Falmelle-san was Myusel’s mother and the president of Faugron & Associates. That would explain why they picked Myusel to take hostage. They might be on a suicide mission, but it didn’t mean they weren’t thinking.

And that made them dangerous. This whole thing was dangerous.

“Stop! This is pointless—we have more important things to do right now!” Amatena said, trying again to reason with them. She’d heard Theresa and me talking, and knew that what the Undertakers were trying to do wouldn’t accomplish anything. Amatena might not have gotten the full story—the conversation about the reactor took place in Japanese, and only Minori-san and I were wearing interpreter rings—but she was smart enough to have grasped the picture of what was going on.

“You all played around down here with no idea what you were really dealing with, and now we may be on the cusp of a world-ending explosion!” she said. “And this man here is the only one who has any chance of stopping it! This isn’t about Bahairam or Eldant—we’re all going to be destroyed together!”

“Pfah! As if we would trust the words of a traitor!” the Undertaker soldiers shouted back. Uh... Well, I sort of saw where they were coming from. Worldwide destruction wasn’t necessarily something that seemed plausible, coming out of the blue like that. If Theresa’s story was to be believed, the world we were in now was Earth’s distant future—but heck, maybe these soldiers didn’t even know the world was round. You might know the word “world,” but you might not know or agree about exactly what it encompassed. At which point “the destruction of the world” became... metaphysical? Academic? Hard to picture, anyway.

And then imagine all that, plus it turns out it’s your fault for screwing around in some ruins. It wouldn’t be easy to accept.

“You follow us, the elf dies!” the Undertakers said, backing toward the tunnel.

“Myusel!” Falmelle-san cried. She seemed about to run to her daughter, but her employees held her back. Falmelle-san had always looked so calm and cool to me, but I guess a mother is a mother. She couldn’t just stand by and watch her daughter be taken hostage.

I didn’t feel great about it, either, but as desperate as I had been feeling for quite a while now, I hadn’t come up with any bright ideas to deal with this situation.

What to do? What to do? You have to stay calm, Kanou Shinichi—stay calm and think!

Okay, so they might or might not have understood the niceties of what was happening. But at least Her Majesty, Minister Cordobal, and Prime Minister Zahar clearly grasped that we had to hurry.

It had been about an hour since I’d explained the situation and begged them to give me the forbidden armor. Minister Cordobal had organized a delivery unit and brought all four sets of the armor Shinichi-san and the others had used out onto the castle practice grounds. Considering that Marinos was in chaos because of the earthquake, it was almost miraculous that all this had been accomplished in just sixty minutes.

It was the transport unit, though, that startled me most.

“But those...” I said. “Those are Faldras!”

That’s right: “false dragons,” a type of machine once built for us by some very dedicated dwarves. They were powered by magic, controlled by elven wind-magic abilities, and could fly through the sky just like real dragons. The Eldant government had recognized their potential as a weapon of war and had begun preparing to mass-produce them—but I didn’t know it had gotten any further than that.

Now I was looking at five of them, sitting smack in the middle of the practice area. For some reason, one of them was painted completely red, while the others were green, but with one unusual dark-red spot.

I knew why they were here, though: this would make getting over the mountains on the border a lot easier. A lot faster. Heck, that was how I’d gotten into Bahairam the first time.

What’s more, I saw a young man and young woman arguing at the foot of one of the Faldras.

“No, no! The mark goes on the right shoulder!”

“It needs to be darker, like blood!”

I recognized those two. “Hey, if it isn’t—”

“Hikaru-sensei!” the young woman said, spotting me. They rushed over to me: not Eldant soldiers, but two of Shinichi-san’s and my students in “otaku studies.” The dwarf Romilda and the elf Loek.

“Don’t tell me!” I said. “You two aren’t going to—?”

“That’s right!” Romilda exclaimed with a grin and a nod. Loek nodded, too, but he looked a lot more serious. They were obviously both raring to go.

“But this is a military mission,” I said. True, we weren’t invading or anything, but we were going to ride on a weapon straight into enemy territory. That seemed like something you’d want to leave to the soldiers. Bringing along a couple of students—kids at that—seemed irresponsible. At least, I thought so.

“But Minori-sensei is in trouble!” Loek said, clasping his hands together. Ahh. So that was why he was so fired up. Ever since one particular incident, Loek had been infatuated with Minori-san, or... really a bit obsessed, you might say. In any event, he was head over heels for her. I guess you couldn’t have kept him away by force when he heard she was in trouble.

“What can I say? Elves are dumb,” Romilda said, jerking a thumb at Loek. “He looked like he might just go running off to Bahairam on foot.” And that, I suppose, explained why his friend Romilda had come along, arguing all the way.

The two of them were too stubborn to admit it, but any outside observer could see how close they were... If Loek had decided he was going, it wasn’t surprising to see Romilda right there with him. Heck, they’d been the ones to operate the very first Faldra, when they used it to fly to Bahairam to rescue Shinichi-san.

Wait... Did that mean...?

“You two are here as, like, consultants?”

No matter how enthusiastic Loek and Romilda might be, they wouldn’t be here without Minister Cordobal’s permission. In fact, I couldn’t imagine how they would even have found out about this mission otherwise. He must have asked them to come. He wanted them along.

“Yep!” Loek said with a big grin. “We’ve been to Bahairam with one of these things before, and nobody knows more about operating a Faldra than we do! That naturally makes Unit 01, the Faldra we’ll be flying in, the lead unit, and tradition dictates it has to be red and have a horn! Every detail is ready!”

“And, uh, what tradition is that, exactly?” I asked. I wasn’t sure those details mattered at this point.

“We’re so good at flying it, it’ll look like it’s going three times as fast!”

“I’m not hearing this.”

“Plus, we’re giving the mass-produced units a mark because they’re the vampire squad!”

“I am not hearing this.”

Ignoring my own profound otaku leanings—I didn’t have time to be entertaining this stuff right now anyway—I looked toward the green Faldras. Each one had four or five crew members: an elf-dwarf team to fly it, and a couple of human soldiers as support staff. As terrifying as a group of Faldras might look, it was actually a small unit, just twenty or twenty-five people. Part of the reason they could get it ready in just an hour.

“Hikaru!”

I turned to find Petralka an Eldant III and her minister, Garius en Cordobal, coming toward me.

“Your Majesty. Minister Cordobal...”

“We have the absolute minimum of soldiers and equipment, prepared to move at the absolute maximum of speed, with the one and only goal of reaching the Third Capital in Bahairam,” Minister Cordobal said. Then he paused. “That’s the fancy way of saying that this is all we could manage at the moment. Getting any more people together would have taken too long, and would have made it hard to sustain the excuse that we were merely delivering supplies. None of the other nations would believe it.”

“Understandable...” I said.

“I’ll be frank with you: we didn’t get as far as planning for the return trip.”

I understood what he was saying. We might fly over the Bahairamanians’ heads and get into the city, but we couldn’t expect them to just suck their thumbs and watch us leave again when we were done. While Bahairam might not have anything exactly equivalent to Faldras, they did have their puppet drakes, a sort of living weapon. If it came to a straight fight, our Faldras weren’t getting out unscathed.

“You’re saying this is a one-way trip?!” I exclaimed.

“Essentially, yes.”

“But they’re just students! Children!” I said, pointing to Loek and Romilda, but Minister Cordobal simply shrugged. “You said it yourself. If we don’t do this, Marinos and perhaps all of Eldant may go up in smoke. That explosion isn’t going to make any distinction between students and soldiers, or grown-ups and children. We have to use the best personnel we’ve got.”

“You’re right—I mean, I know you are...”

“All right. If it please Your Majesty, I shall be on my way,” Minister Cordobal said, and then he bowed to Petralka.

She nodded reluctantly. “Do not say anything irresponsible: do not tell us you may not come back. We charge you to return with Shinichi and everyone else. You, Garius. This is an order from your empress. Do you understand?”

Minister Cordobal paused just long enough for a pained smile to cross his face. “As Your Majesty wills.”

She obviously desperately wanted Minister Cordobal to come back alive.

Wait—she wanted... what?

“H-Hold on! Minister Cordobal, you’re going too?”

“That’s correct,” he said calmly. “Sitting and waiting doesn’t suit me.”

“But—” I couldn’t believe that Minister Cordobal, the leader of the royal guard and de facto head of the Eldant military, would personally come on a mission like this. I guess this handsome young commander was making it clear that he didn’t intend to ask children to put themselves at risk while he sat in safety.

“Whatever may happen to me, so long as Her Majesty survives, there will be no problem,” he went on, with nothing but conviction in his voice. “And let it be said... I also personally wish to help Shinichi. And I must repay Minori for her generous provision of bee-ell books. I have the status, I have the authority. Permit me this one selfish indulgence.”

I was so stunned that I didn’t know what to say. I’d always taken Minister Cordobal to be a calm, rational person—but I guess there was a hidden passion there.

“Even though you will not permit our own,” Her Majesty said with open dissatisfaction. Knowing her, I’m sure she’d tried to wheedle him into letting her come help Shinichi-san as well.

“Your Majesty is the Empress, as you well know,” Minister Cordobal said firmly. “It would be disastrous for our nation if anything should happen to the occupant of the throne.”

“Says the one first in line for the succession. But in any event, very well.” Her Majesty let out a long breath, then looked up at us. “In our own name, that of Petralka an Eldant III, we command you! Go, quickly, and save the world!”

All of us—me, Loek, Romilda, and Minister Cordobal—bowed our heads to the adorable empress and replied in unison: “Yes, Your Majesty!”

The great hall of the Dragon’s Den was rife with tension. The Undertakers stood across from us, at the entrance to the staircase that led deeper into the facility. And they had Myusel as their hostage. An Eleamachi-tribe killer had a dagger at her neck, as if to say: one wrong move, and the elf gets it. And behind him were no fewer than three soldiers with imarufe bisurupeguze, bombs known as “the Consuming Flame.”

Who did we have? We had me, Elvia, Minori-san, Amatena, Clara, and Falmelle-san, along with various members of Faugron & Associates. And Theresa.

Caught in between these two groups were a number of Bahairamanian citizens, looking back and forth between us with agitation. They didn’t know which group to back. Because they were, after all, Bahairamanian, you might have expected them to unquestioningly follow the Undertakers, but since the soldiers had announced that they were going to annihilate the Dragon’s Den in order to save it, the citizens were understandably wary of just going along with their plan.

Besides, we had Amatena and Clara on our side. Bahairamanian soldiers of our own. And Amatena had tried to convince the Undertakers that it would be stupid to blow themselves up. From the perspective of local values, she probably sounded the more sensible, I guessed.

To be fair, the civilians probably didn’t make a lot of difference in the overall equation. Not counting them, our numbers were about equal. But the soldiers had Myusel as a hostage, plus three bombs, so they definitely held the upper hand. I didn’t know if the imarufe bisurupeguze worked exactly the same way bombs did in our world, but it was always possible that if one went off, the others would follow in a chain reaction. Even without the hostage situation, we would have had to approach this very, very carefully.

This was no good. There was no obvious way to deal with this. That was why Minori-san and Amatena were both standing there, looking serious but not doing anything. As soldiers themselves, if there’d been any normal way of handling this, they would have been way more equipped than the likes of me. They would’ve done something already.

But at that moment...

“Hoo... Hoo hoo hoo... Hoo hoo hoo hoo hahahahaha!”

“What the hell?!” The Undertakers flinched at the sudden burst of laughter.

“Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahha!”

It was just something I decided to try. I know you’re wondering: what did I hope to accomplish by laughing?

When you didn’t have any good way to come at an opponent, sometimes the only thing left was to set up a verbal smokescreen. Maybe the only thing I could do was bluff as hard as I could, and try to create some sort of opening we could exploit. If the enemy lost their will to fight, that would be perfect, but at the very least maybe I could distract them. Give Minori-san, Amatena, and Clara an opportunity to do something. Maybe. Possibly. I hoped.

And so I laughed while I thought. “Hahahahahaha, ahhh haahahaha!”

Umm. Ummmm. Let’s see. We got as far as the laughing. What comes after that? Think! Think, Kanou Shinichi! We need to buy time somehow!

I decided to go the “diss” route. “What are you all, stupid?!” I said, still laughing. “Hahaha, of course you are—complete idiots!”

“Idiots?” demanded the soldier with the knife to Myusel’s throat, his bulging eyes sweeping the room.

Ah, they took the bait. Okay, next... Uh, next......

“You say you’ll never give us the Dragon’s Den? That you’ll blow it up instead? Ahh hahahahaha! God! I’d like—haha! I’d like to see that!”

“Wha?” I could see a tremor run among the Undertakers. Then again, the Faugron people looked equally shocked. Please, just don’t come butting in, okay?! I thought.

“What do you think we came here for?! To destroy this facility! And now you’re going to do our work for us? Never had such an easy mission!”

When you tell a person not to do something, they want to do it—but when you order them to do it, suddenly they don’t want to. The Undertakers thought that by blowing up the Dragon’s Den, they would be preserving their pride and rubbing the Eldant army’s noses in it at the same time. But if I told them that was exactly what we wanted, it might make them think twice.

“Just what the hell—”

“You lot think your puppet drakes are just wonderful, don’t you? Fancy new weapon! You’re so sure we in Eldant must be just dying to have some of our own! That’s why you’re so certain we’re here to steal the technology from you! Ahh hahahaha!”

“What—are you trying to say that isn’t what you’re after?”

“It isn’t at all! Not at all. We, the Holy Eldant Empire, already have weapons that can easily match your puppet drakes. In fact, the Empire has already defeated puppet drakes two or three times—without a single casualty!”

That part was true. The time when the Faldra had come to rescue me was one. The time the rogue puppet drake had wandered into Eldant territory was another. Strictly speaking, it was JSDF weaponry that had struck the final blow in each case, but I figured this would be enough to throw these guys off the scent.

The key to getting people to believe a big lie is mixing in a bunch of small truths. It makes people more willing to swallow the whopper. Including some facts the other person can easily verify makes your lie all the more persuasive. I learned that a long time ago from my light-novelist dad. I wasn’t sure if the Undertakers knew that several puppet drakes had in fact been defeated, but I assumed there was a good chance they’d heard the news in some form or other. The puppet drakes were their shiny new weapons system, after all, produced right here in this facility.

Long story short, they would know that not everything I was saying was complete nonsense. As for the rest, I just had to sound confident. Or at least try.

“It’s simple. The Eldant Empire wanted to buy a little time while they brought mass production of the new weapon online. After all, we do recognize that the puppet drakes are powerful stuff. It would be no fun for us if you were able to put a bunch of them in the air before we could get our new weapon underway.”

The Undertakers looked at each other, shocked. Hey! They were buying it! All right!

“And so, here we are to destroy the production center of your puppet drakes. Need I reiterate? We don’t want the technology. If capture had been our mission, I assure you we would have come with a larger force.”

That really got a rise out of the soldiers.

“In any event, if we slow down production of your little pets, that’s good enough for us. If it stops altogether, even better. So if you’re so eager to destroy the Dragon’s Den, then be our guests. It would certainly make my life easier.”

I gave a dismissive wave of my hand specifically to provoke them, even though I could feel cold sweat running down my back. There was always an outside chance they’d just reply: “Huh, then I guess everyone will be happy!” and blow the Dragon’s Den to pieces. Along with all of us. And I didn’t want that.

So I decided to try something else. “Mm, one little wrinkle, though. I would like to get back to Eldant alive,” I said, shrugging as nonchalantly as I could. “So if you want to blow yourselves up, feel free, but be so kind as to do it after we’ve left.”

“Hey! We’re the ones with the hostage here!”

“Yes, a hostage who came here with me as part of the demolitions team, fully cognizant of the risks she was running. Isn’t that right, Myusel?” I smiled, while surreptitiously trying to show her my phone, on which I had typed in Japanese, in the biggest font I could find, “Not true. Play along.” I was a little worried she wouldn’t be close enough to read it, but—

“Wha? Ahem, yes! Of course I did!” she said with an authoritative nod.

“I’ll be sure to inform Minister Cordobal of your valiant sacrifice, Myusel,” I said. “Rest assured the Eldant Empire will take good care of your family. That sick brother of yours? As blood relation to someone who helped complete a mission of this importance, I’m sure he’ll live the rest of his life in luxury at the Empire’s expense. Go to your grave with a serene heart!”

“Y-Yes, sir!”

Uh, Myusel? That nod’s a little too cheerful. Try for something more tragic, okay? But I couldn’t say that out loud, so I decided to forge ahead.

“Shinichi-sa—” Elvia seemed about to say something—maybe she didn’t quite grasp my strategy—but Clara rushed over and clamped a hand over her mouth, while Amatena placed a hand on her shoulder, urging her to stay still. Thank goodness she was a quick thinker.

“Eh, I guess it’d be just as well if she didn’t have to die,” I said, adding as pointedly as I could: “Even if it is for the mission.”

Excepting certain cases of suicidal ideation and maybe some very specific sexual proclivities, people, in general, don’t want to die. They want to survive if they can. I had to think the Undertakers were the same way. They told themselves it was their job, their duty, their mission, and that was why they were willing to blow themselves up. It sounded cool, sure, but when they learned it would all be for nothing, what would that do to them? These soldiers hadn’t just popped into existence. They had families, probably friends, loved ones. And if they knew they were going to be remembered as those idiots who blew themselves up and still only helped the enemy, why would they ever throw their lives away?

I was wagering that they wouldn’t.

“So hey, wait til we’re at a safe distance before you set off those magical weapons, okay? Tell you what—we’ll start a rumor that the Undertakers blew themselves up real good for the sake of the Kingdom.”

The Undertakers still looked shocked, but not quite the same way as they had before. The unusual situation had gotten them all hyped up to destroy themselves, but now it was registering with them that it would be pointless—that other people might even think they were stupid for doing it.

What I’d said was a bluff, of course, but it wasn’t a complete lie. It would be pointless for them to blow themselves up. We’d come here to rescue Falmelle-san, not to take over the Dragon’s Den, so they definitely wouldn’t gain anything. That part was totally true.

“Right, see you later. Or not,” I said, turning my back on Myusel and the Undertakers, continuing the bluff. Falmelle-san was staring daggers at me, maybe because she thought I was abandoning her daughter, but I tried to make my smile say: “C’mon, everyone, let’s go.”

“Good idea,” Minori-san said, getting in on the act. “If we don’t hurry, reclamation forces from Bahairam will show up.” Given how important the Dragon’s Den was, and how important the entire Third Capital was, there was every chance the Bahairamanian military would get involved here.

Then it was Amatena’s turn: “No, wait, Shinichi. I think it would be better to make sure this lot blow themselves to pieces before we go. If even one of them survives, word might get out that I’m a turncoat.”

One by one, the Undertakers began to look at the ground. Until finally...

“Damn it all...” The Eleamachi soldier holding Myusel hostage let her go, giving her a shove. She took two or three stumbling steps, then looked back, surprised. But the Undertakers had lost all interest in her; their spirits seemed broken.

“Myusel!” Falmelle-san cried, rushing over and embracing her. Good. At least we had gotten Myusel back safely. The Undertakers must have decided there was no point using the imarufe bisurupeguze anymore, because they set the boxes on the ground and didn’t look like they were going to go for them again.

All right. We were pulling this off, somehow. Man, forget cold sweat. I felt like my stomach was about to turn itself inside out. I let out a small breath of relief.

“Not bad, not bad at all,” Theresa said from beside me, arms crossed. “But if you’re going to make the most of this, you’d better do it quick.”

“Huh...?”

“I’ve just had a report from our BOUs patrolling outside.” Theresa tapped a finger against her temple. I guess she had some sort of ability to communicate with the nekkids—er, the BOUs, the things we called demi-humans. The genetically enhanced soldiers. This was when having a cyborg, or an android or whatever, came in handy. I wondered if the nekkids had communication devices embedded in their brains or what. But anyway...

“The—what did you call them?” Theresa said. “Bahairamanians? Anyway, the people who used to be here—a military unit that looks like one of theirs is advancing our position. The BOUs are engaging them, but it sounds like there’s a lot of them.”

“Really?” I stole a glance at the Undertakers, but they showed no special reaction. But then, Theresa wasn’t wearing a magic ring, so they had no way to understand what she was saying. I guess Theresa probably realized that, or she wouldn’t have said anything.

“They have a crest that looks like this...” And then, just like before, she placed her palm on the wall to produce a floating picture. It was a figure of a crest; not a photograph, but sort of like a computer-generated image. It showed the flag of the Kingdom of Bahairam, and below it, a design that looked vaguely military. At least, that was all I could make out of it.

It was Amatena and Clara who reacted instead. “Where did that come from?”

“It’s the Eastern Second Unit...”

“I guess a unit with this emblem on their flag is heading this way,” I whispered to them.

Amatena gasped. “The Eastern Second Unit? But that means...”

“Your honored elder sister...” Clara said, and then she and Amatena leaned toward each other and held a whispered conference.

“Shinichi,” Amatena said to me. “Unless I’m mistaken, that unit is a decoy.”

“A decoy?”

“My older sister Jijilea is attached to the Eastern Second Unit. It’s led by a man who specializes in ambushes, surprise attacks, and general treachery. I wouldn’t expect a frontal assault from them.” She furrowed her brow.

“Surprise attacks,” I echoed. The words sounded so simple, but it was hard to guess what this leader might actually do. Whatever it was, though, the one thing that was clear was that he intended to take back the Dragon’s Den.

I said the first thing that came into my head: “If this were a bank heist or something, they would dig a tunnel underground.” And at that moment:

Boom.

“Huh?”

We all turned toward the rumble from deep within the facility, down the tunnel that led to the lower levels.

“Theresa?” I said.

“I don’t see any anomalies in the facility—wait. What’s that?” She looked just a little worried. Maybe even she, the administrator of the Dragon’s Den, with immediate access to all its systems and communications, didn’t know quite what was going on. But that would have to mean...

The next moment, soldiers in armor started pouring out of the tunnel.

Wait, did they seriously—?!

One of the soldiers brandished a sword and cried: “Kill them! Kill them all!”

The metal dragon danced into the air with a rush of wind, its wings spread wide. The scarlet Faldra took the lead, with the four green ones leaping into the brilliant blue behind it. They made a big circle in the sky, making sure everyone was accounted for, and then the transport unit for the forbidden armor went flying off to the west.

Standing there on the practice grounds watching them go, we heaved a sigh. In our heart of hearts, we wished we could be riding in that red Faldra, rushing off to help Shinichi. But the Empress of the Holy Eldant Empire could hardly be part of an infiltration mission into the Kingdom of Bahairam. Then there was the matter of Hikaru’s story. We did not doubt it, of course not, but even if the world was in danger, the Eldant Empire, including our capital of Marinos, was currently suffering the effects of the earthquake. With fear spreading among the people, and other nations, not just Bahairam, circling like vultures, the empress could not leave the city.

“We will return to the castle,” we informed the royal guard, then spun on our heel and headed for the carriage parked beside the practice ground.

But at that moment, someone cried: “Your Majesty!” It was Zahar and several soldiers, hurrying onto the grounds. The patches on the soldiers’ shoulders indicated their various units—they appeared to be from the forces that oversaw the so-called “hyperspace tunnel” that connected our empire to Ja-pan. Then again, “overseeing” might be a strong term. They were mostly responsible for patrolling the area around the tunnel, and for operating the “lid” that had been placed on it after a close call involving the disappearance of magical power. The tunnel itself was not something any of us could control.

“What is going on?” we demanded. If Zahar had come all the way here to summon us, it must be a matter of considerable concern.

“It’s— ahem—” Our prime minister was struggling to get the words out. This was unusual. Most unusual. “We... don’t exactly know,” he said finally.

“You don’t know,” we repeated. And yet Zahar had come here as if there was an emergency.

We looked at him, and Zahar wiped the sweat from his bald pate with a handkerchief as he said: “It’s rather unprecedented...”

“Your Majesty,” one of the soldiers said, “if you’ll forgive my saying so, I think it may be best for you to see for yourself.”

In other words, something was happening with the “hyperspace tunnel,” something all of them could tell was significant.

“Of all the times...” we mumbled, but then we realized: whatever was happening, could it, too, be related to the earthquake, and to whatever Shinichi and his friends were doing? And if so, perhaps whatever was going on with the tunnel was not mere happenstance, but deeply connected. “Very well. Show us,” we said, and climbed into the carriage.

The Dragon’s Den was absolute chaos. The Undertakers, suddenly confronted with reinforcements from a direction they had never expected, were at a loss how to respond. They’d been in a weird place, convinced by my chatter—my bluff—that even though agents of an enemy nation were inside their country’s most important military facility, they shouldn’t do anything. That even though, if these soldiers survived, they would almost certainly be held responsible for not stopping us, if they blew themselves up, they would only be helping the enemy. And just when they had finally started to give in, along came the cavalry.

If what Amatena said was true, though, the Undertakers didn’t necessarily get along with the rest of the military. Even if there wasn’t open fighting among the factions, it seemed the Undertakers were viewed with distaste by other soldiers. I guess it was only to be expected that friction like that would occur. Elite military units being at odds with the soldiers they encounter on the ground is practically a trope in manga and anime.

So when the soldiers of the Eastern Second Unit, led by some dwarven sappers (they must have dug a tunnel with their magic to get in here), discovered the Undertakers were alive, they didn’t actually look that thrilled. In fact, they almost seemed to ignore them, coming straight for us instead. It seemed to leave the Undertakers without a clear part to play. They hesitated to join the Eastern Second Unit for some reason, but they obviously couldn’t join us and fight the other Bahairamanian soldiers. So instead they didn’t do anything, watching as the scene descended into madness.

And then the Eastern Second Unit commander gave that order, “Kill them! Kill them all!” That left the Bahairamanian civilians, to say nothing of the people from Faugron & Associates, devastated. The Bahairamanians in particular were in a bind: it looked like if they tried to step forward to prove they weren’t Eldant soldiers, they might be cut down by their own military.

Amatena and Clara were trying to put themselves between the Eastern Second Unit and the people. “Stop this! These people are—” But the soldiers didn’t seem to be listening; they just attacked. Amatena and Clara each drew a dagger and parried the enemy’s blows, but they were wildly outnumbered. Not to mention, they didn’t really want to kill anyone from the Eastern Second Unit, so they were put purely on the defensive.

That was the last straw: Theresa snapped. “Listen, you shithead sons of bitches! You think you can just march into a person’s house and start turning the place upside down?! I hope you came ready to go to your freaking graves for it!” Then she took a great leap—I could hear the whack as she kicked off the ground—and landed smack in the middle of the enemy forces. Her legs and arms, which had looked so delicate, whipped this way and that, catching every enemy soldier within reach and sending them flying.

Bam, bam, bambambam. The hits sounded too loud to be barehanded strikes. Maybe it was—you know. The sound of armor caving in under a blow. Geez! Was she crunching armor with her bare hands?

“Wh-Who the hell is this?!”

“Damn, she’s strong!”

The Eastern Second Unit started to lose cohesion.

For one thing, Theresa wasn’t a human, she was an avatar. Milspec. She had obviously been designed for hand-to-hand combat. And if her unit was anything like Hikaru-san’s, it was probably a “slime” that was only temporarily in human form. Slice it, stab it, it wasn’t likely to do a lot of good.

But one person is still just one person. There had to be at least a hundred enemy soldiers, and Theresa wasn’t going to hold them off all alone. Then again, if she were less interested in protecting us than in simply murdering everyone in the Eastern Second Unit, she might actually have managed it—eventually.

In any event, the end result was soldiers collapsed on the ground all around Theresa.

“Shinichi-kun!”

“Shinichi-sama!”

Minori-san and Elvia dove between me and a group of soldiers coming my way. Minori-san must have decided she couldn’t use her gun in the melee, because she was holding a military-issue knife. Elvia, meanwhile, was going hand-to-hand with the soldiers.

“You stinking—!” Elvia folded her fingers back and struck an opponent forcefully with the palm of her hand (it looked a bit like a cat punch, I’ve gotta say), then kicked out her leg and swept another guy’s feet out from under him. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen her go on the attack very often, but she was a werewolf just like her older sister Amatena, and she could do some damage when she wanted to.

As for Minori-san, well, that went without saying. This was someone who had once roundhouse-kicked a dragon, and stood toe to toe with Amatena (again, a werewolf). So despite the craziness all over, I was actually pretty safe.

“You airheads!”

“Mud-loving shrimps!”

Not far away, Myusel, Falmelle-san, and the Faugron people were using their wind magic against the soldiers. They seemed to be in a sort of magic showdown with the dwarves who had been the first to burst in, but there wasn’t too much stabbing or punching going on. I wondered if it was really the historic enmity between elves and dwarves that had caused the sappers to go straight for Myusel and the others. The two groups were actually starting to get along in Eldant, but these were Bahairamanian soldiers, so I guess some open hostility was understandable.

“Shinichi-sama—!” Myusel seemed to be trying to keep one eye on me, but there were Eastern Second Unit soldiers all over between us, and she couldn’t get to me. In fact, it might be more dangerous for her to carelessly try to link up with me than it would be to stay where she was.

“There’s too damn many of ’em!” Theresa shouted, even as she fought like a lion—or maybe I should say a god of destruction. Well, she was right. We could put our backs to the walls in this large room, so we weren’t in danger of being surrounded and snuffed out, but there were still only about thirty of us total, and at least a hundred of the enemy. Three times our number, even by the roughest calculation. And the Eastern Second Unit soldiers seemed to have realized how dangerous Theresa was, because they were keeping their distance from her, firing magic or stabbing at her with their swords to pin her in place.

“And I can’t call back the BOUs from outside!” Theresa added.

“Oh, uh... Oh.”

Theresa had sent the BOUs—the nekkids and dragons and stuff—outside in the first place to patrol for trouble, but now they were engaged with the Eastern Second Unit, which had the city surrounded on three sides. It was sort of guerrilla warfare, hitting and running, slowing them down, and bringing the BOUs back into the Den would mean practically inviting the rest of the Eastern Second Unit in with them. Worst-case scenario, we could end up caught in a pincers movement between them and the soldiers we were already fighting.

Ugh... Could we be in even bigger trouble than it looked like?!

I backed up Elvia and Minori-san with Tifu Murottsu as I tried desperately to think of something.

“Argh, this is all just one giant pain in the ass!” Theresa yelled, and then there was a thump as she took another stupendous leap. She somersaulted through the air, landing squarely between me and Minori-san. She placed one of her hands on the nape of Minori-san’s neck, and the other on my forehead.

“Huh?” I said. “H-Hey, what are you—”

“We’re not getting anywhere like this,” Theresa said. “And we can’t get to the BOUs. But I can temporarily grant full administrative privileges for this facility to full-blooded humans. Here goes!”

“No, wait—what does that even mean?!” I cried, but Theresa didn’t look in any mood to explain. The next instant, a soft, blue-white glow emanated from her palms against my head and Minori-san’s neck. It didn’t hurt; it wasn’t even warm. But then...

“Wha?”

I had this feeling. I can’t quite explain it, but it was like my senses had... changed, ever so slightly. I didn’t know what Theresa had done to me, but she was already done doing it; she jumped back into the fray with the Eastern Second Unit, leaving me and Minori-san to fend for ourselves.

That didn’t seem, you know, great for us. What was going on?

“Shinichi-kun!” Minori-san cried, snapping me back to reality. I saw three soldiers from the Eastern Second Unit rushing toward us. I reflexively intoned the Tifu Murottsu spell I’d been using, but to my shock, before I had finished chanting—practically the moment I brought my hands up—a massive Tifu Murottsu blew the soldiers backward. It even caught up some of the guys behind them.

“Huh?!”

Wh—What was this all about? The power was incredible, and I hadn’t even chanted the entire spell...

“I increased your interface privileges with the micromachines by two levels,” Theresa told us, even as she continued fighting. Some of the soldiers out there were Eleamachi tribespeople, and it looked like they had decided to gang up on her. Even Theresa was struggling against these opponents. She wasn’t going to be sending them toppling like bowling pins the way she had with those first enemies. “Only within this building,” she added. “The facility’s communications network will handle the calculations, so you don’t have to know what it’s doing. Imagine a way to take down some enemies and then use it!”

Huh? So, uh, what did that mean? The micromachines she mentioned—those were what they called sprites here in this world. And now we had increased “interface privileges” with them... Did that mean we could use the micromachines more easily? In other words, that we could use more magic...?!

“Hold on... So...” I decided to test it out the most famous way I knew how: I pulled my right arm back. I stuck my left arm forward. I placed my palms by my hip and cried, “Kaaaamehaaaaaameee—”

Store it up, store it up!

“Shinichi-kun? What are you doing?!” Minori-san said. Guess she hadn’t caught on yet.

Me, I shouted: “—ha!!”

A ray of light burst from my outstretched palms and slammed into the Eastern Second Unit soldiers.

Yes! It worked, it really worked!

Not only that, but my body felt unusually light and agile, like the micromachines were helping me move. Was this sort of like having an invisible power-assist suit?

“Minori-san, I think we’ve got a chance!” I said, clenching my fist. The word CLENCH! briefly appeared above my fist before fading into the air. Holy crap, we even got sound effects! “Just think of a technique, shout out the name—and you’ll get it!” I said, twisting my hips as far as they would go, far enough to challenge my joints. Wow! I was immediately surrounded by onomatopoeia reading RM RM RM RM. I was totally just like Joj*! Awesome!

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean like manga and anime and stuff! We can straight-up use those attacks!”

“I’ve never heard anything so stupid...” Minori-san said, but even as she spoke she took a wide stance and exclaimed, “Eight-Hundred-Style Ha***kyu?!” And then she kicked the empty air. Suddenly a massive soccer ball or something appeared and went flying away as if she had kicked it, producing SHOING! and BONK sound effects as it trailed circles behind it in the air.

Naturally, all the soldiers in its way were knocked over. Talk about power. It sort of seemed to me like maybe Amatena, Clara, and a few of the Faugron people had been caught up by the rampaging soccer ball, but... eh, they all got to their feet again after a second, so I guess it was fine.

“The heck was that?” I asked.

“Uh, it’s something one of the characters uses in Prince of Soccer,” said Minori-san, sounding a bit startled by her own performance. “Maybe I should have stopped at Twenty-One-Style?”

“Looks like a little bit goes a long way, doesn’t it?” I said, but Minori-san and I both got what was happening now. Just picture a move, and it would happen! With sound effects and everything! It was awesome! We were literally in cheat mode.

This meant we could do famous moves like the Hokuto Hyaku*****ken or the Futae ** Kiwami or the Kimen Fla** or the Tiro Fi**le or the Dismember*** Halo or the Galactica Mag**m or the Bo*****ken or the Hardening Pu*ch or the Bourei**goku or the Eternal Force Blizz**d or the Diamon* Eternal or the [remainder omitted] as often as we wanted!

“Heh. Heh heh heh... Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo!”

Oops. Did I laugh like that out loud?

Anyway, Minori-san and I lined up, striking poses and chortling joyfully enough to make everyone else take a step back. Then I cried, “You’re finished!” (it was the first cool action-hero-like thing that popped into my head) and waded in.

It was enough to make a guy wish for some Vertical Maneuvering Equipment.

But anyway...

“Zangief’s Super Uryah Jou!”

“Sonic Boom!”

“Bro, get outta the way, I can’t kill her!”

“Catharsis **ve!”

“Fina* tiiime!”

“Your barrage is weak! What are you doing?!”

.........And so on and so forth. We shouted out every technique and move we could think of (even if some of them did seem a little bit off somehow), trusting to luck to hit the Eastern Second Unit soldiers and send them sprawling. It felt like I was starring in my own Dy***** Warriors game. Maybe call it Isekai War***** or something. The fun was in seeing how high you could drive the combo.

“What the hell are these people?!”

“This is ridiculaarrghh!”

“H—Help me!”

The Eastern Second Unit was in an uproar to see me and Minori-san suddenly turn so powerful. All they could do was gibber and shout. Especially about me, the guy who had looked like a shrimpy loser hiding behind a girl and providing covering fire with his magic.

Now the tables were turning. But then:

“Ah—ahh—ahhhh!”

Perhaps terrified by our sudden ability to fight like demons (or, uh, gods or something?), one of the Undertakers let out a deranged yell—just as Myusel and Falmelle-san were passing by him. And there at his feet was one of the abandoned imarufe bisurupeguze...

I gasped as the soldier shoved what appeared to be a key card into the bomb.

Crap!

Myusel, meanwhile, turned and ran toward the bomb, her hand outstretched. She must have been hoping to surround the explosion with wind magic to minimize the damage. The battle gear Petralka had given her strengthened her magic powers and would allow her to produce a spell many times stronger than normal. I’m sure that’s what she was banking on, but it was still an impossible plan.

“Um, uh, uhhhh,” I squawked in her direction. Then I cried: “Barrier!!” In my mind, I pictured a force field surrounding and containing the imarufe bisurupeguze. You know, something that looked barrier-ish. No sooner had I done so than the bomb filled the meter-ish in diameter space I imagined and exploded.

There was a muted bagoom! and the barrier glowed brightly. Flames licked at the force field for several seconds afterward, but they quickly disappeared, leaving only a patch of scorched ground exactly the shape of my barrier, with a big hole in the floor right in the center. Thirty centimeters wide, I’d guess. No telling how deep it was, but probably not deep enough for a person to hide in.

“Thank god,” I said, letting out a breath. “It worked.” I mean, I had been seriously improvising there.

“Shinichi-sama!” Myusel said, turning toward me, her eyes wide. She must have been shocked that my “barrier” had managed to completely suppress the imarufe bisurupeguze. Heck, so was I.

But there was something more important. “Myusel,” I said, “don’t do anything so crazy ever again.” When I’d seen her go running for the bomb, I’d literally felt my blood turn cold. “I think you took a few years off my life.”

“S-Sorry, sir,” she said, but she was still smiling: all’s well that ends well.

Except it hadn’t ended.

“Huh...?”

There was an audible crack, and then fissures started radiating out from the scorched hole in the floor. Straight toward Myusel.

“Oh no!” she cried. The cave-in happened in an instant. She seemed to be floating in midair—and then she disappeared into the rapidly expanding pit.

“Myusel!” I shouted, running up to the edge of the fissure she’d dropped into. “Myusel—Myusel?!” I called again and again, but there was no response. The area around the pit was weirdly warm, maybe from radiant heat. It was like having your face too close to a heater; you could tell you could get burned just by staying there too long. I gritted my teeth, though, and gazed down into the three-meter-wide hole.

To my surprise, I discovered a series of holes: through the crack in the ground I could see another one on the next level, and then another one, going down at least three floors. Wait...

“Is this my fault?!” I exclaimed. By containing the imarufe bisurupeguze inside my barrier, had I inadvertently taken advantage of the Munroe Effect, focusing the energy of the explosion on a single point and thereby blasting through several layers of this facility?!

Incidentally, the Munroe Effect (sometimes called the Neumann Effect) is what’s behind modern shaped explosive charges, especially those used in tank cannons and anti-tank missiles. In a word, it focuses the explosive power of the gunpowder on a single point, creating a blast with tremendous speed and heat that’s able to pierce even thick armor. It works on a similar principle to concave mirrors and parabolic antennas.

Then again, it was always possible that the Dragon’s Den had simply been weakened by the passage of time and a few good earthquakes. But whatever the case, unfortunately, I was the one who had given it that final push.

“Myusel!!” I squinted against the heat, but three floors down it was dark and I couldn’t really see anything. Including any sign of Myusel. The pit simply swallowed my gaze and my voice, as if it led straight down to hell.

My face was battered by hot wind. I didn’t think it had come from the bomb. It was obviously blowing up from whatever was down there.

Is that the effect of the reactor? The reactor was supposed to be on the very lowest level. Maybe this heat was escaping from the rogue device. And I’d just given the hot air somewhere to go. That was my guess.

Fall down into temperatures like that, and it might not kill you immediately... but it wouldn’t be fun.

“Myuseeelllll!” I shouted as loud as I could, but there was no answer.