Chapter Three: One Way or Another?

We hadn’t the slightest idea what it was. It would almost have been ridiculous to think it could be understood. The giant castle that had appeared out of thin air upended all our notions of common sense. For that matter, we weren’t even sure if it really was a castle or not. We simply didn’t have any other words that approached describing it.

The way it widened as it went up, the completely flat roof, the tower that sprouted from one corner: even from a distance, it was stupefyingly large. Then there were the strange dagger-shaped things arranged on the roof. Things that occasionally launched into the sky with a great roar. What in the world were they? Bahairam had flying weapons in the form of our puppet drakes, but from what I had seen, these things flew far faster, although by the same token, they were unable to perform the nimble maneuvers of a good puppet drake.

“This is Eldant’s doing, I’m sure of it. They got their dwarves to do one of their little magic tricks. Or maybe they got their friends in Ja-pan or wherever it is to send them those flying things. Doesn’t matter. We can’t just ignore that thing.”

Such was the assessment of Bahairam’s Eastern Army. Personally, I, Jijilea Harneiman, felt this was going a bit overboard. But since my Eastern Second Unit had been involved in the disaster at the Third Capital just recently, the catastrophe that lost us the Dragon’s Den, my influence was very much diminished, and I doubted the other commanders would listen to anything I had to say.

It was true that the dwarves possessed superb building abilities—Bahairam had engaged dwarves from abroad itself to help build a variety of structures—but I didn’t think even they could construct such a massive thing in the middle of nowhere in a single day. Nothing comes from nothing. Even dwarven magic demanded resources and at least a modicum of time for building.

A few people wondered whether the thing might be a magically created illusion, but our own wizards said that there was no sign of magic in use, and that the wind currents in the wilderness suggested the massive object was really there.

It all gave me a very bad feeling.

“Harneiman.”

“Yes, sir?”

Emerging from one of several tents standing in the shadow of a mountain was my commanding officer, the general in charge of the Eastern Second Unit. “What’s the story on the Eleamachi?”

“First Team got back a few minutes ago, sir. We’re expecting Second Team in soon,” I said.

The Eleamachi tribe were lizardmen, but they weren’t like the rest of their kind—they were especially suited to covert operations. They could change the color and pattern of their skin at will and very quickly, allowing them to blend into almost any environment. It made them ideal spies—or assassins—and our military freely used them that way. I was assigned a single squadron of them, which I had broken into two teams and sent to gather intelligence on the mysterious castle.

“Only hitch is, sir, they weren’t able to get inside.”

“Too much to ask? I figured,” the general said with a frown.

“I’m sorry, sir. That thing being what it is... I’m afraid even the Eleamachi tribe couldn’t manage.” I looked at the castle, which got bigger as it went up. It would have been hard enough to tackle if the walls had been vertical, but instead they arched gently, making them almost impossible to climb. Not to mention there were no windows to speak of, no handholds one might scramble up, and on top of that the entire thing seemed to be made of metal, offering no purchase for climbing equipment. Even the Eleamachi had their limits.

My commander wanted to know who we were dealing with before we took definitive action, but I didn’t have the answer now, and I didn’t expect to get it when Second Team came back.

“Now, this is a pickle...”

“Sir.”

“And there’s the Dragon’s Den to consider, too. Taking on an opponent without knowing the first thing about them is just asking for trouble. But when I try to tell that to the other commanders, they just call me a coward.” The general ran his fingers through his beard and smiled a little.

“They’d call a general a coward, sir?” This particular officer was one of the most hawkish in Bahairam’s military. A lifer who was probably carrying a sword before he could walk. The kind of person who would gladly choose death on the battlefield over expiring quietly in bed.

“Can’t say I don’t know how they feel,” he said. “We haven’t had any serious fights with Eldant in a while. No chance for anyone to distinguish themselves, earn promotions. It must grate on them, just like it does on us.”

I didn’t say anything—what could I say? He was right. The Eastern Second Unit wasn’t supposed to have been alone in the attempt to reclaim the Third Capital. The First, Third, and Fifth Units were supposed to support us. But they had been late, and with the situation deteriorating quickly, we’d begun the operation without them. That had contributed to a number of unexpected outcomes, not least the failure of the operation. The general of the Second Unit had lost considerable face, and the leaders of the other units weren’t afraid to rub his nose in it.

As my commander said, there hadn’t been any big battles for a while, and we were itching for some medals. There’d just been a major purge of corrupt military leaders, too, and the people who had come into their own as a result were eager to prove themselves in battle.

“Second Unit is to wait in reserve. First, Third, and Fifth Units are going to surround that thing and try to bring it down. There are puppet drakes ready to go.”

“I thought it might turn out that way...”

Dropping the troops in with puppet drakes—that seemed like the most practical way inside. Thankfully, the roof was flat, with plenty of places for soldiers to land.

“Sun’ll be setting soon, though. Nobody wants a night battle with an enemy we don’t know anything about, no matter how eager they are. They’ll wait for sunrise tomorrow and then—”

The general was interrupted by a massive roar.

“What the hell?!” I exclaimed.

“Some sort of magical attack?”

The general and I both looked in the direction of the castle. In the deepening dusk, we saw lights blinking on the roof. There were several more claps of thunder. No—it couldn’t be thunder. It must be magic, or some other kind of attack similar to it.

“Bronzer Harneiman!” One of my subordinates came running up to me, calling my name. “The second Eleamachi team—”

“What about them?”

“They got caught in the castle’s attack. There are serious injuries!”

Shit! Was it a mistake to send the Eleamachi to do reconnaissance? I suspected the castle had noticed the tribesmen, provoking the attack just now. Had our Eleamachi been wounded by a direct strike, or were they just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Our camp was starting to come alive. Then I heard: “All units! Prepare to attack!” It was the generals, emerging from one of the tents, shouting. The soldiers, who had been waiting around, got to their feet and formed up.

“Guess things are moving faster than I expected,” my commander said.

“I’ll keep my unit together and prepare to extract Second Team,” I said. I saluted my commander, then ran off to issue orders to my subordinates, including the other Eleamachi troops.

The report came just as we were about to leave the audience room.

“It’s begun,” Theresa said, stopping and pressing her pointer finger to her head.

“It has? What’s begun?”

“Just what you thought, I suspect,” Theresa said darkly. “Combat between the Nimitz and the local troops from Bahairam.”

Everyone in the room went tense.

“What are you talking about? How is it you know that?” Petralka demanded.

“Like I think I said, I’ve got a direct line with the facility—the place you guys like to call the Dragon’s Den. The BOUs I left there—basically soldiers under my command—got in touch with me. Silver lining, it looks like it isn’t all-out warfare yet.” Theresa was frowning deeply.

She said the dragon BOUs she’d had observing the situation had detected gunshots. We didn’t have any details, but someone on the Nimitz must have gotten tired of the staring contest—or Bahairam must have done something to provoke them. Luckily, both sides seemed to be unsure how powerful an enemy they were dealing with, so at the moment they were restricting themselves to keeping a safe distance and unleashing intermittent bursts of ranged weaponry or magic.

At least the Nimitz hadn’t yet turned one of its fighter jets loose. But things were definitely escalating.

“The people on the Nimitz know they can’t fight forever,” Theresa said. “I assume their nuclear reactor was cooled with seawater. Now that they’re on land, it’s only a matter of time until it goes out of control. They’ll have to shut it down. But that will mean disabling most of their fighting capabilities, putting them at a military disadvantage.”

“You’re saying...”

“Now that the shooting’s started, I don’t think they’re going to be sitting down for a chat with the Bahairamanians. They’ll try to take out the most dangerous enemies while they have the wherewithal. It’s the only natural thing.” This time Theresa shrugged.

In other words, it wouldn’t be long before the Nimitz began deploying its jets and helicopters. It was possible the only reason they weren’t doing it yet was because they were busy switching to air-to-ground weaponry.

“Bad! This is bad! We’ve gotta do something!” I wailed, but as I looked around the room, I saw only reticence and unease.

“We could perhaps have dealt with this situation were it within our own territory... But it’s across the border, in Bahairam,” Petralka said from the throne, looking anxious. “After what happened at the Dragon’s Den, using too much force would risk the displeasure of our neighbors.”

“Urgh...”

Petralka was talking about when Eldant had sent a squadron of Faldras to deliver the forbidden armor to us at the Dragon’s Den, smack in the middle of the Third Capital. It had been absolutely necessary to prevent a massive tragedy, but neither Bahairam nor the other nations around Eldant knew the circumstances; all they saw was a provocation.

“If we send in troops without proper care, not only might it be taken as opportunistic provocation, they might well imagine we’re sending reinforcements to this Nimitz,” Garius said from beside Petralka.

“Uh...” He was certainly right. Even worse, if we weren’t lucky, the Nimitz itself might easily mistake the Eldant troops for another enemy army. They had no idea that other twenty-first-century humans like themselves were here in this world. It would only be natural to assume any troops they spotted were hostile.

“Maybe the best idea would be to get within radio range and try to establish contact that way,” said Minori-san, who had been quiet until that moment.

“What are you suggesting?” Garius asked.

“As I believe you know, sir, we possess means of communicating across distances. Although we don’t have any really powerful communications devices with us right at this moment, I’m afraid...” She frowned.

Right at this moment? Oh, yeah. That was the sort of thing they would already have dragged back through the wormhole.

“But if we could get close enough, we could try using a standard-issue infantry radio handset to communicate. Send out calls on different frequencies and see if we could get a response. The JSDF and the U.S. Armed Forces have a cordial relationship, so it’s a start.”

That was actually a pretty good idea. With a wireless unit, we wouldn’t have to get in between the Nimitz and the Bahairamanians. We could stay far enough away that they probably wouldn’t assume we were enemies.

Theresa, though, said, “I’m not so sure about that. I’ll grant I don’t know the exact specs on equipment from your era, but don’t they lock down the communications devices once fighting starts? Once the age of electronic warfare dawned, they were so scared of accidentally leaving a channel open and getting hacked that they started taking extreme measures.”

“Oops...”

It was true—when digital communications and computer networks became potential tools of war, there was always the specter of electronic warfare, including hacking contests between sides. There would obviously be firewalls and defensive measures to protect their computers. At the very least, they would expect codes and call signs; they wouldn’t just open their lines to a random signal from who knew where.

“In my time, analog wireless was extinct in the military,” Theresa said. “I don’t know much about it, to be frank.”

“It’s possible they might still have analog comm lines...” Minori-san said. “It’s the basic building block of intercepting enemy wireless communications, after all.”

“You think so?” Theresa said.

It had been a time of transition from analog to digital. Even the military still used a mix of both methodologies. We had no way of knowing exactly what the Nimitz was equipped with.

“What I’m hearing is, we can’t be sure it’ll work, but if we don’t try it, we can be sure there will be trouble,” Hikaru-san broke in. “So I think it’s time to take a few select people and send them to try to bring the Nimitz around. Am I wrong?”

“Select people?” I said, and then it hit me. Sending people from Eldant wouldn’t actually do any good. No one on the Nimitz had a magic interpreter ring, so even if we made contact with them, we would never be able to talk to them. We needed someone who spoke at least a few words of English. Or maybe just somebody who was at least from the same time period...

And out of the people who were here at this moment, that narrowed it down to... me, Minori-san, and Hikaru-san?!

“We don’t have much time, either,” Hikaru-san said. “We’ll have to take a Faldra and—”

“No, a Faldra would make our involvement too obvious,” Garius said.

Huh. I guess he was right. The Faldras were still technically secret, but they’d made enough incursions into Bahairam that they were probably recognized as an Eldant weapon by now.

“But who knows how long it might take to get there over land?” Hikaru-san said.

“Let me handle that,” Theresa said. “I flew in here on a BOU that’s still parked nearby. If I remove the functional restraints, it might make almost Mach One. I think that would be the quickest way to get where you want to go.”

“A flying BOU?” I said. “You mean...”

A dragon. They were considered to be wild animals in this world, so people wouldn’t assume it was Eldant messing around, and from the ground, the Bahairamanian soldiers wouldn’t know the difference between it and one of their puppet drakes. Which meant there was only one thing left...

Minori-san, Hikaru-san, and I all looked at each other. Who would go? Just one of us? Two? Or all three of us? It might be safest for several to go, just in case anything happened. But...

“You two stay here. I’ll go,” Minori-san said with a bit of a smile. “This is definitely a job for the JSDF. Shinichi-kun, Hikaru-kun, I’ll be seeing you.”

“Minori-san...”

Theresa and the BOU would protect us, I was confident, but it was still definitely a dangerous situation. If I just wandered into it, I might finally get myself killed. Or at least, slow Minori-san down. Maybe it really was best to let her handle this by herself. And yet...

“I’m too stupid to... to say the proper thing, like Her Majesty did... I’m so quick to... to say something so selfish to you, Shinichi-sama...”

“It’ll be so lonely without you, Sensei.”

“This girl’s something else! You should see her drawings!”

“It... It’s not very good, so please... don’t laugh...”

The events of the last several days spilled through my brain.

Another world. Not the world I’d been born in. And yet I, a simple otaku who’d become a home security guard after getting shot down by a girl, had been accepted by this world. By these people.

Directly or not, there was a danger to this world and to the people who lived here. If I just stayed inside and didn’t do anything, and this place ended up being destroyed—I would regret that forever. For the rest of my life, I would wish I had done things differently, but I wouldn’t have the chance. It would be no different from when I had found myself unable to come out of my room because my old friend rejected me.

And so, almost before I knew what I was doing, I said, “I’m going too. Partly to back you up, and partly so we have someone who can talk to the crew of the Nimitz.”

“But Shinichi-kun...”

“No, no, listen to me, Minori-san, Final Cou*tdown is pretty much happening in real life, and I’m not going to miss seeing it with my own eyes! Just try and stop me!” I clenched my fist for emphasis.

I don’t know how convincing I sounded. The truth is, my knees were shaking. But Minori-san just smiled and said, “Heh. Boys.”

“No.” I smiled back. “Otaku.”

Passing through the hyperspace wormhole involves one very unique phenomenon: the reversal of gravity. I had been through the passage many times by now, so I was accustomed to it, but it was a real shock to first-timers. It’s not simply that the direction of gravity reverses; instead, you can physically sense the strength of the gravitational force changing. Perhaps astronauts, or maybe those who have been on sub-orbital spaceflights in jet planes, would be familiar with the sensation.

“I see. Fascinating.” The man sitting across from me didn’t try to hide his amazement. With a shock of golden hair and clear blue eyes, he was the very image of what many Japanese people pictured when they heard the words “white person” or even simply “American.” His name was George Grisham, and he was a diplomat attached to one of several American military units sent to Japan in the name of disaster relief. They’d made landfall in Shizuoka without proper permission from the Japanese government (it was an emergency, they claimed), and had begun making their way inland. At the moment, they were in a standoff with the Chubu-region JSDF.

From his cleft chin to his short-cropped hair to his muscular body, Mr. Grisham looked less like a diplomat than he did the stereotypical American soldier. But why was a diplomat attached to a disaster relief squadron anyway?

Somebody must have leaked something, I thought. After what had happened with the Nimitz, the Japanese government had had no choice but to divulge the existence of the hyperspace wormhole to the Americans and ask for their help. The Americans, however, showed no sign of surprise at this astonishing request for cooperation, but instead dispatched this diplomat and his guard unit as if they’d been waiting for us to ask.

Let it be said that the decision to pull out of the other world was hardly unanimous. Parties both inside and outside the government who had dedicated no small amount of secret budgets to the project in hopes of gaining whatever rights might be available in the other world were against pulling out when there had been no demonstrable damage from our presence yet. I suppose it would be going too far to say they were willing to throw their lives away for money, but there was a surprising number of people for whom treasure weighed heavier in the balance than human life.

It was always possible that one of those parties, figuring they had nothing to lose, had let some information about the other world slip to the Americans, hoping that a little competition would scotch the withdrawal. Obviously, that opened up the likelihood that the place would be pillaged by the Americans, but the informants probably saw that as preferable to simply losing their investment entirely. There was always that possibility that a wrong move could destroy the world, but what did pragmatists like these care for scientists bleating about time paradoxes?

“Ahem. Mr. Matoba. How long does this ‘elevator’ take to reach the other side?”

“Just a few minutes more, I suspect,” I said. The reality was, though, that over the last several days, the duration of transit through the wormhole had been highly variable, so I couldn’t be certain. Japanese scientists had even posited the outside possibility of a case in which the elevator never reached the other side. “The wormhole is unstable. The physical distance from one end to the other changes depending on the day. Safety is not guaranteed, as I believe I explained several times. And as I believe you accepted.”

“Yes, of course. Most interesting,” Mr. Grisham said. Sitting in the seats beside him were a couple of soldiers in full kit, with automatic pistols and everything, as well as someone who was evidently their commanding officer—he had been introduced to me as Lieutenant Colonel John Randolph. Lt. Col. Randolph was a large man, but otherwise he looked more like a civil official than a soldier: he wore glasses, and the expression on his narrow face seemed perpetually high-strung.

“We’re putting ourselves in your hands, Mr. Matoba,” Lt. Col. Randolph said now. “But you should be aware that if anything happens to us, our country will not be silent about it.”

“Thank you, I wouldn’t expect them to,” I said, smiling to conceal the tumult inside me. I guess the lieutenant colonel had thought I was trying to threaten him. Ah, English could indeed be difficult. It was a neat, tidy language, but not suited to working subtle gradations of meaning into a conversation. “Let me assure you,” I continued, “we are approaching this unprecedented situation with the utmost caution, and it is only with the greatest reluctance that we invite people from our esteemed ally nation into a situation over whose safety we have less than complete control. Please understand.”

Lt. Col. Randolph glared at me silently. He still didn’t trust me. And I didn’t blame him. Japan had worked so hard to conceal the existence of the wormhole and the other world from the Americans—and now we had simply gone and told them. However difficult a decision it may have been for us, the Americans could well wonder if it wasn’t some plot on our part. They might think, for example, that the entire “accident” with the Nimitz had been part of the plan all along...

Yes, America and Japan were allies—but chiefly on paper. Military matters aside, our two countries were often at loggerheads politically—and Japan was often a unilateral punching bag. America might bestride the world as a colossus, but it was afflicted with ongoing economic malaise, class and racial divides, and other domestic tensions; criticizing its allies was a convenient pressure-release valve for its various internal arguments. This had become even more common under the new president, and it had gradually hardened Japan’s attitude toward America.

All the more reason for the Americans to suspect we might be planning something. In reality, Japan had simply been keeping mum about our discovery—but we were talking about a nation that had sent major military forces to a far-flung oil-producing country allegedly to protect its own national interests. Our refusal to share what we had found with them might well be taken as a hostile act. It was possible, I thought, that we were making a big mistake telling America about the other world and even taking some of their people there. But it held out our best hope of resolving things with the Nimitz comparatively safely. In the future, anything could happen—but we had to deal with that ship first.

“When we arrive, I’ll start by introducing you to the local ruler—the person in charge,” I said. “Otherwise, we may find we cause more problems than we solve...”

“You said there’s an empire on the far side, right? Barbaric,” Lt. Col. Randolph remarked. I supposed he was implying that democracy was the ultimate ideal. Natural enough, perhaps, coming from an American, and a soldier at that.

“I must beg you to remain civil with them. It’s not the twenty-first century where we’re going. I believe you Americans say... when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” I sighed, and hoped they would heed my warning.

We were standing in the courtyard of Eldant Castle, getting ready. It didn’t involve much: we’d gotten the forbidden armor out of storage again, and now we were waiting for Hikaru-san’s avatar to come back from the mansion with the wireless communications equipment and the JSDF weapons, and for Theresa’s dragon to arrive.

“So you’re now able to use this forbidden armor without a problem?” Petralka asked, patting the wooden crate with her hand.

“Yeah. It’s intended for women, so it’s still a little, uh, tight. But I took that part of it off, so...”

For a moment, Petralka looked at me, then looked at the box. “In that case, perhaps we ourselves should once more don the armor and accompany you.”

“What? I don’t think so. How crazy can you be, sending the Empress herself right out on the front lines?”

“Is it more crazy than sending some evangelist—not a soldier, may we remind you—to those very same front lines?” Petralka asked, puffing out her cheeks.

“You’re the most important person in this country,” I said. The Eldant state may have treated me like a noble, but when you got right down to it I was really just a commoner. Heck, the whole reason I’d been picked as the General Manager of Amutech was because it would make the absolute minimum impact on society if I disappeared (source: Matoba-san).

“You yourself are quite important. Though you consistently seem to fail to realize it.” Petralka sighed.

“Uh... You think so?”

“There are people who think you important. More than a few of them.”

“Sure, but...”

Maybe she was right. But what was “more than a few”? If there were more than a dozen people who thought of me as really, genuinely important, I would be surprised. But the empress? Millions—maybe even tens of millions—of people counted on her. There was no comparison.

“Don’t be ridiculous. It is not a matter of numbers. Listen to us, Shinichi: if you truly value your friends and acquaintances, these people who look up to and rely on you, then you’ll spare them a thought every once in a while.” With that, Petralka frowned and dropped her eyes to the ground. Less like she was really upset than like she was sort of pouting. Was this...?

“Petralka...”

Arrrgh, she is just the cutest little absolute ruler-chan!!

I was almost swept away by the desire to sweep up that tiny body in a hug, but, wary of committing another infraction and being punched again, I controlled myself. It didn’t help that Garius and the royal guard were watching, too.

“Sorry t’ keep ya waitin’!”

It was at just that moment that three—no, four—figures came running into the courtyard. Wait... four?

I discovered that in addition to Hikaru-san’s avatar, Elvia was there, along with Brooke, who was carrying Myusel on his back. Hikaru-san I was expecting; he’d gone back on an urgent mission to grab the weapons and comms stuff. But I hadn’t been expecting Elvia—let alone Myusel and Brooke.

“Hikaru-san?” I looked at him as if to ask what was going on. My eyes drifted between his female avatar and the sleeping male body she was carrying on her shoulders. The avatar frowned and looked away from me before saying, “Uh, well, they just wouldn’t take no for an answer... Not either of them. As for Brooke, he’s got the weapons. It was quicker than calling a carriage.”

“Oh...”

I realized the carriage we normally rode around in was the same one we’d taken to get here to Eldant Castle. Getting another one would have required summoning or flagging down another driver. Plus, the weapons and wireless communications devices Minori-san had requested were surprisingly large and heavy, too much for Hikaru-san’s avatar to run along with all by itself. So he’d asked for Brooke’s help, and, according to his story, Myusel and Elvia had overheard him. I can’t say I didn’t understand, but...

Now the two of them cornered me.

“Shinichi-sama, Hikaru-sama, I’m goin’ with you!”

“Yes, please let me accompany you...”

I noticed that Myusel wasn’t in her usual maid uniform, but in her fighting outfit—the magically enhanced, multifunction battle costume Petralka had given her. Just by wearing it, her magical attacks would be twice or even several times more powerful than normal. And if she was in that outfit, that meant...

“No. Uh-uh. No way,” I said.

“I already told you,” Hikaru-san added. “We only need Japanese people for this mission. People from Eldant can’t be of any help.”

Elvia, though, shook her head. “But I’m from Bahairam.”

“It doesn’t matter. Elvia, you don’t really understand what we’re going out there to do, do you?”

“Not the details, I guess. But I know you’re goin’ into a war zone, right?” She sounded forceful, agitated. “So that means you’ll need someone to protect you, right, Hikaru-sama?”

“No, it doesn’t. I’ve got my avatar...”

While Hikaru-san and Elvia argued, Myusel came up to me, her hands folded in front of her chest as if in prayer. “Please, Shinichi-sama, let me go with you. To protect you.”

“But it’s dangerous!”

“Yes. That’s exactly why. You’re going to need every ally you can get.”

Myusel was usually retiring and reluctant to speak, but the funny thing was, when push really came to shove, she had a tendency to find her voice.

“I’ll be using the forbidden armor, so...”

“I can use that too, remember.”

“Er...”

Shoot. That’s right. There were suits of forbidden armor for Myusel and Elvia, too. And because we’d pulled everything out of storage at once, I was standing right next to them.

“Shinichi-sama, I’m asking you. Please take me with you.”

“Urgh...”

I didn’t think this was the time to be having this argument. But there was no denying that experience showed Myusel and Elvia could be pretty helpful. They played an important part back when we went to Japan, and at the Dragon’s Den, too. I suspected they knew it—and that was why they were pushing to be part of this mission. As grateful as I was for the offer of help—

“If it’s true that we’ll have to say goodbye soon,” Myusel whispered, “at least... let me be by your side this little bit longer...”

I was struck dumb by her earnest, forthright request.

That was when Petralka decided to have her say. “Myusel and Elvia are not empresses, nor are they goodwill ambassadors. So you have no grounds on which to turn them down, do you?” Her tone made it clear she knew she was manipulating me.

Argh, so that’s how it was going to be. Is this what you want, Your Majesty? I searched for something to say, still hoping I could dissuade Myusel and Elvia, but at that moment...

“Finally. There it is,” Theresa said. A shadow passed over our heads, and we looked up to see a massive dragon coming in for a landing.

The wait was agonizing. At last, we felt a gentle jerk as the elevator came to a halt.

“I believe we’ve arrived,” I said to Mr. Grisham, Lt. Col. Randolph, and the soldiers accompanying them. I turned the handle of the lock and opened the elevator doors. I was about to step out when the two armed soldiers shoved past me. “Us first,” they said.

They scanned the area, confirmed there was no danger they could see, then motioned to Mr. Grisham to get out as well.

Lt. Col. Randolph jerked his chin at me as if to say I should go next. Apparently he was going to act as rearguard. Did he really believe I would try to pull something on them from behind? I guess he really didn’t trust me—which is to say, he didn’t trust the Japanese government.

We disembarked on the other-world side of the hyperspace wormhole. Nothing about the place, though, immediately set it apart as foreign or fantastic. All one observed on this side was a crane for opening and closing the giant “lid” over the hole (powered by one of the large avians who pulled the carriages around here) and a fence to keep out intruders. Otherwise it was just a wide, grassy field.

“I see now. Very, very interesting.” Mr. Grisham was smiling, but Lt. Col. Randolph and his men continued to look grim. I admit, the place looked completely ordinary. It may have been another world, but there were no boulders floating in midair or rainbow-colored clouds. I didn’t blame them for wondering if they were being taken for a ride.

“Doesn’t look like any kind of trick, sir,” Lt. Col. Randolph reported.

“I assure you, we have no time for such games at the moment,” I said, and ushered them into a waiting Self-Defense Force LAV.

“Wow...” The wilderness vistas rolled by. As long as you were looking into the distance, it was easy to fool yourself into thinking we weren’t going that fast. But a glance down revealed how incredibly quickly the dragon was traveling. The ground flew by with amazing speed. Even the mountains that formed the border between Eldant and Bahairam were already behind us in the distance. It felt like we had just passed over them a moment ago.

Strangely, there was almost no sound to speak of. There was hardly a whisper of wind, of wings, of the air rushing around us. I could feel the acceleration, but without that it would have been unreal, as if I were sitting in a simulator of some kind.

“This is really something,” I said. Normally when you think of high-speed air travel, you think of a jet, something that makes a big booming noise, but I guess dragons don’t do that. “We need a soundtrack. Like ‘How Far t* Paradise’ or ‘Yo**** no Yume.’”

“Don’t both of those involve crashing? Bad karma. Let’s at least go for ‘Danger Z*ne,’” Hikaru-san said. Picky, picky.

“Yotaka ** Yume” was one thing, but I was impressed that here in the twenty-first century, anyone knew about “H*w Far to Paradise” anymore. No wonder they’d picked him to be my successor. Most people wouldn’t recognize the theme song from an OVA from more than thirty years ago. Even I first saw it on YouTube. Heck, “Danger Z*ne” was hardly any newer.

“Bum bum! Ba-dum-ba-bum-bum!” I exclaimed, mimicking the opening riff from “Danger Z*ne.”

“Ba-ba-buuuuuum!” Hikaru-san added, picking up the tune.

I know, I know, maybe it seemed like a dumb thing to be doing under the circumstances, but it helped ward off the panic. How was a guy supposed to go into a combat zone without some decent tunes?

Okay, anyway. The “dragon” we were riding on was, according to Theresa, a variant of the Type 02R Dragoon BOU, called a Type 02R-H Heavy Dragoon. It was designed to carry people and equipment, and it was getting us into Bahairam at a serious pace. Normally I couldn’t even have brought myself to open my eyes—heck, normally the wind would have knocked us right off its back—but instead we sat there looking out at the scenery as if we were on a passenger jet. It was a very comfortable way to travel.

“So how does this work, anyway?” I asked Theresa, who was riding in front of us. There were six of us on the dragon’s back, in fact. Me, Minori-san, Theresa, and Hikaru-san, along with Myusel and Elvia. The Heavy Dragoon was the biggest such unit we’d ever seen. All six of us fit on its back, and it was hardly even cramped. In fact, its scales were individually articulated, so that they could each be angled to help prevent anyone or anything from sliding off.

“How does what work?” Theresa asked calmly, looking back at me.

Uh, I really think a pilot should be looking forward... Please...

“It’s just, I mean... There’s like, no wind.”

I was pretty sure we’d felt the wind full force when Amatena had carried us around on her puppet drake. The dragoon felt closer to the Faldra, with the wind magic that controlled it.

“Yeah, I’m not surprised,” Theresa said. “The back’s protected by a force field in passenger-transport mode. The force field was intended for aerodynamic control and stuff, but this unit type has output to spare, so you can do things like this with it. Since we’re in a hurry, though, I’ve engaged the SVS Drive we usually use for high-speed patrols. Basically speaking, there is no wind around us.”

“Huh?”

SVS Drive? I made an expression of confusion, and Theresa was kind enough to fill in the details.

“Our ride is surrounded by a vacuum. Nanomachines set up a vacuum tunnel that the unit can fly through. No air resistance means even faster speeds.”

“So it’s kind of like the same principle as supercavitation for torpedoes?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Theresa said.

Supercavitation was an idea someone had come up with to help torpedoes and small submarines move at higher speeds. It sprang from this basic but ridiculous premise: “if water resistance is slowing us down, let’s just fly through the air instead.” You surround a torpedo with bubbles—effectively, with air—so that it moves without actually touching the water, and therefore not experiencing water resistance. Scientifically, water and air are both fluids, so the principal was the same. With a vacuum around you, you could reach higher speeds with the same amount of propulsion.

“Wait, so does that mean dragons don’t have to flap their wings to fly?” It might seem obvious, but if they were in a vacuum, they wouldn’t need to create lift in order to fly.

“Obviously, something this big doesn’t fly the same way as a bird or a bat. They use the ionocraft effect and hydrodynamic control of a certain amount of ingested air. They expel the air backwards to produce thrust. What else?”

“That is downright ridiculous.”

“’Course, the SVS needs an appropriate density of nanomachines to work. Or sprites, or... magic, or whatever it is you call it around here.”

I could only stare at Theresa, stupefied. The Faldras were powered by people using wind magic, and now it turned out that real dragons used a very similar principle to fly. They moved their wings, of course, but it wasn’t to generate lift. It must have been simply to control their heading or position. And with the use of this SVS Drive Theresa was talking about, they didn’t even need to do that.

“Man, future technology really has everything, doesn’t it?” I said, deeply impressed.

“Hey! Whazzat? It’s comin’ right up!” Elvia said suddenly. I followed where she was looking, diagonally behind us—and then I froze.

Minori-san said what I couldn’t: “A Super Hornet!”

Yep. A Super Hornet, unofficially known as a “Rhino.” A U.S. Navy carrier-based fighter jet. The main component of the Nimitz’s military strength.

“Crap!” That was Minori-san, once again giving voice to my inner monologue. Both of us had a pretty good guess as to what the plane was up to. Coming in from behind like that? He wanted a dogfight. Worse, something that looked like missiles could be seen affixed under the wings. With my current knowledge and viewpoint, I couldn’t say for sure whether they were air-to-air or air-to-ground armaments, or maybe even anti-ship missiles—but if they were for fighting other aircraft, then we could be in real trouble.

Not to mention, he had the altitude advantage. I’d heard that advantage in positional energy was a major factor in air battles. Even in the simplest terms, being higher in the sky meant you had less force of gravity to deal with.

“You’ve got to get us out of here! Run! Uh... Let’s see... Maybe there’s a convenient valley—”

“Nothing like that around here,” Theresa replied.

In movies like Independ*nce Day, when a jet plane was confronted with a much more agile adversary, they usually resorted to ducking into a ravine or canyon or something, then waiting for the enemy to destroy himself. It was the classic air battle scene.

Unfortunately, there was no such helpful geography anywhere in sight. That meant there was really only one thing that could happen...

“He’s opening up!” Hikaru-san shouted.

There was a bap-bap-bap, and the plane’s nose flashed. He was starting with his 20mm cannon?! Maybe it was the vacuum that prevented the bullets from sounding very loud—but if they hit us, it wouldn’t matter if we could hear them. Even our dragon, which was technically a living thing, would probably be grievously injured. And of course, if even one of those bullets hit one of us, we’d be a lot worse than injured. We had a force field, but could it stand up to a 20mm cannon? I had no idea.

Crap! Crap crap crap! What do we do?!

I was white as a sheet, but at least Theresa had kept her head. “Hold on tight! Or don’t, I guess. The force field should hold you in place.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe try not to black out.”

Then, with absolutely no further warning, the dragon began evasive maneuvers.

“Gaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!”

Jet fighters have a lot of fancy tricks at their disposal: Split Esses and Immelmann Turns and that sort of thing. But I was no pilot, and I was sure no dragon pilot. I had no idea what this thing was capable of. All I knew was that for a brief second, the world turned upside down, like I was on a roller coaster. The dragon was obviously nimble as anything.

“Ngggghhhhh!” I said.

“Cut the chatter!” Theresa shouted.

A second later, the upside-down world flipped right-side up again, only to immediately flip back, leaving me feeling like ice in a shaker. I hardly knew which way gravity went anymore. And this went on and on. It might have been only a few seconds, but it felt like ages.

I took a deep breath. No sooner had I registered that the relentless flipping had stopped than we found the back side of a Super Hornet hovering in front of us. That had to mean—

“See you in hell!” Theresa shouted.

The dragon opened its mouth ever so slightly and unleashed a beam of white light.

“Dragon breath?!” I exclaimed.

But it wasn’t like any breath weapon we’d seen so far. This thing wasn’t breathing fire—it was more like it was shooting a laser. The white beam lanced through the Super Hornet’s right wing at an angle. About half the wing fell away, flames exploding from the stump. The plane veered wildly. It was a twin-motor craft, so it didn’t look like it was going to go straight down or anything, but—

“Oh. He’s going down,” Hikaru-san said, almost blasé. The Super Hornet, the pride of the American Navy, headed straight for the ground.

A second later we saw the pilot blow the ejection seat, rocketing clear of the plane.

Suddenly, the man Matoba had brought to us said a word that we recognized: America. He was an emissary of some kind from the country called America on the far side of the high-per space tunnel.

This ambassador, if that’s what he was, was surrounded by several bodyguards. They looked more or less like the members of the Jay Ess Dee Eff, although there were subtle differences. We presumed they were from the American military.

Minori had often admonished us that the Jay Ess Dee Eff was not an army, though we had never quite believed her. But now we saw that perhaps there was some merit to what she said. The people before us were indeed something different. Although precisely how would be difficult to articulate.

“America...” we murmured, and the ambassador—Grisham, we believe his name was—nodded.

“Indeed. Specifically, the United States of America, and I am its special envoy. These men are soldiers, my bodyguards. Their leader here, Lt. Col. Randolph—”

“Do you mean as in...” We furrowed our brow. “‘You will not laugh! You will not cry!’ or ‘Who said that? Who the f@#! said that?! Who’s the slimy little Communist sh!t twinkle-toed c@$#sucker down here who just signed his own death warrant?’ or ‘Gung-ho, gung-ho!’?”

“What?” Randolph (we had already forgotten his rank), the American soldiers present, Grisham, Matoba, and even his Jay Ess Dee Eff bodyguard unit looked at us in wide-eyed astonishment.

Had we said something wrong?

We tried to think back over all we had learned of the American army from the various movies, anime, and games Shinichi had lent us.

“Or are you perhaps from the American army whose members overcome great danger and hardship to reforge their bonds with their families?”

“Ahem, I don’t think—”

“Or the ones that will gladly launch a nuclear missile into another country or its own countryside to cover up evidence of monsters or pollution by biological weapons, and pretend the entire thing never happened?”

“Excuse me, is anyone in there?” Grisham said, frowning openly. “Pardon me, but I think you are under some kind of misapprehension, Empress Eldant III.”

“A misapprehension?”

“A serious one,” Randolph said archly, sliding his glasses up his nose. “We wage a daily struggle for truth and justice as the world’s police—”

“And what do the world’s policemen want with us? And so suddenly?”

Randolph looked briefly taken aback to be interrupted, but then he simply shook his head and continued: “The nuclear carrier Nimitz of the United States Navy was involved in an accident that appears to have seen it deposited in your nation. We’ve come to rescue our comrades-in-arms, and in a worst-case scenario, to protect them from harm.”

“Have you indeed?” This time we looked at Matoba. The Ja-panese bureaucrat was bowing his head in the most apologetic way possible. Apparently Ja-pan, trying as best it could to resolve the Nimitz situation, had at last revealed the existence of the high-per space tunnel to the other nations of its world. “The first issue is that this nyoo-clear carrier of yours is not in our territory,” I informed Grisham and Randolph.

“We’re aware of that, ma’am. However, the Japanese government informs us that the only way in or out of this world is the wormhole that exists here in the Holy Eldant Empire.”

“Yes, so we’ve heard.”

“As such...” Here Grisham smiled, although to us it appeared a cold, forced expression. “...We request permission for the unrestricted importation of personnel and materiel into your empire.”

Garius spoke up from beside us. “A moment, if you would, Grisham-dono. Did you just say unrestricted?”

“Yes. Unlimited. No qualifications,” Grisham said calmly.

“In other words, you’re asking to be allowed to import as many of your own military personnel, and your own weapons, as you wish through a portal located within a stone’s throw of our own capital?”

“Yes, I suppose that’s about the size of it,” Grisham replied, still calm. “The Nimitz situation requires an immediate response. If we show up only to discover that we don’t have enough tools for the job or enough people to get it done, then there could be substantial and entirely unnecessary loss of life and property. We simply request the right to do whatever is necessary to protect this country—no, this world.”

Garius didn’t say anything, but groaned softly and averted his eyes. It was as clear to him as it was to us what this American and his country were thinking. They were envisioning the same sort of invasion that the Jay Ess Dee Eff—in fact, Ja-pan itself—had once dreamed of. The Ja-panese had discovered that the high-per space tunnel was too small for the large-scale importation of military strength. It would not have been an efficient way to confront us. So rather than conquer by force of arms, they had decided to control this country through cultural invasion.

These Americans, though, seemed to think differently. The massive castle known as the Nimitz, along with its weaponry and all the soldiers and other fighting strength within it, was already here. What’s more, they now had a perfect excuse to bring in large numbers of people and weapons themselves, on the pretext of rescuing their friends. Even larger weapons could be transported through the wormhole if they were disassembled on the far side and brought over in pieces to be rebuilt here. Even the Jay Ess Dee Eff had managed it with their “lavs,” self-propelled vehicles that moved without the aid of either a bird or a lizard.

All of which was to say that America wanted to pursue the dream of a military invasion Ja-pan had so quickly abandoned. And they meant to force our hand by saying it was all in the name of helping their comrades.

It would indeed be difficult for us to turn them down. Notwithstanding that Shinichi and the others were already on the way, there were no guarantees that they would be able to stop a conflict between the Nimitz and the Bahairamanian army. A communication from their own armed forces would be much more likely to help. Not to mention that removing the personnel of the Nimitz, out of Bahairam and into our own territory, then through the wormhole to Ja-pan, and finally from Ja-pan to America, would require a great deal of effort. We needed their help.

And yet, if and when they had finally assembled more military strength around Marinos than the Jay Ess Dee Eff had, whatever their reason for doing so, they would have a knife at our throats. We well knew how powerful the weapons of the Jay Ess Dee Eff were. We had allowed a limited number of them into our lands because Shinichi, himself a Ja-panese person, was our ally. But when it came to the Americans, the situation was different.

We gave Matoba a long, hard look. This was a terrible trouble he had brought us. We wanted to yell and scream at him—but the representative, such as he was, of the Ja-panese government only gave us a retiring smile, and didn’t say anything at all.

In stark contrast to Eldant, just over the mountains, where there were lots of green forests and bountiful fields, Bahairam was full of craggy mountains and desolate wildernesses. I didn’t know why that was, exactly, but anyway, in my mind’s eye it was a place that was often almost a desert.

Now, we were wandering through that very scenery, looking for the pilot of the Super Hornet we’d shot down. We’d seen him eject, so we knew he was alive. It didn’t seem likely he was going to get back to the Nimitz in one piece all by himself, but if he fired a distress signal and brought his friends running, we could be in a lot of trouble. I wanted to find him as quickly as possible, and let him know that we weren’t enemies.

“Easy to say and all...” I said as we walked toward the place where the parachute had come down. The area wasn’t exactly mountainous, but it was studded with rocks several meters tall; it was anyone’s guess where the pilot might be. A quick reconnaissance run from overhead had shown us the general vicinity of the crash, but once we were down on the ground, we no longer had the advantage of line of sight, and it was hard to tell where exactly the guy might be.

“Maybe we should have had Theresa-san stay up high and keep looking,” I said.

“This isn’t going to be easy, is it?” Minori-san said as she trudged alongside me. We were at the head of the formation, with Hikaru-san directly behind us. Myusel, Elvia, and Theresa had stayed with the dragon. Myusel and Elvia had been eager to go with us, to give us protection, but they were so obviously demi-humans that we were afraid they would freak out the pilot. The same went for Theresa and the shimmering things in her body. Instead, the three of us would look for the downed flier.

The guy would certainly be on high alert, and there was the distinct possibility he would shoot us on sight. I knew American fighter pilots carried a pistol among their survival tools (I’d seen it in Behind Ene** Lines), so we had to be careful.

And so I found myself struggling to remember the modicum of English I knew.

“Um... Aimu notto... uh... yua enemii!”

“Man, your pronunciation sucks,” Hikaru-san announced.

“What am I supposed to do about it? I was never that good in English class.”

“I guess it’s like they say: English-language education in Japan really isn’t practical...” Hikaru-san shrugged. “I’ll be honest, English isn’t my strong suit, either.”

“Hey, Minori-san, you said you’d been on overseas assignment, right?”

“Yeah, but I never really learned a lot of English.” This time it was her turn to shrug. “I wasn’t exactly there to chat with the locals, and we had specialists who handled negotiations. Actually, it wasn’t even an English-speaking country.”

“Oh...”

I guess if she’d really been in the Middle East, the local language had most likely been Arabic or the like... I was starting to think, belatedly, that we might be in over our heads trying to communicate with an American soldier.

Just as I was thinking this, though, I saw something catch the light at the edges of my vision, something different from the ash and drab colors that dominated the landscape. I stopped short. “Minori-san...” I whispered.

“I saw it.” She nodded and reached behind her back. I knew her beloved 9mm was holstered there. I guess she’d brought her Type 89 machine pistol, too, but she’d left it back at the dragon in order to avoid antagonizing the pilot if we found him. The same went for my forbidden armor: that thing practically screamed weapon! It could only be counterproductive.

“What’s going on?” Hikaru-san asked, popping in between us. I silently pointed toward the shadows. I saw some red cloth that I thought was the edge of a parachute.

Hikaru-san nodded wordlessly, then we all took a deep breath. I was just about to shout out “We aren’t your enemies” in the best English I could muster when—

“Elvia-san!”

I heard a voice that sounded very much like Myusel’s from behind us.

“Huh?!” I exclaimed. What was going on? Just as we looked at each other, we heard a gunshot.

“Shit!”

I couldn’t believe this. While we had been looking for the pilot, the very person we were searching for had ditched his parachute and worked his way around the rocks and back toward where we’d landed our dragon. He must have seen us and realized somebody had to be piloting the thing. And while he might not be able to kill a dragon, his gun would work perfectly well on the humans onboard...

We should never have stopped here. But it was too late to take it back now.

“Elvia?!” I shouted.

I was joined by Hikaru-san, who cried, “Elvia!”

Then we went running back the way we had come.

I had simply miscalculated. I’d been naïve. We had two groups of three people—me, Minori-san, and Hikaru-san; and Myusel, Elvia, and Theresa—plus a dragon, even if it was on the ground instead of in the sky. I’d thought it would be obvious who had the advantage here. Elvia and Theresa in particular were better fighters than just about any human you might meet, so it had never occurred to me that they would find themselves cornered. But now...

“Oh, god...”

We rounded a large boulder and were coming up to the landing zone when we saw Elvia on her hands and knees, an American soldier in a flight suit on top of her with his gun drawn. Myusel, Theresa, and our dragon were still there, not far away.

“I... I’m so sorry...” Elvia said, almost crying. At least she didn’t look hurt. The ground near her shoulders was torn up, suggesting the gunfire we’d heard had been a warning shot.

“But how did this happen?” I asked.

“The idiot decided she ‘really was worried’ and went running off on her own,” Theresa growled. “The assailant was hiding in the shadows. He just tripped her.”

“Oh...” We all heaved a sigh.

Elvia had always been susceptible to these little tricks. As a werewolf, she had extraordinary physical capabilities, but not a lot of training. In other words, she had great reactions and immense strength, but didn’t always know what to do with them. Minori-san, for example, could probably beat her in a hand-to-hand fight with a good joint lock. Elvia had the raw material, but no refinement.

Maybe training was a moot point in the long run, if she had enough inborn strength to just bull through anything she ran into. Besides, as a former spy, her first response to bumping into an enemy probably wouldn’t have been to duke it out, but to run away as fast as she could.

Incidentally, Minori-san told me once that Amatena, who looked a lot like Elvia, was a much more formidable fighter, probably because she’d had proper training. Minori-san had said she didn’t think she could beat Amatena without a weapon, and considering that she herself was more or less a master of classical martial arts, that was saying something.

As ridiculously powerful as werewolves were, though, their bodies were no more durable than a human’s. In fact, when you considered how soft Elvia’s chest was, especially when it was pressing against your back or your arms, well, even this writer couldn’t help but—er, no, what I meant was, a 9mm bullet would work on her just as well as it would on me. Hit a vital point, and she would die just like I would.

“I’m just glad he didn’t shoot to kill...”

“Of course he didn’t,” Minori-san said calmly. “He knows perfectly well that even armed, he can’t go toe to toe with us when he’s this outnumbered. Taking a hostage is the obvious move.”

“That makes sense... Huh, in that case, I’m glad he kept a cool enough head to do the obvious thing.”

Some people, after having been flung into an alternate reality, then shot down by a dragon, might have decided to throw caution to the wind and just do whatever came into their head. If he’d simply started firing wildly from the shadows, he might even have gotten Myusel or Elvia and killed them both.

“You’re not wrong,” Minori-san said. Her right hand was dangling at her side—in fact, her right shoulder was slightly lowered, too, making her look unnaturally drained and limp. She wasn’t pulling out her gun because she didn’t want to upset the pilot—but she was staying loose so she could draw at any moment. It was almost like one of those quickdraw contests in a Western. Unfortunately, I didn’t think her holster, which was mostly designed for transport, would be very conducive to a fast move.

“In any event, this means he intends to negotiate,” she said. “But...”

“~~~~~~!” the American pilot shouted something. He was agitated, talking fast, so I didn’t catch what he said. That sure put a wrench in my hopes of having a friendly conversation.

The gun he was holding (a Beretta M92F, I noted) was cocked and ready—a five-millimeter pull of the trigger and it would fire. It was a dangerous situation: if his hand shook, or even just stiffened, the gun might go off. I was busy thinking about how not to upset the pilot further, if there was any way we could get him to at least not point the gun directly at Elvia, when—

“Elvia!” Hikaru-san shouted, stepping forward.

“Hey—Hikaru-san? Calm down...” I said.

“You let her go!” Hikaru-san exclaimed, pointing at Elvia. He was like a different person from his almost too-composed usual self, his voice raised and his face contorted. Well, if he wasn’t a different person, he was at least in a different body. He was using his avatar right now, which looked just like a woman on the outside.

“Hikaru-sama...” Elvia groaned.

“A real man would never point a gun at a woman! Have you no shame?” Hikaru-san bellowed, looking deeply intimidating.

I was really, really worried about what would happen if we agitated the American soldier, but I guess Hikaru-san had a rush of blood to the head and wasn’t thinking about that. This really wasn’t like him. He’d seemed pretty close to Elvia lately—maybe he just couldn’t stand seeing someone point a gun at his friend.

Before I knew what was happening, Hikaru-san was shouting, “You... You son of a bitch!” That was definitely English. And he wasn’t done. He took a step forward and cried, “Chicken! Asshole! Kiss my ass!”

“H-Hey, stop! We don’t want to antagonize him!” I cried. I grabbed hold of Hikaru-san, but his avatar was much too strong for me to hold it back by myself; it kept pressing forward. No, no, this was bad! God, you’d never believe this thing was artificial, it was so soft—no, not the time! Hikaru-san, you have to calm down!

As for the American, he was obviously startled. Huh. Were words like “son of a bitch” and “asshole” really that shocking? I thought they were pretty common insults in America......... Wait. I got it.

“~~~~~~!!” The American bellowed something in English and fired another shot into the ground beside Elvia.

“Heek!” Elvia yelped, and even Hikaru-san froze.

I thought I saw his plan: he’d hoped the American would turn the gun on him. His avatar had some defensive capabilities, and it wouldn’t personally hurt him if the soldier shot this substitute body. If he could just get the gun off Elvia, it would provide an opening for Myusel or Minori-san to attack. But the American wasn’t falling for it. Remarkably cool-headed, this guy.

Okay, so maybe I should try urging him to calm down first. Uhh... how did you say that in English, again?

“Hold your fire!” someone called, in English. But it wasn’t me. It was Theresa. Oh yeah... she’d said she was from some English-speaking army, hadn’t she? She’d been so good about speaking Japanese with us, and about learning Eldant to communicate with everyone else, that I’d forgotten.

Now the American looked really amazed. Who wouldn’t? After all, this complete stranger in this bizarre world had just spoken English to him. He blinked his blue eyes, then looked from me to Hikaru-san and finally to Theresa.

“Calm down, kiddo,” Theresa said now. “Easy does it.” She spread her hands wide to show she wasn’t a threat, adding some extra English just to reassure the pilot that he wasn’t hearing things.

Man, this was just like something out of a movie! It was pretty much, “If I had a nickel for every time some piece of sh*t pointed a gun at me, I’d be a rich man”! The only question was, was she Harley? Was she Davidson? Or maybe the Marlboro man? HA! HA! Theresa-san, you’re so cool!

“Wh-What the hell? Was that English? Do you speak English?” the pilot said.

“Oh,” I said in surprise. I was hearing the words in Japanese. They seemed to be coming from some kind of communications device Minori-san had pinned to her chest. I glanced around and saw Theresa-san discreetly give us a thumbs-up. I guess she’d slipped Minori-san some kind of simultaneous interpreting device.

“Hell, are you people even human?!” the pilot said.

“Uii aah hyuuman!” I shouted as loudly as I could.

“Then what the hell’s this thing?!” the pilot said, gesturing at Elvia, who was still at his feet. Specifically, he was gesturing at her tail. Her big, bushy, adorable tail. “The pointy ears? The animal tail? It looks like something out of one of those Japanese hentai anime!”

But... But... She was what she was! You shouldn’t discriminate because of the shape of someone’s ears, or whether they had a tail! I thought.

“Hentai?!” Myusel exclaimed, apparently shocked. She was touching her own ears, looking like she was about to burst into tears. “P-Pointy ears? Is that what makes something hentai? Are elves hentai?”

“N-No, listen, Myusel,” I said quickly. “I think ‘hentai’ is pretty much English slang by now. I think when Americans talk about hentai, they mean, like, what the Japanese would call moe anime!”

“R-Really?”

“Yeah, definitely,” I said, exhaling.

What I’d heard was that in much of the English-speaking world, when people talked about “hentai anime,” it didn’t have the same derogatory meaning it did in Japanese. In fact, some people who posted their moe pictures online got messages from English-speaking fans like “I love all the hentai stuff you do!” My mom, a former ero-game designer, said she’d received a few DMs like that when she posted some original art of her own.

“Don’t elves come from over there, though?” Minori-san wondered, tilting her head. “Would they really be considered hentai-anime style?”

“I dunno, I think the thing where an elf has really pointy ears that stick straight out from her head took hold with Record of Lodo** War. Over there, they tend to do a Mister-S**ck-style thing. Like, basically normal ears with a bit of a point. Then again, elves are really more European in origin. Americans have a slightly different idea of what they look like.”

“What the hell are you babbling about?!” the pilot interrupted. “Don’t tell me... Are you humans? People from my world?” He squinted his very American blue eyes at us. “Did you just say Mister Spo**?”

“Live longu ando prosper,” I said, holding my hand up with a space between the middle and ring fingers in the traditional V*lcan gesture of greeting. If you’ve never tried it, it’s surprisingly hard to do. I can only do it because I practiced when I was younger and was on a Star Tr*k kick. I sure never thought I would be using it to defuse a situation with an American soldier in another world!

“Holy hell...” the pilot said.

But as for me, I was having a brainstorm. I knew Star *rek ranked right up there with Star *ars as mainstream American popular fiction, but when this pilot saw Myusel’s ears, he hadn’t mentioned either of those. He’d said hentai anime. Was it possible...?

“Hmph!” I exclaimed, clapping the palms of my hands together. “Ichi wa zen, zen wa ichi!” One is all, all is one!

The pilot looked at me in amazement. I continued in Japanese: “Let the girl go. Otherwise, you’ll get a taste of my alchemy!”

“Y—You bastard...!” the pilot said. Good, he was good and worked up now.

I’d seen a list of the most popular anime overseas, and right at the top had been Fu**metal Alchemist. I figured that if this guy knew enough to use a word like “hentai,” maybe he was more of an otaku than you might think—and it looked like I was right! Thank you, Cool Japan! God bless “hentai anime”! Some people said Cool Japan was a waste of public funds, that a pop-culture initiative led by bureaucrats couldn’t get us anywhere—but it was turning out to be awfully useful in another world entirely!

But anyway!

“The point is, we aren’t your enemies,” Minori-san said, and Theresa immediately interpreted.

“Screw you! Did you shoot down my Rhino or didn’t you?!”

“‘Rhino’? Oh, you mean your airplane? I seem to remember that you were the one who attacked us.”

The American didn’t have anything to say to that.

“We’re prepared to overlook that,” Minori-san went on. “But if you insist on holding a young woman hostage, then we’ll just have to do... this!” And then she moved... but not for her gun.

“That stance—!”

The pilot obviously knew what Minori-san was doing: it was the Kameha**ha! It was the sort of thing you would normally laugh at—“You think you can do a cartoon attack for real?” But this was a world where dragons roamed the skies and elves and werewolves walked the earth. The guy probably didn’t know what you could and couldn’t do.

And so we ended up with an American pilot holding a gun, a JSDF soldier poised to deliver a Kame**meha, and a former home security guard preparing to do some alchemy. To any rational observer, it must have looked like the stupidest thing in the world.

“Could you possibly be... Japanese?” the pilot asked, somewhat more mildly than before.

“No possibly about it,” I said. “We’re here straight from the Land of the Rising Sun, the home of hentai, good ol’ Japan. And the lady over there who’s been interpreting for us is American, I guess. She’s maybe not totally human anymore, though.”

A long, tense silence hung between us. At last, nearly three minutes later, the American said, “Fine. Fine...” and lowered his gun.

The name of the Super Hornet’s pilot was Christopher Conops. He was a naval first lieutenant with the Nimitz, twenty-seven years old, and a member of the 154^th Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA-154), nicknamed the Black Knights. Christopher-san had close-cropped golden hair and a manly face; he couldn’t have looked more like a typical American soldier if he’d tried. If he put on a pair of sunglasses, you might think he’d just walked off the set of Top Gu*.

“So this isn’t a different world—it’s a future one?!” he exclaimed, aghast.

“That’s right,” I said. “Japan sent me and my friends here for basically peaceful purposes, sort of like special ambassadors. But then we recently learned that this is a future world, and that too much contact between the future and the past could destroy everything. We were just figuring out what to do about it when the Nimitz came dropping in.”

We’d given Christopher-san one of our magic interpreter rings, so I didn’t have to worry about the state of my English language ability anymore. I could just talk.

“Good god...” Christopher-san looked up at the sky. “And here I assumed we were in a completely different world. What the hell is this, F*nal Countdown?!”

“Oh, hey, I know that movie!”

“Hrm... This being the future, I guess maybe Planet ** the Apes or The Phil*delphia Experiment would be closer,” Christopher-san mused.

“You know some pretty old stuff,” I said, impressed.

“My dad was nuts for those movies. Hell, I’m surprised you recognize them.”

“Hey, you want to talk about dads who are nuts...”

“Hah! And yet us sons are the ones who ended up in the time warp!” Christopher-san laughed so hard he started slapping his knees. He really seemed... I dunno. American. And otaku-ish, I guess. (I’d heard there were a surprising number of them in the military.)

“Okay, more important question,” Hikaru-san said, breaking into our conversation. “What possessed you to try to shoot us down?”

“Oh, yeah, uh, sorry about that.”

“I’m not asking for an apology, I’m asking for a reason.” Hikaru-san sounded pretty pissed. He didn’t seem to like the American pilot, but since we’d finally convinced Christopher-san that we weren’t his enemies, I was hoping we wouldn’t immediately start a new fight.

Hikaru-san, though, pressed the point. “Are you Americans really people who would start a war without even knowing what’s going on?”

“No, we weren’t trying to—well...” Christopher-san looked properly embarrassed. “When we first got here, the captain and the other commanders did a lot of talking about what we should do. This obviously wasn’t our world, and we didn’t have any way to get back home. What we did have was a beached nuclear carrier with no way to cool its reactor. We were going to have to shut the thing down to keep it from going out of control, and that would mean sacrificing most of the Nimitz’s functions.”

“So we were right,” I said.

“I guess the plan they came up with was to demonstrate our power while we still could, and then try to negotiate. Maybe we should’ve started with peaceful interactions, but then if it came to a fight we’d be left with no options. We wanted to make an advantageous bargaining position for ourselves while we had the chance...”

“That doesn’t mean you had to shoot us down! For demonstration purposes—”

“I wasn’t going to! That wasn’t the plan... Not at first.” Christopher-san held up his hands as if to ward off Hikaru-san, who was leaning in toward him. “We were going to start with a few missile strikes in unoccupied areas! But then all of a sudden the Nimitz was surrounded by ground troops, and then they were trying to board us...”

“The Bahairamanian army?!” I said, and we all looked at each other.

“There was a standoff. Reconnaissance had shown a medieval or early-modern level of technology in this world, so we figured we could just stare them down. But then those bastards started hitting us with, like... magic or something...”

“It wasn’t like magic, it was magic,” I said. Of course, Theresa would say that it was simple manipulation of the nanomachine network—but there was no need to get bogged down in specifics. We could worry about those later.

“It wasn’t enough to punch through the armor of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, but it did cause the shooting to start.”

Christopher-san said the first to attack the Nimitz were camouflaged mutants of some kind. I figured those had to be the “chameleon people” we’d run into before—the Eleamachi lizardman tribe. I felt like I couldn’t really blame the crew for opening up when creatures like that tried to get on board their ship. Heck, I’d almost punched Brooke in the face the first time I bumped into him in the dark.

“We knew that if any more enemy units showed up, though, we might not be able to hold out. So they sent me and a few of the others up to recon and act as a diversion.”

“Arrrghh...” It was exactly like we’d predicted. In fact, it was only just shy of being our worst-case scenario. Our only saving grace was that all-out war hadn’t actually started yet—but it wasn’t far off, either.

“And that’s when you guys showed up. Our biggest advantage was air superiority, so when I spotted your unit...”

“Yeah...” I said. If the enemy could launch air attacks with dragons, then not only would they be outnumbered, the immobilized Nimitz would be overpowered easily. Of course he wanted to get rid of us before we could link up with the Bahairamanian force.

“So you’re saying the fighting has started already?” Minori-san asked.

“Just spontaneous volleys, like I said. For now, we don’t know exactly what that army around us has up its sleeve, but it looks like some of it is magic. We don’t want to force their hand if we don’t have to.”

“The Bahairamanians probably feel the same way,” Minori-san said.

Both sides were facing an enemy they’d never seen before and didn’t know much about. But they were both aware now that the opposing force had unexpected fighting powers. As long as they weren’t completely stupid, neither side was likely to rush in. The situation was almost like a siege.

“We’ve got one big problem, though,” Christopher-san said. “We’re working against the clock.”

The nuclear reactor!

“I don’t think they’ll be content with a staring contest forever.”

“Man, we’ve got to hurry,” I said, getting up. “If they haven’t gone to war yet, then maybe we can still stop this, somehow. We’d have to get past the Bahairamanians, but maybe we can do that with our dragon...”

We still ran the risk that the other Super Hornets would come after us like Christopher-san had done. If two or three of them got on us at once, even the dragon might not be able to get out of it.

“Sounds like our only option,” Minori-san said.

We, the members of the Eastern Army of the Kingdom of Bahairam, were in a standoff with the mysterious new Eldant weapon, and the soldiers within.

“What are we doing here, Bronzer Harneiman? Why the staring contest?” one of my subordinates asked, coming up to me. At the moment, we had the enemy castle completely surrounded and totally outnumbered, and yet the only fighting was sporadic bursts of ranged magic. The enemy’s weaponry could reach farther than our spells, so to approach without any cover was to invite attack by something that moved faster than a speeding arrow. The attack itself was invisible, but seemed to involve not wind magic, but some sort of small stone moving faster than the eye could see.

There had been reports of similar weapons being employed on one occasion when people we took to be Eldant soldiers had infiltrated the puppet drake production facility and caused havoc. Presumably, these weren’t magical weapons developed by Eldant itself, but had been provided to them by that other world they were in contact with.

“Chiefly because they’ve got the air power,” I told the man. The enemy possessed flying daggers that were many times faster than any puppet drake. I didn’t know what kind of attack power those things possessed, but assuming they could strike the ground from the air, we would be facing a slaughter if we tried to take them on. So instead of any suicidal charges, it had been decided to set up camp on the rocky hills around the enemy position, surrounding them and waiting for the situation to change.

“Look, Bronzer,” another of my subordinates said. “The puppet drake squadron...” I saw the puppet drakes attached to the Eastern First Unit start to rise into the sky even as we spoke. These things were our newest weapons, and our greatest trump card. We’d had the ability to attack from the air before, but it had typically involved wizards using wind magic to toss objects at the enemy. The ability to move freely in space, that was new. It wasn’t easy to achieve. But dragons were flying creatures by nature.

Even better, because they absorbed most magic, magical attacks didn’t work on them. Bahairam’s success had been to discover how to control the creatures by using magical spikes in their heads that allowed us to enact spells on them faster than they could absorb the energy. With a puppet drake, a person could fly. Our drakes wouldn’t be able to go toe to toe with the flying daggers, but if we loaded our troops onto the back of one and used it to land them on top of the enemy castle—then we might have a fighting chance. That was what our commanders had in mind.

It had taken time to install the seats for all the soldiers who were going to be part of the operation, hence delaying the launch of the puppet drakes. These creatures were usually controlled by wizards from the ground, not pilots from their backs. It made it that much safer to engage with the enemy.

“Aren’t we going to be a part of the operation, ma’am?”

“Our failure at the Third Capital is still hanging around our necks,” I informed the man with a rueful smile. My unit, the Eastern Second Unit, had lost considerable prestige within the Eastern Army as a result of our failure to retake the Dragon’s Den.

We knew firsthand the dangers those ancient ruins posed, as well as the staggering power of those who had been left behind to defend them. I’d argued that it would be unconscionably dangerous to attempt to retake the facility by force, and my immediate superior had trusted me on that—but as for the commanders of the other units, who had been late to the scene and hadn’t experienced the fighting for themselves, in their eyes I was just a coward, and incompetent to boot.

And that brought us to this moment. Having missed their chance at the Dragon’s Den, the commanders of the other units were itching to produce some tangible results. Attacking the mysterious castle seemed like the obvious way. And Second Unit would be put on rear guard duty, excluded from the glorious assault up front.

Second Unit was happy enough to take that assignment, recognizing that the mysterious castle had something in common with the Dragon’s Den, whatever it was. “Let ’em kill themselves if they’re so damn eager,” I’d told my own subordinates.

Now I said, “Just sit back and watch for a while. No need to rush to our own deaths.”

My subordinates didn’t have all the details, and not all of them were pleased to think they were missing their chance. But I just shrugged. They would see.

The dragon lifted off again and picked up speed until it was moving at an incredible rate.

“Oh shit! Oh shit!” Christopher-san, who had joined us on the dragon’s back, didn’t sound like he was enjoying himself. At our request, he was going to try to help us establish communication with the Nimitz. Pilots normally carried wireless communications devices, precisely in case they were shot down and needed to be rescued. If we could use that to get in touch with the ship, I thought, we might be able to prevent all-out war with the Bahairamanians. It would sure be a lot quicker than having Minori-san randomly try different wavelengths or whatever.

The newest military tech, it turned out, could use satellites to communicate over pretty substantial distances, but obviously satellite communications was a nonstarter here. Range would be twenty or thirty kilometers, tops.

“Still not close enough?” I asked.

“Yeah... Too much noise,” Christopher-san confirmed.

“Too much noise? How does that work?” I said. If we were out of range of the radio waves, I could understand that, but if it was actual static that was getting in the way... Was somebody jamming us? Who would there be around here who could interfere with military-grade wireless communications? I didn’t think Bahairam was likely to be capable of that.

“There aren’t even any major obstacles around here,” I said. It was all wilderness as far as the eye could see. A few big, rocky hills, a few fissures in the ground, but nothing that should have completely blocked a radio transmission.

“About these Bahairam people,” Theresa said. “You figure they’re using the nanomachine system—what you people would call magic—to attack the Nimitz?”

“Huh? I guess so, why?”

Magic was standard tech around here, so you would fully expect it to be used in any major battle. It was good for attacking, defending, and more besides. The magic Myusel knew, she’d learned in the army.

“Well, suppose some of that magic produced strong electromagnetic waves.”

“Huh? .........Oh!”

So that was it. Like Theresa said, what we casually called magic was actually a huge collection of invisible machines, the nanomachine network. “Magic” involved tapping into this network to produce various phenomena. TL;DR, the so-called magic in this world actually had a scientific basis. Take the wind magic, Tifu Murottsu, that Myusel and I both often used. It wasn’t produced by wind sprites huffing and puffing; it had to be electromagnetic waves or something else that influenced airflow.

Obviously, electromagnetic energy that powerful would naturally interfere with wireless communications, military or no.

“Is it like—you know? How turning on the microwave can interfere with your wireless LAN network?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Theresa nodded. “Hell, there’s even a possibility that the Heavy Dragoon’s force field is blocking communications. It’s a complicated question, lots of issues with waveform frequency and stuff. The magic around here seems like a bit of a brute-force way of producing physical phenomena. Use an electrical attack, for example, it’d probably produce frequency noise on a large-scale.”

“What you’re saying is, that’s another plan down the tubes,” Minori-san said, touching the radio she was carrying around her neck. Suddenly it didn’t matter whether we had an American radio or a JSDF one. If the airwaves were inaccessible, we might not be able to broadcast at all.

It seemed like electromagnetic interference was under control here on the dragon’s back, inside the force field. After all, that machine had been translating for Christopher-san this entire time.

“But... So what do we do?” What if we got to the Nimitz and couldn’t do anything?

“Guess we could try shouting really loud,” Minori-san said flippantly.

“Yeah, great idea...” They might already be in the middle of a shooting war, and some strangers were going to pop up and be like, “Uh, excuse me! You got a minute?!” Sure. They would listen to that.

As if human voices would even carry over the sounds of gunshots and magical explosions and stuff. It was impossible. It was futile. I just couldn’t think of a way.

“Myusel, uh, is there any magic that amplifies a person’s voice?”

“Amplifying voices? Hmm, maybe careful use of wind magic...”

“Theresa-san, do you think you could swing something?”

“Yeah, probably, but that doesn’t mean they’d listen,” she grumbled. “I think we’re going to be dropping right in on a battle.”

Yeah, that was a problem. The radio would have a dedicated comms officer who was keeping tabs on it even in the middle of a fight, so there was every chance we could get their attention that way. Information could mean the difference between victory and defeat in warfare, so armies today sucked up all the radio waves they could find, allied or enemy. If we just showed up out of the blue and started yelling hello, I questioned whether they would pay us any mind at all. They might even take us for enemies...

Suddenly Myusel shouted, “Shinichi-sama!” Her voice felt like it was physically slapping me on the back of the head. “Look over there! They’re back!”

“Huh?” I turned around, and there behind us I saw three sleek silhouettes, each coming at us from a slightly different angle. They looked like big, flying daggers, and they were cutting through the air...

“More Super Hornets?!”

“The rest of the recon group found its way back!” Christopher-san said. At the same moment, there was that bap-bap-bap, accompanied by the muzzle flash of machine guns. They were shooting at us! They didn’t come anywhere near hitting us, either because those were warning shots or because they didn’t have the aim.

“Dammit, could this get any worse?!” Christopher-san shouted, pounding the dragon’s back with his fist.

Maybe, maybe not—but this was definitely very, very bad. The pilots of those planes were probably thinking the same thing Christopher-san had been, following the same orders. There was a good chance they were cut off from radio communications with the Nimitz, too, and they might not have been very happy about it.

And then they discover a dragon with people riding on it like it’s some kind of sky horse. What do you think they would do? Decide it was enemy airpower and try to shoot it down, naturally. It was extremely unlikely that they recognized their friend Christopher-san riding on the thing. Heck, if they could, they probably wouldn’t have been shooting at us.

“Christopher-san—! The radio—!”

“I know! I’m trying...”

Could a small handheld wireless unit even communicate directly with the equipment on a fighter craft? Might they not be on a different frequency, to avoid interference? It would take forever to try to pick them up...

I was still fretting when one of the Super Hornets unleashed a missile.

“Oh, for god’s sake!” Theresa bellowed. Then, presumably at her command, the dragon started whipping off evasive maneuvers, just like it had done against Christopher-san’s Super Hornet.

“Not this agaaaaiiiiin!”

“Urgh! This time I’m definitely gonna be sick...”

You might be able to suppress wind resistance, but not acceleration. I felt my body being violently pulled around, my vision going dim. Was this that thing? The thing where blood gets forced out of your head because of violent acceleration? A blackout, that’s what they called it, right?

“My eyes! My eeeeyes!”

“A time like this and you’re thinking of Lapu**?! Don’t act too concerned!” Hikaru-san snapped at me.

“I didn’t do it on purpose!” I said.

In spite of our shouting, the dragon kept pulling steep angles and occasionally flipping around in midair, trying to evade the missile. But the warhead matched our every move, trailing a white cloud behind it. At least, I thought so—I couldn’t see it so well with my vision fading out.

“Hnnnngghh!”

The fact that I hadn’t blacked out when we were trying to get away from Christopher-san only showed that Theresa hadn’t been going all out that time. But now it was a missile, not a fighter plane, after us, and she was flinging that dragon around at somewhere past Mach One. But she wasn’t shaking the thing. This was a test even for her.

“The sun! T-Try to get the sun behind us!” I shouted. I seemed to remember a manga I’d read once that showed if an infrared missile got pointed toward the sun, it would go off course. The idea was that you flew toward the sun for a moment, then veered away, and the missile remained locked onto the stronger infrared signal coming from the sun.

“What do you think that thing is, a Sidewinder?!” Christopher-san exclaimed. “Missiles today don’t use infrared-seeking technology!”

“They don’t?!”

“The mothercraft gets a radar lock on the target, and the missile follows that! It’s called an active radar system!”

Well, shoot. I was just a regular otaku, not a military one!

“Uh, maybe some chaff, then?!”

“And where do you think we’re keeping any of that?!”

“Will you two shut your freaking mouths?” Theresa yelled. Yes, ma’am. Very sorry, ma’am.

“Shinichi-sama—!” Elvia exclaimed.

“Y-Yeah, what is it, Elvia?”

“There’s more of them! Two white things! One from the left, one from the right!”

Had the plane fired its other two missiles?! They were closing in on us from all sides, leaving us nowhere to go. It looked bleak. There didn’t seem to be any way to escape.

I vaguely remembered that a missile flying in a straight line could hit Mach Three or Four, significantly faster than a fighter jet. A plane with its big wings, or a dragon capable of nimble jukes and twists, had the edge in aerial maneuvers, but the speed advantage was so overwhelming in favor of the missile that it was really just a matter of time before it caught up. It was a supersonic assassin, closing in on us relentlessly. My sight was gradually going back to normal—maybe my body was getting used to the wild ride. Unfortunately, the main thing I saw with my restored vision was the missile getting closer and closer!

“Hrrrraagghhhhh!” Theresa howled, and then the dragon—Huh?

Suddenly the world flipped a hundred and eighty degrees. As the blood rushed straight to my head, I saw it: as we flew along inverted, the missile coming straight at the dragon’s face, the monster exhaled a pinpoint beam of laser “breath.”

Actually, from what Theresa had said, it wasn’t a laser at all, but more of a plasma cannon. The dragon already used a strong electromagnetic field to fly and adjust the firing angle and area of effect of its fire; by squeezing it down to the smallest possible space, the material became plasma and was fired out in a beam. It was the sort of thing you might normally expect from Go***lla or Ga**ra. Even if this thing looked more like Gya*s.

The plasma beam sliced across the sky, exploding two of the missiles. Two sets of fireworks went off before our eyes. The dull booms came a second later.

“Did we do it?!”

The dragon flipped again, returning to normal orientation. It was like being on an amusement park ride—one that wasn’t any fun at all!

“That was incredible!” I said. Leave it to future science to create a living weapon like this. Something that could go toe to toe with three missiles unleashed by modern jet fighters. But then...

“Huh?”

Three missiles. There had been three of them.

So where was the last one?!

“Brace for impact!” Theresa shouted.

“Huh? What?!”

A white trail came in over her shoulder.

“Hit the deck!!” she said.

“What?!”

“Shinichi-sama!” Elvia shouted, pointing forward. I looked, and there it was: the Nimitz! The jagged flight deck, complete with the huge, white number 68! That was it, no question. The U.S. Navy nuclear carrier Nimitz! Despite the dogfighting, we’d made it to the ship.

“When we get right up next to it, I’m going to drop the force field—then it’s up to you!”

“Are you nuts?!”

Theresa was basically telling us to jump! What were we, action heroes?!

“With you meat sacks aboard, I can’t pull the really high-G moves!”

“But we can’t—”

“I checked the after-action reports on my BOUs. I know you’ve done it before!”

“Huh? Oh...”

She was probably talking about the time Myusel and I had jumped off the back of the puppet drake when we were attacked by a dragon on approach to the Third Capital. We’d used wind magic to scrape out a safe landing, but boy, had I never expected to do that again.

“Get going! I’ll drop your cargo behind you!”

It was obvious Theresa wasn’t looking for an argument.

“Heeeeeek!”

“Shinichi-kun, your hand—give me your hand!” Minori-san shouted. About a second later, the dragon flipped itself over again and away we went.

“Yaaaaarrrrrghhhhh!” I screamed as I was flung into empty space. My sense of time seemed oddly stretched—maybe it was the adrenaline—and everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. Elvia flailed in the air, getting a hold of Hikaru-san and Christopher-san by their collars. Myusel reached out and clasped my hand, and I took Minori-san’s hand as well. We formed a ring, like a group skydiving exercise, or something out of Gat***man (warning: extremely old show alert). I could see the three crates containing the forbidden armor plummeting just near us.

Wait... where was Theresa?! I managed to look up to see her flying away on the dragon. Maybe she was trying to get some distance so that when the missile exploded, it wouldn’t be anywhere near us. Then, probably pissed off about the two warheads we had avoided, the third Super Hornet started firing more missiles for good measure. One, two, three, one right after another. They rocketed toward the dragon from three different angles.

Then I heard Christopher-san shout, “What the hell is that thing doing?!”

The dragon was flying like nothing I’d ever seen, less like a jet than a UFO. It darted upwards, then suddenly stopped, then juked downwards again—and the missiles went flying straight past it. It was ridiculous; practically cheating. But I guess that was the flexibility you got out of one of these dragons over a fighter jet. I couldn’t even imagine the G forces it had to be generating at that moment. Theresa had been right—me and my friends would never have survived moves like those. She was right to dump us.

Just as I was thinking that, though, there was a massive explosion from just near the dragon. “Oh shit!” I exclaimed.

“The Sea Sparrow!” Christopher-san said.

I remembered, vaguely, that the Sea Sparrow was a ship-borne anti-air missile system. (The name pretty much covered the bases.) The Nimitz had probably let loose right when they figured Theresa had let down her guard after successfully evading four separate air-to-air missiles.

Huh? Wait... Hadn’t the Sea Sparrow shot exploded before it hit the dragon? Was this short-range jamming? Or something to do with the dragon’s force field?

Whatever the case, the dragon hadn’t completely avoided the effects of the explosion; I could see a big chunk torn out of its wing. It was flying unsteadily and losing altitude. At that angle, it would just graze the Nimitz on the way down. I was grateful Theresa was at least trying to avoid a direct hit... But of course, this was hardly the time for hugs and rejoicing. We were still in freefall.

So I resumed screaming.

“Yahhhhhhh! Um! Ahhh—” I gave Myusel a pointed look and started chanting wind magic as fast as I could. Before, it had been just the two of us. Now, we had six people. We had to coordinate our timing exactly right, or even if we managed to slow ourselves down, we would all end up with too many broken bones to be of any use at all. Luckily, Myusel seemed to understand the problem. Just as I sucked in a breath and shouted out the spell, so did she.

““Tifu murottsu!””

Bam. The whirlwind spawned by the magic caught us and started to slow us down. But it wasn’t nearly enough. So Myusel and I kept chanting:

““Tifu murottsu!””

““Tifu murottsu!””

““Tifu murottsu!””

The spell was having a visible effect, but the ground was still coming at us awfully fast. We all curled up, bracing for impact. At the last moment, we let off one more spell, a desperate last resort.

““Tifu murottsu!””

There was a blast of sand and dust. As the wind hit the ground, it created, just for an instant, a cushion of air for us to land on. We hit the ground plenty hard, but we were safe.

We tumbled along the ground, bumping painfully over exposed pebbles and rocks.

“Owowow...” I got up rubbing my back. Myusel stood beside me, and then Minori-san. Elvia, Hikaru-san, and Christopher-san were a short distance away. Thankfully, a huge rock happened to conceal us from the Nimitz. We might have been rolling on the ground, but nobody started taking potshots at us.

“Oh...” That’s when I turned around and froze. Hundreds, maybe thousands of members of the Bahairamanian army stood behind us, ready and willing to kill.

So much for thankful.

There you had it. We hadn’t landed on the Nimitz. We’d come down smack in the middle of the Bahairamanian camp that was having a standoff with them.

This was hopeless. Even I thought so. Trying to talk down the crew of the Nimitz was suddenly the last thing on our minds. We didn’t even look like we were going to make it to the ship. We could see the nuclear carrier right over there, but between it and us was a massive contingent of Bahairamanian soldiers currently looking at us as if to ask, “Who the hell are you?” And even if there had only been some skirmishing so far, we were right in the middle of what amounted to a war.

This was hopeless. We were as good as dead. At least if I was going to die, I thought, I could die holding Myusel’s hand—but when I reached out to take it, I felt not her soft skin but something hard.

“Huh?!” It was something that had rolled out of one of the wooden crates, which had exploded on impact. The forbidden armor, in sleep mode. “Yeah... Oh yeah!” Quickly, I placed both my hands on the armor, and it started to move as if it were alive, encasing my body. “Myusel! Elvia!” I shouted.

They immediately connected the dots. They jumped for the other suits, which had fallen near them, and put them on. In a matter of seconds, we were all suited up and ready to go. It was sheer luck that the Bahairamanians didn’t open fire on us while we were changing. They probably hardly knew what to do with us. We’d come dropping off the back of a dragon, which was itself under missile attack from the Nimitz. Were we the enemies of their enemies, they were probably wondering. Were we their friends?

“Minori-san! Christopher-san!” I moved to cover the two of them, who didn’t have the benefit of forbidden armor. These suits had serious defensive capabilities. I would be more than able to fend off a simple magic attack. But the fact was that the Bahairamanians wildly outnumbered us; if they were to surround us and push, it was questionable if I would be able to keep Minori-san safe. No—not questionable. There was no way. If they launched magical attacks from several directions, it would be over.

Myusel and Elvia intuitively understood this. “Shinichi-sama...” Myusel said.

“Wh-What d’ we do?” Elvia asked. Their voices were trembling. And the truth was, I didn’t have an answer for them.

I tried to force my gray matter to work, desperate to come up with any possible solution, but...

I could hear some sort of commotion in the distance. Thunderclaps, explosions, and wind noise that sounded magical came drifting back to us.

“Wait—what?!” I said, standing frozen. A dragon came barreling through the Bahairamanian ranks, knocking soldiers over like bowling pins.

“What the hell are you dimwads doing?! Make for the ship!”

Was that... Theresa?! Yep, that was her, all right, standing proud atop the dragon’s head. I’d seen the dragon take a missile hit at point-blank range. I’d seen the way its wing was damaged. But the creature in front of me was happily performing a low-altitude cruise, and in fact—heck! Look at the way she sliced through the Bahairamanian army! Running, jumping, sliding, jumping, running again... so fast I could hardly follow it. It reminded me of GE**ALK from a certain Super Dimension series...

“Oh yeah!” I said. I suddenly remembered that the dragon didn’t use its wings chiefly for flying, but instead for adjusting its position and heading. It was supported by an electromagnetic field generated by its body. So, actually, it wasn’t that surprising that it could fly comfortably at low altitudes like a hovercraft, or keep on trucking even with one of its wings badly damaged. And as long as it stuck close enough to the Nimitz, the Super Hornets would be less likely to attack it, too.

“C’mon, you slobbering pigs! You got a death wish? Come right this way!” Theresa shouted from atop her dragon. She didn’t deploy the famous fire breath, but the creature plowed through the close-packed rows of soldiers, creating utter chaos. There wasn’t going to be any maintaining of formation with a dragon running amok in the ranks.

I heard someone shout something, and then someone else shouting back. Bahairamanian soldiers, their voices coming from the opposite direction of the dragon. I looked over to see a squadron of half-naked young women, including a werewolf, a weretiger, a werebear, and what looked like a lizardman, assaulting the Bahairamanians with clubs. It was obvious the girls weren’t with Bahairam...

“BOUs!” I cried. They were Theresa’s personal army. The help she’d summoned from the Third Capital must have arrived. Or maybe they’d been planted in the area all along, waiting for an opportunity.

That was when Theresa wheeled the dragon past us, shouting, “Don’t just stand there, do something!”

“Huh? Wha?”

“Have you forgotten why you’re here?! You’re supposed to be talking to those guys on the ship!”

“Oh yeah...”

Before I could do anything else, the BOU girls hustled up with some kind of palanquin, a container big enough to hold even the burliest person. What?

“This thing’ll jack you into the base’s calculation network! Efficiency will take a hit, but you should be able to use the nanomachines effectively enough to keep yourself safe and get to the objective!”

The calculation network? Did she mean, y’know, that thing? The thing that let us do any move we wanted from any game or manga or whatever? It was practically God Mode! There was just one tiny problem...

I looked in the direction of the Nimitz. The prow of the ship towered upwards, defying anyone to approach it—and if anyone tried, potshots and warning fire came down from the deck. They weren’t letting up, even with Theresa and the Bahairamanian army at each other’s throats. And I guess I didn’t blame them. The crew of the Nimitz couldn’t tell any given one of us from any other. Maybe they even figured some sort of convenient infighting had started among their enemies, and they were simply taking advantage of it.

In other words, if we even tried to get close to the Nimitz, we were likely to get shot. Okay, so the forbidden armor might protect us, but the suits pretty much looked like walking weapons. Would soldiers who were shooting to kill be willing to listen to anything we had to say?

“Use the force field, use the active camo, I don’t care, just get going!”

“Y-Yes’m!”

With that kick in the ass to get us started, Myusel, Elvia, and I set off running. Theresa’s BOUs would look after Hikaru-san, Minori-san, and Christopher-san.

Christopher-san waved his arms and shouted, “Hold your fire! Don’t shoot!” But all the dust kicked up by the fighting made visibility terrible. I wasn’t even sure the crew of the Nimitz would be able to see us coming, let alone make out that Christopher-san was one of their Super Hornet pilots.

As we rushed along, I thought desperately about what to do. I guess if I could just get their attention by shouting, “Hey, lookit me!” this wouldn’t be so hard. I needed something that would stop the Americans in their tracks the moment they saw it—and put them in the mood to be open to what I had to say. But what was it? What could I do? What could I do?!

It had to completely amaze them...

“Dammit! I was supposed to go see The Last Jedi with my girlfriend next time I was on shore leave,” Christopher-san said. “I was finally going to pop the question!”

He was definitely gonna die, talking like that.

The Last Jedi, though... That was the new Star *ars movie, right?

“.........Oh!”

That’s when it hit me.

What I wanted to do was run as fast as I possibly could, but instead I forced myself to slow down. Despite the gunshots and the magic flying pell-mell around me, I strode forward as if I had all the time in the world. Like I owned the place.

A couple of bullets flew past my ear with an audible shing! It was freaky, let me tell you. But I was wearing the forbidden armor, and a pistol shot wasn’t going to do me any harm. One of those slugs from a Super Hornet’s 20mm cannon? I wasn’t so sure. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to find out.

Anyway, just then...

“Who the hell are you?!” A Bahairamanian soldier came pounding across the sand, lunging at me with a spear. I raised my hand in his direction, but didn’t deign to look at him as I formed an image in my mind. The soldier crumpled in place, clawing at his throat as if he were being choked by some invisible thing.

I was hoping they’d be able to see me from here, but maybe not... I thought. I released the force field I had been using to constrict the soldier’s throat. “Hrgh! Agh...” After a violent coughing fit, he looked at me as if he had seen a monster. More soldiers, who looked like wizards, stepped up to take his place. They raised their hands, no doubt preparing to launch some magical attack at me. Pebbles rose up by their feet, like slinging stones, and came flying at me. A veritable hail of rocks...

I yawned and slashed through them with my sword.

Okay, so I just sort of flailed around, and it was the armor that protected me from the stones. But the glowing “sword” in my hand was what would have stood out to anybody watching. The wizards would definitely think it was what I had used to stop their attack.

Vwwmm! The sword hummed with exactly the sound I was imagining in my head as it glowed and flashed red. I swung it around a bit, creating sparks here and there to make it look as if I had batted the stones away. Thankfully, nobody could possibly know how many stones or bullets or whatever had actually come at me in the middle of all this chaos.

To the Bahairamanians and Americans alike, it would look like just one thing: a man in black armor advancing with a glowing red sword, sweeping aside anything in his path, and able to choke people with a mysterious power. You might be wondering about the black armor, but that was easy enough to do with the suit’s optical camo. And I had Elvia and Myusel, marching behind me, make their suits mostly white. They had dark marks around their eyes on their helmets, so they looked a bit like round-faced skeletons.

I looked up and focused on the Nimitz. A gust of wind magic lifted me up toward the flight deck. Controlling exactly what I was doing was tough, but I knew this was the moment that counted. I tried to look as imperious as I could, ignoring the fact that I wanted to wet myself.

There are lots of heroes in fiction who can fly. I wonder if any of them get scared for their physical safety while they’re up there zipping around with nothing around them. If their powers stopped working for some reason, they would plummet straight to the ground and probably end up as a splotch on the sidewalk. You wouldn’t even be able to tell whether they had been human. Well, maybe they weren’t worried, the same way a bird wasn’t afraid of flying and a fish didn’t worry about drowning.

Then there I was, on the Nimitz’s flight deck.

Whoops! Ah, uh...

My image! Gotta make the right impression! I stood as straight as I could, coming in for a delicate landing on the deck. The Bahairamanians hadn’t made it this far yet, and several aircraft were still sitting patiently on the flight deck—along with dozens of crewmen and officers, their weapons at the ready.

A second later, Myusel and Elvia made the same amazing jump I had and landed behind me. (Okay, it wasn’t really a jump; I had been controlling the entire thing.)

The people on deck looked at me like they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Their jaws were agape, like they were seeing a ghost, something that shouldn’t be here, couldn’t be here.

“Th—This is impossible. How?”

“How in the world—?”

Every eye was on me. It was obvious that they were all completely astonished. Three completely unexpected people had appeared in the middle of their battle with the Bahairamanians, people whom everyone on deck recognized—but who by all rights should never have been here in this other world.

Perfect. One more good push.

I “turned off” my glowing sword, then pointedly added: “Hooo... fwshh...” Finally, trying to make myself sound as imposing as possible to as many people as my voice could conceivably reach, I said, “Aimu... yua... fathaa!”

The Americans retreated with a collective cry. Ooh. This was really working. I guess I got through to them, even with my weird English pronunciation.

“Wh-What the hell is a Dark Lord ** the Sith doing here?!” one of the soldiers shouted. I’d had to rely on my slightly hazy memory to come up with this recreation, but apparently I looked enough like Darth V*der to do the job. That is to say, I had managed to evoke the villain, the knight of darkness, the guy who in some ways made a bigger impression than the main character, of one of America’s most beloved space-opera series. I’d already covered Star T*ek with Christopher-san, so I wanted to try my hand at Star *ars this time.

Darth V*der was a famous character, but one who shouldn’t have existed in this world, shouldn’t have been known to anybody here. But now here he was right in front of the crew’s eyes. I hoped it would make them think: Is this really a different world?!

It was the conviction that they’d been thrown into another realm entirely with no way to get home that made them so eager to go to war with the other residents of this place. They thought it was the only way to survive. But if I could show them the fight wasn’t actually necessary...

“Holdo yua fiya, gaizu,” I urged them. I seemed to be gaining traction. “Lissun tsuu mii.” I’d checked the English with Theresa and Christopher-san. Now I read it off a crib sheet. Hopefully it would work.

（つづく）

(Cont’d...)