Chapter One: Yup, It’s Another World

I, Kanou Shinichi, was on the horns of a dilemma.

Warm, wet breath brushed against my cheek. I couldn’t help noticing how very white the fangs in those open jaws were...

What a dumb thing to be thinking at a time like this!

I’d heard that when people are in a really life-threatening situation, they sometimes forget where they are, as a sort of coping mechanism. Maybe that was what was happening to me. Why else would I be admiring trivial details, instead of trying to find a way to get out from under the fang-baring beast who had just jumped on top of me the moment we saw each other?

A moist tongue emerged from the dark cavern of its mouth and ran over its teeth. I guessed it was licking its lips at the sight of prey. It might as well have exclaimed, “Bon appétit!”

I was literally, like, five seconds away from dying.

This is bad. This is really, really bad.

This is really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, bad!

If this were an anime, this would be the moment when the picture freezes and the words “really bad” are printed all over the screen until they lose all meaning. I could see how bad things were, but the shock and the suddenness of the situation left me trapped by my panic; “bad!” was the only thing that could break through into my conscious mind. Granted, there was another me that seemed to be looking down calmly on the whole thing, but even so...

In the silence of the dim room, all I could hear was the beast’s harsh breathing. The windows were closed and the curtains drawn, the only source of light being the few rays of the morning sun that slipped in around the edges of the drapes.

I was being held down on the floor of the room, and on top of me was a wild beast.

The beast was using its limbs to pin my arms and legs. The creature wasn’t actually that heavy, but it seemed to know how to hold a person down—it was pressing precisely on the muscles I most needed to be able to move. I tried to make my extremities work, but I couldn’t sit up or scramble away. Now I knew how a cornered animal felt.

Predators who use up energy unnecessarily just bring themselves closer to starvation, so when they hunt, they strike only the most vital points on their prey to prevent any resistance. The pinned, powerless bunny rabbit (i.e., me) can only lie there trembling and waiting for the inevitable.

To put it in chess terms, it was checkmate. I couldn’t move anything really useful, and that left me without a lot of options.

Was this how it was all going to end? Eaten in my own house by some unidentified creature, with no idea what had really happened to me or why?

No—wait, Kanou Shinichi! You aren’t a rabbit! You still have the most powerful weapon humans possess!

My mind started working desperately. Humans have intelligence. We have our wits! That’s what separates us from the animals! Now my brain labored to dispel the haze of panic. I needed a phat plan to break me out of this jam!

Arms? Legs? Pinned flat.

Fingers? Mobile, but there was nothing to grab.

Head? I could try a headbutt, but with my arms held down like this, I had serious doubts that I could reach my opponent.

Think... Think... Think...

What’s this? Human intelligence is exhausted?

Despair overtook me as I ruminated. I found that you can think of whatever you want, but if you don’t have the physical power to pull it off, it’s not going to do you any good. Look, I might have been sort of a big deal when it came to arguing on the internet, but punch me or stab me and, well, that was it.

No—wait again!

I can’t give up yet!

Words! Maybe I could talk my way out! That’s it, Kanou Shinichi! You still have the power to throw up a smokescreen of pointless chatter!

I placed all my hope in the very last weapon available to me.

O Spirit of Words, speak through me! Help me say something really awesome! Help me throw this creature off with my gift of the gab!

“Uh... Um...”

No response.

“Can I... talk to you for a minute?”

No response.

Whaaaa?!

Aw, this isn’t going to do any good! What am I even doing?! Chatter doesn’t help if the other person doesn’t understand what you’re saying! The beast on top of me stared at me with a glint in its eyes, obviously ready to dig in at any moment.

“A beast...?”

I’m not about to say that I’d calm down, but a quasi-rational thought did suddenly strike me.

As we’ve established, I was in a room, indoors. The curtains and windows were closed, making everything dark. But the morning sun that leaked in between the drapery was just enough to dimly illuminate the creature holding me down. It was deep in shadow, yes, but the darkness wasn’t total; I could make out a little bit.

On top of that, my eyes were slowly getting used to the dark. My attacker’s jaws were perilously close to my head, filling my vision. But if I could stay calm enough to pull my own head back, maybe I could at least get a sense of who I was dealing with here.

When I did, I let out a sound of dumbfoundment.

“............Huh?”

The creature’s face seemed to be covered in fur; that was why I had immediately thought “wild animal.” But on closer inspection, it was just really long hair falling down around its face.

Well, not quite. The hair was definitely more fur-like than normal.

“Hold on...”

My eyes had finally adjusted, and I could make out the contours of the face in front of me. I hadn’t imagined the gleaming eyes and the fangs; there was definitely a beastly quality to this person. But...

“Elvia?!”

Yep. The face was that of a girl I knew well. Elvia Harneiman, a werewolf. She had long ears covered in beast-y fur, and (better believe it) a big, fluffy tail.

I use the word “werewolf,” but she wasn’t really some kind of supernatural monster. She was just a girl, and a pretty cute one at that. Her big, round eyes and her slightly unkempt hair were the most distinctive things about her. She wasn’t very showy, but her plain looks had an attractiveness all their own.

I was very confused, first because someone had suddenly jumped on top of me and pinned me down, and (more importantly) second, because of the hungry-animal eyes with which that person had looked at me. Taken together, I had been left with no idea that this was my normally laid-back, easygoing housemate. Most of the time, Elvia was less of a wolf and more of a puppy.

Then again, and on careful reflection, this was Elvia’s room. Breakfast time had come around and Elvia hadn’t shown up, so I’d come to check on her. This being Elvia’s room, it was only natural that the inhabitant was Elvia, and therefore even more natural that it was Elvia who had jumped on top of me. Wait a second... Was that natural?

“Okay... uh... Elvia...-san?”

“Hooo... haaaah...”

The only answer was the continued slap of moist, warm breath against my face. I took a fresh look into her glowing eyes, and I couldn’t shake the sense that it wasn’t the gaze of a rational being. If this were a manga, her eyes would have spirals in them to suggest that she wasn’t in her right mind.

This was bad. I mean really bad.

Yes, I had gone from being pinned down by a mysterious beast to being pinned down by a girl I knew, but nothing else had changed. If anything, this was probably worse. Being eaten alive by a wild animal—I mean, I for sure didn’t want that. But being eaten alive by a girl I was friends with—what kind of bizarre horror-story stuff was that?

How can I explain this? It was like being betrayed by something you trusted. No, not quite... It was like one day, a cute little stuffed toy suddenly grew fangs and attacked you. The fear came from the rupturing of the quotidian expectations of everyday life.

Enough! Now was not the time for meta-commentary.

If I was dealing with a girl, here, then my idea of talking my way out of this might still work.

“Elvia... Let’s all just calm down, okay?”

“Hooo... hooo ...”

“Right, put those fangs away, now. Say, were... were your teeth always this long?”

“Hooo... haaaah...”

Her jaws were open in an ear-to-ear grin. Her tongue, bright red, slid across her lips.

“That... That lip-licking thing you keep doing is really... kind of unsettling. Uh... Breakfast is on the table, you know. If you’re hungry, how about you come have some?”

“Haaaah... haaaah...”

“Hey, if I’ve done anything to upset you, I apologize. L-Let’s talk it out, Elvia.”

“Haaaah... hooo...”

This wasn’t getting me anywhere. It was like she couldn’t even hear me. In fact—

“Eeyikes!”

I found myself letting out a terrified scream. Not only had my coaxing not convinced her to come have breakfast; instead, she shoved her face right up next to mine and, as if to say “Bon appétit for really real!”, licked my cheek with her tongue.

“S-See? I don’t taste so good, right?”

No response.

“Myusel makes a breakfast that’s much more delicious than me! How about you have some, Elvia?”

No response.

Elvia didn’t say anything, but her tongue worked its way from my cheek down my neck. This was about all I could take.

Kanou Shinichi, dead at seventeen.

Eaten by a beast girl he met in an alternate world.

Ugh. I really didn’t want to end up with that carved into my tombstone. Actually, my family was Buddhist, so that wasn’t the sort of thing we would have put on a grave marker anyway.

Once again I found myself thinking a bunch of random and totally useless things.

“............Huh?”

The fangs never came. In fact, Elvia, having finished her tour of my throat, seemed to have taken an interest in my clavicle and was now proceeding on to my chest. I thought I had read somewhere that when a carnivore wants to finish off its prey, they usually do it with a bite to the throat. Maybe werewolves didn’t work the same way?

“Elvia...-san?”

“Haaaah... Hooo...”

Elvia grabbed my shirt in her mouth with what seemed to be annoyance, then shook her head violently, tearing it. When she found she couldn’t pull it off, she straddled my hips and began ripping at it with her hands. Her claws shredded it is easily as if she were mulching a piece of paper. There was way more strength in that little body than you would expect.

This had to be...

“Hold on.”

Yeah, hold on.

It couldn’t be...

A beast girl. Crazy eyes. Not acting normal. Harsh breath. The words came together in my mind like the pieces of a puzzle, and they all pointed to one thing.

“Hey, Elvia, you aren’t...?”

No response, of course.

“H-Hey, that tickles, it tick—oh! No! You can’t go— Elvia! Eeeeyikes!”

Elvia had licked my chest and then continued downward...

“Elvia! Elvia-san! You can’t— This isn’t the place for— Well, it sort of is, but— Just stop!”

No answer at all. Elvia went along, sniffing and licking my body.

When I looked at her again, it occurred to me that she was practically naked. Elvia was never one to wear a lot of clothing, and while in her room she basically stripped down to her underwear. I’d seen her in her room before, so this wasn’t exactly new to me, but under the circumstances it seemed a little more erotic—I mean very erotic—I mean endlessly, infinitely erotic. The cleft of her breasts was completely visible above the tube top wrapped around her chest, and as far as her bottom half, she had traded her usual pants for what amounted to a loincloth, way sexier than hot pants or whatever.

Finally it started to register: she wanted to eat me, all right... but not for breakfast!

“No effin’ way! You want to eat me like that?!”

What had I done to deserve this reward?! Was I about to cash in my V-card?!

No! This is not the time to be thrilled about this!

“Whoa! Elvia, you can’t, you’ve got to stop!”

I won’t try to deny my libido, but I do fancy myself a gentleman with a certain modesty. No, seriously.

And anyway, in the 3D world, you can cause all kinds of trouble for yourself by touching a girl. I was sticking to 2D brides! Okay, not really, but if you let yourself get carried away, you can wind up in some very scary places.

“Hooo... haaaah...”

Still, my words were obviously not getting through to Elvia.

She had never really been the type to jump a guy, so this had to be due to, you know, estrus or something. I mean, that’s the trope, right? Beast girls go into heat!

It’s just instinct, it’s just instinct! I repeated over and over to myself. She can’t help it! I can’t act like she’s hot for me, because it’s just instinct and she’s innocent! Deeply and totally innocent! As if that changes anything!

My words, of course, were powerless in the face of her overwhelming elemental drive. But that didn’t stop me from shouting, “No, no, no, don’t, don’t, don’t—Elvia, doooooon’t!” My words rang through the house, accompanied by the sound of my pants ripping.

My name is Kanou Shinichi. I’m general manager of the parallel-world-first general entertainment company Amutech.

My story begins at the dawn of the twenty-first century...

In Japanese domestic territory, specifically in the “Sea of Trees” near Mount Fuji, a hyperspace tunnel to another world was discovered. An alternate plane of existence, just a hop, skip, and a jump away from us.

The tunnel isn’t very wide, and there’s no way to either enlarge it or block it off, so it sat there, a ripple in spacetime.

In utmost secrecy, the Japanese government sent a survey unit through the tunnel, and they succeeded in making contact with the organisms who ruled this new land—a human state. They convinced this state, the Holy Eldant Empire, to open relations with Japan in the interests of a mutually brighter future.

This other world was something of a godsend, and our unlikely encounter with it almost certainly a first in human history. The establishment of cordial relations was a real coup.

Japan, however, didn’t trumpet any of this; instead, they kept it all dead secret. This was due to certain expectations that had coalesced among the country’s ruling elite.

This was another world, after all. It had unknown lifeforms, culture, technology—and resources. The cultural level of the Eldant Empire was on a par with Middle Ages Europe, so there might not be much to gain from them technologically, but the biological and mineral resources here were all but untouched—practically no one even knew whether they were there. That meant it would be easy to bilk the Eldant Empire into handing them over. Start with some pleasant “dialogue” to get their guard down, and then it was open season on whatever was over there. At any rate, that seems to have been the deplorable thinking taking place among the less savory elements of the Japanese government at the time.

But the best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry... even the nastiest ones.

The government had made first contact and enticed the empire to open relations, but what should they use to promote “friendship”? The magic in this new world made it easy enough to communicate; the trouble came after that. The Japanese delegation brought over lots of little gifts—all kinds of traditional cultural trinkets—in hopes of currying favor with the Eldant Empire, but the Eldant side just didn’t seem that interested in any of them.

The fact that the size of the hyperspace tunnel was constrained, and that they were trying to do all this without alerting any other countries, meant that very large objects, or large numbers of objects, couldn’t be brought over to the new world. Too much activity, and America or someone was sure to smell a rat, and then Japan’s plum little find would be snatched away from it.

What the Japanese government hit on then was the same thing that had powered Cool Japan—a bit of uniquely Japanese culture that had proved capable of crossing linguistic and cultural barriers. That’s right: anime, manga, video games, and light novels. Otaku culture.

As it happened, this otaku stuff was every bit as popular in the Eldant Empire as it had been elsewhere on Earth. So Japan set about really leaning into the otaku angle, and Amutech was their foothold for doing so.

Now, this plan was very much the work of bureaucrats, people who were not well equipped to deal with the unprecedented and who didn’t even know what kinds of otaku goods might be worth sending over. On top of that, they were busy with domestic infighting because of an impending change in administration, and the government didn’t have the time, the budget, or the people to give its full attention to deciding which cartoons would be most interesting to a bunch of Middle-Ages peasants in some other universe. So the bureaucrats did what bureaucrats do best: they delegated.

“What if,” they thought, “we grab ourselves an otaku from somewhere and send him over to run the company for us?”

So they set up a front company, ran a help-wanted ad worthy of a gang of swindlers, and found a dyed-in-the-wool otaku and former home security guard whom they gleefully sent packing through the hyperspace tunnel. That was me, Kanou Shinichi.

“Hrrnngrrahgghhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

An inarticulate scream echoed through the house. It was weird-sounding enough to make me pretty embarrassed for myself, but what else could I do? Elvia was licking me all over, and it kind of felt good but also really tickled, and I was finding it hard to sound like a normal person.

Elvia Harneiman. A self-described wandering artist—and, as we’ve established, a werewolf; in other words, half-beast.

In this other world, beast people were treated as being among the “humanoid races.” That is, Elvia’s cutely drooping ears and adorably fluffy tail were no more remarkable than a difference of skin color would be back on Earth.

Her words and actions, her understanding of what constituted common sense, weren’t that far removed from those of a human; she really wasn’t so different from us. “Beast person” she might have been, but that mostly just meant she had ears and tail (not that those aren’t very important moe points!). I had completely let down my guard.

I had forgotten that being a beast person meant that yes, she was half person, but she was also half beast.

Elvia had explained to me once that beast people had to learn skills that allowed them to sublimate their strong hunting instincts into things they could really get absorbed in. If they followed their instincts to their natural ends—the hunting of everything from livestock to humans—civilized society might not last very long.

In Elvia’s case, she learned to draw. In the sense that this involved following something with your eyes, thereby taking it into yourself, it had an obvious resemblance to hunting. It was probably similar to what a human felt when tracking prey with a rifle, or for that matter taking candid shots with a camera.

But all of this only dealt with the hunting instinct. There were, uh, other instincts that a little bit of artwork couldn’t address.

“Elvia! Elvia!” I kept shouting her name, hoping it would return her to sanity, but it was as if she couldn’t hear me.

Of course, unlike when a man forces himself on a woman, a woman trying to force herself on a man needs the—well, the participation of a certain part of that man.

But woe was me: some small amount of hesitation aside, as a healthy teenage guy, when a girl got this close to me, that part of me definitely wanted to participate. Plus, Elvia was plump in all the right places and thin where a girl should be thin. She was extremely—I mean, she had the sort of body that naturally caused the little guy to sit up and take notice. She had a pretty nice face to boot, and anyway, we were talking about getting with a real, live wild thing here. Not an opportunity you’d ever get in Japan.

Add on to all that the classic extenuating circumstances: “I’m in heat! And because I’m in heat—I mean, I would never normally do this, I’m not that sort of girl, but what the hell, I’m in heat!” I hate to say it, but I could hardly call myself an otaku if I didn’t rise to the occasion.

All that’s to say that even though I personally didn’t necessarily want this, the rest of me was all set and ready to go.

“Hooo... Hooo...”

Elvia impatiently tore off her underwear. She had already shredded my pants, and I was only wearing my own thin underwear. With her strength, Elvia could have ripped through a pair of made-in-Japan synthetic fiber pants with no trouble.

Kanou Shinichi... your chastity is in danger!

Farewell, my purity, which I’ve guarded lo these seventeen years!

Er... Actually, I guess I wasn’t exactly going out of my way to protect it.

As my heart pounded and these thoughts raced through my head—

“Master?”

—a girl suddenly peeked in the door.

She had long, flaxen hair tied in two tails, and she was awfully cute.

Twintails are often treated as shorthand for a snarky tsundere girl, but this girl was just the opposite, an open and mature and very modest maiden. Plus, she was wearing a frilly headdress that pretty much announced she was a maid, her willowy body ensconced in a dark one-piece dress accompanied by a white apron (also frilly).

“Myusel?!”

Myusel Fourant. That was her name.

As her appearance suggested, she was the maid of this household, and my personal caretaker.

I looked at her imploringly. “Help m—”

“M-Master...”

Myusel, however, seemed frozen with shock as she took in the sight of me and Elvia. Her big emerald eyes, open so wide they looked like they might fall out of her head, were filled with a torrent of emotion.

“...Oh.”

I realized how this must look: Elvia, all but buck naked. Me, wearing one measly pair of underpants. And then Elvia straddling me—okay, not my crotch; she was perched a little higher up than that, but not much. And then add in the little detail of her saliva dripping from my face and neck. Frankly, it would be stranger not to misconstrue what was happening.

Still, I couldn’t keep myself from exclaiming, “Th-This isn’t what it looks like!”

Crap! That always means it’s exactly what it looks like!

It was just the sort of thing that would make someone assume I was lying—but since it actually wasn’t what it looked like, what else was I supposed to say?

“This—This is all a misunderstanding! I—”

Myusel continued to stand there, displaying no reaction to anything I said. In that sense, she was a lot like Elvia, although one of them was frozen and the other was boiling over.

Then a calm voice came from behind Myusel. “Men are all the same.”

Another girl emerged from behind the maid. She had black hair pulled into a bun, keeping it neat and rather pretty. She didn’t have the flash to really draw people’s attention, but she did have a certain calming effect, a warm fuzziness to her.

I had never asked her how old she was, but I would’ve said maybe in her early twenties. The glasses she wore, combined with her baby face, could make her look like a teenager from the right angle—in fact, I would say they usually did. But you couldn’t miss her chest—the two great round bulges that pushed up her uniform screamed “Grown-up!” without saying a word.

Koganuma Minori-san. She was Japanese, just like me; as a matter of fact, she was a WAC with the Japan Self-Defense Force, living here as my bodyguard. A gallant older woman charged with protecting me, she carried a 9mm handgun and a 9mm machine gun in case there was any trouble. At least, that was how it was supposed to go.

“M-Minori-san!”

“Shinichi-kun, is this what you meant when you said you were going to go ‘check on’ Elvia? Just what is happening in here?”

“What’s happening? What’s it look like?!”

“Oh, I know what it looks like.”

“I mean—no, this isn’t what it looks like! I need help!”

“Gosh, and here I thought you two were getting along so well.”

“What’s with the banter?! Help me already!”

From the moment she had announced “men are all the same,” it became obvious that this was not someone I was going to be able to rely on in the last extremity. She was going to react to what was in front of her, and not well—if anything, she seemed to be enjoying the fact that I was in trouble at that moment.

“So you want me to help you?”

It only took me a second to respond, “O-Of course I do!”

“Ooh! I heard the hesitation in your voice!”

“This is no time to be clever!” I said, practically crying.

Truth be told, it wasn’t as if I had an aversion to Elvia, or for that matter to fooling around, but the last thing I wanted was for my very first time to be observed by Myusel and Minori-san.

“Okay.” Minori-san nodded, then suddenly crouched and picked up something next to her. She must have brought it with her—had it ready to go.

It was a bucket, the kind you would use for drawing water.

Inside, of course, was—

My face twisted in alarm. “Hold on—Minori-san!”

“This is the best way to deal with an animal in heat,” she said with a bright smile. Then, with a shout and not a moment’s hesitation, she dumped the brimming bucket of cold water right over me and Elvia.

Gosh...

It was a few minutes later.

“Gee, I’m real sorry about that,” Elvia said.

She had regained her sanity pretty much right away.

We were sitting in the dining area of our house. It had a fireplace and a sofa and a big grandfather clock. It was pretty much the stereotypical “Western mansion” look. Pretty different from the average modern Japanese living space. The sheer size of it was remarkable—close to twenty mats. There was furniture here and there so residents could relax. It looked less like a living space and more like what we might consider a reception room.

But, moving on.

After dousing us from head to toe with freezing water, Minori-san had forcibly moved me and Elvia to this room. Myusel brought some towels so we could dry off, then she brought a change of clothes. Only after that was I finally able to relax a little.

Elvia was in her usual outfit, with her belly button and shoulders on full display, but she had calmed down a bit now, and that seemed to blunt the striking eroticism she’d had earlier. That, in turn, allowed the smallest member of our group to relax, too.

However...

“When it gets to be that phase of the moon, I just can’t stop myself...” Elvia was shrinking into the couch, looking very apologetic.

“‘That phase of the moon’?” So was that, like... You know? That thing in The Diary of Anne Frank? I mean, okay, forget the diary.

Come to think of it, when my little sister got hers the first time, our mom made this special red rice. I had no idea why and kept prying and snooping until she clotheslined me. In my young heart, I couldn’t understand why I deserved more than a little smack. But forget about all that.

“You know, you did seem a little different in there.” This came from Myusel, who was considerably more at ease now.

“Uh, yeah. Sorry ’bout that.” Elvia scratched the back of her head in embarrassment. “It just started for me, so it’s all...”

“Ah, is that why you have trouble controlling it?”

“Sorry again. I’ll clean up the fur later.”

“Setting aside the smell—fur?” I asked, frowning.

Now that she mentioned it, Elvia’s body did seem unusually furry.

“Lycanthropes have it rough that way, don’t they?” Myusel said, as if this all made perfect sense to her. I still hadn’t quite put all the pieces together. I looked back at Minori-san, but she only shrugged. Even though she had been in this world longer than I had, she didn’t seem to be any more knowledgeable than me about this.

“Uh... Elvia? I have to admit, this isn’t quite clicking for me.”

“Oh... You’re an off-worlder, aren’t you, Shinichi-sama?” She seemed to see what the problem was. She scratched her cheek. “You don’t have werewolves where you come from, do you?”

“In legends and myths, sure. But they don’t actually exist... I’m pretty sure.”

“I can see why you wouldn’t know about this, then,” Elvia said with a nod. Then she continued, “The lycanthropes, the tribes that are half beast? Once a month there’s a time when we kind of... go back to our roots, I guess you could say. Become more beast-like.”

“You mean like at the full moon?”

“Yeah, right. That’s it,” Elvia said happily. “It differs a little from person to person—some of us get hairier, or some people smell worse, and others, maybe their ears or tails grow longer, or they get more muscular and powerful. That sort of thing.”

“Does anyone ever transform?”

After all, a wolf man transforming on the night of the full moon is sort of the original werewolf legend. On Earth, a werewolf is usually someone who’s normally human, but turns into a wolf on nights when the moon is full. But Elvia had her animal features, her ears and her tail, all the time. Then again, maybe I was being misled by the way beast people in this world perpetually occupied that liminal space between human and animal; maybe it was causing me to arbitrarily imagine that werewolves here never transformed.

Still, it seemed that phases of the moon did influence werewolves here and have physical effects on their bodies. It might not quite qualify as “transformation,” but...

“Yeah, it’s pretty rare for someone’s whole bodily structure to change,” Elvia said.

Huh. So that meant it did happen sometimes. That would definitely count as transformation. The fact that even those sorts of changes fell under the rubric of “individual differences” was... I don’t know if it was awesome, or kind of lazy. Was this all dictated by genetics or what?

“So... How do I put this? The more beast-like we become, the stronger our appetites get. The desires kind of well up from within us, and we can’t ignore them. Again, just how forceful they are varies, but in my case...” She smiled, embarrassed. “Well, ‘that phase’ only just started for me...”

“Hang on a second,” I said, astonished. “I guess I never asked, but Elvia, how old are you?”

Doesn’t a girl usually get her first period somewhere around middle school? I knew Shizuki, at least, was in sixth grade when it happened.

“The average age in Japan is twelve or thirteen,” Minori-san broke in. “But some girls need that red rice as young as eight years old, and others have to wait until their late teens, you know. Besides, who’s to say that it would work the same way for Elvia as it does for humans?”

Although both of our worlds evidently used euphemisms that amounted to the same thing, they seemed to point to opposite phenomena. Usually, human women experienced blood loss accompanied by pain or fatigue. But Elvia and the beast people apparently experienced heightened physical abilities.

“I’m fifteen,” Elvia said shyly.

Yikes.

To see Elvia, who usually had no trouble walking around with half her body exposed, all embarrassed like this was oddly intriguing.

“Wait a second, fifteen?” I had assumed she was at least my age, if not older. Hadn’t we first met because she came here to spy for the kingdom of Bahairam? Even granted that she may or may not have been fully aware of her role, I had never imagined Bahairam would stoop to sending kids to do their dirty work. I had assumed she must be at least eighteen or nineteen. Besides that, maybe having Minori-san around had given me an unconscious bias toward the idea that just because someone looked really young didn’t mean they weren’t a proper adult.

Now that I thought about it, though, during Japan’s civil wars in the sixteenth century, the coming-of-age ceremony often took place at around fifteen years old. The idea that eighteen or twenty was the age at which you became an adult was something established by the post-World War II civil code.

“Anyway, like I said, I... I’m just not used to it yet...” Elvia seemed to shrink even further as she spoke. In other words, because “that phase of the moon” had just begun, she didn’t yet know how to deal with the increased desires and instinctual behaviors that accompanied it.

“What you’re saying is, you jumped on Shinichi-kun purely out of instinct,” Minori-san said. Well, that was a succinct summary.

Elvia nodded. “I’m very sorry. It’s not just hunting and stuff... Certain other desires get stronger, too...”

“No way,” I murmured. What a fantastic instinct! She was actually in heat! In other words—

“That stuff makes you too frisky!”

Imitating Ohtsuka A**o’s rasp was awfully difficult.

Sorry. Never mind.

When I questioned Elvia a little further, I found out that she had first experienced “her phase” about two months before, but that she had somehow managed to keep it under control the first couple of times, hiding it from us. That had the effect, however, of making her feel a little bit unhappy all the time. And today it had finally gotten away from her.

“But do you get so out of control that you’d do it with just any guy?” I asked. I didn’t know how werewolves felt about love, but if your instincts drove you to do it with someone you didn’t even know, then when you finally came to, you might discover your first time had scarred you for life.

I did recall Elvia saying something about how since I had saved her life, she wouldn’t necessarily mind if I jumped her. Did that suggest werewolves weren’t super uptight about chastity?

“Oh, uh, that—” Elvia gave an ambiguous smile and couldn’t quite seem to look at me; she was blushing. “That isn’t... That’s not necessarily the case.”

“Oh ho!” Minori-san leaned in at this. “So you won’t do it with just anyone, but you’d do it with Shinichi-kun?”

Elvia was silent.

Hey, that’s no fair! She was usually so easygoing, or kind of rough around the edges—and now of all times, she decided to be coy? What happened to “it’d be okay if you jumped me”? How out of character was this?!

Thoughts like that were racing through my mind, and my heart was going every bit as fast.

“Ohh. Uhh... Hmm.”

“What’s with the look?” I said.

Minori-san had turned to me, transparently enjoying herself. And here I thought she was only into yaoi! “You’re one popular guy, Shinichi-kun. I guess everyone has their moment in the sun, huh?”

Uh-huh. Isn’t a moment in the sun supposed to give you a nice tan? Elvia pouncing on me this morning was more like a sunburn. Whatever.

“Huh. Is this what it means to be ‘popular’?”

I thought that usually implied more than one girl was interested in you. I didn’t think Elvia alone qualified as me being “popular.”

“Think of it this way,” Minori-san said. “You live in a house with a maid-san and a beast girl. You’ve unlocked the Beginner Harem achievement.”

“Yeah, sure. And which game is that in?”

What did she think this was, some kind of ero-game?

“Again, I’m really, really sorry,” Elvia said. According to her, this “phase of the moon” stuff only afflicted lycanthropes; humans didn’t experience the same thing. Given that society here put humans on top and looked down on demi-humans, the goal became to be as much like a human as possible—and so something like the “phase,” which only affected demi-humans, was considered very embarrassing.

“Because of the way it makes us more beast-like,” Elvia explained.

“It certainly does that,” I said with a wry smile. “But I mean, you are a ‘beast’ person, right?”

I wasn’t sure why she was making such a big deal about it all of a sudden. Beast girls going into heat; wasn’t that pretty much par for the course?

Elvia looked at me and said, “Doesn’t it... bother you?”

“Doesn’t what bother me?”

She blinked in surprise. “You know, the way I’m... different from a human. With the ‘phase’ and all...”

“No way! I love it!” I said, flashing her a thumbs-up as if to say Way to go!

Yes, I had been pretty surprised when she knocked me over all of a sudden, but checking the goes-into-heat box only raised Elvia’s moe level in my eyes. True, one could ask what good it did to raise that level, but let’s forget about that.

“I think it’s... forceful,” I said, “but it doesn’t creep me out or anything.”

Elvia looked at me blankly. Had I really said something that surprising?

“Just communicate with us,” I said. “There’s a bunch of different ways we can handle this. Like, just let us know when your... urges are at their strongest, and I can make sure to keep clear of you. Stuff like that. If you have to keep getting buckets of ice water dumped over your head, you’re gonna catch a cold one day.”

“Shinichi-sama...”

Elvia’s expression, which had been stiff with caution and fear, slowly melted into a beaming smile. Wow, cute. As an otaku who prided himself on having wide and generous interests, I was all for kuuderes and tsunderes and whatever, but there was definitely a lot to be said for a bright, earnest smile like that.

“You’re not just gonna let this slide, are you?” Minori-san said with a pat on the shoulder—Myusel’s shoulder. The maid had ended up as something of a passive observer in this conversation.

“Oh, uh, no, ma’am. I’ll do my best,” she said reflexively, as if snapping out of a stupor. Then she said, “Wha? Oh—you—you mean me?” She looked around, only now taking the situation in.

“Who else would I be talking to?”

“Oh, no, I just—” Myusel looked at the ground, blushing right up to her pointy ears.

Incidentally, Myusel was of mixed blood, half human and half elf, and it was a bit of a sensitive issue with her. She didn’t worry too much about us seeing her ears around the house, but when we went outside she always arranged her hair to make sure it covered her ears. She might face discrimination if people knew she was a half-blood.

“If I may,” interjected the conversation’s second passive observer, “is it all right to take this back outside?”

Passive Observer No. 2 indicated the bucket Minori-san had used to douse us. This newest speaker didn’t sound like he had had any real interest in the conversation up to this point—although I admit his face and voice weren’t the easiest to read.

Brooke Darwin, our groundskeeper, and also the person in this room that someone from modern Japan would consider most obviously “not human.”

That was because he was a lizardman. He had a long, almost conical head, scales all over his face and body, jaws that looked like a gouge in his face—and then there was the tongue that slipped thoughtfully in and out of his mouth. He gave an unavoidably reptilian impression; despite his height, he looked very much like a lizard that had started walking on two legs.

Even in this world, where demi-humans weren’t an unusual sight, lizardmen stood out. They were often treated as separate even from other beast people.

I kind of assumed Elvia wouldn’t try to get with Brooke even if there weren’t any other guys around. Biologically, they just seemed too different.

“Oh, yeah, that’s fine. Thanks,” Minori-san said.

On that note, it sounded like Minori-san hadn’t actually known about Elvia’s being in heat. She just knew there was some kind of commotion—when I screamed, she went and got the bucket from Brooke on the premise that it would be helpful no matter what was going on. “At the very least, stun guns are more effective when someone is soaking wet, right?” she’d said. She was one scary lady.

“I’ll excuse myself, then,” offered Brooke, heading out of the dining area.

As I watched him go I remarked, “Different races really do have different concepts of what’s embarrassing, don’t they?”

I was just kind of thinking aloud, not especially looking for agreement or anything, but Minori-san said, “Maybe you’re right. You know how much values and perspectives can differ just from country to country or even era to era. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising if things look different to someone who’s a completely separate form of life.”

“Come to think of it, what’s the deal with reptilian senses, again? They have pit organs or something, right?”

Pit organs are a special biological feature of some reptiles that allow them to sense infrared radiation. This allows them to “see” prey animals like birds and mice, whose body temperatures are always higher than the ambient. Or something like that, anyway. Basically, it’s like they have special eyes for seeing things on the infrared spectrum. It wouldn’t be surprising to discover the world was a different place for them.

“I thought that was only snakes,” Minori-san said with a puzzled look. “I feel like lizards don’t have pit organs. Anyway, I don’t know if lizardmen are actually closer to lizards or snakes, or if they’re something else altogether.”

True enough. The name “lizardmen” came from their lizard-like appearance, but that didn’t mean everything we knew about reptiles from our world would apply to them. If that were the case, then how could there be dragons here? If we proposed that one pair of feet had evolved into wings instead, we would end up having to classify them along with six-legged creatures like insects.

“I feel like we and Brooke understand each other fairly well, but I wonder if that’s just my misperception,” I said.

There were still plenty of things I didn’t quite get about his facial expressions and speech, but he was a hard worker and didn’t seem at all like a bad guy. He and some warrior friends of his had even helped me out of a very tight spot not long ago.

Since we were all living in the same house together, I thought it would be nice if we could all get along as well as we were able.

Then, however, I felt Minori-san’s hand on my shoulder. “Shinichi-kun,” she said, “I understand. If you truly intend to walk down that difficult path—heh heh heh! I’ll give you all the help I can.”

“Um... What are you talking about?”

This sounded bad.

Minori-san, her eyes shining behind her glasses, exclaimed, “I’ll do everything in my power to help write the Shinichi/Brooke story!”

“Whoa, just hang on, now...”

“Say, Shinichi-kun, do you prefer to be the bottom?”

“Don’t you ever think about anything else?!”

“Never!”

“Oh my God, you actually said it!”

I felt like Minori-san had gotten a little less restrained in her behavior recently. Since we knew she was a fujoshi anyway, maybe she’d decided to lean into it...

“How can a guy and a girl so totally fail to understand each other... Even when we’re both human?” I sighed.

A man and a woman. Two people from different countries. Two people from different planets. And here, people from different races. It would be best if we could all understand each other—but maybe complete mutual comprehension was just too much to hope for.

God knows it wasn’t happening here.

The Holy Eldant Empire—that was the country the Japanese government had made first contact with after discovering this parallel world. And the name wasn’t just for show: this was an honest-to-goodness totalitarian state with an empress at its head.

What about the name Eldant? It didn’t just refer to the country. It was also the empress’s family name... as well as the name of the castle she lived in, smack in the center of Marinos, the national capital. Personally, I found the whole nomenclature kind of overcomplicated, or least confusing. As a matter of practice, though, people rarely addressed the empress by the name “Eldant.” Instead they called her “empress” or “Your Majesty.” I guess it’s not so different from how God doesn’t have a name in the monotheistic religions on Earth.

There was only one empress around, so referring to her with a common noun wasn’t a problem, I supposed. When the word “Eldant” did occur in daily life, it was usually to differentiate this country from others—in which case people usually said “the Holy Eldant Empire”—or to refer to the ruler’s place of residence, in which case one would say “Holy Eldant Castle.” Then again, a lot of people just referred to “the imperial castle.”

Anyway.

“Some things never change,” I murmured as I walked through the halls of Holy Eldant Castle.

Architecturally, this castle resembled something out of the European Middle Ages, but the scale and construction were unlike anything I’d ever seen. We often describe big buildings as being “the size of a mountain,” but in the case of this castle, it was probably literally true. When I stood outside my mansion and looked in its direction, the castle rose up against the horizon like a feature of the terrain. Like an actual mountain peak.

I was just wondering how they had ever built such a gigantic structure when—

“What never changes?” Minori-san asked. She was walking just behind and beside me.

“Oh. Just the way this place overwhelms you.”

“It sure does, doesn’t it?” I didn’t have to look back to know that Minori-san had a wry smile on her face. We had visited this castle dozens of times, and yet we still knew only the smallest corner of it, maybe not even a tenth of the entire building. You could probably have fit a fair-sized town in the space consumed by this place.

“And when I noticed this floor for the first time,” I said. “Man, talk about the shivers.”

I looked down at my feet. The floor was made of beautifully polished marble, but despite slight variations in color and pattern, no matter how hard you looked, you couldn’t see any seams. At first, I hadn’t understood the import of that—it hadn’t even really registered with me that the seams were missing.

“Yeah,” Minori-san said. “To think, this whole place is made out of a single piece of stone.”

Yep.

Believe it or not, Holy Eldant Castle wasn’t made of bricks or stones piled on top of each other. They took a single humongous mountain and carved the castle out of it. This place wasn’t “as big as a mountain.” It actually was a mountain.

Of course there were no seams in the floor. It was all of a piece.

Obviously, this wasn’t work you could do with axes and shovels. You probably couldn’t build this place in a thousand years that way.

Magic was the key.

The Holy Eldant Empire, you see, was home to wizards, some of whom were accomplished in the civil-engineering magics. It was their powers that had carved this castle from a mountain. The building looked like it could stand forever, as indeed it adorned the country’s capital even now.

Now, when I talk about stone architecture, you might think of someone who lives in a cave, or maybe those mountain temples in Tibet. This place, however, looked a lot like a Middle Ages European castle. That was why I had remained oblivious to the construction method (such as it was) for so long.

“Every time we come here, it’s like... I feel like I’m going to meet the VI-est of VIPs. It’s pretty intimidating.”

As General Manager of Amutech, I made periodic visits to Holy Eldant Castle. The mansion I was living in was officially owned by Amutech, but we were actually borrowing it from the Holy Eldant Empire—from the empress herself, as a matter of fact. Actually, the Eldant Empire had fronted part of the capital for Amutech, which was technically a part-public/part-private enterprise. That meant the empress of the Holy Eldant Empire was, in a manner of speaking, my employer.

Hence, I was obliged to provide her with occasional updates on how business was going. Every time I showed up at the castle, though, I was seized by a sort of anxiety, a feeling that maybe I wasn’t quite the right guy for the job. Or maybe more like simple disbelief that I—me!—was going to talk directly to an empress.

She had godlike powers, almost literally. This castle represented just a fraction of her authority. It would be weirder not to be a little ill at ease walking through it.

“As scared as you act in the hallway, you always seem pretty cool when we’re actually talking to Her Majesty,” Minori-san said.

“Yeah, well... I guess,” I said with a bit of a grin.

At last, we rounded a corner of the hall and—

“Ah, you made it.”

At the end of the corridor (way, way at the end of the corridor) stood a man with a knight to either side of him. At first glance, he looked like a salaryman in the most dead-end job imaginable: the neatly parted, salt-and-pepper hair; the narrow, perpetually almost-smiling eyes; and the whole kind of melancholy bureaucrat look. But this was one book you couldn’t judge by its cover.

It was possible the man’s entire appearance was an act, concocted to meet the needs of his current position. He was certainly capable of that.

He was Matoba Jinzaburou, chief of the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau, a governmental organization. Practically speaking, however, he was the government’s man on the ground when it came to interacting with this alternate world; he took care of red tape for Amutech, requisitioned any resources we needed, and handled a variety of other niggling but necessary jobs.

That effectively made him my coworker. But was he my friend? That’s a little harder to say. The government and I disagreed, after all, about what exactly we were doing in the name of “cultural exchange” here in the Holy Eldant Empire. Disagreed so vehemently, in fact, that they had sent a special ops squad to try to kill me.

And Matoba-san, of course, was more or less on their side. That meant it would be dangerous to trust him completely. I grant that, unlike the high-level politicians and bureaucrats I knew of, Matoba-san had said and done some things that suggested a measure of fondness for me. He wasn’t exactly putting me ahead of his bosses; I suspected he just thought that this was the way to make the fewest waves.

But whatever the case, while I couldn’t put my complete faith in him, that didn’t necessarily mean I had to view him as an enemy, either. It was, as they say, complicated. It also meant that talking with him could be a tiring affair.

“Oh, you’re back?” I said as we approached him.

Matoba-san had briefly left this world to return to the one I had come from—that was to say, Japan. When the special ops team sent to eliminate me (on the grounds that I had “gone rogue”) failed in their mission, Matoba-san went back with them to make a full report and settle things in Japan.

It’s worth pointing out that the Eldant Empire was also aware of this special forces operation, as well as what the Japanese government had really been planning. That meant that the two knights with Matoba-san, who appeared to be protecting him at first glance, were probably there to keep an eye on him. The Empire’s response when they had found out about Matoba-san’s true work had actually been pretty measured; they could easily have grabbed him and thrown him in jail. The revelations could have led to the collapse of international relations and even an all-out war.

Granted, all-out war might be a little difficult through a hyperspace tunnel so narrow you couldn’t fit a car through it.

“Well, be things as they may, I am the contact point for this project,” Matoba-san said with a grim smile.

When Minori-san and I caught up to him, he started walking along. He and his guards kept about a half-step behind us. Our footsteps trailed us, echoing off the hard stone of the hallway.

“Ahem. On the subject of the disposition of the Japanese government,” Matoba-san said, as if he had just remembered it.

Here it came. I mentally shrank back. This was the million-dollar question.

The bigwigs back home, the politicians and everyone, had already tried to have me killed once. It was well known that they didn’t change their minds easily. I guess it’s not just politicians and bureaucrats—lots of people who hit forty or fifty years old are taken with a strange kind of self-confidence that makes it hard to admit when they’re wrong. It leads some people to irrationality and extremism in the attempt to defend their views.

The point was, I hardly expected them to humbly apologize at this late date.

“For the time being, the government has decided to acquiesce to your fit of pique.”

“Gee, I’m so happy I could cry,” I said, laying on the spite. Sure, they were happy to go along with it—after they had failed in assassinating me.

But then Matoba-san went on, “As a matter of fact, your efforts here are rather highly regarded. Although they have yet to produce concrete profit, the goodwill you’ve created amongst the populace has its own value. I admit that the very regrettable misunderstanding of earlier did result in some tension between our nation and the Holy Eldant Empire, but—” Matoba-san glanced at the knights just behind him. “We cannot ignore the distinct possibility that your work here may, in the future, produce significant profits for Japan. Such was my superiors’ decision.”

“............Meaning?”

“If things continue this way and we procure a good means of trade, every export Japan creates could find an entire nation’s worth of new consumers. Domestic demand could double.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

You didn’t have to impose unequal treaties or deliberately swindle people to make plenty of money on commerce. And in me, the government already had a pipeline to the Eldant Empire. Most likely, they figured getting rid of me at this point wasn’t the smartest play.

After all, like I mentioned earlier, the Eldant Empire already knew all about what Japan was up to. If I were to disappear, the Empire’s mistrust of Japan would certainly grow, and that might well make exchange impossible. It would definitely make the whole situation a lot hairier, if nothing else.

“What you’re saying is that for the moment, I don’t have to consider myself in immediate danger of my life, is that right?” Still feeling the sarcasm roil within me, I deliberately used the most bureaucratic language I could come up with.

Matoba-san paused thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Well, not that I think they’re to be trusted,” and shrugged. “The prior assassination attempt went forward without the unanimous consent of the government. And we did just get another new prime minister.”

“Great...” I muttered.

True, Japan had long been a country that was ready to change prime ministers at the drop of hat.

“This was not some mere hot-mic gaffe or campaign-finance irregularity. It was too big to be papered over. The prime minister who signed off on having you killed is no longer part of the government.”

“So I’m supposed to treat it as water under the bridge?”

“More or less, yes,” Matoba-san said.

How totally ridiculous—and totally bureaucratic. “We changed the guy in charge, so everything’s different now! Let’s just pretend none of this ever happened, okay?” I wouldn’t be surprised if they wound up creating an Office of Taking Sole Responsibility for Wrongdoing. We could call the guy “Scapegoat” for short.

“Aren’t you embarrassed?”

“I should say so,” Matoba-san said, but his smile got even wry-er. “Regardless, this does represent an unprecedented degree of accommodation to an individual on the part of the government. I presume due punishment is being meted out internally. You can rebuff them, of course, but in that case the budget won’t be passed, and it won’t be possible to requisition new anime, manga, games, and light novels.”

“So that’s how it’s gonna be.”

You might be wondering what this was all about. Well, the manga and anime and games and light novels I was bringing into the Holy Eldant Empire were all being provided by the Japanese government. Given that it was the Japanese government that controlled the hyperspace tunnel representing the one route for exchange between the two countries, that made a certain amount of sense.

The government also fronted the cash to purchase all these otaku goods, which were (natch) made in Japan.

“I suppose this is what we should have done from the beginning. Using budgetary constraints to keep people’s hands tied is Politics 101.”

I couldn’t believe he could say that with such a straight face when he was talking directly to the person whose hands were being tied.

“Bear in mind that the prime minister at the time of all that unpleasantness was... rather hawkish, you might say. He liked to use force. Which, sadly, eventually led to the attempt on your life.”

“How the hell does a guy like that get into the prime minister’s office?”

For that matter, how the hell did a guy like that get into politics?

“It was the people who chose him, remember. He was quite popular. The things he said and did were very radical.”

I didn’t say anything. I mean, he was right, unfortunately. People who are careful to toe the line never get as much attention as the ones who say and do things that are memorable, even if those things are a little outrageous. Everyone tells themselves, “Well, what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked, so why not?”

Anyway, forget about that.

What it came down to was, I had no choice but to accept the government’s proposal. If I couldn’t keep this situation stable, there’d be no hope.

“Right, then.”

As I was contemplating this, we arrived at the audience chamber.

Holy Eldant Castle had several different audience chambers; we were at the smallest one. It was a useful little room—good for personal meetings with the empress, when you didn’t want too many nobles or imperial staff members to hear what you were saying.

In the big, official audience chamber, every time anyone came in, the knights by the door would bellow out their name and order of business, but in this smaller room such pomp and ceremony wasn’t observed. The knights on guard gave us the once over and then nodded silently before opening the door and ushering us through.

I stepped onto the red carpet that ran down the center of the room. I said this was the small audience chamber, but it was still probably about twenty mats in size.

“We are glad you’ve come, Shinichi.”

At the far end, up on a dais, sat the throne, and upon the throne sat the empress.

The confidence and authority in her words should have been intimidating, but I felt like grinning. That was because I knew what her personality was like—and above all, what she looked like.

“Ruler of the Holy Eldant Empire” seems like a pretty darned impressive title, but the person who stared down at me from the throne—

“Your Majesty, I am overjoyed to see you in good health and high spirits this day.”

“Oh, stop that.”

—was a little girl.

Not that I would ever say that to her face. It would totally tick her off.

Petralka an Eldant III. She appeared to be hardly into her teens; in fact, it wouldn’t be all that hard to picture her with a backpack, heading off to elementary school. But she was the absolute monarch of this country.

That didn’t prevent her from also being pretty much the perfect loli character. Her silver hair and emerald eyes were practically a form of jewelry in and of themselves; she was utterly beautiful and you just wanted to put her in a glass case for safekeeping. I’m proud to say that I’m capable of getting moe over just about anything from a loli girl to a big-sister type, so whether you considered her an “archetypical little girl character” or something else, the point was, I found her very attractive.

“Why do you stand on formality? Are you upset?”

“Well, I’m meeting an empress. It’s a pretty formal occasion.”

“Did we not give you permission to call us by our name?”

“Well, uh, yes, you did.”

It was only then that it dawned on me: this was something that Her Majesty—or rather, Petralka—was doing specifically to nettle Matoba-san, or perhaps to control him. Pointedly showing that I was in her good graces was also a warning to him of what might happen if he and his friends tried to do anything to me again. That was the Empress of Eldant for you: she might look like jailbait, but you couldn’t take her lightly.

I guessed this would be a good moment for me to play along.

“Okay, then, Petralka,” I said in my friendliest tone. “Let’s read plenty of manga together next time we get a chance, just the two of us.”

“Wha?!” Petralka’s eyes went wide and she stiffened.

Huh? Did I say something wrong?

“Ahh. We see now.” She collected herself, then nodded as if considering. “Shinichi.”

“Huh? Yes?”

“We are somewhat surprised to hear such an idea from your own lips.”

“Huh? Oh, uh, you are?”

I thought we were acting super friendly to put the pressure on Matoba-san. No?

At the same time, this loli-ish empress was a bit like an instant water heater. If I said the wrong thing, I could find myself in a lot of trouble very quickly. I doubted she would have me executed or anything, but she packed a mean punch despite her small size. I could say from experience that when she hit you, it hurt.

Hence my resolve to tread lightly.

“Ahem. A-At any rate,” Petralka said in a somewhat strained voice, “we shall endeavor to, erm, clear some time in our schedule and... Yes, that’s it. We shall have a special villa readied for the purpose.”

“Er... Right.”

That seemed like a pretty serious thing to say, actually. I mean, a special villa? She wasn’t really going to build a whole satellite palace just to read manga with me, right? I didn’t think she had to go that far to make the point to Matoba-san.

I guess absolute rulers have a different perspective on money than the rest of us, though. Here I thought we were just joking, but there was always the chance that she would actually build a palace. It was sort of like if someone said “I’ll give you your allowance,” and you held out your hands only to have them drop a huge sack of money into them.

“Uh, be that as it may, Petralka, my report...”

“Erm, yes. Your report.”

Huh? What was with the disappointed look? Not that it wasn’t awfully cute on Petralka’s face.

“Things at the school are... Ahem. I’d like to say they’re going well, but...”

The “school” I was referring to was the place where we were teaching people everything they’d need to enjoy otaku culture (manga, novels, anime, and so forth), like Japanese language and the cultural knowledge to go with it. I had asked Petralka to build it for me, but as a matter of fact it was the first public educational institution in the Eldant Empire. And so, much like how Petralka was simply “the empress,” everyone knew that “the school” referred to my otaku training center.

That school, it so happened, was immensely popular. I wanted as many people as possible to be able to enjoy otaku culture, so I did away with exacting entrance standards; Amutech was even footing tuition. But that turned out to be a bad idea. Fueled by rumors that the empress had a special place in her heart for this project, everyone from commoner to noble was champing at the bit to get in.

Our initial plan had been to have about fifty students, but we received twenty times that many applicants, a thousand people. Obviously we couldn’t take them all, and so as much as it hurt me, we started out by limiting admittance to the children of the nobility, along with some of the more well-to-do commoners. Families with influence, you might say. That was how we picked our fifty pupils.

Despite this, however, we still suffered from a dearth of teachers—specifically, the instructional staff consisted of me and Minori-san.

“What is it? Is there some problem?”

“We just don’t have enough staff. I mean ever, for anything.”

We were somehow getting by for the time being, but I eventually wanted the school to be able to live by a creed of accepting all who would come and not trying to detain anyone who wanted to leave. If you try to force culture on people, it all too easily becomes a weapon of invasion. That was why I wanted attending or not attending my school to be entirely the free choice of the students.

But that in turn meant that we needed to accept everyone who applied, and I didn’t have the slightest clue how we were going to deal with twenty times our current number of students. It was possible that we could take our cue from some university classes: just have all the students in one giant room and have a teacher lecture at them, knowledge flowing unilaterally from us to them. Even at that, though, two instructors was obviously not enough.

“One idea is to separate the students into class years and have the higher-level students, like Myusel, teach the beginners.”

Whether it be manga, anime, novels, or games, first you had to learn a minimum of Japanese writing. There were some students who were already so advanced that they were translating light novels from the Japanese; we could take them on as instructors in the more basic classes to rectify our chronic shortage of personnel.

Petralka, however, looked surprised. “Have Myusel do it?”

“Uh... No go?”

Myusel was nominally my maid, but strictly speaking, the Holy Eldant Empire itself was her employer—in other words, Petralka was her boss. If she vetoed the idea of Myusel teaching, we could never go forward with it.

“We are not necessarily saying you can’t do it,” Petralka said, but she seemed unusually hesitant to speak her mind.

I went on, “But I am concerned that if Myusel’s time is taken up with teaching, she won’t be able to attend to housework. I’d love to get another maid to pick up the slack...”

This was definitely something I had to ask Petralka to handle for us. True, it was possible Amutech itself could hire a housekeeper, but bringing someone over from Earth seemed like potentially a lot of hassle, and as far as finding someone around here, letting the Empire do the hiring seemed a lot safer in terms of checking candidates’ backgrounds and so on.

“Shinichi.”

“Yes?”

“Is this not essentially a request to increase the number of women around you?” Petralka was looking squarely at me.

“Huh? Uh—no! That was definitely not what I had in mind!” I said, shaking my head vigorously.

Now that I thought about it, living with me at the mansion were Myusel, Elvia, and Minori-san—three eligible young women. Of course, there was another guy there (Brooke), but he was a lizardman and, as groundskeeper, spent most of his time outside. His totally inhuman appearance, combined with the relative infrequency with which he was inside the house... Well, I could understand where it might leave the impression that I had something of a harem going.

“And?” Petralka asked, drumming her fingers on the armrest of her throne. “Are you hoping for another large-chested helper?” Her gaze was so cold she could have been shooting freeze rays out of her eyes.

“Whaddaya mean, another?! I told you that was all a big misunderstanding, can’t you let it go already?!” I all but shouted.

It seemed like Petralka had pigeonholed me as having a big-boob fixation. And sure, I had nothing against a great rack, but I liked small ones, too! Take Petralka herself, for instance. She had this perfect little swell, noticeable but not overwhelming, like it would fit right in the palm of your hand... But if I let any of that out of my mouth, there was a distinct chance of my head winding up on the chopping block.

“As long as we get someone to help Myusel around the house, it doesn’t matter who they are.”

“Hmm. But if Myusel starts going to the school...”

“Something the matter with that?”

“It would mean the two of you would be together practically morning, noon, and night.”

It looked like this was a topic of considerable reflection for her, but as far as I was concerned, I would be perfectly happy to be with Myusel all the time, and I didn’t see what particular problems it could pose for Petralka. Or was there some nuance to this situation that I wasn’t noticing?

“Petralka?”

“Oh—no. It’s nothing.” She shook her head a bit too emphatically.

Seriously, what’s going on?

“At any rate, very well. We will consider your petition for a maid. Finding someone suitable for a position like this can take a surprisingly long time, though...”

“Thank you for your help,” I said earnestly, bowing.

“Is there anything else?”

“Uh, this and that,” I said with a sigh.

We were getting more pupils—that was a good thing as far as it went. Directly or indirectly, more and more people were becoming interested in otaku culture, and since we were teaching reading and writing as well, it meant the cultural level of the whole Eldant Empire would go up. But also...

“If we get dozens of times more students than we have now... I have to worry that the fighting will get worse, too.”

“Fighting?”

“Sometimes people of different races just don’t seem to get along...”

I thought back to the commotion at the school the other day.

Bam! A fist slammed down on a desk. Everyone looked in the direction of the sound. A short girl and a taller guy were standing there, absolutely staring daggers at each other. The girl was a dwarf, and the boy was an elf.

If you were wondering, it was the dwarf who had pounded her fist on the desk. She left a dent a centimeter deep in the wood surface. Dwarves were inevitably short, and the girls in particular had cherubic faces, so it was easy to think of them like children—but they were also fearsomely strong, and if you figured “they’re just shrimp” or “they’re just kids,” you could be in for a world of hurt. I had seen a unit of JSDF special-ops forces, the elite of the elite, get beaten down by dwarf women who weren’t carrying any weapons at all.

In the JSDF’s defense, the troopers probably saw the dwarves as being women and children (possibly both at once), and so didn’t fight with their full strength. The soldiers had also been hit with magic, and their opponents’ short size made them hard to fight anyway. No matter how well-trained they were, the soldiers had probably never imagined they might have to fight enemies who were barely 1.5 meters tall.

“Just you say that again!”

“Gladly! How many times do you want to hear it?” The elf looked down on the dwarf—I mean literally, being the better part of fifty centimeters taller than she was—and snorted. “How can you imagine that Ko**tsu and Bar**by are all lovey-dovey?! That’s ridiculous! Why do you so enjoy forcing everyone into homosexual relationships? You disgusting dwarf. Does it ultimately come from all the time you spend around dirt? That’s what I said.”

Not to be outdone, the dwarf replied, “Awfully big talk from someone without the muscle to back it up! I’ve heard you! ‘Ka*de-chan is my wife!’ ‘Blue **se-chan is so moe!’ You ought to be embarrassed! What kind of moron are you?”

A volume of some manga or other was sitting on the table between them. When I saw the title, I realized it was the manga version of a particular anime. The DVD must have been available in the library, which we had set up so people could watch videos. It looked like they were having some sort of argument about the characters from the manga...

“Embarrassed? What do I have to be embarrassed about? Moe is culture! Ultimately, it—”

“Ultimately! Ultimately! Do you think you get to stop thinking because you know what everything ‘ultimately’ is? Now I know why elves are so light—you don’t have a brain to weigh you down!”

“Better than a head full of rocks, like dwarves have!”

They were really going at it, trading a parade of insults that would make your toes curl.

I had pretty much grasped what was going on, though. The dwarf was putting a yaoi spin on this manga, and the elf was making fun of her for it.

“Sigh...” I knew from personal experience that what girls and guys wanted out of a given otaku work was sometimes very different. But unlike most manga and novels, anime often wasn’t separated by “label,” so men and women frequently found themselves consuming the same works together, but each interpreting and enjoying it in light of their own preferences.

It was only natural that guys and girls would get moe for different things. The elf and the dwarf were supposedly talking about the same series, but since each of them was coming at it from the direction of what they liked best, they ended up talking past each other—as was all too obvious from listening to them.

Under normal circumstances, such differences in preference generally weren’t inflicted on each other. Take Comiket, for example. Genre distinctions are made both spatially and temporally, and usually people with opposing interests never see each other. Booths selling doujinshi aimed at women and those selling doujinshi aimed at men don’t share the same space, even if their books are based on the same anime.

That’s what’s typical, mind you. Very few people deliberately seek out those with different preferences and try to argue. Otaku usually prefer to just ignore people who can’t understand them. For better or for worse, otaku know how to handle other otaku. The culture emerged organically.

That kind of “common sense,” however, couldn’t be counted on at this school. The Holy Eldant Empire had never had much in the way of “entertainment culture,” and the liberal infusion of manga and anime and games and light novels we had brought over produced a sort of overreaction, like a medicine that was too effective. They didn’t know how to distance themselves from people whose interests diverged from theirs.

And on top of that...

“Elves! Hmph! Who needs ’em?”

“Dwarves! What boors!”

Elves and dwarves had never been the best of friends; add a disagreement about media to the mix and you had a recipe for some truly stupendous arguments. They were often looking for an excuse to fight anyway, and belittling each other’s interests proved an excellent way to bait their opponents.

“Hey! If you think I’m going to let that pass, you’ve got another thing coming!”

“I don’t think you think at all!”

“Try me, you acorn-shaped—!”

“All that time in the trees must have set moss growing in those giant ears!”

“All that underground sulfur must have rotted your brain!”

And considering that the otaku work in question was nothing more than the spark, these arguments inevitably devolved into a series of mean remarks about the other race’s appearance, abilities, or history. Anyone of the same race who was present was obviously not going to let those kinds of barbs slide. Pretty soon, what began as a personal dispute between an elf boy and a dwarf girl had turned into an entire classroom of people squaring off, elves versus dwarves.

“Heh! It’s hardly worth talking to you!” the elf crowed.

“Oh, that’s right,” the dwarf shot back. “Run away! You’re the worst.”

“Excuse me? As if you don’t just prattle on without even hearing what I’m saying!”

I knew from personal experience that these sorts of arguments never really end. Usually someone just says something like “You’re wrong!” or “You’re so dumb it’s not even worth talking to you,” ignoring any kind of rational argument, to say nothing of the other person’s viewpoint. That’s how it works online, for sure. But since differences of interpretation and preference for any given otaku work were just an excuse to start fighting, it ends up not really being a question of who’s right and who’s wrong.

When it comes to stuff like anime, you’d think you could just enjoy it however you liked. But people start talking about how it “should be,” and then things go off the rails—because with a million ways to enjoy any given work, no one conclusion is going to please everyone.

And that was why—

“Unforgivable!”

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

The elf and dwarf both took up fighting stances and began to chant magic.

“Emarufe Ekansu! Flaming Serpent!”

“Erifutoshigeru Tosegunotosu! Fire with fire!”

The coil of flame that the elf shot out wrapped itself around the dwarf like a snake, just as the name suggested. But the dwarf, being a dwarf, had cast a spell of resistance to fire, and the conflagration stopped a hair’s breadth from her skin, doing no damage.

Incidentally, elves tended to be more skilled at offensive magic, while dwarves often specialized in defensive spells. I just learned that myself.

“Gunoru Edirutosu! Thousand-foot Lunge!”

“Tifu Murottsu! Storm Fist!”

There was a tremendous bang as the dwarf girl dropped into a shoulder tackle and the elf boy jumped back and fired off a spell in return. Before the dwarf could connect with her target, a whirlwind spun up and slowed her down.

Maybe the two of them weren’t all that powerful, or maybe they had both held back at the last instant so there wouldn’t be any casualties, because neither of them appeared to be injured, but the power of their magic had thrown little sparks at every corner of the classroom.

“Yikes, that’s hot! Watch what you’re doing, you long-eared loon!”

“Yowch! What’s wrong with you demi-humans?!”

The shouting came from people who had been hurt when the dwarf, still wrapped in the coil of flame, came flying toward them.

The room erupted. Yelling and shouting and arguing spread all over. Racial discrimination is bad enough on its own, but when it’s inspired by a dispute about 801 (that is, yaoi) and moe, that just adds an extra savor of the pathetic. And Professor Tolkien would spin in his grave to see a moe-obsessed elf and a 801-mad dwarf.

The shouting and the stomping and the smashing all ran together. Fire and electric shocks and impacts and pieces of things flew everywhere. The classroom suddenly seemed to have turned into a literal battlefield.

“Ahem.” Minori-san, standing beside me at the lectern, was giving me the eye. “Aren’t you going to do something about this?”

“Do I look like I have a death wish?”

I wanted to have a proper lesson as much as anybody. Besides, it’s not like I enjoyed watching people fight or seeing my classroom supplies get annihilated. Seeing figures destroyed, even if they were mass-produced ones, hurt my heart, and my spirit ached at the waste of manga and novels torn to shreds.

If I just jumped in, though, I could only get hurt, as I had already learned from painful experience. I could try shouting, but who was going to listen to me? Everyone was too worked up about the “enemy” in front of them. The classroom was utterly out of my control, and I didn’t feel like there was anything I could do about it.

“I guess we’ve got no choice, then,” Minori-san said with a sigh.

What came next happened in a flash.

Or rather, a bang.

In an enclosed space, even a 9mm is plenty deafening. Elves, dwarves, and humans all froze in place, then turned toward us. They weren’t looking at me. They were looking at Minori-san, who was holding her JSDF-issue 9mm handgun above her head. Without really thinking about it, I glanced up at the ceiling, but I didn’t see any sign of a bullet. Maybe she had loaded it with blanks.

She still got what she wanted, though.

“Listen up, you stupid students!” Minori-san put both her hands on the teacher’s desk. When someone who was normally as laid-back as she was started shouting like this, it definitely got people’s attention. She glared at everyone from behind her glasses. “There is no racial bigotry here!” If this had been a comic book, her words would have been accompanied by some sound effect like don! (bam!)

Wow. That’s a WAC for you. She sure knew how to lay down the law when it counted. So cool!

“I don’t look down on any of you pigs, whether you’re elf-pigs, dwarf-pigs, or human-pigs!”

I take back my “So cool.”

Um... Minori-san? What’s with this “pig” talk?

“Here you are all equally worthless!”

“Just a—”

“My orders! Are to weed out all non-hackers! Who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps! Do you maggots understand that?”

Y’all remember yer in the Ground force and not the Marines, right?

Wait, was I so startled that I had started speaking with a drawl?

No! What I meant was, where’d this Sergeant Hartman act come from?!

“Stop! Walk it back, Minori-san, walk it back!” I waved frantically at her, terrified that she would start blurting out “I didn’t know they stacked s@&! that high” or “slimy communist c&#ks*@!ers” and other truly unprintable things.

“Aww, but I was just getting into it.” She looked genuinely disappointed.

What is wrong with her?

“You’re gonna get yourself killed by Gomer Pyle.”

“There are no M14s around, so I’m not worried.”

“Yeah, well I do want a teenage queen.”

And on and on we went, in a conversation that would probably have made zero sense to anyone who hadn’t seen F*** Metal Jacket.

Finally, I glanced at the students. “Er, uh, anyway, no fighting in the classroom, okay?”

“Sir yes sir!” they shouted in unison. Funny. They sounded just like a group of spooked recruits.

These people had all been raised in a very authoritarian society, so sometimes Minori-san’s top-down style of leadership (by which I mean shouting things at them) seemed to click better for them.

Having said that, if you think that, having laid down the law once, we never had another problem with fighting... Well, you’d be wrong. We could shout ourselves hoarse, but the effect was only ever temporary. We were talking about rivalries that had been going on for centuries here; that hostility wasn’t going to vanish overnight.

Faced with a classroom atmosphere just as strained as ever, I muttered, “What are we gonna do...?”

Okay, flashback over.

The point is, the classroom constantly seemed to be on the verge of exploding. The spark that set it off could be anything. I happened to pick an example that started with a disagreement about how to interpret certain anime characters, but that was sort of the best you could hope for. Sometimes arguments started over whether it was better for the heroine to have big boobs or to be really young, and once an elf and a dwarf came to blows over whether this actress or that one should have played such-and-such a role in an anime adaptation of a certain manga. Naturally, what started as an innocent dispute about media somehow escalated into a series of “Yo’ momma so fat”-type insults.

“Getting everyone to settle down is a massive pain,” I griped.

But Petralka replied, “Well, we suppose there’s nothing to be done.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“The enmity between elves and dwarves is long-standing.”

“I guess you’re right about that,” I sighed.

I know the differences between races can be pretty noticeable, I thought, picturing Brooke or the way Elvia had acted that morning. Even if you didn’t set out to be discriminatory, when another person’s bodily construction and biology were so distinct, it was all too easy to start thinking of them as though they were a different form of life. The divergence in worldview that sometimes came from those differences could cause friction, and it was almost impossible to eliminate these fundamental differences. I didn’t understand Brooke’s experience as a lizardman, and he probably didn’t understand mine as a human.

Even two people from the same race might fail to understand each other if their perspectives were too different. So maybe some strife between humans and demi-humans, or between different races of demi-humans, was only natural.

“I’ve got to admit, I hoped we might be able to let lizardman children into the school at some point,” I said, more to myself than anyone else.

“Lizardman children?” The dubious inquiry came not from Petralka, but from the handsome knight standing at her shoulder.

We sometimes talk about “knights in shining armor,” but this guy almost seemed to literally embody the expression. Much of the simple armor he wore, as well as the outfit underneath it, was a pure white. He had shimmering silver hair, just like Petralka, and he let it grow long. He was pretty much a stereotypical anime- or manga-style pretty-boy.

This was the noble Garius en Cordobal. He was a knight of the Holy Eldant Empire, as well as a minister, and on top of that he was a relative of Petralka’s. In other words, he was second in importance only to Petralka herself.

“What exactly would be the purpose of admitting lizardmen to the school, Shinichi?” he asked, sounding almost annoyed.

“The purpose? I... I just thought they would be happy to get the chance at an education like everyone else. Lizardmen face even more discrimination than elves and dwarves, right?”

Petralka cocked her head. “Dis-crim-i-na-tion?”

Oops. It happened again.

Sometimes, words that seemed simple enough to me didn’t quite get across. It might be that my Eldant audience didn’t have the right concept, or that they took slightly the wrong nuance from it. Our oh-so-convenient rings readily got across the meaning of most of our words, but when the other person lacked any concept equivalent to what you were saying, the word would be communicated to them as pure sound, with no equivalent meaning.

“Oh, uh, in other words, something that’s not equal, or, like, when someone is persecuted or treated as less important by others. I thought it might be nice if we could eliminate some of that, even if only at school—”

“Ridiculous.” Garius’s response startled me. “I want you to understand something, Shinichi. Those things may walk like people do and talk like people do, but deep down they are beasts. No—perhaps not even that.”

“Gosh, you... you really don’t like lizardmen, do you?” I frowned.

“I feel I should say that this is not simply my personal opinion,” Garius replied. “Lizardmen as a species are cold-blooded, and their humors are less intense than those of humans.”

“Is... Is that right?” I asked. And truth be told, I could almost see where Garius was coming from. As I had noticed that morning, Brooke sometimes seemed less prone to strong emotion than a human. Like how when he got hit, he didn’t seem to get angry—in fact, he didn’t even seem to think of it as sad or disappointing or particularly unpleasant. He felt pain less acutely than we did, so maybe the emotions associated with pain or unpleasantness were absent or less emphatic.

“Trying to treat them the same way as humans could simply create new problems. It could easily lead to the very ‘discrimination’ you’re worried about,” Garius said.

I thought I understood what he meant. If we treated lizardmen the same way we did other humanoid races, it might actually invite scorn from those peoples. I guess even in contemporary Japan people sometimes argue that if you give too many breaks to those who have been discriminated against, you end up actually treating them better than the people who weren’t discriminated against, creating a new kind of inequality.

“Okay,” I said, “but if we can turn the lizardmen into customers, we could start selling otaku stuff to them. It would be, whaddaya call it, a new market.”

Granted the differences in perception and worldview that I mentioned, I wasn’t actually sure whether lizardmen would be receptive to works of otaku culture or not. Brooke, at least, sometimes watched anime or read manga, although that was partly because I encouraged him to. Myusel said that every once in a while he would ask her about the meaning of a word he found in a manga. So that meant he was at least interested, right?

“I had another thought,” I added. “Lizardmen are effectively the lowest class in this country, right? If we want to raise the nation’s overall cultural level, pulling it up from the top is one way to do it, but raising the bottom seems more efficient.”

If we taught the lizardmen, who were considered the bottom of the heap around here, to read and write, if they were able to become bearers of culture, then the higher classes would be embarrassed if they themselves were illiterate. That was my thought, anyway. Then people would actively take it upon themselves to study and learn, and achieving the necessary educational level for the spread of culture would be easier.

“Hmm...” Garius didn’t look quite convinced. He seemed to be considering what I had said.

As nonchalantly as this guy could make racist pronouncements, he wasn’t actually malicious, nor—most striking of all—was he inextricably attached to these viewpoints. What I mean is, if he saw that it was of real benefit not to discriminate, he had the flexibility and vision to change his view.

I had real respect for Garius that way. (Let me be clear: definitely not of the “You’re so amazing! Take me now!” variety.) It was a pretty impressive thing to be able to do, all the more so for someone in a position of power.

“It is true that from small argument comes great bloodshed,” Petralka commented. “Strife between the races is something we can’t afford to ignore. We are told that such discord has even caused civil wars in the past. And racial tension fuels a good deal of the issues that currently occupy the royal guard.”

“All true,” Garius said with a nod.

“If such problems could be decreased even slightly, would that not reduce the burden on the knights?”

The Eldant Empire didn’t have what we would call a police force. All matters that required any kind of armed force, whether domestic or external, were the business of the knights. So if a war broke out, or intensified, the knights got busier, and sometimes public safety suffered as a result.

I was given to understand that the Japanese government, in addition to its scheme to import otaku culture, had also been thinking about taking over policing of the Eldant Empire, but I assumed those plans were on hold. Neither Petralka nor Garius trusted Japan nearly enough for that now.

“Given that all peoples of this empire, regardless of race, are equally our subjects, reducing the amount of fighting would surely strengthen the nation. That in itself is no bad thing.” Petralka frowned and went on, “But the other side of that coin is the emergence of groups like Bedouna.”

“Right,” I said dispiritedly.

Bedouna was an extremist group that referred to themselves as the “assembly of patriots.” At one point, Petralka, Minori-san, Myusel, and I had all been their hostages. They regarded racial discrimination as a part of the country’s culture and were intent on killing me, whom they regarded as an invader who wanted to undermine that culture.

“As ruler, we may tell people not to ‘discriminate,’” Petralka said, “but there may be those who do not understand, as well as those who actively oppose us.”

“True enough,” I said. Racial discrimination was a fraught issue even in my own world. I knew I was hardly going to come up with anything that would eliminate it overnight.

“Is there anything else?”

“Well, no big problems,” I said, cocking my head and searching my memory. “I guess I could point out that I’m a little surprised by the lack of reaction to sports stories here.”

I was being honest. I had decided long before that I wouldn’t hide anything in my reports, good or bad. Although I hadn’t known or wanted it, I had come here as the tip of the spear of an invasion. It would be in my best interests not to hide anything else.

“Suporrrtz?” Petralka looked confused. “What is that?”

“Oh, well, you know... How do I explain?”

Now that I had to put it into words, I found that the concept of sports was so broad I was having trouble summing it up. There were several activities in the Eldant Empire that could have been classified as sports, but they didn’t exactly match up with what I had in mind. Some of them were closer to things like kemari, a kickball game played in Japan in the eleventh century, and others were more like the kind of hunting once enjoyed by English nobles. That sort of thing.

When I talked about sports, though, I was thinking of things like marathons or swimming or soccer. Rugby or baseball. All a little different from what they had here. The closest thing to swimming in the Eldant Empire was the aquatic training conducted by the royal military forces. It was similar to marathon running and the like. Even when it came to things like kemari or hunting, they were treated mostly as entertainment. People didn’t see them as ways of training the body or keeping themselves healthy.

There especially didn’t seem to be anything resembling “ball sports” in which players divided into two teams and competed against each other. That was part of why people around here tended to bounce off most sports manga.

“You know, some people say that ball sports like baseball or soccer are basically substitutes for war,” Minori-san said from beside me. “Think about how violent dodgeball is, for example. Maybe a country that’s actually fighting a war doesn’t have a lot of demand for substitutes.”

“Sure, I could see that.” I understood where she was coming from. “But still, it’s too bad. They’re missing out on a lot of fun.”

Soccer, tennis, baseball, rugby, and lots more besides: sports manga were a long-standing genre, to say nothing of all the other works that were influenced by these games.

“It’s definitely true that sports stories are hard to appreciate if you’ve never played a sport,” Minori-san said with a nod.

That’s not to say that you can’t enjoy a baseball manga if you’ve never played baseball, but you have to at least be familiar with the premise. If you had never so much as heard of baseball before, it would make it a lot harder to understand the story. Being in an environment where you were exposed to it—via radio broadcasts of baseball games, say—helped, too.

“If you know how the game is supposed to be played, you can have a lot of fun with things that tweak it, too,” I said. “Think Shaolin So**er or As**o Kyuudan or We Ain’t Got None!”

I thought back to my father’s personal library. Samurai G***ts was an oldie but goodie. They were forever using the high-jump trick ball or the mirror-image trick ball or the super-spin trick ball and all sorts of other weird pitches that made absolutely no sense, but that was part of the fun.

There was something to be said for stories that were totally over-the-top. Take the time when one player, hoping to counter the high-jump trick ball, practiced shooting his bat out of a bow on a cliffside...

“Those are some awfully obscure references for someone your age, aren’t they?” Minori-san asked. “Wouldn’t something like Prince of Soccer or Inazuma E**ven be more appropriate now?”

That’s a dyed-in-the-wool fujoshi for you: she’s just looking for different things in her media than I am.

“And these are interesting, you say? We are intrigued.” Petralka leaned forward in her seat. When it came to enjoying otaku goods, the loli-ish empress had pretty wide-ranging tastes. That made it easy to get her on board with ideas like this, which I was thankful for.

“You want to try it?”

“Hm? Try what?”

“Japanese-style sports!” I said.

If I could get her interested in sports as a whole, it would open up a number of options in the future.

“I admit, if we’re going to do them properly, we’ll need a baseball diamond or a soccer field or something. I’ll bet we could just use the training ground, or an empty field somewhere.”

“Hmm...” Petralka looked thoughtful for a moment, and then said, “We will consider it.”