Chapter Three: Soccer... Soccer?

It had been about a week since I brought up the possibility of a competition in front of the empress, and the Holy Eldant Empire had decided to support the creation of a series of soccer fields. The plan was for six playing areas. One would be right next door to Holy Eldant Castle, so the knights could use it to train. Another would be built for the exhibition game—more of a stadium, with spectator seating, a roof, and even a special viewing box for Her Majesty. It would be built on the outskirts of the capital city, Marinos.

As for the remaining four fields, they would be built in an open space near the school, so that not just the students, but anyone who wanted to, could use them to play. This was both because Amutech was sponsoring the event, and because there were relevant materials in the school library.

The construction would be handled by the JSDF, as well as the Empire’s Dwarf Corps of Engineers, whom I had gotten to know during the building of the school. Both units were very familiar with this kind of work, so they whipped through the construction of the four fields near the school. From leveling the ground to erecting the goalposts and even putting up fences to prevent balls from being lost, the entire job took them just two days. As soon as the fields were ready, we opened them to the public.

And so...

“Right! You won’t beat me!”

“Bring it on!”

“We’re gonna win, or die trying!”

“Show me what you’ve got!”

Classes were over for the day, and the students were once again on the fields. The raucous voices were coming from the human team. The elf squad was practicing on the field next to theirs.

Once classes were done, students could generally decide for themselves what to do—stick around, go home, whatever. But almost all of them had rushed outside for some enthusiastic soccer practice.

“They’re sure into it, aren’t they?” I remarked.

“They sure are,” Minori-san said, looking out over the soccer fields with admiration.

Minori-san and I had passed out soccer rule books earlier, and it looked like the students had taken them to heart. We didn’t see anyone touching the ball with their hands, or trying to kick on a throw-in, or anything like that. I was surprised at how much they had picked up in barely a week—but then again, the basic rules of soccer are pretty simple. And the students were all excited to be playing a game in front of the empress herself. Maybe that was more than enough motivation to memorize a skimpy rule book.

“I guess they really want those PLPs and 3TSes,” Minori-san said.

“Er... Yeah.”

Minori-san and I were looking out from the library, up on the second floor. All four of the soccer fields were in use, and elsewhere in the immediate area we could see students working on their footing and heading.

“You’d think we were giving out a cash prize...”

I glanced back at the library’s lending record, a notebook lying open on a desk. It had notations in both Japanese and Eldant, indicating who had borrowed what over the last several days.

Your Field of Dreams.

Captain Tsukasa.

Inazuma El**n.

Striker on the Verdurous Planet.

Kick-On.

And so on and so forth. It could practically have doubled as a list of all the soccer manga in the library’s collection. None of the entries bore a return date, meaning they were all still out on loan. I figured the students were eating up every bit of soccer-related media we had. It was the same with the anime DVDs. None of the students had video playback devices at home; the most they could do was watch them on the PCs in the self-study room, but still...

“They seem to have found something to study, too,” Minori-san said, pointing to a group gathered in front of one of the computers.

From their size, I guessed they were dwarves. The school was fielding four soccer teams, but since the fields outside were open to the public as well, everyone couldn’t be practicing all the time. The mixed team, the one Elvia had joined, was using one of the fields, so one of the school teams had to take a bye.

It looked like it was the dwarf team’s turn to sit out, and they were using that time to absorb more soccer knowledge and work out a strategy.

“The elves have longer legs, so we won’t win by running.” Overseeing the dwarf team was none other than Romilda. A piece of paper, evidently standing in for a soccer field, sat on the desk, and she was writing things on it for all the dwarf boys and girls to see. “I swear here and now we’ll beat the stuffing out of those spindly-legged tree-lovers!”

“Woo!”

“Especially Loek!” Romilda pumped her fist in the air. “Pick a fight with every little thing I say, will he? He’s worse than a rock in my boot!”

“You really hate Loek, don’t you, Romilda?”

“He makes me physically ill!”

Gosh. Tell us how you really feel, Romilda.

“Seeing that flimsy beanpole he calls a body just makes me—well, it makes me sick!”

She made a sort of screeching sound that I took for anger. The dwarves all laughed merrily.

Okay... I know this sounds crazy, but... Could it be Romilda was actually tsundere for Loek, that she actually really liked him, but she was so embarrassed about it that her only way of showing it was to smack him around?

I mean, when you really, passionately love someone or something, it can suddenly turn into hatred or resentment, right? Sometimes the biggest fans of a series turn around and become its biggest critics.

So why not the other way around? You think someone is hateful or stupid or obnoxious—until you cross an invisible line, and suddenly they seem attractive...

“I swear we’ll force them to crawl on their knees! We’ll force them to slurp down muddy pond water!”

.........Okay, so maybe not.

I sighed. At length, Romilda and the others adjourned their strategy session at the desk in favor of plugging an anime DVD into the big TV on the wall, gathering around in hopes of learning more about soccer.

On-screen, a soccer ball came spinning out of a curtain of flames. Its trail transformed into a sparkling dragon, and then the title appeared with great fanfare.

Prince of Soccer—FLASH

Oh. Season two of the anime.

The words shattered like glass to reveal a young bishounen soccer player spinning around and around (while flying through the air for some reason) before finally landing on a soccer field like an angel from heaven. It looked like one of those things where there would be a big fuss every time he showed up on-screen—a starburst effect or theme song or something.

Back up. Why was he flying?

I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking the question aloud.

“Masato-samaaa!”

“Ikki-kunnn!”

Romilda and her friends didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the quibbles I felt; they were squealing like, well, schoolgirls. Well, except for the boy dwarves. They looked less thrilled.

“I’m glad they’re using the materials,” I said, “but what good is watching Prince of Soccer actually going to do them?”

“Huh? It’s fun,” Minori-san said, surprised.

“Yeah, but think about it!”

I understood that it was about more than the cute-guy characters. But still, watching those kinds of outrageous soccer battles—call it Apocalypse Savior Soccer Legend—wasn’t actually going to contribute much to their knowledge of the game.

Once the program started in earnest, though, even the guys seemed riveted to the screen.

“I guess it’s not quite what I intended, but if everyone’s having fun, then fine...”

After all, one of my objectives with this competition had been to help them understand the virtues of sports stories.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Minori-san said with a nod.

But there was another factor, something neither of us had thought of at the time.

Minori-san’s and my view of these series was based on—you might say constrained by—what was considered common sense in Japan. But the people of the Holy Eldant Empire didn’t share those assumptions. I didn’t realize it then, but they were getting some awfully strange ideas about soccer.

Construction of the stadium for our competition had begun in earnest. Unlike the fields we had built for people to practice on, this one didn’t have to be completed until practically the day of the tournament, so it had been left till last. A soccer field as such isn’t too complicated, but add spectator seating and a special viewing box for the empress, and you wind up with something that calls for a little planning. Just one more reason it couldn’t be built overnight.

“What’s going on here?”

Minori-san and I had dropped in to see how things were going, and I was surprised by what I found. I had been picturing, you know, a construction site: authorized personnel only, workers coming and going as the walls and stands went up bit by bit.

But that’s not what this was. Not at all.

“Niatoum iruguna! Quake, O earth!”

No sooner had this spell been chanted than the ground began to shake. You know how in manga you’ll see the sound effect go-go-go (ruuumble)? This was that exactly. But it wasn’t a sound that you heard; it was a vibration you felt throughout your whole body.

A whole bunch of dwarves were in the middle of it all. They had their hands together as if in prayer, the veins on their foreheads bulging so much that I could see them even at this distance as the dwarves struggled to control the magic. The spell sounded more like a challenge to battle than a magical incantation, but this was the sort of magic dwarves specialized in.

“That’s awesome,” I said, not trying to hide how impressed I was. As we watched, a wall began to rise up directly from the ground. I don’t mean metaphorically or anything. I mean literally. As if it had just been buried there all along, waiting to be brought to the surface. “It looks just like the gladiatorial arena from VOT**S.”

I was on the edge of a nerdgasm, but unfortunately Minori-san wasn’t big on robot anime, and she didn’t answer me. She didn’t know what she was missing. The banter between Chi**co and Ypsi**n was totally yaoi...

Okay, okay. Never mind.

The elves might deride the dwarves as “hole-diggers,” but a lot of dwarves made their living as miners, and so had a talent for physical buffs—necessary in such harsh environments—and “civil-engineering magics” that made the work easier. Manipulating earth and stone with magic, fashioning it into whatever shape, was sort of their specialty.

In fact, come to think of it, Romilda’s ancestors had been among those who built Holy Eldant Castle, hence the family’s treatment as something like nobility. I guess if you want to hollow out a mountain and use it as a house, you’d better have magic on hand.

“I gather they have to finish the details by hand, though,” Minori-san said.

It was true: what the dwarves produced out of the ground was less a wall proper than the basic ingredients for one. It was a lump of earth in roughly the shape of a wall. It would have to be leveled, squared off, and polished, and that would require either work by hand or a different kind of magic. It didn’t look completely stable yet, either, so some mortar would probably have to be added to keep it steady.

In a word, the dwarves’ magic allowed for the rough fashioning of things from the earth or fine detail work, but there wasn’t much middle ground. That was why there were JSDF soldiers waiting right next to the dwarves, armed with sandbags. They would place them at the foot of the wall to keep it standing, after which mortar could be added. Disaster relief being a specialty of the Japanese armed forces, this was something they were good at.

“Isn’t that nice?” I said. It was pleasant to see two groups of people both helping out with what they were best at. People helping each other is a standard trope in sports series, but to actually see it with my own eyes was a new experience. In Japanese, it’s proverbial that the kanji for person, 人, is actually a picture of two people leaning on each other. So this is what they meant! (Big smile.)

And so I stood looking deeply pleased, even though I hadn’t done anything to speak of.

“Shinichi!”

I looked up at the sound of my name to see the knight Garius as well as Empress Petralka, followed by a selection of servants and attendants. They must have come to see how things were going.

“Pe—I mean, Your Majesty.”

At my house or in the audience chamber, when it was just us and maybe Garius and Prime Minister Zahar, I called the empress Petralka. But in public or anywhere else where people might misunderstand, I addressed her formally as Your Majesty.

I would have to take a lesson from Myusel and just call her Petralka (ahhh) in my heart, then speak the words “Your Majesty” aloud. To think a time might come when I would turn into a moe character myself—my passion burns bright! ...Ugh. Saying it about myself makes me feel a little ill.

Okay, never mind.

“All hands, cease your work!” Garius called out from behind Petralka. “Her Majesty the Empress is in attendance! Bow your heads!”

In an instant, the dwarves came to a hurried stop and froze where they were. The half-formed wall must not have been quite stable, because it crumbled, nearly burying the JSDF unit nearby.

Petralka gave a gracious wave of her hand. “Well and good. Continue the work.”

This caused another knight to bellow, “Her Majesty commands work to continue! You may offer your thanks, everyone, and then resume your business!”

Boy, what a lot of hassle just so the empress could take a quick look. If she checked on progress too often, the work might never get done.

“It seems the construction is coming along nicely,” Petralka said, walking over to me.

“Yes, thankfully,” I replied. “Everyone is really working hard.” To be blunt, I hadn’t done anything at all. The ones doing all the work were the dwarves on the Eldant side and the JSDF on the Japanese side. I didn’t have so much as a blueprint on me. All I could do was watch from the sidelines and cheer encouragingly.

“That’s good to hear.” Petralka seemed quite satisfied.

I saw Garius approach not me, but Minori-san, and hand something to her. I looked at them in confusion. What was that? It seemed to be some sort of book...

“Er... Minister Cordobal?”

“Ah. Pay it no mind, Shinichi,” Garius said, waving me off. “Merely returning something I had borrowed.”

“You? Borrowed?” What kind of book could a knight like Garius have borrowed from Minori-san?

Unless............... No way.

“Oh, just some manga,” Minori-san said. But as I got a look at the book in her hand...

“J-Just a second there, Minori-san...”

The book had a flowery, girlish cover, but an opened page showed nothing but men. Two naked men, specifically, sprawled out on a bed. Granted, they were so pretty that they could practically have passed for women, but they were definitely both dudes.

No question about it: this was 100% pure yaoi stuff.

What had that WAC been up to when I wasn’t looking?!

“I thought Minister Cordobal might like it,” Minori-san said, smiling.

“What do you mean, you thought he might like it?”

So she had just foisted some soft-core man-on-man action on him?!

I admit: the minister Garius en Cordobal did sometimes look at me with a strange gleam in his eye. I was grateful that he had shown such fondness for me since our first meeting, but could that fondness be... you know, something more? The thought set me on edge.

Garius, however, smiled gently and said, “Worry not, Shinichi.”

As if to emphasize his point, he took his gloved hand and set it on my... shoulder? A shoulder is normally where you place a reassuring hand, right?

Agh! Th-That’s my neck! Stop stroking my neck!

“Far be it from me to force myself on anyone who doesn’t... ‘swing my way,’” he cooed.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re even talking about!” I exclaimed, completely forgetting my formality. How was this supposed to keep me from worrying?!

Where did he even get a line like that? That’s not yaoi stuff, that’s like from a straight-up gay manga! Please tell me Minori-san hadn’t gone that far!

I knew that Minori-san and some other members of the JSDF were importing manga and novels for personal use, above and beyond the stuff I was bringing in for business. It wasn’t exactly my place to say, but maybe it was time to think about the order in which things were being brought in.

“Hrm! Shinichi!” Petralka shoved her way over to me and jabbed a finger in my chest so hard I could almost hear it. “We hate you, Shinichi! We despise you! Oh!”

“Say... Say what?” The sudden outburst left me completely flabbergasted. We had been having a perfectly normal conversation until a minute ago, and now, completely out of left field... this? And what was with the weird little exclamation at the end there? Oh! Was it an artifact of the translator ring, some word it couldn’t bring across?

Seriously, though, what was this all about?

“Is... Is that right?” I said lamely. When the empress bursts out that she hates you, how are you supposed to respond? I mean, if you had asked me, I would have guessed that Petralka was closer to liking me than hating me. Was that impression just another product of my overactive imagination? Given that pretty much my entire romantic history consisted of confusing the affection of an old friend for amorous interest, confessing my love for her, and being shot down, maybe I wasn’t a very good judge of these things. “Uh......”

Having said all that, hearing someone say to your face that they hate you still hurts. I quailed inside, but resolved to keep a smile on my face. Smile with your mouth and cry in your heart. I wanted to think I had grown up at least enough to do that. Yeah...

“Have I done anything to displease you, Your Majesty?”

“Er—” Suddenly, Petralka seemed to be on the back foot, almost as if she was the one who was shocked by the whole conversation and not me. What was going on here?

“How foolish! Of course not!”

“I’m sorry, Your Majesty? In that case...”

In that case, what the heck? I wracked my memory, trying to think of any reason Petralka might have taken a dislike to me.

“Is this because the ●● and ×× that I enjoy in the night creep you out?”

“●●? ××?” Petralka blinked.

“Oh, er, uh, well, you know what wide-ranging tastes I have, and, uh, I’m not a stranger to ero games, see. And I just wondered if tentacle-games might be, you know, and they have— well, there’s a certain charm there. And look, I know it might not be exactly right, me playing 18+ ero games, but we aren’t in Japan anymore, right? It’s Eldant laws that apply here.”

“Shinichi,” Petralka said, studying me intently. “What is it you’re doing at night?”

“Oh... Wasn’t that what you meant?”

“No! It’s just— Aargh!” The empress had gone red with anger. “Y-You don’t... You don’t have to take everything so seriously!”

“Guh?”

“How could we possibly hate you?!”

“Yeah, I was wondering—”

You took the words right out of my mouth, Petralka.

“You’re supposed to be the evangelist of otaku culture around here—so why can’t you see it?!”

“See what, already?”

“It’s—argh!—you know! It’s a... a tundra thing!”

I was completely silent for the better part of ten seconds. In that time, I finally put two and two together.

“Your Majesty...”

“Yes, what?”

“You mean tsundere.”

“Hrm? Is that different?”

“Completely.”

Although admittedly, tundra would describe the state of my heart at that moment.

Whatever the case, it looked like Petralka had discovered the concept of a tsundere in some anime or manga and decided she would try it out for herself. And apparently the classic tsundere line “I don’t like you at all!” had gotten lost in magical translation and had simply become “I hate you!”

Japanese can be a tricky language: there are a lot of ambiguous expressions and usages. Maybe it was just lost on Petralka that to not like someone and to hate them weren’t necessarily the same thing. Why she had felt compelled to try being a tsundere herself remained a riddle wrapped in an enigma as far as I was concerned, but we could worry about that later.

“Hrm. It seems otaku culture is indeed a thing of depth and mystery,” Petralka mused.

“Even so, Your Majesty,” Garius said.

Er... Excuse me? Things with both of my imperial buddies were turning really strange. And here I had been thinking that Garius at least was a bit more of an impassive, neutral observer...

“Minori-san,” I said to our resident rotten (and getting rotten-er by the day) WAC. “Is it just me, or do I have a creeping sense of anxiety about this?”

“Trust me,” she said, smiling innocently, “you’re imagining it.”

When we got back to the house, we were taken aback by what we found. Specifically, what we found out back.

Myusel had looked a little troubled, a little hesitant, when she came to pick us up. When I asked her what was wrong, she led us around back. And there...

“Brooke,” a voice pleaded. “Can’t we—Can’t we begin again, just one more time?”

Oof. That’s a line straight out of a romantic drama if I ever heard one. I never thought I would actually catch someone saying it for real.

I could see two figures behind the house. One of them was Brooke. Facing him was the pale-skinned lizardman, the one he had called his wife. She was aiming her question at Brooke, but he didn’t respond. In fact, he wouldn’t even look her in the eye. His own wife!

“Answer me, Brooke. Don’t you love me anymore?”

But Brooke remained silent.

You could take this for a conversation out of just about any strained marriage, if you didn’t see the two lizardmen who were holding it. Each of them was at least a head taller than me and covered in rough scales. It was surreal, to say the least.

Brooke’s wife faced her silent husband, waiting patiently for an answer. But ultimately, Brooke said only two words.

“Go home.”

He turned and began to walk away, despite his wife’s attempt to stop him. He didn’t seem to have noticed us in the shadows of the building.

For a long moment, Brooke’s wife looked after him, but then she seemed to resign herself; she, too, turned to leave. In fact, as it happened, she turned right toward us.

“Oh...” For the first time, she realized we were there. I still couldn’t read exact expressions on those scaly faces, but the slight tilt of her head suggested reluctance. She stopped square in front of us. “I’m very sorry for intruding,” she said with a bow of her head. She may have looked like a bipedal lizard, but her diction and manners suggested a very fully formed person.

“Don’t worry. You’re not intruding,” I said. Seeing Brooke ignore her once—well, things happen. But this was twice now, and it was starting to bother me. “So you’re, uh, Brooke-san’s wife, huh?”

“Yes. My name is Cerise.” She gave another respectful nod. “The bonds among my people are not precisely the same as those humans share, but in the language of your tribe, it would be reasonable to call me Brooke’s wife.”

“Huh...”

That seemed like an awfully roundabout way of saying it, but all right. Lizardmen were more visibly different from humans than most of the races here, so maybe these sorts of qualifications were inevitable in talking about their society.

Interestingly, in nature, it’s actually pretty rare for specific individuals of opposite sexes to commit themselves to each other like humans do in marriage. If your goal is to perpetuate your genes, then your best chance is to bear children with a different partner every chance you get so your descendants have plenty of variation.

But anyway, forget about that for now.

“It looked like you and Brooke were talking about something... kind of.”

“Yes. This was initially about getting in touch with the Tribal Council...”

Cerise told us that Brooke occasionally contacted the Tribal Council, a group of lizardman leaders. Usually he did it by giving a message to some acquaintance of his who happened to be in town. Given the low literacy rate among lizardmen, such a communication network was a necessity.

Normally you think of such networks as using the same people to carry messages both back and forth, but apparently this time the reply had been entrusted to Cerise.

“The Tribal Council is inclined to participate in the match before Her Majesty,” Cerise informed us.

I thought back to when I had asked Brooke to form a lizardman team. He hadn’t seemed very enthusiastic, but it was clear that he had still done what I asked.

“There’s a hope that if we do well, it may raise the status of our kind,” Cerise said.

“Right. I had the same thought,” I said.

Humans and demi-humans of various races lived and worked side-by-side in the Eldant Empire, but lizardmen remained on the bottom of the totem pole. Maybe that made sense, given that they had once been the enemies of the other peoples—but that had been more than a century ago, and personally I had never known Brooke to be anything but a diligent worker who helped me out whenever I needed it. Granted, I wouldn’t want to tangle with him in a dark hallway, but...

“You,” Cerise said, nodding at me. “You’re a human. Why would you be interested in the welfare of the lizardmen?”

“Er... That’s not an easy question to answer,” I said, scratching my cheek. I just felt like if someone was being discriminated against, I wanted to do what I could to raise them up in the world and get them equal rights. But I could only think that way because I had been born in the nice, peaceful country that was modern Japan.

“It’s because I’m not from this world,” I said. “It looks like lizardmen and humans were enemies once, but I don’t have any personal or cultural memory of that. Brooke works at my house, and he seems like a really decent person. He helps me out a lot. It’s just kind of natural for me to hope that he and his people could be treated a little better around here.”

Cerise was silent. From the way her tongue slid in and out of her mouth, however, I guessed she was surprised. Just like I couldn’t readily tell different lizardmen apart, Cerise probably didn’t know me from any other human—in other words, any of the others who happily discriminated against her. Maybe that made it difficult for her to believe what I was saying, as if I had thrown up my palm and declared the exact opposite of everything she had expected. It would be confusing.

That was when Myusel interceded on my behalf. “That’s the sort of person Shinichi-sama is. He’s done a lot for me, too.” She gingerly raised a hand to her hair, pulling it back to reveal her ears. She hated for strangers to see her ears. But either because of some change of heart, or to back me up, she was willing to endure the ignominy.

“You’re—”

“Yes. A half-elf.” Myusel nodded.

Now Cerise was definitely a bit surprised. She stood there, not saying anything, until finally she managed, “Shinichi-sama... That’s your name, isn’t it?” She sounded hesitant. “You are... a most unusual person.”

“Yeah, I hear that a lot.” I grinned. From Myusel and Brooke, among others. I didn’t think it was because I was particularly special or anything. Anyone born in modern Japan and brought over here would fit the description. Anyone born and raised in a world where freedom and equality were matters of course.

Cerise went quiet again, studying me. Then she said, “I see. You are also the reason Brooke went so far as to contact the Tribal Council for help.”

“Huh?” It was my turn to be surprised.

I suspected she was alluding to the assassination attempt. Brooke had brought several lizardman warriors, presumably in the hopes that they might be of some help lest I be kidnapped or killed. He had been so nonchalant about telling me that he had contacted the Tribal Council that I had assumed it was a normal thing to do, but...

From what Cerise told us, it was rare enough for Brooke to get in touch with any other lizardman, let alone the Council. Apparently, the assassination attempt was the first time they had actually been able to pinpoint his location. It was also what had led to Cerise coming here.

Wait...

Pinpoint his location? So he had been, like, a runaway until now? A missing person? How and why had that happened? Could it be that Brooke didn’t really get along with his own kind? And if so... had he deliberately given himself away, contacting the Council for my sake?

“Brooke...”

I owed him even more than I’d realized. I wanted to find some way to repay him.

“The Council says that over the next several days they will find eleven participants and send them here to you,” Cerise said.

Lizardmen generally slept outdoors. As long as they had someplace dry, they could just dig a hole and go to sleep. They could draw on geothermal energy, according to Cerise, so there was no need for us to prepare a place for the visitors to sleep.

“Eleven participants?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Er... What about Brooke?” I had expected him to be among the eleven. “Oh, or do you mean eleven people including a backup?”

“No. Brooke will not take part,” Cerise said firmly. “Even though the Tribal Council asked him—our hero—to do so.”

“Brooke... Your hero?” That seemed to come out of left field. “Wait a second... Brooke is actually a pretty big deal among the lizardmen, isn’t he?”

After a moment of what seemed to be hesitation, Cerise nodded and said, “Yes, he is.”

She told us the story: once, Brooke had been a general of his people and had achieved a series of military victories that greatly improved the lizardmen’s position. The lizardmen had always been fighters, but Brooke was strong even by their standards, and so earned their respect.

That, however, made it seem like he might have been better off staying with his own people, remaining in the military. Why leave all that to serve a human as a gardener?

“I mean, why would he...”

But Cerise didn’t answer my question. Maybe it was a hard one to answer. Maybe it had something to do with Brooke’s refusal to acknowledge his wife.

“I think I must be going for today,” Cerise said. She bowed to us and walked away.

“She’s really something,” I said as we watched her go.

“Yes, I think so, too,” Myusel said.

“Brooke didn’t seem to want anything to do with her,” I said. “I wonder why.”

Myusel shook her head silently. It looked like it didn’t make sense to her, either.

“Shinichi-kun,” Minori-san said, finally speaking up. “I don’t think you should be nosing around in people’s private lives. Especially not lizardman lives. They’re so different from us that you might think you’re doing the right thing but end up causing new problems.”

“Yeah... You’re right,” I said, nodding. But deep inside, I wasn’t quite sure.

I am not very smart.

Oh, sure, I have a pretty good amount of otaku knowledge—but not much else. And frankly, after a certain point, I don’t think hoarding knowledge does you much good. There’s a baseline level of information necessary to think and make decisions, but it’s not like you’re going to become a specialist in every field, and in an age when we can quickly look up just about anything we want on the internet, volume of trivia alone isn’t anything to be proud of. If intelligence has to do with the number of facts you can cram into your brain, then computers are way smarter than humans.

So what do I consider real smarts? I think smart people are those who can quickly make use of the knowledge they have. People who can extrapolate from what they already know. They’re the ones who can tell what’s going to happen, and the ones who can do something about it.

I don’t really see myself as that kind of person.

So what am I getting at with all this? Well, uh...

I was standing there, absolutely dumbfounded.

It was just another day, and classes were over. The students, as usual, were on the soccer fields beside the school, practicing for the imperial exhibition. I was watching the elf team. Led by Loek, the moe-loving elf who had fought with the dwarf girl Romilda, the team had divided up into groups of five and were having a practice match.

“Graaaaaaahhhhhhh!”

I stared stupidly as one of the players let out a very un-elf-like yell and gave the ball a vicious kick.

And that was fine. That much was fine. The problem was—

“Cry out, O magical globe!”

—as the elf shouted, the ball burst into flames. I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean whoosh, fwoosh! Fire.

What the heck was going on here?!

“Retosabunogarudo raripusu!” the elf added.

The ball took a corkscrew path, burning all the while, and went hurtling toward the goal. It seemed less like a soccer ball and more like a cannonball, or maybe a falling meteorite.

“Haaaaaaaaaahhhhh!”

The goalkeeper was evidently charged up, because he gave a huge shout and took a defensive posture, arms crossed in front of his body like he was going to do a karate X-block. No way he thought he was going to stop that rocket ball like that, right? It would have been hard enough even if the ball wasn’t actively on fire. Instead of standing there like he was going to do some anime-style finishing move, shouldn’t he be getting his hands out to catch it?

Even as I was thinking all this, though, the goalkeeper gave another mighty shout, dropped his arms to his sides, and thrust his head forward. What the heck?! It was like he was deliberately going to head a burning ball! But if he met that thing face-first, it wasn’t going to end with some cute little “Yowch!” or “That’s hot!”

“Tinifuini eruou!”

Right in front of the elf’s face—almost literally before his eyes, so to speak—a translucent barrier appeared. The ball, still on its spiral course, slammed into it. The barrier bent, distorting the look of the scenery around it, but it didn’t give way.

The ball was thrown back with almost as much force as it had been kicked forward. The flames were extinguished by their contact with the barrier, but the speed of the ball alone was enough to kill someone.

“I’ve got it!” a different elf shouted, flying forward. Again, I’m not speaking figuratively here. What was this guy, the South Dipper Human Cannon?! Without so much as a running start or even bending his knees, the elf flew through the air and headed the ball.

That sent it back toward the goal, but it went out of bounds at the last possible moment.

“Dang! So close!” all the elves exclaimed. For some reason, they all snapped their fingers as they spoke.

Okay, wait. Hang on. Where did these kids learn to play like this?! All this ridiculous Shaolin So***r-type supernatural stuff? I was very nearly going to ask the question aloud when it dawned on me.

Magic.

A close look revealed that the elves were all chanting as they ran around the field. Maybe not the person who was actually kicking the ball, but everyone around them—all their fellow players—were helping them, intoning spells that changed the direction of the wind or created a burst of flame or buffed the speed of the ball or the players’ own agility.

“They’re...”

“Yep,” Minori-san said from beside me. With a touch of frustration she added, “Maybe we should have seen this coming. All that Inazuma El**en, all those series with outrageous, impossible stuff in them—if you don’t know anything about soccer, why wouldn’t you think that was the way the game was played?”

“Even if you did—you couldn’t actually do it!”

Shout and pose all you wanted; you couldn’t do a Spirit B*** or a Kameha**ha, or use the devastating ancestral technique passed down by your forefathers, or activate some latent special ability.

Not, at least, in my world.

“Magic,” Minori-san said.

I could only nod.

Yes: magic existed in the Eldant Empire; indeed, everywhere in this other world, and the elves, flush with magical power, were especially good at it. They had taken those absurd cartoon soccer battles to heart and re-created them using magic.

In Japan, it’s pretty common to see books that take otherwise difficult or arcane subjects, fit them in a narrative framework, and present them in manga form for easier digestion: Japanese History through Comics, Learn Bookkeeping and Accounting the Manga Way. That sort of thing. The kids had just picked up their knowledge of the game from anime and manga more than from the rule books Minori-san and I had brought them. And they had been consuming the most outrageous series available.

That meant...

“Um... I’m gonna go check the other fields,” I said, and hurried to the next one over.

Our soccer fields were open-air; they didn’t have roofs over them. They did, however, have walls to keep our limited supply of balls from disappearing off the field. Hence, if you weren’t looking down from above, you wouldn’t know what was happening on the field unless you actively went inside and looked.

These walls, just like the ones I had seen going up around the stadium for the tournament, had been built by dwarven magic. Just as that suggested, I found the dwarf team practicing on the next field.

They say those of a feather fight together, but like the elves next door, the dwarves had assigned one person to be referee and divided the rest into two teams of five.

“Get in there!” A dwarf ran along, kicking the ball. He was pretty nimble despite his small stature. Dwarves and elves might both be faerie-type peoples, but dwarves clearly were on a different level of physical ability.

I was at least relieved to see that the ball wasn’t on fire or anything. It was nice, normal, kick-the-ball soccer.

“You think I would let you do that?!” A dwarf girl—it was Romilda—uttered a line that sounded like it belonged to some mecha anime, then slammed her hands against the earth.

No way, I thought.

“Eruou iruguna!!” Romilda howled.

With a wumph!, a wall burst out of the ground right in front of the dwarf who was dribbling the ball. As I’m sure you realize by now, I’m still not being metaphorical: this was an actual wall. The spell sounded somewhat familiar—it was probably a reduced version of what the dwarves had used to build the stadium.

“Nice try!” The kicker nimbly dodged the obstacle.

Romilda, however, shouted, “Hit it, everyone!”

“Yah!” In response, the dwarves on her team all put their hands on the ground.

Wait a second... Weren’t we supposed to be playing soccer? But there was no time for me to interject as—

“Eruou iruguna!”

“Eruou iruguna!!”

“Eruou irugunaaaa!!!”

Wham! Wham! Wham! Walls began popping up everywhere, surrounding the guy with the ball.

“I think I remember Fullm***l Alchemist having a fight scene like this,” I murmured in a daze. But now the dwarf with the ball was shouting.

“You’re not gonna get away with this! Ekansu gunigiddo!”

There was a huge bang, and the dwarf disappeared from within the walls.

No... Not disappeared. He fell, into a hole that had suddenly appeared beneath him. Heck, fell? He practically flew. Dwarven magic had always been about manipulating the earth, making walls out of it and stuff. It was only natural that they would have a network of tunnels and secret spaces under the ground, layer upon layer of them. The dwarf boy had used his magic to simply dig straight down to them.

“Where’d he go?!”

“And where’s he going to come back?!”

The dwarves formed a half-circle around the goal.

“Right here!”

“Noooo!”

The dwarf with the ball popped back up to the surface inside the goal.

“How did that happen?!”

“Wait, wait! The rule book says you can’t dig a tunnel into the actual scoring area,” Romilda insisted.

“It does not!” I found myself exclaiming.

There was a shocked silence as the dwarves finally and suddenly registered my presence. They stopped their game and came over to me.

“Sensei!”

“Sensei!”

“What do you think? How are we doing at soccer?” Romilda, her face shining, asked on behalf of the group.

“Well, uh, that’s a good question,” I said, scrambling for the right words. “What... game exactly were you playing?”

“What do you mean? We were playing soccer.”

Now I stood silently; what could I say? I mean, I guess that was soccer... of a sort. At least, it definitely wasn’t American football or baseball or dodgeball or anything. The field, the ball... everything met the official requirements for soccer. And yet...

“Magic?! You can’t use magic!”

“What?!” the dwarves asked, eyes wide. “W-We can’t?!”

“But it doesn’t say anywhere—”

“Of course it doesn’t!” I said, practically shouting. “It’s a sport, and—”

That was as far as I got when I remembered: the Holy Eldant Empire had no concept of sports. Or rather, they thought of such things very differently. On Earth, where there was no magic, we naturally thought of these games as contests of physical abilities. But in this world, maybe it only made sense that the contest should extend to magical ability as well.

Even in my own world, we used tools and high-functioning equipment that strictly went beyond the human body. Marathon runners have watches; in soccer and baseball, people use spiked shoes or footwear with special shock-absorbing gel. Even in swimming, which may seem like the purest test of human capability, participants can use swimsuits that reduce water resistance. It was up to the international sporting bodies in charge of these competitions to determine what was “unfair” and what wasn’t.

But there weren’t any international sporting bodies here. There was only me.

“Sensei?” Romilda and the others were looking at me, concerned. They were only trying to do their best, and here I came, shouting that they were getting it all wrong. They didn’t have any ill intent, and I’m sure they didn’t mean to disrespect soccer or anything. But still...

“Okay. Uh,” I mumbled, struggling with a vague sense of guilt. “Magic isn’t allowed in soccer. I’m real sorry. My world doesn’t even have magic. That’s why it’s not in the rule book.”

Romilda and her friends froze with a collective gasp. Then they all sat on the ground, looking dejected.

“That’s it...”

“It’s over...”

“This is the end...”

“Two weeks of work...”

You would think I had sentenced them to death. Watching them sit there and groan among themselves was almost as hard for me as it was for them. I felt like I was forcing something terrible on them.

“Hey, uh, but you can just play without magic, right?” I said in a hurry. “It looked like you really had dribbling down and stuff.”

I pointed to the dwarf who had been kicking the ball. As far as I had seen, the dwarves had used their magic to build walls and dig holes, but as for basic soccer technique, that was all them. So why not just play?

“But that...” Romilda said, a panicked look on her face, “that would make us like children playing against them.”

“Them?”

I let my gaze follow Romilda’s finger: she was pointing at the third soccer field...

The dwarf boys and girls wouldn’t say anything more, so I had no choice but to go over and have a look for myself.

“Ahhh hahahahahahahahaha!”

No sooner had I arrived on the third field than a burst of almost ecstatic laughter reached my ears. It was coming from—

“Elvia?!”

Yep. The adrenaline-high belly laugh was coming from my own personal beast girl.

The third field was currently occupied by the mixed team, for which anyone could apply. It wasn’t students on this team, but regular citizens of Marinos; there were eight humans and three beast people.

The beast people were standing smack in the middle of the soccer field, passing the ball to each other and looking like they were having the time of their lives. The humans, however, were standing on the sidelines, looking bored.

“Take that!”

“Got it!”

“Hi-yah!”

There was Elvia. There was a young guy with two-colored hair who looked like a weretiger. And then there was a large girl with round ears, probably a werebear.

Elvia and the beast people loved soccer balls so much that I figured I couldn’t keep them off the field if I wanted to, so I had asked Elvia to go into town and find some young-ish beast people to participate.

But what was going on now? I took a few steps onto the field and stared vacantly at the beast people’s game, just like the human players. Seriously, what was this?

The ball—

“Rrah!”

“There!”

“Try this on for size!”

—it never touched the ground. The beast people were essentially playing hacky sack with it, as if the whole point were to keep the ball in the air. And the way they were doing it—Elvia and her friends would jump up to kick the ball and then jump up to catch it, all using their feet, of course. They would twist and dodge in the air, kicking and blocking the ball again and again.

Bicycle kicks were all well and good, but this was soccer as air war. They might as well have a sign saying Hands off, humans! Er... or Feet off, I guess. Whatever. The point is, the ball was never less than three meters off the ground. Heck, a bicycle kick would practically be the starting point for a game like this.

I stood dumbfounded. I knew beast people had serious athletic abilities, but this was ridiculous. It was like something straight out of Shaolin So***r, but without the supernatural powers.

“So that’s what they meant.” I finally understood why the dwarves were so unhappy to hear that magic was off-limits. Against a team like this, you couldn’t even hope for a fair fight without magic. What was more, watching the expressions on the faces of Elvia and her friends, it was clear that they weren’t even being serious. They were just playing, knocking the ball around; it wasn’t a proper contest yet.

I shuddered to think what would happen if they decided to really play. No human would be able to so much as get a toe on the ball.

“They’re right...” This was something else.

As I stood thinking, Elvia noticed my arrival. “Oh, Shinichi-sama!” she said, breaking off her game and coming over to me. Her eyes were sparkling; she was palpably fulfilled. “I didn’t realize you were here!”

“Oh, uh, sure. Say, Elvia...”

“Man, but this is a great game, this soccer!”

I didn’t say anything. A question—did what they were doing count as soccer?—flitted through my mind, but Elvia looked so happy that I couldn’t bring myself to voice it.

Still, there was a real dilemma here. Without magic, the beast people would have an unbeatable advantage. But at the same time, I could hardly tell Elvia and the others to hold themselves back.

“Oh... I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” I said lamely. Elvia nodded enthusiastically, her tail wagging in time.

“I sure am!” she said. “A whole lot!” Behind her, the weretiger and the werebear were both giving me big grins. They looked so happy. So innocent. What was I supposed to say to them?

“That’s...” I started. “...Great,” I finally managed, nodding without much conviction. “Have fun, then.”

“We sure will!” Still grinning, they launched the ball back into the air.

I waved the dispirited humans over to me.

“You know what? You can use magic.”