Chapter Four: The Hero Stands upon the Field

“Things are like a rolling rock.” I vaguely remembered reading those words in some manga or light novel somewhere. I wonder which one it was.

Often, it takes a lot of effort to set things in motion, but once they get going, it’s almost impossible to stop them—even for the person who started them in the first place. I think that’s what the line is supposed to mean. And at the moment, I was experiencing the meaning of that saying firsthand.

It was the day of the exhibition match. I went to the stadium, nursing a slight headache. Riding beside me in the carriage was Myusel, who carried a basket with a packed lunch. Across from us were Minori-san and Matoba-san. We didn’t see much of Matoba-san around the house these days, but this was a pretty big event—what with the empress attending at all—so he was coming as a representative of the Japanese government.

I didn’t mind that as far as it went, but...

“Master?” Myusel gave me a concerned look. “Is something the matter?”

“Huh? What?”

“Oh... Forgive me for being forward,” she said carefully, “but I couldn’t help noticing that something seems to be worrying you.”

“Ah...” I gave an ambiguous smile. At this point, it was all I could do. “I’m not sure I’d call it worrying, exactly...”

“Hey, why let it bother you?” Minori-san offered. She, at least, seemed to have picked up on what I was concerned about—or more precisely, what I was at the end of my rope about. Then again, one glance at those practice fields would have been enough to give it away. “It’s not like you’re trying to get any of these teams into the World Cup,” she went on. “Let Eldant do soccer its own way.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said with a sigh.

Practically speaking, I supposed there wasn’t really a problem. Yet I couldn’t help feeling very, very worried.

“Hrm...”

In due course, we arrived at the imperial stadium. The driver opened the carriage door and respectfully ushered us out.

“You certainly took your time, Shinichi!”

Who should I see waiting for us but the loli (in appearance only) empress?

“Pe—er, Your Majesty?”

“We have been waiting most impatiently!” she said with her characteristic air of authority. It seemed like she was genuinely excited about this match. Garius had mentioned to me that at one point Petralka had been bent on forming her own team and participating in the tournament. He said it had taken quite a while to talk her down.

Having the empress herself take the field would understandably intimidate everyone else to the point that having a game would be impossible. And soccer could be a pretty rough sport, even before you factored in the magic and beast people. If Petralka went out to play and ended up getting hurt, it might cost someone their head.

Yes, definitely better for her to sit quietly and watch.

“Ho. So you’ve come, too, Myusel.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Myusel said with a bow. “With the permission of my master...”

“...Hm,” Petralka replied, nodding graciously.

Petralka and Myusel had been quite close ever since the “assembly of patriots” incident, but even so, Myusel was careful not to act too familiar toward the empress. She was just being circumspect, but Petralka seemed to find it irritating sometimes.

“In that case, you shall accompany Shinichi,” the empress said.

“Accompany me where?” I asked, and for the first time, Petralka smiled.

“To our viewing box, of course.”

How did this happen?

It wasn’t the first time I had found myself flummoxed and confused like this. As I recalled, I had felt the same way when I was reading manga to Myusel and Petralka.

This time?

“Ah, an excellent view!” Petralka exclaimed happily... from her place on my knees.

That’s right: once again, Her Imperial Majesty was sitting on my lap. She kicked her legs back and forth in breathless anticipation of the opening ceremony. It was adorable, but to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t able to enjoy it.

“It’s almost a little frightening, isn’t it?” Myusel said from her seat beside me. At that moment, we were in the special viewing area built for Her Majesty. It was, needless to say, something altogether different from the rest of the spectator seating. Glass, held together by wood frames, surrounded most of it. Frankly, it felt a bit like being in an aquarium. The floor itself was hardwood, but the glass extended as near as possible to our feet to afford the best view of the field. It gave the sense that the box was floating in the air, and it had inspired Myusel’s completely understandable comment.

In light of the security needs of a setup like this, it had been decided in advance who would sit where. In addition to Petralka, Garius, and Prime Minister Zahar, there were places for me and Minori-san and even Matoba-san. But Myusel’s presence, apparently, had been unexpected; there was no seat for her. The upshot was that someone would have to stand, or at least sit on the floor.

Myusel, sweet and retiring as always, had offered to take the floor, but it bothered me to make her sit on cold, hard wood when I was in a nice, plush chair. We were trying to decide how to handle it when Petralka announced, “We shall sit here, then,” and pointed directly at me. Thus, the current state of affairs.

Myusel was sitting beside me, meaning I had the gorgeous young empress on my lap and a beautiful maid one seat over. Anyone would assume I must be in seventh heaven, even if I might also be feeling a little awkward...

And in the past, I might have agreed with them. The reality was, flop sweat was rolling down my forehead. Confronted with the actual situation, I found I didn’t have the wherewithal to enjoy it.

For one thing, this space was mostly glass. That gave us a great view, sure, but the Holy Eldant Empire didn’t have one-way mirrors, so we were on display for everyone who showed up. The imperial viewing box was located at the highest point of the stadium, but some of the spectator stands reached this height, too; if anyone were to look over and see me with the empress on my lap and a maid sitting next to me, what kind of person would they think I was?

“It has been tested for strength and durability, of course.” This assurance came from Garius, who had set his hands gently on my shoulders. Wait—why were his hands set gently on my shoulders? I considered asking, but was too afraid that the answer might launch us straight down a truly 801 (yaoi, remember?) path, so I kept my mouth shut. “You needn’t worry, Shinichi.”

“Uh-huh...” That depended on what he thought I was worried about, but never mind.

Incidentally, Petralka’s viewing box was well separated from the rest of the stands. Partly that was because, well, it was for the empress, but I gathered that security considerations also played a large role. It really wasn’t that long ago that Her Majesty had been held hostage by terrorists. The box’s excellent view meant it would be possible to spot anyone suspicious long before they got close. Mages and knights were posted just outside, making sure no one unauthorized came near the box.

None of this, however, seemed to bother Petralka, who was in high spirits.

“Ooh! We cannot wait!” She continued fluttering her legs happily.

Aargh! Every minute she does that, she gets cuter and cuter!

I could feel her behind on my knees; her hair was so close to my nose I could practically smell it. My heart started pounding with the moe-ness of it all, despite how dangerously close I was to Petralka. It was right about then that I thought I felt a squeezing on my left shoulder.

“Huh? What’s up?” I turned to the side. For some reason, Myusel was looking dejectedly at the ground. It looked like she was the one who had pressed against my shoulder. Like maybe our bodies were bumping up against each other.

“Something wrong?”

Maybe the seat was too small for her?

But Myusel only said, “It’s... nothing. It’s nothing,” in a very quiet voice. I couldn’t shake the sense that her cheeks were just slightly red. Feeling like it wouldn’t be quite right to pursue the subject any further, though, I fell silent.

“Oh ho!” Zahar said a moment later. “It’s starting!” I turned my gaze to the soccer field, below us and beyond the glass.

All eight teams were arranged neatly on the field, facing the viewing box. They were about to pay homage to the empress.

The knights’ team.

The JSDF team.

The elf student team.

The dwarf student team.

Two human student teams.

The mixed team that Elvia was on.

And then, finally, the lizardman team.

“Gosh... I think the JSDF is at a pretty serious disadvantage here,” I mumbled.

All of the Eldant teams, to a greater or lesser extent, could probably use magic. The Japanese self-defense forces, however, could not. What were they going to do about a volley of kicks that looked like they came straight out of some manga? True, Minori-san was on the JSDF squad, and she had witnessed the “magic soccer” of the elves and dwarves firsthand, so maybe she had been able to help them come up with a strategy...

“You might be surprised. It seems the odds rather favor the JSDF team,” Matoba-san said blandly from behind me. “They come from the home of soccer, after all.”

Yeah, great. That didn’t make them pro soccer players or whatever. It sounded like that swindle where a guy says “I’m with the fire department” and then tries to get you to buy a fire extinguisher.

“Hang on just a second. Did you say ‘the odds’?”

“Yes,” Matoba-san replied calmly. “There’s quite a bit of betting going on already regarding which team will be victorious.”

I almost choked. This was the first official soccer game here, and people were already gambling on it?!

“Bear in mind that there’s no law to prevent betting on a soccer game in this world,” Matoba-san said. “As such, none of us, including myself, are in a position to condemn such behavior.”

“Ugh! Could you sound any more bureaucratic?”

“I may remind you that I am a bureaucrat.” My remark didn’t appear to move him.

I’ll just bet he had money on at least one of the teams...

“Oh, look,” Matoba-san said. “It’s starting. There’s Koganuma-kun.”

The JSDF team had been chosen to lead the others in opening the game. (Was that because they came from the “home of soccer,” too?) Minori-san took a step forward and raised one hand.

“The Players’ Oath!” she declared, and players from the other teams followed her lead. “We players swear to honor the true spirit of sportsmanship, respecting and abiding by the rules of the game—”

And so on and so forth; but I had serious doubts that everyone there understood what the rules of the game actually were.

In any event, Minori-san led the players through the rest of the oath. Then Garius rose.

“Very good,” he said, speaking into a microphone we had borrowed from the JSDF. “In the name of Her Imperial Majesty, the Empress of the Holy Eldant Empire, let the first game begin!”

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!

The entire stadium erupted. (This time I’m speaking metaphorically.)

Naturally, the people of the empire didn’t really know what sports were, and they didn’t know what kind of contest they could expect from this “soccer.” But they clearly knew it was almost like a festival, something to celebrate. I looked out over the stands and saw that the people way down in the general seats, along with those up higher in the special seats, were all leaning forward, their eyes shining, ready for some soccer.

I let out a little sigh. Let the chips fall where they may...

We had come this far. All we could do now was see what happened.

The speed was incredible. The projectile reminded me less of a soccer ball and more of a bullet tearing through the air. It goes without saying that this was not something an unaided human body could intercept. All the JSDF team could do, standing there in their dark-green uniforms, was watch in stupefaction as the ball went hurtling past them and into the goal.

Thud.

Honest to God, I could practically see the sound effect.

I think that ball might actually have broken the sound barrier. Naturally, it tore the net out of the goal, then went straight on toward the spectator seating. But if there was one thing you could have faith in, it was a wall designed and built by dwarf engineers and the JSDF. It held firm as the bullet-like ball slammed into it, and there was no further incident.

The ashen faces of the JSDF players were visible even from this distance. If the goalkeeper thoughtlessly tried to block a shot like that, there was no guarantee they would survive.

The knights’ team, on the other hand, seemed practically overjoyed.

“Did you see that?!” they were exclaiming from their bench. “This is the very specialty of the First Knights!” Standing by the bench was a collection of men and women in robes that made them look very much like wizards. Apparently, they were using magic...

Suddenly, I heard two voices from just behind me.

“My goodness! An overwhelming opening gambit!”

“So it would seem.”

I jerked my head around and saw Matoba-san and Prime Minister Zahar standing with microphones in their hands.

When did they get those?!

The Prime Minister stood alone, but Matoba-san was accompanied by a member of the Royal Guard, who was interpreting everything he said. This wasn’t because the man spoke Japanese; he simply took the understanding granted to him by his magic ring and repeated it verbatim. The rings were only good for one-on-one interactions; they wouldn’t help the people in the stands understand Matoba-san’s words as they were broadcast through the microphone. That was why “interpreting” like this was necessary.

Apparently the two old men (plus one interpreter) intended to commentate the soccer game. I didn’t recall making these preparations...

“The Jay Ess Dee Eff team seems quite stunned.”

“Well, I doubt they’ve ever experienced a ball traveling faster than the speed of sound before.”

“Tell me, don’t you use magic back in your country?”

“No, I’m afraid we don’t. We had to permit the use of magic here, though, in light of the beast people’s tremendous physical and athletic abilities.”

“Certainly. What else could you do?”

They sounded as if they weren’t even involved. Which, I guess, they weren’t really.

“Erm... It seems rather one-sided,” Petralka muttered.

In just a brief period, the knights’ team had scored a whole ten points. I guess that’s what happens when your kickoffs blast straight from the kicker to the goal. On the rare occasions when the JSDF managed to get a foot on the ball, they would be slammed in the face with wind magic, and the opposing team would pluck the ball away from them. The Japanese armed forces were as helpless as babes.

This was all exactly what I had been worried about. There was a real question of whether it was acceptable for the wizards to “play” from the bench. Strictly speaking, they weren’t directly involved in the game. Even those hyper-speed kicks were only facilitated by “tunnels” of acceleration magic the wizards laid down; it was the knights on the field who actually kicked the ball.

“This Jay Ess Dee Eff of yours is not so impressive after all,” Petralka said, sounding disappointed.

“They’re, uh, considered pretty impressive by human standards,” I answered, a bit put out. This was soccer beyond anything a person from Earth could imagine. We could have put a World Cup team on that field and they would have had problems. The JSDF squad was composed of guys who knew about soccer, but they weren’t pros or anything.

The commentary continued as these thoughts ran through my head.

“Ooh! Something appears to be happening on the JSDF team.”

“What could it be? Several of them have—what are those?”

I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but Matoba-san sounded excited. In fact, he was about as happy as I had ever heard him. He had a pair of binoculars in one hand and was looking down at the field.

“Koganuma has her 9mm out! She’s drawn her pistol!”

“.........What?”

Maybe I misheard him. Because I’m sure he didn’t just say...

“Oh ho! Perhaps inspired by Koganuma, the other JSDF players have drawn their Type 89s! That’s a small automatic weapon which—”

“Guh?!”

They have their guns out and you’re doing commentary?! How did they even get in here with those?!

I was just about to cut in on Matoba-san’s narration when—

brrraaaaapppppp!!

The air was filled with the sound of small-arms fire.

Now, to be clear, even a small-caliber gun is still a gun, and it makes a serious noise, but after hearing the ball fly around at subsonic speeds, this was really nothing.

A Type 89 is fully automatic. Technically it’s an assault rifle, but it has an automatic firing mode like a machine gun. You can just hold down the trigger and it’ll spit out ten rounds a second, a shower of 5.56mm bullets.

But come on—!

“Incredible! This is incredible! The JSDF is meeting the oncoming soccer ball with a hail of Type 89 fire!”

“Say what?!” I exclaimed.

I looked at the field, and that was exactly what was happening. The ball came flying at the speed of sound, and the army people shot at it with their rifles. Minori-san alone had her 9mm pistol out, but in the rain of bullets it didn’t make much difference.

Now, you might think that a hail of small-arms fire would lead to one deflated soccer ball. And you would be right.

Normally.

It appeared that a magical barrier of some sort was protecting the ball (it must have been, or the ball would have exploded every time it was kicked), and none of the shots succeeded in striking their target.

Gunfire, however, is still gunfire. The kinetic energy of a wall of bullets traveling three times the speed of sound, impacting the ball again and again, had to have some sort of effect. The ball was ever so slightly diverted on its course.

Thud.

It was the same sound the ball had made earlier, but rather than flying into the goal, it lofted high into the air, over the wall protecting the spectator seating. A collective exclamation rose from the crowd.

Ooooooh!

The spectators might not have been able to explain the nuances of the game, but they already grasped that the point was to kick the ball into the opposing team’s goal. They also understood that the JSDF, which had been at the mercy of the knights until that moment, had just found a way to fight back.

“Did you see that?” Minori-san exclaimed, throwing her arms up in excitement. “The JSDF isn’t so powerless after all!”

Microphones all around the stadium picked up and broadcast her voice. This Minori-san was nothing like the laid-back, warm and fuzzy girl I knew. Or maybe this was the real her...

“At last, the armed forces succeed in defending! Amazing,” Matoba-san said, sounding practically excited.

I mean, I guess it was amazing... in a sense. Full-auto weapons or no, hitting an object traveling at practically the speed of sound was no mean feat. So, yes, amazing! Sure!

“Master?” Myusel looked at me, probably wondering why I suddenly had my head in my hands. “Is something the matter?”

“No,” I muttered, “nothing at all.”

What the heck was this? It wasn’t soccer.

Normally the use of weapons like that would be totally inexcusable, but insofar as their opponents had magic and the JSDF had no way to fight back against it, who could say it was unfair for them to pull out their guns?

“Now it seems the royal knights are really getting into it,” Zahar remarked.

“Indeed it does,” Matoba-san responded. “Oh! What’s this? One of the knights is—flying?”

A member of the opposing team had jumped straight into the air, almost ten meters off the ground. Magic again, no doubt. What was more, the ball floated up along with him.

“A high-jump shot?!” Matoba-san exclaimed. “Incredible! Astonishing! A veritable meteor strike!”

Boy, he really is enjoying himself.

Right at that moment, though, I didn’t have the time to appreciate discovering this unexpected side of the old bureaucrat. The floating knight executed a bicycle kick, and now the ball wasn’t just traveling at an ungodly speed, it was coming down from overhead. The JSDF had no answer.

“Ah, but what’s this? The knights’ team has overreached itself! He’s lost control—the ball is going to miss!!”

And so it happened: maybe shooting from midair was too much to ask, because the ball missed the goal, slamming into the ground just in front of the net and bouncing way back up into the air.

“Say! What’s that? Has the JSDF team just thrown something? Is that a hand grenade?”

No sooner had Matoba-san spoken than the grenade exploded in midair.

The force of the blast pushed the ball back down to the ground, where a waiting JSDF trooper started dribbling it. The wizards on the bench began intoning spells to throw up obstacles, but a flashbang from the armed-forces team interrupted them. The mages couldn’t aim their spells when they couldn’t see.

And so, at last, the JSDF scored their first goal.

“How about that?!” Minori-san howled.

“And the JSDF puts its first point on the board!” Matoba-san said.

“Will this turn the tide of the game?”

“It’s always possible.”

Yeah, maybe, but the knights still had a definite advantage, and they were quick to seize the initiative again.

“Goodness! That burst of wind magic has blown away the JSDF players! Surely that’s against the rules?”

“Ah, but the wizards weren’t targeting the JSDF troops, only their ‘eigh-ty-nines.’”

Basically, when the troops were about to fire, the wizards released wind magic and scattered them. Naturally, the mages weren’t players themselves, and since they were technically aiming for the Type 89s the JSDF squad was holding, not the players as such, they shouldn’t get yellow or red cards. That appeared to be the logic, anyway.

The result of this little strategy was that an already serious score deficit only got bigger...

...and bigger...

“Now, what’s this?” Matoba-san said. “Has there been a breakdown on the JSDF team?”

“They appear to be arguing about something,” Zahar said.

For some reason, we couldn’t hear what the team was saying; maybe the mics weren’t in the right place. I could see Minori-san, looking as crazy as the day Elvia had stolen her golden ball, shouting and being restrained by her fellow players. Given the way she was looking, she was probably trying to bring a tank onto the field, or an RPG or something.

Not that I didn’t sympathize with her... a lot.

“Right, things seem to have settled down among the Jay Ess Dee Eff team.”

“Yes, they’ve calmed down the member who was making a scene. Our armed forces certainly exemplify restraint and endurance.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what she wanted, but I’m glad she’s come to her senses.”

“The JSDF is very much recognized for its discipline. They must always be in control of themselves.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about Matoba-san waxing proud about the group that had tried to kill me. But hey, better keep it to myself.

The first game ended with victory going to the First Knights, while I was still trying to fathom what had happened.

So the first game, between the knights and the JSDF, turned out to be totally outrageous. You could hardly even call it soccer. What was it? Don’t ask me. No question, though, any soccer-type person who saw what I had just seen might well faint clean away. But it could have been worse—as the second game proved.

“Goodness! The dwarf team appears to be using some sort of new magical tactic!”

“Ahh. That’s a clay puppet. A standard dwarf spell.”

“Yes, but marionette or no, doesn’t this make twelve people on the field? And that’s against the—Wait! Did he climb in? Did he just climb in?!”

“Indeed he did.”

“A dwarf has just entered the clay puppet as if he were being sucked inside! Are they trying to suggest that this brings them back down to eleven players?!”

No words. I had no words.

The short-legged dwarves were at a natural disadvantage against the tall, sinewy elves. Apparently, their plan was to use earthen marionettes—essentially, golems—to even the field, almost as if they were donning powered exoskeletons. Before I knew what was happening, eleven clay giants, each nearly three meters tall, were standing on the field. The bodies basically looked like oversized dwarves, but they didn’t have heads; instead, a dwarf would ride in them, the top half of the pilot sticking out where the head should be. All I could do was stare.

And their opponents’ response?

“The elf team is doing something—oh! What’s that?”

“It’s large-scale magic. An enlarged version of tifu murottsu. Ho! They’ve succeeded in blowing over the clay puppets.”

“The huge surface area of those suits makes them especially vulnerable to those gale-force winds.”

The elves had brought wind magic to bear as if it were a hail of bullets.

“Hah! Hah! Hah!” The high-pitched laugh came from the elf team captain, Loek. “Your ugly little dolls are nothing but trash for our wind sprites to blow away!”

The wind was invisible but unmissable, gusting everywhere. It caused the dwarves’ golems to weave drunkenly from side to side. It was like Matoba-san said: their huge size made them easy targets. (I can hear some design otaku now: “I told you humanoid weapons would be at a distinct disadvantage!”) And it’s true, most weapons are built to have a slim profile in order to reduce vulnerable front surface area. From that perspective, a giant humanoid is sort of asking for it.

Romilda, however, was unimpressed. “We won’t lose to youuuuu!” she bellowed.

The clay giants slumped to the ground as if exhausted, down on all fours—but that was also the same pose dwarves used when casting magic.

“Aha! The dwarf team appears to be building a barrier to protect against the wind!”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s all they’re doing.”

“Oh my goodness! They’re turning the soccer field into a maze! And does it feel a little more slanted than usual to you? Look! The ball is rolling toward the elf goal!”

Yep: the color commentators were right. The dwarves had built some sort of labyrinth structure to ward off the elves’ wind attack—and by tilting it, they could cause the ball to roll toward the other team’s goal of its own accord.

What strategy! Dwarves may not look like much for battle-planning, and yet here on this field—!

Okay, forget it.

I knew it was a little late to be complaining, but this wasn’t soccer anymore. It wasn’t anything.

Not that the elves were ones to complain. Or anyone, for that matter. In fact...

“Ahh, so that’s how it’s to be! Most interesting!”

“So it is. A great many of their tactics would be highly applicable on the battlefield. This has indeed been a useful exercise.”

“Oh—Master! Master! The elves stopped the ball.”

Petralka, Garius, and Myusel—in short, everyone around me—were enjoying the spectacle immensely. I could hardly jump up, flip over a table, and exclaim, “This isn’t soccer!!” Not least because there weren’t any tables here.

And at last...

“The game is over! What a truly, profoundly close contest, but that final push gave the dwarves the victory!”

“The home-field advantage is one thing, but taking advantage of the field—that’s something else!”

This was live commentary? Two old men jabbering and making bad puns?

I finally resolved to stop worrying and love this bomb.

Every cloud has a silver lining, they say, and every bitter trial has an end...

Okay, so this wasn’t anything that dramatic, but eventually enough mind-spinning games went by that it was time for lunch. Sweet, sweet lunch.

As she promised, Myusel had brought a packed meal for me. She made delicious food. It’s like... most heroines in manga and light novels are bad cooks, but I remembered my dad, a light novel author himself, saying that that was mostly so they could get an episode of easy laughs out of putting her in the kitchen. Myusel, for one, didn’t fit the stereotype. Her stuff was seriously good.

Granted, during my time as a home security guard, I pretty much had two food groups: junk food, and my mom’s cooking. So I didn’t exactly have the world’s most refined palate.

“Here you are, Master,” Myusel said, holding out a basket to me.

Hm?

We were still in Petralka’s viewing box, but something felt off. Myusel had made me lunches before, but it was unusual for her to simply pass me a basket without opening the top. Normally, she was so into these packed lunches that it seemed like she would practically have spooned the food into my mouth if I asked; she always opened the basket and sometimes even set the food out on place mats.

Did she want me to open the basket myself this time? I took it from her, somewhat perplexed.

“Wha...?”

I froze, and my eyes went wide. There was something very familiar there. Very familiar, and yet something I had gone a very long time without.

“Are these... onigiri?” And they were: little triangular rice balls. They were even wrapped in nori, just like they were supposed to be.

Close inspection revealed small differences in size and shape from one to the next; obviously, Myusel had hand-made them. I mean, that made sense, but how in the world did she—?

“Myusel?”

“I see you’re surprised, Master,” she said shyly, her cheeks flushed. “I asked Minori-sama to share some ‘rice’...”

I took another look at the onigiri.

Of course I knew that the JSDF troops sometimes imported things from Japan, including favorite foods. And yes, I had sometimes remarked how nice that was at breakfast, when Myusel would have heard me. But I never once expected her to take it to heart, then go out of her way to get Minori-san to bring her some rice. I assumed Minori-san had also taught her both how to cook the rice and how to make the rice balls. All just so I could have onigiri for lunch.

And she had managed to keep it all a secret from me. Where in the world had she found the time? It must have demanded so much work...!

“Er... Master?” A cloud of anxiety passed over Myusel’s face. “I’m... I’m very sorry for hiding it from you, sir. But... I just...” She sounded worried, almost panicked. She must have interpreted my shocked silence as anger.

I clenched my fist and exclaimed, “Don’t apologize!”

“Eep!”

“I’m moved beyond words right now!”

“Er... Ah?” She blinked her big, emerald eyes.

I took her hand and exclaimed further, “Myusel—you formed these onigiri with your delicate, graceful fingers, worked your very heart and soul into them! It’s wonderful!”

“Er... Ahem... And that makes you... happy with me, Master?”

“Absolutely!” I insisted. How could I not insist? “You must understand! The heroine’s hand-made o-bentou is a rite of passage in every romantic comedy, a standard trope not to be denied, an event as inevitable as the rising of the sun! And what does she make the hero? A sandwich is okay, but my heroine—! She chose onigiri! Made by hand, yes, by her very own hands! The rice caressed by her fingers, as if they, by proxy, were touching my very tongue! Such care should never be less than completely respected! Banzai, Japanese food!”

“Th-Thank you.” For some reason, Myusel seemed just a touch hesitant, but she smiled.

As for me, I picked up an onigiri and put it in my mouth, soaking in the thousand feelings it evoked. There was an instant where I worried there might be some bizarre twist, like maybe she had used sugar instead of salt, or maybe there was caramel in the middle or something, but it was filled with minced fish, just like it was supposed to be.

Wonderful!

“D-Do you like it?”

“Ah lahb ih,” I said. I was devouring the rice balls like a starving child.

It had been close to a year since I had had rice. Myusel’s cooking didn’t leave much to be desired, but I was still Japanese, and there was nothing more familiar and comforting to me than that soft, white staple.

“We do not quite understand. Is this some foodstuff from Shinichi’s country?” Petralka asked, peeking into the basket. She had disembarked from my knees and was eating a full-course meal prepared by her personal chef, but it looked like my intense emotion had attracted her attention.

“It is,” Myusel answered. I was too busy eating to say anything. “Minori-sama taught me how to make it, and then I prepared it.”

“Mm. If it so pleases Shinichi, we are most eager to taste it as well.”

“Ah, Your Majesty may certainly—”

“Have one? So we shall.” Petralka grabbed an onigiri.

I noticed that these rice balls were a little on the large side. Since this was Myusel’s first time making them, she probably found it easier to get the shape right that way.

“Hrm. And one eats them with one’s bare hands?”

“That’s what Minori-sama told me, yes.”

“Most intriguing...”

Having never tried onigiri before, Petralka seemed a little hesitant. She picked up one of the balls of rice with both hands, as if afraid of dropping it.

“A very strange object indeed,” she said, but she took a little bite, chewing off one corner of the triangular onigiri.

D’awwww...!

A little, silver-haired girl holding an onigiri in both hands...

Taking a sweet, tiny nibble of one corner...

It’s like she has a dang moe checklist, and she’s ticking the boxes one by one! So cute!

Between the emotion evoked by Myusel’s rice balls and the moe-ness of the way Petralka was eating them, I was very busy.

“Ahh. How interesting. This is entirely different from bread, and yet the rich, chewy texture is—nom nom.”

I guess Petralka liked the rice ball, because she ate the rest of it with gusto. Maybe she thought she was supposed to eat it like I was, because she took big, indiscriminate bites, getting rice all over her mouth.

“Oh, Your Majesty. Your honorable face...” Myusel pulled a handkerchief from her pocket. “Just let me—”

“No, don’t!”

My unexpected shout brought a squeak from the maid.

Staring fixedly at the rice on Petralka’s cheek, I said, “Wiping it off with a handkerchief would be completely unacceptable! When a beautiful young woman has a bit of onigiri on her cheek, you say, ‘There’s a few grains on your cheek...’ and pluck it gently away and eat it! This is basic!”

“Beautiful young woman—?” Petralka said, blinking in confusion. “D-Do you refer to us?”

“Yes, Your Majesty, I do! Listen to me! You have to recognize that you are a beautiful young woman, and behave accordingly! You must respect yourself enough not to let anyone do something so crassly wasteful as to wipe rice off your face with a mere handkerchief!”

I had become so agitated that even I wasn’t sure what I was saying anymore, but the sincerity of my emotions came through. I hoped.

“Erm... Yes. We do not fully understand, but very well,” Petralka said. “In—In that case, Shinichi, you shall remove it.”

I snapped back to reality. “What?”

Me? She wanted me to do it? To take the rice off her cheek? And eat it? MAJI DE??

Wait... Was I getting so agitated that I was thinking in Japanese? Heck, that wasn’t even actual Japanese, it was romaji!

But forget the self-flagellation.

“Er... ahem.”

“Is this not how things are done in your country?”

“Uh... I mean, yes, sort of...”

I could see now that the rice on Petralka’s cheek was stuck right next to her pale-pink lips.

Ack! This is suuuper-duper almost a kiss!

“Are you trying to tell us that you cannot eat an object that was stuck to our cheek?”

“Not in the least, Majesty...”

“Then remove it!” Petralka commanded. Then she closed her eyes and stuck out her face. She almost looked like she was getting ready for a kiss, and it was impossibly cute.

Calm down, O my heart! Ahhhhh! But— But—!

Petralka opened one eye. “Will you not do it quickly?” she asked. “Why are you shaking? Your embarrassment—although we don’t know why you should be embarrassed—is nearly contagious!”

“Y-Yes, ma’am!” I exclaimed, unconsciously straightening up. I reached out, pulled the rice off her cheek, and—

Ate it. I actually ate it.

Yaaaaaaahhhhh?!

How do I put this? It tasted just like rice always tastes, but it was also—hmmm. As if I had crossed some culinary Rubicon. This was probably how Adam and Eve felt when they ate the fruit of knowledge.

Father! Mother! Today I take another step on the path to manhood...!

Knowing my parents, they would have just said something like “Good work, that’s one flag down.” But whatever.

“Mm,” Petralka said, opening her eyes and nodding. “Tell us, Shinichi. Is this ritual always performed by men?”

“Er, no. In fact, it’s usually the other way around.”

“Then we shall perform it as well.”

“I’m... I’m sorry?”

“Shinichi. There is rice on your cheek, too.”

I caught my breath.

OMG! Kanou Shinichi—could you ever have been prepared for this?!

I stiffened as Petralka reached for my cheek and plucked off a grain of rice. The brush of her white fingers was almost like a caress... Ahhh.

“Hrm. A most unusual custom,” Petralka said. She popped the rice in her mouth without hesitation. “It makes one rather... bashful.” And then the empress smiled shyly.

No fair! Super no fair!

The whole thing was like throwing gasoline on the moe fire of my heart.

To think that I, who once held that “the third dimension is just for show; the brass doesn’t... (you know the rest)”—to think that I should reach such a pulse-pounding point in a relationship with a 3-D girl!

“Shinichi. You still have rice stuck to your cheek.”

Who should approach me as I was thinking all this, take the rice off my cheek, and eat it but... Garius?!

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!

“Hm, I see,” he said with an easy smile. “What a deeply intriguing custom.”

I remained completely stiff.

No! Crud! I should have thought of the possibility that Garius would get in on this! But I got so moe over Petralka’s totally unfair behavior—how was I supposed to think?! (Note: rhetorical question.)

“Err... Um...” I rose from my seat as if I were about to run away. “I, uh, I’ve got to... use the bathroom!”

It was a half-baked excuse for leaving in the middle of a meal, but it got me out of the viewing box.

Danger! Danger, Shinichi!

Garius wasn’t a bad guy by any means, and along with Petralka he was one of my staunchest supporters. But I just didn’t have any interest in same-sex romance. Having another guy touch my cheek, or eat the rice he plucked off it... I just couldn’t get moe about that.

I felt like I had eaten the sweetest candy and then been forced to swallow the hottest pepper—they pretty much canceled each other out.

“Aw...” I sighed as I walked down the hallway. Maybe I really should go use the bathroom. Obviously there were no sewers or indoor plumbing around here, but they did have clay pots full of nice, clean water that you could use to wash your hands. I could rinse my face, cool down a little...

But then, I stopped. “Huh?”

I thought I heard a voice I recognized. They were talking to someone. Indistinct chatter, not very loud, but the conversation sounded strained.

Curious, I went in the direction of the voices, and found I could hear them more clearly.

“Husband, does that time still—?”

There was silence in response.

I peeked around the corner. Brooke and Cerise were standing nearby. The lizardman team’s prep room must be right around here.

“Everyone is hoping to see you out there,” Cerise said.

She sounded pleading, but after a pause Brooke replied only, “Tell them... I’m sorry.” And then he left her there, just like before. Cerise, standing all by herself in the hallway, looked terribly lonely.

“Ah.” Cerise looked up and met my eyes. “Shinichi-sama...”

“Er, uh, sorry, I didn’t mean to, uh—”

Cerise seemed oddly cold toward me. Maybe it was because every time we met, I appeared to be eavesdropping.

But she said, “Not at all. I’m the one who should apologize. You caught us at a most... unflattering moment.”

“You really don’t need to apologize,” I said. “Um...”

Brooke’s repeatedly giving her the cold shoulder was really starting to bother me. This was twice now... In fact, including that very first time I’d seen them, it was three times.

“Are you guys fighting about something?” I asked quietly. “Is Brooke... I mean, is he unhappy working at my place?”

“No, certainly not,” Cerise said, shaking her head. Lizardman expressions were, as ever, hard for me to read, but she seemed to be anxious to dispel any misunderstanding. She repeated certainly not again, and then hung her head.

So... what was going on?

Cerise seemed like a really heartfelt and decent person (even if she did bear a passing resemblance to Godzilla), so I wanted to do anything I could to help her.

“If there’s anything I can do to help, just tell me,” I said.

“I’m sorry?” Cerise asked.

“Er... I don’t mean to butt in, of course,” I said, embarrassed. “It’s just... Brooke does a lot of good work for me, and I’m grateful for that. I want him to be happy.”

She was silent.

“Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like husbands and wives should get along. Maybe lizardmen don’t see it that way, or maybe happiness means something else to you. Maybe I’m being self-indulgent. But the impression I get is that right now, you and Brooke... aren’t very happy.”

It was nice to live with someone else. Living alone—being by yourself when you were supposed to be with someone else—that was sad. I knew that from experience. That was why, if there was any way I could help reconcile Brooke and Cerise, I wanted to do it.

“Shinichi-sama...” Cerise looked at me for a moment. “Truth be told...”

And then she started talking about the past.

Cerise was the daughter of a powerful member of the Tribal Council—effectively, lizardman nobility. When she married Brooke, it was for chiefly political reasons. He was the lizardmen’s greatest hero, after all. The feelings of the husband- and wife-to-be didn’t really matter. Still, Cerise and Brooke had known each other a long time, and she hardly disliked him, so she had no specific objection to the wedding.

Marriage in lizardman society, incidentally, has just one purpose: procreation.

Cerise told me that unlike mammals, lizardmen didn’t have the same clear-cut division of labor when it came to childcare. That is to say, the mother didn’t breast-feed, so it was easier for both husband and wife to look after the kids. The society’s laissez-faire approach to child-rearing helped, too. The adoration humans displayed toward their offspring—hugging them, touching them, Eskimo-kissing them—wasn’t really present with lizardmen.

These limited interactive behaviors were one of the reasons observers from other races called the lizardmen “cold-blooded” or claimed they didn’t have emotions. Personally, I figured it was just a fact of biology, and not something to criticize.

But anyway, Brooke and Cerise got married, and she bore his children—or I guess, laid his eggs. Normally, they would have looked after the eggs together. But at the time, Brooke was still a member of the army of the Holy Eldant Empire. His whole race considered him a hero, and now that his marriage with Cerise had been consummated, he had no excuse for neglecting his military duties. When the call-up came, he couldn’t ignore it. That was how he ended up going off to war, leaving his wife and eggs behind.

While he was away, his home was attacked by the Kingdom of Bahairam.

Since lizardmen were so low on the social ladder to begin with, they were often treated as pawns who could be deployed into occupied territory. In other words, they often lived in the hottest parts of every conflict zone. Cerise and Brooke’s home was one such place.

Now, Cerise might have been female, but she was also a lizardman. She had considerably more toughness and fighting strength than the average human. Under normal circumstances, she might have been able to defend the eggs even without Brooke. But bad luck brought a further twist of the knife: when the attack came, Cerise was sick.

Their eggs were broken in the conflict.

If Brooke had been there, sturdy as he was, there was a good chance he could have defended the eggs in Cerise’s place. But he was on a battlefield far away, unable to protect his wife and “children.”

“It’s pained him ever since,” Cerise said. “He says he has no right to be a father.”

“But it wasn’t his fault,” I said. Anyone could see that.

“And yet he blames himself.” Cerise looked at the ground. “And this... ‘soccer.’ The ball you use in this competition. Its size and pattern look very much like those of our eggs.”

“Is... Is that what’s been going on?” I asked, the realization slowly dawning on me.

Now I understood why Brooke had given the soccer ball such a long, strange look. It reminded him of the eggs he had been unable to protect. It was probably the same reason Cerise had looked at the ball the way she had. And with all that in his past, I had asked him to go out and play soccer?

“I can see why he wouldn’t want to kick a soccer ball,” I said. A game where you kicked a ball that looked just like one of your eggs? No wonder the lizardmen weren’t eager to play.

But Cerise seemed surprised. “What? No... I don’t think there’s a problem with that.”

“You... You don’t?”

“No. In fact, lizardmen transport their eggs using their feet.”

“............Huh?”

My eyes went wide. Cerise was kind enough to explain.

As one might guess from her remark that her eggs looked like soccer balls, lizardman eggs weren’t quite the shape we associate with eggs. Instead, they were perfectly round. This, apparently, was because they had evolved to be easy for the parents to transport. Unlike human births, a clutch of lizardman eggs usually numbered three at the least, and averaged five to ten. If they needed to go anywhere with them—to keep them safe, say—they’d find that all the eggs wouldn’t fit in their hands, and they could hardly put them in their mouths. The natural thing to do, then, was to roll the eggs along with their feet.

The eggs were apparently tough enough to put up with a little bit of kicking. I guess if kicking a soccer ball were inherently repulsive to the lizardmen, none of the others Brooke brought would have been willing to participate, either.

“Wow. Everyone really does have their own customs, don’t they?” People like me might be shocked to think about kicking an egg with your feet, but if humans were completely biologically different than we are, maybe it would seem natural to us, too. Heck, there are fish that raise their offspring in their mouths—and then there’s the praying mantis. In order to be sure she has enough nutrients to lay her eggs, the female mantis eats the male mantis after they copulate.

People tend to react viscerally to this sort of thing: “That’s weird!” or “How awful!” But that’s just how we see it. A mantis, for example, is a totally different creature.

“Heh... So we’re the same, when it comes down to it.”

“I’m sorry?” Cerise said.

“Oh, no... It’s just, our appearances and our ways of life are so different. I always thought Brooke was a good person, but there was a line in my mind separating me and him. He was a different kind of creature.”

Brooke was Brooke. Not a human. Lizardmen weren’t like us. That caused me to resign myself to certain things from the outset, to assume that there would naturally be little misunderstandings. I had given up on completely understanding him before I’d even tried.

“So often we see what’s different, and it gives us an excuse to fight someone or keep our distance. But instead, we should be recognizing that even separate species share certain things. Then we might get along with them. I’d like that better.”

What did humans and lizardmen share? Well, for one, Brooke was a father who cared for his offspring. I was sure he wasn’t the only lizardman who felt that way. They didn’t show it quite the way we did, and that caused humans to misunderstand them. Their obviously different appearance didn’t give us many chances to reconcile that misunderstanding, either. It meant there was a deep and seemingly unbridgeable gap between us.

Cerise looked at me with unblinking eyes. Her tongue flitted in and out of her mouth. “Never have I heard a human speak in such a way,” she said wonderingly.

“Er... I guess it helps to be an outworlder,” I said with a shrug. “I get to stand outside of what seems like common sense in the Eldant Empire. But look, I’m not trying to destroy local customs or push my ideas down people’s throats here.”

Cerise didn’t speak.

“I’m the president and salesperson for Amutech. The most I can do is say ‘What about this?’ or ‘Give it a try if you like.’ I’m sorry that means I can’t raise the lizardmen’s status by sheer force.”

Of course, to blindly affirm all the values of modern Japan would be dangerous itself. That was why I offered only suggestions, so as not to become a cultural invader. Maybe it might seem like I was evading responsibility, but in order to avoid forcing anything on anybody, making suggestions like “What if you tried thinking about it this way?” was the most I should—or could—do.

“Having said that, salesmanship does involve a certain amount of promotion.”

“Pro-mo-tion, sir?”

“Meaning you don’t force anything on your listeners, but you try to convince them that you’ve got a good idea.”

“I suppose I don’t... fully understand.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it.” I gave a dry grin. Maybe this world wasn’t quite ready for the niceties of marketing theory, humans and lizardmen alike.

I parted ways with Cerise and headed back, but at the turn in the hallway I ran into Myusel.

“Yikes!” She was the last person I had expected to see standing there.

“Master,” she said. Her eyes were brimming, and she looked... well, she looked overwhelmed with emotion.

“Wh-What? Huh? What’s going on?” I sputtered, totally confused. Honestly, it really hurt me to see Myusel cry.

But she said, “Oh, Master, you took so long to come back, and I—”

She must have gotten worried and come looking for me. True, I had been gone an awfully long time for someone who was ostensibly going to the bathroom.

“S-Sorry,” I said. “I just ran into somebody.”

“Yes, sir,” Myusel said with a firm nod. “Cerise-san, right?” It seemed she had heard me and Cerise talking, much as I had heard Cerise and Brooke talking.

Then Myusel said, “Master... Shinichi-sama. You’re truly, truly...” Her emotions seemed to overcome her again, and she was lost for words.

“Huh? What?”

“You are the strangest—no.” She shook her head. “The most wonderful... the kindest...”

“Gosh, what brought this on?”

I gathered that she was referring to my conversation with Cerise, but I didn’t think I had said anything to warrant a reaction like this.

“Lizardmen... half-elves... You treat us all just like normal humans,” she said.

“Oh...” I said, smiling sheepishly. “It’s nice of you to say that, but it’s really pretty normal back where I come from.”

I didn’t think I would be considered especially kind back on Earth, or especially unusual. It wasn’t some special trait of mine, just a product of where I had been born and raised.

“Do you mean the ‘liberty, equality, and fellowship’ that you spoke of before?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Those are values I was raised with. I’m just sort of, you know, the opposite of people who discriminate against lizardmen or half-elves. I assume the people who discriminate against you mostly do it because they were raised that way.”

Obviously, discrimination existed in my world, too. Humans were not all equal. They were born with different abilities and talents, raised in different environments, and that inevitably led to personal differences. If we were all exactly alike, we might be a lot more like ants or bees—a hive society with few individual distinctions. I found that sort of terrifying.

More than anything else, a society like that couldn’t produce manga, or anime, or light novels, or games. Something else my dad used to say was that being a creator meant trumpeting what made you different from other people.

My point is, this inequality among people caused some to try to make up for feelings of inadequacy by ridiculing those they saw as beneath them. It’s hardly an uncommon behavior, even in our world. Just look at the internet.

I have to think, though, that somewhere inside, people who do that feel guilty about it, that they regret it. I don’t think anyone in our world genuinely sees that sort of ridicule as a good thing. But here in this world, they didn’t see it as a bad one. Even the people being discriminated against considered it perfectly normal. That was why nobody considered changing things. It took someone from an entirely different world to even suggest it.

“So it’s not something admirable about me,” I said. “There are a lot of people in my world who worked hard to achieve those ideals. They’re the ones you should admire. I’m just walking in their footsteps.”

“I... I wonder,” Myusel said. “But Matoba-san and Minori-san don’t say the things you do.”

“Well, they—I mean, not everyone is in a position to speak as freely as I am.”

I could only smile ruefully. Public servants didn’t have the same freedom to express themselves that I did. But trying to explain that to Myusel would probably just make things even more confusing.

“Look, all I’m saying is that I’m not this great person or anything. I wouldn’t want you guys to make more of me than I am. But... it does make me happy to hear such kind words from you. Thank you.”

“Oh... Not at all...” Myusel blushed and looked at the ground.

Gaah! Every time she does that, it’s so innocent and cute!

“Ah, Shinichi-sama... I mean, Master,” she quickly corrected herself. “We mustn’t take too long...”

“Oh, you’re right. Petralka’s gonna be ticked.” I smiled again, then Myusel and I set off walking down the hallway back toward the viewing box.

“Hey, Myusel,” I said, stopping in my tracks. “I just thought of something. Do you think you could help me?”

“You want... my help?” She looked surprised, but then she said, “If it’s within my power, I’ll do anything. Just tell me... Shinichi-sama.” Then she smiled.

The games seemed to be going smoothly—or at least, what passed for smoothly. This being a tournament, obviously, the losing teams left, while the winning teams continued to play. One surprise was that both the elf and dwarf teams, despite their extensive use of magic, dropped out early, and even the mixed team with Elvia and her friends was eventually defeated.

Elves and dwarves being hereditary enemies as they were, the two teams had used every ounce of their strength in their game against each other, and when the next round came, they were too tired to put up a fight.

As for the mixed team, Elvia and the other beast people were really more interested in the ball itself than they were in doing much of anything with it. It actually didn’t turn out to be much of a game, and ended with a critical self-inflicted wound by Elvia—specifically, when she kicked the ball into her own team’s goal.

I had to admit, Elvia had never seemed entirely clear on the concept of soccer—or tournaments, for that matter. It probably didn’t help that enough time had passed that her “phase of the moon” had come around again.

There wasn’t much we could do about any of that now. If we ever did this again, maybe we could make some improvements.

We had come down to the final round, and I wasn’t sure whether or not to be surprised by the two teams remaining. On the one hand, we had the First Knights. Humans, as basically the rulers of this world, had the best balance when it came to “fighting” in a group like this. I guess that was the same as saying humans were the best at making war, and I didn’t know whether that was something to be proud of. But anyway...

The other team—and this really was a surprise—was the lizardmen. The main reason they had done so well seemed to be related to their custom of moving their eggs with their feet, as Cerise had explained. They had a long tradition of manipulating round objects with their feet...

When a bunch of kids who don’t know much about the game play soccer, it’s usually quick to devolve into something where everyone is making their most powerful kicks all the time, or shooting from absurdly long distances. I remembered doing that myself. And that was how the knights and the other teams had mostly played.

To be fair, the manga and stuff that had served as their examples definitely favored dramatic, last-ditch long shots and final-move-style craziness. Even the shots that weren’t actually so long tended to be depicted in a way that made them seem to fly for miles before they landed in the goal.

The knights, though, had magic on their side; magical support was something they were used to. It allowed them to get away with an otherwise childish strategy like taking lots of long shots.

By comparison, the lizardman team seemed practically gifted. They never made long passes, they tried to keep the ball as close to their feet as possible, and they used their inborn physical strength and athletic ability to move down the field and score. Some of their moves and tactics could have been taken for pro stuff.

“Most unexpected,” Petralka said as she watched the final match begin. “Who would have imagined that the lizardmen would win through?”

“Very true, Your Majesty,” Garius said, subtly but unmistakably surprised. “And here I had dismissed them as mere savages. I confess a certain nervousness watching this match.”

“Yes. This may not be a proper battle, but the First Knights’ reputation will not be bolstered if they lose to a group of lizardmen.”

I sighed internally. So that’s what it’s come to...

No matter how much I urged them to forget about status and just enjoy the game, as long as there were winners and losers it would be impossible to completely ignore relations off the field. Privately, I had been rooting for the lizardmen, but I admit I never thought they would make it this far. And I definitely hadn’t thought about the ramifications if they happened to be in a game against the knights—let alone if they won. If the knights had been knocked out in the first round, they might have been able to say, “Well, it’s just a game.” But each time they won, that possibility got more and more remote.

“Master...” Myusel tugged on my sleeve anxiously.

“I know,” I muttered. “This is tense.”

I was in a tough spot: I could hardly tell the lizardmen to throw the game. But if they won, the knights, as well as the humans in the audience—probably half the crowd—would be very, very angry. And if they obviously took it easy—if it was clear by comparison with their earlier performances that they were holding back—that would probably upset people, too.

Like I said, tough.

What to do, what to do? Well, one thing was certain: worrying about it now wouldn’t help.

“No choice but to let this play out,” I said.

“Right...” Myusel nodded.

“Hm? What are you two whispering about?” The annoyingly sharp-eared Petralka said, looking over at us.

“Secret,” I said with a grin.

“Is it, now? What secrets could you have from your empress?”

“Hey, don’t worry, I promise we weren’t privately making fun of you or anything.”

“Ahem... That is not what we were concerned about,” she said, frowning. “We simply don’t like to be left out of the discussion.”

“Oh yeah? But I think it’s going to be more fun if you don’t know what we just said.”

“What?”

“Remember earlier, how happy I was to be surprised by those onigiri Myusel made? Not knowing ahead of time made me that much happier to find out.”

“Er... Yes, we see your logic,” Petralka muttered. “Well, all right. But we shall learn of this surprise in the course of this match, shall we not?”

“Yeah... you will,” I said. I gave her my most confident nod, but inside I was sweating bullets.

The competition between the knights and the lizardmen went... more or less as expected, I suppose. The knights had a huge advantage, and they used it.

For starters, they had magic on their side, which some might justifiably call cheating. The lizardmen couldn’t use magic and didn’t have any sympathetic wizards to back them up. And because everyone in the stadium knew that the knights’ reputation was on the line, the lizardmen seemed to be holding themselves back. They seemed to have realized that they must not win this game.

But just as I had predicted, the crowd didn’t react well to the lizardmen pulling their punches.

“Hrm. This is terribly boring,” Petralka said, a fair assessment of the one-sided contest. At the moment, the lizardmen were down ten to nothing. A knightly win seemed almost inevitable.

“Your knights seem rather savage,” Petralka commented.

“I suppose because it would be no laughing matter if they were simply handed victory,” said Garius, the division’s leader. He didn’t look terribly pleased.

He was right: the lizardmen’s reticence could all too easily be seen as them throwing the game. That might not be what the lizardmen intended, but the difficulty of understanding their gestures and expressions left people to read things into what they could see. The lizard squad was visibly slower and weaker than they had been; even an amateur could tell they weren’t playing at their full strength.

“It is all too clear that the spectators are losing interest,” Petralka said. “We understand that a lizardman victory might tarnish the dignity of the First Knights, but winning a game the other side isn’t playing simply makes them look ridiculous.”

The lizardmen were caught in a paradox: they couldn’t hold back, but they weren’t allowed to win. As a group, they didn’t seem delicate enough to walk a tightrope like that.

It looks like I’ve got no choice but to intervene.

I didn’t set up this tournament because I was desperate to see some soccer here in the Eldant Empire. Soccer fans might be upset to hear this, but I didn’t particularly care about the game one way or the other. I was just trying to lay the foundation for people to understand what made sports so much fun, and maybe take the edge off interracial relations while I did it. So while I wasn’t going to fix a match, maybe I could be forgiven for trying to encourage one team or another.

I couldn’t forget what my goal was.

Silently, I met Myusel’s gaze. She gave a little nod, and together we slipped out of the viewing box.

What follows is essentially an account Brooke gave me later of what happened. So although I’m relating it in first person, the viewpoint is really his.

Without further ado...

Brooke was on the lizardman team’s bench.

Cerise, along with Brooke’s other friends, had urged him repeatedly to be there, and even I had asked him to be part of the squad, and that explained why he was sitting there. He, however, had no desire whatsoever to be out on the field; as far as he was concerned, he was only there in case anyone else couldn’t play and they needed a replacement.

So when the voices of Matoba-san (and his interpreter) and Prime Minister Zahar came over the speakers the JSDF had installed, announcing, “The lizardman team looks like they’re going to switch out a player!” Brooke didn’t imagine for a moment it had anything to do with him. For him, the commentary was hardly distinguishable from the general roar of the stadium.

Until he heard...

“The lizardman team is making a substitution! In place of Gayle Drood, Brooke Darwin will be taking the field!”

Brooke gave a start at the sound of his name. When he looked up, Gayle was already back at the bench, patting Brooke on the shoulder. As it happened, Gayle was someone Brooke had known since his military days—in effect, an old war buddy.

“What is this, Gayle?”

“Orders from the Tribal Council’s representative. Hit the field.”

“Whose representative?” That meant the command came from the person acting on behalf of the Tribal Council. In this case... Cerise.

“You’re Brooke the Hero. When you were of a mind, you could lead us toe-to-toe against a division of knights. If you go out there as if we’re gonna slaughter them... we will.” Gayle’s tongue slipped in and out of his mouth. “Do us a favor. Don’t forget what you mean to us.”

Brooke stood silently and made for the field. He knew, of course, what they called him. Hero. He understood that his presence would dramatically raise the morale of his teammates.

And to him, that knowledge was a huge burden.

He had failed to protect even his own eggs. What kind of hero was he?

Yes, there was meaning in bringing glory to his people, advancing their station. Or there had been. But to Brooke, it was cold comfort. There were certain things that were all too clear to him, exactly because he was a “hero,” a hardened soldier. He knew, for instance, that no soldier could go on forever. Every man of arms would one day grow old, weaken, and die. Hence, to ensure his existence was not in vain, he sought to leave children behind him, a link to the next generation. Wasn’t that what all living creatures wanted?

But in this, the most basic task of life, he had failed. He had let the word hero carry him away, off to the front lines... And as a result, he had been unable to defend his wife and clutch. The simplest of things.

He was a fool. That was the thought that caused him to quit soldiering. To distance himself from his wife. He didn’t believe that a fool like him had any right to ask Cerise to bear his eggs again. Cerise was still young. She would be happier bearing the offspring of some other, better man. He was so sure of this that even when Cerise pursued him repeatedly, he cruelly rebuffed her.

It was only right that this should be his fate: to die old and useless and alone.

That was why he couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm for this game, no matter how much people might want him to.

Those were the thoughts swirling in his mind as he stepped silently out onto the soccer field.

The air was impossibly heavy. There was no more cheering from the crowd; instead, they were looking venomously at the disappointment that was the lizardman team. Lizardmen might not have pronounced facial expressions themselves, but that didn’t mean they were oblivious to what humans were feeling. The contest had been so lopsided that the knights were far, far ahead in goals.

The lizardman had the kickoff.

“Brooke...”

“The hero...”

The beseeching gazes of his teammates pierced him. He walked between them, some to his right and some to his left, until he was standing in front of the ball. He still had no desire to play, but if all he had to do was kick this thing straight ahead, he would manage it.

He drew his foot back and—

“Brooke!” a familiar voice called. It was coming from the stands.

He looked back, and there was Cerise. Myusel was with her. It was his wife who had called his name.

“Brooke-saaaan!” Myusel yelled. He hadn’t suspected the demure girl of having such a strong pair of lungs. “The ball! The ball is one of your eggs—one of the ones you couldn’t save!”

This took him completely aback. He stared down at the ball in front of him. What did Myusel think she was saying?

“Brooke!” Cerise’s voice cut through his confusion. “This is your chance to take it to a safe place!”

Still he said nothing. It was not a real egg, of course. Yes, the size and appearance were quite similar, but this was something else completely. Brooke knew that. The eggs he had lost... those had been real eggs. They were gone, and he would never get them back.

And yet...

Ahh. I think I see now, Brooke thought. He had been unable to forgive himself because he could have protected his eggs, but hadn’t. He could not bring himself to say, as Cerise did, that it was what it was.

Yet all of that hinged on a hypothetical world. If he hadn’t been at war, would he have been able to protect his eggs? Maybe, maybe not. There was no way of knowing. The eggs were gone, and there was no changing that.

No amount of self-recrimination would undo what he had done, but neither could he forget it all and go back to the way things had been. So instead, he had cut himself off from Cerise and everyone he knew.

But...

“This—”

This ball, here in front of him.

The eggs he had been unable to protect so long ago.

Well, then he would test himself, here and now. He would see whether he was truly fit to be called a hero. Whether he could protect this egg.

Perhaps then he would be able to accept all of it.

“Listen up, you lot,” he growled, staring intently at the ball. “We’re going to give it everything we’ve got.”

“Yessir!” A joyous cheer went up from the lizardmen.

“Sssssshhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaa!” Brooke raised the unique lizardman war cry and kicked the ball.

The course of the game changed almost immediately. And Brooke was the reason.

With their hero on the field, and with that yell reminding them of what a soldier he used to be, the lizardman morale skyrocketed. Suddenly, they were at the top of their game.

There was no more hesitation. If they managed an upset victory against the knights, there was a chance it would turn people against them even more. But they didn’t seem to care. They were ready for anything. With that mindset, the lizardmen’s athletic prowess turned out to be a match even for that of the beast people.

“Incredible! Amazing! This is absolutely unbelievable!” Matoba-san was caught up in paroxysms of excitement. “He got through! Three defenders! Four! Five! The knights just can’t get the ball back!”

He was right: while Brooke dribbled, all the other lizardmen deftly covered the knights, keeping them at bay. The royal forces were so used to shooting the ball from a distance that when the lizardmen got up in their faces, they didn’t seem to know what to do.

And Brooke kept running, the ball safely at his feet. It almost seemed glued to his toes. It didn’t bounce. It didn’t jump. It didn’t get away from him for an instant. Several of the knights’ players managed to slip around their guards and throw themselves at Brooke, but he dodged them without so much as blinking. Compared to rolling an egg, handling a soccer ball was easy work for the likes of Brooke and his people.

“Don’t look now, but a wall has been thrown up in front of Brooke!”

Magic from the knights’ side—the same stuff the dwarves had used—created a wall that was blocking Brooke’s progress. But he showed he could do more than go in a straight line: he dodged the wall neatly, and casually resumed running.

More knights launched themselves at him, but they failed to get anywhere near the ball.

“Goodness gracious, what’s this?! Have the knights gotten desperate?”

What the knights came up with next, believe it or not, was offensive magic.

“I have to imagine that directly attacking another player would be grounds for a red card...” Matoba-san said.

“Yes, but they aren’t targeting the player,” Zahar replied. “Most likely, they’re aiming for the ball.”

“The ball! Brilliant! In soccer, you would never get a red card for abusing the ball!”

Well, no. Abusing the soccer ball is sort of the point.

The knights must have hoped they could land an explosion or something close enough to the ball (which was to say, close enough to Brooke) that they would be able to pluck it right away from him. One slight miscalculation would result in an attack on Brooke and a red card, but the palace mages working with the knights knew how to make their magic very accurate, how to focus its power in a single place.

“Ssssssshhhhhhaaaaaaaaaa!”

It turned out even magical attacks couldn’t stop Brooke. He dodged to the right, to the left. He dribbled the ball neatly past every obstacle.

“This! Is! My! Egg!” he bellowed.

There was no one ahead of him. Perhaps he was saying it to himself.

“I will never!” He ducked another explosion. “Again!” He dodged past an earthen redoubt in his way. “Let it be broken!” He spun around several knights who came flying at him. “I will protect it!” He couldn’t take a straight line, but step by step he was gaining ground.

His shouting, fired by the fury and passion within him, carried clearly around the stadium, even over the noise of the explosions. I could hear it as if he were standing next to me. I was sure the other spectators could, too.

“Well, now,” Petralka said in surprise. “Is he—Is he pretending that ball is his own egg?”

“This is unexpected,” Garius murmured. “Such spirit. Who knew lizardmen could show such vigor in the defense of their young? I always took the cold-blooded creatures to be more... dispassionate.”

Petralka made a sound of admiration in the back of her throat. “The lizards may not look like us, but it is clear that parents and children share a bond...”

I thought, or at least wanted to think, that she was voicing the feelings of everyone watching the game.

People called the lizardmen cold-blooded; took their scaly faces as expressionless. People treated them almost like bugs, as if they were emotionless machines. I don’t think anyone expected to see this display of overwhelming passion.

But it paled in comparison to what came next.

Brooke ran.

A number of obstacles kept him from taking a straight course, but he ran just the same. He juked right, then left, avoiding fire and earth and members of the other team.

“You dirty, stinking—!” One of the knights shouted and flung himself at Brooke. It just so happened that they were hidden by one of the earthen walls; it was impossible for the spectators to see what he was doing, least of all from Her Majesty’s viewing box. The knight was aiming straight at Brooke. And he was deadly serious.

The knights were still quite a few points ahead, but with Brooke’s entry into the game, momentum had shifted decisively in favor of the lizardmen. An upset victory looked increasingly possible, and it drove the knights to desperate measures. This guy went for the ball, but his foot connected with Brooke’s ankle instead.

Brooke let out a voiceless gasp and stumbled. His bones were of course too strong to be broken by a simple human kick, let alone one intended to look like an accident. But lizardman joints weren’t much less vulnerable than those of a human. Even Brooke was going to notice a hit like that.

It cut into his momentum. He couldn’t roll the egg—no, the ball—so easily anymore. His footwork had been perfect until that moment, but now he was thrown off his game. The knight didn’t manage to steal the ball, but when Brooke got moving again he was noticeably slower than before.

This was bad. There were three more knights heading straight for Brooke, not counting the guy who had just kicked him. Brooke’s teammates had their hands full with various magical impediments and couldn’t back him up.

Brooke made no sound. But he had sworn, this time, to protect his egg—no matter what he had to do. Honor. Integrity. Such things had nothing to do with this. As a man—as a father—he was going to keep his vow.

“Sshhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

For Brooke, the ball had transcended being a substitute for an egg and had become an egg itself. One of the eggs he had lost that day. He had been given a second chance to protect his children, and the idea had taken hold with the force of an obsession.

Or perhaps, by that point in the game, Brooke had become completely delusional.

“Yaaaaaaahhhhh!”

He looked at his leg; he knew he couldn’t run well enough to protect the egg. So instead—

“Oh! What’s this?! Matoba-san’s voice sounded from overhead, but Brooke paid no heed. Without a moment’s hesitation, he grabbed the ball and set off at a dash.

“A handball! That’s a handball! Brooke is in violation of the rules—”

As if he cared.

He was going to protect that egg, no matter what!

Brooke thought of nothing but his promise as he ran. Fancy weaving was beyond him now, but he could run. A dull pain (lizardmen did feel pain, even if less acutely than humans) pulsed up his leg, but he ignored it and kept moving. He held his egg tightly, safely in his arms.

“That is clearly illegal! Brooke is obviously in violation—but he won’t stop!”

Truer words were never spoken. He wasn’t stopping, and now no one could stop him. Brooke was the Hero.

“Can’t you hear them, you bastard?!” one of the knights shouted. “You’re in violation! Stop where you are!”

“Shut your foul face!” Brooke shot back, and continued running.

The next instant, there was an earthen wall in front of him.

It was that familiar spell, Eruou Iruguna. But with all the momentum he had built up, this time Brooke couldn’t dodge it.

The fact didn’t seem to bother him. If anything, he ran faster.

“Shaaaaaaa!” With a great shout, he punched through the wall with his shoulder. He managed to hit it before it was completely formed, while it was still soft, and the force of the blow was enough to bring it tumbling down. Now covered in mud, Brooke kept running.

“That son of a—!”

Now the knights were really angry.

“Somebody stop that monster!”

“Anyone! This isn’t a game anymore!”

They weren’t immune to Brooke’s intimidation factor, but they flung themselves at him, no longer caring about red cards or being ejected from the game. They hit him with their fists, grabbed him with their hands. But still Brooke didn’t stop.

He shook off the knights, or dragged them along as he moved ever forward. He broke past first one, then another, and then he was through their blockade.

And then—

“Hold it right there!”

The soldiers weren’t the only ones affected by Brooke’s display of spirit.

“I’ll take your holy li’l friend there!”

It was, of all people, Elvia. You could hear the whoosh as she jumped down onto the field, landing just in front of the goal. She—or perhaps more precisely, the beastly part of her—had been inspired by the air of battle. Now she was charging straight at Brooke, her eyes practically bloodshot.

“What the hell?!”

“Yikes! Keep away from me!”

The blood had gone to Elvia’s head, and she was naturally in no state to pay any attention to the knights around her. Brooke twisted his body and used the very knights who were still clinging to him to ward off Elvia’s attack. The men could only cry out, busy as they were holding on, but Elvia, agitated by her “phase of the moon” and protected by powerful muscles and thick fur, didn’t seem to notice anything was wrong, even when Brooke was slamming knights into her. In fact, she easily sent them flying.

“Ssshhhhaaaaaaa!”

“Grrraahhhhhhh!”

They may have technically been a lizard and a werewolf, but they might as well have been a dragon and a tiger—pretty evenly matched. On top of that, the remaining knights, along with Brooke’s fellow lizardmen, and even the weretiger and werebear from Elvia’s team all jumped into the brawl.

“Hrrraahhhh!”

“Yaaaaaaaahhh!”

“You bastaaaaarrrddds!”

“Diiiiieeeee!”

“Eeeeyaaahhhh!”

The stadium filled with all the noise of combat.

“You know, I heard something once,” Minori-san whispered to me. When had she gotten to the viewing box?

“What’s that?” I asked, most of my attention still on the field below.

“I heard rugby started when some kid playing soccer let the blood go to his head, grabbed the ball, and started running.”

“Uh... Huh.”

“We may be witnessing the birth of Eldant rugby.”

“Yippee,” I said, raising a fist unenthusiastically.

Is this what they mean by history repeating itself? Or was this, perhaps, inevitable? They say you can’t distinguish coincidence from fate, but this was beyond even that...

“Never mind. This is no time for some half-baked monologue.”

“True enough.”

“What do we do?”

“Think we should dump a bucket of water on them?” Minori-san said mischievously.

The indolent glow of sunset turned the soccer field golden.

The field had been turned upside down, almost literally. It looked like there had been a natural disaster: here there was a rent in the earth, there, an impromptu mountain, somewhere else, a newly formed crater. It was an absolute mess. And amidst all the chaos, thirty-ish people lay collapsed.

Not like, dead, mind you. They were all simply too tired to get up. The knights. The lizardmen. The beast people who had charged onto the field—to say nothing of the elves and dwarves who had joined in after that, not entirely sure what was going on but certain they wanted to be a part of it.

The JSDF, at least, had retained their sanity. But with all this ridiculousness going on, it was actually the calm, thoughtful humans who lost out. Now the soldiers were crawling over the battered soccer field, retrieving the fallen players. Maybe it made a certain perverse sense; search and rescue was a specialty of theirs, after all.

Right in the middle of the field, which had seen the most intense action of all, knelt a single figure.

It was Brooke.

He was holding the ball up in both hands, as if in offering to the setting sun. Elvia, incidentally, was collapsed right next to him. She looked almost as bad as the field, her face swollen and bruised. Maybe it was because she had insisted on going toe-to-toe with Brooke. But in any event, she seemed to be breathing.

“Brooke...” Myusel and I, along with Cerise, came down onto the field. “Do you... feel better?”

“Master,” Brooke said, looking at me. “Was it, perchance, you who plotted to have Myusel remind me of my eggs?”

“Yes, that was me. I’m sorry for sticking my nose in your business.”

Brooke was silent for a moment, staring at the ball with that same distant look in his eyes.

Finally he said, “Cerise.” His voice was almost a whisper.

“Yes?”

“This does not mean our eggs have come back to us.”

“No, it doesn’t...”

Both of them sounded downbeat. A ball, in the end, was just a ball, and could never bring back the eggs they had lost. The children they had lost.

“But it has given me the confidence that I will be able to protect the next one.”

“Brooke...” When she said her husband’s name, Cerise’s voice trembled just a bit.

“Would you copulate with me again, and bear my eggs?”

“I will,” Cerise said, quiet but sure.

Myusel and I stood some distance away, smiling. “Ain’t that just th’ sweetest thang?” I said, wiping my eyes.

“What’s with the drawl?”

Who should wander up at this moment of emotional climax but Minori-san and Petralka?

“Oh, uh, you know,” I said.

“They sound so innocent and sweet.”

Myusel nodded in agreement with Petralka’s judgment. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” she said, smiling.

And, well, that’s the story. That’s how soccer came to the Eldant Empire—to this whole other world, in fact.

Even if I never did figure out what the heck was going on.