Chapter One: Do We Meet by Chance?

Looking back on it now, maybe I had a sense that something was coming.

There was a big, bright full moon that night. I was lying in bed, which was all well and good, but even when I closed my eyes I couldn’t quite slip into unconsciousness. Unable to fall asleep, but not able to muster up the energy to go do something, either, I just lay there, aimlessly passing the lazy time.

This was unusual—normally I’m a pretty good sleeper.

“Hrm...”

I sighed and opened my eyes at last. I could see the familiar shapes of my room in the semi-darkness.

I didn’t have any nightlight in my room, nor were there any lamps outside. When night fell around here, you were really closed in by the darkness. If there were clouds or rain at night, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I had grown up with plenty of good old-fashioned urban light pollution, and I was a little shocked to find out how dark a night could really be.

But that’s how the world really works after sundown, after all. And it made the moon, when it was out, all the more conspicuous, bright against the canvas of night. With no air pollution, the sky was especially clear, with nothing to interrupt the cold, indifferent light from pouring down on you.

It all added up to the sense that the night was actually brighter outside than it was in my room.

“Hm...?” Suddenly, I frowned.

Despite the curtain over my window, I had the feeling something had moved outside.

Maybe an owl or a bat or something? We did have a forest adjacent to the mansion, which was supposed to be home to a number of nocturnal species. In fact, wasn’t there a big tree just outside my window? Maybe one of those night-dwelling animals was in the branches somewhere.

So it was no big deal. Nothing worth worrying about. Right?

But as I lay there in the dark, I couldn’t help thinking about it.

I snuck suspicious little glances toward the window—and I was sure I saw something like a shadow flicker there again.

I wasn’t imagining it. And it wasn’t an owl or a bat, I could tell now.

Naturally, I couldn’t make out the exact size or shape of whatever was out there. But I was pretty sure the birds and the bats in this area wouldn’t get any closer to our house than they had to... and they definitely wouldn’t tap insistently on the glass if they did.

“What the heck...?”

I sat up in bed, feeling distinctly suspicious.

The sound came again: tap, tap.

Two soft taps. Then a pause, then two more.

It didn’t sound like something just blowing against the glass in the wind. It was purposeful, clearly intended to get the attention of the person in the room.

That’s right: someone was knocking.

“At this time of the night?” I grabbed the smartphone by my pillow to check the time. The screen said 2:30 a.m.

I would have considered the night still young at that hour back during my time as a home security guard, but since moving to this mansion, I had adopted a more proper schedule. On most nights, I would have been sound asleep by now. So, I assumed, would everyone else in the house. It was that hour of the night when, as the proverb said, even the grass and trees were asleep.

So who was out there?

As I lay there in silence, I realized my whole body was stiff with fear. My mind was replaying old television programs I’d seen about paranormal phenomena.

What if it was a ghost? This world was full of things that would be considered occult or fantastical or even superstitious in modern Japan. Magic and sprites were well within the realm of the everyday around here. So it was entirely possible I was dealing with a ghost.

But even so...

My more than a dozen years growing up in modern Japan had firmly cemented in my mind the idea that ghosts = scary. It was practically instinctive. So I clung to any bit of logic that might help me deny the possibility. But still, what’s scary is scary.

Meanwhile, the sound went on.

Of course, it crossed my mind to simply pull the covers up over my head, pretend to be asleep, and insist to myself that I was just imagining all of this. Unfortunately, the pervasive silence made the tapping all too obvious. It’s like how once you notice the ticking of a clock, you can’t take your mind off it, and then good luck falling asleep again. It becomes impossible to ignore.

I kept lying there. And lying there.

Finally, I gave in.

I got out of bed and went over to the window. My heart was pounding so loud it was distracting.

A corner of my mind was busy asking, What am I going to do if there’s some awful monster there?

The classic Japanese ghost is a woman with half her face hidden with long, greasy black hair. Oh, but in the Western tradition there’s a lot of zombies, creatures who are rotting or whose faces are melting off. When it comes to anime, I guess weird ghosts aren’t as scary as a yandere with a hatchet who can’t quite meet your eyes and who— No! Not the time for that!

“How stupid am I, feeding my own fears like this? What good does that do?”

The procession of terrifying images flashed through my mind, my brain jumping from one to the next even as I wished it would stop. I’d come this far, though. It would be even worse to stop now.

I screwed up my courage, standing in front of the window.

Then I grabbed the curtains with both hands—and closed my eyes.

“I’m not afraid I’m not afraid I’m not afraid I’m not afraid, Kanou Shinichi is not afraid!” I chanted like a spell. “I’m not afraid because there’s no need to be scared! Be it a ghost or a faerie or a devil or a demon, if she’s also a beautiful girl then she’s not scary! There are plenty of moe ghost characters!”

A lot of them were even the heroines of their shows! Forcing myself to picture several such characters—aren’t those clumsy ghosts dressed as shrine maidens great?!—I pulled aside the curtains as hard as I could and flung open the window.

“Ghost! I see your true form—Otherworld Monster!!”

If there was really something paranormal out there, I figured I would pretty much be reduced to a tiny, frightened baby, so I shouted and struck a pose partly to encourage myself. Between me throwing the window open and the breeze gusting in, the curtains went billowing to the side.

And then it was just me staring out into the night.

I didn’t even get to those famous (?) words, “Spirit Wave of Light That Shines upon Immoral Beings!” before my mouth hung open.

There, bathed in the moonlight, was a girl. For a second, I almost thought she was floating in midair, but I quickly realized my mistake. She was sitting on a tree branch, watching me.

“Evening,” the girl said with a smile. Her voice was the slightest bit husky, as if she were caressing the ear of her listener with—

“Er... Hello,” I said, mostly reflexively. It was about as dumb a thing as I could possibly have said at that moment, but I had completely and totally lost my nerve.

Why? Because she was perfect.

Sitting there in the moonlight, she was terrifyingly composed; there was no way past her guard. She almost looked like a doll or something that had been prepared with anything and everything in mind. The slight tremble, the grace note of hesitance that real humans, for better or for worse, always have, she completely lacked.

Her big, black eyes, fringed with long lashes, stared straight at me. Well-formed brows peeked out from behind her bangs. Then there was the straight, smooth bridge of her nose, her soft-looking, fine lips. Everything combined for an enormous impact.

“Lovely night, isn’t it?” the girl said easily. The wind whistled and the leaves shook as if in agreement.

The wind picked up her hair, dark as the night itself, and tugged at the hem of her dress. She was wearing a Gothic-style dress with more frills than just about anything you would normally see. It was cinched at the waist but left the shoulders exposed, as if it existed not for the comfort of the wearer but only to make them look adorable. And on her, it worked.

There were a lot of dark colors on the outfit, but that made the abundant frills, the bare shoulders, and her white knees all the more striking—the contrast strangely enhanced her presence.

Wait... She seems less like a ghost and more like... a vampire!

Her very assertiveness made her seem like she wasn’t a ghost. Disembodied spirits seem like they hardly exist, like they might melt into the night at any moment—but this girl appeared to take the night, in fact, the moonlight itself, as a stage upon which to display her beauty.

She gave me an alluring smile, as if she could read my thoughts, and said, “The night wind shimmers in the moonlight—and it is very beautiful.”

“Hey...”

At that moment, I finally realized something: I recognized her dress.

I took a fresh look at her face—or more precisely, just above her face. And just as I expected, there was a dark-purple ribbon woven into her hair.

“Suiren...”

She was dressed like the character Suiren from the anime Rose Princess. It’s a show about dolls who battle each other, and Suiren is one of the villains, a doll who’s hostile to the protagonist. But her Gothic Lolita design, which is frankly better balanced than the heroine’s, ended up making her the more popular of the two characters.

Of course, in Rose Princess, Suiren is an antique doll, so she only comes up to about half the height of a person—whereas the girl in front of me now was full-size. Excepting that one detail, though, she looked like she could have come straight out of the anime.

“You...” she said with a giggle, the edges of her lips just turning up as she looked at the person staring moronically at her, his mouth hanging open (i.e., me).

I found it intensely seductive. I felt a shock of something akin to fear, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Just the opposite. It was almost like being emotionally moved, but it wasn’t quite that, either. Was this what they called being attracted to someone?

“...must be Kanou Shinichi,” she said.

“Er, yeah,” I answered, nodding reflexively. “How do you know my name...?”

Even as I asked, though, something else occurred to me.

Japanese. The girl was speaking Japanese. In a place where I was one of the only people who knew that language. That must mean she was—

“I am the light that guides the darkness.” She placed both her hands over her chest, closing her eyes with their long lashes. “Yes: I am the chosen light, elected to be the guide to a new world.”

“Um...”

Part of me wanted to joke, “That’s cool, go ahead and speak Japanese”—but I didn’t have it in me at that moment. I was completely enraptured by the aura she exuded.

And then...

“Kanou Shinichi-san...”

She reached a pale hand out to me, as if to say, “Here, take it.”

“You have a choice. If you take my hand, it will mean that you acknowledge my existence. It shall be a bond of destiny, testament to the contract.”

“The c-contract?”

“If you don’t take my hand, you shall wallow in ignorance, accomplishing your reason for being while trapped in darkness. It is I who guide, but you who choose. Now—steel yourself. Once the way to Ragnarök has been opened, you will not be permitted to sit idly by.”

I could only stare at the slim, white fingers and look into her beautiful face.

Was this—you know, that thing that happens all the time in anime and manga and light novels?! Was I going to enter a contract as her servant, throwing myself into battle so that we could beat the bad guys together? Was it one of those?! Would she turn into a sword for me to use, or would she power up when I sang for her, or would we be stealing holy relics, or be gamblers laden with debt and betting with our lives so that we had to do burning prostrations, or—! Wait. I think that last thing is not like the others. Probably.

I felt my heart pounding even harder than before. I mean, we were talking about “destiny” and “chosen” and “light” and “darkness” and “contracts” and “reasons for being,” and to top it all off, “Ragnarök”...! What tension was in the air! Think of the heft the word “destiny” has—we’re not just talking about fate, but fate! Consider the portentousness of “twilight of the gods” when you call it Ragnarök!! This is foundational stuff!

Ahh! A captivating unreality appears before my eyes. This girl might have leapt straight out of my computer monitor...!

Yes! This very moment is when I make my break with the tedious day-to-day!

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

(Insert your own deadpan comment like “Is your life really boring?” or “Didn’t you do that once already?”)

“Me... I...”

Hesitant, quaking, I reached out my hand toward her. Our fingers nearly touched...

And then she pulled her hand away.

“Huh?”

I stood there blinking, but she closed her hand and shook her head gently. “It seems the moment is not come yet.”

What, after stirring me up like that? It’s a little late, señorita!

She lowered those long eyelashes and said wistfully, “But the time for the contract approaches. I believe I will see you again presently. So long as it be what is destined...”

“What in the world are you—”

Yes, I understood I wouldn’t get any answers by finishing that question. But I couldn’t not ask. I still didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on, even though this girl in front of me seemed satisfied enough.

“Then... I’ll see you again.”

“Wai—”

I reached out in a flash as if to stop her, but a second later, she was gone.

No...

“Huh...?!”

There was a rustling, and when I looked over, there she was: directly below the window, at the base of the tree.

Had she jumped down there?! We were two stories up!

I was just about flabbergasted when I noticed something very fine moving in the night breeze. There was some kind of wire attached to the branch on which she had been sitting. That must have been how she was able to get down without hurting herself.

She spun on her heel and left the mansion behind, quickly vanishing into the night-clad forest around us.

“What the heck was that...?” I wondered aloud, still conscious of my heart drumming in my chest.

Was I dreaming? Hallucinating? Or had it all been real?

I felt like I had started to get used to weird things happening, but even so, meeting that girl left me shaken. Something about it still felt unreal, like I really had met Suiren, come straight out of her anime.

It all gave me a lot to think about. What future would have awaited me if I had taken her hand?

“...Oops.” I just realized. I hadn’t even asked her name.

I was pretty sure it wasn’t Suiren. Mostly sure.

“Seriously... What the heck...”

The night breeze tickled my cheek. It cooled the heat of my moment of excitement, as if washing away the last traces of proof that the girl had really been there.

That was it. It had all been a dream. I should just forget about it. Like an argument without words.

My name is Kanou Shinichi, and I was a perfectly normal high-schooler. Maybe the only thing that set me apart was that I was a home security guard.

(Paaaaaause.)

Hey... You there. Don’t go away. And don’t laugh, either. My heart is fragile like glass. I’ll cry. I will.

Er, well, never mind.

Various and sundry circumstances led to my refusal to go to school; instead, I holed up in my room enjoying the neat life of a NEET. For better or for worse, though, my parents were not soft enough to let their son live the rest of his life as a shut-in.

To put it concretely, one day they busted down my door with a chainsaw, and (as logically follows) I was out pounding the pavement soon after.

You may be aware, though, that the economic situation these days isn’t the greatest. For an otaku whose only work experience was as a security guard in his own house, it wasn’t that easy to find a job. I didn’t even have any particular qualifications. I figured my only hope was to try to find work in a field I had some expertise in, and so I traveled to that otaku Mecca, Akihabara, where I interviewed with a particular company.

So far, so good.

But this was where my daily life stopped adhering to common sense.

Believe it or not, this very first company I interviewed with greeted me with a drink of tea that turned out to have sleeping drugs in it. I drank the tea without so much as wondering whether it might be drugged, after which I was kidnapped and woke up to find myself in another world.

You heard me. Another world. Not Kansas anymore. An actual isekai.

Not only that, it turned out to be a fantasy land complete with dragons flying in the sky, humanoid races like elves and dwarves walking around town, and battles full of swords and sorcery. It was in this world that I was named General Manager of the general entertainment company, Amutech, an enterprise representing a pan-dimensional first. Specifically, the company had been founded to help spread otaku culture in this other world, and I had been selected to oversee it.

Ridiculous, right?

That’s what I thought, too. At first.

I wondered what anyone had to gain from any of this. But things turned out to be more serious than I had ever imagined.

You might be wondering, what do I mean by “another world,” anyway?

Well, exactly that: a world not our own. A place where the culture, environment, and everything else is different from Earth’s.

There’s a country here called the Holy Eldant Empire, and it turns out Japan is connected to it via a “hole” (scholars refer to it as a hyperspace wormhole) that exists underneath the Sea of Trees at Aokigahara, near Mount Fuji.

Japan might be an island chain, but it turns out it’s actually contiguous with a whole other world.

On learning of this fact, the Japanese government, hoping to keep this new world and its resources all to itself, decided to begin an investigation of what was on the other side of the hole. They did it secretly so no foreign countries would find out about what was going on.

Let me reiterate: we’re talking about a different world, here. Different life-forms, different culture, different resources, all there.

In short, a cornucopia waiting to be plundered. If the government played its hand right, Japan might even become one of the richest countries in the world. But if anyone else found out about it, they would come up with some excuse to swoop in and take the abundance of this other world for themselves.

During exploratory expeditions, the government made contact with the Holy Eldant Empire and succeeded in establishing a certain level of exchange. SF stories since time immemorial have warned of the risks of first contact—but in this case all that worry turned out to be for nothing. The number-one problem—the language barrier—was all but smashed by the magic on this side of the wormhole. In the end, it turned out a little talk went a long way.

That didn’t mean our two countries were all lovey-dovey, though. The Japanese government was trying to figure out the best way to get on good terms with the Holy Eldant Empire. They focused on mutual understanding of culture, the thing on which personal values and common sense are based, but something—maybe some difference in cultural standards, or who knows what—made the Eldant people cool toward all the stuff Japan showed them at first.

Obviously, in a place like this, where the level of technology was relatively low, you could certainly shock them by showing off household electronics and other industrial goods. But the wormhole was surprisingly narrow, putting a hard limit on the size and number of objects that could be brought across—not to mention, suddenly moving a whole bunch of resources might attract the attention of foreign observers.

Starting to worry, the government proceeded by trial and error. This produced an unexpected result: the thing the Eldant people responded to most was modern entertainment, especially manga, anime, and video games. In other words, otaku stuff.

That led to a whole new problem for the government: namely, that none of the bureaucrats knew the first thing about otaku culture. They just didn’t get it. On the one hand, they recognized that it could be a surprising source of export income, and so they tried to promote it to other countries on Earth with initiatives like Cool Japan. But on the other, they also did everything they could to control and regulate it. Suffice to say, they didn’t have eyes to see otaku culture clearly.

The solution, they decided, was to find someone who did. But the whole point here was to keep everything top secret. They couldn’t go bringing a famous creator or academic to this other world. Ideally, they would find someone who could just disappear one day without causing any special concern—someone with so little clout that if by chance the whole plan went south, they could blame everything on this person.

They were just waiting for an ignorant otaku to swallow the bait they’d set. And I, Kanou Shinichi, did. Hook, line, and sinker.

In my defense, I think I was kind of naïve at the time. Look, not only had they recognized my “talents” as an otaku, but they told me my beloved anime and games and manga were going to help build bridges with a whole new world. On behalf of all otakudom, I decided to give it my best shot.

And I did. Or at least, I feel like I did. I soon found that the Empress of the Holy Eldant Empire had taken a shine to me, and things were going swimmingly.

But then one day, I began to catch on to something. I started to see that what the Japanese government was after wasn’t cultural exchange: it was cultural invasion. Japan had no intention of having a relationship of equals with the Eldant Empire. They wanted to make the place a vassal state, a part of Japan. And this was just a ploy to get their way.

When you hear the word invasion, maybe you think of the military, but that wouldn’t have been very practical in this case. A major mobilization of Self-Defense Force units would have alerted other countries, and anyway, the wormhole was too small to bring over most military equipment. Coming through the portal with a show of overwhelming force was a transdimensional pipe dream. Not to mention, the Holy Eldant Empire did have magic, and no one was sure whether modern human technology was actually strong enough to triumph against it.

All these considerations were what made the Japanese government decide to take the cultural route. They grabbed a page from the playbook of any number of empires of the past and began by introducing the population of their target country to their own culture, so that it would be easier for the people to accept Japanese rule later.

And although I eventually caught on to this, I wasn’t the first to do so. The Eldant people were way ahead of me.

A group calling themselves Bedouna, claiming to be an “assembly of patriots,” attacked the “cultural invader” (that is, me). Given that, at the time, I was still under the impression that I was out there spreading otaku culture in the name of interworld friendship, being called an invader was quite a shock.

After that incident, I rebelled against the Japanese government—a course that led to them sending in a special forces unit to eliminate me. It all became a big to-do.

Even after I survived that, a lot happened: we had the first soccer tournament ever seen in Eldant. A video clip of the same leaked on the internet back home, so we produced a movie in order to cover it up. That led to my kidnapping by Eldant’s neighbor, the Kingdom of Bahairam.

Suffice to say, since coming to this world, my life had been anything but boring. And honestly, I’d been having fun. I had a sense of fulfillment I could never have imagined during my time as a home security guard. I had met all kinds of people, gotten to try all sorts of different things, and stayed so busy I hardly so much as had time to feel down. I had almost started to think that being general manager of the entertainment company Amutech, being the prophet of otakuism here in Eldant, was pretty much my calling. But pride goeth before the fall.

I had been getting altogether too optimistic. Or to put it more directly, I hadn’t given the Japanese government enough credit. Sending in a special ops squad to murder an ordinary teenage boy had to be some sort of last resort, right? Since the assassination attempt had failed, the government had been so docile that I’d even started to think they had given up; that they were just going to leave me alone and let me do what I’d supposedly come here to do.

But of course, they hadn’t given up on anything.

Least of all the cultural invasion of the Eldant Empire...

I took a deep breath of the clear morning air. The chill spread through my body, helping my brain gradually shake the haze of sleep.

“Mmmm~!”

Having changed out of my pajamas and into my day clothes, I left my room and headed for the dining area downstairs. I expected everyone would be there already. I hadn’t fallen asleep until so late the night before, and then I’d had that weird dream, so even when Myusel came to wake me up like she always did, I found myself staring vacantly into space for a while. Getting dressed had felt like a lot of trouble.

As I came down the staircase, my stomach gurgled as if to urge me to hurry up.

Back when I’d been a shut-in, I had a pretty pathetic excuse for a daily rhythm. Usually I didn’t even eat breakfast. But since arriving in the Eldant Empire, my attitude had completely changed, and now I hardly felt the day had started without the morning meal.

“Mornin’,” I said.

“Good morning, Master,” came a voice as pleasant as a ringing bell. The first person to greet me this morning was the maid, hard at work setting the table.

Myusel Fourant.

She was the first person I had met after I arrived in this world, and one of the people most responsible for making possible my life in this mansion, including doing the cooking and laundry. She was dedicated and pure and sweet—but also a bit shy and clumsy. She was adorable, but also lovable, a half-elf maid-san who could soothe your cares just by being around. The heck?! She was the full package! Did they want me to die of moe-ness?! was what I wondered, but Myusel herself never seemed to notice the effect she had on me.

Even now her long, flaxen hair, tied into twintails, swung behind her each time she moved, each gentle swish of her hair revealing her pale, pointy ears. What could be cuter?

Ah! Thank you, God, that I was born an otaku!

“Morning, Shinichi-kun.”

This next greeting came from a girl who was seated at the table and fiddling with her smartphone. She was probably checking the schedule for the day.

This was Koganuma Minori-san.

Minori-san was a WAC; that is, a woman in the JSDF—and she was also my bodyguard. Her soldier’s uniform and the way she kept her hair in a neat bun made her look kind of uptight, but the soft eyes visible behind her glasses and my view of her face in profile didn’t seem intimidating at all. If anything, she came across like a gentle older sister.

“Breakfast is almost ready,” Myusel said with a smile like a blossoming flower as she urged me to one of the seats. I sat down next to Minori-san.

“Huh? Are we it?” I asked. I had expected to be the last one to arrive, but we still only had about half the population of the household here.

“I think everyone else will be here soon,” Minori-san said, sliding her phone into her pocket.

And indeed, at that very moment...

“Yaaawn... Goof morningh.”

As if on cue, two more people entered the dining area. One was a young woman unsuccessfully trying to stifle a yawn. Her chest was covered in nothing more than a piece of cloth, while down below she wore baggy pants; the outfit left her shoulders and midriff completely exposed. Oddly enough, she still didn’t come across as sexy, exactly. Her taut body, free of any unnecessary fat, just looked toned and healthy.

This was Elvia Harneiman. Dangling alongside her leaf-brown hair was a pair of big, floppy ears, although it could be hard to tell because they were the same color as her hair. On her butt was a furry tail, also the same color. That tail looked really soft, and every time I saw it I had to fight the urge to feel how fluffy it was.

Elvia was a beast person—a werewolf. There was a whole story about how she had ended up in this mansion with us, but basically she was originally a spy sent here by the neighboring country of Bahairam. Not that she ever seemed very intent on spying.

“G’mornin’...”

Beside her was Brooke Darwin. He was similar to Elvia in that they both had a certain animal-ish-ness to them, but he gave an altogether different sort of impression. At first glance, Brooke looked just like a walking lizard—which made some sense, because he was one of the people known as lizardmen. But it wasn’t just his face that was reptilian. His people were cold-blooded, laid eggs—they might have been kissing cousins to actual reptiles.

Brooke was my gardener, and the second person I had met in this world. I had to admit, he could be scary: he looked pretty tough, like if you tried to hit him, you would be the one who ended up getting hurt. Plus, it was hard to tell what he was thinking, and he tended to seem a little tired in the morning because his body temperature hadn’t risen yet. But by now I knew he actually had a warmth (if you will) and really was, as it were, a man among men.

“Sorry for the wait.”

Myusel withdrew into the kitchen, perhaps to get the food, and almost as if changing places with her, the fifth member of our little band came out: Cerise Darwin.

She was Brooke’s wife, and also a lizardman. Wait, she was female, so would that make her a lizardwoman?

They had been living apart for a time, but a series of fortunate events brought them back together, and now she lived and worked here with Brooke. The maid uniform looked a little weird on her, and her lizard-like face made her, like Brooke, kind of hard to read, but we all knew that she was really sweet. And also that, like Myusel, she could be a bit clumsy at times. But for the most part, it wasn’t a problem. Nobody here was going to get all upset over some little stumble.

“Everything’s ready,” she said, and set out breakfast for herself and Brooke.

The two of them were biologically pretty different from the rest of us, and they had different tastes—what they liked to eat just wasn’t what we liked, so there were special meals just for the two lizardmen. There was also the question of class: I gathered that in the Holy Eldant Empire, lizardmen would never be allowed to eat with people of other races, but of course, having grown up in Japan, I had no such qualms.

And so it was that we all found ourselves at the same table.

“Mm. Looks like we’re all here.”

Elvia and Brooke sat down, as did Myusel and Cerise as they finished the breakfast preparations. There was still a sense that some spots at the table were more honorable than others, but at least we were all eating together.

The people facing each other at this table represented the entire population of the mansion.

I looked around at everyone, then brought my hands together in a gesture of thanks. “Well, as they say where I come from—itadakimasu! Let’s dig in!”

This was a Japanese custom, obviously, but somewhere along the line everyone else had gotten into the habit of making the same gesture before they ate. Maybe they were just imitating me, as I was technically, somehow, the most important person in the household.

“Let’s dig in!” everyone chorused, reaching out with spoons and forks. I didn’t feel they really had to wait for me, but I knew no one would have touched their food if I hadn’t taken my first bite. Everyone reciting a phrase in unison like that was slightly embarrassing, kind of like we were still in grade school, but at the same time I sort of enjoyed it. It really helped me feel like the meal had started.

“Mm!” I exclaimed when I tasted the food. The meals Myusel made were always delicious. They were so consistently good, in fact, that frankly I thought she could have afforded to screw up every once in a while. But I never got tired of them. She claimed once that when she went to wake everyone up, she took note of how they were feeling and changed the ingredients a little bit to suit everyone’s condition.

What was she, a master chef?!

I’ve heard the expression “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” and I’ve kind of got to agree. Some people say food is love; isn’t that basically a way of saying that your dedication and care come through in the delicacy of the flavor? Myusel was beautiful, yes, but I think even if she hadn’t been, she still would have had plenty of suitors.

I was mulling all this over when there came a deep yawn. It practically made me feel sleepy just hearing it.

The persistent yawning was coming from Elvia, seated across from me.

“You sound pretty tired, Elvia,” I said.

“Aw, I just... Once I started drawing, I couldn’t stop, and all of a sudden it was dawn...”

I smiled as I watched her rub her eyes. Elvia was Amutech’s in-house artist. At least, that was what we called her for publicity purposes. It was true enough that she drew pictures, and she had thrown herself into learning about the art style of that mysterious foreign country, Japan. In other words, learning how to draw in the “anime” or “manga” style.

She really was a talented artist, but she did sometimes get swept away in her own work. Sometimes she would forget to eat or sleep.

“I’m glad you’re working so hard, but make sure you get your sleep, okay?”

“Yeeaahwwn,” she said, trying to agree and also stifle another yawn. She munched away at her food.

Her answer didn’t exactly convince me that she was truly on board, but at least she was here for breakfast.

Minori-san, Myusel, and I smiled at each other, and I grabbed another piece of bread from the communal basket.

That was when a quiet, brisk voice said, “Good morning.”

I looked up, shocked, in the direction of the door. I knew that voice, but I had never heard it at breakfast before.

“Matoba-san?” Minori-san got to her feet, looking ever so slightly panicked.

“Hullo,” the besuited, middle-aged man said from the entry of the dining room. His outfit was impeccable, but he still somehow seemed a little... beat-up. Maybe that was because he was basically a middle manager. His always narrow eyes squinted still further in a characteristic smile. He looked like a harmless older man. Looked like.

His name was Matoba Jinzaburou. He was nominally chief of the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau, the man on the ground for Japan’s other-world diplomacy. To put it simply, he was Minori-san’s and my boss.

While Minori-san generally helped me out with what amounted to physical labor, Matoba-san was all about the administrative side of things—procuring any resources I needed and taking care of whatever else I needed help with. You could think of him as part of Amutech’s inner circle.

Personally, though, I considered him a bit of a last resort. I didn’t entirely trust him.

Matoba-san was essentially the intermediary between me and everyone over my head in the Japanese government, and in that role he had defended me several times. But that didn’t change the fact that I often didn’t know what he was really thinking behind that innocent smile. I won’t say that he was evil or ruthless or anything, but he was capable of dropping someone like a hot potato if the need arose, smiling the whole time. He had almost done it to me, once.

But anyway.

Matoba-san came and went between Japan and the Eldant Empire pretty frequently, so there were regular stretches when he wasn’t around. He didn’t live at the mansion, anyway. It was unusual to see him here so early.

“What brings you here so—”

I practically choked on the end of my sentence. Someone else emerged from behind Matoba-san, moving so gracefully it almost looked like they weighed nothing at all.

It wasn’t the first time I had seen this person.

I’d met them before... just a few hours ago, in fact.

“You’re—”

She wore a dress of deep violet with lots of frills. There were ribbons on her boots the same color as her dress. She looked just like Suiren, sprung straight out of the Rose Princess anime. It had been just last night when—or was that this morning? It didn’t matter. She looked exactly the way she had when she was sitting in that tree branch. Wait... So that wasn’t a dream?!

“Hm?” Matoba-san seemed surprised by my reaction. “What seems to be the matter, Shinichi-kun? Do you know this girl, perchance?”

“In passing.”

It wasn’t me, but her, who answered. The girl looked at me, her lips ever so slightly upturned.

Now that I saw her in the light, I could see how pretty she really was. Her outfit had long sleeves and lots of decoration, but her bare shoulders gave a fairly good idea of her build. She had fine hands and wrists, and her shoulders were narrow. The overall impression was of delicate-ness, as if she were made of glass. It was almost like she would break if you hugged her too hard.

“This is Ayasaki Hikaru-kun,” Matoba-san said, “Amutech’s newest employee. And starting today, Shinichi-kun, your assistant.”

“Huh?” I gaped. This was, to say the least, unexpected.

Hikaru-san, for her part, simply smiled at me; she seemed to know all about this already.

“I was born as the light that guides the darkness. Yes, you.” She started walking towards me. I just sat and stared dumbly. Hikaru-san bent down to look in my face. There was something elegant in the gesture, along with the suggestion of something hidden but immensely powerful.

“I told you, didn’t I?” she said. “I am the light that guides the darkness. I said we would meet again, if it was destined.”

“Uh.........huh.”

This was bad. There was chuunibyou and then there was chuunibyou, and I was nowhere near quick enough to come up with an appropriate comeback on the spot.

It was Minori-san who spoke up instead.

“I didn’t hear anything about this,” she said to Matoba-san, an edge in her voice.

I certainly hadn’t, either. You’d think they would tell the general manager when they were planning to hire someone new. Then again, you could argue that a general manager basically hired as a puppet doesn’t have a lot of input into these things anyway...

Minori-san, though, was in a somewhat different position. She was my bodyguard, and insofar as she was also charged with protecting all the Japanese employees of Amutech, she might rightly expect to be informed when someone new was going to come in.

Then there was the little fact that I had been kidnapped by Bahairam just the other day. It was only natural for Minori-san to be on edge, and now she found out she had someone else to guard without any warning or time to prepare. It practically qualified as a crisis.

Myusel, Elvia, Brooke, and Cerise were all startled by this turn of events, sitting frozen in the middle of their meals. That made sense: if I hadn’t known about this, they definitely hadn’t.

“Very sorry,” Matoba-san said with a bit of a shrug. “It’s been so busy recently. I just never had a chance to talk to you.”

Minori-san was silent, but her expression was dangerous. I wasn’t exactly sure, but I got the impression that she knew something I didn’t, and that it made this increase in Amutech’s staff all the more dubious to her.

“I get that you’ve been busy, but this is just too sudden,” I said, breaking into the conversation between Minori-san and Matoba-san. “And why now?”

True, we were shorthanded at the school, and we had a lot on our plates in terms of figuring out new ways to spread otaku culture and start selling otaku merchandise. But still, why foist someone on us in such a rush?

It was Hikaru-san who answered. “The gears of fate always turn suddenly. But there is no coincidence that isn’t also the vehicle of destiny. There needs be no reason; it is ever now.”

Uh... okay. Still not making any sense.

“Well, there you have it,” Matoba-san said.

“There we have what?!” I exclaimed, but Matoba-san and Hikaru-san both just gave me those ambiguous smiles.

“I really am sorry for dropping this on you,” Matoba-san said, “but it’s already been decided.”

There it was. That famous bureaucratic excuse, “it’s already decided”! Hey, here’s an idea: how about you be decent enough to talk to us before you decide things? But I knew how that would go. “It’s not up to you to make these decisions.”

Gosh...

“If you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to Japan immediately. Lots of things to take care of, you know. Play nice with Hikaru-kun, now.”

Without waiting for an answer—as if he had finally finished reading a script he had prepared in advance—Matoba-san saw himself out of the dining area.

And that left us with...

“I look forward to working with you all,” Hikaru-san said, smiling.

She played with the hem of her Gothic-Loli dress, bowing theatrically to everyone. I wanted to demand where (and for that matter, when) she’d come from, but coming from her, the gesture was oddly fitting.

Holy Eldant Castle.

The place was so important, it simply took the entire country’s name for its own. It was the residence of Her Majesty the Empress and the political heart of the Empire. If this castle were ever to fall, it would literally be the end of the country. The building was made from a hollowed-out mountain using magic. It was big enough to be an entire city, had the defenses of a military installation, and was just generally impregnable.

Its grandeur was more than enough to overwhelm anyone who saw it. I remembered the very first time I had come to the castle—I had practically panicked, with no idea what to do with a building that big. As it happened, at that initial meeting with the empress, I had said a few impolitic things, unaware of what thin ice I was on, which had resulted in me taking a royal right hook—but anyway, forget about that.

“It’s quite incredible,” Hikaru-san said as she approached the castle with me and Minori-san. But unlike my own first experience of the building, she sounded perfectly calm. In fact, between her clothing and her chuunibyou behavior, it practically seemed like this must be par for the course for her. I with my jeans and T-shirt, and Minori-san in the dark-green jacket and tight skirt of her military uniform, looked far more out of place than Hikaru-san did.

And then we were in the audience chamber.

“Is this, then, Ayasaki Hikaru?”

Looking down at us from the throne on the far end of the room was a little girl (okay, a young woman—she was pretty sensitive on this point, so it was best to correct yourself, even mentally) with long silver hair and a magnificent crown on her head.

Petralka an Eldant III.

She was so small physically that you could picture her with an elementary schooler’s backpack on, but she was actually sixteen, just a year younger than me—not to mention the single most powerful person in the entire Eldant Empire. People didn’t call her Your Majesty for nothing.

Royals and nobles seem to like to marry beautiful people, leading to families full of handsome men and gorgeous women—and Petralka was a classic case. Yes, Hikaru-san had something of an otherworldly beauty about her, but Petralka was still on another level. I had become relatively friendly with the empress, but even so, there were moments when I wondered with an apologetic feeling whether it was okay for me to even occupy the same dimension as her. I felt like a caricature from some shounen gag manga who had accidentally wandered into the flowery world of a shoujo romance.

“Yes, milady. It is my immense honor and pleasure to make the Imperial acquaintance,” Hikaru-san said from beside me, with a respectful bow of her head.

After Matoba-san left, we had ended up coming over here to the castle. We’d already had plans to make our report to Petralka about the current state of Amutech’s affairs, anyway. We just decided to bring Hikaru-san along and introduce her.

Amutech operated freely in the Eldant Empire largely due to the empress’s good offices, so it was only right that we introduce any new staff members to Her Majesty. Especially one who was supposed to be my personal assistant.

“We hear you have come from Japan to be Shinichi’s helper.” Petralka looked at Hikaru-san through narrowed eyes. She put a finger to her chin as if she were thinking about something—or maybe as if she had already figured it out.

Really, it was only natural for her to react that way when we showed up suddenly saying we had a new staff member from Japan that we wanted to introduce to her. Incidentally, sometimes these audiences consisted solely of me, Minori-san, and Petralka, perhaps along with the minister Garius en Cordobal, the head of the royal guard—but today, perhaps because of the introductions, there were several royal knights lined up along the wall, swords at their hips.

“It is as Your Majesty says,” Hikaru-san answered, not raising her head. “I’ve heard much of Your Majesty, as well. For example, how you had the clarity of vision to become one of the first adopters of Japan’s entertainment, or how you learned to converse in the Japanese language in quite a short period of time. I envy the people of this empire, who live under such a wise and visionary ruler. Let me reiterate how grateful I am for the opportunity to finally meet you this day.”

She reeled all this off without missing a beat. For her first imperial audience, she seemed awfully comfortable here. I couldn’t help but think back on my own first meeting with Petralka, where despite having been told to watch my mouth, I managed to misspeak and nearly get my head cut off. (Looking back on it now, the whole thing sort of makes me smile.) Determined, as the more experienced hand here, not to embarrass myself, I gently cleared my throat.

“I apologize for how sudden this is,” I said.

“Well, we already had room in our schedule this morning to hear your report, Shinichi. So this is no disruption as such...” Petralka then turned to Hikaru-san. “Hikaru. Let us see your face.”

“Milady.” Hikaru-san looked up. Her dark hair cascaded around her shoulders, her face with its perfect features meeting Petralka’s.

Ooh! Two beautiful girls gazing at each other!

“Mm,” Petralka grunted, her finely formed eyebrows coming together.

I had been getting the impression that Petralka was upset about something—that there was something about Hikaru-san that she didn’t like. Even though, as far as I could tell, Hikaru-san’s greeting had been impeccable.

“So the ranks of women around you have increased again, have they?”

“Er...?”

“Minori, Myusel, Elvia, and now this Hikaru... How many women will it take before you are satisfied?”

Um... Excuse me, Your Majesty, but are you talking to me?

“W-Wait a second! That’s not—!” I shook my head vigorously. “I only just met Ayasaki-san this morning! In fact, I’d never even heard of her before that!”

It wasn’t as if I was begging them to send more women my way. Yes, I know I had somehow ended up with a lot of female boarders in my mansion! And yes, it was definitely enough to make you start wondering if this was a harem or something! But there was nothing behind it! At least, not for me! Look, if I could bring about such an awesome situation on my own, I would have—er, you know what? Never mind about that!

Incidentally, one could also count Cerise among the ranks of women at my mansion. The fact that Petralka hadn’t mentioned her was probably because she was a lizardman, and Brooke’s wife, so the empress didn’t really count her.

“We wonder how far we should trust you,” Petralka said, now clearly unhappy. Her green eyes were full of doubt. Then she looked at my new companion. “Be wary, Ayasaki Hikaru. This man loves women’s chests, especially big ones. Give him half a chance, and he’ll come up with some plan to enlarge your bust.”

“Will you stop with that already?! There was never any plan!” I cried. “And anyway, I like big and small boobs equally! I don’t discriminate based on bust size! Big, jiggly ones that are heavy as ripe fruit and flat, even plains are both equally wonderful! But! If you still insist on a ranking, I think the crucial element isn’t size—but sensitivity!”

I had started unconsciously shouting and clenching my fist.

“Yes! For example, say that through pure and total coincidence, you get a lucky but perverted break, and although you had absolutely no intention to, you end up touching them—and that alone is enough to make her exclaim ‘Ahn!’ That itself elevates her from unsullied maiden to goddess of abundant love!”

There was silence all around. For some reason, I felt like Petralka and Minori-san were both giving me the coldest stares of my life, but it was probably just my imagination. Yeah. That was it.

“Well, er, anyway!” I said, clearing my throat and pointedly returning the conversation to the topic at hand, “Ayasaki-san will be working with me starting today. Will that be all right?”

“Certainly, we have no reason to prevent you from increasing the number of capable personnel around you,” Petralka said hesitantly. She shot a glance at the beautiful young man beside her. “Garius, do you approve of this?”

He was the noble, Garius en Cordobal, whose name I’ve mentioned before. He was both Petralka’s relative and her closest confidant.

He was also good-looking as hell. Tall and slim, but toned and muscular in all the right places, so he never gave any impression of weakness or fragility. He had a face to match—almond-shaped eyes, the kind of profile that made girls swoon and cry “So cute!” at just a glance.

But he wasn’t quite... interested in that sort of thing, if you take my meaning. He seemed to prefer the company of men, and what’s more, he didn’t try very hard to hide it. Well, I guess even in Japan, homosexual love between men only became taboo under the Confucian polices of the Edo era. Maybe it wasn’t even a big thing here in Eldant.

The upshot, though, was that every once in a while I felt like my chastity was in danger around him. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t always sure how to handle myself around the beautiful knight.

Speaking of Petralka’s confidantes, there was one more, an old man called Prime Minister Zahar, but I didn’t see him today. It wasn’t that surprising; he kept pretty busy.

In any event, Garius was silent.

“Garius?” Petralka said, looking at him questioningly.

“Hrm?” Garius seemed to come back to himself then, blinking a few times and then bowing his head respectfully toward Petralka. “My apologies, Your Majesty.”

“What’s the matter? This is most unusual.”

She was right; Garius didn’t typically act this way. He would never normally ignore her when she spoke to him. In fact, I think this was the first time I had ever seen him zone out like that.

“Something about Hikaru seems to have had your attention throughout this entire audience.”

“...Hrm.”

“Could it be love at first sight?” Petralka asked teasingly.

She, of course, knew all about his preferences. That made Minori-san and me smile in spite of ourselves. A wry look also came over Garius’s face. Next he would offer a bantering denial, and then...

“Yes, I suppose so.” He nodded, then added, “She is most wonderful.”

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

“Huh?!”

“Wha?!”

Sounds of disbelief came from all our mouths at once. I could see Minori-san’s eyes open wide behind her glasses, and even Petralka seemed taken aback, looking like she might jump up from her throne.

“G-G-G-Garius?”

“Yes, Your Majesty?”

“What has come over you? Do you have a fever?”

Yeah... a fever. That’s what causes this sort of thing.

Nonetheless, Petralka’s surprise was certainly real. Garius had never given any indication of being interested in a woman; even the fact that he got along pretty well with Minori-san was largely because they shared a hobby—specifically, BL.

And anyway, why was Garius looking at me...?

“Shinichi.”

“Y-Yes?!”

“You could learn something from her.”

“Like wha—”

But even as I spoke, I figured it out.

Ah. He means... like that.

When he issued his judgment of “wonderful” about Hikaru-san, he didn’t just mean her outward appearance, but her politeness, her propriety, and so on and so forth.

It was true that, unlike me, she didn’t seem to be in any danger of getting punched out for saying the wrong thing at her very first meeting with the empress. In my case, Petralka happened to have taken a liking to my disregard for traditional politesse, and ever since that beginning she had never insisted that I stand on ceremony. But regardless of how I felt about manners, it could never hurt me to at least keep them in mind. Garius was right; I certainly could learn from Hikaru-san in that respect.

I was just mulling over the implications when Minori-san, sounding scandalized, exclaimed, “H-How could you? Minister Cordobal, I thought you were truly and only devoted to Shinichi-kun!”

Hey, listen, you rotten fujoshi. Don’t take this conversation in any weird directions.

“What about my dreams? My fantasies?! My whole scenario where you pretend to be a cool lone wolf, but behind it all you really do have a heart, and your kindness slowly brings the otherwise totally straight Shinichi-kun around until...!”

“Minori-san... You’re remembering we can hear you, right?”

Hey... When did you start writing me into your fanfiction, anyway?!

“Oh, but then it turns out he actually swings both ways, and finds himself becoming more and more serious about Minister Cordobal. A bittersweet Gari/Shin crossover! Or would that be Shin/Gari?”

“Will you stop it already?!” I exclaimed, sounding a little more desperate than I meant to.

Man... If it weren’t for this little quirk, she would be the perfect older-sister character.

Hikaru-san didn’t pay our banter (??) much mind, but bowed politely and said, “It is an honor, I assure you.”

She was the picture of composure, as if the ridiculous jabbering of those around her didn’t bother her in the least. I didn’t know what level of otaku she was, but maybe she really would make a good assistant for someone like me, who tended to freak out a bit too easily.

“Ahem. Anyway,” Petralka said, clearing her throat, “Ayasaki Hikaru, we commend you as Shinichi’s assistant, and have no special objections. Now then—”

Petralka sat herself back on her throne, then her expression briefly flickered. She seemed hesitant, almost shy; it was an unusual look for her.

“We wish to ask you something.”

Her gaze settled on Hikaru-san. Or... more specifically, Hikaru-san’s outfit.

“Is it possible that those are the clothes of Suiren, from Rose Princess?”

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had noticed. Come to think of it, I had lent the Rose Princess manga to Petralka not too long ago, right up to the most recent volume. She seemed to like it a lot, and since I’d gotten my hands on the anime, she had been fitting in episodes between her public duties...

“Yes, ma’am. Indeed they are,” Hikaru-san said. “I had it on good authority that Rose Princess is a favorite of Your Majesty’s.”

Ahh, so that was it.

When I’d submitted the paperwork to Matoba-san requisitioning the Rose Princess anime DVDs, I had added a note to the effect that Petralka seemed to enjoy it. I’d included that detail on the assumption that it would speed up the delivery from Japan. Matoba-san had probably passed the information on to Hikaru-san.

So it wasn’t so much her own interests that led her to dress like this; it was specifically in order to be seen by Petralka. A sort of performance, almost.

“Excuse me,” Hikaru-san murmured, and rose up slowly. Then she said, “Have I pleased you, Your Majesty?” Her tone and inflection had changed, and she cocked her head just a little bit. Suddenly, she was the spitting image of Suiren from the anime.

“Oh-ho...” Petralka was probably thinking the same thing as me; she was nodding vigorously, a big smile on her face. “A most convincing impression!”

“I’m honored.”

Performance it may have been, but it appeared to have won Petralka over entirely. She continued nodding as she glanced at me. “You seem rather more adept than the average boor who exclaims ‘IS THAT REALLY AN ARCHETYPAL LITTLE-GIRL CHARACTER?!’ the moment he sees us.”

“Hey, come on, I apologized for that already...”

Much like the boob thing, I had a sneaking suspicion I was never going to live that down.

Petralka smirked at me (did I detect a hint of malice?), then turned back to Hikaru-san. “We hope you shall be most dedicated to your work as Shinichi’s assistant.”

“It shall be my honor and pleasure, Your Majesty.” Hikaru-san tugged at the hem of her skirt and dipped her head in a curtsy.

What could I say? She really was practically perfect in every way.

Let’s talk about the so-called General Entertainment Provider Amutech.

From the name, you might guess that its main activities revolve around the importing and distribution of entertainment products. And they certainly should—but as a matter of fact, that was still a goal for us, not what we were actually doing.

In our defense, the literacy rate in the Holy Eldant Empire and the surrounding countries was not very high, so there weren’t a lot of people capable of reading manga or light novels, even if they were to be translated into the local language. The magic rings some of us wore helped to telepathically translate the thoughts of two people who were speaking face-to-face, but they were only good for in-person conversations and couldn’t translate words coming from a machine, which had neither magic nor thoughts. We had floated the idea of doing Eldant-language dubs, but that would be on top of the work of translation, and presumably ADR dubbing was not a well-developed industry here.

This meant that it was a pretty limited slice of society that could enjoy otaku culture for the time being. In principle, of course, it was always possible to try to sell a smaller number of items at a higher price rather than selling a bunch at a lower one, and indeed we had a pilot program going on that model. The Rose Princess manga and DVDs I had given to Petralka were one example. But as for me personally, I wanted as many people as possible to be able to enjoy otaku products.

To me, that meant we should start by helping more people learn to read.

And that meant education.

Hence, Amutech’s primary activity at the moment was running a school. This school was being operated as a joint venture between the Japanese government and the Holy Eldant Empire, and theoretically it was open to anyone of any race, whether noble or commoner. True, in spite of my intentions, most of the current pupils were the children of the upper crust—nobles or rich merchants—as the whole idea of “learning” by going to a building where you were instructed in reading, writing, and other knowledge didn’t really exist among the commoners. But I was still aiming to gradually increase the percentage of non-noble students. That, I hoped, would bring up the literacy rate of the entire country.

My reasoning seemed to be more or less on target so far. As more and more students became able to read and write Japanese, I found myself with a cadre of people who were capable of translating light novels and manga from Japan into the Eldant language.

The school also served as something of a microcosm of the larger society. By introducing otaku works at school and observing the reaction, it was possible to get a sense of what sort of reception they might get in the Holy Eldant Empire as a whole, or even this entire other world.

Anyway, that was the story. I was at the school five and a half days a week. Not as a student, obviously. I was teaching Japanese language along with otaku culture.

Given that I naturally expected to have my new assistant Hikaru-san help out with teaching duties at some point in the future, I figured it wouldn’t be bad for her to at least get a look at the place. And so, after we concluded our audience at the castle, we headed as usual for the school.

“Here it is! Our proud institute of education,” I said, standing in front of the school and gesturing for Hikaru-san’s benefit.

The building was actually a renovated grain silo. The creation of the exterior had been handled by the Holy Eldant Empire, but the interior design and all the equipment had come courtesy of the JSDF—since I had a free hand, I decided to make it as much like a Japanese middle or high school as I could.

“Hmm,” Hikaru-san said with interest, looking at the building.

“We get power from the windmill and the solar battery panels you can see over there. Other than Amutech’s mansion and the JSDF base, it’s the only building in Eldant with electricity. Not a lot of it, granted. We mostly use it to run the computers, projectors, tape decks, and such.”

I looked back from the windmill to Hikaru-san, then ushered my new acquaintance inside.

We still had ten or fifteen minutes until the school day started. Students were milling about in the hallway; they bowed politely and greeted me whenever they passed by. Today, however, they were looking less at me and Minori-san and more at Hikaru-san.

Fair enough, I guess. Their teacher had shown up with a stranger in tow. Someone obviously not from the Eldant Empire, moreover—a girl in a Gothic-Loli costume. The students had to be wondering who she was. Like Petralka, some of them probably noticed that she looked like Suiren.

“So, what is it you usually do for class?” Hikaru-san asked as we walked along.

“Oh, lots of different things.” I stopped in the doorway of the classroom. “Mostly we focus on reading and writing, but we do general education, too. After all, how else are they supposed to enjoy stuff set in modern Japan, like school rom-coms?”

Unlike alternate-world fantasy or SF stories set in the future, romantic comedies set in the modern day assumed a certain worldview and a specific kind of “common sense.” They were written on the understanding that readers would share this knowledge with the book, so we wanted to make those stories as accessible as possible to our students.

“Today we’ve got...”

“Sensei!”

Just as I was calling up the day’s schedule on my phone, several students came up to us from the classroom. It looked like their curiosity had gotten the better of them—they could no longer restrain themselves from coming over to find out about Hikaru-san. Besides the students who had called out to me, several more were looking on with obvious interest.

“Have you brought us a new teacher, Sensei?”

One boy was speaking on behalf of the group—an elf named Loek. He was tall and slim; even his face seemed narrow. He was handsome in a way that just screamed “elf.” He was pretty easy to spot among the gaggle of students: he came from a good background and had become something of a leader among the elves in the classroom.

Four other students had accompanied him to talk to me. Two stood on his left and two on his right in a sort of half-circle. Three guys, two girls—and now that I looked closer, I saw, all elves.

“She probably will be eventually,” I said, “but she only just got here today, so I thought I would bring her along just to see how we do things and maybe help me out a bit. Her name is Ayasaki Hikaru-san.”

“I look forward to seeing you all in class,” Hikaru-san said with a delicate nod of her head.

Faced with her gentle smile, the boys—even Loek, who was traditionally a Minori-san LOVE! stalwart—turned red and speechless. From a human perspective, male and female elves alike tended to look very beautiful, but maybe to them it was Hikaru-san who was stunning.

The girls, in contrast, weren’t struck dumb: they were looking at Hikaru-san’s clothes with admiration.

“That outfit is so cute!”

You’d think Gothic-Loli might already be a thing here in the Eldant Empire, but it really wasn’t. For these girls, Hikaru-san’s outfit probably seemed like a fresh new style direct from the source. And despite this being a fantasyland in another dimension, the reaction was pretty much the same as it would have been in our world.

The girls chattered and exclaimed.

“Hey, is that—”

“You’re right! It’s Suiren from Rose Princess!”

Hikaru-san, however, remained calm and composed. “You like it? Thank you very much.”

Maybe she was already used to this sort of reaction, especially after dealing with Petralka.

“It’s wonderful! I wish I could wear something like that.”

“Would you like to try it on sometime?” Hikaru-san suggested with a smile. “I’m not quite sure it would fit you, but we could make a few simple adjustments.”

“Wha...?” The girl’s eyes went wide. “D-Do you really mean it?!”

“I’m sure it would look better on you. I happened to wear my Suiren outfit today, but I also have Shin-ku and Konpekisei ones.”

“Hooray!” The girls grabbed each other’s hands and jumped up and down.

When they saw this, the students who had been keeping their distance began to filter over to us. Hikaru-san didn’t look unhappy about this; she smilingly answered the questions the students peppered her with.

Nice. I think she’s going to fit right in here.

But just as I was feeling this rush of relief...

“I’m telling you, you’re wrong!”

The harmonious atmosphere was shattered with the bam! of someone pounding on a desk.

Startled, I looked in the direction of the sound. “What the heck?”

Over in one corner of the classroom, an elf girl and a dwarf girl were glaring at each other. I had to assume they were fighting, because both of them looked hopping mad.

Elves and dwarves were both of the faerie races, but despite that, they never really got along. They seemed to dislike each other even more than they disliked beast people. Maybe you always hate what you are, or something. In any event, squabbles between them were common. But I couldn’t just stand there and let them argue.

“What’s going on, you two?” I said, working my way past the gaggle of students and over to the two debaters. “Why are you fighting?”

As I broke in between them, the two simply stared silently at each other for another moment—but then, perhaps realizing that it wasn’t getting them anywhere, they both turned to me and started talking simultaneously.

“Sensei! Hear me out!”

“What do you think, Sensei?!”

The dwarf produced a DVD case. On the cover, against a black background, a character with a mask and a red cape stood back-to-back with a character wearing a helmet and a blue cape. The title was written at the bottom: Order of the Dark Knights: Zero’s Revenge Vol. 1.

It was an anime that had finished airing last year and whose final DVD volume had recently come out. It was about a young boy who gains a mysterious power, then tries to take over the world in the guise of the masked man Zero. I had watched it myself. The manga had gotten a positive reaction from the students, so just like with Rose Princess, I had the DVDs brought over from Japan when they were released and had put them in the self-study area-cum-library so students could watch them. The students were naturally still having some trouble with their Japanese listening skills, but because they were already familiar with the story from the manga, they were still able to enjoy the show.

“This DVD? What about it?”

“Zero is the protagonist, isn’t he?!” the dwarf girl said with a snort.

As I mentioned, the character named Zero is right there in the title, and the story does start when the boy gets his powers and takes on that name. That would normally lead one to think that he was the protagonist. But...

“What are you talking about?!” the elf girl demanded, arching her beautiful eyebrows angrily. “Seiryuu is the main character, and you know it! He’s a military man working for the good of his country, trying to change the world from the inside out! He’s the classic ally of justice! He’s the true hero!”

“Ah,” I sighed.

As the elf said, from an outsider’s perspective, the boy with the mysterious power definitely came across as the villain. Zero’s character design used a lot of reds and blacks in a way that made him look kind of menacing. He definitely seemed more like a Demon King or last-boss type.

Then there was the little matter of his trying to take over the world. In his fight against a major nation, Zero wasn’t afraid to use people for his own ends, any time he needed to. He was willing to try any stratagem, any trick. There was an element of guerrilla tactics to how he fought, but some viewers might consider his methods brutal.

On that point, Zero’s rival Seiryuu was a model of uprightness, serious and dedicated and the consummate main character. Given how passionate the elf girl obviously felt, it was hard not to sympathize.

“No matter how you look at it, Zero is obviously the villain!” the elf said.

“Is not! He’s just following his own vision of justice!”

Each of the girls was so invested in her own favorite character that she felt compelled to reject the other’s choice. It was an all too common occurrence in the otaku world: in order to elevate your own favorite, you tried to tear down other characters, especially those who were rivals to your choice.

“O-Okay,” I said, “let’s all calm down...”

“Sensei! Who do you think is the hero?!”

Two pairs of very sharp eyes fixed on me, and I found myself lost for words.

Dark Knights was actually the subject of similar debate in Japan, where people had seized upon the parts of it that were a little different from run-of-the-mill anime. People had gotten a little tired of simple, clear-cut stories, so when something like Dark Knights came along, something with a more nuanced presentation, people got hooked on it. (Another fairly common occurrence.)

But exactly because it was a little different from average, it was impossible to bring the same judgment to bear as you might on other works.

“Uhhh...” I fretted about it for a moment, then finally, unable to come up with a good answer, I just smiled ambiguously. “Either one is fine, right?”

“What does that even mean?!

“There has to be a main character, doesn’t there?!”

“No, no, no,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think it matters so much who the main character is, as which character you care most about.”

It was true that the story took Zero and Seiryuu as its protagonists, but the point of view in the anime wasn’t limited to these two. Both Zero and Seiryuu were depicted as impossibly handsome geniuses who could also handle themselves in a fight—in short, comically overpowered characters. Because of that, I just couldn’t get into them. My favorite character from that series was actually someone else entirely.

And so I said: “If it seems like there are several main characters, I think that just means that you can enjoy the story from any of a variety of angles depending on how you watch it. Maybe instead of arguing about who the main character is, you could talk about what kind of enjoyment you got from watching the show the way you did. Then you can both discover new perspectives, and the whole experience can be more meaningful.”

Both girls looked at me in complete silence.

Huh! Maybe I actually managed to teach them something.

Neither of them looked entirely pleased, as if in their heart of hearts, they didn’t really buy what I was saying. But either way, the fighting had stopped for the moment, and I decided I was just going to have to be satisfied with that.

“You know, I saw that anime.”

The words came from an unexpected source: Hikaru-san. She had wandered over to us and took the DVD case from the dwarf girl, running her fingers gently over the cover. Even that small gesture seemed strangely alluring, and my back prickled as if her fingers were caressing my skin instead of a plastic case. But, er, that’s really neither here nor there right now.

“Zero and Seiryuu,” she mused, letting her gaze play over the two characters on the cover. “If the question is whose perspective the anime takes more often, I would have to say it’s Zero by a small margin.”

“There, see!” the dwarf girl said triumphantly. The elf looked less than thrilled.

But then Hikaru-san went on. “But isn’t it a little hasty to assume that simply because a story is told from a certain character’s perspective that that character is the protagonist?”

She smiled at the girls, almost indulgently.

“Do the both of you know that Order of the Dark Knights: Zero’s Revenge was originally planned with Seiryuu as the protagonist?”

The girls goggled.

“R-Really?”

“Yes. But in Japan right now, stories featuring antiheroes—characters with a bit of a dark side to them, like Zero—just happen to be popular. So they changed the story to be told from Zero’s perspective so that people who like those sorts of shows could enjoy it. Or so I’ve heard.”

The students both looked thoroughly perplexed. And why shouldn’t they? Hikaru-san was talking about behind-the-scenes stuff, the concerns of the production committee. You might argue that, to the extent the information was never divulged to the viewing public, it wasn’t really relevant to the enjoyment of the work, but at the same time it was indispensable.

The girls had been talking about Dark Knights purely in terms of its content, and they had just been hit with a completely separate dimension of the show. Anyway, the more you liked a show, the more you wanted to know every little thing about it—and we otaku definitely ate up behind-the-scenes secrets like that.

“Furthermore,” Hikaru-san said, looking at the elf, “as a matter of fact, there was a manga written primarily from Seiryuu’s point of view.”

“Huh? Th-There was?!”

“It must mean more than a few fans felt the way you do.”

The elf girl’s face brightened immediately.

“If I may go on, there was also a manga that focused on Zero’s little sister, as well as a novelization that took yet another perspective. If point of view determines who the main character is, then Seiryuu is the main character, but so is the little sister.”

“We get it now...!” The girls nodded enthusiastically.

............Wait a second.

Had Hikaru-san really said anything that different from what I had?

For some reason, it hadn’t really sunk in with the girls when I said it. Did this just go to show how much the mode of explanation mattered? Or was it something more than that?

“In the end, it doesn’t matter who the protagonist is,” Hikaru-san said suddenly. “The fact that you’re arguing about it merely proves you’re still young and inexperienced.”

“B-But—”

“For if they are both main characters,” Hikaru-san proclaimed, linking hands with the elf and the dwarf, “does that not mean you can ship them both?”

Ooh! Very powerf—wait, what?

“When it comes to top and bottom, it matters not who the main character is,” Hikaru-san declared, holding the DVD case aloft as if it were some kind of holy book. “Because the two are also one!”

“Ahh!” The elf and dwarf, who had been fighting a moment ago, now raised their voices in unison. Around us, other students who had been tensely watching this exchange swallowed in relief. A general murmur of appreciation broke out—especially among the girls.

“You’re a fujoshi, too?!” I exclaimed. I didn’t think I could take another “rotten woman” around me. It was bad enough with Minori-san constantly trying to get me and Garius to “be friends.” I already couldn’t take my eyes off her.

“Zero/Seiryuu would be great!”

“I think you mean Seiryuu/Zero!”

“Excuse me? Mob slash Zero slash Seiryuu!”

“N-No one’s ever done that before!”

The girls had summarily ignored my concerns and turned quickly to the question of the best BL pairings.

......Before I knew what was happening, I found Minori-san in there with them. And so an argument about who the main character was had transformed into a bubbly conference about who would be most moe with whom, involving most of the girls in the school.

Do you really like BL that much? Are you all addicts?

“......Errr...... So, uh, glad that worked out.”

I wasn’t about to let myself get sucked into a discussion about boys’ love shippings. I tried to put some space between myself and the animated discussions in which Minori-san and Hikaru-san were featuring.

Now a safe distance away, I watched them for a moment, and finally I understood.

Hikaru-san wasn’t just blending in. Almost from the moment she arrived, she had become the center of conversation. There are a lot of otaku, myself included, who can’t tell what other people are thinking to save their lives, or who otherwise have some kind of difficulty communicating. Hikaru-san, however, was completely different.

“Assistant, huh?”

I had a thought. Between her background and the fact that Matoba-san had brought her here, it made sense to think that Ayasaki Hikaru was another of Japan’s chosen “otaku missionaries,” like me.

“But maybe...”

If it had been Hikaru-san, and not me, who had come here first and been the general manager of Amutech, I wonder how things would have turned out.

Not that there was any benefit in getting lost in counterfactuals. It just sort of nagged at me.

After that, class went well enough that day, with no special problems. Hikaru-san’s introduction to the classroom could be considered a qualified success. The whole thing with the Order of the Dark Knights seemed to have led the students to accept Hikaru-san as the same sort of person as me. During class, she mostly sat in a corner of the classroom and observed what Minori-san and I did, but during break, I saw her chatting amiably with the students.

And so day turned to evening.

A bird-drawn carriage collected me, Minori-san, and Hikaru-san, and we came back to the mansion.

“Welcome home,” Myusel said, greeting us in the foyer. Incidentally, she also sometimes acted as a Japanese language teacher at the school, but having her there every day would have interfered with her maid work. So she often stayed at the mansion, as she had today. “I’m sure you’ve all worked hard today.”

“Thanks. Everything good here at home?”

“Yes, sir. Oh, that’s right—those nayal berries you like so much arrived from the market today. I’ll be pairing them with duck in a paté for dinner tonight.”

“Ooh, those are tasty. I mean, your cooking is always great, but I especially like that paté. Maybe it’s the nayal berries.”

“It’s weird,” Minori-san said. “They taste like avocado, even though they’re a completely different color.”

“Avocados are something of a strange food to begin with,” Hikaru-san replied. “I’ve heard they’re sometimes called the ‘butter of the forest.’”

Thus Myusel, Minori-san, and I went about with our usual easy conversation, now with Hikaru-san joining in, as we walked down the halls of the mansion.

“Brooke-san, Cerise-san,” Myusel suddenly whispered. And indeed, I could see Brooke and Cerise walking together down the hallway. They seemed to have noticed us, because both of them stopped, looked in our direction, and bowed their heads.

“Welcome back, Master.”

“Thanks,” I said.

As we exchanged these routine greetings, I noticed: Brooke was carrying some sort of bag. At first I thought maybe it was the trash, but then I realized that both Brooke, who was our gardener, and Cerise, who was a maid, had identical bags.

“What have you got there?”

“This? Er, it’s...” Cerise trailed off, sounding hesitant.

Brooke answered instead, scratching his cheek with one rough, clawed finger. “These are our scales.”

“Scales...?”

“Yessir. New ones are coming in.” He gave the bag a gentle shake. It made a rustling sound, like a bag of potato chips. “Left to their own devices, they’d just drop everywhere. So instead we pull out the loose ones and throw them away.”

“Ahh,” I said, nodding. “It’s like when you brush out an animal’s summer or winter coat.”

As I recalled, when a house was home to an animal that changed coats between seasons, you didn’t just wait for the for it to fall out; you went ahead and brushed the animal to get out loose fur. That kept the hair from getting all over the house.

Come to think of it, Elvia had mentioned that her fur got thicker during her “phase” or whatever. I wondered what she did. The thing was, questions about someone’s body could so easily be taken the wrong way, so it wasn’t something you could just ask about.

“Don’t you also shed your entire skin at once? Is this different?”

“Yes, it is...” Cerise said. A certain shyness kept her from speaking. It seemed that among lizardmen, the coming in of new scales wasn’t considered a decent topic of conversation.

“Shedding involves the entire skin at once, so there’s nothing to scatter everywhere.”

Boy, lizardmen really were different from the rest of us, biologically as well as culturally. Then again, as strange as they might look to us, Brooke and his friends probably thought that humans were the weird ones.

“If you’ll pardon us, we’ll just go and get rid of these.”

Brooke and Cerise were about to walk off again when a voice said, “Um...”

It was Hikaru-san.

“Could I perhaps... see them?”

“Ahem? See what?”

“Your scales.”

“You wish to... see them?”

Brooke and Cerise looked at each other. I was no expert at reading lizardman expressions, but I had to figure they looked shocked right about then. They shared a moment of reluctance, but then...

“Yes... Very well.”

They couldn’t really refuse Hikaru-san’s request. As a visitor from Japan, Hikaru-san was in the same sort of position as I was, treated like a noble here in Eldant. From Brooke and Cerise’s perspective, a little embarrassment was no reason to refuse her what she wanted.

“Here you are,” they said after a moment, and each of them opened the bags and held them out.

Inside, there really were dozens and dozens of scales about the size of the fingernail on my pinky. I wasn’t usually too conscious of Brooke and Cerise as having scales as such, but when I took a close look, I could make out the fine pattern of the covering on their bodies.

Thinking about the whole process as being akin to an animal shedding its fur had left me with a less than great impression, but up close, I found the scales partially transparent and surprisingly beautiful.

Hikaru-san must have had the same reaction, because she said, “Are you really going to throw these away?”

“Er, yes.”

“If you’re just going to get rid of them anyway, would you consider giving them to me?”

“I—I’m sorry?!” Brooke’s voice seemed to have uncharacteristically gone up an octave. “B-But that’s—”

“Is it a bad thing?” Hikaru-san asked, tilting her head.

“N-No, not exactly, but they’re... they’re scales,” Cerise answered, equally confounded.

I had rarely seen the lizardman couple so taken aback. They hardly changed their behavior when slightly surprised—so the way they were acting now must have represented absolute and utter shock.

“But—” Hikaru-san plunged a hand into Cerise’s bag without hesitation, coming up with a scale that twinkled in the light of an oil lamp. “These look like they would make excellent earrings, or necklaces or something.”

“Oh, I get it,” Minori-san said, nodding.

Now I remembered: she was a “layer,” too. Cosplayers made clothing, sure, but people who were really into it often made their own accessories, too. The fictional costumes they were recreating, though, frequently included stuff like jewels or dragon claws—things that either didn’t exist in modern Japan or, if they did, were prohibitively expensive. So plastic figured heavily, as did recycled parts from whatever the cosplayers thought might fit. Serious hobbyists were always on the lookout for anything that might work for their costumes.

Minori-san was dedicated to playing male characters, so I guessed she wouldn’t be that keen on earrings or necklaces or other feminine accessories.

“But they, er... don’t disgust you?” Brooke asked hesitantly.

“Why would they?” Hikaru-san asked.

“You don’t feel they’re... dirty?”

“I can wash and polish them.”

“You honored humans would normally feel sick at the thought of wearing lizardman scales, I should think.”

“Ahh. Is that how things are here? What a waste,” Hikaru-san said assertively. “It doesn’t make me feel at all sick to think of wearing your scales. Perhaps some people have an instinctive aversion to wearing something that came from someone else’s body—but consider wigs, which were once made of real human hair.”

“Uh...”

“What’s beautiful is beautiful. That’s all I’m interested in.”

“You... think they’re beautiful?”

“Yes. Very.” She reached into Brooke’s bag this time, took out another scale, and placed it in her palm alongside the one from Cerise. “Each of you has slightly different color scales, don’t you? Pairing them like this brings out the contrast, and I think it’s wonderful. If I polished them, I’ll bet they’d be even prettier. If I’m careful about which ones I use, I think I could make something truly amazing.”

Brooke and Cerise were dead silent. They had to be completely shocked.

“Shinichi-san, Minori-san, don’t you agree?” Hikaru-san said, looking in our direction.

“Yeah. You’re right. I think you’re on to something.” I nodded.

Just like Hikaru-san had said, wigs used to straight up use human hair. In fact, I had heard about a short story from another country called “The Gift of the Magi,” in which a woman cuts off and sells her luxurious hair in order to buy a watch fob for her husband. Come to think of it, even today, some people have the ashes of deceased loved ones turned into diamonds that they then use to make accessories. And that’s just human bodies. Think about leather—that used to be part of a living thing. Or silk, which comes from silkworms.

Sensibilities about this sort of thing probably weren’t so different between Japan and the Eldant Empire. That being the case, the perception here that lizardman scales were dirty or sickening probably sprang from the racism that was already present. And unfortunately, everyone in this world took those attitudes as given.

So it was that an idea like this could only have come from someone from a completely different world—someone like one of us. And given how important it was to me to minimize status differences, I couldn’t help but agree.

“You see? If you’re only going to throw them away anyway, I’d like you to give them to me.”

Brooke and Cerise still appeared dubious, but at length they looked in my direction—and when I nodded, they slowly and uncertainly closed the bags and held them out to Hikaru-san.

“You’re quite sure about this...?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Hikaru-san said, smiling.

“Thank you very much.” The words came not from Hikaru-san, but from Cerise, who bowed her head as if to emphasize the point.

“Why should you thank me, Cerise-san?” Hikaru-san said, still smiling.

“This is the first time any human has called our scales beautiful.”

“That isn’t anything deserving of thanks. I simply said what I thought.” Holding the bags and looking quite pleased, Hikaru-san tilted her head again. “Don’t you think the two colors together, along with some lace or beads, would make a lovely bracelet?” She was asking Minori-san.

“Yeah, I think you could pull that off.”

“I’m going to try it right away. Tonight.”

“Tonight? Did you bring lace with you?”

“Yes. I have a few store-bought accessories too, but I so like handmade. I brought plenty of clothes as well.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” said Myusel, who had been quiet until that moment. “I’m very sorry that I forgot to tell you. A great deal of luggage was delivered from Japan to Hikaru-sama’s room. The Jay-Ess-Dee-Eff person who delivered it told me I could open and organize it. I only took out the things I recognized and hung the clothes so they wouldn’t wrinkle... Er, I hope that was all right.”

“Of course it was. Thank you very much,” Hikaru-san said.

“Er, ahh...”

Myusel wriggled slightly and waved her hand in front of her face. It meant there was something she wanted to say or ask, but couldn’t quite bring herself to do so.

“What’s up, Myusel?” Minori-san said.

“Um... About Hikaru-sama’s luggage... There were a lot of adorable Western-style outfits.”

“You think so? Thank you.”

“Do they... all belong to you?”

“I made more than half of them myself.”

“That’s amazing. I was so surprised when I saw Minori-sama making the costumes for our moo-vee. But Hikaru-sama, your dresses are so detailed, like something the nobility might wear...”

Gothic-Loli, with all its frills and lace, was definitely not a kind of costume we had created for the movie, and it was a very labor-intensive style. I could understand how Myusel might see it as some kind of elevated fashion for important people.

“It’s manageable, as long as you have a sewing machine and some other helpful tools.” Hikaru-san paused, then clapped her hands as if she had just thought of something. “Say, Myusel-san.”

“Y-Yes?” The maid blinked at suddenly being addressed like this.

“Would you like to try on my clothes?”

“Huh?!”

“I had a similar conversation with the students at school. I think the size would be just about right for you. I’m sure it would look great. What do you think?”

“I... I don’t know what to say... Wh-Why should I ever presume to...”

Myusel couldn’t hide her astonishment at the sudden proposition; she shook her head vigorously. Hikaru-san, however, seemed to have gotten the idea into her head and was not planning to let it go. Instead, she turned to me and Minori-san for support.

“Minori-san. Don’t you think this would look wonderful on Myusel-san?”

“I absolutely do!” Minori-san answered immediately—she even clenched her fist for good measure.

“And what about you, Shinichi-san?”

I was silent for a long moment, picturing a Gothic-Loli Myusel in my mind’s eye.

That dress, all that black lace... Her usual sweet maid’s smile replaced by a devilish grin, looking at me...

“...Yes.”

Yikes. Nosebleed danger: high!

“See? Even Shinichi-san says so.”

“W-Well, in that case... um... if you wouldn’t mind...”

Myusel was clearly backed into a corner here—she still looked hesitant, but nodded ambivalently.

“Come to my room later then, please. Oh—and since we’re taking the time anyway, bring Elvia-san, too.”

“Elvia, too?”

Myusel was one thing, but this was a bit surprising. Elvia didn’t strike me as the type who would normally be interested in wearing a dress. Maybe overalls or hot pants or something. Or, you know, something more boyish.

“She’s quite an interesting piece of material herself. I’d love to try some things on her,” Hikaru-san said.

“Uh...huh...”

So that was it.

“Later, then,” Hikaru-san said and bowed, then went trotting off.

As we watched her go, Myusel said, “Are... Are you really sure it’s all right...?” She was definitely still concerned.

“Well, the person who owns the clothes says it’s okay, so why not?” Minori-san said, trying to sound upbeat. “And Shinichi-kun said he wants to see you in that dress, didn’t he? Goth-Loli Myusel!”

“Ah...”

Myusel glanced at me—and then immediately blushed and looked at the ground.

Ahhh! What’s with that unbelievably sweet, shy gesture?! When a beautiful girl like Myusel does that to me—does that to me—I just—I aggghhhh!

“I—I’ll go call Elvia-san...”

Myusel put her hands to her cheeks to try to hide her blush, then walked off down the hallway. Oh! What a model of maidenly modesty. Granted, it was a perfectly normal cue for two-dimensional girls. But to see it in real life! I never imagined. I’ll never wash these eyes again.

“Oooh, someone’s in loooove!” Minori-san said as she watched me watch Myusel leave.

“You know who else fixates about who’s in love, Minori-san? Old dudes.”

This attempt at a comeback was the best thing I could think of to hide my own embarrassment.

And so, about half an hour later...

“Um... Wh—What do you think...?”

“Do y’ like the way it looks...?”

Two startlingly beautiful, but hesitant, women appeared in the living area.

Of course, I’m referring to Myusel and Elvia. Except...

“Whoa...” I couldn’t hold back a gasp of admiration. They looked so different from usual that just for a second, I hadn’t known who they were.

They had just changed their clothes and hair, but still, they looked like completely different people.

“Um... Master...?” Myusel, who usually wore her hair in twintails or a ponytail, had a black lace ribbon around her head now. She was wearing a white blouse with plenty of frills. There was layer upon layer of black lace on her skirt, which stopped above the knees. Finally, she was wearing knee socks and black heels.

“Normal Myusel” is awful cute, but her beauty in this outfit radiated a nobility that made her seem almost like some princess. This wasn’t about just getting gussied up with a little makeup; it suggested that she had a fundamental beauty.

“Sh-Shinichi-sama...?

Elvia, on the other hand, was wearing a black headdress woven into her hair. Her sleeves as well as the space from her neck down to just above her chest had been covered in a translucent black material, so that the cleft of her breasts was just visible. I’m a little ashamed to say I couldn’t look away from that feature, but... it was an unstoppable force! An immovable object! The material was translucent—practically begging me to look!

Anyway, her skirt had a butterfly pattern on it and was hemmed with white lace. On her feet was a pair of black boots.

It was nothing like her usual “wild child” appearance. There was a certain harmoniousness to her body (maybe there was a corset at work?), and she seemed unusually sexy. It contrasted with the ambivalent expression on her face to make the effect even more pronounced.

The heck? This is awesome.

In just thirty minutes, the two of them had changed completely—was this magic?!

“I think both of you look absolutely adorable—or maybe I should say beautiful!” I exclaimed, clenching my fist.

Myusel and Elvia fidgeted shyly—and that only made my heart pound harder. Even though they were both girls, Minori-san seemed to be having the same reaction.

“You look fantastic! Can I take a photo?!” She grabbed her phone out of her pocket, and without waiting for an answer she rushed over and started snapping away. “Okay, look this way, please. Great! Perfect! Now, pose!”

“Er—yes?”

“Right hand like this! Head tilted, like so!”

Myusel’s head was obviously spinning as Minori-san started arranging her with all the gusto of a professional photographer. She seemed like such an experienced hand that I half expected her to say, “Okay, next, let’s get that top off!” (Yeah, sure.)

Standing beside Myusel, Elvia clasped her hands to her chest and exclaimed, “It’s... It’s like I’ve gone and turned into a noble or somethin’!”

“I think nobles tend to have more refined diction,” I said, laughing.

It was like I had noticed with Myusel: Elvia seemed to associate lots of lace with nobility. I guess if you don’t have a sewing machine, attaching this many frills to something would take a lot of time-consuming hand labor.

“Did you notice they’re both wearing makeup?” Hikaru-san asked, coming into the room a bit belatedly.

“Oh! So they are,” Minori-san said, pausing her hand on the shutter long enough to add, “It completely slipped past me.”

Hello? You’re a girl, too. This is supposed to be your department...

“Pink for Myusel-san, a bit of brown eyeshadow for Elvia-san. Both of them have such lovely skin, it works so well for them.”

“It’s easy to overdo pink and make it look like a bruise, but it’s really perfect for Myusel,” Minori-san said.

“Both of them have pink on their cheeks.”

“That’s great! Oh, but do you think orange might have worked on Elvia?”

I think they were talking about makeup... but unfortunately, I couldn’t be sure. I wished I had something to add, but it was all girl talk at that point, not a conversation I could easily join.

At length I even started to wonder if I should really be there. I looked around the room, whereupon I spotted Brooke and Cerise standing by the wall. They were staring on, not appearing to understand Minori-san and Hikaru-san’s conversation any better than I did. Maybe lizardmen had a different standard of aesthetics than humans. Brooke, being a guy, probably doubly didn’t understand.

“Oh, Brooke-san, Cerise-san,” Hikaru-san said, turning to them. “Let me know when you’re getting rid of your scales again. They’re really a wonderful material. I’m going to be considering what kind of design to use them for.”

“Hm! If our scales be good enough for you,” Brooke answered.

“It will please us greatly if you find a use for them,” Cerise said. “Won’t it, Brooke?”

“If you wish, we can produce more scales than usual. We would be happy to see you enjoy them.”

“Indeed we would!”

“Gladly,” Hikaru-san said, and just like that, she had drawn them both into the conversation. Just like she had done at the school that morning, she really seemed to know how to shorten the distance between people.

Happy voices rang throughout the living area. It seemed to get more and more cheery by the moment.

Everyone was enjoying themselves. But me?

I didn’t know why, but it seemed like I had missed my chance to get in on the conversation. In the end, I just hung out by the wall, watching everyone else have a good time.

After dinner, I jumped in the bath.

“Ahhh...”

Back when I was a home security guard, I often did little more than rinse off with a shower, but I had to admit, there was nothing like sinking deep into a bathtub, letting the water wash away all your tension and fatigue.

“This is paradise,” I murmured, practically compelled to use a cliché. My words echoed around the large bathing area.

I had used this bath more times than I could count, so it was pretty much normal to me now, but the very first time I had seen it, I thought I had wandered into the main bath at some hot-springs resort. There were scads of decorations on the walls and ceiling, and the hot water gushed out of the mouth of a lion—er, almost. More like some kind of wolf-like creature.

As a side note, there obviously was no electric pump to keep that water flowing, and there wasn’t a spring nearby. When, out of curiosity, I looked into it, I discovered that Brooke was heating a bunch of water and then moving it with a hand pump or something. So that was why he had wanted me to let him know when I was going to take a bath.

I felt bad about it and told him he didn’t have to do that for me, but apparently it was part of keeping the bathwater at a stable temperature, so the water had to keep flowing.

“Nghaa...”

I felt so good, I found my voice turning a little weird. I like it this way: almost but not quite too hot. The constant changing of the water helped keep the temperature just the way I liked it. I didn’t know who had designed this bath, but I was very grateful to them, and to Brooke.

I put my washcloth on my head and sank into the water with a sigh (another cliché). Then I rested against the side of the tub, stretching out my arms and legs.

I sat there in silence. As I stared up at the ceiling, the events of the day kept replaying in my head. I was thrilled that Hikaru-san had integrated into the school so extraordinarily well. It was easy on me because I didn’t have to go out of my way to help her fit in, and above all, it made me genuinely happy to see the students have fun.

But I couldn’t deny that, for whatever reason, there was a little part of me that felt like it didn’t quite jibe. Almost like it was unbearable.

Yet another woman in the house meant yet more subjects a man couldn’t broach. Sure, I had Brooke, but he wasn’t exactly a proactive conversation-starter, and anyway, the difference between the sexes seemed subtly different for lizardmen than for humans. I had a sneaking suspicion that even if I’d wanted to commiserate with him about being the only men in a house full of women, it wouldn’t have gone very well.

I know it might have been more normal in this situation to be thinking to myself, Is this my own personal harem? or Did I just land in some sort of gal game? But even though I knew that intellectually, I couldn’t help but be stung by the feeling that I was being excluded from the circle of my own friends.

Then again, maybe all this stuff was just in my own head.

“Go away, bad thoughts!” I shook my head, trying to break the increasingly vicious downward spiral I was slipping into.

You’re just overthinking things.

It was a bad habit of mine. Looking back on it, even the entire incident that had caused me to become a home security guard in the first place—being rejected by my childhood friend—if, instead of shutting myself up in my room, I had just put the whole thing out of my mind and continued going to school, I probably would have had a perfectly normal school life.

As it happened, of course, it was precisely that stint as a home security guard that had set me on the path to coming to this other world, meeting Myusel and Petralka and Elvia and Brooke and everyone else here—so I guess you could say things worked out in the end.

“Hmm...”

I swallowed an oncoming sigh, sinking into the tub up to my chin. The only sound in the entire bathing area was the water pouring from the wolf’s mouth.

Brooke, as I said, was the one heating the water and working the pump, so we never had a chance to bathe together. And obviously, none of the girls were going to join me in here, so I always found myself alone in the bath.

It didn’t usually bother me, but somehow I found the huge, empty space made me feel, well, lonely.

I glanced toward the door of the bathing area.

If this were a manga or something, this was the moment when the beautiful girl characters, not realizing that the protagonist was in the bath, would wander in and he would get a lucky peep. You know? When I looked at the door, it’s not as if I were seriously expecting anything like that. Besides, my clothes were sitting right there in the changing room. No one could miss them.

But then...

“Huh...?”

There was a sound on the far side of the door. I furrowed my brow in confusion.

Was someone in the changing room? It wouldn’t be that weird; it was possible it was Myusel or Cerise bringing me a change of clothes. But if that was the case... then why was the door opening?

The door was opening?!

I sat, frozen and astonished, in the tub as the door slid open with a rattle.

“Shinichi-san?”

“Hi-Hika...gh...”

I almost choked on her name. It was so sudden, I didn’t have time to hide myself—or for that matter, to think, Oh yeah, I’m in the water, so everything below my neck probably isn’t exactly visible. All I could do was stare, my mouth hanging open stupidly, at the person who had just come in.

It was Hikaru-san (as if you needed me to tell you that). She had wrapped herself in a towel, sure, but the pale legs below the hem of the towel, as well as her equally pale and exposed neck, shoulders, and arms, were all too visible.

It was a reminder that being partially hidden is even sexier than being completely naked. To hide something is the same as saying you would be embarrassed for it to be seen, or in other words, to announce precisely that there’s something there to be embarrassed about, or in other words again, that there’s a secret garden right here, just one thin towel away, inviting the imagination to rise up and—rise up—grraagghhhkk (Shinichi is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.)

“I-I-I-I-I’m in here right now!” I finally stammered out. “I’m s-sorry if you didn’t realize that!” I turned my back to her as I spoke. I didn’t exactly count, but I would guess it took me about ten seconds to get around to doing this. During that time, I had an unimpeded view of Hikaru-san and her pale skin. The standard thing would be for her to scream “Pervert!” and throw a bucket or two at my head.

But Hikaru-san didn’t say anything.

I found that even more intimidating, and it made me start babbling. “I j-just, you know? I can’t qu-quite get out of the bath right now, so—!” I was in a bad place. “S-So, just, you know—”

“In that case, let’s bathe together.”

“Exactly! So let’s j-just bathe to—ggghhaa?!”

Whaaat?! What’s with this crazy plot twist?!

Could it be, O God, that the path to a real and fulfilling life with a woman has finally opened to me?! Do you want me to explode?! I think it’s too early to get torn to pieces! Ahh, Father, Mother, your son Kanou Shinichi this day abandons his dream of becoming a wizard...!

My ridiculous imagination was, as usual, going a mile a minute.

“B-B-BBBBBut w-w-wait...!”

I’m sorry to tell you this, God, but I just don’t have the nerve. Offered the chance to bathe with a beautiful woman, I don’t have it in me to be all, Well, it would be a shame to waste an opportunity when it comes knocking, ho ho ho!

I didn’t say anything. Then I heard a soft splish from behind me. I had to assume it was Hikaru-san getting into the bath. The skin on my back seemed immensely sensitive all of a sudden; I thought I could feel her getting closer.

“U-Um, uh, Hikaru-san...sa...n...”

I could tell: she was right there. Right... behind me...

Ahh! Why does my extrasensory perception seem so acute at these moments and only these moments?!

My heart was pounding wildly; I didn’t know if it was from the heat or the excitement.

I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up don’t ask what I mean you know what I mean!!

“U—Um...!”

Desperately fighting the urge to glance back one more time, I forced my eyes shut.

“Er, uh, would you maybe be so kind as to get out again? No, er, or, maybe you could honorably look away and I could... humbly... get out...”

Nervousness seemed to have inspired an abundance of politeness in me for some reason. I could almost hear my shoulder devil mocking me: “C’mon, turn around! She said you could!”

“No!” responded my good angel. “Don’t do it. You’re a better man than that, Shinichi-sama!”

Wait a second, I could understand why my shoulder devil had my face, but why did my angel look like Myusel?

“Are you unhappy to be here with me?”

“I—I wouldn’t say... I mean...”

I’m not unhappy about it—that’s exactly the problem!

If this was an all-too-obvious plot twist, then I knew what came next: I would turn around, thrilled by this opportunity, at which point somebody else—another one of the women, no doubt—would come bursting in, just in time to find me in what appeared to be a compromising situation that I would never be able to talk my way out of. I might be able to survive if the witness were Minori-san or Cerise, or even Elvia, but if poor, serious Myusel were to see this, if she were to think worse of me because of it—I don’t think I would recover for at least five years.

But then...

“It’s all right.”

I could feel ripples coming closer. There couldn’t be more than a meter between me and Hikaru-san now. The fact that her voice seemed to come from slightly above me implied that she was standing in the water rather than submerged.

Meaning that if I were to turn around now, I would be, er, staring right at the lower half of her body, and there was no way she would still be wearing her towel in the bath, meaning, uh, her mysterious Bermuda Triangle would, it would be right in front of— it would be right— gaahhhgk (Please stand by.)

“Or are you more excited by naked members of the same sex, Shinichi-san?”

“No, even I don’t get excited by naked—...............”

............Come again?

What was that? Pardon moi?

In my complete and utter confusion... I unthinkingly turned around.

The first thing I saw was Hikaru-san’s devilish little smile.

Below that was a chest as flat and tranquil as the sea, then a belly button sitting smack amidst a smooth, pale abdomen, and below that...

“..................”

Well, I mean, it was definitely... It was very, distinctly noticeably...

“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!”

The echo of my shout bounced all around the bathing area.

“Wha— Wha-wha-wha-whaaa...”

I stood bolt upright in spite of myself.

“You don’t have to act so shocked,” Hikaru-san said, looking a bit annoyed.

“Y-Yeah, but—I mean—b-b-b-b-but...!”

“But what?”

“You’re a m-m-m-m-man?”

“Yes. So?” She—he?—seemed to wonder what all the fuss was about.

Argh! How can you act so cool and like this is all just perfectly normal?!

“But— Your clothes— The Suiren outfit—”

“It’s cosplay. It’s not that unusual, is it?”

Hikaru-san smiled without a hint of malice.

O-Okay. Calm down, Kanou Shinichi. Calm down and count your prime numbers—I mean, take stock of the situation!

A man? Who? Hikaru-san? A man?! Cosplay?! Dressing as a girl?!

I caught my breath: something like a flash of inspiration hit me.

I remembered what Garius had said:

“...Wonderful.”

“Shinichi.”

“You could learn something from her...”

Could Garius possibly have known at a glance that Hikaru-san was actually a guy?!

So when he told me to “learn from” Hikaru-san, had he meant... whoa, whoa, wait a second!

My imagination was headed to some dangerous places. I hate the way my otaku self only seems to have a really powerful creative streak at times like this.

To compound the situation...

“Shinichi-sama?!”

They must have been able to hear my scream in the rest of the house, because who should come charging into the bathing area but Myusel?

Oh yeah. I’d forgotten how sharp elf hearing is... Wait, trivia like that doesn’t matter right now!

“What in the world ha—”

“Er...”

Time stood still.

I was just standing up in the bath—in other words, I was looking right at Myusel, and all the important bits were plainly visible.

Hikaru-san was also standing there, facing away from the maid.

And then there was Myusel, staring straight at me, eyes wide.

For an instant, nobody moved a muscle—but Myusel’s face turned red about as quick as was possible.

“Er, uh, um, Myusel—san?”

“I’m...... very, very, very s-sorry!” Myusel stuttered, then squeezed her eyes shut, turn around, and started to dash—

“Eep?!”

—straight into the wall of the changing room.

“Hey, M-Myusel!” Panicked, I jumped out of the bath and ran over to her. It must have been a pretty good clonk—or maybe she was just overwhelmed by what she’d seen. In any event, she was out cold. Except she kept muttering “I’m very sorry, I’m very sorry,” like a mantra. What propriety.

No! That’s not the point!

“Is—Is she okay?” I muttered, looking closely at her face.

And that was when...

“What happened?”

“Whatsa matter?”

“What’s wrong?”

...as it just so happened, the rest of the women showed up.

“Ah...”

I froze.

I realized that this was an even less explain-awayable situation than the one I had appeared to be in a minute ago.

There was Myusel, sprawled on the ground and out like a light.

There was me, buck naked and hovering over her.

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

What did I do to deserve this downward spiral?!

“Shinichi-kun?” Minori-san crouched in front of me, grinning. That was a grown-up for you—the nakedness of some punk kid didn’t move her at all.

That was all well and good, but—ahh! That posture emphasized Minori-san’s softness and her jiggliness and why now of all times was she only wearing an old T-shirt, and—just a second, was it possible she was going bra-less? Not the point! My you-know-what was getting harder and harder to explain...!

“Uh... This is all a big m-misunderstanding...” I knew it was futile, but I had to say something.

Minori-san nodded as if to say I didn’t have to go on.

“Believe me, you don’t have to explain anything. ♪”

“Of course you’d say thaaaaaat!”

That was when Minori-san put a serious joint lock on me. Of course she did. It was in the script.