Chapter Two: A Trading-Card Strategy?

The girl looked as if she had been incarnated from the darkness itself.

She simply appeared, there in the black—her hair long and dark as pitch, the hem of her dress, which was covered in frills and lace, billowing as she approached. She wasn’t walking, either; much less running or jumping. She simply stood there and seemed to grow bigger and bigger. It was a weird feeling, as if the distance were shrinking itself. As I watched her stupidly, she got closer and closer until we were practically breathing on each other.

“Ah...” A trembling sound escaped my lips.

I stood frozen, with no idea what to do—when she poked me in the chest.

It caused me to collapse to my knees, then fall flat on my back, and then she was bending silently over me, ever closer. There was no light anywhere, yet for some reason I could easily see her pale face, her smile.

“This time, the ritual of the contract shall be done...”

In contrast to her solemn pronouncement, I noticed that she was blushing like a shy little girl. Meanwhile, all I could do was quiver. Our eyes met—and she furrowed her eyebrows as if in embarrassment, bit her delicate, pink lip like she was fighting something back.

“In order to manifest the vow between light and darkness here and now...”

She unceremoniously mounted me. Her thighs, which I could see peeking out from under the lace-fringed hem of her dark skirt, seemed impossibly bright in the darkness. I could feel the heat of her body through her clothes, proving to me that she was no illusion, but a being of flesh and blood.

“The door of destiny will now open...”

She reached out for me, pulling at my shirt, her slim, white fingers brushing my skin.

Ahh... I trembled at the thought of what was to come.

I was as helpless as a sparrow now, unable to do anything in the face of this girl. I couldn’t move a muscle, as if the very root of my existence had been entrapped. I was totally at her mercy.

Of course, the two of us were all alone in the darkness. There was nobody who might come and stop her.

“The pact of blood washes all things...”

Or at least, I hadn’t thought there was.

So why did I hear someone whispering?

I looked around in a panic.

“Myusel—?!”

Myusel was there.

No—not just her. Minori-san and Elvia, too. I didn’t know when they had arrived or how long they had been there, but now they were illuminated as if by a spotlight.

None of them said anything. Instead, the three girls kept looking at each other, occasionally shooting little glances in my direction. They had their hands to their mouths and were whispering to each other, like old ladies spreading the latest gossip.

Then, for some reason, Minori-san took a step closer.

“That’s some pretty face, huh?”

What the heck? Why did she sound so... masculine? Like the older brother at a morgue seeing the corpse of his younger twin...

“Heh,” Minori-san went on, pointing at me and the girl. “Some guys have all the goddamn luck, eh?”

“......Huh?”

My gaze vacantly followed Minori-san’s pointing finger.

At some point, I discovered, the girl in the black dress had become completely naked.

Not a scrap of clothing on her, naked as the day she was born. But... There was no bulge at her chest. Instead, the bulge was between her legs... and what a bulge! And it was standing at attention—

“Huh?! Huh?!”

My brain, which until that moment had been partially paralyzed, suddenly kicked into high gear—and I remembered the name of the girl sitting on top of me.

No—not the girl.

His name was Ayasaki Hikaru-san. The other otaku who had come from Japan to be my assistant. And a real, true, bona fide—

“I,” Hikaru-san said with a languorous smile, “am perfectly happy with one of you cute little straight boys.”

“Who are you, the Yaranaika guy?!”

But my little one-liner didn’t get me anywhere—Hikaru-san grabbed me by the collar of my shirt. With great gusto, he opened both his hands wide. Buttons went flying, and suddenly I was exposed to the world, and Hikaru-san’s gaze.

“Noooo!” I gave a girlish scream and covered my chest.

But that meant I didn’t have any hands left to defend my pants. His manner terrifyingly casual, Hikaru-san pulled my belt away, stripped off my pants, and then he was reaching for my underwear...!

“N-No, please don’t!” I protested.

At this rate, this book is in danger of being declared harmful to youth! Er, I mean—

I don’t want to lose my maidenhead before my virginity...!

Er, or maybe I had that backward! But anyway, the point was, I wasn’t exactly jealously guarding my first time, but I didn’t want to have it stolen by a man...!

I tossed and turned, trying to escape, but Hikaru-san held down my shoulders, much stronger than he looked. And from that mounted position, it was easy enough for him to pin my flailing arms with his knees.

This was bad. I couldn’t get free.

There was nothing to save me now. Myusel and the others were just looking our way and whispering.

“Ah... Ahh...”

The blood drained from my face. Hikaru-san leaned closer.

Even at this moment, his face was very pretty—it still looked like a girl’s face to me, and maybe that was as close to salvation as I would come.

But... But...!

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

It was with that scream that I woke up.

I opened my eyes to find myself drenched in an unpleasant sweat. I checked my smartphone, which was by my bed, and found that it was still quite a bit earlier than I usually got up. Gentle morning sunlight peeked through the curtains in stark contrast to my bleak mood, and I could hear birds chirping happily outside.

It would have been a really beautiful morning, if it hadn’t been for that dream.

I put a hand to my chest and could feel my heart pounding, and not in a good way. It was just a dream. I knew that, but my body hadn’t gotten the message yet. I didn’t seem likely to fall back asleep at this rate.

“Sigh...”

I changed clothes without much enthusiasm, then decided to have a walk around the house in hopes that it would refresh me a little. Just sitting around seemed likely to invite flashbacks of that nightmare. A bit of exercise might be just what I needed.

“This sucks...”

I headed for the dining area, still periodically shaking.

The early hour meant I didn’t see anyone else on the way over. Even so, I assumed Myusel, Brooke, and Cerise were all up and at work already.

“Mornin’,” I half-whispered as I entered the dining area.

As I expected, there was no one there. Myusel was probably in the adjacent kitchen. There were a lot of mouths to feed and several different diets to observe, so the kitchen was a busy place in the morning. I didn’t want to cause Myusel any trouble by distracting her, so I just sat in my chair and waited.

“Mmm...” I sighed and stretched, then slumped down into the chair.

“Ah, Shinichi-kun.”

“Er... Matoba-san?”

I looked up to see the bureaucrat just coming into the dining area.

“You’re up early,” he said with a smile.

“Speak for yourself. Is something up?” As I recalled, he had said he had to get back to Japan in a hurry. Or had he already been there and back again?

“Oh, I just got back here a bit sooner than expected. As I had the time, I thought I would drop in and see how things were going.” That seemed to support my theory.

“Should I go get Minori-san and Hikaru-san?”

“That won’t be necessary. I’m not really here on any specific business.”

With that, Matoba-san sat down at the table across from me. Faced with a man easily old enough to be my father, I found myself sitting up straighter. Not that I had anything in particular to talk to him about right now...

“Say, Matoba-san,” I said, briefly thinking back on my nightmare. “Why didn’t you say anything about Hikaru-san being a guy?”

He could have just introduced my new assistant as a man up front.

To my barbed question, however, Matoba-san responded with a blank look and an inquisitive tilt of his head. “You didn’t know?”

“Let’s just say it was a bit of a shock when I found out,” I said.

Plus I’d had to look at a naked dude when I was totally unprepared for it. I was sure that nightmare was residual trauma from that experience.

“I don’t believe announcing someone’s gender is a typical part of introducing them.”

“Well, er... That’s true, but...” I wanted to think Hikaru-san constituted a special case. “It’s a kind of androgynous name, and with the way he was dressed... Wouldn’t most people assume he was a girl?”

“Ahh. I see,” Matoba-san said with a bit of a dry smile. “I saw his resume before I interviewed him, so I wasn’t so shocked.” In other words, misunderstandings are a lot less likely when you know he’s a guy going in.

Honestly, though, given what a convincing girl Hikaru-san made, it seemed like it might be natural to just, you know, say something about it. Or did this guy really not think of anyone as anything besides the info and photo on their paperwork?

“As I recall, I did refer to him as Hikaru-kun...”

“Well, yes, you did...”

Matoba-san could see I wasn’t quite convinced. “What do you think of Hikaru-kun?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Is he fitting in?”

“Yeah. I can’t believe he’s only been here a few days.”

It was true: Hikaru-san had only been in the Holy Eldant Empire for three days. To be precise, this was the morning of the fourth day.

He had pretty much been part of the action from the moment he got here, and by his third day, he was on good terms with almost all the students. I’d often seen him chatting happily with all the various members of our household, and I hadn’t heard of any disagreements or trouble.

When I saw all the costumes and various other things he’d brought along with him, I got the impression that unlike me, he had known what was coming and had been able to prepare for it. But even so, I could only admire how thoroughly prepared he was.

I wondered when it was that I had gotten used to this world, had started to be accepted here.

I wasn’t sure, but I knew it had taken more than three days.

“Honestly, I’m almost a little jealous.”

“Well, we learned from our experience with you, Shinichi-kun. We made sure to inform Hikaru-kun of what would be happening. Perhaps that made the difference. In any event, I’m glad to hear he’s getting along.”

“He sure is.”

“He’s very talented, you know.” All of a sudden, I thought I heard something portentous in Matoba-san’s tone. “He had to be, to be chosen as your assistant.”

“Uh...huh,” I replied with an ambiguous smile.

I might normally take that sort of remark to mean that Matoba-san was calling me an even more talented person, but it was dangerous to take anything this guy said at face value. Even if he wasn’t exactly my enemy at the moment, the Japanese government stood behind him—and given how impertinently I had opposed their plans, I doubted they thought very well of me.

Having said that, I had gotten myself accepted in the Holy Eldant Empire much more quickly and much more thoroughly than the government had expected—including becoming good friends with Petralka. Set aside the question of whether that was deliberate: if you thought of this as a sort of infiltration op... well, I’d done a pretty good job.

So in short, Japan may not have really wanted to keep me as the general manager of Amutech, but as things stood, replacing me with someone else would be too much of a blow to their efficiency to be a viable option.

“Master? Matoba-sama?” a familiar voice said.

Both of us looked toward the kitchen door. There was Myusel, standing with a look of surprise on her face. She wasn’t used to seeing me up this early—and definitely not with Matoba-san for company.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were here. I’ll make tea right away.”

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself,” Matoba-san said easily, holding up a hand. “I was just on my way out.”

Then he stood and started out of the room—but he paused at the door. He turned to me with a cheerful smile. “Play nice with Hikaru-kun, now.”

“Hrm...” I gave a noncommittal nod, to which Matoba-san once again waved, then quickly showed himself out.

Now it was just me and Myusel in the dining area.

“Uh, um... Would you like t-tea?”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. I just got up early and came to clear my head a bit.”

“Clear your head, sir?” Myusel looked at me with an inquisitive tilt of her head. No matter how many times she did that, it was always cute!

“Yeah,” I muttered, “I’m definitely more of a Myusel guy.”

“Er...?”

“A girl can be really cute, but a flat chest and a hard body are just deal-breakers for me. I want someone with a little roundness, someone who looks like they’d be soft to hug.”

“Shinichi-sama...” Myusel’s white cheeks turned scarlet.

“Huh? Oh...”

Crud. Did I say that out loud?

“Er, ah, y’see...”

“I, uh... I’ll just go get breakfast ready...!”

Without waiting for me to try to come up with an excuse, Myusel zipped out of the room and into the kitchen.

Ahh, Myusel. You’re like detergent for my soul!

As I sat there, moe-ing it up in an attempt to clear away the clouds of my nightmare, my heart filled with that classic, tender bittersweetness.

After another day of classes at the school, we came back home, where we sat in the living area, doing whatever we felt like. We were all in the same room together, but we were each just doing our own thing. This stretch of time until dinner was brief, but richly relaxing.

I continued in a light novel I’d been reading. Myusel was bringing tea to each of us in the room. And Minori-san seemed to be typing up a report on her laptop.

As for Elvia, she was drawing industriously in her sketchbook, apparently doing some type of design. Hikaru-san was peeking over her shoulder at her drawing. Incidentally, Hikaru-san was dressed in another Gothic-Loli outfit, although not the Suiren one. Our newest resident didn’t seem to feel any compulsion to wear anything more typical.

“Shinichi-san?”

At the sound of my name, I looked up from my novel to see Hikaru-san looking in my direction. She—I mean he—had his hand at his chin as if he was thinking about something.

“I was thinking. What if we tried bringing in some trading cards?”

“Huh? Trading cards?” I blinked.

Trading cards. In Japan, we called them torekaa for short.

As an otaku, they were a perfectly familiar bit of merchandise to me, but I hadn’t tried introducing them here yet. The biggest reason was simply that I wasn’t that interested—had never been that into them, really.

“Do you know why trading cards were so quick to catch on when they were first invented?” Hikaru-san asked.

“Huh? Er, uh, no,” I said.

“It was because they’re cheap enough that people can buy them with pocket change, and yet they fulfill the desire for acquisition. They’re something you can purchase without thinking too hard about it.”

“Oh, sure, I guess that makes sense.”

For sure, I had seen plenty of elementary school kids buying cards at convenience stores or bookshops.

“At the same time,” Hikaru-san went on, “from a vendor’s perspective, the return on floor space dedicated to cards is very high.”

“Sorry?” I said. The discussion had suddenly taken a turn for the technical.

“Even a pack of ten cards takes up virtually no space, right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I nodded, picturing one of those boxes stuffed with packs of trading cards. A box with ten or twenty packs could still practically fit in the palm of your hand.

“Say a pack of ten cards costs a hundred yen. So if you have twenty packs in the box, that’s two thousand yen. And yet you dedicate less space in your store to those twenty packs then you would to two paperback books. If one book sells for six hundred yen, you aren’t quite at double the profit, but it’s still obviously a better return on your investment.”

“............Ah.”

Now that he mentioned it...

Trading cards were usually put right next to the cash register as an impulse item. I had always thought of this as being primarily because it made the purchase easier for the customer, but considering it more carefully, I realized that what it really implied was that the store didn’t need a specialized, dedicated space for the cards. You didn’t have to line oodles of them up. It meant you could sell one more thing in your store without having to give any additional space to it. You didn’t even need any specialist knowledge to sell them.

I could see why that sort of calculus would appeal to store owners. And from the perspective of Amutech’s business...

“They’re easy to transport, which means they would be simple to bring to this world,” Hikaru-san said. “They’re also cheap and you can buy them anywhere, so procurement wouldn’t be a problem. And a collection fits in your pocket, but you can pull it out and brag to your friends about all the cards you’ve got.”

“It’s... It’s starting to make sense,” I said.

“I can see all the works that are already a big hit here in Eldant, with the students and the people around them. Since they don’t seem to have any objection to anime- or manga-style art, I’m sure they would be fascinated by the beautiful pictures on some trading cards.”

“Yeah, that’s true...” I nodded, picturing how the students would react.

There were several differences between otaku and non-otaku, and in my experience, one of the brightest lines was an interest in the people on the production side of any given work.

What I mean is, some people pore over the credits in an anime, checking out the names of the director, the character designer, the animation director, the scriptwriter, the production studio, and on and on. When you hear someone talking knowledgeably about things like how they love the art in episode X because so-and-so was the animation director, you know you’re dealing with a bona fide otaku.

Now that I thought about it, though, recently the students at school had stopped talking exclusively in terms of “pretty art” or “cute art,” and had started saying that they liked the way X-sensei drew girls, or that the way Y-sensei handled hips was sexy, or that when it came to thighs, Z-sensei was the undisputed master, and so on and so forth. That is to say, they were starting to be able to discern personal differences in artistic style.

It would only be natural, then, for them to take an interest in trading cards, where the illustrations were done by a variety of artists. It was like a gallery of lovely pictures small enough to fit in your pocket. Then again, there was also the possibility that the Eldant people would see trading cards as revolutionary, a totally new concept.

Then there was the fact that a lot of trading cards depicted things the students already enjoyed: stories they knew, familiar characters, and of course, monsters and robots and stuff. Not to mention cards inspired you to want to collect them all. There were a lot of facets to cards’ attractiveness.

“Don’t forget, production and transport costs are low enough to make it economical—and probably profitable—to import large amounts of product,” Hikaru-san said.

“Hang on—large amounts? How much do you think people are going to buy?”

“Consider that they’re also excellent Japanese language teaching material.”

“Uh...?”

“Most cards have some sort of explanatory text on them, right? Or at the very least, a card name.”

“Right...”

“People might not be able to get longer sentences immediately, but I’ll bet a lot of them could pick out vocabulary and decipher shorter sentences. Gaining that understanding would make the cards even more fun. And since so many cards are used as part of a game rather than purely for collecting, they could learn while they play.” Hikaru-san was smiling now.

He was right; picking up vocabulary in the context of a game did make it easier to remember. What it all meant was that in addition to introducing a product with high profit margins, Amutech could simultaneously hope to quietly increase its customer base. Trading cards were cheap, portable, and easily understood, so they might give the Eldant masses—most of whom were currently illiterate—their first real brush with otaku culture.

Ooh. It almost seemed too good to be true.

“As far as the cards go,” Hikaru-san said, “rather than just importing packs and selling them as-is, I think we should open them and then sell individual cards in sleeves or packages that we make here.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Individual cards would be cheaper. And I think it would be useful for the Eldant side to get used to being part of the supply chain.”

“I mean, maybe...”

It had been in the original plan to have Eldant start producing otaku products that could then be exported to other countries around here. Some experimental otaku goods had already worked their way secretly into Bahairam, but that was the exception. I would certainly be happy to see them become more plentiful in the free market.

Then there was the little fact that I was opposed to the Japanese government’s plan for cultural invasion.

A major pillar of that plan was for the government to control the supply of otaku goods—and if I could undermine that foundation, so much the better for resisting the weaponization of otaku stuff. So how could I not be on board with a plan that would help make Eldant a supplier of product?

“It’s true that up until this point, it’s just been us importing things for them to enjoy,” Minori-san said with a nod. She was a member of the JSDF, and so technically part of the Japanese government, but she was also an otaku herself. Just like me, she wasn’t thrilled at the idea of otaku products being turned into weapons of invasion, and she had a lot of sympathy for my perspective.

“So,” Hikaru-san said with a glance at the beast girl beside him. “I was thinking maybe we could have Elvia-san do the illustrations for the packaging.”

“M-Me?!” Elvia was very surprised to abruptly become the topic of conversation.

“You are Amutech’s in-house artist, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes, I am, but...”

“Then perhaps it’s time you started doing some art.”

“I get it,” I said, crossing my arms and thinking.

You know... This might be fun. It was always interesting to create something. That didn’t have to mean manga or novels or whatever. Coming up with a new plan and seeing it to fruition—making it real—is itself a form of creativity. I felt myself getting excited, just like I had when we had come up with the idea for the movie.

Along with our personal computer over here, we did have a printer and scanner, good business-grade equipment with relatively significant functionality. So far I had only ever used them to produce teaching materials for the school, but there was no reason we couldn’t set them to printing packaging.

Or better yet, why not use the printing technology available here? I had seen those broadside portraits of Petralka, which proved that local color printing technology was at a fairly sophisticated level. It might not be as crisp as a computer printer, and the details might seem just a little off, meaning that there could be minor variations in the quality of any given product... but we could consider that part of the experience.

Yeah. I liked where this was going.

“B-But my art isn’t...” Elvia still seemed hesitant. “Compared to the stuff that’s for sale, it’s just... different...”

She seemed to be talking about artistic style. Personally, I thought Elvia did terrific examples of “moe art,” very much in line with proper otaku products, but maybe there was something that kept her, as the artist, from being totally satisfied with them.

“Moe art and otaku things don’t have any hard and fast rules. They aren’t some kind of tradition or anything. It’s all about whether the audience can feel moe about them or not,” Hikaru-san said firmly. “Elvia-san, I think your art is excellent. What about you, Shinichi-san?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I love your stuff, too, Elvia. I think it’s terrific.”

“Y’ really mean that?” Elvia looked at me, her eyes wide. Her tail, which had been hanging limply, wagged slightly behind her.

Elvia was easy to read if nothing else. It was part of what was so adorable about her.

“Y’ really do like my work, Shinichi-sama?”

“Sure I do. I’ve told you before. If I didn’t like what you were doing, Amutech wouldn’t have kept you on as its artist.”

Elvia turned bright red—was she that happy to hear her work praised?

“Okay! I’ll do it! I’m all over the packaging for your ‘cards’!”

All of a sudden she was super into it. I could practically see the flame burning behind her. It looked like she was 100% on board now.

“Well, it looks like that’s settled. I’ll talk to Matoba-san tomorrow or the next day,” Hikaru-san said.

“Oh, sure. Thanks,” I said, nodding.

Nodding was all I could do. No matter how you looked at this idea, there was absolutely no reason for me to object or oppose it.

If anything...

“What kinda pictures do you think I should do?”

“Good question. Given what I’ve observed among the students over the past several days, it seems like the most popular features are—”

Hikaru-san and Elvia had already begun an impromptu conference on the content of the packaging. I let their conversation drift in one ear and out the other; the only thing I felt was sheer amazement. You could even say I was overwhelmed.

Unlike me, Hikaru-san was clearly capable of viewing otaku products from a business perspective. The profit margins on trading cards? I had never once thought about such a thing.

I had been importing things into this world on the basis of what I thought was interesting. It was really nothing more than the desire to share what I liked, so that everyone could enjoy it together.

But Hikaru-san was different. She—er, he—didn’t think about things as a consumer, but rather more like a creator or producer. More like someone on the supply side of the equation.

“He’s very talented, you know. He had to be, to be chosen as your assistant.”

Matoba-san’s words came back to me. And he was right: Hikaru-san was tremendously capable.

More so than me, really.

I wasn’t upset about that. It was a good thing to have another talented person in my circle. But it’s true that I felt something akin to nervousness.

If Hikaru-san was really that much more distinguished than I was—then what if they decided they didn’t need me anymore?

I had already gone against the Japanese government once. The only reason I was still General Manager of Amutech was because it was the most efficient way for the government to ingratiate the company here in Eldant. They knew that if they just went and got rid of me, it would invite the ire of the Eldant government. I was simply too close to Petralka.

But Hikaru-san had already begun to endear himself to the empress. He was already proving how much more effective he could be than me. And if the Japanese government took that to heart...?

Another incursion by the special forces—successful this time? Or maybe I would just be forcibly sent back to Japan?

No, stop. These grim fantasies weren’t going to help anyone. Letting my imagination get carried away was a bad habit of mine.

“I’ve been thinkin’ I’d like to do something like this,” Elvia said, striking a pose where she covered her chest with one arm. It squeezed her boobs in a way that was kind of sexy, but not low-class. A spot-on moe pose. But the ability to strike that pose at a moment’s notice showed just how deeply Elvia had gotten lost in my world—how well acquainted she had become with otaku culture.

I didn’t say anything. Elvia seemed to be having fun, and that was worth a lot.

That was what I told myself, anyway, as I finally turned back to my novel and tried to focus on the words.

I had eaten dinner and taken my bath, and was nearly back to my room when I noticed someone coming down the hall from the other direction and stopped. The other person seemed to notice me, too, because they looked up from arms full of something.

“Shinichi-san,” Hikaru-san said, coming to a halt and smiling softly.

Her—ahem, his—arms were full of clothes.

They were probably the cosplay costumes he had brought from Japan. And there were plenty of them. He had a firm grip on them, but even cloth had to get heavy after a point. I felt a little concerned just looking at him.

“Want some help?” I asked.

“No, I’m fine,” Hikaru-san said.

“Yeah? You sure have an awful lot of clothes there.”

“These are the ones I lent to Myusel-san and Elvia-san. Minori-san and I got a little carried away and just tried them in everything we could think of. I had them laundered, and now I’m just bringing them back to my room.”

“Ahh...”

I thought back to Myusel and Elvia, dressed in Gothic-Loli outfits. Hikaru-san and Minori-san had enjoyed having the two girls cosplay—or whatever you wanted to call it in this case—on Hikaru-san’s very first day here, and I gathered that since then, they had asked Myusel and Elvia around several more times to try on new dresses. Cerise, for what it’s worth, wasn’t involved; her body type and proportions were just too different from Hikaru-san’s.

...Hang on.

I knew it was a little late to be worrying about this, but was this really okay? I mean, Hikaru-san was a guy... so what did he do when the girls were changing?

“It takes time to wash something with this much lace and decorations.”

“Oh, huh...”

As casually as I could, I scoped out Hikaru-san’s body again. Long, black hair. Slim build. Pretty face. Black lace can look really tasteless if you get it even a little bit wrong, but it actually looked really good on Hikaru-san. I had never known anyone else who wore Gothic-Loli so well. It looked cute on Myusel and Elvia in part because they would look cute in anything, but I couldn’t deny a certain sense that the outfits had been “wearing them,” so to speak. But Hikaru-san looked absolutely at ease in the style.

But still... a dude.

I heaved a mental sigh. Even looking at him right now, all I saw was a girl. To be honest, as long as I couldn’t see... you know, what was between his legs... it seemed almost impossible for me not to think of him that way.

“Something on my face?” Hikaru-san asked with a wry smile.

“Huh? Er, no,” I said quickly.

Hikaru-san was a type of person I’d never had around me before. Even though I was an otaku, I didn’t have much experience with cosplay, and even less with crossplay. Nor did I know anyone or have any friends who were into those kinds of things. So I didn’t have a good grasp of what would move a guy to dress like a cute young girl. I just knew that everyone had their own way of thinking about things... and that there were some preferences strangers didn’t have a lot of sympathy for, and that if you weren’t careful in how you approached people, you could end up causing pain.

After all, I knew what it was like to be hurt by someone’s unexamined assumptions about me.

So yes, I could have said something like, “That Goth-Loli stuff looks great on you, you don’t even look like a guy!” but maybe that would turn out to be stepping on the tiger’s tail.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t entirely sure how to interact with this “new employee” of mine. It made every time we talked a little harder than it had to be.

But then:

“Maybe you’re thinking, ah, but he’s a guy,” Hikaru-san said teasingly.

“Huh? No, I wasn’t—” I had definitely not expected Hikaru-san to be the one to broach the subject, and it caught me off guard. “I mean, uh, when I found out you were a man, yes, I was honestly a little surprised.”

“That’s only natural. Everyone is,” Hikaru-san said with a nod—and then set off walking with his armfuls of clothes.

The conversation obviously wasn’t finished—I couldn’t just watch him go. So I fell into step behind him.

“To be honest,” Hikaru-san said, “I don’t, like, want to become a girl or anything. I’m not one of those people who feels like they have a woman’s heart in a man’s body.”

“Oh. Okay.”

But then... Why?

“My parents... It seems like my parents wanted a girl.”

“Huh?”

“Both of my parents are otaku. They met at Comiket! When they had a kid, they just wanted to dress it up, so I’ve been wearing girl-character outfits from a pretty young age. By the time I could think for myself, these kinds of frilly dresses already seemed normal to me, or... I couldn’t fight back against them.”

“Uh-huh...”

That’s what you call being dyed in the wool.

“I don’t dislike looking cute, and it seemed to make everyone around me so happy...”

“And so you just got used to looking like a girl?”

“Yeah, more or less,” Hikaru-san said with a dry smile. “And I like to dress people up in cute outfits myself, so I can sympathize with my parents.”

“Oh, like you did with Myusel and Elvia...” Hikaru-san really did seem to have fun with that.

There was no denying that the two girls had looked incredible in that cosplay, or that the disconnect with how they normally looked had produced an equal and moe reaction. So much so, in fact, that I might have found myself compelled to wheedle a few of Minori-san’s copious photos out of her.

“Minori-san isn’t a big fan of Gothic-Loli, though,” Hikaru-san said.

“Ah...” That was true. Minori-san was Hikaru-san’s opposite number, a specialist in male costumes.

“I told her it would be easy enough to alter the chest, but...”

“Ahh...”

I gave a wry grin of my own. I knew Minori-san didn’t object to Gothic-Loli on grounds of body type. Just like Hikaru-san, she was the child of someone who had wanted offspring of the opposite gender, and that was why she wasn’t so into women’s clothing.

Now that I thought about it, she and Hikaru-san actually had a lot in common. Minori-san was a “layer,” too, who frequently cosplayed as characters of the opposite gender. But then...

She definitely doesn’t act like a man.

She had a bright and cheerful personality, for sure, but she also had a womanly gentleness to her.

So I thought: maybe Hikaru-san didn’t crossplay because he was uncomfortable with his biological gender, or out of any desire to express an “inner gender,” but purely because he enjoyed wearing those clothes, like a kind of roleplay or game.

“Say, Shinichi-san, your parents are otaku too, right?” Hikaru-san asked. “I heard from Matoba-san. Something about how you and I are both ‘thoroughbred otaku.’ He didn’t give me the details, though.”

“Oh, uh, yeah, I guess so. ‘Thoroughbred’ might be taking it a bit far.” I nodded. “My dad is a light novel author, and my mom used to work on ero games.”

“Wow, that’s cool!” Hikaru-san looked impressed.

“Is it, though?”

I shook my head, picturing my parents in my mind’s eye. Neither of them struck me as exactly being an ideal parental unit. At the very least, I figured no normal parent would slice through their shut-in son’s door with a chainsaw. Strictly compared to the average parent, I suppose they could be considered colossal failures.

“My parents, neither of them ever made it pro.”

“Huh...? Oh—oh yeah?”

Hikaru-san had mentioned that his parents met each other at Comiket. And while cosplayers were definitely respected there, the big draw at Comiket was the doujinshi. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that both of Hikaru-san’s parents were there as creators, whether of fan spin-offs or original work.

“I gather they tried to make it big, but it just didn’t work out. They found that the quick ways to make money were copying whatever was popular, or making X-rated doujinshi.” There was that half-smile again.

“Ahh...”

I definitely knew those stories. If you could pump out one popular work after another, it would make you plenty of money to live on—sometimes hundreds of thousands of yen. Of course, it also required the artistic agility to keep your style up to date, and a fine sense of what was going to be the next big thing.

“Well, I guess being a pro doesn’t inherently make a creator a great person,” I said, thinking of my father and mother. “My parents always told me that sometimes it’s best not to do what you really love for your job, that it can take away your ability to watch those works for enjoyment.”

When you go pro, my mom and dad often told me, you lose the ability to make work just for the love of it. What professionals produce is to sell—the customer comes first, and rather than doing what you want to do the way you want to do it, your primary responsibility is to produce something that will sell.

They also warned me that you can lose the ability to simply enjoy the creations of others. Whatever you look at, you can’t help thinking how you would do it another way, or how you could fit a given part of it into your own work, and so on and so forth.

“Plus, all-nighters were par for the course before a draft was due or when a game development deadline came up, so at times like that they could be pretty irritable or... well, just not a lot of fun to be around.”

“Oh, really?”

“I mean, I can only speak for my own parents, but...” I shrugged.

They would have an energy drink in one hand and a coffee in the other, no time to even take a bath, let alone get any sleep, just locked up in their room working... It wasn’t a recipe for a pleasant disposition.

The upshot is, I never really thought about becoming a creator. In fact, it made me think that anyone who could endure a life like that and not just quit must really be doing it because they loved it. Because they couldn’t imagine doing anything else. At least, that was my suspicion.

“It sounds like both of us suffered a bit on account of our parents,” Hikaru-san said with a laugh.

“Guess so.”

Granted, given the time I had spent as a parasitic home security guard, I didn’t exactly have the right to criticize my family too harshly.

Finally we arrived at Hikaru-san’s room.

“I’ll see you, then,” I said.

“Yeah. Sleep well.”

I left Hikaru-san there and headed back down the hallway.

“It’s starting to make sense...”

As I walked back to my room, I reviewed my chat with Hikaru-san. His mercenary streak—the way he looked not just at the content of a given work, but at the best way to sell it as well—might just show the influence of parents who made doujinshi while also keeping a finger on the pulse of what was popular. It reflected the idea that you could pick genres based on what was big rather than what you personally liked, a surprisingly businesslike approach to the often passion-infused work of making fan comics.

I had no idea whether doing it that way was any fun. But it opened my eyes to the idea that you could create something that way, that you could have that sort of relationship with creative works. It was a notion I found just a little bit surprising.

Roughly once a week, a delivery would be made from Japan to the training ground located in a far corner of the downtown area.

Unlike the official cargo brought in as part of Amutech’s business ventures, these loads were full of personal items for the JSDF members stationed here. In other words, not technically anything to do with me.

For the most part, if there was anything I wanted, like an anime, manga, light novel, or other otaku merchandise, I could just officially requisition it and have it brought over as trade goods. Not only would it arrive quicker, it would even be delivered directly to the mansion. I didn’t want to go to nuts mixing business and private shipments, but I had to admit it was convenient.

When it came to personal-interest items that had absolutely nothing to do with Amutech, though, I would ask Minori-san, and she would get them included in the regular JSDF shipment. Like when I got cravings for junk food that wasn’t available in the Eldant Empire, such as potato chips or cola. Myusel made wonderful meals and I couldn’t complain about my diet, but this was something else.

As it happened, today was the day of that regular delivery.

I was there to receive an order, as was Minori-san, and Brooke was with us to help lug things around. Our presence had become pretty standard, but today Myusel and Hikaru-san were with us, too. Myusel would periodically ask Minori-san to help her obtain Japanese ingredients so that she could make dishes with rice or soy sauce. She was here today to see that her order had arrived safely.

“Ooh, here it comes!”

We kept one eye on the kids—they were bound for the military when they grew up, and were currently training nearby—as we headed for where the shipping containers were piled on top of each other.

“Ahh, the day has finally come!” Minori-san walked beside me, chuckling to herself in a way I found more than a little disturbing. “Takai-sensei’s new stuff, Misagi-sensei’s new stuff, the fan disc of Gakuen Rakuen...”

“Minori-san, your face.”

Her expression had practically melted, until it seemed like it could put ice on a century-old love affair. Yikes. How yikes? Well, Myusel was walking on the other side of me, and it was enough to make her draw a face and fall back a step.

It’s not like I didn’t understand how Minori-san felt. It’s always exciting when something you’ve been waiting for finally shows up.

“C’mon, slowpokes!”

Unable to wait any longer, Minori-san went rushing ahead.

“Oh, I’ll help!” Myusel said, hurrying after her.

Hikaru-san, Brooke, and I followed behind.

“Sorry I’m always dragging you away from your gardening, Brooke,” I said.

“Think nothing of it, sir.” He shook his head. “Does it seem there’s more cargo than usual?”

“Hmm. I wouldn’t say that, but it might be heavy. We ordered a lot of rice and miso and such. Elvia really wolfs that stuff down.”

Maybe the flavors of Japanese food really agreed with Elvia, because she easily ate three times as much of it as I did. Yet she never seemed to put on any weight. It was enough to make me think that her basic metabolism was different, or maybe it was the result of being so well-muscled.

“It would’ve been nice if we could have gotten her to help us, too,” I said. Elvia had a werewolf’s strength, which made carting around cargo a pretty simple task.

“There wasn’t much we could do,” Hikaru-san said. “She got so into the card idea that she hasn’t come out of her room since.”

“True enough.”

As Hikaru-san said, Elvia had become a shut-in herself.

She was currently doing the art for the trading card packaging. This would actually be the second one. The first one had already been piloted—which is to say, the sale of trading cards had already started, primarily at the school. Hikaru-san had said he would handle the legwork, so I left him to take care of most card-related matters. It sounded like the new product was doing pretty well.

That was exactly why we had decided to bring in another bunch from Japan, the packaging for which Elvia was at that very moment feverishly designing. The sight of her pictures being printed and distributed en masse had a distinctly positive effect on her, and she had thrown herself into the new design. Hence why we had given up on coaxing her into coming along today.

In any event, it looked like introducing trading cards to the Eldant Empire had been a good call.

“Oooh hoo hoo hoo hoo!”

Minori-san, the endless grin still on her face, was taking a cardboard box out of a shipping container with Myusel’s help. When I got to the containers, I joined the JSDF soldiers in extracting the contents and making sure everything was there.

When I was most of the way through, I looked up.

“Okay, so...”

All around me, people had finished getting their orders and had settled to chatting with each other. I let out a small sigh of relief to see things apparently safely wrapped up.

“Huh?”

That was when I noticed two cardboard boxes piled on top of each other in a corner.

Whose could those be? None of the soldiers seemed to be paying any attention to them, and Minori-san was already pawing happily through her delivery, so they probably didn’t belong to any of them.

I went over to the mystery boxes.

“Huh...?”

I furrowed my brow. The boxes had been torn, whether in transit or while being taken out of the shipping container, I didn’t know. So I could just see inside...

“Those are personal items. Could you kindly not peek?”

“Ah...”

I turned and saw Hikaru-san walking toward me; as he went by, he swooped the boxes up in his arms. Whatever was in there, it wasn’t very heavy.

“This is your stuff?”

“Yes. My name is on them, as you can see.” He indicated the sides of the boxes.

“Er... What’s in them?”

Hikaru-san didn’t answer immediately, but gave me a mischievous grin. Then he tapped a finger to his lips before whispering, “Never ask a girl her secrets.”

Er, ahem. With you, it’s impossible to tell when you’re joking around. Please be careful...

“Are you that interested in what a girl might be hiding, Shinichi-san?”

“N-No, I—”

I didn’t know what to say. If I said I wasn’t interested at all, it might sound like I was saying I didn’t care about him as a person, but if I nodded eagerly, I suspected it would only cause a misunderstanding.

“Hey,” I said, deciding to go with the easy out of a one-liner, “whooza girl here, anyway?”

“Why the drawl?”

“I thought that was supposed to make any one-liner funnier.”

“Hehehe. Well, there are a few things in here I might be embarrassed for anyone to see, so I have to ask for your discretion.” Hikaru-san turned, putting himself between me and the cardboard boxes. Brooke happened to be passing by at just that moment. “Brooke-san,” Hikaru-san said, holding the boxes out, “would you be so kind as to take care of these?”

“O’ course. Put ’em right here, please.” He indicated the three boxes he was already holding. Hikaru-san placed his two, smaller boxes on top.

“I’ll put ’em in the carriage,” Brooks said, and shuffled away. I gazed vacantly after him.

“Shinichi-san? Is something the matter?” Hikaru-san asked me.

“N-Nothing! Nothing at all,” I said with a hint of panic.

“Is that all the cargo?” Minori-san asked as she came up with her arms full of boxes. It looked like she was more or less sane again, having confirmed that all the stuff she wanted was present and accounted for. Beside her was Myusel with another box.

“I guess so,” I said, checking over my own box once again and nodding.

“Let’s get going, then,” Minori-san said, and the three of us headed for the bird-drawn carriage.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, about what I thought I had seen in Hikaru-san’s box. It looked like it was stuffed with memory cards—all of the same type, at that.

What was he planning to use all those for?

Hikaru-san had brought his own laptop computer over here, and I was sure they must go with that—but did he need so many of just one type? Wouldn’t a portable hard drive have been a more efficient form of storage? Even if he was planning to use them with a digital camera or something, it wasn’t realistic to think he would switch them out so often.

I was left with a questioning look on my face. Oh, well. I didn’t know if they were a girl’s secrets, exactly, but since he had said they were private, I couldn’t very well press the matter. Maybe he just... liked to collect memory cards. Okay, so it wasn’t very likely. But it wasn’t impossible.

“Hmmmm...”

I felt like something was wrong, though, even if I didn’t know what it was. It was a sense I couldn’t shake, even as I climbed aboard the carriage with my boxes.

The next morning...

“G’morning.”

When I arrived at the classroom at school, I found the students thoroughly absorbed in something. It was rare for the students to pay me no mind at all when I came in; it seemed less like they were ignoring me and more like they were completely engaged in whatever they were looking at. The wall of bodies kept me from seeing what exactly it was from the doorway.

“It’s always my turn!”

Didn’t I know that line from somewhere? Whoever was saying it sounded very confident.

There was still time before class started, so I moved up as quietly as I could, so as not to disturb whoever was playing. I peeked in between the rows of students.

“Hrr! In that case—”

“Ha ha ha! It’s futile! Feast your eyes on this!”

“Wh-What?!”

“It costs zero and reflects all damage back at the opponent! You take 160 damage!”

“Hey, that’s no fair!”

“It’s all right here on the card!”

Two human students appeared to be dueling each other in a card game.

“You don’t have a copy? Too bad for you!”

“Where’d you even get—”

“Ha ha ha! With this card, I’m invincible!”

“Grr...”

“Now, moving on!”

And so on and so forth.

It looked like the game had turned pretty lopsided, with one of the players making a punching bag of the other. The card illustrations depicted adorable characters, but the actual card effects seemed really nasty. It was hardly even a fight.

I didn’t know much about card games, but this...

“Hah! Hah! I win!”

I gathered that the battle was over.

There had simply been too much of a gap in the abilities of the players’ cards. It was like bringing a knife or a gun to what was supposed to be a fist fight. Whatever rare card that kid had, the moment it came out, the other student’s chances of victory had vanished.

“Now,” the winning student said, holding out his hand to the loser, whose shoulders slumped dejectedly. Slowly, reluctantly, the loser gave one of his own cards to the winner.

............Wha?

“Uh—Uh, excuse me!” I said, pushing past the other students and approaching the players.

“Oh, Shinichi-sensei. Good morning, sir.”

“Morning. No! I mean—did the guy who lost just give you a card?”

“Hm? Oh, sure.” The students all nodded.

“Wh-Why would he do that?”

“Why? That’s the rule, sir,” the winner said with a smile. “Were you not aware of that?”

“Er, cards are more Hikaru-san’s—”

Hikaru-san’s thing, I was going to say. I’m not really that familiar with them.

The student must have figured what I was going to say, because he replied with a smile, “The winner can take any one card they like from the loser. That’s what gives these battles their excitement!”

“Huh, easy for you to say. You’re the one who goes around getting all the powerful cards so you can win.” The resentful mutter came from the losing student. “I saw you, buying that super-powered card earlier.”

“Huh...?”

Buying?

The winner didn’t look very happy about that. “That was a fair exchange based on mutual consent. Everyone’s doing it. If you don’t like it, go get some powerful cards of your own.” His tone was awfully harsh, and just for a second, I thought a fight might break out. But happily, it didn’t come to that. At length, the two students cleaned up their cards and went back to their seats.

I was silent for a long while. Buying? Were people really that into the cards?

I understood trading to complete your set or something. But the way they’d been talking, it didn’t sound like that was what they were referring to.

I looked around the classroom.

Almost as soon as Hikaru-san had started selling the trading cards, they had become a big hit both at the school and with everyone connected to it. Students carrying their cards in the classroom had become a common sight. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t really noticed it.

No. I had seen it, but it just hadn’t sunk in. I hadn’t realized that when students were over in the corner of the classroom trading, cards weren’t the only things changing hands.

It had been...

“..................Money.”

The bronze and silver pieces minted by the Eldant Empire.

I mean, these were merchandise to begin with, so maybe it wasn’t that strange if the people who bought them then traded them on. They were called trading cards, after all. They might even sell extra cards to people who didn’t have them.

But no matter how you sliced it, the amounts of money being paid for a single card were weird.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought that when I saw students trading, some of them had been giving change. That implied the cards had a market value, and that there was a difference in “price” between cards that couldn’t be ignored.

What the heck was going on here?! Something was wrong, even though I couldn’t say exactly what. It gave me the creeps.

Wasn’t this basically gambling? Heck, we were lucky gambling was all it was. If this sort of thing escalated, it could lead to extortion, people stealing cards from one another, and who knew what else? I was pretty sure things like that had happened in Japan already...

“Hikaru-san...?” Almost unconsciously, I found myself looking for the Japanese who had introduced trading cards to the Eldant Empire.

“Yes? Can I help you, Shinichi-san?”

Hikaru-san, who had arrived at the classroom a little later than me, was seated beside the lectern. He was reading what appeared to be a light novel, from which he now looked up at me with a quizzical tilt of the head.

“I know I decided to have you handle the trading cards...”

“Yes, that’s true,” Hikaru-san said, nodding evenly.

“So, uh, does that mean all the cards those kids are playing with are ones you imported?”

“I wouldn’t know for sure without looking,” Hikaru-san answered, “but I don’t think the technology for printing PP-coated paper like on cards exists in this world, does it? In principle, I control it.”

I paused. “Come with me a sec.”

I took Hikaru-san by the hand and pulled him to his feet, then led him out of the classroom.

“A few minutes ago, I saw a couple of students playing that card game, and... I mean, the balance seemed really off.”

“How do you mean?” Hikaru-san’s smile never faltered.

I furrowed my eyebrows, feeling oddly adrift. “I don’t know much about card games, but when a single overpowered card lets one player walk over the other, that doesn’t seem like good balance to me. Shouldn’t a card game be a little more like, you know, Rock, Paper, Scissors? When you have some almighty, invincible card, it doesn’t seem like much of a game anymore...”

The outcome ends up being decided not by strategy or tactics, but simply by the question of whether or not you have that particular card. That was why students were offering money exchange for powerful cards. Many times more money than the cards had originally sold for.

“Ahh,” Hikaru-san said, his smile deepening. “Perfect. Just the effect I was looking for.”

“Come again?”

“That, Shinichi-san,” Hikaru-san said evenly, “is exactly what I hoped would happen.”

“Exactly what... what you hoped...?” For a second, I was so stunned that all I could do was repeat his words dumbly.

Was Hikaru-san saying that he had deliberately introduced an unbalanced card game to Eldant? Had that game actually been designed from the ground up to be that one-sided?

“There are some cards so powerful that you can simply decimate your opponent,” Hikaru-san said melodically. “And how do you think they look to people who are already obsessed with the game? Especially people who wager cards on the outcome?”

“I mean... They...”

Obviously, they would be desperate for cards like that.

Cards like that would be a license to just go “ME SO STRONG!!” all the time. And if you also got an opponent’s card from winning that way, you wouldn’t just get to enjoy the bragging rights, you’d get actual spoils of war. The cards were already becoming market products here in Eldant, selling for far more than they seemed worth to us Japanese. If you could obtain them just by battling...

“Even if you had to pay a boatload of money for them...” It was then that it dawned on me. “Hikaru-san, you didn’t—”

I remembered what the losing student had said.

Where’d you even get—

Did that imply the card wasn’t normally for sale? Sure, there were rare cards in every trading card game. But despite this still being a pilot program, we had already sold close to ten thousand cards in the Eldant Empire. People should be pretty familiar with what was available by now.

“Hikaru-san... are you importing super powerful rares with no concern for balance and selling them at a premium?!”

Okay, hold on. Having little or no concern for balance was one thing. But was he doing it deliberately to break the balance?

The cards we were selling in Eldant had originally been sold in Japan. And the companies that produced these cards were pros; they knew better than to sell individual cards that would totally upend the balance of their game.

Again, this was a subject I didn’t know a whole lot about, but I gathered that trading cards could be subject to expansions and more expansions, as many as they could sell, that could be added on to the original game. This was obviously in part to entice players and collectors, but it was also common to add flashier and more powerful cards to the game.

When you did that, you always added other cards, too, ones with special effects or ones that could counter the most powerful cards—all so that one player couldn’t simply dominate everyone else just because they possessed a specific card. If you didn’t, there wouldn’t be any game left, and the people buying your trading cards would quickly stop.

“Yes. I’ve had to decide things like what to import, when to release it into the market, who to sell cards to, and how many, all chiefly by trial and error. I was worried it might not work.” He didn’t sound like he felt the least bit guilty about any of this.

Was this part of why he had wanted to open the packs before repackaging them here? So he could control the rares?

“But then...”

After all the work we went to to bring trading cards over here, people wouldn’t be able to enjoy them. In fact, wasn’t there a good chance that it would cause people with no interest in the cards themselves to treat them as investment products? That you would have warped players who didn’t care about the game, but only fulfilling their desire to have?

“You’re afraid investors and collectors will create a cutthroat trading market,” Hikaru-san said as if he had read my mind. “Of course, that’s well within my calculations. For that matter, how else could there be any point to controlling the market? You create deliberate inequality by introducing overpowered rare cards, let the market lie fallow for a while until enough card-flippers come along, then you toss in new products that can counter the overconcentration of those rare cards.”

I was silent, astonished.

“By that point, people will already be used to a premium markup, so they’ll think they’re getting off cheap and flock to the new cards. Once things have started to even out a little bit, you bring in even more powerful cards or ones that nullify the previous ones, and sell those.”

“Hang on. Hang on just a second, Hikaru-san. That’s—”

“Yes? What is it?”

Hikaru-san cocked his head, as if to say, I’m not doing anything wrong.

“That’s just so commercialistic.”

It was against the spirit of the games themselves. It was a sales strategy that treated the customers as nothing more than objects to manipulate. Induced scarcity, deliberately inflated value. The only parallel I could think of was the drug trade.

“Wait. Wait...”

I thought of three words: the Opium Wars.

They were conflicts the English had manufactured with Qing China. Faced with a trade imbalance they couldn’t seem to rectify, the British started producing opium in large quantities in order to prevent too much of their own currency from winding up in China. It was cheap even in huge amounts; they had it produced in India, which was a colony of theirs at the time, and then imported it to China to squelch the trade imbalance.

Some people, however, saw it as a kind of invasion strategy on the part of the British. Why? Well, after the Arrow War—the second of two conflicts known as the Opium Wars—a part of the Qing empire became a colony of the British.

I know I’m hardly the first person to say this, but drugs and religion, when used in certain ways, can be powerful non-military means of invasion. Some people claim that from the Middle Ages until the modern era, England and Holland have deliberately sent one or both of those things to countries all over the world as a way of invading. And if you look even a little bit closely at any given history book, you’ll find what seems to be proof of that. Because the topic provokes such passion, it’s also often the subject of novels and manga.

“Shinichi-san?” Hikaru-san asked after a very long moment. His smile hadn’t wavered a bit. “What are we?”

Even at that moment, he was so pretty I could barely imagine he was a man. Suddenly, I found something very sinister in that.

“What do you mean, what?”

“We’re Amutech, an entertainment company.” He emphasized the word company, so that it sounded particularly important. “We sell things for a living. Why are you so surprised if there’s an element of commercialism?”

“Well, I mean—”

He was right, but...

“I’m grateful to you, Shinichi-san, and I respect you very much,” Hikaru-san said. “The whole reason I can pull off this trading card scheme is because you’ve done so much to spread otaku culture already. Without your hard work, this could never have succeeded.”

I caught my breath.

“But...” Hikaru-san’s smile never slipped, frozen like a mask. “Your methods, Shinichi-san, are just not very profitable.”

“I just— I—”

Sure. I’d heard that before. It hadn’t escaped my notice, Matoba-san talking about some of the complaints he’d had from over his head.

But complaints or no complaints, I had never wanted to make profit my one and only motive, to do whatever made a buck. Even if the Japanese government thought that made me a naïve child.

And yet... In fact, exactly for that reason, the government, irked that things weren’t going its way, must have decided to cut me loose and replace me with somebody else.

From the start, cultural invasion had been Japan’s goal. In other words, now Amutech was doing exactly what the government had hoped.

Ayasaki Hikaru.

He was—

“We’re purveyors of merchandise. What’s right is what sells, and the more it sells, the more right it is. The Japanese government is paying our salaries, remember. This isn’t our hobby or our pastime. It’s our job.”

I was silent.

“It’s not like we’re doing anything illegal. Or immoral, for that matter. I’ve just found my own way to help ensure that Amutech generates profits as efficiently as possible.”

He sounded so proud of himself.

And as for me, I didn’t have a comeback.