Chapter One: This Just In: We’re Under Attack!

It was dark inside the building.

The place hadn’t been cleaned in months, or maybe years. The windows were so dirty, it was hard to see outside, nothing but dim light seeping through. Somewhere in the gloom it was possible to make out some old metal drums and piles of wood. The chains and crane hooks hanging from the ceiling were rusty, and there wasn’t so much as an emergency light anywhere to be seen.

All of this, along with the layer of dust coating everything, suggested how long it had been since this building had been used.

And in the middle of it all was a woman. A female officer of the Japan Self-Defense Force: Koganuma Minori.

A woman, yes, but one highly accomplished in the martial arts. Her glasses may have given people a gentle first impression, and she usually acted reserved and calm. But when the moment called for it, she could draw on the fighting skills her father had taught her—or simply draw the pistol she always carried. She was a bracing sight either way.

The fact that she was involved in a highly confidential special operation spoke to the fact that she was more than just a foot soldier who knew how to beat people up. She was quick-witted and resourceful.

But now... Now...

“...Hrgh...”

At this moment, she couldn’t put any of her copious skills to use. The reason was simple: her wrists were bound by one of those chains hanging from the ceiling. Her toes—her shoes had been stripped off—didn’t quite graze the floor. Psychologically speaking, it was a more disconcerting place to be than hanging high in the air.

Minori’s hair, usually tied up in a bun, now hung messily at her shoulders. Her glasses still sat on her face, one of the lenses clearly cracked; they hadn’t been taken away, but looked like they might fall off at any moment. The state of her clothes, too, spoke to the violence with which she’d been treated. On top, she’d been stripped down to her underclothes, clearly revealing the cleft of her generous chest. And while she still had her skirt, her stockings were badly torn. There was a certain kind of person who might have been overjoyed to be in her position—but not her.

“Ugh...” She groaned softly and shifted. She was trying to get out of her bindings somehow. There are stories about people who have learned to dislocate their own joints in order to escape handcuffs and ropes. Minori might even have known some of those techniques. But...

“Ah, you’re awake.”

The door opened, and several silhouettes entered. The question was posed to her in Japanese, but when the speaker got close enough to see through the grimy darkness, he was clearly not from her country. He was white, as were all the sharp-featured faces around him.

Russians, perhaps? The faces looked meticulous, yet imposing, wide cheeks accompanied by strangely cold eyes. It was hard to imagine them smiling. The wrinkles lining their foreheads and creeping in next to their eyes suggested they were not young men.

Minori-san looked up in shock.

That face had to be one of the best known in the entire world.

“Pu**n...!”

Vladimir Vladimirovich Pu**n. The fourth and current President of Russia.

But there was something else, something even more shocking.

“That’s impossible!”

All of the men standing in front of her were Pu**n.

He was the strongest president—probably literally, being a former KGB agent, judo champion, and experienced sambo practitioner who had allegedly survived five separate assassination attempts. In other words, he was the one who put the scare in Red Scare.

This man would be despair-inducing enough by himself, but now Minori-san was faced with a crowd of him.

“And now it is time for you to talk, young lady of Japan,” Pu**n No. 1 (let’s call him) said, coming closer. Minori-san spared him a single glance... then scowled hatefully and looked away. She wasn’t going to say a word, she seemed to be telling him.

The corners of Pu**n No. 1’s mouth turned up just a little at this display of defiance. He seemed to expect the reaction. He turned to the Pu**ns (that’s the plural form) behind him and said, “Bring it in.”

“Yes, sir,” one of the Pu**ns (plural form again) said—then he ushered a large container on a self-propelled platform over toward Minori-san. A second later, one of the sides fell free, revealing what was within.

Minori-san caught her breath: inside the container was a cage. It had dozens of thick bars; it was obviously intended to hold a huge, powerful animal.

And there was, in fact, a large creature inside it.

Fangs bared, drooling, eyes alight with madness—a lion!

No, not a lion. Not a tiger, either. Or a wolf, or crocodile, or a snake.

Inside was a polar bear.

What was it doing there? Was it just... because this was Russia she was dealing with?

Then Pu**n No. 1 said something unbelievable: “This bear knows the taste of human flesh. You might survive an arm or a leg, but if he gets to your torso, well, you won’t last long. I advise you to speak before he does so.”

Minori-san was silent. She stared at the white animal in the cage, never looking away.

After a long moment, Pu**n No. 1 said, “I see how it is.”

Then Pu**n No. 2 (not that you could really tell them apart, but let’s just say) opened the door of the cage.

Two massive, white legs came out. The animal must have been at least two meters long—maybe even three. Covered in fur and muscle, made its way patiently toward Minori-san, who was in no position to run away.

Minori-san, still silent, stared the creature down. Her eyes were practically piercing...

“Hrm?” Suddenly, in front of the shocked Pu**ns (all of them), the bear made a sharp right, hunched over, and rode away on a bicycle that it seemed to pull out of thin air.

It was kind of cute, actually.

Now the Pu**ns (plural) looked at each other.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have borrowed him from the Bol**oi Circus?”

“What were we supposed to do? We didn’t have the budget to train our own.”

Apparently even the Pu**ns (none of them) had been expecting Minori-san to be able to win a staring contest with a polar bear. They might not have been so surprised if they knew she had gone toe-to-claw with a dragon once. A domesticated circus animal was really no threat. Apparently the thing about human flesh had been a bluff.

“She leaves us no choice,” Pu**n No. 1 said. “Call them in.”

“Yes, sir,” another of the Pu**ns—Pu**n No. 3—said. He nodded and left the room.

A short time later, though, he came back and nodded to Pu**n No. 1.

“Behold, young lady,” Pu**n No. 1 said, indicating something with a jerk of his chin.

Minori-san, despite her desire not to look in his direction, couldn’t ignore his portentous tone. She spared the slightest of glances—

—and her breath caught in her throat.

There were two more silhouettes at the entrance now. Both men, she guessed. The light behind them obscured their features, but their outlines were suggestive enough.

“Hrk...!” Minori-san, who hadn’t been intimidated even by a live polar bear, made a small, strained noise.

“You are free to pretend indifference, but I doubt your little act will last long with these two. I will be watching to see for myself exactly how long.”

The Pu**ns (all of them), all wearing the exact same half-smile, backed away from Minori-san. The newcomers stepped forward in their place.

They were not Pu**ns.

One was a young man with golden hair. The other was a middle-aged man with black hair. Both were wearing plain overalls, but the complete lack of any sort of stain, mark, or discoloration revealed that these weren’t their everyday work outfits.

“We already know your weakness,” Pu**n No. 1 said from over by the wall. “Just look. Are they not identical?”

Minori-san didn’t say a word.

“Do it. Hold nothing back.”

The golden-haired young man and the dark-haired middle-aged man began to unzip their overalls, from their collars down toward their crotches. Underneath, they appeared to be completely naked. Nothing but unblemished skin and toned muscle appeared from under those clothes...

Still Minori-san said nothing. The two men were expressionless except for a slight flush of excitement on their faces. What could the two of them be planning to do with the bound, half-naked young woman hanging before them? The mind went to many places, none of them good.

Minori-san resolutely tried to look away, but Pu**n No. 3 (probably—it was hard to tell) came around behind her, grabbing her chin and forcing her to look at the men.

“Ohh...” Minori-san trembled. She couldn’t suppress an instinctive response to what was obviously about to happen.

And then...

Then the golden-haired young man reached out and grabbed...

...the dark-haired older man, slowly drawing him closer.

“No...!” Minori-san groaned. “Don’t do that... Handling him as gently as a broken dream...!”

Her breath got hotter. She wanted to look away, but Pu**n No. 3 made sure she couldn’t. Surely she should just close her eyes—but behind the glasses, her eyes were so wide that it was obvious she didn’t even want to blink.

The two men pressed against each other, but then they stopped. They simply stood there, looking at each other.

“Those passionate gazes...” Minori-san breathed. “What could they be wishing for, with such melancholy in their eyes...!”

“I suggest you start talking,” Pu**n No. 1 said, “or things are going to escalate.”

“This... This is unconscionable,” Minori-san said, writhing where she hung from the chain. But of course, she found no sympathy from the Pu**ns (any of them).

Instead, one of them said, “We are aware that you’ve been buying Cat & Bunny doujinshi. The especially yaoi ones.”

They suddenly produced a small book—specifically, a doujinshi aimed at ladies eighteen and up. Minori-san couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

“You seem to particularly enjoy seeing the main characters in each other’s arms. We have, of course, properly investigated which is the top and which is the bottom. And we are all too cognizant of the fact that you cannot abide role reversals. So tell us everything you know, or things are only going to get steamier from here.”

“This is a... a crime against humanity!” Minori-san all but howled.

What an astonishing twist! The Russian agents had discovered just how rotten Koganuma Minori was, and now they were exploiting her weakness to the full. It was real-life BL, right there in front of her eyes—but it was the opposite of what she wanted to see, with the top and bottom reversed, staring into each other’s eyes. Could there be a worse fate for a fujoshi?

She had never imagined such tortures could exist in this world.

Wait—was it torture? Or was it heaven?

Role reversal had been known to destroy fujoshi groups before, though...

“They’re practically nose-to-nose... Erg! No! You can’t touch him there... Ah, ahhh, nooooeeees!” Her voice cracked sweetly, her eyes brimming and her face drawn. The sound of her voice alone could have warranted an X rating.

“Now,” Pu**n No. 3 said. His tone was soft, almost sweet, like Mephistopheles negotiating with Faust. “Tell us, Minori Koganuma...”

“Ahhh...” Her pitiful cry echoed through the building.

And then...

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

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

“Master...?”

Myusel’s voice suddenly brought me back to the real world.

“Huh...?” I looked up to see Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia sitting around the table, and all looking very worried.

“Are you okay?” the flaxen-haired Myusel asked, touching me.

Myusel Fourant—my personal maid, if you can believe it. Her sweet, beautiful face was presently darkened with concern. She had always been the meek type—and watching her blink as she gazed at me with her big, violet eyes, I could practically feel how generous and kind she was.

But then, so were the other faces around me.

“We have been calling you, but you did not answer,” Petralka said with a frown. She, too, had a hand on me.

Petralka an Eldant III. At first glance she looked cute, almost like a doll, but she was actually the Empress of the Holy Eldant Empire, a country in an entirely separate world.

And she shouldn’t have been here. Yes, she was the one who had decided to sneak along—but if there was anyone we had to worry about here in Japan, it would be her.

“Are y’ feeling tired? Or maybe sick?” This question came from the third girl—yes, also touching me—Elvia. Specifically, Elvia Harneiman.

She was a beast-girl artist from the other world. She had actual ears and an actual tail—in short, an otaku dream girl.

And she had the same sort of anxious look as the other two. She was always pretty easygoing—you could almost say mellow—so she looked like the calmest of the three, but I could see her tail flicking nervously from side to side.

“Oh... Sorry, I just...” I must have slipped off to sleep, even though I hadn’t remotely noticed it happening.

Let’s just say it had been a busy afternoon. I must have been running on adrenaline and not noticed how exhausted I was. Then again, Myusel and the others had been through just as much as I had, and they were all still awake, so maybe it just went to show what a weakling I was. How embarrassing. Apparently I still had all the physical strength of a former shut-in.

Anyway...

“I just... got a little drowsy...” I looked around my nice, familiar house.

That’s right: I was in Japan. Not the other world.

But Myusel, Elvia, and Petralka were all here. Everything that had happened since we’d arrived in Japan flashed through my mind: the reunion with my family. The yakiniku we’d all shared. Going back to Akihabara.

And then there was being cornered by a Chinese (?) spy, kidnapped by the US Army, and losing Minori-san to Russian (?) agents.

Minori-san...

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Myusel said when she saw me frown silently. “We shouldn’t have woken you up when you were resting...”

“No, no, no,” I said, shaking my head. She must have thought I was angry. “I shouldn’t have been asleep anyway. And besides, I appreciate you woke me up when you did. I was having a nightmare.”

“Like a bad dream?” Elvia asked. “What kind?”

“Well, uh...”

I could still hear Minori-san’s erotic groan in my imagination. I unconsciously squeezed my knees together.

The others looked at me, puzzled.

“Anyway, uh, like I said, this is no time to be sleeping. Sorry about that.” And it wasn’t the time to be having weird dreams, either. “Let’s get back to what we’re going to do next.”

My name is Kanou Shinichi.

I’m pretty much your average otaku—I love anime, manga, light novels, whatever.

If there’s anything that’s unusual about me, it’s not me personally so much as my environment.

I don’t live in Japan.

In fact, I don’t live on Earth.

The place I live is technically contiguous with Japan, but it’s a completely different world—you have to pass through a hyperspace tunnel called “the hole” to get there.

It’s a long story, but suffice it to say I’m the General Manager of Amutech, the first general entertainment company in the Holy Eldant Empire, a nation in that other world. My job is to spread otaku culture in a place that’s basically a full-throttle fantasy world, with magic and dragons and all kinds of things.

I was lost at first—very lost—but over time I’ve ended up surrounded by people who help me have a fulfilling life. My maid and caretaker, Myusel; the empress of the whole place, Petralka; my bodyguard and WAC Minori-san; a self-proclaimed wandering artist, Elvia; and so many others.

But then one day, I heard that my dad, a light-novel author, was in the hospital. I can’t say I had ever been very homesick, and I found my life in Eldant plenty rewarding, but there was no way I could ignore a family crisis like that. So I asked the Japanese government to let me go home for a while, and they agreed.

In my case, though, there was no way it could be that simple. My intentions for the spread of otaku culture hadn’t always lined up with the government’s, and they had even sent a special-forces squad to assassinate me once. A change in the Japanese government and the protection of the local leadership had saved me from being killed outright, but I was definitely on Japan’s list of people who didn’t toe the line.

You could say I didn’t entirely trust them.

So when I came back to Japan, it wasn’t just Minori-san who came with me. Myusel and Elvia went along as my bodyguards, too.

Actually getting back didn’t prove to be any problem, anyway. Yes, it turned out Petralka had stowed away... but still, no serious issues all the way back to my house.

My dad, I learned, was actually in pretty good shape—in fact, he was downright energetic, and I probably didn’t need to have worried. But I did finally get a reunion with him, my mom, and my thoroughly disenchanted little sister. I couldn’t tell them the whole truth about everything that happened—state secrets and all—but I was able to bring them up to speed on roughly what was going on. Apparently I had disappeared without so much as a note, and my sister even thought maybe it had been her fault.

So I took care of my nominal reason for coming home within the first afternoon, leaving me plenty of time to take Myusel and the others to Akihabara. Minori-san and I hadn’t been there in ages, and Myusel and company had never been there at all, so I was really looking forward to it.

Buuuut...

I never noticed the shadows closing in on us as we hobnobbed around Akihabara.

First the Chinese (probably, I think) spies. They pretended to be employees at a maid café in order to kidnap me, but it didn’t work.

The next attack came from the Russians (apparently). Incredibly, they succeeded in abducting my bodyguard Minori-san.

The rest of us, though, were approached by people from the American army who pretended to be our friends—and then tried to kidnap us.

Obviously, the rest of the world knew about us and was paying attention. They knew we could tell them something about the big secret Japan was clearly hiding.

Using every trick we had—from magic to Elvia’s superhuman physical abilities to a passing otaku’s itasha—we somehow made it safely back to my house, but we still didn’t have Minori-san. We didn’t know what to do.

Her superior, Matoba-san, had advised us to let the Japanese government handle Minori-san while the rest of us went back to Eldant—but you might remember what I said about trusting the government.

And then...

Back in my living room.

“I wonder... if Minori-sama’s all right...”

We sat around the table looking at each other. Specifically, we each had one arm stretched out on the tabletop, our hands placed on top of one another. It looked like we were about to give a cheer at a sports game, or maybe participate in some bizarre ritual—but there was a perfectly good reason for it.

Magic rings.

The quickest way to communicate with Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia, who were after all from another world, was to use magic devices that could communicate thoughts. Myusel and Petralka knew a certain amount of Japanese, but as the talk got more complicated, these translator rings saved us a lot of time.

In general, though, magical items didn’t work in an environment where there was no magical energy in the atmosphere. Strictly speaking, the rings worked based on the magical energy emitted by a person’s body, but without a medium to travel through, there was no way for the magic to communicate with the person you were trying to talk to. In a confined space, we could have opened a bottle of sprites and used the magical energy to talk just as if we were in the other world. But we only had so many of those bottles, and we wanted to save them when we could.

So instead we sat with our hands joined, literally communicating by touch. This would allow the rings to work even without sprites in the atmosphere.

“What if they’re doing something terrible to her?” Myusel grimaced, apparently envisioning what that “something terrible” might be. She usually looked like a sweet, smiling angel... but circumstances had made my maid look very grim indeed. It made me realize how hard she must have been working to look upbeat when she had come to cheer me up earlier.

How noble, how heroic...

“She will be all right... or so we would like to believe,” said Petralka. She looked less grim than flummoxed, unable to come up with a plan to get around this deadlock. She was so pretty, even her frown was cute.

“Y-Yeah, she’s gotta be, right?!” Elvia sounded a little too eager; maybe she was trying to help lighten the mood. She looked at me almost pleadingly and said, “Th-The Ja-panese guv-erment will save her! Won’t they?”

I didn’t answer.

“Shinichi-sama?!” Her eyes started to look like a dog’s being abandoned by its owner.

I just couldn’t bring myself to blithely say, “Sure, it’ll be fine!” After all, I’d brought Myusel and Elvia along exactly because I didn’t trust the Japanese government to take care of things. Like I said, I wasn’t their favorite person.

I had been getting some results in Eldant, true, but there was that squad of trained killers they had sent after me. And the time they pretended not to notice when I was abducted by the neighboring kingdom of Bahairam. And the person they sent as my “assistant” whose real job was to replace me.

Of course, I was the one the government had a grudge against, not Minori-san. But as my bodyguard, Minori-san had spoken up and acted in my support more than once. Would Japan go out of its way to save her? I hated to say it, but I wasn’t sure.

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that nation-states won’t hesitate to ruthlessly sacrifice a single individual if that person is inconvenient to them. Fiction and history alike are overflowing with examples. And Minori-san was in a unique position. If what the American agent had said was true—if she was officially already dead—it had to be because that was what best served the interests of secrecy. In a word, the government could pretend she didn’t exist, and no one would be the wiser.

If there was one sliver of hope, it lay in the fact that Minori-san was privy to state secrets. If she started talking, the world Japan had gone to such lengths to hide would be out in the open. The government might rescue her just to keep their secrets safe.

Then again, it might be easier just to kill her...

My mind flashed back to the “medical exam” we’d undergone when we came over from Eldant. They had taken blood from all of us except Petralka—meaning they had stuck us all with a hypodermic needle. What if they had injected us with some slow-acting poison, or bacteria that didn’t show symptoms until later? It would be like a time bomb, reaching its most deadly effectiveness only after a set amount of time. Maybe you had to take regular antidotes, or a vaccine to counteract it. That would certainly be a logical way to protect your secrets. Maybe it was a sort of insurance—even if they hadn’t expected exactly what happened, it was something that would ensure we had the good grace to die if we ran off where the government couldn’t get us.

“Shinichi-samaaa...” Elvia was obviously deeply distressed.

This was bad. She really wanted an answer—or maybe she could see from my face that my thoughts weren’t going anywhere good. Heck, with her nose, maybe she even detected some subtle change in my smell.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, glancing around at everyone. “Whatever else... I’m not sure I can bring myself to just go home to Eldant and leave Minori-san here.”

“That is obvious enough by now,” Petralka said, frowning. “You are a fool in the strangest ways, Shinichi.”

“Er... Petralka?”

“Had it been Myusel or Elvia who had been kidnapped, you would be no more likely to simply shrug and go home.” She sounded a little exasperated.

I was lost for words. This meant that she... she trusted me.

Gee, that made me kind of... happy.

But then Petralka said, “So tell us—what exactly do you plan to do?”

“About that,” I said, looking straight at the adorable empress. “First of all, I want at least you, Petralka, to go back to Eldant.”

“What?” Petralka didn’t look happy to hear that.

Dang, I knew that would make her angry. But...

“We’ve got who knows how many countries after us. I hate to be so blunt, but you would be the biggest prize for any of them—and the biggest problem for us if you got kidnapped.”

“Ahem...” Of course, Petralka knew that perfectly well.

“They could get me or Myusel, or Elvia, and it wouldn’t make that much difference to the big picture. But you, Petralka? What then?”

I was, in the end, a Japanese citizen. Myusel and Elvia both came from the other world, but they were ultimately ordinary people, too.

But Petralka was different. Completely. She was a head of state. An absolute monarch. And the way they viewed people like her in the Middle Ages wasn’t like today’s world of democracies and communist regimes and whatever else. I had no doubt that the Eldant Empire had tens, maybe hundreds, or thousands, of people who would gladly lay down their lives for their empress.

If that empress were to be captured by a foreign power, how would the Holy Eldant Empire react? If we weren’t careful—heck, even if we were careful—it might lead to all-out war.

“Let us worry about Minori-san, Petralka, and you—”

“No.” She stuck out her lip and looked away. Sure. This of all times was when she chose to act her age. Or younger.

“Petralka...”

“No, no, no!” She shook her head like she was throwing a tantrum. “We shall not countenance going back alone under these circumstances!”

“But listen—”

“If we are to leave, then you, Shinichi, must come with us. And so must Myusel, and Elvia—and Minori! We will accept nothing else! And what’s more...” She glanced down for an instant. “What would we say to Garius if Minori alone did not return...?”

“Huh...?” I said.

Minister Garius en Cordobal—why would she bring him up right now?

He was Petralka’s cousin, an important advisor within the Eldant Empire. He led the knights of the realm and effectively controlled most of the country’s military. Did he see Minori-san as special somehow? Wait—what? Were they, like... you know? Had I just never noticed? I mean, I knew she lent him a lot of books, but—

“How could we tell him that his precious sister in yaoi, the one who knew his heart, was gone?”

“Oh. That.”

In addition to being a minister, Garius was also, uh—you know. He was a guy, but he liked guys, which apparently gave him something in common with the fujoshi Minori-san. I might have expected it to be exactly the opposite—but apparently not.

“Even we have never seen Garius look so happy as when he speaks of yaoi with Minori,” Petralka said.

“...Is that right?”

I suppose that’s how it gets when you, you know... share an interest with someone. Even if it is an interest I think I’m going to stop talking about right now.

“Thus, we refuse to return home alone.” Petralka put a hand to her modest (a word I choose for political reasons) chest, tapping it with her fist. “We shall go to rescue Minori. It is, after all, a ruler’s duty to look after her subjects.”

Ahh. So Petralka saw Minori-san as practically one of her own people now. That made me kind of happy, too.

This adorable empress called us her friends, without the slightest hesitation or doubt. We, who had once been part of a plot to culturally invade her country.

“It looks like we’re up against at least one army unit, though,” I said. I wasn’t sure if they had intelligence agencies or subversive operators in the Eldant Empire, so I used a broader expression. I guess it wasn’t that far off, insofar as it described people who used guns and skirted the law to support their nation behind the scenes. “Rescuing her is easy to say and all...”

“We need only use magic, needn’t we? And we have the strength of a werewolf, as well.”

“That’s right,” Myusel said as Petralka looked at her.

“Yes’m!” Elvia added as the royal gaze turned to her.

It was true that Myusel could use some magic—even I knew one spell—and that we still had a bit of leeway in our sprite supply. They weren’t very good for ranged attacks, but a rescue operation was likely to involve a lot of close-quarters fighting.

Elvia’s physical abilities, meanwhile, were something we were likely to rely on extensively. Someone who pulled a gun might have an advantage, but in hand-to-hand combat, no one could top her. And again, she would be helped by the amount of close-in battle there would probably be.

The only certainty was that it was very uncertain, but it was a start.

“But there’s the little matter of where she is...” I said.

Fighting power was no good if you didn’t know who or what to fight. And at the moment, we had no idea where Minori-san was. All we knew was that some Russian agent had abducted her in the hurly-burly of Akihabara, and to be honest, we didn’t even know if that was true; it was just what the Americans had told us.

“So where do we look?” I concluded.

“Hrm,” Petralka grunted. Maybe she hadn’t thought that far. “We may simply have to start searching, but we personally are not familiar enough with Ja-pan to have much confidence about what to do.”

“I’m from here, and even I’m lost without any clues. Hey, how would you search if we were in Eldant?”

“By magic, principally.” Petralka looked troubled. “But—”

“You need sprites or a magic stone to use magic at all in this world,” Myusel said, picking up Petralka’s thought. “But those cover such a small area that finding Minori-sama could be next to impossible...”

“Right, sure...” I said.

Even if we had a spell that could find Minori-san, it wouldn’t do us much good in Japan. The lack of magical energy to conduct the spell through the air would severely limit its range. No way we could use anything that would let us find one specific person in a large space. Could we possibly narrow down the search area even a little?

“Maybe Elvia could track her scent!” I said. “Or... maybe not.”

Elvia was shaking her head even as I spoke. “I know Minori-sama’s scent, but...”

“I know, she must have traveled by car,” I said.

And with all the people who came through Akihabara at any given time, Minori-san’s specific odor was probably long gone by now.

“Hmm,” we each muttered. It was starting to look like we were out of options. But then...

“Um, Shinichi-sama...” Myusel seemed to want to offer an opinion. “What about... you know?”

“What?”

“It was in a manga you let me read once. Something from this world that allows you to know a person’s location. Uh, the name had three characters, but they weren’t kanji, katakana, or hiragana.” She began to write in the air with her free hand.

“Jee... pee... oh! You mean GPS?”

Her face lit up. “Yes, that’s it! In the manga, it sounded like it could locate someone for you...”

“Why did you not mention such a useful thing sooner?!” Petralka demanded.

Myusel shrank back. “I—I’m sorry...”

“Er... worry not.” Petralka scratched her cheek uncomfortably and looked away.

“Well, I think it’s great that y’ remembered it.”

“Er, yes, thank you.”

“At any rate, Shinichi, could we not use this zee pee ess—”

“I’m sorry, but... I’m afraid we couldn’t.” Petralka looked so hopeful—but I had to shake my head. “I had the same thought, for a moment. But if we could track her cell phone’s GPS, the government would have located her ages ago. And anyway, if a bunch of civilians thought of this, what about the people who captured her? Any trained agent would have destroyed her cell phone the second they got their hands on her.” There was a moment of silence. The others looked at each other, not quite following me. “Uh, so what I mean is—GPS is—it’s like these magic rings. If you don’t have a special tool with you, it can’t track you.”

That was pretty imprecise as explanations went, but I didn’t have time to try to tell them about how man-made satellites communicated with base stations on Earth to triangulate a position.

“Anyway,” I said, “tracking someone by GPS isn’t normally something a private individual can—well, okay, so my mom traced what I was doing once using a GPS log.”

My mom had been an ero-game designer, drawing X-rated pictures of beautiful women. Sort of as part of this vocation, during her student days she had picked up some coding skills, and used them to pitch in when her perennially shorthanded studios needed a programmer.

She acquired a bit of a talent for hacking, too. I don’t mean the “super-hacker” stuff you see in manga or whatever, where someone breaks into a military facility’s network to launch ICBMs. Come to think of it, I’ll bet nukes aren’t even connected to the network. But never mind.

“Shinichi, your mother is capable of using this ZPS?”

“Maybe, but again, if Minori-san doesn’t have a special tool with her, we won’t be able to find her. The only thing you can track is the location of the tool, not Minori-san herself.”

The four of us were looking dejectedly at each other when—

— ♪

My cell phone jingled from my pocket. The sound was the theme song from the Rental☆Madoka movie, meaning this wasn’t a mail or a Twitter notification—someone was calling me.

I glanced down at the screen to find Matoba-san’s name.

“It’s from Matoba-san,” I told the others, and then I answered and put the phone to my ear.

Maybe he had new info about Minori-san. Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia all had the same idea; they watched me with bated breath. But the voice we heard from my phone was... ragged.

“Shinichi-kun, are you at your house?!”

I had never heard him sound like this before. For that matter, I had hardly known him to get upset before.

“Huh? Y-Yeah, so?”

What was going on?

“All right... Shinichi-kun, stay calm and listen to me.”

“Okay...”

I felt my back stiffen. I didn’t trust Matoba-san completely, but I didn’t think he’d try to lead us into a trap, either. And that meant...

“The regular check-ins from the Public Security division assigned to your house have stopped.”

“Huh? You mean—”

“Most likely, someone or something neutralized them and is very close to your house right now. Be on the alert.”

“......Wait...”

What the heck?!

How was I supposed to be on the alert? What for?!

But Matoba-san hung up before I could ask. Silently, I took the phone away from my ear, staring at the words Call ended on the screen.

“Shinichi?”

“Master?”

The look on my face obviously didn’t inspire confidence in my friends. Elvia was leaning forward too, waiting for me to say something.

All I could manage was: “What are we gonna do?”

It was the deep of the night—sometime after 3 a.m. Normally, I would have been asleep by now.

Dark shapes approached the Kanou household, careful to slip through the shadows left by the city lights.

That’s right: shapes. Not just one. Eight all together.

They were all men. They looked Asian—you could be forgiven for thinking they were Japanese, but as a Japanese myself, I just didn’t think they looked like my fellow countrymen. Something deep in my genes told me something was off. If I had to guess, I might have said they were Chinese.

They were all dressed in perfectly ordinary clothes, almost like they didn’t care if a wandering patrolman spotted them. Their shirts and pants were all the sort of thing you could find year-round at any bargain clothing shop. Over their clothes they wore windbreakers, parkas, jackets, coats. All kinds of things, none of them suited for the same season—but there were plenty of dark colors, probably to make it easier for them to blend into the night.

They had one more thing in common: all of them had their right hands in their pockets, like they were holding onto something so they could pull it out at any time.

Each of them approached from a different direction, then stopped when they got close to my house. They looked to make sure there was no one else around, then collectively pulled their hands out of their pockets. They were all wearing thin gloves and carrying stun guns, along with—

“Ooh! Those are Type 64 silenced pistols! I didn’t know they were still using those.”

Two of the men were carrying weapons that brought an innocent joy to my dad, the light-novel author Kanou Shougo.

“What are you talking about?” I said, turning toward him. My dad was a gun nut who knew all sorts of obscure trivia like this.

“It’s a silenced handgun used for special operations. The unique thing about it is that it’s designed with the suppressor, the part that makes it shoot quietly, built right into it. It dates from the Vietnam War, and I thought they stopped using them after they introduced the Type 67. Maybe they never bothered giving new ones to people stationed in a quiet country like Japan.”

“Huh,” I said, my answer reflecting my deep indifference to all of that.

My mind, meanwhile, went straight to the two (probably, maybe) Chinese women who had attacked us in Akihabara. Were these men here because the women had failed and someone—their superiors, their country?—was ready to resort to more certain and more violent means?

This was all turning into a major pain.

“They fire small-caliber, subsonic rounds, so relatively speaking they’re not that powerful. I think.”

“And what, that’s supposed to make us feel better?” I sighed and looked back at my computer screen. The 27-inch liquid crystal display had several windows open on it, showing the approaching men from a variety of angles.

We were in my mom’s room, by the way, and this was my mom’s computer. The six-mat room I called my own wasn’t exactly cramped, but with me, Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia in there—and then adding my mom, my dad, and my sister Shizuki, it would have gotten awfully cozy. In fact, I figured it would turn into a bit of a sauna, even without the heat on...

“Are these people after you, Master...?” Myusel asked in a whisper.

Elvia, perplexed and equally quiet, pointed to something on the screen. “What’ve they got in their hands here?”

“Those are guns, like Minori-san’s weapon. And the rest of them have stun guns—I assume.”

“Skun gans?”

“Stun guns. They deliver a strong electric shock—uh, like a portable lightning bolt. They can knock someone out.”

“So it’s like a magic item for lightning attacks?” Myusel asked.

“I guess you could think of it that way,” I said, and then I looked back toward my mother, Kanou Sakiko, who had been silently working at the computer. “Listen, Mom...”

“What?” Her hands were flying across the keyboard; she didn’t even look at me. I had no idea what she was doing...

“Why do you even have this?”

“This” was the optical devices that were currently displaying real-time feeds on our screen—in other words, security cameras.

“Because we bought it, obviously.”

“Back before they raised the consumption tax,” my dad offered. What a mundane reason.

“I mean, why does a private household even need security cameras?!”

One camera I could understand. But we had so many, it was crazy. There must have been at least eight separate cameras sending us the views we were looking at now.

“Ahh, you just can’t be too careful these days,” my dad said.

“Things happen sometimes,” my mom added, still tapping away on the keyboard. “Frothing fans of your father show up, and the police have to get involved. You must remember, Shinichi.”

“Oh...” I vaguely recalled something like that happening once every three or four years.

“And there’s a young woman in the house,” my dad said, and then he and my mom shared a “Right?!” look.

Shizuki (the young woman in question) didn’t say anything. She wasn’t the least bit amused by this overprotectiveness, but since it was explicitly for her benefit, she couldn’t exactly object, either. She just stood there looking annoyed.

I guess nowadays there were security cameras on half the street corners, and with cameras getting cheaper even as their resolution got better and better, there was no real reason a private residence shouldn’t have a system like this.

“Your mom and dad worked hard to make this happen,” my mom said.

“We buried some of the cameras in walls and made covers for others so they’d be hard to see.” My parents were both smiling beatifically.

“That sounds less like hard work and more like an arts and crafts project,” I shot back immediately.

If you were really worried about security, the smart thing to do was to put a camera right out in the open, like, Hey, here’s a camera! Once you started hiding them, you got into creeper territory real quick.

I hadn’t even noticed the equipment myself, so it must have been really well hidden. Reflecting on my parents’ already dubious personalities, it wasn’t hard to imagine them gleefully pursuing the project together. Otherwise how would they have ended up with such high-res cameras in places full-fledged secret agents wouldn’t spot them? Then again, the spooks probably didn’t even imagine a private home would have a setup like this.

The image we were looking at was so sharp that we could pick out the type of handguns they were using even though it was the middle of the night. I wouldn’t have put it past my parents to have installed infrared sensors, too.

“Well, we looked at the options and just wanted to try some different things.”

“Not to mention, decommissioned military night-vision equipment is starting to make its way onto the market.”

“The market for who? Other than you, I mean...”

I turned away from my parents, who still seemed inordinately proud of themselves, and looked at the agents on the screen again. A moderately crazed reader was one thing, but I have to say I never expected Chinese (???) secret agents to show up at my house.

Neither, it looked like, had my parents...

“This is like a plot twist out of a light novel, eh, Mom?” my dad said.

“They do say truth is stranger than fiction.”

“You’re recording this, right? I might use it for one of my books sometime.”

“In HD, dear.”

When I heard my parents bantering back and forth in spite of the nerve-racking situation, I felt some of the tension drain out of my body. I wasn’t sure if they didn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation, or if they were simply made of sterner stuff than I’d been giving them credit for. Either way, I owed them an awful lot...

“Uh... hey.” Shizuki was the only one who didn’t seem to quite follow what was happening. She sounded less scared than just sort of put out. I guess that was understandable. Try telling a random high school girl that a Chinese assault squad is knocking at her door—it wouldn’t seem real. “I don’t exactly get it. Who are these people? Are those real guns?”

“Uhhh...” I thought as quick as I could to come up with a story. “You remember I said Petralka was a princess, right?”

“Uh-huh...”

“Well, people from the country of, uh, pandas want to kidnap her while she’s here. I could tell you why, but there’s a bunch of, you know, international relations stuff involved.”

Shizuki didn’t answer, but only stared at me. To her, I was just her no-account shut-in otaku of an older brother, and she probably had trouble believing I was really caught up in anything on that scale.

“Myusel,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder where she stood beside me.

“Yes, sir?”

“If push comes to shove, I’m trusting you with Shizuki and Petralka.”

They were the only two among us who had no way of their own to fight. Er, well, my dad probably didn’t, either. I really doubted the “correspondence karate course” had taught him anything that would help against professional brawlers, but—well, women and children first, right? Myusel’s wind magic should allow her to deflect bullets and maybe land a hit on the enemy.

“Yes, sir...!” She clenched both fists and nodded at me... but then she hesitated for a moment. “Er, Master... You...”

“I can fall back on what you taught me, Myusel,” I said, keeping my voice down. I had to be careful not to mention magic in front of my parents and Shizuki.

Our talk was interrupted by Elvia, looking at the screen, who exclaimed, “It looks like they’re gonna come in any minute!”

I glanced over and saw she was right: the men had gathered at the back door of the house and seemed to be touching it. Maybe they were trying the lock.

“L-Listen, I think we should call the police...” Shizuki, who at least understood that this was no laughing matter, was getting out her phone.

But I shook my head. “If that were a good idea, Matoba-san... I mean, the Japanese government official I talked to, he would have already alerted the local authorities.”

He’d had the good grace to let me know when he found out my security detail had been neutralized, but that meant the police probably weren’t on their way. I assumed they hadn’t been given any details of my presence in the area for security reasons, and maybe some assemblyperson who was friendly with the Chinese was even leaning on them to stay out of it. I had no way of knowing.

There was also a pretty good chance our cell signal was being blocked. They didn’t seem to have cut our landline, presumably because it would have drawn attention to them by affecting the entire neighborhood; even the phone company might have noticed that there was an outage.

So maybe we could have called the cops and told them we were being robbed or something, but it was too late now. By the time the police got here, it would all be over. That was how fast the agent(-ish) men were working.

“But... what do we do?” I wondered aloud.

It looked like our only choice was to fight them ourselves. But could we possibly?

Our opponents were obviously professional fighters. This wasn’t like facing down the JSDF special forces in Eldant. We’d had our own trained brawlers then—the knights of the Eldant Empire. We’d had Garius and Brooke. But now? Myusel, Elvia, and I were the only ones with any ability to fight at all. My mom, maybe a little. But even if she could handle herself in hand-to-hand combat, I just didn’t think a housewife had much chance confronted by enemies who not only knew martial arts but had ranged weapons and stun guns. Myusel’s and my magic gave us ranged abilities the agents didn’t know about, and I doubted they were aware of Elvia’s superhuman physical strength, either. Those things would probably offer our only opportunities.

But how could we actually use them?

At the moment, we knew everything about the agents—what they looked like, where they were, what they were doing. We could use that information to launch a surprise attack. In this house, though, what was the best place for that? How should we set it up?

“...Man, digital equipment is really something else these days,” I said.

I couldn’t believe the image was so clear. We could see more than just their faces; we could make out the actual weapons they were holding. If what my parents had been saying was true, you could even record at this resolution. Considering that apparently any Neanderthal of a DIY handyman could hide the things so well that even trained agents didn’t notice them, it looked like there was hardly anything to complain about with the cameras.

“It’s like watching a movie,” I added, inspired by the unreality of the moment and the pristineness of the image. It looked so good I practically wanted other people to see it, too.

.........Wait, hang on.

“That’s it.”

“Shinichi?” Petralka looked at me in surprise. Ahh, the sweet befuddlement this empress shows me sometimes it’s just so cu—okay, not time for moe now!

“Yes, that’s it. That’s what we’ll do.” I looked at her with one of those smiles you get when you have a wonderful, awful idea.

“Have you thought of something?” Petralka pressed. I nodded, then reached for the mouse and keyboard. My mom looked like she was about to object, but then she just silently moved aside.

“We’re online, right?”

“Yeah, but you can’t call 110 from the internet,” my dad said. “Given most telephone landlines and internet cables are buried underground these days, they probably can’t cut just ours.”

He was right. But we would teach those people (probably) from that panda country what a mistake it had been not to try.

“This is just such a good-looking image, I said,” pointing to the screen. “I want everyone in the whole world to see it.”

The agents went around the back of the house and began by infiltrating the garden. They double-checked that the lights in the house were off. Then they placed some sort of cloth or something against the window of the living room, which faced the garden, and smacked it with the guns they were carrying.

Ahh, okay. They were causing a partial break in the glass there.

My dad had told me once that in real life, it’s very hard to make a nice, round hole in a piece of glass like you might see someone do in manga or anime. It’s not like using an X-Acto knife to cut a circle in a piece of paper. It’s not like in the movies where they scratch a circle in the glass, then slap on some special tool that pops out a segment.

No, the agents were using some kind of sticky covering to dampen the sound and minimize scatter while they broke the window. No one would hear them and they would be less likely to end up with a bunch of broken glass all over.

None of us spoke.

One of the agents reached through the hole in the window, undid the crescent lock, and then they all came tramping in without even taking off their shoes.

At that moment—

“Oof!”

The lead agent stumbled backward with a short, sharp exhalation.

The kick that came flying out of the darkness had taken him square in the face. Even a professional fighter like him couldn’t defend against such a sudden attack; he fell spectacularly onto the floor and stopped moving. Out cold, I guessed.

The other agents shouted, softly. Definitely not in Japanese. It really did sound kind of like Chinese to me. The excited tones suggested they were saying something like, “What the hell just happened?!”

“Hrgh!”

While they were whispering to one another, another agent was attacked. This one found a leg swept out from under him, costing him his balance, before a rising uppercut caught him in the solar plexus. He rose nearly a meter up in the air before collapsing to the ground with a dull thud like his comrade.

There was another excited burst of the foreign language. The remaining agents took a step back, guns at the ready as they tried to ascertain who or what was attacking them.

She didn’t pursue them, though—I had warned her not to do anything reckless—but crouched on all fours where the agents weren’t likely to spot her.

It was Elvia.

The living room was dark, obviously—but Elvia had strong night vision, and could even locate her opponents by smell, so a lack of light was no problem for her. Even a glancing blow from her beast-person muscles, so much stronger than a human’s, was more than enough to knock a man out.

Of course, the agents had snuck up to the house without any light; their eyes were adjusted to the dark. They finally located Elvia, who looked like a wolf prepared to spring on her prey at any moment. The agents looked at each other, but they had their composure back now. They leveled their guns at Elvia.

They didn’t fire immediately, maybe because killing wasn’t their objective.

“You come with us!” they ordered in heavily accented Japanese.

Elvia, obviously, wasn’t about to just meekly go along with them—she probably didn’t even understand them that well. She just growled quietly, like an animal.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I said, and suddenly the area was flooded with light.

I had really just flipped the nearby light switch from my place by the wall, but the agents, suddenly assaulted by the bright light, took a startled step backward, holding their hands up to shield their faces.

It was only a second, but it took their eyes off Elvia and made them move their guns just a little.

She didn’t let the opportunity go to waste. Elvia kicked off the floor, leaping at them. The agents tried to respond, but they probably didn’t have a lot of experience with an “animal” attacking from below waist level. They couldn’t get a good aim. Elvia knocked one of them over, and he hit his head on the floor. She drove a fist into his solar plexus, and the agent went unconscious without a sound.

That made three.

That was all our little ambush was going to get us, though.

“Do not move!”

Pew! I guess a silencer doesn’t actually silence a gunshot completely. Suddenly there was a hole in the wall. A warning shot. Even Elvia couldn’t move faster than a speeding bullet. She froze where she was.

“If you will behave, we do not kill you. You come with us, Kanou Shinichi.”

A classic threat. But I didn’t answer. I just nodded, smiling.

The agent didn’t seem to like that. “You come with us!” He sounded more agitated now. Even a civilian like me could practically hear the murderousness in his voice—but I was also aware of my lips turning up in the biggest grin I had ever grinned. Uh-oh. I just couldn’t hold it in. I didn’t have a mirror, so I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I was smirking like the last boss of some video game.

I was looking at the ground, but my shoulders had started to shake. The agent must have taken me for terrified—so it took him a moment to realize that the sound I was making was suppressed laughter.

“What is so fun—”

“Hey.” Still grinning, I held up the thing I had been holding in my hand this whole time. “You know what this is?”

It was a perfectly ordinary smartphone, the one I used every day.

Specifically, its screen.

I had one particular app open. And the agent was right there on the screen for all to see.

Let’s turn back the clock just a little, to the moment when the Chinese agents were breaking through our fence and moving into the garden.

“...There.”

Sitting at the keyboard of my mother’s computer, tapping away on the keys, was... Shizuki. On the LCD screen was the Twitter client, with which I was so familiar. Shizuki was tweeting away.

“Spread the word.”

She was tweeting out using her own Twitter account, and we hoped her friends would pick up on the post and retweet it far and wide, until it was all over the internet.

I guess there were plenty of high school girls still awake even at this time of night, because the chime indicating we’d been retweeted just kept dinging. It started to sound like a machine gun. Shizuki put a similar message out on LINE, then opened a browser window and started posting on social networking services. She was trying to get the message to every friend she had. Each post ended the same way: Spread the word.

“Wow,” I breathed. That was the power of high school girls on Twitter, LINE, and the like. Shizuki’s short post, photo, and the URL she’d included were speeding around the world. “I know it was my idea, but... I’m still kind of amazed. And honestly, kind of scared.”

“This?” Shizuki said, not even looking at me. “This is nothing.”

That explained why even the most insipid post could set Twitter on fire. Once the retweets started, there was no stopping them.

“Thanks,” I said. “This is a big help.”

Despite my sincere words of gratitude, my sister still didn’t look at me. “...Whatever. Anyone can throw a web link out there.” Still, I thought I caught a hint of bashfulness in her tone. Aaargh—she really was a tsundere. It was adorable.

I knew better than to voice those thoughts by this point, though, so I kept my mouth shut.

At any rate, I was starting to feel like things might turn out all right. I grinned at the ongoing stream of dings and retweet notifications. The Twitter client was still open on the screen, along with a tweet:

tfw pandaland secret agents try to break into ur house lololol

The post also included a link... to a live video stream.

Back to the present. I was grinning evilly as I showed the agents my cell phone, which was displaying an ongoing livestream.

“You know about Ni** Nama?”

The agents didn’t respond, but I was sure they were listening to me. Speaking slowly so they would be certain to understand me, I said, “Right this minute, we’re broadcasting live around the world.”

From just over my shoulder, a security camera we’d hastily set up was recording the agents’ every move and sending the video straight to the web.

They looked shocked.

“Man, this is something else. We’ve already got over ten thousand viewers. And more comments than I can count!” Even as I spoke, the number of viewers was shooting up. I actually had the comments hidden because they were coming so thick and fast they nearly blocked out the video. “Electronics today are just amazing, huh? Great pictures, instant communications. Just like this.”

It actually wasn’t just the live feed we put online. We’d also shared the security camera footage of the agents working their way up to the house—but I didn’t feel I needed to give them all the specifics.

The agents looked at each other, panic evident on their faces. They may not have spoken perfect Japanese, but they had been posted to this country and there was a good chance they understood perfectly well what I was saying. Livestream sites and Twitter-type services had gotten pretty popular in China, too, recently.

If nothing else, they definitely got that they were in a tight spot.

Incidentally... other than myself and Elvia, I had everyone else stay hidden in the room on the second floor. After I charged Myusel with protecting Petralka and my family, Elvia and I went down to meet the agents. Between Elvia’s physical abilities and my magic spell, I hoped we could make something work.

I faced my phone back towards me again and set comments to show. Bam! A zillion words filled my screen.

“Is this for real?”

“Clickbait!”

“It’s the real thing, man”

“That was a silenced pistol shot!!”

“Reported”

“rptd”

“Reported”

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

These and similar posts were flying across the screen.

“I don’t know if you’re here to kill us or kidnap us or what,” I said, turning the screen back toward the agent. “But are you sure you want to do it in front of all these people?”

“Grr,” the agents growled. I smiled triumphantly.

Inside, though, I was shaking and sweating. Please go away please go away I’m begging you please go away...!

If the agents decided things were too stacked against them here and left, great. We wouldn’t have to fight them. But if they decided they were in too deep already—well, they were still the ones with the guns. And so far they hadn’t put them down.

I stood silently. It was looking like I’d bet wrong. I pulled out my sprite bottle and started chanting my spell under my breath. Elvia stood to cover me.

Bad bad bad bad!

Three people unconscious on the floor, five more with guns pointed at us. Just the two of us to fight back. If they were willing to kill one of us and kidnap the other, then the odds weren’t in our favor. However strong Elvia might have been, fighting five armed men at point-blank range was too much even for her.

Just as I was doing these frantic mental calculations, though—

“Oh.”

—I let out a stupefied mumble.

The reason was the shadow I saw coming up from behind the man. It was—

“Grgh!” One of the agents went down with a small shout. The others spun around to find a young man with a shovel standing behind them.

“Reito-san?!” I exclaimed.

Ariga Reito. Owner of the Rental☆Madoka itasha. With his black shirt, fingerless gloves, and overlong hair, he might as well have been carrying a sign that said I’m an otaku, nice to meet ya.

He was the one who had helped rescue Myusel and Petralka when they had been nearly kidnapped in Akihabara. He didn’t know much about what was going on, but after he parked his car at my house, he decided to stick around because he thought it looked like things might turn interesting. (I found the logic a little hard to follow.)

Er... I’m very sorry, Reito-san. I had completely forgotten about you.

“T-Take that!” Reito-san said, brandishing the shovel over the fallen agent.

The tool had come from our garden. Reito-san had grabbed it, snuck up behind our attackers, and smacked them with it. A shovel was a superb weapon, capable of taking off someone’s head when used properly. And with its solid metal spade, it could stop a projectile more reliably than a bulletproof vest.

“Why, you...!” One of the agents leveled his gun at Reito-san. One eyeblink later, though, Elvia was on him. She grabbed his wrists and forced him to the floor. That obviously didn’t render him unconscious, though, and he kept struggling. The gun went off once, then twice, the bullets ripping into the walls and ceiling. Reito-san and I both dove for cover.

Then one of the agents shouted something in Chinese (probably). It must have been some kind of signal, because the others suddenly started behaving very differently. The guy Elvia had a hold on tossed his gun away and kicked her in the stomach, gaining himself some distance from her. She might have been strong, but she was light, making it easy to fling her off. She never hit the wall, but landed on all fours, never in any danger.

“Elvia, are you okay?”

“Oh-kay!” she shouted. Apparently she had picked up at least that much Japanese.

Even so, she tottered a little; it couldn’t have been pleasant to get kicked in the stomach.

The agents were shouting again, taking the opportunity to pick up their fallen comrades and weapons, after which they beat a hasty exit towards the garden. Elvia instinctively made to go after them.

“Stop, you don’t have to chase them!” I said, grabbing her as she went speeding past. “If they retreat, we win! Remember?”

“Oh yeah...” I guess the excitement of battle had driven that fact out of her mind.

Elvia blinked like she was coming out of a trance, and then with a long sigh I felt her go limp. She may have been a werewolf, but she was still a young girl—she was probably scared.

“But why did they suddenly...?”

“Maybe ’cause half of ’em got beat up?” Reito-san offered. “I’m betting they’re Chinese. The last thing they would want is to be picked up by the Japanese police. They probably decided they wouldn’t all be able to get away if any more of them got knocked out.”

“Yeah... That makes sense.” It would be pretty hard to move carrying two or three people your own size. And they didn’t want their unconscious friends captured alive.

“Anyway, what the heck was all that about?” Reito-san said, tossing the shovel back into the garden. “I was out there in my car when I saw some weird guys come in, so I just kinda followed them. I was watching from the garden when all of a sudden you guys jumped them...”

“Ha ha ha, haaa...” Not sure what to say, I tried to just laugh it off.

Reito-san, though, helpfully came up with a misunderstanding of his own. “Hey, were you guys filming a movie or something?! I didn’t crash your set, did I?!” He looked around, trying to find a camera.

Come to think of it, in this world, we—especially Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia—were supposedly involved in a canceled fantasy film.

“Did I at least look cool?! Did the whole world see me doing my thing? Is there a Hollywood debut in my future? Shoot, I gotta practice my autograph!”

“Well, I think you looked great.”

Not in a movie, granted, but on a live video streaming site.

Reito-san continued to be weirdly excited about the whole thing as I just looked at him.

“Ah, Shinichi-kun, so you’re all right.”

Matoba-san had appeared almost as soon as the agents had vanished. It was almost like they were handing off to each other—but even I thought that was a little too much conspiracy-think. Matoba-san probably wasn’t involved this time. Otherwise, why would he have warned me in the first place?

He had his hair parted to one side as usual, and was wearing a drab suit, as usual. He was, as ever, the very embodiment of what people thought of when they heard the word bureaucrat. Which made a certain amount of sense, considering that’s what he was—Chief of the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau, an organ of the Japanese government. He was also, as a matter of fact, my direct superior at Amutech.

He wasn’t a bad person, exactly, but he wasn’t really good, either. He was nice enough to me, but I wasn’t completely confident I could trust him when the chips were really down.

But anyway...

“Yeah, I guess.”

As I showed Matoba-san to our living room, I gave him the short version of how we had driven our attackers off. The posts on Twitter, LINE, and social media, along with the video streaming site.

“I see,” Matoba-san said, impressed, a slight smile coming over his face. “You might say I expected no less from you. You always were a quick thinker.”

Matoba-san was hard to read—he could look like the most innocent thing in the world, all the while calmly plotting some awful scheme. So I wasn’t sure if he was really that impressed with me or not.

“I understand the broadcast is over now,” he said, “but is it possible someone might have recorded it and could put it up on YouTube, say?”

I could see Myusel cleaning up the muddy footprints on the floor and rearranging the furniture that had been shoved around in the fighting. My family was helping her, as for some reason was Reito-san. I shrugged.

Once something goes up on the net, taking it down is virtually impossible. All those guys’ faces could be floating around cyberspace more or less for eternity.

“I doubt your new friends will find much refuge,” Matoba-san said with a sad smile. “I suspect their country will disown them. Suddenly they’ll find themselves stateless vagrants. As a government employee myself, I feel a bit sorry for them.”

“Do you, now?”

Honestly, whatever happened to those guys didn’t much matter to me. When you force your way into someone’s house with a gun, you pretty much deserve what you get: internet infamy, national abandonment, whatever.

The point was, we had managed to survive the crisis. Only once I was talking with Matoba-san did I feel like we had really and truly done it. At last, I let out a sigh of relief.