Chapter One: Look Who’s Mr. Popular

“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home”—those words are a complete fantasy. At least in my opinion.

And how often have people said “money makes the world go round”? There’s even an expression, “poverty dulls the wit.” Being poor isn’t something to be ashamed of, but it’s not a mark of honor, either. Since the moment the money-based economy came into being, there’s probably been some standard below which a person is considered to be “poor.” And being poor leaves them with fewer freedoms and fewer choices. Who wouldn’t feel bleak in that situation? People are products of their environment. Its influence can’t be ignored. That’s just the way it is. So—

“Shinichi...sama...”

A girl in an apron called hesitantly to me from the kitchen.

Myusel Fourant. The most immediately striking thing about her used to be the maid uniform she wore, but these days it was much more common to see her in a patched-up old apron. She had sold her maid outfit ages ago.

“Dinner’s ready...”

I thought she looked a little gaunt compared to when I’d first met her. She’d always had a slim build, but now she looked emaciated. She was a top-notch cook, but she never ate the best ingredients herself; she always gave them to me instead. Or at least, so I suspected, and that wouldn’t be helping her physical state any. I knew I should be thankful for such a show of consideration, endlessly grateful in fact, but at the moment I just didn’t have the wherewithal. In fact, coming from Myusel with her haggard look, I felt it almost as a rebuke to me, with my meager earnings. I was always afraid the unspoken message was, If you weren’t so worthless, I wouldn’t have to work so hard.

I glanced at the food on the plate Myusel held out to me and pulled a face. “Blech. Vegetable stir-fry again?”

There wasn’t even any meat in it.

“Y-Yes, sir, I’m very s-sorr—”

“Meat, goddammit, meat! Even some eggs! Can’t you scare something up somehow?”

“I’m very s—”

“Sorry! Yes, very sorry! You’re always very sorry! What are you, a broken record?” Overcome with frustration, I gave our cheap tea table a kick. Too light to withstand the blow, it flipped over, sending everything on top of it—the chopstick holders, spices, and teacups—scattering all over the unpleasantly fuzzy tatami mats. Myusel flinched at the crash of breaking ceramic, then her shoulders sagged.

“I’m very—”

“Ahh, forget it. Just get outta here, I’m sick of looking at you!”

“Y-Yes... sir...” Myusel, her shoulders hunched, set the plate on the floor, then retreated to the kitchen. In our situation, “get out of here” was a figurative expression; we only had one room, so when I yelled at her, Myusel would just go to the farthest corner of the kitchen and sit down, hugging her knees.

It was disgusting. Pathetic. Wretched. I reached for a bottle of cheap wine by the wall. The drinking was all that kept me going these days. Everything pissed me off. Everything sucked. Even the winter wind that worked its way through the crack in the wall sounded like it was laughing at me.

When I picked up the bottle, though, it felt light. It was already empty. That’s right. I’d drunk the whole thing the night before.

“Feh!” I grunted.

Our rickety door opened and in walked a small, silver-haired woman. “We are home!”

Petralka an Eldant III—a big, fancy name for someone who was now just Petralka. The whole “Empress” thing? Someone else took over the gig ages ago. Petralka had gone from absolute ruler of a nation to the cleaning lady at some dive bar. Even the tiara that used to sparkle in her hair, we’d had to hock long ago; now she had a cheap plastic hairband.

“Ah, Shinichi, Myusel, you needn’t wait. Go ahead and eat di—”

“The hell’s this, Petralka? Empty-handed?”

“Er?”

“Did I tell y’ to get some more damn alcohol or didn’t I?”

“Ah—” She put a hand to her mouth. Guess she’d forgotten. ’Course, I’d forgotten I even asked her, myself, until just that moment. “Y-Yes, but Shinichi...”

“Don’t you but me! When I tell you to buy some alcohol, you go and buy it!”

“But our money...”

“What’re y’ workin’ for if you ain’t making money?! Get an advance or something!”

“We... We have already borrowed through next month’s salary...”

“I don’t care if you have to borrow through next year!” I shouted. “Think what a man wants!”

Petralka looked at me fearfully. She used to be all high and mighty, but since she’d eloped with me, I hadn’t hesitated to use my fists to keep her in line when I had to, so she’d become a lot more willing to listen. And still there were times like this when she acted like a complete idiot. It must have been that cushy upbringing as a princess.

An imperial ruler and a commoner? Nobody would approve of a match like that. Especially not if they knew that the commoner was keeping his ex-maid lover around. Then it would go from opposition to “we’ve got to keep these two apart.” We knew that. That’s why we’d run away.

Yeah, we’d run. And run. Farther and farther north, until our pursuers finally gave up. We wound up in a little town in a far northern country, where Petralka and Myusel and I settled down; but of course, we were never going to have a normal life. We stumbled along, no jobs, my resentment building day by day. Eventually I started to speak harshly to Myusel and Petralka, then grew physically abusive with them.

Why didn’t they leave me? Maybe because even if they left, they no longer had anywhere to go. The fact that our pursuers had stopped chasing us was itself proof that everyone had finally given up on Petralka. As far as everyone who knew her was concerned, she—and probably I—were as good as dead.

So, nowhere to go. Nothing to do but stay here and wither.

With that vision haunting me, I’d started to drink, and to needle Petralka and Myusel. It was the only way I knew to help my miserable life go by.

I was the very image of the make-inu, the “defeated dog,” the L-O-S-E-R.

Where? Where had I gone so wrong?

“Shinichi. W-We wish to speak with you about something...” Petralka said hesitantly.

“Yeah, what?”

“As... As it so happens, we are expecting...”

“Expecting what? A new Pachinko place by the station?”

“No, not that. Shinichi, you and we are going to have... are going to be...” Petralka looked at the ground. She was sitting formally in seiza, with her hands on her knees. “So we... we doubt how much longer we will be able to work...”

“You’ve got to be joking! We can’t afford to feed a kid!”

“B-But don’t you remember? We were unable to conceive for so long that we had given up... Surely this child is a gift from heaven, we must care for it.”

“Gift, my ass!” I bellowed. “I don’t need that kinda gift! I can barely afford to feed myself, and you come in here saying you’re freaking pregnant?! Forget about this damn kid and go buy my alcohol!”

“Shinichi...!”

“You say that kid’s gonna keep you from working? The hell he is! Do your damn job!”

“But if we w-work too hard, the child might—”

“Yeah? Let’s hope so, maybe it’ll save us the trouble.”

“Shinichi!”

“Hell, I’ll fix it right now. One good punch to the gut—” I stood up, but then it happened. “One good... Huh?”

I felt a supreme sense of dislocation. What was the handle of that knife doing, growing from my belly?

“Huh? Ah—ahh? Hagh...” I was too shaken to form words.

All Petralka could manage for her part was my name. “Shinichi...!”

Geez. What... What’s with the face? You’re the one who stabbed me. What the hell gives you the right to stab—

“Shinichi-sama...” No sooner had the words registered than I felt a piercing pain in my back.

Myusel. You too? But why...

“I can’t do it... I can’t stand it anymore. So... together, let’s—”

“W... Wai—”

“I’ll follow you... anywhere.”

I somehow swung around in time to see Myusel, an unusually warm and gentle smile on her face. She pulled the knife out of me—then raised it over her head.

“Shinichi-sama...”

“Myus—”

The last thing I saw was the rusty blade heading for a point between my eyes.

“Geez, what is this, some kind of bad TV drama?!” I quipped with all my might as I woke up. I was drenched in sweat, and my heart was going a mile a minute.

I had never asked for such a realistic dream, but there it was. I even thought I could feel the tip of the knife between my eyebrows. At the same time, I didn’t feel any particular pain despite having been stabbed—I guess that’s dreaming for you.

“Urgh...” I hauled myself into a sitting position and let out a breath. That was the worst dream. It had practically been a stereotype of the dysfunctional family, yet the details were weirdly specific to my life. Even on television, you pretty much never saw a short tea table like that except on old slice-of-life shows like Sa**e-san. And the thing where a couple (okay, in my case, a trio, but never mind that) elopes and runs off to the far north, and one of them is a worthless lout who waves a bottle around and shouts a lot? It’s such a bunch of hoary clichés that it could practically be considered certified cultural heritage by now.

But then on the other hand, Myusel and Petralka had been there, and everything about them—the way they looked, sounded, and acted—was eerily true to life. So much so that I found myself thinking that if one of them really stabbed me, that’s probably how it would feel.

Believe me, it wasn’t pleasant. In particular, I really hated how disgustingly pathetic I had been in that dream. I mean, a guy like that was hardly even human anymore.

Or so it was easy to think, but I couldn’t guarantee that if I was driven out of my own life, I wouldn’t become like that. I didn’t have the confidence in myself to say for sure it would never happen.

“Is everything all right, Shinichi-sama?”

“Yeah, I’m f—” I froze as I looked up: Myusel was standing there with a cleaver in one hand.

“Shinichi-sama?”

“Eeeeyaaagghhh!”

What—what the hell? Was I still dreaming?! Was this the bad ending, the one where I woke up from a nightmare only to discover I was in another nightmare, forever and ever?!

“What are you going to do with that? Are you going to stab me?! They’re going to be out there going, ‘We think the motive was an affair gone wrong,’ even though I’m still a virgin! That’s so wrong!”

“Er...?” Myusel blinked a few times. “Oh!” She noticed the knife in her hand and quickly hid it behind her back. “P-Pardon me. I heard you shouting, Shinichi-sama, so I came running—but I was right in the middle of making breakfast...”

So she had brought the knife with her. Unfortunately, knowing that didn’t do much to slow my pounding heart. After a dream like that, I would have to be crazy not to freak out a little when I saw Myusel with a knife.

“If, ahem, if I may ask... are you okay?”

“Uh-huh, yeah, fine, I’m just fine. Doing great,” I said, nodding vigorously. “Don’t worry, Myusel, just... you can go back to your cooking...”

“Mm...” Myusel nodded, looking a little unsure, and then left the room. As I heard her footsteps recede from my bedroom door, I let out a sigh.

This seemed like all kinds of bad. I had an inkling of why I’d had that nightmare. The reason was happening at that very moment. Or rather, not happening. I had only just realized it, and things weren’t moving forward. Things weren’t getting resolved.

And what things were those? Well...

“Um...” The girl stood there holding a boxed lunch. “I, uh, made this for you... You can eat it. I mean, if you want.”

The twin-tailed girl blushed and hid her eyes. Her eyebrows drooped timidly, yet the flush in her cheeks expressed her hope, her expectation. The impression of innocence was complete, the knowledge that she had poured her heart and soul into this lunch inescapable. No man alive could have said no to her.

Or anyway, couldn’t have, if she had been the only one standing there.

“Choose my lunch!” said a long-haired girl standing beside her. She squeezed forward, a bit aggressively, offering up a lunchbox. She seemed so confident that it was her creation that would be picked, it almost made her look somehow taller than the other girl. Yet there was just that hint of doubt, that lingering question, “But what if he doesn’t choose me...?” behind her confidence, and that was sweet in its own way.

Aargh, they’re both so cute!

How could I pick just one of them?! It was impossible!

““Which will you choose?!”” the girls chorused when they saw that I wasn’t immediately making a decision.

What to do, what to do? Think of it like a multiple-choice question. The answers:

A. Eat Miu’s lunchbox

B. Eat Ruka’s lunchbox

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

“Ummm...”

As I hesitated, the girls’ voices came flying at me:

“Sensei, you have to pick Miu!”

“No, pick Ruka!”

“Miu’s so devoted! You have to respond to her love!”

“The very thought that Ruka overcame her own clumsiness to make that lunch for you should set your heart on fire!”

“Miu is the MC’s oldest friend—she’s gone through everything with him, remember?! They share more memories than anyone!”

“But the MC is the first person who ever saw Ruka as just a girl! He’s the only one for her!”

In the swarm of students surrounding me—well, what they were really surrounding was the laptop computer sitting in front of me—two in particular argued with special vehemence. One of them was standing to either side of me, and I felt very literally caught in the middle of their argument.

Standing to one side and leading the charge for the “pure-hearted best friend” Miu was a dwarf girl. She was, let’s say, vertically challenged, in the way these earth-and-metal-loving faerie-like people usually were, making her look young and sweet—but she was actually in her late teens, a forceful character who served as a sort of spokesperson for the other dwarf students. Her name was Romilda Guld.

On my other side, championing the “tsundere sweetheart” Ruka, was a slim elf boy. These wind-and-tree-loving faerie-like people of the forest were often tall and finely featured. It almost made him look like a girl sometimes—but he was in fact the son of a notable elvish household: a point of pride for him, and of course, something that made him an authority among the other elf students. His name was Loek Slayson.

Elves and dwarves. The fantasy demi-human races par excellence, renowned for, among other things, not getting along very well. It wasn’t so much that there was some deep ancestral hatred between them, just that they had different lifestyles, and different opinions on a lot of subjects, and it was hard for them to agree about much of anything.

Here at my school, there were frequent disagreements between the elves and the dwarves, and Loek and Romilda were usually leading their respective factions. They could often be seen bickering with each other on behalf of their cohorts. That sort of thing had been going on for centuries, and I didn’t expect it to change overnight. But I thought recently I’d been hearing just a little less about fights starting for fatuous reasons like “She’s an elf, and I hate elves,” or “He’s just a dumb dwarf, that’s the problem.” If anything, there were increasingly more arguments about me, and about otaku stuff—anime and games and manga, and differences of opinion thereon.

Not to mention that when it came to Loek and Romilda... Well, for all the fighting, I also saw them together a lot. It was enough to make me think that maybe they were actually really close friends. Some say the more you fight, the closer you are, because you know you can say anything to each other.

Er, but getting back on subject.

““Sensei, which one will you choose?!”” Loek and Romilda both demanded. I turned my eyes to the laptop screen, more than a little worried. Two 2D women gazed back at me from the 13-inch LCD. Miu and Ruka. The screen, of course, was showing a gal game. Several other people in the classroom besides me had laptops of their own open, with the same game playing on each. It might look like we were just screwing around, but this was an important lesson in real Japanese otaku culture. (No, seriously.)

“S-Sensei!” someone exclaimed. It wasn’t Loek or Romilda, but one of the other students, someone playing the game on another computer. I looked over to them—they weren’t an elf or a dwarf, but a human, and they were looking very conflicted. I wouldn’t say despondent, but certainly like they didn’t know what to do and needed some help.

“Something weird happened to my Affection with Ruka when I picked Miu’s lunchbox!”

This got some excited murmuring from the other students.

“If you choose Ruka, Miu starts acting really strange!”

“Is this that thing? You know, a yandere?”

“I can’t stand it, this feels like a lose-lose choice!”

“Sensei, what’s the best strategy here?”

The student body, distraught and looking for guidance, turned to me.

“Er... well... I...”

Normally, I would have been able to answer them with confidence. Not to brag, but I’ve completed over a hundred gal games in my time, and have left many hundreds of women heartbroken in my wake. I’m a battle-hardened veteran of love (in two dimensions, anyway)! My vast experience allows me to evaluate a girl character’s traits at a single glance, predict what will happen in a given scenario, and use the eye of my heart to discover the perfect strategy hiding behind the monitor. It should have been easy. But...

“Wellll...”

I was trying to buy time. Who should I pick? How was I supposed to know...?! To choose just one girl out of all those who loved you—what did that mean, but to abandon all the rest? To throw away the many possible happy, lovey-dovey futures that might have awaited you with them?! No—to dismiss the affections of a beautiful girl who cared about me—even if she was only two-dimensional... It was the height of caprice...!

Such a thing was repugnant! I couldn’t! No, I just...!

“Sensei...?” The students were looking at me worriedly. But I just couldn’t spit back an answer at them like I usually did.

Before I had anything to say to them, the bell rang for the end of class.

“Ahh............”

Literally saved by the bell. I stopped at the choice-select prompt and saved my game. I looked around at the students and tried to force a smile. “O-Okay, I guess that’s it for now...”

It might have been class and the exercise might have been serious, but we were still playing a video game. The students were enjoying themselves too much to talk about anything else, even during break. So there was a lot of...

“Do you think you really have to choose one of them?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean maybe you could skip Miu and Ruka and go down the Mary route instead!”

“No matter how you cut it, Mary doesn’t have as many flags as the other two, does she?”

“That’s exactly why you should do it! Focus on Mary and you find out just how far this game can stretch.”

“What if you focused on all the characters equally and built up a harem?”

“Ooh, that’s a great idea!”

The students—okay, mostly the boys—were all chattering away about it. Humans, elves, and dwarves alike were passionate about the subject. Normally the sight of all of them having a lively conversation together would have brought a smile to my face, but today, somehow, it wasn’t happening.

“All of the characters at once? What’s wrong with you?” an elf girl demanded in exasperation.

“Yeah,” a dwarf girl added. “That’s basically the same as admitting that you’re too flippy-floppy to choose anyone at all.”

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

Ow, th-that hurts! That hurts me right in the heart!

“There is no harem ending. This guy isn’t a noble or anything.”

“Trying to hang on to all those girls even though he’s a worthless lout. What a monster.”

“It would probably end up with him getting stabbed.”

“Yeah, one of the heroines turns out to be a yandere.”

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

“Heeeeeeeeeeeeek?!” I screamed without meaning to, drawing the attention of the entire classroom.

“Sensei...?” Boys and girls both were looking at me with concern. Their naïve, open faces were just that—they were only looking at me in surprise because I’d suddenly screamed. It didn’t mean anything more than that, nothing at all, and yet their conversation kept playing in my mind, looping like bad background music—or should I say, ricocheting around like a bullet, piercing me again and again.

Could it be that they were all just using the game as a cover to attack me? Maybe this place only seemed like a classroom, but it was secretly a place for class trials, and I was looking at a death sentence?

“Um, Sensei?” Romilda raised a hand and stepped forward as if to speak on behalf of the student body. To me, it looked like she was coming to make an arrest...

“I—I’m sorrrrryyy! Forgive meeeeeeeeee!”

“Sensei? What’s the matter?” Loek sounded just as perplexed as Romilda when he saw me crouching on the floor with my hands over my head. But I didn’t have the slightest capacity to respond to them. I just kept revisiting that morning’s nightmare...

Meanwhile, the two of them started arguing.

“Romilda, what did you do to Sensei?”

“Me? I didn’t do anything!”

The other students watched from a distance. Finally...

“Excuse me,” someone said, coming into the classroom. “Shinichi-san, may I have a... moment...?” The voice trailed off, probably because the owner saw me clutching my head.

I looked up shakily to see someone with long black hair, an elaborate Gothic-Loli costume, and looks to rival the gorgeous dress. Ayasaki Hikaru-san. At first glance, ten out of ten people would have said this was a woman, but ten out of ten people would have been wrong. Hikaru was a guy who liked to dress up as a woman.

“What are you doing down there?” He came into the classroom, his black hair flowing behind him.

Loek answered for me. “We were playing this gal game in class, and all of a sudden...”

“A gal game?”

“Here, this one,” another student said, indicating the computer screen, which was still showing the game. Specifically, still showing that impossible conundrum of which lunchbox to choose.

“Ah,” Hikaru-san said with a glance at the screen. “Just leave him.”

“Huh? But—”

“It’s his own fault.”

“Hyaaaarggh! Don’t... Don’t look at me like that!”

I had hoped Hikaru-san might rescue me, but instead he dealt the coup de grace, sending a fresh wave of agony through my heart.

The bell rang for the end of fourth period. In other words, the beginning of lunch break.

With class over, I booked it out of the classroom. I just... couldn’t quite stand being in there. I had set things up so we had four straight hours free to work through the gal game material. Those things take time to play, and we didn’t have anywhere near enough laptops to send each of the students home with one. Even if we did, they didn’t have electricity! The only solution was to play a portion of the game here at school.

As I’d sort of expected, the kids went wild for it, so much so that they were even “studying” it (by which I mean playing through it) on their own during breaks. Obviously, everyone couldn’t all play at once, so one student would work the controls while a gaggle of others looked on, with the natural result that the classroom overflowed with arguments about the game. We should bump our Affection with Ruka. No, this is the branch that takes us to the Miu ending, we should take her on a date! And so on and so forth.

For me, at that moment, listening to those debates was heart-rending. And that was what led to me practically fleeing the classroom.

“Sigh....................................”

The moment I was out in the hallway, I let out a huge sigh. I wished I could find my past self, the one who had thought it was a good idea to do gal games in class, and beat him up.

“Rough morning, Shinichi-kun?”

In direct contrast to my bleak mood, the voice that called out to me was downright cheerful. I looked up to see a girl coming down the hallway. “Minori-san...”

She was giving me a sympathetic smile, her eyes narrowed behind her glasses. She had a baby face, still round like a child’s, but she was 100% a grown woman—a public servant, at that. The JSDF uniform she wore—let’s just say the chest was part of what screamed “adult!”

Koganuma Minori-san. A WAC (that’s a lady member of the military) and Hikaru-san’s and my bodyguard.

She came up to me. “Class as bad as all that?”

“Er... Well...” I found myself trailing off. It was just really hard to explain. If I said the wrong thing, I could end up pouring salt in my own wound. Especially when I pictured how Minori-san would react. But it turned out not to matter.

“Finally started to comprehend your situation, Shinichi-san?”

When had he gotten there? The shockingly good cross-dresser, Hikaru-san, showed up behind Minori-san, obviously enjoying himself. Actually, the way he was kind of peeking around from behind her was legitimately cute. I knew for a fact what he had between his legs, yet I still couldn’t help feeling like a very weird door was about to open when I saw him. It made him someone to be reckoned with. The fact that he didn’t seem the least bit, y’know, interested in men despite his outfits made the whole thing thoroughly confusing to me.

But back to our subject...

There was me, Kanou Shinichi.

The WAC, Koganuma Minori-san.

And my assistant, Ayasaki Hikaru-san.

The three of us were employees of Amutech, a so-called “general entertainment company” established to spread Japan’s otaku culture here in the Holy Eldant Empire, a nation in another world. This school helped us disseminate that culture, and even teach some Japanese language, to the local children, in hopes of deepening the connections between our countries. (Okay, so it was originally intended to be the front line of a cultural invasion, but let’s bracket that for now.)

And we were teachers at this school. Specifically, we introduced manga and anime and games and light novels to the young people of this world. Sort of like making learning fun, right? But because (for better or for worse) a lot of otaku stuff relies on certain clichés or stereotypes, you have to build up a body of knowledge before you can get the most out of it.

“So how’s it feel, being the protagonist of a gal game?” Hikaru-san said gleefully.

“Lay off,” I said with a frown.

This seemed to tip Minori-san off as to what I had been sighing about. But rather than comfort me, she saw fit to join Hikaru-san in his merriment.

“It must be rough being so popular, Shinichi-kun.”

“I’m not p—”

Popular, I was going to say, but I stopped in midsentence.

Even I couldn’t completely ignore it. Two different girls were in love with me, or so it seemed. In Japan, it’s almost proverbial to say that everyone has a “moment in the sun”—we call it moteki, the time when a person becomes popular with the opposite sex. I had been well on track to becoming a wizard (by which I mean a thirty-year-old virgin), so I had no idea if this was the fabled time of my irresistibility to women, or if the entire thing was some big misunderstanding.

And by the way, both these girls were completely beautiful.

But me, I’d confessed my feelings to my oldest friend, convinced there was something there, and she’d shot me clean down because I was an otaku. So I had all but given up on the idea that some sweet, cute girl might like me. It had led, in fact, to me not just living but trumpeting my otaku lifestyle after I arrived here in Eldant.

And now I was suddenly popular? This had to be some sort of sick joke.

On top of that...

“Shinichi-sama!”

Suddenly, somebody called my name. And they didn’t address me as Sensei, or Shinichi-kun, or even Shinichi-san. No, they went the full -sama, and only a few people in this world called me that.

I jumped involuntarily, and slowly turned around. Coming down the hallway at a brisk trot was a lovely young woman wearing a one-piece dress perfect for going out.

“Myusel...?!”

At the sight of the flaxen-haired, twin-tailed beauty coming toward me, a sweet smile on her face, my heart went into turbo mode.

Myusel Fourant: the maid at my mansion and also a half-elf. And also, one of those two girls I mentioned who was in love with me. She’d picked up a fair amount of Japanese, so she sometimes taught at the school. I was pretty sure she hadn’t been scheduled to teach today, though.

“Y-Yeah, what’s up? I thought you weren’t teaching today.”

“No, sir. I’m not, but...” She came to a halt in front of me, her long eyelashes floating over her large, violet eyes, which looked demurely at the ground. “I thought you might like lunches. Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama, and...”

Myusel was carrying some kind of bag. I guessed there were bento boxes inside. She glanced at Minori-san and Hikaru-san, then shyly, hesitantly, pausing to look down at the ground for an instant before looking back up, looked at me, a flush in her cheeks. “...And you, Shinichi-sama.”

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

No! Those eyes! That face! If you look at me like that, why I might—I might just take off!

My heart was pounding like it was playing a rhythm game that had suddenly launched into hard mode, bam-bam-bam-bam-bam! But I managed not to look away from Myusel.

Man, was she cute. I mean cute. Cute to beat the band. (It’s so important, I said it three times.) Those big eyes. That flat nose. The soft-looking cheeks, delicate lips, and the perfect contours of her figure, which was rounded exactly where it needed to be even though she was so slim. All of it just perfect.

Now, of course, all those great looks would be for nothing if she turned out to have a terrible personality—but thankfully, Myusel’s heart was every bit as good as the rest of her. She lacked a certain confidence on account of being a half-elf—but she was refined, thoughtful to everyone, yet surprisingly stalwart when the moment called for it...!

How could someone be so totally freaking perfect?!

And more to the point, how could a girl like that care about a guy like me? I mean seriously be interested in him as a member of the opposite sex?! I just didn’t know what to do with that information. It wasn’t like I could just be like, “Well, all right then!”, run into the bedroom with her, and shove her down. But we were living in the same house, which made the idea of going on dates or exchanging diaries seem kind of weird. And in this particular alternate world, I could hardly invite her out to the movies.

I completely lacked what you might call “experience points” in this area, leaving me totally unable to respond.

“Thanks, Myusel.” Seeing that I was too frozen with self-consciousness to react, Minori-san answered instead, smiling.

“Seeing as she went to all this effort, let’s all eat together,” Hikaru-san added, then looked at me with what I thought was a nasty grin. He could probably barely contain his amusement at how freaked out I was. For a while there I had been under the impression that I’d managed to make an ally out of an enemy, but now I was starting to wonder if maybe Hikaru-san was just fundamentally sort of a black-hearted person.

“You join us too, Myusel,” he said. “I’m sure if we each give a little of our lunch, we can scrape together enough for one more. How about it?”

“Wha? Oh, all right.” Myusel nodded happily. We were just about to go find somewhere to eat when—

“Shinichi!” a high-pitched female voice called out, and I froze again.

That voice... I... I know that voice...!

“Oh! It’s Her Majesty,” Minori-san mumbled.

I didn’t want to turn around—no, I didn’t, but neither could I not, and so with my head full of a crea-a-a-a-a-k like a rusty robot standing up, I slowly looked behind me.

“Petralka...” I said, but my voice came out as something of a groan. Followed—or rather, scrambled after—by her knight-bodyguards, a diminutive girl with long, silver hair made a beeline for us. This was Petralka an Eldant III, Empress of the Holy Eldant Empire, where we were now living—in other words, the highest power and absolute monarch. She was adorable to look at; if someone told you she was in elementary school, you might believe them. Her features were as sweet as an angel’s, holding the promise of true beauty in the future. “Wh-What are you doing here...?!”

That is, why had Her Majesty the Empress, the single most important person in this entire nation, left her castle and come all the way here? Yes, I knew how interested she was in otaku culture, and that she used to come to the school all the time, but after a nasty run-in with a group called the Assembly of Patriots when she had been taken captive, the people around her had been a lot more touchy about when she got to go out.

“Are you surprised?” she asked as she put a hand on me, smiling.

“What else would I be?!” I yelped, almost in tears.

What was going on here? Of all the days for both of them to walk into my school at the same time, the day after that nightmare was almost more than my heart could stand.

“We came in order to deliver this.”

“Huh...?”

I blinked as she puffed out her chest (tragically flat, but that’s a mark of status, too!) and chuckled in satisfaction. Despite her claim that she was “delivering this,” there was nothing in her hands. Could it be that this was—you know? “I’m the delivery!” or whatever?

I was just starting to sweat when Petralka stuck her hand out to one side. One of the knights approached from behind and respectfully passed her a wicker basket.

“Huh...?!” In contrast to Petralka’s self-confidence, my own response sounded even stupider.

A packed lunch? From Petralka, to... me?

Petralka was an actual empress. I didn’t think going out of her way to give someone a lunch she prepared herself was something empresses normally did. Typically, it was other people who made food for them. Anyway, she’d certainly never done this before now. So why the sudden burst of... lunchiness?

Wait, this can’t be...

“We have prepared this especially for you, Shinichi. You are welcome and encouraged to sob with joy.”

“I’m sorry, uh...?” My eyes flitted toward Myusel, who was still standing beside me. She was clutching the lunch she had brought to her chest.

“Now, quickly................................... Hrm?” Petralka followed my glance over to Myusel. She blinked, seeming to register for the first time that Myusel was there (actually, she probably was just noticing her), and then she took in the bundle the maid was holding.

The next instant, one of her finely-formed eyebrows arched in displeasure. Neither of them said anything for what felt like a long moment. There was Petralka, obviously not amused. Myusel took a half-step back under the ruler’s steely gaze, but then she seemed to think better of it and looked the empress directly in the eye.

U-Um...? G-Girls, am I the reason you’re staring at each other so hard? Perchance? I’m assuming it’s just my imagination that makes it look like sparks are flying between you two. Maybe I’m getting tired.

I groaned a little, feeling a waterfall of sweat on my back. I didn’t know exactly why, but this seemed bad. Real bad. Actually, I was gripped by an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Surely it was just a sort of trick of the light that seemed to cause a choice prompt to float in front of my eyes:

A. Eat Myusel’s lunchbox

B. Eat Petralka’s lunchbox

Long pause.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?!

“Uh, um...” I could hardly form words.

I felt two hands slap my back. One on my right shoulder, one on my left. I looked back to find Hikaru-san and Minori-san standing there.

“It must be hard, being so popular!”

“No... I’m not...”

“Not what? A popular guy? Could’ve fooled me.”

“...............................rk.”

Darn, these two weren’t going to be any help—in fact, they were clearly going to make full use of this opportunity to make my life miserable!

So there we stood, me and my quote-unquote “friends,” facing Myusel and Petralka, each holding a lunchbox. You could have cut the tension with a knife.

My name is Kanou Shinichi. I’m the general manager of Amutech, and it’s my job to spread Japanese otaku culture here in the fantasy land known as the Holy Eldant Empire.

The world is a tricky place, let me tell you. One minute a guy (namely me) is living cocooned in his room, and the next he’s running an interdimensional cultural-promotion agency. All of it made possible by some truly crazy stuff about Japan discovering a “hole,” a portal to another world, that connected to the Eldant Empire. Not to mention that it started out as a devious ploy by the Japanese government to instigate a cultural invasion by means of—you know what? You’ve probably got this part already.

Anyway. Let’s just say some very surprising things can happen in life. Things you would have sworn were impossible, or just laughed off, until bam, there they are. For example, a run-of-the-mill otaku having two gorgeous women who looked like they jumped straight out of two dimensions both fall in love with him. That sort of thing can happen, did you know that? And when you find yourself dropped into what feels like a plot line from a manga or a light novel or something, believe me, it’s not easy to know what to do.

It started not long ago, when a certain Prince Rubert of the Kingdom of Zwelberich, an ally of Eldant’s, proposed marriage to Empress Petralka. In a world with what amounted to Middle-Ages values, getting married in your teens wasn’t unusual. In fact, if you went unwed into your twenties, people might start to talk. So in principle, there was nothing the least bit surprising about Petralka receiving a marriage proposal.

The catch was that Prince Rubert had a variety of ulterior motives, with the ultimate result that he and his proposal got kicked to the curb. But it seemed to get Petralka thinking, and maybe even to change her mind about a few things.

“We will not brook your overtaking us while we take our time to think, Myusel.”

That was something she’d said directly to my maid, and for her part Myusel, who always used to simply cower before the empress, had replied, “Understood, Your Majesty,” in a tone that said “challenge accepted.” At the time I’d been completely flummoxed, but through lengthy discussions with Minori-san and Hikaru-san, I had come to understand that the challenge in question was which of them would be the first to shoot an arrow through the heart of Kanou Shinichi.

Well, I say “had come to understand,” but maybe “had been made to understand” would be more accurate. Sigh.

Yes, that’s right: I had finally been confronted with the reality that these two women, Myusel and Petralka, were in love with me. Not that either of them had specifically told me so to my face—and I wasn’t about to be all, “So, d’you love me? Is this L-O-V-E? Ai, amour, amore?” I was floored just thinking about it.

But speaking of thinking about it, when I looked back over our time together, I had to admit there had been some signs. It was just that, well... For a guy whose years without a girlfriend were exactly equal to his lifespan, a guy who would happily answer “anime, manga, and light novels” when asked about his hobbies—for a guy like that to suddenly be downright popular was just something I had never imagined.

For that matter, the whole reason I’d become a shut-in in the first place was because, when I had dared to confess my love for a childhood friend, she’d shot me straight down, citing the fact that I was an otaku. Never wanting to experience that kind of humiliation ever again, I’d vowed to myself not to make any assumptions about anyone, ever; reminded myself again and again that an excess of self-consciousness was the root of all embarrassment; and generally set myself up to be oblivious to the way these girls felt about me.

And yet eventually the fact got through even to me. Oh yes, it did. And once it had, I was left with the need to respond to their feelings in some way, but...

“Shinichi, which do you choose?!”

There we were in the schoolyard, where I was sitting on a bench with Petralka’s face very close to mine. She was really, seriously cute—and not just cute, I mean she was genuinely beautiful, delicate as a doll (in the best way), with a face that never flinched.

And right at this moment, she was so close that I could feel her breathing on me. How could my heart not be pounding? It couldn’t not! (Double negative.)

Of course, this wasn’t the first time our faces had been this close, but those other times, I hadn’t been thinking about love and romance and whatever else, so my only reaction had been “Aw man, Petralka’s so cute!” and heedless moe-ing.

Now? Now I couldn’t get away with that.

To add to my troubles, I felt a tug on my sleeve from the other side, the one not occupied by Petralka. I reflexively looked over—and discovered Myusel standing there with her face red, her eyes down, and a firm grip on my shirt. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. Those pale fingers clasping the fabric of my shirt practically cried out, Pick me!, sending my heart into overdrive, bmbmbmbmbmbmbm. It seemed like only a matter of time until my heart rate went over 300. (At which point I would die.)

Arrgh... What am I going to do?!

Obviously, a part of me was happy to be sandwiched between two young women. A much bigger part of me felt virtually crushed under the weight. I mean, I’d never been asked to choose between two such beautiful girls before! Sure, I’d done it a few times in the worlds of gal games. I tended to start out by going the main-heroine route, and then trying out the secondary girl later. Always saving before any crucial choices, of course.

That’s a thing you can do in games. But the situation I was facing now was no game. There would be no do-overs. And if I screwed it up—well, worst-case scenario, I could end up like my nightmare from this morning, or with my decapitated head in a sack, or my beautiful boat being shown on television.

“So, what are you going to do, Shinichi-kun?” From another bench just behind the one on which I sat frozen between Myusel and Petralka, Minori-san was looking at me with a pained smile. Beside her was Hikaru-san, who wasn’t even trying to hide his schadenfreude.

“Better make up your mind quick.”

“Y-Yeah, but...”

Behind them, incidentally, stood Petralka’s bodyguards. Full armor, swords, the works—just standing there silently, looking intimidating. In fact, the silence was a big part of the intimidation.

The reality was that nobody dared to come into the courtyard while we were there. One look from those knights was enough to keep anyone from thoughtlessly getting too close to the empress.

“Urrrgh,” I gurgled.

“Better pick somebody’s lunchbox, or lunch break will be over before you can eat it,” Minori-san advised, scarfing down her own packed lunch.

Some advice. The only lunches Minori-san or Hikaru-san had were the ones Myusel had made for them, so they didn’t have to make any choice at all. No doubt, no hesitation!

“Minori is right! Decide quickly, Shinichi!” Petralka was insistent now, gesturing with her boxed lunch in front of my face. A boxed lunch hand-made by an empress.

“Shi... Shinichi-sama...” The sight of Petralka was enough to set Myusel back on her heels, but she still managed to hold up the lunch she had been keeping on her knees.

Ahhhhhhhhhh!

I was caught between a rock and a hard place! Between the devil and the deep blue sea! Between a tiger at the front door and a wolf at the back! The point is, I had to choose between one of two things, and either of them would obviously lead to a bad ending! That was the nature of my situation. This “game” was impossible!

A long moment passed.

No... wait. Wait just a second, Kanou Shinichi. They say despair is the haven of fools. Think! Don’t get tunnel vision. Sometimes there are secret codes, or sometimes you get more choices if you fulfill certain conditions.

Maybe there was a third option.

“I... uh, I’ll take both. Happily,” I said, keenly aware of how forced my smile looked.

Long pause from Petralka.

Long pause from Myusel.

Painful looks from Minori-san and Hikaru-san as they chowed down on their lunches. Hikaru-san especially: he didn’t say anything, but I saw him take a sip of tea and then mouth, “Looooser.”

But what else was I supposed to dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo?!

This was the only answer that would save me from hurting either Myusel or Petralka!

“Y’know, they... they b-both look so good.” I took both of the boxed lunches from the girls and set them on my knees.

Gotta be honest, there was no actual way for me to know whether they looked good or not with the lids still on, but neither Petralka nor Myusel mentioned that. Maybe they were both too nervous.

Another pause.

Okay, start with Myusel’s lunch.

I opened the lid and there, as was pretty much normal by now, was an ideal packed lunch. I’m not even really sure what that means, but the stuff in there was totally bento-ish. Full of soft colors, the appearance was like the way a traditional Japanese bento box would be drawn in a manga or something. There were some meatball(-like thing)s, some tiny tomato(-like vegetable)s. Even perfectly formed rice balls lined up in a neat row.

I had a thought...

“Myusel, did you base this on anything?”

“Well, yes...” Myusel smiled, her face flushing. “I asked Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama... what would normally be in a Ja-panese ‘bento.’”

In other words, she went out of her way to make something that would be familiar and enjoyable for me. This wasn’t the first time Myusel had consulted with Minori-san about Japanese food, or tried to imitate it using similar ingredients from this world or even tapping Minori-san’s JSDF connections to import ingredients from Japan. But this time she had outdone herself. The little wiener had even been cut to look like an octopus!

Where did she get those wieners, anyway? She must have had them brought from Japan.

My thoughts were interrupted by Petralka, who said, “And wh-what about the ‘bento’ that we brought, Shi-Shinichi?”

I quickly opened the lid of her lunchbox, too.

“Ooh!”

This one was—what’s the best word? Fresh and original. I ate Myusel’s cooking every day, so I had a pretty good idea of how it would taste. It was comforting and familiar. But on some level, that’s another way of saying it wasn’t very surprising anymore.

For one thing, Petralka’s lunchbox was a riot of color. It included dishes I had never seen, and it had a certain elegance—almost like it wasn’t a lunchbox at all. Finely chopped vegetables, delicate sauces, careful, arcing lines everywhere—it looked like a French meal transplanted wholesale into a Japanese bento box. What was this unbelievably fancy vibe I was getting...?!

Maybe I should have expected as much from an empress. Honestly, though, I practically felt bad eating it.

“You didn’t make this, like, yourself yourself, right?” I said. I didn’t mean to say it. I just couldn’t imagine Petralka preparing all this by hand. She must have had professional help.

“But—But of course we did.” Petralka pursed her lips—ahh, Your Majesty! You are simply too adorable!

“Huh? So you mean... you did this, Petralka? Chopped the vegetables and everything?

“Er, no, well—” Petralka trailed off.

“And you were the one who grilled this thing over here? Look at the scorch marks on it, they’re perfect! And the way this sauce is drizzled over this thing is downright artistic.”

“Y...Yes, well... That... Ahem. We... We put it in the box.”

Uh... I don’t think that counts as making a lunch.

I managed to swallow the quip before it came out of my mouth. Look, everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Honestly, even if Petralka’s contribution had been at the level of a kid helping a parent in the kitchen, she had still gotten this boxed lunch ready for me and brought it all the way here, and nothing changed that. I might question her methods, but never her feelings for me. Those feelings by themselves were enough to make me kind of happy but also kind of embarrassed but also send my heart straight into overdrive.

“In any event, be quick and partake of it.”

“S-Sure.”

Petralka handed me a fork she had at the ready, and just as she ordered me, I dug in. I started with one of the side dishes in Myusel’s lunch. I tried to really taste it. It had that special savor she was so good at, the gentle burst of flavor I had imagined. She said she had first learned to cook back when she was in the military, so you might have expected her to specialize in things that would really stick to your ribs, and not to have a very fine touch for spices—but I guess that was where her personality shone through.

I took a sip of tea to sort of “reset” my tongue, then try to bite Petralka’s meal.

Oooh.

Talk about a rich taste without (etc.)...

It was so good, it practically had me quoting from a certain “gourmet” manga. Actually, though, the flavor was sort of at a tangent to what I’d expected. Most times, you could get a sense of how something was going to taste from the color and the smell, but here those things seemed almost completely disconnected; you truly had to taste it with your own tongue. I guess that’s what comes of not actually having any experience with fancy food: the first bite is like a revelation.

And what a revelation! The flavor...!

Both of them were...

“Absolutely delicious,” I concluded, looking at the girls in turn. This, at least, was absolutely the truth. Myusel’s lunch, as I said, lacked the surprise of Petralka’s, but it was profoundly comforting and pleasant. Petralka’s food, in contrast, left me eager to discover what flavor I would encounter next with every bite.

“I’m so glad to hear that!” Myusel smiled happily, letting out a breath of relief. Like a true “warm-and-fuzzy” character, her smile was infectious, and soon I was grinning, too.

About an instant later, though, I found my warm, smiley dream interrupted when somebody grabbed me by the collar.

“Which?” Petralka demanded, raising an eyebrow.

“Er...?” I said.

“Which lunch is absolutely delicious?”

“Well, both, of course...”

“Which is more delicious?”

“Uh... W-Well...” I thought I had managed to avoid the worst by eating from both lunches, but now I had to rank them?! “Wellll...” I glanced away from Petralka’s intense stare as if in hopes of escape, but I only found myself looking into the expectant eyes of Myusel. “Hrk...?” She was looking at me almost as intently as Petralka. Her gaze was one of supplication, of creeping self-doubt as she waited for my answer.

Ahhhhh, she’s so cute, but no, this isn’t the time!

I was starting to panic. I wasn’t sure how long I could hold it together. I had to come up with an answer, fast. But ranking one above the other was virtually impossible—I just wanted to enjoy the flavors—and above all, I didn’t want to say something that would hurt Myusel or Petralka.

“I c-can’t compare them,” I finally managed. “I mean, it’d be like comparing apples to oranges!”

“Apples to oranges?”

“But I didn’t use any Ja-panese fruits...” Myusel fretted.

It was a figure of speech!

Okay, no time for a comedy routine. Having found my way out, I couldn’t permit myself to get sidetracked with quipping. I decided that going full restaurant-reviewer was the best plan.

“This one here, it’s fluffy and melts in your mouth! I have to imagine that eating a cloud would be just like this! But this one over here, you can really feel it when you bite down, and the taste lingers on the palate! Yet the flavor is never overbearing or tiring! How can one of these possibly rank above the other?!”

I was trying to distract them, but I wasn’t lying. Still—and maybe I should have expected this—neither Myusel nor Petralka looked really happy with my answer. Fair enough. I was being honest, though—I couldn’t say one of these was number one, and the other second-best. I was just starting to feel so apologetic I thought I might drown when—

“Now that you’ve brought him lunches, you know what the next stage is.” Hikaru-san sounded nonchalant, but he had a broad smile on his face.

Oh, the bad feelings this inspires in me!

“Better say ahh, Shinichi-san.”

“Hrk...?!”

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, hold on! We were way beyond pouring oil on a fire—he was practically throwing rocket fuel on there! And I had been trying so hard to get out of this situation! What an ambush! What skulduggery!

“Say ahh?” Myusel said.

“Is it some form of intimidation?” Petralka asked, cocking her head.

Er, no, Your Majesty. You’re thinking of how thugs and crime bosses greet people. The important thing is to tilt the head down a little and rake the other person with your gaze.

Okay, something else this isn’t the time for.

“I mean you have to feed it to him. ‘Open your mouth and say ahh,’ that’s what I’m talking about. When a girl brings a guy a lunch, that’s what she always does. It’s an ironclad rule. Am I right, Minori-san?”

“You sure are. Happens every time.”

Hikaru-san and Minori-san looked at each other. They were obviously, unmistakably, truly enjoying this. Was it possible they both secretly kind of hated me...? I could sort of understand why! Believe me, I could! But I wished they would stop jerking me around at times like this! I was so desperate not to hurt Myusel or Petralka!

But these cries from my heart went unheard.

“Indeed!” Petralka said, and then she snatched the fork from my hand and stabbed a random item from the lunchbox. It was a piece of meat. The meal might have been French, but someone had been thinking ahead enough to make sure everything was cut down to bite-size. Petralka brought it to my mouth. “A most useful lesson. Here now, Shinichi, you will... say ahh.”

“Er, um, uhh...”

“U-Um, Shinichi-sama...”

While I dithered, Myusel, eager not to be outdone by Petralka, likewise grabbed a bit of food from her lunchbox on a fork and pushed it toward my mouth. The two bites of food were practically pressed up against my lips before I could open my mouth, urging me on. If my lips had been even the slightest bit open, I think the girls would have shoved both bites of food straight down my throat.

“Uh, okay, w-wai—hrmf!” I wanted to urge them to calm down, but the moment I opened my mouth, I found food in it from two directions at once. I almost literally choked on my words. I somehow managed to chew and swallow, hoping I could then resume trying to talk them down, but I didn’t have the chance: one bit of bento after another was crammed into my mouth.

“Mrgh! Mrrfgh!”

“How about that, Myusel? We have made Shinichi ahh for far more of our food!”

“O-Oh, no... I w-won’t let you beat me...!”

“Mrrrghhh!”

I couldn’t even beg them to stop anymore—my mouth was so full of food it could practically have qualified as a bento box itself. There was way too much for me to appreciate any distinct flavors or textures. Anyway, this wasn’t even “saying ahh” anymore! I couldn’t open my mouth far enough to say it!

“Mrfgh!”

At this rate, it’s going to end up in my throat and I’m gonna choke! Argh! My throat! My throat! (Diary ends here.)

...Okay, enough cosmic horror.

“How delightful.”

“Yes, wonderful.

I reached out to Hikaru-san and Minori-san, my hand trembling with agony, but they only stood there smiling beatifically.

C-Curse you booooth...!

“Come, Shinichi, eat more.”

“Shinichi-sama, here, have some of this...”

And so it went. This continued until Minori-san, having savored enough of my suffering, clapped her hands and said, “We’d better get back.”

“Ahhhhhhh...”

Back at the mansion, I was in my office, cradling my head in my hands. After the incident with the lunchboxes, Petralka, still not looking entirely convinced, had gone back to the castle with her guards. Which lunch had been more delicious, or for that matter which one had ended up filling the most of my mouth as I said “ahhh,” remained inconclusive. Petralka seemed prickly about it, but Myusel looked downright relieved.

“What am I going to do?” I asked myself. “What am I going to do?”

As General Manager of Amutech, I had a mountain of work to get done, but I just couldn’t seem to focus on any of it. My brain was too full of Myusel and Petralka. Their smiling faces kept floating in my mind’s eye and wouldn’t go away.

Both of them, allegedly, were in love with me. And that made me happy. I mean, really. If just one of them had confessed to me, I probably would have spun around from sheer happiness so fast that I would have bored into the earth like an industrial drilling machine.

But both of them? I could pray to God or Godzilla, and still not have an answer. I could be Akira or Agira, and never have the power to solve this problem. Speaking of which, I feel like as capsule monsters go, Agira was way less well-known than Windom or Miclas. I wonder why that was. I mean, I readily acknowledge how cool Windom was, but—

No! Focus!

What was I supposed to do? Pick one of them and say “Sorry, better luck next time!” to the other one? Was I even capable of that?! I, who was absolutely, totally ordinary in every way other than my inveterate otakuism? Was I supposed to shoot down either Myusel or Petralka—beautiful women like them?! I had an embarrassment of riches here, and I was supposed to throw some of them away? Wouldn’t the Waste-Not Ghost come and get me?

“Urrrgh...” I slumped over on my desk, too tired even to fret any more. The mental fatigue didn’t help, but I wasn’t exactly feeling my best physically, either. I felt like the food from that afternoon was still trapped in my stomach, just sitting there. Petralka and Myusel both seemed to have made an inordinate amount of lunch. A full stomach is an important part of happiness, but after a point, you go from full to overstuffed, and that’s no fun.

“God, what am I going to do...”

Me, I just wanted time to think, but it looked like Petralka and Myusel both were suddenly in some kind of hurry. I didn’t think they were going to cut me a lot of slack.

Myusel? Petralka? Or—and I thought the chances of this were very slim indeed—maybe neither of them? Those were my only choices at the moment. I guess I also had the option of exclaiming, “You two are my wings!” like a certain (TV) kabuki actor, and just going for harem mode—but truth be told, I couldn’t imagine myself saying those words.

Besides, I had a sneaking suspicion that if I took that route, I’d end up stabbed by someone.

“...Siiiigh...” I sighed for the umpteenth time. I lay on my desk like some kind of invertebrate—but suddenly a knock came at my door.

“Yeah?” I asked, springing up again. Maybe it was Myusel? Wh-What should I do? What if she was here to say “I love you”?! My heart wasn’t ready! I would probably be torn to pieces between my happiness, and my guilt towards Petralka!

But when I said, “Wh-Who’s there?” the voice I heard back through the door was confident and bright.

“’s me! Shinichi-sama!”

“Elvia?” I muttered, blinking.

So... not Myusel.

Partially relieved, I stood up and went to open the door. Standing there was a girl with a cheerful smile on her face. Her eyes darted this way and that, her short brown hair curled in places; everything about her said “full of energy” even when she was just standing still. She had all the sweetness of a big dog.

Her body was lean and well-exercised, her midriff exposed, and her generous chest practically spilling out of her tube top—the look was downright dirty, but her forthrightness and brightness kept me from feeling too steamy about it.

Her name was Elvia Harneiman. She was a former spy for the nation of Bahairam, but—well, things happen. Now she was living here as Amutech’s artist in residence. Other details? Each side of her head boasted a floppy ear, and her behind was home to a bushy tail—that’s right, she was a demi-human. Specifically, a werewolf.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Can I come in?” Elvia said with an innocent smile.

“Huh? Yeah, sure.” I stepped to one side and gestured Elvia into the room. She took a few steps into my office, then stopped and looked me right in the face. I looked back, not completely sure what was going on. Looking at her face, though, it was impossible not to notice the cleft, the valley between those huge, soft peaks, just at the bottom of my vision. We’d been living in the same house for quite a while now, and you’d think that valley would have lost some of its power to entrance me, but not so. Elvia, in fact, wasn’t very modest toward me—she didn’t get upset even if she noticed me staring at her boobs—and I had the distinct sensation that I spent more and more time doing exactly that.

“Shinichi-sama?”

“Er, yeah!” I quickly pried my eyes away from her chest.

“So Myusel and Her Majesty both made lunch for you today.”

“Oh, uh, yeah... At school...”

I didn’t think Myusel would deliberately tell Elvia about that; I suspected she had heard from Minori-san or Hikaru-san. Both of them seemed to have enjoyed the little scene, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they had told Elvia about it to entertain themselves.

“Well, I’d like for ya to eat mine next.”

Huh? What? Don’t tell me Elvia made a—

I took a good look at her, but she didn’t look like she had anything edible with her. She was standing there empty-handed, looking just like always.

No, wait—on closer inspection, I saw she had a white ribbon or scarf of some kind wrapped around her neck, but that was about the only difference from usual.

“Um... What am I eating, exactly?”

She grinned and replied, “Me!”

“What?!” I goggled at her very energetic answer and reflexively took a couple of steps back, only to find myself bumping up against my desk. Elvia took a couple of steps forward, still grinning, so we were just as close as we were before, or maybe even closer.

“No... Wait...”

Eat—Elvia—eat... What did that even mean?!

Was that white thing wrapped around her neck—was it supposed to be a table napkin?! Eat? “Eat”?! If that didn’t mean, you know, like, splatter-movie-type... like... outright cannibalism, then the only thing I could think of was, it had to be, an 18-and-up-rated— [technical difficulties]

“E-Eat? You mean, like, eat? Like, umm, you can’t mean—l-like s-s-sexually?!”

“I mean sexually.”

Thus said Elvia, still smiling innocently.

As far as I knew, the once-a-month thing where Elvia went into heat (a special characteristic of her people) was supposed to be a ways off yet, so why was this coming up now? Why at this moment? What was with this girl’s timing?!

And then the pieces fell into place.

“Hikaru-san! I know you’re there!” I shouted at the door, which Elvia had left hanging open.

For better and for worse, Elvia was a very straightforward person. That extended to her speech; she always said exactly what she meant. She wouldn’t think of an expression like “eat me,” and she certainly wouldn’t think to accompany it with a table napkin.

Several seconds passed. Then, the fringe of a Gothic-Loli skirt appeared in the doorway.

“I knew it!” I said. Hikaru-san, frowning in a you-got-me sort of way, looked into the room. “I knew you had to be behind this! Why won’t you stop teaching Elvia all this sick stuff?!”

“You’d think a fundamentally unpopular loser of an otaku, finally getting his once-in-a-century moment to hit it off with the girls, would be more, you know, excited. That he would do something. I mean anything.”

“You’re not wrong, but I can’t believe you would put it that way!”

“Herbivores should just shut up and be eaten by carnivores!”

“What does that even mean?! How can you drag Elvia into your stupid little games?!”

Elvia was so innocent that it was easy for a villain like Hikaru-san to string her along without her really knowing what was going on. It wasn’t like I didn’t understand that it was funny to get a rise out of me, but I objected to his using Elvia as a tool to do it.

“I didn’t drag her,” Hikaru-san said, looking away poutily. The way he made that gesture was really cute—even though he was a he—and I wondered if that was why he was so mischievous. But never mind.

“I just thought, Elvia’s the only one who’s sort of behind here, so I wanted to help her out,” Hikaru-san said.

“Help her out.”

Yeah, right.

“You know, be her cheerleader.”

“For what? What were your cheers leading her to do?”

There was a pause. Hikaru-san looked back at me and narrowed his eyes. Finding myself pinned by his exasperated glare, I involuntarily gave ground. “Wh-What...?”

“Are you seriously asking me?”

“Am I asking you—what? Anyway, Elvia’s got nothing to do with this, so—”

“What are you talking about?” Hikaru-san said with an elaborate sigh. “Elvia, you love Shinichi-san, too, don’t you?”

“Now you’re the one who’s not making any—”

“Sure, I love ’im!”

“—sense?”

I froze when I heard Elvia’s energetic response.

“You love him as a man, don’t you?”

“Absolutely!”

“Sexually, right?”

“How... How else would I love him?” Her answers were unhesitating and unfiltered.

..........Wait.

Both of you, just wait.

I looked at Elvia to find her looking back at me with her usual bright grin. Then there was her fluffy tail (gosh, it looked like it would feel good to touch), which was wagging so hard you could practically hear it.

Oof... This was—

“Um, do you really... Does she really—?”

“I can’t believe you haven’t noticed it. Elvia obviously isn’t interested in anyone but you, Shinichi-san.” That was Hikaru-san, still sounding thoroughly sick of me.

“N-No, nonono, hang on. That’s just because of her phase of the moon or whatever, right?”

I mean yes, Elvia had shoved me down on the bed once, and one time she dragged me to the bathing area and tore off my clothes! But those were both because she was in heat! Her thoughts and feelings had nothing to do with it!

“If she was just possessed by the moon—if she really didn’t care who she did it with—she’d be out in town right this minute hunting down a random man.”

“Erk...?”

C-Come to think of it, Elvia had mentioned once that not just anyone would do.

“Shall we find out for certain? Elvia, do you love Shinichi-san here?”

“I adore him!” Her smile was the picture of innocence. There was no room to think she might mean “as a friend” or “as a housemate.”

Which left only one option...

“E—Elvia...”

This girl was inescapably direct. When I thought about it, I realized I hadn’t heard the words “I love you” even from Myusel or Petralka. Hearing them from Elvia, with no hint of shyness or embarrassment, was actually really moving. By which I mean the blood was rushing to my head.

On top of that, having made this cheerful pronouncement, Elvia did something very unusual: she blushed, a demure look coming over her face.

“Eh heh heh,” she added. “Guess I’m feelin’ a little shy.” She fidgeted and looked at me hesitantly.

G-Geez, this is a totally new side of her!

But wait, did this mean...?

“E-Elvia, you too...?”

“Are you just noticing?” Hikaru-san said.

Okay, so now that I thought about it, maybe there had been clues! Maybe a few! But! But!

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

Anyway, that’s the story. The story of how, unbelievably, my options expanded from two to three.

Arrrgh...

And so it went. In order to escape from Elvia and Hikaru-san, I fled to the living room, holding my head. Maybe a closet or the attic would have been a better hiding place, but if they found me somewhere like that, I would have nowhere else to run. I liked to think that even Elvia wouldn’t try to jump me in the living room, where anyone might show up at any time.

Still, I had to ask myself: seriously, what was I going to do? I know it must seem like an indulgent question. A harem was supposed to be every guy’s dream, right? The “harem route” in a gal game was the prototypical example: the best ending, where everyone winds up happy.

But in reality, I didn’t think it would ever happen. For one thing, there would be arguing for sure. There already had been arguing, between Myusel and Petralka. I don’t think there are many women who would just conveniently go “I don’t mind if you have other women besides me.”

For that matter, even if, in theory, I could get Myusel and Petralka to both go along with the idea, there was the simple legal problem that I could only marry one person. There would always be a rank, an order.

Wait—speaking of laws, this was Eldant. Another world. Polygamy might be illegal in Japan, but what about here? And even if it was illegal here, one of the partners to this marriage would be the all-powerful monarch, and she could change the laws! Maybe I should ask Petralka if it was possible to get a one-man-many-wives system recognized in—

No, no, NO! Stop that! (Rim shot.)

I ended up putting a little comedy ba-dum-pishh after my own thoughts to try to break them out of the corner they were increasingly getting stuck in.

Just then...

“Shinichi-kun?” Minori-san wandered into the living room. The moment she spoke, I flinched, ready to run away at full speed. She looked perplexed. “What’s wrong?”

“N-Nothing. Really.” I quickly tried to force a smile. I didn’t expect Minori-san to be any more help than Hikaru-san had been. They were both, in effect, my enemies. I wanted to know what I had ever done that made it so fun to torment me, but in fact I already had a whole host of ideas, and I thought it would destroy me to hear Minori-san actually spell it out.

But there was someone else right behind her.

“Hullo.”

It was a middle-aged man in a battered old suit. His narrow eyes and perpetual smile made it look like he was wearing a mask—and that made it hard to know what he was thinking.

Matoba Jinzaburou-san, that was him. In a word, he was my superior at Amutech. He traveled frequently between Japan and Eldant, handled any importing that needed to be done, and took care of paperwork and other details that needed attending to. That, at least, was the front he presented here in Eldant. Behind all that, he was almost like a spy, sent by the Japanese government to keep an eye on me. He was on their side more than mine—that is, the side that had tried to commit a cultural invasion of the Eldant Empire. In my mind, there was still some question whether I could really trust him if push came to shove.

But anyway.

“Matoba-san, you’re here too? What for?”

“I’m done with my business in Eldant. I’m just about to head back to Japan. But you see, I finished a little early, and thought I would come check on you. And what should I hear but that something rather unusual is going on.”

“Rather unusual? Gee, uh...”

“At least, I would consider being in a love triangle with an empress and a maid to be unusual.”

“Oh,” Minori-san interjected, “if you count Elvia, maybe it would be a love square?” That was not helping! She must have run into Elvia and Hikaru-san on her way here and found out everything.

“Hmmm. Quite the operator, aren’t you?” Matoba-san said in an appreciative tone.

“H... Help me, please...” I responded.

I had a bad feeling, asking this person for help, but this one time, I knew I couldn’t count on Minori-san or Hikaru-san, and meanwhile Myusel, Elvia, and Petralka were all personally involved. There was no one around me that I could turn to for advice. And obviously, stewing about it by myself wasn’t getting me anywhere.

“Hmm...” Matoba-san said thoughtfully, sitting down in the chair across from me. Minori-san sat next to him, gleefully watching me sweat.

“I understand being spoiled for choice,” he said. “And I know all three of those girls really care for you. But doesn’t one stand out over the others? Isn’t there one you would pick if somebody forced you to?”

“I can’t pick, that’s the problem!” I wailed. “Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia are all really cute, and all so distinct, and they’re all great girls, aren’t they?! If I were capable of cellular division, maybe I could split into three of me and date all of them! Doesn’t Japan have the technology to create robot doubles yet? Or clone me or something?!”

“Uh, you’re pretty much only succeeding in making yourself sound like a creep so far,” Minori-san said, squinting at me.

“I know!” I groaned. Heck, if I ran into somebody saying all that with a straight face, I would want to punch them with a running start!

“Hooo...” Minori-san briefly closed her eyes, a concerned look on her face, then she opened them again and turned to Matoba-san with a sigh. “You heard the man. You have any advice for him in your, uh, inimitable style?”

“Who, me?” Matoba-san said innocently.

“You’re the one he asked for help. Or at least advice.”

“Hmm.” Matoba-san crossed his arms, cocked his head, and then sat that way for several seconds. Then he said flatly: “Well, as for me personally, I’d like you to try to bag the empress if you could.”

“So you’re saying, choose Petralka?”

“Everything Japan and Amutech are doing here, we do at the pleasure of Her Majesty, because of her vaunted affection for you, Shinichi-kun.”

“So... you’re not encouraging me to go with Petralka for the sake of love.”

“I’m saying you should think of things holistically.” Matoba-san shrugged. “The entire problem is that your feelings alone aren’t settling the issue, isn’t it? Then why not consider what else you might gain from the match?”

Yikes. This guy could be D-I-R-E-C-T. Of course, I knew that already.

Profit. Value. What that made me think of was Prince Rubert, who had proposed to Petralka practically the other day. He hadn’t proposed out of love, either; for him, it had to do with social position and a number of other benefits. I knew nobles and political types had to think of marriage that way, and that it wasn’t always a terrible thing. But—

“But in that case, you’d really feel bad for Myusel,” said... Minori-san, surprisingly. “She loves Shinichi-kun so much.”

“Huh...?”

“Hm...?”

Matoba-san and I both looked questioningly at Minori-san. He didn’t seem to expect that comment any more than I did, and his normally all-but-invisible eyes had widened slightly, presumably in surprise.

“What?” Minori-san said.

“Nothing... It’s just, knowing you, I thought you would back Petralka.”

“Why?”

“Well, if Petralka and I were—hypothetically, okay? Hypothetically, if we were going out...”

“Uh-huh.”

“I might... Well, I thought maybe you would think that over time I might get friendlier with G-Garius... You know?”

Minister Garius en Cordobal was Petralka’s cousin and a knight who served near her at all times. Gorgeous, smart, and a fine fighter, it seemed like someone up there must have really, really liked him, because he got all the good stuff. He, however, was—well, let’s say not interested in women, and in fact had been very (uhh) close to Prince Rubert once upon a time.

And as difficult as I found it to believe, even he—ahem—didn’t think badly of me, if you know what I mean. Minori-san, in addition to being a WAC, was a completely rotten fujoshi, and I’d thought she would have relished the idea that by getting close to Petralka I would ultimately be getting closer to Garius, too. And yet...

“Oh, is that what you were hoping for?”

“No, definitely not.”

I had only been saying what I thought Minori-san might like. One hundred percent not what I personally hoped for. I like girls. Cute girls. (It’s important, so I said it twice. I’ll say it as many times as I need to.) Men were not on my radar, not one bit. Out of sight, unnoticed, not even there.

I guess Matoba-san must have been thinking the same thing I was, because he was sort of half-smiling and murmuring, “Indeed, indeed.” During the Rubert incident, he’d seen with his own eyes just how rotten this girl was, so it was a natural assumption.

“Gosh, you guys.” Minori-san pursed her lips as if to say she found all this very hurtful. She was older than me and normally someone I could lean on, but sometimes she showed a childish side. Her baby face made the sulky expression really cute, and... Uh-uh! Not the time to be thinking about that!

“I do know how to keep business and pleasure separate,” Minori-san said. She crossed her arms. Just beneath her chest. That only emphasized her boobs—obviously bigger than Elvia’s—and left me with no idea of where to put my eyes... Not the time to be worried about that, either!

She certainly didn’t seem like she knew how to separate “business and pleasure.” Maybe she didn’t actually realize how she acted?

“Myusel is the one I’d like to see rewarded,” Minori-san said with a quiet smile. “I’ve seen how faithful she is, living here in this mansion. When you were captured by Bahairam, Shinichi-kun, she was so desperate it almost hurt to see. You know she stole my pistol and pointed it at Elvia?”

“Minori-san...” Gosh, she really had a kind streak.

“And...” Minori-san was talking quietly. “Anyway, picturing Garius-san writhing and wishing for his reward is practically enough for me to live on...”

“Don’t say things like that with that look of pure contentment on your face.”

“Love that you can’t abandon, even when you know it will never be returned... The gossamer nature of unrequited feelings... It’s irresistible!”

“You aren’t separating anything!”

Maybe that rottenness had penetrated so deep she couldn’t separate the two anymore. BL, thou fearsome thing!

Buuuuut.........

Hikaru-san was basically in Elvia’s corner, and Matoba-san sounded like he was on Petralka’s side, while Minori-san was openly advocating for Myusel. I’d looked for advice, knowing I wasn’t going to solve this problem on my own, but I found everyone’s opinions completely divided, and now things seemed even worse than when I’d been confronting the whole situation on my own. Was this my fault?

“Aw, what am I gonna do?”

Confronted with Minori-san, who even at that moment was staring into the middle distance, picturing how delicious Garius looked as he pined away, I could only slump my shoulders and heave a sigh.

“Ah-choo!” I quickly put my hand to my mouth to keep the sneeze from flying everywhere.

“Are you quite all right, Garius-dono?” Elder Zahar asked, looking at me.

“I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

“You’ve a cold?” The lips beneath the old man’s mustache curled into a thin smile.

“No. Can’t say there’s been anything unusual with my nose or throat.”

“Well and good, but... still, the stress must be getting to you. You’ve kept yourself so busy lately. A young man ought to take a break every now and again, let himself relax... But I suppose that won’t do now. I’ll have the royal physician mix up a simple treatment for you.”

“I would appreciate that,” I said. At the moment I had a great deal of work that needed taking care of, a mountain of issues that had to be addressed. I had no time to relax and recuperate.

“And I know how you suffer on account of Her Majesty,” Elder Zahar added. I didn’t respond, but I could feel a sour expression on my face.

Of late, Her Majesty had become ever more eager to leave the castle. It seemed Shinichi was her objective. She had always liked to go to see him, but recently the demands seemed more and more frequent—or at least more insistent. Today, for example, she had proclaimed that rather than finish the two days’ worth of work she had waiting for her, she would go to the school. And ultimately she did, though at least it seems she was compelled to bring bodyguards. Knowing that Prime Minister Zahar would break if she applied enough pressure, she waited for a moment when I was not there, making her little demand of the prime minister alone.

It was all a great deal of trouble she was causing. It is not that I failed to understand the pressure attendant upon assuming the throne at just seventeen years of age, but if she became too willing to throw her proverbial weight around, it would mean more work for everyone. In fact, just yesterday, it seemed, she personally summoned the chef and gave him some kind of orders...

Perhaps I would have to give her a stern talking-to one of these days.

“I must apologize for her,” I said.

“Heavens, you have nothing to apologize for,” Elder Zahar said with a smile. Still, just now, I was probably the only one in a position to scold Her Majesty. If she was acting selfishly, it could be said that it was because I had been too indulgent with her. “And in any event, this is more important than Her Majesty right now.”

“Yes... Of course.” I dropped my eyes to the floor.

The two of us were in what was effectively the deepest chamber of Eldant Castle. This building had been carved wholesale out of a mountain, and there was nothing in the world to rival it for size; it contained a practically innumerable quantity of rooms. Even to consider storage areas alone was to contemplate food stores, treasure rooms, armories, and miscellanies—several of each in sizes large and small.

Some of those rooms contained things that were not to be taken outside the castle. Some of them had doors that were not to be opened.

Many of the contents of such places were magical items of unknown construction.

“Well, quite the collection, isn’t it...”

At our feet was a panoply of items of every size. All of them magical, that much we knew, but all widely divergent in appearance. Many appeared to take the form of swords or shields, but some looked like eating utensils or clothing, while others had simple shapes like a ball or a stick. It was truly a motley assortment, and it included items we didn’t even know the use of. I could hardly believe there were so many things there.

“And all of these...?”

“Yes. According to our records, all of them are capable of interfering with the mind or spirit.” The answer came from a woman standing beside us, a mage who was responsible for overseeing our stores. “I must ask you to be cautious, sirs. Some of these items could activate and put you under magical control at merely a touch.”

I had just been reaching out to take one of the items, but thought better of it. “I see... Dangerous business indeed.”

That, of course, was why these items were locked up here.

“That mirror over there transports anyone who looks into it to a nightmare world,” the witch said, indicating something draped in a cloth and tied with copious ropes. “And that necklace causes everyone around you to be attracted to you if you so much as put it on.”

“I see...”

It appeared that mind control took many forms and meant many things. Even the magic rings many of us used on a daily basis were in this category, but the decisive difference between those rings and these items was the degree of control or interference they represented. The interpreter rings were ultimately nothing more than an aid to telepathic communication. The magic worked because both parties had the intention to align their understanding. Hence why even the largely unmagical lizardmen could use them. They were simple as magical items went, the method for making them was well known, and they were in abundant supply.

But when it came to serious mental-manipulation magic—what might even be called mind control—such items were of a vastly different kind from those simple rings. They could break a human mind, or take away a person’s free will. What’s more, many of them could do it without being activated, so to speak, by any human intention, so it would be all too easy to have an accident. This was risky, what we were doing.

Some of the items were so old, their origins so obscure, that even the way their magic functioned was not well-known to our mages, and thus counteracting their effects was difficult. Hence the special storage area deep in the bowels of the Imperial Castle. Normally, people in our position would never even approach the place. But necessity had driven us to this dangerous survey.

Not long before, Prince Rubert of the Kingdom of Zwelberich had sought Her Majesty’s hand in marriage. The prince had attempted to assassinate Shinichi, whom he saw as a potential obstacle to the success of his proposal, by using mind-control magic on Shinichi’s maid, the half-elf Myusel. Thankfully, his efforts failed, after which his proposal was naturally declined and things returned to normal. Such as it was...

“Our only saving grace has been that Zwelberich has always viewed mind control magic as something to use on demi-humans.”

There was considerable prejudice against demi-humans in Zwelberich, a strong view that humans were the master race, such that the people of the kingdom saw nothing wrong with using magic on their demi-human compatriots. In fact, it was said in some quarters that Zwelberich knew so much about mind control magic precisely because they had developed it as a way of keeping their demi-human population in line.

In other words, it was widely accepted there that mind control magic was something humans used on demi-humans; it was not conceived of as something a human would cast on another human. It would not be an exaggeration to say that that fact had saved us during the recent incident. Consider, for example, if it had occurred to Prince Rubert to use mind control magic directly on Her Majesty. She would certainly not have turned down his proposal, and most likely would have ceded all her powers as empress to Rubert, making the Holy Eldant Empire not an ally of Zwelberich’s but a vassal.

Naturally, if the use of powerful mind control magic caused the victim to suddenly speak or behave very differently from normal, that would be a liability. We might have noticed such a change in Her Majesty—but then again, we might not have.

Eldant lagged behind Zwelberich in the development of mind control magic, but it was now necessary that some research be done in that direction. The events of the previous days had made that painfully clear. Without some example to follow, however, any work we might do would be no better than groping in the dark. But by the same token, if we could procure some kind of mind control magic that we might use as a yardstick, it would be a boon to our research project.

Obviously we couldn’t go to Zwelberich asking for help. Thus, Elder Zahar and I had come to this storeroom full of forbidden magical items in hopes of finding an example to follow.

“Excuse me...” We were surprised by a girl’s voice, flat and toneless. Elder Zahar and I looked up from the items at our feet, peering deeper into the room, from whence the voice had come.

Two humanoid forms loomed there, each a good two heads taller than me. Despite being basically human in shape, they didn’t feel quite human, and the length of their limbs was obviously not to normal human proportions. Dolls? No—puppets.

Made of wood, metal, and leather, these things could be controlled by magic, in order to do work for their masters. They represented the safest way to transport magical items that could be dangerous to touch—and the dwarves were the undisputed masters of controlling such creations. The two puppets walked up to us, accompanied by heavy footsteps, and on the floor they set a box they had been carrying.

From behind them appeared two dwarves, the ones who had been controlling the puppets. One was a petite young woman, the other a gruff older man. Both had the short stature and greyish skin characteristic of dwarves, but that was about all they had in common. The girl was Lauron Selioz, a young woman exceptionally talented in the control of dolls and puppets, to the extent that she had even been given the duty of puppeteering Her Majesty’s body double. She rarely showed much emotion, but Elder Zahar and I were both well acquainted with her diligent work, and she was a natural choice for this job.

The middle-aged man was Rydel Guld. He was the foreman of Guld Workshop, one of the very best production centers in the nation. It was his family that had excavated the royal castle. Despite being a dwarf, he was accorded a status nearly equal to that of a human noble; he was one of the empire’s most important people. He was also Lauron’s former superior. He, too, had been summoned to control one of the puppets. They would both normally have been too important to bother with menial labor like this... but considering what we were actually doing, we needed to keep our numbers small and trustworthy.

“My, my... This is going to put this old body through the wringer,” Prime Minister Zahar said, casting his eyes once more over the magical items lined up before us.

We weren’t talking about a handful of inventory. We had dozens, or perhaps even hundreds, of items to inspect, many of which were immensely dangerous to handle, and we didn’t know if any of them would even be of help. It demanded vigilance and care—dangerous and draining work.

“But it will prove a good opportunity,” I replied. Even before the events with Zwelberich, I had been considering the burgeoning necessity of investigating mind control magic. For example, the so-called “Puppet Drake” developed by our neighbors Bahairam: that, too, was presumably a form of this magic, although also not intended for use on humans. Such magic might not seem destructive in and of itself, but it was very much a weapon. Setting aside the question of whether we would use such a weapon ourselves, so long as our enemies had it, it was incumbent upon us to learn at least enough to prepare countermeasures.

Sounds like something Shinichi would say, I mused, and the thought brought a smile to my face. I had learned much since he came to our country. Shinichi, evangelist of the culture of another world entirely, had a way of shaking us out of our most entrenched notions—what might be called tradition if one were feeling favorable, and meaningless habits if not. More than once, he had called my attention to things that had seemed so natural to me I had never even thought about them.

He was an interesting man. Someone the like of whom I had never had around me. I had the surprising feeling that if we were to consult with him about this magical research, he might think of some method we hadn’t considered. Sometimes there is a perspective one can only gain by not being too close to a matter.

When we were done with this selection, perhaps we could both go with Her Majesty to Shinichi’s mansion, as a way of refreshing ourselves.

The thought comforted me as I gazed at the heaps of magical items sitting before us.