Chapter Three: Believed Forbidden

An unexpected visitor arrived first thing in the morning the day after Petralka had come to see me.

I had just finished getting dressed and was heading out of my room to breakfast when I heard voices in the front hall. I went to see what was going on and found Myusel and Cerise, greeting guests.

“Wh—What brings you here?” I asked of the unexpected party I saw standing there.

One of them, just like yesterday, was Petralka. She had sneaked out of the castle yesterday, and I had been sure Garius was going to find out, give her a scolding, and then ground her for a while... and that’s why she was unexpected.

But there was someone else I hadn’t counted on: Garius himself. He very rarely visited the mansion. Instead, we typically saw him when we went to the castle ourselves. If he was here, it was usually to accompany Petralka—and it looked like that was what he was doing today, too. In addition to the two of them, there were several knights who I assumed were bodyguards.

Finally, there was a diminutive girl with short hair and sort of grayish skin. Lauron Selioz, the dwarf. I knew her for her exceptional skill in controlling magical puppets—she spent most of her time at the castle, having been given the duty of puppeteering Petralka’s body double. Today, though, I didn’t see the double, but rather a burly-looking puppet standing behind her. I recognized it as one of the work dolls from the Guld workshop.

“Lauron, you’re here too? But why?”

She didn’t respond, but bowed slightly when she saw me. She still wasn’t very expressive, and it was a little hard to tell what she might be thinking.

“What’s going on?” The question came from Minori-san as she and Hikaru-san wandered into the foyer. Minori-san was in her uniform, and was even carrying her suitcase, the one with the concealed 9mm machine pistol. Her cell phone was hooked into the mansion’s security network, and she’d likely known about Garius and the others before I did. The weapon was probably inspired by the unusual fact that they’d brought a detachment of knights and even a work puppet.

What in the world was going on here? I looked at Lauron again—and then I realized.

“Shinichi. We must talk about—”

“I’m so s-sorry!” I exclaimed before Garius could finish, throwing my head down in a bow. “I know I should have sent Petralka home as soon as she showed up yesterday, but... I just... I couldn’t...”

Lauron, as I said, was responsible for Petralka’s body double. Meaning that while Petralka was away from the castle, she had to play the part of the empress. When Garius found out what had happened, he would have been angry not just at Petralka, but Lauron, too. He had obviously brought Lauron here to talk about yesterday’s shenanigans. In a word, he was here to complain about Petralka’s stopping by for a visit. Or so I had assumed.

But instead...

“No, that’s a separate topic,” he said brusquely. “And in that case, it is I who should apologize for the way Her Majesty foisted herself on you.”

I blinked in surprise to find Garius turning the apologetic tables. So... this wasn’t about Petralka’s visit yesterday?

“Huh? But—”

Then why was he here? I looked at Petralka, baffled, but she stood there with her arms crossed and her chest puffed out. She certainly didn’t look like someone who had just been given a dressing-down along with the keeper of her body double. “Garius claims he has some kind of business with you, Shinichi. And we have come along with him.”

“You mean like extra content?”

“Do not put it that way.” Petralka frowned.

It looked like whatever this was, it really wasn’t about yesterday. “But what kind of business—” I was about to ask, but suddenly Minori-san practically shoved me aside.

“Don’t tell me!” she exclaimed. “Could it be that you’re here to join the battle for Shinichi-kun’s heart?!”

“Hold it right there, you rotten—”

“If you are, I am so in your corner!”

“Stop trying to make this all about your personal interests!” I cried, as our resident WAC stood with her eyes glittering and her hands joined in front of her chest as if in prayer.

“Battle...?” Garius said, perplexed.

“It’s nothing.”

“And if I win this battle, Shinichi is the prize?”

“I am not.” I groaned. Why did he have to home straight in on the worst part of this conversation? “Minori-san’s just off in her own little fantasy land—as usual—so please, don’t pay any attention to her.”

“Hmm.”

“So what’s this business you mentioned?”

“Well, as it happens, we found a certain something at the castle,” Garius said, getting right to it.

“A certain something?”

“Yes. Namely, something known as ‘Forbidden Armor.’” Garius’s brow furrowed ever so slightly. “It has lain sealed away in a special storehouse, but—”

“Ooh! Forbidden... Sealed away...” This sounded pretty exciting. Was it—you know? One of those crazy armors with some outrageous power? Like, when you put it on, it controls your brain? Or gives you superhuman strength, but erases your memories in exchange? Or maybe the armor fuses with your skin so you can never take it off?! Maybe it was like the equipment of some last boss in an anime or manga: when he’s defeated, he suddenly goes, “You have my thanks. Now I am at last free of this accursed armor,” and turns out not to be such a terrible guy after all before everything ends up great?

“Certain circumstances have compelled us to begin investigating dangerous articles like this. This armor in particular, though, remains rife with mysteries.”

“Really? What kind of mysteries?”

“For one thing, we are told it is armor, but it has the shape of no armor I’ve ever seen.”

“Huh?”

Come again?

“It’s difficult to explain—it’s almost a sort of globe. At a glance, it’s impossible to tell where a human limb could even fit in the thing. What’s more, there are too many gaps in the records accompanying the armor to explain why it was sealed up to begin with. Much about it is, at best, rather unclear.”

“Geez, give me a break...”

Then again, this thing was sort of an antique. And we all know how easy it is to lose the instruction manual to something that keeps moving from owner to owner.

“However,” Garius continued, “there are letters carved on the armor’s surface that look familiar to me.”

“Familiar letters? What kind?”

“They look much like the characters inscribed on the cover of a book Minori once lent me.”

“One of my books?” Minori-san asked, pointing at herself in surprise.

Garius nodded briefly at her, then looked back at me: “I asked Her Majesty, and she confirmed that the letters look like those found in the books in your library, Shinichi. I came to ask for your opinion, thinking that perhaps the letters have some connection with Ja-panese.”

“Letters..................”

I knew Petralka was capable of reading Japanese at a grade-school level, so if it were simple enough, there would have been no need for them to come specifically to ask me about it. Maybe the letters were stylized, like something on the cover of a book, or maybe they involved difficult kanji or something. But how would anything like that get on some kind of “forbidden armor”? Maybe it only looked like Japanese, and didn’t have anything to do with my world at all...

“In any event, I would like to begin by showing you the armor itself. Perhaps you and your friends will understand something that we could not.”

“Okay... But just to be clear, we might not understand anything at all. In fact, I think that’s more likely. The resemblance between these letters and Japanese might turn out to be complete coincidence.”

“Certainly. We’re prepared for that possibility. But you and your friends often have a different way of seeing things than we do, and we are hoping it might yield fresh insights here.”

“Uh-huh...” So they were hoping for any kind of clue. It sounded like they weren’t getting anywhere on their own. “And where is this armor?”

“In the carriage,” Garius said, turning around. “There are five examples of the armor. Each is in its own wooden chest, but I must warn you not to touch any of them. Some magical items take prisoner anyone who touches them, you see. One may presume that, being armor, any effect does not activate until the armor is equipped, but we can’t be too careful. To that end, Lauron is here to use the puppet to get the armor out of the chests.”

“So just to be clear, you’re saying: look, don’t touch; definitely don’t accidentally put it on; and if we do, you’re not responsible for what happens?” Hikaru-san said.

“More or less.” Garius nodded.

Now we knew why Lauron was with them. I guess it made sense to take extra precautions when handling something called “forbidden armor.”

“For the time being, we don’t even understand how one puts on this so-called armor. If none of you have any objections, Lauron will now bring out the chests.”

“Er, fine, I... I guess...”

We would just look at it. No problem, right? Surely it wasn’t, like, a bacterial weapon that would infect us the moment they opened the lid—right? If it were, it would have gotten Garius and Lauron already.

That was my rationalization, anyway. But really, I was just very interested in this Forbidden Armor. An item by that name was practically a trope in manga, novels, anime, and video games—I never dreamed I would see the real thing.

“How about we start by taking them in the living room? It’s the largest space in the house.”

“Very well. Lauron...”

“Yes, sir.” Lauron, and the puppet standing behind her, began to move.

I headed for the carriage with Lauron-san. It was her puppet who would be doing all the carrying, of course. The problem was, not only was the puppet very large, but whatever this cargo was, it apparently wasn’t small itself. They would need a large entrance and hallway through which to bring the chests, and I was to help them find it. I trailed along behind Lauron-san, mentally reviewing various entrances and passageways.

“Is this it...?” I asked as we arrived.

“Yes. Please be careful not to touch it,” Lauron-san said as several wooden chests were lowered one by one from the carriage. There were five of them, all identical in size. They were so large, in fact, that I thought someone my size could have climbed inside and closed the lid. As for what they weighed, I couldn’t tell, but probably enough that a full-grown man would find them hard to lift. All of the boxes were blackened with age, the nails rusting: they had obviously been around for a long time.

Once Lauron-san had unloaded them all, she had the puppet pick one of them up. I could hear the box groan with the strain.

“This way, please.” I started off at a walk, Lauron-san behind me now. We had opened both doors of the service entrance, and went into the house that way. The front door was bigger, but the foyer was home to several furnishings and decorations that seemed likely to be hazardous for the puppet, so I decided to bring them around the back way.

“Ahem. Are you quite all right?” I asked, feeling some trepidation, but Lauron-san replied, “I’m fine.”

The source of my concern was the ongoing complaint from the wood of the box the puppet was carrying. Maybe the contents were heavy, or maybe the wood was in poor shape, or maybe the puppet was just grasping it too hard... In any event, I wondered if it might not be best to stop and adjust the thing’s grip. That was just my feeling, though. Lauron-san didn’t seem unduly disturbed. She was the specialist when it came to controlling these puppets, and it wasn’t my place to tell her how to do her job.

And so I led them past the kitchen, toward the living room. That was when I heard my name: “Myusel~~!” And shambling down the corridor toward us came... Elvia-san. “Ain’t breakfast ready yet?”

“Oh! I’m sorry...” The sudden visit from Her Majesty and Minister Cordobal had caused me to put my breakfast preparations on hold. “I’m afraid I have to help get this chest to the living room first.”

“Aw, but I’m soooo hungry...” Elvia-san did indeed sound downright pathetic.

After Her Majesty’s declaration the previous evening that “a woman’s fiftieth kilo is mere self-indulgence,” Elvia-san had declared that she was “cutting down” and left the room before she had eaten half her dinner. Then, it seemed, she spent the hours until almost dawn doing laps around the nearby area. It certainly would make a person hungry.

“Please hang on just a little longer,” I said.

“But I’m dying,” she said. Then her eyes lit on the box in the puppet’s hands. “So all you need’s to get this thing to the living room?”

“I’m sorry...?”

“If this box gets to that room, you go back to making breakfast, right?”

“Well, yes, but... er, Elvia-san?”

“All right, I’m on it! Let’s get you back to breakfast duty, Myusel!” And then, before I could stop her, Elvia-san grabbed the box from the puppet. She was so strong, she could easily carry the box all by herself, and faster than Lauron-san’s doll. The puppet really did look large and ungainly.

“Oh—!”

“No, don’t—!”

My voice and Lauron-san’s sounded at almost the same time, and the wooden box creaked ever louder. An instant later—

“Huh?!”

Perhaps the box really had been under too much strain, or perhaps something had simply come loose—whatever the reason, the chest flew apart in Elvia-san’s hands.

“Ohh...!”

The contents of the box—the “forbidden armor” Minister Cordobal had described—fell out and went rolling on the floor. It looked like a round, smooth lump, just big enough to put your arms around. Instinctively, I reached out to stop it from rolling away.

Reached out with my hand.

After all those warnings not to touch it. After they had brought in a puppeteering expert specifically so no one would have to.

I shivered. I felt a strange sensation in my fingertips. The surface, which I had taken to be steel, was hard and smooth, but lacked the chill of metal. It wasn’t warm either, though—it was a very odd feeling. They kept saying it was armor; maybe it was made from something other than metal, the way hard leather armor was.

“Wha—?”

Then, the lump split apart. It swallowed my right hand, like the jaws of some beast.

“Oh—!”

I tried to pull my hand away, but it was stuck fast. Worse, the lump had proceeded to swallow my arm. In a flash, it had my right arm up to the shoulder—then, shifting shape, the lump attached itself to my back and covered my shoulders, then my chest, and finally my legs.

Chik. Chik-chik-chik-chik-chik.

With a sound like a chittering insect, the former sphere attached itself to my body, covering my arms, legs, and torso in shapes much like those of Lauron-san’s puppet—in fact, even more angular. I was ensconced in something like a bubble, with no idea where it had come from.

“Myusel?!” Elvia-san exclaimed in shock. Her voice somehow sounded slightly different from usual—was it because of the bubble? I realized that perhaps it was more of a transparent membrane.

Everything up to this point had truly happened in the blink of an eye. I discovered that my arms were fully exposed, but my legs had something like greaves on them. And none of it showed any sign of coming off again. Maybe even more surprising, I realized I was no longer in my maid uniform, but a thin, form-fitting outfit of some kind.

Minister Cordobal’s words echoed in my mind: forbidden armor.

So I was...

“Myusel!!” Elvia-san grabbed my hand—or rather, the armor surrounding my hand. But: “Huh?”

That was the only sound she made before she went tumbling backwards through the air.

We sat in the living room and waited for this “forbidden armor” to arrive. “We” included me, Petralka, Minori-san, Hikaru-san, and Garius. The knights who had come along as bodyguards were stationed in the next room. We thought that would be best, because it would give us the most space to deal with this forbidden armor, whatever it was. If anything happened, the knights could be here in an instant.

And so I sat there, scratching my cheek. “So, uh... Petralka.” I didn’t need a mirror to know my face was bright red.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Aren’t you a little, uh... close to me?”

“Are we? Th-This is where we always sit,” Petralka said, but her cheeks were flushed, too.

When we had all sat down on the sofas, Petralka had plopped herself next to me as if it were the most natural thing in the world. There was lots of open space, but she squeezed as close to me as she could. She stopped short of cuddling up, but her leg was pressed right against mine, and I could feel the softness and warmth of her body. I was feeling—maybe not embarrassed, exactly, but kind of antsy.

Heck, she had sat on my knees before, so really, this was nothing. Of course, back then, I didn’t know anything about her being in love with me, if she even was. But now?

“D-Do not pay it any mind. We c-certainly aren’t.” Petralka pointedly looked away from me. Her silver hair fluttered as she turned her head—and revealed her ears, which were even redder than her face. And there was that skin, the little stretch from just behind her ears, down her neck—the delicate curve was undeniably alluring, even kind of... sexy...!

Was this it? Was this that “new side” Hikaru-san had talked about?! This new sexiness of Petralka’s had my heart on overboost, and I felt like it was going to explode! I hoped she couldn’t feel it pounding away in my chest. Arrgh, where does an omnipotent imperial ruler get off being so dang cute?!

But while I was busy losing my mind with moe, Hikaru-san apparently had a thought. “I wonder what Myusel and Elvia would think,” he mused, “if they saw this.”

“G-Geez, Hikaru-san!”

Don’t start that again!

“I should take a picture. I bet I could blackmail you for the rest of your life, Shinichi-san.”

“Huh. G-Good point.” That was when I realized Minori-san, who for some reason was nodding vigorously, had a camera-pen tucked into her breast pocket. Ugh, so had she already taken a picture?!

“Speaking of Myusel,” Minori-san said in an effort to distract me, “she and Lauron sure are taking their time.”

“Now that you mention it...”

They were just going outside to get something from the carriage. I wouldn’t have expected it to take so long. Even if they had to go really carefully, I assumed it wouldn’t take more than five minutes or so. Or maybe that puppet was even slower than it looked?

“Think we should go check on them?” Hikaru-san said, standing up from the sofa.

BOOM.

“Uh...?”

That was when we heard what sounded like an explosion—I mean, you could practically have put a “B-O-O-M” sound effect over it.

I flinched, startled. An explosion was bad enough, but what really bothered me was that it sounded very, very close. This wasn’t some distant echo. It seemed as if it had come from just near the mansion. As if to prove my point, a vase in the living room shivered, shaking several petals from the flowers it was holding.

So we were close enough to feel the shock wave. What if it had come from inside the mansion?

Garius and Minori-san stood up almost simultaneously. Minori-san grabbed the 9mm machine pistol from the suitcase at her feet, while Garius put a hand on his sword. Almost as if they had rehearsed it, each of them took up a position, Minori-san by me, Garius by Petralka, and then they watched the entrance to the room.

“What’s going on? Report!” Garius shouted, presumably to the knights nearby.

“Wh-What was that?” Petralka asked, clinging to my arm.

“Not sure...” I said.

Minori-san and Garius both seemed to be operating on the assumption that whatever had caused the blast, it was an enemy, but I didn’t think that was very likely. If Bahairam or whoever else was planning to attack my house, they could have chosen a way better time to do it. Why deliberately strike when a minister was here with a squadron of armed knights?

Unless they weren’t after me or the house—but Petralka. As many knights as we had here, it was still less than they had at the castle, making this the better target. But that still left the question of how they would have known Petralka would be here today. The earliest she could have decided to come would have been the night before, not enough time to plan and execute an entire ambush.

Then there was the fact that Minori-san’s cell phone hadn’t gone off. The various sensors around our mansion had even detected the Eleamachi Tribe—trained killers from Bahairam who possessed natural abilities practically equivalent to active camo. But whatever caused that explosion hadn’t so much as tripped an alarm. Which all led to just one conclusion...

“Eeyikes!”

Suddenly, the door to the living room came flying off. I don’t mean it flew open. I mean it literally burst off its hinges. And it was accompanied by... one of the knights of the royal guard?

“Wha...?”

Even Garius looked surprised when he saw the knight at his feet, clanking faintly as he shifted. To send a grown man flying was hard enough—but an armed knight in full equipment probably weighed something in the neighborhood of a hundred kilograms. Not to mention the stopping power of the door he’d just gone through. That must’ve been some explosion.

I looked again, and this time I noticed the huge dent in the chest of the knight’s armor. If he was especially unlucky, he might even have some broken bones.

One thing was clear: this was bad. I didn’t know exactly why, but it definitely was.

“Garius-san,” I said, eyeing our now doorless entryway and shifting so Petralka was sort of behind me. “I think this is—the thing.”

“Thing?” he said, but my guess was he had put the pieces together, too.

It was unlikely to be an attack by a third party. So whoever—or whatever—had sent the knight sprawling had to have come from inside the house. From inside a box brought from a nearby carriage, say.

“The forbidden armor,” I said.

“One supposes,” Garius replied, nodding darkly.

It almost had to be. That was the explanation that made the most sense.

We were talking about an ancient, cursed magical item. If it was “forbidden,” that had to be because it was dangerous. Maybe, for example, it could move on its own and attack people. Maybe something had caused one of the suits of forbidden armor to awaken and begin its dark work.

Then Hikaru-san said, “Do you hear something? It’s like... a high-pitched jet engine noise...”

Now that he mentioned it, I did. Kind of a “fwoooo,” an awful lot like a jet or helicopter sounds when its engine revs up for a landing. Not very bassy or anything, but a mechanical noise that definitely said “power.”

“It’s coming,” Garius said, and drew his sword.

In the space where our door used to be, there appeared a bizarre shape. The first thing I could make out looked like... an arm. The roughest, meanest arm you ever saw. The hand, or what I thought was the hand, looked as big as a park bench. You wouldn’t want to get squeezed by that... or punched by it.

Then the elbow appeared, and finally the shoulder, and then.........

“Huh?” I said stupidly.

“Myusel...?” Petralka, peeking over my shoulder to see this “forbidden armor,” said from behind me.

She was right. Standing there was... Myusel.

But “standing” wasn’t quite the right word. She looked nearly crucified on the armor, like it was the armor that was standing, and she was sort of dangling from it. Her legs were covered up to the knees by armored pieces, but much of the rest of her body was exposed. From her legs, the armor wrapped around behind her like some kind of lurking ghost. From her sides, pushing her shoulders forward, extended two things that definitely looked like robot arms; they seemed to be connected to her arms and to move in concert with them. Maybe the best equivalent I could think of would be the Power Loader from Alie*s. This thing looked less like armor than like heavy machinery that you wore on your back.

On closer inspection, though, I noticed that the parts of Myusel I could see looked slightly distorted. And everything about her seemed a little pale, like she was covered by something translucent. She looked vulnerable in there, but the armor probably had some sort of shielding. It wasn’t as obvious as glass or plastic, though—maybe it was more like a mirage, incorporeal—or like a gravitational field.

Whatever the case...

“Is that... the forbidden armor?”

It looked less like armor and more like something created by an otaku: Armored Girl, or MS Girl, or some kind of weapon anthropomorphized into an adorable young girl—a classic powered suit! Especially the way the chest and hips and everything round was exposed! She was practically naked! O, great Armored Girl!

...No, wait.

What the heck was that thing?! As gadgets went, it sure looked out of place in a fantasy setting.

“Myusel, what in the world...?”

“I—I don’t know, sir...!” Myusel said, sounding as if she might cry.

“It must be the forbidden armor!” Garius said, his face grim, and that was when I knew for sure that whatever else that thing was, it was definitely the dangerous, off-limits, absolutely-do-not-touch item he had brought from the castle storehouses. He had said it didn’t look anything like armor, and now I knew what he meant. It didn’t even have a helmet or chest plate.

“Th-The wooden box broke, and this came out... And I, I t-touched it, and it just...! And I can’t get it off...! Elvia-san and Lauron-san, they...!”

“Elvia? Lauron? Did you do something to them?” I pressed, but Myusel shook her head in a sort of panic.

“It—It wasn’t me! My body moved on its own...! Me, I—I—!”

Her twintails waved back and forth almost audibly. Her chest was bouncing, too, so that I inadvertently found my eyes pinned to it. It wasn’t as large as Elvia’s, but it was still generous, and so soft-looking, and—hey, let’s get our priorities straight, okay?

“Elvia-san, I—”

As Myusel vehemently protested her innocence, I saw something just in front of her face. In the air in front of her—or rather, I guess, on the transparent screen surrounding her—characters quickly appeared and disappeared, scrolling through empty space. What were they? They were backwards, so I couldn’t make them out very easily, but they looked a bit like an alphabet...

“Elvia-san, I—I’ve actually always thought she was in the way!”

“...Huh?”

What had Myusel just said?

Surprised as I was to hear Myusel say something so out of character, I was no more surprised than Myusel herself. She quickly slapped her hands over her mouth—or tried to, producing a shower of sparks from the metal gloves encasing them.

“In the way? You mean...”

“N-No, I don’t...” Myusel shook her head. But in spite of the emphatic gesture, she went on speaking fluently: “...not mean it! She gets to slobber all over you because of some song and dance about the moon, Shinichi-sama, and I can’t stand it! It’s not fair! When I work so hard to restrain myself!”

“M-Myusel?”

The rest of us stood dumbfounded. We had never heard her express herself so directly, so bluntly. And yet her expression—she looked like she was about to burst into tears—was the complete opposite of what was coming out of her mouth. She herself couldn’t seem to believe what she was saying.

When they said this armor was cursed, is this what they meant? Did it make the wearer say things they didn’t mean—or maybe even things they meant, but would never say themselves?

Sheesh, I could see why it ended up forbidden.

But that still left—

“Lauron. What happened to her?” Garius demanded, his face still stern and dark.

“She attacked me with her stupid puppet, so I took care of her! Elvia-san, too!— I d-didn’t mean to, my body just moved on its own...!” Myusel went on shaking her head, denying every other thing she said.

I assumed that, in an effort to help the trapped Myusel, Elvia, Lauron, and Lauron’s puppet had attempted to remove the armor by force, and that the armor had counterattacked. The story was probably the same for the knight who had come flying through our door. There was a distinct possibility that the rest of the royal guard had met the same fate.

Could this go on? I was especially worried about Elvia and Lauron, but just then—

“Sh-Shinichi-sama...” Elvia arrived in the room, carried on Lauron’s back—or, well, because of the height difference, more like half-dragged. She looked like she had been worked over pretty good, but she was still alive and kicking. Lauron looked unharmed; probably because it was the puppet, and not her, who had borne the brunt of the suit’s counterattack.

Huh? But that meant...

“If we don’t attack it, it won’t attack us...?” Garius, who had evidently had the same thought as me, mumbled.

“Looks that way,” Minori-san said, lowering her pistol.

If the suit were intent on attacking anyone and everyone within range, then it would have roughed up Lauron when it had the chance, not to mention the knight groaning on the floor near us, not to mention all of us in the room right then.

“This suggests that the impetus for the prohibition on this armor is the unrestrained speech,” Garius said.

“Yeah, having your innermost feelings come pouring out is a scary thing,” Minori-san said. She nodded at him.

Uh. Did they really think that was the main issue?

“Myusel says she can’t take it off. That might be a problem eventually,” Hikaru-san said. “I mean, at this rate, she’ll never be able to go to the bathroom again...”

“Now that’s scary!” Minori-san said, wringing her hands.

“Is that really what bothers you the most?!” I interjected.

“Shinichi-kun, it won’t do to make light of a young woman’s toilet plight. Do you know why at Comiket and every other big event, the guys’ restroom is always practically empty, while the girls’ has a line that seems to go around the block?”

“Uh, not as such...”

Seeing as I was a boy and all.

Even if we could figure out how to handle the toilet situation, being unable to take the armor off would definitely be an inconvenience. And constantly spewing your own darkest thoughts wasn’t super great, either.

Hmm. What to do.

Thinking that maybe a closer look at the armor would be a good place to start, I was about to take a step forward—when someone pulled on my arm and stopped me.

“Petralka?” I turned around to find the empress hanging off my arm, holding me back with all her strength. It looked like she hadn’t moved since I shifted to put her behind me. “Sorry, but maybe you could let me—”

“Get away from Shinichi-sama!” Myusel demanded the very next second.

All of us looked at her in shock. The only one who was anywhere near me right now was Petralka. That made it pretty clear who Myusel was speaking to.

Then she went a step further. Tearfully, but also assertively, she declared, “Enemy presence detected. Eliminating!” The jet-engine whine increased again, and she floated straight towards us. Evidently, to “eliminate” Petralka.

“Just—whaaaaaaat?!”

“H-Halt! Stop right there!”

At that moment, two royal guards came into the room, staggering slightly. Both had dents and chips in their armor, suggesting they had already tangled with the power suit once, but it was their duty to put their lives on the line for Her Majesty, and they launched themselves at Myusel without hesitation or fear.

But she—or rather, the armor—gave one dismissive sweep of its huge arm and launched them through the air, until they slammed against a wall. This was no good. That thing was exponentially more powerful than anything we had. Saying it was like a child fighting a grown adult would have been an understatement—we were like fairies attacking a mythical Titan.

This was very bad. Whatever Myusel may or may not have really meant, she had threatened to “eliminate” Petralka. She could try to blame the armor, but the fact remained that a half-elf maid had threatened the life of the absolute monarch of the Empire. If she harmed a hair on Petralka’s head—voluntarily or not—somebody would have to take responsibility...

“Here’s where we run!” I exclaimed, and swept Petralka up in my arms.

“Wha?! Eep!” she yelped.

It looked like Garius and Minori-san, along with Lauron and Elvia, intended to try to stop Myusel, so that would buy us some time.

Alright then...

“Ia redoro imu shigamu reuobu dona euruto uoi, diifurisu ekamu toshifu dona ekirutsu taato imene!” I intoned, although it took me a few false starts. It meant “With True Words and my magic power I command thee, sprites of the wind, form a fist and smite my enemy!”

I hesitated for a moment—but this was an emergency. I didn’t have a choice. I held tight to Petralka as I stuck out my right palm toward a window facing the front yard. “Tifu Murottsu!”

I unleashed the offensive magic with as much power as I could muster. The glass shattered. I jumped through the now-vacant window and made for the yard. I was glad we were on the first floor. If we had been up a level, there might have been no way out.

Anyway, we had to run. Had to escape.

But where?

I was thinking desperately when I felt Petralka’s arms squeeze my neck. “Shinichi...!”

Ahhhhh. I was already carrying her in my arms, but with her squeezing, squeezing like that, like that, I might... I was...! Then Petralka looked at me with those huge, emerald eyes and said...

“We knew fifty kilos was an indulgence!”

“Are you still stuck on that?!”

Okay, so it was because Petralka was so light that even a wimp like me was able to pick her up and run! And notwithstanding Petralka’s somewhat out-of-place satisfaction and my completely out-of-place rejoinder, that was what I did.

Shinichi-kun leaped out the window with the empress in his arms—and Myusel, still trapped in the forbidden armor, followed him. Minister Cordobal headed around to the front door, leaving me, Elvia, Hikaru-kun, Lauron, and a few groaning knights in the living room.

“Hikaru-kun, Lauron, take a look at the royal guards. Help them out of their armor if you can. Broken shoulders or arms we can deal with later, but if anyone has a broken collarbone, it could puncture a lung.”

“Right, I’m on it.”

“Understood.”

They both nodded.

“I’m going after Shinichi-kun,” I said, and then I left the room. Instead of just barreling straight after him, I thought I would have better luck coming around from the opposite direction from Minister Cordobal; we might be able to catch Myusel in a pincers movement. The fact was, I didn’t think a sword or even my 9mm was going to stop that armor, which looked like it had jumped out of the pages of some manga, or come alive from an anime. But Myusel was trapped inside it, and that meant I couldn’t just open up with an anti-personnel weapon like a 110mm LAM. I switched the safety on my weapon to AUTO and headed around the back of the house.

“Minori-sama!” Elvia, moving unsteadily, caught up with me.

“What do you think you’re doing? You’ve already been on the losing end of a fight with that forbidden armor. You shouldn’t be running around. If you have any internal injuries—”

“It’s my fault for breakin’ the box...”

Ahh. Elvia hadn’t been there when Minister Cordobal cautioned the rest of us about the armor, so she hadn’t known how dangerous it was. She must have somehow gotten her hands on it while Lauron was trying to bring it to us.

I pulled out my phone as I jogged alongside Elvia. We had a wired network running between the mansion and the garrison, so I could communicate with the JSDF via my phone, which was hooked in by wireless LAN. I could get in touch with Captain Satou and the others there, get them to bring a Type-89, or an M-24 sniper rifle. The forbidden armor might be tough, but it was always possible we could find a weak point. And if we could hit it with pinpoint accuracy, we might be able to render the armor harmless without killing Myusel. For that, we would need a very precise weapon. Something better than a handheld pistol, or a machine gun that sprayed bullets.

“Hrgh!” Beside me, Elvia suddenly doubled over. Had she tripped?

I knew she needed rest. Normally, her sense of balance was almost impossible to upset, but the forbidden armor must have really done a number on her, because now she was stumbling in a sort of diagonal, looking into the distance...

“Hey, Elvia!”

“Buh?”

I was too late. Trying to get her balance back, Elvia reflexively reached out for the wooden box right nearby.

“Wha-huh?!”

I guess the lid had come loose when it was taken down from the carriage, or maybe it had shaken free with the other forbidden armor running around. Whatever the case, Elvia’s hand slipped right into the opening as if springing a trap. Her face froze.

She fell down, hard. Her hand, still trapped in the box, flipped the whole thing over.

“Elvia, are you o—”

Then I saw it, and the words died in my throat. A ball—there was no other word for it—rolled out of the box. Then it suddenly split in two, like a giant pair of jaws, and swallowed Elvia’s whole body.

“Elvia!”

This had to be—yes, I knew what was happening.

“Ahhhhhhh!” Elvia shouted.

The “ball” split apart, pieces sliding out even as Elvia’s clothes appeared to melt away. In their place, a kind of red bodysuit enveloped her from the neck down.

“What on earth...?” I said vacantly, as the second suit of forbidden armor wrapped itself around Elvia.

I went as fast as I could, Petralka in my arms. I ran desperately—around the house. I’m sure it would have looked completely stupid to anyone watching me. Just circling the same place like a chicken with its head cut off. Where was that going to get me? But it was really the only option left to me by the terrain around the mansion.

My house, see, was built adjacent to a big forest near the Eldant capital. The grounds of the mansion itself were neatly tended by Brooke, but take one step outside the property and it was all weeds and uncut grass as far as the eye could see. I wouldn’t be able to go very fast at all trying to run through that; I might even trip and fall. So in an effort to avoid that possibility, I had to stick to the inside of the property line.

There was always the path out the front door, the one that led to the capital—it was paved with stones and relatively well-kept, but at the moment several of Garius’s carriages were parked on it, and I would have had to work my way around them. The bird-drawn conveyances were essentially a big, feathery roadblock.

Then there was the little fact that Myusel was behind me in a powered exoskeleton. I felt like the moment I slowed my pace, she would catch up to me.

Solution? Dash in circles around the mansion like a chicken with its head cut off.

“Faster, Shinichi, faster!”

“I’m going—as fast—as I can...!”

I was a former shut-in, not a former gym rat, and I didn’t have the strength or the explosive power for this. I had hardly been running for five minutes, but my breath was already coming in gasps, and my heart felt like it might burst. Not to mention I was carrying another person, even if she was relatively light...

“Come—to think of it—Petral—ka...”

“Hm?”

“Wouldn’t it be—faster—if you ran—yourself?”

It was very, very late to be thinking of this, but in between gulping breaths I managed to suggest this new strategy. Petralka, though, adopted a pouty expression and looked away.

“...We refuse.”

“What? But...?”

“We said, we refuse! Keep running!”

She could order me around all she wanted, but I was close to my limit... I groaned, but continued my mad dash. I was just rounding a corner of the house when—

“Huh?”

There was the forbidden armor. But how?! How could it be here?! I came to a halt so quickly that my shoes kicked up dirt, and was about to go running the other way when—I stopped.

As I turned around, I saw Myusel in her forbidden armor behind me.

“There’s another one?!”

Now I saw that hanging from the torso of this new suit of armor was Elvia. Where Myusel’s armor had blue highlights all over, on Elvia’s they were red.

“But why?!” I wailed.

The colors may have been different, but Elvia was now just as much a “mecha girl” as Myusel. Her usual midriff-exposing white tube top was gone, replaced with a full-body leotard—it didn’t show nearly as much skin, but it did highlight her curves to much better effect, giving the whole thing a fresh—no, not the time!

Elvia looked shaken—she had probably put the armor on by accident, just like Myusel—but in spite of that, her arms and legs were moving, and she was coming our way. By now it was pretty clear that the forbidden armor acted based on the wearer’s most deeply buried feelings. And not long before, Elvia had been fighting over me just like Myusel. Which meant that the target of her attack had to be Petralka.

She was truly the “tiger in front,” Myusel the “wolf behind.”

“Shinichi-kun, watch o—” Minori-san rounded the house from Elvia’s side, shouting, but it was already too late.

“Wh-Wh-Wh-Wh-What am I supposed to d-d-d-d-do?!”

“Run!”

“There’s nowhere to run!”

It was a perfect pincers movement, and I was exhausted, anyway. And then...

““Shinichi-sama!!” Myusel and Elvia shouted at almost the same time—and then they both charged madly.

“Heek...?!”

I’m gonna be crushed!

With nowhere to run, I instinctively hugged Petralka tight and ducked down. There was an earsplitting clang of metal just over my head.

Slowly, fearfully, I looked up, and discovered Myusel’s and Elvia’s suits just above us, their hands locked together. It was like we were playing a very surreal version of London Bridge, and we were under the bridge.

Oh, I see.

Myusel and Elvia were both fighting over me. Myusel had gotten first blood, so to speak, on Elvia, and it made sense that Elvia might now consider her the biggest threat.

“U-Um, Elvia-san, please let go...!”

“You... let go... first, Myusel...!”

There was an awful scraping sound as they leaned into each other. For sheer strength, Elvia obviously had the upper hand, but when they each had a suit of powered armor, it looked like the contest was a lot closer to even.

“N-Now’s our chance!” Still holding Petralka, I sort of rolled out from between Myusel and Elvia. When we got to our feet, I wasn’t carrying Petralka in my arms anymore, but I had a firm grip on her hand, and pulled her along as we ran toward Minori-san.

““Shinichi-sama!””

Myusel and Elvia broke up their shoving contest and set off after me again. This was bad. I was right back where I had started, except this time there were two people chasing me!

“What are we supposed to do about this, Minori-san?!”

“I’ve already contacted the garrison, they should be bringing us a sniper rifle or something soon,” Minori-san said, jogging alongside me. “Though whether it’ll be here in time, I’m not sure...”

“A sniper rifle... Wait. Are we going to shoot Myusel and Elvia?”

“You think we can stop them without help?”

“No, I don’t, but—!”

“I’m not suggesting we use a rocket launcher or something. I’m hoping a rifle would allow us to hit a weak point, or at worst, injure instead of kill them. I don’t want to shoot those girls any more than you do, but I can’t think of anything else.” Minori-san looked genuinely disturbed.

She was right, a gun might give us the chance to take it easy on them, in some sense. There was some question about whether a pistol or other small arm would even have any effect on the forbidden armor. Those things looked a lot like powered exoskeletons from some anime or manga, and I had to assume they were pretty sturdy. Those transparent coverings seemed likely to be screens of some kind, or even force fields, and I got the distinct impression they would stop a bullet. That sort of thing was, like, the bare minimum requirement for a mecha girl.

“I’m going to try to at least buy you some time—you run on ahead with Her Majesty.” Then Minori-san stopped and drew her 9mm pistol. “Hold it right there! Stop or I’ll shoot!”

She probably knew the warning was pointless, but she gave it anyway. Then she fired a few shots into the ground near the girls’ feet, as a warning.

I heard the pistol bark behind me, again and again. Little plumes of smoke dotted the ground in front of Myusel and Elvia. The two of them, though, didn’t seem bothered. Well, to be fair, the girls, inside the suits, looked very scared, but the suits themselves didn’t so much as slow down. In fact...

““Hostile activity detected. Deactivating weapon safeties,”” Myusel and Elvia intoned together.

“Minori-san!” I stopped in spite of myself and shouted. “Run aw—huh?”

A second later, Myusel and Elvia—or really, their forbidden armors—stuck out their right arms and launched something.

There was a bam! I could feel in the pit of my stomach, and then the ground split, and Minori-san’s small form was thrown through the air.

“Minori-saaan!” I shouted, but Minori-san was... not slammed mercilessly into the ground. She twisted in midair and landed on her feet, bracing herself with one hand before pushing herself up again. What was she, an acrobat? I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I knew what an experienced martial artist she was.

For a second, I thought maybe the suits had fired cannons, but I was wrong. They hadn’t used a firearm at all, but...

“Rocket hammers?”

Each of the suits had launched something with a rope or wire attached to it. The thing the wire was attached to appeared to be a globe, now half buried in the earth. Then each of the suits gave a tug, and the globes jumped backwards: the forbidden armors had clearly fired them. The things were shaped like cannonballs, and they were about as big around as a man’s fist.

So these things got shot out as if from a cannon, but the ammunition wasn’t lost after one round. It could probably be fired multiple times. Infinite ammo, if you will. And probably more destructive than Minori-san’s gun. If one of those connected with a human body, it would tear it apart.

“What are you doing?! Run away!” Minori-san said, starting to run herself. I quickly set off again, still pulling Petralka by the hand.

Boom! There was that sound again. This time it was Petralka and me who were tossed into the air. Not as high as Minori-san had been; I think I only made it about a meter before coming down, largely unharmed. But Petralka—

“Eeeeeeek!”

“Petralka!”

She was lighter than me, and although we had been thrown the same short distance, she tumbled along the ground for several meters more.

“Wait...”

She was tumbling right towards a wooden box. Minori-san and I watched in horror as she slammed into it, bursting it apart.

No. No, no, no. That can’t be what I... This is too much!

“P-Petralka...?” I said timidly, as she sat up, woozy, from among the remains of the box.

I saw immediately that she was wearing the white third suit of forbidden armor.

Her Majesty and Minister Garius en Cordobal had already departed for Shinichi-dono’s mansion, leaving me to look after the castle, when the witch in charge of our special storehouses came up to me in a veritable panic.

“Prime Minister Zahar, please forgive the interruption—we have found it!”

The witch was speaking of the archives just nearby—specifically, of written records that had been discovered regarding the forbidden armor. As the records themselves were paperwork, and not a magical item, they had been stored separately from the armor, and their existence had gone forgotten. The keeper of the archives had noticed a four-digit number scrawled on the wooden boxes containing the armor, and had determined that it must be a classification and location code for the archives, which led to the discovery of these records.

“And? What did they say? Are there any hints, any clues?”

“Yes, Prime Minister.” She walked up to my desk and set the papers in front of me. She proceeded to give me the gist of them, and a rather shocking report it was. The forbidden armor, it seemed, “possessed” those so careless as to touch it—but only women, or so the records said. Men could handle the armor safely.

The term “possess” seemed to imply that women who touched the armor would not only be enveloped by it, but that it would influence their words and actions. Specifically, that desires and impulses from the deepest depths of her heart would come to the surface. This didn’t seem terribly dangerous as far as it went—except that the young woman ensconced in the forbidden armor couldn’t control the manifestation of these impulses. The result would be a young woman, terrified because she was possessed by an unfamiliar magical item, attacking everyone around her like a wild animal, on a rampage she was powerless to control.

Evidently, it was possible to gain some measure of agency over the suit if one remained calm enough—it seemed one woman had succeeded in removing the armor with her own hands, though only after having razed an entire town—but exactly how calm one had to be to exert this agency was as yet unclear. The records, I was told, said only that if anxiety exceeded a certain threshold, it would be impossible to take the armor off.

All this left me with a question, though: Why in the world had this armor been created in the first place? Cursed items were frequently devised with the intention that they would be used not by the one who made them, but by some enemy, inviting the foe to destruction. But this armor seemed altogether too roundabout a way to entrap an unsuspecting enemy. If that was what it was for, why not have the armor simply go berserk the moment it was equipped? Why have its actions bear no connection at all to the woman inside? Why leave the woman safe?

For that matter, if chaos was the intention, why limit it to women at all?

Magical items have creators, and creators have plans. The plans may not always work, but one would hardly bother to finish an item if it was completely divorced from what its creator wanted.

Whatever the case, there was still too much guesswork, too many things we didn’t know. It had clearly been the right choice to shut those things up in the castle storehouse; they were too dangerous to do otherwise.

But then, too...

“Hrm?” I grunted, stroking my beard absently. “Well, Garius-dono... Surely he wouldn’t...”

There were a great many women at Shinichi-dono’s house. Presently, that included Her Majesty the Empress, and even young Lauron, the puppeteer Garius-dono had taken along to handle the cargo. It seemed to me that all this simply meant a greater probability of an “accident” occurring...

“Perhaps it was wrong of us to take the armor to Shinichi-dono’s home,” I mused.

It was too late for regrets, however. I ordered the witch to dispatch a message to Shinichi-dono’s mansion immediately.

There was another air-shaking boom. Probably. I thought. It was the sound of a clenched fist tearing through the atmosphere. It moved so fast that you could hear it, or at least feel like you heard it. The steel “hand” was about to bury itself in its enemy.

Myusel’s forbidden armor was attacking Petralka. We already knew how powerful these suits were from Myusel’s encounter with the royal guard. If the diminutive Petralka took a direct hit, she could easily be killed. It was only barely a hand, but a speeding fist was more dangerous than any inexpertly wielded sword.

I reeled as the metal claws raked across Petralka’s face.

But there was no sound of impact—instead, an instant later, Petralka sort of shimmered from side to side—and disappeared. Myusel hadn’t hit her at all. It had only been an afterimage.

But wait... An afterimage implied—just to be clear what we were saying here—that Petralka and her entire body had moved fast enough to leave such an optical illusion. Was that even possible?

What was with this hyper battle?! Was this Shura ** Mon?! Grappl**?! Or were they going to go Super S**yan? Was there going to be a second transformation stage?!

My head spun with confusion as in front of me, girls wearing “forbidden armor”—Myusel, Elvia, and even Petralka—fought relentlessly.

“You lot...” Petralka growled, circling around Myusel and lashing out with her “arm” in a sort of counterattack. There was another rush of air, no less impressive than the one from Myusel’s blow. It was a blitz. “...are always, always, always with Shinichi all the time! We are left out!”

“Complain all you want, Your Majesty!” Myusel, leaving an afterimage of her own, dodged half of Petralka’s blows, and caught the other half with her own arm... Or anyway, that’s what it looked like. I thought. It happened so fast, I wasn’t really sure. “But Shinichi-sama is always so nice to you! Holding you! Carrying you around! I want him to carry me like that!”

“You can’t carry a girl who weighs more than fifty kilos! A woman’s fiftieth kilogram is an indulgence!”

“You wanna know why you’re so light, Your Majesty? Take a look at your chest!”

“Gnnraaahhh!! Now you have truly gone too far!”

The “arms” crossed and crossed again, so hard and so fast that you could almost put a bo-o-o-ong sound effect over them. The physical exchange was amazing enough, but the dialogue—I mean, they weren’t pulling their punches, physically or verbally. It seemed like a sorta weird conversation to be having during a superhuman battle to the death, though.

Was this... Was this... where we learned that war was truly hell? (Note: don’t really think so.)

“No fair! No fair!” Elvia came howling down from overhead. Myusel and Petralka dove aside, and Elvia slammed into the space between them. A huge flying kick. Her metal-clad leg hit the ground with a terrific boom!, throwing up dust and dirt.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

Elvia, or rather her forbidden armor, sank into the ground up to her ankle, at which point Myusel and Petralka, sensing their chance, rushed in from either side to take her by the arms. But Elvia spun, using her buried leg as a pivot, thrusting her arms out to deflect the attack and then using the momentum to free her trapped leg.

“Y’all are such lucky girls! Shinichi-sama fawnin’ over ya all the time!” Just like Myusel and Petralka’s fists, Elvia’s right leg was almost audible as it spun through the air. Her kick looked like it could crack a tree in half, but Myusel ducked low, while Petralka crossed her arms to absorb the blow. It still wasn’t enough to totally disperse the power of the kick, and Petralka went scooting backwards a couple of meters, bracing herself with her legs. “I want some! I want some, too!”

“You speak as if your chest were not a permanent fixture before Shinichi’s eyes!”

“You know he won’t shut up about how great your stupid fluffy tail is!”

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

The dialogue here was completely out of whack. Like, if this were a manga, I would wonder if they printed the wrong script in it.

Even for ladies going crazy, you’re going pretty crazy, ladies.

I could only watch the incredible scene in stupefaction. Then again, there was that part of my brain burning so hot with moe that I thought it might melt. I mean, I was basically watching a battle straight out of a tokusatsu show unfold before my eyes. I had never dreamed such a thing would happen. Plus, those forbidden armors were 100% mecha-girl powered suit things, and they were pretty, you know, cool—or, hot, I guess, and even in the midst of all the nuttiness, as a guy, it was hard not to get excited. Each time Elvia or Myusel moved, their chests moved with them—just follow the bouncing boobs, y’know? And Petralka, I guess she didn’t bounce, exactly, but that was great, too! Her body, lithe and graceful as a fawn, had a delight all its own.

“You are a mere half-elf and werewolf!”

“Yeah? Well, you’re supposed to be the almighty Empress!”

Petralka launched a back fist, but Myusel and Elvia each took a single step back and dodged it. Every attack of the forbidden armors took place with impossible speed and power, but if they missed by even a millimeter, then it was all for nothing. I guess it had that much in common with a normal fistfight.

Or that’s what I thought, anyway.

“Why, you...”

The transparent “screen” surrounding Petralka’s torso lit up, a series of lights flickering across it. Then a bunch of small rays of light gathered in front of her, spinning faster and faster until they became a blinding sphere. This looked awfully familiar from all the anime I’d seen—but it couldn’t be. As I watched in astonishment, two rays of light shot from the area of Petralka’s chest.

“The heck...?!”

They carved a dark rut in the earth, just in front of my feet, obviously formed instantaneously by superheated light. Were those beams—as in, beams? Did we have a beam weapon, here?!

“They’ve got Killer Boobeams! ...Argh, that’s dumb even for me!”

I didn’t know how it worked, but apparently that transparent screen doubled as a lens for focusing light into this destructive form. In practice, it looked as if the beams were coming directly from Petralka’s chest (such as it was).

“You lowlifes!”

“Speak for yourself, Your Majesty!”

“At least I have—!”

As if in response to Petralka’s beam attack, Myusel and Elvia launched those cannonball-like things at her. They were more than fast enough to be plenty destructive, but Petralka easily swept them aside. Maybe the wires were made of some kind of memory material, though, because the one launched by Elvia slowly arced around in midair, wrapping around Petralka’s armor. Elvia pulled on the wire while bending over, as if doing a judo throw. Petralka floated into the air, came around, and then slammed into the ground like the head of a gigantic hammer. There was another roar and lots more dust, so much that for a second, I couldn’t see her—but then two more blasts of her beams cleared the haze away, and she emerged, unscathed.

“This is, like...” Bad, right? The worst. It was bad enough when they started punching each other, but when the ranged weapons come out, you just can’t be like, “Oh, they’re having a little argument!” anymore. “Minori-san...!” I looked over at the WAC, but she shook her head as if to say there was no longer anything she could do.

Garius and a couple of the royal knights with the least serious wounds rounded the house at that moment, but even they could only watch the three women in amazement.

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “This is just the worst thing...”

The moment they had attacked Petralka, Myusel and Elvia had probably already consigned themselves to the death penalty. They were lucky, if you could call it that, that Petralka had her own suit of forbidden armor, because without it, she could certainly have been badly hurt or even killed.

Just as importantly, though, I didn’t want to see these three fight each other. They might be spitting out their innermost thoughts as they circled and jabbed, but even as they did so, I could see Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia on the far sides of those transparent screens, and all of them looked deeply disturbed. Whether they really meant what they were saying or not, being forced to speak and to fight by the armor could not have been fun for them.

And on top of all that, the real cause of this trouble was... me.

“And that means...”

Even though we were right there, the forbidden armors made no move to attack us. Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia were completely absorbed by their three-way struggle. Although the armor could be said to be on a rampage, it really started with the dissatisfaction each of them felt.

“You need to give us a chance, Your Majesty!”

“We forbid you from taking Shinichi!”

“Who needs to give everyone a chance, Myusel?!”

All three of them assumed the same stance, legs apart, fists clenched, sides braced, elbows up—obviously ready to launch an all-out attack at any moment. When I saw them like that, I threw myself toward them, shouting: “Stop! Stoooop!”

“Shinichi-kun?!” Minori-san reached out a hand in shock, but she missed me by an inch, and I went racing towards the girls. They were fighting over me, so if I got in the middle of them, at least they wouldn’t use their beam weapons or their cannonballs or whatever—at least, that was my assumption. And a punch, they could pull up short.

“Stop! Everybody just st—mgrh?!”

“Shinichi-sama?!”

“Shinichi?!”

“Shinichi-sama?!”

Again, that was my assumption. And we all know what happens when you assume.

Somebody’s fist—I didn’t know whose it was—pummeled me in the face. I guess there hadn’t been enough time to stop. Still, she had managed to slow it down considerably, so at least it didn’t knock my head clean off—the huge, hard chunk of metal merely slammed into me in a classic bit of blunt-force trauma. A critical hit to my brain, if you will. It knocked me clean out.

I’m not sure how long I was out. The first thing I noticed when I came to was a sharp, shooting pain in my cheek.

“Eeyowowow...” I instinctively put my hand to the side of my face, and I could feel how swollen it was. There was a damp rag there, so someone had attempted to see to my injury. My mouth felt off, too. I probed the area with my tongue, and discovered there was something weird with my teeth. Specifically, two of them appeared to be missing. Knocked free by the punch, I guess. That would explain the swelling.

“Urgh,” I gurgled, sitting up.

I was surprised to hear someone say, “Master.” I looked over and spotted Myusel. “You’re back... That’s good.”

“Yeah, ’s great.”

“Mm. It seems our long night’s vigil caring for you has paid off.”

“Y’all didn’t do anything, Your Majesty.”

“You yourself did not do anything, either.”

“Ya sure stopped me when I tried to climb into bed with him.”

“Of course we did!”

...There were Petralka and Elvia alongside Myusel. It looked like they had stopped fighting. So at least maybe I hadn’t gotten punched in vain. When I thought of how easily I could have ended up with a lot worse than a swollen cheek, I realized how well things had turned out. Or, if you prefer, how lucky I had been.

“Um... Is your cheek all right?” Myusel asked me.

“It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it,” I said bravely, working my face into a smile. It wasn’t very comfortable with my cheek all puffed up, but still, I would live.

Yes, I had survived, but...

“Uh, Myusel?”

“Yes, sir...?”

“You, uh, still can’t take that off, huh? And Petralka and Elvia, you too?”

Yes, the three of them were still wearing the forbidden armor. They still looked like walking tanks. The girls inside were still wearing the skintight, leotard-like outfits, and still looking like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. I was seriously curious about what the heck was going on here.

“Oh! Shinichi-kun, you’re awake.” Minori-san appeared in the open doorway. She was dressed, uncharacteristically, in an apron. “We had the garrison doctor look at you and he thinks you’ll be fine, but we were a little worried when you didn’t wake up. Myusel and the others swore they wouldn’t leave your side until you came to.” Minori-san smiled as she told me this. “Anyway, breakfast is ready. I’m no Myusel, but I gave it a shot. Think you can eat?”

“If it’s something very soft, then yeah, probably,” I said, trying not to open my mouth too wide. I made to get out of the bed. I guess I still had some damage, so to speak, because I wobbled and just about fell over.

“Shinichi-sama?!”

“Shinichi!”

Myusel cried out, but it was Petralka’s hand that reached out and held me up. To be perfectly accurate, she tried to reach out, and the forbidden armor moved its arm the same way. The heavy-weaponry look was for more than just show; that arm felt rock solid.

And then it started...

“Heh heh! Shinichi, let us repay you for yesterday—we shall carry you this time.”

“Er, Your Ma—yipes!” I said.

“Your Majesty, no fair!”

“Majesty...”

If I was surprised, Myusel and Elvia were downright peeved. But Petralka, looking pleased with herself, informed them, “The early bird gets the worm,” and then swept me off my feet and walked away, the suit so stable that it felt like I was being carried by a boulder.

“G-Geez, Petralka, this is embarrassing.”

“Pay it no mind. Allow us to hold you in our arms,” she grinned.

“‘Hold me in your arms...’?” That sounded borderline really dirty, and what with Petralka’s childlike body, it sort of felt like I was doing something really questionable, or having it done to me, or something. And her face was so, so close... er, uh...

“It is perhaps not ideal being unable to remove this armor, but it does have its uses—such as enabling us to sweep you off your feet, Shinichi!”

“Argh, you don’t have to sweep me off anything!”

“You are so light, Shinichi! Come now, don’t struggle!”

It was clear that carrying me really was a piece of cake for Petralka, who continued to grin as she carted me down the hallway, Myusel and Elvia following grudgingly behind.

So the girls were still stuck in the armor, but it didn’t seem like they were going to start whaling on each other again. Small victories.

And so it went. I confirmed with the girls that there was still no sign of the forbidden armor coming off. They hadn’t even put it on voluntarily; it had all been automatic, and there was no obvious way for anyone to help them out of it. No handles, no tabs labeled “lift here to release.” So despite being stuck in the armor, the girls just had to go on with their lives...

“It’s armor,” I said to myself. “Somebody made it, presumably on the assumption that whoever put it on would want to take it off eventually. Whatever happened to the last person to wear it, anyway?”

If you could never take the armor off, then it should have been sealed up along with the last “pilot,” and we should have found a skeleton or a mummy inside, like in some really difficult RPG.

Incidentally, the transparent “screen” surrounding the torso and head seemed pretty versatile: a hole would open up when the girls were eating breakfast, or when they needed a drink or something. I legit didn’t understand how this worked. Surely there was no way we could go on like this, and yet...

I was walking down the hallway after breakfast, thinking it over, when:

“Myusel? Petralka?” I saw them squatting in the hallway, facing each other, seemingly talking about something. They looked unusually serious. Was there going to be another fight? I rushed over to them. “What’s wrong?!”

They looked up at me, startled. “Sh-Shinichi? Get lost!” Petralka shouted.

“Hrk?” I came to a screeching halt.

She must have been awfully angry, because her face was bright red, and the look on her face and the tone of her voice were unusually sharp. My instincts told me to just do as she said, but from a distance of about two meters, I managed to squeak out, “N-No fighting... Let’s just all stay calm...”

“No one is fighting here!”

“Erk! Then why are you so mad?” I looked at Myusel with an expression I hoped communicated: What’s going on?

When I caught Myusel’s eye, she shifted uncomfortably and looked at the ground before responding, “It’s... It’s nothing...”

“Really?”

“Y-Yes...” Her thighs sort of rubbed together in a way that was strangely erotic... or would have been, if not for the surreal click-clack-click from the forbidden armor. “It’s nothing unusual... except I wanna go to the friggin’ toilet so bad!”

I kind of jumped.

“Oh!” Myusel slapped her hands over her mouth, but it was too late. Oh yeah... the forbidden armor had a nasty tendency to make you spit out your most secret thoughts. Myusel, turning more and more red, tried to walk it back. “Sh-Shinichi-sama, I... I’m at my limit. I can’t hold it anymore!”

“Oh, uh... Oh.”

Red-faced and eyes brimming, nonetheless Myusel’s mouth continued running itself. She looked kind of perverse, like this was some bizarre S&M game, and... argh, what was this sudden impulse I was feeling, this desire to pick on her? No! Get it together!

Okay. Being serious now.

Anyway, it was natural enough. She’d been trapped in the armor since yesterday, meaning there’d been no chance to, you know, answer nature’s call. But she had been able to eat and drink like normal, meaning biological processes would eventually have their effect. She still couldn’t get the forbidden armor off, though. And so she and Petralka had been crouched in a discreet corner, trying to decide what to do—until I bumbled along.

But now what? Having been clued in to what was going on, I could hardly just say, “Welp, okie dokie then!” and walk away. But I didn’t exactly have a lot of advice to offer...

The limit was fast approaching. Both of them looked at the ground, trembling. This was starting to become an issue of, like, human dignity, I thought. Whereupon:

“What’s goin’ on?”

I turned and found Elvia standing behind me. She looked a little perplexed, but otherwise perfectly normal. At the very least, she didn’t look like someone straining to hold in number one. In fact, she looked downright relieved.

“Elvia?”

“Uh-huh?”

I went over to her, then gently ushered her behind an especially prominent pillar. “Say, uh, Elvia, you’ve been wearing that thing since yesterday, right?” I whispered.

“Yeah, so?”

“And you ate a normal breakfast this morning.”

“Minori-sama’s cooking’ll never beat Myusel’s, but it’s not half bad.” She sounded even more energized than normal.

“And, uh... how are you doing with your, uhh, toilet needs?”

In some cases, putting a question like that to someone of the opposite gender would be considered outright sexual harassment, and I wasn’t eager to ask—but just then was no time to hesitate. I swallowed my embarrassment and asked the question.

Elvia’s reply was immediate: “Aw, the armor just absorbs it for ya.” She pointed downwards. Just between the legs was a little piece of armor, almost like it was designed to support the area...

“Say what?!”

“Yeah, this morning I just couldn’t wait any longer. I didn’t really mean to, but I—”

“Okay, stop! I get it! I don’t need the details!” I said.

Come to think of it, a lot of work suits that weren’t easy to get off once you put them on—things like spacesuits or jet pilots’ suits—came equipped with that sort of functionality. But who would have guessed the forbidden armor was one of them?

This thing was getting weirder and weirder.

I couldn’t exactly imagine myself going up to Myusel and exclaiming, “Hey, turns out they just suck it up for you, so go ahead and let ’er rip!” And if I did manage it, I could hardly imagine Myusel responding, “Oh, okay!” and taking my advice.

“Uh, Elvia?”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

“Could you, uh... Could you tell Myusel and Petralka about that?”

“About what?”

“I mean, about not having to hold it...”

“Oh! On it!” She went trundling off in the direction of the others. I spent just a second watching her go—and then I beat feet.

So that solved the toilet problem, I guess. But there was no way Myusel and Petralka and Elvia could go on living like this. While I was unconscious from taking a giant metal fist to the head, a messenger had arrived from Prime Minister Zahar at the castle with word of some kind of description of the forbidden armor that had been discovered elsewhere in the archives. It told us a lot about the armor, but unfortunately, how to take it off wasn’t one of the things it explained.

“So, to summarize...” I was in the living room with Minori-san, Hikaru-san, Myusel, and Elvia, along with Garius and Petralka, who would be staying with us. Lauron went back to the castle with Zahar-san’s messenger and the injured royal knights. I didn’t love that this meant Petralka had no bodyguards—but then again, she wasn’t exactly vulnerable in her current state, and she still had Garius with her, anyway.

“To summarize, the forbidden armor automatically attaches itself to any woman who touches it, causes them to say everything that’s on their mind, and in a broad sense, can influence their actions.” Minori-san tapped a finger on her cheek as she spoke.

“We don’t know who built it,” Garius said, crossing his arms with a frown, “and I certainly can’t imagine why. It’s far too indirect to prove a useful trap against one’s enemies. And if that’s what it were for, why even bother including the ability to deal with one’s... business?”

He had a point.

“I’m speculating here,” Minori-san said, “but I don’t think this armor is really ‘cursed’ or a trap at all. I think it might even have been intended to help soldiers in war.”

“Help them?”

“If you’ll pardon my asking, Minister Cordobal, do you have experience of real combat? Not just a sword duel, but—”

“But a killing contest on an actual battlefield?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Several times. I haven’t exactly kept count, but I would estimate five or six different engagements, including close-quarters combat with soldiers from Bahairam,” Garius said.

Wow. Garius had ceded the succession to Petralka, but until she got married or had a kid or something, he was next in line for the throne—I wouldn’t have expected them to risk him in front-line combat against enemy troops. I guess his I’m a hottie! exterior didn’t mean he couldn’t be a warrior at heart.

“I see. Then this should sound familiar: you’re in the middle of a battle, and you know what you’re supposed to do, but you’re so agitated that you can’t seem to do it.”

“Yes, I recognize that...” Garius nodded. “That is the point of intensive training—so that when the moment comes, a soldier need not think at all, but can trust his body to act on its own. But there are limits even to that.”

“Uh-huh. But what if you could force your body to surpass those limits somehow?”

Then Garius connected the dots, and his eyes went wide as he surveyed Petralka’s armor. “You think that’s what it’s for...?”

“Yes, sir. And I think you understand, too, that there’s a lot more to a battlefield than swinging your sword around. Unit cohesion is paramount in group combat, but sometimes excitement or panic can keep you from saying what needs to be said. All the more so for inexperienced soldiers.”

“I see what you’re saying...”

“Right. What if you could get around those sorts of problems by just automatically saying whatever was on your mind?”

“Indeed. Experienced veterans might not need such help, but the untested...”

What if you could unlock the utmost potential of even the most inexperienced soldier?

“I think that might be why they lack helmets, too.”

“Do you, now?”

“Again, sir, you probably know this, but helmets obviously limit field of vision. If you’re not used to them, they make it impossible even to run forward, let alone wield a weapon.”

You know, I thought I’d read in some manga somewhere that a full-face helmet made fighting extremely difficult. Humans derive a surprising amount of their sense of balance from their vision. You could find out exactly how much if you closed your eyes and tried to stand on one foot. With your eyes open, you could probably do it all day—or at least until your legs got tired—but with your eyes closed, it’s much harder.

So a restricted field of vision made it harder to move. If you could have a wide field of vision but still be safely defended, that would be ideal. If those screens were at least as strong as bulletproof glass, they would certainly serve for armor. And they wouldn’t shatter like glass. But then there was extra armor around the arms and the lower legs—the parts of the body that held weapons and moved along the ground, the areas most likely to get hurt. Hold on... Could it be that the whole “mecha-girl” look was unexpectedly logical?

“My guess is that this armor was created for new soldiers or conscripts—for amateurs. Japan no longer has a draft, but there are countries that claim every citizen should be a soldier and encourage everyone to keep weapons in their homes and participate in military training. Some of those countries have even had special weaponry made that’s adapted for use by nonprofessional soldiers.”

Ah, now it all made sense. My dad, a light-novel author, had explained sort of the same thing to me: in Switzerland, he claimed, there was practically a rifle in every house. The country looks peaceful and has vowed to remain neutral in conflicts, but most of the adult men there are actually in the military reserves, and if it ever came to a fight, they could all be part of it. Supposedly there won’t be any more wars that involve the mobilization of entire populations, so maybe it’s merely a point of historical interest now. But still.

Think of the FN P90 that you see in so many movies and anime—it has a sort of sci-fi look. The construction makes extensive use of polymers, and it looks a bit like some kind of tropical fish. You might think it was designed for the special forces, but apparently it was originally created for military reserves to keep at home to use in case of an emergency. It was developed as a so-called Personal Defense Weapon, or PDW, so features like small size, rust resistance, and intuitive usability were primary concerns—all because reserve troops were going to be keeping them in their houses.

Hmmm... The more I thought about it, though, the more these things looked like sci-fi weapons. Who could possibly have made them? No country I was aware of in this world—not Eldant, not Bahairam, not Zwelberich—had the technology to do something like this, or even to conceive of the idea. In fact, Garius and the others were so unfamiliar with the concept that the armor hardly seemed to bother them at all, but for me, it was like a mob**e suit had suddenly walked into the middle of The Lo** ** the Rings.

“What became of the other armors, if I may ask?” Garius said, looking around.

“We put them in my room,” I answered. “In the office.”

Five separate suits of “forbidden armor” had been discovered and brought to the mansion. Figuring it wasn’t a good plan to leave the remaining two lying around, I enlisted Brooke’s help to move them into my office.

“I figured Brooke and I would be safe if we happened to accidentally touch them.”

I had thought it might be a bad idea to leave the armor in Hikaru-san’s room, because frankly I wasn’t sure how the armor distinguished between men and women. If it was actually about external appearance, then there was a real danger that—

Huh?

If this stuff was really some kind of Personal Defense Weapon, then why did it only work for women? I guess it was possible we had happened to only find suits that worked for women, but wouldn’t it have been more convenient to make the armor work for anyone?

Speaking of Hikaru-san, he was studying Myusel and the others, and finally said softly, “I don’t know. These things look a lot less like armor than like some sort of powered suit.”

He was right about that. The design was simple—there was no complicated mask or helmet, none of the decorations or embellishments we associate with medieval weapons and armor. The only aesthetic here was practicality—a very modern touch.

“Plus it can shoot beams and stuff...” Not that you couldn’t do something similar with magic. “Could it be...”

There was a common trope, and not just in fantasy stories: ages in the past, there was some super-advanced civilization, so ancient it isn’t even in the history books. The civilization is destroyed for some reason, but some artifact of it remains—an artifact like this forbidden armor. That would explain the whole sci-fi mech look.

“It seems the only thing we can be sure of is that we can’t be sure of anything,” Garius said, letting out a breath. “Including how to remove the armor. Most distressing.”

“If it’s not cursed and it isn’t intended as a trap, then there has to be a way to take it off,” Minori-san said. “If it’s supposed to be for personal defense, then maybe there’s some kind of safety, something to keep it from accidentally coming off in combat.”

“How do you mean?” Hikaru-san asked.

“If the armor is really intended to protect inexperienced or untrained soldiers, then it wouldn’t be very useful if it came off too easily, would it? Maybe it’s designed so it can’t be removed until the mission is accomplished, or until all threats in the area have been eliminated or something.”

“The mission?” I said. “Like, a combat mission?”

I didn’t think there were any threats around Myusel and the others right now—no enemies to speak of. So did that mean it was about accomplishing some sort of mission? But it was a total accident that the girls had put on the armor. There was no mission. “Does that mean... they can never take the armor off?”

Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia let out a cry.

“And we certainly can’t take Her Majesty back to the castle in this condition,” Garius said gravely.

Yeah, it would probably cause a bit of a stir if Petralka went around looking like that. Not to mention that if rumor got out that the empress had been trapped in some sort of “cursed armor,” things could get out of hand in a hurry. Plus, in that case, suspicion would probably fall on Garius before anyone else. I’m sure he didn’t want that. As I’ve mentioned, if Petralka were to be conveniently gotten out of the way somehow, he would be next in line for the throne.

“Our people at the castle have been instructed to search for any possible clue. Luckily, it seems that eating, drinking, and other... daily necessities are not impacted, so while it pains me to say this, Her Majesty will simply have to endure for a while. As will you and your household, Shinichi.”

“I wondered if that might be the case.”

Myusel and Elvia, of course, and the rest of us, had no choice but to roll with this bizarre situation. I would probably have to suspend classes at school for a while.

I looked once again at Myusel and the others in their forbidden armor, and all I could do was sigh.

I gathered up the laundry and took it out into the yard. It was a perfectly ordinary, everyday chore, but with the massive, powerful arms of the “forbidden armor,” I could easily carry a load that would have been a heaping armful otherwise. In fact, because I wasn’t using my own hands, it didn’t really feel like I was carrying anything, and I was more worried that I might drop some clothes along the way without realizing it.

After an entire day wearing the armor, I had started to feel like I was getting the hang of moving in it. When you grabbed something, there was no sense that you were touching it, which was confusing at first. Seeking more tactile feedback, I would put more strength into my fingers and end up crushing a dinner plate or something. I felt no bodily fatigue. Nor were there actually any... elimination problems, although even knowing this, I found myself hesitant—but in general, I was able to lead a basically normal life despite being unable to remove the armor. In fact, it made some things easier.

Not that I would go so far as to suggest I didn’t want to be able to take off the armor. For example, I couldn’t take a bath like this, and I was afraid my body odor might get so bad I couldn’t hide it with perfume. Or perhaps, as with my bathroom needs, the armor had some way of attending to my personal hygiene...

I looked up at the blue sky, perfect laundry weather, and began to dry the wash.

How... How can I get this armor off?

If I had correctly followed what Minori-sama and the others had been discussing earlier, the forbidden armor couldn’t be removed until all threats in the area had been eliminated, or until some kind of mission or objective had been completed.

“Objective...” I hadn’t put on this armor in order to obtain any objective. But the armor seemed to believe I had one. Perhaps one I didn’t even realize was there. “An objective... A goal?”

“Request confirmation of goal designation.”

“Huh?!”

I dropped the laundry in my giant metal hand. Was it just me, or had I just heard a voice? I didn’t recognize it, and it seemed to come from nowhere, surprising me.

“Wh-Who’s there?” I looked around, but I didn’t see anyone else. Which had to mean...

“Goal designation. Remove all obstacles to actualization of wearer’s wishes.”

“Wha...?” There was that voice again. I looked around once more, but I was still alone. Was I hearing things? Or... “What are these obstacles, please?”

“Two women. Both acknowledged threats.”

When I asked a question, there was an answer, like a whisper in my ear. No—more like a voice in my own head. I was sure I wasn’t hearing things. At least, assuming I hadn’t simply gone crazy. Hadn’t they said that this forbidden armor was technically classified as an item that used some kind of mind control magic? Could the forbidden armor be speaking directly into my own heart...?

“These two women...”

“Designations: ‘Her Majesty,’ ‘Elvia-san.’”

I nearly choked. The armor believed Her Majesty and Elvia-san were “obstacles.” And that these obstacles had to be eliminated...

“I—I don’t believe that about Her Majesty or Elvia-san!” I retorted to the voice—or rather, to the armor. In an effort to calm myself down, I picked up the laundry I had dropped.

The way I heard the voice seemed similar to the way the magic rings worked. At first, the words I heard were in an unintelligible foreign language, but then their meaning floated into my mind, overlapping with the sound. But in order for the magic rings to work, both you and the other person had to be wearing one, and each of you had to expend a modicum of magical energy to use them. That meant whatever this was, it only seemed similar, but had to function some other way.

“Wearer acknowledges that these two women, ‘Her Majesty,’ ‘Elvia-san,’ are potential obstacles to goal, strategic operations concerning ‘Kanou Shinichi.’”

“Strategic operations? Concerning Shinichi-sama?”

Could that possibly refer to my personal desire that Shinichi-sama’s affections should favor me, much as I knew it was a foolish wish that reached beyond my station?

“I—”

Without meaning to, I bit my lip. It was true, my heart ached every time I saw Her Majesty or Elvia-san with Shinichi-sama. Seeing how close he was with them, I felt... jealous. I wanted to be closer to him, too. Closer than anyone. I wanted to feel the heat of his body, catch the scent of him, always...

“Er...?” I suddenly discovered something about the laundry I’d picked up: I’d torn it clean in two with the armor’s hands.

This particular outfit belonged to Elvia-san.

“Did I...?” I stood there, astonished at what I myself had done. Yes, I was jealous of her. Maybe I even felt things were unfair. But perhaps more: maybe, without even realizing it myself, I had come to hate Her Majesty and Elvia-san from the bottom of my heart.

I loved them both so much.

At least, I should have.

Her Majesty, for one, was so kind as to be friends with me, a commoner and half-elf. It was essentially thanks to Her Majesty that I had even been able to meet Shinichi-sama. She was so pretty and so delightful, truly a wonderful person. As for Elvia-san, she always smiled and complimented my cooking. I was only average when it came to housework—I knew how to cook a little, do the laundry, keep things clean—but she was continually amazed. She was cheerful and outgoing, and being with her was always fun.

And yet... I didn’t want to let the two of them monopolize Shinichi-sama’s feelings. I didn’t want him to see only them, to stop looking at me. The thought that he might not talk to me as often, might start to smile at me less—that, that was the one thought I couldn’t bear. A fact I couldn’t deny.

“Goal designation. Remove all obstacles to actualization of wearer’s wishes,” the forbidden armor repeated.

I didn’t say anything back to it, but stood where I was, frozen.

Everything is a matter of perspective—or so I chose to tell myself.

When it came to the forbidden armor, at first I had been all: How dangerous and deadly! How can we get it off?! Oh, poor Myusel and Petralka and Elvia! What a tragedy! You know, terrified and confused and moe—I mean, uh, mournful.

But the suits wouldn’t come off for now, and that was that. It wouldn’t help anyone to get fixated on the worst possible outcomes; I knew from experience how that kind of thinking tended to take you to strange places. So I decided to find a different way of looking at things. Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be, and all that.

To put it more succinctly, I decided to enjoy the situation. I mean, we were talking about mecha shoujo, girls in powered suits, the sort of thing I’d only ever seen in anime and manga and light novels, walking around before my eyes. It was incredible! And it wasn’t even cosplay or something! And the girls wearing those suits included a gorgeous half-elf, a gorgeous young empress, and a gorgeous beast-eared girl! Real ones! It was an embarrassment of riches! An otaku’s dream come true! I would moe until I could moe no more, until I was consumed by my own burning moe passion and reduced to moe-ified ashes!

And sooooo...

“All right, smile! Everyone say ‘Cheese!’”

And so I was smack in the middle of a little photo shoot in the living room with Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia, using my smartphone for a camera.

“That’s it, perfect! The camera loves you, girls!” I was getting so into it that I wouldn’t have been that surprised to hear myself blurt out, “Okay, why don’t you start by just taking off those tops?”

Petralka and Elvia, seeming to feel, like me, that they might as well enjoy it, were happily striking poses and goofing around. I guess they were used to it from that cosplay photo shoot we’d done once. Myusel, though... she didn’t seem in the mood. In fact, she looked sort of down.

“Myusel? Something the matter?” I ventured.

“Huh?” She looked at me as if snapping back to reality. Then she looked right, then left, as if she wasn’t even sure she had been spoken to—then she finally found me, and shook her head. “N-No.” Then she tried to smile.

I say tried because it clearly wasn’t natural. It looked awkward, obviously forced. I saw her smile every single day, so I knew. I was sure there was something wrong now.

Well, why was I so surprised? She was stuck in a powered suit, or armor or whatever, with no idea when she would be able to take it off. If we couldn’t figure it out, she might be stuck in that thing forever. Who wouldn’t feel a little anxious, knowing that? At least we knew from the records that whoever had worn the armor last had gotten out successfully, so maybe there was a ray of hope to cling to.

“Aren’t you quite the little mercenary?” Hikaru-san said to me. He was watching the photo shoot from the sofa, leaning against an armrest, his head propped against his hand. He gave a dramatic sigh. “Your whole mood can turn on a dime.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? We don’t know how to get those things off right now, anyway. We have the chance to take some pictures! Show this really happened! So why wouldn’t we?” I clenched my fist for emphasis: yes! We had a real chance!

I understood Myusel’s anxiety! I did! But!

“We may never get an opportunity like this again!”

Hikaru-san didn’t say anything. He didn’t even bother to open his eyes all the way as he glared at me.

What? I would have expected Hikaru-san to be the first to get on board with this, so why was he looking at me so skeptically?

“Look how cute they are!” I protested. “I know what a surprise it was at first, but all three of them are just adorable!”

And cuteness was justice!

“You... You think so, indeed?” Petralka, overhearing my impassioned argument, asked shyly.

Not only that, but the way you asked that question makes you even cuter. It’s double cuteness. A double dose of adorability! Ahhhh, I can’t stand it!

Elvia too, and even the slightly dispirited Myusel, looked a bit embarrassed, but happy. If you had asked me to rank them in order of sweetness and lovability, I could never have answered you.

“If the armor won’t come off, then the only thing for us to do is have some fun with it!”

“Indeed. Shinichi is quite correct,” Petralka nodded with a smile. And then she said: “So tell us, which among us is the cutest of all?”

“......Er.” She was still smiling. I had been in such an excited state, but now I froze. “Well, uh...”

I didn’t know what to say. I suddenly found myself in a very dangerous position, walking a tightrope with no safety net. I was reminded that the very presence of the armors was in part the result of a problem I had tried to sweep aside, but one which had neither been resolved nor gone away. One big issue that was literally right in front of me.

“U-Um, you’re... all... cute?”

Well, it was worth a shot.

I wasn’t just trying to get out of the question. It was the real truth, how I felt deep down inside. But would the three girls accept that? No, of course not.

“Yes, but we are the cutest, are we not? The one for which you ‘moeru’ the most?”

“Er... uh.”

“Naw, it’s me! Ain’t it, Shinichi-sama?!”

“Well... umm...”

“Shinichi-sama, I... I...”

“Uhh, y’see...”

As I hemmed and hawed, the atmosphere among Petralka, Elvia, and Myusel got more and more tense. Maybe hostility heats up a room, because I was sure starting to sweat. I could see where this was going...

“I can’t believe you.” Hikaru-san managed to sigh again even as he was standing up from the couch and making for the exit. He was wearing a helmet. Where had he gotten that?

A warm afternoon breeze blew through the front yard. It had no color, hardly any sound—you only knew it was there because of the way the grass and flowers bobbed as it went by. It’s almost like watching something’s shadow—we can’t perceive it directly, but only the traces of it after it’s gone by.

And yet...

“If this ends in tears, do not come crying to us.”

There was a rushing sound, as if the wind itself were afraid. Petralka’s long, silver hair splayed out, glittering in the lengthening light.

It was so beautiful. She was so beautiful, but it was the beauty of a Valkyrie on the cusp of battle. Her resolve was set; all excess had been wiped away, and only what was essential remained. Like an unsheathed blade, the beauty came from its functionality. Beautiful—and terrible.

“I understand.” Nodding at Petralka, directly across from her, was Myusel. She sounded calm, but on her face there was no hint of her usual retiring nature. Maybe she was just as resolved to fight as Petralka was—or maybe it was the forbidden armor causing her to speak.

“Y’ took the words right out of my mouth.” Forming the third corner of the triangle was Elvia. She was normally so footloose and fancy free, but now she looked like a woman prepared for battle. No—in her case, perhaps it was more appropriate to say she looked like a beast setting out on the hunt. Ready to attack, to maul, to claim victory. To judge by her smile, she didn’t even believe this would be a fight.

The three girls stared each other down. The enmity among them was palpable, so strong it permitted no one to come between them. I could only watch helplessly...

“Very well, then,” Petralka said, and the three of them took up fighting stances. “Let us fight!”

The spark of battle was struck. All three of them lashed out with their “arms” at exactly the same instant. They held forth their hands as if to envelope something, as if to force some kind of energy into the space between them. And a second later, a glowing globe of energy appeared between them, spinning wildly...

“Broom!”

...Gotcha. No, it didn’t.

The forbidden armors’ huge, plier-like hands uncurled their fingers—or perhaps they were more like claws. Whatever they were, they had probably been intended to allow for fine manual work.

A thin rope ran between those “claws.” Myusel moved quickly, tugging at the rope wrapped around the fingers of one hand as if pulling the safety pin on a grenade, until something very much like a broom appeared between her fingers...!

It was the work of an instant for her. The claws moved so fast they left an afterimage; I could only goggle. But as for the other two girls...

“A nice try, Myusel, but we have Broom as well!” Petralka had also completed a “Broom.” She, too, moved at an incredible speed. I could hardly see what had happened.

And then there was Elvia, proclaiming proudly: “I’ve got Ladder!”

Although more complicated than “Broom,” the product appeared in an instant. To create something of greater complexity in the same span of time was to say that you were the fastest. Even if a normal human couldn’t perceive the difference between one one-hundredth of a second and two one-hundreths.

“What?!” Petralka exclaimed.

“A-All right, then—Tokyo Tower!” The other two clapped their hands together, demolishing their “brooms,” and in the blink of an eye they had reformed the ropes between their fingers into something like Elvia’s “Ladder,” except it came to a point at one end.

It was Tokyo Tower! It really was!

Even if the distinction of tallest building in Japan had been usurped by Sky Tree, Tokyo Tower had been a symbol of a nation grasping toward prosperity for half a century after the end of the war, and there it was before my eyes...!

“Wh-When did you learn to...?”

“Minori-sama taught me once.”

“What?!”

In a word, the three girls were playing cat’s cradle. A fiery, fierce battle of cat’s cradle.

I can hear you now: Pff! Cat’s cradle? you’re quipping. But the girls were using the fingers of the forbidden armor to do cat’s cradle faster than you’ve ever seen. If there were cat’s cradle tournaments in Eldant, these three would have swept the podium.

The air was tense. Their faces were serious. This was a real battle, no question.

“Nice job, Shinichi-kun, thinking of this on the spot,” Minori-san said from beside me, where she was also watching the contest unfold. She sounded half exasperated and half genuinely impressed. I was pretty pleased myself, if I may say so. I had suddenly remembered how my little sister Shizuki and I used to have cat’s cradle contests back when we were in grade school.

“I was afraid that if they seriously started fighting again, there’d be casualties this time,” I said.

They had been bent on knowing which one of them was the cutest. And as I had been at a loss to provide an answer, they had been on the verge of starting another fight to settle the question—whereupon I had come up with this idea in a panic. I thought it was a little crazy myself, but anything was better than for the giant metal fists to start flying.

“I—I love girls with terrific fine motor skills!!” I had exclaimed.

My thinking was this: equipped with the forbidden armor, Myusel and the others had many, many times their normal strength. They could move so fast that they could leave an afterimage almost at will—I had seen it myself (or not seen it, as the case may be). As long as they insisted on a physical contest, they would be locked in an eternal stalemate. And then would come the punching.

That was when the idea had struck me. Everyone knows what it’s like to try to use a pen or a box knife while wearing mittens—suddenly, it’s not so easy. You have to get used to it. How much more so when you aren’t even using your own hand, but a gigantic metal arm. And so I suggested a contest that would pit them against an exceptionally difficult task. If it produced an obvious hierarchy, so much the better, but even if it didn’t, it would buy us some time.

“Okay,” Hikaru-san said, looking at me questioningly. “But how is that a contest?”

“........................Uhh...”

I didn’t have an answer to that. The whole idea of a cat’s cradle contest was one that had just popped out of my mouth, a desperate bid to avoid an oncoming tragedy. It wasn’t like I had thought through the details.

“Irresponsible...” Hikaru-san said, his voice heavy with criticism.

“Come on, we can’t just let them start hitting each other!”

“That’s not what I meant. ‘I love girls with terrific fine motor skills’? You’re just pouring oil on the fire. One wrong move and we’re all done for.”

“Erk...”

Well, uh, he wasn’t wrong. Nope.

Myusel and the others could easily make a gigantic mess of this place if they got it into their heads. And given that the forbidden armors took a pretty broad interpretation of everything that went through their heads, the smallest thing could turn into the biggest problem if we weren’t careful. I didn’t know if those suits were really meant to help out inexperienced soldiers or what, but I was starting to think I had spotted some flaws in the design.

Normally, Myusel would never in a million years have considered getting into a fight with Petralka. Elvia probably wouldn’t have, either. Now I had to use the time I had bought to come up with some kind of solution.

“I wonder if Garius-san has figured anything out yet...” I was hoping as hard as I could that somebody would come to my rescue.

“It’s practically been less than twenty-four hours. I really wouldn’t expect them to have learned anything new. Anyway, I’m sure they would tell us immediately if they had,” Hikaru-san said.

“Blargh,” I offered. He was right as right could be.

As we stood talking, the cat’s cradle battle got more intense.

“This ain’t getting’ us anywhere!” Elvia finally cried, tossing her rope to the ground.

Uh-oh. There’s the break.

Well, if the forbidden armors all had the same capacities, then either Petralka or Elvia was going to be at a disadvantage in a test of finger agility. The armor itself could make up for simple disparities in reaction time or physical strength. It was so powerful that individual differences were subsumed. The difference between thirty and forty kilograms of grip force, for example, was significant—but when you started dealing with 500 kilos and more, subtle differences started to matter a lot less.

Close work like this, though, was more like an extension of normal, daily tasks, and a bit of extra strength from the suit didn’t matter as much. Elvia was an artist, so she was pretty good at delicate hand movements, but it wasn’t the same sort of thing as the nimbleness required for cat’s cradle. The closest thing to that was the housework Myusel did, mending clothes and that sort of thing.

In any event, this was not good. It looked like this competition was going to wrap up sooner than I had anticipated.

“We can’t let this go on...”

“It’s all right!” I said, holding back Minori-san, who looked ready to jump into the middle of the deadly trio. “This is quicker than I had hoped... but I thought this might happen, so I’ve already got another contest in mind.”

“You do?” Minori-san said, and I nodded at her, trying to look confident. Then I turned to my other companion. “Hikaru-san?”

“Yeah, sure.” He sighed, and produced the thing I had made sure to have on hand, pulling it over on a cart like the one Myusel normally used for serving tea or dinner. It would have been most appropriate for me to present Myusel and the others with it myself, but out of an excess of concern that my presence might make things worse than they had to be, Hikaru-san had volunteered to do the job.

He pushed the cart directly among the three girls. There were six plates on it, two for each girl, along with two long pieces of wood each—three sets of chopsticks. And on the dishes were...

“Agility test, round two!” Hikaru-san declared. Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia all turned toward him in surprise. He went on: “Behold! That most venerable implement of Japanese culinary culture, the chopstick! The first person to move these hundred beans from the dish on the right to the one on the left wins the title of sweetest Yamato nadeshiko of them all!”

“Y—”

“Yamato...?”

“Nadeshiko?”

“Is that like Space Battleship Yamato?”

No, no it’s not.

Yamato nadeshiko was an expression that described the ideal Japanese maiden, demure and refined, but they didn’t know that. No, they thought of a classic anime. I know I was completely, totally, not remotely one to talk, but I was starting to think maybe there were some pitfalls to making anime and manga their very first exposure to Japanese culture.

Hikaru-san seemed to have won them over by sheer force of will, though, because Myusel and the others grabbed the chopsticks with the claws of their forbidden armor.

“Very well! Let it be a contest, then, for speed with these chopsticks!” Petralka pronounced.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Myusel responded. And then they lunged at the cart, and the battle began... sort of.

“Ahh...!”

“Hrgh... This makes no sense...!”

“Grr!”

Coming from a place that didn’t use chopsticks, they were never going to have a very easy time of this contest. They saw characters in anime and manga using chopsticks all the time, so they had a general idea of how they were supposed to work, but doing it themselves? That was something else. It would have been hard enough with their actual hands, but doing it using the claws of a powered exoskeleton was darn near impossible. They clutched at the beans with the utensils, only to have them pop-pop-pop out of their grip. In frustration, they tried to stab the beans, but they were too small and round, and the chopsticks simply slipped off them.

It was a bizarre sight, three girls in heavy armor crouched over bowls of beans, struggling to learn how to use chopsticks.

“I’ve got to hand it to you,” Hikaru-san said, not entirely admiringly, as he came back to us. “You sure came up with a real time waster.”

“It was the only thing I could think of that we could get together in a hurry but that wouldn’t cause any fights.”

“At least it should buy us a few minutes.”

Myusel, in particular, was struggling mightily to move the beans from one bowl to another. She was holding the chopsticks more or less correctly, but first she put too much strength into it and couldn’t pick up the beans; then she managed to pick one up, but dropped it halfway there, and when she finally had it again, it would slip away from her. This went on and on. Even for experienced chopstick users, it was a task that would have taken a good five minutes, so I had assumed it would burn plenty of time. Although if it took too long, someone was likely to snap again.

I was watching the contest develop when Minori-san said nonchalantly, “Shinichi-kun, why don’t you just pick one of them while we still have the chance?”

“Huh...?!” I felt myself go stiff.

Minori-san leaned toward me. Behind her glasses, I could see in her eyes that this wasn’t a joke; she looked completely serious. Uhh... was she angry?

“The whole reason we have this problem is because you wouldn’t make a choice,” she said.

“Well, I...”

“You’ve got them distracted right now, but the real contest here is about who you think is ‘cutest,’ isn’t it, Shinichi-kun?”

“W-Well, I...”

“She’s right, Shinichi-san,” Hikaru-san broke in. “Those girls’ real ‘objective’ is you.”

I just didn’t say anything.

“If you choose one, Myusel and the others have no more reason to fight, and the armor comes off, right?”

That certainly, uh, seemed like a very plausible possibility. It would be worth trying... probably. I thought.

“B—But...” I looked away, trying to escape Minori-san’s and Hikaru-san’s gazes.

Yes, it would be worth trying, but you couldn’t exactly “try” it, could you?!

Even when I attempted to look away from Minori-san and Hikaru-san, I found myself staring right at the three girls, assiduously working away at their beans.

Myusel.

Petralka.

Elvia.

Which of them did I find attractive? All of them.

There was Myusel: gorgeous and even-keeled but somewhat retiring; short and sweet and serious and kind, yet stubborn in her own way; who made me feel more relaxed just being with her.

There was Petralka: gorgeous and strong-willed, yet somewhat hesitant despite being the absolute ruler of an entire nation; who made me want to embrace her with all my strength and keep her safe.

There was Elvia: gorgeous and also innocent like a puppy; a little oblivious, but also openhearted in a way that, to my own surprise, sometimes really got my heart racing.

All of them were really, truly cute. If you asked me to rank them in terms of who I liked best, I genuinely couldn’t. If just one of them had confessed her feelings to me, I would have floated off to heaven at that very moment. Would have exclaimed “I love you, too!” and thrown myself at her without a second thought. I mean hugs, kisses, the whole R-18+ gal-game enchilada. No question.

Actually, wait. First I probably would have exclaimed, “Why would such a beautiful girl be interested in me? Is this a trap? It has to be a trap! Did you think I would be reeled in by such obvious bait? Think again!” and ended up going completely crazy.

Why did all three of them have to confess to me at once? Choose one? I’ve played games on Hard Mode, Nightmare Mode, and Completely Freaking Insane Mode, but this was just plain impossible!

“We believe it is time for you two to admit defeat.” Petralka sounded frustrated, maybe because the bean-transferring wasn’t going as well as she would have liked. “What, do you believe a half-elf and a werewolf can prevail against a human like us?”

“I do, Your Majesty. You can see I have better fine motor skills than you do.”

“What?!”

“Please know that you won’t be able to intimidate us with simple mind games.”

“Grrrrr...”

“Y’ ain’t even managed one bean, Your Majesty. I’ve got three already!”

“Curse you...!”

O forbidden armor, truly to be feared. The girls were already almost like different people. To be fair, Petralka had never been the most patient person in the world. And the forbidden armor brought all your thoughts to the surface, making tempers even shorter. It also had a disconcerting tendency to convert the wearer’s impulses immediately into action—including any nasty remarks you considered letting out of your mouth. I shouldn’t have been surprised if the girls seemed a little prickly.

“Are we to simply endure a contest such as this?!” Petralka suddenly shouted, and then with a sweep of her arms she overturned the entire cart. The dishes went flying, scattering beans all over the ground.

“What are you doing, Your Majesty?!”

“Y’ can’t do that just ’cause y’ aren’t winning!”

“Bah! Hush, pipe down, be silent, shut up!” As the conversation got heated, Petralka lashed out with her arms again and smashed the cart to pieces. “This does not please us! We declare this contest invalid!”

Myusel and Elvia both looked at her in shock. The tension between them was off the charts. It was like a bomb about to blow. I felt that familiar bad feeling...

Simultaneously, all three of them took up fighting postures and launched into action.

I aimed an attack at Her Majesty, but she dodged easily. At the same time, I felt a blunt impact against the “arms” I had crossed in front of me, as if they had been hit by a giant, metal hammer. I managed to plant my two armored legs against the ground, but couldn’t quite absorb the entire impact; I felt myself being shoved back, plowing up earth as I went.

“Hrgh...” I opened my eyes, which I had instinctively squeezed shut, and was presented with the sight of Her Majesty. Her right arm was extended, as if she had just thrown something, and she was leaning over, suggesting that the impact and reverberation I had felt was her hitting me with all her strength.

“Minor damage. Commencing na-no-ma-te-ri-al repair.”

I heard that whisper inside my head again, but I couldn’t pay attention to it now.

“Engaging hand-to-hand combat mode. Multipurpose field set to hand-to-hand fighting mode allocation pat-tern. Defense, 55 per-cent; mobility, 35 per-cent; postural maintenance, 10 per-cent. Su-per-con-duc-tive-stor-age-bat-tery, low state of charge, mi-cro-gas-tur-bine-en-gines one and two commencing operation.”

I didn’t really follow what it was saying, but the forbidden armor clearly thought it was helping me fight. I could feel the “screen” surrounding my face and torso increase in thickness.

“Aren’t you both lucky!” Her Majesty shouted at me and Elvia-san, giving us the glare of a lifetime. “Living in the same house as Shinichi! When you wake up, he is there! At meals, he eats with you! You talk to him freely! When you go to bed, he is still just a few rooms away! You can see him whenever you like! Talk to him whenever you wish!”

Majesty...

It was true that compared to us, Her Majesty had much less time to spend with Shinichi-sama. I was the first person he had met in this world, and she was the second, but Her Majesty probably didn’t get to spend half as much time with Shinichi-sama as Elvia-san and I did, living in the same house as him.

Elvia-san took a flying leap at Her Majesty. The blow could have knocked over a tree or shattered a boulder—if it had landed. But even as Elvia-san reached out an arm, Her Majesty stepped neatly backward, just out of range.

“We are given to understand that you even ‘accidentally’ encounter him in the bath! We know that cliché from manga! Let us guess—did you also ‘unintentionally’ knock him over and set his heart to racing?! Does he not have many an opportunity for what they call ‘lucky sukebe’?!”

“So what if he does?!” Elvia-san demanded, pursuing Her Majesty. She had her right arm pulled back, her entire body turned like she was about to deliver a massive punch, but then she spun with her left hip, launching a kick diagonally from the ground. Her Majesty blocked this with an upraised arm, but I could see her lift slightly into the air, perhaps because of the difference in their weight.

“Shinichi-sama saved my life!” Elvia-san yelled, and grabbed onto Her Majesty’s arm, trying to rip it off. An instant later she spun again, this time launching a reverse roundhouse with her left leg. Her Majesty dodged it, just.

“Hrrf?!”

But... what was that in Her Majesty’s august face? A tail?

It was only a second, but it was enough. Her Majesty, partially blinded, was left open to Elvia-san’s next move: she continued spinning, coming around with a back fist that finally landed. The spin, especially with both of Elvia-san’s feet planted, gave it plenty of power, and this time Her Majesty went flying.

“There’s one person who said they like my ears and tail! One person who acknowledged me as an artist—who said my pictures were good! Do you know how happy it made me t’ hear that? And it was Shinichi-sama! I’ve never known anyone like him!”

Elvia-san...

I understood how she felt. I was painfully familiar with that feeling. My half-elf ears had been, for me, nothing but a source of shame, a reason for people to shun and revile me. But he had had nothing but praise for them. He had spoken up for me, a mere maid. He had taught me to read and write. Shinichi-sama had done all of it, without any regard for what he might get out of it. I had never met anyone like him before. The memories came flooding back to me. I knew this wasn’t the time for such things, but...

“Eek?!” Her Majesty came tumbling toward me, and we rolled to the ground in a tangle. Thanks to the armor, it didn’t hurt, but I could feel the impact all the way through me, shaking my brain.

“So I don’t want—I don’t want y’all to take Shinichi-sama from me!” Elvia-san shouted. “Y’ can have anything you want, Your Majesty! All you have to do is ask for it! So don’t take Shinichi-sama away from me!”

“That’s... my line...” I said, getting up. “Even when Shinichi-sama saw my ears, found out I was a half-elf, he didn’t recoil or get upset. He said they were ‘moe’...!”

Humans were put off by my ears, of course, but even elves seemed to see them as not quite “Elvish.” I was stuck in the middle, excluded from both groups. A pariah with no home. It was a burden I had borne since the day I was born, an inescapable fact put upon me by the gods. Shinichi-sama had really and truly changed my life.

I remembered the first day we met. When he had taught me Ja-panese. All the times he had enjoyed my cooking and told me how delicious it was. Just thinking about those things was enough to make my chest tight.

“Don’t make us laugh,” Her Majesty said, swaying on her feet. “Yes, we are the empress. We can have almost anything we want. But know this: there are things we cannot have because we are the empress!”

That caught me by surprise. And then I remembered. Years ago, Her Majesty’s parents had died in a struggle for the succession with their siblings. If they hadn’t been of royal blood, there would never have been cause for such bitter enmity, and Her Majesty could be living happily with her mother and father even now. As she stood there biting her lip and looking at the ground, Her Majesty looked so much smaller than usual...

“You saw it, did you not?! You heard what happened! All the events with Zwelberich! We are not permitted to follow our heart even in the matter of whom we may love! No, even that must be subject to calculation and strategy! For us, there is no love without consideration of the costs and benefits!”

My feeling of shock redoubled; Elvia-san must have felt the same way, because we both took a long swallow. What Her Majesty was saying—it was true. Exactly because I was a have-not, I never had to doubt the truth of Shinichi-sama’s affection. In fact, that was what allowed me to humbly accept the many things he did for me. But as for Her Majesty...

“Shinichi is the only one! He is the only one who knew us as an empress, yet never wondered how he might gain from it! The only one who could exclaim ‘IS THAT REALLY AN ARCHETYPAL LITTLE-GIRL CHARACTER?!’ upon our first meeting... Rude though it was! But... That is— It is exactly—”

“Your Majesty...”

“You say we have everything? That we can obtain whatever we wish for? Yet we have no half-elf ears, no werewolf tail, for Shinichi to moon over! We have nothing to elicit his affections, to draw him to us—we are only a little human girl! And it’s—”

Her Majesty was truly bellowing now—were those flecks of spittle I saw flying from her lips? Elvia-san and I could only listen in silence.

“And it is the same with our chest! You with your large endowments have no inkling of how we feel!”

“But Your Majesty, you’re, like, ‘anorexically thin’ or whatever they said!” Elvia-san objected. “Just the minimum of meat on your bones! Shinichi-sama’s always sayin’ about how ‘small boobs are a big deal’ or something, too!”

“Shinichi may say what he wishes, but the testimony of his eyes when he stands with us all speaks to where his true interest lies!”

Well... that was true enough. I had often spotted him glancing at Elvia-san’s very large chest. I have to admit, I had wondered sometimes if bigger was really better...

“And then you add to this your ‘beast ears’ and tail! All the things Shinichi likes, in one girl! It is unfair! Unfair, we say! It is not even a contest!”

“But ain’t the same thing true about Myusel?!”

“Wha...?”

“Half-elves are, like, the rarest ‘moe point’ for Shinichi-sama or something, aren’t they?!”

“W-Well...”

The elf population was simply smaller than that of the humans, and half-elves were even fewer in number than that, so I suppose you could say we were something rare...

“That is true—Myusel, you have an unfair advantage as well!” I suddenly found myself the object of Her Majesty’s attack. “Not only do you fit Shinichi’s tastes, but you have ‘captured his stomach’ with that delicious cooking of yours!”

“Yeah, ’s right! Your cooking really is delicious!”

“Gosh, I don’t...”

“From the beginning, he has said nothing but Myusel, Myusel, Myusel! Do you have some kind of contract to receive a piece of gold every time somebody says your name?!”

“B-But at home, he’s always talking about you, Your Majesty!” I shot back, remembering many dinner conversations. “He’s forever worrying about you and fretting about you—do you have any idea how it hurts to have to see Shinichi-sama like that day after day?!”

“Of course we do not! But tell us, is that true?!”

“Why else would he have come up with a whole song and dance about creating a puppet body double for you?!”

“Hrr—!”

...............And so on. When we weren’t attacking each other with our fists, we were doing it with our words. But we still couldn’t settle who was Shinichi-sama’s “one and only,” the most special person to him. So we resented those who had what we didn’t, burned with jealousy towards them, complained about the advantages of the other two, grieving, as if it would somehow let us finally claim Shinichi-sama’s feelings.

“Significant possibility for mission goals to be accomplished by elimination of obstacles,” someone whispered to me. I had to think Her Majesty and Elvia-san were hearing the same thing.

I didn’t even understand what I was doing anymore. I didn’t know if it was me talking, or someone else. But this much I knew: the words came from me.

“Argh, this will never end!” Her Majesty shouted, and took up a fighting posture.

Elvia-san and I started to move at the same moment.

Bad, bad, bad. I knew things would end up like this.

I dashed into the mansion, groaning to myself as I ran down the hall.

“Huff... Puff...”

I didn’t have a moment to lose. Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia were going at it again in the front yard, for real. Kicking, punching, throwing. You’d never normally see a fight this outrageous outside of an anime or manga. I could see it through the windows as I ran past. If a mere flesh-and-blood human tried to get in the middle of all that, they would be killed instantly. That left Minori-san and Hikaru-san unable to do anything but watch.

But what about me? What should I do? Could I just stand there, chewing my fingernails?

“No, I’ve got to... I’ve got to do something... But...!”

I understood. I knew that deep down, the real reason those girls were fighting was me. Yes, the “forbidden armor” had exacerbated and enabled this, but the real source of their growing frustration was my own dithering attitude. The girls got along so well superficially that I had taken the situation for granted, not fully recognizing how they really felt. So now it was on me to do something about this. But...

Like Minori-san and Hikaru-san said, the simplest and most certain solution would be to just pick one of them. Not necessarily, like, get married to them immediately, but at least declare my love to someone—Myusel, Petralka, or Elvia. Then they would have no more reason to fight. Then they could get the armor off—probably. I hoped.

Yet, pathetically, even at this moment, I just wasn’t capable of picking any one of them. Or to put it another way, I couldn’t shoot down two of them. I remembered all too clearly what it had felt like when I got rejected.

You’re not needed, it had said to me. You’re worthless. Were you so presumptuous as to think that I would want to have anything to do with you for even an instant?

“Anyway...!” I said, diving into my office. The clean, simple solution of picking one of the girls was out. Then I just wouldn’t pick anyone right now. I couldn’t force myself. There was some advice I had given to Petralka once: it’s not good to ignore your problems, but you’ll always regret a rushed decision.

So what to do?

I would have to stop them with force. And if I didn’t have the strength on my own, I would have to borrow some from somewhere. Even if it was somewhere “cursed.”

“Nothing ventured—!”

There were still two boxes in my office, containing two more suits of forbidden armor. I opened the lids; they both looked about the same to me. Like gloves and greaves and other bits of armor all rolled up into a big ball.

But still—they only looked about the same. Close inspection revealed subtly different designs. According to Garius, it was the same with the armor Myusel and the others had put on: functionally similar, but perhaps not identical; we weren’t sure yet. For one thing, the color schemes were different, Myusel’s blue, Petralka’s white, and Elvia’s red.

Ever since this whole thing had started, though, one question had nagged at me. Why only girls? Even if these were just prototypes, it would make sense to have one that worked for guys. Or what if there had been suits for guys, but it just so happened that the one that went nuts in the past belonged to a girl?

The reality was, I hadn’t tested for myself to see if they really didn’t work on guys. Maybe one of these other two would react if I touched it. So I steeled myself, reached out, and put a hand on one of the remaining suits...

(screechy violin crescendo)

And... nothing happened. I waited. Myusel and the others had said the armor reacted the moment they touched it, basically swallowing them up. But this one didn’t do anything. Strike.

But there was one left...

I touched it, waited a moment, but still nothing. Maybe they were both duds.

“Gah, work, dammit, work! Do something! This is an emergency, we’re done for if you don’t move! I never knew magical armor could be so fussy...!” I pounded my fist against the armor. And that’s when it happened.

There was a sort of shloop sound, I thought.

“Hrgh?!”

The globe split open, and suddenly a series of bits and pieces were attaching themselves to me, first from my fist to my elbow, then from my elbow to my shoulder, climbing up along my arm. Like a snake, or a swarm of bugs, parts made of metal and polymers attached themselves to my body, defying gravity to reach me. Then they started covering my lower half, too.

The clothes I was wearing disappeared, schlepped away somewhere, replaced by a perfectly form-fitting black suit that covered me from the neck down. Was it my imagination, or did I feel something like static electricity run along my skin? And then...

“E—Eyowowowow!” I exclaimed. “Ouch, that hurts, what the heck!”

To be more precise, it was my thighs that hurt—or to be even more precise, the thing between them, on which a very uncomfortable pressure was being exerted!

I heard a voice in my head: “This unit is for female use.”

“Guh?!”

I didn’t recognize the voice. There was no one around, and strangest of all, the voice didn’t seem to get to me by vibrating my eardrums. It was like it was reverberating right inside my head. Like telepathy, or if I had suddenly become one of those “denpa” people who claimed to receive mysterious transmissions directly into their minds. But...

“Could that be... the forbidden armor talking...?”

I knew magic made it totally possible to communicate directly with someone’s mind. I did it every day using my interpreter ring.

“Operation by males is recommended only in emergency situations. As an emergency has been asserted, restriction to female-only use has been lifted. Some functions may be unavailable. Please operate carefully.”

“Wh-What’s going on here...?”

“Detailed information requested. Mechanisms related to biological functions: system for disposal of biological excretions malfunctioning. A female excretion-disposal system is fitted to this unit, and is exerting pressure on the male organs.”

“...............You mean...”

“Determination: no concern at this size.”

“.........Uh, so you’re saying...”

“It is not nearly big enough to cause a problem.”

“Lay off already!” I wailed.

So I knew for sure now that this forbidden armor was intended for a woman to use, but because I had insisted it was an emergency, it had managed to adapt itself to me by disabling a few specific systems. And the pain between my legs was because, uh, you know, the toilet or whatever—it was adapted for women, who lacked... certain things a man had.

“O......Okay... N-Now I can... help Myusel and the others...!” Still uncomfortably focused on my tenders, I rushed out of my office to break up the fight in the front yard.

Without warning, something came bursting into the middle of our battle. A humanoid form that seemed to crash down out of the sky. The “arm” with which I had lashed out, the similar strike from Her Majesty, and even the leg Elvia-san had thrown up in a kick were all stopped by the figure with a screeching sound of metal. It used both its arms and lifted a leg as well. Almost like an acrobat performing a trick.

And finally...

“Wha...?” I blinked in amazement. The figure—it looked just like us. Someone wearing forbidden armor. It hung off them like a massive puppet, with broad shoulders leading to gigantic arms, and metal legs ensconcing the lower half of the wearer’s body.

And just like us, there was someone inside the armor, their body standing exposed except for a form-fitting suit. It was a boy.

“Shinichi... sama...?”

It was Shinichi-sama.

I took an instinctive step back. Her Majesty lowered her arm as well, and Elvia-san put her foot back on the ground, staring in astonishment. I understood her incredulity: how could Shinichi-sama be wearing armor that was supposed to be only for women?

“Wh... Why...?”

The question came unbidden to my lips. I didn’t know if it meant “Why were you able to put on the armor?” or “Why are you interfering in our battle?”

“Stop... Please, stop...” Shinichi-sama said, the very image of seriousness. “I’m begging you to... stop...” He looked nearly... pitiful. I felt a tightening in my chest—but...

“Shinichi, why do you stop us?!”

“Yeah, what’s goin’ on?!”

“Please don’t get in our way!”

Her Majesty, Elvia-san, and even I exclaimed almost simultaneously. I can’t quite say it was in spite of myself. Yes, it hurt me to see Shinichi-sama looking so sad—or at least part of me. But there was also a part of me that was annoyed to be interrupted.

In the end, this “forbidden armor” was me myself. Another me that I had within. One that I would never normally reveal; one that was mean and selfish but also very sure of what she wanted. The forbidden armor simply brought her to the surface.

Then I flinched, because Her Majesty and Elvia-san had begun to move. They were coming around Shinichi-sama from either side, presumably to launch a concerted attack against me. Caught between them, it would be difficult for me to react. I went to push Shinichi-sama aside so I could deal with Elvia-san...

“Eek?!

But instead, I found myself being pulled forward; someone had a grip on my arm. The world seemed to spin. Then I realized I was standing behind Shinichi-sama. He had moved to put his back to me, protecting me. I could see him through the suit, through a spot with no armor and no supports, and he had never looked so heroic.

He raised his arms and intercepted the blows from Her Majesty and Elvia-san.

“Shinichi-sama...” I felt something hot welling up inside my chest. He had protected me. He had kept me safe.

Me.

“Why do you protect Myusel?!”

“Yeah, no fair, you’re always takin’ her side!”

But Shinichi-sama responded, “You’re wrong!”

“What are we wrong about?!”

“It’s no fair, no fair!”

Her Majesty and Elvia-san attacked Shinichi-sama mercilessly—or perhaps I should say, they tried to attack me, but he was in the way. He deflected every blow. Of course, it was possible in part because we were all wearing forbidden armor. But it was the first time I had ever seen Shinichi-sama fight, not with magic, but with his own hands, and it was inspiring. I could only watch him in awe.

“Petralka! Elvia!” Shinichi-sama called out. That was all, but at the gravity in his voice the others slowed their attacks as if it had had a physical effect on them. In fact, just for an instant, they froze entirely.

Shinichi-sama took advantage of it, spreading his arms wide and... embracing them, armor and all.

Yes, they were all covered with the forbidden armor, which enveloped their arms and shoulders—but somewhere between the two, a bit of their own bodies was exposed, and Shinichi-sama was able to touch Her Majesty and Elvia-san himself.

“Wha—Shin—?!”

“Shini... sama...?!”

I was shocked, too, maybe even more than they were, for I found I could say no words at all. Armor or no armor, I thought this might be the first time Shinichi-sama had hugged either of them.

When Shinichi-sama was sure that the two of them were still, he gradually released them. He took a step back and straightened up.

Maybe that had been his plan all along, to stop them with a hug.

“I’m not protecting just one of you. I’m not taking sides. I just... I just don’t want any of you to be hurt!” Shinichi-sama said, and he had never sounded more truthful.

He looked at Her Majesty, then at Elvia-san, and finally he turned to me. On his face was a look of utmost seriousness. The heat I felt inside me burned hotter when I saw it.

Of course. I should have known. Had known. Shinichi-sama, kind and gentle as he was, would never have wanted us to fight. It could only have hurt him to see it. It was exactly that quality that drew me—drew us—to him so strongly.

We had been forgetting that. We had tried to win Shinichi-sama’s affections by fighting for them, but we had it backwards...

“Shinichi-sama...!”

Ahh! To know someone could be so kind! My vision blurred and I felt a prickling in my nose. Overwhelmed by emotion, I discovered I was flinging myself at Shinichi-sama’s chest. I thought the transparent “screens” that protected our torsos might collide, but to my surprise, there was no sound or feeling of impact; instead it was like water had been pressed against water.

“Shinichi-sama...” I could feel his body heat, dimly. His body was by no means sculpted like that of a knight or soldier who spent his days training, yet it was firmer than my woman’s form, more manly. It felt wonderful, reassuring. I wanted to stay this way forever. Even if I could hardly believe I was thinking that...

“Myus—”

Shinichi-sama’s voice sounded somewhat strained. At the same moment...

“Sexual excitement detected. Registering rapid expansion of male organ. This is producing interference with operations support functions. Initiating emergency functions...”

“Huh...?”

That was the forbidden armor I heard. After listening to it so many times, I was slowly becoming accustomed to its strange turns of phrase. But I didn’t think the voice I was hearing was coming from my armor. Because of the way we were touching, I suspected the voice of Shinichi-sama’s armor was being communicated to me. The words, which sounded very much like Ja-panese, came to me at almost the same moment as their meaning, overlapping directly in my head.

Excitement? Organ? Expansion? Wait—did that mean...?

“L-Look, don’t get the wrong i-idea...” Shinichi-sama said with a hurried shake of his head. “I just...” He backed away quickly, and our “screens” returned to normal. “It’s just instinctive, okay?! It’s totally natural!”

“Wha...?” Her Majesty, Elvia-san, and I all blinked to hear Shinichi-sama’s tone change so suddenly. Was that...?

“Huh?! No, that isn’t—not what I meant! Myusel’s pillow-soft boobs pressed right up against me like that! How could my @&$! not ‘expand’?!”

“Shi-Shinichi-sama...?”

“No! I didn’t mean to say that! Heck, it’s Elvia’s fault for having that luscious, overflowing chest right out there in front of me!”

“...Buh?” Elvia-san’s eyes went round.

“No, no! Petralka’s tiny, totally jiggle-free rack is moe, too! What I wouldn’t give to just cup that in my hand and $&! the &**@ out of it before I *!$# my **$ in there and...”

“Wha—?” Her Majesty’s mouth just hung open.

“Nooooooo I don’t even mean that!” Shinichi-sama wailed, clutching his head.

And then we realized: the forbidden armor had a way of bringing out what was deep inside a person, feelings they wouldn’t admit to or didn’t even know were there. Meaning... everything Shinichi-sama had said just now...

“Myusel is adorable! But Elvia’s boobs are outta control, and that’s great too, but so is Petralka’s complete smoothness! I can’t choose! And I like you all and you’re all welcome to like me but having you fight like this is a huge pain in the ahhhhh that’s not what I mean! I don’t mean any of it! I don’t want to say any of that, shut up!”

As Shinichi-sama yelped and howled, the three of us could only watch him in silence.

“Choose one? My ass! Sometimes you want Chinese food, and sometimes a nice cheeseburger’s what does it for you, and other days it’s a little sukiyaki! It’s important to keep your options open—hell, I’d like to get with all these chicks for a long time yet! N-No, I don’t mean—ahhhh!”

“.....................”

“.....................”

“.....................”

Elvia-san, Her Majesty, and I all looked at each other. The fever, as they say, had broken. Her Majesty and Elvia-san both looked implacably serious. I can only assume I seemed the same. I believe the Ja-panese otaku had a word for this phenomenon. What was it?

Oh yes. Don-biki. To be completely put off by someone. And...

“Shinichi-kun?” I heard someone call. I turned to see Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama approaching.

“Oh! M-Minori-san, help me! M-My mouth, it’s just talking on its own! And I can’t get my body to move!”

“Ahh... Hm.” Minori-sama had a somewhat inscrutable expression on her face. It was almost a look of pity, like one might give to an upset child one didn’t want to get too close to. Beside her, Hikaru-sama just looked exasperated.

“That’s because it’s built for women,” he said. “You aren’t even supposed to be able to put it on, but since you did anyway, it’s probably caused all sorts of errors.”

Minori-sama turned to the rest of us. “Anyway, Myusel, Elvia. Now that you’ve been completely put off by Shinichi-kun and cooled down, listen to me for a moment. I know you’ve been fighting over him, but even if one of you somehow won this battle, that wouldn’t automatically make you Shinichi-kun’s ‘number one.’ You know that, don’t you?”

There was nothing we could say to that. When she put it that way, it was obvious enough. If anything...

“If anything, I know Shinichi-kun should have just picked one of you to begin with, and then we could have avoided this whole mess.”

“Yeah, I hate seeing carnage like this, but having a bunch of girls fight over me, it’s pretty moe by definition, you know? This ‘forbidden armor’ is already hot-looking enough on you girls, but when you start going at it, it’s like, mrrow! A whole new level of hot. What if instead of punching each other, you were using, like, joint locks and stuff, so you got pressed up against each other, and then maybe Elvia’s boobs and Petralka’s boobs would be like squoosh! up against each other, and man, what I wouldn’t give to be right in between them, just thinking about it makes the blood rush to my $#@! ... is not what I really mean! Arrrgh, somebody stop meeee!”

“Shinichi...”

To my surprise, it was Her Majesty who took a step forward.

“Huh? What? Petral...ka...?” Maybe he could feel that something was different, uncalm. Shinichi-sama just frowned.

“We shall stop you,” Her Majesty said. She was smiling. But I could see, at the edges of her august face, her honored cheeks twitching.

An instant later, the “arm” of Her Highness’s armor launched itself at Shinichi-sama’s face.

“Hrfh?!”

Of course, there was a screen there, so she wasn’t going to actually hit Shinichi-sama. Nonetheless, he leaned away—but his hands and feet were still frozen to the spot, and like a puppet collapsing, he went down with a thump. Obviously, he had no chance to catch himself.

“If it breaks, we believe you will stop,” she said.

“Uh...?”

“There are no finger holds or the like to allow us to tear it off of you, so we believe the process will consist of beating you mercilessly until something breaks and a vulnerability appears. Though the armor itself may be destroyed in the process. We suspect.”

“Hey... Wait...”

“Let me help, Y’r Majesty!”

“Mm. We would welcome it.”

Her Majesty and Elvia-san climbed on top of the fallen Shinichi-sama.

“Wait, hold on, you’re gonna break it! You’re gonna break it and me! Ow, ow, ow! M—Myu—!”

As the other two pounded on him in every way they could think of, Shinichi-sama looked desperately at me.

Ahh. My poor Shinichi-sama. I’ll help you—

“Your Majesty. Allow me to help you.” I discovered my mouth saying. “Shinichi-sama, just hang in there for a few minutes.”

“Wha? What? Noooooo!”

For a while, Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama watched him shake his head furiously behind the transparent screen. Finally, Minori-sama advised, “Try not to kill him, okay?” Then she and Hikaru-sama went and sat on a bench in the garden, apparently to watch.

“Ah, not there! That’s off limits! Ahh! Ow! Minori-sa—! H-Hikaru-san, you too?! Somebody help meeeee!”

And so, with Minori-sama’s blessing, we swarmed Shinichi-sama and set about the work of pounding his forbidden armor to scrap.

The dust finally settled.

Once the girls had lost interest in “winning” me, they no longer viewed each other as “interference,” and the forbidden armors popped off face-palmingly quick. They returned to their original spherical shapes, Lauron and Romilda’s dad returned the spheres to a set of newly built boxes—with chains on them this time—and they were deposited back in the castle storehouse.

Then there was the one I had been wearing, which Petralka, as good as her word, had broken apart. It went in its box still smashed. It didn’t look like it was ever going to function again, but we figured you couldn’t be too careful. I wondered when, or if, the forbidden armor would ever see the light of day again. Personally, I thought they could just stay in that storage room until the end of the world. They had really caused me a lot of trouble.

So there I was...

“Shinichi-sama, how are you feeling?”

“Shinichi, say something. We can get you anything you like.”

“Shinichi-sama, I’ll draw y’ a picture so you won’t get bored, any picture at all!”

I was curled up in bed, the sheets pulled over my head, my bed surrounded by three girls. Myusel. Petralka. And Elvia. All three of them seemingly enjoying themselves.

But as for me, I didn’t say a word. Feelings-wise, I was like a newbie adventurer down in some dungeon who had run into a monster that was way too powerful for him, and was trying to guts it out. If I made any sound, if I so much as moved, it would notice me.

“You think he’s asleep?”

“Sure looks that way.”

“Then perhaps we shouldn’t bother him...”

With that, I felt the three of them getting farther away.

“Ah, Myusel. Our tiny stomach is empty. Make us something.”

“Yeah, I’m hungry, too!”

“Of course, what would you like me to make?”

“Some kinda sweet treat!”

“This would be a nice opportunity to take some tea in the garden.”

“I’ll get everything ready, then.”

The voices, and accompanying footsteps, receded down the hallway. Somehow the girls seemed even closer than they had before. Even after I couldn’t hear them anymore, I stayed under the covers, counting to a hundred, just to be safe. Finally—

“Phew!” I poked my head out. Operation: Pretend to be Asleep had been a success.

Just as I was sitting up with a sigh of relief, though:

“Look who’s afraid of women now.” I twitched. The voice sounded faintly amused. I looked over and saw Minori-san standing in the doorway Myusel and the others had just left through, smirking at me. “Not even going to let them see your face? Her Majesty especially—I’m sure she has to argue with Garius-san every time she wants to come over here.”

“Yeah, well... Yeah. You’re right.” I heaved a sigh.

“’Course, I guess if I had been turned into a punching bag by a bunch of girls who had been arguing about who loved me the most until a moment before, I’d probably be scared of women, too.” She shrugged and came into the room. “Then again... ever heard the expression you reap what you sow?”

“...Uh-huh. And I don’t have a response to it.” I hung my head, thoroughly chastised.

Incidentally, I was currently unable to walk around freely. Every muscle in my body ached—not because of the pounding, but, I suspected, because of how I had basically tried to act like a Hollywood action star while wearing the forbidden armor. Oh, and I did also have, like, three dozen bruises. Between wet compresses and the bandages wrapped all over, I pretty much looked like a mummy from the neck down. These were all wounds I’d sustained when Myusel and the others ripped the forbidden armor off me.

You know, I think a few of those punches were “just for good measure”... Still, I understood perfectly well that I was in no position to complain.

“Turns out it’s tough to have a harem in real life,” Minori-san teased.

“I don’t have a harem.”

At least, I didn’t mean to.

“Oh! So you’ve picked one of them, then?”

“Hoo hoo hoo,” I laughed, more than a little desperately. “Of course I... haven’t.”

“Ah.” Minori-san, staring down at me from behind her glasses, stopped at the foot of my bed. “Anyway, I guess all’s well that ends well, at least for Myusel and her friends.”

She was right about that. As the conversation earlier had suggested, Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia were better friends now than they had been even before they put on that armor. There had been a certain distance between Petralka and Elvia in particular—maybe that was only natural when one of you was an empress and the other was a former spy from an enemy nation—but now they seemed happy as clams together.

“I guess those who fight together, stay together,” I said.

“You don’t think it’s just because they have a common enemy now?” Minori-san replied.

“Common enemy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do they? Who is it?”

Long pause. Big grin. A finger pointing toward my face.

...................Uh, well, I definitely did get beaten up by all three of them together! Hey, isn’t Minori-san supposed to be my bodyguard? Where was she when I needed help? It was a little late to be worrying about that, though.

“Okay, that’s a joke, sort of. But maybe it’s a good thing that the forbidden armor got everyone’s real feelings out in the open. Cleared the air, so to speak. Helped everyone say the things they could never say before. It’s not like you all hated each other. And nothing deepens a friendship like honesty, right?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right...”

When we had put the suits back in their boxes, Garius, among others, had suggested the possibility of putting a more definitive end to them—dumping them in the sea or throwing them into a volcano, for instance. The person who put a stop to that idea was one of the very victims of the armor—Petralka. Garius had discreetly informed me as much when he came to visit me at my sickbed yesterday. The logic, he claimed, was that it was the forbidden armor that had allowed Petralka to get closer to Myusel and Elvia, so it hadn’t been all bad. As such, she wanted it to be retained at the castle for the time being rather than thrown away.

“I’m curious what the heck those things actually are, though.”

Straight-up power armor that looked like it had walked out of an SF series someplace? A voice in your head when you wore it that sounded like onboard AI? The voice seemed to function a bit like the magic interpreter rings, but it sounded less like there was some sort of spirit stuck in the machine than as if it were the machine itself that was talking.

With these thoughts in my head, I looked over at Minori-san... She didn’t say anything, but she looked uncommonly serious.

“Minori-san?”

“Huh? Yes?” She blinked like she was waking up from a dream.

“Something the matter?

“What would be the matter?”

“I don’t know. You just looked like you were thinking really hard.”

“Oh..................... Yeah, I guess.” She nodded, but her expression was ambiguous. “Shinichi-kun, did you get a good look at the forbidden armor when it was still in its box?”

“Huh? Not really. When I put mine on, I was too busy freaking out.”

“Mm. Okay, then do you remember Garius-san mentioning that it looked like there were some Japanese characters on the armor?”

“......Oh.”

Come to think of it, he had said something like that, hadn’t he? That was the whole reason he had brought the armor to our place to begin with. So-called letters or characters are really just symbols; people in two different worlds could have come up with similar looking systems by chance. It wouldn’t be that surprising. So I hadn’t given a lot of thought to the hypothesis that the writing was Japanese.

“I took a few pictures,” Minori-san said, and produced her phone. “The characters are too faded to read for the most part, but they definitely do look sort of... earthly.”

I blinked and waited for her to say something else. What was she suggesting? The forbidden armor was ancient, and it came from this world. But it had characters on it that looked like they came from ours. The armor looked and acted like something out of a sci-fi story. So...

“W-Well, I’m probably just imagining things,” Minori-san said.

“Y-Yeah,” I agreed. “Probably.”

Minori-san and I deliberately ignored the conclusion forming in our minds. Instead, we smiled at each other. Weakly.

(つづく)

To be continued...