“Hmmmm...”

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

  The next morning...

  “G’morning.”

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

  “It’s always my turn!”

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

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

  “Hrr! In that case—”

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

  “Wh-What?!”

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

  “Hey, that’s no fair!”

  “It’s all right here on the card!”

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

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

  “Where’d you even get—”

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

  “Grr...”

  “Now, moving on!”

  And so on and so forth.

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

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

  “Hah! Hah! I win!”

  I gathered that the battle was over.

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

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

  ............Wha?

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

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

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

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

  “Wh-Why would he do that?”

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

  “Er, cards are more Hikaru-san’s—”

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

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

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

  “Huh...?”

  Buying?

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

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

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

  I looked around the classroom.

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

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

  It had been...

  “..................Money.”

  The bronze and silver pieces minted by the Eldant Empire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes? Can I help you, Shinichi-san?”

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

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

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

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

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

  I paused. “Come with me a sec.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Come again?”

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

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

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

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

  “I mean... They...”

  Obviously, they would be desperate for cards like that.

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

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

  I remembered what the losing student had said.

  Where’d you even get—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “But then...”

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

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

  I was silent, astonished.

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

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

  “Yes? What is it?”

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

  “That’s just so commercialistic.”

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

  “Wait. Wait...”

  I thought of three words: the Opium Wars.

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

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

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

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

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

  “What do you mean, what?”

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

  “Well, I mean—”

  He was right, but...

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

  I caught my breath.

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

  “I just— I—”

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

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

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

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

  Ayasaki Hikaru.

  He was—

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

  I was silent.

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

  He sounded so proud of himself.

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

  Chapter Three: Cornered?

  Petralka was in excellent spirits.

  “Ah, we understand now...!”

  How do I put this? She looked... different.

  Petralka had always looked like a young but well-manicured, attractive girl. But her clothes, position, and behavior had worked together to create the presence that was Petralka an Eldant III.

  And so just by wearing different colors, different materials, she became like a totally new person.

  “Oh ho!”

  She was currently dressed in a Suiren outfit like Hikaru-san had worn at their first meeting. Of course, Hikaru-san’s costume would never have fit the empress; this was a new outfit he’d made especially for Petralka. Minori-san had already requisitioned a sewing machine back when we were doing costumes for our movie, so it was just a matter of getting some cloth and using it with the lace Hikaru-san had brought along. Add some fasteners to make it easy to get in and out of, some buttons, and a few other little details, and voila.

  What was more, Petralka had taken off her crown and replaced it with a black wig, making her look even more different. She hadn’t gone so far as to wear color contacts, though, so her eyes were still their usual emerald green.

  She looked... Well, she looked like a girl you could just fall in love with.

  An old saying holds that one tires of a beautiful woman after three days, and it was true that I had kind of gotten used to the way Petralka looked—but the impression she made now was fresh and new, and inspired my heart to pound all over again.

  “Wonderful!”

  “I receive your words of praise with utmost gratitude,” said Hikaru-san, standing next to me on the carpet of the audience chamber.

  Hikaru-san, Minori-san, and I were Amutech’s representatives in the audience hall at that moment. For the Eldant side there were Petralka and Garius. Royal guards waited just beyond the door, but inside, it was only us.

  As ever, Hikaru-san blended perfectly into this environment. It went beyond simple etiquette; it was a matter of the ability to communicate. It was like he could choose his words and behavior in response to the way the other person looked and acted. Maybe it was a skill he had picked up from cosplaying. Dressing up just for your own amusement was one thing, but if you were going to be around other people, then you would have to branch out.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21