To put it another way, if you just follow along, you’ll get to the end. If you decided to do nothing but play such a game, no matter how slow you took it, you could probably get through one in about three days. Despite a certain degree of freedom in such titles, they’re not really that different from manga, anime, or novels.

  What I’m saying is: eventually, they end.

  But there are also games that don’t have an “end.” Ones you can play over and over, as many times as you want, or ones whose content changes in some way based on a random number; some others you can play for ages if you want, and so on. A lot of online games are like that, but so are a lot of single-player games.

  There are plenty of ero games like that, too. Games where you can choose what the heroine’s face and body look like, and where her spoken lines are chosen randomly from a large pool of possibilities. There’s a lot of replay value to be had in something like that—in fact, the play itself is often a series of lengthy loops.

  In a word, you could spend an endless amount of time with an ideal woman you designed yourself and never have to come back to reality. In fact, it was all too easy to get so sucked in that you started to think, Who wants to play a crappy game like reality, anyway?

  Now, as I’ve mentioned before, the people of the Holy Eldant Empire seemed especially susceptible to otaku culture. And any time you get too into something, whatever it is, there can be strange side effects. If those side effects cause real harm, then naturally people will criticize whatever the thing was that you were into. And if that thing happens to be ero games—i.e., the sort of thing widely considered depraved entertainment—then people are really going to be up in arms about it. And if people’s criticism started to extend from the game to the people who had brought the game—Amutech—we could have genuine hysteria on our hands. This was a slippery slope I’d already had too much firsthand experience of with the Assembly of Patriots.

  Early on, I realized that some of the first things I’d imported had been mistakes, and ever since then, I had steered completely clear of importing any ero games. I figured those could come later, after otaku culture had become more normal here.

  So then, who?

  Someone on the Japanese side, obviously. And that meant one of a fairly limited number of people. Me, Minori-san, Matoba-san, Hikaru-san, and a handful of JSDF soldiers.

  Minori-san was importing her share of BL books, but those were for her personal interest—notwithstanding the pleasure she took in showing them to Garius. I couldn’t picture her importing ero games to sell to the kids over here.

  Matoba-san, then? I didn’t think so. He barely knew the first thing about otaku entertainment. It was entirely possible he didn’t even realize ero games existed. He hadn’t known what an “ero game triple threat” even was before he met me.

  What about the soldiers from the garrison? I couldn’t be sure. They did get those regular deliveries of personal items, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out there were X-rated games in some of those boxes. But...

  “...Huh?”

  Thinking of those deliveries spurred a memory in me.

  Hikaru-san’s delivery.

  The memory cards I’d seen packed into that box.

  “Now it makes sense...”

  How would you get ero games for consoles like the PLP or the 3TS? You couldn’t do it with official cartridges or optical discs. Neither Somy nor Nindento wanted X-rated titles on their systems. There were no official ero releases for either console.

  But modern handheld games had cameras and music players and such, along with memory card slots to hold the data for those functions. Games you downloaded could be stored on memory cards, too. If you used a PC to create a program and put it on one of those cards, you could essentially have a “doujin” ero game on PLP or 3TS. What if that was what Hikaru-san had wanted all those memory cards for?

  “Bad... This is bad,” I muttered as I headed back toward the classroom.

  The image of Shade, wearing a zombified expression and clinging to his 3TS, was burned into my memory. However you sliced it, that wasn’t normal. I’d heard stories of some people who had done nothing but played online games for days on end until they finally died—and it looked like Shade was heading down that path.

  Ero games also naturally lend themselves to, uh, certain behavior while playing. While playing all night, if you know what I mean. I read about an experiment once where supposedly, they taught a monkey to pleasure itself, and the monkey just kept doing it until it collapsed. In the same way, when you have something that isn’t limited, and where there’s no outside pressure condemning it as “bad” or “shameful,” then it can be impossible to stop.

  The result? If enough of these games made it into the hands of enough students, at least one of them was bound to just keep playing until he dropped. Just like how my students had gotten completely hooked on otaku culture because they had been starved for entertainment, it can be hard to control what you’re not used to.

  I couldn’t let things get like that again.

  “Damn. I should have stopped him earlier,” I groaned.

  Him, of course, was Hikaru-san.

  “But how should I do this?”

  I wandered through the school, looking for Hikaru-san. We were past the point of “seeing how things went.” Trading cards were one thing, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with telling me that the ero games were just about business.

  Finally, I spotted Hikaru-san through the window of the classroom.

  “Hikaru-sa—”

  I opened the door of the classroom with a mind to corner him about the games, but then I stopped in my tracks.

  Hikaru-san looked like he was having so much fun. He stood in the classroom surrounded by students, chatting amiably with them. Myusel and Minori-san were beside him. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but everyone seemed really into it.

  Everyone seemed to be... enjoying themselves. So much so that I, who had come to give Hikaru-san a piece of my mind, actually felt alienated. I hesitated to shatter the convivial atmosphere.

  What did I think would happen if I confronted Hikaru-san about his behavior here and now? The students adored him, and even Petralka seemed to like him. Myusel, Elvia, and Minori-san all enjoyed talking about cosplay with him. If someone were to criticize Hikaru-san, wasn’t it likely that there would be somebody who took his side?

  A new spear tip for the cultural invasion, sent to replace me...

  In other words, a new person who could and would undermine me. If I set myself up against Hikaru-san, whose side would everybody take? That of the former shut-in and worthless otaku who was prone to saying things that invited misunderstanding? Or Hikaru-san, who was intelligent, beautiful, and a superb communicator?

  I stood there in thought.

  I felt pathetic—but I got scared.

  I was scared they would say, “Kanou Shinichi, we don’t need you anymore.”

  I was so scared, I found I couldn’t move from my spot.

  “Master?” Myusel noticed me at the door and smiled. “Is something wrong?”

  Her words caused everyone else in the room to stop talking and look at me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they resented me for interrupting just when they had been chatting so happily—even though I knew how unlikely that was—and it killed me.

  So I said...

  “Er, no, nothing really...” I gave a reflexive shake of my head and promptly exited the classroom.

  “Master?”

  Myusel’s voice, sounding doubtful, followed me—but I just couldn’t stay there any longer.

  We were back at the mansion for that short stretch between school and dinner.

  Minori-san had gone to her room, and I saw Myusel head into the kitchen, so I talked to Hikaru-san in the hallway. Minori-san, supposedly my bodyguard, was all but attached at the hip to Hikaru-san these days, so I didn’t get a lot of chances to speak to him alone.

  “Hikaru-san,” I said.

  He turned to me with a smile. “Yes? What is it?”

  I had what I thought was a pretty serious expression on my face, but Hikaru-san never let his smile slip. Was he just not worried? Or did he imagine that I would never attack him?

  I felt like the ant challenging the elephant. In a toe-to-toe fight with Hikaru-san, I could never win, and somewhere in my mind I had the feeling of self-loathing that comes with having given up before you ever started.

  But all the same...

  “I just wanted to talk to you for a minute,” I said after a few seconds’ hesitation, as coldly as I could. “What is that 3TS game?”

  “What? I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t act dumb,” I ordered him in a voice dangerously close to breaking. “You’re the one who gave Shade a memory card with a homebrew ero game on it, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry. I truly have no idea—”

  “I said, don’t play with me!” I broke in. “I saw all those memory cards in your box the other day. You meant to use those to sell ero games, didn’t you? Otherwise, why would you need to buy so many of the same card? You have the game on your own computer, and you’re copying it to those cards for distribution, aren’t you?”

  Hikaru-san was completely silent. Slowly, an inch at a time, the smile disappeared from that lovely face.

  Staring—no, glaring—into my eyes, he shrugged his shoulders. “So? What if I am?” He didn’t look the least bit perturbed. In fact, he put his hands defiantly on his hips and sighed as he looked at me, as if to indicate how much of a pain in the neck this had all become.

  “Then I want you to stop right away.”

  “Why?” His voice was so calm, so even. “Don’t you see how much everyone is enjoying themselves?”

  “Hold on a second. ‘Everyone’...?”

  Not just Shade, then? Think about it: I only learned about Shade because his mother came and talked to me. I hadn’t noticed on my own. Between the varying classes of students, from noble to commoner, as well as the frequent fights that broke out in the classroom, it wasn’t that unusual to go several days without seeing a given student. Unlike in Japan with its long-established system of compulsory education, people around here didn’t necessarily feel that it was such a bad thing to miss a few days of school.

  But what if a lot of those missing students were out for the same reason as Shade?

  “How many are out there?!”

  “I sold ten. We’re still at the pilot stage,” Hikaru-san said.

  “Ten!”

  “Looks like they’re hooked, too. Starting the day after I sold the games, out of those ten students, six have only shown up at the classroom when they need to recharge their batteries. Though admittedly the other four have continued to attend class as usual.”

  That was still more than half the students gone, a spectacular rate of addiction.

  “This is bad. You can’t do things like that.”

  Shade’s health was obviously suffering, but even so, he refused to give up his 3TS.

  As I mentioned, the game he was playing was one with a vast degree of replayability. It was possible to be finished with a story-based game once you had seen the story, even accounting for games that had branching paths and multiple endings. But games that emphasized simulation elements often didn’t have endings. You could design a character the way you liked her, then go on fake dates and have fake hanky-panky, and the more you indulged in this stuff, the more new images of your character you could unlock.

  It was easy to see how this could turn endless.

  “Games like that shouldn’t be...”

  “You imported ero games yourself, didn’t you?” Hikaru-san said with a smile. “Are you eighteen? I don’t think so.”

  “But—But that—”

  Okay, fair point—I wasn’t eighteen. Maybe I shouldn’t be trumpeting the fact that I had played X-rated games. But...

  “I just want everyone to have fun—I simply asked myself what everyone would most enjoy, and that’s why I imported those games. And because they’re just data, there isn’t even a need to physically transport them through the wormhole, unlike manga, or anime DVDs. I start by selling blank memory cards, and then sell the data later. The games are simple to duplicate on my computer. Can you think of a better business model?”

  “Business model? You can only call it that because you didn’t see Shade!”

  “See him? See him how? You mean see how he’s so entranced by that game that he’s destroyed his own health, like a monkey who’s learned to jack off?”

  “Then you know?!”

  “I can guess easily enough.” Hikaru-san shrugged.

  “Don’t tell me... You knew that might happen to people, and you still—?”

  “Take a population that’s not used to this kind of stimulus, and dump all-you-can-play ero games on them. What do you think’s going to happen?”

  I couldn’t say anything. He was right. It was true.

  Back when I had first begun importing otaku products, hadn’t it been the same way?

  When you have someone who’s never been exposed to a given stimulus, even a relatively mild version of that stimulus can be extremely potent—so much so that when you take it away, it produces withdrawal symptoms. But at least with typical manga, novels, and anime, you could look at them once and be done with them. They didn’t suck away your life force, like ero games.

  “So you did this knowingly?”

  “Of course I did. It was an experiment, and these are exactly the results I expected,” Hikaru-san replied without a trace of guilt.

  “So the experiment’s over, then. Ero games—”

  “—have been a huge success,” Hikaru-san said. “We’re seeing an addiction rate of over fifty percent. That speaks well for future sales.”

  God. He really saw this as nothing but a business matter, didn’t he? It just has to sell. What sells is what’s right.

  “We’re not talking about sales anymore! And the same with the cards!”

  “The cards?”

  “People aren’t just enjoying them anymore!”

  Some cards were going for prices that weren’t even funny. An actual secondhand market was forming here, albeit on a small scale.

  “We need to wrap up this operation and just leave our hands off for a while!” I said.

  “Why?” Hikaru-san looked genuinely puzzled. “People are having fun. Amutech’s business is booming. To a limited extent, even Japan itself is feeling the effect. And that means our reputations are on the rise, too. Where’s the problem? Do you really want to give all that up? Why would you?”

  “You! Do you really think of nothing but sales numbers? Nothing but money?!”

  “And just what else am I supposed to think of?!” I must have touched a nerve, because suddenly Hikaru-san didn’t sound so calm anymore. “How do you think entertainment works? How do you think the otaku industry works?! Consumers are nothing but swine who’ll throw themselves at the first thing that flashes a bit of skin at them! What’s wrong with giving them what they want?! They don’t give a rat’s ass about stories—just sex, sex, sex!”

  I was left speechless by this sudden storm. I couldn’t understand Hikaru-san’s scathing tone. It was almost as if he was belittling otaku, despite being one himself. Had familiarity bred such contempt?

  Or could it be that this person, Ayasaki Hikaru, wasn’t an otaku at all? That it was hatred for otaku that drove him to say these things? It wasn’t as if otaku were the only people in the world who read manga, or watched anime, or whatever. Hikaru-san had said his parents were both otaku. Was it simple exposure that had given him his knowledge of otaku works...?

  “As sellers of goods, what’s wrong with bringing in what consumers want?! Or what? Are you going to tell me companies are wrong for even making those products?!”

  “No— I don’t mean—”

  That wasn’t what I was trying to say at all. But I didn’t know how to put it into words.

  Hikaru-san looked at me as I stood there, unable to say anything, and the edges of his lips twisted. “Hmph.” He looked at me out of the corner of narrowed eyes, mockingly. “Exactly what do you think you’re playing at, anyway?”

  “Huh...?”

  “Being Amutech’s General Manager? Yes, of course that’s what you are. But for how much longer, do you think?”

  “What are you—?”

  “Have you still not figured out why I came here?”

  “Wha...?”

  What was he... talking about?

  Hikaru-san put his face right next to mine. I instinctively twisted away a little bit, but he leaned down and whispered in my ear, as if sharing a secret. “I was the one who was chosen to replace you when you were gone.”

  “When I was... gone...?”

  What? Why the past tense?

  “I was supposed be the second General Manager of Amutech. But then you had the gall to come back alive. So we quickly decided I would be your assistant instead. Did you really not notice any of this?”

  I sucked in a breath. Hikaru-san stared into my face. He was still gorgeous, still could have passed for a woman, and he was inches away from me. But I didn’t feel my heart pounding. In fact, I could tell the blood had drained from my face. At that moment, I was a frog hypnotized by a snake.

  “And when it comes right down to it, you’re not so special after all, are you? Just an otaku. Don’t you think someone with a head for business—someone like me—would make a better manager?” He giggled girlishly. “So we have you, who has hardly made any profit and even went rogue on one occasion. And we have me, someone who has achieved tangible, if experimental, results in a very short time. Which do you think the Japanese government would prefer?”

  I didn’t answer. There was only one answer, anyway.

 

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