Outbreak Company: Volume 6 (Premium), page 6
part #6 of Outbreak Company Series
“Minori-san. Don’t you think this would look wonderful on Myusel-san?”
“I absolutely do!” Minori-san answered immediately—she even clenched her fist for good measure.
“And what about you, Shinichi-san?”
I was silent for a long moment, picturing a Gothic-Loli Myusel in my mind’s eye.
That dress, all that black lace... Her usual sweet maid’s smile replaced by a devilish grin, looking at me...
“...Yes.”
Yikes. Nosebleed danger: high!
“See? Even Shinichi-san says so.”
“W-Well, in that case... um... if you wouldn’t mind...”
Myusel was clearly backed into a corner here—she still looked hesitant, but nodded ambivalently.
“Come to my room later then, please. Oh—and since we’re taking the time anyway, bring Elvia-san, too.”
“Elvia, too?”
Myusel was one thing, but this was a bit surprising. Elvia didn’t strike me as the type who would normally be interested in wearing a dress. Maybe overalls or hot pants or something. Or, you know, something more boyish.
“She’s quite an interesting piece of material herself. I’d love to try some things on her,” Hikaru-san said.
“Uh...huh...”
So that was it.
“Later, then,” Hikaru-san said and bowed, then went trotting off.
As we watched her go, Myusel said, “Are... Are you really sure it’s all right...?” She was definitely still concerned.
“Well, the person who owns the clothes says it’s okay, so why not?” Minori-san said, trying to sound upbeat. “And Shinichi-kun said he wants to see you in that dress, didn’t he? Goth-Loli Myusel!”
“Ah...”
Myusel glanced at me—and then immediately blushed and looked at the ground.
Ahhh! What’s with that unbelievably sweet, shy gesture?! When a beautiful girl like Myusel does that to me—does that to me—I just—I aggghhhh!
“I—I’ll go call Elvia-san...”
Myusel put her hands to her cheeks to try to hide her blush, then walked off down the hallway. Oh! What a model of maidenly modesty. Granted, it was a perfectly normal cue for two-dimensional girls. But to see it in real life! I never imagined. I’ll never wash these eyes again.
“Oooh, someone’s in loooove!” Minori-san said as she watched me watch Myusel leave.
“You know who else fixates about who’s in love, Minori-san? Old dudes.”
This attempt at a comeback was the best thing I could think of to hide my own embarrassment.
And so, about half an hour later...
“Um... Wh—What do you think...?”
“Do y’ like the way it looks...?”
Two startlingly beautiful, but hesitant, women appeared in the living area.
Of course, I’m referring to Myusel and Elvia. Except...
“Whoa...” I couldn’t hold back a gasp of admiration. They looked so different from usual that just for a second, I hadn’t known who they were.
They had just changed their clothes and hair, but still, they looked like completely different people.
“Um... Master...?” Myusel, who usually wore her hair in twintails or a ponytail, had a black lace ribbon around her head now. She was wearing a white blouse with plenty of frills. There was layer upon layer of black lace on her skirt, which stopped above the knees. Finally, she was wearing knee socks and black heels.
“Normal Myusel” is awful cute, but her beauty in this outfit radiated a nobility that made her seem almost like some princess. This wasn’t about just getting gussied up with a little makeup; it suggested that she had a fundamental beauty.
“Sh-Shinichi-sama...?
Elvia, on the other hand, was wearing a black headdress woven into her hair. Her sleeves as well as the space from her neck down to just above her chest had been covered in a translucent black material, so that the cleft of her breasts was just visible. I’m a little ashamed to say I couldn’t look away from that feature, but... it was an unstoppable force! An immovable object! The material was translucent—practically begging me to look!
Anyway, her skirt had a butterfly pattern on it and was hemmed with white lace. On her feet was a pair of black boots.
It was nothing like her usual “wild child” appearance. There was a certain harmoniousness to her body (maybe there was a corset at work?), and she seemed unusually sexy. It contrasted with the ambivalent expression on her face to make the effect even more pronounced.
The heck? This is awesome.
In just thirty minutes, the two of them had changed completely—was this magic?!
“I think both of you look absolutely adorable—or maybe I should say beautiful!” I exclaimed, clenching my fist.
Myusel and Elvia fidgeted shyly—and that only made my heart pound harder. Even though they were both girls, Minori-san seemed to be having the same reaction.
“You look fantastic! Can I take a photo?!” She grabbed her phone out of her pocket, and without waiting for an answer she rushed over and started snapping away. “Okay, look this way, please. Great! Perfect! Now, pose!”
“Er—yes?”
“Right hand like this! Head tilted, like so!”
Myusel’s head was obviously spinning as Minori-san started arranging her with all the gusto of a professional photographer. She seemed like such an experienced hand that I half expected her to say, “Okay, next, let’s get that top off!” (Yeah, sure.)
Standing beside Myusel, Elvia clasped her hands to her chest and exclaimed, “It’s... It’s like I’ve gone and turned into a noble or somethin’!”
“I think nobles tend to have more refined diction,” I said, laughing.
It was like I had noticed with Myusel: Elvia seemed to associate lots of lace with nobility. I guess if you don’t have a sewing machine, attaching this many frills to something would take a lot of time-consuming hand labor.
“Did you notice they’re both wearing makeup?” Hikaru-san asked, coming into the room a bit belatedly.
“Oh! So they are,” Minori-san said, pausing her hand on the shutter long enough to add, “It completely slipped past me.”
Hello? You’re a girl, too. This is supposed to be your department...
“Pink for Myusel-san, a bit of brown eyeshadow for Elvia-san. Both of them have such lovely skin, it works so well for them.”
“It’s easy to overdo pink and make it look like a bruise, but it’s really perfect for Myusel,” Minori-san said.
“Both of them have pink on their cheeks.”
“That’s great! Oh, but do you think orange might have worked on Elvia?”
I think they were talking about makeup... but unfortunately, I couldn’t be sure. I wished I had something to add, but it was all girl talk at that point, not a conversation I could easily join.
At length I even started to wonder if I should really be there. I looked around the room, whereupon I spotted Brooke and Cerise standing by the wall. They were staring on, not appearing to understand Minori-san and Hikaru-san’s conversation any better than I did. Maybe lizardmen had a different standard of aesthetics than humans. Brooke, being a guy, probably doubly didn’t understand.
“Oh, Brooke-san, Cerise-san,” Hikaru-san said, turning to them. “Let me know when you’re getting rid of your scales again. They’re really a wonderful material. I’m going to be considering what kind of design to use them for.”
“Hm! If our scales be good enough for you,” Brooke answered.
“It will please us greatly if you find a use for them,” Cerise said. “Won’t it, Brooke?”
“If you wish, we can produce more scales than usual. We would be happy to see you enjoy them.”
“Indeed we would!”
“Gladly,” Hikaru-san said, and just like that, she had drawn them both into the conversation. Just like she had done at the school that morning, she really seemed to know how to shorten the distance between people.
Happy voices rang throughout the living area. It seemed to get more and more cheery by the moment.
Everyone was enjoying themselves. But me?
I didn’t know why, but it seemed like I had missed my chance to get in on the conversation. In the end, I just hung out by the wall, watching everyone else have a good time.
After dinner, I jumped in the bath.
“Ahhh...”
Back when I was a home security guard, I often did little more than rinse off with a shower, but I had to admit, there was nothing like sinking deep into a bathtub, letting the water wash away all your tension and fatigue.
“This is paradise,” I murmured, practically compelled to use a cliché. My words echoed around the large bathing area.
I had used this bath more times than I could count, so it was pretty much normal to me now, but the very first time I had seen it, I thought I had wandered into the main bath at some hot-springs resort. There were scads of decorations on the walls and ceiling, and the hot water gushed out of the mouth of a lion—er, almost. More like some kind of wolf-like creature.
As a side note, there obviously was no electric pump to keep that water flowing, and there wasn’t a spring nearby. When, out of curiosity, I looked into it, I discovered that Brooke was heating a bunch of water and then moving it with a hand pump or something. So that was why he had wanted me to let him know when I was going to take a bath.
I felt bad about it and told him he didn’t have to do that for me, but apparently it was part of keeping the bathwater at a stable temperature, so the water had to keep flowing.
“Nghaa...”
I felt so good, I found my voice turning a little weird. I like it this way: almost but not quite too hot. The constant changing of the water helped keep the temperature just the way I liked it. I didn’t know who had designed this bath, but I was very grateful to them, and to Brooke.
I put my washcloth on my head and sank into the water with a sigh (another cliché). Then I rested against the side of the tub, stretching out my arms and legs.
I sat there in silence. As I stared up at the ceiling, the events of the day kept replaying in my head. I was thrilled that Hikaru-san had integrated into the school so extraordinarily well. It was easy on me because I didn’t have to go out of my way to help her fit in, and above all, it made me genuinely happy to see the students have fun.
But I couldn’t deny that, for whatever reason, there was a little part of me that felt like it didn’t quite jibe. Almost like it was unbearable.
Yet another woman in the house meant yet more subjects a man couldn’t broach. Sure, I had Brooke, but he wasn’t exactly a proactive conversation-starter, and anyway, the difference between the sexes seemed subtly different for lizardmen than for humans. I had a sneaking suspicion that even if I’d wanted to commiserate with him about being the only men in a house full of women, it wouldn’t have gone very well.
I know it might have been more normal in this situation to be thinking to myself, Is this my own personal harem? or Did I just land in some sort of gal game? But even though I knew that intellectually, I couldn’t help but be stung by the feeling that I was being excluded from the circle of my own friends.
Then again, maybe all this stuff was just in my own head.
“Go away, bad thoughts!” I shook my head, trying to break the increasingly vicious downward spiral I was slipping into.
You’re just overthinking things.
It was a bad habit of mine. Looking back on it, even the entire incident that had caused me to become a home security guard in the first place—being rejected by my childhood friend—if, instead of shutting myself up in my room, I had just put the whole thing out of my mind and continued going to school, I probably would have had a perfectly normal school life.
As it happened, of course, it was precisely that stint as a home security guard that had set me on the path to coming to this other world, meeting Myusel and Petralka and Elvia and Brooke and everyone else here—so I guess you could say things worked out in the end.
“Hmm...”
I swallowed an oncoming sigh, sinking into the tub up to my chin. The only sound in the entire bathing area was the water pouring from the wolf’s mouth.
Brooke, as I said, was the one heating the water and working the pump, so we never had a chance to bathe together. And obviously, none of the girls were going to join me in here, so I always found myself alone in the bath.
It didn’t usually bother me, but somehow I found the huge, empty space made me feel, well, lonely.
I glanced toward the door of the bathing area.
If this were a manga or something, this was the moment when the beautiful girl characters, not realizing that the protagonist was in the bath, would wander in and he would get a lucky peep. You know? When I looked at the door, it’s not as if I were seriously expecting anything like that. Besides, my clothes were sitting right there in the changing room. No one could miss them.
But then...
“Huh...?”
There was a sound on the far side of the door. I furrowed my brow in confusion.
Was someone in the changing room? It wouldn’t be that weird; it was possible it was Myusel or Cerise bringing me a change of clothes. But if that was the case... then why was the door opening?
The door was opening?!
I sat, frozen and astonished, in the tub as the door slid open with a rattle.
“Shinichi-san?”
“Hi-Hika...gh...”
I almost choked on her name. It was so sudden, I didn’t have time to hide myself—or for that matter, to think, Oh yeah, I’m in the water, so everything below my neck probably isn’t exactly visible. All I could do was stare, my mouth hanging open stupidly, at the person who had just come in.
It was Hikaru-san (as if you needed me to tell you that). She had wrapped herself in a towel, sure, but the pale legs below the hem of the towel, as well as her equally pale and exposed neck, shoulders, and arms, were all too visible.
It was a reminder that being partially hidden is even sexier than being completely naked. To hide something is the same as saying you would be embarrassed for it to be seen, or in other words, to announce precisely that there’s something there to be embarrassed about, or in other words again, that there’s a secret garden right here, just one thin towel away, inviting the imagination to rise up and—rise up—grraagghhhkk (Shinichi is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.)
“I-I-I-I-I’m in here right now!” I finally stammered out. “I’m s-sorry if you didn’t realize that!” I turned my back to her as I spoke. I didn’t exactly count, but I would guess it took me about ten seconds to get around to doing this. During that time, I had an unimpeded view of Hikaru-san and her pale skin. The standard thing would be for her to scream “Pervert!” and throw a bucket or two at my head.
But Hikaru-san didn’t say anything.
I found that even more intimidating, and it made me start babbling. “I j-just, you know? I can’t qu-quite get out of the bath right now, so—!” I was in a bad place. “S-So, just, you know—”
“In that case, let’s bathe together.”
“Exactly! So let’s j-just bathe to—ggghhaa?!”
Whaaat?! What’s with this crazy plot twist?!
Could it be, O God, that the path to a real and fulfilling life with a woman has finally opened to me?! Do you want me to explode?! I think it’s too early to get torn to pieces! Ahh, Father, Mother, your son Kanou Shinichi this day abandons his dream of becoming a wizard...!
My ridiculous imagination was, as usual, going a mile a minute.
“B-B-BBBBBut w-w-wait...!”
I’m sorry to tell you this, God, but I just don’t have the nerve. Offered the chance to bathe with a beautiful woman, I don’t have it in me to be all, Well, it would be a shame to waste an opportunity when it comes knocking, ho ho ho!
I didn’t say anything. Then I heard a soft splish from behind me. I had to assume it was Hikaru-san getting into the bath. The skin on my back seemed immensely sensitive all of a sudden; I thought I could feel her getting closer.
“U-Um, uh, Hikaru-san...sa...n...”
I could tell: she was right there. Right... behind me...
Ahh! Why does my extrasensory perception seem so acute at these moments and only these moments?!
My heart was pounding wildly; I didn’t know if it was from the heat or the excitement.
I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up I mustn’t stand up don’t ask what I mean you know what I mean!!
“U—Um...!”
Desperately fighting the urge to glance back one more time, I forced my eyes shut.
“Er, uh, would you maybe be so kind as to get out again? No, er, or, maybe you could honorably look away and I could... humbly... get out...”
Nervousness seemed to have inspired an abundance of politeness in me for some reason. I could almost hear my shoulder devil mocking me: “C’mon, turn around! She said you could!”
“No!” responded my good angel. “Don’t do it. You’re a better man than that, Shinichi-sama!”
Wait a second, I could understand why my shoulder devil had my face, but why did my angel look like Myusel?
“Are you unhappy to be here with me?”
“I—I wouldn’t say... I mean...”
I’m not unhappy about it—that’s exactly the problem!
If this was an all-too-obvious plot twist, then I knew what came next: I would turn around, thrilled by this opportunity, at which point somebody else—another one of the women, no doubt—would come bursting in, just in time to find me in what appeared to be a compromising situation that I would never be able to talk my way out of. I might be able to survive if the witness were Minori-san or Cerise, or even Elvia, but if poor, serious Myusel were to see this, if she were to think worse of me because of it—I don’t think I would recover for at least five years.
