Home Security [Part 2]
The moment Martha opened the door, she let out a shriek.
“Hiii!”
“What’s wrong? Martha? …Uwah.”
“Kuh—!”
“Ah—……”
“…this is bad! Emma-sama! Please hide behind me!”
They left the room in the order of William, George, Emma, and Joshua. Each of them raised their voices in surprise.
There sat Koumei-san proudly, with her catches arranged in one neat row. It looked like she had brought and arranged them for Emma to see.
They still remembered that even in their previous life, Koumei sometimes put cicadas, cockroaches, mantis, or grasshoppers neatly in a line at the house entrance for the Tanaka family.
‘I know that the whole family sucks at hunting, so I will give these to you’ was probably the intention behind her gifts.
Sometimes the cicada had only its wings left, though… There were many occasions that prompted thoughts which shouldn’t be explored deeply, like ‘Just where does the body end up……?’.
However, Koumei-san‘s gift this time was 10 (at the least), not cockroaches, but people wearing pitch-black clothing lined up on the floor in an unconscious state (they were still alive, right?).
“Ko—! Koumei-saan!”
This just kicked off a diplomatic crisis… While Joshua and Martha were also surprised, the three siblings were the only ones here who had a good idea of what these fallen men were. The siblings collapsed as their knees gave out.
These ‘Gifts’ from Koumei-san, who had lined them up neatly, were each uniformly dressed in black from head to toe. Even their faces were covered with cloth, except for their eyes, making it unable to identify them individually.
An extremely similar figure came to the siblings’ minds, who were Japanese in their previous life.
“Why are there ‘ninjas’ sleeping in our house?”
William complained, still on his knees. He didn’t know if these guises were how real ninjas from antiquity actually would have looked, but they looked like the stereotypical ninja.
“Meow!”
Koumei snorted proudly and moved closer to Emma. Cute. Koumei-san is cute but…!
“No matter how we look at it, these people must be related to Imperial Japan, right?”
The Rule of ‘Japanese-like = Imperial Japan’.
“Eh? Imperial Japan?”
“Are they Imperial Japanese?”
Only after hearing George’s words, did Joshua and Martha realize the seriousness of this matter.
People from Imperial Japan, who was trying to form a diplomatic relation as a friendly nation, were sneaking around in the Stuart house. They could sense nothing but a bad feeling from this situation.
Feeling greatly perplexed, George and William thought for the first time that getting a cockroach as a gift would have been much better.
“Meoww meow, meow♪”
Koumei-san, who was feeling blissful after receiving head pats from Emma, made her report.
“Eh!? There are still 5 more in the attic?”
“Meoww meow♪ Meow♪”
“Those in the attic… have already been captured with Violet’s spider web?”
“Meow♪”
Huh? Violet shouldn’t be out of the insect shed today, though…? Don’t my children[1] have too much freedom?
[T/N 1: Emma refers to her pet insects as her “children”]
As Emma continued to reply to Koumei-san’s report, Martha’s head sank in exasperation.
“Emma-sama, please only talk with the cats inside the mansion… For now, I will gather some of the mansion’s manservants. If we left these people in front of Emma-sama‘s room, on the off-chance they were seen by His Majesty the King, it would turn into a serious matter. Let’s stuff all of them into an empty room.”
While they were carrying the ninjas to an unused room (Note: they have more unused rooms than used ones), they met Kan-chan and Chou-chan halfway, holding some additional ninjas in their mouths.
“……just how many ninjas have sneaked in!?”
