Freak Show of the Circus (10)
The horned horse was bound tightly in the corner of the tent. The sheer restraint reeked of something criminal—like illegal poaching.
“Hiiiiiing! Hiiiiiing-hihiiing! (Let me out! Release me, I said!)”
“Tsk.”
Fuck, this thing was obnoxiously loud. If it kept this up, people would come running. I approached the creature. I couldn’t set it free, but I had to shut it up somehow.
“That child… could it possibly be a bicorn?” Franc asked, examining the bound foal.
Bicorn?
“Looks like it☆ It has two horns,” Larilura replied, scanning the interior of the tent. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone deeper inside. But the fact they’ve deliberately tied this bicorn alone in such an out-of-the-way spot and left it here… it doesn’t feel like an ordinary situation, does it?”
“Yeah.”
I agreed one hundred and forty percent. The atmosphere was far creepier than necessary if they were simply confining a rare animal.
“Let’s get out of here before we get dragged into something weird. There’s no one around to ask for directions anyway—”
—You saw a person? Where?
I frowned mid-sentence. I had sensed someone approaching the tent.
‘Ah, shit! Why is it always like this?!’
Just like last time—why did people keep wandering in and out the moment we tried to hide? Still, this time we’d been openly roaming around inside the circus grounds, so I couldn’t exactly blame anyone else.
Urgency rising, I whispered to the others.
“Damn it! Someone’s coming! What do we do? Hide?”
“H-hiding sounds good!”
“But where?!”
“Look for any space we can conceal ourselves in!”
—Clatter! Clatter!
We frantically searched what appeared to be a prop storage area. There was almost no place to hide inside the tent. Franc could squeeze into an empty oak barrel, but there was no way Larilura and I would fit in anything that small.
“We’re fucked! Hey, Larilura! Over here! This is our only option!”
In a panic, I pointed at a wardrobe that still had about half its space empty. Larilura looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“What?! That rickety old wardrobe?! I’m really sorry, but I have zero confidence I can stay quiet in there without making it creak!”
“Just get in and stop complaining! In this field, I’m your senior!”
I yanked the wardrobe door open and pulled her inside with me. On the inner wall, I carved a reversed ᚲ (Kenaz). Recalling the special activation conditions I’d read about in the book, I activated the rune.
‘Must be a space isolated from the outside. Must be a stationary space.’
This wardrobe satisfied both. I poured mana into the rune.
“There. Any noise we make in here won’t reach the outside.”
I tapped the wardrobe door as I spoke. The reversed Kenaz activated within a completely sealed space functioned as a barrier. It wasn’t particularly impressive—its activation conditions were stricter than a basic Silence spell and its mana efficiency was terrible.
‘Still, as long as no one opens the wardrobe, we should be fine.’
I let out a sigh of relief, but the moment my breath brushed Larilura’s ear in the darkness, her body shivered.
“Um… self-proclaimed senior? Something hard is poking my million-gold butt, you know?”
Larilura, pressed tightly against me in the cramped wardrobe, suddenly started talking nonsense.
“I understand that any man would react when stuck this close to the cutest, most lovable girl in the world, but isn’t this a bit too cruel for a pure virgin like me who’s never even held a man’s hand before? Don’t you feel sorry for me, having that kind of thing rubbed against me before you’ve even touched my hand?”
“Hey. Even if no one can hear us, don’t you think you’re talking a bit too much?”
“How can I not? This is a serious crisis! We skipped all the lovey-dovey stuff and you went straight to grinding against my butt. There’s no mood at all!”
“What the hell are you even saying? Has your brain finally broken?”
“No! I’m perfectly sane! What are you going to do about it? Will you take responsibility, senior? And more importantly, could you please do something about that indecent object that’s been poking my butt this entire time? It’s that kind of body part, so it’s awkward for me to push it away myself.”
“I told you to shut up. Besides, what’s poking your butt is the hilt of my sword, so don’t get any weird ideas.”
“Sword? Is that some kind of size brag? Men really do enjoy that kind of sexual harassment. So senior was a pervert too. I’m disappointed.”
I genuinely wanted to smack her. I was about to flick her forehead following Alexandra’s advice when the sound of the tent door opening made me freeze.
The men’s conversation mixed with the sound of someone being struck. Larilura and I, who had been bickering, fell silent at the ominous atmosphere. The men were speaking Romanian.
“The hell? You think any non-members would come in here? Have you ever seen Anasis-noona’s barrier fail before?”
“Ugh, you’re so damn noisy. I saw what I saw, alright? Anyway, it’s almost time for this hunchback bitch to work, so it doesn’t matter if someone drops by. Right? Hey, isn’t that right?”
“Ugh!”
—Thud!
The sound of a man laughing creepily drew closer. I immediately frowned and pulled Tabula’s mask from my pocket. I’d brought it because the circus was on our list of suspects, and I was glad I had.
I slipped the mask on. Deciding to reveal my identity as Arthur Wayne to Larilura, I spoke in Romanian.
“Larilura. You understood what they said, right?”
“Of course. Seems senior understood it too?”
“I have personal reasons for learning Romanian. I’ll take the one in front. Don’t kill him.”
“I’ll try.”
—Creak!
The moment we finished speaking, the wardrobe door opened.
“The punishment whip should be right he—urk?!”
Larilura lunged forward and slammed her fist into the long-haired Romanian man’s jaw. His eyes rolled back. Seeing that, I charged the scrawny man behind him and drove a punch into his gut.
—Thud!
“Guh?! Grrrrk?!”
The scrawny man doubled over from my fist. I quickly circled behind him and locked his neck in a chokehold. He passed out in three seconds. I lowered the unconscious man quietly, then looked for the girl they had been beating.
“Uuu…”
She was a child with a hunched back and a crushed-looking head. The contrast between her pretty golden hair and her twisted spine made my stomach churn. From what I’d heard, she hadn’t been born this way.
“Shh. Little miss? Can you stay quiet for me?”
I knelt in front of her and spoke gently. I removed the mask since it was far too intimidating. The girl’s eyes widened at my Romanian.
She must have met someone outside the circus troupe who spoke her language for the first time since arriving in Britannia.
—Clatter!
Franc emerged from the oak barrel to assess the situation. When she saw the two subdued men and the hunchbacked girl, she gasped.
“This is horrible…! That child is covered in bruises! What on earth have these people been doing to such a young girl?!”
“…Those aren’t bruises from learning circus tricks. I had a feeling, but the people of the Chrysos Circus really are far worse scum than I imagined,” Larilura spat with open contempt at the fallen men.
I quieted them both and asked the girl softly.
“Pretty young lady. What’s your name?”
“R-Rozanna… is my name.”
“Rozanna. That’s a lovely name.”
It was indeed a Romanian name. So she really was from there. I spoke as calmly as possible to keep her from feeling afraid.
“Rozanna. Could you tell your older brother and sisters your story?”
The child said she was born between a Romanian brewer father and a seamstress mother. One day they went together to see a circus troupe that had come to their city. That evening she went to sleep in her bed, but when she woke up, she had already been taken away from the city by this very circus.
“They gave me a small box as my bed.”
Rozanna continued.
“The box is so narrow my whole body doesn’t fit, but if I push and squeeze hard enough, they can close the lid. I sleep inside that box every day. At first it hurt, I was scared, and I couldn’t breathe well, so I couldn’t sleep. But lately I’ve gotten used to it.”
“…How long have you been sleeping in the box?”
“I’m not sure. But winter has come three times. I’m young so I only do odd jobs, and there have been exactly three snowy seasons.”
Three winters. At least two years. Rozanna had spent two years locked inside a tiny box. I barely suppressed the urge to grind my teeth.
In ancient China there had been the evil custom of foot binding. Small feet were considered a mark of beauty, so they would forcibly bind young girls’ feet to prevent them from growing. Rozanna’s situation was similar. A child forced to hunch her back and have her limbs compressed while growing—exactly the kind of child who would end up like Rozanna, a deformed hunchback with twisted limbs.
“W-wait! What… what does that mean?”
Larilura stammered in shock after listening to the Romanian conversation.
“You’re saying this child—Rozanna—was kidnapped by the Chrysos Circus and turned into this? Then the kidnapping incidents happening in Heisvent are also—”
“Sorry, Larilura. I’ll explain everything at once later.”
I cut her off. I understood her horror. The rage that would follow was natural too. But there would be time to be shocked or angry later.
“What about the other children? Rozanna, there are more children besides you, right?”
“There are. Kelly. Dorian. Grace. Radi… But they all got sick and died. Now it’s only Grace and Radi left.”
“…I see. I’m sorry for making you remember painful things.”
“Mmm. It’s okay.”
Rozanna’s shy little smile. The moment I saw it, white flames roared up inside my chest. The critical point of my rage was surpassed in zero-to-sixty time. Snatching innocent children from their families and tormenting them like this? These insane clown bastards deserved to be executed in the worst possible way and wiped out completely.
Swallowing my fury, I asked her.
“Rozanna. Can you run away with us?”
“I absolutely cannot run away.”
Rozanna’s demeanor changed completely as she declared it firmly.
“Lady Anasis is a mage. We are cursed and cannot escape from here. Even if we run, Lady Anasis can find exactly where the bad children are hiding. If we keep running and get caught… we die.”
“Rozanna.”
I gently placed my hands on the child’s twisted shoulders.
“There is no such thing as ‘absolute’ in this world. Anasis is only a mage, not a god.”
An inescapable barrier, tracking magic that could locate you anywhere in the world with one hundred percent accuracy? That was impossible.
‘I understand what Rozanna means by the barrier.’
It was probably the same barrier that had drawn the three of us here. Most likely an effect that ‘captures anyone trying to leave.’ If magic circles were inscribed all over the ground, such a barrier was entirely possible. That might even be why they deliberately set up their circus grounds in a section of the city rather than the colosseum—to catch runaway slaves.
‘Which means—the tracking magic used to chase escaped slaves must have a trick too!’
—My eyes widened.
I focused mana into my eyes, staring so hard the blood vessels nearly burst, searching Rozanna’s mana for any sense of wrongness. Where was it?
There had to be an ‘engraving’ on Rozanna’s body. Anasis was probably detecting the children’s escape attempts or tracking them through the mana of that engraving—just like when I had carved a rune on Franc’s forehead to follow her mana!
‘Concentrate! Focus!’
But it wasn’t working. Even though I was drawing up several times my normal amount of mana, I couldn’t sense any dissonance in Rozanna’s body. Damn it, was I mistaken? Was Anasis using a different method?
Just as I clenched my teeth, the bicorn who had been watching us spoke bluntly.
“Hrrruuung. Hiiing. (Back of the neck, idiot.)”
“—Hrrruuung? (Back of the neck?)”
The words broke through my concentrated state so I reflexively repeated them. When I asked in their own language, the bicorn stared at me with her mouth hanging open.
“Back of the neck? The back of the neck?”
I turned Rozanna around and carefully examined the back of her neck as the bicorn had said.
—There it was. A dark-blue flow of mana!
‘So this is Anasis’s magic!’
Having found the trace, I brought Rozanna closer to the bicorn. Then I asked the dumbfounded bicorn who was still standing there stupidly.
“Prrruuung hihiihenghe hiiheng? (Is there a way to undo it?)”
“F-Franc unni! Senior is talking to a horse! He must be so angry that his mind has gone a little strange!”
No, you fucking idiot.