8. Curse Plague (21)
8. Curse Plague (21)
The troupe members, now calmer, set about clearing the aftermath.
They salvaged what intact luggage they could from the wrecked wagon and loaded it onto another.
They also gathered the bodies of the villagers who had fallen to the demon.
The villagers had pointed weapons at them, but leaving the corpses to rot felt wrong regardless.
Wild beasts or lesser demons might be drawn to them.
Ella stared at the demon's corpse, a carving knife lodged in the back of its skull, and clicked her tongue.
Umon's Inspira, "Blade Juggling," generated return force proportional to the power of the throw.
Which meant the sheer strength that had caved in the demon's skull had come purely from Umon himself.
She'd known he was strong, but not strong enough to topple a demon.
Yurakne's feat was just as astonishing.
Their opponent had been a demon capable of lifting an entire wagon and slamming it down.
And yet, even with the aid of an Inspira, she had managed to completely immobilize one of its arms.
That was far beyond the physical capability of any ordinary woman.
The rest of the troupe was no different.
At a baseline, they were all simply stronger and tougher than normal people.
If they hadn't been, then no matter how perfectly Wonderstein tailored a script to each of them, no matter how precisely he calibrated their training, there was no way they could have produced such results in just two months.
Their current skill level barely qualified them for the middle ranks of the competition as a whole.
But considering that everyone else they faced had devoted years purely to professional circus training, their innate physical ability was remarkable.
The Curse Plague. Devolut.
The troupe members were the children of its survivors.
Had Wonderstein known that when he drew them in?
That same Curse Plague—he had also unleashed it upon her homeland.
In the end, every answer to all these questions rested with Wonderstein.
She needed to see him.
"Let's head into the village first. We need to find those two."
"Agreed. Umon, how about you? Can you walk?"
"Yes. I applied the potion."
The group turned toward the palisade gate.
Having weathered the crisis without a single death among them, their steps carried a buoyant confidence.
Sven boasted that even if one or two more demons showed up, he felt more than ready to knock them down.
A short while later, they regretted not shutting his mouth.
The path leading into the village.
"Kieeerrk!"
"Kikiki!"
There, two more demons of the exact same breed as the one they had just slain were waiting for them.
***
The Stakes of Light wielded by clergy possessed the power to repel unclean forces.
They could not inflict harm upon physical matter.
But for a creature of the Abyss, the rule was different.
Zakanuba, its body riddled with holes, writhed as it was engulfed in searing white flames.
"Kieaaah..."
Its final thrashing did not last long.
Its blackened, charred carcass collapsed to the ground.
The people who had been holding their breath inside the cathedral erupted into cheers.
"Long live the Sister—no, the Saintess!"
"Blessings upon Saint Valentina!"
These were villagers who had wept and wept again, multiple times today alone.
The hero who had saved them could not share in their joy.
Valentina's expression was rigid as she studied the mirror in her hand.
It was a metal mirror made of brass, shaped as though a single cymbal had been detached from its pair.
In an age where glass mirrors were commonplace, its value was purely ornamental.
But the brass mirror she held was no ordinary object.
It was a Demon-Detecting Mirror—a device capable of sensing demonic energy.
Whenever a demon was nearby, it emitted both light and heat.
She peered into the light reflected in the Demon-Detecting Mirror.
A spectrum of colors rippled across it, like oil floating on water.
Interpreting "light" was one of the primary duties of Holy Church clergy, for they believed God delivered revelations through it.
Within the spectrum, which appeared utterly random, she read a sigil.
It was akin to deciphering a code.
Skilled decoders claimed that the moment they saw a sigil, a sentence would bloom naturally in their mind.
She, too, could draw forth an image from the sigil.
Demons with the heads of rabbits and the antlers of reindeer.
When she had first confirmed their number, there had been three.
After defeating the one directly before her and checking again, the count had dropped to one.
Yet just now, two more had appeared somewhere.
"Good heavens... has a hole been torn in the barrier to the Abyss?"
She warned the villagers to remain inside the church under all circumstances, then sprinted downhill toward the lower village, checking the mirror in her hand at regular intervals.
She had descended roughly halfway down the hill when an intense scorching heat in her palm made her lose her grip.
The brass mirror clattered and rolled across the ground.
If light revealed the demon's type, heat represented its power.
She stared down at the metal surface, now superheated and blazing with a riot of colors.
Within the vortex of light—like a churned rainbow—she read a sigil that had not been there moments before.
"This is—!"
It resembled a Zakanuba, yet was distinctly different.
And the ferocious heat radiating from the brass mirror...
The clues all pointed to one conclusion.
The color drained from her face.
***
Find Wally!
Amid the chaos of frenzied cats, Zakanuba struggled to identify which one was carrying the telekinetic force.
The cat always struck at an exquisite, split-second opening.
Zakanuba would whip around to follow the trajectory, but it slipped away every time.
All the cats looked identical; once they mixed together, telling them apart again was impossible.
And on top of that, he was now missing one eye.
As time dragged on, wounds steadily accumulated across Zakanuba's body.
-Meow!
Another hit landed.
Zakanuba, eyes locked on the cat, froze.
Wally melted back into the swarm of its companions.
So far, that was the same as before.
The problem wasn't Wally. It was the rest.
The entire horde of cats had always looked identical.
But now, something was off.
Their shapes and colors had begun to shift, varying slightly from one to the next.
Was this another trick of the mage?
The demon remembered exactly what Wally looked like.
It rolled its single remaining eye, spotted one among the multicolored mob, and swung its claws.
An illusory cat was torn to shreds.
-Mreoow...
Not the real Wally.
This one's tabby markings were mirrored—reversed left to right.
The demon spotted another and lashed out.
Wrong again.
This time, the colors were placed on the opposite sides.
It pounced on a third.
Wrong.
This one was identical in every detail—except it inexplicably had boots on its hind legs.
By the tenth attempt, it thought it had finally found a perfect match in color and pattern.
Wrong again.
Everything was identical, except this one wasn't a cat. It was a dog.
-Woof! Woof!
Just as suspicion dawned that the telekinesis-bearing target might also have changed its appearance, Wally streaked past again, raking a gash across his thigh.
He confirmed its form.
Strangely, Wally alone still wore its original appearance.
"Haaah... haaah..."
Maya leaned against a wall, gasping for breath.
The chaotic swirl of illusions unfolding now was not something she had engineered deliberately.
Her concentration and mana were both failing, making it harder and harder to calculate the illusions.
The reason she could still keep her telekinetic focus on Wally was that Wally alone was not made with a polyhedron illusion but a different kind.
A Mind Illusion, drawing upon the mysteries of the 'Image.'
It required none of the intricate, high-order calculations of a Polyhedron Illusion, and infusing it with telekinesis was far simpler.
But crafting all the illusions as Mind Illusions was impossible.
The canvas of her mind could only host one creature at play, and that was Wally.
The rest still had to be rendered as polyhedrons.
Maya noticed that the polyhedron cats were growing increasingly sloppy.
Some had stopped moving altogether and simply sat frozen; others weren't even cats anymore—just drifting clumps of fur.
At this rate, it was only a matter of time before Zakanuba identified the real body.
She had to make a decision.
"Kikikik!"
Zakanuba had caught on to Maya's condition as well.
Her Illusion Magic was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
He stopped bothering to hunt for Wally and instead coolly evaded attacks, dragging the fight out.
Before long, the number of illusory cats visibly plummeted.
A hundred... forty... ten.
...One.
Wally stood alone.
At the same moment, Maya's true form was exposed.
She was slumped against a pillar at the front of the assembly hall, seated in a pool of her own blood, glaring at Zakanuba through faint, shallow breaths.
-Myaaow!
The demon kicked Wally aside as the cat bared its fangs at him.
The faint telekinetic force laced into the cat scattered, and Wally's illusion vanished with it.
"Kikiki!"
The demon strode toward Maya.
Through half-lidded eyes, she lifted her gaze at the approaching Zakanuba.
The demon let out a derisive snicker, as though amused by the threat in her glare.
'Almost there.'
Maya stared at the back of the demon's skull, her expression tense.
Her real body was not yet slumped on the ground.
She remained invisible, standing behind the demon, carefully mustering her remaining mana.
What Zakanuba was looking at now was an illusion of herself she had conjured.
She had decided that stalling was useless—she couldn't hold out until dawn regardless—so she would gather her last reserves and attempt the telekinetic sphere that had failed at the start.
Factoring in the creature's bestial instincts, its cunning personality, and its distinct burst-mobility, a clumsy attempt would be suicide.
She needed to fool it completely.
And the method was to stage her own collapse perfectly, lulling it into complacency.
Constructing the illusion was not difficult.
Her bloodied, dying image was no exaggeration.
Once she spent her remaining mana, she would almost certainly end up exactly like that.
"Kirrrk!"
Zakanuba raised its claws.
Maya hurled the telekinetic sphere at the back of its head.
'I did it.'
She had run the trajectory calculations; she could already picture the sphere punching clean through the back of the creature's skull.
But luck was a thing that always struck at the most spiteful moment.
"You demon bastard!"
Knight Ivanenko had arrived right on cue.
He bellowed to draw the demon's attention away from the blood-soaked girl it was about to kill.
At his shout, the demon reflexively ducked its straightened back and re-entered a combat stance.
The telekinetic sphere smashed through one of its antlers and slammed into the roof of the building across the way.
CRACK. BOOM.
"Whoa—! What the—!"
The knight was buried under the collapsing roof debris.
"Ah."
Maya let out a sigh.
Her invisibility spell unraveled in the same instant.
It didn't take Zakanuba long to understand what had just happened.
It saw the trail of shattered horn and, beyond it, the caved-in roof.
It saw the knight who'd suddenly appeared now crushed beneath the wreckage.
If that had struck the back of his head, he would be dead. Of that, there was no doubt.
"Kirrrk!"
The chill crawling up its spine curdled instantly into fury.
It knew what that attack was—the same projectile the mage had launched at him at the very start.
And it had come from behind.
It slowly turned its head.
There, her mana utterly spent, sat Maya, collapsed on the ground.
Her face darkened sharply as she met its crimson eyes.
It was over.
All of it.