9. Black and Gold (4)
9. Black and Gold (4)
August 11th marked exactly ten weeks and one day since the Circus Grand Prix began.
It was also the day the organizing committee partially lifted its ban on recruiting new members.
The rule had been introduced to prevent shady collusion and under-the-table deals between competitors.
If several troupes pooled their members to rotate performers between them, or if mercenaries suited to a particular trial camped out in the host city and swapped teams for every test, that would undermine the competition's fairness—and it would bore the festival-goers senseless.
So the committee had imposed a complete freeze on any kind of recruitment or transaction for the first ten weeks. Once that period ended, a limited number of special cases could be approved.
The content of the trials held at the Six Great Theaters had already been made public.
That meant competitors knew exactly what talent they lacked and what sort of performer they needed to pass.
Because of that, the day the ban lifted, the cities hosting the Six Great Theaters turned into frantic bidding wars as troupes scrambled to recruit.
Yeterinpurk was the exception. Even when the 11th arrived, the participants staying here showed little enthusiasm for chasing new members.
That was because of a special event scheduled for the following Monday. Most of the troupes in the city were keeping a roster spot open specifically for that day.
Our troupe, perpetually shorthanded, was no different.
Thanks to our performance in Rouge, a fair number of acrobats came looking for us even knowing we were the Monster Circus.
Before the opening ceremony, I would have welcomed them with open arms. Not now.
The acrobats who sought us out were, without exception, not up to our improved standards. Anyone confident in their own skill would wait for next Monday—they wouldn't be trying to join our troupe at this particular moment.
Under the competition rules, we could only add one more person. We couldn't hand our one precious slot to just anybody.
Like the other troupes, we decided to wait for Monday and turned all the visitors away.
And then that long-awaited day arrived. We ate breakfast early and set out from the mansion by carriage.
"We don't need a tightrope walker. Yura's too good for that. Same with strongmen—where are you going to find another Umon? A shooter wouldn't be bad if they've got Bandik-level bandage technique. The real problem is Ground Acrobatics. Yobel's still way too green. If we're going to fill a slot, I'd prefer someone who excels at Ground Acrobatics. It gets more effective the more people you have doing it together."
Ella sat beside me, flipping through her notebook and chattering away.
She was pressed so close that her hat was squashing my cheek. Even in the middle of talking, she kept meeting my eyes, smiling or crinkling her eyes at me. Once upon a time, I couldn't have imagined it.
Over the last three weeks, I'd gotten a rough handle on the state of her memories. Every unhappy recollection she had of me had either vanished or been twisted.
The massacre of her hometown—probably her deepest trauma—had been repackaged as a plague sweeping through it with me arriving to save them, and the death toll had shrunk dramatically.
To her, I was the benefactor who had rescued her home, her first audience, the co-founder who'd started the circus with her, her partner on the stage.
The only thing that had changed was the very first part—the hometown. But that alone had flipped her attitude a hundred and eighty degrees. It showed just how much of the love-hate she'd felt toward Wonderstein had been occupied by hatred.
Her goodwill and trust toward me now ran impossibly deep. Calling me her favorite person hadn't been empty words.
Of course, the system still showed Ella's Affection level exactly where it had been. Just as the notification right before I was stabbed by the Reaper's Scythe had said, it hadn't budged one point from 31.
Apparently the system didn't recognize increases in Affection level achieved through magical means. What had been done to Ella wasn't the natural movement of her heart—it was the result of a curse delivered by the Reaper's Scythe.
"Hey. Are you listening?"
She had an uncanny knack for catching me when my thoughts wandered, and she glared at me. But before I could stammer out an excuse, her expression shifted to worry and she asked again.
"Did you not sleep well? The light in your room was on late last night."
From my left, a laugh burst out.
"Keh-heh, of course it was. I was teaching him herbalism into the night."
The old man seated on my left aimed a grin at Ella. Her face crumpled instantly.
"What? Are you serious? On the night before something this important, you genuinely lost sleep over plant studies?"
"'Plant studies'? How dare you! Plants are far superior to raising mere animals!"
"They seem completely boring."
Raised voices came at me from both sides.
Gaston had leveraged his position as the troupe's guest—and elder—to claim the seat next to me. That meant Yurakne, who always sat by my side, had been displaced.
Behind us, Sven burst out laughing as he watched Ella and Gaston bicker.
"Hot-hot, now that I think about it, ever since those two started going at each other like that, neither of them's gotten to sit next to the boss at all—urk!"
Sven's neck wrenched to the right, twisted by an invisible force, and his spine bent left at an angle no visible attack could have produced.
The most likely suspects were Maya and Yurakne on either side of him, but both were gazing out the window with their arms folded. I knew about the other arms they possessed, so I just smiled quietly.
"Miss Ella, please. It's not that I have some personal fascination with tending plants."
Gaston let out a disgruntled grumble.
"It's all for treating you."
At my words, Ella's expression flickered with guilt. She looked away and turned her head.
"Ah... treatment, right? Of course. Sorry..."
Every time I mentioned her treatment, something uncomfortable crossed her face. I took it as a positive sign.
It confirmed that with every treatment, her unhappy memories were resurfacing a little at a time. The nature of dreams meant they'd fade the moment she woke, but the next stage of treatment would let those images rise all the way to the level of actual memory.
Seeing progress in her treatment had eased my mind somewhat. It would take a little longer than using mental magic, but it seemed I could restore her to her original state without side effects.
Aside from having one annoying barnacle cling to me, I was satisfied with this method.
"I'll teach you the next treatment method once you've mastered grafting."
"What does grafting have to do with pharmacy?"
"...Then don't learn it, if you don't want to."
The old man turned away wearing a petulant, childlike scowl, and I couldn't help but laugh as I placated him.
"Fine, old-timer. I'll learn it."
"Tch! I don't need treatment, so don't bother learning!"
"I can't do that. This is for Miss Ella."
"Urgh...."
Once the carriage settled down, I checked the notification window. Nothing, as usual.
For the last three weeks, I'd been opening the quest window out of habit, hoping a new Member Quest might appear.
Member Quests were how the system detected a member's wish and offered it in quest form.
But even three weeks after receiving their wishes, no Member Quest to heal their bodies had appeared.
From everything I'd experienced so far, the system never issued impossible requests or anything that conflicted with the Main Quest.
If that weren't the case, Ella's plea to free all the members would have popped up hundreds of times by now. When we were escaping the Isumi Hills, requests to move to a different region immediately would have flooded in.
Working backward from that fact, if the members wanted something this badly and yet no quest appeared, it had to mean the "system"—the Demon God Kirkeus—had judged it impossible.
Was it truly impossible? Or was there a viable method, but healing them ran counter to the situation the Main Quest was steering toward?
I hoped it was the latter. Whatever it took, I wanted to grant their wishes.
No matter how well-intentioned the lie, if all I did was enjoy the benefits their Affection levels provided, I'd be no different from the cult pastor who had exploited my childhood.
Over the remaining two years of this journey, I genuinely wanted to find a way to fix their bodies.
It took a full hour and a half to travel from the mansion to the plaza in front of the theater.
Yeterinpurk was the largest city in the empire's east. Its population and scale were several times that of Rouge.
In the game, of course, only a version roughly the size of Rouge had been implemented, with the setting that monsters had half-destroyed it.
I watched the carriage roll into a familiar landscape.
"Whoa!"
"I've never seen a place this huge!"
Shouts of amazement erupted from beside and behind me. Ella, Yurakne, and Sven had plastered themselves to the windows, gaping at the scene outside.
Even the always-composed Maya was scanning her surroundings with astonished eyes. Only Gaston, who'd been inside the imperial palace itself, refrained from making a fuss.
I spoke with the feeling of returning to a hometown I'd missed.
"This is Tetromino, the heart of Yeterinpurk."
A colossal rectangular plaza spread out before us, large enough to hold hundreds of thousands of people. Its size alone was staggering, but what made it truly unique was the paving. Blocks in vivid colors—every shape that could be formed from four squares: J, L, T, Z, S, O, I—were fitted together so tightly across the ground that not a single gap remained. They appeared to have been laid completely at random, obeying no discernible rule.
The plaza's sheer scale and the strange tile patterns had spawned every kind of urban legend.
Solve the riddle hidden in the block patterns and you'd be invited to a Demon God's palace. Dozens of mathematicians had hurled themselves at the puzzle and gone mad as a group. Somewhere in the plaza, a single missing black square concealed a secret treasure.
I smiled, remembering the special broadcast I'd done introducing the Easter eggs hidden across the map that tied into those legends.
At that moment, voices and gazes all converged on a single point.
"Wow! Look at that! That's the...."
"Huh. Remarkable."
"Incredible."
At the far end of the plaza, in the direction our carriage was heading, a building blazed with colors so intense they stung the eyes. That was our destination today.
Nine towers of different heights were arrayed around a sharp central spire, arranged with an asymmetrical sense of balance. Atop each tower perched an onion-shaped dome—some solid-colored, some spiraling with two hues, some latticed in three—each crowned in a different pattern and palette.
The structure was a rainbow-hued manifesto of an architect's burning ambition to employ every color that existed in the world.
This was the main dungeon that appeared on Yeterinpurk Stage in TT2.
One of the Six Great Theaters hosting the Circus Grand Prix preliminaries.
The most prestigious elite acrobat training institution in the industry.
Rekachev Circus School.