9. Black and Gold (29)
9. Black and Gold (29)
"Dad, I'll see you tomorrow."
"Right. Reina. Sleep well."
That was how the first night ended—with nothing more than a simple goodnight.
After she returned to her room, I stood there laughing at the empty air several times.
Here I was, a man who had never even had a proper romantic relationship, let alone a marriage, being called "Dad" by someone else. It was bewildering.
And Wonderstein's current appearance was, like my real self, somewhere in the mid-to-late twenties.
Either way, the age gap was nowhere near large enough to call us a father-daughter pair.
Factor in that she looked older than her actual age, and the gap shrank even further.
And I was supposed to play her father.
It was horribly embarrassing, but I had no choice but to grant her request.
I looked back and forth between two entries on the Status Window: "Member Quest — I Don't Want to Ride the Jige!" and "Sub Quest — Part-time Dad."
The first quest offered miserly rewards but came with substantial failure penalties.
Up to now, most Member Quests carried only light penalties for failure.
Member Quests were a sort of wish-fulfillment box: a troupe member's wish directed at their leader would manifest as a quest.
Conversely, the content of each quest also revealed just how much the members were tiptoeing around me.
"U-um, Troupe Leader, would you mind doing me a small favor...? Ah, if you can't, oh well, what can you do..."
If I had to put it into words, that was the tone.
Because of that, failure often came with no penalty or only a token one.
But the higher the members' Affection levels rose, the bigger the demands—and the bigger the punishment for failing them.
With a near-stranger, you could raise their Affection level just by buying them a meal. With someone close, you had to meet trickier expectations to earn the same increase.
By the same logic, strangers don't expect much from you to begin with, but close companions expect you to step up as a matter of course—and feel genuine disappointment when you don't.
The Affection level mechanic and the Member Quests mirrored that natural shape of human relationships.
In other words, the high efficiency I'd enjoyed from Member Quests so far had all been built on one premise: "The troupe members are afraid of Wonderstein."
Gaston wasn't afraid of me. If anything, he treated me like a subordinate, so his Member Quest was exacting and its failure penalty steep.
Considering how things might develop, simply kicking him out would have been the easier option.
But because he overheard me talking to myself, he triggered a Member Quest that prevented exactly that outcome.
An entirely self-inflicted problem.
And Reina's Sub Quest came with a failure penalty that wasn't minor, either.
I had to pull this off, no matter what.
It was only two days, anyway.
I steeled myself.
We'd agreed not to act the part in public, so there was no reason to feel too mortified.
But what she actually wanted from me went far beyond what I had imagined.
The next morning, I jolted awake at a strange pressure against my side and threw back the covers.
There, to my shock, lay Reina in her pajamas, clinging to my waist and fast asleep.
"Miss Reina?"
She let out a huge yawn and rubbed her eyes.
Blinking groggily up at my face, she broke into a loose, drowsy smile.
"Hee-hee, Dad... did you sleep well?"
My mind spun into chaos.
Why was she in my bed?
"How long have you been here...?"
"Since early morning. Ah, I was super quiet so I wouldn't wake you, Dad..."
What made it remarkable wasn't that she'd slipped in without alerting me.
She possessed an absolute sense of balance.
On a swaying bridge, she could carry a cup of coffee without spilling a single drop.
Controlling the slight wobble of a mattress would have been trivial for her.
What startled me wasn't her skill.
It was the fact that she was here at all.
"Why are you here, Miss Reina...?"
"I was scared to sleep alone, so I slept next to you. And..."
Hesitating mid-sentence, she suddenly snapped her eyes wide open.
A cold, sharp energy bled from her gaze.
"Who calls their daughter 'Miss Reina'? I asked you to act like my dad, didn't I? Please do it properly."
Under that steely pressure, I found myself nodding before I could think.
"Right. Reina. You must have been... frightened."
Just then, someone knocked on the door.
I flinched, yanked her against me, and pulled the blanket over us both.
"Who is it?"
"It's Maya."
At her voice, I checked the clock and realized I'd already missed the morning training session.
I'd been up all night listening to Gaston rage, lament his fate, and grumble spitefully, and I'd overslept as a result.
Before I could even ask her to wait, the door swung open.
Creeeak.
A girl in a tilted beret and a thin cardigan stood in the doorway.
Sunlight pouring through the hallway window caught her hair, making it shimmer silver.
For the past two weeks, Maya had been going out regularly for reasons she hadn't explained.
She'd taken the previous day off to visit a confectionery factory, but it looked like today she was resuming her routine.
Whenever she left, she always came to tell me she was heading out, and whenever she returned, she reported that she was back.
She stared at me with her usual expressionless face, then walked right up to me.
She didn't seem concerned in the slightest about getting the room's owner's permission.
I'd grown accustomed to her single-mindedness, but given the situation, I was inwardly wound tight.
I kept it off my face and offered a natural smile.
"You're heading out a bit early today, aren't you?"
Something about her face struck me as haggard.
Ever since she came back from the factory yesterday, something had been off.
Now, the faint shadows under her eyes looked even worse than yesterday.
"I have something that needs resolving quickly. Are you alright, Troupe Leader? You slept late today."
She stepped closer to the bed.
I pulled Reina, who kept trying to raise her head, more tightly into my arms.
"Yes. No problem. I was just a bit tired from yesterday's events. So, you're going to Tetromino Plaza again today?"
"Yes."
"Heh-heh, I see. Take care, then."
She glanced briefly at the inside of my blanket, then gave a small nod.
"I'll be going."
The door shut behind her.
Only then did I let out a sigh of relief and throw the blanket aside.
Reina was draped limply across my stomach.
"Miss Reina—no, I mean, Reina. Are you al...right?"
"I... I couldn't breathe..."
Her face had flushed a blazing crimson, as if it might burst.
It dawned on me then that I'd had my arms and legs wrapped around her entire body.
I untangled myself in a hurry, and she rolled off me in a boneless motion.
Head bowed low, refusing to meet my eyes, she gasped for air.
"Hahh... hahh..."
"That must have been rather stifling. If we'd been caught, though, it would've led to serious misunderstandings."
She whipped her head around at my words.
"I-I know that... I'm... I'm going to my room."
"Okay..."
Soaked in sweat and still in her pajamas, she hurried out of the room.
For the rest of Sunday, I stayed by her side constantly.
The day's schedule was no different from usual.
Lessons, meals, training, bathing, meals, consultation.
When others were present, the two of us talked like we normally did. The moment anyone else vanished, she reverted to acting like a child, and I played the father for all of it.
That was how yesterday passed, and today followed much the same pattern for most of the day.
After the interview ended, we climbed into the carriage and headed back to the villa.
She'd been throwing all sorts of small tantrums and pleas for attention along the way, but by the time the carriage reached the villa, she had simply worn herself out and fallen asleep.
"We've arrived."
"Would you give us a moment? I'd rather not disturb the child's sleep."
The coachman said he'd return in thirty minutes and headed for a nearby rest area to smoke.
At least this meant I could rest a bit too.
I looked down at Reina, who was asleep using my lap as a pillow, and let out an exhausted sigh.
It felt like I'd been trapped inside a farce and had only just managed to crawl out of it.
Thanks to her, the last two days had been a whirlwind.
Worn out as I was, though, I couldn't resent her.
For fifteen years, a man as vile as Simon Magier had subjected her to psychological abuse.
It would have been stranger if her psyche hadn't taken damage.
My mind drifted back to my orphanage days.
If you had to name the single biggest factor shaping the emotional development of abandoned children, it came down to whether or not they remembered the moment they were abandoned.
The ones who remembered carried deeper scars, of course.
Kids discarded before they had any memory of it grew up treating the orphanage as their home and their friends as family. Emotionally, some of them showed no significant differences from children raised in ordinary households.
It was the ones who remembered being given up who struggled.
No matter how close they grew to their friends at the orphanage, they always perceived their "real family" as lying somewhere beyond that break in memory.
Meaning they spent their whole lives growing up conscious of having been cast aside by their family.
Reina carried a wound even deeper than those friends.
The person she believed to be her real family had never been her real family to begin with. She herself was a "fake," bought as a substitute for the real one.
"Dad... mmng..."
Her lips smacked softly.
In her sleep, she was chewing on a few strands of her own hair.
I carefully pulled them from her mouth, wiped the traces of saliva, and smoothed them back into place.
I couldn't claim this body bore no blame for how she'd turned out.
The reason I had been so especially flustered by her demands was that I knew that fact all too well.
Dad, huh...
Of all the things she could call me.
It was a cruel joke.
The main antagonists of TT3 were three organizations led by three figures called Wonderstein's friends—or sisters—known as the Three Witches.
In the third chapter, after the heroes defeated the Rabbit Witch and brought down the Voodoo Cult, they searched for the fleeing Wonderstein's whereabouts.
Still far from fully revived, he had clashed with Saint Valentina and sustained injuries.
It was clear he'd gone into hiding somewhere to recover his strength.
But he didn't show himself easily.
Weeks passed. Then they received word from Reina, a former companion, that she had discovered traces of Wonderstein.
In TT2, she'd learned she wasn't her father's biological daughter but an adoptee purchased as a replacement, and it sent her into a deep psychological spiral.
She'd managed to overcome it by channeling herself into teaching students, but she never stopped tracing her own origins.
That investigation led her to the existence of a certain organization.
The human trafficking ring from which Simon had bought her.
It wasn't a simple operation that merely snatched children and sold them off.
They modified children according to client specifications before delivering the product.
Reina had been a "custom-made" child.
They even had a catalog.
They kidnapped children and freely altered their appearance, height, muscular development, and physical traits.
Simon's order had been for a child who looked exactly like his dead daughter.
He believed that would heal his wife's grief.
And, while he was at it, he wanted circus talent as well.
Her accelerated physical development and her absolute sense of balance had been added during that modification process.
Reina was shipped out as "merchandise" and delivered to Simon.
By the time the heroes heard this much, they could easily guess who stood behind the organization.
A trading company where one of the Three Witches, the Crow Witch, served as vice-chairwoman.
In the story, they were referred to by a specific name—traffickers who kidnapped children, remade them to a customer's taste, and sold them.
The Comprachicos.