10. Demon in a Bottle (6)
10. Demon in a Bottle (6)
In the third week of August, on the day of the Rekachev entrance exam, the eleventh test began at the Rose Windmill Cabaret.
All the matches among the twenty troupes that had participated in the opening ceremony in Rouge were over.
Ten circuses had earned stars, and the ten losers were sent to the back of the line to wait for their retest.
Meanwhile, troupes arriving from other cities filled new spots on the bracket. But none of the troupes that had lost in the first or second weeks were among them.
The two teams were set to face one another.
Pandora Magic Show and Papael Circus.
The two troupes that had lost to the Silver Screen Circus and the Mango Troupe had waited nearly three months for another chance to test.
The gamblers of Rouge predicted a one-sided victory for Pandora Magic Show.
The simple analysis was that a troupe with two stars from the Christian Guide would be superior to one with only one star, but even considering the match theme, Pandora's strength was overwhelming.
The trial at the cabaret tested business performance.
Whoever earned the higher profits would win.
As a venerable classical magic show that had long catered to the wealthy, Pandora's food was excellent, and its souvenirs also boasted considerable quality. Its flagship Escape Puzzle series was famous enough to appear even in high-end auction houses.
Papael Circus's sales strategy looked shabby by comparison.
Why else would they have lost to a zero-star troupe like Mango Troupe?
Of course, eight weeks had passed since then.
The strategies of the competing troupes kept evolving, informed by the previous matches.
In particular, the strategy Wonderstein had employed in the third week had profoundly influenced the matches that followed.
The tactic of selling merchandise that emphasized acrobats' star power and personality allowed even relatively less-skilled troupes to turn a large profit.
But for Papael, using it was nearly impossible.
That was because of an inherent problem within Papael Circus.
Papael Circus's main acrobatics were ground arts.
Ground arts—acrobatics of bracing and standing with the body, or conversely flinging the body—were the oldest of the five disciplines known as the "traditional five acts."
As the words "jaejuggun" and "jaejunemda" imply, ground arts are the fundamental skills upon which all acrobatics are built.
Papael Circus's ground arts were excellent, acknowledged by everyone in the industry.
The acrobatics—dozens of performers stacking human towers or coiling their bodies to move like a single enormous creature—were worthy of admiration.
But there was a downside.
Because they prioritized precise collective coordination, they had no flexibility.
They moved rigidly, like soldiers, and their response to the audience's cheers was subdued.
Even their costumes reinforced that image.
All of Papael's acrobats wore black tights and masks.
As a result, their performances were impressive to the expert eye, but to the general public they felt somewhat cold and lifeless.
Pandora, while maintaining show quality, captured hearts with Luini's flamboyant showmanship and superb crowd rapport, which only heightened the contrast.
Barring a major upset, the forecast heavily favored Pandora.
And so the eleventh-week match began.
A stunning upset did occur.
In the final tally, Papael Circus narrowly edged out Pandora.
Part of the cause was Luini's stamina issues surfacing again. For the first time during an escape show, he nearly had a "real accident." Though he escaped safely, he injured his back and suffered burns on part of his leg in the process.
But that alone would not have cost Pandora the match.
There had been a change on Papael Circus's side, which until then had only presented conservative acrobatics.
An acrobat with both star power and character had appeared.
Originally, Papael's format was for Troupe Leader Hobbs to blow a horn and command the black-clad figures. But in this match, they unveiled a new member.
A red-haired beauty clad in lavish Gypsy dancer attire.
She assisted Hobbs with the proceedings at the front and leaped onto the stage to join the acrobatics.
It was reminiscent of Wonderstein's strategy. That troupe had also started with only a male Troupe Leader handling the proceedings and later added a female host.
She drew great attention from her very first appearance. Amid the black-clad figures, her looks stood out.
Papael mimicked the earlier troupes' strategies and sold dolls of her, autograph session passes, and portraits of her. They generated an absurd net profit relative to the cost of materials.
People wondered where she had come from so suddenly. They noted that the restrictions on new recruitment had been lifted the previous week and speculated that she might have been a newly hired talent.
The possibility that one of the masked figures had revealed their face was mentioned but quickly dismissed. After all, Papael Circus was known to be an all-male troupe.
Papael's acrobatics involved a great deal of body contact. The idea of a girl in tights mixing in with them was unthinkable.
Besides, since everyone wore form-fitting outfits, their physiques were always on display during the show. If a woman had been among them, there was no way no one would have noticed by now.
Absolutely not.
"Absolutely not!"
"Stop adding stuff that isn't in the article."
The subject of the article growled.
The comrades around Hobbs burst into laughter.
"Puhahat, if you only looked at the figure, nobody would easily guess it's a girl. Honestly, Uncle No. 8's muscular chest is bigger..."
"Shut up! Before I rip your mouth wide open!"
The girl's eyes flashed along with the curse.
"Whoa! Scary!"
The young member who had cracked the joke stepped back with a playful laugh.
Papael Circus had left Rouge ten days ago and had just arrived in Yeterinpurk the day before.
They had finished breakfast and were now leafing through the magazines they had just bought, passing the articles around.
Among them were reviews of the performance they had given.
The article focused less on their show and more on the rookie acrobat who had newly appeared.
Of course, everyone in Papael Circus knew she was not a new member.
She was Troupe Leader Hobbs's blood relative, and the two had been together since the circus was founded.
Given their more than twenty-year age gap, one might have assumed they were father and daughter, but they were actually siblings.
Half-siblings, at that.
Hobbs, a 7th-term graduate of Rekachev, had found work at a circus after leaving school.
At the time, Rekachev's standing was not as high as it is now. The acrobat pool was deep, and it was an era when newcomers were said to have to hold a rag and scrub floors for three years.
Hobbs originally planned to hone his skills there, learn about running a circus, and methodically prepare his own troupe.
But the world changed abruptly.
Two years after he started working, a massive tragedy struck.
It was the terror attack at the sky city Hippodrome.
Because of it, a significant number of active acrobats lost their lives.
As a result, the world began to suffer from a shortage of acrobats.
Three years after the attack, he left the circus because the opportunity to realize his dream had arrived sooner than he'd expected.
He headed to his hometown to let his family know he was still alive after all that time.
He didn't have any particular affection for his father or his remarried mother.
It was just that his father was the type of man who, the moment he heard news of the terror attack at the Circus Grand Prix, would scour the casualty list. And since Hobbs's name wasn't on it, he would rush to the government office to file a missing-person report, then spend five years with his eyes practically falling out his head, waiting for the missing status to automatically convert to death—all so he could quickly dispose of the land Hobbs's maternal grandmother had bequeathed to him. That was why he decided to show his face.
Hobbs recalled the old woman who, even on her deathbed, had giggled seeing the young boy's acrobatics.
That land was what his grandmother had given him to use toward achieving his dream.
It could not be spent paying off his father's gambling debts—or racking up new ones.
The moment he returned to his hometown and opened the door, the first thing he saw was his father about to hurl a child barely older than four at his third wife.
Hobbs remembered his own childhood memories of sailing through the air several times and muttered to himself.
No matter how many times he remarries, that son of a bitch's nature never changes.
He recalled the graduation project his own team had designed during the Rekachev entrance exam. It had involved catching a ball shot from a cannon in place, without being pushed backward.
Hobbs threw his body and caught the child.
The speed was slower than the cannonballs from the exam, but he tumbled backward several times.
In the exam, merely catching the ball was enough. Here, he had to protect the "ball" so it wouldn't take any shock.
He set the child down, exchanged a storm of profanity with his father to confirm their mutual continued existence, then went into the room, grabbed the land deed, and came out.
He found the child he had just caught waiting for him at the yard entrance.
Her features were too delicate for a boy, but her eyes were too fierce for a girl.
If he hadn't heard his father hurl the vulgar slurs he did, he wouldn't have been able to say for sure even now whether she was a boy or a girl.
She approached him while he lit a cigarette and spoke.
"What kind of work do you do?"
"An acrobat."
"Do you make a lot of money?"
"I intend to."
The conversation cut off there.
When his cigarette was nearly gone, she spoke again.
"Can I come with you?"
Hell.
So the story goes this way again.
He spat on the ground.
"No, I'll pass on dead weight. You can't think that just because I saved you once, I'm going to keep helping you."
"I know..."
The girl murmured with a slightly gloomy expression.
Hobbs looked away from her.
I grew up getting beaten too, and I turned out fine, didn't I?
She'll manage somehow.
What's so pitiful about her?
The seniors and friends who died in the terrorist attack are way more pitiful.
He threw the cigarette butt on the ground, crushed it out with his foot, and hoisted his bag onto his shoulder.
"Still, there are soft touches in the world who keep helping anyway. If that bastard gets drunk and starts acting up again, you know the pig farmer uncle's place across the road? Hide there. He looks scary, but he's weak with kids. And he's a good cook. On my way out, I'll pay off all the meal debts I owe him, so you go ahead and run up a new tab in my place. And..."
Hobbs stopped talking when he saw his conversation partner suddenly bend at the waist.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
He wasn't asking because he truly didn't know what that motion was.
There was no way he wouldn't know.
It was the preparatory motion for "lightning handspring," one of the ground-art techniques—a back handspring without touching the hands to the ground.
"Was it like this?"
"Hey!"
Before he could rush over, her body flipped through the air.
He winced. He expected to see a child who had cracked her head on the floor or stumbled while trying to catch herself with her arms.
But what he saw was a child standing upright in the same spot. She wobbled precariously for a moment before thumping backward onto her rear.
"Agh, damn, I had it in practice."
She grumbled as she dusted off her backside.
"How...?"
"I read a book from the attic. It was yours, right?"
Hobbs remembered that he had left a few textbooks at home during school vacations.
She had seen those?
But could someone really figure it out just by reading on their own?
A four-year-old, no less?
"Just give me one more chance! I can do it."
"No, I've seen enough."
"I mean it! When I practiced..."
He held out his hand to the girl who was rubbing her sore tailbone.
She hesitated, then took his hand and stood up.
"Can you leave your mother behind?"
At his words, the child smiled brightly and nodded.
"It's okay. She's not my real mom. Dad remarried a year ago. My real mom ran away."
Ah, so she was that woman's kid.
Now that he thought about it, there was a slight resemblance.
"It'll be harder than you think. The life of a wanderer."
"Harder than this?"
She pushed up her sleeve.
Bluish-black bruises covered half the skin there.
Bastard.
Hobbs swore inwardly, but his expression remained hard.
"It'll be harder."
Her shoulders flinched for a moment at his words, but she soon nodded with a resolved look.
"...I still want to try. I'll put in the effort. I won't be a burden."
"All right. First, sign here."
He took a sheet of paper from his bag.
It was covered densely in handwriting, with blank spaces here and there.
"What's that?"
"A contract."
"A contract?"
"Yeah. I can't stand things that aren't systematic. Don't get any half-baked ideas about tagging along as so-and-so's little sister. As for a guardian's signature... I can buy that for the price of a few sacks of flour."
Hobbs shook his head, remembering his childhood years spent on a miserly old skinflint's farm.
"Employer: Hobbs. That's my name... And what's yours?"
The red-haired girl peered at the contract.
She didn't understand what it was, but she recognized that this was the ceremony that would take her into a new world.
In a bright voice, she said,
"Karen."
And that was how, thirteen years ago, the two of them started Papael Circus.