10. Demon in a Bottle (9)
10. Demon in a Bottle (9)
Four professors were gathered in the faculty lounge at Rekachev.
The world called them the Four-person Gang—the founders of this school, figures who had carved their names into the history of circus itself.
Hobbs looked at the teachers seated before him.
Nearly twenty years had passed since he graduated from this place.
This wasn't the first time he'd seen them in those twenty years, of course.
He'd crossed paths with them at the memorial service after the terrorist attack, had visited once for advice before founding his troupe, and had stopped by briefly when passing through Yeterinpurk a few years ago.
But today stirred something different in him.
It wasn't simply that they had all aged a little more.
He had arrived at the same place they once stood—fretting over the future of a seventeen-year-old. That was probably why.
As he had grown older, so too had his teachers.
Elpara, the "Witch" whose dignified middle-aged allure had once set schoolboys' hearts ablaze, was now a grandmother nearing sixty. Yakovlev, the ever-vigorous "Beast," had fur streaked through with white. Lugo, the "Vampire" who had always seemed frozen in perpetual ice, now carried gentle wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. And Jombe-in, the "Ragged," who had once embodied his namesake steel skeleton, spent his days grumbling about aching knees.
And the one absent from this room—he had vanished without leaving so much as a corpse behind.
The five of them were industry legends.
It was their fame that had allowed acrobats to wrest the circus world's balance of power from the magicians who had long dominated it.
Before coming here, he had resolved not to shed a single tear.
Whenever he'd heard fellow alumni say they'd gone back and come away weeping, he had always scoffed at them.
And yet, in the end, tears welled up in his own eyes.
There was no simple way to explain why.
The Four-person Gang were long accustomed to handling students like this.
"Ho-ho, what's there to cry about?"
"Every last one of you turns up just to snivel."
"And that's precisely why we can't help treating you like children, no matter how big you get."
The three men spoke in somewhat disapproving tones.
Only Elpara, the sole woman of the Four-person Gang, addressed him with calm composure.
"They're simply embarrassed. Please understand, Troupe Leader Hobbs."
"Speak comfortably, please. It makes me terribly uncomfortable when the vice principal addresses me like that."
At his words, Elpara smiled a benevolent smile quite unlike her nickname.
"Fufu, shall I? You've grown rather dignified, our young Hobbs."
The woman students called Witch for her severity always maintained courtesy toward graduates. Once you finished school, she treated you not as a student but as an equal acrobat—a mark of respect.
In a public setting, Hobbs would have accepted that consideration, but here in private he couldn't allow his former teacher to use deferential speech.
The four of them traded stories of his school days until the room bloomed with laughter. They questioned him about his post-graduation career—what was true and what was rumor—alternating between admiration and lament.
Once the atmosphere had ripened, Hobbs glanced around the faculty lounge and spoke.
"Piri—no, not Piri anymore. Professor Phairen. Where is she?"
He posed the question as casually as he could manage, but the Four-person Gang exchanged glances and burst into laughter.
"See? I told you Hobbs would ask after Professor Phairen, didn't I?"
"Young Hobbs, are you still interested in her?"
"The tale of you confessing on stage at the Halloween festival, getting rejected, and then skipping the entire first year of high school—that one's still a legend, you know."
Hobbs learned, in that moment, that a man could still feel shame over something more than twenty years old.
He grimaced and cleared his throat.
"I've heard who keeps that particular legend alive, Professor Jombe-in."
"Kah-ha! Nothing the current students love more than us spinning tales about the graduates."
"Now that I think of it, Hobbs, you're rather too well-dressed today."
"Could it be you're trying to impress her?"
A low groan escaped him at the professors' continuing mischief.
"Ugh. I'm simply asking after a junior's well-being. Doesn't the new term start this coming Monday? Where has she gone?"
"She's been busy lately, I hear."
"Yes. She found an old locker while tidying up the closed-off warehouse. She's been occupied with the things discovered inside."
"It belonged to her teacher."
At the word teacher, Hobbs paused.
He caught that the nuance differed slightly from the way he used the word for the four people before him.
"Her teacher...?"
"Ursus's belongings."
Hobbs nodded at the name of the fifth teacher who wasn't here today.
Silence drifted through the room for a moment.
The incident seventeen years ago remained an open wound in their industry.
To shift the mood, Hobbs deliberately spoke with feigned cheer.
"Is she still the same? Even now that she's a professor, I imagine her still tripping over things and bursting into tears at every turn?"
His words didn't lighten the atmosphere at all. They made it heavier.
The Four-person Gang wore wry expressions and shook their heads.
"Just as we have grown old and you have matured, so too has she changed."
"Is... that so?"
Realizing that the change was by no means for the better, Hobbs suppressed a pang of regret and lowered his head.
Even if the whole world changed, he had always imagined she alone would remain exactly as he remembered her...
"Ah, you mentioned you arrived yesterday afternoon? Then you'll probably receive an invitation on your way out."
"What kind of invitation?"
"Wasn't there something like that back in your own school days?"
Hobbs rummaged through old memories and, lighting on one in particular, let out an exclamation.
***
"Meet the Pros?"
"Yes. I'm told they invite a currently active acrobat recognized in the industry to talk with the students. My father says he'll be the mentor for the first week. Did you receive an invitation as well, Troupe Leader?"
The moment Reina brought it up, I was already rifling through a drawer to pull out the letter.
I read through it and replied.
"I did. I'm scheduled for the second week. It seems they're cycling through us in the order we placed during the draft."
"It's efficient to pick from troupes staying in Yeterinpurk during the Grand Prix season."
"Fufu, we might run into each other on campus, then. Have you decided which classes you'll take?"
"Well, I..."
Mid-conversation, the subject of her uniform fitting today came up.
Judging by the timing, she and our group must have missed each other by a hair's breadth.
At one point she faltered, trailing off mid-sentence.
"That... um..."
I smiled quietly.
It had been a few days since we'd started talking through the communication device.
By now, I knew what she wanted.
"Speak, my daughter."
The words weren't even all the way out of my mouth before something like a sob burst from the other side.
"Dad!"
"Yes, Reina. What's wrong?"
"Today, right? I went to get fitted for my uniform, and, well, the kids at Rekachev..."
For the next several minutes, she poured out the indignities she'd suffered today.
The Rekachev students, it seemed, were still getting under her skin about the mistake she'd made during the entrance exam.
"I'm not a bedwetter, am I?"
"Of course not. They're just jealous because our Reina is so pretty. The kids at school."
"Hehe, right?"
Her mood lifted a little—her voice took on a slightly giddy edge.
"Even if I do wet the bed, you'll change me, won't you, Dad? Like last time."
"Of course."
I crumpled the letter in my hand as I answered.
Reina had a way of blindsiding me from completely unexpected angles.
Even so, I recovered my composure quickly.
What she was saying might have made an ordinary person recoil, but to me it wasn't particularly unsettling.
That was because, in my old life, I'd often had to ask someone else for the same sort of thing.
"I want to sleep next to Dad."
"What if the kids pick on me again when I go to school?"
"Don't you want to see me in my uniform?"
After fussing like that for a while longer, she suddenly steadied her breathing and spoke.
"...I-I'm sorry for being a nuisance, Troupe Leader."
Her voice was deeply flustered—evidently, she did feel some shame.
I marveled at her determination to request this role-play of ours every time in spite of it.
"Not at all. It's fine. Let's talk again later."
The connection cut off.
I saw the quest completion notice appear with a small reward.
Honestly, I'd rather have a quest telling me to beat someone up.
Every conversation quest with Reina threatened to leave me mentally drained.
I slumped onto the sofa.
Just as I was catching my breath, someone threw the door open without knocking.
I didn't need to turn around.
Only one person in this troupe did that.
"Training finished for today, Master?"
Gaston leveled a murderous glare at me in response to the word I'd loaded with deliberate weight.
"Master? You scoundrel! What kind of disciple treats his master like this?! This—this is elder abuse! Elder abuse!"
I answered his outburst with a calm voice.
"Before you are my master, you are a member of my circus troupe. Is it wrong to have a troupe member practice acrobatics?"
"I'm no acrobat!"
"Then are you a gardener?"
Gaston's mouth fell open.
He glared at me, clenching his fists.
I'd cut off Ella's treatment, too.
This old man had become a genuine headache.
I wished he would just leave, but he was obstinately determined to make me his disciple to the bitter end—and one accursed Member Quest sat open in my log.
I had to make him walk out on his own two feet.
The quest's conditions, after all, specified only that I must not be the one to expel him.
So I'd been putting him through what I called training—acrobatic drills from morning till night.
He made it abundantly clear that he hated it, but when I countered by refusing to study horticulture otherwise, he had no choice but to participate.
No matter how much he resisted the drills, the Member Quest never triggered.
Member Quests weren't omnipotent.
They came with a few stipulations.
First, they never demanded the outright impossible.
That was why I still hadn't seen a single quest to cure a member's innate traits.
And second, they never accepted a request that ran counter to a Main Quest.
If that weren't the case, I'd have been flooded with thousands of quests by now—things like "Please let us go" or "Could you just disappear for us?"
In other words, the system only granted a member's wishes so long as they didn't conflict with preparing for the tournament and growing the troupe.
Requests that would obstruct those goals were simply ignored.
I grew increasingly convinced that the god of festivals and performances stood behind this system.
"Fine. Let's see it, then. Show me how diligently you've studied."
He inspected the assignments he'd given me today.
The inspection was over in a flash.
I'd flawlessly reproduced every required technique and rattled off the memorized material the moment he quizzed me.
"Ahem. F-fine."
As if forgetting his earlier fury, the corners of his mouth twitched, and his expression looked like he was barely holding back a smile.
It seemed he was genuinely pleased that I absorbed everything he tried to teach.
When I saw this old man caked in sweat and dirt gazing at me with pride, I admit I felt a twinge of guilt.
I'd put almost no real effort into completing his assignments.
For memorization, I simply fed everything into the system's memo function and retrieved it through a willpower-based search. The practical work was nothing more than techniques I'd slotted into the Skillbook.
Hoping he'd give up and leave soon, I stepped out of the room.
"Let's get some dinner."
"Ahem. Ah. Very well."
Everyone had gathered in the dining hall except Maya.
She'd apparently be eating out again, so we started without her.
The meal was boisterous.
Now that my Average Affection level with the troupe had crossed the 15-point mark, no one walked on eggshells around me anymore.
Everyone ate while talking about whatever they felt like.
"Less than a month left now until Halloween season."
At Sven's remark, a few members lit up with anticipation while others tilted their heads in confusion.
"What's that?"
"Haha, Umon, you said you're from the Delos countryside, right? Then I suppose you wouldn't know. It's mainly a custom in the Empire. The Holy Church's roots are in Kiev, after all. On the eve of the Saints' Day, November 1st, people dress up as monsters and roam the town or city. In the countryside they usually only celebrate it during the last week of October, but a big city like this starts buzzing at least two weeks ahead—sometimes a whole month."
"But why is that a good thing?"
One of the Trimery Triplets beside Umon scoffed at the question.
"Idiot. If people are roaming around in costume, then nobody's going to be shocked if we happen to slip in among them!"
"Whoa! So that means we can walk around outside too?"
The conversation swung fully onto Halloween.
The monster members had little else so exciting to talk about.
Ella told me which classes she planned to take.
Every version of the timetable included mandatory lectures on taming.
I couldn't help feeling uneasy about her.
The taming professor, Phairen, had appeared as a helper in TT2.
Which meant she was someone steeped in her own brand of madness.
She probably wouldn't do anything to her students at this point in time, of course.
But trusting my knowledge of the game had gotten me blindsided more than once or twice now.
I worried that variables might come into play again here.
Just as I was about to suggest she consider trying a different subject as well, the villa's front door opened, and Maya stepped in with a somewhat tired expression.