10. Demon in a Bottle (17)
10. Demon in a Bottle (17)
No natural landscape had ever captured the human imagination quite like the Sky City Hippodrome.
Writers and artists drew endless inspiration from the sight of an island drifting above the clouds.
Countless metaphors, proverbs, paintings, and songs had their origins there.
But its influence on architectural and engineering history was a more delicate subject.
Because the Hippodrome was not a city that had been built — it was a city that had been "discovered."
To anyone familiar with the modern Hippodrome, where hundreds of airships came and went every day, it was hard to believe that humanity had been permitted to set foot there only relatively recently.
The Sky Island had been considered forbidden not because the technology was lacking.
Even before the invention of the airship, there had been no shortage of attempts to reach it.
People had tried kites, hot-air balloons, and trained flying beasts like griffins to conquer the floating island.
All of them had failed.
Whatever approached the island was repelled by some immense force — even creatures that had been flying perfectly until that moment.
Some scholars, invoking the wind that buffets a speeding carriage, proposed theories of their own for the phenomenon.
But too many eyewitness accounts resisted easy explanation.
The clergy insisted the island was inaccessible simply because God denied access. Some even warned that further attempts might call down divine punishment.
And so the Sky Island remained a mystery for a very long time.
Of course, by now the cause of that strange phenomenon had been understood for ages.
Atop the Sky Island stood a city built by an ancient civilization.
Its inhabitants had been a bird-like race, short of stature, with beaks and feathers.
They had ruled the continent before humanity migrated to Columbia.
They possessed technology that defied measurement by contemporary knowledge.
The force surrounding the Sky Island was a powerful field generated by a device they had constructed.
That same force was what kept the island suspended in the air.
Humanity never fully uncovered its principles, but they did learn how to operate it —
how to open and close portions of the field, how to adjust the island's altitude and speed.
And so humanity built its present city atop the traces left by those ancients.
Naturally, developing the city to its current state took an enormous span of years.
Solving the problems of ground-to-air transit, securing materials for construction and repair, the food supply, and the question of who actually owned the place required centuries of technical and institutional progress.
The Sky City only truly began to assume its modern form after the airship was invented.
With the revolution in aerial logistics, the city's growth exploded.
A few voices had worried the city might one day fall, but that did nothing to quell the desire of those who dreamed of living in the Hippodrome.
The privilege of residing in the world's one and only aerial settlement drew plenty of aspirants.
Above all, the island had never given cause for concern.
Enough time had passed that the Sky Island's presence in the heavens felt as natural as the sun rising. So much time that imagining it plummeting to the earth was genuinely difficult.
Scholars confidently declared the island would hold even if the hundred largest airships ever built rammed it head-on at once.
So when a single airship slammed into the Hippodrome's core, residents worried for the people caught in the chaos — a cargo vessel loaded with gunpowder, of all things, crashing in an accident, of all places — but they did not worry about the island's safety.
When a second airship struck the identical spot, the situation changed.
The force field generator was damaged, and the entire city began to tremble like a patient in the grip of a fever.
The odds of two airships of the same type, carrying the same cargo, crashing at the same spot at the same time being a coincidence were nonexistent.
Those "accidents" were an attack on the Hippodrome.
The terror unfolded at a time when the whole city was drenched in festival spirit.
The streets were so congested that ordinary security forces couldn't possibly maintain order, and half the city's leadership lay sprawled drunk in every corner.
That was the setting for the attack.
Bustling streets transformed into scenes of terror in an instant, and no one could command the chaos.
The sober half of the leadership had been watching a performance at the Wonder Stage, the festival's focal point.
They tried to respond immediately after the terror began.
But communication with the outside was impossible.
Perhaps from the shock of the successive explosions, the Sky City's force field malfunctioned.
A vast curtain of force enveloped the Wonder Stage.
It severed all passage in and out.
"Aaaah! Why aren't you moving?"
"Shut it! No matter how hard we push, nobody's getting out!"
"Stop shoving! You're crushing the people in front!"
Hundreds, then thousands struggled to pass through the zone the force field had sealed, but the invisible wall didn't give.
A metallic shriek. A grinding groan.
The sound of twisting steel echoed across the entire Wonder Stage district.
Stone floors cracked and collapsed. Chains and iron beams connecting the island sections snapped with sharp reports.
The Wonder Stage was breaking away from the main island.
But that wasn't what drove the crowd to flee. Most of them hadn't even registered the ground crumbling beneath their feet.
They had simply run this far to escape the things trying to kill them.
"Aaaah! They're here!"
"Right behind us!"
"Please, let us out!"
Screams erupted from those at the rear.
Everyone looked back.
Across the street, shapes resolved from the shadows — forms that looked like human flesh, bone, and viscera jumbled together at random.
"Kyeeek!"
"Humans!"
"E-eat!"
They chanted a handful of words that curdled the blood just to hear them, then lunged at the crowd.
A slaughter began.
While everyone else was shrieking and clawing to escape the Wonder Stage, Phairen was running toward its center.
"Master!"
She tracked her teacher's scent, drawing on her animals' keen senses.
"Master!"
But no matter how far she went, her eyes found only the dead.
Or things so distorted she could barely recognize them as human.
After a long, desperate search, she came to a halt before one particular figure.
It was a black wolf the size of a bear.
Phairen knew this beast.
It was her master's animal.
Its body lay crumpled on the ground, slashed and torn until it was little more than rags, its head buried in the dirt.
The wolf had clearly fought to protect someone.
Instinct drew Phairen to search the rubble it had been guarding with its bulk.
Scattered flesh and bone, barely identifiable, met her gaze.
The thought struck her that her master might be dead.
She had been searching only a short while when a groan rose from a corner of the stone debris.
"Grkghh."
She moved toward it without thinking. A snake blocked her path.
It aimed a threatening hiss at the spot, glaring.
Only then did she realize whoever lay there might be a monster, not a person.
She steadied her ragged breathing and spoke.
"I'm Phairen, a teaching assistant at Rekachev! Who are you?"
Silence stretched on for a long time.
She had just begun to wonder if he'd died in the interval when an answer came.
"Phairen?"
The voice's owner emerged from the darkness.
More than a dozen legs, sheathed in hard carapace, scraped across the floor.
Barnacles studding its back rattled with every movement.
Phairen nearly screamed.
It was not human.
It looked as if a god had tried to crossbreed a conch with a crab, failed, and thrown away the result.
"M-monster!"
Phairen scrambled backward.
Her snake flicked its tongue at the creature, baring its fangs.
Every monster she had met here had charged the moment it spotted a human.
Her reaction was pure reflex.
But it did nothing. It simply stared at her.
A black mass of flesh — impossible to tell where the eyes, the nose, or the mouth began — quivered.
"Grkghh."
Another groan escaped the thing.
Phairen realized the monster was dying.
Its shell and flesh were crumbling away slowly, like a sandcastle beneath a rising tide.
Then it spoke words she hadn't expected at all.
"Put me in your glass bottle."
"...What?"
The fact that a monster had addressed her normally was startling, but what it said was far more so.
It was talking about her Inspira.
An ability she had awakened only recently.
No one knew of its existence besides her master.
"H-how do you—"
"Do it! There's no time!"
Its shout snapped her out of her hesitation. Phairen withdrew the glass bottle from her breast.
She had no idea how it knew about her ability, but she decided to save it first and find out later.
Her glass bottle held a curious world within.
Any animal placed inside remained comfortable and unchanged — it neither aged nor altered, as if time itself had stopped. There was no need to feed it.
Perhaps her power could halt whatever was killing this monster.
She spoke a specific phrase, and the monster was drawn smoothly inside her bottle.
—There are conditions. First, the target must not be human. At least, I can't perceive it as one. And it has to consent. I can never trap something by force.
The Demon in the Bottle recalled the words she had spoken.
She had said them to her master just days ago.
The moment he entered the bottle, he felt his body stabilize.
The gamble had worked.
In here, his body's disintegration halted.
He had originally been unable to survive outside a flask without regularly ingesting a specific drug.
But in this place, he could sustain his life functions without any such treatment — exactly as if he were inside a flask.
The Demon in the Bottle observed her through the glass.
A useful ability.
He needed her to survive.
It was laughable that after clawing his way out of that scientist's grasp, he had ended up in yet another glass container, but he chose to be content. It was better than never knowing when he might be disposed of.
The Demon in the Bottle instructed her to flee the Wonder Stage.
Thanks to his power, she avoided the monsters and found a gap in the force field, barely escaping that hellscape.
"Over here! We have a survivor!"
Dozens of airships were combing the ground for survivors.
The Wonder Stage had ultimately collapsed into the sea, but those who had been right at the boundary had managed to jump clear in time.
"Were you inside the Wonder Stage?"
At the investigator's question, Phairen hesitated, then shook her head.
Hundreds of other survivors were receiving care at the emergency shelter alongside her.
A handful who admitted they had been inside the Wonder Stage were taken aside for intensive questioning.
The investigation itself was routine —
a physical examination and detailed questions about what had happened inside.
But if the creature in her glass bottle were discovered during the process, what would happen to him was the problem.
While she recovered at the shelter after escaping the Wonder Stage, she had formed a hypothesis.
Every monster she had seen there had been human-based.
Their clothing made it certain they had been people on the scene.
Phairen stared at the monster curled inside her glass bottle and murmured,
"Could you possibly be...?"
While she was building her theory, the demon was building a plan of his own.
He was a fake Apostle created in a laboratory —
an Apostle of Sinepekus, the Demon God of rumor, fame, and gossip, said to collect every story in the world.
He studied Phairen through the glass.
He reviewed every piece of her past.
A woman with a powerful dependence on her master and a twisted possessiveness.
He caught the flicker of something darkly joyful in her eyes as she stared into the bottle right now.
The thrill of perhaps having obtained her teacher, even in the form of a monster.
Controlling such a woman would be child's play.
He readied his performance.
"...You've figured it out, Phairen. Yes. It is I — your teacher, Ursus."
Whispered the Demon in the Bottle.