10. Demon in a Bottle (28)
10. Demon in a Bottle (28)
Ella's birthday party began in the early evening and stretched deep into the night.
The original plan had been a light toast and an early finish, but somehow it had ballooned into a raucous festival.
Any event Ella threw herself into steering inevitably ended up this way, no matter how solemn the initial intent.
Just as the cheerful singing and spirited dancing were reaching a peak, the villa door opened and the final absentee arrived.
"Oh, Maya, you made it!"
"Miss Maya!"
"Maya!"
The troupe members normally kept a certain distance from her, but tonight everyone's heightened spirits made them greet her with genuine warmth.
Ella, wearing a fake crown on her head and a sparkling candy necklace around her neck, stopped spinning in place with her arm linked through Wonderstein's and approached her with a bright smile.
"What took you so long? It's been a blast. Pff-haha, look at that. Old-man Gaston's got more moves than I thought."
She pointed at Gaston, who was advancing while mimicking a swimming motion in midair, a ball tucked beneath his stomach, and burst into laughter.
For a man who normally held circus folk in disdain, he proved remarkably adept at fitting into this kind of revelry. He had just won a ball-swimming contest against Bandik and was now downing a glass of the expensive wine he'd claimed as his wager's prize in a single draught.
"Kahaha! How's it feel losing to an old man, eh?"
"Decent natural dexterity, maybe? He picks up techniques fast, even at his age."
At her remark, Maya's gaze went cold and flat.
It sounded to her like a sneer: And you, so young and hardworking—how did you manage to score a zero on your practical exam?
She pulled the pastry gift set she had bought earlier that day from inside her coat and held it out.
"Here. A present."
"Told you, you didn't have to. Heh. Anyway, thanks! C'mon, hurry in. You haven't eaten, right? Let's eat first, then we'll properly get started!"
Ella reached for her arm to pull her along, but Maya shook her off with force.
"I'm tired. I'm going straight to bed."
At her cold response, the elation on Ella's face dimmed a fraction.
"Uh... but what about dinner?"
"I already ate outside. With someone else."
She said it, then flicked a glance toward Wonderstein.
Unfortunately, he was deep in conversation with Yurakne and paying no attention to this side of the room.
Ella, assuming Maya had been with Karen as usual, nodded.
"Got it. Oh, right—speaking of which, Maya, what do you think about giving Yura your partner invitation?"
At the mention of that name, the two who had been chatting looked over at Maya.
Maya squared her shoulders as stiffly as she could, then turned her back on them with icy finality.
"I already have a partner."
"...What?"
With that, she climbed the stairs to the bedroom.
Time passed, and Saturday arrived.
The day of the Freshmen Welcome Party was here.
***
Ordinarily, participants at the Freshmen Welcome Party invited upperclassmen as their partners.
Most new students had come far from their hometowns to study, and the only connections they'd managed to build in two weeks were almost entirely within the school, so their range of choices was inevitably narrow.
This year, however, was an exception.
With the Circus Grand Prix underway, renowned acrobats swarmed the area around the school.
Their presence had the effect of making the upperclassmen—who should have been objects of admiration—look utterly unimpressive by comparison.
A large number of freshmen sent their invitations not to senior students on campus but to the active professional acrobats nearby.
Most of them accepted gladly.
As a result, the number of current students attending this year's Freshmen Welcome Party was unusually low.
For a variety of reasons, they could justly be called a cursed generation.
Clara was one of the few enrolled students who had been invited as a partner.
Her invitation had come from none other than "Meren of Silence," who had made a scene in the bamboo grove on the very first day of classes.
"For us it's the reverse, isn't it? A professional acrobat inviting a student. Hoo-hoo."
"I suppose so..."
Meren stared at Clara, who was beaming at her, with a distinctly ambivalent expression.
In truth, she harbored no goodwill toward Clara at all.
At first, Clara's kind smile and gentle manner had fooled her. But as the days passed, a growing sense of wrongness had crept in.
The upperclassmen who targeted the auditing students moved with obvious coordination. It was as if they were acting on someone's orders.
The most plausible suspect was, of course, their representative: Clara. Without her tacit approval, the lower years could never have gotten away with that sort of harassment in the first place.
And more than anything else—that branch she had stepped on and snapped.
Clara had unmistakably stomped on it with force just moments before.
The suspicion that she had broken it deliberately, intending to trip up whoever followed behind her, was impossible to dismiss.
In retrospect, her refusal to allow a retest had likely been just more of the same mockery.
So Meren had sent Clara an invitation.
It was something close to a challenge.
A dare: If you've got the nerve to stand beside me in public, then let's see you accept.
And Clara had accepted with nauseating warmth.
"I wanted so much to come... Thank you, Miss Meren! Oh, but we're the same age, so we can drop the formalities, right? Meren, yes?"
At the entrance to the banquet hall, Clara extended a request to link arms. Against her own will, Meren held out her arm.
Clara immediately pulled her arm tight against her side.
Meren had been about to adopt a stern expression, but the sight of Clara's beaming smile made it impossible to muster any real anger.
This entire situation was the result of a demon who had misinterpreted Clara's character.
Through the Garden of Whispers, only conversations between people could be harvested—not a person's actions or private thoughts.
In other words, only the face someone predominantly showed to society could be observed.
The demon had no knowledge of Clara's duplicitous side.
As a result, the Clara it was playing was nothing more than a thoroughly, cloyingly kind girl.
It was only natural that Meren, who could not possibly know the circumstances, was utterly confused.
"You..."
"Hm? What's wrong?"
Faced with the girl blinking up at her with an innocent expression, Meren shook her head.
"Ah... never mind."
Clara smiled brightly, then turned her gaze back toward the stage.
Fifty freshmen, thirty auditing students, plus their invited partners and the event organizers—roughly two hundred people were filling the banquet hall.
All the students wore their white ceremonial uniforms, so to an outsider unfamiliar with the institution, the gathering might have looked like a party for naval cadets.
Within the limits of that regulation, however, every last one of them had tried to dress themselves up as much as possible.
Most of the male students wore the uniform as-is, but the female students had added overcoats, pins, or adornments, striving to stand out by even the smallest margin.
Clara, true to her model-student image, wore only her neatly pressed uniform.
Nothing else over it—and nothing else under it, either.
Four days had passed since she had left Phairen's hands and moved into the dormitory.
In all that time, she had not slipped up even once.
She was not surprised by this fact.
She had somehow sensed it would turn out this way.
And she had a fair guess as to the cause.
The Black Magician.
Her master.
A few days earlier, she had at last come face to face with the one she had always only glimpsed from beyond the flask.
The moment she stood before him, she had braced herself to pay the price for fleeing seventeen years ago.
But he had not punished her. He had forgiven her. He had even gone so far as to offer encouragement for the life that lay ahead of her.
The gnawing fear that she might be discovered and killed at any moment, the doubt that undercut the very foundation of her existence—all of it had dissolved at once.
And with it, the problem of her incontinence had resolved itself as well.
It must have been a psychological issue, after all.
Unaware that Phairen had been drugging her, she could draw no other conclusion.
Clara felt ashamed of how she had vaguely feared her master based on swirling rumors.
Judging by his deeds in the Hippodrome and at Dvalchev, he was by no means a righteous man.
Yet he also possessed a tenderness that extended warmth to his own creations.
Master...
Clara felt her heart give a soft flutter.
She watched a couple just entering the banquet hall.
A blond, handsome man in a black suit and black cloak was escorting a black-haired girl in a school uniform.
Either her master had failed to notice her, or he had judged it unwise to acknowledge her in a setting like this—either way, he gave her no glance.
A pity.
"You're going to drip on the floor."
Thanks to her partner's dry observation from beside her, Clara just managed to compose her expression.
Meren surveyed the room and spoke.
"Well. It's not just you staring at him."
Everyone standing near the entrance had their eyes fixed on him.
Among them was Reina.
She looked at Ella, standing at Wonderstein's side, with undisguised envy.
Her own invitation had been confiscated by her father the moment it reached their lodging, without so much as a question. She was furious at herself for letting it be snatched away so helplessly, but a part of her accepted it as inevitable.
In the end, the idea of her supplanting Ella to become his partner had been impossible from the start.
Her relationship with him was not real.
No matter how much she called him "Dad," he could never truly become her father.
He was only indulging her, surely—acting out of pity for a girl who was, at most, a former temporary member of the troupe. The fantasy of stealing him away from her own father was possible only inside her delusions.
The way her father had plucked the invitation from her hand felt like a demonstration of that cold reality.
Perhaps the time had come to end this make-believe relationship.
The moment Ella stepped into the hall, she scanned the room.
"I don't see Maya anywhere."
"No. And she left several hours ahead of us."
Who Maya had invited as her partner had been the subject of lively speculation among the troupe members for days.
A wide range of names had been floated as candidates, but all of it was baseless conjecture.
With the person in question keeping her lips completely sealed, there was no way to know.
To make matters worse, starting the very next day she had begun leaving early in the morning and returning late at night, repeating the pattern so consistently that no one had a chance to pry.
As the banquet hour approached, Ella finally nodded as if she had figured it out.
"Poor thing... She was definitely bluffing. Pretending she had a partner when she didn't."
"That can't be. Miss Maya doesn't seem the type to lie about something like that."
"Then think about it. Does it make any sense that a girl who's been this distant and standoffish with her own troupe members for months would suddenly go out and land herself some man?"
"Hmm... When you put it that way..."
Wonderstein found himself agreeing with her assessment.
The strongest suspect had admittedly been Karen, but the rift between the two of them had looked irreparable to begin with, and, decisively, Karen had entered earlier on her brother's arm.
Just then, a single figure flickered across Wonderstein's mind.
Someone who was acquainted with Maya, and who was known to be in the vicinity.
If she were to invite anyone as her partner, it could only be that person.
"Miss Ella, I've got it."
"Huh? Got what?"
"Miss Maya's partner."
"What, really? Who?"
"Heh-heh. The clues were all there. It could only be that person. Without question, the owner of that café she frequents so often..."
At that moment, the final couple entered the banquet hall.
One of the two was a figure so famous that everyone in the room recognized him on sight.
A man in a long white robe, his face veiled behind silver gauze.
It was none other than Arno, the Troupe Leader of the Silver Screen Circus.
Beside him walked the student who had invited him as her partner.
A girl with skin and hair as white as the uniform she wore.
It was Maya.
***
The Rekachev campus lay quiet this weekend evening.
Students had paired off in small groups and scattered into the city's night streets.
Only a handful remained in the dormitories, unwinding from the week's accumulated exhaustion.
Today, at least, the Freshmen Welcome Party kept the banquet hall and its immediate surroundings bustling with noise and laughter.
The rear garden, where the Taming Training Ground stood, was quiet too.
And so was the small tower at its far edge—Professor Phairen's office.
Yet the scene unfolding inside was grotesque beyond all reason.
A viscous liquid, a red mixture that seemed to blend blood, shreds of flesh, and pus, slid across the floor.
The dozens of half-formed arms and legs that extended to pull its mass forward gave the impression of something crawling; the squelching, rippling motion of the fluid made it look as if it were flowing.
Behind it lay a shattered black glass bottle, toppled and rolling.
It had only just broken free from within.
The thing fixed its attention on a jar that had been reverently placed at the center of the room.
Inside, a powder sparkled like starlight.
An item that had come up for auction in Vegas a few weeks prior.
Castle Slagbort's proxy had secured the winning bid; it had passed through the Duke's hands and eventually Phairen had brought it here.
Every scrap of information about it surfaced in the liquid monster's mind.
The Demon God himself had hammered the knowledge directly into her head.
- Fragment of Trill.
- A byproduct created during the production of an Eye of Kirkeus.
- Capable of controlling Devolut...
The Apostle extended a single tentacle from her mass of flesh, stretching it outward.
It snagged the jar containing the fragments.
Then she turned around.
Shelves stretching up to the ceiling held hundreds of glass jars arrayed in neat rows.
Inside each one was a creature, collected by Phairen from every corner of the world, in which the Curse Plague was still actively progressing.
Creatures whose Devolut was still alive.
The Apostle swung her tentacle at the shelves.