10. Demon in a Bottle (31)
10. Demon in a Bottle (31)
"Delicious. Heh heh, if I could just drag every soul here into my domain..."
The Avatar prattled on as if she herself were the Demon God.
Not that being an Avatar made her the Demon God itself.
An Avatar was merely a fragment of a Demon God revealed to this world through a "window"—an Apostle.
Which meant it was inevitably shaped, in large part, by the individual psyche of that Apostle.
The problem was that Clara had never been qualified to be an Apostle in the first place.
Her physical vessel had been forcibly enlarged through Devolut. Her spiritual vessel was likewise built on an artificial foundation.
Add "fraudulent name-borrowing" on top of that, and the whole thing was unstable beyond measure.
The Demon God felt fissures spreading through the vessel.
"Mmm? Kuh-huh... so this is as far as it goes. Fine. Nothing to be done. For the time you have left, rampage as you please. Brief as it was, you were my Apostle."
Blanketing the entire banquet hall with Papilax had been an egregious exertion of authority.
The window cracked, and the frame warped.
The Demon God surrendered dominance of the persona back to its Apostle and vanished beyond the Veil.
The exoskeleton encasing the Avatar's body rippled with a dry clatter, segment by segment like falling dominoes.
She surveyed her surroundings and bellowed at full volume.
"Hrrgh, good. My turn now... Reina. Where has that bitch gone? Come out!"
The Avatar lurched off the stage, leg after leg pounding the floor—thud, thud, thud.
She lashed dozens of feelers through the air as she scanned the hall.
Hundreds of people lay with their faces mashed against the floor, hands clamped over their ears in agony.
Around them, bubbles of air were still bursting—pop, pop, pop.
Each one laden with spiteful whispers and backbiting tales engineered to plunge a listener into psychic shock.
Massive corals in a riot of colors flickered, half-translucent, in and out of existence.
The Garden of Whispers, Sinepekus's domain, was a forest of coral reefs rooted in the shallow seas of the Abyss.
Those corals fed on the conversations that accumulated there, growing fat on them and spewing the whispers back out as air bubbles.
"It's all because of that bitch! That bitch! Reina, where did you go!"
The Avatar stomped through the banquet hall, howling.
That bitch was supposed to be here.
Everything that had happened to her was because of that bitch.
First she stole Charlie away, and now she'd reduced her to this.
She had to make her hear it.
The secret of her birth!
That her whole life was a lie!
That she was nothing but a manufactured doll!
Haha, it'd drive her to despair, wouldn't it?
Dragging her tail, the Avatar circled the hall, hunting.
A huge pincer swept directly in front of Karen, but she stood rooted to the spot, unable to move.
She, too, was in the grip of a Heart Demon, just like everyone else.
—Ah, you little bitch. You think your whore of a mother threw you away for no reason?
—What are you staring at, huh? You want me to gouge your eyes out?
The curses and beatings from her father.
—You're... weird. Honestly, I can't stay friends with a girl like you.
—Isn't that her? You know, the girl who likes girls.
—Ugh, crazy bitch, just thinking about it makes me sick.
The first friends she'd ever had—other girls—who eventually ostracized her.
—Get lost.
—I said get lost.
—I've never met anyone as disgusting as you.
Not so long ago, when Maya had cut ties with her.
Every foul memory crashed over her in waves.
Karen had her ears covered, but the sound didn't diminish in the slightest.
It worked directly on the inside of her mind.
"Stop... please... just stop..."
Karen collapsed to her knees.
She had no strength left to endure it.
It felt as though her soul was about to slip free of her body.
The same phenomenon was spreading across the entire banquet hall.
Clara swept her gaze over the room, her eyes despairing.
Adult or student, it made no difference—everyone was seized by Papilax, their vitality draining away one after another.
"I'll walk properly... please don't hit me..."
Beside her, even Meren was crawling flat on the floor, weeping.
Ordinarily, Papilax operated in a subtler fashion—a murmur at the back of the mind. For it to attack so brazenly and directly meant the Demon God had wielded his own authority in person.
Fortunately, Clara herself was unaffected.
That didn't make the situation hopeful.
To keep existing as Clara, she had to drink a special potion every day.
Producing it required Devolut and a Fragment of Trill to manipulate that Devolut.
And she had just been robbed of both.
Even if she survived this, starting tomorrow her body and soul would slowly fall out of alignment, and before long the spell would collapse entirely.
And when it did, she no longer had an original body to return to.
Watching the Avatar rampage now, it was doubtful the creature would last more than a few hours.
There was exactly one option.
Break the spell right now.
Once she'd recovered her original body that way, she'd have to scrape together whatever resources remained and flee.
After a disaster of this scale, there was no chance the Orthodox Church would stand idly by.
Exorcists would swarm the place.
Clara drew a dagger from her bosom.
At a glance it looked ordinary, but the blade was packed tight with crimson characters written in blood.
It was something she'd carried in secret, just in case she ever needed to make an emergency escape from this body.
Stab herself with this, and the spell would break.
"Reina, where are you hiding? Hmm?"
The Avatar swung her pincer-tipped tail in wide arcs, ransacking the hall.
She sifted through people with her legs, tossing them aside, but the girl was nowhere to be found.
After shrieking her fury, she found a different target for her rage.
Two figures standing in front of the stage.
Maya and Karen.
"Right. There you two are."
Those two had wrecked the trap she'd so painstakingly prepared in the bamboo grove, using some cheap trick.
Those little brats dared humiliate a senior?
Menacingly raising her exoskeleton, the Avatar advanced on them.
Clara tightened her grip on the dagger.
If she was going to do it, it had to be now.
Before the monster committed something even worse.
'What a shame.'
A bitter smile touched her lips.
She'd finally grown used to life as Clara.
She'd come to welcome the friends who greeted her now, had started to enjoy school, and was just about to throw herself into learning acrobatics with real enthusiasm.
She'd even received encouragement from the Master she'd feared so much.
And now she had to leave again, go back into hiding.
'I'm sorry.'
Silently she apologized to the person she assumed had already left the hall, and plunged the knife toward her throat.
But an instant before the blade met flesh.
Her hand stopped.
Something had changed in the two people the Avatar was targeting.
Or rather—one of them was still collapsed on the floor in panic, but the other had moved.
Today's party queen.
Maya waved a hand dismissively at the air bubbles drifting near her, popping them like troublesome flies. A cluster of whispers spilled out of each one, but her expression stayed utterly blank.
"What... how did you overcome it?"
The monster muttered in disbelief.
A Demon God had directly exerted his authority, yet this girl was still standing there unfazed—the monster couldn't understand it.
Maya felt vitality surging through her whole body.
Magical power that had been frozen like a block of stone was flowing again.
The Papilax that had been intensifying for days had been completely dispelled.
Her voice was devoid of emotion.
"Thanks to you."
What she'd heard were the two matters that had been troubling her heart lately.
What had happened between the Troupe Leader and Reina.
And the fact that Karen had confessed to the Troupe Leader.
The Demon God, intent on tormenting her further, had poured out the scenes in lavish, vivid detail.
That was his mistake.
Every word of those two conversations reached Maya's ears—from beginning to end, nothing omitted.
—It's a garment I made four years ago.
—Thank you for indulging my childish request. I truly enjoyed myself, thanks to you.
Reina.
The idea that she'd spent a passionate night with the Troupe Leader had been her own misunderstanding.
She'd simply been acting like a spoiled child.
This ridiculous girl.
What sort of preposterous favor had she asked of him?
Listening to their exchange, she could only laugh.
A girl who carried herself so haughtily had turned into a child in front of the Troupe Leader.
The conversation with Reina ended, and then Karen's voice followed.
The entirety of their talk that day reached her ears.
—Do you have any idea how badly Maya wanted to go with the Troupe Leader? Please, be generous to her this time too!
—But my heart still races at feminine things. Is something wrong with me?
The secret Karen had kept from her hadn't been about her feelings for the Troupe Leader.
A faint sigh slipped from Maya's lips.
She looked down at Karen, crumpled on the floor and weeping.
You idiot.
The murmur was aimed at herself as much as at the other girl.
Going out of her way to do something nobody asked for just to blow a misunderstanding out of proportion.
If the Demon God had targeted Maya alone, he wouldn't have made this error.
He'd have mixed truth and falsehood in careful proportions.
The way he had with Hobbs.
The Demon God had deliberately omitted several pieces of information when he fed Hobbs his truth: that Phairen had drugged her master's drink and coaxed him into their wedding night, and that a different senior, competing for the year's top student rank, had made a deal to deliberately toy with him.
Making it impossible to simply hate someone inflicts far greater psychic damage than turning them into a complete villain. Sinepekus knew that well.
But the final attack had been an area-wide strike aimed at hundreds of people here, and it hadn't undergone that kind of delicate calibration.
And so Maya had, inversely, broken free of the Papilax.
The Avatar, ignorant of this, ground her teeth in frustration.
"...Fine. Let's see what other tricks this cowardly bitch has. Just like when you made those stairs back then. But you know..."
Crrk. Crrk.
The Avatar twisted her exoskeleton and reared up on dozens of legs.
"I'll just smash you to pieces myself!"
A vast shadow engulfed Maya.
She wrung out every drop of magical power she had and hurled a telekinetic sphere.
It was smaller than the one she'd deployed in Dvalchev.
She couldn't help it.
Having only just recovered her magic, the amount she could draw upon was minimal.
Bang.
The telekinetic sphere slammed against the exoskeleton with a resonant crash but dealt no real damage.
It left a faint scratch on the hard shell and stalled the descending leg for only an instant.
The Avatar burst into cackling laughter.
"Is that all? No more little tricks?"
She drove her leg down again.
Maya stared at the death coming down on top of her.
She'd done everything she could.
This was truly the end.
'Troupe Leader.'
Had he left the party early?
It felt cruel, but also a relief.
Even the Troupe Leader would have struggled to oppose a Demon God's Avatar.
Thank goodness.
At least the Troupe Leader was alive.
She closed her eyes.
THUD.
A thunderous impact shook the entire banquet hall.
The marble floor shuddered.
A frigid gale swept across Maya's cheek.
After waiting several seconds, she realized she was still perfectly intact.
Only one person came to mind.
Could it be the Troupe Leader?
She opened her eyes.
But there was no black cloak, no golden hair.
Only red.
It streamed from the body of the person who had stepped in front of Maya, and at the same time, it was her hair.
Maya's eyes flew wide.
She called the name.
"Ka...ren...?"
Karen had taken the Avatar's blow to protect her.
Bare-handed.
She glanced back at Maya and gave a faint smile.
While coughing up clots of blood and viscera by the handful.
"Cough, hack... staying on your feet... is a ground acrobat's specialty..."
Her body crumpled like a heap of rotten straw.
An attack driven by something dozens of times her own weight, putting its full mass into the strike.
Even if she'd employed every technique of Ground Acrobatics to the utmost, no human body could endure that.
Maya caught Karen as she fell.
Both of her arms were twisted so badly that bone and muscle were unrecognizable. Both legs had ruptured where the skin couldn't withstand the pressure, bone and flesh bursting outward.
Maya clenched her teeth for a moment, then spoke.
"Why did you do that?"
She wanted to curse her own mouth.
She couldn't even manage a word of thanks, and in this situation that was what she was curious about?
But Karen wasn't offended.
Maya's expression was still unchanged, and her voice was still emotionless. Yet Karen could see it.
Her trembling hands. Her pursed lips. And the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes.
Karen wanted to burst out laughing.
Her friend was grieving for her.
"Maya, you know..."
The voice that came from Karen's mouth was vivid and alive.
Nothing like what should come from a dying person.
And then...
That was it.
Her eyes stared blankly into empty space, and her lips no longer moved.
Maya's clinical mind accepted the situation logically.
Karen was dead.