11. Wonderland (6)
11. Wonderland (6)
I pushed through the crowd and went to her.
Clara was slumped on the ground, sobbing, but the moment she spotted me, her head snapped up.
"...T-Troupe Leader? Eek!"
She forgot about her broken arm and tried to push herself up off the ground. An instant later, she screamed and pitched forward, face-first.
The sight was pitiful, but absurd enough to draw laughter from the onlookers.
Tears poured down her face. She was the picture of misery.
I let out a small sigh and walked over to her.
"Miss Clara, what happened?"
"Waaah, Troupe Leader!"
She buried her tear-streaked face against me and started babbling incoherently.
"It, it's just that... I wanted to be useful to the troupe... hic!"
"Calm down. Let's fix that arm first, and then we'll talk."
Her arm was twisted completely backward, a jagged shard of bone jutting through the inside of her elbow.
No wonder she was crying like this.
She'd always been especially sensitive to physical pain and sensation.
After a long carriage ride, she'd fuss that her back ached. Bring anything cold or hot anywhere near her, and she'd carry on so dramatically it startled the people around her more than it did her.
I took hold of the shattered arm and channeled my will into it. A fistful of Devoluts streamed into her body.
My command was to restore the arm's joints to their proper position.
It was a recovery order I'd used frequently before.
This time, however, I'd overlooked one detail.
"Hrk—gyagyah!"
Crunch. Crack.
The broken arm obeyed my command faithfully, with zero regard for its owner's agony. It snapped and wrenched itself back into place entirely on its own. Clara's eyes rolled back, foam frothed at her mouth, and she passed out cold.
"Damn it."
The healing happened so fast I never got a chance to adjust the order. I compensated by injecting a sedative-analgesic compound into her system.
Color seeped back into her pale, contorted face, and her expression eased into something peaceful.
With her treatment finished, I could finally take in the situation around me.
"I—I made a mistake... I shouldn't have..."
"It's all right, it's all right. It wasn't your fault. See, the lady over there just twisted her arm a little bit, that's all."
A little bit?
I turned around.
A man built like a bear—nearly two meters tall—was cradling a child in his arms and murmuring reassurances.
Looking more closely, I realized the crowd's attention wasn't on Clara at all. It was on those two.
The man noticed me looking and waved a hand.
"Whoa, terribly sorry about this. My daughter didn't do it on purpose, she just—huh?"
He was wearing a chicken-head mask.
Still, his voice tugged at my memory.
He seemed to recognize me too.
"Wonderstein!"
He called my name and tore off the mask.
A man in his thirties with a red mohawk like a rooster's comb and a coarse beard.
I knew who he was.
The leader of the Morning Star Circus, our opponent from the Rose Windmill Cabaret show: Rooster Minova.
It was good to see a familiar face after all this time.
I moved to greet him. Before I could speak, rough words came flying at me.
"You bastard! You've got a lot of nerve showing your face! What the hell did you do to my daughter?!"
"Excuse me?"
I stared at him blankly, caught off guard by the sudden hostility.
Just then, the child weeping in his arms turned her head toward me.
Minova's daughter, Ruelo.
She looked exactly as I remembered her, but something about her expression felt alien.
She looked me up and down and let out a dry little laugh.
"So you're the one. The one who made me."
What came out of her mouth was nothing like a child's voice.
I glanced back and forth between Minova, fuming, and Ruelo, smirking.
I had no idea what was going on.
***
Minova first noticed something was wrong with his daughter shortly after Wonderstein left Rouge.
The signs had been there even before that.
The furniture in her room kept getting wrecked—or simply falling apart.
Shelves collapsed. Doorknobs snapped off. A window gave way, frame and all.
Ruelo blamed it on her own roughhousing.
Minova didn't scold her. He praised her instead.
A child who'd spent more than half of every day bedridden was finally up and running around.
It nearly moved him to tears.
That changed when he saw her rip a solid oak door clean off its hinges. He realized this was no ordinary recovery.
In his younger days, Minova had made a name for himself as a strongman.
He knew talented kids started to stand out before they turned ten.
But that was when they were in stance, executing a deliberate maneuver. The raw, uncontrolled strength she was displaying in everyday situations was something else entirely.
Ruelo herself had no explanation for it.
"I don't know. It's been like this ever since I got better. And it's getting worse."
"It's—it's fine. It's not a bad thing! Haha, looks like my little girl inherited her daddy's strength, eh?"
At first, he'd tried to put a positive spin on it.
At least his daughter's future as an acrobat was a sure thing now.
But that wasn't the only side effect.
He was jolted awake one night by a thunderous crash from his personal training grounds.
He sprinted over and found his daughter standing there in her nightgown.
"S-sweetheart, what are you doing in Daddy's training room?"
Then he saw the iron bar lying in front of her—crumpled like a sheet of paper.
Ruelo gazed at it indifferently and shrugged.
"Just felt like testing my strength."
Such a casual tone.
Minova's instincts as a father flared.
The child before him wore his daughter's face, but whatever was inside her wasn't his daughter.
"W-who are you? Where is my little girl?!"
At his question, Ruelo let out a short laugh and shook her head.
"Sharp, aren't you? But even if you ask, I don't know who I am either. And your daughter's asleep inside me. Don't worry. I'll hand the body back soon enough."
Another entity inside his daughter's body!
That was enough to throw Minova into utter shock.
After hearing the story, Wonderstein used his Diagnosis Function to examine Ruelo's physical condition.
When he asked if there was a problem, the Evolution Lab reported no issues.
So he initiated a deep diagnostic, combing through her body detail by detail.
It didn't take long to figure out where things had gone wrong.
Milky Way.
That was the problem.
Back then, Ruelo had been receiving daily injections of Milky Way to treat her illness.
Though originally developed as a cure for the Curse Plague, it was also effective at killing cancer cells.
On the day Wonderstein visited to treat her, Ruelo had just received a fresh dose. He'd introduced Devoluts into her body to cure the disease.
The command he'd given the Devoluts was: "Cure the cancer cells, make the body healthy and strong—oh, and restore her hair as well."
The process should have ended there.
The problem was the Milky Way already circulating through her system.
It had altered the Devoluts.
Wonderstein recalled the fanatics he'd encountered in Dvalchev.
Mercifully, Ruelo hadn't progressed to that stage.
The corrupted Devoluts hadn't seized control of her brain. Instead, it had formed a separate personality inside her.
Her body's transformation into something "healthy and strong" had been a byproduct of that process.
Ruelo's hair squirmed like living creatures, slithering lazily over her shoulders.
It kept picking up nearby objects, toying with them.
Ruelo, at a loss for what to do, hung her head low.
The hair was moving with its own will.
Wonderstein exhaled.
He remembered an old ghost story—about a cursed wig, an evil spirit that possessed whoever wore it.
"It does appear my treatment caused a side effect."
"I knew it!"
Minova slammed his fist onto the table in front of him.
It split in two, sending every cup on it clattering and rolling across the floor.
He called in a worker to clean up the mess, then sat back down.
Watching Ruelo stroke and soothe her own hair, Wonderstein asked:
"So, what did you do after that?"
"Ahem. I figured a demon had possessed Ruelo's body. So I looked for a church nearby. As it happened, Father Tishiang of the Rouge diocese had experience working with the Heresy Inquisition. I asked him to exorcise the demon inside my daughter."
Minova recounted what had taken place at the church.
It was like something out of a horror film.
A possessed daughter strapped to a bed. A priest locked in a desperate struggle with a demon. The tension had been unbearable.
The treatment itself was brutal.
Each time the priest drove a Sacred Stake into Ruelo's body, the demon wasn't the only one who suffered—Ruelo herself endured agony as if her flesh were being burned away.
That was inevitable, Wonderstein reflected.
The entity born of the corrupted Devoluts was now, for all intents and purposes, one with Ruelo.
In the end, Minova couldn't bear to watch his daughter's torment any longer and knocked the priest unconscious from behind.
The demon inhabiting Ruelo's body, still tied to the bed, offered him a deal.
It would pretend to have been healed, and in exchange, Minova would cooperate with the ruse.
"But if someone drives a Stake of Light into your body, won't the truth come out immediately?"
"Cut my hair. The bulk of my consciousness resides within it. Once the hair is severed, I lose my power. I sink into the depths beneath her own consciousness. While I'm dormant, the Sacred Stakes won't hurt."
"And when it grows back?"
"That's when I return."
Minova's fists trembled.
To be forced into a bargain with a demon wearing his daughter's body.
He had no choice.
At this rate, the priest was prepared to kill Ruelo if that's what it took to destroy the demon.
Just as he was about to accept the proposal, Ruelo's head rotated a full 180 degrees and stared behind her.
"Seems we have a little rat eavesdropping."
The door opened.
Thud.
Every eye turned toward it.
It was the worker Minova had just summoned to clear away the broken table.
An unusual figure.
Not because his appearance was strange.
He simply didn't look the part—a scholar-type with an old-world bearing that suggested considerable education, entirely at odds with his menial position.
He clicked his tongue at the sight of the table split in half.
"Father and daughter, the same. Breaking things seems to be your vocation... Huh?"
His eyes met Wonderstein's.
They locked gazes as if frozen in place.
Both of them knew exactly who the other was.
"Wonderstein!"
"Baron Dosville?"
They glared at each other in silence.
They'd met again after a long time, but there was no chance of a warm reception. There could never be good feelings between them.
From Baron Dosville's perspective, Wonderstein was the man who'd orchestrated his ruin—twice. And from Wonderstein's perspective, the baron was the infuriating adversary who'd twice pushed him to the edge of a quest failure.
A chill settled over the room. Minova broke the silence.
"That's him. The one who was listening in on us."
Minova had clearly noticed the murderous atmosphere between the two of them, but he pressed on with the story, playing it smooth as ever.
Baron Dosville, as it turned out, had been living at the church as a charity case.
His defeat at the opening-ceremony trial had cost him the noble patrons who'd been shielding him. Poor wagers at the Rose Windmill Cabaret's test had left him with staggering debts to loan sharks. On top of that, he'd fallen out of favor with Rouge's power brokers.
The church was the only place left that would take him in.
From ancient times, churches had held the privilege of sanctuary—a place even a king couldn't touch a sinner.
The modern Orthodox Church no longer commanded that degree of authority, but it was still more than the loan sharks would dare cross.
So he'd survived, scraping by on one bowl of church porridge a day.
He'd witnessed the exorcism purely by chance. Late that night, he happened to notice the newcomers and the priest descending to the basement.
He'd watched all the way through to the negotiations between the demon and Minova.
The moment Ruelo's head had swiveled 180 degrees and fixed its gaze on him, he'd panicked and tried to flee.
But the demon, still tethered to the bed, had lunged bodily and pinned him beneath the frame.
"Aaargh! S-somebody, help!"
Baron Dosville thrashed, trapped under the bed.
"Kill him."
Ruelo's hair extended outward, each strand sharpening like a blade.
Baron Dosville saw it and began convulsing, foam flecking his lips. But against that monstrous strength, he couldn't so much as twitch.
Just as the hair was about to slice through his throat, Minova intervened.
"Hold on. You mean to commit murder using my daughter's body? I won't allow it!"
"Then would you like to kill him yourself?"
At the suggestion, Minova glowered at Baron Dosville.
The baron trembled, meeting his stare.
He knew his life now rested in this man's hands.
His mind raced.
His desperate will to survive sharpened his judgment to a razor's edge.
He read the killing intent in the man's eyes.
A promise of silence wouldn't work here.
The image he'd cultivated among circus people was already rotten, and this man would do anything to protect his daughter.
A do-or-die moment.
What came out of his mouth was the only answer his quick, scheming mind could produce.
He scrambled out from under the loosened bed frame, threw himself prostrate at Minova's feet, and pressed his forehead to the floor.
"Please—accept me into your circus troupe!"