14. Melting Point (5)
14. Melting Point (5)
Bears hibernate. They're tough enough to endure winter's brutal cold, but the animals they prey on aren't nearly so sturdy. So before the hard freeze sets in, a bear sweeps through the local ecosystem, gorges itself until its belly is full, then retreats deep into a den and doesn't emerge until spring.
The Empire was often compared to a bear. The land genuinely had a lot of bears, and the crest of the Kiev Imperial Court was a bear, but the analogy also said something about the inhabitants' habit of plunder.
Kiev had traditionally been a land of nomadic peoples who lived by hunting and herding. When winter approached, they raided neighboring countries whose harvests were already in and looted their food stores. There were several attempts to subjugate them, but exterminating bears who hunkered deep within a vast frozen wasteland was impossible.
The idiom Kievans often repeated—"last year's business is last year's business"—was dressed up as a mark of their lack of grudges and their magnanimous spirit. In truth, it was a phrase that had stuck in their mouths because a society where raiding was routine met a harsh climate that demanded extreme isolation between regions every winter.
That regional peculiarity, however, had faded considerably in the present day. The bear no longer hibernated. The railway lines that crisscrossed the Empire—and were still being laid—sent hot blood flowing through the frozen Kiev winter. On the tracks of the Transcontinental Railway linking far eastern Hugh Bay with the western Black Sea, iron horses spewing steam surged ceaselessly, never giving a single snowflake time to settle.
Markets formed along that expanding transportation network, and population inflow followed as a perfectly natural consequence. But around the railway stations, the scale of development was exceptional compared to the old ports or market towns. Trains were slower than airships and carried less cargo than ships, yet they possessed one advantage that overwhelmed both other modes of transport: accessibility.
A train could deposit a volume of goods and people that utterly dwarfed any carriage right into the heart of a city. That density and convenience of distribution were something a port or an airport, with its need for enormous open space, could never match. Even a small town near a station could sustain foot traffic on par with a major city's downtown. A performance venue built in such a spot would be, in scale at least, every bit the equal of its metropolitan counterparts.
The tent theater where the Wonderstein's Monster Circus was now performing on its third day was huge enough to seat 1,500 spectators. Already the winner of two stars in the Circus Grand Prix, the troupe was famous for stirring up a buzz wherever it went, and as a result they'd sold out every show over the three days.
The number of acrobats they fielded was modest, but each one radiated fierce individuality, and the writing and direction that heightened their characters were equally striking.
The Skeleton Clown, who peeled off his skin, tore away his muscles, spilled out his organs, and slipped free as nothing but bones—all while pretending to be cheerful. The Mummy, who cultivated and casually swallowed and regurgitated repulsive insects—centipedes, moths, cockroaches—from inside her own body. And the Spider Woman, exuding a bewitching air as she bound living creatures tight in webbing and sucked out their fluids.
With those three monster acrobats' turns over, the stage now awaited the most ferocious Red-Blood Ogre, with only one—no, three—performers left.
"After escaping the prison ward of that infamous murder hospital—and committing a staggering thirty-three killings—they barely dodged the gallows thanks to a preposterous ruling that 'the killer cannot be identified as any single one of the three'! The lunatic triplets! Trimery!"
At Rooster Minova's booming cry, the Ratmen threw open the barred door. From inside, a three-headed human cackled and clambered onto the stage. His entrance drew groans and shrieks from every direction.
The triplets had stripped to the waist, and just as the emcee's introduction had described, the traces of some mad doctor's surgical experiment to fuse three siblings together were hideously visible across their body. Seams stitched with steel cable ran down from both shoulders and met at the navel.
The three stood side by side on stage, but that didn't guarantee any affection among them. From the very moment they introduced themselves, they began squabbling.
"I am Trimery!"
"What are you talking about! I'm Trimery!"
"Hey, I was about to say that."
"The 'I am Trimery' bit?"
"No. The 'What are you talking about! I'm Trimery!' bit!"
"Nonsense! It's me!"
"Me!"
Each monster acrobat served the audience a different flavor of dread. What Trimery offered was a demonstration of how threatening sheer stupidity could become. The spectators, tense from their entrance, quickly relaxed and burst out laughing at the trio's stand-up bickering. But as the scene unfolded, tension crept back onto their faces.
"Oh, this is Tosuni, the rabbit I'm raising."
"No, I'm raising her."
"I feed her every day."
"Me too."
"So who's actually raising her?"
"Hm, no idea."
"Let's just share her nicely among the three of us!"
A pitiful animal shriek rang through the venue. With terrifying grip strength, they tore a rabbit apart alive and divided it among themselves. Screams and sobs erupted from the audience. Tosuni, of course, was no real rabbit. It was a prop Ella had built, overlaid with an illusion by Maya.
The spectators had no way of knowing that. Watching the triplets happily chortle among themselves while holding the savagely killed rabbit, they felt a visceral shudder.
And that was only the start. The triplets offered to help set up stage equipment and promptly crushed a Ratman to death. They fought over control of their shared body and snapped their own arm. They nearly hurled a dagger into the emcee by accident because each head wanted to throw it a different direction. The audience found themselves gasping, half-rising from their seats as if they could physically stop them.
The triplets often played off that reaction, turning to the crowd with shameless expressions that asked, What's the problem?
"We're smart."
"We've got three heads!"
"Three times the intelligence!"
And so they laid bare, with brutal clarity, how problems anyone with normal judgment—or a normal body—could solve easily turned into catastrophes in their hands.
"Then I'll go in!"
"No, I'll go in!"
"Wait! Stop making me go in however you want!"
After a solid bout of cold sweat from their nonsense, the audience breathed a sigh of relief as the triplets were caged and wheeled offstage.
The triplets' acting had grown enormously compared to their first attempts. Back then, they lacked the skill to create that delicate, complicated tension and just rampaged blindly. Now, with only their expressions and dialogue, they were drawing genuine "Don't do it!" reactions from the crowd.
At the after-party, Reina laid out her impressions of the Monster Circus, gathered over the last three days, with complete candor.
"Trimery—all three of you were incredible. The script really is on a wholly different axis from the old monster circuses. In clown performance, there's a category called nail-riddled. It's similar to slapstick but a different genre. Slapstick earns laughs from situations where the body gets hurt and the clown's reaction to it. Nail-riddled creates tension from situations where the body nearly gets hurt, combined with the clown's complete obliviousness to the danger. Your performance took nail-riddled to its absolute extreme."
Reina hated stepping onto a stage herself, but when it came to circus theory and technique, she had absorbed the very best through an elite education. She'd taken on the role of coaching the troupe members.
Name: Reina Magier
Age: 19
Affection level: 22 (Next Reward: Affection level 30)
Title: Golden Libra
Occupation: Training Instructor
Traits
: [Persona - Weeping Woman], [Return Command]
The triplets beamed at each other under the praise of an acrobat as accomplished as Reina.
"So what do we need to fix?"
The previous performers had already received a few criticisms from Reina along with suggestions for improvement. She'd spent the last three days silently watching the shows precisely to give them an objective assessment. Glancing at the notes she'd compiled on the performance, she spoke.
"There are a few things. From the perspective of what I just called nail-riddled, Trimery—"
"Hold on, what's this 'Trimery' business, 'Trimery.'"
"Too stiff. Just drop the formality and..."
"Would calling you... big bros be all right?"
Reina's voice remained earnest and wooden. She'd used the word without any particular thought behind it. But the triplets' faces instantly split into idiot grins.
"Wha—what did you say?"
"Pfft-hehe, big bro? She said big bro?"
"Big Bro! She called us big bro!"
Reina, thinking she'd made some blunder, asked in a tense voice.
"D-did I do something wrong?"
Her earnest reaction drew laughter from all around. Wonderstein, who had been quietly watching Reina coach the troupe, nodded reassuringly toward her.
"They're just happy."
"Puhaha, that's right! Happy, of course we're happy!"
"You wouldn't understand how we feel, Troupe Leader!"
"Unlike the Deputy Leader, who just tosses out casual speech, she's got a kind heart too!"
One of the triplets said this and then shot a glance toward the corner. There lay Ella, completely spent and sprawled across the floor. She looked at the three brothers and replied with a smirk.
"Want me to call you that? Big Bro?"
Another wave of laughter rolled through. They were giddy over nothing. Today was the last day of performances here, and starting tomorrow, they had two days off. They were primed to crack up at even Sven's tiredest gags.
"Have you checked all the schedules, Miss Ella?"
Wonderstein glanced sidelong at the stack of papers she'd just been reading. Ella didn't look up; she kept her eyes on the documents and gave a nod.
"Yeah. Rented six freight cars. Departure's in three days, in the morning. We move one station down, disembark, and stay there for a week. Three days of performances. The venue's a tent theater, about nine hundred seats. Booked three hundred flyers at a print shop near the station and farmed out advertising to the local paper."
"And you handled all of that in just two days? Impressive."
"Hmph. Not like it'll lighten my workload. You demon."
She got that one jab in, then proceeded to relay everything in order: the expenses incurred during scouting, a list of area commercial districts worth approaching near the station.
Since the Rekachev incident, her attitude toward him had gone back to how it was before she'd lost her memory. Yet she wasn't openly hostile the way she'd been at the start either. She still threw out barbed jokes and needled him now and again. But when they sat down to discuss the running of the troupe, she'd stay seated across from him for a long time, asking a lot of questions, trading opinions, chiming in agreement.
Her manner toward him now was calm, with no trace of emotion on display. She didn't show him affection the way she had when her memory was gone, but she seemed to be making an effort to be reasonably pleasant. She didn't initiate physical contact—but when he drew near, she no longer grimaced as if the sight of him repulsed her.
A stray hair poking from the back of her head gave a little twitch. Without thinking, Wonderstein fell into an old habit and scratched her scalp. Realizing what he'd done, he stole a glance at her face. She didn't get angry, didn't smile—just stared back at him.
"What are you doing?"
She offered only that one chilly line and edged a step sideways.