14. Melting Point (34)
14. Melting Point (34)
Before going after the Madosa of the Voodoo Cult, Wonderstein intended to move Anais and Nika somewhere safe. Bringing them into a potential combat zone risked their capture as hostages.
The situation, however, did not unfold as simply as he had hoped. The entrance to the Heavenly Bath was currently clogged with guests trying to leave after their soak. They had sensed that something unsettling was unfolding throughout the hotel and were trying to hurry back to their rooms.
But the dressing room had a limited capacity, so the exodus was dragging at a crawl.
The architects may have designed this spot to be sheltered from the wind, but it was still winter. The warmth of the spring water dissipated rapidly. Guests, beginning to feel the bite of the cold, accosted the hapless staff with demands.
"Here now, what in blazes is going on?"
"Damn it, I'm freezing to death. Is it safe to go back to the rooms or not?"
"I could've sworn I heard screaming outside just now."
The staff, however, knew no more about the situation than anyone else. They strained to remain as calm as their training dictated, but their anxiety was impossible to conceal whenever the clash of arms and the crack of gunfire echoed from outside.
"W-we're trying to find out ourselves at the moment."
"Perhaps... you could wait inside the baths? It's cold out here."
Fending off hounding guests was one thing. But then the Imperial Guards escorting the Crown Prince had also come charging in, demanding they summon a physician immediately, alert the Guard Corps, and lock down all exits. The staff were on the verge of losing their minds entirely.
Just as the chaos was rising to a fever pitch, a man burst out of the building's emergency door. The staff lit up with relief at the sight of him.
A hotel of this scale invariably had a central office that oversaw all operations. He was a man from that department.
People expected him to offer at least a brief explanation of the current situation. Instead, standing before the crowd, he did something no one could have anticipated.
"TSSSSAAAAAAK!"
His mouth gaped open to an impossible width, and from it tore a shriek that sounded nothing like a human noise. It was as though the whistle of wind through teeth had been amplified fifty times over.
A few onlookers fleetingly wondered if this might be some peculiar local dialect. But no matter how they listened, it did not seem to be the case.
None of the staff could understand a word he had said. Instead, they reacted violently, their whole bodies convulsing.
"Gyyiiggkk!"
"Khhyyuuukk!"
As one, they began to thrash and convulse as if seized by a collective fit. Their eyes rolled back, and foam bubbled at their lips.
"Wh-what's wrong with them?"
"H-hey! You there!"
Spectators scrambled backward, terrified it might be contagious. The sight, plucked straight from an urban legend, turned their faces ghastly pale.
The staff writhed for a long while, then suddenly stopped all at once, as if a switch had been flipped. Slowly, they righted themselves and began to wander through the area.
Those who met the eyes of any of them felt a wave of gooseflesh wash over their entire bodies. Their expressions, utterly devoid of any emotion, were like wooden marionettes.
Just then, a woman who had been at the back of the crowd and had not witnessed what had just happened shoved her way to the front.
"Here, you, the manager fellow. You owe us an explanation of what is going on, don't you think?"
Her attitude might have been brave, but it was far from wise. The moment she stepped forward, every staff member's gaze snapped to her in unison. The way their heads swiveled simultaneously was nothing short of grotesque.
"Wh-what are you all staring at?"
The answer the staff gave the startled woman was that same shriek the manager had just unleashed.
"TSSSSAAAAAAK!"
The staff member at the very front jabbed a finger at her. At once, the ones behind him swarmed forward and surrounded her on all sides.
"Ahhk! Wh-what do you think you're doing! Stop it!"
With blank, expressionless faces, the staff subdued her and began to drag her away.
It happened in a heartbeat. Her companions and everyone nearby were too frozen to react in time. They could only stand there, rigid, and watch until the staff vanished into the interior of the building.
Not long after the woman disappeared, the staff began to prowl the hot spring area again, their faces as empty as if nothing had happened.
"D-darling, let's just go back to our room."
"Damnation, they're possessed by some evil spirit..."
"Walk quietly."
"Yes. Don't provoke them for no reason."
Gripped by fear, the crowd began to creep toward the exit. Everyone was careful not to breathe too loudly.
That was when a group of young men was spotted approaching from the far side of the spring. They were chattering boisterously, utterly oblivious to the situation.
"Oh dear, and they're just..."
"What can be done about that."
"You stay put. Don't even think about getting involved."
The young men, tipsy with drink, did not notice the strange atmosphere at all. If anything, they shoved roughly past the staff members as if the employees were simply in their way.
Onlookers tensed, certain something terrible was about to happen. But the imagined scene never came. The staff showed no reaction to them whatsoever. Their faces remained blank as they walked on by.
The screams, when they came, erupted from an entirely different direction.
"Ahhhk! M-Mother!"
"Let go of my child!"
"Wh-why are they doing this?"
There, the staff were dragging a teenage boy out of a group that appeared to be his family.
"You bastards! Let him go this instant!"
The man who seemed to be the boy's father swung his cane and struck one of the staff members across the arm. A crack echoed, and the arm snapped outward at a wrong angle.
The man stared at the staff with a heated expression, sure he had landed a telling blow. But they showed no particular reaction. Even the injured one, with a face that betrayed no concern, let his broken arm dangle limply and simply used his body to block the path so his colleagues could drag the boy away.
"Wh-what in hell are these creatures?"
"Are they... cursed by some evil spirit?"
The inhuman sight of the staff silently carrying out their task, broken bodies be damned, froze the boy's family in place. Any will to resist violently evaporated. They could only watch helplessly as their child was hauled off.
"What's that ruckus over there?"
"Forget about it. It's none of our business."
"They probably got caught committing some crime or other."
"Maybe they were stealing women's underclothes under cover of the night bath?"
"Pwah-ha-ha!"
The group of young men traded puerile jokes as they sauntered casually right through the staff and off to somewhere else. The boy's family rushed into the building, pursuing the staff who had abducted him.
Once that commotion ended, the staff resumed their blank-eyed wandering about the area.
Witnesses to all of this felt both a wash of relief and a creeping unease. Whatever was happening, the staff were not simply out of their minds. They were acting under some command, searching for certain people and taking them away.
"Let's just leave. They're not bothering us, right?"
"He's right. Let's get out of here."
"We'll go back to the rooms and lock the doors."
"Alright, everyone, move quickly."
The guests at the exit barely took the time to dress, hurriedly throwing on robes before fleeing the baths.
The staff's forcible removal of guests repeated several more times. The people remaining in the springs would crane their necks at each nearby disturbance, but the moment they realized it had nothing to do with them, their interest died. Everyone assumed the hotel management had its reasons.
Wonderstein, who had dodged into a shadowy corner of the spring the instant the trouble began, and his two companions were able to identify a common thread among the guests being dragged away.
Young women with green hair. Teenage boys with grey hair. That alone made their targets obvious: Anais and the Crown Prince.
"Y-you were right, Troupe Leader. The Crown Prince's assassins and the Madosa have indeed joined hands..."
Anais shuddered, thinking of the people who had been overpowered and dragged off by the staff. If Wonderstein had not yanked her back when that manager first let out that shriek, she would have been standing right there, caught without a chance to flee.
His quick reaction owed much to his experience with the original story.
Florand, the first stage of TT3, was the only region in the entire Tril Trillo series that did not reek of bloodshed. For players who had started the game bracing for another nightmare realm, the peaceful tropical scenery had come as a refreshing shock.
But that peace was a lie. The entire place was already under the Voodoo Cult's influence. Whenever a citizen spotted someone suspicious, they would sound the alarm with that same unearthly shriek, and then every citizen on the street would swarm the person, subdue them, and drag them off to the basement of City Hall.
The moment a player, accustomed to safe zones in other games, tried to strike up a conversation with an NPC, only for every citizen within sight to stop what they were doing and turn to stare at them in sequence, as if the game had glitched out—that was a sequence every player remembered flinching at.
"It is a spell created by Madosa from three different Demon Gods, pooling their powers together. It can forcibly implant a general directive into a group's consciousness."
Wonderstein drew on the lore from the original game to explain the Voodoo Cult's magic to them.
"The group in this case, you mean the Golden Palace staff?"
"Yes. They have likely been preparing this for days. The one odd point is that you were also an employee yet remain unaffected. The enemy probably used that spell hoping you would walk right into their hands..."
Anais rubbed her chin, lost in thought for a moment, then answered.
"At lunch today, I submitted my resignation to the Lady Proprietress. I told her I'd leave after finishing the last card game. The moment that game ended earlier, I was no longer an employee here. That is probably why."
The explanation made sense. Sorcery was flexible in interpreting such intentions, contracts, and circumstances.
Just then, Nika let out a sharp hiss. A staff member was approaching the shaded rock outcropping where they were hiding.
He cast a single blank glance at their spot and kept walking. The darkness concealed the color of their hair well enough.
Fortunately, the staff were not actively hunting. They simply wandered, reacting only when they happened upon someone who fit the criteria.
"I don't need to hide, do I?"
Nika spoke once the staff member had left without incident, her thumping heart settling back down. The staff were searching for a grey-haired teenage boy. Dressed as a girl as she currently was, she did not match.
"You are not exempt. I cannot gauge their perceptive abilities. Worst case, they might not even bother to check between your legs to tell man from woman, don't you think? They might just drag you off regardless. Miss Nika, you do have—shall we say—a certain boyish air about you in many respects."
At his remark about her boyish appearance, Nika felt a flash of indignation for reasons she herself could not name. Yet she had no choice but to nod at his reasoning. That is, even if those creatures really did check between the legs to tell male from female, she would still have to nod. That method would trap her without hope of escape anyway.
Having summarized the situation, Wonderstein prepared to move.
"Do you know how many staff the Golden Palace employs?"
"Five thousand, to my knowledge."
"...Too many to deal with one by one. It seems I have no choice but to capture the ones who cast the spell."
Wonderstein checked his remaining Devoluts and readied himself for battle. Anais had told him about a place called the Central Control Room—the department that managed all hotel operations. The Madosa were likely holed up there.
"You intend to go yourself, Troupe Leader?"
"I have no other choice. I am likely the only person in this hotel who understands this sorcery. I must stop them before they do anything worse. If the Guard Corps storms in and a clash ensues, we could see mass casualties."
"Then should we simply keep hiding here?"
Wonderstein glanced over at a large boulder nearby. Around it, the Imperial Guards were clustered protectively around the unconscious Crown Prince, on strict watch.
The fact that they had not budged an inch from their post despite watching people being dragged away nearby showed they at least possessed the fundamentals expected of the Imperial Guard. They clearly intended to wait there until reinforcements arrived.
"You should get out of here. Assassins will be swarming this place soon. The enemy is likely Hunters... Staying here risks getting taken out by poison or a blind arrow. Being too conspicuous is also a problem. They may try to capture you as well."
"But how do we escape? And even if we do, won't hotel staff be roaming everywhere outside?"
"That is..."
Wonderstein had originally intended to alter the color of their hair. But he quickly abandoned the thought.
Their adversaries were Madosa of the Voodoo Cult. They almost certainly had Fanatics serving as their foot soldiers. And if they had come prepared to face him specifically, there was a high probability they possessed Starlight or even Milky Way.
Using Devolut to change their hair color, only for them to be captured and have the Devolut be tainted by the enemy, would create an even greater disaster. Hair was especially close to the brain. A single mistake could reduce them to imbeciles.
He had a safer method instead.
Tools that could make them appear as someone else entirely.