14. Melting Point (38)
14. Melting Point (38)
The four searched every corner of the garden, but the two they sought were nowhere to be found. They stopped several people to ask, but no one had seen them.
"Could the Tracking Scent be wrong?"
"Impossible. Intelligence Department squirrels are drilled in reflexive conditioning for Tracking Scent to the point where they're practically machines."
"Or have they already been dragged off by the staff?"
"But the squirrel determined this was where the scent was strongest. If His Highness had been taken elsewhere, it would have led us there."
Natasha said this while casually stroking the head of the dog right in front of her. It was the instinctive motion of someone trying to calm their nerves.
But in another sense, it was also the manifestation of an unconscious desire that had slipped past the perception distortion. Her wish to find her lord had guided her hand toward him. Tragically, her rational mind failed to register that the dog she was now petting was, in fact, her lord himself.
"Good boy. There we go."
Natasha not only stroked his back but also gave his hindquarters a few pats. The dog, delighted by her touch, wagged his tail in greeting.
"Pant-pant."
Those who wore the name tags were immune to one another's perception distortion. Anais could watch, in vivid clarity, as Nika desperately waggled her rear end at her own attendant.
From what she knew, Nika was the daughter of a high-ranking noble house. Her bearing alone made that unmistakable. And now here she was, stark naked, sticking out her tongue and fawning at her own retainer.
'Did I look like that just now, too?'
The mortifying emotions she had been too paralyzed to fully process while under mortal threat now crashed over her all at once.
As the four continued their stalled search, the butler Bartel suddenly spotted someone in the crowd and shouted.
"You!"
Where he pointed stood an old man of imposing stature, his snowy beard cascading to his chest like a Taoist immortal. Bartel knew exactly who he was. It was Duke Shtani, the same man who had hired Anais as a go teacher days earlier.
"You know me?"
"You hired my young lady—no, my grandniece."
"Hm. Now that you mention it, Miss Anya did say she lived with an elderly relative... So that would be you, I take it?"
Duke Shtani, despite Bartel pointing an accusatory finger at him, showed no offense and replied with a genial laugh. Many were taken in by the duke's outward appearance of a detached sage who had transcended worldly concerns. But Bartel knew from his mistress just what a perverse and treacherous old man he truly was.
"Where has Anya gone? You were clearly with her!"
"I wouldn't know about that. We merely arranged three hours of go each day, nothing more..."
Duke Shtani feigned ignorance with an oily grin. But the moment he caught sight of Dmitri standing behind Bartel, sword at his hip and eyes fixed on him, he hastily came clean.
"My go teacher and her two opponents were summoned by His Highness and went to the hot spring."
"His Highness? You don't mean Crown Prince Nikolai?"
While Bartel was startled by the word 'Highness,' Dmitri's attention had fixed on the words preceding it.
"What did those two opponents look like?"
"A blond man in his twenties and a gray-haired teenage girl."
"The hot spring...?"
"That would be the Heavenly Bath."
Carlson recalled the intelligence that the Crown Prince's party had rented a section of the Heavenly Bath this evening and relayed it to them.
Natasha bit her lip. If he had gone there, she understood why the squirrel hadn't led her that way. The Tracking Scent would have been washed away by the spring water. Though why the residual scent remained strongest here in the garden was a mystery...
'Could His Highness really be at Koka's debauched play party... No, wait! The assassins were definitely headed that way too...'
Natasha and Dmitri's eyes met. Until now, they had operated under the assumption that the assassins did not know Nika's face. That had allowed them to hold onto a cautious optimism that he would be unharmed. But if he were to stumble right into the scene of the assassination?
"We must hurry! There's likely already a battle underway there!"
As if in answer to Natasha's cry, a volley of gunshots rang out in the distance. Bartel shot forward. Carlson moved up beside him.
"You don't need to do any more than you already have."
At the old butler's words, the old bath attendant replied with a deadpan expression.
"That's my workplace. I'm just going to teach a lesson to anyone who climbs into the bath without showering first."
Dmitri welcomed the two men's added strength. From the assassins they had clashed with on the way here, he already knew these two elders were no ordinary fighters.
The four of them, prepared to risk their lives, strode out of the garden. But they did not know. They had no idea that the two people they sought were right beside them.
Anais clawed at the dirt until she nearly broke her nails. Nika clenched her teeth so hard something cracked.
The four people they could call their own were walking straight into a battlefield. Their opponents: an unknown number of assassins and the thousands of staff under their control.
Both of them wanted to stop them. Wanted to cling to them and scream that they were right here, please don't go. But they could not move.
If they tried to force the matter, the perception impairment would shatter instantly. Every person here would remember who those dogs had been just moments ago, urinating in front of them. They would remember everything they had done.
These devices did not deceive the senses—they deceived perception alone. The moment the distortion broke, there was a high probability that all prior memories would peel away in a chain reaction.
The two dogs assumed an awkward, half-lurching stance as if they meant to follow. But before they could take more than a few steps, the four had vanished from sight in an instant. Their urgency alone conveyed how deeply they cherished the two they sought.
Anais and Nika were crushed by a sense of self-loathing unlike anything they had ever known. The earlier actions could be justified as a matter of survival.
This was not. Their lives had not been in danger. They could have stopped them if they had only been willing to swallow their pride. And they had failed to do so.
That single moment of hesitation had sent them out of reach. Toward a battlefield that almost certainly meant death.
For Nika, experience at the heart of politics had accustomed her to choices like this. Standing by while loyal people were sacrificed for cause and expediency.
But Anais had no such preparation. She had held the chairmanship for only three years, and even the dirty work had always fallen to Pierre, the vice-chairman until now.
"They'll be all right. The assassins are after the Crown Prince we saw earlier. They're just going to search for us. Everyone will come back safely. It was right that we didn't step forward."
Nika tried to comfort her, but Anais did not hear him. Whether his reasoning was correct did not matter. She could not forgive herself for having made that judgment so reflexively.
That loyal butler...
Who had followed her here at the risk of his life... The only one who had believed in her...
She had called him family...
Had all of that been just words?
Had she truly considered him nothing more than hired help?
When it truly mattered, she was no different from every other coward...
I... I...
She heard the sound of something that had been holding her up crumbling away.
***
Names follow trends, from era to era and region to region. Twenty-five years ago, in the south of Florand, the name most commonly given to baby boys was "Mario."
But even so, it was a remarkable coincidence that three twenty-five-year-old Madosa from Florand, all named Mario, had ended up in the Voodoo Cult.
Mario Dunellon.
Mario Montura.
Mario Albercle.
The three Marios shared not only their name, age, and hometown but also their backgrounds and upbringing. All three were second sons of prominent local families in Florand, raised without want, but were so bored by country life that they took up mado as a diversion.
They had become Madosa merely to flirt with women, prank their servants, and make gambling more entertaining. Yet the three Demon Gods they had contracted with found their tastes highly agreeable. After performing only a few rites, they had distinguished themselves as Madosa and gained entry into the Voodoo Cult.
Within the cult, people called them collectively the Mario Three Brothers.
As Madosa, they were of only middling ability, but they held a fairly high rank within the Voodoo Cult, treated as just one step below Apostle. Their status as scions of influential Florand families played a major part.
The name Mario Three Brothers had been given to them within the cult as a half-mocking remark. The path of mado was typically taken by those cast out from mainstream society; the sight of rich young masters strutting about was insufferable.
Yet the three of them liked the nickname. Their personalities, tastes, and ways of thinking were all alike. They got along so well they genuinely considered each other brothers.
It was under such circumstances that a dark magic combining the Authorities of their three Demon Gods had been born. The Hive Mind—the spell they had used to seize control of the hotel staff's chain of command—was one such collaborative creation.
They had subdued the hotel's manager and used his body, his seal, and a box containing five thousand employment contracts as the medium to activate the spell. Their objective was to abduct Anais Bergson before she fell into Wonderstein's hands. They had also exaggerated the Crown Prince assassination plot to conceal that goal.
But even more than an hour after the spell was cast, their target had not fallen into their grasp. Worse still, the Cult Leader they had hoped to avoid had noticed their presence and was coming straight for them.
"What went wrong?"
"The Hive Mind has never been revealed to anyone..."
"He's coming this way as if he knows everything!"
"We underestimated the Cult Leader."
Wonderstein was now heading straight for the Central Control Room. They had sent hundreds of staff to stop him and even borrowed the assassins' strength, but all had been subdued at his hands.
"What do we do? Run?"
"If we return empty-handed, the Vice Cult Leader will have our heads."
"Right. We still have time. The Fanatics are guarding the way."
The Fanatics were Voodoo Cult soldiers whose bodies had been injected with Devolut and engineered for combat. Their physical abilities were several times those of an ordinary person, and each came equipped with one or two specialized techniques. Given their physical prowess and resistance to Devolut, they should be able to stall the Cult Leader sufficiently.
"Didn't they say the target was working as a staff member here?"
"She should have been caught in the Hive Mind..."
"Could it be that the Cult Leader's side got to her first..."
At that moment, with a thunderous crash, one wall of the Central Control Room blew inward. The Mario Three Brothers shrieked and toppled backward.
A gigantic arm, the size of a man, crashed down onto the desk where they had been gathered—it was unmistakably from the Fanatic who had boasted the Trait known as the "Invincible Right Arm," its pink muscle fibers still twitching.
"Well, what do we have here? Some familiar faces."
A handsome blond man in a black suit and black cloak emerged from the billowing dust cloud. In his hand he held an unconscious Fanatic, one arm entirely torn off, foaming at the mouth.
"The Mario Three Brothers."
Looking at the three who served as the stage boss of TT3's first chapter in Florand, Wonderstein smiled coldly.