4. Ghost of the Cabaret (9)
4. Ghost of the Cabaret (9)
The demon troupe leader and the Ghost.
A chill tension hung between them.
Ella's voice broke the silence.
"Cough, cough—what?"
She looked at Wonderstein, struggling to catch her breath.
Her stare was pure disbelief.
"Who's calling who garbage?"
He swallowed a groan at her blunt rejoinder.
Fair enough. Who was I to call anyone trash?
After everything Wonderstein had done to her, she could have called him garbage a hundred times and every word of it would have been justified.
Still, he kept his composure.
Thanks to the Smiling Man, he managed a breezy smile and an answer.
"That man was tormenting you, Miss Ella."
"So you... lost your temper on my behalf?"
"Heh heh. Yes, that's right. Aren't you my deputy? What's wrong with a troupe leader losing his temper now and then?"
Ella's face curdled at his teasing tone.
You insufferable, smirking demon.
Just as she was about to snap back,
the Ghost pulled something no one expected.
"Graaagh!"
Shk.
He lunged forward—straight into Mantula's blade, arm first.
The arm with the dagger embedded in it.
His momentum did the rest. The limb came off clean.
Blood sprayed into the air. The severed arm flopped across the floor.
"Ghhk! Kehk! Heh!"
Derek clutched the stump and let out a groan and a laugh at the same time.
He'd freed himself from the 'mass' that blocked his Matter Permeation.
He lifted his head and grinned at Wonderstein and Ella through bloodshot eyes.
"Well, this is awkward. Looks like I'm free again, hmm?"
A dagger whistled toward him.
Ella's throw.
But Derek had already activated Matter Permeation.
The blade sliced through empty air.
He sneered at her.
"What's this, you bitch! Were you on his side the whole time? Don't tell me everything you told me about your past was a lie too? That monster wiped out your home village—that's what you said, wasn't it?"
Ella's expression twisted.
"Shut your mouth!"
The Ghost pointed at her like he'd caught her red-handed.
"Ha! So that part was true. And yet you run around doing circus tricks with him? Was this your big 'spiritual escape'? Huh? Your mentor's a cripple, your friends are dead, and you just look the other way! Hah! What an excuse! Hahaha!"
Something inside Ella's skull snapped.
He'd hit the one nerve she couldn't afford to have touched.
Wonderstein, her mortal enemy.
This warm, happy life she lived now.
Two irreconcilable things coexisting in one contradiction.
She'd thought she'd made her peace with it—two and a half years, a bargain with time. Then this bastard came along and ripped every wound open again.
She reversed her grip on the dagger and stepped forward.
Wonderstein put a hand on her shoulder to stop her.
She smacked it away.
"Don't touch me! Stop acting like we're friends. You damn... damn... demon."
She glared at him, cold.
"Miss Ella, he's—"
"Get lost. I'll handle him."
She climbed onto the mound of rubble.
Before her, the half-transparent Ghost smirked. The mask hid his face, but his lips alone were enough to taunt.
"Hah, and what are you gonna do, huh? Picked up a few tricks and now you think you can catch me? But this power—this is Kirkeus's blessing! It's Inspira!"
Ella's face went rigid.
"What?"
"That's right! He acknowledged me! My work—a legitimate form of art!"
The Ghost floated into the air.
With a flicker of Materialization, he yanked a switch on the wall.
A heavy thud, and something descended from the ceiling on chains.
Clank. The pulley stopped.
Shapes swayed before Ella's eyes.
"Wh-what is...?"
"My little birds."
Cages hung from the ends of the chains.
Each one just large enough to hold a person—generous, if you were feeling generous; cramped, if you weren't.
Inside every cage was a skeleton, long rotted.
From the frames and the sizes, every one of them had been a girl.
None older than their teens.
"Children I saved. And children who repaid that generosity by rejecting my affections—the insolent little things. A bird that tries to fly away? You clip its wings and shove it in a cage. And on the day the first one starved to death—that day, Kirkeus whispered to me. He said: Unleash your talent to your heart's content!"
Ella bit down on her lip.
Kirkeus. The god of wit, brilliance, and art—the deity every acrobat held sacred.
The idea that he would grant power to filth like this was an insult to the god himself.
Then Wonderstein's cold laugh cut through Derek's rant.
"Hah. A blessing? You think that's a blessing? Heh heh. Don't lie to yourself."
The Ghost rose into the air and wheeled on him.
"Wh-what? What the hell do you know?"
A smile ghosted across Wonderstein's lips.
What did I know?
Everything.
"What Kirkeus gave you was a curse. The curse of vanishing from this world. The punishment for anyone who dares to defile the stage and its actors. You're supposed to turn transparent, fade out, and eventually disappear. But you found a way to cling to existence."
The Ghost shuddered.
"Shut your mouth! What, are you Kirkeus's spokesman now?"
"I've seen you before. Saw you howling with hatred at this very curse. You were meant to vanish. But one element lets you barely hang on. Your ability isn't Matter Permeation—not exactly. Matter Permeation is just a mid-stage of the curse's progression. The power you developed is the opposite: temporarily breaking free of the curse just long enough to Materialize. And to do that, you need sulfur. Isn't that correct? That's why you've been hiding down here, in a basement that reeks of shit. Excrement decays, producing hydrogen sulfide. Absorb enough sulfur, and you can solidify yourself. Pathetic, really. The dregs that human beings eat, digest, and finally shit out—that's what holds your existence together. Sulfur is the only thing that can touch your phantom form. And your melted face? That happened because your second little bird threw sulfuric acid at you while trying to escape. Right?"
"H-how do you—how could you—"
The Ghost trembled like a man in the grip of a fever.
No need to see beneath the mask to know.
The face underneath it had gone as pale as the mask itself.
Wonderstein turned toward Ella and shouted.
"Miss Ella, now!"
The words had barely left his mouth before her hand flashed.
What she threw was the pouch of sulfur powder she'd lifted from Wonderstein's pocket.
He'd brought it along as a countermeasure against the Ghost. She'd slipped it free during that brief embrace.
The cloth burst open with a soft puff, and the powder scattered into the air.
The Ghost, caught in the cloud, shrieked.
"Gyaaaagh!"
A hiss, and embers sparked across his form.
Color bled back into the Ghost's body as he plummeted to the ground.
Ella let out a long, cathartic breath and watched him writhe on the floor in agony.
"Well done. And that performance fooled me—for a moment I genuinely believed you'd lost your temper and charged in. At least until I noticed my pocket was empty."
"I did lose my temper. And I meant every word about not pretending we're close, too. I just know you won't listen, so I've stopped bothering."
"Oh, you've learned well."
The demon troupe leader shot her a teasing grin.
Ella waved him off, too exhausted to keep reacting.
"Where'd the sulfur powder suddenly come from, anyway? You buy it from the Alchemy Guild?"
"The Alchemy Guild won't sell materials without clear credentials and qualifications."
"So you stole it?"
"No. I brought along someone with the right credentials. One of the qualifications on the list is 'musketeer.'"
"Musketeer? Ah, the mustache gentleman."
Muskets used black powder.
But musketeers didn't carry gunpowder around pre-mixed.
Moisture made it difficult to store, and it could explode if mishandled.
So they kept the raw ingredients separate and mixed the powder on the day they needed it.
The recipe called for saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur.
Yesterday afternoon, while Ella was at the theater, Wonderstein had talked Sir Porshu—Anais's bodyguard—into accompanying him to the Alchemy Guild in Rouge to purchase sulfur.
—Might I ask what it's for?
Knowing the man's personality and tastes made him easy to befriend.
But even someone as casual as Sir Porshu wasn't going to source a substance like sulfur without asking what it was for.
"I told him I was making fireworks."
"Plausible."
Wonderstein and Ella approached the Ghost.
His clothes were riddled with holes, and the skin beneath was seared an angry red. He was still twisting and groaning—the sulfur clinging to his body hadn't been shaken off yet.
"Now what?"
"We hand him over to the police."
He hesitated at her answer.
The quest directive was clear: eliminate the Ghost.
But Ella seemed unwilling to go that far, even for a monster like this.
What am I agonizing over?
He turned the question on himself.
He'd already made two mistakes today because of her.
First, failing to stop the Ghost on the roof of the Rose Windmill. Second, letting his attention drift to her and giving the Ghost an opening to sever his own arm and escape.
Both were the result of deviating from the quest walkthrough—acting not as Wonderstein the character, but on his own impulses.
Wonderstein wouldn't have cared who Ella kissed.
Wonderstein wouldn't have cursed someone out just because she'd taken a few hits.
The situation had somehow worked out this time. But if his emotions took over at a critical juncture again and caused him to fail? If a quest he absolutely had to complete slipped through his fingers?
Two outcomes awaited him.
Death, or waking up in his real body—limbless, a torso on a bed.
He wanted neither.
Time to make a firm decision about his approach.
"Heh heh. I'm sorry, Miss Ella."
"What?"
Shunk.
Mantula's blade punched through the Ghost's shoulder.
"Guhk—hk!"
Another strike. Then another.
Shunk. Shunk. Shunk. Shunk.
Stomach. Chest. Thigh. Arm.
And then—
Shunk.
The head.
"Ghhh..."
The Ghost's body slumped backward with a deflating wheeze.
Dead. No question.
[Sub Quest - "Ghost of the Cabaret" completed. Reward: "Ghost's Mask" granted.]
A silver mask shimmered in the notification window.
Reaching out to take it felt like it would pull the thing straight into reality.
He closed the window and decided to postpone retrieving the mask.
No rush.
Wonderstein lifted the Ghost's impaled corpse on the blade and pitched it into the water.
It struck with a splash, and the current slowly caught the body, dragging it away into the darkness.
"Ah."
Ella exhaled, watching the direction the body had vanished.
"Heh heh. Too shocking?"
"It's... not that extreme. Mild, compared to everything else you've done. And he wasn't someone worth pitying."
"Is that so? Good."
Ella fixed him with a stare for a moment, then walked past him toward the boat.
"I'm just relieved."
"Heh heh. About what?"
"That you're still someone I can hate."
Wonderstein tilted his head.
He'd arrived too late to hear the conversation she'd had with the Ghost.
Why would that be a relief?
He followed after her, puzzling it over.