5. Mage Maya (2)
5. Mage Maya (2)
The police of Rouge were known for their impeccable courtesy toward tourists.
They not only escorted hotel guests to their lodgings but, on request, thought nothing of standing guard through the night.
But even their seemingly bottomless goodwill had scraped bedrock by now.
Incident after incident, day after day.
A few laughable, a few serious.
Every day the same chaos with a fresh coat of paint.
A lion loose from its cage, a clown poking his face out of a toilet, a department head suspended in midair, a crushed iron cage, a unicycle pedaling itself around, a banana peel guaranteed to trip you the moment you set foot on it—that sort of thing.
Trouble flared across every corner of the city without pause.
Until now, most problems could be settled with a club.
Clubs had an excellent corrective effect on irrational behavior.
These last few days, however, the officers had arrived at an unsettling realization.
The irrationality they were used to handling fell comfortably inside the bounds of the rational.
Drunk sailors wrecking a bar, dine-and-dashers, pickpockets, brawling gangs—that sort of thing.
Handling those required no deep thought.
The station even kept detailed guidelines for them.
But nobody knew how to swing a club at the irrationalities unfolding right now.
A tiger escaped from its cage, a clown waggling his rear end out of a pot, a department head dangling in empty air, a crushed wagon wheel, a ball rolling around on its own, an apple that went bang! the moment you grabbed it—
A single incident like that would normally supply the station with a solid month of gossip, and they were detonating nonstop, day after day.
"No need to shove so hard!"
"I'd heard Rouge police were courteous—not what I'm seeing!"
"I was a court jester for the Kiev Imperial Court, you know!"
Watching yet another batch of acrobats march in wearing handcuffs, the mounted police sergeant felt certain the current mayor—the one who'd pushed to host the Circus Grand Prix—had just lost a great many officers' votes for next year's election.
"I said stop slipping out of your cuffs!"
"Heh-heh, what can I do when they keep sliding off?"
A scuffle broke out as they entered the holding cell.
One acrobat's cuffs kept slipping off his wrists. Nothing was wrong with the cuffs.
The acrobat's hands simply stretched like rubber and kept leaking through the gaps.
The officers watching let out a sigh.
A month ago, everyone would have laughed and called it a funny sight.
They'd long since lost that kind of composure.
"A contortionist, eh."
"Pretty advanced level."
"Looks like he's even unlocked Inspira."
"Is it a bone-softening ability?"
The other acrobats murmured among themselves, nodding as they watched.
To the officers, the whole situation was infuriating.
'Don't talk about it like it's just another day on the job.'
The sergeant badly wanted to scream at them.
But he was the one who had to get everything under control.
He approached the old man curled up asleep on a chair in the corner.
"Father. I believe we need your assistance."
"Nngh. More of them?"
The white-haired priest blinked himself awake and rose.
He'd been a wrinkled old man with white hair to begin with, but over the last few days both the white hair and the wrinkles seemed to have multiplied.
He straightened his cassock and approached the contortionist, who was still joking with the officers.
"Whoa, what's this now?"
The priest merely fixed him with a quiet stare, not a word in reply.
I smell a Demon God.
So it is Inspira.
The priest closed his eyes and began to recite a prayer.
A few devout officers standing nearby joined in.
The man playing around with the cuffs realized something was going badly wrong.
"E-excuse me, old-timer—ah, F-Father? Don't do that! Look! I'll put the cuffs on properly!"
He hurriedly shoved his hands back into the cuffs.
The priest did not stop reciting.
"H-hey, listen!"
The power wielded by priests of the Holy Church was well known across the world.
The other acrobats backed away with the sound of air hissing from a balloon.
When the prayer ended, a silver cross floated before the priest.
A cross that radiated sanctity.
Its long end was sharpened to a point.
The overall shape resembled a stake.
"A Sacred Stake!"
Several acrobats screamed at the sight of the silver cross.
Some shrank back, trembling, trying to put distance between themselves and it.
The contortionist, nose-to-nose with the thing, chattered his teeth.
"No! Father, I'm sorry! P-please, anything but that!"
Despite the man's pleading, the priest swung his hand with an indifferent expression.
The silver cross flew at neither a fast nor a slow speed and pierced the man's shoulder.
"Aaargh!"
A shock like being struck by a solid club slammed through his shoulder.
No blood poured. No wound appeared.
The Sacred Stake was no true stake with real physical force, after all.
But the man who'd been struck would have preferred a real one.
He felt his hand, which had been squirming free of the cuffs, stiffen into rigidity.
The rubbery sensation vanished. His hand had become an ordinary hand.
"Th-the link's been severed!"
The man screamed.
His Inspira—his blessing from Kirkeus—was gone!
The other acrobats buzzed with agitation.
"So the rumors were true."
"First time I've seen someone get staked."
"Did he really lose his Inspira?"
"Isn't this too much?"
"Right. What's he done that's so awful?"
True, they'd caused trouble.
But the kind that got you locked up a few days, then fined—nothing more.
Yet here they were calling in a Holy Church priest to strip their faith as if this were the Inquisition.
Shock, fear, humiliation.
An unusual hostility spread among the acrobats.
Sensing the shift, the sergeant quickly stepped in front of them.
"Your Inspira hasn't vanished. You simply can't use it for a few days."
At the sergeant's words, the weeping man looked up at the priest.
"I-is that true?"
"It is. An archbishop or an inquisitor, if they set their mind to it, can obliterate it completely. I lack that capacity. Consider it merely a temporary block for now."
"Ohhh!"
The man sprang up and performed a full flip on the spot.
The silver stake embedded in his shoulder didn't seem to hinder him in the slightest.
It had no physical force.
"Glory to Kirkeus!"
The man's cry sparked a roar from the acrobats inside and outside the holding cell.
The old priest withdrew, his expression sour.
Kirkeus, Kirkeus, Kirkeus.
Over the past few days he'd heard the name enough to grow calluses on his ears.
Why were they all so fond of a minor god like that?
Even if the fellow did mortals little real harm, he was still nothing more than one of the Demon Gods dwelling in the Abyss.
No matter how many worshippers a Demon God might gather, it remained helpless before the power of the Holy Church, which rejected the Abyss's influence outright.
Fortifying his faith once more, the old priest lay back down with a tired look.
The sergeant thanked him and rose to his feet.
"Where are you off to?"
"The Rose Windmill. Bwallet contacted me—says he's got something to sort out quietly."
"Ah, is that right? More clown trouble, I'd wager. They've got it rough over there too. A Grand Prix, on top of everything—can this city even manage...."
"Haha, we'll all have to manage together."
The sergeant gathered up the materials he'd assembled in advance.
Records of teenage girls who had gone missing over the past few years.
***
Triplets with three heads on one body—the Trimery.
Counting from the left, their names were Hansten, Dunedol, and Sebram.
The three didn't consider themselves to have any hierarchy among them, but on official records they'd ended up as first, second, and third.
"I've got a question."
"What?"
"You guys go from the left—one, two, three—so it's easy to count. But you three aren't like that. Why didn't you go one, two, three from the right?"
Umon occasionally asked completely out-of-the-blue questions.
The kind of sincere curiosity a ten-year-old could muster.
Sebram, the third, looked at him with a warm smile.
"Usually, people don't name themselves before they're born. The people who look at us do the naming."
"Oh."
Umon scratched the back of his head.
Now that he thought about it, that was obvious.
Just then, the Deputy Leader appeared, walking back from seeing guests off at the hotel entrance.
Wearing faintly awkward expressions, the triplets each spoke in a deflated voice—one after the other.
"I'll have a look around elsewhere, thank you."
"I think the direction of my acrobatics is rather different from yours."
"I'll need to consult with my colleagues."
The troupe members burst out laughing.
Lines they'd heard over and over the last few days.
As if they'd all bought their dialogue in bulk, every single one said more or less the same thing.
Having caught the three voices from a distance, Ella wore an exasperated smile too.
"It's a tie this time. One to one to one."
Over the past few days, the Wonderstein Circus Troupe had been laboring to bring in a new member.
Leader and Deputy Leader had been roaming the streets, searching for decent-looking acrobats.
Getting them to the hotel was easy.
They had the pull of Bergson Trading Company's sponsorship, after all.
But the acrobats they summoned, the moment they checked the state of the troupe members, saw their expressions shift entirely.
Then they reeled off excuses like the ones above and never returned.
By now even the members greeting these guests were starting to get irritated.
Uneasy stares.
Disdainful looks.
Involuntary sighs.
The acrobats' attitude toward them was uniformly consistent.
Faces that said: How dare you ever think of stepping on stage among things like these?
"Still, I thought these guys might be different."
"Same here. They didn't look openly disappointed, so I had some hope...."
"The leader helped the three of them, remember? Guess they were just being polite about that."
The grumbling started, then gradually slid into self-blame and self-deprecation.
"I'm starting to get scared."
"How badly are people going to tear us apart behind our backs when we enter the competition...?"
"Can we even pull this off? There's no proper acrobat besides Ella."
"We're just going to get insulted."
Ella's expression slowly hardened as she watched the troupe members.
Just as she was about to press them, Yurakne stepped forward first.
"It's all right. Having more people doesn't mean you win, does it? Ella said so herself—if we can just execute one hundred percent of the assignments we've been given, even winning isn't a fantasy. We just need to practice harder among ourselves and show a good result. Our skills really have shot up over the last two weeks. Isn't that right?"
At Yurakne's words, everyone nodded.
Their abilities truly had improved beyond all comparison.
Just as Ella had promised, the tricks they were learning fit their physical traits uncannily well.
Basic movements that were supposed to take months at a minimum—they'd all but polished them off the day before yesterday.
They had reason to be proud.
"Fine. Let those guys go perform on street corners their whole lives."
"That's right. Let's enter the Circus Grand Prix and show them what we can do."
Fighting spirit kindled among the members.
Yurakne glanced back at Ella and smiled.
Ella returned a sheepish smile and dipped her head slightly in thanks.
"If Yura weren't here, I almost went off on them again."
"Heh, I stepped in first because I'm afraid of exactly that."
Yura threw her a playful side-eye, and Ella burst out laughing.
"Speaking of which, where did the Troupe Leader go?"
"The square again. He says he's looking for other acrobats. I'm about ready to give up, myself."
Ella gazed toward the square and let out a small sigh.
She had known it wouldn't be easy, but she hadn't imagined it would give them this much grief.
The Monster Circus.
Prejudice against it ran deep among acrobats.