5. Mage Maya (4)
5. Mage Maya (4)
The sunset spilled its failing light below the horizon.
In the center of the village, a pyre of bundled straw stood tall.
They set it ablaze.
The first curl of smoke was the signal, and the festival began.
Voices lifted in song to the accordion's melody. Shoulders swayed to the beat of drums.
Amid the roaring flames, the scarecrow that had toiled all year bowed its head and crumpled into the fire.
Just as the whole village had drunk deep of the harvest festival's fervor—
a heavy shadow crept over the hill at the village's edge.
Someone shouted. Heads turned. Eyes followed his pointing finger skyward.
A colossal island blotted out the darkening heavens.
Upon it, firecrackers burst without pause, and an endless roar of cheers spilled down from above.
Some kind of raucous festival was underway.
There was no chance anyone up there could see them, but the villagers still waved their arms toward the Sky City with all their might.
May you enjoy yourselves as much as we do!
In a corner of the village, a crow picking at a rotten pumpkin lifted its head at the noise.
It stared up at the sky with curious eyes.
An island floating in the sky.
What could be up there?
The lights and sounds leaking from it lured it closer.
The crow spread its wings and took flight.
Wingbeat by wingbeat, it drew nearer to the island.
Buildings emerged through the gaps in the clouds.
The sight of a city adrift in the sky taught even a mere beast what wonder felt like. The brilliant decorations draped across every corner of the city stirred its blood.
Something incredible is going on up there!
The crow pressed on toward the city, drunk on anticipation.
Yet a nagging unease began to creep in.
The sounds the people were making—
they were nothing like the voices rising from the village below.
They were thick with terror and agony.
—Aaaagh! Get away! Stay back!
—Hiiik!
—Help me, please, somebody, he— glk! Gurk!
Screams chased each other down every street.
Blood and flesh spilled through every alley.
The whole city was a slaughterhouse.
The killers were mostly clowns and acrobats in gaudy face paint.
Limbs that stretched beyond human proportion. Needle-sharp teeth. Tongues that lashed too long. Spines erupting from backs. They impaled, gouged, tore, and flayed.
None of them were human anymore.
—Heheheh! Behold! My finest trick!
—An offering for the Demon God!
—Ladies and gentlemen! Won't you stay for the show?
A kind of rapture burned in their eyes as they killed and tortured — an exaltation, an ecstatic high.
The crow beat its wings faster.
Every feather might have shaken loose from sheer shock.
Madness. Everything here had gone utterly mad.
Lunacy bled from the city itself.
One wrong move and it would be swallowed up, too.
A column of flame erupted with a whump.
A firework whistled past its face.
Gunshots cracked at intervals. Acrid gunpowder haze stung its eyes and blurred its path.
So it dodged, and dodged again, and kept dodging — until it found itself at the city's heart.
There, the crow witnessed something it never expected.
In the very center of this chaotic hellscape, one man radiated utter tranquility.
He had golden hair that brushed his shoulders, a black silk top hat, a black suit, a black cape.
Standing atop a spire, gazing down over the city, his smile was beautiful.
The crow descended slowly and alighted before him.
No hostility lurked in the eyes that regarded it.
If anything, he seemed pleased.
The crow relaxed.
At last — the only sane human being in this place.
He approached.
His hand settled gently around the crow's body.
His mouth opened.
Wide.
Wider.
The jaw unhinged past his cheeks, split all the way to the back of his neck.
Inside writhed dozens of tongues bristling with spines and serrated teeth, coiled like a nest of snakes.
Horror filled the crow's eyes.
But it could not move.
The hand that held it had already transformed — fingers now beast-like talons hooked like gaffs, crushing its body.
And so the crow's head vanished into that maw.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch.
As flesh tore and bone splintered, the game's title blazed across the screen.
Tril Trillo.
The camera retraced the crow's flight back through the city.
Maybe it, too, wanted to put as much distance as possible between itself and The Smiling Man — its pace quickened with every passing second. It swept over alleys drenched in carnage as the names of the company, director, investors, and developers flickered past. The camera finally halted at the city's edge.
Amid the soldiers hurling spears at the monsters, one towering man commanded the line, swinging shield and blade.
The camera locked onto him.
From here, the game began.
Players learned to control Knight Ivan — cutting down monsters, rescuing civilians. They crashed through weak walls with his brute-force shoves, cleared wreckage with his strength, pushed forward. At last, he arrived at the scene of a massacre in progress.
A swarm of creatures beat bat-like wings overhead, spitting down at the crowd. Wherever the spit struck, skin seared and shrieks tore the air.
Knight Ivan had no way to strike airborne enemies.
Then the camera shifted.
A woman crouched low on a rooftop, hood drawn, surveying the chaos.
Her eyes fell on Knight Ivan and she tilted her head, puzzled.
Behind her, a blade-wielding monster acrobat crept closer, step by silent step.
Without so much as a glance back — as if she had eyes in the back of her skull — she loosed an arrow. It drilled through the creature's forehead and sent it plummeting off the roof. The winged monsters' attention snapped toward her.
The thief clicked her tongue, straightened up on the rooftop, and readied herself for a fight.
Now players took control of Thief Chiara. She shot down the winged creatures with her bow, and whenever corrosive spit ate through a roof beneath her feet, a double-jump carried her to the next building. When her quiver ran low, she scavenged arrows from fallen soldiers' bodies.
With the creatures cleared, Knight Ivan called out his thanks.
The two of them moved together after that.
Every obstacle ahead demanded a careful swap between knight and thief as they pushed onward.
But the bridge to the neighboring island had already burned and collapsed. The way was severed.
The island's levitation failed by degrees. It was falling.
The knight and the thief argued.
The thief insisted they should have headed straight to the docks and fled by airship. The knight fired back that there were still people on the other islands who needed help — how could they abandon them?
Just then, the camera dipped into a nearby well.
Inside sat a white-haired mage, eyes closed.
As if stirred by the sound of the knight and thief quarreling, she rubbed her eyes and woke. Her hand found the back of her head. It came away smeared with blood. She had fallen into the well while fleeing the monsters' rampage.
The player could now command the mage.
Her specialty — "Barrier" — conjured rigid polyhedrons. Click points, draw edges, and a solid barrier formed.
Stack blocks inside the well to create a stairway, climb out, and reunite with the knight and thief.
Shape the mage's barrier into a long plank-like polyhedron, span the gap, and cross to the next island.
The moment they reached the far side, the island behind them plunged from the sky.
Knight, thief, mage.
The three of them let out long breaths of relief and surveyed the city's heart.
The Sky City was suffocating beneath flame and screaming.
And so the Prologue Stage of TT1 ended, and the main story's curtain rose.
I stared at the white-haired girl, lost in thought.
Her appearance wasn't much different from the Maya I knew. But compared to the poised, dignified figure she would become in the future, something bashful lingered around her now — a fleeting hesitation.
I only noticed it because I'd watched Maya across the entire series.
Someone seeing her for the first time couldn't possibly read any emotion at all on her face.
Maya always wore an expression carved from ice.
That was why, for Allen and Joe's recruitment condition, only the Knight's and Thief's Laugh emotes counted. If the player made Maya use the Laugh emote, the corners of her mouth barely lifted. For better or worse, she was a doll of a girl.
She was probably Ella's age.
According to the lore, she had only recently become an adult by the time TT1 began.
Maya had joined the Grand Prix as a troupe employee and gotten swept up in the events of the first game.
She originally came from a renowned mage lineage in Castille.
She joined a circus for the sake of her magical training — specifically, the Silver Screen Circus, a troupe famous for wielding Illusion Magic with unmatched finesse.
The knight had been conscripted for Sky City security duty; the thief had come looking for things to steal. Maya alone was directly tied to the Circus Grand Prix.
That was why, out of the three heroes, I figured I was most likely to run into her.
I never expected to see her this soon, though.
The Grand Prix preliminaries were held simultaneously at six venues across the world. To qualify for the finals, you had to complete trials at all six within two years, but every troupe moved according to its own schedule. I thought there was no way our paths would cross.
Yet here we were — in the very first city on the circuit, Rouge.
And she wasn't even part of the Silver Screen Circus right now.
The opening ceremony was only two weeks away.
In the games, she'd described the Silver Screen members as comrades she'd been with for two and a half years. Did that mean she was about to be recruited by them right here, at this moment?
Greed pricked at me.
What if I took her for myself?
It would solve the Illusion Magic problem in one stroke.
But would she even consider joining our troupe?
The dozens of acrobats who'd slipped through my fingers over the past few days flashed through my mind.
Her reaction wouldn't be any different from theirs.
Then light bloomed from her hands.
Her pale skin and white hair shimmered, reflecting every hue the Illusion Magic cast off. The crowd murmured in awe at the otherworldly air her appearance lent her.
I swallowed.
In the lore, she was the greatest prodigy her family had produced in generations.
Her magic had to be extraordinary.
In the game, it had been crudely abstracted as stacking polygons. But here, what would it actually look like?
A burst of light signaled that her calculations were complete. The spell began to coalesce into a concrete form.
A brown, lumpy body.
Brown, lumpy legs.
Brown, lumpy... wait — what was this?
The kindest description was a kindergarten craft project: something started in brown clay and hastily abandoned midway. A less generous one was a severely botched bread loaf.
But mercifully, it made a sound — and supplied the answer for us.
"Meow."
That was... a cat?
No one else noticed, but the expression that flickered across her face was unmistakably embarrassment.