6. The Reversal Opening Ceremony (17)
6. The Reversal Opening Ceremony (17)
The storm Anais had unleashed threw the hall into an uproar.
—So the Viscountess really was infatuated with that man?
—Good heavens. Even so, what was she thinking? The man's an unregistered person and a murder suspect.
—She's lost her mind completely. Tsk, tsk. The Bergson Trading Company's finished.
The commotion showed no sign of dying down as time passed.
That was how shocking her declaration to serve as defense counsel had been.
Finally losing patience, the judge struck his bench with his wooden gavel.
Bang! Bang!
The ebony wood's clear ring sliced sharply through the crowd.
"Order! Order!"
Only after he'd shouted it several more times did the disturbance finally subside.
The presiding judge himself had been considerably shaken when Viscountess Bergson stepped forward as defense counsel, but with the composure befitting a judge of many years' experience, he swiftly regained command of the situation.
Prosecution, defendant, defense counsel.
All the elements of a trial were now in place.
He was just about to declare the court in session when Baron Dosville raised a hand and cut him off.
The baron stepped forward wearing his characteristic oily smirk.
His eyes glinted with the light of anticipated victory.
"This is unexpected. The Viscountess herself as defense counsel. You must be quite anxious. Worried your beloved's neck might end up on the block?"
Winning or losing the trial no longer mattered to him.
Catching the culprit had never been the aim here—it was about smearing the opponent's honor.
How she answered here could decide the whole contest in a single stroke.
Every gaze in the room converged on Anais.
Even the judge himself stared at her, the words he'd been about to speak momentarily forgotten.
Anais composed herself with a steady breath.
She cast a leisurely smile around the assembly.
"Heh. Word on the street does seem to say so. This rumor that I've fallen for Troupe Leader Wonderstein."
She shook her head as though the whole idea were preposterous.
"I'd meant to announce this after the opening ceremony, but given the circumstances, I'll say it now."
Her voice was calm, stripped clean of emotion.
"The rumors all grew from a misunderstanding. Troupe Leader Wonderstein and I are nothing to each other."
At that, Anais flicked the briefest of glances toward the defendant's chair.
Wonderstein returned a wry smile.
Baron Dosville spread his arms in theatrical disbelief.
"So you've come before this court for a man who is nothing to you? A vagrant murder suspect, no less? I'm impressed! With judgment like that, how on earth do you run a trading company...?"
Anais ignored him as though his words were beneath answering and delivered what she had prepared.
"I assume you've all heard of the incurable illness I've long suffered."
The moment she mentioned her illness, many spectators nodded.
Those unfamiliar whispered explanations to their neighbors.
She waited a moment for the murmur to subside, then continued.
"Troupe Leader Frank Wonderstein cured me. The disease that every doctor had declared incurable. I extended my patronage in gratitude."
At this declaration, the hall buzzed again like a kicked beehive.
—He cured an incurable disease?
—A mere circus magician?
—That was why she sponsored an obscure troupe?
The courtroom fell into disorder nearly as great as before.
This time, however, the judge had no need to swing his gavel.
When Anais opened her mouth again, everyone stopped talking and fixed their attention on her.
"That is why I am serving as defense counsel. My benefactor's life hangs by a thread—how could I stand idly by? I came forward for the honor of the nobility."
At her words, Marquis Mustang clenched a hidden fist.
Her volunteering as defense counsel should have been a blow to noble prestige.
Yet in an instant, the act had become the epitome of noble conduct.
The crowd nodded, as though persuaded.
—Well, when your life's benefactor is in danger...
—To sit back and posture about dignity and reputation would be the real disgrace.
Had Baron Dosville not thrown down the 'summary execution' clause to rattle her, onlookers might still have wondered whether she truly needed to come herself. But his heavy-handed threat had instead handed her an unassailable justification.
Realizing his own move had been a self-destructive blunder, Baron Dosville's face curdled.
He had never anticipated an attack from this angle.
Still, he wasn't about to take it lying down.
He scrambled to find a crack in her account.
"Was traveling together for a month part of repaying this debt as well?"
It was a decent riposte for an off-the-cuff attempt, but she'd already prepared a rebuttal for that line of attack.
Anais shrugged as though the question barely deserved acknowledgment.
"Follow-up treatment. A disease that severe could hardly vanish overnight."
"Tch."
Baron Dosville swallowed a groan of frustration.
Infuriating, but the 'rumor' gave him no further material to use against her.
The spectators now clearly understood.
Who had won the opening skirmish.
—So it all had a reasonable explanation.
—Now that you mention it, the timing of her sponsorship and the sudden improvement in her health do match up perfectly.
—I've seen her life-support machine. The thought of being tethered to that for life... a benefactor who cured an illness that severe, well...
—This magician is remarkable. What skill does he possess to cure a disease even doctors gave up on?
—Gypsies and wanderers know all sorts of strange things.
[Circus Troupe Fame has increased by 10.]
Wonderstein released a sigh of relief at the message that appeared.
He'd thought the end had come, but Anais had reversed the entire situation with her deft command of rhetoric.
The rumor was neutralized. Now they could focus wholly on the case itself.
But her planned stratagem didn't end there.
With public sentiment flowing in a favorable direction, she pointed an accusing finger at the prosecution's camp and declared,
"I'll see to it that every other underhanded trap you've laid is swept clean here today as well."
Baron Dosville stifled a groan.
'Every other underhanded trap.' The phrasing was exquisitely chosen.
Originally, the 'rumor' and the 'trial' were two separate matters.
She had deftly lumped them together as one package of opponent-orchestrated traps.
In other words, by dismissing the rumor as nonsense, she was subtly implying the trial would meet the same fate.
This, too, turned the prosecution's own tactics back against them.
Since they had attempted to entwine the trial with rumor in their attack, they had walked right into this counterattack.
With a single phrase, she reduced this 'trial' to nothing more than their 'political intrigue.'
The spectators on the defendant's side, who'd been cowed for some time, erupted in cheers.
Morale and justification. She had seized both.
[Circus Troupe Fame has increased by 3.]
With a sequence of unadorned logic—no harsh profanity, no dramatic plot twists—she had brilliantly overturned the situation.
Wonderstein was genuinely impressed.
He'd played plenty of games requiring higher-level stratagems and sharper wits than this.
But that was always from an omniscient observer's vantage, with every clue stockpiled and the safety of a monitor between him and the action.
Face to face, in front of a live audience, with no room for verbal slip-ups and no second chances—delivering a convincing, orderly argument under those conditions was a skill he simply didn't possess.
Seeing her, having pulled off that feat, standing with her head held high and a smile on her face—she looked magnificent. Beautiful.
Their eyes met.
Both wore sheepish smiles.
Unalloyed delight was impossible; the memories of the wounds they'd dealt each other stirred between them.
Just as she parted her lips to say something to him, an enormous shout rang through the hall.
"Woooaah! You can do it, Wonderstein!"
A familiar voice.
Everyone in the hall knew its owner.
He had been adding harmonies to the main vocalist's songs throughout the entire opening-ceremony celebration.
A man adorned with a rooster's tail-feather decoration on his back, sporting a comb-shaped beard and a mohawk, had risen from his seat and was bellowing encouragement toward Wonderstein.
A faction had held a not-unfavorable view of Wonderstein from the moment the trial began.
No—when his status as an unregistered person came to light, their gaze toward him had grown more sympathetic. When jeers rained down on him from the gallery, they'd bristled in shared indignation.
The members of the other circus troupes.
These days, prestigious troupes and whatnot made good money and built reputations with relative ease, and even commoners and lower nobles had begun sniffing around the circus industry. But clowns and acrobats remained looked-down-upon professions.
Thus acrobats were often orphans or of low birth, and unregistered persons were not a rarity among them.
The circus itself, after all, had begun with the artistic traditions of the nomadic Gypsies.
The two were as inseparable as fate.
In this very hall, most troupes counted at least one or two unregistered persons among their membership; some troupe leaders had been unregistered themselves.
Even those who weren't had each endured their share of unjust treatment for being wandering performers.
Men who'd risen to lead a circus troupe had generally spent over fifteen years in this life—they'd known far harsher times than today's.
So Wonderstein's ordeal felt far from a stranger's trouble.
"You can do it, Wonderstein!"
Bang! Bang!
"Order! Order!"
Though, naturally, no one else lacked social awareness quite like Rooster Minova.
[Circus Troupe Fame has increased by 1.]
[Current Circus Troupe Fame: 15]
The fame that rose alongside Minova's shout worked on the crowd as a performative declaration that the circus world backed Wonderstein. Translated directly into Fame points.
Wonderstein looked at the man settling back into his seat, still huffing with fervor, his expression one of genuine surprise.
Rooster Minova had never been a character who endeared himself in the game.
He was perpetually at odds with the other acrobats, petty, grumbling, and eaten up with jealousy.
Many players had made a point of deliberately steering him into lethal attack patterns and using him as disposable bait.
The man he saw now, however, seemed very different from the one in the game.
Well, of course—two and a half years from now, he'd have just been eliminated from the Circus Grand Prix preliminaries, his resentment freshly banked.
Under those circumstances, envying and resenting the success of others was inevitable.
Like Allen and Joe, time had changed the man.
As for his earlier grumbling about being upstaged at the interview—on reflection, the provocation had been real enough.
Something about this sight of Minova struck Wonderstein as oddly heartening.
It felt like discovering a redeeming quality in a hopeless friend.
At the abrupt shift in the hall's atmosphere, Baron Dosville wore a sour expression.
He could feel several of the high-ranking figures in the prosecution camp glaring daggers at him.
Damn it all. Who could have seen this coming?
He glowered at the woman standing in the defense counsel's seat.
Anais Bergson.
The whole reversal had begun the moment she appeared.
Her personally appearing as defense counsel—an extraordinary gambit he'd never anticipated.
She'd caught him completely off guard.
The judge, now belatedly recalling what he'd been about to do, hurriedly brought his gavel down.
Bang! Bang!
"This provisional court shall now convene to adjudicate the ghost incident at the Rose Windmill Cabaret."
The real contest had only just begun.