7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (14)
7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (14)
Subliminal.
That was definitely the name.
Wonderstein finished his rough explanation and looked at Maya. She'd been deep in thought from the moment he started. From here on, this was her territory to figure out.
Truth be told, he didn't know much more about the Silver Screen's trick than what he'd just explained. He'd only ever caught it in passing on a broadcast. Even noticing that much would've been nearly impossible without Wonderstein's superhuman eyesight. Tossing out clues like this was about the limit of what he could do.
The method the Silver Screen was actually using was dozens of times more potent than what he'd seen on that broadcast. No hypnosis or suggestion from the real world he knew could produce effects as immediate and overwhelming as the crowd swarming that concession stand right now. Some kind of magical force he didn't understand was at work.
While Maya mulled it over, Ella raged beside her, practically bouncing with indignation.
"That's a rule violation!"
She pulled a crumpled scrap of paper from her pocket, worn grimy from being read dozens of times over.
"Look! It's written right here! Psychoactive substances and mental magic trigger immediate disqualification upon use!"
"Shh! Keep it down. People are staring. You can't just shout about this stuff. Remember? Spreading malicious slander about another team or inciting the crowd against them is grounds for a participant's disqualification too."
Yurakne's calming reassurance was the only thing that kept her from losing her temper entirely. The thought of dirty tricks worming their way into what should have been a fair contest had stripped her of restraint.
Wonderstein caught an odd glint flickering in Maya's eyes as she surfaced from her thoughts.
"Miss Maya, would this qualify as mental magic?"
Every gaze swung to her.
She'd been the top-ranked student at the Magic Academy. She'd never managed to master the Mystic she truly sought, but her grasp of theory alone was sharp enough to make Academy professors balk.
Maya turned over the theory she'd learned at the Academy—the five categories of Mystery that interface with the human mind. The surface-level Image, the active Thought, the structured Will, the projective Essence, the fundamental Spirit. Among these, the 'Image' required to deploy Illusion Magic was the shallowest Mystery in the mental realm—half of it anchored in the material plane, half in the mental.
Projecting an illusion was material magic. Opening and reading another person's Image was mental magic. A spell that seduced the target was unquestionably mental magic—but seducing someone by crafting something beautiful out of Image itself couldn't be classified as mental magic. The Silver Screen's method was playing right along that boundary.
"It's razor-thin."
"Could it get them disqualified?"
"No. At least, it doesn't fall under what the magical community currently defines as mental magic."
She laid out the framework of mental magic under the Image-Thought-Will-Essence-Spirit system, then drew on multiple magical theories to explain how the Silver Screen had managed to influence the higher mental layers through Image. The troupe members understood none of it. What the hell is she on about. Ella felt a headache coming on and scowled.
Wonderstein was in the same boat. A simple yes-or-no would've sufficed, yet here she was hauling out the full theoretical framework. But he was the one who'd asked, so he could hardly cut her off mid-lecture.
Maya finally finished her explanation and glanced at his expression. He nodded as if satisfied.
"I see. Remarkable as always, Miss Maya."
Watching him beam like that, Maya let out a wistful sigh inside. She knew the Troupe Leader possessed a genius-level perspective on magical theory that few could match. His only handicap was lacking a formal education—held back by his circumstances and his station.
On the day of the opening ceremony, learning his background hadn't diminished her respect for him one bit. The opposite, in fact—it had deepened into something closer to reverence. Surely he'd held all the answers in his head just now. A man who saw straight through Eunmak Arno's methods couldn't possibly be ignorant of basic mental magic classifications. Yet instead of simply handing her the answer, he'd given her time to think. And through their exchange, he'd let her reach the conclusion herself.
Like a teacher guiding a student onto the right path. And he never put himself forward—he deflected the credit as if she'd worked out the theory on her own, just like when he'd insisted she was the one who'd developed the new Illusion Magic.
He knew. Knew that a man with no verified credentials, no formal schooling, and no ability to cast magic himself would be laughed out of academic circles the moment he tried to advance a magical theory. Knew that, at worst, his ideas would be stolen outright and he'd be shown the door. Maybe he'd already been through that exact betrayal once. Maybe that was why he'd given up entirely.
And yet, with her—with her, he genuinely tried to pass something on whenever an opportunity arose. This sketchbook, pulled from gods knew where, was the same. A thing prepared perfectly, specifically for her.
She couldn't call him by that title since he'd refused it, but she regarded him as her true teacher.
"You all heard the explanation. That's the situation."
Ella stared at Wonderstein as he smiled placidly at her, and she pushed out her lips in a sulk. She wanted to argue, but she couldn't make heads or tails of what Maya had said, so she had nothing to work with. Picking a fight now would just mean sitting through another few minutes of headache-inducing jargon. She swallowed it. And found herself resenting Maya, who'd done nothing but explain theory, for no good reason. Maya's explanation had sounded, somehow, like a fellow mage siding with her own kind. Ella's own frustration at feeling cowed by that "educated air" played its part too.
Wonderstein, as if he'd seen right through her mood, tossed out a question she could answer with confidence.
"What do you think? The Silver Screen's Kinema versus Pandora's escape show? Judged purely as a performance."
Ella stopped fuming. She closed her eyes for a moment and replayed the show she'd just seen from start to finish, coolly assessing every element. She even set aside her own personal distaste for illusion shows.
She opened her eyes and gave a single number.
"Seventy-five percent."
"You said Pandora's Magic Show was eighty-one earlier. So Pandora's still ahead?"
Wonderstein had suspected as much after watching the show. The intricate illusions had genuinely impressed him, sure—but only during the opening segment and in brief flashes. At its core, Kinema was essentially a play. The actors' performances and the script mattered most. And in that respect, Kinema fell well short of a conventional play. The characters' expressions and movements looked fine from a distance, but zoomed in, they lacked the naturalness of real humans. The story, generously speaking, was conventional; less charitably, it was kind of juvenile. With such limitations on expression, they had no choice but to keep the emotional throughline as shallow as possible and lean on spectacle and action.
Compared to Luini's show—where he'd commanded the stage's rhythm so utterly that hours vanished without notice—it was a little lacking.
"So this match ends with Pandora Magic Show winning?"
"The Silver Screen still has that suggestion effect we just saw."
"Ha-ha! I'll back Pandora just because I want to win the bet!"
"Well... the bigger issue might be... No. We'll know once more time passes."
Ella, who should have confidently declared the Escape King would win, answered in a voice strangely lacking in conviction.
Wonderstein learned what her hesitation meant on the third day.
The Escape King's offerings that day were "Fire Escape" and "Rock-Shatter Escape." Ella walked out of the hall looking openly tired.
"Sixty-seven percent."
No one asked her why the score dropped. They'd been unsure on the second day, but by now, they could feel it too. The Escape King was running on fumes.
Ella sat down at the concession stand, sweeping her gaze around the crowd.
"In performance, after polish, the next most important thing is consistency."
She spotted that the food Yurakne had bought from the stand was lemon cheese cake and honey soda, let out a tiny sigh, and took a bite anyway. Those were the exact items she'd been avoiding because eating them felt like surrendering to the Silver Screen's design—but apparently Yurakne couldn't hold out any longer.
"No—in some ways it's more important than polish. No matter where, no matter when, no matter who performs it, the show's quality has to stay constant."
She mentally overruled her tongue's insistence that the lemon cheese cake was delicious and pressed on.
"Pandora Magic Show's quality is too dependent on one person's skill: the magician Luini. That's fatal for consistency. Luini twists an ankle, the show's over. No replacement. So he has to keep his body in peak condition, always. But this time, he hasn't been able to. Logically, a one-man show running close to ten hours a day will leave you wrecked and collapsing after a single day. But Luini's been hauling that aging body through it for three days straight."
Today's flame illusion had even recycled the "failed escape" acting bit from the first day's glass-tube escape. The original version probably had him catching fire, running around in a panic, rolling on the floor playing dead, then—bang—exploding and reappearing above the audience. Instead, Luini had skipped the on-fire-and-flailing reaction and gone straight from the explosion to his reappearance above the seats. The motion wasn't smooth, and the dead time between beats was noticeably longer than on the first and second days. His face, suspended in midair, wore undisguised exhaustion. The drop in his stamina was plain to see.
"The illusion show stands at the exact opposite pole. It has a consistency so rigorous a human could scarcely hope to imitate it."
The group nodded along. Play a Memory Disk and the exact same footage rolled out, every time, unchanged. The troupe leader's mid-show interjections and the Deputy Leader's narrator role added some variables, but compared to any other kind of performance, the quality stayed overwhelmingly stable.
Luini normally managed his stamina by handing middle segments off to his apprentices. But this was a short, six-day sprint, so he'd pushed his energy levels recklessly. He'd overestimated his own endurance.
By the fourth day, Luini's caliber had plummeted into the fifties. The afternoon show that day was handed off to Pandora's other acrobats.
A man wrapped in chains from torso to tail, Chain Tail, demonstrated glass-crafting with a heated metal rod—molten, glowing, goopy slime traced searing arcs through the air. The woman who'd appeared at the drawing ceremony holding a cube turned out to be a contortionist virtuoso. She bent backward nearly folding herself in half, then twisted her arms and legs through the gap between her back and waist, cramming them in until she fit neatly inside the box she'd been carrying.
Ella scored them forty-six and thirty-nine percent. Lower than the Escape King's magic, but thanks to the reduced load, Luini's own escape magic stayed in the seventies.
By this measure, the Silver Screen might have looked like they held the upper hand. But it wasn't that simple.
Perfect consistency wasn't always a net positive in performance. The Silver Screen's Kinema maintained near-flawless consistency—which, flipped around, meant almost no reason to watch it more than once.
The people who swung the biggest weight in this contest were the VIP spectators carrying high-denomination coins, and most of them had bought six-day passes. Unlike the single-day or two-day ticket holders, they'd been enjoying these shows on repeat for days now. The Silver Screen's Kinema got stale fast. They lacked the resources to swap out the scenario every time, so viewers ended up watching the same thing over and over—an identical, unvarnished repeat with little reason to sit through it again.
Pandora's Magic Show, by contrast, was enjoyable on repeat even when the same type of trick was performed. Luini's veteran stage banter and sheer magnetism delivered a different flavor of fun every time.
"That—is the power of a master!"
Ella clenched her fist.
Through the fifth day, the two troupes' scores remained neck and neck. Pandora held a razor-thin edge—just enough that Wonderstein and Maya would each owe two hundred zircoin on their bet.
The clash between these two titans of the industry was so magnificent that the second-week participants were already dreading the comparison. And so the final sixth day drew to a close, and at last, the moment for the results arrived.