7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (17)
7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (17)
['Blood-red Plate Armor' has been added to the Costume Room.]
A notification window appeared, and the armor—marked with a 'New!' speech bubble in the Costume Room catalog—now showed up alongside the rest.
From here on, I could pull that armor out and equip it on any troupe member, anytime.
"Umon, step forward."
A giant with red skin—and a menacing face framed by enormous horns and tusks—stood before me.
He glanced around, sheepish, and chuckled under his breath.
I looked up at him and clicked my tongue inwardly.
No matter how many times I saw him, I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that this guy was a ten-year-old boy.
He met my gaze with a frightened stare—the sort of glare a stranger would mistake for something that could chew a man up—and spoke in a trembling voice.
"I-it won't hurt, right?"
"It'll be over before you even have time to feel anything."
The troupe members formed a circle around us.
"Here we go."
"Okay."
I targeted him, selected the armor, and snapped my fingers.
A faint glow flared and wrapped around his body.
The Costume Room's effect triggered in a split second.
With a metallic clank, the armor—identical to what had been in the crate—materialized onto him.
Its size and proportions adjusted themselves perfectly to his frame.
The troupe members' eyes widened as they stared at him.
Were it not for the horns and tusks jutting from his helmet, he would have looked like a gallant knight in every sense.
They swarmed around him, touching the armor and letting out a stream of admiration.
"Whoa!"
"Is this the Troupe Leader's new magic?"
"Incredible! You look amazing, Umon!"
Umon lifted his visor and grinned.
In that blood-red armor with a face like his, he looked like a general straight out of hell.
The members took turns stepping forward to receive outfits tailored for their respective roles.
The ones who appreciated the Costume Room's ability the most were Yurakne and the Trimery Triplets. Until now, they'd had no choice but to cut holes in ready-made clothes or stitch them together piece by piece. The outfits the Costume Room produced, however, fit their bodies as though custom-tailored from the start.
Sven, too, had always had to stuff cotton wadding into his clothes at strategic places to suggest a body shape underneath. The Costume Room's outfits filled those areas automatically with sponge-like forms, so he no longer needed to bother.
Born with such unusual bodies, they were genuinely delighted by the very concept of clothes that actually fit.
I understood their feelings better than anyone.
"Troupe Leader, is it really all right if this armor gets wrecked?"
Umon, still looking as though he couldn't quite believe it, examined the armor he was wearing.
"Of course. My magic can restore it anytime."
The great thing about the Costume Room's apparel was that you could restore any item to like-new condition on the spot, even if it got filthy or damaged, just by paying the cleaning and repair costs in Devoluts.
Until now, Umon's monstrous strength had routinely torn his practice clothes to rags, forcing Ella to stay up all night mending them. That would no longer be necessary.
"This is quite good."
Ella scanned the troupe members with a satisfied smile.
Thanks to the armor, the script digestion rate had shot up considerably.
Troupe members = 25%.
Illusory backgrounds, props, special effects = 22%.
Costumes = 9%.
Total = 56%.
We'd finally crossed the fifty-percent script-digestion threshold.
It was more than ten percentage points higher than what Ella had projected a month ago.
"Is this enough to rank among the top competitors?"
"Not yet."
She'd assessed the roughly one hundred troupes participating in the Circus Grand Prix using her own methods.
She kept close tabs on the famous troupes as a matter of course, and because magazines were overflowing with analysis pieces on Grand Prix participants this season, gathering intelligence was straightforward.
Her estimation placed our current skill level somewhere in the lower-middle tier.
As long as we didn't go head-to-head against the industry's absolute top tier—the Silver Screen or Pandora—we faced opponents worth a real contest.
Furthermore, that 56 percent figure was an average across all the members. If we expanded the stage time for Umon, who had the highest marks, and trimmed the parts for the lowest scorers like the triplets and Yobel, we could push our actual performance capability closer to 60 percent.
"What about the Morning Star Circus?"
"Probably about even with us."
Minova's circus was a "project-based circus troupe" assembled specifically with this competition in mind.
The sponsor side had recruited people with decent experience and thrown the unit together.
Ella had identified quite a few of them.
After assessing their reputations and reviews, she rated their skill level roughly equal to our own.
"Don't worry. The most important thing is selling merchandise, isn't it? Your idea is good. It'll definitely click. That outfit-changing magic of yours exceeds expectations. Now we just need Maya to pull her weight."
The idea I'd proposed.
It required both Maya's abilities and my own.
For that purpose, Maya had been practicing not only illusions but also telekinesis for the past week.
I stood behind her and watched the black powder scattering above her palm.
Her mana control was precise enough that no one her age could match it, but because she'd devoted herself solely to Illusion Magic until now, her telekinesis hadn't yet reached the same level of finesse.
The powder drifted slightly off its target positions.
"Miss Maya, will you be all right?"
"I can do it."
Her voice was resolute.
Thankfully, she regarded the task assigned to her not as work but as a form of discipline, and pushed forward in quiet dedication.
A commendable kid.
That was how we spent our days—each of us grinding away, wholly absorbed in the effort.
The second week flew by.
***
Ella opened her eyes at four in the morning.
She'd fallen asleep a little past two, which meant she'd barely gotten two hours of rest.
She hauled herself upright, her entire body feeling as though it were weighted down with iron ingots.
Her mind, in contrast to her physical exhaustion, was surprisingly sharp.
To force herself through her schedule by any means necessary, she'd been steadily drinking caffeinated beverages morning and night. Doing so let her keep her body moving until she collapsed from sheer exhaustion. It meant she could wake quickly after only a short sleep, and no matter how worn out her body was, her mind stayed clear enough to drag herself from task to task.
'Just hang on a little longer. Only about a week left now. Just one more week of hardship, and then you can rest.'
She forced her sluggish limbs to cooperate, sat down at her desk, and immersed herself in revising the script.
The script Wonderstein had given her was packed with unconventional elements that didn't match the conventions of the current era.
Ella liked that about it, but there were sections that had to be adjusted for commercial appeal.
The dialogue, specifically.
Naturalism—the latest trend in the performance world—favored everyday, naturalistic speech, yet what remained popular with the masses was still old-fashioned, dramatic dialogue.
The troupe members were Apachi monsters, so they didn't need to recite their lines like aristocrats or poets, but maintaining at least a minimum level of decorum made it easier for audiences to accept.
For two hours, she pored over the books she'd brought for reference and refined the script's phrasing.
At six o'clock, she drank a cup of coffee and headed out to the garden to maintain the troupe's practice equipment.
No matter how busy she got, she never skipped this task.
Every single member was precious to them.
A single safety device failing and causing an injury during practice would be a devastating loss.
During the morning hours, she inspected the members' practice progress.
Every small detail—movements, tricks, lines—she scrutinized and corrected meticulously.
With her morning schedule complete, she headed to the cabaret.
It was time to analyze the second week's matchups.
At moments like this, even the deepest fatigue seemed to dissolve entirely.
Watching a performance was always a joy.
The acrobats of the Papael Circus moved with military precision under the directives of their leader, Hobbs.
Dressed in form-fitting black leotards, they interlinked their arms and legs, supporting one another and moving as a single body.
Their signature act, the human tower 'Hourglass,' lived up to its reputation.
Eighty-eight acrobats built a twelve-story human tower, and true to its name, it tapered inward toward the middle.
The most astonishing detail was that the sixth and seventh tiers each consisted of only a single acrobat.
They stretched out their arms, pressed their palms together, and bore the entire load with nothing but the strength of their arms.
Having learned the 'tower building' acrobatic in school herself, she understood the principle at work.
The crisscrossing structure of the staggered human pyramid distributed the load broadly, and those in the direct weight-bearing positions aligned their bones at a vertical angle to the ground—enduring the pressure through the strength of bone itself rather than their joints.
The theory was one thing. Executing it with precision across such a massive number of people was an entirely different feat.
The Papael Circus's new production, 'Leviathan,' which followed, was no different.
Over thirty acrobats clustered together to form a colossal human shape.
They didn't merely imitate a static form—every movement replicated genuine human motion.
Bending the knees and standing back up, cartwheels, backflips, jump rope, hula hoops—they even danced in time with the music.
When a giant sword suspended from the ceiling descended and bisected Leviathan's thirty-two-person waist, screams erupted throughout the audience.
But when the halved Leviathan sprang back up as two separate sixteen-person humans, the crowd burst into cheers and applause.
The pair then delivered a double comedy act so entertaining that it felt almost unfair to compare Allen and Joe's work to it.
Soon after, the two split into the eight-person, four-group formation seen at the opening ceremony. Repeating this pattern, the thirty-two acrobats finally lined up in a single row to take their bows.
Ella assigned the following scores to the two acts:
Hourglass: 62%
Leviathan: 68%
She scored them lower than the Silver Screen or Pandora's acts.
The reason was that the show felt far too stiff.
Even if the acrobatic feats were perilous—where a single mistake could spell disaster—transmitting that atmosphere of tension all the way to the audience seats made the show difficult to enjoy.
Leader Hobbs's rigid tone and the acrobats' perpetually grim expressions while performing quickly drained the audience's mental energy.
People came to have a good time—not to gauge the "level" of acrobatic technique.
In that sense, the Mango Troupe's performance stood at the complete opposite pole from the Papael Circus.
Their show offered nothing particularly novel.
It was a pale imitation of the Rose Windmill Cabaret show from opening night.
That made sense, since the troupe's director, Sol, was a former dance director for the Rose Windmill.
What Sol did possess, however, was the knack for entertaining people.
Even when things drifted from the script or the intended flow, he excelled at ad-libbing in response to the room's atmosphere, making sure the audience left sweaty and satisfied.
Moreover, he showed far more enthusiasm for the trial format than Hobbs had.
Unlike Hobbs, who postured and insisted people should simply behold his troupe's greatness without concerning himself with commerce, Sol crafted the songs and dances from the ground up to mesh with the merchandise.
The lyrics—absurdly cheap-sounding for a stage presented at the Circus Grand Prix—were paired with simple melodies and easy-to-grasp words that made them highly addictive. People who had sung and danced along jubilantly found themselves unconsciously humming the tunes as they left, and ended up buying goods from the Mango Troupe's concession stand.
Ella rated their performance at 54%.
She hadn't originally intended to give them even that much, but their masterful pacing in handling the audience bumped up the score.
Unlike the Papael Circus, which merely stacked popcorn and soft drinks at their stand, they showed a clear intention to sell. They had a real chance of winning the matchup.
And on Saturday.
The crown of victory went to the Mango Troupe.
"Have you no pride, you wretch! Are you happy winning with such vulgar song and dance?! A low-grade dancer pandering to the masses!"
Hobbs, indignant, shot up from his seat, and Sol responded with provocative mockery.
Before long, a brawl had broken out between the two circus troupes.
Ella wanted to see how the fight ended, but she had too much to do and hurried out of the theater.
Her evening, too, was packed with tasks.
Checking the Ratmen's role assignments and guest reception routes; reexamining the program's details with Wonderstein; reviewing points to refine with Maya regarding the illusions for the backgrounds, props, and special effects...
......Zzz.
"Hrk."
Ella's eyes snapped open.
She'd nearly dozed off without realizing it.
No.
There isn't much time left.
She had to endure.
If she could just hold out a little longer, she'd see the fruit of their labor.
Today was Saturday.
Just one week.
Just one more week until next weekend. Hang on just a little longer.
Gritting her teeth, she downed the coffee she'd picked up from the concession stand, and inside the carriage heading toward the hotel, she began organizing the day's ideas into her notebook.