Chapter 297: Save! Save! Save! I’m Gonna Save Every Damn One of Them! (Patreon)

On the stage, Mario still stood gripping the trapeze bar. He glanced at Leiliya, kneeling on the platform across from him, drew a deep breath, and his gaze hardened once more.

"Leiliya, don't worry. I won't fail."

Leiliya begged him to stop, but he showed no sign of backing down. Instead he looked at her with deep affection and declared in a loud voice:

"I will finish this performance, and then! I will propose to you properly!"

The mood of the audience around them gradually grew heated.

"What's going on?"

"No idea. Part of the show, maybe? Look, the ringmaster isn't reacting at all."

"Wow, this circus has a pretty dramatic script."

Unlike the worries weighing on Amamiya Rin and the Tomies, to the rest of the crowd Mario and Leiliya's lines sounded like a play staged before the act.

No one took Leiliya's words seriously. All that shouting about demons and the god of death was, in their ears, nothing more than the prelude to a romantic drama.

"Go for it, Mario!"

Someone even whistled and clapped to cheer Mario on.

"Mario! No! Don't do this!"

Leiliya cried out in panic, but her voice was drowned beneath the applause and cheering.

Mario's mind was made up, and he heard nothing of her pleas.

He took a deep breath, tightened his grip on the bar hanging in midair, and kicked off hard. Swept up by momentum, he soared into the air and swung out along the arc of the rope, flying toward Leiliya on the high platform opposite.

Inside the tent, the audience held their breath, eyes glued to the figure in midair. Many instinctively covered their mouths, anxious and expectant at once.

On the high platform, Leiliya could no longer speak.

She simply knelt there, hands pressed together against her lips, tears streaming between her fingers as she trembled without a sound.

Mario's movements were fluid and graceful, his form elegant, the work of a top-tier performer with years of training behind him. He was about to swing across to the opposite platform.

But just as the distance between them narrowed to a few meters, at the most critical moment of the aerial handoff, an uncanny sense of weightlessness suddenly wrapped around Mario's body.

His arms went limp. He couldn't hold the bar. It felt as though an invisible hand had seized him and yanked him downward. He lost his balance completely and plunged straight toward the empty floor!

Gravity turned monstrous in that instant, an invisible hand dragging Mario savagely down. Wind howled past his ears, his clothes whipped upward, and his hair was torn into disarray by the rushing air.

On the high platform, Leiliya's scream tore through the night.

"Aaaah——!!"

It was no longer a human voice. It was despair erupting from the deepest part of her soul.

Her body pitched forward and she collapsed against the railing. Her outstretched arm clutched at empty air in vain, her nails raking through nothing, unable to hold on to anything.

Tears rolled down her face and shattered into countless tiny points of light in midair.

Below, the audience seemed to have been put on pause. Every sound vanished at the same instant.

Some gaped, some covered their mouths, some had risen to their feet. Someone's popcorn lay spilled across the floor, and no one bent to pick it up.

The children's eyes went wide, and in that moment the adults' faces drained to a deathly white.

"Aaaah——!"

The screams finally exploded, filled with terror and chaos.

"He's falling!"

"My God! There's no safety net!"

"Call an ambulance——!"

Some covered their children's eyes. Others turned away, unable to look. No one could accept that they had come to watch a famous circus only to witness something as horrifying as a death.

In the shadows of the stage, a cold, cruel smile curled the corners of Babirus's mouth. Greed gleamed in his eyes as he quietly waited for the moment a life would fall.

But in the next second, the thunderous crash of a body hitting the ground never came.

Just as Mario was about to strike the floor, a formless, bodiless force quietly spread out and caught his rapidly falling body.

The entire force of the impact dissolved at once. Mario seemed to land on a soft cloud, sinking slowly until he came to rest gently on the ground.

For a moment, the whole tent was deathly silent.

Mario scrambled to his feet and stared down at his unharmed arms and legs. Then he snapped his head up to look at the platform, more than ten meters above. He was dazed and incredulous, his heart still pounding, lost in the shock of having cheated death.

"Mario!"

Up on the platform, Leiliya slowly opened her eyes. She stared at her lover, unscathed on the ground, and froze for a moment. Then she wept with joy, though her whole body still shook with lingering fear.

A few seconds later, hesitant applause rose from the stands.

"Th-that was a stunt, right?"

"Definitely. Look, he doesn't have a scratch on him."

"This circus is incredible. They can control even a scene this thrilling."

…

The audience was uncertain and bewildered. No one could tell how Mario had fallen from such a height and come away safe. Could the floor only look solid, with a layer of cushioning beneath it?

At the side of the stage, the smile froze on Babirus's face. His expression darkened at a visibly rapid pace, and his sharp gaze cut through the crowd and locked directly onto Amamiya Rin in the audience, brimming with intense malice.

At that moment, Amamiya Rin was lightly rubbing his temple with his fingers, a trace of obvious fatigue showing between his brows.

Wielding Ultra Willpower in a human body was already costly enough to shorten his life. Worse, he didn't have the vast energy of an Ultraman. Whatever ability he used drew on his soul power, so he was being drained twice over. It was truly a bit of a mess.

Still, there was no helping it. Mara Tomie's attitude was clear, so he couldn't just tear off the mask and go to war.

Besides, these demons rarely killed without doing it themselves. As long as he played along, he could buy some time for the other Tomies to arrive.

Babirus stared at Amamiya Rin. After a brief silence, he laughed.

The smile was no longer hidden. His mouth stretched wider than at any point before, baring two neat rows of teeth, savage and eerie.

"Ladies and gentlemen——!"

His voice rang out again, still in that exaggerated, feverish tone.

"I am truly, deeply sorry! Mario, the leading star of our troupe, has made a mistake in the middle of the act!"

Babirus shook his head, sighing theatrically.

"Alas, alas! What a pity, what a shame! Had he succeeded, he would have won the hand of the most beautiful Miss Leiliya. Sadly, he has failed."

"But never mind."

Babirus spread his hands wide, the corners of his mouth stretching further and further until they nearly split to his ears.

"Even if you are not a member of our troupe, it doesn't matter. Whoever completes this act, whoever you are, may marry the beautiful Leiliya."

He paused, his gaze sweeping across the stands, an eerie light glinting in his eyes.

"Ladies and gentlemen, would anyone like to try?"

He opened his arms and made an exaggerated gesture of invitation toward the audience, his smile deepening a few degrees more.

The instant his words fell, the atmosphere in the stands changed.

As if pushed by some force, the men began to stand.

One, two, ten… More and more figures rose from their seats. Their eyes burned, their cheeks flushed, and they stared fixedly at the beautiful woman on the high platform in her plain white gown, her tear tracks not yet dry. Something unnatural blazed in the depths of their pupils.

"What? I can marry that beautiful girl?"

"Me! I'll do it!"

"Let me!"

"I can do it! I can marry her!"

"Count me in too!"

Voices rose one after another, each scrambling to be heard. Like a pack of stray dogs drawn by a meaty bone, they shoved and jostled and surged toward the stage.

Someone stepped on the backs of the front-row seats. Someone tripped and nearly fell. But no one stopped, and no one showed a flicker of hesitation.

"The nerve! 'Most beautiful,' he says! Does he dare call that ugly woman beautiful in front of me?"

Kawakami Tomie had stood up as well. Her face twisted slightly, laced with unconcealed malice and irritation.

"Now is hardly the time to fuss over trivial things, is it?"

Amamiya Rin's eyelid twitched.

So many people. At least a hundred.

If every one of them fell from that platform, how many could his Ultra Willpower catch?

Three? Five? Ten?

And then?

His soul power would run dry, and he would have to watch the rest smash into pulp.

Amamiya Rin turned his gaze to Babirus. Babirus met his eyes and made a gesture of invitation.

It was as if he were saying: you want to save the humans? Then please, go on. Keep saving them. I will supply as many dangers as you like. Let me see your performance.

"What do you mean, trivial? This isn't trivial! It concerns my dignity!"

Kawakami Tomie paid no mind to Amamiya Rin's thoughts and snapped back indignantly.

"If you keep fretting over an ugly woman calling herself beautiful, that's what really hurts your dignity. A true beauty doesn't care about an ugly woman's delusions. She just watches from the side and laughs."

Amamiya Rin rose to his feet while placating Kawakami Tomie.

What should he do next? There was no need to think any further.

If he wanted to save everyone, he could no longer wait for the other Tomies to arrive.

Amamiya Rin drew a deep breath and raised both hands level in front of him, palms facing, fingers slightly spread.

Then——

"Clap, clap, clap."

Three claps.

The first rolled in like muffled thunder from far away. It pressed against the canvas at the top of the tent and set the hanging pennants trembling.

The second was like a sledgehammer striking an anvil. The sound waves bounced back and forth in the enclosed space, layering and amplifying, until even the seats in the stands shivered faintly.

The third burst beside everyone's ears like a thunderclap, piercing through all the noise, overriding every sound, and boring straight into every eardrum.

With Amamiya Rin's physique, a mere clap of his hands could rival a sonic weapon.

The tent fell silent at once.

The men who had been pushing forward froze together. Some were caught mid-stride, some had an arm still stretched in the air, and the fervor on their faces cooled bit by bit, like coals doused with ice water.

Then they felt it.

An indescribable pressure spread from a certain direction in the stands.

It was not killing intent, nor hostility. It was a crushing difference in the very level of life, like a rabbit suddenly realizing that what stood before it was not a person but a cheetah.

The feeling made their hearts clench involuntarily. Breathing grew difficult, their knees went weak, and cold sweat crawled across their backs.

Every gaze was drawn by that pressure and turned toward the young man who had risen to his feet.

Amamiya Rin stood before the seats of the third row, his body straight as a sword. He wore dark casual clothes, the fabric pulled taut along the lines of his shoulders and back, and his broad shoulders cast a heavy shadow in the dim light.

He only stood there. He only looked at everyone.

But everyone felt it.

An invisible, weighty presence, one that made people instinctively want to submit, rolled out from the young man standing before his seat.

Like a mountain. Like a sea. Like an ancient beast awakening.

The air in the tent seemed to solidify.

Those moths that had been so frenzied a moment ago, ready to hurl themselves into the flame, now stood frozen in place. No one spoke. No one moved. They breathed with great care, afraid that the slightest sound would make those eyes lock onto them.

Amamiya Rin's gaze swept slowly across the tent: from Babirus at the edge of the stage, to Leiliya trembling on the high platform, to the men frozen in the aisles, and finally to the women in the stands who clutched their children and covered their mouths.

Everyone he looked at felt a shock like an electric current in that instant. They shuddered, their scalps prickled, and they fell into a strange, dreamlike state.

Then Amamiya Rin spoke.

"Everyone, the performance is over."

His voice wasn't loud, yet it carried an odd cadence, like the bell of an ancient temple deep in the mountains, low and far-reaching, ethereal. It echoed softly through the tent and reached straight into the depths of people's hearts.

"Please leave in an orderly fashion, go home, and get some good rest."

His tone was unhurried, with a calm that left no room for even a shred of resistance. It was neither a command nor a request, only a statement, one that made people instinctively want to comply.

As the gentle voice entered their ears, the spectators, who had been panicked or wildly excited, gradually grew calm and vacant-eyed. The fervor and curiosity in their hearts were smoothed away, leaving only a will to obey.

No one questioned. No one lingered. Parents led their children, couples leaned on each other, and everyone rose and walked quietly and in order toward the exit of the tent.

Their steps were unhurried, their manner natural, like the end of any perfectly ordinary show.

Children held their parents' hands and chattered about the wonderful performance they had just seen.

Adults conversed in low voices, satisfied smiles on their faces.

No one looked back. No one felt that anything was wrong.

Amamiya Rin walked against the flow of the crowd, stepping slowly toward the stage. He passed through the figures brushing by him, the lights of the tent casting alternating bands of light and shadow over him. Though he was right there among the crowd, he formed a solitary, lone silhouette moving against the current.