Introduction
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Dissonance — Creaking Laughter is the twenty-sixth chapter of Jun Mochizuki's The Case Study of Vanitas.
Summary[]
Marco runs after Astolfo and worriedly warns that they can’t afford to stray from their objective—Astolfo snaps at him and marches on. He thinks of Roland, looking down at him with an almost condescending gaze, and is filled with fury. He snarls at being compared, even told that he’s inferior to, “that buffoon of a man.” Vanitas smirks and tells Dante to back him up. Dante grimaces reluctantly and says this will cost him while cocking his gun.
Snow continues to fall. Jeanne remains locked in fierce combat with the Beast of Gévaudan. They trade blows one after another, barely missing each other as they go. All the while Jeanne yells to the Beast, calling it “Chloé,” and the Beast’s visage twists at the name. The Beast strikes down at Jeanne, but she swiftly leaps up to avoid the attack. Agile and fast, Jeanne uses the falling debris thrown up by the Beast’s rampaging as landing points and jumps more and more upward. She slashes the Beast across its face with her Crimson Gauntlet, causing blood to spill. She wields her Gauntlet at the Beast’s face, preparing for another fiery strike, as she declares that this time she will kill the Beast for sure—a yell interrupts her. Noé jumps into the air right between Jeanne and the Beast and delivers a forceful kick to her Gauntlet. The charged-up beam of fire is sent blasting into the other side of the forest, its trajectory just managing to miss the Beast. Jeanne falls from the sky.
On the ground, Noé has easily and safely caught Jeanne in his arms before she could hit the ground, and he apologizes for interfering. Jeanne is surprised to find Noé here, but reasons that he must be here because Vanitas is as well. Noé asks Jeanne to not kill the Beast yet, and Jeanne stiffens in shock. Noé says she already knows; with Vanitas’s abilities he might be able to save the curse-bearer, who the Beast truly is. Jeanne is silent as she ponders Noé’s words. “Save…?” Jeanne twists her leg up and around Noé’s neck. Noé is bewildered and unable to react in time, and Jeanne successfully twists their positions around so that she has him snared in a chokehold with her legs. She says she won’t allow that. Her eyes glowing red and fangs bared, she declares herself a Bourreau with the duty to execute a curse-bearer, and she’ll kill anyone who gets in her way, even him. Noé grits his teeth.
Vanitas and Astolfo are locked into a struggle of their own. Vanitas swiftly blocks each and every one of Astolfo’s attacks with his knives, all the while steadily backing up against the boy’s spear work. Vanitas taunts him, saying that Roland far surpasses him in speed and strength, and Astolfo grits his teeth in anger. Dante, a distance away, comments that Vanitas is actually being pushed rather far and that he could taunt at all is surprising. Dante aims his gun and shoots, but all his shots miss as Astolfo nimbly backflips out of the way before any could land, to Dante’s shock. Astolfo then looks up in alarm—and Vanitas hanging from a tree branch above kicks him right in the face. Astolfo glares up, having intentionally leaned his back further back so as to soften the brunt of the kick, and Vanitas smirks while complimenting his reaction times. Astolfo barks an order to Marco and his other subordinates to rid of Dante. They start to move in, but from a tree above Johann fires a net that ensnares the Chasseurs and renders them harmless. Johann marvels at the special gun he’d fired the net from and plans to order some more. But another Chasseur rushes in with their weapons and Johann shrieks as he barely avoids the attacks and starts running. A thud resounds—Dante just whacked the Chasseur directly in the head with a branch, hard enough to break it. He and Johann go to tie the Chasseur up, remarking how no one with any sense would fight the Chasseurs directly. Dante picks something up from the Chasseur’s pockets.
Vanitas continues with his taunts, commenting that Astolfo’s subordinates have already been subdued. Astolfo continues attacking with his spear and Vanitas continues defending with his knives. He attributes his subordinates’ failure to the incompetence of their Captain—the Chasseurs must be truly struggling if someone like Astolfo was able to make Paladin. Vanitas then says that’s not it, and the two of them pause in their fight. Vanitas guesses that Astolfo’s family had gotten him in. Astolfo stares at Vanitas as the latter speaks of his family—the House of Granatum, an active player in the war, specifically the Vampire hunt, and to this day are still tied strongly with the Church. Vanitas grins. He mocks Astolfo for having “begged” his father for the position of Paladin like a whining, spoiled child, as Astolfo stares at him wide-eyed. Johann looks disturbed, commenting that Vanitas is saying all this with full knowledge of what actually happened to the Granatum family. Dante is both unsurprised and unimpressed as he watches Vanitas do this. Vanitas continues to laugh at Astolfo and asks how much his “foolishly fond aristocrat father” bribed the Church for his Paladin rank. Astolfo thinks of his parents, of the last time he saw them; bloody unmoving bodies turned cold and stained red. Astolfo snaps, absolutely exploding with fury at the insults to his family, and he charges once again. Vanitas sighs, remarking how surprising someone so simple-minded has survived for so long. He smirks and rushes in himself, ready to give the boy a lesson from a “senior Chasseur.”
They trade blows, single spear meeting pair of knives.
“Oh… Lucky…”
Johann and Dante flinch as Astolfo’s subordinate Chasseurs free themselves and rush in.
“That looks like such great fun.”
Noé is roughly shoved out of the way by Jeanne as she returns to her fight.
“Hey… won’t you…”
Jeanne and the Beast stare one another down, ready to properly finish each other off this time—
“…let me play too?”
A train car erupts from the snow. It bursts upwards right under Jeanne’s feet, sending her flying into the air. She’s bewildered, as is Noé from seeing this happen to her. The snow-covered land quakes under their feet. Vanitas gasps—and the specter of a whale’s skeleton passes over his head with a sharp ringing noise. He stares up at it in surprise. Dante and Johann, standing back to back, become surrounded by mist. The creaking of the gears return, and something starts to appear. Automatons, clowns, performers; music celebratory in nature but so dissonant in tone it almost sounds mocking; the twisted smiles and derisive grins. Vanitas knows exactly what this is.
Charlatan’s parade.
Naenia’s shadowy, distorted form curls behind Noé, her hands lovingly cupping his face. Her terrible smile greets him from upside-down, and she calls his name. Noé yells her name back in both fury and panic. Elsewhere, someone’s form residing in a tank of liquid seems to move ever so slightly. Ruthven, standing by that tank, stares at the form. Astolfo on edge and unnerved attacks the puppets with his spear. But despite his beheading them, one puppet without raising a finger brings its head back onto its neck, reconnecting by way of an odd mixture looking like mechanical gears turned sinew. Astolfo grows even more unsettled and takes a step back. The puppet looks at him and grows interested—and asks why his body is so completely covered in Marks of Possession. Astolfo freezes. His eyes are wide with horror. He drops his spear and wraps his arms around himself. The puppet goes on to count the number of Marks and finds thirteen that are on him—no, were. It says, there are only five left. Astolfo gets lost in his memories: him as a young child, protectively clutching an even younger child in his arms, surrounded by shadowy figures with pointed teeth gnarled into grins and hungry eyes, hungry for his blood. He starts shaking. More puppets surround him, grinning hungrily just as the specters from his past, and wonders if his blood is extraordinarily delicious. Astolfo stares up at them. He remembers his father and his mother, dead and drained of their blood. The grinning shadows reach their hands toward him, just like those from his past who had grabbed and claimed him all over. They laugh and smile and drool, fangs ready for his blood. Astolfo screams at the top of his lungs and starts rampaging.
All the others caught in Charlatan’s parade do not fare much better. Shrieking laughter surrounds them, but Dante and Johann both manage to stay grounded and with their wits about them by sticking close to one another and making sure each of them aren’t dragged in. Vanitas stomps on a puppet’s head and sneers into the mist. He wonders where the Beast had disappeared to in the chaos. A strangled cry catches his attention, and he turns to see Jeanne collapsed onto the ground, before her a two-headed puppet calling her “their sweet daughter.” Jeanne, at these pale imitations of her parents, grows pale and nauseous. The puppets’ heads suddenly crack open and Jeanne flinches, barely able to defend herself as Astolfo, mind lost to his trauma-induced rampage, attacks her. The collision of each of their weapons sends Astolfo’s spear flying away and renders Jeanne prone to attack. Astolfo in lieu of his spear takes out a knife and growls that he’ll slaughter every last Vampire he sees. Jeanne, too distressed to do anything, can only stare with wide-eyes as the enraged Astolfo advances on her—blood spills as Vanitas jumps in front of her and deflects Astolfo’s attack. He suffers a cut on his arm from this. Jeanne is surprise, while Vanitas kicks Astolfo in the gut and knocks him backwards, wherein Marco catches and tends to him. Vanitas curses at how sickening this is, and Naenia still wrapped around Noé looks to him. Vanitas whips out the Book of Vanitas and declares this “vile spectacle” done with, and Naenia grins. A dagger comes flying in towards Vanitas—
The dagger severs the chain of the Book of Vanitas and sends it flying out of Vanitas’s hand.
Vanitas stares in shock. He had been just in the middle of activating the Book, clockwork opened and black pages flipping, meaning it had been severed while in the middle of his machinating. The Book flips in the air, and its energy crackles as starts its rewriting of the World Formula. But it has no user to guide its rewriting. And so the energy of the Book explodes upward and outward, engulfing the entire area of Charlatan’s parade in a shockwave of blue light. The puppets are torn apart by the force. Jeanne is sent flying back, Dante stumbles as the land below him quakes, Marco cradles an unresponsive Astolfo in his arms, and Noé stares in utter shock. The blinding blue light could be seen from miles away even through the blizzarding snowfall.
Snow continues to fall. The Book of Vanitas sits half-buried in the snow. A hand comes to pick it up, belonging to a young man with shaggy hair covering his eyes. He walks across the snow to find a young girl with short pale hair in a black dress, whom he calls “Chloé,” and he beckons her to return to the castle. Chloé looks up at him from where she kneels on the ground, next to an unconscious Noé. She says her leg hurts and she can’t move, and orders him to carry her. The dark shadow of a castle looms behind them in the distance.
Characters[]
- Astolfo Granatum
- Marco
- Roland Fortis*
- Vanitas
- Dante
- Jeanne
- Beast of Gévaudan
- Noé Archiviste
- Johann
- Naenia
- August Ruthven
- Éric (Mentioned only)
- Louise (Mentioned only)
- Jean-Jacques Chastel (First Appearance)
- Chloé d'Apchier
(*) - Denotes that the character did not appear physically, but as a part of another character's memories.
Terms[]
Trivia[]
- Dissonance is a French word that shares the exact same spelling and definition as the English word "dissonance." Still, this is to be regarded as the French word and is meant to be pronounced in a French manner.
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v - e - t | The Case Study of Vanitas Chapters |
---|---|
Parisian Excursion Arc | 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 |
Bal Masqué Arc | 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 |
Hunters of the Dark Arc | 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 |
The Beast of Gévaudan Arc | 22 • 23 • 24 • 25 • 26 • 27 • 28 • 29 • 30 • 31 • 32 • 33 • 34 • 34.5 • 35 • 36 • 37 • 38 • 38.5 • 39 • 40 • 41 • 42 • 43 |
Amusement Park Arc | 44 • 45 • 46 • 47 • 48 • 49 • 50 • 51 • 52 • 53 • 54 • 54.5 • 55 • 55.5 • 56 |
Miel Incident Arc | 57 • 58 • 59 • 60 • 61 • 61.5 • 62 • 62.5 • 63 |
Intermissions | 15.5 • 46.5 • 51.5 • 60.5 |
Volumes | 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 |
Omake | Romance is a✰LOVE MISSION |
Other | Vanitashu no Karute • Author's Notes |