Faust didn't hesitate.
Before the giant male Tarasque could lung, he brought his bare heel down with an aggressive, crushing stomp right into the center of his discarded crimson costume.
A sharp crack echoed through the fabric, followed instantly by a fierce, volatile hissing.
Then, Faust ran.
In his underwear, with the heavy Ars Goetia and the silver Tarot box thumping against his thigh, he sprinted harder than he ever had in his life.
At that moment, a profound wave of gratitude washed over him for his foster father. The old Duke of Saxe-Weimar had enforced a rigid, unyielding rule: every child of the house ran and trained at the break of dawn, every single morning. Even his fragile, ill younger brother Wilhelm had been forced to build what stamina his failing heart could afford.
Faust had hated those grueling mornings a century ago; right now, they were the only reason his lungs weren't being crushed by a medieval reptile.
Behind him, the monster surged.
The ground shuddered as the Tarasque crossed the distance in a terrifying second and a half. But just as its massive, crocodilian jaws snapped down onto the pile of velvet, the fuse hit the payload.
Boom.
An explosion of brilliant, violent, multicolored smoke erupted, tearing the Mephisto costume into absolute shreds.
It wasn't a military weapon, but eight heavily packed bags of stage pyrotechnics detonating simultaneously carried more than enough force to create a blinding, blindingly vibrant screen of crimson, azure, and gold.
The smoke bloomed outward, but the visual distraction wasn't the real masterstroke.
It was the scent.
Wunder's stage powders were heavily aromatized—eight completely different, highly concentrated perfumes designed to mask the smell of sulfur and coal smoke in crowded tents. Peppermint, lavender, burnt cinnamon, and citrus collided with raw black powder in a dizzying chemical soup. For a creature like the Tarasque, whose tracking was entirely dependent on its incredibly acute sense of smell, it was the equivalent of a flashbang directly to the nostrils. Faust heard a muffled, agonizing screech of confusion behind him as the beast's senses were violently overwhelmed.
Faust didn't stay to watch the monster sneeze. He used the cover to disappear into a dark, narrow alleyway between two bizarre underground structures he had noticed earlier.
To his left stood a building that looked like a subterranean tavern or a cheap flophouse, muffled murmurs vibrating behind its thick wood. To his right was a pharmacy—a deeply unsettling one, its windows displaying dust-covered jars filled with floating, preserved organs and faintly glowing emerald liquids.
He was pressing himself deep into the shadows between the buildings when the world tilted again.
Without a sound, a rough, calloused hand burst through a gap in the loose wooden planks of the tavern's foundations.
Before Faust could register the threat or reach for his revolver, the fingers clamped onto his ankle with iron strength and violently dragged him downward into a dark, opened hole beneath the floorboards.