Sports Day (2)
Bang!
The instant I fired the starter pistol I'd prepared for the track events, the animals set in their lanes burst into motion. First off the line, unsurprisingly, was the cheetah—the very definition of running. A cheetah raised at a zoo in the United States was said to hit sixty miles an hour from a dead stop in two or three seconds, and this one was no exception, blasting ahead in a single tremendous surge. Maru tore after that blur at a fierce pace of her own, but her acceleration fell a little short of a cheetah's, and she slipped half a length behind.
"Hee-hee-heeeee!"
Bboni, of course, wasn't about to stand still. At the crack of the pistol she surged forward, mane and tail streaming, all four hooves driving hard.
"I'm going too-sha!"
Between that flying mane, Ilgito popped into view. He'd sprung onto her back the moment she took off, hoping a little cunning would make up for the disadvantage of a tiny body. Last came the kangaroo, thick legs working like springs, flung forward the way a marble leaves a slingshot. Each time it touched down and leapt again, it covered well over thirty feet.
"Waaah! That's the cheetah! I knew I could count on you!"
"Wasn't the cheetah just supposed to stand there and smile?!"
"Win, Bboni! The princess is watching!"
We'd promised prizes—season passes and the like—to anyone who correctly picked the winner, so a tremendous roar went up the moment the animals left the line, and it erupted again every time they jostled and traded places. True to its reputation, the cheetah opened an enormous gap on the rest. But a cheetah has one weakness: it cannot hold that enormous speed for long. Even with the stamina boost that came from living alongside me, the animals on its tail were monsters.
"Nooo! Hang in there a little longer!"
"See? A cheetah really ought to just stand there and smile!"
As the cheetah's top speed bled away and Maru and Bboni began to pass it, cheers and wails tangled together in the stands. People had put their bets on the cheetah, certain that not even Maru could beat it—and now Maru had overtaken it, and then Bboni had too. Aside from Ilgito riding on Bboni's back, the only one left behind the cheetah was the kangaroo, still hopping for all it was worth.
"Told you a cheetah only makes the cut against humans! How's it supposed to hang with those monsters!"
"Maru, let's gooo!"
"Show them a mount's pride, Bboni!"
"Ilgito! Take it at the line!"
A two-way race between Maru and Bboni... no. Count Ilgito, scheming to steal the finish, and it was a three-way fight. The track bent into a gentle oval, so it wasn't a pure straightaway, but Maru was exceptional the moment the running went in a single direction, and Bboni thundered along at tremendous speed, proving that a miniature horse was still a horse. A dead heat—though the shape of the ending was already beginning to show. It came down to temperament. Maru was a drag racer, built to do nothing but go straight and fast, while Bboni had the feel of an all-around sports car. Bboni was giving everything she had, but little by little Maru was opening the gap and tearing down the track.
When the long-awaited finish line drew close, Ilgito, still perched on Bboni's back, pricked his ears straight up. Maru was ahead, but the distance looked short enough that one of his jumps could close it.
"I'm the one who wins-sha! Everybody out of the way-kik!"
Seeing how near the line was, Ilgito coiled his legs and sprang. Or tried to. He left Bboni's back, but she was moving so fast that he simply slipped. One instant of misjudgment, and the little schemer who'd been gunning for first tumbled to the track and rolled across it like a white ball of fur.
"Jwaaaaa—eu-ssuuuuu!"
And so the winner of the footrace was Maru, who showed no intention of stopping even after the race was over and kept circling the open field.
"I lost...!"
Bboni snorted hard, bitterly disappointed. I sent the sulking animals off and went straight into the prize drawing. Up for grabs were season passes good for the zoo anytime over the coming year, along with pet supplies from the companies that kept sending me sponsorships. The delighted faces in the crowd left me more than a little satisfied, and I moved on to the next event.
"This event is volleyball. Of course, out of consideration for the animals who have nothing but feet, it's volleyball and jokgu in one. Hands and feet are both allowed."
The moment I finished speaking, the animals came out again—raccoons and cats, Yubu and Wonsungi, and plenty more besides. I'd already split them into teams, and I sorted them onto two sides at once, putting the two raccoons, Daepodong and Sopodong, opposite each other, and doing the same with the strongest of the lot, Namcat and Yubu.
"Hmph. This was not what I intended... but now that it has come to this, I shall show that monstrous cat the might of the talons I have honed."
Yubu had once given up on beating Namcat, but growing stronger beside me under the influence of my superpower seemed to have lifted his confidence. Namcat, the very opponent in question, did not spare him the slightest attention.
"Tch. Why the hell are there so many humans again?"
He didn't give a moment's notice to Yubu, who was clicking sharp talons in his direction, and instead looked around at the crowd. Yubu grumbled at the slight, and the grumbling went ignored as well. Muttering about that infuriating monstrous cat, he headed for the right-hand court with the teammates I'd assigned him, while Namcat and his team took the left.
The match that followed was nothing like ordinary jokgu or volleyball. Up through the moment Wonsungi lofted the ball, it was a normal ball sport. After that, it was a problem.
"I shall not let this stand, monstrous cat!"
Perhaps he still remembered being ignored a moment ago. Yubu met the ball Wonsungi had sent up and kicked it with all his strength from the air, spinning his body more than three full turns—feathers snapping—and driving it with those long legs. And the ball's destination was not the floor of the opposing court. It was Namcat, standing there looking perfectly at ease.
"Too slow. You call this garbage an attack?"
Namcat spotted the heavy ball coming for him, hopped, and took it cleanly out of the air. He popped it up lightly, stuck to it as if the ball's own gravity had caught him, and then fired it back at Yubu with all four paws. He hadn't returned the ball. He had launched it. With a piercing whistle of split air, it screamed toward Yubu. Fast as it came, Yubu's extraordinary eye for motion picked it up without difficulty. The trouble was the power packed inside it. He simply couldn't deal with it properly.
"Kwehk!"
Fortunately, Daepodong, watching the ball from the ground, took it with his whole body, and Yubu's team didn't surrender the point. The ball bounced off Daepodong, and Wonsungi, waiting for it, sent it back—jumping the way one does in volleyball and spiking it down with his palm. It flew into Namcat's court as if sucked down, and this time Sopodong stopped it with his whole body. Namcat launched the rebound yet again, and the match went on in much the same way.
"...Is this even jokgu? Or volleyball?"
"Right?"
"Pretty sure I saw this in an anime once. You know—that battle dodgeball where people were just dropping dead..."
The spectators had their doubts about what this sport even was, but a sight worth watching had unfolded, and nobody minded. If anything, some of them were glad. It had been a while since Yubu and Namcat's clashes carried this kind of fight in them, and there was real fun in watching the two send the ball at each other as if they were attacking. Still, everything that begins has an end, and this match found its own. Sometimes the ball bounced off Daepodong or Sopodong and sailed out of the court, and sometimes the other animals simply made mistakes. In the end the last ball caught Yubu in the wing. He couldn't keep his body under him, and his team lost.
"The winners are Namcat's team!"
I drew simple prizes once more for the people who had predicted the result, then moved on to the next item on the program.
"As a bit of a breather, we'll have the animals' talent show!"
This part wasn't a contest between the animals. It was a talent show, and it opened with the white-handed gibbon, the most famous pair of hands in our zoo.
"Kik-kik!"
With a light step he waved his hands in big showy arcs from the center of the stage, then brought out the balloons he'd prepared. He bit one, blew it up fast, and tied the end off with easy practice, making a long balloon. Then he began twisting it this way and that, weaving it together with others, changing the shape.
"Kik-kik! Banana-kik!"
What he'd made was a banana. Not a yellow balloon bent into a rough curve and generously called one—a banana tree, with several whole bunches hanging from it. Set down on the floor, the balloon tree almost looked as if a real one had grown there.
"Would you look at those hands..."
"Give that to me and I guarantee I pop it inside of ten seconds."
"Suddenly I want a banana. When the sports day is over, I'm going to demolish a strawberry-banana smoothie."
Delighted by their amazement, Wonsungi made several more pieces. One was a balloon in his own image, and another took as its model Bbwoobbwoo, the elephant he often kept company with. He finished them to a chorus of admiration and left the stage looking thoroughly satisfied.
Next after Wonsungi came the dozen or so chameleons that had arrived along with Nureongi. They huddled together in a tight cluster and began to change the color of their skin. Filmed from a short distance and thrown up on the big display, the sight drew another burst of gasps, because the chameleons packed close showed a picture as clearly as if they themselves had become a screen. Shifting skin, they rendered a seashore, then the depths of a lush forest. They even managed something like a family portrait, with So-eun at the center of all of us. The spectators had no choice but to let their mouths fall open.
A few more acts followed after that. There was the Podongs' show of marvelous skill, springing a safe's lock with two paper clips, and there were honeybees carrying lights the size of a fingernail, flying through the air the way a drone show does.
And once the talent show was over, the next event was a match that could settle something the crowd had been quite curious about.