9. Black and Gold (9)
9. Black and Gold (9)
The distance from the marked X to the line was exactly one meter.
The man who had caught the ball had been driven back more than a meter from his starting position.
"How is this... when did it come to this...."
The acrid scent of burnt rubber rose from the floor.
"Next!"
The student signaled for him to step down, but he shook his head and bellowed.
"Give me another chance! Something went wrong, I tell you!"
He snatched the fallen ball from the floor and shouted, but the student shook his head.
"Step down immediately! There are other applicants waiting behind you!"
Jeers rained down on him from the stands.
"What are you doing? Get off the stage!"
"And he came out here acting so full of himself."
"The fact that someone his size got shoved back that far is its own punchline."
"Is that thing made of muscle or just water balloons?"
"Now I see why he was cut."
The man's face flushed crimson.
He had trusted his own strength too completely.
He had failed to notice that the grain of the floor was designed to make you slide easily in a specific direction.
This was not a test of 'Strength Show-off.' It measured talent in 'Ground Acrobatics.'
What it demanded was not brute force, but the technique to plant one's feet firmly on the ground.
Thanks to the scorched black marks, the man belatedly realized that the floor's grain ran differently from everywhere else.
"Urgh."
A zero.
It felt profoundly unjust.
If he could just try again, he knew he'd do it right....
The man fell back on a piece of life-wisdom his massive frame had taught him over the years.
Raise his voice and bulldoze his way through.
"This is unfair! I didn't get a proper explanation!"
The student dismissed his protest coldly.
"You were the one who rushed ahead."
"That's— well— those girls stepped aside when I moved in! They pressured me into a situation where I had to take the test fast!"
At his words, the onlookers stared with sheer disbelief.
He'd cut in line first, and now he was being this brazen about it.
A man whose size did absolutely nothing to match his character.
"Just let me take it again! I'm telling you, I can block it!"
At his obstinate outburst, the two students assigned to the 'Own-Goal Keeper' station exchanged glances.
Over the past few years, they had seen more than a few applicants throw tantrums during entrance exams.
Experience had taught them that when someone was this determined to be unreasonable, there was a better option than trying to persuade them.
One of the students stepped forward.
He stood at the starting point of the rubber burn marks.
"Try to knock me off this X mark. If you can, we'll concede that our explanation was inadequate and let you retake the test."
At those words, veins bulged on the strongman's forehead.
This boy dared challenge him to a contest of strength?
"What discipline are you aiming for?"
"Ground Acrobatics."
"Hah! What, are you the next 'Immovable Hobbs' or something? You're telling me you won't budge a single step from there?"
"Naturally...."
The student never finished his sentence.
The man had charged the moment he started speaking.
A cheap trick to deny his opponent any time to react.
A mountain of a body bore down on him.
Even against an ambush that could only be called cowardly, the student did not flinch.
Compared to the oppressive aura of Strength Show-off Professor Yakovlev, this was nothing.
He leaned his body at an angle, seized the man's arm and pulled, while simultaneously hooking his leg.
It was jujutsu — the art of using an opponent's own force against them.
"Huh?"
The man's body floated into the air and spun a full rotation.
Thud.
His back hit the floor.
The hand that had hooked his leg was now pressing down firmly on his stomach.
An absurdly anticlimactic end, given the ferocity of his charge.
"Disqualified."
By the time the man understood what had happened, everything was already over.
Applause for the student and jeers for the man erupted simultaneously from the spectator seats.
"Pathetic, you hog!"
"Get off the stage!"
"Well done, Rekachev!"
"I almost feel sorry for that circus troupe. Their draft order is going to be dead last."
"They should count themselves lucky they cut a guy like that."
The man squeezed his eyes shut.
Never had he suffered such humiliation.
He had over eight years of experience as a strongman, and he'd just been beaten by a teenager.
He, along with the other applicants, felt the sheer height of Rekachev's wall in their bones.
This was the caliber of the world's finest elite acrobats.
The student hauled the prone man off the apparatus, dragged him bodily outside, and tossed him to the ground.
The man made no effort to resist. He simply rolled limply across the floor.
"Uhoohoo, hoo, hoo."
Reina watched the weeping man sprawled on the ground with contempt in her eyes, then stepped up onto the apparatus.
She didn't even glance at the marks on the floor.
Even without hearing the explanation, she'd already deduced that the floor was designed to be slippery.
She had taken the entrance exam once before, four years ago.
The content of the task was different then, but their way of laying traps had not changed.
How pathetically simple.
Fwoong.
The crank released, and the tightly drawn rubber band snapped free.
The ball shot forward.
She spread her feet slightly wider than shoulder-width apart, pulled the ball into her chest, and twisted her body in the same motion.
Her pivot foot turned perpendicular to the ball's incoming trajectory.
Screeech.
The impact that slammed into her body coursed down through her leg bones and into the floor.
Both the angle of her extended leg and the motion of absorbing the ball were flawless.
Her body slid back a mere handspan before coming to a stop.
There was a saying that Ground Acrobatics is performed with bone, not muscle.
The discipline contained many techniques, but a single principle ran through all of them.
Channel the impact to travel along the direction of the bones.
An impact arriving perpendicular to the bone could break it.
An oblique impact could wrench a joint out of place.
Against force arriving parallel, however, the bones acted like the pillars of a building.
Simply let the impact drain downward.
Fail to grasp that fundamental principle and try to absorb the shock with muscle strength alone, and you'd end up shoved aside — just like that man lying on the floor.
The audience witnessing her acrobatics swallowed hard.
Compared to the hulking man who had been driven back over a meter, her result had come out impossibly clean.
Even those who had seen it with their own eyes found themselves doubting their memory, wondering for a moment whether the ball had been moving slower for her.
"So what was her score?"
"How many centimeters?"
The student at the apparatus entrance measured the distance from where her toes had landed to the line.
A flicker of disappointment crossed his eyes.
One defensive barrier had just been breached.
"Eighty-one point three centimeters!"
"Oh!"
"What's the current student record?"
"Sixty-three point four centimeters!"
"It's the top score!"
A nearly twenty-centimeter gap from the best student record.
Reina, looking as though the feat meant nothing, swept a cold glance around the hall and stepped down from the apparatus.
Her comrades sat in the stands across from her.
Beside the lame man waving his hand in cheerful greeting sat her father.
The man gave a small nod.
His eyes remained cold and the line of his mouth remained rigid, but the gesture was unmistakably one of praise.
There.
That much is enough.
Reina clenched her fist and moved on toward the next testing apparatus.
Behind her, she heard the sound of the next applicant stepping up.
She did not look back.
She had never had the hobby of watching others do worse and savoring the feeling of superiority.
To her, the circus was simply a means to earn her father's acknowledgment. Nothing more.
Screeeeech.
Just the sound of shoes dragging against the floor told her everything.
Whoever it was had slid back at least several dozen centimeters.
But as she glanced idly toward the stands, she froze for an instant.
Every single gaze in the audience was fixed behind her.
Directed toward the place she had just left.
What startled her was the expression rising on their faces — a look crystallized out of pure excitement and anticipation.
They were waiting for the proctor to announce the score, already half-risen from their seats, poised to leap to their feet.
Behind her, she heard the voice of the student who had just taken the measurement.
"Ninety-eight point seven centimeters!"
Reina felt her heart sink with a thud.
When she turned around, Ella stood there wearing a triumphant expression, the ball tucked against her hip.
Standing directly atop the marked X.
The hall erupted into chaos, as if a bomb had just gone off.
"The— the new top score! And a record, at that!"
"Unbelievable."
"Forget the number. The move she just pulled...."
Those who had witnessed Ella's feat began explaining what they had seen to the people around them who were asking what had happened.
From their gestures and scattered words, Reina was able to piece together the event.
Ella had caught the hurtling ball with one hand, pivoted on one foot, and spun around and around in place. Then, just as the rotation wound down, she had planted her foot and stood exactly where she was.
The 1.3 centimeters of drift came from a tiny wobble at the moment she set her foot down.
The only reason students could draw that giant slingshot in the first place was the mechanism of the crank — a device that converts rotational motion into linear force.
What she had done was precisely the reverse.
She had converted the ball's linear trajectory into rotational motion.
'That's absurd.'
In theory, it was possible.
But to execute it with a human body?
Catching a ball moving that fast with one hand without dropping it was an extreme-difficulty feat on its own.
Maintaining a perfect circular motion on a single pivot foot without distortion was another.
And to stop spinning and plant yourself exactly in place at the end — that was yet another layer of extreme difficulty.
Reina could do it, if she had to.
But it would take several attempts of the same motion, reproduced through memorization. She could not do what Ella had done — pull it off on the spot with absolutely no preparation.
No, the very fact that she would even attempt such a preposterous stunt at a high-stakes event was proof that her heart was made of something entirely different from ordinary people's.
Ella let her arms hang loose and gave the cheering audience and fellow applicants a polished, stylish bow.
"Thank you! My name is Ella, Deputy Leader of the Wonderstein Circus Troupe!"
Straightening up, she bounced on her heels and waved her hands in every direction.
Maybe it was the effect of her irrepressible energy.
Even among the proctors, who were supposed to maintain strict neutrality, a few students could be seen openly responding to her performance.
"Ella! Ella! Ella!"
A portion of the crowd had even started chanting her name.
Professor Lugo, serving as the chief proctor, asked the audience to contain themselves.
But even as he said it, his own face plainly failed to hide his excitement.
As Ella descended from the apparatus, she flashed a smug smile in a particular direction.
There, a young man and woman who looked to be a married couple were waving at her.
Her parents, perhaps?
At the very least, they were clearly something close to that.
Before Reina could even register the feeling of envy, an ominous foreboding slithered down her spine.
Parents.
The word alone was enough to set her nerves on a razor's edge.
She slowly turned and scanned the stands.
There sat her father, an awkward smile twisting his lips.
His eyes, fixed on her, smoldered with inflamed emotion.
"Aren't you going to do that one? I'll go first then!"
Ella brushed past her and climbed onto the next apparatus.
She no longer seemed to even see Reina.
If anything, her mind seemed more genuinely set on simply enjoying all the acrobatic stations.
The name of the next apparatus she mounted was 'Ground Ball Outfielder.'
For one minute, she had to catch balls flying in from every direction and toss them into a net basket.
This one measured aptitude for 'Tightrope Walking' — namely, agility and balance.
She passed this test, too, with dazzling skill.
All fifty balls that came her way were fielded cleanly into the net.
The top student record was forty-six.
"Did you just see that?"
"Air-catch to air-throw!"
"Using both hands independently, no less!"
"And what about throwing it in behind her back without even looking!"
"That's not human dexterity."
Ella flashed multiple V-signs with both hands at the cheering crowd, then hopped down from the apparatus.
Reina had taken in every single one of her movements.
She hadn't intended to analyze anything in particular.
It was simply that terror of what her father's eyes might look like right now kept her from daring to turn her head that way.
"Next!"
The proctor called her name.
You can do this, Reina.
You're capable of catching all fifty too, aren't you?
Reina steadied herself and stepped up onto the apparatus.