9. Black and Gold (10)
9. Black and Gold (10)
At the proctor's signal, balls began arcing toward her.
She fielded each one calmly and deposited it into the mesh basket.
No matter the angle of approach, her center never wavered.
Her nickname, "Golden Libra"—the Golden Balance—had been earned precisely because of that absolute equilibrium.
The crowd marveled at her movements.
Her body worked like a machine, without a single wasted motion.
She was the polar opposite of Ella's flashy improvisation.
Unlike Reina, Ella had laced her run with little performance flourishes meant to delight the eye.
She'd gather balls instead of dumping them straight in, juggle a handful with one hand, then rapid-fire them into the net—or hurl a held ball to intercept an incoming one, sending the deflected shot into the basket while the original sank neatly back into her palm. Trick after trick.
And none of it cost her a point on the exam. It was, by any measure, a divine art.
Reina's movements contained nothing of the sort.
She did not so much as flick her wrist without purpose.
She moved only when necessary, and only as much as necessary.
The spectators understood what they were seeing.
Until now, everyone had called Reina a prodigy.
Her abilities so utterly overwhelmed those of her peers.
But standing side by side with a true genius, the truth became visible.
Every motion, every skill she possessed had been built through relentless effort.
One minute elapsed.
Reina, too, succeeded in landing all fifty balls in the basket.
She'd even set a new record.
Five seconds before the trial ended, the final ball fired.
Most examinees would have spent those last seconds scrabbling for loose balls on the floor, desperate to force even one more into the net.
But with forty-nine already secured, she simply swatted the incoming final ball with her palm, guiding it into the mesh, and ended the test.
Reina's time to clear every ball: 55.4 seconds.
Faster than Ella's 55.8.
The margin came down to one difference: reach.
Reina stood 178 centimeters tall.
Ella stood 162.
Those extra centimeters had carved out the final 0.4 seconds.
A victory won by the narrowest of threads.
Reina turned toward the spectator seats.
She braced for the sight of her father's face, ready with a sneer—you barely won.
That alone would have been enough to let her breathe.
As long as there was no contempt, no mockery.
Instead, she witnessed something she could scarcely believe.
Her father was beaming.
His hands were even coming together in applause.
Reina nearly forgot herself and burst out laughing.
That cold, exacting father, reacting like that.
A shiver ran through her, emotion surging in her chest.
At last. She'd been acknowledged.
Before this enormous crowd, he was finally praising her achievement with sincerity.
She wanted to shout, "Dad!" at the top of her lungs.
But her soaring hopes froze over just as quickly as they had risen.
It felt as though something heavy and solid had lodged itself in her throat.
She realized.
She had been nursing an absurd delusion.
She hadn't misread his expression.
Her father was still smiling even now, exclaiming with wonder.
Only—he wasn't looking at her.
His gaze was fixed on the apparatus labeled "Mad Tomato Baptism."
And there stood—
"Whoa!"
"Incredible!"
"Ella! Ella!"
The crowd erupted in cheers thick with fervor.
Ella, realizing no more fake tomatoes were incoming, glanced down at herself.
Her raincoat was pristine.
Only the floor lay sodden with pigment.
"Contamination rate: zero percent! Maximum score!"
At the proctor's shout, the entire hall surged with applause.
Ella launched into a backflip right where she stood.
A wet splat—the pooled paint splashed upward.
Droplets of every color embroidered the air.
Mid-flight, Ella twisted her body just enough to slip through them.
The paint pattered back onto the floor, yet not a single drop clung to her raincoat.
The crowd's admiration tipped into something closer to a shriek of disbelief.
"What—what is that? What is she doing?"
"Whoaaa!"
"Ella! Ellaaaa!"
Ella splashed through the paint like a child playing in puddles on a rainy day, crossing the stage in quick, deliberate steps.
She knew exactly how the droplets would fly with every stride.
By the time she reached the proctor and pulled off her boots, her raincoat remained spotless.
"Guess you can reuse this!"
She handed the coat to the student proctor.
He accepted it with deference.
The examinees were, in essence, provisional new students.
That hierarchy made the proctoring students view them as juniors, subtly looking down on them.
Yet even they floundered in front of Ella.
Her skill and the unforced charisma that came with it naturally overwhelmed them.
Once she'd climbed down from the apparatus, Ella checked the scoreboard for "Ground Ball Outfielder," then spotted Reina standing ahead of her and let out an exclamation.
"You beat my record? Kind of stings. Can't challenge again, can I? Too bad..."
The moment that chatter reached Reina's ears, she felt an impulse to slap the girl across the face.
Her fist clenched so hard her nails bit into her palm.
"Hey."
Reina strained to keep the emotions churning inside her from showing.
"Get lost."
Ella's sunny expression stiffened briefly—then relaxed.
"Sorry, sorry. We're rivals, right? I got a little carried away."
With that, she headed straight off to the next exam.
Reina scanned the audience again.
She hadn't misread it before.
Her father's gaze remained fixed on Ella.
Reina fought down the urge to sink to the ground right there and cry.
Just do better.
Do better.
She's still an outsider.
I'm his daughter.
Right. I'll win.
Even if it's 13 wins and 12 losses, that's fine.
If I win...
She steadied herself with those thoughts and moved on to the next trial.
Simon Magier cared not one whit whether his daughter steadied herself or fell apart.
He was busy watching Ella's next exam.
From the instant Ella cleared her first test, he had been unable to tear his eyes away.
One way or another, the man was a fervent devotee of Kirkeus, having received no fewer than four Inspiras.
How could he not be stirred by such splendid talent?
"Whoa!"
"Troupe Leader, Reina's just flipped another of her opponent's records!"
His fellow Golden Carnival members paid Reina their due attention—she was still one of their own.
But Lord Fantastic merely glanced that way and sneered.
"I saw. No novelty whatsoever. She won on physical superiority. Nothing more."
His colleagues exchanged awkward glances, then looked away.
All of them seemed weary of his coldness toward his own daughter.
Simon's eyes met Reina's as she descended from the apparatus.
That haughty expression, that unshaken composure even after a near thing.
Well-crafted—but to the man who had forged it himself, the heart cowering behind the mask was clear as glass.
For a moment, he felt a flicker of pity.
Only for a moment.
The door in his heart shut again at once.
He did not smile at her the way he had at Ella.
No nod, no applause, no acknowledgment of any kind.
He turned his head toward Ella's seventh task, now just beginning.
***
Maya wandered aimlessly through Tetromino Square after leaving the school.
The seven types of blocks packed the ground so tightly that not a sliver of gap remained between them.
Soon she settled at a café table set right where the square met the street.
From inside her coat she drew out a flat metal disk, doughnut-shaped.
A Memory Disk.
The tool illusion mages used to record their illusions.
Only an illusion mage could inscribe one—and only an illusion mage could play it back.
The one in her hand was a keepsake her mother had left behind.
Not long after giving birth to her, her mother had been called up to Sky City by an acquaintance pleading for extra hands—and had met with tragedy there.
This was the object her mother had clutched to her chest even as she died.
Engraved on the disk's surface were words saying it was left for her daughter.
Seventeen years had faded the lettering nearly to nothing, but the goal of replaying it with her own hands still lived deep in Maya's heart.
An ordinary illusion mage pursuing the Mystic could have played it without trouble. But the magic Maya wielded was anything but ordinary.
The only way she could manage it was to collect other Memory Disks, model every pattern inscribed on them into polyhedra, and work by inductive reasoning.
A task that would take at least a year.
Yet recently, she had opened her eyes to a fragment of the Mystic.
She had set foot into the Mystery of Image—the very realm she'd once believed beyond her reach.
In the life-or-death struggle against the demon, an emotion had bled onto the canvas of her mind, the one she'd thought empty.
Thanks to that, she could now produce an illusion not through calculation but through the workings of her heart.
Only one kind, granted.
—Mrowww...
An illusion cat stretched itself out in front of her.
It walked the way she remembered Wally walking. It behaved the way Wally behaved.
No need to calculate every little movement.
She simply brought it to mind as she remembered it, and that was enough.
Holding that memory steady, Maya channeled mana into the Memory Disk.
The metal surface flickered with a riot of colors, and an illusion burst forth.
The corpses of slaughtered cats lay strewn everywhere.
A cat was dying, crushed under a building made of cat-bricks.
It stared straight at her and let out a feline cry.
Then another cat appeared, the dying cat's face twisted in terror—and with a wet pop of blood, the illusion cut off.
Every cat that appeared was built and colored exactly like Wally.
This was her best attempt at replaying the Memory Disk, marshaling the full extent of her current ability.
—Mrowww...
Beside her, Wally pulled a face as though it had witnessed something ghastly.
Plain to see, the Mystery she had grasped was almost no help in realizing the disk's contents.
What the Mystery of Image had granted her was the ability to create only the memory of Wally the cat.
The illusion she had just played back was a foolish thing, constructed almost entirely from Wally's image.
She could guess the gist of its contents, but seeing the illusion come out like this, she couldn't even be sure she had read the disk correctly. It might simply have mirrored the vague images she already held about the attack. This was a magic driven by the heart, not by rigorous calculation.
This was the fruit of three weeks of effort.
Maya tucked the disk away inside her coat again.
When she hit a wall, the correct course was to seek instruction from her teacher.
He would surely point her toward a path she hadn't thought of.
But she didn't want to.
If she did, he would go on seeing her as nothing more than a high-maintenance kid—a child who needed help, a disciple who required instruction.
In front of him, she wanted to stand proud as... a mage in her own right.
If all else failed, there was still the inductive approach she had originally planned, so she felt no fear of being unable to realize the illusion.
So how could she broaden the domain of the Mystery of Image?
What had triggered the vessel of her heart to open in the first place?
She thought back to the first moment Wally had materialized.
She had been cradling the unconscious Troupe Leader in her arms.
The same emotion she had felt while fleeing the auditorium earlier returned.
So what was I supposed to do?
Hold him in my arms again?
—Pfft-pfft-pfft.
Beside her, Wally wore a smirk and made a noise like air leaking through a grin.
Maya barely restrained herself from swatting the creature across the square.
Just then, a voice called her name from a distance.
"Miss Maya! Ha-ha, time's almost up, don't you think? Shall we head back in?"
Sven waved toward her.
Beside him staggered Gaston, reeling like a man who'd lost his wits.
"Would you mind steadying him with your telekinesis? I tried and nearly had my arm pulled off. You know how fragile my joints are... ha-ha!"
Before he'd finished speaking, she had already wrapped the wobbling old man in a telekinetic grip.
"What happened?"
"Well, I... handed him vodka and told him it was flat beer... and he actually believed me. Drank the whole 250 milliliters in one go..."
"..."
"Bwueeegh!"
Gaston heaved violently.
Wally, who had been standing right underneath, took the full blast.
—Mreowww!
Being an illusion, at least, meant none of it actually stuck to him. Small mercies.