9. Black and Gold (11)
9. Black and Gold (11)
Mathematically, it would take over six hours for all four hundred applicants to complete every station. Some pieces of equipment required considerable time to reset after a single attempt.
Yet barely two hours in, the exam was racing toward its conclusion.
The hundred or so students still in line each had only one or two tasks left. Once those were finished, the exam would end.
The prediction that it would take more than six hours had been built on the assumption that all four hundred applicants would actually possess the ability to finish every station.
"Here! Hand me some suture, would you?"
"Are there any more bandages?"
"Right, look here. I'm setting the bone on three. One... hngh!"
"Guaaagh!"
A steady stream of groans and screams poured from the space set aside in one corner of the auditorium.
It had been going on since the moment the exam began.
One doctor and two nurses wove busily among the patients sprawled across the cots.
Their treatment was swift and precise.
Anyone with a minor injury—a sprained ankle or the like—was up and out before long.
But they had no time to rest.
The proctors kept bringing in casualties, a handful every minute.
Dr. Nakhimov, head of the school infirmary, frowned at the newest arrival.
"What the—? How does this even happen?"
The prospective student they'd carried in had one eyeball dangling loose from its socket.
Excluding the applicant whose skull had been shattered by a horse's kick and the one whose crotch had been impaled in the pole vault, bursting a testicle, this was the most gruesome sight he'd seen all day.
Thankfully, the student who had brought him waved a hand.
"The eyeball's a prop he brought himself! He apparently thought a popped-out-eye reaction would be hilarious..."
Dr. Nakhimov found himself thinking it was a stroke of luck that this particular applicant wouldn't be passing the exam.
Every year on April 1st—Kirkeus Day—he had had his fill of little hooligans barging in with fake severed limbs or plague-symptom makeup, trying to pull one over on him.
Rekachev boasted the highest medical-absence rate of any school in the world.
This was not because its professors were easily fooled by feigned sickness and forged doctor's notes.
It meant the training at Rekachev was that punishing.
Gashes during class were routine; every day, some part of someone's body was twisted, fractured, or shattered. Burns and animal bites happened regularly too.
Dr. Nakhimov's paper "On Emergency Treatment and Post-Care Strategies for Trauma Patients"—the work that had earned him entry into the Imperial Society—existed only because he had spent over twenty years working in this very place.
"They're even more of a mess than usual today."
He plucked out the fake eyeball, found a broken nose and a vivid black bruise blooming around the eye beneath it, and set to work.
Rekachev's entrance exam was every bit as notorious as its classes.
It was famous for producing a staggering number of injuries.
The claim that simply completing all twenty-five stations was enough to guarantee acceptance was no exaggeration.
This year, however, the toll was especially high.
Part of it was students blinded by the Circus Grand Prix qualification pushing themselves recklessly. But part of it was the provocation of two geniuses.
Students kept snapping fingers and arms trying to mimic the outlandish stunts Ella performed, and others, lacking Reina's innate equilibrium, attempted her techniques and crawled away with wrecked backs or legs.
By the time the two who had caused all the trouble stood before the final station, fewer than a hundred people were still taking the exam in any normal fashion.
The professors, each busy with their own responsibilities until now, were finally settling onto the dais to watch the proceedings at their leisure.
Ella and Reina.
So far they were even: twelve victories, twelve losses apiece.
Reina's superior physique and absolute sense of balance had given her the edge in Strength Show-off and Tightrope Walking. Ella's remarkable perception and natural affinity gave her the edge in Shooting and Taming. In Ground Acrobatics, Reina dominated anywhere solidity was required; Ella, wherever suppleness was key.
Both had displayed prodigious skill, but what had truly stunned the professors was Ella's ability in Taming.
"Squaawk! Squee!"
"Huh? Hahaha! What's this? Are you cheering me on?"
A creature the size of a bull, with an eagle's head and a lion's body, folded its wings and nuzzled its head against her chest, vying for affection.
A griffin—the beast most commonly tamed in the Kiev Empire.
They were known to be stubborn and fiercely prideful animals, nearly impossible to tame without establishing a thorough bond with a single trainer starting from infancy.
The one in Rekachev's possession was considered relatively docile, but it was by no means the sort of creature you could expect to behave like a puppy around a total stranger.
This griffin was one of the exam stations.
Feeding it, stroking it, mounting it—
completing a set of tasks like these would earn the highest possible score.
Not a single student had yet managed to climb onto its back.
The friendliest student had tried to mount it forcibly and had his arm broken by the creature's talons for the effort.
'Charlie did it about a year before he graduated.'
Yet Ella, on her very first meeting, achieved the seemingly impossible: she climbed onto the griffin's back.
And she didn't stop there.
At the "Serval Interpreter" station, she interpreted every vocalization and gesture the wildcat made. In the "Mounted Obstacle Race," she guided an unfamiliar horse as if it were an extension of her own body, threading every obstacle and shattering the previous record.
Her talent for taming was difficult to measure.
What the professors wanted to know most was who had trained her.
Her posture and movements were unmistakably "Rekachev school."
The first training students received upon entering was posture correction.
Everything—greetings, landings, leaps, handwork, footwork—was refined into a form called the "Rekachev method."
No matter what acrobatic feat they performed later, that distinctive form bled through their movements in a unique way.
It was how, even out in the world, they could identify fellow alumni from the subtleties of a hand gesture or the angle of a toe.
And, astonishingly, the girl named Ella demonstrated a flawless Rekachev method.
"What is she? Who is this child?"
"Could she have been trained by someone from a branch school?"
Twenty-eight years had passed since Rekachev Circus School was founded.
By now, many of its graduates had gone on to teach independently.
But none of the students raised outside these walls had ever demonstrated such perfect command of the Rekachev method.
Rekachev's style wasn't something you could acquire merely by being taught. It was something absorbed naturally over years, honed by the school's competitive, brutal environment, where students spurred each other on constantly.
"Who knows. She might have picked it up naturally from a few days of observation, just like Charlie did."
"Hard to believe. I thought there was only one such genius per generation."
"Let's ask her about it in detail when we get the chance."
The griffin was finally hauled off by other Taming majors.
Ella gestured for the struggling beast to be still, and it stopped resisting, docilely allowing itself to be led from the hall.
The twenty-fifth station was special.
It remained sealed until everyone who had completed the previous twenty-four gathered.
Around a hundred applicants assembled to face it.
Forty of them would be selected through the draft in this exam.
Rekachev's entering class varied year to year, but sixty was typical.
In other words, simply standing here already almost guaranteed their admission.
Professor Lugo—notorious among students for bleeding them dry, which had earned him the nickname "the Vampire"—stepped forward. His eyes gleamed above the high collar that covered his nose.
"Our entrance exam consists of stations designed each year by our graduates, pooling their ingenuity for the next incoming class. Perhaps because they work from their own experiences, similar patterns tend to repeat on a four-year cycle."
At his explanation, Wonderstein, watching from the audience, nodded in comprehension.
That explained why so many of the implements he'd seen in TT2 had appeared in today's exam.
The contraptions the top seniors—Shepherd Girl among them—were building right now would be the very tools he'd seen in the game once they graduated.
"The twenty-fifth apparatus served as the inspiration for the 'test' our school set for the Circus Grand Prix this year. We were floored when we saw the proposal submitted last year by the valedictorian of the 26th graduating class. The idea was simply too compelling to waste on a mere entrance exam. We had been wrestling with the design for the Grand Prix trial, and we adopted her idea, turning it into the Grand Prix event. Allow me to introduce it. The work that gave us that spark: 'Depart! Dream Race,' designed by the top graduate of the 26th class!"
The curtain screening off the rear of the auditorium drew back.
Beyond it rose a colossal steel structure.
It occupied nearly half the hall.
Obstacles were arranged among dense steel framing, like the bare skeleton of a building, and ten tracks branching out from the starting line cut through them.
The moment it was revealed, murmurs of admiration rippled through the competing troupes.
"That's—!"
"Aha, so that's what it was."
"A student came up with that?"
Those who had already taken the test were struck by its familiarity; those who had only read about it in journals were startled to see it in the flesh.
The theme of Rekachev Circus School's trial was "Skill."
They regarded acrobatics itself as the most vital element of the circus.
Their initial plan had been something similar to the entrance exam:
a scoring system across dozens of apparatuses.
It felt a little bland for a festival, but they'd seen no alternative.
Then Charlie's graduation project gave them inspiration.
He had woven together the equipment used in the entrance exam into a kind of obstacle race, exactly as everyone was seeing now.
"'Depart! Dream Race' has a simple rule. Ten runners line up at their respective tracks, overcome the obstacles, and race to the finish line."
Rekachev's Grand Prix trial was held once a month.
Its format was similar to the twenty-fifth station that now stood before them.
Ten circuses would race, with three stars up for grabs.
The scale, however, was incomparable.
The entire school building—known as the Palace of Miracles, or the Magic Palace—served as the stage.
'Charlie made this?'
Ella's gaze swept across every corner of the steel framework, a smile forming on her lips.
'He's something else, that guy. If what the professors said is true, he basically designed one whole Grand Prix preliminary by himself.'
She thought how wonderful it would have been if he were here.
Why did he have to go back to his hometown?
Rekachev 25 was an unbelievably elite circus troupe.
And he'd turned down their invitation to join...
There wasn't anything special waiting for him back home...
Special...
Huh...?
A throbbing ache suddenly split through her skull.
The landscape of her hometown, Alamo, flickered through her mind.
The desert sprawling in every direction, the majestic wall of the Sierra Madre Mountains to the west, surfaced in her memory.
Her master and her friends, the kind villagers.
And...
The monster.
The one that killed them all...
Ella clutched at her pounding head.
That damned geezer's performance had scrambled her brain.
For a moment, she'd nearly confused things.
The village where everyone had died of the Curse Plague was Dvalchev, not her hometown.
That was where the monster had appeared, too.
She had experienced a baffling confusion of memories.
Resolving to find even more material to needle Gaston with once she returned, Ella stepped up to the starting line.
Beside her stood her rival in this exam: Reina.
"Last one. Which of us do you think will win?"
"Me."
"Hm. Is that so?"
Ella bared her teeth in a grin.
Good. This tension—she loved it.
With a bang, the ten challengers shot down their respective tracks.