9. Black and Gold (12)
9. Black and Gold (12)
Ella and Reina shot to the front of the pack.
By the time the rest of the field had even reached the first obstacle, the two of them were already clearing the second.
For Ella, it felt like stepping straight into the past.
The hills and ravines near their village had been their playground.
On days off from training, they would tear across the terrain, using every natural feature as a tool to sharpen their skills—and squeeze in a little fun.
Grabbing vines, crawling through burrows, climbing trees, scaling cliffs.
Charlie's graduation project was their childhood resurrected.
Every obstacle she cleared felt like Charlie sitting beside her, asking, "Remember this one?"
Even lost in reminiscence, her movements stayed fluid and razor-sharp.
No one in the audience would have guessed her mind was somewhere else entirely.
The only person who sensed the ease in her pace was Reina, running right beside her.
Reina thought Ella was toying with her.
She glanced around as she ran, humming as though making sure Reina could hear her.
The message was unmistakable: I'm going to win anyway, so I'm just playing along.
All through the exam, Father had not taken his eyes off that girl for a single moment.
His face wore a delighted smile—the kind he had never once aimed at Reina herself.
The weight of shock and frustration pressed down on her entire body.
Keep working harder, do better, beat her—then maybe he would finally look at her. She had told herself that over and over.
But Father had remained cold and dismissive to the very end.
Even when she shattered the girl's record twelve times, his expression had barely flickered past indifference.
Reina shot a sidelong glare at the neighboring track and quietly sharpened her knives.
Right. A tie wouldn't impress Father.
So I just have to win.
Win at the very end.
'The fox-faced bitch who stole my place.'
The irony was that while Reina spat those words inside her own head, someone else was muttering them at her, too.
Clara was tidying equipment and tallying scores alongside her friends.
The Rekachev students stole glances at the final event in between tasks.
Most of them wore expressions of relief now that their proctor duties were over.
Everyone except Clara.
She gave her friends just enough replies to stay polite while she tracked Reina's every move, her face rigid.
Reina was about to reach the trap Clara had laid.
The original goal—stopping her runaway streak—no longer mattered.
Because a dark horse named Ella had materialized.
Twenty-four wins and one loss would have been humiliation. Twelve wins and thirteen losses wasn't. The audience would lament her narrow defeat and shower the loser with just as much applause as the winner.
A simple defeat wasn't enough anymore.
Clara wanted to see her seriously hurt.
But how do you spring a trap on a genius acrobat with that kind of absolute equilibrium?
Clara found her answer in the three years she had spent at Rekachev.
There had been one drill that was even more dangerous for the most gifted tightrope majors.
The very thing that made them exceptional—their agility, their sense of balance—became a liability in that exercise.
She decided to weaponize it.
She had already dispatched her pet ferret to the machinery room.
The plan was to trigger the mechanism the instant Reina reached the obstacle.
Clara smiled as she watched the two of them finally fling themselves into her trap.
After scaling the rock face, Ella and Reina halted.
They took in the final obstacle stretching out before them.
Ropes spanned the gap between the cliffs.
Hundreds of small lines tangled into an impossible snarl, woven together like a spider's web.
Tightrope territory.
Reina felt a surge of excitement. She could win this.
Tightrope was the one discipline where she had always held the edge over Ella.
She trusted her absolute sense of balance and launched herself straight onto the ropes.
The moment her weight landed on one line, its clasp released with a sharp ping, and the rope snapped free.
She had already stepped off, so the trap didn't catch her.
She worked her way across the cliff face, picking out the fakes as she went.
On the adjacent track, Ella kept pace right beside her.
They had made it roughly halfway across when it happened.
The ferret, having received its master's command, pulled the machinery-room lever down.
A metallic clank rang out, and every clasp supporting the ropes on both cliffs released at once.
Everything. The weak clasps designed to snap under a specific load, and the reinforced clasps sturdy enough to hold several people.
All of them—except for the dozen or so lines on the fixed clasps.
"Huh?"
"What the—!"
Hundreds of ropes came crashing down at once.
The two of them plunged—and dozens of lines wrapped around their bodies as they dropped.
Neither hit the ground, but they found themselves dangling in midair, cocooned like flies in a spider's web.
'Petty, Charlie. You actually built this in?'
Ella cursed him as she struggled against the ropes binding her arms and legs.
The vine-draped cliff had been a route they had often taken as children.
You had to dodge the rotting vines and trust only the solid ones.
But there had always been sections where the whole mess of vines would give way at once and come crashing down.
Ella drew on those old memories and worked methodically to untangle herself.
Reina thrashed her arms and legs.
The ropes tangled around her without mercy.
She searched for Ella with frantic eyes.
Unfortunately, her rival was suspended above her.
'No. I can't lose.'
Reina began tearing through the clumps of rope at high speed.
All she could think about was shedding the weight crushing down on her and climbing upward—right now.
That was exactly the trap Clara had set.
For all its emphasis on safety, Rekachev saw dozens of students climb up and down these rigs thousands of times every single day—and with that much repetition, unexpected accidents happened.
The year before, there had been an incident where all the ropes released during training.
Tangled up in the lines, Clara had rushed to strip them off her body.
That way, she could drop down onto the mat below.
That was when she heard Charlie scream, his face twisted with terror.
"Nobody move!"
He held everyone still and carefully untangled the ropes from each person's body.
The students didn't understand why at first. They only found out afterward.
"A few real ropes mixed in with the fakes is far more dangerous than all fakes."
What held them in the air was a tangle of dozens of fake lines.
What happens if you tear those off blindly?
You are left with just the one or two real ropes still looped around you.
That was the problem.
The real ropes ran through pulleys.
And those pulleys had safety catches—designed to lock every few rotations to stop a rope from running free.
In this scenario, those safety catches turned into executioner's switches.
Your body drops with gravity, but the real rope jams to a halt halfway down.
If it catches your wrist or ankle, you might dislocate a shoulder or a knee.
You would be lucky if that was all.
But if it catches around your neck?
Your neck snaps.
The students had always thought of the real ropes as lifelines, but in a situation like this, they worked the other way around. All their routine training became a blind spot.
After carefully freeing everyone, Charlie had scooped Clara into his arms and dropped safely to the ground.
She had already respected him—found herself noticing him all the time.
But the real crush, the real yearning, had started right then.
Clara marveled at the strange humor of fate.
Who would have guessed that experience would come full circle like this.
She studied where the real ropes lay across Reina's body.
One across her left shoulder.
And...
"Hah, hah, almost..."
Reina had no idea what could happen in this situation.
She had only ever trained on perfectly prepared equipment.
A normal test-taker would have frozen up, floundered for ages, and by the time they finally started thrashing at the ropes, a horrified professor or student would already be screaming at them to stay still.
But Reina was exceptional.
Her innate sense and lightning reaction time sent the situation careening toward catastrophe in an instant.
By the time the other acrobats realized what was happening and shot to their feet, she was already one move away from shaking off the last clump of rope.
Ella was cursing Charlie under her breath for building something like this.
He knew full well a handful of kids had nearly died on that cliff back then, and he still packed in this death trap.
That idiot Charlie.
Just wait till I see him again.
I'll give him an earful.
As she worked the ropes open with careful hands, she glanced down to check on Reina.
The girl was ripping through the lines tangled around her without a second thought.
"Stop, you idiot!"
Reina had no idea why Ella was shouting at her.
All that ran through her head was the desperate need to get free, now, and sprint for the finish line.
The instant she thought she had thrown off the last of the rope clumps—
Her body dropped, and something yanked back with brutal force.
Her left shoulder twisted backward.
Then something cinched tight around her throat.
Crack.
The sound of bone snapping.
Reina's body swayed left and right where the rope held her.
"Aaaaah!"
"S-someone's dead!"
The audience screamed.
The students stared up, faces drained white.
But Lord Fantastic, Wonderstein, the professors—the top-tier acrobats—all let out complicated sighs.
"Krrk, hk, hk."
Tears slipped down her cheeks.
I almost died.
Her body wouldn't stop trembling.
The skin around her neck throbbed and burned.
She had thought her neck was breaking.
It had nearly happened.
But the rope had stopped just short of it.
"Hah, hah."
Because someone had grabbed hold of it.
Reina looked up.
Ella was clutching the rope wrapped around her throat.
The sound of a joint snapping that she had heard—that had come from Ella's arm.
"Haha... th-thank god..."
Ella laughed.
But her body was not right.
The hand gripping Reina's rope had its skin flayed clean off from the friction. Her elbow and shoulder joints were dislocated, the arm dangling loose.
And the ropes that had been tangled around her own body—she had thrown them off in a rush and hadn't gotten properly free. Her other wrist was caught by a rope above, the skin torn away to leave raw, red flesh exposed. The arm on that side looked dislocated too, with bone visibly protruding through the joint.
"What're you... doing...? Get the one off your neck..."
"Y-yeah..."
Reina, barely aware she was on the verge of tears, untied the rope and threw it clear.
She pulled the line tangled around her left arm free and grabbed on with her right hand, holding herself up.
The moment Ella saw she was completely free, she let go.
The released rope lurched sideways.
Reina was on her own now.
Her left arm was broken and her neck still stung, but she could use her right arm to haul herself up the rope.
But Ella still couldn't move from where she hung, both arms limp.
"What about... what about you..."
"What about me, nothing... these arms aren't doing any more climbing..."
She gave a bitter smile.
"Just go. You take first, and at least I might still hold onto second."
At that pitiful sight, Reina forced the sob back down her throat.
"I'm sorry..."
She crushed the urge to forfeit and dragged herself upward.
She could see the other challengers arriving at the opposite cliff.
They stared at the cliff face, now nothing but a dozen fixed ropes, wearing baffled expressions.
In that time, Reina climbed the rope and crossed the finish line.
Professor Lugo, who had been standing there dumbfounded, called out her name.
"First place! Reina Magier!"
No cheers rose.
Only scattered applause.
Reina looked down over the cliff's edge.
She could see the proctor students untying the ropes from Ella's hands and lowering her to the ground.
Dr. Nakhimov from the school infirmary was sprinting over.
She turned toward the stands.
Father was watching her.
But his expression looked strange.
Half smile, half tears—half anger, half joy—a face where contradictory emotions churned together.
The others' faces were the same.
She registered expressions of pride, pity, and mockery all aimed at her.
Do they think I stole first place?
That was when the whispers around her resolved into a single word she understood.
Ah.
She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them.
Slowly, she lowered her trembling head and looked down.
Her pants were wet.
A sour smell rose up.