9. Black and Gold (20)
9. Black and Gold (20)
Reina's skill improved day by day.
Ever since she'd shattered the board, it was as if she'd thrown off some shackle that had been hobbling her ankles.
Over four days, she passed every drill Ella had classified as "advanced"—with top marks every time.
Now only one thing remained.
The drill they called "Freecell."
Cards came flying at her from every direction, and she snatched them all one-handed. She caught the very last card and spread her fingers open.
Between her five fingers—
in the four gaps, fifty-two cards sat arranged by suit: hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades, each stacked in order from ace to king.
It was a drill that demanded she read the suit and number on an incoming card and catch it into the correct gap between her fingers.
Cognitive ability pushed to its absolute limit.
Even Ella had only pulled it off a handful of times. Reina did it on her first attempt.
Just as the troupe members were about to erupt in cheers, Bandik's rough voice leaked through his bandages and stopped them cold.
"Where'd the joker cards go?"
"Huh?"
"Now that you mention it, there are two more. The black joker and the red joker."
Freecell required filtering out the two joker cards hidden among the fifty-four-card barrage.
Holding one even momentarily meant instant failure.
But neither joker was anywhere on the floor.
"Maybe they got shuffled in wrong?"
"Y-yeah, think so? When we were playing cards the other night, did we forget to pull out the ones we hid in our lapels?"
"What? Hey, no wonder you guys kept pulling jokers whenever you needed one!"
While the troupe buzzed, Wonderstein smiled quietly and drew a single card from his breast pocket.
It showed a clown in black costume.
At the same moment, Reina drew a card from her own pocket.
A clown in red costume.
Amid the storm of flying cards, she had batted those two—and only those two—straight into his pocket and her own.
Not even Ella had managed that trick.
The troupe burst into cheers.
With this, she had conquered every one of Ella's challenge drills in ten days.
Reina stood at the center of the heated scene, her expression still resolutely cold.
She was thrilled, but maintaining composure after a successful feat was a habit ingrained deep in her bones.
Sven rattled his skeleton and shouted,
"Ha-ha! Every last one of Miss Ella's drills, beaten! Miss Reina's ambitions have advanced another notch!"
At that, her frozen expression cracked just slightly.
"N-no! Wh-who said anything about going after the Deputy Leader position...!"
The Skeleton Clown pounced on her words with an oily voice.
"Oh? I never said anything about going after the deputy position. I just said 'ambitions,' didn't I?"
"Th-that's... you've been teasing me with exactly that this whole time..."
Her flustered reaction sent the whole troupe into laughter.
If anything had changed most of all, it was her demeanor.
The stiff, drill-instructor tone had softened around the edges.
Instead of bristling at the troupe's teasing, she floundered and went red in the face.
Looking at her now, it was impossible to believe she was the same person who had been so icy on the first day.
"Miss Reina."
Wonderstein approached her.
She looked up at him, visibly startled.
"Yes?"
"When shall we hold the Deputy Leader selection exam?"
"D-Deputy Leader! Ah, no..."
Her lips had twitched for an instant—tempted—and then she caught the playful smile on Wonderstein's mouth and flushed even redder.
"Troupe Leader, are you teasing me too now?!"
"Haha, everyone else was having fun, so I wanted to get a word in. Heh. That aside—is Miss Reina actually after the Deputy Leader position in our circus?"
Faced with his completely direct question, Reina felt her pounding heart grow strangely calm.
Maybe it was thanks to the years of weathering her father's cynical way of speaking.
When someone was this blunt, she actually steadied.
You're asking if I want to be your Deputy Leader?
She decided to answer honestly.
Whether it was possible or not was secondary—she was curious how he'd react.
"I..."
She opened her mouth.
But at the same instant, Wonderstein burst out laughing and waved a hand.
"I know. Your rivalry with Miss Ella has you fired up, so it looks that way. Miss Reina has to go back to the Golden Carnival."
"What? No, I..."
"It's fine. Heh—I was only teasing too."
"Ah..."
Once the mood turned like this, Reina couldn't push harder.
She was someone who could fire right back at anyone who came at her directly—but if they teased or gently deflected, she flustered, hesitated, and missed her chance.
The troupe members watched Reina and whispered among themselves.
- Does the boss seriously not know?
- He's always been a little emotionally cross-wired.
- Even a demonic superhuman like him, in this department, honestly...
- If you want to make a move, you've gotta do it like Ella...
As it happened, the person Reina thought of was Ella too.
If only she had a personality as bold as hers.
She'd heard from an acquaintance at the Golden Carnival how well Ella was doing there.
Despite her young age, she never got cowed—treated the older members without awkwardness and grew close to them right away.
She herself had been at the Golden Carnival for months and still felt stiff around most people...
Even the few who'd grown friendly had approached her first, after seeing her father's harsh treatment—they'd come to comfort her. She had never once been the one to initiate a relationship.
Until now, that hadn't bothered her.
Her head had been full of one thought: becoming the supreme acrobat her father demanded.
Above all, she had believed she was strong enough.
She kept her composure when dealing with renowned, high-ranking people.
She could stand before thousands of spectators and say whatever she wanted without her expression shifting.
But the moment someone she actually wanted to be with appeared, everything changed.
She couldn't easily say what she wanted to say.
Only then did she realize: the composure she'd carried all this time hadn't been born of confidence. It had been born of resignation.
Because whatever anyone thought, she just had to play the part of the "Golden Libra" and be done with it.
She hadn't really been communicating with people. She'd just been performing alone, facing a wall.
Now that someone she couldn't treat as a wall had appeared, she'd turned desperately timid.
She was pathetic.
Some Golden Libra.
Idiot. Loser. Crybaby.
Wonderstein watched Reina's expression grow forlorn and gave a rueful smile.
He assumed his remark about returning to the Golden Carnival had made her gloomy.
Lord Fantastic.
Of course she'd feel wretched imagining herself back under his thumb.
"Miss Reina."
Wonderstein's hand stroked her hair.
A warm heat wrapped around the crown of her head.
"Ah..."
A murmur leaked through her lips.
She was being treated like a child—something she hadn't experienced in a very long time.
Barring an era too distant to remember.
"Thanks to you, the troupe members learned their acrobatics with genuine enjoyment. You worked hard over less than two weeks. Thank you."
Thank you.
That was what Reina wanted to say to him, if anything.
He had breathed confidence into her that she could be useful to someone. He had stood by her side so she could sharpen her own skills.
The drills Ella had designed demanded the simultaneous manipulation of multiple variables.
Back at the Golden Carnival, a dedicated support team would have built the equipment.
But Wonderstein's side had no technicians to craft specialized props or gear.
So someone had to personally spar against the trainee, and that partner needed skill equal to the person attempting the drill.
Wonderstein had adapted to her seamlessly, even as the trainees changed.
When she practiced catching daggers, he had already seen through her height, arm length, and jumping power completely, and threw each blade to exactly the right threshold.
That wasn't something talent alone could achieve. He needed to observe her movements in person several times to know that.
She had performed movements like that in front of him exactly once.
The New Student Selection Test.
He must have been watching her since then.
When even her own father looked away, when almost everyone in the hall had their eyes stolen by Ella's dazzling movements.
He had been watching what she did from that very moment.
It made her happy: the fact that his concern and attention weren't something he'd been forced to give simply because she was staying here.
"I'm the one who should be thanking you."
But she was mistaken.
Wonderstein had the "Skillbook"—the reward for reaching average Affection level 15.
When he'd learned that the second preliminary trial's theme was "Technique," he had expanded the Skillbook's slots to two.
He had helped with her drills by swapping acrobatic techniques in and out of the Skillbook.
For example, just equipping "Throwing Arts" in the Skillbook gave him instant clarity on where to hurl a dagger or a board so it would strike its intended target, and where to throw so the opponent couldn't catch it.
To exaggerate a little: it was as distinct as a building simulation game showing constructible zones in green and unconstructible zones in red.
Above all, the drills Reina was doing were ones he'd already run once with Ella.
Every time they trained, he knew exactly which techniques were needed.
Training and encouragement.
By Wonderstein's reckoning, he had already given her everything he could give.
Today was Friday.
Only a few days remained.
He decided it was time to indulge a personal craving of his own.
He brought up a proposal that had been making his mouth itch the whole time.
"You're set to return next Tuesday, yes?"
"That's right."
"So here's the thing. Would you care to step out for a bit over the weekend?"
Step out?
An outing?
A date?
A handful of synonyms tumbled chaotically through her head.
Reina answered, her voice trembling.
"S-step out? I... I don't mind, but... you won't have any fun with me..."
Reina knew she had no gift for conversation.
On top of that, her ability to match someone else's pace was abysmal.
An image surfaced in her mind: him walking down an alleyway with Ella, chatting and laughing.
She'd managed to leave a decent impression through training and instruction. The last thing she wanted was to go out with him, get compared to Ella, and be branded "the boring one."
Wonderstein grew anxious and coaxed her.
"Haha, we'll barely be talking. We're going to go see something fun. I just happen to need one more person."
Reina let out a quiet sigh of relief.
Of course. That made sense.
A circus leader wasn't about to invite her for a flower-viewing stroll.
"What kind of performance is it?"
"It isn't a performance. We're going to the Slagbort Confectionery Factory."
Wonderstein spoke with vigorous enthusiasm.
The Slagbort Confectionery Factory was one of the two great labyrinthine dungeons featured in Yeterinpurk.
A location that had appeared directly in the game. Wanting to make a "pilgrimage" there was pure gamer instinct.
In Rouge, he'd wound up exploring the sewers while unintentionally hunting a ghost.
But here, he'd never gotten a chance.
The sewers were uninhabited to begin with.
So he'd been able to pry open an abandoned well lid and go in as he pleased.
The place he wanted to go now, however, was a factory in perfectly normal operation.
He had to follow the official route.
A "tour accompanied by a child or adolescent" was the easiest admission method.
But the two teenagers in his circus had turned it down.
- Waste a whole day at a place like that?
- I am not a child.
Umon was available, but the only time he could go outside was during the Halloween season.
And at that exact time of year, factory tours were temporarily suspended because of the candy-distribution event.
Watching Wonderstein and Reina head into the villa together, Yurakne spoke wistfully.
"What a shame. If only I were three years younger, I could've passed for a teenager."
Sven glanced at her and answered in a dead-serious voice.
"You mean ten years, surely."
Maya returned to the villa at the exact moment Yurakne had Sven's neck in a stranglehold.
Expressionless, Maya looked at the two of them and said,
"Is training over?"
Yurakne detached herself from Sven's neck and nodded.
"Yes. Just now."
"Kh-hat—feels like the resonance chamber inside my neck bones got bent!"
Sven brushed himself off and stood up.
Maya scanned the yard.
"Where is the Troupe Leader?"
"Ah, the boss is inside discussing tomorrow's outing with Miss Reina."
A premonition of dread shot through Maya's entire body.
"...Outing?"
"Ha-ha, yes! The Slagbort Confectionery Factory, he said..."
Maya stood rooted to the spot as if nailed there, listening to Sven's explanation.
She stared at the villa with a blank expression.
- Mrowl...
Wally stood beside her, face utterly dejected.
Had he ever worn that expression even when his cozy box got stolen?
Maya gritted her teeth.
She had thought of Reina as just a guest who happened to be staying.
So she hadn't been on guard.
But she had vastly underestimated her teacher's capabilities.
In under two weeks...?
- Mrooowl.
Wally let out a mournful cry.
He wore the look of a cat who'd had its empty nest ransacked by a stray dog.