9. Black and Gold (End)
9. Black and Gold (End)
Simon returned to their quarters, seized Reina, and flung her into the training yard like a piece of trash.
She tried to use her innate balance to recover, but every time she fought for her footing, he struck her center of gravity with his cane.
"This is training."
Ribs, shin, ankle.
Each impact sent a shock through her body, staggering her as her balance crumbled.
"Guhk—! Kghk—! Gah—! Fathe— ngh!"
"Two weeks of playing around. Your body's gone dull."
Watching his daughter in visible agony did nothing to soften the force of his strikes.
The members of the Golden Carnival looked on and shook their heads.
"Here we go again."
"You'd think he'd take it out on us instead."
"Taking his anger out on the wrong kid."
They pitied Reina's situation.
But unlike earlier, this was not a place where they could easily step in.
Simon was, in name at least, training her.
The drill involved constantly shifting her support and center of gravity without falling.
Though it looked like senseless violence, he was in fact following a genuine training regimen.
Even so, at the pace he was pressing her, barely anyone in the Golden Carnival could keep up. Only someone who specialized in tightrope walking might have managed to match those movements.
In this era, the belief was strong that parents bore full responsibility for a child who had not yet come of age.
Had he been trying to cripple or kill her, it would be one thing, but he kept his force strictly within the bounds of training.
Several members who had grown up taking harsh beatings from their own fathers found his conduct repugnant, yet they could not claim he had truly crossed a line.
"This level of skill—hah. No wonder you lost your spot to Ella."
Instead, he gouged at her heart with looks and words.
His jab made her body freeze for an instant—and in that instant, another volley of cane strikes rained down.
He spent ten minutes wielding that thinly disguised violence without mercy, then turned on his heel.
His daughter lay writhing in the dirt, hacking up sweat and saliva, yet he offered no small comfort.
Coldly, he declared a ten-minute rest and ordered solo drills.
The troupe members always burned to comfort her in moments like these, but they never acted on it.
She always brushed off their hands. No matter what, she was determined to complete the tasks her father set. And the moment they so much as spoke ill of him, she clenched her teeth and pushed them away.
There was only one person she could truly open up to, and today Simon had sent him far away on an errand. He probably meant to trade him off once he secured Ella, but since the members already knew Ella was merely acting, they weren't particularly worried about that.
Lord Fantastic withdrew to his room.
The troupe members threw sympathetic glances at Reina sprawled on the ground, then hurried inside the villa.
So that she could be alone.
Sure enough, the moment they were all inside, profanity spilled from her lips.
The training she'd just endured hadn't actually been that intense.
It was the kind of thing her father occasionally subjected her to when his mood had soured.
Two weeks ago, she would have accepted this without blinking.
I just need to work harder.
If I show him a better version of myself, things will be fine.
She would have murmured those empty words like a spell, not believing them herself, and steadied her heart.
She couldn't do that now.
With her uncle gone, of all times, her emotions were that much harder to restrain.
Her chest swelled.
Tears fell.
She clawed at the dirt with her nails.
The name of this aching feeling was longing.
There, practice had been so much happier.
There, she had comrades who needed her.
There, she had a troupe leader kinder than anyone else.
Only two weeks. Yet that place had become warmer to her than her own home.
She walked to the edge of the cliff.
She leaned against the wooden balcony railing.
Below, more than ten meters down, an alleyway stretched into the dark.
If she followed that road, she would reach that place.
Five minutes. No, three minutes of walking, and...
Right then, the sound of horses whinnying rose from the alley.
The timing could not have been worse.
A carriage carrying the people she missed had just arrived.
Reina ducked swiftly behind the railing.
In case they spotted her.
They passed below the cliff.
Cheerful, warm conversation drifted up along the stone.
Reina clamped her hands over her ears.
She didn't want to hear it.
That was a place she could never belong to again.
Letting herself miss it would only hurt her own heart.
She had to let it go.
She stayed huddled like that for minutes.
She lowered her hands.
The alley was silent.
They were gone.
Still, she could almost still hear their voices and laughter in her ears.
She rubbed the parts of her body that throbbed from being struck, and clutched the parts that hadn't been hit but ached all the same.
Falling asleep on her father's lap.
Watching the stars with him.
Him dressing her.
All of it had happened just yesterday, yet it felt like a distant dream.
She wanted to scream toward the alley beyond.
Dad, save me.
Reina is here.
It's too hard here.
Couldn't you just take me away?
She leaned against the railing and wiped her tears.
Regret washed over her.
Should I have thrown a tantrum and insisted on staying?
Even if it would've made things difficult for them.
Should I have just been stubborn?
The rest period her father had ordered was nearly over.
She had to return to training.
She hated herself for springing to her feet.
The instinct that she must not disobey her father moved her body for her.
She was about to leave the balcony when she froze in place.
Something impossible was happening.
Someone was calling her name.
Right next to her.
The voice belonged to someone she knew.
How could he be here?
It was hard to believe, but the voice was unmistakably his.
He had come to see her.
She turned, smiling brightly.
"Troupe Lea..."
The smile on her lips died slowly.
No one was there.
Only a heavy, silent darkness.
Had longing made her hallucinate?
A deflated sigh escaped her.
Reina took a step.
How stupid.
There's no way he'd suddenly show up here.
It was a contract. You idiot.
It was fake.
How long are you going to live inside a fantasy?
Time to face rea...
"Miss Reina, can you hear me?"
She stopped again.
She definitely hadn't misheard.
***
There were two categories for admitting a troupe member.
Registering a name in the system's Member Management Window, and enrolling them on the competition register.
The two lists differed.
The system counted the triplets as three people.
Their Affection levels were tracked individually, and they were each granted Inspira separately.
The worker Ratmen were excluded.
The competition register, on the other hand, included all Ratmen as circus employees but treated the triplets as a single acrobat.
The system reflected the judgment of some absolute entity; the register was a matter of administrative procedure.
During the entrance exam, I'd had to induct Gaston as a member to free him from the mental thrashing Sven's Inspira had put him through.
Sven's Inspira, "Clown's Lie," only worked on people outside the troupe.
The system defined "member" by the former list, so I tried to add him to it.
It didn't work.
I exerted my will and even spoke the command aloud, but he wouldn't appear on the member list.
In the end, I had to use the one remaining supplementary selection right granted by the competition rules.
Only by following that formal procedure was I able to recruit him.
[Gaston Haliwooden has been added to the Member List.]
So I couldn't just freely add members at my whim?
Looking back, the same thing had happened when Maya joined.
I hadn't activated the system then, either.
Ella had simply taken her in on her own.
And yet, that act—completely independent of my will—had added Maya to the member list.
I could draw one conclusion from these facts.
You couldn't trick your way into recruiting a member.
A meeting of personal intent, a social procedure—some kind of formal act was required.
Which made sense. If I could add and remove people from the list at will, I could deal with any troublesome enemy by temporarily slapping their name onto the roster, dressing them in "Cast-Iron Armor" via the Costume Room, or blasting "Maximum Volume" into their eardrums with the Sound Room until they ruptured.
So how was I supposed to interpret what had just happened?
[Sub Quest — 'Stand-In Dad Part-Time Job' completed.]
[Reward: 'Reina Magier' has been added to the Member List.]
Reina had never formally joined our circus.
She was a guest—staying temporarily, then leaving.
Yet the system had added her to the roster.
I'd been brooding over that all morning.
In games and comics, there were cases where someone acted separately but still received the "companion" designation.
I suspected this might be one of those cases.
Independent of any social bond or administrative process, her heart had already leaned this way.
I'd planned to go to her first thing in the morning and tell her, framing it as my magic now allowing us to talk whenever we wanted.
But Ella's report made me reconsider.
"Lord Fantastic said Reina would take the stage first and expose scandalous rumors about our circus."
Reina, under Simon's orders, attempting to slander us.
My head could make sense of it, but somewhere inside, it stung.
And I was angry, too.
Not at her.
At Lord Fantastic.
Just when her heart was finally starting to heal a little, he was trying to shatter it like that.
I abandoned the idea of contacting Reina.
As long as she remained under Simon's grip, speaking with her was dangerous.
Then, on stage, she showed me something I hadn't expected.
She defied her father's command.
I could tell from the look on Simon's face as he listened to her remarks—a man who'd just bitten into a bug.
At the last moment, she had protected her heart.
Of course, it still made me uneasy.
This was one act of rebellion.
She could easily fold under her father's next order.
But I thought about the courage she'd shown.
Wasn't that enough to put a little faith in her?
Might that not do more to help her stand on her own?
"That vile, wretched, boorish..."
"Oh, for goodness' sake! Enough! How long are you going to grumble?"
Ella finally snapped at Gaston's unending stream of curses.
We had returned to the villa.
I was about to step into my room to contact Reina when a message arrived from her end first.
The system had detected her wish.
[Member Quest — Hey, Mister, Wanna Be My Secret Friend?]
I read the quest description and chuckled.
The timing couldn't have been more perfect.
She had been wanting to reach out, too.
I opened a communication channel to her through the Sound Room Function.
"Miss Reina?"
Her voice cut in and out.
What was this—signal interference? Equipment trouble?
"Miss Reina, can you hear me?"
When I called her again, her reply came through from the other side.
—T-Troupe Leader...? I-Is that you, Troupe Leader?
Her voice alone told me exactly what she was feeling.
I put a teasing edge into my own.
"Heh heh. Has my little girl had a hard time?"
***
Standing under the moonlight, Reina would have looked unnerving to anyone who didn't know the circumstances.
A girl grimy with sweat and dirt, shouting at empty air, crying, laughing, collapsing, springing back up—acting for all the world like someone hearing voices.
Catching the word "Dad" here and there, the Golden Carnival members realized exactly what sickness gripped her heart, and sighed in dismay.
When they saw Gremi returning from his errand outside, they hurried to fill him in.
Gremi had been a sworn younger brother to Reina's mother—her uncle, in effect.
He walked with a limp in one leg but was an exceptional knife acrobat.
Though he drifted between provinces, he made a point of visiting Reina once or twice a year.
After her father had turned inexplicably cold, Reina had clung to her uncle instead.
It was that bond that had brought him into the Golden Carnival when it formed.
His face contorted as he heard the news from his comrades.
"Reina? Dammit. Simon, that bastard..."
Gremi couldn't understand him.
His brother-in-law had always been greedy and full of bluster, true, but never toward his family.
He had genuinely cherished his wife and his daughter.
Then, after his wife's death, his personality had warped into something unrecognizable.
Setting other matters aside, the cruelty toward Reina made no sense at all.
Gremi and the other members stepped out into the rear courtyard.
They expected to find her babbling to phantoms.
What they saw instead was a golden-haired angel dancing across the air.
Her hands were clasped behind her back, and she leaped from line to line strung between poles using nothing but the strength of her ankles.
They stood transfixed, spellbound.
They'd always known Reina's technical skill was outstanding.
But they also knew her movements were mechanical, straight-lined—and utterly lacking in ease.
That was how she had always been.
In two weeks, though, the girl before them had unmistakably changed.
Her motions were fluid, her arcs curved, her posture relaxed.
Above all, the smile on her face stole the show.
She wore a radiant smile that matched the beautiful movements.
At the end, when she launched into three consecutive aerial somersaults, she even laughed out loud.
A shiver ran through Gremi.
It was as if his elder sister had come back to life.
Reina's body touched down on the line.
The members burst into cheers.
They had changed, too.
Two weeks ago, they wouldn't have reacted this way.
The time spent with Ella had taught them to genuinely enjoy practice, and more than anything, they were overjoyed to see the perpetually gloomy Reina brighten.
They called for her to keep going.
A few even tossed out the kind of rowdy lines a drunk audience might shout.
"I'll keep going, then."
She had originally been ordered to practice only Act 1, but buoyed by their response, Reina flowed into the next sequence.
Every time the audience laughed and cheered, a smile bloomed on her own lips.
Ah... so circus really is fun.
She bounced upward off the highest line.
In that instant, she glimpsed another villa beyond the trees in the distance.
He wasn't far away.
He was over there, watching her.
Cheering her on.
A single ribbon, the one used in Act 2, unfurled from her wrist.
As the golden silk unraveled, it traced a tail several meters long against the void.
Against the black sky, a trail of gold danced.
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Black and Gold (End)