10. Demon in a Bottle (14)
10. Demon in a Bottle (14)
The first challenger came from the group that had clustered around Reina.
They were teenage celebrities already performing professionally, each of whom had been the subject of a solo article at least once.
The girl now walking toward the jungle gym was a fairly well-known figure in the industry in her own right.
"Meren!"
"It's Meren of Silence!"
"The 12 Minutes of Silence!"
The auditing students buzzed with excitement.
The Rekachev students also looked visibly tense the moment she stepped forward.
Tightrope majors were usually the fastest at clearing the jungle gym.
What took other majors weeks, they routinely finished in a fraction of the time.
Meren was a tightrope acrobat as well.
Among the teenage acrobats currently working professionally, her tightrope skills ranked in the top five.
She walked to the center of the garden, all eyes upon her.
Tension showed on her face, but she didn't seem afraid.
She stopped at the exact spot where Clara had stood earlier.
Crouching down, she unfastened something strapped around her ankle.
Jangle, jangle.
A clear, ringing chime echoed through the garden.
A bronze bell dangled from her hand.
She always wore it tied to her leg.
"She's been wearing that this whole time?"
"I never heard a thing."
"Well, that explains the name 'Meren of Silence.'"
Acrobatics on a bell-strung rope was Meren's signature act.
She was famous for leaping across ropes hung with multiple bells without producing a single sound.
The audience instinctively sealed their lips whenever she began her performance.
The etiquette at her shows was the reverse of normal: you refrained from applause and cheers.
Once, she had plunged an entire venue into profound stillness.
People called that moment "The 12 Minutes of Silence," and it became the phrase they used to praise her soundless act.
Even at Rekachev, only one or two students per class ever conquered the jungle gym in a single attempt.
In the previous class, it had been Charlie. In the current one, it was Clara.
Maybe Meren could, too.
All eyes—auditing students and enrolled students alike—fixed on her.
She steadied her breathing, then launched herself forward.
The way she moved was peculiar.
A person normally alternates between stepping and shifting their weight.
She shifted her weight and stepped in the same instant.
For an ordinary person, taking a few steps like that would probably send them stumbling with a lot of "whoa, whoa."
But she had drilled that walking method into her body through brutal training.
She moved as though gliding over the ground.
No footfalls could be heard.
She kicked vertically off a bamboo stalk and launched herself into the air.
She followed the exact route Clara had taken.
She precisely replicated the moments Clara had sprinted and leaped.
Floor by floor, she ascended—first level, second, third—climbing higher and higher.
On the faces of everyone watching, enrolled students and auditing students alike, the strain grew sharper.
And then came the long-awaited fourth floor.
She flung herself onto the opposite bamboo stem for her final upward leap.
At that instant, something went wrong.
Crack.
The bamboo she set her foot on snapped.
Her body plummeted from 25 meters up.
Short screams tore from all directions.
She broke her fall with practiced reflexes.
But right then, a branch jutted into her descent path.
Thud.
Her foot slammed against it.
Before she could even register the pain, her body hit the ground.
Boom.
The garden floor shuddered.
The auditing students stamped their feet in frustration.
"Why the heck did it break!"
"Out of all the moments—"
"What happened to Meren?"
She was back on her feet at once.
The parts that had struck the ground throbbed, but she wasn't seriously hurt.
The spot she'd struck during the fall, however—a bone had been dislocated there.
She waved off the colleagues who tried to approach and limped to a bench in the corner of the garden.
She sat down, examined her foot, bit down lightly, and reset the displaced bone.
Snap.
Not a single scream left her as she set the bone.
She let out the breath she had been holding in a rough exhale and kneaded her foot this way and that, checking its condition.
Soon, she nodded toward the friends who were worried about her, signaling that she was all right.
The auditing students cheered.
"Whoa!"
"Such a shame!"
"Meren! Meren!"
The Rekachev students, who had been staring at her blankly, snapped back to attention at the noise.
They watched Meren, who was loosening up and preparing to jump again, with blatant annoyance.
Loud enough for her to hear, they started sneering.
"I mean, just take the stairs if you can't do it."
"Why butt in and make a scene? Tch."
"If you get hurt, you expect us to take responsibility? Yeah, no thanks."
"Some 'Silence' nickname. Awfully noisy, heh heh."
Since Charlie's graduation, the atmosphere at Rekachev had turned markedly hostile.
The students were mobilized directly into Circus Grand Prix preparations more and more, and they were frequently put on display at events like open entrance exams and drafts, where they were compared against outsiders. This naturally drove up their internal solidarity and hostility toward anyone external.
Meren's shoulders twitched faintly, as though the hostile mood pressing in from all sides had made her shrink back.
The jeers were one thing, but she was someone accustomed to performing in quiet settings. Noise scattered her concentration easily.
Reading the mood, Ella swore internally.
What's with these kids.
She did pretty well, honestly.
Why jeer at her?
Old memories surfaced.
At the school she had attended, the competition among kids polishing their skills had been fierce, too.
People said that children without parents matured early, but they were still kids.
They'd check each other out of rivalry or get into ego battles.
Ella had been on the receiving end of that a few times. The ironic part was that it usually came not from her direct rivals but from their followers.
Mostly, it was girls who liked Charlie.
Ella figured they targeted her because they saw her as his competitor and wanted to drag her grades down.
Once or twice, it had escalated to insults and physical shoving matches.
But it never went further than that.
They were people living together and leaning on each other through hardship. They didn't openly humiliate anyone the way these kids here did.
Ella was disappointed that not a single enrolled student bothered to comfort Meren.
Watching them glance among themselves, laughing or looking satisfied, was almost disillusioning.
'Charlie spent four years with people like this?'
She looked at Clara.
The breaking of that last bamboo had been no accident.
When Clara made her leap earlier, she had applied a technique from "Strength Show-off" to deliberately stress the bamboo from the inside, creating a crack.
She had been at this school for years.
She'd have a handle on bamboo strength by now.
How much force it took to ruin the interior without leaving a visible mark.
She'd set a trap on purpose.
A trap to make the next person fail.
'The trap was probably meant for me, originally.'
Reina had seen through Clara's scheme as well and wore a bitter smile.
But she wasn't as angry as Ella.
After all, it was her father who had first set out to insult Rekachev.
Clara felt both of their gazes on her but ignored them.
She spoke with a voice of feigned sympathy.
"Bamboo does break sometimes. The auditing students are new here and may not know how to properly judge the strength. So please, everyone, don't be too harsh on them."
Having said that, she turned toward Meren, who was getting ready to jump again.
"Miss Meren, please stop. What if you get hurt again?"
"No, just one more try—"
"I'm responsible for your safety... I'm afraid I can't give the injured Miss Meren another attempt."
"Ah..."
Disappointment spread across Meren's face.
Given her ability, she had a high chance of succeeding on a second try.
But Clara denied her that second chance.
Phrasing it as concern for her safety, and citing her own responsibility as well.
"If no one else wishes to try, please take the stairs up. We're falling behind schedule."
Two or three people here were tightrope artists on Meren's level.
But after watching Meren get laughed at, they had gotten a clear read on the room.
This was a task where success was never guaranteed even with a supportive, encouraging atmosphere.
Now that the place was crawling with enemies just looking to take a bite out of anyone, they were reluctant to bother trying.
On top of that, getting hurt—
Just as everyone was turning to head for the stairs, one person stepped forward.
She didn't emerge from the first group of elite acrobats, nor from the second group of high scorers in the entrance exam.
She walked out of the third group, the one Clara had dismissed as the leftovers.
The students initially mistook her for a mannequin.
Her expressionless, doll-like face and chalk-white skin encouraged the idea.
"What's with her?"
"That's not an athletic build at all."
The kids gathered here had been training their bodies from a young age.
The kind of body an acrobat required was, of course, different from a soldier's or a laborer's.
Most tended to be lean and compact.
No trace of that could be found in Maya's body.
Her petite frame, the hands without a single callus peeking from her sleeves, her marshmallow-soft complexion, and those blank, unaggressive eyes—all of it belonged to a sheltered, well-raised young lady of a wealthy house.
"Maya!"
Ella called her name, but Maya stepped into the bamboo grove as though she hadn't heard.
She walked straight toward the wall with the fifth-floor window where Clara stood.
Her steps never faltered.
She walked, and kept walking.
Past the garden's center, higher and higher.
"What is that!"
"Is she cheating?"
"That's against the rules."
The students buzzed like an angry swarm of bees.
The auditing students watched her actions like stunned mutes.
She was walking through the air.
With every stride she took, a plank-shaped illusory step materialized beneath her.
She blithely ignored the bamboo stalks blocking her path and strolled around them.
Like someone with no interest at all in such things.
"What even is that."
"It looks like Illusion Magic."
"There's no way someone can give Illusion Magic physical force."
"R-right. It's probably Inspira. Or maybe a magic tool."
Maya finally set her foot on the ledge of the fifth-floor window.
Clara, forgetting for a beat that she was supposed to welcome her warmly, shouted in confusion.
"Wh-what do you think you're doing?"
"You told us to hurry."
Clara flinched at her cold tone but refused to back down.
"B-but why didn't you use the jungle gym..."
Maya looked genuinely puzzled by the question.
"Why would I have to?"
"P-pardon? O-obviously, you should show your, your skill—"
Maya answered in a flat, unwavering voice.
"This is my skill."
The students chattering below went dead silent at her words.
This is my skill.
That was a phrase the professors often used.
The students of Rekachev, so fixated on their grades, frequently forgot their essence.
That they were jesters who performed their skills on stage to delight an audience.
They obsessed solely over raising the raw level of their techniques to dominate Rekachev's system, neglecting to develop something distinct and unique of their own.
This was what set them apart from the kids who had spent their teenage years in the field.
Those kids, driven by survival, worked to cultivate provocative, individual skills that caught the eye of passersby.
As a result, when Rekachev graduates faced them out in the professional world, they were often overtaken in popularity.
That was why the professors urged students to develop their own signature skill—their 'this is my skill.'
Maya's words felt like a reprimand aimed at those who looked down on kids who had honed a single skill in the field.