10. Demon in a Bottle (20)
10. Demon in a Bottle (20)
Classes at Rekachev officially began on Tuesday, the day after the orientation tour.
The auditing students sorted themselves into the same groups they had formed on the first day.
The teenage stars orbiting Reina had little use for lectures on drama or stagecraft.
They were professional acrobats, every one of them already running their own show.
What they wanted was to measure their skills against the rigorously trained elite. Practical classes were the only ones they bothered with.
The drafted kids who had gathered around Ella, on the other hand, hungered more for theory than practice. They were the ones who had stood at the crossroads of school admission and troupe enlistment—and chosen the troupe.
Regret over the studies they had given up ran deep. They threw themselves into theory and group work.
Ella had already scored top marks on the entrance exam and held no particular ambition for practicals. She focused on auditing the prestigious school's curriculum alongside her group, comparing every lesson against her master's teaching methods.
The third group had been scattered from the start and shared no real common thread.
They simply built their own timetables and attended whatever caught their interest.
Karen matched her schedule to Maya's and tagged along everywhere she went.
Unlike Maya, who listened diligently, Karen spent the lectures goofing off or dozing.
The only time any life flickered across her drowsy face was when Maya spoke to her.
Maya had no prior ties to the circus world, unlike the others.
Even the introductory lectures at Rekachev were designed for elites who had already passed a grueling acrobatics exam—they assumed basic knowledge and moved on without pause.
That left Maya stumbling over gaps. She usually turned to Karen at her side.
"Do you know what TS, NTR, and BL mean—the terms the professor wrote on the board?"
Karen glanced toward the lectern, loosed an enormous yawn, and answered.
"Hmm? Those... TS is Tilt Slightly. It means angling a subject just a bit in the lighting—mostly used in stage direction cues. NTR is Narration Talk Range. It's a unit for distance when you're doing a first-person narrative address to the audience. Level five is practically a soliloquy; level one is a talk show, straight conversation. Stand-up comedy usually sits at level three. And BL is Bilingual Language—when a play mixes two languages. You know, to underline that certain characters are foreigners..."
Even half-drowsing, the words poured out of Karen like running water.
She had made companions of the circus textbooks her brother left behind when she was small. She had crammed that knowledge into her head to escape a hellish reality, and it had taken such deep root that it stayed with her even now.
Maya blinked, genuinely taken aback by the depth of her learning.
"...That's unexpected."
Karen nodded along for a moment before the implication caught up with her. She yelped.
"What—Maya, are you saying I looked like an idiot this whole time?"
"Quiet, you auditing students!"
The teaching assistant's shout made Karen clap a hand over her mouth. She shot Maya a wounded look.
Maddeningly, Maya only raised a finger to her own lips and mimed a shush.
Why, you—
Karen bristled and opened her mouth to fire back.
Right then, she caught the murmur of seniors behind her.
"Isn't she obnoxiously loud?"
"She's been like that since the break. Voice on blast, no filter."
"And the second class starts, she's asleep."
"Why did she even come? Pathetic."
If they had been boys, Karen would have told them where to stick it.
But they were girls.
Her face flamed. She dropped her head, unable to muster a word.
The girl she wanted to befriend brushed her off, and the other girls shredded her behind her back.
Suddenly, coming to school felt like a mistake.
She should have just stayed in her quarters and practiced.
Misery crashed over her. She buried her head in her arms on the desk and shut her eyes.
She fell asleep like that and stayed asleep until Maya shook her awake.
"Mnn? Maya?"
"Class is over."
Maya's tone was cool, clipped—but a smile bloomed across Karen's face anyway.
Just the fact that Maya had looked after her made her heart swell.
"Next is standard freehand gymnastics."
"Oh, that one! It's used for warm-ups, and..."
As though her earlier gloom had never existed, Karen launched into loud, excited chatter.
She spotted the same seniors whispering again, but this time she could brush it off with a grin.
Maya gave no thought to the other disciplines.
Someone with no physical conditioning learning Ground Acrobatics, tightrope, or Strength Show-off would be a stretch.
Taming was out of the question—she had no animal to begin with.
She poured every last hour into one thing: Shooting.
The spatial perception and precise force distribution Shooting demanded were skills she had honed relentlessly while mastering Illusion Magic and telekinesis.
Three-dimensional spatial calculation had always been her gift, and her control of minute force—projecting paint particle by particle to produce a portrait—was a realm no one in the world could match.
"Remarkable. May I ask who taught you?"
The professor was astonished to see a complete novice execute the throwing drills with such ease.
At his question, Maya allowed herself a faint smile.
"Our troupe leader."
Something that had been clenched tight inside her chest gave way with a clean snap.
In that moment, she broke free of the Papilax at last.
Full command over her magic power returned to her.
Wonderstein had refused to be called her teacher as a mage.
Being branded the disciple of a mere Madosa—one with a dubious identity and no formal education—could close doors for her down the road in academia.
She could not bring herself to reject his consideration.
Instead, she found another way to name him her master.
By becoming an acrobat herself.
She might not be able to call him her master as a mage, but she doubted he would mind if she regarded him as her master as an acrobat. That was the idea she had set out to test.
At her reply, the professor nodded, an expression of satisfied understanding settling on his face.
"The Wonderstein Circus Troupe, you said? The one that raised Ella? It seems the troupe leader teaches quite well. One look at his student—at you, Miss Maya—tells me everything."
His student.
The words deepened Maya's smile, though to anyone watching, her face remained as expressionless as ever.
She was turning to go back to her seat when she found herself face-to-face with Reina.
Reina offered her a gentle smile—the warm look of someone who considered them colleagues after sharing meals for a few days.
But Maya's features were set rigid, and the smile landed like a sneer.
The difference in their heights did not help; the angle of Reina's gaze came off as looking down at her.
Maya's temper flared.
She had a good guess what the other girl was really thinking.
She was asking if she was content with merely being called his "student."
When she herself had already shared his bed.
Maya leveled a hostile glare at her.
Reina, who had meant the greeting in good faith, flinched at the icy response and averted her eyes.
What is her problem? Did I do something wrong?
She was deeply flustered inside. But her naturally cool expression made it look, to any onlooker, like she was the one doing the dismissing.
Maya's small fists quivered.
That vulgar wench, seducing the troupe leader with her body...
Both of them had things they wanted to say.
Neither was the type to express her heart well.
They stood staring one another down until, in silence, they looked away and went their separate ways.
"You seem to especially hate her. You are not the only one, but still."
Karen murmured it, glancing around as she spoke.
None of the Rekachev kids thought much of Reina.
Part of it was the scheme she and Lord Fantastic had pulled, but they also resented the entourage of teenage acrobats she kept around her.
Losing to Reina was something they could swallow—the gap in ability was too wide to argue with. But losing to any of the others? The pride of the elite would not allow it.
Being outdrawn at the box office was one thing. Being beaten on pure skill stung in a different way.
"Dammit, if Clara were here, she would wipe the floor with all of them."
"Of all times to be unwell..."
The students' gazes drifted toward the corner of the gymnasium.
There, a blue-haired girl with an intellectual air sat on a bench.
Normally, she would have worn a calm expression and a leisurely smile. Now she was watching their practice with eyes that could not hide their curiosity, grinning a wide, foolish grin.
For days, she had been acting like someone a few screws loose.
She really must have been quite ill.
"Clara. Time to head to the next class."
"Oh? Really? Let us go!"
She sprang up, delighted. Her friends traded slightly flustered looks at her innocent reaction.
The friendly, honeyed tone that put everyone at ease was definitely still hers.
Yet the Clara they knew paired that gentle speech with a subtle sense of distance and an evaluating look, leaving people unable to feel entirely relaxed around her.
Her friends had always felt fond of her and vaguely uneasy at the same time.
But in the last few days, they had not seen a trace of that old Clara.
Her words and actions lined up perfectly.
The "kind Clara" had turned into a "terminally kind Clara."
That was not the only change.
Her emotions came through much more plainly now.
She would be moved nearly to tears over a single bite of food. She would flush with excitement at an expensive perfume. She would stroke a passing dog's fur, grinning over how soft it was.
She made other spaced-out, un-Clara-like moves too.
Still, no one seriously suspected her mind had been replaced.
In this era, it was common for people on painkillers to behave as though they were drunk. The medicines prescribed here were often laced with substances that a more scientifically advanced world would classify as psychoactive—narcotics, by any other name. That was where the jokes about cold medicine turning people into idiots came from.
For the friends who had always stuck close to Clara, the change was both strange and welcome.
They were getting a look at the real person underneath the mask their model-student friend had kept clamped so tightly in place.
"Heh-heh. So this is what she was really like inside. Why all the pretense before?"
"It is just her personality. What can you do."
"Will she not be embarrassed when the meds wear off?"
Her friends smiled as they watched her gather her bag from the bench.
The image of her flustered little dash was ridiculous—especially from someone whose walk had always been so perfectly controlled.
"Let us hurry."
"We have to go to the rear garden. It is a taming class, remember."
The color drained from Clara's face at their words.
It was the hour she dreaded most.
"What is wrong? Oh, right—you said your ferret has been sick? Acting strangely aggressive toward you?"
"The professor said she would check on it. Said it was not anything serious."
"Uh, y-yeah... it just... got weird all of a sudden..."
Clara hedged, hemming and hawing.
She could not exactly say that the creature had noticed its owner had been swapped for someone else.
Taming class was the most free-form session at Rekachev.
Today's lesson was a practicum on "cross-morph socialization"—getting animals with wildly different appearances accustomed to one another and lowering their hostility.
Professor Phairen left the class under the proctor's supervision and addressed the girl standing blankly by herself, with no animal at her side.
"Miss Clara, could you follow me for a moment?"
The voice was kind and thoughtful, but to Clara, it sounded like a devil's whisper.
She tried to hide the flash of tension, but "expression management" was every bit as hard for her as "suppressing a reaction to a stimulus."
Her face tight with dread, she followed the professor into her office.