12. Rekachev Circus School Trial (14)
12. Rekachev Circus School Trial (14)
The forty-nine runners launched forward, the roar of the crowd washing over them as they sprinted onto the track.
On the special stage set up in the plaza outside the school, Rekachev's teaching assistants provided live commentary. They had set up a school map divided by sector and were explaining the unfolding situation, pointing at the pieces moving across the grid. Student emcees gathered those explanations and relayed the current state of play to the audience.
"Am I seeing this right? It looks like about half the runners are all heading for the same location."
"You are. And why wouldn't they? It's the one place where a treasure chest has never appeared in any of the previous exams."
The emcee pointed at one particular map on the display, where pieces were flooding in. The map showed a lone red piece just crossing the threshold.
"Here we are."
Ella surveyed the area she had just entered.
The school's grandest entrance, its highest ceiling, its broadest staircase.
She had arrived at the foyer, designated Number 2 Arena. In all three exams held so far, not a single treasure chest had ever been discovered here.
"The aces from every team are pouring into the foyer one after another!"
"This is expected to be the fiercest battleground of the day."
"Which is also why the seat tickets for this area were the most expensive."
Every time a new runner entered, a fresh wave of cheers erupted from the second-floor railing overlooking the foyer. The space, originally a school corridor, had been converted into a spectator gallery for the occasion.
The runners in this sector were confined to the first-floor lobby, the central Grand Staircase, and its landings. The staircases on either side leading to the second floor were blocked off by billboards.
The runners moved carefully, watching their footing to avoid stepping on tiles belonging to other teams. To cross over to an opponent's tiles, they had to vault over garden stones as tall as a person or use low stone walls as springboards. Performing such acrobatic feats within the confines of a mere fifty-centimeter square was nerve-wracking for the athletes, but for the spectators watching, the tension was exquisite.
"They didn't touch the ground mid-vault, right?"
"Wow, that's incredible. Clearing an obstacle like that."
"Top-class acrobats, the lot of them."
And so the runners leaped from tile to tile, dodging obstacles, rummaging through flowerbeds, inspecting stone walls, and scrutinizing the stairs.
Ella observed their frantic activity with an unhurried calm. If the pattern of the previous exams held, a treasure chest wouldn't simply be sitting out in the open. At minimum, a few traps had to be disarmed before the path to the chest would reveal itself.
So, while the other runners scoured the arena, she focused her energy on mapping the positions of the red tiles. Her own permissible stepping stones were flickering in and out of existence across the arena floor even now.
The color of a tile was, in principle, fixed—unless specific conditions were met.
The first condition triggered the moment someone stepped off a tile. The instant a runner's body left the old tile and touched the next one, the previous tile changed to a random new color. That meant it was impossible for teammates to travel in a line, stepping on the same tiles in sequence. A runner who entered an area also couldn't simply turn around and exit the way they came.
The second condition required all four tiles directly bordering a given tile to change color at least once. Once they did, the center tile itself shifted to a random new color. This, too, was a rule published in the competition handbook. Because of it, chain reactions of multiple tiles flipping color at once were common.
The third condition was when two tiles of the same color sat adjacent to each other. In that case, one of the two would be forced to change. This, likewise, tended to trigger cascading shifts.
Under these three rules, red tiles continuously appeared and vanished.
Ella tracked the shifting mosaic of the arena floor with methodical precision. She had to be methodical. If she just trampled every red tile that caught her eye without a plan, she'd back herself into a "corner"—a dead end with zero valid tiles left to step on. And that would mean being trapped. Out of the game.
One team was already in exactly that predicament. They'd crammed four people into this area, run out of safe tiles, and were now in serious trouble.
"What were you thinking stepping through there?! I was on my way to that spot!"
"Then you should've signaled first. Did you forget the plan?"
"Hey, this isn't working. One of us—no, at least two of us—needs to go somewhere else!"
"And you think you can just decide that on your own when command hasn't sent a signal yet?"
Discord among teammates was erupting here and there, mostly in teams that had committed two runners or more. With so many people flooding into the prime chest-candidate zone, the tile changes had spiraled into a level of chaos that was impossible to control.
This was a phenomenon unseen in the earlier exams. Back then, the possible chest locations hadn't narrowed so overwhelmingly to a single arena.
Even amid the turmoil, runners kept trying to search for the chest. But that effort, too, proved difficult—because of the traps the school had scattered everywhere.
Those who tried to dig through the flowerbeds found themselves face-to-face with snakes. Dozens of them, each one boasting brilliant patterns, held their bodies rigidly upright like blossoming flowers and bared their fangs at anyone who came too close.
Surely the competition organizers hadn't stocked the flowerbeds with actual venomous snakes—but the sight of those serpents occupying the flowerbed in numbers was still enough to intimidate the acrobats into keeping their distance.
"Anyone got a snake handler?"
"Damn it. Our team has one, but they're deployed somewhere else."
Meanwhile, those inspecting the stone walls encountered their own vexing obstacle. They'd spotted a suspicious gap between the bricks—clearly cut deliberately for the exam. Inside, something resembling a switch was visible.
Judging from past exams, activating that switch was likely the key to opening the path to the treasure chest. The problem was they had no way of reaching it. The crevice was deep enough to swallow a whole arm, but the opening was barely the width of a child's wrist.
"This seems like an obstacle designed for someone who's mastered contortion."
"Couldn't we poke around inside with a stick or something?"
"No good. The path inside curves at an odd angle. A stick won't reach."
Examining the stairs required equal caution. The Grand Staircase looked like an ordinary, moderately steep stone staircase, but in truth, it doubled as a training apparatus for students' leg strength and balance. If you failed to plant your foot squarely on the center of a step, every tread would tilt at once, transforming the entire staircase into a single enormous slide.
"Whoaaooh!"
"Tch—which team's idiot was that?!"
"Anyone who doesn't specialize in tightrope walking, go somewhere else!"
When the steps all flattened into a smooth incline, the correct response was to brace your ankles and hold your ground. But right now, that was harder than it sounded. The school had slathered the stairs in oil for the exam. The more agile acrobats, the instant their footing slipped, flung themselves bodily toward the colored tiles on the floor below. Those who couldn't manage that, desperate to arrest their slide, planted a foot down wherever they could—and often ended up stepping on a tile of the wrong color. Some even suffered the indignity of landing hard on their backside and sliding all the way to the bottom.
"Eliminated! Eliminated! Eliminated! Eliminations are pouring in!"
"Three runners just got eliminated on the Grand Staircase alone!"
Ella watched the eliminated runners with a faint, composed smile. The person who'd discreetly shifted their weight onto that one stair tread, tilting the whole staircase, had been her.
Just then, Clara's voice sounded in her head.
Good job. Now, can you move toward the Arch Gate on the left side of the flowerbed? Two runners from the Blue Team went inside. If we erase just the two tiles leading out of there, they'll be trapped and unable to do anything.
Got it. So that eliminates both of them?
They could get out if one of them sacrifices themselves. Or they could wait quietly for another team to create a new blue tile nearby and give them an opening.
Alright. What do I do?
Step on four red tiles in the order I give you.
Ella moved as Clara directed.
The reason she'd come here in the first place wasn't to search. It was to hunt the other teams' runners.
The idea had been Clara's. She'd seen through to a more effective strategy than simply trying to earn coins: forcing other teams to lose them.
"It makes sense, no? Runners are a precious resource—a maximum of five per team. And losing three means automatic forfeiture. Unless a team has nerves of steel, once they've lost two runners, they have no choice but to spend thirty coins to revive one. Forcing a thirty-coin loss here, sixty coins there, and suddenly our path through the game becomes much easier."
Her argument was sound. But deliberately eliminating other runners wasn't easy. There were almost no means of directly attacking an opposing team in this race. And the school grounds were too vast to reliably corner someone into a pinch.
"No, no. There is a way. A single moment, a single place, where that kind of opportunity opens up."
Only three people grasped Clara's meaning immediately: Wonderstein, Maya, and Baron Dosville. All three sets of eyes flicked to the same spot on the map.
The Number 2 Arena, the foyer. The location with the highest probability of containing a treasure chest in this exam.
The race started with fifty runners spread across the track, but this was the place where they were most likely to mass immediately after the start signal.
What if they treated it not as a search zone, but as a hunting ground? What if they could begin the match by forcing a negative-score penalty onto their opponents? For a lower-ranked team like theirs, that would dramatically increase their odds of winning.
Clara's strategy was one that couldn't have been used in any of the previous exams. In the June, July, and August trials, the fifty runners had dispersed across nine arenas. Each arena typically held five—at most, ten—runners.
But now? Nearly thirty runners had converged on a single arena. It was a special situation, unique to this month alone, across the entire two-year run of Rekachev's preliminaries. And she had her sights set squarely on it.
"Of course, the other troupes might worry about exactly that and decide not to come. But I'm certain they will."
Wonderstein had agreed. The situation mirrored an arms race. Everyone knew it was inefficient, but they were forced into an all-out engagement anyway to avoid falling behind.
The optimal move for every team was to scatter their runners randomly across the arenas and search for the chest unimpeded. But this game wasn't designed around "everyone enjoying the game together without interference." Only three teams would win. The other seven would lose.
And in the middle of that zero-sum scramble, a location with a near-100% guarantee of holding a treasure chest had emerged. Not sending a member there wasn't an option. Any alternative strategy of concentrating strength elsewhere lacked persuasive force—because at the end of the day, they were still gambling on picking the right two arenas out of nine.
Given all that, the best possible strategy the Monster Circus could adopt was, indeed, hunting. Their available firepower couldn't hope to dominate this arena anyway. If Maya, Gaston, or Sven walked in here, they'd hemorrhage red tiles, get swept up in the chaos, and be eliminated in short order.
Everyone except Ella had a more efficient role to play: surviving while following Clara's directions to lay groundwork and search the other arenas.
Clara had also noticed that the Monster Circus wasn't the only troupe that had sent just one member here. The Golden Carnival and the Silver Screen Circus had committed only a single runner each as well.
The Silver Screen Circus made sense—they were sharing strategy. But the Golden Carnival sending only Reina was a surprise. What was more, she was actively working to eliminate other teams' runners, exactly the same role Clara had assigned to Ella.
The Golden Carnival was the undisputed favorite to win. They'd deployed four Rekachev-trained acrobats plus Reina into their search team. For the auditorium team, they'd cherry-picked well over a dozen of the highest scorers from each game.
And yet the tournament favorites were stooping to the same underdog playstyle as their own troupe?
It was rare for a team with the strongest lineup to choose a slow, grinding path to victory over a swift, overwhelming one.
Clara ran her tongue over her lips as her gaze swept over the Golden Carnival staffers seated nearby, exchanging hand signals among themselves.
The championship favorites really were on a different level.
The moment the fourth and fifth eliminations came—engineered by the combined work of Ella and Reina—a booming announcement rang out from the special stage outside the school.
"The first Mini Game in the auditorium has just concluded!"