12. Rekachev Circus School Trial (20)
12. Rekachev Circus School Trial (20)
Many who watched the Acrobatic Rush remarked afterward that the match was far more brutal and intense than they'd expected. Families and couples who had come for a lighthearted outing were shocked by the sight of acrobats bleeding, rolling across the ground, and screaming in exertion.
Even the most cheerful circus has a harsh, merciless underside behind the stage. But witnessing it in such raw form was difficult for ordinary spectators to stomach.
The clash between Ella and Reina was exceptionally fierce. It would be no exaggeration to say that the roughest moments of today's competition all came from this one duel. They leaped tirelessly from ball to ball, each straining to shove the other into the water. They lunged at each other with the desperation of lifelong enemies.
Unlike earlier matches, however, the crowd felt no discomfort watching the scene unfold. What the two were waging was not a bloody brawl or a degrading scrap, but a display of superlative acrobatic prowess. The varied skills they poured out delighted every eye in the stands.
A middle-aged gentleman watching from the audience couldn't contain his admiration.
"I've never seen a performance like this!"
His words carried a weight different from the casual exclamations around him. He was no ordinary spectator. He was an evaluator for the Christian Guide. His profession was to travel the world, watch performances, and assign scores. For such a man to say "I've never seen this" was high praise indeed.
"A shame. If only today weren't my deadline for filing evaluations, I could simply sit back and enjoy it."
He flipped through his notebook with a gesture like shooing away an irritating fly, rapidly jotting down his observations of the spectacle before him.
Evaluators working for the Christian Guide were required by editorial policy to attend a minimum number of performances each month, submit written assessments to the head office, and then wait as the editorial board collated those assessments in conference and awarded "stars"—that was the Christian Guide's method.
To ensure fairness, the Christian Guide kept the identities of all of its several hundred evaluators entirely confidential. Only the editor-in-chief knew who any of them were.
The editorial board provided the evaluators with no funding beyond manuscript fees. They were obliged to attend performances at their own expense, and accepting favors or payments from organizers was strictly forbidden. Such uncompromising insistence on impartiality was precisely why the Christian Guide had maintained its credibility and authority in the performing arts world for so long.
The evaluator meticulously documented the two contestants' duel. He didn't usually scrutinize every last technique in such detail, but given the theme the Rekachev Circus School had set out, he concentrated exclusively on technical execution in his report.
"Ooh, here it comes!"
"That thing from earlier! That one!"
Expectant murmurs rippled like a wave through the audience. The evaluator, who had been sketching little stick figures to capture Ella's earlier high-difficulty maneuver, stopped writing and turned his gaze back toward the stage.
Three yellow balls had gathered around the ball Reina stood on. He caught on immediately. She was unmistakably about to attempt that technique from before.
Reina rocked her body left and right, setting the ball beneath her in motion to generate a wave. As she waited for the timing, the three yellow balls reached the crest and were launched upward—at that instant she leaped into the air. While suspended, she spun her body and kicked the three balls in rapid succession.
Pop, pop, pop.
The three balls shot outward. Reina dropped cleanly back onto the ball she had sprung from. Though the ball wobbled and tilted with the impact, her body didn't waver in the slightest, as if pinned in place.
The crowd gasped in disbelief. She possessed a sense of balance so flawless it was hard to accept even while seeing it with their own eyes.
"Astonishing! Simply astonishing! So the claim that she can stand on a needle was no exaggeration after all."
"Truly a skill worthy of Lord Fantastic's daughter."
"Reina! Reina!"
Ella watched the three balls hurtling toward her. At first glance they seemed to be flying in neatly parallel paths, but the shape of each trajectory was different.
To strike a ball three times in the same direction while airborne should have pushed her body backward. And yet Reina had landed squarely on the same ball she'd jumped from.
Ella realized what she'd done: Reina had applied a different spin and speed to each of the three balls as she launched them, then distributed her own force across three vectors to match.
The reaction force from kicking the first ball was channeled into the second kick; the reaction from the second was loaded into the third.
The reaction from that third kick didn't need to concern her. The original ball she'd leaped from had slid down the wave and arrived precisely at her landing point, waiting for her.
I couldn't pull that off.
Reina's technique was made possible only because it was supported by superior physical attributes. Her tall frame and long legs contributed heavily. If Ella tried, even if she managed the first kick, her leg would never reach the second ball.
The three yellow spheres came closing in as though to surround her. Ella's own assigned color was red—any contact with a different colored ball meant elimination. But she wasn't worried in the slightest. From the instant Reina launched them, Ella already knew the arc each one would follow.
It wasn't calculation by formula the way Maya would do it. This was a feral instinct built on experience. Simply by capturing a momentary motion from her opponent, she could see clearly how that body would move next.
Coupled with the feel for the balls' elasticity and weight she'd gleaned from running around this pool earlier, she could trace their trajectories with vivid clarity.
The cannon-shot balls crashed down on the spot where Ella had been standing. The impact sent a surge sweeping through the nearby water. Ella took a faceful of spray, but by shifting onto another red ball she just managed to evade—given the speed they came in, if she hadn't read the trajectory and gotten clear beforehand, she would certainly have been struck.
"Incredible! Reina's three-stage spinning kick, narrowly evaded by Ella! Reina's technique is breathtaking, but Ella's reaction time is equally sensational!"
Her best blow had missed, but Reina wasn't disappointed. Almost as though she'd expected Ella to dodge, she immediately relocated and began launching more balls. Gathering three at once again proved difficult, however—one or two at a time was the limit—and Ella dodged those far too easily.
After several more lopsided exchanges of attack, the boat horn blared through the dome. Reina, who had been bounding wildly across the balls, stopped dead in place. She fixed Ella with a long, steady gaze.
The crowd roared in anticipation—this was the moment they'd been waiting for.
Most of the onlookers' eyes, too, found Ella. If Reina had her three-stage spinning kick, Ella had this.
As though she had been biding her time, Ella kicked a nearby red ball. But it flew in a completely different direction from Reina's position. It landed loosely somewhere in the general vicinity, but it lacked the force to produce a wave of the magnitude Reina had managed.
Ella merely grinned.
Barely a moment after the horn sounded, a surge convulsed through one area of the pool. Seconds later a column of water blasted upward with a boom. Balls shot into the air, scattering in every direction. Their trajectories and velocities varied wildly—but a handful displayed especially peculiar behavior.
Those were the red balls from a moment ago.
Some sailed through the air. Some ricocheted off the pool walls. Some careened crazily between the other balls. There was no apparent order to any of it. Yet after passing through that seeming chaos, a dozen spheres abruptly, as if by design, converged upon Reina.
One dropped toward her head. Another came from behind. One knocked a potential escape ball far out of reach. Another plunged into the path between her and a ball she might otherwise have moved to, blocking her line.
The balls' colors varied, but they shared one commonality: in every case, the motion of a red ball had somehow influenced the outcome.
"Magnificent! Ella's predictive strike once again pressing Reina hard!"
Which of the fountains on the pool floor would activate was entirely random. But Ella could tell a full minute before the horn sounded where the water would next erupt. By reading the subtle shifts in the water's flow, she could gauge where air was being compressed.
She'd let the first fountain pass unremarked. By the second she had begun to find the feel of it, and from the third onward she had set the board. Which meant: the very instant the fountain burst, an automatic attack would already be in motion—balls positioned in advance to trigger exactly that.
And it was working beautifully. The sort of compound calculation a professional billiards player might execute, she was pulling off in the water. Earlier this very match, she had used the same tactic to drive Reina to the brink of elimination.
Could she manufacture such an opening again?
Reina clenched her teeth at the onrushing hail of spheres from every direction. What a monstrous girl. Facing her, the title "Golden Libra" lost all luster. Her own gifts, she knew, extended only to physical capacity; the label of "genius" seemed far better suited to Ella.
Even so, I will not lose.
Reina honed her focus to its absolute limit and searched for a path through the chaotic barrage of a dozen flying balls. It demanded the utmost from her joints' range of motion and the precision of her technique, but she narrowly slipped through.
The finish, in particular, stole the show. Extending her body straight as an arrow, she plunged into the water, skipped across the surface three or four times like a skipping stone, and landed on a ball on the opposite side.
Ella felt a hot surge when she saw it. Skipping across water like a stone—she had done that herself plenty of times. As a child on outings to the valley with friends, she had even used a rock as a slide, letting the momentum carry her across the water's surface to land on the far bank.
But what stung was that Reina had managed it lying flat on her stomach.
She's got a chest. Doesn't that get in the way?
Ella chewed her lip, recalling what she had seen while bathing with her.
A skipping stone was usually flat and thin...
Having pushed her opponent to the ropes, she felt an inexplicable sense of defeat.
Having thus countered each other's attacks in succession, both realized that merely trading offense and defense like this would settle nothing before the match ran out.
To end this, one of them had to get a step ahead.
I have to exploit the moment she attacks.
Ella and Reina arrived at the same thought simultaneously and began to circle each other, eyes locked.
When the next horn sounded, they would finish everything.