12. Rekachev Circus School Trial (23)
12. Rekachev Circus School Trial (23)
Ella left Sven behind and headed straight for the first arena: the Front Garden.
It was the garden visible as soon as you entered the school from Tetromino Square. Well-tended trees lined the walking paths, and at the end of those paths stood a statue of the Emperor.
"Ella is entering Arena 1! What kind of performance will she show us here—wait, what's that? Spectators from Arena 9 are flooding in!"
Ella looked up at the three-story wooden spectator stands encircling the garden. People were pouring out of the passageway connecting to the pool. They spotted her and shouted with delighted faces.
"Whoa, it's Ella!"
"Long live Ella!"
"I'm a fan!"
"I'll follow you anywhere!"
Spectators who had purchased tickets for Acrobatic Rush could leave their assigned seats and move freely between arenas. All the school buildings were connected internally, so their movements never interfered with the competitors.
Still, not many spectators actually moved around to watch different arenas. Leaving your designated seat meant you had to stand in the open seating areas.
The school buildings serving as Acrobatic Rush stages were never designed for spectator viewing in the first place. The seats with a proper view were limited. Even the fixed seats had their drawbacks, and the open seats were far worse.
Yet the crowd following Ella now amounted to more than half the spectators who had been at the pool. They were willing to endure the discomfort just to watch her acrobatics.
"Thank you! Thank you! I'll do my best! Please cheer for me!"
A thrilling shiver of exhilaration ran through Ella's whole body under the weight of those gazes. She did a light tumble for the crowd, waved as she circled halfway around the garden, then got down to business.
The Front Garden was now scattered with statues that hadn't been there just a week ago. They were human figures, each wearing an oddly distinctive mask.
Clara had been about to explain what they meant. Ella didn't need the explanation. She already knew.
"It's the White-Mask Play, isn't it?"
The White-Mask Play was a traditional masked drama from the Kiev region. Typically, it took the form of satire, with stock characters representing the lower classes mocking the corruption of the upper classes. Its defining feature was that every character wore a mask representing their profession or social station.
Ella studied the masks on the statues. The White-Mask Play used hundreds of masks, but only a handful of characters appeared regularly. She counted them—around fifteen.
'The Potbellied Knight, the Female Thief, the Old Bachelor Mage...'
All were comic exaggerations of their stations. She knew the masks well enough to recognize them at a glance.
She hadn't always been this knowledgeable about the White-Mask Play. She'd crammed the details right before the opening ceremony. One of the Six Great Theaters specialized in it.
After counting all dozen-plus statues, she realized they matched the cast of a well-known script. But by that script's dramatis personae, one mask was missing.
"There's no 'Emperor' mask."
Her eyes naturally drifted toward the Emperor's statue. Arrayed around it were props that also hadn't been there before—stage properties from the White-Mask Play.
A closer look told her the characters had predetermined positions arranged around the Emperor. The arena's puzzle would likely activate once all the statues were set in their proper places.
"So that's why people are doing that."
Across the Front Garden, competitors were grappling with statues, straining to move them. Despite their efforts, progress was minimal. Ella had been here nearly five minutes, and most statues hadn't budged more than a few steps from their starting positions.
The statues weren't actually that heavy. She tested one—it was light enough to tilt or shove with her own strength alone.
The problem was the ground. The garden's walking paths were paved with large, uneven stones, making the surface too rough to drag a statue across easily.
A strongman could simply pick up a statue this size and carry it. But there was a catch.
Competitors could only step on tiles matching their own color. Leaping a meter or two between differently colored tiles with your bare body was easy for any acrobat. Doing it while carrying a statue weighing dozens of kilograms was another matter.
A few exceptional strongmen resorted to heaving statues onto the next tile, or laying them down to bridge the gap, jumping across, grabbing the far end, and dragging them fully onto the tile. But that method failed when the gap between tiles stretched to several meters, or when the path led over stone walls and fences.
At those points, you had to rely on pure strength and skill.
"Haha, watch this!"
A strongman in a purple gym uniform beamed at the result of his efforts. He'd succeeded in lifting his statue onto a head-high stone wall without touching any other color's tiles.
The technique resembled the trick of tossing a water bucket so it landed upright. The statue had its center of mass oddly low, just like a bucket full of water. He'd thrown it with spin from the top, making its base land square on the wall. The statue righted itself like a roly-poly toy, wobbling precariously before teetering to a stop exactly on the wall's edge.
He'd hurled a statue weighing dozens of kilograms onto a wall nearly two meters high and landed it standing!
The crowd roared. The strongman shrugged. Even he had to admit that was impressive.
Then he noticed the spectators weren't looking at him. They were all focused on a girl in a red gym uniform sprinting toward them from a distance. He scowled.
What, nobody's watching me? Did they seriously miss what I just did?
"Who's that?"
The question was answered by a strongman in orange a few tiles away, wrestling with a statue's fingertips to haul it inside his own tile.
"Oh, them. The Monster Circus's—"
"The what circus?"
"You know. The one from Frank 10 with the biggest crowd..."
The strongman in purple smacked his palm in recognition.
"Right, I remember. The Monster Circus Deputy Leader, or whatever. Golden Libra's rival, all that noise."
His voice dripped with hostility. It wasn't just because she'd stolen the spotlight from his feat. The other strongmen nearby, still wrestling with their own statues, also eyed Ella with undisguised disdain.
They didn't like girls like Ella or Reina commanding public attention. The entrance exam performances had looked laughable to them. Elite-school standards or not, those were just training tools for teenagers.
No matter how much praise their technique got, the strongmen believed the girls would never match them in actual Strength Show-off, where raw muscle decided everything.
The strongman in purple sneered at her as she examined a statue.
"Doesn't matter how good your technique is. This takes brute strength and size. You're out of your league."
Others chimed in with dismissive remarks.
Ella ignored the chatter and kept inspecting the statue's structure. Her focus was on the edges of its base. She glanced back and forth between the base and the stones set into the path, then let out a short laugh.
"What, that's it?"
She grabbed one end of the statue. Even with her weight behind the pull, it barely tilted.
The strongmen clicked their tongues and shook their heads.
"Give it up, little girl. You'll hurt yourself."
"This is the domain of strength. Not a place for kids to mess around."
Ella tipped the statue, balanced it on one corner of its base, and propped it at an angle. The strongmen just snorted. With that level of strength, she'd be lucky to move it a single step.
Then she flashed them a grin and shoved hard. The statue, balanced on its corner, spun a full rotation.
"Whoa, what the—"
"Hey, it's falling!"
The strongmen scrambled backward. Touching a statue covered in a different color meant elimination.
Was this brat actually trying to get us disqualified?
Ella kept the statue spinning, heedless of their shouts.
She'd noticed two things.
One: the statue's center of mass was very low. Two: the edges of its base were sharply beveled.
The moment she saw that, she thought of an Unbalanced Top.
Street acrobats used them all the time. The classic tricks involved standing up an object that looked impossible to balance because all its weight was on one side, or spinning a lopsided top that was anything but round.
This statue looked ordinary from the outside, but it was essentially a giant Unbalanced Top.
She guided the spinning statue's corner edge into a gap between the paving stones. The garden path was a mess of irregular stones, uneven underfoot—but one groove ran smooth and true: the cement-filled seams between the stones.
Those seams were even V-shaped, a perfect fit for the statue's sharp corner.
The corner caught in the groove with a harsh grinding sound, but the spin grew far more stable than before. Ella kept it rotating, then gave it a nudge—aimed toward her next red tile.
The statue-top glided along the seam. The groove wasn't straight, so the statue weaved left and right with it, never losing balance.
The crowd erupted.
"That's Ella for you!"
"Incredible!"
"Now that's a circus!"
"Yes! This is what we came to see!"
"Ella! Ella! Ella!"
The strongmen stared blankly at the trail the statue had left. In seconds, it had covered more ground than they'd managed in minutes of struggle.
Ella watched the statue lose momentum near her target, wobble, and settle into place. She turned to face them.
"Hey, old-timers, if brute strength isn't cutting it, why not call in some other acrobats? Anyone who's practiced spinning an Unbalanced Top could handle this."
With that, she left the arena. The standing spectators chased after her. Even some in the fixed seats got up to follow.
The strongmen stared after her, dumbfounded.
Ella's next stop was Arena 6, the theater. There, too, she dropped just enough hints to get past the core obstacles before moving on. She visited arena after arena in quick succession, never lingering.
This was Clara's strategy. Delaying the clear to avoid having the trophy stolen by another team was pointless—once Sudden Death Time began, the surviving competitors would be crammed into a single arena and forced to solve its puzzle in a swarm. Outnumbered, they'd have no real shot at claiming a trophy at all.
But if they helped push each arena's puzzle progress to eighty percent right before Sudden Death Time, then when it triggered, Ella could sweep through the arenas and snatch them by surprise.
Ella had to admit the odds were better than waiting for one treasure chest location to be pinpointed and gambling on that single opening. Though without a key to open any chest she found, she'd still just be doing the work for someone else.
'Either way, we can't open anything until twenty minutes before the end. Same difference, right?'
'Huh? Twenty minutes? Ella, you've been forgetting.'
Clara corrected her misconception.
Once a team secured a trophy, they stopped participating in the Mini Games from that moment. They were automatically ranked tenth. That meant the lower-ranked teams could now earn one more coin than before.
'Oh, right. Slipped my mind.'
'At this rate, Golden Carnival's going to grab the second trophy soon. We'll barely scrape together a hundred coins by the time Sudden Death starts.'
In the distance, a fanfare sounded.
Ella watched a yellow flare streak into the sky. She knew what it meant.
Golden Carnival had just secured the second trophy.