Book 1: Part I: Season of New Leaves — Chapter 4: |
Chapter 4
The house of cards rose in the blink of an eye.
I snuck a glance at Satoru sitting next to me. Looked like it was going well. He was already on the fourth layer. Satoru sensed that I was looking and spun the four of hearts card he was levitating with a smug expression on his face.
Determined not to lose, I focused on the house of cards before me. It was a simple task — stacking playing cards into pyramids — but actually doing it involves a lot of discipline in using your cantus.
First and foremost was concentration. The slightest touch or breath of wind would knock the house down. Next was spatial perception. Third was multitasking — you had to be able to pay attention to all that while looking out for signs that the house was about to fall and correct it in time.
Incidentally, there’s a story saying that when Shisei Kaburagi tried this assignment, he was able to complete it instantly by imagining a pyramid made of eighty-four cards. But no one else has ever been witnessed doing such a thing, so it’s probably just an exaggerated tale.
In Harmony School, we were instructed to build card houses on many occasions. I never thought that it would have been in preparation for Sage Academy.
“Saki, hurry it up,” Satoru said, unnecessarily.
“This isn’t a fair game. But don’t worry, I won’t lose to you.”
I looked over and saw that all the members of team five were moving at the same pace, moving steadily toward the tip of the pyramid.
“And like always, our ace is in top form.”
As Satoru said, Shun was undeniably the best in our class. He had already built it up seven levels and was working on the eighth. No one else in the class could control cards the way he did, like the gentle flapping of butterfly wings. It was fascinating to watch.
“…but there’s also someone holding us back,” Satoru sighed, looking over the group.
Next to Satoru, Maria was working at almost the same speed as Shun, but her technique was sloppy and she had knocked over some of her cards twice already. But since she managed to fix it quickly each time, her pace was the same as ours on the whole. Next to Maria, Mamoru was almost the exact opposite. He worked almost unbearably carefully, but the result that his house was extremely stable. However, his slow pace meant that he was just barely above average in the class.
The problem was Reiko, sitting the farthest end. She hadn’t even completed one layer yet.
It was depressing watching her work. Her cards were shaking the same way a child’s hand would shake if they were bad at building card pyramids. Reiko was from Gold village, so I’d never seen her in school before, I have no doubts that she was also bad at making card houses back in Morality School.
Even so, her clumsiness was astounding. When it looked like she finally got the cards to stand up, it would collapse and she would have to start all over again.
“It’s so bad it’s almost funny,” Satoru shook his head and turned back to his own cards. “As long as she’s here we’ll never win.”
“So what? Reiko’s a good person, she just hasn’t had a breakthrough yet.” Even as I said that, I knew it was a lie. Reiko Amano couldn’t use her cantus well. No matter what task we were given, her results were always different from the dictated goals.
Earlier, we were playing a game similar to telephone in order to hone our image replication skills. Each group sits in a line and the first person is given an oil painting to look at. They then reproduce the picture as a sand drawing using their cantus and show it to the next person in line. That person only has a few seconds to look at the drawing before they have to reproduce it as accurately as possible. The team whose final drawing is the most faithful to the original wins.
For us, team one, I thought our image construction and transmission techniques were exceptional. Shun especially stood out from the rest of us. His pictures were so good they looked like photographs. The next best was Maria. Unfortunately, I was not as skilled as she is in producing accurate and artistic images.
If Satoru were first, he might not be able to do it, but he was great at copying sand drawings. I was the exact opposite; I was able to create sand drawings based on the originals. Mamoru was quite artistic and could produce beautiful pictures, but they weren’t always accurate.
Out of the six of us, Reiko was always the one messing up. If I were to be perfectly honest, her sand drawings looked like marks in the sand left by the torturous struggles of a dying crab. No matter how closely I looked at her pictures, I had no idea what she was drawing. No matter what position she was placed in line, her drawings never looked like anything other than random scratches.
In the house of cards competition too, her slowness was a deciding factor in our loss. The team with the highest number of cumulative layers wins, but before that, each member must build at least seven stories.
And this time, Reiko made a fatal mistake.
I was concentrating so hard on my own cards that I’m still not entirely sure what she did. Her cards suddenly flipped through the air and smacked into Maria’s.
Unsteady as it was, Maria’s card house was the second tallest of the group. It was flattened in an instant.
“Ah, I’m s-sorry!”
Needless to say, Reiko was panicked. Maria sat stunned for a few moments before she began rebuilding her pyramid twice as quickly as she had been doing. But given how little time we had left, even if both Shun and Maria’s pyramids were complete, it wouldn’t have been enough. Before she could even complete the third layer, a whistle blew, signaling the end of the competition.
“I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I did something like that…” Reiko kept apologizing incessantly.
“Don’t worry about it. I knocked it over a bunch of times myself, anyway,” Maria said, smiling, but her eyes were empty.
Here, I’ll give a brief introduction of team one. The six members are Shun Aonuma, Maria Akizuki, Satoru Asahina, Reiko Amano, Mamoru Itou, and me, Saki Watanabe. You might have noticed that the names are in alphabetical order, so it would have made sense for me to be in team five, but I somehow wound up in team one. Since three of my good friends are in the same group, I thought it was done as a special consideration to help me get used to Sage Academy.
After class that day, Maria, Satoru, Shun, Mamoru and I walked down a small path that ran along the canal near school. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to be friends with Reiko, since we did hang out with her pretty often, but that we felt it might be awkward for her to be around us after messing up so badly.
“I wanna be able to use my full power already,” Satoru said, stretching.
Everyone felt the same way. Since we were still students, we couldn’t use our canti in public. Unlike the classes in Harmony Schools, the lectures at Sage Academy were long and tedious, but we had to go through them before our canti would be unsealed for the practical course at the end of the day.
“When you get to use your full powers, I have to be sure run away as far as I can,” I teased.
“Why?” said Satoru sullenly.
“No particular reason.”
“I already have perfect control. But you’re clumsy as a drunk.”
“I think you’re both really good,” said Shun, trying to placate both of us.
“Hearing this from you, I can’t really be happy,” Satoru kicked a pebble into the canal.
“Why?” Shun asked, genuinely confused. “I’m not lying. I really think that both of you are good. Your cards didn’t go flying the wrong way or anything.”
“Aah, stop it already,” Maria sighed, covering her ears.
“Hmph, Shun’s unconsciously looking down on us. Don’t you think so, Saki?”
To tell the truth, I agreed with Satoru, but I didn’t say that.
“Don’t lump me in with you. You’re the only one being looked down on.”
“What? No I’m not,” Satoru grumbled, then suddenly fell silent.
“What’s wrong?” Maria asked.
Satoru pointed to an area of the canal six or seven meters ahead of us. “Look at that.”
There were two humanoid shapes shrouded in dirt-colored robes.
“…queerats?” Maria whispered, twisting a lock of red hair between her fingers.
“Yeah. What are they doing?”
Shun was fascinated, as was I. This was the first time I had ever been this close to a queerat.
“We shouldn’t stare,” Mamoru warned. His curly hair always made it look like his head was exploding. “In Friendship, if we saw queerats,we were told not to stare or get close. Didn’t they ever tell you in Harmony School?”
Of course we had been, but it’s human nature to want to do things you’ve been told are forbidden. We advanced slowly, keeping an eye on their movements.
I remembered what my father had told me when I was younger. As we got closer, we saw that the queerats were in the process of cleaning the trash that collected in the bends in the canal where the water flowed slower. They were diligently scooping up leaves and twigs with nets on bamboo poles.
Something like this could be done in an instant with cantus, but no doubt humans find it too boring to be worth their time.
“They’re working pretty hard.”
“But it looks hard to hold a net with hands like that.”
I was thinking the same thing as Maria.
“It sure seems like it. Their skeletons are structured differently from ours, just standing on two legs is hard enough.”
It was just as Shun said. Even though we couldn’t see their bodies covered by the robes, the arms holding the nets looked rodent-like, and they balanced unsteadily on their hind legs.
“…we shouldn’t be watching them,” Mamoru took a few steps away from us and turned his back to the queerats.
“Come on, nothing’s gonna happen…hey, watch out!” Satoru ran forward shouting.
One of the queerats had tried to lift up a net laden with leaves that was heavier than it had anticipated. With a huge wobble, it pitched forward.
The other queerat tried to catch it, but was a second too late. The first queerat fell headfirst into the canal.
There was a huge splash. We rushed forward.
The fallen queerat was struggling under the water about a meter away. It couldn’t swim very well. In addition, leaves and twigs were tangled all around it, preventing it from moving.
Its companion dashed back and forth in a panic — it didn’t seem to realize that it could hold out the net for the queerat to grab.
I took a deep breath and concentrated.
“Saki, what are you trying to do?” Maria asked, surprised.
“Helping it.”
“Huh, how?”
“It’s better not to have anything to do with them!” Mamoru shouted in a cowardly voice from behind.
“It’s fine, I just have to lift this part to get him back to shore. It’ll be easy.”
“You can’t be serious…”
“You can’t just use your cantus whenever you want.”
“I think you should stop too.”
“If I don’t do anything, it’ll die!”
I calmed down, drove their voices out of my mind and chanted my mantra.
“But this is really bad.”
“We were taught to be compassionate to all living things, right?”
I focused on the queerat bobbing in the water. The problem was that it kept moving and all the leaves and debris made it hard to get a grasp on its size.
“…it’s easier to lift it up along with the leaves,” Shun said, realizing my dilemma.
I cast him a grateful glance and tuned out the others.
I concentrated on lifting the mass of leaves, imagining it rising up. Finally, it broke the surface tension and hovered above the water.
Water trapped in the pile cascaded into the canal. Bits of leaves that had escaped my notice fluttered down. The queerat should be somewhere in there, though I couldn’t see it. I slowly guided it toward the shore. Everyone stepped back to make room.
I gently dropped it on the path.
The queerat was alive.
Thrashing and kicking, it managed to turn over and cough up a flood of water and bubbles. Up close, it was pretty big. It was probably a meter tall fully upright.
“Wow, it looked like you just scooped it up with a big net. That’s a perfect levitation.”
“Yeah, thanks to your advice.”
As I was basking in Shun’s praise, Satoru cut in.
“What do we do now? If the school finds out…”
“As long as they don’t find out, it’s fine.”
“I’m saying what if they find out?”
Maria came to my rescue.
“Everyone absolutely has to keep this a secret, okay? For Saki’s sake.”
“Okay,” said Shun without hesitation.
“You too Satoru, got it?”
“You don’t have to tell me. But what if it gets out somehow?”
“It doesn’t seem like anyone saw us. As long as no one says anything, it’ll be fine,” Maria replied. “Mamoru?”
“What?”
“What do you mean, what…”
“Nothing happened today. I didn’t see anything. I had nothing to do with the queerats or anything.”
“Good boy.”
“But what do we do about this?” Satoru wrinkled his nose at the queerat.
“It’s not going to talk to anyone.”
“Can queerats talk?” Shun looked curious.
I approached the queerat who was still lying on the ground. I wondered if it was injured somewhere. When the other queerat saw me, it also fell prostrate to the floor.
They were obviously afraid of humans.
“Hey, I saved your life, got it?” I tried to speak gently.
“You shouldn’t talk to queerats!” Mamoru shouted in a strangled voice from somewhere behind me.
“Hey, can you hear me?”
The soaked queerat nodded silently. Looking a lot more comfortable now that it was back on all fours, it crawled over to me and made a movement like it was kissing my shoes.
They both bowed. Somehow, that simple action was full of meaning. Suddenly, I really wanted to know what their faces looked like.
“Hey, look this way,” I clapped my hands lightly.
“Saki, stop it already,” Maria sounded slightly stunned.
“Seriously, you can’t…the queerats,” Mamoru sounded even farther away now.
“Do you understand what I’m saying? Lift your head up.”
The queerats lifted their heads nervously.
Somehow, I had been expecting a cute face like a field mouse’s, so I was shocked.
Under the hood was a face uglier than any I had ever seen on a living thing. It had a flat snout, more like a pig’s that a rat’s, loose pale skin that hung in folds and was covered in brown, downy hairs, and shiny, beady eyes.
“Th★k yu Thakyu. Kikikikiki. Kakakakaga★…ds. Gods.”
The queerat suddenly started speaking in a high squeaky voice. I froze in surprise.
“It’s talking…” Maria murmured.
The other three were dumbfounded.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“§@★＃◎＆∈∂Å♪” it chirped in a sing-song voice. Spit frothed at the corners of its mouth.
I knew it was saying its name, but there’s no way to write it out in Japanese, not that I even remember what it was.
“Well it looks like we won’t have to worry about them ratting us out,” Satoru said, sounding relieved. “It’s not like anyone will understand what they say.”
Our anxiety gone, we started laughing. But for some reason, a chill ran up my spine as I looked at the queerats.
It felt like I had touched on something taboo that was hidden deep in my heart.
“Although we can’t use their names, there should be some other way to tell them apart,” Shun mused.
“You can tell by their tattoos.”
Surprisingly, it was Mamoru who had spoken.
“Tattoo? Where?”
“Somewhere on their forehead. It should have their colony and identification number,” Mamoru said, his back still turned.
I put my hand tentatively on the queerat’s head and lifted its hood. It stayed docile like a trained dog.
“There it is.”
Down the length of its forehead, the words “Goat 619” were tattooed in blue ink.
“What do these words mean?”
“It has to be the colony’s emblem,” Shun said.
Queerats have three characteristics that are unlike most other animals.
The first is their appearance which is the basis for their name. Queerats resemble hairless rats and are around sixty centimeters to a meter in length. Standing upright, they’re between 1.2 and 1.4 meters. In some cases they can be as tall as an average human.
Second, even though they are very clearly mammals, they are eusocial, like ants or bees, and live in colonies with a queen. This is a trait that comes from their ancestor, the east African naked mole rat. Small colonies have only around two or three hundred workers, but large ones can have thousands, even up to ten thousand, workers.
Third, queerats are far more intelligent than dolphins or chimpanzees. Some would even say they are as intelligent as humans. Those who pledge allegiance to humans and become “civilized colonies” are given protection in return for their tribute and labors. The colonies are named after various insects.
For example, the colony with the greatest strength and most often recruited for public works operations is the Giant Hornet colony. Other colonies dotted around Kamisu 66 are the Wood Ant, Deerfly, Dragonfly, Spider Wasp, Robber Fly, Giant Stag Beetle, Cave Cricket, Paper Wasp, Ground Beetle, Tiger Beetle, Goat Moth, Diving Beetle, Cricket, Blue Centipede, Plant Hopper, Pyraloid Moth, Garden Tiger Moth, Tachina Fly, Millipede, Orb Spider, Cricket, and more.
“The ‘Goat’ probably stands for the Goat Moth colony,” Shun said.
“They’re probably all tattooed, since there are so many of them you can’t recognize them just by sight.”
“Then this guy is a worker of the Goat Moth Colony.”
Goat Moth was a small colony with only two hundred workers.
“Goa★moth. Goat Moth. Chichichi. Co★ney…Grrrrr,” it said, shivering.
“It looks cold.”
“It’s completely soaked. And since queerats live in burrows, I imagine their body temperatures are naturally lower,” Shun said.
We let the queerats go. The two of them bowed low as we left. No matter how many times I looked back as we walked away, they remained bowed.
“As I thought, there’s only the dung beetle method, right?” Maria said.
This was about a month after the queerat incident.
“That’s way too obvious,” Satoru objected. “Every group is going to have thought of that. Plus, it’s impossible to control the ball like that.”
We were having a discussion around a lump of clay sitting on the desk.
“What if we made a big ring and put the ball inside? That way, the ball will move with the ring wherever we want it to go,” I said, swinging my legs from my perch on the desk. The idea had come to me out of the blue and I thought it wasn’t half bad.
“But it might lose power halfway through, and what if the ball rolls over the ring?” Satoru objected again.
I was about to snap at him when Shun pointed out something rather more important.
“It’ll be hard to make sure the ring stays on the ground the whole time. If even one part of it floats up, we’ll get a penalty.”
“…right,” I admitted.
“We’re not getting anywhere just thinking about it. Why don’t we just try it out? That way we’ll get a feeling of how much clay we’ll need to use to make the pusher.”
As Maria suggested, we allocated about half the clay to making the pusher and the other half to making attackers.
“Is this it?” Satoru sounded disappointed.
“I wonder how much the ball weighs,” Maria mused.
Shun folded his arms and thought. “It’s made of marble, so I’m guessing over ten kilos.”
“That’s about how much clay we have total. So in other words, the pusher is about half that weight at most,” Satoru sighed.
“But as the clay dries out while it’s baked, it’ll also get lighter, right?”
“Oh yeah! So then at he very end, the pusher will only be about the third of the ball’s weight.”
Everyone else still looked confused, but I couldn’t help smiling when Shun agreed with me.
“So we’ll have to push it from behind after all,” Mamoru said.
“Now we’re back to the same idea.”
The ball tournament was five days from now. That means that in those five days, we had come up with a basic strategy, make a working pusher, attackers and defenders out of clay, and learn to control them perfectly.
Here I’ll explain the rules of the tournament. There are two teams, the offense and the defense. The offense rolls a large marble ball across the field into the goal while the defense tries to block. The total time allowed for one round is ten minutes, and the team that takes the least time to score a goal is the winner. In the case where neither side scores, both teams play defense as well as offense in a tiebreaker match where the first team to score wins.
Throughout the match, you can only use your cantus, but there is one serious restriction. You are not allowed to alter the ball or the field with your cantus. That means we have to be good at controlling our pieces, the pusher and attackers when we were the offense, and the defenders when we were on defense. In addition, our pieces are not allowed to lose contact with the ground. {If we were allowed to use floating pieces, we would be able to use the ball to absorb any impacts the pusher might sustain.}
The field constructed in the inner courtyard of the school is two meters wide and ten meters long, and paved with sandy dirt and patches of grass so that it required considerable concentration just to push the ball in the a straight line. The defense could put the goal wherever they wanted, but could not do anything else, like making potholes or mountains to protect it.
The pieces only have to be within the weight limits. We are free to decide what shape, or how many pieces we wanted to use, but the more pieces we use, the harder it is to control them all.
One more important restriction is that we are not allowed to attack the opponent’s pusher. Otherwise, everyone would just target the pusher and it would be destroyed before the other team had a chance to do anything. However, only one pusher is immune to attack, so while we are allowed to use more than one, it is disadvantageous to do so. Most teams only used one pusher.
“So, is this good for the pusher?” Shun asked, his forehead glistening with sweat.
While we were all fooling around with the clay, only Shun had the capabilities to freely shape it to his will. It was impossible for the rest of us. The overall shape was a short cone with a shallow rounded bottom like a boat’s to help it glide on the field. In order to control the ball, there were two arms coming out of it at a hundred-twenty degree angle from the front. It looked like a person with his arms outstretched.
“That’s pretty good. It’s simple, but still looks cool,” Maria commented.
“So now all we need are attackers. Since Shun is focusing on working the pusher, we should split up the rest of the work among the rest of us,” Satoru said, taking the opportunity to hand out tasks to us.
“How is team one doing?” Mr. Endou poked his head in, smiling at us. His round face, framed by his hair and beard, somehow earned him the weird nickname “Sun Prince”.
“We’ve just finished the design for the pusher,” Satoru said, proudly showing off the model.
“Oh, you’ve done a pretty good job in such a short time.”
“Yup, we’re thinking of hardening it now.”
“Who’s controlling the pusher?”
“Shun.”
“Just as I expected,” Mr. Endou nodded.
“Well, the rest of you work hard on the attackers.”
“Yes sir!” We replied energetically.
Later, after a heated discussion, we decided on five attackers. Shun would control the pusher and an attacker simultaneously while the rest of us each had an attacker.
At this time, no one remembered that there used to be one more member in team one.
Our first round was against team five. That was a stroke of luck. Rumor had it that team three had built the best pieces and was the favorite to win the competition, and that team two had been spotted behaving suspiciously.
A round of rock-paper-scissors determined us to be the first to attack. Since this was our first match, we were nervous to see what team five’s defenders would look like. They had six wall-like defenders moving from side to side, blocking the entire width of our path.
We huddled together in a circle, each of us silently reciting our mantras.
“As we expected, they’re using the most basic strategy,” Maria whispered, looking delighted.
“This won’t even take half a minute,” Satoru chuckled like he’d already won.
“Let’s break through the center,” Shun said quietly. “With that kind of defense, we can break through wherever we want, but it looks like the middle of the field is the flattest.”
When our pusher and attackers came onto the field, all the members of team five looked disturbed.
The pusher glided slowly into position with its arms up behind the ball.
The attackers were deployed in a neat formation. Three were positioned in a triangle in front of the ball and the other two were guarding either side of it.
The vanguard attackers were shaped like triangular pyramids, with the tip pointed forward. They looked like paper airplanes because the long edge of the pyramid was touching the ground, and the flat side was facing up. The two guards were bottom heavy, shaped like squashed cylinders, with numerous protrusions on the surface. Actually the protrusions had no real purpose, but had the effect of making the guard look more sturdy.
“Play fair, work together as a team and do your best. Got it?” the Sun Prince announced, and blew the whistle to start the match.
The vanguard advanced slowly. The pusher was still building up power, so the heavy ball stayed where it was. While it was stationary, the ball was vulnerable, but trying to rush it too much risked damaging the pusher. Then again, since Shun was controlling it, such a blunder was unimaginable.
The defenders couldn’t gather up the courage to advance and continued wavering uselessly from side to side.
The ball finally started rolling slowly forward. It gradually gathered speed and hurtled down the field with the three attackers leading the charge.
Team five finally realized our plans and hurried to gather their defenders in the middle, but it was too late. We were going to crush them in a single blow. The attackers plowed through the defender’s heavy walls like they were made of paper. A second later, the marble ball rumbled past. All that happened in the blink of an eye.
The second we broke through their defense, team five was defeated. The marble ball made straight for the goal and fell into the hole with a resounding thud. The time was twenty-six seconds, faster than Satoru had predicted.
“I wish they had tried harder; that wasn’t even a competition,” Satoru said.
“Seriously, it was like they didn’t have a defense at all.” Even the usually quiet Mamoru agreed.
But if we became complacent, things might turn out bad.
“The other side still gets to attack,” I tried to get them to focus. “We haven’t won yet.”
“We’ve basically already won though, right? No matter how I think of it, there’s no way they can score a goal in under twenty-six seconds,” Satoru said, still smirking.
“But we never know what might happen. Don’t get caught off guard,” Shun said as we moved our defenders onto the field.
When we saw the pieces team five was using, we were all dumbstruck.
Since their defenders were so plain, we had been expecting the same of their attackers. Unfortunately we had grossly underestimated them. They had used a cleverly deceptive all or nothing strategy.
“What is that? Huh?” Maria said in a low voice. “All six of them look the same.”
The pieces were rectangular, with a protruding arm like a bell hammer.
“They made all of them pushers,” Satoru whispered.
The Sun Prince took one of the pushers and drew a red circle on it, indicating that it was the one we were not allowed to attack.
“But we’re allowed to attack all the others right? So that one still doesn’t have any defenders to protect it…” I said.
“It’s okay if one or two pushers are damaged. If all six pieces push, any of our defenders would be crushed by the speed of the ball,” Satoru answered.
So that’s how it was. The whistle sounded and the ball started rolling, quickly gathering speed.
Four of our defenders are shaped like door-stops, the idea being that we could wedge them under the ball to slow its movement and throw it off track. But two of them were sent flying by the speed of the ball before they could do anything.
The two that were left went after the pushers on the edge. One managed to flip a pusher over, but with five remaining, the ball showed no signs of slowing down.
“This is bad. At this rate…,” Satoru shouted.
The ball was moving a lot faster than ours had been, so if it scored a goal, we would lose.
Our trump card was our fifth defender, sitting in the middle of the field. It took aim down the path the ball was traveling.
“Shun, I’m leaving it to you!” Satoru shouted.
The defender was shaped like a thick disk, with a knob at the bottom where it touched the ground. When the ball rolled onto the defender, it would spin a hundred-eighty degrees, sending the ball back where it had come from. It was Shun’s brilliant idea.
The ball came barreling down the path at an incredible speed. But I had no doubt that Shun would be able to time it just right.
However, something unexpected happened. The ball hit a an uneven patch on the path and jumped a little into the air.
Shun instantly adjusted the defender so the ball wouldn’t jump over it.
The ball landed with on the defender with an unpleasant cracking sound. Although Shun spun the defender, the ball bounced back up again, and continued on, its path unchanged.
“It’s too late now…” Satoru said dejectedly.
At this speed, it wouldn’t take twenty-six, but more like sixteen seconds to reach the goal. Just as I looked away, Maria shouted.
“Ah! What’s that?”
I looked up and saw an unprecedented scenario unfolding before me. The ball had gathered so much speed that team five had completely lost control of it.
One of the pushers was pulled over in front of the ball and crushed.
The forces directing the ball became unbalanced and the ball swerved to one side.
There was no way to stop the ball anymore. It missed the goal by a large margin and flew off the field.
“Since team five can no longer continue, team one is the winner,” the Sun Prince’s voice sounded like a voice from heaven.
“Yes!”
“We passed the first round!”
“Team five really sabotaged themselves. Probably because their tactics were too extreme.”
As we gathered together to celebrate our victory, I realized Shun was standing outside the circle.
“What happened?” I asked.
Shun turned toward me, holding the defender and looking dejected.
“This is bad. It cracked.”
“Huh?”
Everyone gathered around Shun. Since the clay was baked at high temperatures, it should have the strength to withstand the weight of the marble ball on top of it. All the same, we never expected the ball to jump and fall onto the disk.
“Well we don’t know if we still have one or two matches left, but does this mean we won’t be able to use it?” Maria asked.
“Yeah, it’ll probably break the next time a ball rolls onto it. It’ll be impossible to spin it and throw the ball off course.”
“So we have no choice but to go out with only four defenders…”
We tried to come up with countermeasures, but couldn’t think of anything good, so we decided to take a break and go find out who our next opponents were.
Since there are five teams, the numbers are uneven for a tournament. How they do it at Sage Academy is, two pairs of teams are picked by lottery to compete, and the two winning teams draw straws. The winner proceeds directly to the final round and the loser fights the team that was seeded in the first round. The winner in that round becomes the other finalist.
Depending on your luck, you could win the tournament with just two bouts, or have to do all three.
In any case, we went to watch the bout between team three and four. As rumored, team three was strong, and we got to see both their offense and defense.
Their pusher was a complex curved shape, like a horseshoe, that could control the ball perfectly. Their attackers were similar to ours, but seemed more refined.
What surprised us was how they used their two defenders, which were shaped like kokeshi. Between the two stretched a rope made of wet clay. When the ball rolled over the rope, it naturally wrapped itself around the ball and stopped it from moving forward. Although team four eventually made it to the goal, they lost a large amount of time.
“They’re pretty smart to think of that,” Satoru said grudgingly.
“We were wrong to assume we had to use hardened clay.”
“It seemed like they were pretty confident that they could cause their opponents to lose enough time to ensure their own victory.”
“Team three is definitely going to win,” Maria said with a rare look of admiration.
Team three beat team four by a huge margin of twenty-two seconds to seven minutes and fifty-nine seconds. We drew straws against team three and fortunately got to advance directly to the finals.
“Looks like we got lucky.”
“Since we have time, let’s think of a good strategy.”
“Can you fix the disk?”
“My cantus isn’t powerful enough to bake more clay onto it to restore it perfectly. The most I can do is patch it up temporarily.”
While Shun, Satoru and I tried to work out a solution. Maria and Mamoru went to watch the semifinal bout between teams three and two.
“In any case, lets try to fill in the cracks on the disk first.”
“Can we get some clay to fix this?”
Satoru went to relay my question to the Sun Prince. In the end, we were told that if we could exchange some of our pieces for the same amount of clay the pieces weighed. But since baked clay was lighter than wet clay, the amount we would get in return was a lot less.
“There’s nothing we can do about it. There was one defender that was damaged earlier, so let’s trade that in.”
We filled in the cracks and Shun hardened the clay with his cantus. How should we use the leftover clay? I kneaded it into a ball, then flattened it until it was a paper-thin.
Wait a minute. This might…
“Saki, stop playing with it,” Satoru said.
“Hey, we might be able to beat team three with this.”
“What are you talking about?”
Shun looked over from the repaired disk. “Did you just think of something?”
I nodded tentatively, and told them about my idea.
“Amazing, you’re a genius.”
My ears reddened at Shun’s compliment.
“Yeah, well it’s a pretty cheap trick, but they definitely won’t be expecting it,” Satoru said. As usual, he was trying to insult me, but he couldn’t deny that the idea was good.
“We should do it, Satoru. There’s no other way.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“We don’t have time to try anything else.”
We all set to work flattening a new piece of clay and attaching it to the one I made earlier. Since we were all working on the same thing, we couldn’t use our cantus, so we had no choice but to do everything by hand. We finished just as Maria and Mamoru burst into the room.
“The semifinals just ended. And something really bad happened!”
“Don’t tell me, we’re up against team three? But we have a plan against them,” Satoru said, as if he was the one who had come up with the idea.
“No,” Maria said. “Team three lost. Team two is our opponent in the finals!”