The pair moved a kilometer or so to the east from the chaos of the area around Shimokitazawa Station to Komaba Park and sat down together on the roof of a Western-style building standing quietly in the center of the park.
Once a noble’s manor in the Meiji era and now designated as an important cultural property, the Tudor-style house was more or less unchanged, despite the fact that this was a Factory stage. The buildings of the massive university campus that enclosed three sides of the park had been quite clearly turned into factories, but the noise of those didn’t reach them here.
Sitting to Risa’s right, Comet Squeaker glanced at the timer before asking innocently, “So what’s this thing you wanna talk about, Unicchi?”
Perhaps Risa was caught off guard by this sudden question, staring intently as she was at the animal-shaped option that was now silent on Comet’s left shoulder; she blurted out the problem that had been weighing her down.
“Oh. Uh-huh… Lately, I’ve been scared of the vault,” she said, and then thought, Oh, crap.
Mimosa had warned her any number of times that cracking in the real was a Burst Linker’s greatest taboo. But in order to explain her slump with the vault, Risa would have to tell Comet she was a gymnast, and since there definitely weren’t a lot of schools in that area with a gymnastics club, it wouldn’t have been impossible for Comet to crack Risa in the real if she were so inclined. So she thought, but…
“Whaaa? Vaaault?” Comet squealed in surprise. “You mean, that guy with the faces of the Five Tiger generals on his helmet?”
“That’s Ma Chao!” Risa retorted, slightly stunned at this entirely unexpected response. “And the whole face helmet thing was just in the manga!”
“Ooh, you sure know your stuff, Uni-Uni. I like Huang Zhong best of the Five Tiger Generals, maybe,” the magical girl boasted, and looking at her, Risa felt foolish for being on guard against being cracked in the real.
“I’m team Zhao Yun,” she replied with a wry smile. “But I don’t mean that. I mean the vault. You write it with the characters for ‘jump’ and ‘horse.’ It’s an artistic gymnastics event.”
“Oh. Ohhhh. That vault! I know that thing. I’ve seen it!”
Just goes with the flow, huh? Risa thought, but only for a fleeting moment.
“So then, you’re in gymnastics, huh, Unicchi?” Comet flashed her a smile. “Is it just the vault? You’re not scared of the uneven bars or floor or the balance beam?”
“Wow, you know your stuff,” Risa said, surprised.
It was one thing to know that the events in artistic gymnastics were different for men and women, but not too many people could readily list the four events in women’s artistic gymnastics—floor, vault, uneven bars, and balance beam. If Comet understood that much about the sport, then Risa needed to respond to her seriously.
“No.” She sat up straighter and nodded slowly. “I can do the uneven bars, the balance beam, and floor, just like usual. But the moment I’m standing on the runway for the vault, I get so nervous in a bad way.”
“Hmm.” Comet frowned. “You don’t have a mental performance coach in your club?”
The way these words came out of her so easily, Comet was also likely on some sports team. So then why on earth was the magical girl…? Pushing aside this question, Risa nodded slightly.
“We do, but… It’s kind of hard to talk to her. And I think I know the reason why I’m nervous.”
“Did you get hurt on the vault before or something?”
“Uh-uh.” Risa shook her head. “I’m not nervous because I’m not good at it. Vault’s always been my top event. But maybe that’s why. It’s like I end up thinking that I absolutely have to make it, I have to get a good score there.”
“Oh, yeah, I get that.” Comet nodded and seemed to fall into thought, so Risa continued haltingly, half to herself.
“…The runway’s super important in vault, but, like, that doesn’t mean you can just run full speed. The really good people go at about seventy or eighty percent and land square on the springboard, so they can make a stable jump. But…the technique I want to do, I seriously can’t make that jump running at eighty percent. Even if I can’t hit a hundred percent, I need to run at, like, ninety percent and hit the springboard at the perfect moment, or I won’t get enough height.”
The real-world Risa’s goal was to succeed in performing a triple front flip—the Produnova—in competition. While this was one flip less than her ultimate dream of the Racoviţă quadruple flip, the Produnova also had a high level of difficulty, and few gymnasts attempted it, even at the Olympics. But Risa’s success rate at practice was barely 60 percent, so she very much could not use it at competition.
The individual event championships were two months away and closing in fast. Unless she pulled her success rate up to 90 percent within the next month, her coach wouldn’t give her permission to do the move at the meet. So how could she balance both runway speed and accuracy on the springboard?
The answer to that was already inside of her. She wouldn’t get anywhere without running, so she had to just run as hard as she could. There was no other way to do it than to focus on practicing running at 90 percent of her top speed and making sure she hit the springboard.
She knew that, but…she couldn’t run. The moment she surpassed 80 percent of her top speed, her body instinctively applied a limiter. So even if she did hit the springboard right, she didn’t get enough height. Which meant she was forced to open her legs wider in order to increase her spin in the second midair stage after launch, and that led to her being unable to stick her landing.
In the end, she simply lacked courage. She was not equipped with the kind of courage Racoviţă had shown at the 2040 Olympics.
She realized that she was feeling even more down now, in the duel she’d started to reset her negative thinking, and a self-deprecating smile rose on her face as she moved to stand up.
But before she could, Comet Squeaker opened her mouth, after long thought. “I think there are two ways.”
“Huh?” Risa stared at her, startled. “F-for what?”
“Ways to get over your fear of the runway.”
“…!!” Half in disbelief, she looked intently at the face mask of the magical girl.