"Well, well. The busy man himself actually came all the way out to see me? Now that's rare~~~"
At another training ground at Tracen Academy, Tamamo Cross said this with a grin as she went through her warm-up stretches.
"Come on, I'm usually up at Nishikino, aren't I...?"
Sakuraba Ryo felt the back of his head itch. Even he could not split himself in two and run back and forth between Hokkaido and Tokyo at the same time.
Maybe one day the system ought to reward him with some kind of shadow-clone technique.
Then he could cover both ends at once!
Too bad that wasn't happening.
"So what is it, then? Worried I can't win the Japan Cup?"
Tamamo Cross stopped in front of Sakuraba with her hands on her hips and a smile on her face.
Because of the height difference, she had to tip her chin up slightly to meet his eyes, but that did not lessen her enthusiasm for doing exactly that.
"Huh? I just came to cheer you on a little."
"Oh? You've got it in you to do that too~ So how were you planning to cheer me on?"
"I was going to, but seeing how relaxed you are, it kind of feels like you don't need it after all."
Sakuraba shrugged.
"When you get down to it, everyone out there already thinks you're the strongest active Umamusume in Japan. At that point, whether I cheer you on or not probably doesn't make much difference."
"Strongest active Umamusume? Heh..."
A glint flickered in Tamamo Cross's eyes at that.
"The me right now still doesn't qualify."
Even with three straight G1 wins to her name, only Tamamo Cross herself knew just how perilous her last showdown with Oguri Cap in the Tenno Sho Autumn had really been.
Oguri Cap had awakened her Zone several months later than Tamamo, yet on the Tenno Sho Autumn stage she had still run hard enough to match her stride for stride.
The Zone Oguri Cap displayed at the time had already been terrifyingly strong. And now that another month had passed, the Oguri Cap of today could only be stronger than she had been then.
Tamamo had won the decider in the Tenno Sho Autumn, yes—but if they ran it again, would she still win?
It was hard to say.
As far as Tamamo was concerned, that victory had not been enough.
The win wasn't concrete enough.
If she was going to call herself the strongest in Japan, then at the very least she had to beat Oguri Cap one more time.
And the Japan Cup before them now was the perfect chance.
"But after tomorrow, I'll be number one for real."
"Number one, huh..."
Sakuraba looked a little dazed.
God damn it.
Wasn't I supposed to have just randomly picked some Umamusume to invest in...?
Beat Oguri on the world stage and prove to the world that you're Japan's strongest!
So how did the top two Umamusume in Japan both end up being girls I invested in?
Damn these rotten heavens.
I ought to punch the sky.
At this point, there was nothing Sakuraba could do except blame the heavens.
It was not as if he could blame himself, right?
"Well, if you can win, then obviously that's best."
"But those overseas Umamusume on the other side aren't pushovers either..."
Obey Your Master's face flashed across his mind.
Sakuraba patted Tamamo on the shoulder.
"Anyway, be careful."
"Don't keep all your attention on Oguri."
He did not say anything that might dampen Tamamo's drive. If anything, there was some encouragement in his tone.
"Honestly, from a normal investor's point of view, the way you've been running already leaves nothing to criticize."
If he were not carrying that damned Loss System on his back, then of course he would have been happy to see Tamamo keep winning like this.
"Then what about you, Ryo? What do you think?"
Tamamo Cross did not care what other investors thought. The only thing she cared about was what Sakuraba thought of her.
"As far as I'm concerned..."
Looking at the hopeful look in Tamamo Cross's eyes, Sakuraba ultimately could not bring himself to say anything that might knock her down.
"As far as I'm concerned, Tamamo, you've got this!"
Silently, Sakuraba raised a thumbs-up.
Looking at that thumbs-up, Tamamo Cross was a little disappointed.
She had thought Sakuraba might say something more personal than that.
"Well, whatever. It's not like I was expecting you to say anything mushy in the first place~"
Tamamo Cross shook her head and smiled helplessly.
"But don't worry."
"It's just the Japan Cup, right? Just watch me bring it back tomorrow~"
"Ha..."
Sakuraba could not smile.
Forget it.
If Oguri won, then she won. If Tamamo won, then she won.
So long as the girls were happy.
When the two of them stabbed him in the back, he was not going to be sad—really!
...
In a luxury suite in a high-rise hotel in one of Tokyo's busiest districts, the night view beyond the window glittered with flowing lights, while inside the room only a single soft reading lamp was on.
Obey Your Master stood quietly before a large whiteboard, a black marker in one hand while the other rested lightly against the board.
The whiteboard was covered with photos of this year's Japan Cup entrants, race records, and data notes, dense enough to fill the space yet arranged with meticulous order.
Her gaze lingered for a long time on the section just left of center.
There were race snapshots of Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap pinned there, along with recent training records and several numbers circled in red.
Arrows crossed back and forth between the two, with small English annotations beside them:
Zone stability comparison.
Finishing-kick burst interval.
Preferred race tempo.
These were all valuable materials painstakingly compiled by Obey Your Master.
Her gaze slowly shifted from Tamamo Cross's section to the one beside it for Oguri Cap.
Over the past few weeks, she had repeatedly dissected nearly every piece of material she could gather on Tamamo Cross—race footage, data reports, even notes taken from the edge of the training grounds.
Tamamo's style was clear and sharp. She excelled at gathering momentum through the middle stages, then deciding the race in one stroke on the final straight through exceptionally stable Zone control and an explosive finishing kick.
In one corner of the whiteboard, Obey Your Master wrote her conclusion in red:
"Do not run alongside her on the final straight. Must open the gap earlier, or conserve strength and strike late."
And yet when her eyes fell on the few pinned photos and sparse lines of data under Oguri Cap's name, the tip of her marker stalled without her noticing.
Oguri Cap had awakened the Zone nearly half a year later than Tamamo Cross, and her time in top-level races was shorter as well.
There was simply too little material to analyze. Aside from a few G2 races, the only real sample was that razor-close clash with Tamamo Cross in the Tenno Sho Autumn.
And that race, more than data, felt like an unsolved riddle.
Obey Your Master had replayed the footage of the final four hundred meters many times.
With her Zone fully unleashed, what Oguri Cap displayed was not Tamamo's sort of precise tempo control, but a pure eruption of energy.
If the other Umamusume were like having a single engine built into their bodies, and entering the Zone drove that engine into overload—then Oguri Cap was nothing like that.
She was more like a body with two engines inside it.
Under normal conditions, only one of them was putting out power.
But the moment she used her Zone, the second engine started up too.
There was no obvious windup to her acceleration, and the fluctuations in her Zone were far harder to predict.
Obey Your Master simply could not calculate when Oguri Cap would activate it...
"...So you're tomorrow's biggest variable?"
Silently, Obey Your Master drew a red circle around Oguri Cap's name.