The crisp, sharp air of a late autumn morning hung over the Annex training grounds.
“Trainer!
Look!
Look!
Everyone came to run with me today!” Haru Urara squealed, her tail swishing with such violent enthusiasm that it kicked up a small cloud of loose dirt behind her.
Standing on the perimeter track in their pristine Tracen athletic tracksuits were Special Week, El Condor Pasa, and Grass Wonder.
They were stretching, doing dynamic leg swings, and grinning brightly at Urara, who was bouncing on the balls of her feet like an overcharged rubber ball.
Kazuma leaned against the wooden boundary fence, his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his green tracksuit, his stopwatch hanging loosely from his neck.
“Yeah, yeah, I see them,” Kazuma said, his tone dripping with his usual lazy indifference.
“Since you ladies are so eager to burn off your dorm breakfast, you can lead her through four laps of the **4:2 Low-Intensity Rhythm**.
Don’t let her sprint.
If she tries to go full speed, grab her jacket.”
“Understood, Satou-sensei!” Special Week gave a cheerful, overly crisp salute.
“We’ll keep Urara-chan right on cadence!”
“Leave it to us, *amiga*!” El Condor Pasa declared, striking a dramatic pose.
“We shall be the walls that contain the Pink Torpedo!”
“Have a good run, everyone,” Grass Wonder added with a gentle smile, taking her place beside Urara at the starting line.
With a loud cheer, the four horse girls took off down the dirt oval, their rhythmic footfalls echoing against the surrounding ginkgo trees.
Kazuma watched them go, his face impassive.
He knew the truth, of course.
He wasn’t stupid.
This “spontaneous joint training session” was a setup.
Special Week and the others hadn’t suddenly decided to spend a Tuesday morning running slow recovery laps on the Annex dirt out of pure athletic curiosity.
They were the distraction.
The sound of measured, heavy footsteps approaching from behind confirmed his suspicions.
“A clever maneuver, letting them run ahead,” a calm, regal voice remarked.
Kazuma didn’t bother turning around.
He simply reached into his pocket, pulled out his thermos of barley tea, and took a slow sip.
Standing a few paces behind him were three figures who practically radiated authority and social pressure: President Symboli Rudolf, Vice President Air Groove, and King Halo.
None of them were in running gear.
They wore their immaculate student uniforms, their coats draped elegantly over their shoulders, their sharp eyes locked onto Kazuma’s back.
“I don’t like crowds,” Kazuma said flatly, his voice dry as bone.
“And I certainly don’t like three high-ranking student council members cornering me before my second cup of tea.
If this is about the Annex toilet paper budget, I already submitted the receipts.”
“This has nothing to do with facility budgets, Satou-sensei,” Air Groove said, stepping forward, her sharp eyes narrowing slightly behind her dark hair.
Her horse ears flicked back, registering the faint, lingering memory of his hand on her head from two days ago—a gesture that still made her chest feel oddly tight.
“We are here to ask you a question.
A real one.”
“One that you avoided on your initial application forms,” King Halo added, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her chin held high, though her eyes betrayed a deep, burning curiosity.
“And one that you skirted around during your interview at the Student Council office.”
Symboli Rudolf stepped alongside Kazuma, leaning her forearms against the wooden fence, staring out at the track where Urara was currently giggling as she ran between Special Week and Grass Wonder.
“In your official stable registry, under ‘Reason for Selection,’ you wrote a single sentence,” Rudolf said, her voice dropping into a quiet, serious register.
“*’She was the only one sitting on the floor.’* At the time, we assumed it was your strange, eccentric sense of humor.”
“It wasn’t humor,” Kazuma grunted, taking another sip of tea.
“I was tired.
The chairs were full.”
“We know the truth, Satou-sensei,” Air Groove interjected, her tone dropping all pretense of official bureaucracy, carrying a heavy, somber weight.
“Everyone in Tracen knows.
The faculty knows.
The senior trainers know.
Even the media, behind all their grand *Zero to Hero* headlines, knows it.”
Kazuma paused, his thermos hovering an inch from his lips.
“Urara’s victories in Kochi and Chiba…” King Halo whispered, looking away toward the track, her voice tinged with a complex mix of respect and raw honesty.
“…they were not born from latent, world-class talent.
Urara’s baseline physical metrics are bottom-tier.
Her lung capacity is average, her muscle density is below the academy standard, and her stride mechanics are chaotic.
Those two victories happened because of *you*.
Your absurd, terrifying luck.
Your hyper-specific pacing algorithms.
Your willingness to drag your own body through the mud to shield her from wind resistance.”
“She didn’t win because she’s a genius,” Rudolf concluded quietly, turning her head to look directly at Kazuma’s profile.
“She won because *you* were her Trainer.
You could have chosen any girl in the unassigned pool.
You could have taken a prodigy with top-tier genetic potential, applied your bizarre, immaculate training methods, and walked smoothly into Grade 1 glory without breaking a sweat.”
Air Groove took a step closer, her voice thick with a question that had clearly been burning in her mind for weeks.
“Even if your goal was simply to live a lazy, effortless life without attracting attention…
you didn’t need to pick an athlete at all.
You could have resigned your license.
You could have taken a quiet desk job in the administrative wing.
Yet you tied your name, your reputation, and your entire life to a girl who had lost over a hundred races before she met you.”
King Halo’s breath hitched slightly as she stared at his side profile.
“Why her, Kazuma-sensei?
What is the *real* reason you chose Haru Urara?”
The morning wind rustled through the yellow ginkgo leaves, showering the wooden fence in a gentle cascade of gold.
Out on the track, Urara’s high-pitched laugh echoed across the dirt as she tried to imitate El Condor Pasa’s dramatic running form, almost tripping over her own feet before Special Week caught her by the arm.
Kazuma lowered his thermos.
He let out a long, slow, exhausted breath that formed a faint white plume in the chilly autumn air.
His eye twitched.
His shoulders slumped into that familiar, lazy posture he always fell back on when conversations got too dramatic for his liking.
“You people really overthink everything,” Kazuma muttered, his voice flat, completely devoid of the grand, poetic passion they were clearly expecting.
“You stand there talking about ‘baseline metrics,’ ‘genetic potential,’ and ‘Grade 1 glory’ like you’re reading from an industrial livestock catalog.”
Air Groove’s breath caught in her throat.
Rudolf remained silent, her green eyes fixed on him, waiting.
“You want a deep, fundamental reason?” Kazuma scoffed, turning his head slightly to glare at them with his dark, cynical, tired eyes.
“There isn’t one.
I didn’t look at her metrics.
I didn’t look at her loss record.
I didn’t care about her pedigree.”
“Then why?!” King Halo demanded, her voice cracking slightly under the emotional tension.
“Why take on such a burden?!”
“Because she’s Haru Urara,” Kazuma said simply.
The three horse girls froze.
“That’s it,” Kazuma continued, turning back to face the track, his hands shoved deep into his green tracksuit pockets.
“That’s the whole reason.
She was sitting on the floor, she looked at me, she smiled, and she said she liked running.
She didn’t ask me for a championship.
She didn’t ask me to turn her into a legend.
She just wanted to run, and she wanted people to smile when she did.”
He took a slow breath, his voice dropping into a quiet, surprisingly solid tone that hit the three girls like a physical impact.
“Everyone in this academy is obsessed with winning,” Kazuma said, a trace of his old, cynical world-weariness bleeding through his words.
“You choke yourselves with expectations.
You measure your self-worth in trophies, press headlines, and G1 badges.
It’s exhausting just watching you people breathe.
But Urara?
She runs because she likes the feeling of the wind on her ears.
She runs because she thinks a burnt sweet potato tastes better after a lap on the dirt.”
He pointed a lazy finger toward the pink-haired girl out on the track.
“I don’t care if she wins first place, fifth place, or hundred-and-fifth place,” Kazuma stated, his tone absolute, carrying a cold, terrifying lack of compromise.
“The math, the algorithms, the pacing…
I do all that garbage so she doesn’t break her legs.
I do it so she can cross the finish line, eat her cheap strawberry cake, and sleep like a log on the train ride home.
That’s my job.
The rest of it—the media, the rankings, the prestige—can rot in a ditch for all I care.”
Air Groove stared at him, her lips parted, her heart suddenly hammering against her ribs with a violent, terrifying force.
“Satou-sensei…” Air Groove croaked, her voice trembling.
“Do you…
do you have any idea what the media will do to you if she starts losing again?
If the public realizes her victories were just tactical flukes?
They will drag your name through the mud.
They will call you a fraud, a incompetent trainer who wasted public funds!”
Kazuma let out a dry, quiet laugh—a sharp, wicked smirk spreading across his face that belonged to a man who had faced down dark gods, crazy cults, and terrifying explosions without blinking.
“Let them,” Kazuma sneered, his eyes glinting with a dark, unyielding stubbornness.
“If the media wants a villain, I’ll be the worst villain this country has ever seen.
If the internet wants to talk trash, I’ll write a thousand-page complaint form and burn their servers down.
I don’t give a damn about the media’s opinion.
I don’t give a damn about Tracen’s reputation.”
He turned fully toward the three of them, his posture straight, his wiry, newly conditioned frame standing tall under his green jacket.
“She has me,” Kazuma said, his voice ringing with a fierce, absolute protection that shattered any illusion of him being just a lazy NEET.
“She has her friends in the dorm.
And she has those loud, crazy fans in Kochi who send her black bags full of peanuts.
That is more than enough.
If the entire world turns against her because she stays in the regional circuit and refuses to be their Grade 1 trophy, I will stand in front of her and curse every single one of them to their faces.”
Silence fell over the Annex fence.
It was a profound, suffocating silence.
Air Groove’s face flushed a deep, burning crimson.
Her hand flew to her chest, trying to suppress the sudden, violent thumping of her heart.
The raw, unfiltered, absolute devotion in his words—a devotion that asked for nothing in return, that didn’t care about fame, talent, or success—hit her like a physical blow.
It was the exact kind of unconditional, fierce protection every Uma Musume secretly craved from a trainer, stripped of all corporate politics and academic pressure.
King Halo stepped back, her eyes wide, her hand covering her mouth.
Her cheeks were burning hot.
She looked at Kazuma—at his tired eyes, his messy hair, his ugly green tracksuit—and felt a terrifying, sweet ache bloom inside her chest.
*He would fight the whole world for her…
even if she never wins a G1 race…*
And Symboli Rudolf…
the iron-willed President of Tracen Academy…
stood frozen.
Her green eyes were wide, her breath caught in her throat.
Her ears twitched violently, pinning back against her hair as a strange, electrifying heat raced up her spine.
In her years as President, she had heard hundreds of trainers give passionate speeches about ambition, victory, and potential.
But she had *never* heard a man say he would gladly become the world’s greatest villain just so a small, talentless girl could eat cake and run without fear.
It wasn’t a trainer’s speech.
It was a declaration of absolute, unbreakable stewardship.
Kazuma, completely blind to the emotional nuclear bomb he had just detonated in the hearts of the three most powerful girls in the school, blew his nose into a tissue, let out a loud groan, and checked his stopwatch.
“Time’s up,” Kazuma grunted, completely shattering the heavy, romantic atmosphere.
“Hey!
Torpedo!
Bring the cheer squad back!
It’s time for cool-down stretches!”
Out on the track, Urara heard his voice, her pink ears snapping straight up.
“Aye-aye, Captain!” she cheered, turning and sprinting toward the fence with Special Week and the others in tow.
Kazuma turned back to Rudolf, Air Groove, and King Halo, giving them a lazy, dismissive wave.
“If you three are done interrogating me, clear out,” Kazuma deadpanned, pulling a clipboard from his jacket.
“We have dynamic hamstring stretches to do, and I don’t want you high-society types distracting my athlete with talk about ‘genetic potential.'”
Air Groove couldn’t speak.
She merely nodded frantically, her face bright red, avoiding his eyes as she practically stumbled backward.
King Halo swallowed hard, her eyes glued to his face for three long seconds before she turned away, her heart hammering like a war drum against her ribs.
“W-We’re leaving!
Don’t think this means you’re exempt from the afternoon budget meeting, Satou-sensei!” she squeaked, her voice an octave higher than usual as she turned on her heel and hurried away.
Symboli Rudolf stayed for a second longer.
She looked at Kazuma, a soft, incredibly dangerous, beautiful smile touching her lips—a smile that carried a terrifying new resolve.
“You truly are a dangerous man, Satou Kazuma,” Rudolf whispered softly, so low he couldn’t hear her over Urara’s approaching footsteps.
“What did you say?” Kazuma asked, frowning.
“Nothing,” Rudolf said smoothly, adjusting her white gloves, her eyes gleaming with an intense, lingering heat.
“I shall see you in the Student Council office at two o’clock.
Do not be late, Trainer.”
She turned and walked away, her coat fluttering in the autumn wind, leaving Kazuma standing by the fence.
“Trainer!
Trainer!
Did I do the rhythm right?!” Urara skidded to a halt in front of him, covered in sweat, dirt on her nose, beaming like a little sun.
Kazuma looked down at her.
The dark, cynical irritation in his eyes completely vanished, replaced by that quiet, familiar warmth he would never acknowledge.
He reached out, his hand settling on her head, messing up her pink twin tails with a rough, solid rub.
“You ran like a hyperactive torpedo,” Kazuma said, a small, genuine smirk finally appearing on his face.
“Go grab your water bottle.
We have two more sets before lunch, and then I’m making you eat those Chiba peanuts.”
“Yay!
Peanut time!” Urara squealed, bouncing toward the bench.
Kazuma leaned against the wooden fence, taking a long sip of his cold barley tea, watching her run around the bench in circles.
He didn’t know about the quiet storm brewing in the hearts of the Student Council.
He didn’t know about the dozens of elite Uma Musume who were already quietly inquiring about transfer permits to the Annex stable.
And he certainly didn’t know that his simple, stubborn answer had just made him the most dangerously desired man in Tracen Academy.
He just knew that the weather was nice, the tea was warm, and in two weeks, they were going to Niigata to fight for a glorious, beautiful, perfect Fifth Place.