When Kitasan Black and Toujou Kaisoku took their positions on the track, even Kaisoku—a girl who knew nothing about racing, whose soul was pure corporate drone—felt the call of her umamusume bloodline.
She had zero interest in running, yet the moment her feet touched the track, something primal stirred: the instinct that she was meant to run.
So this is the call of the umamusume blood?
Kaisoku thought.
Kita noticed it too—the instant Kaisoku stepped onto the track, her entire presence transformed.
Like she’d become a different person.
That overwhelming aura, indifferent to everything around her, rolled forward like a bank of stormclouds—and she was the single blinding bolt of white lightning at their heart.
Kita’s conviction solidified.
From the very first moment she’d laid eyes on Kaisoku, she’d sensed the potential coiled inside her.
She claimed she barely trained, yet her physique was perfectly proportioned.
Her legs were long and toned—not willowy, not bulky.
Her usual air of lazy indifference had masked everything, but now that she stood on the track, that languid energy evaporated.
Even the air seemed to buckle under the weight of her presence.
This girl is no weakling.
The sheer intensity jolted Kita.
She’d planned to treat this as a casual jog, nothing more.
But standing across from Kaisoku, she felt the same pressure she only ever felt from her greatest rival—Duramente.
“Huh?
Wasn’t the forecast clear skies?
Where’d all these clouds come from…” Sweep Tosho had been lounging on a water mattress by the pool, savoring the sun, but as shadows crept across the sky she looked up with a frown.
Sometime while nobody was paying attention, dark clouds had swallowed the blue horizon.
Wind whipped through the grounds, catching Kaisoku’s slightly too-long white hair.
Through the pale strands, Kita caught a glimpse of her eyes.
Blood red.
“Ready—” The weather was acting strange, but Diamond raised her hand anyway, preparing to start the trial.
A two-thousand-meter course.
She wanted to see for herself whether Kita’s emphatic guarantee of raw talent held any water.
She drew a breath and gave the signal.
“Go!”
The word hadn’t finished leaving her mouth before thunder cracked the sky.
Like a starting cannon, the downpour hit all at once, engulfing the entire track.
Kaisoku launched forward in the same instant, and she’d never imagined her body could feel this light.
Her legs delivered a burst of speed that felt like being launched from a cannon—in one explosive instant, she fired out of the starting gate.
From the very first step, she held nothing back.
It wasn’t a conscious choice.
Her body was speaking for her, and it said only one thing:
“Give it everything.”
Kita was stunned that Kaisoku had beaten her off the line, but it was already too late.
Kaisoku had cleared the gate first, seized the inside position first.
The sudden cloudburst was baffling, but with her competitive fire now lit, Kita stopped thinking about it.
A race was a conversation by other means.
That was what it meant to be an umamusume.
Diamond opened her umbrella and watched the two figures sprint through the downpour.
Concern flickered across her face.
The rain was genuinely heavy—the track had gone muddy almost instantly, badly hindering Kita’s speed.
The waterlogged ground was a nightmare for a frontrunner like Kita, who relied on building an early advantage.
But Kaisoku, charging ahead with reckless abandon, had already claimed the lead.
So fast—I can actually run that fast?
Kaisoku was astonished by her own body’s potential.
So the original Toujou Kaisoku hadn’t just been sulking in isolation—she had been training this body.
Otherwise this kind of speed was impossible.
And the instincts that kicked in after the gate opened were nothing a beginner should possess.
Kaisoku may have been a shut-in, but she had real talent?
The race passed the halfway mark quickly.
Two thousand meters was short for runners like Kita and Kaisoku, and even at top speed Kaisoku felt no fatigue.
If anything, the faster she ran, the more the heat surged through her veins, leaving her almost dizzy.
It was as if a dormant bloodline was reawakening, and her rational mind was teetering on the edge of disconnecting entirely.
“She’s incredible…
This is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone besides Duramente suppress Kita this completely.” Diamond murmured.
Sweep had come back from the pool with an umbrella to watch.
She’d expected Kita to cruise to an easy lead.
She hadn’t predicted this.
“Is it the rain?”
“Kita isn’t that picky about conditions.
The rain’s a factor, sure, but this is Kaisoku’s strength showing through.
I’ve been her roommate this whole time and never realized she could run like this.” Diamond was seeing Kaisoku at full speed for the first time, and something about it nagged at her.
A strange sense of dissonance.
For a moment, Diamond was reminded of the old Kaisoku.
The one who couldn’t bring herself to talk to anyone.
The girl she’d been before she changed.
This kind of running wasn’t built in a day.
Even back then, Kaisoku must have been putting herself through grueling self-imposed training.
Alone, where nobody could see, running lap after lap after lap, forging this level of skill through sheer repetition.
Training in silence, with no one cheering her on, sprinting through a solitude that nobody else could touch.
Why didn’t I pay more attention to her?
She’s been this extraordinary all along…
and everyone overlooked her.
No parents, no teacher watching out for her, no friends.
She was the loneliest shadow in the world, hiding herself where the light couldn’t reach.
“Diamond…
are you crying?”
“It’s just the rain.” Diamond wiped the moisture from the corner of her eye.
Silently, she cheered Kaisoku on—for the talent that had finally been revealed today.
Maybe she really had overlooked this girl in the past.
But now she’d seen it.
This talent could not be allowed to go to waste.
“Rain like this, and right now of all times…” Meanwhile, inside a building overlooking the grounds, another umamusume had been observing the race.
She’d originally come to inspect this Satono-funded training facility on a routine visit.
A state-of-the-art facility built in the heart of the city—it wasn’t going to stay private forever.
A membership program was inevitable.
And any membership program would naturally seek celebrity endorsements.
One umamusume in particular was impossible to ignore: the student council president of Tracen Academy, one of the most powerful runners of her era, the legendary seven-time crown winner, a black-card member at virtually every training facility in the country.
A genuine superstar.
Symboli Rudolf.
What started as a routine social call had turned into something far more interesting.
Through the rain-streaked glass, she couldn’t make out the runner’s face clearly, but the girl’s form, her speed, her ability to maintain this level of performance in a torrential downpour—all of it confirmed one thing.
This was a talented, rigorously trained umamusume.
“Middle school, by the looks of it.
Didn’t expect to find a prospect here.
Tracen’s about to get more exciting.” Rudolf smiled at the companion who’d been invited alongside her.
“What do you think, Oguri Cap?
See anything special?”
“Very steady…” Oguri Cap was another black-card invitee for the promotional push.
As marquee names, these two were obvious choices.
They’d planned to test the track themselves, but Diamond and Kita had booked it first—and they weren’t about to bump a couple of kids off the course.
So they’d settled for watching from the sidelines.
“To run like that in this kind of rain—that’s impressive.”
Oguri Cap’s praise was sparse but precise.
Rudolf couldn’t hide her admiration either.
A talented umamusume who also worked hard—that was the foundation for greatness.
The girl’s luck might be rough, given the weather, but that only made Rudolf more curious about what she could do on a clear day.
Performing at this level in the rain was already beyond what most middle schoolers could dream of.
“Kitasan Black is solid too, but she’s from a major family—that’s expected.
What I’m really curious about is the other girl.” Rudolf stroked her chin, calculations clearly running behind her eyes.
She couldn’t help it—she had a weakness for talented youngsters.
Once the race ended, she fully intended to find out who this mystery runner was.
She knew practically every notable umamusume in the middle school circuit.
But this white-haired girl was a blind spot.
It seemed even the great Rudolf missed one every now and then.
Back on the track, Kaisoku and Kita were approaching the final curve.
Kita had been trailing by about two lengths the entire race, but she’d spotted something: Kaisoku’s straight-line speed was terrifying, yet her cornering had flaws.
She had no instinct for positioning into a turn.
This was the one thing you couldn’t train alone—Kaisoku’s muscle memory had never run against anyone.
She didn’t know the first thing about the tactical jockeying that happened at every bend.
Kita seized the opening, cutting in at a sharp angle to steal the inside line.
Forced wide, Kaisoku had to take the long way around, and that tiny disadvantage was enough to flip the race.
Kaisoku had talent.
She had the work ethic.
But her isolation had left her understanding of racing fatally narrow.
This wasn’t a time trial where speed solved everything—it was competition.
It required reading your opponent, and Kaisoku couldn’t do that.
The moment she became aware of another runner sharing her track, her form started to fall apart.
A surge of unfamiliar panic hit her.
Her heart rate spiked for no discernible reason.
The fear didn’t come from the girl—it came from somewhere deeper.
Kaisoku was afraid.
Afraid of the other presence on the track.
As the terror spread, she didn’t just slow down—she lost the will to sprint entirely.
Her speed was dropping.
“…This is bad.
Decelerating here—but it doesn’t look like a speed drop…” Diamond’s anxiety couldn’t reach the runners on the track.
Kita couldn’t afford to look back.
But everyone watching knew the same thing: something had gone very wrong with Kaisoku.
“It’s not a speed drop…” Rudolf frowned.
“And it’s not interference from her opponent…
What’s happening?”
“She’s afraid.” Oguri Cap spoke quietly.
“That aura of hers earlier—that total disregard for everything around her—that might not have been confidence.
She might genuinely not have registered that her opponent existed.”
“Afraid of her opponent…” This was outside Rudolf’s frame of reference.
Opponents were afraid of her—she’d never once been afraid of anyone.
But Oguri Cap nodded with certainty.
“She clearly still has energy left, but being disrupted made her aware there’s another runner out there.
And now she’s too scared to remember how to run.”
“That’s actually a thing…” Rudolf pressed a hand to her forehead.
“That was not what I expected.”
What do I do?
Kaisoku snapped out of her adrenaline-fueled trance and realized she’d fallen behind.
Whatever had been driving her body a moment ago, it hadn’t felt like her.
She had to hand it to the umamusume racing impulse—it had nearly taken her over completely.
That sort of thing was basically Shiki Tohno’s Reversal Impulse with a fresh coat of paint.
Too bad she didn’t have the Seventeen Divisions or the Nanaya Assassination Arts to go with it.
I lost, she told herself.
It was fine—she’d never planned to become a racer anyway.
A loss was a loss.
And losing to Kitasan Black was hardly shameful.
Kita was a generational star, a rising talent everyone was watching.
Losing was perfectly normal.
Kaisoku was just some shut-in nobody.
That was all she’d ever been.
Nobody’s going to care—
Nobody had ever cared whether she won.
Losing didn’t matter, so why bother trying to…
“GO FOR IT!”
“…Huh?” Kaisoku craned her neck toward the sidelines and saw Diamond, umbrella discarded, hands cupped around her mouth, shouting at the top of her lungs.
“Kaisoku!
You can do it!
Don’t lose!”
…Why is she cheering for me?
Something warm stirred in Kaisoku’s chest.
Someone actually wanted her to win?
She’d already lost…
so why did this feel so unbearable?
Whatever.
Probably just the umamusume Reversal Impulse again.
Might as well ride the instinct—
The moment she cleared the final bend, Kaisoku had been running on the far outside—an objectively hopeless position.
Four lengths separated her from Kita, who wasn’t going to falter.
This should have been mathematically unwinnable.
But the final stretch of this two-thousand-meter course was a straight—nearly four hundred meters long.
Just four hundred meters.
Kaisoku took a breath, gathered every last ounce of power, and detonated.
In the instant she exited the turn—in the instant everyone watching had already written her off—something erupted from inside Toujou Kaisoku like a bomb going off.
The moment her right foot struck the ground, her speed exploded upward.
“…A Final Spurt?” Rudolf’s eyes went wide.
“That kind of Final Spurt—from a runner who’s been leading the whole race?
How does she still have that in the tank?”
“…Fast.” Oguri Cap’s assessment was simple, but it said everything about what Kaisoku was doing on that track.
At the tail end of the race, with her stamina nearly spent, Kaisoku had been hiding a devastating finishing kick.
The gap shrank in an instant.
Four hundred meters—only four hundred meters of straightaway!
A flash of white lightning ripping through the curtain of rain.
There was a saying about time passing in the blink of an eye—a white colt glimpsed through a gap in the wall.
In this moment, the old proverb found a brand new meaning.