Gentildonna had sought Equinox out for training.
Naturally, with Almond Eye having moved in, she joined the two of them for their runs as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
In fact, the turf course at Mejiro Estate had even carved out a special section just for training races between those three Umamusume: a "mock Shuka Sho turn."
You could count that as one of Eternal Beat's special perks, probably.
They had what was practically an exclusive course to themselves, one that could recreate the key turning points of a given race as faithfully as possible before the real thing.
And that still wasn't all.
Yes, temporary barriers had been set up along both sides of the improvised lane, but—
the Mejiro Estate course's most exquisite, and most terrifying, imitation of the Shuka Sho went far beyond that.
The truly unique part—the part that gave the three running Umamusume an edge—wasn't anywhere the eye could see.
It was... under their feet.
Yes. This was the sort of thing many active Umamusume had never had the chance to experience or even pay attention to—or rather, the sort of thing many slow-on-the-uptake teams and trainers still hadn't realized mattered.
Once the turf underfoot had changed so drastically, how were they supposed to deal with a surface this unfamiliar to Japanese Umamusume?
The first thing Mejiro Ramonu and Symboli Rudolf did after taking command of the URA had, in many people's eyes, happened almost without a sound.
They had ripped up Japan's long-standing fast turf and replaced it with a European-style course laid over deep, soft earth.
Even for two families as wealthy as theirs, though, there was obviously no way to push through a full replacement of every turf course in Japan all at once. So they could only prioritize most of the venues that actually held Umamusume races, along with part of the courses at regional Tracen Academies.
There was no way they were going to prioritize replacing every course at Central first...!
Central might be the highest-level region in all of Japan, but the local scene was just as much a part of Umamusume racing.
They couldn't very well say that just because Central's level was higher, its turf had to be replaced first.
So when it came to resurfacing, roughly fifty percent of the work went to Central, while the remaining fifty percent was divided up among the tracks at each regional Tracen Academy.
That wasn't something you could finish easily, so for the Japanese Umamusume world as a whole, the truly disruptive impact still hadn't arrived.
But Gotham Song—or rather, Mejiro Estate—understood perfectly well how important a change like this was to an Umamusume's career. So almost immediately, perhaps even earlier than that, Mejiro Estate's private turf had already been rebuilt, updated from the same fast turf used at the racecourses to soft-earth footing.
Mejiro Estate had always been quick to stay ahead of the times. For Mejiro Estate, renovation costs meant nothing, and any change in conditions that might bring victory—even the slightest one—was worth being pleased about.
And under the present circumstances, that had become an advantage for Eternal Beat that other Umamusume simply couldn't hope to catch up to.
You could say that for Umamusume with no way to train in an environment like this, the disadvantage might as well be infinite...
Isn't that right, Verxina?
Running was still running, yes, but the feel of fast turf, with its firm, immediate response underfoot, was completely different from a surface built over soft earth, where each step gave far less back...
Watching the three Umamusume still running in the distance, Gotham Song couldn't help sighing over it all.
The fact that the whole Umamusume scene, trainers included, could be this insensitive to something like this really was just... far too slow on the uptake, wasn't it?!
Unable to do anything about it, Gotham Song could only let out a deep sigh, then harden her resolve to make all of it public, to overturn the entire industry, and to drive out the people who had no right sitting in those positions in the first place—the ones using other Umamusume's talent to bankroll their own lives.
Still, the fact that Gentildonna didn't mind Almond Eye running alongside her at all, even in the middle of race prep, wasn't remotely surprising.
How was Gotham Song supposed to describe the scene before her right now?
It was the kind of sight that simply made her think: of course Gentildonna would do something like this.
That was the feeling, more or less.
Because Gentildonna was the kind of Umamusume who stayed serious and exacting at all times, met every challenge head-on, and held herself to brutal standards no matter when or where.
So even Almond Eye showing up and asking to run training races together was, to Gentildonna, probably nothing more than another ordinary challenge—just one more that had always been there at her side. In every sense, she was the kind of Umamusume you could see coming a mile away, and yet couldn't help admiring anyway.
Gotham Song knew perfectly well that she could never do anything like that. At heart, she was still the kind of person who would stay in bed out of laziness. Asking her to spend all twenty-four hours of the day holding herself to Gentildonna's standards—high standards, at that—was just asking the impossible, wasn't it?!
That wasn't something ordinary grit and endurance could ever accomplish!
But then again, it was exactly because of that seriousness, that attitude, that Gentildonna had been able to defeat Almond Eye twice and completely overturn the gap between them in talent, wasn't it?
Had she really ground that gap away with sweat and relentless effort? Gentildonna really was terrifying in every possible sense.
For an Umamusume, just how despairing—how nearly impossible to bridge—was a gap in talent?
Gotham Song felt this was the best way to put it.
Some people are born already able to step into places that, for others, might remain forever beyond even a glimpse no matter if they struggled for a hundred years or two hundred.
That was about how large the gap was, probably.
Talent among Umamusume was just that cruel—nothing beautiful about it at all.
And the more clearly Gotham Song understood that, the more clearly she understood just how incredible what Gentildonna had done really was.
She had truly used that same unwavering seriousness and severity to catch up to Almond Eye, whose strides should have been impossibly far ahead of hers.
Could you have done better?
Or if you had met an Umamusume even more gifted than you, could you have done better then?
It was hard even to imagine something like that, and yet Gotham Song still sank into the thought—and she didn't need to think very long to arrive at a clear answer.
She could never have done what Gentildonna had done against Almond Eye, using effort to fill in the chasm between their talents.
That was absolute. Certain.Unquestionable.
Because first of all, Gotham Song simply didn't have Gentildonna's kind of tenacity—
If she had transmigrated into an ordinary, average Umamusume, without such overwhelming talent and without that time limit back then, she would never have taken any interest in Umamusume in the first place, and she definitely never would have stepped onto the track.
An ordinary her, a lazy her, knew better than anyone that she couldn't do something like that.
So in a certain sense, there were plenty of times when Gotham Song felt Gentildonna could serve as a role model for her.
Maybe the only place where she herself had the edge was the luck of what she'd run into after transmigrating. That might have been all.
But that kind of speculation never led anywhere. In the end, Gotham Song gave up on the thought completely. What was the point of thinking about it?
Better to watch the Umamusume running in the distance.
As always, Gentildonna lagged behind because of her speed, while Almond Eye, who had already displayed her unmatched superiority in that department, seized the front outright and fought Equinox, running beside her, for control of the early pace in this training race.
Clearly, in this three-way training race, Equinox had taken over the niche normally occupied by the other front-running Umamusume—and in an outright superior form, at that...!
Poor Verxina. Even when the threat she posed wasn't all that great, they were still dissecting and targeting her this thoroughly in private practice.
In a way, their thoroughness was enough to make you break into a sweat.
At first, the three Umamusume did open up gaps between one another, but the moment they entered that tight turn, the whole picture changed at once no matter how much distance there had been up front.
Equinox and Almond Eye even had to slow down, reaching a point where they could no longer take the corner quickly enough to widen their advantage.
By contrast, Gentildonna, who wasn't especially fast to begin with, seized the initiative there instead. Maintaining her pace, and as if deliberately laying her cards on the table, she used that turn entry—one Almond Eye could never possibly imitate—right in Almond Eye's sight, time and time again, to snatch a huge advantage, then pulled away into the clear and used her monstrous stamina as a weapon to finish the race completely.
What an ingenious, razor-sharp training race it was.
This had already played out several times. Not only had Almond Eye, as one of the runners in it, been left with a deep impression by Gentildonna's display, but even Gotham Song, watching from the sidelines, had the script engraved in her mind by now, and yet...!
And yet there was one thing she could see clearly.
Gentildonna was doing it on purpose.
She was deliberately exposing the only path she had to victory—and the fact that once that path opened, there was no stopping it—right in front of Almond Eye.
She... she was intentionally making Almond Eye understand it even more clearly.
As early as the conversation last night, Gentildonna had already known that Almond Eye had figured out her weakness. So why had she chosen, in a training race, to reinforce Almond Eye's judgment even further and make her opponent clearly realize this—that if the race wasn't killed before the turn, victory would be absolutely impossible?
Gentildonna wasn't the kind of Umamusume who would act that rashly—or do something so irrational just because it was "only" a training race.
An absurd thought, one frightening enough to border on horrifying, rose in Gotham Song's mind.
She suddenly realized a cruel fact.
Was Gentildonna doing this out of sheer pride?
No.
Was it because she was certain—utterly certain—that Almond Eye had no way to beat her, and was using this to flaunt her own strength and crush her opponent's confidence?
That didn't seem right either. Effective or not, Gentildonna shouldn't be arrogant enough for that. Her Shuka Sho plan was already one that walked on thin ice, a race with no room for error at all.
She should have been the one forced into a corner, the Umamusume who had to tread carefully, hide her trump card, and leave her opponent mired in doubt, wasn't she?
Wasn't this the same as laying everything Almond Eye would have to face out in the open and asking, Can you break through it? If you can't, you lose.
No matter how you looked at it, Almond Eye would pour all her strength into trying to force a way through a setup like that.
At the end of the day, it was only a tight turn. The biggest problem was how sharp the angle was, but in a situation like this, Almond Eye could absolutely unleash closing-burst speed right from the start, take the advantage on the opening straight, ease herself into the turn, and then accelerate again. If she did that, she could conquer even a corner this tight.
The price, though, would be a level of stamina drain Almond Eye could hardly afford, so high that she might well end up unable to finish the race at all.
No. No, wait. No, no—could that be it?
Was this Gentildonna's true aim?
To force Almond Eye to consider going all in, to pour nearly all of her stamina into the start of the race, and then... to seize an overwhelming advantage on the stamina side?!
Was that the real reason Gentildonna wanted Almond Eye to see it clearly?!
Gotham Song felt as if she had understood everything, and sank into profound shock.
What she herself had wanted to tell Almond Eye yesterday had only been a plan to use positioning to box Gentildonna in at the start of the race, but...
But if Gentildonna had taken things to this level—if she had an open gambit like this—then Almond Eye was already very nearly out of options, wasn't she?
Almond Eye had to stake her hopes of victory on her not-especially-strong stamina, because that was the only opening she had left.
Even if it was a stretch for her to do it on stamina, a ten percent chance was still better than five, wasn't it?
A direct, aboveboard tactical move from Gentildonna—one Almond Eye had no way to refuse, one she could only grit her teeth and meet head-on... What a response. It came down like a raging storm.
Gotham Song couldn't help marveling. Had one of her own Umamusume already reached this level in tactical play?
She herself hadn't grasped at first that there was this much depth behind it...
So then, Almond Eye—what would you choose?