King Halo stepped out of Trainer Kuronuma's office.
In the end, she hadn't forced herself to sign with Kuronuma — she'd simply left with a handful of his suggestions. And truth be told, she wasn't particularly satisfied with any of them. None of what he'd offered was what she actually needed. His perspective was just too narrow.
Kuronuma had given her two pieces of advice.
First: find a way to pick up more skills. Japan might not have "skill masters" among its trainers, but the international scene wasn't so barren. With King Halo's family background, there was nothing stopping her from pulling a few strings and inviting a foreign specialist over.
It really was that simple — all she had to do was swallow her pride and ask her mother. This life's parents of hers were, after all, absurdly well-connected. In the uma musume world, pedigree didn't work the way it did for real racehorses. Tokai Teio, for instance, wasn't Chairwoman Akikawa's biological daughter. But King Halo's parents in this world were genuine world-class uma musume, and that kind of origin carried real weight.
Second: hire a professional tactical team. The fees weren't cheap, and on the surface everything they did could theoretically be handled by a competent trainer — but that thinking was a trap. A proper tactical team would break down every meter of the course and every opponent in exhaustive detail, then feed it all through their specialized knowledge to build a bespoke winning formula tailored to her.
That was work no single trainer could match. With a professional team behind her, an uma musume could race without carrying any of the mental burden herself. Execute the tactics cleanly and her win rate would jump to ninety percent. The number sounded outlandish, but in reality uma musume frequently botched execution mid-race, or had their tactics studied and countered after a single leak. A dedicated tactical team solved both problems — it was proven, not theoretical.
At Tracen Academy, only Tojo Hana's team operated at that level. But according to the memories King Halo had inherited, even the whole team combined didn't outthink Tokai Teio's single brain.
That kind of genius didn't need a team.
And stripped to its essentials, what did a tactical team actually do? Feed data into advanced AI and spit out a winning formula. Useful for ordinary races — but for dealing with her "sisters," the idea was laughable.
Because the raw numbers of her sisters already conveyed a single, blunt message: unbeatable.
King Halo suspected that if you fed Demon King Ship's data into an AI, even that would return a verdict of "almost impossible to defeat." Every one of them had base stats pushed to the absolute ceiling, and their skill rosters were monstrous beyond reason. Just glancing at their pentagonal stat charts felt like looking at numbers some intern had spammed into a broken game.
And if she got used to obeying tactical instructions, her own brain and instincts would dull. Real racehorses needed tactical direction because they lacked the cognitive capacity to strategize on their own. But uma musume weren't mere horses. They'd even evolved abilities like the mind's eye. Giving up on thinking for yourself was the same as cutting off your own future.
Kuronuma's vision was ultimately capped by the ceiling of this world, but King Halo wasn't about to tell him the truth. She had no evidence that would make him believe her, and what would the point even be? Would Kuronuma achieve sudden enlightenment right there on the spot?
In that moment, she finally understood why every sister after McQueen had lost interest in trainers. Their strength had already hit the ceiling of this world from day one. There just wasn't much a trainer could do for them.
Training plans were meaningless too.
Their stats were locked by the System until Story Mode was cleared — and even without the lock, stats pushed to their theoretical maximum couldn't be raised by ordinary training. Better to clear Story Mode first and then go crawl back to the System.
Maybe I was rushing...
King Halo shook her head.
She was composed, yes, but there was no denying it — her "sisters" loomed over her path like a row of mountains. No amount of composure could fully erase the pressure they put on her.
Is this what Kitasan Black felt back then? Unable to see a path through, she'd wanted to give up. But King Halo refused to take that road. I don't accept it. We all started from the same place. I refuse to believe I'm the weakest of us. If we're all [me], there's no reason I can't do it.
The idea of hunting for a trainer was shelved.
Kuronuma's office had clarified one thing for her: looking for external help wasn't realistic at this stage. Unlike novel protagonists who still had room to grow, her cheat had planted her at the summit from day one.
What she needed wasn't help reaching the peak. She needed to break past it. And no ordinary power could do that.
In the standard setting, sure — uma musume could hit their personal ceiling, even break past their original fate, with a gifted trainer at their side. But she and her sisters had already achieved that on day one. That road was closed to them.
And besides, each of them had been through Training Mode. They were already excellent trainers in their own right. They just didn't feel enough pressure in Story Mode to put that skill set on display.
Once King Halo grasped all this, the urgency to find a trainer evaporated. She'd let herself be influenced by how Rice Shower and Kitasan Black thought — she'd forgotten she was different from them. She'd actually studied properly.
Rice Shower's early talent had all come from [The Overlord]. Since her Training Mode had been cleared by [The Overlord], Rice Shower had started out like an ordinary uma musume — she'd needed a trainer to guide her before she could draw out the hidden power in her body.
But King Halo was different.
She thought back to how McQueen had handled it. McQueen had known from the start that a trainer meant little to her.
Which was why McQueen had chosen Trainer P — not for his ability, but because he handled all the logistical clutter competently, letting her enjoy campus life and racing in peace.
McQueen had even assigned her own training menu most days.
I see. So if stats barely grow in Story Mode, instead of chasing power, I should be looking for inspiration in a different direction?
Back in Story Mode, McQueen had consciously tried to master skills on her own too — but because she'd practically lived in the library, she'd passively maxed out her trainer-class abilities along the way.
The sisters who came after inherited McQueen's memories and knowledge, but inheritance was just a raw data packet. To actually digest it, you had to go after it actively. Without deliberate study, even shared knowledge remained a half-understood tool you only knew how to wield on autopilot.
Kitasan Black was exactly that type.
Maybe I should spend this Story Mode studying — trainer knowledge, medicine, that kind of thing.
The thought cleared her head like a lifted fog.
Of course. If stats couldn't be raised in Story Mode, then the correct use of this time was study. Look at what McQueen had done. She'd maintained perfect scores across all of an ojou-sama's coursework while still digging into uma musume training research on the side. In a world without skills, she'd studied adjacent fields until she could cross-reference her way into creating them.
Why could McQueen sublimate her original Flash-tier skills into dedicated upper-tier variants tailored to herself? Probably because of what she'd studied back in Story Mode.
So this is the fortune the seniors left behind...
King Halo finally saw what her inherited memories and knowledge were for. This "fortune" was far richer than she'd first assumed — the key to breaking through her limits was buried inside it.
Whether it was the comprehension of special abilities or the research into higher realms, the knowledge had all been bundled up and handed to her. As long as she could parse it, breaking the current ceiling was trivial — easily within reach.
And if she couldn't parse it?
Hmph.
You couldn't know you couldn't do it until you tried.
McQueen hadn't taken this route because she'd already found her own path — she'd already made her first step past the limit, and until she hit a new bottleneck, she had no reason to dig through the rest.
Demon King Ship scorned relying on anyone else. That arrogant Demon King believed that whatever McQueen could do, she could do too, by her own methods.
And Rice Shower and Kitasan Black didn't even count — with the cheats those two had, breaking their limits was barely a challenge.
But King Halo was different. She didn't have [Fusion]. She didn't have [Flawless Imitation]. Among the "sisters," she was the closest thing to ordinary. So this overlooked "treasure" — let her be the one to use it. She didn't share Demon King Ship's insistence on doing everything alone. If it made her stronger, if it won her races, and if the methods were clean — every option was on the table.
So King Halo got to work. Once she understood how to use Story Mode, she stopped being in a hurry to clear it. Her only regret was not realizing this sooner — if she'd woken up to it when her memories first awakened, she'd have dropped the pointless training and thrown herself into the ocean of knowledge right away.
Soon enough, everyone noticed that King Halo — once obsessed with training and simulated races — had changed overnight. She was haunting the library now, and every trainer who came sniffing around for a contract got turned away.
She still had Trainer P's contact info saved. Her plan was to hold off on her debut until Special Week arrived at Tracen Academy — until the [plot] actually began. Before then, she needed to digest McQueen's knowledge as fast as she could. Inherited knowledge didn't come pre-installed. It was more like experience points — points you had to actively unlock before you could spend them.
So King Halo sat in the library unlocking, one piece at a time. In the process she started picking up trainer abilities — [Analysis Eyes], for example, which let her read an opponent's stats at a glance.
McQueen hadn't fully mastered this ability during her own Story Mode. Back then McQueen had still needed to observe an opponent's training session just to estimate rough numbers. But after a few version updates, McQueen had since reached Tojo Hana's level of observational skill — which was how she'd been the first to spot Kitasan Black's terrifying talent.
King Halo sank deeper into this "level-up" process.
Each new ability unlocked was a small thrill — and also a fresh reminder of how terrifying McQueen was. She hadn't realized McQueen had been hiding this much. No wonder McQueen had looked increasingly unshakeable in recent races.
Back when McQueen first faced Demon King Ship, there'd still been visible pressure. Now, even Kitasan Black — a genuine talent monster in full eruption — couldn't truly push her.
Because McQueen was evolving too.
Faster than any of them.
The accumulated knowledge, compounded across version updates and sister-sharing, had leveled Mejiro McQueen up into something genuinely frightening — eye for talent, tactics, intuition, monstrous base stats. Every axis maxed out at the top tier.
The Strongest like that was obviously unbeatable.
And the most terrifying part: McQueen had already grinded several [sub-classes] to max level before the others had even realized [sub-classes] were a concept. That was obscene grinding.
The more she absorbed McQueen's abilities, the more King Halo's respect grew. Clear goals. Never stopping evolving. And most crucially, the woman seemed impervious to pressure or despair — unlike Demon King Ship's blind self-assurance, McQueen's confidence was always rooted in something concrete she could point to.
Terrifying.
Completely different from everyone else.
While the others hadn't even fully mined their own potential yet, Mejiro McQueen had already evolved into a higher realm. In her recent races — how much of her actual strength had she shown? Her normal "full output"? That was a joke. Her everyday baseline meant nothing as a reference point.
If this [truth] ever went public, the rest of the group would despair. No — Rice Shower and Kitasan Black might not know. But King Halo suspected Demon King Ship was hiding something too. Others might not bother digging into McQueen's secrets, but Demon King Ship would absolutely pore over every scrap of data on her.
Unfortunately, most of Demon King Ship's memories were data and archaic text that King Halo couldn't parse yet. All she could glean was that Demon King Ship was researching both the Satomi family's System and excavating ruins of the Three Goddesses around the world.
Her instincts told her that for all of Demon King Ship's outward carelessness, that woman was hiding plenty — there were even little encryption tricks embedded in the memory inheritance itself. Nothing that could hold forever, but enough to cost McQueen serious time to crack. A booby trap Demon King Ship had specifically set for McQueen. And Demon King Ship trusted her younger sisters — she was confident that once they discovered it, they'd team up with her against McQueen.
And honestly, Demon King Ship wasn't wrong. King Halo hadn't spent any time cracking those encryptions. Because unlocking Demon King Ship's secrets would simultaneously reveal McQueen's hidden depths — and in the current situation, that would only make Mejiro McQueen even more terrifying and unbeatable.
The state of play was this: uma musume from other worlds were no longer their opponents. Their real opponent was Mejiro McQueen, the matriarch. And if they couldn't win once — not even once — they'd never forgive themselves. They were all [her]. Why should you be the strongest while the rest of us played background scenery?
Sorry, McQueen. But since you're the strongest, you won't mind us cooperating, will you? And Demon King — when the time comes, don't forget to share your research with me.
King Halo adjusted her reading glasses and kept turning pages, her brain multitasking, absorbing knowledge at multiple levels simultaneously.
And all the while —
King Halo was evolving, fast.
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