The deafening roar of engines intertwined and snarled through the night, like a pack of starving steel beasts tearing into one another.
A red supercar and a matte-black Japanese performance car sat side by side at the starting line.
Their blinding headlights washed the asphalt ahead a deathly pale.
The underground racers ringing the track instinctively drew back, leaving open a starting space heavy with pressure.
Inside the cabin, Eden reached out and pressed a button.
The window between the passenger seat and the driver's seat slowly lowered.
The black sports car opposite lowered its window as well.
A fox mask drifted out of the shadows.
Two utterly distinct auras, separated by less than two meters, collided violently in the air.
Su Yu sat in the passenger seat, studying that fox mask through the windshield.
Quite tasteful.
"Setsuna." Eden spoke.
Her voice was completely different from how it sounded by day.
Lowered half an octave, the tail of each word lilting slightly upward, carrying a kind of languid magnetism.
For a world-class Diva who could command every vocal style from classical to rock, changing her voice was about as much trouble as changing her clothes.
"I've long heard of you."
A reply came from behind the fox mask.
That voice had been run through an electronic modulator, compressed into a temperatureless, neutral tone.
"Golden Diva."
The two false names brushed against each other in the night wind.
"I hear you broke the lap time of my team's number two."
Eden draped her left arm over the window frame, fingers tapping lightly on the metal edge.
"A beautiful result."
"You flatter me." The fox mask tilted slightly. "I merely found this track rather interesting, and thought I'd come run it."
Su Yu sat in the passenger seat, watching these two women who saw each other day in and day out under ordinary circumstances—now wearing masks, probing one another through assorted voice modulators, putting on a whole show against each other, even trading compliments.
In his head he was frantically paging Fenghuang.
"Old Squad Monitor, are you seeing this?" Su Yu felt he genuinely couldn't keep the corners of his mouth in check. "What even is this? A polar battle royale, the acquaintances' lobby edition? If Sister Eden found out that the murderous yakuza queen across from her is the same Sister Sakura who comparison-shops three different stalls just to buy groceries, what kind of reaction would she have?"
Fenghuang's voice came drifting over, unhurried.
"Compared to that, what I'd rather know is—if Sakura found out that the one sitting in the passenger seat of that red supercar is the very Su Yu who fought her over the last bowl of tonkotsu ramen at the convenience store... whether her blade would come straight out of its sheath."
Su Yu swallowed, forcibly dragging his gaze back from Sakura's direction to look at the beam of headlights ahead.
Eden hadn't noticed anything off about Su Yu in the passenger seat. Her attention was entirely on the opponent across from her.
"Glad you like it." The corner of Eden's mouth twitched. "I built this road."
Su Yu raised an eyebrow.
Eden half-turned her head, her eyes flicking at Su Yu from beneath the dark-gold mask, then turned back to face forward.
"Arc Mountain's winding mountain highway. Total length fourteen point three kilometers, an elevation drop of six hundred and twenty meters, forty-seven corners in all. Among them, twelve sets of consecutive hairpins, minimum corner radius nine meters."
She spoke at an unhurried pace, as though introducing the scenery of her own back garden.
"The north face of the mountain is a granite cross-section, the south face a cliff of thirty meters or more."
"No guardrails. At its narrowest, the road is only wide enough for two cars to pass side by side."
Listening to these figures, a familiar name surfaced automatically in Su Yu's mind.
Mount Akina?
Steep downhills, dense hairpins, cliffside stretches without a single safety measure.
The only difference was that this road was longer, with more corners and a greater drop.
Good grief.
"On the racer forums they call this road the Diva's Strings." Eden continued, something hard to define in her tone. "They say that as a racer, if you don't run a lap on Arc Mountain in your lifetime, then you've lived in vain."
She paused.
"Though most people, after running it, say they very nearly did live in vain."
Su Yu leaned back against his seat, watching Eden's proud air.
"Sister Eden," he muttered inwardly, "when you praise your own handiwork, aren't you being just a little too unsubtle about it?"
The fox mask offered no comment on any of these figures.
She fell silent for a few seconds.
"A downhill chase," the fox mask said. "Starting from the summit, first to reach the foot of the mountain wins. Is that acceptable?"
"The classic Initial D format." Eden nodded. "Fine."
"Then—"
The fox mask's gaze seemed to slide off of Eden, coming to rest in the direction of the passenger seat.
"Diva, there's still someone sitting in your car."
"Mm." Eden didn't even turn her head. "My man."
"You'd race me carrying a passenger?"
Her tone carried obvious surprise, and a faint, subtly offended chill.
In the world of underground street racing, weight is the mortal enemy of speed.
Even carrying one extra bottle of water would affect a car's dynamic balance through the corners and its power-to-weight ratio.
In a downhill race—an environment so brutally demanding on brakes and tire wear—the added weight of one grown man in the passenger seat was simply handing yourself extra difficulty.
All the more so when the opponent was her, "Setsuna."
"From your license plate, you shouldn't be a local."
Eden tilted her head, facing that fox mask.
"This track—I've run it countless times. I could tell you every apex of every corner and the camber of the road surface with my eyes closed. For me, this is an absolute home field."
She paused a beat.
"That's not fair to you."
"And so?"
"I'll carry a person—consider it added ballast, a concession to you."
Eden looked at the pair of eyes revealed beneath Sakura's mask and tossed out her final line with airy nonchalance.
"After all, you prefer an evenly matched race too, don't you? Madam Setsuna."
The wind over the gravel road stilled for an instant.
In the passenger seat, Su Yu nearly laughed out loud.
That was a beautifully delivered line.
Elegant phrasing, courteous manner, airtight logic.
But translated into a racer's language, it was a single sentence of provocation—
Even with a passenger aboard, with the added weight, with the balance thrown off, I can still beat you on this track!
Inside the black cabin, Sakura's fingers tightened hard around the steering wheel.
In those eyes, the trace of surprise from a moment ago had already been replaced by an icy will to fight.
"So it is." Sakura's voice remained muffled, yet the people in the car could feel a bone-chilling murderous intent. "Then I shall accept—it would be discourteous to decline."
Su Yu noticed that in that modulator-processed voice, the tail of her words had sunk a little lower than before.
Sakura, oh Sakura.
Fenghuang was right.
Beneath that cold, icy shell of yours, there really is a hidden flame.
"Then I'll go on ahead."
The fox mask turned aside, glancing once toward the entrance of the mountain road.
"Diva, I'll see you at the summit."
As the words fell, the Japanese car's engine abruptly surged to high revs.
A burst of white mist shot from the exhaust, and amid a teeth-grating screech of tires, the matte-black body launched itself forward, plunging headlong into the winding mountain road that led to the summit.
The red glow of its taillights flickered once behind a corner, then vanished.
Eden did not immediately give chase.
She rolled the window back up.
The cabin returned to a sealed quiet.
"Su Yu."
Eden's voice returned to its original tone.
"You—do you really never ask about anything?"
Su Yu turned his head and looked at her.
"Ask what?"
"Ask why I dragged you into a race like this. Ask who that madwoman across from us is. Ask how dangerous this downhill road is. Ask whether, if I make one mistake, the two of us might be buried together at the bottom of a cliff hundreds of meters deep."
Eden's pace gradually quickened, every word like a test of Su Yu's limits.
"An ordinary person sitting in my passenger seat, seeing the kind of standoff just now, would already be screaming or trembling by this point. But you..."
Her gaze swept over Su Yu's relaxed shoulders and his folded hands.
"You're too calm. Calm to the point of being abnormal."
Su Yu looked at Eden.
At this distance, he could make out the delicate gold dust along the edge of Eden's mask, could even catch the scent of her—more potent than usual, the womanly fragrance she gave off as her adrenaline surged.
The air was suffused with the mingled scent of high-end perfume and the perspiration seeping out from her extreme exhilaration.
Su Yu turned his head and met her eyes across that black mask for two seconds.
"If Sister Eden wants to race, then as your little brother, I've no choice but to risk life and limb to keep a gentleman company."
He said it very casually, even with a hint of teasing in his tone.
Eden stared at Su Yu for a full three seconds.
She heard no fear in that answer, nor the kind of mindless, limitless submission.
She was a woman who had clawed her way through both the world of fame and fortune and the underground street-racing scene for years.
She had seen countless kinds of men, countless kinds of fear and flattery.
But the feeling Su Yu gave her was entirely different.
He sat in the passenger seat not because he thought Eden wouldn't crash.
But because he firmly believed that even if this supercar worth tens of millions lost control at hundreds of kilometers an hour, rolled, smashed apart, even exploded—
he would survive the destruction.
And more than that—he could keep her alive even at the brink of death.
Having thought this through, Eden suddenly felt her heart slam, as though struck hard by something.
A powerful, indescribable shiver rose from the base of her spine and instantly spread through her whole body.
For a woman who had carved the pursuit of ultimate thrills and the sensation of losing control into her very bones, what in this world could be more exhilarating than having beside you a man you couldn't see through at all—one who could even catch you when life and death hung in the balance?
Her curiosity about Su Yu, her urge to probe this man, in this moment was utterly ignited by this supercar's twelve-cylinder engine.
"Risk life and limb to keep a gentleman company?"
Eden withdrew her gaze, both hands gripping the steering wheel once more.
Her red lips, half-hidden beneath the Venetian mask, curved into an intensely aggressive arc.
"Then you'd better hold on tight, Su Yu."
"My car—it's pretty wild."
The instant the words fell—
Eden's right foot stomped down hard on the accelerator pedal, pinning it brutally to the floor.
ROAR—
The red supercar let out a terrifying howl that ripped the night sky apart.
A mighty surge of acceleration, like an invisible giant hand, slammed Su Yu deep into the carbon-fiber seat.
The car transformed into a bolt of red lightning. Under the gaze of countless fevered eyes, it cut savagely into the dark track ahead, launching a deadly pursuit of that black sports car already long gone into the distance.
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