In the rearview mirror, the wine-red taillights were shrinking.
With every curve, the point of light behind her fell back another notch.
Behind the fox mask, Sakura's breathing held as steady as a metronome.
Her right hand rested at the three o'clock position on the steering wheel, her left hand draped over the gear lever.
Her feet switched between throttle and brake clean and crisp, without the slightest hesitation.
The point of light in the rearview mirror shrank again.
Won.
The thought surfaced in Sakura's mind.
Bringing a passenger along for a downhill chase against her—the Diva had been far too cocky after all.
The extra seventy or eighty kilograms in the passenger seat might not have been obvious in the long sweeping bends of the first stretch, but once they entered the consecutive hairpin section, every left-right shift of the center of gravity would be amplified like a rolling snowball.
The laws of physics don't lie.
The outcome of this race had already been decided the moment the Diva chose to take a passenger aboard.
Sakura's right foot pressed three more millimeters into the throttle.
Corner thirty-two.
Her movements were even smoother than in the first half.
The trailing she'd done in the first stretch hadn't been for nothing. Every entry angle the Diva took, every braking point, every moment she opened or closed the throttle—all of it had been etched into Sakura's muscle memory.
She had thoroughly mastered the Diva's driving style.
Elegant, composed, every motion riding the very edge of the safety margin, yet never once crossing the line.
Just like her codename, the Diva's driving was the performance of a perfect symphony.
Every note precise to the millisecond, every melody flowing like drifting clouds and running water, with not a single flaw to be found.
But it was precisely because it was perfect that there were no surprises.
And without surprises, there was no room to surpass it.
Behind the fox mask, the corner of Sakura's mouth twitched.
This victory—she would claim it.
Corner thirty-three.
Out of habit she glanced at the rearview mirror.
The point of light was still behind her.
But the gap hadn't widened any further.
Corner thirty-four.
She looked again.
The point of light had grown larger.
Behind the mask, Sakura's brow furrowed.
Inside the matte-black Japanese car, Sakura's red-and-white fox mask was washed ghostly pale by the cold glow of the dashboard.
Sakura's hands gripped the wheel steadily. Her gaze stayed level on the road ahead, but the edge of her vision was locked dead onto the interior rearview mirror.
The distance was being eaten away.
The lead of nearly three car lengths she'd already built up had, after clearing corner thirty-four, been brutally hacked in half.
Those two blazing-white pillars of headlight stabbing in from behind were now like two sharp blades, scraping back and forth right against her rear bumper.
Something was wrong.
Sakura tapped the brake lightly just before the entry of corner thirty-five.
The shift of the chassis's center of gravity answered like an extension of her own arm.
She knew the opponent behind her all too well.
Through the twelve and a half kilometers of the first stretch, she'd stayed right behind that wine-red supercar, and her mind had long since built up a model of the Diva's driving behavior.
Precise, fluid, forever chasing the smoothest possible line within the limit of the road's friction. It was an artwork of a driving style, wrapped in airtight logic and powerful muscle memory.
But now, that artwork had gone mad.
In the rearview mirror, the wine-red supercar's cornering posture was extraordinarily violent.
It wasn't decelerating at the standard braking point. Instead it held its speed at the very edge of losing control and slammed headfirst into the corner.
Then, at the last possible moment before it would have shot over the shoulder, the tail was forcibly dragged back at a horrifyingly steep angle, the violent friction between tires and ground even striking a burst of dazzling sparks into the dark night.
This wasn't the Diva.
The Diva would absolutely never adopt this kind of self-destructive driving that wrung out the tires' lifespan and the suspension's limits all in one go.
What's more, in these continuous, densely packed downhill hairpins, the extra hundred-plus catties of dead weight in the passenger seat should have been a fatal burden on the supercar.
Every one of those extreme yanks would multiply the asymmetric shift of the center of gravity.
One slight misstep, and the wheels would completely lose their grip, taking everyone in the car tumbling down a thirty-meter cliff of stone.
Unless...
The eyelids beneath the fox mask narrowed slightly.
Unless every single motion of that car was making millisecond-level predictions of that center-of-gravity shift and counter-compensating for it.
Then what on earth was this completely different way of driving?
Hidden strength?
Just like those bosses in games who suddenly transform into a second phase halfway through the fight?
Corner thirty-six.
The point of light in the rearview mirror drew closer again.
Sakura could now make out the front end of that supercar.
Its headlight beams swept across the mountain wall through the curve, dragging out two rapidly spinning bands of light.
She could even hear the shrill scream of the other car's tires grinding over the road surface.
That sound was far louder than her own tires.
Because the other car's cornering speed was faster than hers.
Through the rearview mirror, she watched the supercar that bit down on her like a rabid dog and wouldn't let go. That trembling thrill of dancing on a knife's edge, that mad ferocity of someone who had cast life and death entirely behind them, came crashing straight at her through two layers of windshield.
Sakura's temples began to throb.
It was her blood burning.
Who on earth was driving that car?
The question churned up from inside her chest, wrapped around something she couldn't quite name.
It was a craving.
A thing that would never appear in an office grinding overtime late into the night, that would never appear on the way to buy a midnight snack at a convenience store, a thing that couldn't be found in any crack of ordinary daily life.
A craving for someone who could catch up to her.
A craving for someone who could force her to give everything she had.
A craving to be pushed to the edge of the cliff by an equally reckless lunatic, and then to see just how far she herself could go.
Corner thirty-seven.
The supercar behind her closed in.
A single car length away.
The roar of its engine was so close it sounded like it was right outside her rear window.
She could feel the heat wave blasting from the other car's exhaust pipe passing through the narrow gap between the two cars and slapping against her rear end.
Win.
She had to win.
Sakura's right foot stamped down the clutch, downshifted, blipped the throttle—the whole sequence so fast it left nothing but an afterimage.
The Japanese car let out a high, drawn-out howl and hurled itself into corner thirty-six.
In that instant, the world beneath the fox mask changed.
The roadside shrubbery that had blurred into solid masses at a hundred and seventy miles an hour suddenly became distinct, every single twig.
The cracks in the road surface, the rust on the drainage grates, the loose stone at the cliff's edge, that little patch of slightly darker pavement at the entrance of the next corner far ahead—every detail magnified in her field of vision, as though someone had pressed the slow-motion button.
She'd had this feeling for a very long time.
At first it had been during extreme street racing—occasionally, for a second or two, the things before her eyes would turn very slow.
Later it grew more and more frequent, lasting longer and longer.
And later still, she figured it out.
It wasn't that things were slowing down.
It was that she was speeding up.
The fruits of those long years of training as a swordswoman, catalyzed by adrenaline, were awakening at an unbelievable speed.
Sight, hearing, touch, her perception of the chassis's vibration frequency, her judgment of the tires' grip limit—all of it broke through her previous ceiling.
Corner thirty-eight.
Sakura's entry timing was four-tenths of a second earlier than the GPS navigation's prompt.
Yet she still skimmed precisely past the apex, not wasting a single centimeter of her line.
But even so, she couldn't open up the gap any further.
She was getting faster.
But the person behind her was getting faster too.
No matter what method the Diva had used, no matter what role the person in the passenger seat was playing—they were evolving at the very same pace.
At this moment, tracing back up from the track's finish line, nine corners remained.
Nine corners would decide everything.
Inside the supercar.
Su Yu felt it.
The car up ahead, that black fox—its momentum had changed.
"Squad Monitor, she's evolving."
"I know."
Fenghuang's voice surfaced from the depths of his mind.
"Though I don't know the situation of this world's Sakura, even before she became a Fusion Warrior she was already a killer of Poison Pupae. Her potential is more terrifying than either you or I imagine."
"Unleashing her potential under extreme pressure—that's nothing new to her."
Su Yu's gaze shifted away from the rearview mirror and landed on Eden beside him.
Her fingers were wound around the steering wheel, sweat sliding down from her forehead, her breathing fast and shallow, her chest heaving violently.
To squeeze out the last bit of engine power, Eden had switched off the air conditioning compressor.
Inside the sealed space, the heat radiating from the supercar's big-displacement engine seeped continuously through the firewall.
In this oven-like cabin, Eden's long legs, sheathed in dark gray pantyhose, had long since beaded with a fine layer of sweat.
The scent of high-end perfume, turned extremely intense and pungent by the heat, combined with the distinctive feverish odor baked out of the pantyhose's synthetic fibers by her body temperature, fermented into an aggressively feminine hormonal smell that hung heavy and thick in Su Yu's airways, nearly dragging what little reason he had left to the brink of drowning.
But this heat-laden scent, far from suffocating Su Yu, was like a shot of cardiotonic injected straight into his veins.
When he opened his eyes again, all the usual idleness and flippancy in his gaze had completely evaporated.
The salted-fish husk he wore every day, the disguise he put on to avoid trouble, split open in that instant.
Sirin's thousands upon thousands of slaughters in the consciousness space, those memories of being cut down, run through, torn apart, the pain that numbed the soul until it finally transformed into an ice-cold contempt for death—all of it came surging out.
Every death was like a knife, slowly shaving away that surface layer of "it doesn't matter," exposing the bastard underneath who would never truly give up.
That bastard was, at this very moment, sitting in the passenger seat of a supercar hurtling at a hundred and seventy miles an hour toward a cliffside corner, bound together with a woman who had handed him everything she had.
The air was full of Eden's scent.
Sweat and high-end fragrance mixed together, steamed by the heat radiating from the engine, becoming an indescribable, scalding-hot odor.
She was right there, half a meter to his left—every breath she took, every turn of her wrist, every contraction of the muscles in her ankle was within his perception.
Between them there was no longer any distance of "elder and junior."
Nor any courtesy of "investor and producer."
In this moment they were just two lunatics who had tied their lives to the same car.
He wasn't afraid of death.
He even relished this thrill of walking a tightrope on the cliff's edge between life and death.
"Corner thirty-eight, right."
Su Yu's voice wasn't loud now, but every syllable was as hard as a hammer striking an anvil.
"Delay the entry point by fifteen meters. Outside line, ride the shoulder."
Eden didn't answer.
Her hands were gripping the wheel so hard the veins nearly popped.
Her reason had already been stripped away entirely.
When Su Yu called out those utterly impossible commands, she even skipped the very act of thinking.
Su Yu said outside line, and her wheel turned toward the outside.
Su Yu said delay the brake, and her right foot jammed dead against the throttle.
In these extremely dangerous few dozen seconds, the two of their minds completed some kind of utterly bizarre fusion.
Su Yu was the brain of this machine, and Eden was its perfect nerve endings and executing organs.
Between them there was no superfluous emotional exchange—only a symbiotic relationship born for the sake of squeezing out the very last sliver of speed.
Corner forty.
Corner forty-two.
Corner forty-five.
The gap was closing.
The matte-black Japanese car and the wine-red supercar were like two leopards tearing at each other on a sheer precipice—whoever yielded a single step would be smashed to pieces.
Ahead was the final corner of the entire track—corner forty-seven.
A high-speed left-hander with an enormous radius, stretching a hundred and twenty meters long.
Past this corner came a straight less than four hundred meters long, leading directly to the finish line at the foot of the mountain.
That was a dashed line drawn out in red-and-white rumble strips.
The matte-black Japanese car cut into the inside line.
Sakura's line was without a flaw; she pushed her speed to the physical limit she could withstand under the corner's centrifugal force.
The wine-red supercar was squeezed to the outside.
Under normal circumstances, taking the outside line meant a longer driving distance—right before the finish, this was an absolutely fatal disadvantage.
"Full throttle."
Su Yu's eyes were fixed dead on that outer arc.
"Don't touch the brake. Turn the wheel half a rotation and use the weight inertia to fling it out."
Madness.
Not braking on this corner meant the car would slam straight into the outer mountain wall on the way out.
But Eden's right foot drove the throttle pedal straight into the carpet.
The wine-red supercar let out a shrill, anguished roar.
It didn't enter the corner along the normal line. Instead, like a cannonball fired from the barrel, with its outer wheels hugging the very edge of the road surface at the absolute limit, it smashed bodily into the corner.
At that instant, Su Yu's weight in the passenger seat became the decisive ballast, forcibly holding down the right front end that teetered on the brink of losing control.
The tail snapped sharply outward.
The immense centrifugal force slammed Eden and Su Yu hard against the right-side windows.
On the outside line the supercar drew an arc larger than the Japanese car's—yet at a speed maddeningly faster.
Out of the corner.
The front ends of both cars straightened at the same moment.
Four hundred meters of straight.
Both tachometers slammed into the redline simultaneously.
Flames spat out from the exhaust pipes.
Wind noise, tire noise, the engine's scream—all of it vanished in that instant. In Su Yu's field of vision, all that remained was that red-and-white dashed line rushing straight at him.
Two blazing-white front headlights, two car bodies—one black, one red—pressed tight against each other.
"VRRROOOM—!!"
Two gusts of wind swept up the fallen leaves beside the finish line at the same time.
The front bumper of the matte-black Japanese car and the front lip of the wine-red supercar cut through the play of light and shadow on the finish line at the very same instant, with not a fraction of a second between them.
The piercing screech of brakes rang out through the entire valley.
Thick white smoke billowed up from beneath the tires of both cars, spreading and rising through the night.
A draw.
A duel worthy of being called a legend had come to its curtain in a way no one had expected.
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