After the two cars crossed the finish line, their tires dragged two long black streaks of friction across the asphalt.
The ear-splitting shriek gradually died down.
The engine's RPM dropped from the redline back to the low rumble of idle.
The red supercar came to a stop.
The cabin was as hot as a boiler that had just been shut off.
Eden's hands still gripped the edge of the steering wheel with a death grip.
Her chest heaved violently.
That black off-the-shoulder knit top was already completely soaked through with sweat, clinging stickily to her skin, even revealing the lace pattern of the underwear beneath.
Her breathing was heavy.
Every mouthful of air drawn into her lungs came with an extremely faint hissing deep in her throat.
It was the sound of vocal-cord muscles convulsing involuntarily after the body's functions had been squeezed to their critical point.
In the passenger seat, Su Yu's head rested against the headrest.
His gaze was a little unfocused.
The instant the high-intensity perception of Tai Xu Sword Qi was switched off, a tide-like wave of exhaustion crashed over him.
Cold sweat slid down from his temples and dripped off his chin.
He raised his right hand, meaning to undo the buckle of the five-point harness.
His fingers had just touched the metal clasp, before he could even press it down.
A hand covered his.
Eden's right hand moved over from the shift lever and seized Su Yu's wrist.
She said nothing.
The temperature of that hand was frighteningly high.
Her palm was slick with cold sweat, yet the force of her fingers clamping around his wrist was startlingly strong.
Su Yu stopped his motion to unbuckle the harness.
He turned his head.
Eden was looking at him.
Beneath the dark-gold mask, the pupils in those eyes were still bloodshot and dilated. The corners of her eyes were faintly red from the trickling sweat.
She did not let go.
Not only did she not let go—her fingers slid down along Su Yu's wrist and forcibly wedged themselves into the gaps between his fingers, then closed, becoming a posture of fingers tightly interlaced.
After that life-and-death high-speed duel just now, the one that had practically entangled their very souls together, something had quietly changed.
"Well done, Su Yu."
Fenghuang's voice sounded in his mind, carrying a rare trace of approval.
"Forcing your spirit to such a limit is of great divine benefit to the tempering of the Tai Xu Sword Heart. Once you recover, both the range and precision of your perception will advance another step."
Su Yu did not respond to Fenghuang.
Right now he didn't even have the strength to pull his hand back.
Outside the windows, after a brief dead silence, an avalanche of cheering and whistling erupted.
Those underground racers who had been watching surged forward as if they'd gone mad, surrounding the two cars completely.
Camera flashes flickered on and off throughout the crowd.
"Oh my god! A tie! It's actually a tie!"
"What the hell happened on that last corner? I couldn't fucking see a thing!"
"Golden Diva and Setsuna! Are these two women both monsters? Is that even a speed a human can pull off?!"
The underground racing world revered strength.
And the strong, in turn, feared those who didn't care whether they lived or died.
And in that duel just now, Eden and Sakura had perfectly demonstrated to everyone what it meant to "have both the strength and the disregard for one's own life."
The little assistant with the ponytail was the first to rush over, pressing against the driver's-side window, her whole face flushed red with excitement.
"D-Diva!" the little assistant gasped for breath. "That was incredible! That outside-line drift on the last corner... pressing the rumble strip at that kind of speed, insane! Truly insane! The whole crowd went wild!"
"If that video gets posted on the underground racing forums, it'd absolutely crash the servers! Do you have any idea how shocking that moment was, the two cars crossing the line at the exact same time?!"
Eden's breathing eased slightly.
She kept clutching Su Yu's right hand without letting go.
Her left hand rested on the steering wheel.
"Disperse the crowd."
Her gaze swept across the little assistant's excited face.
"That's enough for tonight. I want to rest."
The little assistant blinked, then nodded frantically, turned, and ran back to drive away the overly fervent spectators.
Ten meters away.
That matte-black Japanese car backed up by half a car length and stopped one position diagonally ahead of the supercar.
The driver's-side window rolled halfway down.
Sakura leaned back against her seat.
The fox mask was still on her face.
The seatbelt across her chest rose and fell in time with her breathing, which was a full twice as fast as usual.
As she steadied her breath, she turned her head, her gaze passing over Eden in the supercar's driver's seat and stabbing straight at the passenger seat.
Though the cabin was dim, though the other person also wore a black half-face mask.
Sakura's gaze settled on one spot.
The man in the passenger seat had his left hand resting weakly on the edge of the center console.
In the dim yellow light, the silver-gray metal ring on his wrist caught the glint.
The edge of that device had a ring of extremely fine red identification lines.
Sakura had seen this thing before.
A while back, in front of the frozen-food case at the convenience store, a just-off-work Sakura had dragged her weary body in, planning to buy a few things and incidentally check on Fu Hua, who worked part-time there.
Word was that during this period Fu Hua and Su Yu had set up some kind of studio together, doing motion capture. Sakura wasn't really into that sort of thing, but her younger sister Rin said it sounded interesting.
She had run into Fu Hua, and as it happened, she'd also run into Su Yu, who'd come out to buy a late-night snack for Kiana.
When the two of them reached for the last cup of tonkotsu ramen at the same time, that was when she'd noticed the gadget on his wrist.
It was said to be the companion terminal to some kind of physiological-monitoring collar built by Dr. Mei's own hands. Sakura wasn't too clear on exactly what it did.
But she was clear on one thing.
There would not be a second person in this world wearing the exact same thing.
Sakura's breathing stalled for a second.
Behind the fox mask, both eyes snapped wide open.
Su Yu?
That salted-fish streamer who was always in casual clothes, shuffling around in slippers, loitering at the convenience store? That guy who'd yawn even just buying a cup of coffee?
Sakura's mind rapidly replayed every detail of the race just now.
The supercar's driving in the first half was the extremely textbook circuit-racing school, every corner pursuing the physically optimal line.
That matched every description of "the Diva" on the forums.
But after that stretch of consecutive hairpins where she'd overtaken, the supercar's driving mutated off a cliff.
Late braking.
The death outside line.
Riding the rumble strip without slowing.
This wasn't a question of driving skill.
This was a self-destructive style that split one life in two—one half used to step on the throttle, the other half flung straight off the cliff.
It was an operation that could absolutely never be completed on the driver's nerve alone.
In those few extreme corners, the passenger's weight had become a crucial counterbalance, every shift of the center of gravity precise to a scalp-prickling degree.
On the edge of a cliff at a speed exceeding one hundred eighty kilometers per hour.
The woman sitting in the driver's seat had obeyed the passenger's commands completely and without reservation.
They had stitched their two lives together.
Sakura's fingers tightened slowly on the outer rim of the steering wheel.
The leather gave a faint creak of friction.
What kind of monstrous tacit understanding did that require? What depth of trust barrier did one have to cross, to entrust life and death to the person beside them?
Since when had there been a woman like this at Su Yu's side?
"Well? Want to race another round?"
Eden's voice drifted over from outside the window.
Sakura came back to herself.
She looked at Eden.
The mask hid all of her expression.
"No need, Diva," Sakura spoke up.
The voice through the voice-changer sounded especially cold and hard in the night wind.
"You and I both know there's no need to continue this match."
She shifted into reverse.
The engine's RPM climbed again.
"If it weren't for him," Sakura's gaze swept over Su Yu once more, "you wouldn't have beaten me tonight."
The words fell.
The matte-black Japanese car's tires scraped against the ground, leaving behind a pungent burnt-rubber stench, whipped its nose around, plunged into the darkness of night, and soon vanished at the end of the mountain switchback road.
After driving more than a dozen kilometers.
The car stopped beneath an overpass at the edge of the urban district.
Sakura killed the engine.
The interior fell into a dead silence, broken only by the distinctive clicking of cooling metal beneath the hood.
She raised her hand, pulled the fox mask off her face, and tossed it onto the passenger seat.
Sweat dripped from her chin onto the floor mat.
Her gaze fixed on the streaming light and shadow of traffic flashing past outside the windshield.
What she couldn't shake from her mind was that black-masked figure in the supercar's passenger seat, and that silver-gray wristband.
Su Yu.
He was in the Diva's car.
Who was the Diva?
Sakura's fingers unconsciously tapped against her thigh. To establish that kind of prestige on Arc Mountain, to own that kind of top-tier supercar...
Eden?
That woman who played the cello in Vienna's Golden Hall.
That top-tier financial magnate who even drank tea with the water temperature calculated to precision.
How could such a perfect star, who carried artistry even in her breathing, possibly be out in the dead of night in a short skirt, risking her life on a mountain switchback road?
Impossible.
Absolutely impossible.
But no matter how hard she racked her brain, she couldn't come up with a second possibility, a second candidate.
Actually, confirming it would be very simple, incomparably simple—just return to the Golden Courtyard, and then wait.
But that would be meaningless.
The Golden Diva was indeed a formidable opponent.
What she cared about wasn't the Golden Diva's true identity at all, nor did she have any interest in exposing the identity behind that Venetian mask.
If it was that woman, then she had probably recognized Sakura in the very instant Sakura recognized her.
But she'd said nothing.
She had simply treated her as an opponent.
That was the unwritten rule of underground racing, and a show of respect.
But—
The person in the passenger seat was Su Yu. Of that there was no doubt.
Sakura leaned back against the headrest.
The heart in her chest was still beating at an overloaded frequency.
Her hand rested on the steering wheel.
That extreme thrill of probing back and forth along the edge of death hadn't dissipated; instead, like poison, it was fermenting through her nervous system.
All this time, the reason she'd become addicted to underground racing, addicted to this kind of extreme speed that placed life on a knife's edge, wasn't merely to vent the pressure she'd accumulated day after day as an "Office Slave."
The deeper reason was that she was searching.
Searching for someone who could keep up with her speed.
Searching for someone who could understand her madness.
Searching for a true opponent, one who could let her release everything she had without holding anything back.
She had once believed this person would never appear.
But tonight, she had found him.
Su Yu.
Sakura's lips moved faintly, biting out those two words.
Into her originally cool, clear voice, somewhere along the way, had crept a trace of fire-scorched hoarseness.
She knew what state she was in right now.
Her muscles, her nerve endings, the bloodthirsty beast hidden beneath her Office Slave's skin—all of them were howling, craving madly.
Craving to peel back the true face beneath that man's salted-fish exterior.
Craving to slam violently into him once more, on the track, or somewhere else.
Tomorrow, or maybe the day after—she would go to the convenience store again.
The reason would no longer be as simple as checking on Ah Hua; it would be to engineer a fated encounter that was certain to happen.
The corners of her mouth curved up.
She had already begun to look forward to the arrival of that moment.
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