With the Japanese Derby drawing closer by the day, the Oaks, held the week before it, had ended up feeling strangely subdued by comparison.
There simply weren't any truly dazzling standouts on this year's Triple Tiara route. Most of the girls who had fought it out in the Oka Sho had also chosen not to stretch their distance by another eight hundred meters for the Oaks.
The reason was simple: even though 2400 meters was widely recognized around the world as the classic championship distance, for most horse girls, it was still too long. And as for races beyond 2400 meters, just having the ability to run one at all was already a rare gift.
"So the Oaks just ended like that, huh. Rather plain, all things considered. Catch the Whale losing again was unexpected, though. I really don't get it."
Behind his desk, Wada sipped from a coffee cup, newspaper in hand. He still wasn't used to reading news on a smartphone, so he subscribed to the daily URA racing paper instead. At least that was mostly horse-girl news.
Unlike a phone, it didn't bombard him with pointless trivia and nonsense.
Opera O had made time to go watch in person, and the race itself had hardly felt like an Oaks at all.
"Does that mean when the Triple Crown line is strong, the Triple Tiara line ends up weak?" she mused. "It's a strange pattern. But now that I think about it, that really does happen a lot."
"You could say that this year's Triple Tiara line was just ordinary," Wada replied after a slow sip of scalding coffee. "But part of it is also that the Triple Crown route is simply too eye-catching. Put Dyna's performance into almost any era with a strong Triple Tiara field, and she'd still overshadow them."
After all, the fact that she'd won a French G1 as a two-year-old was right there in front of them. Across the entire history of Japanese horse girls, how many had ever done that?
Wada had never expected Radiant Dyna to become the one who opened that door. And maybe there wouldn't be anyone else after her, either. European horse girls matured much earlier than Japanese ones. They tended to retire after their classic year, and the more extreme cases didn't even bother with the classic season at all—some ran hard as juveniles and retired right after.
With a gap like that, what exactly were Japanese girls supposed to use to compete with Europe and America? Their still-developing bodies? It was almost laughable.
At that moment, Dyna was out on the training field, finishing the last drill Wada had assigned before the Derby.
It wasn't anything ridiculous like breaking bricks this time. Just a paired training run with Aristocrat. Once that was done, she could rest until the race itself.
"Senior Dyna," Aristocrat said, stretching with her forearms crossed in front of her, every inch of her body wound tight and ready, "this may be our first side-by-side training run, but don't expect me to go easy on you!"
Before today, Aristocrat had only really done solo training or drills with classmates. This was the first time she had ever felt real pressure from another girl.
From a distance, Radiant Dyna always looked gentle enough. But up close, every fiber of her seemed to whisper the same thing:
You cannot beat her.
You'll lose badly.
And yet, Aristocrat's eyes still burned with battle lust.
She couldn't understand why Orfevre had shrunk back from someone like this. But she also didn't care anymore. The strong had every right to look down on the weak—but the weak also had the right to challenge the strong.
If a weaker girl refused to grow stronger and only waited for the powerful to age and decline, then victory meant nothing. To defeat someone while she was still at her peak—that was what it meant to become the strongest.
Dyna noticed the emotion flickering in Aristocrat's wine-red eyes. It was only there for a moment, but it was enough. Beneath the agitation was something more important: pure exhilaration.
Dyna liked that.
No matter how strong or weak someone was, going all-out was its own kind of respect.
She found herself liking Aristocrat a little more.
"That's a fine look in your eyes," Dyna said softly. "I like horse girls with eyes like that. Before you, the only one I'd seen it in was Swiss Timepiece. Orfevre, on the other hand, gives me nothing but avoidance. And yet you're still a debutante—already looking at me like you're dying to fight."
"Huh?"
Aristocrat froze.
Dyna had seen through that in an instant?
She'd only let that feeling slip for a moment. To have a senior catch it so cleanly—someone as sharp as Dyna really was terrifying.
For one heartbeat, the polite, composed Dyna she knew seemed to turn into something darker.
Aristocrat suddenly understood, just a little, what kind of pressure Orfevre must have been under.
But unlike Orfevre, she had no intention of backing down.
So she stepped forward instead.
"Then I'll take today's training with twelve times the seriousness. And I'd like you to use your full strength too, Senior Dyna. Let me understand exactly how wide the gap between us is."
"Good," Dyna said, smiling brightly. "I'm very, very happy to hear that, Aristocrat. You've got more courage than that coward Orfevre, at least."
She covered her mouth with one hand and let out a light laugh.
Aristocrat only heard the faintest trace of it, but even that made her tail spring upright.
Something was off.
It felt as though she had just opened a door that should have stayed shut.
Once they stepped onto the turf, there was no more talking.
Aristocrat lowered her center of gravity and waited for the signal from the training assistant. From the corner of her eye, she caught Dyna beside her—legs only slightly bent, posture much higher than her own.
She'd seen that kind of upright stance on television before. Dyna had looked the same way in the gate during races. But seeing it in person made it even harder to believe.
How could someone start like that and not lose badly?
No wonder Radiant Dyna ran from behind.
"Ready?" the assistant called.
He was really asking Dyna that question, but when she gave a small nod, he raised the flag high and slashed it down.
Whoosh.
The flag ripped through the air.
Aristocrat's nerves, still untouched by society's wear and tear, reacted first.
Thump.
Only her toes touched the turf as she drove forward, but the force of her launch still tore up the grass beneath her, leaving a patch of black earth exposed behind.
Dyna reacted a beat slower. Her start was gentler, and her initial speed was nowhere near Aristocrat's.
Already behind? Aristocrat thought. But isn't paired training supposed to be all-out from the start? This feels no different from a solo run…
In the space of a few strides, she had already put three or four lengths between them.
From behind, Dyna watched Aristocrat's running form—powerful, balanced, textbook. She was more suited to being a rival than Orfevre ever had been.
Dyna's heartbeat quickened again.
So this was all this training was going to be? Just a normal chase drill?
That was what Aristocrat thought—until the footsteps started.
Heavy. Close. Wrong.
Dyna, who should have still been lengths behind her, had vanished from her blind spot. She could no longer locate her with a glance.
And then Aristocrat's body screamed one thing at her:
Danger.
Dyna came up like an arrow, soundless until she entered her immediate range. The instant she drew alongside, the noise of her steps hit like thunder.
What kind of technique was that?
Aristocrat had never seen anything like it.
"If you don't get serious, you'll lose horribly, Aristocrat~"
Dyna's voice brushed past her ear as she slipped by, the wind she dragged with her strong enough to send Aristocrat's hair streaming forward.
Once Radiant Dyna's speed finished building, no one in the same generation could match it.
Unless a front-runner could open an absurd safety margin before Dyna even realized what was happening, nobody could fight her in a straight line at ordinary speed.
After weeks of strength training, every full-speed step she took now bit into the turf deeply enough to leave divots that could disrupt the footing of girls behind her. On a bad track, she'd probably be sending mud and sod flying into the faces of anyone unlucky enough to follow.
Wrapped in the pressure radiating off Dyna, Aristocrat felt her breathing begin to fray. It wasn't overwhelming—more like a film spread invisibly through the air.
This was Dyna's personal aura.
Gentle as water.
Constant from start to finish.
Always there, always eroding the others, adding drag to every movement, wearing down their stamina bit by bit. By the time the final straight arrived, girls caught in it often discovered too late that they'd already spent too much.
But this was only a 600-meter training run. No matter how much pressure Dyna exerted, Aristocrat wasn't going to collapse from exhaustion in such a short distance.
So when she recovered, she kicked into her own closing gear in a single motion.
As a classic front-runner, Aristocrat possessed the kind of final burst that could change history: explosive to start, long to sustain, the kind that could flatten an entire generation almost casually.
The problem was that her opponent here was Radiant Dyna.
Even though Aristocrat broke her own personal best for a finishing run under Dyna's pressure, even at the line she still couldn't get within three lengths of her.
"Ha… so fast." Leaning against the rail, Aristocrat breathed hard. "That wasn't how it looked before…"
The pressure around her had finally lifted, but her throat still burned, saliva flooding her mouth as if she'd just run a full 2000-meter race.
It made no sense. A full-out 600 meters shouldn't leave her in this state.
Unless the other girl had used those kinds of techniques.
"Take a breather. You did much better than I expected, Aristocrat."
Dyna came up behind her carrying a bottle of room-temperature sports drink and a towel.
"Ah… right. Thank you, Senior Dyna."
Aristocrat stared at the items as she accepted them.
She genuinely had no idea when Dyna had managed to go buy a drink and fetch a towel. From Aristocrat's perspective, it had all happened in the few seconds she'd spent recovering.
And Dyna herself looked completely untouched by exertion.
Resting beside her against the rail, Dyna smiled.
"I thought you'd be seven or eight lengths down by the end. I didn't expect you to close it that much. You really pushed yourself, didn't you?"
"I did," Aristocrat said frankly after a sip from the bottle. "But even so, right now I still can't even touch your shadow."
Dyna, too, took a small drink before speaking again.
"The pressure I used on you just now? It was a hidden type. You probably didn't notice it while we were running, but afterward you felt much more tired than you should have, didn't you?"
"Yeah," Aristocrat admitted. "More exhausted than after 2000 meters. I even started wondering whether I'd messed up my breathing rhythm. So that was your ability, Senior Dyna?"
She'd read about things like this in books, vague descriptions of horse girls' "presence" or "pressure." Even teachers said that something real did exist there—but to awaken it, a girl usually had to drive herself to the brink in an actual race.
If you wanted to experience something similar sooner, the advice was always the same: seek out a retired G1 winner. Current horse girls were usually too busy to bother guiding newcomers.
But if you happened to be in the same team—like Aristocrat was now—then things were different.
And what Dyna had just shown her was one of the most insidious kinds of pressure there was.
"There are much more straightforward kinds too," Dyna explained, rolling the cap of her drink bottle between her fingers as she leaned slightly closer. "Once you start running in G1s, you'll find that most girls' pressure hits you openly. You can feel it coming, and that means you can resist it."
Her smile thinned.
"But girls like me—the kind who affect you without you ever noticing?"
She tapped the bottle lightly against the rail.
"We're the most annoying to deal with. So in the future, Aristocrat, never underestimate a horse girl just because she seems harmless."
"Otherwise she'll stab you in the back before you even realize it~"
It was, in its own way, Dyna giving her junior a lesson.
She herself had never been on the receiving end of that exact kind of horse girl. But since she was that kind of horse girl, she figured she ought to share a few dirty tricks. Maybe someday Aristocrat would avoid a loss because of it.
After all, in some vague corner of Dyna's memory, she felt fairly sure Aristocrat hadn't been undefeated in the original timeline.
Maybe, just maybe, Dyna could help make her the first undefeated Triple Tiara winner of the post-Shuka Sho era.
"Meow."
"Meow meow."
"Meow meow meow."
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
Uma Musume, But I Only Have Five Years Left to Live (Chapter 178)
Zenless Zone Zero: I'm a Doctor, Not a Bangboo (Chapter 139)
Ben Tennyson Wants to Join the Justice League ( 126 )
TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter110)
Yu-Gi-Oh! — Transmigrated into the White Dragon Girl (Chapter171)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter100)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter184)
Can Playing Games Save the World? 65
Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 77
From Junkman to Wasteland 66
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 46
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 168
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 156
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass 105
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 185
Naruto: Weaving the Future, Be 65
Zenless Zone Zero, but Kamen R 76
Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 66
My Cyberpsycho Girlfriend 65
Uma Musume: The Dark Trainer 160
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 150
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player 76
The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 97
Uma Musume: The Horse Girl Who 66
Uma Musume: From Beginner 116
Becoming a Horse Girl, I Will 75
Uma Musume: I Want All 93
I Can Copy Unique Skills 79
Summoning an Evil God, but the 55
Supernatural Multiverse 75
My Harem Is Indescribable 68
Jujutsu Kaisen: Heroic Spirit 70
"I'm just a Valkyrie passing through." 66
Uma Musume: Today Is Another Romantic Battlefield 69
Still playing traditional Honk 49
The Most Filial Son Under Heav 53
What Should I Do After Switchi 42
Reincarnated as a Demon, Skill 50
Hell-Difficulty Dungeon? 38
Transmigrated as Sukuna 35
Checking In in Demon Slayer 40
The Reincarnating Trainer of Tracen Academy 55
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