Chapter 320: Only One Year Left—I’ll Become a Legendary Uma Musume! 2 [263]

The Shuka Sho was drawing near.

After returning from the beachside summer training camp, the entire Eternal Beat team shifted into Shuka Sho preparation mode.

In fact, this had always been one of Eternal Beat’s particular habits.

Most Umamusume teams did not prepare on the scale of the entire squad. Usually, when an important race was approaching, they would have the girls without races of their own work with the runner in question, invite a few Umamusume from outside the team, or simply arrange practice races at Central and similar places as part of pre-race training.

But Eternal Beat was one of the few teams where, whenever one member had a race coming up, the entire team would be mobilized to take part in the preparations.

That method had actually been Gotham Song’s idea, and the reason was simple. To begin with, it was extremely effective as a form of guidance.

The girls might spend every day together as close friends, but the sparks between Umamusume often burned even fiercer in exactly those relationships. Using the other girls on the team as sparring partners for the runner in question naturally created a tenser, more exciting training atmosphere, which raised the intensity and better simulated the feeling of a real race.

Of course, in a sense, it was also the only practical option. Eternal Beat as a whole was simply too strong. Even if they went out of their way to arrange practice races with other Umamusume, it was hard to find opposition strong enough to make proper race prep worthwhile.

And beyond that, there was another benefit to using more in-team competition as part of preparation.

Namely, the other girls helping with preparations would grow more as well.

Gentildonna already had far more race experience than Equinox, so matching up against Gentildonna allowed Equinox to get a feel for the atmosphere of Classic Year ahead of time. At the same time, Equinox’s raw ability was simply too overwhelming; even if she lacked experience, she was still a formidable threat. That, in turn, could give Gentildonna fresh motivation as well.

So when it came to Eternal Beat’s preparations, things generally settled into a familiar pattern.

Gentildonna and Equinox were always there, and from time to time the Umamusume from Mejiro Manor would show up as well. The most frequent visitor, as ever, was Mejiro McQueen, still training like mad to recover her form and keep her weight under control as she prepared for the Dream Cup.

All one could say was that everyone was getting what they wanted out of it, with a future of their own ahead of them.

"This training setup of yours is really quite good. Having seniors and juniors sharpen each other like that... just being able to think of something like this already puts you ahead of a great many other trainers."

Dancing Brave set down the tablet in her hands and let out that heartfelt observation.

She had never truly led a full Umamusume team herself, so she was not especially familiar with this side of things. Even so, that did not stop her from admiring how serious Gotham Song was about it.

Serious, yes.

After all, she was the one who had led Gotham Song onto the path of becoming a trainer in the first place. No one knew better than Dancing Brave how much thought Gotham Song put into training.

She would watch every race her girls ran over and over, study the replays in painstaking detail, and seriously think through every small point, even whether the schedule she had arranged for them was truly appropriate.

Compared with the majority of trainers, who simply followed standard plans, or relied on habit, experience, or outright hands-off management, the level of care she put in might as well have belonged to another dimension entirely.

Were Equinox and Gentildonna extraordinarily talented Umamusume?

Of course they were—so talented that if they were simply left to run as they pleased, they would probably still post excellent results.

But!

If they had been left to themselves, or handed over to another trainer, there was absolutely no way they would have reached their current level.

That much was certain. The reason those two possessed this much strength now was because Gotham Song had personally drawn it out and guided it into being.

In Dancing Brave’s eyes, if an ordinary trainer could bring out eighty percent of an Umamusume’s talent, then in Gotham Song’s hands, that same Umamusume could perform at one hundred twenty percent—or even more.

That was a frightening thing.

Put another way, if a team like this did not become one of the strongest in the entire world, then what team possibly could?

A team led by some trainer who did not truly care about her girls, who relied entirely on luck, or worse, thought she cared while actually doing more harm than good because she had no idea what her own level was?

If that ever happened, then the Umamusume world might as well just end on the spot. It was too terrifying.

Gotham Song truly did work unbelievably hard for the girls on her team—so hard that even with major races of her own approaching, she still went out of her way to make additional preparations.

Normally, when a top-level race was coming up, an Umamusume would begin preparing a month in advance, sometimes even two or three. But now September was nearly half over, and Gotham Song herself still had the Breeders’ Cup and the Dream Cup ahead of her—yet she was still carving out time to do extra work on top of that.

It was hard not to admire her.

"Really? I just thought it would be useful, so I did it. Though I am planning to promote it later when I get interviewed."

Gotham Song scratched her head and said that a little bashfully.

And she truly meant it.

It was not just the senior-junior linked training method. Lately, in whatever spare time she had, she had also been compiling all the experience and insights she had gained as a trainer while leading Eternal Beat, planning to find a chance to share the whole lot in one go later.

There had always been something rather strange about the Umamusume trainer world—especially the trainer scene in Japan.

Namely, all the material promoted in magazines, even supposedly authoritative trade publications, was incredibly outdated. Much of it was theory and experience from ten or even twenty years ago.

Gotham Song could understand why. In practical terms, most Umamusume trainers were each other’s rivals—

There was only one runner who could take first. If your placing fell behind, your prize money would naturally be smaller. From a realistic perspective, it was only normal not to share valuable experience.

And then there was simple competitiveness: the desire to prove that you were the one who had it right.

In short, the current atmosphere of the trainer world was more or less this: learn the basics, and everything else, either you figured it out yourself by stumbling into mistakes, or a senior taught you directly. There was basically no way to self-study the truly practical side of things in advance, or avoid pitfalls ahead of time.

To put it simply, the Umamusume trainer industry was just a little too traditional.

Gotham Song did not like that atmosphere very much. So she intended to find a chance to share everything she knew, and then keep updating it from time to time, pushing the entire trainer circle toward a fiercer level of competition.

The trainers who genuinely loved Umamusume were, of course, never going to stop trying to improve.

But those people who treated it as nothing more than a job, who did not put their whole heart into it, and who even delayed the futures of the girls on their teams...

They had better be careful.

Seeing the gloomy smile on Gotham Song’s face, Dancing Brave naturally understood exactly what the girl was thinking. She wholeheartedly approved of the idea, so she offered no objections at all.

"You really do handle big and small matters alike. Don’t tell me you’re actually a workaholic?"

"A workaholic? Not really. It’s not like I stay up all night every day or anything. This doesn’t even begin to count."

A workaholic? This wasn’t even close.

Gotham Song seemed utterly unconcerned. In her understanding, a real workaholic was probably the sort who could be summoned at any hour of the day. As things stood, she only put in about six or seven hours of actual work a day; the rest was her own time for training and rest. That was nowhere near enough to count as being a workaholic.

Old fossil. Completely warped by overwork culture.

Dancing Brave’s mouth twitched. She clearly was never going to recognize that for what it was, but seeing how obviously Gotham Song was enjoying herself, there was not much left to say.

"So then? Do you have any tactical ideas for the Shuka Sho?"

Seeing the topic drift into a field she could not fully follow, Dancing Brave finally changed the subject—or rather, steered it back to the real reason the two of them had left Mejiro Manor together in the first place.

"Tactics? I don’t really have any. I can’t properly arrange tactics for any of those three girls, because every one of them wants to beat the others with her own strength."

"All I’m here to do is look over the tactics they’ve chosen for themselves and see whether there are any holes in them. That’s why I came all the way to Kyoto Racecourse."

Dancing Brave nodded. She had no intention of arguing with that.

Because it was true. As the one connected to all three Umamusume, Gotham Song had landed in a position where helping any one of them too much would not be appropriate. Gentildonna, in particular, had made it quite clear that she wanted to rely on her own ideas—

Perhaps because she did not want to put Gotham Song in a difficult position.

In any case, that was how it had come about: an occurrence exceedingly rare in Umamusume history, a single race featuring three Umamusume all taught by the same "trainer."

And what, exactly, was the point of coming to Kyoto Racecourse in person to inspect the race environment?

Gotham Song was not all that unfamiliar with Kyoto Racecourse, since this was also where the Kikuka Sho was run.

But!

The same venue did not mean the course conditions were identical.

A single racecourse did not have only one course layout. In other words, the course Gotham Song had run before was not the one that would be used for this Shuka Sho.

So where, exactly, did the difference lie?

The Kikuka Sho course was just shy of 3,000 meters long and used the outer track, with a fairly substantial incline that served as a test of stamina. By comparison, its corners were not especially sharp, and the turns had plenty of room to them.

But the Shuka Sho was completely different.

Because it used the inner course, its turns were viciously tricky, to the point of forming an extremely tight U-shape.

And by "tight," she meant at the bottom of that U.

Trying to take a course like that at full speed was practically a fantasy. Even Gotham Song herself might make a mistake on the smaller inner bend—it was that severe.

Of course, since those brutally sharp turns served as the race’s main challenge and test, the course itself was not especially hilly and was relatively gentle in elevation.

And with the distance being only 2,000 meters...

"This looks pretty favorable for Almond Eye and Verxina, doesn’t it?"

"This race feels more like a combined test of speed and stamina."

Gotham Song answered Dancing Brave’s observation. In truth, she also felt that this race was not especially kind to Gentildonna.

Still, it was not as though there was no opening—no point at which the deadlock could be broken.

That opening was that brutally tight first turn...!

As the single biggest test point in the race, it did not come before the finish line at all. Instead, it sat at the end of the opening straight and entered the race as the first bend—the greatest obstacle of the early stages.

And what kind of Umamusume did a turn like that punish most harshly?

Runners with too much speed...!

The logic was simple. The faster you went, the harder it was to control your rhythm through the turn. So in the early stages of the Shuka Sho, most Umamusume would not bring out their true top speed. Even the kind who liked to break away early would usually wait until they were out of the first turn before really kicking on.

So one thing could be stated with confidence: before the first turn was over, Almond Eye’s and Verxina’s speed advantage most likely would not be able to come into play.

And that, more than anything else, was Gentildonna’s greatest hope of winning this race...!

The logic there was simple as well. Gentildonna was not the sort whose speed easily rose into a wildly explosive gear. But at a steadier pace, she could rely on her formidable control and technical skill.

Which meant that the size of the advantage she could preserve through the opening straight and the first turn would be the key point deciding whether she won or lost this race.

Gentildonna... could you bring out something even more astonishing than before, a level of technique beyond your own limits?

It was hard not to wonder.

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T/N: heres ur updates :3 meeting the 4 chaps a week quota :3 posting earlier so bonus chaps will be a longer waitttt >:)

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