Uma Musume: To The Top!!

At the starting line.

McQueen and Dancing Brave were both warming up.

As McQueen stretched her arms, her eyes narrowed slightly, and from the corner of her vision, she glanced at the dark-skinned girl beside her, who was cheerfully doing high knees.

"What exactly are you planning? Why did you suddenly decide you wanted to do side-by-side training with me?"

"Yeah, why indeed?"

Dancing Brave stopped moving and gave McQueen an incredibly warm smile.

Before McQueen could press any further, Kuroha, standing at the edge of the track, had already raised his arm high.

"Ready—"

The two girls immediately took their running stances.

A few seconds later.

"Start!"

The instant his voice fell, the two figures who had still been chatting a moment earlier shot forward like arrows, bursting out with lightning speed.

Because the purpose of this sudden "side-by-side training" was not to truly decide a winner, neither of the two top Uma Musume used their real strength.

They simply controlled their breathing with an almost tacit understanding and raced shoulder to shoulder along the broad grass track.

"Hah... So this is what it feels like to run beside you? To be honest, it really is quite pressuring."

Feeling the abyss-like, terrifying aura coming from the violet-haired figure beside her, Dancing Brave could not help speaking in admiration.

McQueen frowned slightly, her eyes fixed straight ahead.

"If you only wanted to use this little game to probe the depths of my information, I advise you to save your effort. This is nothing but wasted labor."

"Your trainer is not even here. Even if this side-by-side run really does allow someone to collect so-called data and information, our side has the advantage."

"You should understand that very well."

Whoosh—! Whoosh—!

Their bodies tore through the air.

The two Uma Musume stood among the strongest in the world.

Even amid a running tempo so intense that an ordinary elite Uma Musume would struggle to breathe evenly, they were still able to converse with calm composure.

"I know~"

Dancing Brave did not deny it at all and laughed.

"And even if Uncle John—oh, I mean my train...er. Tch. Even if he came, it wouldn't help!"

"The information he collects can't compare to the truth of experiencing it myself."

At this point, a cunning look suddenly appeared on the dark-skinned girl's face.

"And besides, who said this side-by-side training... necessarily means you're the ones taking advantage?"

"..."

When McQueen heard that, deep within her eyes, a pure-white flash of lightning suddenly flickered out like thunder.

But in the blink of an eye, it withdrew into nothingness again, like an illusion that had never appeared.

After a brief silence, the young lady of the Mejiro family no longer paid attention to the strange opponent beside her and merely replied faintly.

"Suit yourself."

...

Off the field.

It was not only Dancing Brave, who was on the track, carefully feeling what it was like to run beside McQueen.

Brave, standing beside Kuroha, was also watching this training race with complete concentration.

Just as McQueen had said.

If the two teams' overall intelligence-gathering capabilities were roughly on the same level, then the two of them asking for a side-by-side run today would be a losing move.

It was equivalent to running onto someone else's home field and allowing them to openly record and judge the details of their own abilities.

But...

The premise of that logic was that "the two teams' intelligence capabilities were roughly equal."

What if the difference in their intelligence capabilities was like heaven and earth?

Brave's thoughts could not help drifting back to that afternoon a few days ago.

In her memory, Dancing Brave and Brave were sitting side by side on a bench, watching McQueen not far away as she looked at a little notebook and wrote something down.

"Uncle John doing this is completely useless. How could step-by-step intelligence gathering ever win against someone like McQueen?"

There was a rare trace of worry in the dark-skinned girl's eyes.

"And besides, the information he's collecting is just too... uh, useless. I can't even bear to look at it!"

She had originally wanted to say "trash," but considering that Brave was right beside her, she chose more civilized wording to avoid getting hit on the head.

Beside her, Brave sat with her legs crossed, rapidly flipping through a stack of papers in her hands.

In the end, she helplessly sorted them and set them aside, then nodded.

"Indeed. It looks proper enough on the surface, but for a duel between Uma Musume at your level, this basic data has almost no practical effect."

The two Uma Musume went back and forth, mentally simulating the information they had recently gathered and the tactics they could use in the race. In the end, aside from feeling even more discouraged, they made little progress.

But very soon, the dark-skinned girl's eyes turned, and she immediately came up with a shocking plan.

That was this side-by-side training plan.

"After Brave-nee reminded me last time, I spent the past few days watching every important race recording of every Uma Musume trained by McQueen's trainer."

Dancing Brave bent her long, slender legs up onto the bench, hugged her knees with both hands, and looked like a dark-skinned dumpling.

Brave raised her brows.

"You finished watching them? Then what did you think?"

"He really is an extremely terrifying guy."

Dancing Brave answered.

"His tactical arrangements can almost calculate every possible action that every threatening opponent might take."

"Even when something unexpected happens that he didn't calculate, the Uma Musume he trains still have enough backup options to solve the problem."

"So, maybe while Uncle John is still standing in place collecting scrap paper, Chasing Light has already seen me inside and out, down to what color underwear I wear to sleep at night! Ow!"

"Don't run your mouth!"

As the dark-skinned girl bared her teeth in pain, Brave withdrew her hand in annoyance. After pondering for a moment, she more or less understood what Dancing Brave meant.

"What you're saying is... Chasing Light has actually already calculated seventy or eighty percent of your data and details."

"But on our side, aside from the useless public data that everyone already knows, we know almost nothing about McQueen's current depth."

"Except for the race against Generous. That one did let us see a little."

Dancing Brave raised her hand and corrected her.

Brave nodded.

"True. Even across Europe's past generations, Generous could still be called top-class."

"But the little bit revealed there is practically the same as revealing nothing."

She, too, was an Uma Musume who had once grasped [World], the endpoint of [Domain].

Naturally, she knew exactly how terrifying an Uma Musume who had stepped into that realm could be.

"Exactly! So..."

Dancing Brave raised a brilliant smile, and her eyes shone with the sharp light of a gambler.

"Even if this side-by-side run exposes every last one of my trump cards and all of my strength to that Kuroha..."

"As long as it can get me even the slightest glimpse of McQueen's current real condition, or even just let me personally experience what it feels like to run beside her, we'll make a profit no matter what!"

"In other words—this is the legendary win-win situation! But I definitely win a little more!"

"Because for me, this is a qualitative leap from zero to one. For them, at most, it only pushes the progress bar from nine to ten!"

(End of Chapter)

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