After the Japanese Derby ended, Special Week, Silence Suzuka, and the others returned to training.
Next, Special Week would focus on preparing for the Kikka Sho.
Silence Suzuka's race route, however, would have to change.
Nishizaki Ryuya knew very clearly that Silence Suzuka lacked the aptitude and stamina for long-distance races. Forcing her to participate in the Kikka Sho would only make her lose even more miserably.
Since she had already appeared in the Satsuki Sho and the Japanese Derby, it was admittedly somewhat hard to justify skipping the Kikka Sho. Even so, Nishizaki made the correct decision.
They would abandon the Kikka Sho and enter the upcoming Takarazuka Kinen instead.
Because of that, Nishizaki began designing specialized training plans for both of them. The only thing he found somewhat regrettable was that King Halo had not continued coming over to guide them.
After the Japanese Derby ended, King Halo's reputation rose another step. She had already become the most popular umamusume in Japan.
Even with official promotion behind her, and even with the halo of being this year's representative for the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, El Condor Pasa was still utterly crushed by King Halo in popularity.
The Association's people found this especially helpless. Their plan to create a star had ended just as it began.
But that matter was not especially important. The truly serious problem was that El Condor Pasa's mentality seemed to have been affected by this race.
Hana Tojo and Symboli Rudolf were both uncertain whether that effect was good or bad. Their original plan had been for El Condor Pasa to keep winning, then go to the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe carrying the momentum of certain victory.
But now, just as El Condor Pasa's momentum had begun to rise, King Halo had forcibly suppressed it.
What came next would depend on whether El Condor Pasa's will could endure, absorb the experience of this defeat, and evolve under that pressure.
If she could not do that, then there was no way she would win the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.
King Halo did not pay attention to any of this. After the Japanese Derby, she immediately entered the Yasuda Kinen.
Many people could not understand what King Halo and her Trainer were thinking. She had already decided to claim two Triple Crowns, so why waste energy entering an unrelated race?
"I really can't make sense of it."
Nishizaki Ryuya muttered in the stands.
The Yasuda Kinen was a GI race, but it was a mile race. It should not have been worth the risk of entering.
Among Japan's races, the most prestigious were currently middle- and long-distance races, followed by mile and sprint races. Dirt races, meanwhile, received almost no attention at all.
Since King Halo had already shown middle-distance aptitude, logically speaking, there was no need for her to enter a mile race. Even if she wanted to fight through a packed schedule to accumulate popularity and prize money, she should have chosen the later Takarazuka Kinen. Entering the Yasuda Kinen was a decision no one could understand.
"No, could it be because she's considering the opponent lineup for the Takarazuka Kinen?"
Nishizaki guessed.
Quite a few entrants for the Takarazuka Kinen had already been confirmed.
First, Silence Suzuka from their team had entered. Then El Condor Pasa and Grass Wonder from Rigil had also confirmed their participation.
Special Week and Seiun Sky would not be entering, but the lineup was already not much different from the Japanese Derby. It was easy to imagine it becoming a fierce race.
If one considered only that point, then avoiding the Takarazuka Kinen, where strong opponents would gather, and entering the Yasuda Kinen instead did seem like a decent decision.
But... was there any need for that?
Nishizaki tried to guess what King Halo and her Trainer were thinking, but no matter how much he thought about it, he still could not understand.
No matter how he looked at it, the decision to enter the Yasuda Kinen seemed meaningless.
Symboli Rudolf had a somewhat different thought.
"Is it because the last race wasn't satisfying enough?"
She was one of the few who had been able to see the truth behind the previous race.
She understood that King Halo's strength might not be on the same level as the umamusume of her generation at all. Those previous races had all been play.
For others, a race required them to give everything, perhaps even overdraw their potential. For King Halo, it might not be much harder than daily training.
In practice, King Halo's consumption in each race should be very low. A packed schedule was not a problem at all.
At least at the current level of competition, repeated races truly would not put much pressure on King Halo.
So Symboli Rudolf could only guess that King Halo's reason for racing continuously was that the previous race had not satisfied her, and she was applying pressure to herself.
But in truth, none of these guesses meant anything. King Halo was entering this race for one simple reason: it was a "mission."
This race was one of her "missions," so she entered it.
As for why she had entered immediately after the Japanese Derby, it was simply because doing so was more convenient.
Of course, it was also because, as Symboli Rudolf believed, the previous race had not placed enough pressure on King Halo. Its toll was basically no greater than daily training, which was why she could make this decision.
King Halo would not disregard her health just to increase the difficulty of her challenge.
If the opportunity came naturally, she did not mind helping her opponents improve, allowing herself to obtain better "nourishment." But she would never take the initiative too eagerly.
That was because she was not like the Demon King, someone who longed for battle. Her true pursuit was becoming stronger. Battle itself had never been what she chased.
Her thinking was similar to Mejiro McQueen's. They entered races only to accomplish their goals. What they looked toward was victory and a higher realm. Racing itself was not something they would become addicted to.
Therefore, King Halo truly had no particular thoughts about entering the Yasuda Kinen today.
The moment King Halo, dressed in her racing outfit, stood before the gate, the other participants around her nervously turned their eyes toward her.
Japan's current strongest umamusume. The undisputed queen.
Strictly speaking, King Halo's record at present was only that of an undefeated two-crown winner. But in modern Japan, that record was already the best in recent years.
More importantly, King Halo had taken those two crowns from the hands of the prodigies and monsters of her generation. The quality of this year's rookies was very high, even stronger than some veteran competitors.
King Halo's two crowns carried tremendous weight.
So even though she had not yet claimed the undefeated Triple Crown, the current King Halo was already qualified to reign.
That said, this queen was only the queen of Japan. Between her and the true queen, the true strongest in the world, there was still a considerable gap.
"So that's King Halo..."
"I never thought she'd enter this race while challenging the Classic Triple Crown route. Is she trying to achieve a GI Triple Crown this way?"
"What a pain. Why did she have to come block my path out of nowhere?"
Some people also speculated that King Halo might lack long-distance aptitude, which was why she had chosen the Yasuda Kinen. Although that would indeed prevent her from achieving the traditional Classic Triple Crown, it would still allow her to claim a Triple Crown achievement.
After all, even if it was a mile race, a GI was still a GI. It still counted as one crown.
But if she wanted a variant Triple Crown, would it not be better to challenge the Takarazuka Kinen? That was a middle-distance race, and King Halo's middle-distance strength had already been proven.
Could it truly be because the Takarazuka Kinen's opponent lineup was too strong, so she had come to challenge the Yasuda Kinen, where there were no particularly famous runners?
Some of the participants felt somewhat looked down upon when they thought of this.
At any rate, there were GI umamusume among them too.
It was true that their strength was not equal to King Halo's. But King Halo had only just finished the Japanese Derby. How much strength could she really display now?
Without sufficient insight, it was impossible to see how King Halo had won that race.
Quite a few people even suspected that El Condor Pasa and Silence Suzuka had held each other back so severely that King Halo had merely picked up the scraps.
That theory had not become popular only because King Halo's previous results were already impressive. Her strength truly was powerful, and she had enough chance of winning even without taking advantage of others.
No one understood the meaning behind King Halo's participation in this race.
King Halo had no intention of explaining herself to anyone either. She was not even willing to say more than a few words in interviews.
After all, to her, these were all meaningless matters.
Her current thought was to finish this race as quickly as possible, then go back to continue reading, digesting McQueen's knowledge, and making her own abilities stronger.
Beyond digesting that experience, she also had the important matter of constructing her domain to continue.
When it came to awakening ZONE, she placed incomparable importance on it.
And she already had some ideas.
First of all, immunity to blocking skills was essential. Even if she could not achieve all-around resistance like Mejiro McQueen, she at least needed some kind of purification ability.
Blocking skills might look useless in races at that level, with Gold Ship getting frustrated every day, but in reality that was only because the opponents Gold Ship currently faced happened to counter her. In truth, the effects of blocking skills were extremely powerful. Even in the system's major races, Gold Ship's blocking skills could be considered almost unstoppable in terms of strength.
Because of that, King Halo felt that if she did not invest in some resistance, Gold Ship would absolutely control her so hard she would not be able to run at all.
As for other abilities, she was still considering them.
ZONE abilities were linked to mental strength and obsession. The more abilities one wanted, the more one's mental power would scatter, weakening the intensity of each ability.
Conversely, the more focused and pure an ability was, the greater the strength it could display.
Mejiro McQueen's ZONE was honestly not that strong in raw intensity. It was simply that its mechanical priority was too high, and on top of that it suited Mejiro McQueen far too well, which made it so invincible.
Mechanics were mechanics. Stats were stats.
In terms of stats, Mejiro McQueen's ZONE was undoubtedly the weakest. She had not invested in stats at all, possessing only the baseline value.
The clever part was that Mejiro McQueen had chosen to take no stats whatsoever and put everything into mechanics. As for the stat issue, she relied entirely on skills and attributes to support it.
King Halo was considering whether she should choose some degree of raw stats while constructing her ZONE.
At present, mechanics seemed to have higher priority.
After all, everyone's ZONE was currently entirely mechanical, with no investment in stats.
Even the Conqueror's [Fusion], which appeared to have very high stat strength, was fundamentally still a mechanic. Its stats came entirely from consuming opponents and fusing skills.
True stat-based ZONE had appeared only in some native umamusume. That type of ZONE usually boosted speed and strengthened burst power.
But that effect truly could not compare with the priority of mechanics.
If one insisted on saying it, then Gold Ship's ZONE could also count as stat-based. After all, disruption values were still values.
And the result of investing in values was plain to see: no matter how high the value was, it meant nothing if it could not hit the opponent.
At the moment, King Halo would not consider disruption skills.
She was thinking about whether she should invest in a burst. But if the burst she produced was only as strong as a Flash Skill, then it would be a massive loss.
Thinking about all this, King Halo entered the gate.
Her mind was not on today's race at all. Although she should respect her opponents in order to win, the problem was that these opponents' attributes truly were not enough to look at.
Their overall strength averaged around A-rank or below. Not a single one reached S.
Opponents of this level... even if this was a GI race, it was simply impossible for King Halo to take it too seriously.
At this level of competition, King Halo could not imagine how she would lose.
So her thoughts remained on awakening ZONE.
Because she had already obtained the qualifications, she hesitated. Unlike those who awakened ZONE in the midst of an explosive breakthrough, she could choose. And precisely because she had too many choices, she was unable to decide.
More than that, although she could choose, she could only decide on a broad direction. The specific effects would only become clear after she truly awakened. There were too many unknowns.
And once ZONE awakened, there was no going back. One wrong step meant defeat.
It was true that Rice Shower's [Fusion] seemed capable of letting them awaken ZONE again. But without having tried it, who knew whether it would actually work?
And no one knew whether the difficulty of awakening ZONE a second time would increase.
Therefore, if she could awaken a ZONE she was satisfied with on the first try, King Halo felt it would be best to settle it in one attempt.
The consequences of [Fusion] were far too unknown.
At this moment, King Halo felt as though she had fallen into a strange state of mind.
She even felt a little as though she had suffered a cultivation deviation. She clearly knew this way of thinking was incorrect, but she still could not help sinking into it.
She wanted to awaken a powerful ZONE in order to catch up to Mejiro McQueen and the others. But that desire was undoubtedly born from her own lack of confidence. And that lack of confidence would certainly prevent her from awakening the ZONE she wanted.
Yet she could not control that thought.
So King Halo could only suppress the impulse to enter that door and continue adjusting her own mentality.
...
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