Faced with Sirius Symboli's request, Kitahara ultimately didn't refuse.
After all, unlike the younger girls, Sirius Symboli was an adult. She was capable, too. Having one more reliable person helping out—there was no reason for Kitahara to say no.
As for "raising affection" and all that…
Same line as always: it's just working together and investigating. If that alone could raise affection, then wouldn't Komata-san and Hayakawa-san—who worked with him and talked with him every single day—be at max affection already?
There's no way that's happening, right?
Thinking that, Kitahara didn't dwell on it. He contacted Kudou-san privately again, reconfirmed the situation with him—
Then, as agreed, he had Sirius Symboli and Maruzensky begin cooperating with his "research."
...
Time passed.
With prior experience, plus how much more practiced his control had gotten over the past few days, the research went smoothly. Nothing unexpected happened along the way.
After repeated trials, Kitahara gradually confirmed that the kind of aura in his hands—at least in its outward manifestation—really could trigger certain desires buried in an Uma Musume's heart.
As for whether the desire it triggered was truly the thing they craved most deep down, and whether "taking it internally" would produce other changes beyond the external effect… Kitahara still wasn't sure yet.
After the experiments ended, the two of them chatted with Kitahara a bit longer. They set a time to meet again tomorrow, then left as normal.
After they left, Kitahara originally planned to slump on the sofa like usual for a while, and sort through his thoughts.
But he'd barely been collapsed for a few seconds when he felt that hot gaze behind him—still approaching.
Kitahara immediately climbed off the sofa.
And, by sheer coincidence, the moment he got up, his phone rang in his pocket.
He checked it. A message from a senior Uma Musume: she had time tonight, wanted to meet him—talk about what had been going on lately, and that incident from before.
If it were the old days, a sudden invitation from a senior Uma Musume would've been something Kitahara was probably not happy about.
But right now—feeling that increasingly scorching gaze closing in from behind—Kitahara took it like a pardon from heaven. He seized it as an excuse and fled his own home, temporarily escaping Super Creek's clutches.
Then, bringing Eclipse with him, he followed the navigation on his phone, winding through turns and alleys until he arrived at an unremarkable-looking izakaya tucked inside a narrow lane.
Just like always—outside, it looked a little run-down, but inside, the place was set up quite nicely. There were no other customers either. Only the senior Uma Musume sat there alone.
Kitahara straightened himself up a bit, then sat down across from her. Before she could even ask, he started talking—explaining, in one breath, everything he'd learned about how that incident began and ended.
The senior Uma Musume didn't speak. She just listened quietly. Only after he finished did she nod slowly.
"You handled it correctly. Kudou-san is currently our only channel for information about the Black Market. Even if he must be judged, that has to wait until the Black Market threat is eliminated."
As she spoke, the elderly Uma Musume lifted the small sake cup on the table, took a light sip, then continued.
"There's one more thing. I didn't tell you before, but my investigation hasn't loosened at all—and I've made some progress."
"Or to put it more directly: I've locked onto a few people."
Then, without waiting for Kitahara to ask, the senior Uma Musume pulled out a thick stack of documents and slid it in front of him.
And before he even opened it—just seeing the cover—Kitahara froze.
Kamisato Daisuke.
The very first sheet was his, his information laid out in detail.
"What—do you know him?"
The senior Uma Musume caught the change in Kitahara's expression.
Kitahara nodded, then picked up the stack. As he flipped through it, he recounted to her everything about his dealings with Kamisato Daisuke.
Kitahara and Symboli Speed had partnered up on Uma Musume Hunting incidents quite a few times in the past.
But because Symboli Speed didn't want to expose her identity, she'd never met the liaison from URA. So even Kitahara wasn't close with Kamisato Daisuke, and hadn't dealt with him many times.
After he finished describing his interactions with Kamisato Daisuke, Kitahara had also finished reading the stack.
Kamisato Daisuke's appearance in there had startled Kitahara a little, but once he read through everything, he realized there weren't actually that many familiar names inside.
Forget people like Kamisato Daisuke—most of the names, he'd never even heard before.
The few he recognized were either trainers he'd bumped into while drifting around over the years, or trainers currently working at Tracen whom he'd only met in passing—seen a couple times, never really interacted with.
After confirming that, Kitahara tapped his index finger lightly against the table, then looked up at Symboli Speed.
"So you're saying… these people might all be members of the Black Market?"
Symboli Speed nodded.
"Evidence?"
"None."
Symboli Speed answered cleanly.
"If I had evidence, what you'd be holding wouldn't be a stack of profiles—it would be verdict documents."
"...Fair."
Kitahara nodded, then asked,
"Then can you tell me why you suspect them? I just flipped through all of this, but there aren't any members of anti–Uma Musume groups in here. A lot of them even participated in—or led—operations to protect Uma Musume…"
"Precisely because of that, I suspect them."
Symboli Speed cut him off and stated her reasoning.
"At the beginning, when we didn't understand them, we all agreed the so-called 'Black Market' was a den of scum willing to do anything for money—so vile they'd even set their sights on underage Uma Musume. So our investigation leaned toward financial factors."
"But clearly, based on what we've learned recently, this 'Black Market' is very complex. Most of its members aren't short on money, and they don't harbor any malice toward Uma Musume…"
"So change the angle: if they aren't doing it for money at all, then what are they doing these messy, absurd things for?"
"Kudou-san does it out of guilt from the past—he wants redemption. His two helpers do it to warn society this way, to push some kind of change…"
"Birds of a feather. If they think like that, then other people in the Black Market think like that too."
"So this time, I shifted the direction of my investigation—from economics, to people with 'ambition,' people who 'want to change the world,' or people who have 'suffered major upheavals.'"
"And then I found that among these people… quite a few look normal on the surface."
"But in private, there are always… things that aren't quite normal."
Ambition. Wanting to change the world. Major upheavals.
The moment those three phrases came out, Kamisato Daisuke's figure immediately surfaced in Kitahara's mind.
Because they'd dealt with each other plenty of times—especially back when Kamisato still saw him as a kid and would talk without much guard, mentioning his past often, trying to teach him "lessons"—
Kitahara knew far more about Kamisato Daisuke's past than those sparse lines in a profile could ever show.
By Kamisato Daisuke's own account, before he turned fifteen, he'd had absolutely no exposure to anything related to being a trainer, and had never once thought about becoming one.
His family wasn't some trainer dynasty either. His parents were ordinary rural farmers. And the village was so small there weren't even any Uma Musume there.
So in the early years of his life, he hadn't even come into contact with Uma Musume as a "species."
The turning point came when he was thirteen.
When he'd just entered middle school, a transfer student arrived in his class.
It was the first time in his life he saw an Uma Musume in reality, not on a screen.
Normally, an Uma Musume who had entered middle school should've been managed under Tracen's unified system, to prevent accidents during True Awakening.
But Tracen was a school. Its capacity wasn't infinite.
Especially back then, with regional Tracen branches—when the Uma Musume industry wasn't as developed yet...
When they hit their load limit, they would sometimes reassign certain Uma Musume who hadn't yet begun True Awakening to stay outside for a period, prioritizing intake for those already in True Awakening.
And that Uma Musume—who hadn't begun True Awakening and showed no signs of it—was naturally one of the ones sent out.
And then, she met Kamisato Daisuke.
But unlike Kudou-san's story, their meeting wasn't pleasant. Forget a bickering-but-close "happy enemies" vibe—those two nearly got into a fight on day one.
The problem was Kamisato Daisuke himself.
Unlike the URA vice chair he was now, young Kamisato Daisuke couldn't be called "upright." He was, at minimum, a complete bastard.
A poor family. Neglected education. The constant influence of those "friends" around him…
With all that stacked together, back then, Kamisato Daisuke—if you put it nicely—was a school bully.
If you put it bluntly, he was a gang-leader punk.
But unlike the average delinquent, Kamisato Daisuke was smart. While acting as the head of his little crew, his grades hovered in the top three of the year, year after year.
Sure, he had minor infractions nonstop, fights and brawls weren't rare—but he never went out of his way to create unnecessary trouble, and he never did anything that would truly hurt him, or endanger his future.
He was proud of that. He believed he was a real "smart person."
He had ability. He had ambition. If he hadn't been born into a chicken coop like this, he'd definitely make something of himself.
But that Uma Musume's arrival hit him like a hammer.
In strength—girls at that age developed faster to begin with, and she was an Uma Musume. Even without True Awakening, he couldn't even begin to compete.
In grades—despite his long-time top-three standing, from the very first exam after she transferred in, she never once gave up first place.
And more than that—because she was an Uma Musume, her personality was absurdly good.
Not only tolerant, patient, and considerate, but with her ability came a strong sense of justice. She especially couldn't stand Kamisato Daisuke's way of living—and on the second day after transferring in, she locked horns with him.
From then on, she won again and again, crushing him in almost every domain—ability, grades, popularity, and more.
Her momentum was like the protagonist of those urban webnovels, and Kamisato Daisuke became the stepping-stone laid down for the protagonist to climb.
He couldn't beat her in a fight. He couldn't beat her in academics. Even the "maturity" and "street smarts" he'd always been so proud of turned into a joke in front of her—she dismissed it as "the kind of thinking only the most childish little kids have."
In the end, after nearly every method of retaliation failed, his reputation and standing crashed.
Even his so-called buddies left him one by one. He practically became a rat everyone chased down the street.
Only then did Kamisato Daisuke finally find one thing she could never defeat him in.
Becoming a Trainer.
It was well known that, for reasons no one understood, Uma Musume generally couldn't become Trainers.
And it wasn't just "beating" her in that sense—Kamisato Daisuke also considered that she still hadn't begun True Awakening, and from the looks of it, wouldn't for some time.
The earliest you could sit for a Trainer license exam was sixteen. If he became a Trainer early, maybe he'd end up running into her later.
And if they really did run into each other, then he'd raise a strong Uma Musume in her generation, stalk her races specifically, and try to make sure she couldn't win even once in three years.
And then… his guess came true.
He got his Trainer license at sixteen, entered Tracen as a trainee Trainer—and in his second year there, that Uma Musume finally began True Awakening.
Only, what he hadn't expected was that the period he'd entered happened to be exactly when Tracen was cracking down hard on improper relationships between Trainers and Uma Musume.
The era people later called the "Great Lifetime Regret" era.
Back then, the academy and Student Council believed that a huge reason those improper relationships formed was because Trainers and Uma Musume would choose a Tantou (an assigned Trainer–Uma pairing) based on personal taste—basically love at first sight.
First sight, then time together… if nothing happened, that would be the accident.
So, to improve the situation, Tracen made a bold decision: Trainers and their Tantou would no longer be freely chosen, but determined by lottery draw instead, minimizing the possibility of love at first sight as much as possible.
Driven by pure spite—wanting to make her miserable—Kamisato Daisuke joined in. Nervously, he signed up to recruit an Uma Musume, participated in the draw, and pulled a pink slip.
With an unsettled heart, Kamisato Daisuke returned to the dorm. After confirming no one was around, he slowly uncrumpled the pink paper in his hand and looked at the name written on it.
Then—cardiac arrest.
---
T/N: LMAO DID HE GET THAT UMA?
everyone is on vacation so no character notes this week
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