The office of Team Capella smelled of stale coffee and crushed dreams.
Jun Sato sat behind a desk cluttered with rejection letters and scouting reports, rubbing his temples. The fluorescent light above him flickered with a rhythmic bzzt-bzzt that was slowly driving him insane.
"Another one gone," he muttered, tossing a file into the trash.
The scouting season for the new generation was brutal. The big teams—Team Rigil, Team Spica, and the private syndicates—had already swept up the top prospects. The daughters of prestigious families, the ones with gleaming coats and perfect stride mechanics, were all spoken for.
Sato was left with the scraps. He was a good trainer—he knew that. He understood the biomechanics of racing better than most. But in Tracen Academy, talent attracted talent. Without a star horse girl, you couldn't get the funding. Without funding, you couldn't attract a star. It was a spiral of mediocrity he was desperate to break.
Knock. Knock.
He didn't look up. "If it's the student council asking about the budget report, I'm not here."
The door didn't open. Instead, a piece of paper slid under it. Then another. Then a third.
Sato frowned. He leaned over and picked up the first sheet.
It was a printout of a biometric scan. A heart rate graph.
He picked up the second. A velocity chart.
He picked up the third. A stride frequency analysis.
His eyes narrowed. The data didn't make sense. The velocity curve was exponential in the final two furlongs, but the heart rate remained flat.
"What the hell..."
"Intriguing, isn't it?"
The door creaked open. Agnes Tachyon stood there, leaning against the frame with a casual arrogance that made Sato's teeth itch. She was holding a test tube filled with a bubbling green liquid.
"Tachyon," Sato sighed. "I told you, I'm not testing your 'Spider-Leg Serum' on my trainees again. The last one grew extra hair on her elbows."
"That was a feature, not a bug. Aerodynamic drag reduction," Tachyon dismissed him with a wave of her hand. She walked into the office uninvited and sat on the edge of his desk. "But that's not why I'm here. I'm here to offer you a charity case."
Sato gestured to the papers. "This data. Is it yours?"
"Heavens no. If I ran like that, my legs would shatter." Tachyon tapped the velocity chart. "This belongs to a stray I found this morning. A null variable. No training, no gear, no brain."
"No brain?"
"She runs on instinct. Pure, unadulterated, savage instinct," Tachyon said, her eyes gleaming. "She ran a 1:58.2 on the dirt track in sneakers."
Sato froze. The air in the room seemed to vanish.
"1:58.2?" Sato whispered. "On dirt? In sneakers?"
"And she wasn't even out of breath." Tachyon leaned in, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "She's a monster, Sato-san. A monster disguised as a sleepy girl. But she's raw. Unpolished. If she runs in an official race like she did this morning, she'll break herself. She doesn't know how to land. She doesn't know how to pace."
Sato looked at the graph again. The line went up and up, defying the laws of fatigue.
"Why bring her to me?" Sato asked, suspicious. "Why not keep her for yourself? Or give her to the Student Council President?"
"Because," Tachyon's smile turned sharp, predatory. "I want to race her. And I can't race a teammate. I need someone to polish the diamond so I can crush it properly."
She hopped off the desk and headed for the door.
"Her name is Kagura Seiran. She's currently in Cafeteria B, likely consuming her body weight in carbohydrates. Do with that information what you will."
Tachyon vanished into the hallway, leaving the scent of chemicals and opportunity in her wake.
Sato stared at the empty doorway. Then he looked at the trash can filled with rejection files.
He grabbed his jacket.
Cafeteria B was a war zone of clattering trays and high-decibel chatter. It was the domain of the unranked and the junior classes.
Sato spotted her immediately, mostly because of the empty space around her.
While other tables were crowded with groups of friends comparing notes and gossip, Kagura Seiran sat alone at a corner table. In front of her was a terrifying amount of food. Three bowls of rice. A mountain of grilled fish. A salad bowl that looked like a small garden. And a carton of milk.
She was eating with a mechanical, rhythmic efficiency. Chopsticks. Mouth. Chew. Swallow. Repeat.
She looked... unremarkable. Her blue hair was messy. Her posture was slouchy. She radiated an aura of "please do not perceive me."
Sato approached the table. He didn't sit down immediately. He stood across from her, watching.
She didn't look up. She was focused entirely on a piece of mackerel.
"You're going to get a stomach ache," Sato said.
Seiran paused, chopsticks mid-air. She slowly raised her eyes. They were grey, cloudy, and completely devoid of the usual spark he saw in aspiring racers.
"I have a fast metabolism," she said flatly, then put the fish in her mouth.
"You're Kagura Seiran?"
She nodded, chewing.
"I'm Jun Sato. A trainer."
Seiran swallowed. "Do you have a badge?"
Sato blinked. "A what?"
"A badge. The orientation lady said not to talk to strange men without a badge."
Sato fumbled for his ID card clipped to his belt and held it up. Seiran squinted at it, then nodded, satisfied. She went back to her rice.
"Agnes Tachyon told me you ran a 1:58 this morning," Sato said, pulling out a chair and sitting down uninvited.
"The lab coat girl?" Seiran mumbled around a mouthful of rice. "She talks a lot."
"Is it true?"
Seiran shrugged. "I just ran. The ground was nice."
"The ground was nice," Sato repeated, trying to parse the statement. "Kagura-san, do you know what the record for a Junior debut is?"
"No."
"Do you know who Manhattan Cafe is? Jungle Pocket?"
"No."
"Do you know why you're here at Tracen?"
Seiran stopped eating. She put her chopsticks down, aligning them perfectly parallel to the edge of the tray. The silence stretched between them, heavier than the noise of the cafeteria.
For a moment, the "sleepy" look vanished. She looked out the window, toward the distant track visible through the glass.
"It's too loud everywhere else," she said softly.
Sato frowned. "Loud?"
"The city. The people. The trains." Seiran tapped her ear, a twitch of her horse ear accompanying the gesture. "It's all noise. Scritch-scratch. Bumping into things."
She turned her gaze back to Sato. It was unsettlingly direct.
"But when I run fast enough... the noise stops. The wind gets so loud that it cancels everything else out. It becomes..." She searched for the word. "Quiet."
Sato stared at her. He had heard a lot of motivations in his career. I want to be the best. I want to make my mom proud. I want to be an idol.
He had never heard: I run to silence the world.
It was lonely. It was tragic. And for a racer? It was perfect focus.
"You want quiet?" Sato leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. "I can give you quiet. But only if you listen to me."
Seiran looked at his empty hands. "You don't have any food."
"I'm not hungry. I'm ambitious. There's a difference." Sato pulled the biometric sheet Tachyon had given him out of his pocket and smoothed it onto the table. "You have raw speed, Kagura. But you run like a disaster waiting to happen. If you keep running like you did this morning, you'll blow a tendon before you debut. Then the noise will come back, and it will never go away."
Seiran's eyes widened slightly. The threat of the noise returning seemed to strike a chord.
"What do I have to do?" she asked.
"Training. Real training. Not just running when you feel like it," Sato said, his voice hardening. "Early mornings.Drills that will make you hate me. Diet control—" he eyed the mountain of food, "—well, we'll work on that. I'll teach you how to run so you don't break. I'll make you the fastest thing on two legs."
"And then?"
"And then," Sato grinned, a tired, jagged smile. "You'll be so fast that no one will ever be able to catch you. You'll be alone at the front. Just you and the wind. Total silence."
Seiran stared at him for a long time. She looked at his tired eyes, his frayed jacket cuffs, the desperation he was trying to hide.
She didn't see a prestigious trainer. she saw someone who was also fighting the noise.
She picked up her milk carton and took a sip.
"Okay," she said.
Sato blinked. "Okay? Just like that?"
"You smell like coffee and old paper," Seiran observed. "But you don't smell like a liar."
She stood up, grabbing her tray.
"I'm done eating. When do we start?"
Sato felt a weight lift off his chest, replaced by the terrifying thrill of a gamble. He checked his watch.
"Tomorrow morning. 4:00 AM. Track 3. Don't be late."
Seiran nodded. "4:00 AM. It's quiet then."
She turned and walked away to the return counter, moving with that same loose, unbothered gait.
Sato sat alone at the table, looking at the biometric sheet. He traced the line of her velocity spike with his finger.
"The Gambler and the Ghost," he muttered to himself. "This is either going to be legendary, or I'm going to get fired."
He pulled out his phone and dialed a number.
"Yeah, it's me. Cancel my appointments for the week. I found one."