Three days later.
Great Britain.
Inside the manor villa, in a spacious, brightly lit gym, the faint scent of sweat and metal equipment hung in the air.
A purple-haired uma musume lay on a bench press station, drenched in sweat as she pushed through an intense strength-training session.
At the moment, she was dressed in a fitted sports bra and shorts.
At a glance, the slight curve at her chest looked rather modest.
Yet the soft, slender waist that seemed narrow enough to fit in one hand, and the graceful line of her waist and hips shifting with each breath as she exerted herself, radiated the healthy beauty unique to youth and uma musume alike.
"Hah..."
After grinding through another set at her limit, Mejiro McQueen racked the barbell and let out a long, quiet breath.
She sat up, took the water bottle Godolphin handed her, tilted her fair neck back, and took small sips to rehydrate.
"Mm... As expected..."
"At this stage, even maintaining this level of training intensity no longer produces much change in your physical metrics."
Godolphin stood beside her, studying the latest numbers on the clipboard in her hand as she spoke softly in thought.
McQueen nodded, twisted the cap back onto the bottle, and said pensively, "Yes, Lady Godolphin. I can vaguely feel it myself. My body seems to have reached its limit."
"No matter how desperately I push myself now, the growth in my physical strength is minimal."
Godolphin lifted her head and gave her a gentle smile.
"Yes. Your bodily intuition is rather sharp."
"Still, there's no need to worry too much about it."
"For top uma musume, this is entirely normal. No one's body can defy natural law and keep growing forever. There will always be an upper threshold."
Here, Godolphin paused slightly, then added with a light laugh, "Besides, your baseline is already very high."
"All the scientific training you've done, along with Kuroha-kun's guidance, has developed nearly every bit of potential you possess."
"In a sense, you've even surpassed your original limits."
"At that level, McQueen, you could be said to have surpassed almost every other uma musume."
Surpassed every other uma musume...
McQueen had just risen to her feet and was wiping the sweat from her forehead with a towel.
After hearing Godolphin's words, her amethyst-like eyes went faintly unfocused, and her thoughts seemed to drift back along the river of time, toward a distant past.
Back then, she had only been an unknown gray-coated filly.
Aside from the Mejiro name, she had almost nothing.
Then, during an entirely ordinary moment when she had been dragged into Teio's antics, Tokai Teio's impulsiveness had forced her to accompany Teio in apologizing to Kuroha-kun.
And in that slightly awkward moment, she had met the Trainer slowly walking over with an electric scooter, watching everyone with concern in his eyes...
That had been the turning point that changed her life completely.
"If Teio hadn't been running too fast back then and accidentally bumped into Inari One-senpai..."
"Maybe the me standing here now would never have existed..."
McQueen lowered her head and stared steadily at her fair right hand.
She clenched it tightly into a fist, then slowly relaxed it again.
A relieved smile suddenly bloomed across her delicate face.
Thinking back on the happiness she now had, wrapped in love, she simply could not imagine what her days would have been like if fate had shifted even slightly and she had never crossed paths with her Trainer.
Perhaps everything would have gone terribly wrong.
The thought had only just surfaced in her mind before she immediately shook her head and threw it far away.
Pulling herself out of her memories, McQueen looked around the empty gym and suddenly realized something. She asked in confusion, "Come to think of it, where did Kuroha-kun go today? And where are Maid and Responsible-senpai?"
Her post-race rest period had ended.
She had already resumed her normal daily training today.
So why had Folkqueen, who should have been at her side the whole time, not shown even a shadow of herself?
Godolphin did not answer right away.
Instead, she set down the clipboard in her hand, gave McQueen a strange look for a while, and only then spoke slowly.
"...Think back carefully. After the Arima Kinen ended, how many days did you sleep in Kuroha-kun's bed before you woke up?"
"..."
Somehow, McQueen understood instantly.
In the next moment, the gray-haired girl's fair face visibly tightened, and two blushes flew across her cheeks.
A flash of understanding and inner conflict passed through her eyes.
In the end, however, it turned into a helpless sigh, and her once-straight posture softened with it.
"I understand."
Exhaling quietly, McQueen sat back down on the bench press.
"All right! I'll keep going!"
The brief rest between sets was over.
The young lady of the Mejiro family decided to use high-intensity training to thoroughly numb her brain, which was far too prone to wandering thoughts.
Just as McQueen lay down again and prepared to exert force, inspiration suddenly flashed through her mind.
She looked at the gentle blue goddess beside her and asked weakly, "By the way, wasn't it Lady Godolphin's first time too? Why does it feel like you've been... very free and energetic these past few days?"
"..."
In that instant, it was as if all the air had been sucked out of the room.
The gentle smile on Godolphin's face froze.
Then the corners of her mouth twitched twice, beyond her control.
Her half-lidded green eyes suddenly opened a crack, and her face filled with a helpless smile.
"All right, McQueen! Enough chatter. Continue your training!"
"...Oh."
Seeing that Godolphin had not only refused to answer her question directly, but had even scolded her for some unknown reason, McQueen was utterly confused.
Still, under the pressure of the goddess's authority, she obediently nodded and began her next set of training.
Beside her, the blue-haired goddess stood with both hands clasped in front of her, her posture slender, graceful, and elegant.
On the surface, she still looked every bit like an inscrutable deity.
In truth, however, her heart was crouched in a corner at that very moment, furiously drawing circles on the ground.
"No one ever told me in advance that a body condensed from divine power would feel so different in that kind of situation..."
In her heart, Godolphin recalled that night three days ago with an urge to cry.
Originally, she had volunteered to personally demonstrate to Folkqueen how to handle an intense Pokémon battle.
As a result, when Kuroha's Mega Steelix unleashed its Z-Move and, with unstoppable force, broke through the Tera defenses of her Eternal Flower Floette, the two of them discovered something rather wrong.
Namely...
This seemingly perfect body of hers was, at its essence, shaped entirely by the Blessing Power inside Kuroha's body.
Under Godolphin's own will, every physiological detail of this body perfectly recreated the form of her true self.
However, the most fundamental source of the Blessing Power that condensed this body was Kuroha's own power.
That made the two's duel feel just a little subtle.
"Ugh..."
"If only this body had been condensed from my own divine power..."
Godolphin pressed her lips together in grievance.
The moment she thought about the love she had waited three hundred years for being right within reach, only to remain impossible to embrace for such a bizarre reason, she felt as if she were about to completely shut down.
"Kuroha-kun, when are you going to become a god? Hurry up and restore my world already..."
The blue goddess murmured impatiently in her heart.
(End of Chapter)
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