The Trainer With Little Time Left Just Wants to Live [11]

“I’ll have one ginger pork set meal. Oh, and grilled salted salmon, miso soup, rice…”

Kitano’s group had finally arrived at the cafeteria, and judging by the amount of breakfast Mr. C.B. was ordering, it was a little excessive even for an Umamusume—let alone for C.B., who had long since stopped racing and was nearing graduation.

Naturally, C.B. was not going to eat it all herself. She was ordering it specially for Kitano alone. After seeing him try to get by on nothing but an instant sandwich earlier, she could already tell how little regard Kitano had for his own physical condition. Choosing not to eat because he had no appetite was, in her opinion, the worst possible thing for a patient to do.

So she decisively put together a lavish meal for him. When she returned to the table with two more trays, several others had already filled what had originally been a fairly spacious tabletop, leaving almost no room for the Umamusume themselves to eat.

“All right, please eat up, Trainer Kitano.” C.B. set the two trays down as well, pretending not to notice Kitano’s troubled expression. In her mind, she had chosen the best combination for helping him recover his strength.

The breakfast she had picked out for Kitano included fish, meat, and vegetables. There was the classic combination of miso soup and rice, along with soft, liquid foods that would be easier for a patient to digest. In terms of variety, she had gone as far as she possibly could, making it almost impossible for anyone to be picky—except she had not considered Kitano’s actual physical condition.

“Um… C.B.-senpai, you’re seriously overestimating how much I can eat.” Kitano’s mouth twitched as he looked at the plates in front of him. Judging purely by appearance, he knew this food would stir any healthy person’s appetite.

Unfortunately, Kitano had only a month left to live, and his senses of taste and smell had already failed him. To him, eating was simply a way to take in nutrients. No matter how deliciously the ingredients were prepared, they tasted like wax in his mouth. There was no meaning in it.

“Kitano can’t taste anything. No matter how much you give him, he won’t be able to eat it.” Nakayama Festa spoke while casting C.B. a teasing glance, clearly having already expected C.B.’s efforts to be useless.

Now that she had calmed down, Festa could see a few things from what had happened today. Even if she found it strange, this Mr. C.B. might really have some kind of interest in her family’s little doggie. That kind of ingratiating behavior, with nothing in it for herself, was enough to prove that.

The key point was that Kitano seemed to have feelings for C.B. too. Otherwise, he would not have gone soft and called her back.

Strictly speaking, Nakayama Festa considered the matter none of her business. Kitano could like whoever he wanted. But right now, he was her Trainer, and his future was still tied to hers. Thinking about this sort of thing at a time like this was, to some extent, irresponsible toward her too, wasn’t it?

For all those reasons, Festa showed her senior no friendliness whatsoever. Yet even she failed to notice that the smug look on her face seemed, no matter how one looked at it, like she was flaunting how well she understood Kitano while mocking C.B. in passing.

See? You don’t understand the person you’re trying to pursue at all. You’re not even as good as me, his trainee. That was the face Nakayama Festa was making in the eyes of C.B. and Gold Ship.

“—I know, of course.” Yet as C.B. looked at Nakayama Festa, the free-spirited Umamusume showed a rare flash of intense competitiveness. She controlled it in an instant, however, and answered with a faint smile.

“But Trainer Kitano’s current physical condition isn’t something we can handle by simply letting him eat nothing because he feels like it. A patient should take in more nutrition. Otherwise, his body will have no way to recover.”

“But I really can’t eat all this…” Kitano forced down a toothache-like feeling. In truth, Kitano himself knew that no matter how well he nursed his body, the speed at which his life drained away would not slow by even a second. On the contrary, if he accidentally encountered some major incident, his remaining time might instead drain away rapidly. In several loops, Kitano had died suddenly because of things like that.

Kitano had no way to deal with these sudden events at all. After being tempered by who knew how many loops, he had always treated his current body with the attitude that “being alive counts as a win.” Eating was just a way to fool his body. As long as he had enough nutrition, that was fine. Eating more would not do a damn thing.

But Kitano’s answer played right into C.B.’s hands. After blinking, the smile on C.B.’s face widened a little, and she replied softly.

“You can’t be this willful, Trainer Kitano. No matter what, you have to make sure you get enough nutrition every day. I… You wouldn’t want to collapse from illness before you’ve even finished serving as a Trainer, would you?”

As she spoke, C.B.’s eyes narrowed slightly, revealing a smile that was extremely familiar to Kitano. That smile… was just like the one from that loop, when C.B. had “threatened” him into going to meet her parents. It was a sign that she was taking a forceful stance.

“Or… are you trying to be spoiled, Trainer Kitano? If that’s the case, I suppose I’ll have to coax you into eating.”

There was a faint joking note in C.B.’s final sentence, and everything she did next seemed to answer her own joke. She quietly picked up a piece of fish with her chopsticks and slowly moved it to Kitano’s lips, smiling as she said gently,

“Please open wide. Aaah~”

BANG!

Almost the very instant C.B. did this, Kitano felt the table in front of him shake violently. Along with that loud noise from who knew whom, the sight of C.B. feeding Kitano immediately drew the attention of everyone in the cafeteria.

And once their gazes locked on, they never pulled away again. Their curiosity only burned even brighter.

What had they just seen? C.B.-senpai was actually feeding a Trainer they didn’t know? In that moment, whether Umamusume or Trainers, everyone was deeply shaken by the scene before them. Yet amid that shock, the two sides gave completely different reactions.

Without a doubt, C.B.’s action held an extremely strong appeal to the Umamusume. C.B. was a Triple Crown Umamusume who had clashed with the “Emperor,” Symboli Rudolf, more than once. Coupled with her dashing air, she enjoyed almost top-class recognition throughout all of Japan, and her popularity among Umamusume was extraordinarily high. Some even felt C.B. was more suited to being student council president than Rudolf.

And a key reason behind C.B.’s popularity was that, influenced by her family background, she supported the idea of Umamusume and their Trainers being together. This stood in stark contrast to Symboli Rudolf, who had always suppressed romantic developments at Tracen Academy—though with little effect.

Interestingly, however, while C.B. supported relationships between Trainers and Umamusume, just like Rudolf, she had no Trainer to this day and had never shown any particular favor toward any member of the opposite sex. Slowly, rumors began to spread that C.B.’s attitude was really just a way to compete with Rudolf, not something she sincerely believed.

But now, C.B.’s intimate gesture toward Kitano had thoroughly shattered the rumors the Umamusume had discussed for so long.

Who said C.B.-senpai didn’t support free love? Who said C.B.-senpai was only trying to compete with the President? Look! Wasn’t C.B.-senpai making her move now?!

And the moment she did, she went straight for an advanced move like “feeding” him! So Senpai had only stayed silent all this time because she had never met someone she liked!

In sharp contrast to the Umamusume’s excitement and delight were, without question, the Trainers whose faces instantly turned ashen as they thought of the consequences after seeing what C.B. had done.

As everyone knew, even an ordinary Umamusume was at least three times as strong as an adult man, and the Umamusume at Tracen Academy were the best of the best. If their emotions exploded and they wanted to do something excessive to their Trainers, the Trainers could be said to have no room to resist whatsoever.

And Tracen Academy gathered some of the most powerful Umamusume in all of Japan. The Trainers who spent all day and night with them, teaching them one-on-one, were naturally the hardest-hit victims.

It was only because Umamusume were beings ordained by the Three Goddesses to be “pure and beautiful” that their attitude toward feelings was so utterly sincere. This meant an Umamusume’s feelings toward someone could not be false. If she liked someone, that was real. If she hated someone, that was real too. And if excessive love gave rise to possessive feelings that would stop at nothing, that was absolutely real as well—and they could absolutely act on it.

As for which Umamusume had first opened Pandora’s box and used this somewhat violent method to obtain the final “happy ending,” no one knew anymore. But without question, the frequent attacks on Trainers at Tracen Academy were not something that had appeared overnight. Rather, as time passed and more and more Umamusume became “examples,” the Umamusume who came after them began to imitate them one after another.

It was precisely because more and more Umamusume had truly obtained their own happiness through such methods that Tracen Academy had become increasingly violent, and that miserable Trainers like them had it harder with each passing generation!

And now, even an Umamusume as influential as C.B. had set an “example.” These pitiful Trainers did not even need to think to know that the environment they would face in the future would absolutely become several times worse because of this incident.

And reality unfolded exactly as the Trainers expected. Before long, quite a few Umamusume began imitating C.B.’s “excellent lesson material,” pestering their own Trainers and trying to feed them.

Of course, there were also several Umamusume who knew how to extrapolate. After failing to feed their Trainers, they immediately changed strategies and said things like, “Then how about Trainer-san feeds me once instead?” Their cheeks were flushed, their tails wagging rapidly as they looked forward to what would happen next.

As for Kitano, the instigator of all this, the atmosphere around him was not quite so harmonious. Watching the chopsticks gradually approach him, Kitano felt Nakayama Festa’s gaze beside him, cold as an iceberg. Caught between retreat and advance, he looked at C.B.’s familiar face in front of him, smelled that familiar scent, and the defenses in his heart could not help but begin to waver.

But just as Kitano was on the verge of raising the white flag, Gold Ship, who had been silent all this time, finally stepped forward and broke the silence, helping Kitano out of his predicament.

“Kitano-chan, you can’t eat it? Hehe, then don’t mind if I do~”

Gold Ship’s sudden, carefree remark forcibly interrupted C.B.’s movement. Before C.B. could react, the shameless Gold Ship took the initiative, stretched her head forward, and directly ate the salmon held between C.B.’s chopsticks.

What left everyone even more speechless was that when Gold Ship’s mouth left the chopsticks, her saliva remained on them. As her lips pulled away, it stretched into a long, thin thread… before slowly thinning until the naked eye could no longer catch it.

“…”

Well, now even anyone who had wanted to eat had lost their appetite.

Gold Ship herself was playing dumb despite knowing exactly what she had done, but thanks to her usual airheaded personality at the academy, not a single person suspected her motives. When Gold Ship’s gaze finally landed once again on the face of Kitano, who had been saved off to the side, she immediately put on an “I get it now” expression.

“Oh! Golshi-chan knows! Kitano-chan, you don’t have any appetite, right? Mm-hmm, Golshi-chan has a great idea! It’ll definitely help!”

“Remember to wait for me! I’m going to find someone. I’ll be right back!”

“…What is she going to do?”

Gold Ship still acted with that same reckless haste, doing things the moment she thought of them, making it extremely hard for anyone to keep up with her train of thought. This time, even Nakayama Festa, her own older sister, had absolutely no idea what Gold Ship was going to do.

“No idea, but I think Gold Ship won’t do anything too out of line.” Kitano shook his head as well. How was he supposed to understand what went on inside that alien weirdo horse’s head? But thanks to his advantage as a transmigrator, he knew that even when Gold Ship joked around, she had limits.

However, the calm certainty with which Kitano trusted Gold Ship did not escape C.B., who had finally recovered herself. And now, she faintly sensed that Kitano might hold some special position in the heart of Gold Ship, this strange junior of hers…

Before C.B. could think it through, she soon saw Gold Ship jogging back from not far away with people in tow. The two Umamusume following Gold Ship had the same hair color as her, and the three gray-haired Umamusume happened to cover tall, medium, and short height categories. Very quickly, they stood in front of Kitano.

The moment Gold Ship brought over the people she wanted to bring, Kitano’s gaze focused on the medium-height gray-haired Umamusume among them. His pupils visibly contracted, clearly because he had seen someone who shook him.

“Kitano-chan, Golshi-chan brought someone who can solve your appetite problem!” Gold Ship seemed not to have noticed the slight change in Kitano’s expression and was just about to introduce them when Kitano waved a hand. Controlling his wheelchair, he slowly moved closer and said softly,

“No need to introduce them, Golshi-chan. I know them.”

With that, Kitano focused his gaze on that gray-haired Umamusume. She noticed him as well. Her expression was calm, as if she could remain composed no matter the situation. That familiar face, which seemed incapable of being surprised no matter what she faced, made Kitano involuntarily recall the past he had experienced with this gray-haired Umamusume.

Kitano had left behind many regrets. Before his deaths, he had tried to do everything properly, yet there was always only so much he could do. But if he had to choose the loop he considered the most complete, perhaps… it would be the short yet brilliant one he had experienced together with this gray-haired Umamusume.

T/N: WHAT??????????????????????????? I THOUGHT HE ONLY DID TWO LOOPS???????????????????????????????????????????? DID I MISREMEMBER????

This is a fan translation of 时日无多的训练员只想活下去 by 许氏子谦 Rights to the original work belong to the creator. Please support them by exploring their original work or sharing it with others if you can. Thank you for reading and supporting my efforts to bring this story to a wider audience!