An alternate universe of Umamusume by Shiwudesu
Taoka Yuki. Born from an umamusume mother. A yakuza boss father. A male Uma, an Umamusuko — a thing that isn't "supposed to exist". The Mejiros and the yakuza struck a pact and built him a village to be hidden in, and he grew up in it peacefully, never knowing what he was or why the walls were there.
Then the village was found, and destroyed.
He cut himself apart to avenge it. Surgery took the tail, took the ears, gave him human ones in their place. Whatever the village had protected, he removed, and gave the rest of himself to the blood. His teens and his early twenties went into it. By the end he was ready to stop.
A small woman found him first. Akikawa Yayoi asked a question instead of offering help: what if you found purpose by giving others joy? She proposed Tracen. He thought it was a joke. Something underneath him didn't.
So the yakuza became a trainer. An assistant period first, then Team Sirius, then Mejiro McQueen; elegance and butchery, water and oil, until they were somehow building the same dream. Gold Ship, who made chaos into comedy. Rice Shower, who he understood better than anyone, because he was carrying the same weight in a different shape.
A family. For a while.
Akikawa had been building something the whole time. Friend to the Mejiro estate, keeper of hidden government records, going back far enough that she'd met Yuki as an infant and already knew what was being concealed. Slavery. Uma exploitation. Genocide. Years of evidence, assembled into a statement she would deliver in public.
June 4, 1995. She steps up. Millions watching, on television and in front of the stage.
Gunshot. Back of the head. Yuki is there.
She goes down, and her life runs behind her eyes before they give out.
And the same day, everything else.
The Mejiro estate burns; the government knew where the evidence was, and used the eruptions as cover. McQueen walks into it, because her trainer taught her to help others and become the best version of herself, and she believed she could be a hero. A falling beam nearly splits her. Her right eye ruptures. She keeps going anyway, keeps pulling people out, until the heat reaches deep enough and she drops.
Gold Ship is taken. She gets a hand on a gun tucked into her captor's belt and uses it. She survives, and becomes someone who has killed. There is no undoing that.
Rice Shower is racing the Takarazuka Kinen. The crowd starts murmuring: the Mejiro estate is burning, Gold Ship has been taken, and she goes blank mid-stride, thinking it must be a joke, seeing on every face around her that it isn't. One bad step. The bone cracks. She smashes her head into the barrier and doesn't get up.
All of it was scheduled. Everything at once, so that Yuki could reach nobody. Overwhelm the yakuza's son and he saves no one.
He learns afterward that his parents were taken and killed that day too. Gold Ship was meant to end the same way and was only barely strong enough not to. They weren't.
He broke.
He took the yakuza. He swore to end the Japanese government. And he became the bloodiest, most destructive thing any of them had ever built.
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End of Prologue.
