About ten seconds later, the racers from the other side of the battlefield passed through the area.
"What the hell?! Why's the road so slippery?!"
The four teams still busy ganging up on Jei Chou suddenly realized something was wrong with their handling. It felt like they'd run over something nasty, and their vehicles had become much harder to control.
With their tires slipping and their cars swaying left and right, the encirclement around Jei Chou immediately developed an opening.
"Now!" Jei Chou didn't let the chance slip by. Shift, gas, turn, signal—he did it all in one smooth sequence and shot straight through the gap in a blur.
"Damn it! He got out!" Ash from Team 7, who had been blocking the front, shouted in alarm and hurriedly tried to reposition and box Jei Chou back in.
But by the time he moved, it was already too late. Jei Chou floored it, surged right past him, and blasted completely out of the trap, horn blaring as he sped away.
"Mizuno, I'm coming." A smile tugged at Jei Chou's lips. He didn't spare the four teams desperately chasing him behind a single glance. His only target was Mizuno, three hundred meters ahead.
Because in his eyes, the racers on the other teams were all minor players—not worth mentioning. The only ones he regarded as real rivals were Mizuno, the mysterious powerhouse introduced by his grandfather, and Maruzensky, the former number one on the rankings.
"Damn it!" Ash cried out in frustration.
They had all hit the oil on the road just now. Logically, everyone should have slowed down immediately to make sure their cars didn't tip or skid out.
But Jei Chou had driven through it as if nothing had happened at all, like he was on flat ground. That kind of control could only come from an incredible command of the car.
How is his skill this monstrous?! Can we really beat him?!
Just as the others were falling into despair, Nobita from Team 3 suddenly spoke up.
"Don't panic. We still have a chance."
"He's only ahead for the moment. That doesn't mean he'll stay ahead."
"Anyone can floor it on a straight. The real test is how fast you are in the corners!"
"There's a turn up ahead. If he wants to make it through safely, he'll have to brake. The moment he does, we hit him with items, make him mess up the drift, and send him crashing into the guardrail. Then he's finished!"
"Right! Exactly!" The others all nodded, feeling Nobita had a point.
Sure, Jei Chou was insanely fast on the straight, but he had to slow down for the corner, didn't he? Taking a corner without reducing speed was extremely risky. It was easy to flip the car, and even world champions eased off a little when cornering.
And the bend ahead was a ninety-degree right angle. If he went in too fast, inertia would throw the whole car wide.
So all the racers agreed on one thing: Jei Chou would definitely slow down at the next turn, and that would be their chance to overtake him.
Ready...
The racers stuck close behind Jei Chou, waiting patiently for him to reduce speed.
"Wait! No, that's wrong!"
The moment they raised their items, they realized the AE86 ahead had no intention of slowing down at all.
If anything, it was accelerating.
"What's he doing?! Is he trying to kill himself?!" everyone shouted in shock, convinced Jei Chou had lost his mind.
But the next moment left both the pursuing racers and the audience watching on the big screen completely dumbfounded.
Just as the AE86 was about to reach the corner, Jei Chou suddenly swung it sideways and let the front left wheel drop into the drainage gutter beside the road.
Then he yanked the wheel hard. With the tire locked into the gutter, it instantly gave the AE86 enough centripetal force to keep the car from flying out.
And once the AE86 cleared the corner, the wheel popped neatly back out of the gutter under inertia and landed perfectly on the main road again, the car continuing forward without the slightest wasted motion.
At the same time, a golden title appeared above Jei Chou's head:
PROFESSOR OF CURVATURE
"The gutter run! It's a gutter run!"
"What an ingenious cornering technique! What insane vehicle control!"
"Holy crap! So this is the demon king?!"
Everyone cried out in shock, as though they'd just watched an incredible magic trick.
Jei Chou's absurd driving skill was like a towering wall in front of them, and everyone who saw it with their own eyes was left shaken to the core.
Even though the finish line was still far away, and by all logic there ought to have been plenty of chances left, Jei Chou's superhuman skill had already shown the racers behind him exactly what their defeat would look like.
"Is that really even human?!"
"We've lost. We've completely lost..."
"Just give up. There's no way we can beat him..." The racers wailed in despair.
Even so, one of them still hadn't given up hope.
"'There's no way to win'? I don't get that." The Tiga cosplayer from Team 6 gritted his teeth and pulled out a bottle of brightly colored potion from behind him.
If one looked closely, there was a sticker on the glass bottle bearing Agnes Tachyon's smiling face.
"This is a special potion I got through connections at the Tracen Black Market. As long as I drink it, I can become true light!"
"For victory, it's all worth it!"
Gulp gulp—!
Having made up his mind, the Tiga cosplayer pulled off his headpiece and chugged the potion in one go.
A few seconds later, his whole body began to glow.
"Ultraman Tiga! Shining Form!"
Boom—!
The blinding light that erupted from him was like a flashbang going off right in front of everyone's eyes, instantly drowning their vision in a sheet of white agony.
"AAAAH! My eyes!"
"What happened?! I can't see the road!"
"There's a Tiga in front of me! I'm not joking!"
"Buga!"
This "light attack" from the Tiga cosplayer was absurdly powerful. In just a few breaths, Teams 2, 3, and 7 all lost sight of the road in the glare and crashed into the guardrails, flipping out one after another.
Even his own partner, Camearra, who had been beside him throwing items, couldn't keep her eyes open in that blazing light.
At that point, only Mizuno's team and Jei Chou's team, both far enough ahead in the lead, were still relatively unaffected and driving normally up front.
"Hm? What's going on?" While racing, Mizuno suddenly felt like the night sky had become way too bright, so he curiously glanced back.
And just that one glance!
It felt like his eyeballs had caught fire. He was almost blinded by the searing white light on the spot!
"What the hell, why is there a real Tiga now?!" Mizuno quickly looked forward again, freeing one hand to rub at his stinging eyes.
"Don't run!" The Tiga cosplayer stomped on the gas and came charging after Mizuno and Jei Chou, wrapped in a glare too intense to look at directly.