REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!Chapter 54: Behold the Power of a Pay-to-Win Warrior!
The dojo was spacious, well-lit, and trimmed with an elegant dry rock garden that gave the whole space an air of genuine refinement.
You could call Toudou a scoundrel, but you could not question his taste or his money. This was a man who once decided, because a particular ramen shop was good, to simply buy the restaurant outright and eat there whenever he liked. The money was nothing to him.
Into this grand, impeccably appointed space, two competitors had been dropped, about to spend three minutes trying to kill each other with no exit available.
Rando, one hand pressed to his chest, still feeling the residual poison, hit the dojo floor and immediately pushed off into the air. Then the demon aura around him shifted.
The aura leaking from his body rapidly mixed with the surrounding air, beginning to suppress it and create small pockets of near-vacuum. One by one, invisible to the naked eye, kamaitachi filled the space around him, until even Rando himself was suspended off the ground.
"Slash Wind Formation!"
He deployed his omnidirectional attack-and-defense formation the instant the match began. In judo terms, this put him in a position approaching invulnerability. As long as the formation held, Ross could not close the distance, let alone reach Rando directly.
Rando registered that the poison was no longer spreading and that rest would gradually reverse it. What he could not process was what Ross had bought during those frantic trips through the shops. He had watched the young man buying things in store after store and had no idea what any of it was.
So his original plan of killing Ross as fast as possible had been quietly revised. The current goal was simply: endure three minutes.
Against a Rando who could not be reached by any conventional means, Ross, still on the ground, cheerfully settled into a wide horse stance and pulled both hands back to his waist.
Through a demon's sensitivity to human life energy, Rando registered it immediately: aura was gathering fast in Ross's palms, behavior that matched precisely with what Badge 408 had done with his fingertip earlier.
The moment that registered, Rando let out a sharp shout. Three kamaitachi blades split from the formation surrounding him and flew down directly at Ross.
The demon aura coating them made the blades just barely visible as physical phenomena.
Ross was already pushing both palms forward from his waist.
"HADOUKEN!!!!!"
He announced it with the enthusiasm of someone playing an unbeatable hand. Calling the technique name was technically irrelevant to whether it worked, but in the Hunter world, that kind of fighting spirit actually did convert to some degree into manifested aura output.
The next second, a Nen blast no smaller than Rando's copied Spirit Gun erupted from his palms and flew straight into the three descending kamaitachi blades.
The two forces met in mid-air. They held for about one second before the blades shattered completely. The Hadouken, noticeably smaller now, continued toward Rando, shrinking further with each collision against the kamaitachi spread throughout the formation, until it vanished entirely.
The Hadouken had been neutralized.
Rando was already sweating down the back. He was about to laugh to settle his own nerves when he saw Ross assume the exact same stance again.
"Where are you getting all this aura?!"
Ross grinned. He did not explain.
[All-Style Judo Rule 1: Inside the dojo, both competing participants receive a continuous aura recovery effect. Recovery rate: approximately 1 unit per second.]
Rule 1 gave both fighters the same baseline. But right now, Ross's aura was refilling at a rate that bordered on surreal, while Rando was not only not recovering but still losing ground.
[All-Style Judo Rule 2: Actions such as attacking, jumping, and being knocked down will suspend aura recovery.]
Rando had cleverly suspended himself in mid-air to deny Ross any approach. The consequence was that this registered as a continuous jump state, cutting him off from the dojo's recovery effect entirely.
Even if both had been standing on the ground, Rando's recovery rate would have been nowhere near Ross's.
[Aura Rapid Replenishment Supplement: Limited item, effective in All-Style Judo only. Price: 15 Gold Badges (Gold Rings).
Your aura recovery speed doubles.]
Watching Ross's nearly empty aura refill as if from nowhere, Rando moved to cut it off before the next charge. Three more blades shifted from behind him to the front and fired.
Ross threw himself into a sideways roll, body moving like a ball. Anyone watching with Gyo would have seen a circular aura sawblade form around him, shaped almost identically to a kamaitachi.
[Rolling Tackle: Limited item, effective in All-Style Judo only. Price: 2 Gold Badges (Gold Rings).
Your shoulder charge is replaced with a rolling tackle. (Controller: forward, forward, attack)
Technique Crossover: Nekketsu New Record x Sonic
Your rolling tackle can charge in place and, on hitting a target, adds one Sonic Impact judgment.]
Ross transitioned smoothly from the roll back to standing, both hands returning to his waist. The pressure on Rando was considerable.
The Hadouken-style charging stance was pure personal preference and could be cancelled at any moment.
[Hadouken: Limited item, effective in All-Style Judo only. Price: 15 Gold Badges (Gold Rings).
When your aura reaches maximum, consume all aura and fire a Hadouken. The higher your maximum aura, the more powerful the Hadouken. (Controller: press attack when at full aura)]
The release condition had nothing to do with the hand position. As long as aura was full, any basic punch would fire it. Ross's imitation of the Hadouken-style karate stance was purely personal preference, but it had worked: Rando, already compromised by the poison and the mounting pressure, had let his focus slip.
The reason the blast had been so large in the first place was simply that it consumed all ten of Ross's aura units in one shot, with the flat +20 attack bonus from the brass knuckles on top of that.
Combined with the supplement's doubled recovery rate of two units per second, the numbers were completely one-sided. Rando had no viable option for a sustained long-range exchange.
"Rando, do any of your ninety-nine techniques actually cover a situation like this?"
Pay-to-win warrior Ross has deployed Psychological Strike.
Rando's blood pressure spiked. The wound on his chest began to bleed through.