Chapter 67: Power Glove, AVGN Approved
The Sky Arena was located in the Republic of Batopia, the same country that housed the Zoldyck family's Kukuroo Mountain. Open to ordinary tourists. Three days by airship from Association headquarters.
Airships were the primary long-haul aircraft in this world, and three days was actually quick.
With Hunter licenses in hand, the three of them had no trouble at all booking first-class private cabins, all inclusive, entirely at no cost. For three young men without much experience of this kind of thing, it was a thorough introduction to what having resources actually felt like.
Ross, for his part, spent all three days doing exactly one thing: playing games.
The two delinquents sat and watched.
Yusuke and Kuwabara came from an island nation with a dense gaming culture. Arcades on every block. Game broadcasts cycling on television constantly. But their actual relationship to games was quite different.
Yusuke dipped into arcade machines occasionally, but the majority of his time outside of fighting was spent in pachinko parlors — cigarette going, hammering machines, running tokens through the cycle, collecting prizes, taking them to the exchange spot down the street. Technically prizes, practically cash. Roundabout gambling, straightforwardly. Not much genuine interest in games as games.
Kuwabara was the opposite in that specific direction. He went to arcades with his crew and had a good time playing beat-em-ups and fighting games, and he had never once touched a pachinko machine in his life, which almost certainly had something to do with his older sister and the specific kind of authority she carried in his life. For him it was entertainment, not a serious pursuit.
Neither of them treated gaming the way Ross did, where it was simply what life outside of work consisted of.
What had been occupying Ross on the airship, though, was something neither of them had seen before. His right hand was wearing a strange glove. The back of the hand and the forearm had additional hardware built into them: directional inputs, attack, jump, pause menu, all integrated into the surface, plus a cluster of additional buttons with other functions. He was running his console with a single gloved hand, and the glove clearly had physical haptic feedback built in.
Anyone with some familiarity with Famicom accessories, or anyone who had watched a certain emotionally-charged game criticism program known for its colorful vocabulary, would have recognized it immediately.
What Ross was wearing was the Power Glove.
A concept that was well ahead of its time, ultimately rendered a punchline by hardware limitations that the technology of the era simply could not support.
Like the custom 1P controller before it, though, this Power Glove was a modernized version. Flip open the hidden panel beside the cartridge slot on the console to reveal the built-in flip-style camera inside, and the camera would pair with the glove for full motion control.
It had not appeared from nowhere. Ross materialized it at Hunter Association headquarters at the cost of a forced 24-hour Zetsu.
He had tried to conjure the 2P controller almost immediately after the initial materialization back in Chapter 1, and gotten nothing. No response at all, for weeks. On the tenth day of the exam, out on Zevil Island waiting out the clock, he had suddenly sensed that it might be possible, like some internal cooldown had quietly completed. But materializing anything on Zevil Island meant entering forced 24-hour Zetsu in the middle of a hunting phase. In a dangerous environment, announcing to everyone in the vicinity that you were currently at your absolute weakest was not a viable strategy.
So he had held off until Hunter Association headquarters, where the environment was as controlled and safe as it was going to get. Which meant that on the day of the orientation lecture, the entertainment that followed, and the evening social — Ross had been in forced Zetsu throughout.
The reason he scrapped the 2P controller plan and went with the Power Glove instead came down to combat experience. Even with one-hand controller technique, having something in your hand that cannot be used as a weapon creates a real practical problem in an actual fight. His win against Kazemaru had relied on surprise and first-mover advantage. His win against Rando had been poison, arena economy, and a generous application of unconventional methods overwhelming a technically superior opponent. What he urgently needed was a way to free both hands for combat, similar in concept to a certain spider's leader who would later develop a method for activating abilities without holding anything at all.
Two options had been available: push for a higher tier of Secret Realm access beyond Intermediate, or conjure the Power Glove. He chose the Power Glove.
The only side effect was that with the Power Glove on his right hand and the Mega Buster already bound to his left, the overall visual read he gave off had a distinctly odd resemblance to the Mega Man western box art.
The three days on the airship were spent almost entirely in Nekketsu New Record, with occasional Sonic 3 as a change of pace. Unlike Sonic, Nekketsu New Record had a meaningful strategic layer and varied enough content across its events that finding the optimal high-rating approach was not immediately obvious.
The full run of Nekketsu New Record covered five events. A player could win first place in all of them. But the overall champion was determined not by event wins but by total medal count.
The system per event: first place, fifteen gold medals; second place, five medals; third place, one medal; fourth place, five silver medals; last place, five bronze medals. Each event also offered a Special Athlete Award worth five gold medals to whoever qualified.
The complication was this: that wastrel Toudou had hidden gold medals all over every venue.
Inside the broken hurdles on the combat track. Suspended in the air above the hammer golf course. On the bottom of the pool. In the gaps between the high-rise buildings. In all four corners of the judo dojo. Toudou had scattered gold medals across the entire facility, apparently for entertainment.
This meant that even a player who finished last in every event could accumulate enough hidden medal pickups to claim the overall championship. Finishing first in everything was one path. Collecting hidden medals was another. They were not mutually exclusive.
After clearing the game normally for an A rating, Ross moved on to a self-imposed restriction run.
By the time the airship was approaching Batopia, he had completed the run under six simultaneous restrictions: Nekketsu High School Team only, Kunio only as the playable character, collect ninety-nine gold medals, ninety-nine silver medals, and ninety-nine bronze medals, first place in all five events, no-damage clears across every event, and zero store purchases throughout.
SSS rating confirmed.
Nekketsu New Record Secret Realm Key: ACQUIRED!