Chapter 72: The Ultimate Gaming Setup; A Gaming Partner
Kurama was exceptional. Not in one specific direction but across the board, in a comprehensive, three-dimensional way.
The beautiful, polished student appearance was the surface. Underneath it, he was genuinely skilled at nearly everything, including gaming, and was a regular at arcades. Unlike Yusuke and Kuwabara, who played casually without any particular drive to get good, Kurama was the type whose inherent excellence meant he reached mastery-level depth in things he had never even specifically set out to study.
Video games were one of them.
So he was quite certain: neither the strange console Ross had produced from nowhere nor the game footage showing on the television existed anywhere on the market. This was an unreleased personal game of some kind.
The current flagship in the Hunter world was the JoyStation 3, and the latest-generation machine had already been out long enough to be considered an established piece of hardware. By comparison, the game Ross was running was visibly sixteen-bit level. Old in terms of technical generation.
But the gameplay concepts that a sixteen-bit game was demonstrating were fresh and genuinely impressive.
When Ross, running the demonstration, guided Sonic through the defeat of the Dive Blimp and cleared Zone 1, only for the content to simply stop because there was nothing beyond it yet, the perfectionist that Kurama fundamentally was experienced a small but genuine discomfort.
"Try it."
Ross extended the controller with obvious enthusiasm.
"I'll take you up on that."
Kurama accepted it. He took a breath.
His professional instincts, the ones that had served him through a career as a thief in the Demon World, told him this game had something unusual going on inside it. But he had already accepted it, and Ross had already demonstrated it for him. At this point there was nothing to do but proceed.
What followed was a clear illustration that the difference between people could exceed the difference between species. The simplest summary: Kurama's gaming intelligence was extraordinary.
Ross had demonstrated the level exactly once. Kurama had the full sequence memorized by the time the demonstration ended.
His coordination and reaction time were at the near-ceiling level. First run: just over nine points. On Ross's enthusiastic recommendation, he ran it again, and the second run produced an S-rank completion. The efficiency with which he had arrived at S-rank was considerably faster than the time it had taken Killua to reach the same result.
"A genuinely good game. The shame is that it's unfinished."
The regret in Kurama's voice was sincere. Not being able to see something through to its proper end was a real frustration for him.
That said, Kurama also knew something about himself. He picked things up fast, mastered them fast, and once a thing stopped producing new stimulation, his interest in it moved on just as quickly.
Then he watched Ross reach into his pocket and produce a strange glove for the right hand.
"Kurama, this is where it actually gets interesting."
Ross talked while setting things up. He swapped the 1P controller's plug into the 2P port, ran the Power Glove's connection cable into the 1P port, and flipped open the built-in camera on the console.
"Is that the motion-control concept controller that's still at the concept stage?"
True to his nature as something like the original template Kurapika had later been drawn from, Kurama had his own encyclopedic range of knowledge and had identified what the Power Glove was immediately.
"That's right, it's a motion controller. But the important part isn't the motion control."
Ross raised an eyebrow with an air of mild satisfaction and gestured for Kurama to pick up the regular controller.
"Are you ready to actually enter the game?"
"...Yes. Whenever you are."
Kurama nodded with calm composure. He had, in fact, been forming his own suspicions from the moment he first held the controller. His analysis had arrived at the following: Ross's console was clearly not ordinary. The gameplay process was almost certainly a precondition or screening mechanism for some underlying ability, and the letter-grade rating system was probably the manifestation of that mechanism's criteria.
That conclusion had, interestingly, resolved his earlier suspicion that the ability might be a trap. A screening mechanism that worked like this was clearly positive-reinforcement in design: you had to engage with it voluntarily, perform well enough to be recognized, and cross a threshold to receive anything from it. That structure pointed toward "invitation to earn something worthwhile," not exploitation.
"Transport!"
At Ross's command, two people, holding a Power Glove and a 1P-to-2P controller respectively, vanished from the room.
[Detected: successful conjuration of new Little Tyrant console accessory - Power Glove.]
[Detected: another Nen user with a Sonic the Hedgehog 3 S-rank or above completion is present.]
[Secret Realm transport permission upgraded. You may now transport a maximum of two people, including yourself, simultaneously into a Secret Realm zone. Only those physically holding a controller or the Power Glove, and who have independently achieved an S-rank or above rating on the corresponding cartridge, may satisfy the Secret Realm transport condition.
A Nen user transported into a Secret Realm zone by this method will default to ally unit status. They will receive certain special bonuses while being subject to the zone's basic rules.
Your permission level is always: Secret Realm Access. Your teammate's permission level is always: Guest Access.]
[Detected: player has transported a teammate and activated Secret Realm Mode, entering the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Secret Realm zone together. The Secret Realm has automatically created a new two-player save file. Save file character assignment: Sonic + Tails.]
[Enjoy your game!]
Angel Island. The familiar lush subtropical jungle, dense and green in every direction, unchanged from before. Except this time, there was another person standing in it.
The richness of the vegetation hit Kurama before he had even finished taking in his surroundings. It reached him as a quality in the air: dense, complex, and clean in a way that felt untouched by anything external.
Then his eyes registered the expanse of green around him.
"This is Angel Island. A Secret Realm zone, classified under the Ancient Ruins branch, and a physical realization of the environment you were playing through."
Ross patted Kurama's shoulder with a degree of barely-contained showing-off.
"It really is a remarkable place."
Kurama drew in a long, slow breath and let it out. Being surrounded by vegetation of this quality was genuinely affecting.
In practice, his primary combat method was the use and manipulation of plant life. A single ordinary rose, infused with his Nen, could be transformed into a whip capable of splitting steel. What this meant was that if the plant material itself was of higher quality, the same expenditure of Nen would produce a result proportionally better in quality and effect.
The environment here was extraordinary on that scale.
But what Kurama was actually more focused on in this moment was something that had appeared on him from out of nowhere.
[Your teammate "Yoko Kurama / Shuichi Minamino" is currently mapped to the ability template: Tails.]
[While "Yoko Kurama / Shuichi Minamino" is inside the current Secret Realm zone, the following temporary abilities are always active:
"Fox Double Spin (Grade D)" "I'll Be Back (Grade C)"]