Chapter 24: Whirlwind Kick!
Bendot (Scarred Bald Examiner) VS Ross (Badge 406)
Fight to the Finish
GET READY...
Bendot, in track two, dropped into a textbook starting crouch. By comparison, Ross in track one looked thoroughly unprofessional. He hadn't adopted any kind of starting stance, and he was holding something long in his hand that had no obvious business being there.
GO!
Bendot launched off the line at a speed that immediately put him ahead of Ross, who needed a full five seconds to reach his movement ceiling.
This wasn't fear. Bendot had a specific objective: get to the hurdles first and collect a board to use as a weapon within the rules.
As the gap between him and the first white hurdle apparatus closed, he had already committed to a collision rather than anything resembling actual hurdling form. The support legs crumbled on impact. The white board between them stayed intact — and Bendot had it in his hands before it hit the ground. He hit the brakes immediately, planting himself in place and waiting for Ross to come to him.
Competition Rule 1: Once moving, a player cannot voluntarily move backward. Players also cannot leave their assigned track.
Competition Rule 2: Players may use hurdle boards knocked loose from destroyed hurdles to directly attack or throw at their opponent.
With the finish-line rule already stripped out, Bendot had fully committed to treating what should have been a race-and-combat hybrid as pure combat. His intention was straightforward: beat Ross to death with this plank.
Ross, meanwhile, was accelerating steadily, looking for all the world like he hadn't registered the problem in front of him.
The moment Bendot swung the board toward Ross's incoming head, Ross — his left hand gripping the controller with his palm pressed against the d-pad to hold the forward direction — pressed B.
He went airborne with a lightness that didn't match his momentum. But this time there was no tucking, no multi-stage jump, and no elbow strike. Instead, his entire body began rotating clockwise around his own torso, his left leg sweeping outward like the hour hand of a clock held horizontal, turning him into something that looked, briefly, like a spinning top in midair.
In the industry, this had a perfectly standard name that any fighting game player with even a passing amount of experience would know immediately:
Whirlwind Kick.
Bendot's board connected with what had been Ross's head and had now become his rotating leg. The force behind the Whirlwind Kick was on a completely different level than anything the board was built to handle — it exploded into splinters on impact. The same force continued, uninterrupted, directly into Bendot's jaw before his expression had finished deciding whether to show surprise at all.
A build two or three times the size of Ross's went flying two or three meters through the air and hit the ground face-first. The man who had just delivered the kick didn't slow down, didn't look back, and continued running with exactly the same smooth momentum.
Competition Rule 3: Players may use the Whirlwind Kick to attack their opponent and to deflect incoming hurdle board attacks.
Ross did not naturally know the Whirlwind Kick. Bendot, for that matter, didn't either — even as the ability's activator, his understanding of his own Domain had limits, and the deeper rules were beyond him not for lack of time but for lack of the knowledge to even look for them.
What Ross had done was prepare in advance.
Nekketsu New Record — a Famicom game, one of the Nekketsu series. Players select a five-person team and compete against four other teams in five specialized athletic events. Their current group happened to be exactly five people facing exactly five commissioned examiners, which was the main structural reason this particular game had surfaced as the parasitic ability.
Bendot had activated the Domain. But his understanding of it was only surface-level. The preparation area contained four accessible buildings: an inn functioning as an information house, a pharmacy, a general store, and a sports equipment store. The inn sold detailed competition rules in exchange for payment. The currency the shops accepted was gold, silver, and bronze medals at a ratio of one gold to ten silver to one hundred bronze.
Bendot didn't have a single bronze medal. And even if he had been able to pay for information, he couldn't have read it — the cartridge ran in its original Japanese version, and for the overwhelming majority of people in the Hunter world who read the reskinned syllabary and nothing else, Japanese text was simply unreadable.
Ross hadn't started with any medals either. But he had a Ring Set.
He had tried the exchange on the off-chance it would work, and it had worked perfectly: Gold Rings traded at one-to-one with Gold Medals. The shop had returned change in Silver Rings, which were functioning here as Silver Medals.
Total expenditure: two Gold Rings and five Silver Rings, spent at the sports equipment store on two items. Item one, priced at two Gold Medals, was named Auto Whirlwind.
Auto Whirlwind: Limited passive ability. Active only during the 400-Meter Combat Hurdles event. Price: 2 Gold Medals. When the player jumps, the Whirlwind Kick is automatically executed.
The item's effect had supplied the technique. The attack that hit Bendot had been real.
In the instant Ross's kick landed, the NPC spectators filling the stands — closer in this world to humanoid Nen constructs than to actual people — erupted into genuine noise, responding without hesitation to the quality of the hit.
"That was... something."
Kuwabara watched Ross's figure shrinking into the distance with an expression that was struggling to stay composed.
"Why isn't he stopping to finish him off? There's no finish line, right?"
Yusuke's question had the particular energy of someone whose first instinct was always the direct approach.
At the same time, Lippo had lost the battle against his own reaction and was openly laughing.
"Warden..."
One of the prison staff — pulled into the spectator seats the same way everyone else had been — looked at his superior with visible unease.
"Are none of you seeing it yet?" Lippo said, once he had finished.
"Badge 406 knows this Domain's rules better than Bendot does. That's now confirmed. And beyond that—"
He paused, then stated it with complete certainty.
"Unless I'm wrong, he's planning to use the rules themselves to finish Bendot off."
Barely a beat after those words, Bendot — still sprawled on the track, mind not fully back yet, now trailing Ross by roughly eight and a half meters — felt something grab him.
What came next was a pain so severe and so immediate that it hauled him out of his daze entirely, and then his entire body was seized by a force operating on a completely different level than anything physical — ripped off the ground and hurled forward along the track.
Competition Rule 4: When a player falls more than 8.5 meters behind the leading player, they are forcibly returned to the adjacent position behind the leader. This forced movement inflicts 5% HP loss.
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