Chapter 32: The Fist of Fury and the Cartridge Recovery
Yusuke hadn't been through Genkai's training yet. His Nen application was rough in every direction — calling it wild would not be an overstatement. But underneath that roughness, his physical conditioning, neural response speed, and combat instincts were all exceptional. Through nothing but self-taught exploration, he had independently worked out Ten, Ren, and Hatsu from the four foundational techniques, and his proficiency with them was notably high.
The fact that Johness had survived that opening punch at all was evidence that he had also broken through ordinary human limits, developed basic Nen, and managed a defensive response in time. If his defense in that moment was worth ten points, Yusuke's attack had been worth at least fifty. Defense or not, there was no outcome other than the one that happened.
Everything after the jaw strike was effectively settled.
What Ross was actually concerned about was not Yusuke's ability to finish this. It was the live explosive standing next to him.
Hisoka had a playing card pressed over his mouth. The sounds coming from his throat — unmistakable, layered with a particular quality — and the way his tongue was occasionally sliding against the edge of the card to deal with something, made the direction things were heading visible to anyone paying attention.
"Not yet... not yet... too early... still too early..."
Barely audible. The kind of tone someone uses when they are doing the active work of talking themselves back from an edge.
Illumi's response to watching a well-known behavioral pattern play out was a sequence of clicking that communicated, as clearly as clicking could communicate anything, complete exasperation.
Kuwabara had his eyes entirely on Yusuke and was not watching the psychos.
One punch. Two punches. By the time Johness's last trace of HP reached zero, the body was no longer recognizable as a person. Uniform impact marks distributed across the entire surface, bones and muscle probably fused together in places. The end result resembled a hand-pounded beef meatball, assuming someone had done the pounding by hand, on a very dedicated schedule, for several consecutive minutes.
Ross had watched every movement Yusuke made throughout this. Not once, from the moment the match started to the moment Johness stopped moving, had there been any visible hesitation. Only the resolve of someone who had decided from the beginning that this was going to end in exactly one way.
Yusuke spat on the corpse.
"Go suffer in hell."
As curses went, it sounded ordinary to everyone in earshot. To Ross, knowing what he knew about the YYH universe, the specific phrasing carried a second layer. If hell as an actual destination genuinely existed in this world's framework, the implications for how this world was structured were more interesting than he had been treating them.
Winner: Yusuke!
The moment Yusuke and what had previously been Johness were transported back to the platform, all five event sections of the floating disk went dark simultaneously. The Advanced Challenge Vow counter had reached 5/5.
The disk began to glow. It shrank. The light consolidated, and when it was done, a palm-sized game cartridge sat in the space where the disk had been, yellow-shelled and immediate.
When Ross saw that particular yellow, something settled into place. That shade of yellow was not from the original Japanese release. It was the exact yellow of the standard bootleg cartridge shell from back in the day — the retro look he had prepared in advance as his intended shell style for the Famicom-spec library. The man who had hand-built his own console into a Little Tyrant knockoff clearly had specific requirements when it came to nostalgic presentation.
The cartridge came to his hand on its own, without him reaching for it.
You have successfully recovered a complete game cartridge and Little Tyrant Nen tool: Nekketsu New Record / Competition Roulette.
Your game cartridge collection +1. Your spare cartridge slot +1. Current cartridge collection status: 2/2.
Competition Roulette: Little Tyrant exclusive Nen tool and cartridge, active use. When the player runs this cartridge without connecting a video output device, the dual-form cartridge automatically switches to Nen tool mode.
In Nen tool mode, the cartridge transforms into the Competition Roulette and projects it into reality, randomly selecting one event from: 400-Meter Combat Hurdles, Hammer Golf, Swimming Combat King, High-Rise Pole Vault, or All-Style Judo.
Once per day, the player may designate any one opponent and forcibly transport both the player and the designated opponent to the Tōdō Group General Arena for a fair competition. Time allocation: one minute of pre-match preparation, three minutes of match time. The player may use the controller to activate Real Mode during the competition. Aura consumption during Competition Roulette follows the same rules as Entertainment Mode.
Further effects will unlock as Entertainment Mode and Secret Realm Mode clearances are achieved.
Rules-based duel format. Applications included isolating a priority target from a larger engagement, or buying time. Ross had the practical scenarios sketched out before he finished reading.
The random event selection was an uncontrollable variable, which meant he could not guarantee a non-lethal pure-competition event in every use. Future unlock progression would presumably address this. The overall trajectory was promising.
He mimicked the particular motion Hisoka used with his cards, and the yellow cartridge vanished between his fingers.
"Recovery complete."
He turned toward the surveillance camera and gave it a clear OK.
Lippo had a list of questions. What the parasitic Nen tool actually was, why it had been present in his prison, why a candidate knew it well enough to recover it. He chose to hold all of them. Everything had been recorded. The report would be written immediately. The Association could form its own assessment.
What he was now genuinely considering was whether to submit a formal request for special protective measures for Ross in the fourth phase. Even for Nen users, the fourth phase came with real mortality risk for anyone who made a single careless mistake. Watching something this unusual and specifically capable die in an exam would be a genuine waste.
"Congratulations. You have all officially passed this test."
"That said, this is only the beginning of the Majority Rules path. You have many more decisions ahead of you."
He watched the five of them disappear into the corridor.
His attention shifted to the two surviving convicts.
The psychologist with her resolve in pieces could wait. The fraud convict who had broken his pole in there had demonstrated genuine Nen ability in the middle of a monitored competition. Once a prisoner developed Nen, the ordinary rules for handling ordinary prisoners stopped being applicable, and the situation required a different category of thinking entirely.