Chapter 179: Might Guy Arrives
Two or three days had passed since his discussion with Yukari about the new members' training — and Ryū had not spent those days idle.
He was well aware by now that he had too many gaps. If an enemy ever identified and exploited those gaps in an actual fight, the person most likely to end up dead was him.
The only solution was to go into the Arena, grind out opponents specifically calibrated to punish those weaknesses, and keep reviving — again and again and again — until the gaps were closed.
Simple. Brutal. Effective.
Die enough times and eventually you stop having that problem.
Whitebeard and Tatsumaki had been running the same programme, spending their days in the Arena and racking up deaths they'd lost count of, all in service of pushing their limits through the revival mechanic. The progress was hard to argue with. The Point drain, less so.
Ryū himself was down to 1,000 Points. Every coin he'd earned from sign-ins over the past few days had gone straight back into revival fees.
"Armament Haki: hardening — Six Powers ultimate: maximum rotation — Six King Pistol!!"
The ground went berserk the moment the words left his mouth.
The solid earth fractured in every direction at once. Cracks spread and kept spreading. A monstrous shockwave erupted outward, catching stones that weighed several hundred kilograms and hurling them ten, twenty, thirty metres into the air. Towering clouds of dust billowed up. The noise was continuous.
For several kilometres in every direction from where Ryū stood, the ground was a patchwork of fissures — large ones, small ones, the shockwaves still rolling outward, the outer edge of the vibration reaching distances nobody had measured.
The target — whatever the Arena had generated — had been reduced to a fine red mist on impact.
The word "VICTORY" appeared in front of him.
Ryū exhaled heavily.
Fifteen deaths this time.
"Still… that's better than the first run. Twenty deaths, four hundred Points in revivals. This time fifteen deaths, three hundred Points. Hmm. Not actually that different."
He checked his injuries — extensive — and spent another 10 Points to restore himself to full condition. Stamina, constitution, everything back to peak in an instant.
He'd tried to game this once, testing whether Arena healing would apply to injuries sustained outside. It didn't. He'd cut a small wound in his arm, entered the Arena, watched the wound vanish — then exited to find it back. The Chat Group was not going to let him exploit that particular angle. Honestly, if an exploit that obvious had existed, it would've been embarrassing for everyone involved.
"Broke again. The emergency reserve is untouchable, so if I don't count that thousand, I'm genuinely sitting at zero Points right now. Truly, thoroughly skint."
He exited the Arena.
The Arena's training grounds dissolved and reassembled into his bedroom in Konoha.
Reconstruction was going well, by the look of things outside. Large stretches of livable housing had been completed, the main roads were mostly repaired, and at this rate the village would be fully restored within six months — possibly less. Assigning shinobi as construction labour tended to have that effect on timelines. The civilian volunteers helping with lighter tasks hadn't hurt either.
I've been in there for a few days, haven't I? Lost track somewhere in the middle. Hard not to — it's nothing but fighting, and every minute you're not fighting you're dying.
He checked the clock on the wall. Mid-afternoon.
He pushed open the window.
Konoha's streets were quiet — mostly children running around, since the heavy work was strictly adult territory and the kids were useless for anything beyond occasionally ferrying snacks.
"Hm? Why isn't Guy helping with the rebuild?"
Something pinged at the edge of his Observation Haki.
Ryū's eyes moved right.
A bowl-cut boy in dark green was running in his direction.
Konoha had no shortage of bowl-cut hairstyles. But bowl-cut plus dark green uniform plus thick eyebrows — there was exactly one person that combination described.
Kakashi wasn't with him, presumably out on an ANBU mission. That checked out.
Why does he look like he's not heading home. Why does he look like he's heading here. Ryū's eye twitched slightly. Please don't let today be another incident.
He wasn't annoyed by Guy, exactly. In a village where he knew almost nobody, Guy was one of the few faces he actually recognised. It was more that every time the bowl-cut showed up at his door, something happened.
True to form.
Guy ran past his own house.
Stopped at Ryū's door.
He'd clearly come from a distance — even with his physical conditioning, he was slightly winded. Three knocks landed on the door.
Then Guy seemed to sense something. He looked up at the second-floor window.
Found Ryū looking down at him with an expression of profound resignation.
Guy didn't register the expression. He broke into a brilliant, sunlit grin, thrust both thumbs up, and called out with visible excitement:
"Ryū-kun, I've done it! I've met the condition you set for me! Without chakra, without any taijutsu technique or trick, I lifted a two-ton weight — and my body came through completely unharmed!"
"You said before that if I met that condition, you'd take me on as your student, right? So does that mean you're my teacher now?!"
Ryū stared down at him.
Did I say that? Did I actually say that?
He dug through his memory.
He had, apparently, said something like that.
The issue was that at the time he had been politely declining. It had been a brush-off. How had Guy interpreted a brush-off as a conditional acceptance and then gone and fulfilled the condition?
Ryū genuinely wasn't sure whether to call this pigheaded singlemindedness, or something else entirely.
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