REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!Chapter 78: Receive! Redirect! Release!
The Spirit Gun was Yusuke's sole killing technique at this stage. But it was a powerful one, self-taught, its force unconsciously amplified by an internal vow of no more than two shots per day. ( seems like the OG author changed it to 2? cuz earlier in the story it was 4...)
An energy ball half the size of a person flew directly at Gido.
Several small tops tried to intercept with their bodies. They were either sent flying or destroyed. The Spirit Gun barely lost any momentum.
After taking several hits and losing five points total, Yusuke finally noticed something about Gido: unlike the surrounding tops, which moved freely through the air, Gido himself was completely stationary while spinning.
In other words, he was a giant fixed target.
Yusuke gave him the first shot directly.
What happened next exceeded his expectations.
The Spirit Gun connected with the high-speed spinning Gido solidly. But Gido, sensing the threat, immediately activated Ren and pushed out an overflow of manifest aura, converting what had been simple rotational kinetic energy into a massive Nen-powered top. That meant when the Spirit Gun made contact, it couldn't break through the defense in that first instant. Instead, just like Yusuke's opening punch, the spinning force deflected it sideways.
"What!?"
Yusuke, who had no particular interest in physics, stared in complete shock.
The deflected Spirit Gun, with almost no loss of kinetic energy, went screaming toward the spectator seats.
The Sky Arena had no protective barriers. For many spectators watching floor-200 matches in person, buying a seat implicitly accepted the risk of accidents during the match.
[bloodthirsty spectator crowd.jpg]
Whether by design or by some convenient variety of accident, the deflected Spirit Gun was heading directly for where Ross, Kurama, and Kuwabara were sitting.
Faced with an indiscriminate Spirit Gun, all three's Nen burst out simultaneously.
But Ross concentrated more aura into both arms, and the Power Glove materialized on his right arm.
In that moment, in Ross's talent system, the Enhancement type compatibility column shifted from sixty percent to one hundred.
Ross brought both arms together and performed a textbook catching stance.
In fact, Kunio was an all-rounder across sports, but the first sport he ever mastered was dodgeball: a game of catching, redirecting, and striking opponents with the ball. His specialty was precisely this. Receive. Redirect. Release.
Ross was still self-taught, but he had a solid theoretical foundation, and some advanced techniques he had been working out on his own.
The high surge of aura concentrated in both his arms right now was Ken: the advanced Nen technique formed by layering Ten and Ren together and wrapping more aura around the body. Defense far stronger than Ten alone, and far more costly.
Ross's transition into it wasn't perfectly smooth yet. It was enough.
Leaning back slightly, at the instant the Spirit Gun was about to connect, he slammed both joined fists upward in a sharp sweeping arc from below.
His Ken-wrapped forearms struck the Spirit Gun hard.
The next second, the Spirit Gun was forcibly redirected for the second time, shooting diagonally upward and blowing through the ceiling.
Boom.
A hole opened. Spectators screamed and scattered.
At the same time, having used the dodgeball catching technique to disperse the force on himself while redirecting the Spirit Gun, Ross had half his body embedded in the tiered spectator seating. Temporarily unable to extract himself.
Couldn't be helped. On flat ground he could have absorbed the full force cleanly. But tiered seating was not flat ground. Nothing to be done.
...This was Yusuke without a master, with nothing but raw power and zero technique. If he actually got a proper teacher, what then?
That senior disciple role. He was claiming it.
This was the genuine inner voice of Ross, being excavated from the hole by both Kuwabara and Kurama simultaneously.
The ringside referee, seeing Yusuke frozen at a standstill outside the ring, immediately issued a countdown warning.
Yusuke paid it no attention. He watched until the dust settled, confirmed all three were unhurt, confirmed that Ross, freshly dug out of the wreckage, still had enough left to flip him off, and then exhaled.
In fact, the moment Yusuke saw his Spirit Gun heading for Ross's group, his heart lurched. Without hesitation he leapt off the ring and sprinted to intercept. Then he saw Ross deflect it.
"That guy..."
Yusuke muttered, but the corners of his mouth were going up. If the situation had been different, he would genuinely have wanted to fight Ross.
"Five! Four!"
"Tch."
Yusuke pulled his attention back, heard the countdown, and turned to look at the ring.
Two things caught his attention. First: the small tops had not followed him off the ring to keep attacking. Second: Gido, while spinning, appeared to be completely stationary in place.
With a light jump, Yusuke returned to the ring. The referee stopped the countdown.
Gido was in a cold sweat. He had tried to figure out what type of Nen user Yusuke was, but had genuinely not expected him to produce an Emission-type energy ball at that power level.
If his Tornado Tops hadn't happened to carry a counter-advantage against ranged energy blasts, and if the blast's power had exceeded his defensive ceiling, that shot wouldn't have been deflected. It would have sent him flying off the ring entirely.
"Hmph! Too bad! Your energy ball can't break through my Tornado defense!"
Having spent extra Nen to block the Spirit Gun and noticeably reduced his remaining runtime in doing so, Gido chose to keep applying verbal pressure while preparing to reinject Nen commands into the scattered tops.
But then he noticed: Yusuke's right index finger was gathering Nen again.
Gido wasn't alarmed. From his perspective, Yusuke was just stubbornly trying the same approach again, and in terms of Nen expenditure, Gido's costs were clearly far lower.
Yusuke raised his hand, seemingly repeating the same motion as before.
"Oh. Looks like he's noticed something."
Kurama, standing in the aisle, had a faint light come into his eyes.
"His combat instincts are first-rate."
"Yeah."
Ross nodded.
"What? What are you two talking about? What did he notice? Notice what?"
Only Kuwabara was entirely lost, looking between them like they were speaking in code.
Just before the Spirit Gun fired, Yusuke's arm angled down by a fraction.
Bang.
The Spirit Gun fired again. Under Gido's watch, its trajectory curved sharply downward.
The smile under Gido's mask vanished. There was no time to run.
The Spirit Gun hit precisely at the pivot point of the Tornado Tops: the connection between the prosthetic that Gido used to spin himself like a top and the arena floor.
The pivot point, reinforced by Nen, did not break on first impact. The floor could not absorb Yusuke's last Spirit Gun of the day.
Gido and his prosthetic were sent flying.
Briefly airborne, he crashed straight back down to the arena floor and landed like a turtle flipped on its back, unable to right himself.
"Finally got you!"
Dazed and rattled, Gido heard a sound that hit somewhere he didn't like, and what was growing steadily larger in his field of vision was Yusuke's enormous fist.
"It's over."
Ross said.
***
30+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces