REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!Chapter 88: The Stat Cap for 8-Bit Consoles Is 255
[Magic Backpack: Grade C, Lv-, Passive. Gilgamesh possesses a special magic backpack capable of holding up to 10 different types of magical implements simultaneously.
Current magical implements held: Gold Pickaxe, Key Detection Tome, Hero's Shield, Golden Helmet, Golden Armor, Hero's Sword, Dragon-Slaying Spear, Sapphire Ring, Sapphire Necklace, Sapphire Staff.
When outside a Tower of Druaga Secret Realm stage, you may only draw and use 1 magical implement from the backpack at a time.]
Tower of Druaga's protagonist is Gilgamesh. Most people these days, on hearing the name "Gilgamesh," have their first impression shaped by a certain golden figure who stands on street lamps shouting "mongrel" at people and throws Noble Phantasms around like they cost nothing. But in a strictly theoretical sense, Tower of Druaga's Gilgamesh and that one are basically parallel-dimension counterparts of each other.
His in-game characteristic of collecting and carrying large quantities of treasure has been distilled into the Magic Backpack ability, specifically a simplified version based on the PC Engine port of the game.
The ability is rated Grade C and cannot be leveled through experience grinding, since it only works with items from the original game and has only 10 item slots. But for Ross, this was already more than enough. The Magic Backpack's real value was that it drastically simplified the conditions for bringing the game's more absurdly powerful magical items out into reality.
All Ross needed to do was obtain each floor's treasure through the game's built-in hidden methods while inside the Secret Realm, load them into the backpack, and they became usable directly in the real world.
The Gold Pickaxe currently in his hand was the highest-grade pickaxe in the game's system.
The Iron Pickaxe, available on the very first floor, broke after two uses. The Gold Pickaxe, the highest tier available, however...
[Gold Pickaxe: Grade A Nen tool, Pickaxe type. From Tower of Druaga. The highest-grade pickaxe. Extremely powerful destructive effect against "Wall" unit types. Capable of excavating any rock wall surface with ease. Has no effect against other wall types or non-Wall units.
Daily use limit: 255 uses, or 255 meters of linear excavation. Durability resets at midnight each day. Exceeding the limit causes immediate breakage.]
255 uses or 255 meters. Exactly 122.5 times the Iron Pickaxe's use count.
The limit was itself a product of the 8-bit processor architecture. Once the binary value "11111111," which is 255, was exceeded, data overflow occurred. Without that constraint, the Gold Pickaxe's maximum would theoretically be able to climb even higher.
But for the Gate of Betrayal's single-corridor design, this was completely sufficient.
Under the baffled stares of everyone present, Ross swung the Gold Pickaxe and drove it hard into the solid wall on the left side of the passage.
In an instant, the wall vanished, as though it had simply developed a glitch. A substantial chunk of it was simply gone.
If someone had taken measurements right then, they would have found a perfect two-by-two-by-two-meter cubic void.
"...Is this real?"
Kuwabara rubbed his eyes. When the static cleared, what he saw was Ross swinging the pickaxe in continuous arcs, excavating a private side tunnel through solid stone with less effort than cutting tofu.
"That's incredible."
Yusuke, who had never once accepted being outclassed by Ross in combat, could only watch with uncomplicated admiration at something this obviously requiring a particular skillset he didn't have.
"A Nen tool specifically developed for excavation? Is he a Hunter who specializes in ruins digging?"
Hiei, who had already heard from Kurama that Ross had passed the Hunter Exam, was puzzling over this. The Gold Pickaxe's actual wall-breaking performance had clearly gone past the level you'd see from a "hobby" development and into something that required deep, dedicated specialization.
The thing was: a Nen user's talent had a ceiling, more accurately described as a memory capacity.
If Ross's total Nen ability memory capacity was ten points, then developing an Iron Pickaxe Nen tool that could be used only twice per day would probably cost about one point, leaving Ross with the remaining capacity to operate other abilities alongside it.
But if what he had developed instead was something that could punch through a fortified wall at this efficiency, that would likely consume all ten points, which would mean that using the Gold Pickaxe at all would lock out every other ability he had.
Hiei had, reasonably enough, made that assumption. The wall-breaking performance was just that overwhelming.
His private concern was that Hiei himself had paid a permanent price for exactly that kind of situation: having a foreign enhancement organ implanted that exceeded his own memory capacity limit, resulting in a permanent reduction in both his ceiling and his physical constitution. The drop from his peak combat capability was enormous.
As for Kurama: he had already guessed that Ross had obtained this powerful implement through one of those strange cartridges of his, the ones that led to Secret Realm stages. He had been briefly curious about what Ross had paid for it. But after spending enough time around him and recognizing that Ross's attitude toward games was obsessive even by gaming enthusiast standards, he had found a kind of peace with it.
That particular brand of conviction, the genuine belief that the real world could contain the contents of electronic games, was probably the core reason Ross was able to bring game items into reality at all.
Meanwhile, at the far end of the Gate of Betrayal's official tunnel, a one-eyed winged demon had started scratching its head with a tentacle.
Having received advance warning that intruders were approaching, it had been waiting in position at the Gate of Betrayal long before they arrived. Its task was simple: the moment those idiot invaders wandered into the middle section of the tunnel, it would activate the mechanism.
The Gate of Betrayal could calibrate its pressure distribution based on the number of invaders, scaling precisely to the point where everyone inside was straining at maximum capacity just to keep the ceiling from descending further. The moment any one of them gave out, the result would be...
Splat. Every last one of them, pressed into paste.
Unless one person was fast enough. Then they could escape at the cost of everyone else's death, letting the trap select its traitor naturally. That was the Gate of Betrayal's real design philosophy.
The demon had been waiting. And waiting. Not a single person came through.
Instead, it began to hear a faint but strange sound.
It followed the sound, pressing close to the wall with its ear against the stone.
And then the wall broke. A golden pickaxe punched through the rock with precise aim and went directly through its round body.
"Hm."
Ross looked at the twitching, dripping corpse hanging off the end of his pickaxe and made a face.
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