Chapter 236: Hell's Kitchen — Best Match!
Decade looked at Tony in the Build form and felt the specific mild disappointment of someone who had been hoping for a new card and received a reprint.
"Build," he said. "I've seen Build."
"You're looking at the best Build," Tony said. He was still annoyed about the suit damage. He was channeling the annoyance productively. "There's a difference."
They went back at it.
And the thing was — Tony was right. The fight settled into a rhythm that surprised Tsukasa in a way few things did anymore. Tony's Build wasn't Sento's Build; where Sento's fighting style was intuitive and scrappy, Tony's was analytical in real time, finding structural weaknesses and exploiting them mid-combination, adapting the Fullbottle power output on the fly in ways the original form hadn't been designed to accommodate. He'd reverse-engineered the system and then improved it.
Ethan watched from the side and revised his assessment of how far Tony had come.
After several exchanges, Tsukasa stepped back and regarded Tony with something that had shifted from contempt toward something more like attention.
"Better than the barbecue one," he said.
Tony had no idea who the barbecue one was. He filed it. "I'll take it."
He did not want to take it. He found acknowledgment from a stranger in a magenta suit actively irritating. He also couldn't deny that the statement had pleased him slightly, which was also irritating.
"You're still losing," Tsukasa said.
"I'm not—" Tony stopped. He assessed the situation honestly. "I'm in a slightly suboptimal position."
"You're losing."
Tony took a breath. He reached into the Fullbottle storage.
"Nobody tells me what I can't do," he said, and that was absolutely true, and had caused problems throughout his entire career, and was in this case going to produce something genuinely interesting.
He held up two bottles that he had made himself.
Not acquired. Not delivered by the System. Made. Two custom Fullbottles, designed in his lab over the past month, incorporating local materials and properties that had no equivalent in the original Kamen Rider Build world.
He slotted them.
"HELL—"
"KITCHEN—"
"BEST MATCH!"
The transformation sequence ran differently. The apparatus that appeared around Tony was not the standard experimental setup — it had the specific character of something built in a workshop in New York, rough-edged and functional and deeply personal. The colors were black and white with red hellfire running through the joints, and the helmet had a shape that suggested both a chef's toque and something significantly more threatening.
Ethan's mouth curved.
Tony, you absolute genius.
Kamen Rider Build: Hell's Kitchen form stood in the facility and looked at Tsukasa Kadoya.
His weapons materialized: a cleaver on one side and a cast iron skillet on the other, both wreathed in blue hellfire, both clearly engineered to do more than they appeared to.
Tsukasa stared at the skillet.
Then at the cleaver.
Then at Tony.
"A skillet," he said.
"It has a targeting system," Tony said, and threw it.
The skillet arced wide — obviously too wide, telegraphed badly, exactly the kind of throw that invited a deflection. Tsukasa got the Ride Booker up and knocked it aside without difficulty.
Then the skillet turned.
The tracking engaged mid-flight, the hellfire trail adjusting the trajectory with the precision of something that had been calculating the deflection angle before it was deflected. It came back around and hit Tsukasa squarely from behind while he was still engaged with Tony's cleaver offense.
Tsukasa took the hit.
He stood there for a moment.
Then, very slowly, he started to laugh. Not his usual arch amusement — something more genuine, surprised out of him by a flying pan with a guidance system.
"A targeting system," he said. "On the skillet."
"Everything I make has a targeting system," Tony said. He caught the skillet on the return arc. "Philosophically, I don't understand why anyone would build anything without one."
Ethan straightened off the wall. This was the moment — Tsukasa genuinely amused, Tony holding his own in a form he'd built himself, the dynamic between them shifting toward something that wasn't purely combat.
He walked toward them.
Tsukasa's attention moved before Ethan was close. The way someone's attention moves when they've registered something they've been looking for.
He looked at Ethan.
Not at the face, specifically. At something around him — the System's presence, maybe, or the specific quality of someone who'd been through a Henshin more times than they'd counted.
"You," Tsukasa said. Not a question.
"Me," Ethan said.
A pause.
"You're not Build," Tsukasa said.
"No."
"What are you?"
Ethan considered the question for a moment.
Then he reached for the Lost Driver.
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