Chapter 28: Extend! Spirit Sword!
Sazza (Examiner) VS Kuwabara Kazuma (Badge 407)
Standard Competition
GET READY...
GO!
The timer started. Neither participant moved. They stood on opposite rooftops, a hundred meters between them, looking at each other.
"Move, Kuwabara! Move!"
In the spectator seats, Yusuke watched Kuwabara stand perfectly still and immediately started shouting.
Kuwabara couldn't hear him. And even if he could, he wouldn't have listened.
For all that his face was considerably less cooperative than Yusuke's, Kuwabara's head worked fine. Not studying was the product of youthful arrogance and the simple absence of a reason to bother — but given a reason, he could absorb material at a pace that would have surprised anyone who had written him off. The same brain that produced zeros on every test could hit sixty in a sprint when it decided something mattered.
He wasn't moving because his sixth sense had been speaking to him since the moment the venue materialized. Persistent, steady, not screaming — but not nothing. The examiner on the mirror building looked like someone who would snap in a strong wind. By any reasonable logic, nothing about him could reach Kuwabara. But the same sense that had steered him through the entire Numere Wetlands without a scratch had never lied to him before. He suspected this examiner had something that could matter at the wrong moment.
The examiner, though, had no good reason to be the first to move. Which meant Kuwabara was the one who had to break the standoff.
He gripped the pole and stepped forward — two deliberate paces — then stepped backward one.
He stepped backward one.
On the other rooftop, the examiner tested a forward step of his own — and froze. He could not retreat. Couldn't turn around either.
Retreat Scroll: Limited passive ability. Active only during the High-Rise Pole Vault event. Price: 2 Copper Medals. The player may walk backward freely on all building routes.
The examiner — whose name was Sazza — registered what he was seeing with a brief tightening of his expression, then let it go.
What the candidates didn't know, and what Lippo had chosen not to correct, was that Sazza wasn't the only one of the five convict-examiners who had been prepared. All five of them had been patched in advance. They had known the full rules and content of all five Nekketsu New Record events before the exam started, and each of them carried an ability enhancement specific to their assigned event.
Their earlier performance — the questions, the protests — had been theater. They were feeling out whether Lippo could be worked for additional benefits.
Lippo had seen through most of it. He had simply used the double reduction offer to communicate the allowable terms: stalling, yes; cheating, no. Stay inside the rules.
That said, Sazza's offense profile was different from Bendot's. He was a fraud convict. He had served a century-plus sentence not for violence but for elaborate deception.
From the very beginning, his plan had been to stay on building one's rooftop and do nothing. The rules allowed for this — it was legitimate delay. The candidate would be the one who needed to make the crossing.
In a standard high-rise pole vault, both competitors ran the same route. If neither moved, the event simply ran on the clock. That suited Sazza perfectly.
The item Kuwabara had purchased had just made that plan unworkable. With no retreat and no ability to turn around, holding his ground on building one's rooftop had become considerably less comfortable.
Kuwabara, on his side, was wrestling with the same dilemma. He could feel the unknown threat from the examiner. He also knew that he was the only one who actually needed to make these jumps.
Fine. Ross said there are trampolines down there.
"You can do this, Kazuma."
He said it quietly, just to himself. Then he started moving.
Pulling up what he had seen of pole vaulting on television, Kuwabara began his run. The speed of the approach, the force of the plant, the nerve it took to clear the gap between two buildings, the acceptance required to commit to a fall from this height — all of it working together.
The pole found the edge of the rooftop. For a brief moment it bent into a taut arc, and then the elastic release fired him upward and outward, and he was in the air.
"OHHHHHHH!"
His mouth did something involuntary and loud. His body, running entirely on instinct, made its adjustments without waiting for instruction. At the moment of landing, his body rolled forward through it — a technique he had seen on television, approximately executed.
When the motion stopped, he was lying on rooftop two, having slid a reasonable distance. Undignified. No significant damage.
He got up before his brain had fully processed what had just happened. Moving on the instinct Ross had given him, he retreated to the edge of building two closest to where he had started and looked back.
Fifty or sixty meters below. About ten meters of horizontal distance.
He had crossed it.
His entire body was shaking — the kind that happened when your body dumped adrenaline into your system whether you wanted it to or not.
Buildings one through six had ten-meter gaps, consistent throughout. Poles and unicycle tightropes were available on each rooftop. None of that was beyond him.
The first genuine difficulty was the transition from building six to building seven.
Thirty meters. No tightrope. No unicycle. Pole only, and the technique had to be clean — the release timing especially.
Kuwabara had five successful vaults behind him now. He was locked in, committed, running toward building six's edge with the same approach — aiming the pole at the drop point, going through with it — when Sazza moved.
The examiner set one end of his pole on the rooftop, gripped the other end, lifted it, and stamped down on the shaft. The pole broke into a long section and a short stub. He grabbed the short broken end.
A burst of Nen rose from him — the kind that could only operate within the current Domain's rules — and the broken stub in Sazza's hand flashed once and reformed into a complete, intact pole.
At the same moment, the complete pole in Kuwabara's grip became a broken stub.
An exchange ability. Poles only. Operational range: whatever the Domain permitted.
Kuwabara was already in motion. His body had no mechanism to abort at this speed, and the broken stub did not vault. He hit the edge of building six wrong, slipped, and went over.
Yusuke's voice said something from the spectator seats.
Kuwabara dropped.
Then the trampoline fired, and Kuwabara came back up.
One of three used.
The problem was the numbers. A trampoline launched him back upward on the combined energy of the fall and the rebound, but height was not horizontal distance. When he came back down from the apex, he had covered roughly fourteen meters.
Thirty meters was the gap. Fourteen meters was where he was. At this rate the full gap would consume all three trampolines and leave him without a safety net for anything that came after.
He knew this. He could see exactly what was happening. His body went down again.
Two of three used.
On the second bounce, he actually tried to swim through the air. It didn't help. He watched the edge of building seven pass him for the third time, still out of reach.
That is the only place. If I could just reach that point.
The want was immediate and absolute, the kind of wanting that bypassed thought entirely. And in the same instant, without deliberate intention, the shape that formed in his mind was the pole — the same shape that had carried him across every gap he had cleared.
Then:
BZZZT.
Kuwabara's palm blazed white.
A long rod of pure Nen energy — a construct of nothing but spirit power given physical form — erupted from his palm, crossed two meters, and drove itself into the rooftop wall of building seven.