Chapter 46: No Stand? ORA ORA ORA Anyway!
Yusuke hadn't found his assigned target, Badge 23 Kibano -- but someone who had almost certainly drawn him had already locked on.
He didn't have Kuwabara's instincts, which were practically a system exploit, but Yusuke's sensitivity to killing intent was sharp.
"Hey! You in the grass! Get out here!"
The moment he caught that thread of hostile intent aimed at him, Yusuke stopped wandering and issued a direct invitation.
After roughly five seconds, the grass -- standing about half a person's height -- parted.
Yusuke's gaze settled and went flat the instant he saw who it was.
Small and slim overall, a strand of Buddhist prayer beads at the throat, a slightly bashful expression, and an appearance that read as anything but threatening. A young monk, looking faintly awkward, walked out from the grass.
"Caught me, huh?"
A self-deprecating chuckle. Two notes of affected embarrassment.
Yusuke didn't return the light tone. Every muscle in his body had pulled tight, and he was watching every movement the young monk made with an expression that had gone completely flat.
The performer's shyness and awkwardness faded without ceremony, replaced by something that made no effort to hide itself.
"You... seem to know who I am."
Badge 66, Shaolin, said this to Yusuke with an air of relative certainty.
"Figured it was you. Rando."
Yusuke was blunt. In moments like this he didn't suppress anything, or didn't think to.
The air thickened.
"...Interesting. This skin I'm wearing was custom-made right before the exam. And my actual face -- the ninety-nine people who knew that face are all dead because of me."
Unexpectedly, the Shaolin who in the original story had maintained some degree of pretense just dropped it here and confirmed everything outright, including a piece of personal information that made things significantly worse.
"What--"
Yusuke froze for an instant, then the rage surfaced without any way to hold it back.
Rando kept talking, casually, as if Urameshi Yusuke's presence hadn't fully registered as a threat.
"So how do you know me? Some kind of intelligence-type ability user...
No, you don't look like someone who needs much thinking to use their ability."
Rando reconsidered his own guess, shook his head, and looked back at Yusuke, whose fury and fighting intent were both still climbing.
"Since you know who I am, I can't exactly let you walk away. I just hope you're capable enough to become the hundredth technique I--"
Bang.
A familiar angle. A familiar fist. A body launched upward from the spot it had been standing in.
Yusuke's fist embedded itself in the left side of Rando's jaw. It physically interrupted the sentence and sent him airborne simultaneously.
Enhancement-type explosive force was not something to test at close range. Provoking Yusuke from arm's reach was always going to end one way.
Yusuke had never put much space between his patience and his fists, something Kuwabara could speak to with more authority than anyone. Since their first year of middle school, Kuwabara had lost count of how many of Yusuke's punches he had personally absorbed. Whatever else could be said about the experience, it had built his impact resistance to a level that was, in some meaningful way, part of the foundation that eventually led to his Nen awakening.
The disguised Rando -- wearing a temporary human form clearly calibrated to reduce his physical values for concealment purposes -- didn't react in time.
But the moment the punch landed, Yusuke knew something was off.
Compared to hitting Johness during the judo match, this punch had achieved the same airborne result but with a completely different feedback. Like hitting an old tire. The force had been absorbed and dispersed in a way that wasn't right.
That specific, wrong-feeling feedback triggered a very specific piece of stored memory.
On the ship crossing to Zevil Island, Ross had confirmed their respective hunting targets with him and Kuwabara, and then -- with the same methodical, nothing-left-out briefing style that was distinctly Ross -- had gone through every one of their targets' abilities in full detail.
Yusuke had let most of the Musashi section slide off him. Not his target. But for Kibano, and for the entity who was almost certainly the demon Rando hiding inside Shaolin, Yusuke had forced himself to actually retain it.
This wasn't like the material at school that didn't matter whether you knew it or not. This was genuinely life and death. Yusuke had no interest in dying again.
The memory of Ross's face, voice, and that organized, piece-by-piece delivery of his surfaced in full.
"I guarantee: nobody knows Rando better than I do.
This Rando has a powerful imitation ability. He kills people and tries to steal their signature techniques, copying them for his own use. He's reportedly learned ninety-nine different techniques at this point -- accurate or self-promotion, I can't say for certain.
As far as I know, the techniques he currently has are: Fire Palm Fist -- Transmutation plus Emission, fires a fireball; charge time is very slow, far slower than a Spirit Gun; try a close-range rush attack when you see him charging, and a direct beam-to-beam clash theoretically doesn't lose.
Slash Wind Formation -- Transmutation type, converts aura into invisible slashing wind blades that fill the surrounding area; stationary ability, he can't move while it's active; the entire area becomes a field of invisible blades, but the space directly above his head is comparatively thin -- a weak point. Kuwabara could try using the Spirit Sword as a pole and vaulting through from above.
He has a second phase. If he takes enough damage he'll tear off his own false skin and revert to demon form -- assume his physical stats go up significantly.
His true form is a spider demon. He can produce tough silk threads from his body. Getting bound by them will be very difficult to escape. There are countermeasures -- I'll explain them in a moment.
In my personal read, though, the two things worth the most attention are his imitation ability and his curse techniques.
If either of you uses a Spirit Gun or a Spirit Sword in front of him once, he'll almost certainly be able to copy it. Don't let the copied version's power scare you -- unless his type compatibility is some kind of absolute across-the-board maximum, the copy will always be weaker. If it still looks powerful, he's compensating by dumping more aura into it. It's a bluff.
Curse techniques are the nastiest part. The only answer is to never give him an opening to cast. That means even after he goes down, no mercy, no warrior's honor about hitting someone who's already on the floor -- this isn't a fighting game with some kindly knockdown mechanic built in. Pursue and keep hitting. Fists, feet, whatever is in reach. He's down, he's hurt, finish it.
But if you actually end up hard-controlled -- forced to obey a curse, no way to resist it -- prepare for that possibility in advance by doing the following..."
Yusuke's brain processed information in a fairly direct way. Ross's thorough briefing, by the time it finished filtering through him down to the tactical layer, had reduced to four usable points.
Close-range rush. Interrupt the cast. Ground pursuit. Finish while he's down.
"ORA ORA ORA ORA!"
He launched forward, and Yusuke -- who only knew that the shortest path between two points is a straight line, and did not know what a line segment was -- rained punches down on Rando without interruption, cutting off the sentence for the second time and not letting up.
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