Chapter 73: Don't Touch a Fox's Tail
The new Secret Realm run had opened a fresh save file. This one used the Sonic and Tails combination, enabling co-op play. What that meant in practice was that when Player 1 Ross was mapped to Sonic, Player 2 Kurama was passively mapped to Tails, receiving it as an additional ability overlay.
What made this particularly interesting was that, in a certain sense, Kurama and Tails were practically the same species.
Fox Double Spin operated along similar lines to Sonic's Sonic Speed Movement: a high-speed movement ability. But its underlying logic was rooted in Tails's natural two-tail physiology. Beyond rapid ground movement, it also granted flight, with the two tails spinning like propellers to generate enough lift to carry both Tails and Sonic into the air together. The working principle was roughly equivalent to a powered paraglider with a large turbofan strapped to the back.
I'll Be Back, meanwhile, was a variant of Golden Ring Lifeline derived from the Sonic and Tails co-op state. The base death condition carried over: two or more consecutive valid hits without recovery still meant instant death. Two new rules were added on top.
First: Gold Rings could still be collected, but they transferred directly to Sonic, meaning directly to Ross. Second: when Tails "died," he would temporarily go offline and respawn fifteen seconds later, with one exception. If Sonic died first, Tails died instantly and permanently alongside him.
As the assistant unit, Tails was functionally immortal. His real death condition was tied entirely to Sonic's survival. Which meant that for as long as they were inside a Secret Realm zone, Kurama mapped to Tails was also functionally immortal.
From a pure zone-clearing standpoint, if the two of them wanted to, they could play it with Ross hanging back at a safe distance while Kurama took every hit, died, respawned, and took every hit again. No one in any game Ross had ever played had tanking capacity like that.
After Ross finished explaining, Kurama went quiet.
Part of the silence was genuine surprise that Ross's ability could spontaneously grant additional abilities to both himself and others. The other part was an instinctive discomfort: his life was now bound to someone he had known for less than half a day.
"Hey. If this feels off, I can send you back right now and run it solo for a while."
Ross had noticed that his new companion wasn't exactly thrilled. The expression on his face was the particular one of someone who had tried to show off something they were proud of and gotten a lukewarm response. Visible, immediate deflation.
The principle held, though. Gaming was supposed to be fun. Forcing someone through it when they weren't feeling it was no different from clocking into work. Ross had never been the type to evangelize by pressure.
"No. An opportunity this rare deserves to be experienced."
Kurama shook his head. He had already settled it internally.
The concern about his life being tied to Ross was real. But Ross clearly had no ill intent, and the plants surrounding them were in a class that simply did not exist anywhere in the outside world. The curiosity that was inseparable from being a demon fox surfaced and refused to be put back down.
The moment the words were out, Kurama watched Ross's expression brighten visibly.
He revised his earlier read. Ross was the type who simply could not hide anything on his face. Whatever he felt was immediately legible, no filter between the inside and the outside. The mental age, Kurama decided, had probably settled permanently somewhere in the passionate, earnest summers of early adolescence, that particular phase where nothing was muted and everything was felt at full volume. There was something about it that made it hard to stay guarded.
Another layer of caution came down.
And apart from the surrounding vegetation, Kurama was genuinely curious about the new abilities he had just acquired.
He ran into a problem almost immediately. His body knew instinctively how the ability was supposed to work. Using it was a different matter.
Unlike Sonic's method, Tails's high-speed movement relied entirely on his two tails, spinning at high speed to push air backward and propel himself forward. Flight worked on the same principle: adjust the direction of airflow and the thrusters converted to rotors, lifting him off the ground.
But Kurama did not have tails.
His true form was a demon fox. His current body, however, was that of Shuichi Minamino, a human shell without a single ambiguity to it, clean and authentic all the way through, and completely tail-free.
"Ross."
After a moment's consideration, Kurama decided that not knowing was better resolved by asking.
"Go ahead."
"There seems to be an issue with activating my ability."
"Hm? Let me think."
After listening carefully to what Kurama had identified, Ross sorted through the possibilities and came back with three that seemed viable.
"If you can push your Nen output all the way to its ceiling, your body should temporarily shift toward your demon fox form. Your true form has tails, if I'm right?"
"Yes, that's correct."
Kurama nodded. The part of him that had been quietly filing Ross under not bluffing added another entry to the running tally.
"That said, the aura demand for that approach would be considerable. Hard to pull off in the short term."
Ross moved on to the other two options: conjuring a pair of additional tails from scratch, or working with whatever plants were available as a functional substitute.
The problem common to all three approaches was exactly the same. Whichever route Kurama took, the end result involved two additional objects growing out of his backside.
Using twin tails as spinning propellers for flight. On a small, chibi-proportioned anthropomorphic fox cub, that read as undeniably charming. On a tall, lean young man with the kind of face that made rooms go quiet, it would be a completely different experience.
Ross thought about it briefly. Outside of Tails himself, the only comparable reference that came to mind was Nobita from Doraemon, specifically the version with the Take-copter attached somewhere deeply, fundamentally wrong.
That said, Kurama did not look particularly weighed down by the aesthetic problem. His true form was a demon fox with tails. If anything, existing for a second lifetime in a human body without them was probably the adjustment that needed making, not the other way around. Like Kakarot, spending years in a form with his Saiyan tail removed and eventually simply stopping thinking about it.
So neither of them touched the zone content.
Ross ground away at Sonic Speed Movement's experience counter with focused, unhurried effort. Kurama moved through the surrounding vegetation, cataloguing specimens and collecting seeds, pausing at intervals to make quiet, concentrated attempts at conjuring a tail.
Three hours passed pleasantly.
And Ross finally had a real gaming partner.
Today was the thirteenth day since Ross's group had arrived at the Sky Arena.
February 4th, 2000.
They had reached the one-hundredth floor and secured their private rooms within the first three days. From there, an unbroken winning streak had carried them all the way to the two-hundredth floor.
Over those two weeks, the group that had arrived as three and quietly become four had turned into the most talked-about new arrivals the Sky Arena had seen in some time. Their accommodations had upgraded with each floor cleared. Their bank balances had kept pace.
Two weeks prior, the three of them combined couldn't have pulled together twenty thousand Jenny. By today, their total prize earnings across the three of them had reached 1.2 billion Jenny, equivalent to roughly seventy-two million in the currency of their original world at that era's exchange rate, or about twenty-four million each. Well past the point where money was something to worry about.
Ross had warned both delinquents in advance about what the numbers were going to look like. It hadn't helped much. Nine digits in their own bank books still took a long time to absorb. And those were the after-tax figures.
The Sky Arena didn't shortchange its fighters. Each star competitor generated far more in betting and ticket revenue than was immediately apparent, and the Arena simply distributed the fighters' rightful share of what they produced.
If Ross hadn't already known that Greed Island's asking price was fifty-eight billion Jenny, he might have been just as stunned.
The prize money stopped here, though.
Above the two-hundredth floor, the structure changed entirely. No payouts. What lay above was competition for status, for reputation, for something that couldn't be deposited in a bank.
Getting there, however, was its own matter.
If nothing went wrong, the Baptism was coming.
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