Chapter 152: Only Kids Make Choices. Adults Take Everything
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 was a side-scrolling beat-em-up, focused entirely on weapon combat and fighting through enemies.
Tournament Fighters was a fighting game, protagonists and villains all selectable, everyone hitting everyone else.
Worth noting: of all the TMNT spinoff games, Tournament Fighters was the only one where the four Turtles fought unarmed. Strictly speaking, of the seven playable characters, only Casey Jones used a weapon. Everyone else fought bare-handed.
Ross found himself in an unusually indecisive state.
If it were any other TMNT beat-em-up, he would have chosen Tournament Fighters without hesitation: more mappable character templates, broader ability pool, significantly more useful for actual combat capability. Especially Shredder's Iron Fist Shadow Strike, which had a built-in property that forced the opponent into a combo on hit. Extremely dirty.
But the Famicom version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 had a mechanic that was genuinely extraordinary and almost nonexistent in other games of its type: unlimited Blood Kill.
Blood Kill. Life Burst. Super. Different names, same concept: spend a portion of your own HP to force-release a move that immediately gets your character out of a dangerous situation. Common in action RPG beat-em-up platformers.
In TMNT 3, all four Turtles had their own distinct Blood Kill moves. But unlike every comparable game, when the player's character was at critical HP, activating Blood Kill would not consume any HP at all.
Which meant: as long as you could guarantee staying at critical HP without getting hit, you could use the high-damage Blood Kill move unlimited times for the entire run, and clear the game from start to finish with it.
Can I have both?
Wait. It actually seemed like both was possible.
Ross realized suddenly that the navigation arrow had provided two acquisition directions, not two mutually exclusive choices.
Then get both.
That said, going for both meant considerably more items to collect, and they clearly weren't all concentrated in the sewer market. The workload had just increased substantially. Fortunately, the navigation arrow could still do the heavy lifting.
When Ross selected Direction 1, the arrow immediately began pointing toward the prerequisite Nen items in order of proximity. A significant time savings.
Coming two days early had been the right call.
And so Ross began his treasure hunt across both the sewer market and the surface flea markets.
The next day, August 31st, he ran into three familiar small people in the surface flea market entirely by chance.
Gon, Killua, and Alluka.
In early May, after reaching an agreement with the Zoldyck family and securing his freedom, Killua had brought Alluka back to the Sky Arena and resumed his connection with Gon, who had been recovering from injuries.
With a younger sibling now part of the picture, Killua maintained his twelve-year-old self in most ways, but had begun noticeably and frequently showing a different quality: the bearing of an older brother. Gon found this unexpectedly hard to adjust to.
Perceptive Killua had noticed Gon's discomfort but hadn't changed his behavior because of it.
The friendship with Gon remained important. But compared to this friend made during the Hunter Exam, Alluka and Nanika, who were simultaneously family and something else that defied easy description, some kind of dependence that ran deeper than any word could capture, occupied significantly more of Killua's emotional investment and energy.
"You're the big brother. Look after your younger siblings."
The line Ross had sent after seeing the oil painting family portrait. A completely ordinary sentence that had, contrary to all expectation, left a deep impression on Killua.
Because it made Killua realize clearly: the Dracula family's protection had come on a whim. Which meant it could disappear on a whim just as easily.
In other words: he himself was his younger siblings' only true final line of defense. If something happened to him, the only outcome waiting for them was being taken again and locked back into that lightless underground cell.
He didn't want that to happen.
So he had to use the time while the Dracula family's protection still held to become stronger. Strong enough to protect his younger siblings even from his obsessive older brother.
And he had to become more mature. Mature enough to handle the day-to-day of looking after them, and to teach them how to take care of themselves when he wasn't there.
The Killua who had reached that conclusion had genuinely grown up in how he thought.
Sometimes a person just matures suddenly, for one specific reason. And Killua's change had left Gon, who was still operating on a child's instincts and hadn't shifted in the same way, feeling, instinctively and without fully understanding why, like something had been taken from him. As though his friend had been partially taken away.
It was different from how things felt with Kurapika or Leorio, and it was hard to put into words. Gon didn't even know how to settle the discomfort in himself.
After wrapping up their Sky Arena training, Killua had brought Alluka along and gone with Gon to Whale Island to visit Aunt Mito. But the expected scene of Killua rediscovering what genuine maternal love felt like through Mito hadn't happened. Killua had already received that earlier, and from Neon.
Beyond that, after receiving the Greed Island accessories that Ging had left behind, Killua wasted no time bringing Gon to the Dracula family compound, Castlevania.
There, Gon met the teenage mother Neon, the adoptive older brother Alucard, and the lord of Castlevania himself, Count Dracula. Light: What about me?
This experience, all by itself, baffled Gon completely. Gon had been to the Zoldyck estate, had seen that bizarre collection of family members who were stranger than the actual servants, and had ultimately managed to get Killua out. How was it that this group inside Castlevania somehow felt more like Killua's actual family than those people?
As a side note: when Gon arrived, his father was in fact inside Castlevania. Ging knew his son was there. And this man, one of the world's five greatest Nen ability users and invariably awkward the moment anything personal was involved, immediately hid.
His personality was genuinely warped. Leorio should punch him when the opportunity arose.
And so through various roundabout routes, the three of them had hitched a ride on a Dracula family airship and arrived in Yorknew City several days ahead of the official auction date.
They were here for Greed Island. The opening bid of eight point nine billion jenny had genuinely stunned them, so they were hoping to find valuable items at the Yorknew markets, use those items as auction entries, and try to get into the main auction without relying on the Dracula family's resources.
"How's it going? Any profit?"
Ross, knowing they were here for Greed Island, asked casually.
Then he looked at the three of them and saw expressions of pure devastation.
"...We lost money."
Killua's lip trembled slightly. Then he laid himself flat on the table and said it very quietly, with great reluctance.
"How much?"
Ross, having forgotten the exact figure, continued the follow-up.
"Three billion nine hundred ninety million..."
Ross spat a mouthful of soda water all over the table.