After the draw, Lucas was slotted into the third match of the round of thirty-two.
The tournament format spanned two days.
The round of thirty-two would take place on the first morning, and the round of sixteen that same afternoon.
The second day would see the quarter-finals and the semi-finals in the morning, with the final held in the afternoon.
Once this competition concluded, there would only be about half a month left before school started.
And that was the point at which the plot would begin.
Lucas was not worried about this at all.
His spiritual pressure might not reach Captain level by then, but it would be close.
And his actual combat ability would definitely be at Captain level.
He finished the draw and settled in to wait for his match to start.
On the other side of town, at the Kurosaki house, Ichigo was also watching television.
Although he had not been to a dojo to train in a very long time, he had never once stopped training.
It was not because he was particularly diligent.
It was because his house contained an unreliable father who might ambush him at any moment.
So in order to deal with the sneak attacks from that unreliable father, Ichigo had no choice but to keep training.
It was also the reason he could still suppress Tatsuki without ever setting foot in a dojo.
Kurosaki Isshin had lost his powers, but his combat techniques and his combat awareness remained.
Trained by a man like that, Ichigo could naturally not turn out weak.
Isshin did not want his son getting involved in the affairs of the Soul Society.
But the world was a dangerous place, after all, and he was someone who had been stabbed in the back by Aizen once already.
That was why Isshin was trying every possible way to train Ichigo.
As for why he never asked Urahara Kisuke for help, the truth was that Isshin still had his reservations about the man.
Urahara’s mind was simply too calculating.
And the same was true of the Visored.
Why else would they have gone such a long time without contacting him?
You have to remember that their lives had been saved by Urahara Kisuke and Shihōin Yoruichi, and yet by the time the plot began, there was almost no interaction between them.
You could only say that Urahara’s thinking ran too deep.
He looked like a man who spent every day fooling around without a serious bone in his body, and only he himself knew what he was arranging behind the scenes.
Take Kuchiki Rukia, for example.
That the Hōgyoku was hidden inside her body was one thing.
With a person like Urahara Kisuke, you never knew when he might turn you into a piece on his board.
If he simply had a good brain, that would be one thing.
But he also had a pile of unnerving technology in his hands, and so Isshin did not dare have too much contact with him.
“Ichi-nii, look, quick. Isn’t that person Sado?”
Just as Ichigo stood up to pour himself some water, Karin suddenly pointed at the television and asked.
In the manga, Karin and Yuzu did not know Chad when the plot first began, because he usually met Ichigo outside the house.
Furthermore, the Chad of the manga was taciturn and had a relatively withdrawn personality, and had never once visited the Kurosaki house.
But the current Chad was a transmigrator.
Even though his memories had been sealed away for years, his personality had come out different from the original’s.
He had been to the Kurosaki house more than once.
So both Karin and Yuzu knew exactly who he was.
“Sado? Where did you see Sado?”
Ichigo asked, somewhat dumbfounded.
“Right there on the TV. I can’t be mistaken.”
Karin said it while pointing at the screen.
Hearing that, Ichigo immediately walked over to the front of the television.
And then he saw Lucas standing in the arena, with Tatsuki at the edge of the ring.
“What’s going on? That really is Sado. How did he end up on TV? And he’s even competing in a tournament this heavy.”
At that moment Ichigo was completely confused.
He could understand why Tatsuki would appear at the ringside.
She was a member of the Tatsuoka Dojo, a seeded fighter the place valued highly.
So even if she was not competing in a tournament at this level, it was perfectly normal for her to be at the venue.
Chad appearing there was not normal at all.
If he remembered correctly, it was only a week ago that the man had called to ask how one went about observing at a dojo.
How had it happened that in a single week, Chad had transformed into a member of the Tatsuoka Dojo, and was now representing the Tatsuoka Dojo in a competition of this weight?
“I understand now. It has to be that monstrous physique of his. With a body like that, even if all he knew was some street fighting, just standing in that ring basically means victory.”
Chad’s physical conditioning was plain for anyone to see.
Even if he stood in place and let these people hit him, not one of them would be able to break through his defense.
You could say he was in an unbeatable position from the very start.
On top of that, he did know some street fighting techniques.
And more importantly, all that conditioning was not only about strength.
His speed was terrifyingly high as well.
So facing a monster like Chad, the others could not stir up any trouble at all.
The Tatsuoka Dojo must have known this perfectly well, which was exactly why they let him compete.
But once the match started, Ichigo was left dumbfounded all over again.
Because what he saw was not absolute domination through physique.
It was absolute domination through technique.
Lucas did not show much strength, and his speed was nothing remarkable, about level with his opponent’s.
And yet whenever he faced an incoming attack, he was always able to dissolve it without effort.
He never took anything head-on.
He answered each one with a different move.
Then, after defending passively for a stretch, the moment he finally moved, he finished his opponent in a flash.
If Ichigo had not known his friend’s personality, he would have suspected him of toying with the man.
He could clearly have ended it instantly, and instead he defended passively and let his opponent hit him for a while.
In fact it was not that Chad wanted to humiliate his opponent, nor that he was being polite by letting the man swing at him.
His only purpose was to map out the opponent’s patterns.
From the very beginning of that first match, Lucas had been studying the movements of these contestants.
These people could already be considered top tier.
In a competition of this weight, anyone who reached the main tournament was naturally no amateur.
Which meant that to Lucas, these people were definitely experience packs.
As the saying goes, stones from other hills can serve to polish the jade of your own.
These moves did not amount to much for Lucas at his current level, but every school had its own strengths and its own characteristics.
What he had to do was take what was worth taking, discard the rest, and then fold that essence fully into his own fighting techniques.
So he mapped out the shape of an opponent’s moves through defending.
And once the man had nothing left to teach him, he ended it in a single strike.