After getting home, Lucas received a call from Ichigo.
“Congratulations, Sado. You actually took the championship.”
Ichigo offered his congratulations the moment the call connected, which threw Lucas off for a second.
Then he thought it over and realized that since the matches had been broadcast live, it was only natural Ichigo had seen them.
“So you already know.”
“Yeah, I watched it on TV. How exactly did you pull that off? You only just started learning. But that technique was so airtight it felt like there was no way to beat you, even watching from the outside.”
As the saying goes, the layman watches the excitement while the expert watches the craft.
Ichigo was an expert himself, and even from a live broadcast, he had put himself in that ring.
The result was that he had to admit he was completely outclassed.
In the past he could still edge Lucas out on technique, if never on raw physique.
Now he could not think of a single way he would beat the man.
He was simply too strong.
“By the way, come over to my place tomorrow. We should celebrate you winning.”
Ichigo extended the invitation.
The two of them were close friends, and he was genuinely happy his friend had taken the title, so he wanted to mark it properly.
“No problem. I’ll come by tomorrow.”
Lucas did not refuse.
They were friends, and back before he transmigrated, he had genuinely liked Ichigo as a character while reading the manga.
Out of the three protagonists of the Big Three shonen series, Ichigo, Uzumaki Naruto, and Luffy, Lucas had always liked Ichigo the most.
Ichigo was a character born to protect people, and from the first page to the last, that is exactly what he did.
Naruto was not bad by comparison, but he was too much of a saint.
Late in the story he was even able to forgive Obito, the man responsible for his parents’ deaths, which was hard to swallow.
And then there was what he said to Black Zetsu at the very end.
Black Zetsu was genuinely someone who deserved to die.
Over the course of thousands of years, there was no telling how many people had lost their lives because of his scheming.
But Naruto’s line to him amounted to calling him a spoiled child who could not let go of his mother, and telling him that a child who grows up should leave his mother and walk his own road.
From his own point of view, was there anything wrong with trying every possible means to free his mother from the seal?
On that specific point, there was nothing to criticize him for.
By Naruto’s logic, Black Zetsu should have simply abandoned the mother sealed away beneath him.
Which was ridiculous.
Combine that with how extreme Naruto’s idealism got in the back half of the story, and Lucas’s impression of him had taken a serious hit.
As for Luffy, that was another matter entirely.
In the early arcs he was the very picture of loyalty and conviction.
By the later ones he had turned into an oddball who mostly just clowned around, and plenty of the things he did made you want to strangle him.
Once the call ended, Lucas went back to developing his own fighting style.
On the other end, Ichigo also invited Tatsuki.
He did not call anyone else, since none of them had started high school yet.
Only after that would they end up in the same class as Inoue Orihime and the rest.
Early the next morning, Lucas set out.
He needed to pick up some gifts on the way.
Ichigo had invited him over to celebrate the championship, but he was not about to show up empty-handed.
After buying gifts and some ingredients, he arrived at the Kurosaki house.
Ichigo’s family was doing reasonably well financially.
They ran a private clinic, and while the scale of it could not compare to the Ishida family’s, it brought in a solid income.
“Hey, Sado’s here. Welcome, welcome. I watched the recording of your matches yesterday, seriously impressive. How about teaching your uncle a few moves so I can use them on Ichigo later?”
The Kurosaki clinic occupied the ground floor with the family’s living space above it, so Lucas saw Kurosaki Isshin sitting in the clinic the moment he walked in.
Isshin leaned toward him as he spoke.
The man usually carried himself like a clown.
Of course, he only behaved that way around people he knew well.
In front of strangers he was actually quite dependable.
Lucas had visited Ichigo’s house many times, so he knew Isshin well.
And in front of someone he knew that well, Isshin let the clown out freely.
Hearing the request, Lucas had to complain silently.
If he did not know this old man’s real identity, he might genuinely have been fooled.
He might not claim mastery of everything, but there would be no serious holes in him anywhere.
His strongest suit was swordsmanship, but his Hakuda was certainly nothing to sneer at either.
Lucas had absorbed a large amount of martial technique by now, but all of it was technique used by ordinary humans.
None of it even registered on his attribute panel.
Teaching any of it to a Captain-class Shinigami would be a joke.
Just as he was grumbling internally and preparing to decline, a figure came flying across the room.
Literally flying.
It was Ichigo, who had come downstairs after hearing the commotion.
Catching his clown of a father asking his friend for techniques to use against him, he could not hold back any longer and delivered a flying kick straight into Isshin.
“Bang!”
After the dull thud, Ichigo was standing where his father had been.
As for Isshin, he had rolled all the way to the end of the corridor like a dropped sack.
Watching this display of fatherly love and filial devotion, Lucas felt his mouth twitch.
These two really were a fighting father and son.
Every day they were either brawling or on their way to a brawl.
And only those two could carry on like this.
In any other family, how would a scene like that even happen?
“Come on, Sado, don’t mind him. But why did you bring so much stuff?”
Having kicked his father across the room, Ichigo invited him upstairs as though nothing at all had occurred.
He was also a little put out that Lucas had brought so many gifts.
He was the one who had done the inviting, after all.
“Didn’t I just win a big prize? Besides, half of what I brought is food I like anyway. Of course, if you’re unhappy about it, we could always spar.”
Lucas said it with a flash of white teeth.
“I think I’ll pass. I wouldn’t dare spar with you at your level.”
Ichigo shook his head immediately.
He was not weak, and Tatsuki was no match for him.
But he was nowhere near the same league as Lucas right now.