Toriko 333 Review: Badass Yuda vs Megaton

Toriko, Chapter 333: First Round Battle

Not much in lieu of answering the dark secrets of Blue Grill, mostly because we don't see anything from Komatsu or Team Chiyo at all. Most of this chapter is just focusing on the whole chef competition battle thing, and it starts off with the Ten-Shells just commenting on how shitty the human world chefs seem to be. Asarudy, who apparently is super-smart because of reading so many books and reading them super-quickly (and, y'know, being a thousands-year-old spirit) is apparently able to "read" people... and what he read from the human world chefs is a pants-shittingly horrifying vision of him being dragged down into the bowels of hell by horrifying screaming demonic things. 

Asarudy tries to warn the other chefs, but they're just kind of confident, especially this dude with the super-funky hair, Condor. Asarudy also mentions something about them ending up in the Soul Furnace, which is later revealed to be this stove for spirit food cooking that's powered by the hunger of dead spirits or something along those lines, so, um, is there a punishment for the ones that lost? That kind of seems horrifying. 

This giant creature called a Casket Crab shows up, and it's, well, a coffin with crab appendages. Apparently Casket Crabs are able to preserve long-extinct ingredients, and this seems to be an effort to make it an even playing field for the chefs of Blue Grill and the human world so they both face a similarly unknown ingredient. Though considering how super-old some of the Blue Grill chefs are...

The Ten-Shell chefs talk about how they're going to win because they can 'hear the voices of the food spirits' and whatnot, while the Soul Furnace -- a gigantic furnace with flames shaped like the wailing banshees of souls from the other side -- is activated. The Casket Crab then spits out this giant floating bubble of... something, and opens its coffin refrigerator chest, sending out two fish into the bubble. Only one of the judges knows what the fish even is, and identifies it as a Leafish, an extinct species which once lived in the Multi Gravity Valley area of Area 5, and is a super-special preparation ingredient even just to catch. 

Yuda takes on the challenge, after noting that the bubble isn't quite water, air or normal space. Yuda brings out a knife that Melk Sr had made for him, the All Purpose Blade... Condor, likewise, pulls out two katanas from his fucking hair and beings drooling from under his mask, talking about how the fish seemed to have a megaton of flavour and megaton this and megaton that. He's basically like Yuda, actually, only that he inserts 'megaton' into everything instead of 'millimeter'. 

Condor is completely fucked up by the bubble, and Don Slime tells us that the 'Soul World' doesn't even have the concept of gravity, and it will pull you around in all sorts of directions at once. The Leafish is apparently bigger than it seemed, and tries to eat Condor... who creates this bubble in his hand, before extending it out into this space-thing that engulfs the Leafish's head, before doing knocking on it. Condor talks about how he's not really that young, and how he's got a megaton of experience and whatnot...

And we are greeted with Yuda just delivering badass lines about how he's only 124 years old, and he hasn't competed with anyone older than him with the exception of Setsuno, Zaus and Chiyo. And he's already completed knocking on the Leafish before Condor did, with this motherfucking All Purpose Blade which would be oversized for a sword, let alone for a kitchen knife. 

Condor goes all 'oh, you're so young! You're just a brat!', and he's apparently 3000 years though he doesn't remember his exact age... and Yuda immediately turns that little throwaway line into an insult. 'You'd best remember it. Just one millimeter of a lapse in memory will be the cause of defeat to this brat.' Well, they made motherfucking Yuda badass. And I do like it -- I like Yuda the best out of all the human world chefs competing and it's awesome to see him do badass stuff like this.