Toriko, Chapter 334: One Millimeter Yuda
Yuda is... easily my favourite character in Toriko other than the Four Kings and maybe some of the Bishokukai people. He's always just been this funny old dude who keeps saying one millimeter while being scarily competent despite being old and a chef, and he's definitely grown in prominence through the Four Beasts and Cooking Festival arcs. And that's saying something, considering Toriko has a scary number of guest star chefs that are simply just one-note people with jack shit personality beyond a character quirk.
Yuda's full course is revealed at the beginning of the chapter, and it's filled with laughably weak capture levels -- somewhat similar to how Coco and Sani's filled parts of their full courses are, actually. And Condor, like most of the fandom, mocks this... but Yuda speaks about how full courses are the ultimate program for each person, and how his own full course reflects his feelings for his old Combo.
Condor continues to be a gigantic piece of dick, but the crab slices the space bubble they're on and drops them into the Soul Furnace, and they end up on a Seesaw Kitchen... which will teeter depending on who is faster in cooking. Which doesn't exactly make sense considering the overall mass and weight of both bubbles will be the same whether it's a raw fish or a cooked fish, but I guess in a comic with floating space bubbles spat out by coffin crabs and flames created by the burning hunger of the damned dead, I can't argue too much and just say it's designed to teeter depending on who's faster.
One of the commentators gets dragged by the Soul Furnace's screaming flames and he's basically reduced to a dessicated corpse and holy shit, that's brutal. And it shows that Blue Grill is playing for keeps, killing off whichever chef's going to lose.
Condor creates his bubble thing again, which is apparently called Warp Space, and Damala Sky studies it with his cyborg eye. We don't get any information from Damala, though, as a different commentator explains about how the gravity is all out of whack in the bubbles, and despite Yuda and Condor standing straight like it ain't no thang, every cooking utensil around them is just spinning wildly thanks to the psychotic gravity. And Yuda starts to slowly judge the properties of the Leaf Fish, how its scales are like medicinal leaves and whatnot.
Yuda's side of the seesaw suddenly drops, however, and apparently Condor is moving really, really fast. Yuda is all like "That's impossible! ... is that what you thought I'd think?" before making an utterly badass boast about how he's outgrown the concept of surprise itself over 100 years, barring the one exception of Komatsu making the medicinal cooking mochi that one time. Condor keeps trash-talking Yuda, and Yuda takes the insults in stride as he does this vitality-buffing trick he calls Ishoku Dougen Kiketsu Up.
And we get a fucking flashback for Yuda and normally I'd decry shoving in random flashbacks, but we don't know much about Yuda and this flashback holy shit is absolutely grand. Apparently back when he was young he was cool-looking and didn't have a mustache that takes up 70% of his facial surface area. He was a super-genius cook, but he is considered unworthy to inherit the shop by his master.
Young!Yuda travels throughout the land, and meets this sickly boy who's hunting Medicinal Cattle... who, despite its funny name, is this monstrous horrifying-looking carnivorous warthog who can swallow an adult man in one chomp. Young!Yuda, of course, slices its throat without looking, and returns to the village with the kid, finding out that the entire village is afflicted with a plague, and Yuda, being a medicinal chef, creates a medicinal dish to counteract this super-plague. However, because the medicinal dish is bad-tasting, none of the kids would eat it. Which, by the way, is utterly stupid because you wouldn't gulp down a bad-tasting soup on pain of death? Really?
The kid Yuda saved, Zen, was the only child who ate Yuda's medicinal soup, and while he remarks that the soup was awful, he talks about how he dreamed about being a Bishokuya, how he had a full course planned out, how it can cure the illnesses of people around the world. Zen talks about how Yuda can be his partner, and can make his disgusting medicinal full course taste good. Yuda is kind of snarking... when Zen suddenly, out of nowhere, coughs up blood. And fucking dies.
And we get this solemn panel of Yuda standing in front of Zen's gravestone, thinking about how during the preparation stage of the antidote cooking, for child use a slight shift was needed in one of the openings with a kitchen knife... a shift of one millimeter. And that difference, apparently was what killed Zen -- he probably overdosed on the medicine like how you can't feed adult doses of pain-killers or depressants into children or that will kill them. And while all the villagers are all like 'you saved the rest of us, master Yuda!' He definitely takes it to heart.
And all along we thought he was just a kooky old guy who just happens to have this weird quirk. It's apparently part of his tragic backstory... and it's awesome, from a storytelling point of view.
Yuda flashes back to his master telling him how without knowing failure, he will be confident, and subsequently be so overconfident to overlook a millimeter of negligience. And, of course, the full course that Zen has decided on is exactly the one that Yuda has in the present day, and the meat dish was the very same medicinal cattle that Yuda cooked and killed Zen.
Also, subtly for people who pay attention, Yuda named his shop, Zen-O, after Zen. So holy hell that was an awesome backstory.
Present-day-Yuda, meanwhile, is discovering things about the Leaf Fish, like how the leaves are multiple layers of thin membranes he needs to peel off one at a time, and starts beginning prep work with this Ashura Dance. Condor has finished cooking and starts talking about how each membrane was 0.1 millimeters and how it's impossible for him to finish cooking at that moment... shut up, Condor, you have four arms.
Yuda's side of the seesaw drops into the Furnace, but it suddenly rises up again. Yuda talks about how he can't win in terms of speed... but he will finish his cooking thanks to his prep work, and he has been fucking cutting the gravity around him, presumably with the aid of the Melk super knife thing he has, and apparently somehow altered all the gravitational space around him to point straight up, other than the area right around the Leaf Fish itself.
Yuda makes some badass proclamation about how prep work is crucial if you don't want to make mistakes, how less haste will eventually lead to more speed, and Condor falls into the Soul Furnace. Yuda says about how 3000 years of confidence has produced a megaton-class mistake. And as Condor is consumed by the furnace, Yuda proclaims with all the confidence of that badass motherfucker that he is that the lines within the gravitational space was merely... one millimeter. *ba dum tss*
Overall? Yuda is the boss. Fuck Komatsu, he can go around discovering secrets. Yuda's going to own this cooking contest. I'm likewise really interested in seeing the stories of the other four chefs that show up with Yuda, though I don't really rate their chances that highly. Some of them's gotta lose, right?
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