"Ah, I'm alive, I'm alive."
Having eaten and drunk his fill, Yuma pounded his chest as he munched on rice balls and sipped hot tea, looking utterly blissful.
"Sure enough, you need rice balls before you have the energy to duel."
Yuma smiled until his eyes narrowed into slits.
Four Arithmetic Operations rested his chin on his hand beside him. "Why does that sound so familiar?"
The nearby students all nodded in agreement.
They all thought of a certain carefree Jellyfish Head from when they had first enrolled, whose mind contained nothing but food and cards.
As far as they knew, that guy was the only person who could get hungry and want to eat halfway through a duel. Principal Samejima had supposedly speculated that some people in the world were good at thinking with their small intestines, and perhaps Judai was just such a rare oddity.
If that theory was true, then they had probably just met one of Judai's kind. This Lobster Head boy before them might also have a small intestine smarter than his brain.
Come to think of it, that actually made sense. Looking across the history of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yuma Tsukumo was probably the only other oddball besides Judai Yuki who suddenly stopped to eat in the middle of a duel. And if anything, Yuma had surpassed his predecessor. After all, Judai's eating duel had been a casual match against graduate Zane Truesdale, while Yuma had been playing a Life-Gambling Card match—a heavyweight BOSS Battle against Vetrix early on. When he ate, he had even been in his Saint Seiya-like state after merging with Astral to become ZEXAL.
Making the BOSS watch him eat in the middle of a BOSS Battle—Yuma had truly done something unprecedented, and there would probably never be anyone like him again.