Automatic Attack Reflex Training - is a form of martial arts training utilized by Mitsuomi Takayanagi during the flashback arc of the story. It was utilized as part of Dougen Takayanagi's plan to mold his son into the "true warrior".
Overview[]
This type of training was developed by an engineer from Taiwan named Pei, and comprises of a room that has letters placed on the floor and numbered buttons on the wall, seemingly in a random pattern. The person using the room has small nodes attached to their body on both arms, shoulders, and abdomen, as a means of monitoring and recording the person's physical attributes. As stated by Dougen, the position is the stance, and the letters dictate where the user's feet should be positioned with each stance. The numbers on the wall are indicative of where the user should strike. According to the Chinese assassin Fu Chi'en, the purpose of this training is for imprinting automatic attack reflexes into the user, enabling them to seemingly strike at random, while also enabling the user to learn to transition between different stances more seamlessly. The letters and numbers can be increased at different intervals, allowing for the user's precision and reaction rate to be trained accordingly. Mitsuomi was stated as scoring excellently in both the precision of his strikes and foot placement, and his reaction rate between each.
While Fu Chi'en seems initially interested in the effectiveness of this training, he ultimately dismisses it as nothing more than attempting to cram the talent of martial arts into a human-shaped container. Dougen himself viewed it as a pathetic toy, simply being akin to an arcade game he saw once. However, Fu Chi'en himself sees Mitsuomi as the toy, as he views Dougen's goal of creating a "true warrior" with skepticism, perhaps due to his having been trained as a martial artist in a traditional sense. If there is one flaw within the training room's design, it is that it can be damaged significantly by someone with a certain level of strength, as Mitsuomi is shown having practically destroyed the room after the death of his former friend, Shin Natsume. Pei himself admits that when designing the room, he did not envision any human being able to break it, and resolved to build it more sturdy in the future. However, it is unclear if he ever accomplished this, as he was dismissed by Mitsuomi and returned to his country, soon after the teenager overthrew his father in an armed coup, as the new head of the Takayanagi family.
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