John Cruel

### Debut

Chapter 28 "The Warmth, Ever Calling" (Mentioned)Chapter 74 "Chopin's Prelude Op. 28 No. 15 in D Flat Major (Raindrop)"

## Overview

John Cruel was an ethnically Ayrachea General, Admiral, combat tactician, marksman, martial artist, poet, painter, and living weapon. Today, he is perhaps best known for authoring the book "Exercises in Barbarism" and creating the radical alt-right group The Strong, which eventually officially seceded from Ayrach and became the sovereign nation of Deadara. During The War of the Mob, Cruel was quantifiably responsible for every victory achieved by The Strong, and after their development into a recognized nation, Cruel is commonly believed to be the reason that the treaty granting them sovereignty was as far in their favor as it was. To this day, Ayrach does not recognize Deadara's sovereignty, but due to the fact that Cruel had an unknown number of proteges before his disappearance, they have elected not to attempt to regain the territory that they believe belongs to them.

## Super Moves

**Tomb Mirror**

An interesting stance super with two levels. The stance occurs after the super flash and has a small hitbox surrounding Cruel for about 120 frames. For those 120 frames, cruel can press any four buttons to do any of the four very strong options that come out of this stance. A is a plus on block punch that wallbounces, allowing for a followup that's relatively easy and does slightly more than BnB damage, with more difficult routing allowing for higher damage. B is a launching kick that isn't advantageous or punishable. Usually used to help in hitconfirms since you can use the super flash to tell if you hit your opponent or not. C is a semi-reactable (18f) command grab that doesn't combo out of or into anything and has no corner carry to speak of but you get a really fucked safejump off of it, even midscreen. D is an unreactable low that crumples and sets proration to 120%, which gives insane damage, but this is heavy punishable at block. Use sparingly.

**Hold My Fire**

Very slow-moving projectile utility super. Too large to jump reliably on most characters, six projectile hits. Some specific moves with projectile invincibility can go through this, but in most cases it's very strict. Covers a lot of space, extremely active, recovers extremely quickly, very advantageous on block, launches on hit. You can sort of just use this at any point and then run a mixup or do a followup. Extremely obnoxious attack that Cruel can use at any time in a match to push his advantage or mount a comeback.

**In a Handful of Stars**

One-hit ground pound super that's mostly used as a combo ender, considering the fact that its scaling does not decrease past 50%. It drops in some juggles that leave the opponent low to the ground at super cancel points due to its relatively long startup (19f) but outside of those situations you can just dump this super to tack a minimum of 260 damage onto the end of any combo. The explosion counts as a projectile and the extended arm has projectile invincibility on startup, so this can be used as a semi-reliable fireball punish at midrange in situations where the guaranteed kill from this is better than the mixup from Hold My Fire.

**Body Rival**

Possibly the best install super in the game. Spawns another version of Cruel on the other side of his opponent who copies all of Cruel's actions 30 frames after Cruel does them. This can setup unblockables. Conversions off of pretty much any hit gained by this super are difficult and will be heavily scaled, making it not a huge threat if Cruel doesn't have another meter after using this for In a Handful of Stars, or won't build the meter for it during the following combo. There isn't much to do against this super other than to know what the unblockable setups look like and use an invincible reversal during them. This would be much easier if Cruel couldn't feint 4D, but if you have an inkling, it's not bad to act on it.