Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-67.70.92.41-20151228204640/@comment-4010415-20160221121714

I've explained this I don't know how many times already.

The entire reason that Mercury let Yang take him down to 0% Aura is because the backlash from the audience would be much much WORSE if they thought that Yang actually injured him. That's why!

If he still had Aura and it just looked like she was a sore loser, they would've been like "Wow, what a sore loser. Get the hell outta here." It just looks like she's throwing a momentary tantrum, while he's still perfectly fine because he has Aura.

But since she won and they thought she injured him, they were like "Holy fucking shit, what a Grade A bitch! That was completely uncalled for! She won, and then she just turned around and hurt that guy?! His leg is broken now, and for what?! For losing?! Does she just shoot people she thinks are weak?!"

As for your point of "though this would be risky. If he got too beat up, he might be out of commission and would be unable to help with the plan" What exactly did he help with after that? They couldn't predict Ruby getting suspicious of them and trying to go alert a professor. Even then, they could've had Neo on standby for any problems instead of Mercury. Emerald could've broadcast the chaos instead if Mercury was too injured to walk around filming.

The whole point was that he'd get down to 0% Aura, and Emerald would trick Yang into shooting/punching specifically his leg so he'd be fine because it's a prosthetic.

Seriously, we still have the fact that he walked away and stopped fighting even though the buzzer didn't go off, so he had to have known that the fight wasn't over, and then, he smirked when Yang made her explosion happen. He threw the match.