I'm reading up on some lore in piece of Japanese fiction, and I'm finding it rather difficult to parse the short paragraph below due to confusion on two specific points.
To add a little context, a character named レーミhas abilities/powers that can cause a man to collapse and lose consciousness by scoping out (観察) weaknesses in the opponent's エーテルのパターン (their power source) and intensifying the weakness, he's done this before with powerful opponents but when he tried it on a guy named アンソニー the following happened:
だが、肝心のアンソニーに対して行おうとした結果『観察しても無駄だよ。エーテルのパターンなど秒単位で変化させるのは基本だろう』と断言されてしまう。
実際、変化し続けるパターンに観察が追いつかず、アンソニーがレーミの身体に仕込んだ装置による電気ショックを喰らう事となってしまった。
My questions are:
(A) why is there an 肝心の~ in front of the guy's name? I've seen this in other writings too but I didn't think much of it.
(B) is the ~のは基本 equivalent to the word "basically" in this passage? Or something closer to "it's a basic thing", e.g. however, as a consequence of attempting to use it against アンソニー , he got the assertion that "it's pointless to even scope me out. It's a basic thing to make changes to things like エーテルのパターン in seconds."
(C) who is receiving the 電気ショック? I'm not sure if the subject is omitted or if it's アンソニー, a friend tells me the subject is omitted but I'm quite doubtful.
I would be very interested to see how a more adept or native speaker interprets this passage, thanks!
