The front runner was too obvious a target to ignore.
Machi had been holding first position since the starting gun, and somewhere in the vanguard a candidate had done the arithmetic and come to an unfortunate conclusion. She had been running at this pace for twenty-plus kilometers. Her aura was sealed like everyone else's. Her lead was comfortable but not insurmountable. The top forty slots were not guaranteed.
If Machi didn't finish, that was one less competitor for the list.
The candidate was quiet about it. Silenced pistol, drawn low against the hip, barrel angled while the surrounding runners were still focused on their own oxygen intake. A professional shot, technically. Clean sightline to the back of her head.
The bullet left the barrel spinning.
Machi raised her hand without looking back.
Five Nen threads spread from her fingertips like a net cast sideways through the air, caught the bullet mid-rotation, and redirected it in a single motion so smooth it looked like she was flicking water off her wrist. The shot that had been aimed at her skull arrived instead at the shooter's own head.
A burst of red mist. The candidate dropped and skidded forward along the asphalt for twenty meters before stopping in a heap. The candidates running behind him split without breaking stride, flowing around the body like water around a stone.
Nobody stopped. The exam did not stop for this. Knuckle, running parallel line along the right edge of the track, looked at the fallen figure and looked away again. The exam rules had nothing to say about candidates killing each other during a sprint.
The body fell behind at forty kilometers per hour and was several hundred meters back in seconds.
Hisoka materialized beside Machi with the comfortable familiarity of someone who had been waiting for a good moment. His scarred face arranged itself into an expression of genuine appreciation.
"Impressive," he said, not breathing hard. "Thread manipulation at that level of aura suppression."
Machi glanced at him from the corner of her eye. She kept running.
Hisoka flicked his right hand in a small arc, a gesture that looked like a card flourish. Text materialized across his palm in careful lines, rendered in Bungee Gum thin as pen ink.
Chrollo says hello. He's very curious about when you'll come home.
Machi looked at it for one full second.
Then she moved her fingers, slow and deliberate, and Nen threads spread across the gaps between them like a cat's cradle. The threads shifted and crossed and formed shapes. Not letters exactly. A pattern that held the meaning without needing the alphabet.
Before I become a one-star Hunter, consider me dead.
Hisoka read it. His smile widened by a precise and dangerous increment. He understood the implication: whatever contract bound Machi here wasn't personal. It was conditional. Someone held a restriction over her, and that restriction had a specific release clause.
He waved his palm again. The Bungee Gum text rearranged.
Then let me help~
The thread pattern between Machi's fingers shifted. What replaced it was less a sentence and more a mood: the visual impression of a face with prominent veins, a jaw tight enough to crack, every line of it communicating a very specific variety of irritation.
Then the threads dissolved and she picked up her pace.
Hisoka watched her go. He looked pleased, which was the most unsettling possible response to that exchange.
Several hundred meters back, Liam was paying attention to something else.
The death energy pulse from the shooting had reached him immediately, a cold-hot pressure that pressed against the back of his awareness and waited. The Memento Mori system recognized it. Liam recognized it.
And instead of absorbing it, he said no.
It was purely instinctual, the same way you flinch at something coming toward your face before you consciously decide to flinch. He felt the pulse arrive and something in him pushed back at it, a flat and deliberate refusal, and the pulse did not enter.
He checked the tally.
Still eight. No addition.
The rejected energy didn't disappear. It lingered around him instead, that same cold-hot sensation drifting at the edges of his aura like smoke that couldn't find a window. He had refused to eat it but hadn't managed to actually dispel it. It was hovering.
He imagined swatting it away. Like a fly. The mental image was so undignified that he filed it away for later consideration.
Interesting, though. He could refuse.
A few hundred meters back, among the dwindling second group, Camilla felt her white kitten move.
The palm-sized creature had been riding the hollow between her neck and shoulder for the entire sprint, quiet and observant, a subsidiary of the Million Reincarnation Cat that had been drawn into existence specifically by proximity to something unusual. It stirred now, stretched one tiny paw into the air beside her ear, and caught something.
A faint gray breath. Cold and hot at the same time. The kitten bit into it with the focused satisfaction of an animal that has located the exact dried fish it wanted.
Camilla looked back at the body that had just been left on the runway. Then she looked at the vanguard, far ahead.
The arithmetic was not complicated. One death. Close range. The death energy should not have reached someone running hundreds of meters away. The absorption range she had observed attached to Liam at the hotel banquet had been approximately one kilometer. That was the figure she had been working from.
But the rejected pulse had drifted further. Much further.
The range had expanded.
She filed this away with the precision of someone who had been collecting data points since December and intended to collect more.
Then the second group started dying in earnest.
The first pulse had been singular. The next ones arrived in sequence.
Liam felt the count tick.
Nine.
Thirteen.
Fourteen.
Four additions inside thirty seconds. Each one that cold-hot sensation, each one absorbed now without hesitation because his brief experiment with rejection had provided its data point and the pragmatic half of his brain had immediately overruled the curious half.
More death energy was better than less. That math was not complicated.
He looked back.
The group of twenty-plus that had been trailing the vanguard by several hundred meters had contracted violently. A dozen people remained where there had been more than twenty. The rest were on the road. The survivors scattered from each other in a chaotic mess, trying to put distance between themselves and whatever had just happened.
Camilla's three private soldiers ran in close triangle formation around her. Each of them had a silenced pistol. Each of them was putting it away now, the work done with the clean economy of professionals who did not discuss what they had just done while they were still doing it.
Shizuku noticed. Kurapika noticed. Neither of them said anything, because the exam was still happening and you could not afford to spend oxygen on commentary.
Liam looked at Camilla.
The princess had slowed. The pace she had been holding was no longer what it was. She was calculating something, or conserving something, and either way she was no longer running like someone committed to the top forty. The brutal equalization of Menchi's fried rice had caught her the same way it had caught everyone, and fifty kilometers without her full aura was apparently the point where being the second prince of Kakin stopped mattering to her legs.
He swept his gaze left.
Akane and Aoi were still on the road. Both of them were past the point where pride was a useful emotion. Lips dry. Eyes fixed on some middle distance that was neither the finish line nor the ground. Legs still moving on the momentum of having decided not to quit in front of Liam, which was a kind of stubbornness that deserved respect even when it was making everything harder for them.
He slowed.
Effortlessly, because he was riding the wind and slowing cost him nothing, he dropped back beside the two sisters and matched their pace. He reached out both hands and placed them lightly against the backs of their necks, one palm for each, a contact that lasted less than two seconds.
Rose-gold stars settled into the skin and vanished.
"You've done enough," he said. "Give up when you need to. After the whole exam is over, find me. I'll take you on officially."
Aoi stared at him with the expression of someone who had just been told something too good to immediately believe. She was still running. Her body was apparently operating on a separate protocol from her brain.
"Really?" Her voice came out ragged from the effort of breathing. "Really really really?"
Akane didn't ask twice. She believed it, slowed her stride, and let the pace collapse all at once. Her whole body seemed to register permission and exhale simultaneously. Her legs went from numb to heavy to aware of how heavy they were.
Then she noticed that the heaviness was fading.
Not gone. But softening. The Star Mark had already begun its quiet work, the small current of healing running through muscle and joint and the specific kind of exhaustion that lives in the chest.
She looked at her hands. Then at her legs. Then at Liam's back, already pulling ahead.
Aoi ran two more staggering steps and stopped. She bent over her own knees, hands braced, sweat dripping from her face onto the asphalt, and stood there getting her breath back. Then something flew over her head.
She looked up.
Three candidates sailed through the air in a loose arc, launched from somewhere ahead, trajectory calculated to cover the distance to the remaining second-group survivors with geometric precision.
She looked forward.
Liam was already walking his hands together in a casual clap and accelerating back into the vanguard's formation, the kind of person who throws three human beings behind him as debris and treats it as roughly equivalent to swatting a hand in someone's general direction.
Pariston, somewhere in the crowd, watched this and turned his attention to the girl ranked fifteenth in the vanguard.
Behind the chaos, Camilla's guards caught the flying candidates before they could land, deflecting them sideways with efficient force. The bodies skidded across the road and lay still. The guards repositioned around Camilla without discussion.
Then a voice said, very quietly: "Camilla."
Camilla turned.
The girl standing behind her had blue braids and an expression of pleasant neutrality that did not quite fit her face. She was holding a small gourd, palm-sized, lacquered jade-green, the stopper already removed, the mouth aimed forward.
There was a carved image on the gourd's surface. Two small figures, one laughing, one crying, hands clasped together.
Camilla's mind processed the threat and the body was already half-moving when the pull arrived.
It was not violent. It was simply definitive. The air around her contracted inward toward the gourd's mouth, and her aura contracted with it, and her form followed her aura, and she was drawn inward in the span of a breath.
The girl who was not entirely herself raised her other hand, pressed the stopper firmly into place, and shook the gourd once. A light, satisfied motion.
Then she tucked it away, turned, and walked back along the runway alone.
A few steps behind Camilla's last position, the three private soldiers had finished throwing aside the launched candidates and turned to find the person they were protecting had ceased to exist in the space she had occupied. One second she had been there. Now there was road.
They looked at the blue-haired girl walking away in the distance. Then at each other.
The second soldier turned slowly, looking for the other one. The red-haired girl. There had been two of them.
Something brushed the back of his neck, light as a sleeve catching in the wind.
A small rose-gold mark settled into the skin between his collar and his hairline and was still.
Aoi drifted past the last private soldier in silence, light-footed and unhurried, and the star talisman she left behind glinted once in the afternoon sun before fading from view.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~