Hakagon Lake.
Octagonal. Roughly eighty-two square kilometers. Side length approximately one kilometer per face, though the sign at the valley entrance gave the exact figures if you wanted them, and Kurapika had already read it by the time Liam finished looking at the water.
"Eighty-two square kilometers," Kurapika confirmed, in the tone of someone filing information under 'problems to solve.'
"There's a sign," Shizuku said, pointing.
"Yes," said Liam. "I saw it."
Thirty-seven candidates gathered at the shoreline while the lake glittered in the noon sun, indifferent to being examined. Mountains ringed every direction. The valley entrance was behind them. There was nowhere to go but forward, and forward was a lot of water.
Knuckle had vanished at some point between the valley passage and the shore. This seemed in character.
The roar hit before anyone noticed the source of it.
"QUIET!!"
The candidates parted around a man who had apparently grown from the rock itself. He stood roughly two meters tall, long dark hair hanging loose past his shoulders, jaw like carved stone. His suit shirt was doing structural work just containing his arms. He held a pipe the size of a small tree trunk in one hand with the casual grip of someone who had been carrying it since childhood and stopped noticing the weight.
He wore sunglasses indoors. Outside. Everywhere, presumably.
Liam looked at the pipe and placed the face behind it.
Morel. One-star Sea Hunter. Knuckle's master. In the original story, he had held a smoke cage so strong that the Chimera Ant King's royal guards had failed to break it with raw force, which put his ability in a very specific bracket of serious. Currently his aura was suppressed to fifty the same as everyone else, and even so the sheer mass of his Nen reserves made them visible like heat shimmer when Liam checked with Gyo.
His total aura sat somewhere around Liam's full ceiling. Which was not a comfortable thing to be standing next to at a Lake.
"I am the examiner in charge of the second phase!" Morel announced, to the entire mountain range as much as to the thirty-seven candidates. He had the lung capacity of someone who considered shouting a resting state. "Now! Let me explain what the second phase requires!"
He used the pipe as a pointer, tapping the map on the sign with a crack that suggested he had underestimated how much force was involved, or had not tried to estimate at all.
"This is where you are now." Tap. Bottom edge. "This is where you need to go." Tap. Top edge. "Directly opposite. Across the lake."
He swung the pipe in a wide arc, directing everyone's attention to the far shore. Liam estimated the straight-line distance at around four kilometers. The shimmer of something on the other side that could be a building if you squinted correctly.
Someone in the crowd said: "Swimming? Again with the sports events?"
Nobody responded to this aloud, but several people's body language agreed.
"There is a temporary hotel on the opposite shore," Morel said. "Candidates who arrive at that hotel with the key to their room have passed the second phase. Two conditions apply. First: the key."
He reached into his pocket and produced one.
It was ordinary in size, ordinary in shape. Not in material. The key appeared to be made of something between solidified smoke and very confident fog, a matte gray substance that held its form as though it had decided to and might un-decide at any moment. It caught the light the wrong way.
Liam's Nen sense confirmed what his eyes already suspected. Manipulation-type construct, shaped from the smoke Morel channeled through that enormous pipe. The same material Morel used to build his smoke soldiers, his cages, his entire tactical toolkit. He could create them anywhere in range. He could sense them all simultaneously.
Which meant finding one was not purely a search problem. It was also a threat assessment problem.
"There are fifty keys hidden throughout Hakagon Lake!" Morel declared.
The crowd produced a noise that was several emotions at once.
"In that lake." Someone pointed, helpfully.
"Fifty," confirmed another candidate. "In eighty-two square kilometers."
"That's one key per what, a football field and a half? How is that finding a needle in a haystack? That IS a needle in a haystack, there are six hundred football fields in that lake!"
Morel weathered this without visible reaction. "Candidates who find the task too difficult are welcome to surrender their number plates and exit the valley."
Nobody surrendered anything.
Someone near the back raised a hand: "You mentioned two conditions."
"Five days," said another candidate, before Morel could answer. "Obviously. It's a time limit. Otherwise you'd just camp the lake until retirement." The first candidate started to argue. The second candidate was already arguing back.
Morel did not intervene. The exchange resolved itself.
"The lake contains substantial aquatic life," he continued. "Islands, reefs, and shoals are distributed throughout. Food and shelter are available within the exam zone. You may use any methods and any location within the valley. Exiting the valley to sleep and return each day is technically permitted under the rules." He paused to let this register. "The only constraint is time."
The thirty-seven candidates stood with this information.
The arithmetic was not subtle. Fifty keys, thirty-seven candidates. The first phase examiner had capped advancement at forty, which meant the second phase examiner had quietly over-provisioned his keys by thirteen. Either this was an administrative discrepancy, or it was an invitation to take more than one, and both possibilities were interesting in different ways.
There was a third possibility. The keys were made by Morel's Nen ability. Morel could track them all at once. Morel was the exam. The question of how many keys existed was therefore adjacent to the question of what Morel could be made to do about it.
A few candidates had already done the third calculation.
The first splash came before the announcement was finished. Then more. One after another, candidates committed to the water with the decisiveness of people who had decided that thinking too hard was its own disadvantage. They hit the surface and dispersed, diving, spreading across the lake in all directions.
Liam watched this and turned his attention to his own aura.
Still fifty. His full ceiling sat somewhere above sixty thousand, which according to Menchi's formula meant he was still hours away from recovery. No Ginseng Fruit, no effective En, no abilities beyond wind transmutation and the passive Star Mark effect. He had the physical tools and the tactical knowledge. He did not have the Nen toolkit.
Shizuku stood beside him. Blinky was conjurable in principle, but.
"The keys are Nen constructs," she said.
"Yes."
"Blinky can't absorb Nen items."
"That was my read too."
She accepted this with no visible disappointment and looked at the water.
Hisoka had not jumped. He stood slightly apart from the departing crowd, holding his hands up and turning them slowly, studying his palms with the focused interest of someone auditing a financial document. Testing the Bungee Gum at suppressed aura levels. Measuring how much stretch remained.
Whatever the number was, it satisfied him enough to put his hands in his pockets. He turned and began walking along the shore in the direction of the hotel, not toward the water, not toward any key. He was walking four kilometers around the edge of an eighty-two square kilometer lake at a leisurely pace.
Waiting. The math of waiting was: recover his aura eventually, and let thirty-six other people bring the keys out of the water for him.
The remaining candidates on the shore completed the same deduction about Hisoka in approximately two seconds and moved away from him in the direction of the water with renewed urgency.
Pariston had not moved either. He regarded Morel with the pleasant curiosity of a man pricing antiques at an estate sale.
"I imagine the examiner can sense the location of all fifty keys in real time," he said. "And presumably control them remotely. If a candidate managed to control the examiner, they'd have immediate access to all of them."
Morel held his pipe. "If you can control me, I'll make a hundred extra keys on the spot." He looked at Pariston from behind the sunglasses. "Can you?"
Pariston smiled. "Aura's still sealed, I'm afraid. You did think of everything." He sounded genuinely complimentary, which was its own variety of unsettling. "Very thorough. It almost seems like the examiners considered the possibility of being killed by the candidates."
Morel remained still.
Pariston waited to see if this landed. It did not. He shrugged, put both hands in his pockets, and walked away along the shore in the opposite direction from Hisoka. They would meet somewhere on the far side, eventually, and that meeting would be whatever it would be.
Three candidates remained at the shore.
Morel looked at them.
Kurapika had been watching the water with the expression of someone doing careful arithmetic in real time. "Ten more minutes," he said quietly, to Liam. "Menchi's formula, my baseline. Ten minutes and the suppression lifts. I can use the Revelation." He looked at Liam. "Divination. I can locate the key directly."
Liam nodded. This was a reasonable plan. Waiting ten minutes to use a divination ability that could find the key immediately was objectively more efficient than swimming into an eighty-two square kilometer lake blind.
He looked at the water.
He looked at Kurapika.
He placed one hand on Kurapika's back and pushed.
Kurapika left the ground with a sound of complete betrayal. He hit the surface at an angle that was technically a dive if you were being generous, and came up somewhere in the shallows looking at the shore with an expression that had moved past anger and into a very quiet, very specific variety of resignation.
Liam grabbed Shizuku by the wrist and jumped in after him.
The water was cold and clear. He went under and came back up with his hair in his face and the general sensation of someone who had just solved nothing but at least was no longer standing on a shore thinking about it.
"Wait!" His own voice echoed back off the mountains. "We're swimming!"
The doll-girl had cleared the shore at some point without anyone noticing her leave. She was already deep water, visible as a shape several dozen meters out, twin braids loose in the current. She moved through the water with the same absence of wasted motion she applied to everything else.
Machi hit the water a moment later, smooth and efficient, and headed toward the far shore on what appeared to be a fixed bearing.
Morel watched the lake from the shore, filled his pipe, and lit it. Purple-gray smoke rose in a column. He turned toward the valley passage and began walking at a steady pace in the direction of the hotel.
He had fifty keys to sense and five days of exam to run, and he did not appear to be in a hurry either.
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