The rules hung in the air like a bad smell nobody wanted to acknowledge.
Fifty kilometers. One hour. Top forty advance. Knuckle let the numbers sit.
Battera did the math. It didn't take long. He sighed, and the sound of it was somehow louder than the announcement. A man who had built an empire from nothing, and had the good sense to recognize when a door was closed.
"I'm out."
Liam had been watching him for exactly this reaction. "You heard the terms. At your age, fifty kilometers in an hour isn't a sprint. It's a eulogy."
Battera almost looked offended. Then he looked at the 140 candidates shuffling around them, each one carrying the bone-deep exhaustion of having their aura forcibly rearranged by a bowl of fried rice, and he let the offense go.
Alice took his arm and smiled. "When we were training with our hired Hunter instructor, fifty kilometers in an hour was never in reach. And we were in proper shape back then." A small shrug. "We'll cheer from the sidelines."
Knuckle was still going.
"Rule two! Since this is a sprint and not a scenic stroll, candidates who exceed one hour will be disqualified immediately upon reaching the finish line threshold!"
Somewhere in the crowd, someone made a noise that was half laugh and half grief. A standard marathon ran forty-two kilometers, and finishing in two hours was considered excellent. Knuckle wanted fifty in one. After the rice. After all of it.
The universe, Liam reflected, had a very consistent sense of humor, and all of it was directed at him personally.
Camilla stood among the candidates with perfect posture and not a trace of the cold sweat she had very recently been wiping from her face. The sealed-aura crash had hit her the same as everyone else. She had apparently decided this was irrelevant. The princess of Kakin did not get frightened off by a time limit.
Kurapika was already adjusting his breathing, calculating distance and pace against the fifty aura he had left. Shizuku stood at Liam's shoulder, waiting without fidgeting. Whether this was admirable composure or genuine indifference was, as usual, difficult to determine.
"What about you two?" Kurapika glanced at Akane and Aoi.
"We're trying," Akane said, no hesitation.
Aoi glanced back toward the bathrooms at the far end of the chamber. "What about Leorio?"
"He can take care of himself." Akane waved a hand. "My guess? When we cross the finish line, he'll still be on the toilet."
The laxative that had ended Leorio's exam had been thorough. Criminally thorough. Whoever had slipped it into his food had committed to the bit.
"You only need to understand what's happening," Liam said.
Akane's smile sharpened. "If we advance, you'll actually take us on as students?"
Aoi didn't push her sister this time. She lifted her eyes and looked at Liam directly, waiting. Neither of them had fully processed how much the man standing beside Lumos had changed their lives.
Liam glanced toward the far gate. "We'll talk after we finish running."
A grinding sound rolled through the chamber. Everyone turned.
At the far end of the corridor, past Knuckle and Menchi, the wide security door was rising. Slowly. Then fast. The rollers screamed against their tracks.
Afternoon sun poured in.
It was too bright after the underground lighting. The candidates squinted as one, blinking at the concept of sky. Then the shapes resolved: a road. Dozens of meters wide. Straight as a ruler. Running from the gate directly into open wilderness until the distance swallowed it whole.
Shizuku tilted her head. Her expression said: we were underground beneath a shopping mall. Where did that highway come from.
Liam had no answer. Hunter Exam geography operated by its own internal logic. Questioning it cost calories he was going to need.
Menchi moved past them toward the starting position. She glanced back at the group as she walked by, quick and professional, the look landing somewhere between Liam and Machi without fully committing to either.
"Come on," she said. Aimed at the air.
Machi didn't react. She looked straight ahead. When Knuckle called the start, she was already moving.
She hit full stride in three steps.
Fifty aura in her body, and she ran like the number was a rumor she didn't believe. Years of physical conditioning don't care about aura levels. Machi opened a gap on the field immediately, a lone point pulling away from the mass, and the 140 other candidates surged out behind her in a dark wave, chasing a lead they were not going to close.
Knuckle ran alongside the field on the right edge, keeping pace with the leaders without visible effort. Examiner privilege.
Liam settled into the rush and thought briefly, practically, about his fifty aura.
Fifty aura was almost nothing. In a real fight he would have called it a rounding error. But a rounding error moving at the speed of a sprinting body was still something to work with.
He pushed the thought into the aura. Let it shift. Wind attributes, all of it, spreading outward from his center until the sensation of running into a headwind simply stopped.
The resistance vanished.
The air that had been pressing against his face became part of his movement instead of opposition to it. He was not fighting forward anymore. He was being carried.
The aura cost was nearly nothing. His Star Mark's natural recovery refilled at the same rate he spent. He had, in effect, an endless trickle of almost nothing, which turned out to be the exact right amount of fuel for this exact situation.
He was not sweating.
Shizuku ran beside him. Her aura wasn't doing much of anything beyond existing. She was running on legs that had been doing this kind of work since before she'd ever learned what aura was. She was fine. She always seemed fine, which Liam occasionally found more unnerving than the candidates who were visibly struggling.
Kurapika was showing the math on his face. Stride length against available energy against distance remaining. Jaw set. Breathing controlled. Fifty aura was well below what he normally operated on, and the difference was being paid in muscle. His physical reserves were good. The Kurta clan had built him for endurance as well as precision. But good was not the same as easy.
Liam drifted alongside him. "Suzaku. Need a hand?"
Star bubbles gathered at his fingertips. Ready.
Kurapika shook his head. One steady breath. Kept running.
He was going to do this on his own. Liam recognized the look. He left the offer open and pulled forward.
Ten kilometers in, the first candidates started losing color.
Not metaphorically. They went pale and uneven, rhythm breaking, form collapsing from sprint into something that could generously be called determined stumbling.
At twelve kilometers, they started falling behind in groups. A candidate would lose pace, see the field pulling away, and the understanding would arrive all at once. Some of them kept going anyway. A few sat down in the road and watched the others pass.
At sixteen kilometers, several went down entirely. Knees buckled. Vision cut out. They hit the asphalt with the finality of people whose exam was over. Liam passed two of them on the right shoulder of the road. Still breathing. One with foam at the corner of his mouth. Alive. Just finished.
He didn't break stride.
The vanguard had settled into a rough formation of about seventy. All of them had done the math. All of them had decided they would finish inside the hour. The sprint had become a controlled burn, each candidate managing output, watching the runners beside them, saving the real effort for the final kilometers.
The decisive stretch was still ahead. Everyone knew it.
Liam looked back.
Akane and Aoi were still running. But the cost was on them now. Lips dry. Faces flushed past the color of their hair. They had been keeping pace through sheer stubbornness, which was not nothing, but the gap between them and the vanguard was growing. A few hundred meters. Getting worse.
Behind them, running in close formation, were three candidates who had refused to let the sisters disappear from view. The second prince's personal security detail. Patient, professional, and not in any hurry to be noticed.
Then it hit him.
A sensation without a clean description. Cold and hot at the same time. It pressed against the back of his awareness like a hand laid flat against a wall, deliberate, waiting for him to open a door he had not chosen to open.
Death energy.
Liam knew the feeling the way you know a recurring bad dream: recognizable on contact, unwelcome regardless. Each time the count had climbed and the Memento Mori mechanism drew more dark accumulation toward his heart, this was the signal. He had learned to note it. Absorb it. Let it settle into the tally.
This time was different.
Something in him pushed back.
The thought arrived complete and unexpected: he could try to reject it.
Whether that was actually possible, he had no idea. Whether attempting it in the middle of a fifty-kilometer sprint was a sensible moment for an experiment in resisting the internal mechanics of his own death energy was also genuinely unclear.
He kept running.