Fifty minutes.
Five kilometers left.
Sixty-two candidates remained on the track and every single one of them looked like they were carrying a small invisible boulder on their back. Most of them had reached the point where the body stops registering exhaustion as pain and starts registering it as weather: a general condition, ambient, not worth addressing separately from the problem of continuing to exist.
A few candidates in the trailing cluster were past even that. Their eyes had gone glassy. Their legs kept moving on whatever neural signal reaches the muscles after the brain has formally checked out. They could fall at any moment. They wouldn't stop, though. Stopping meant seeing the finish line and not reaching it, and that was apparently worse than collapse.
A dozen or so candidates ran slightly ahead of the rest, the tentative vanguard of the exhausted, the people who had done the math and believed they could hold this pace for five more kilometers.
Then someone passed all of them as if they were standing still.
Liam cruised through the field with the specific energy of a man who had somewhere more important to be. His aura was still pinned at fifty, the same as everyone else. The red seasoning's crash had not made exceptions for him. But his Star Mark had been doing quiet structural repair on his muscles since the first kilometer, and he had spent the entire race riding a current of wind that made the air work with him instead of against him, and the combined result was that he felt good.
He felt, if he was being honest, slightly bored.
The candidates he passed did not have the breath to express what they were feeling about this. The sentiment was visible anyway.
Shizuku appeared at his shoulder a moment later, having closed the gap on her own legs without any particular aura technique. She also had a Star Mark. She also felt fine. She had not bothered to use wind Nen because she had not needed to.
"Your aura still sealed?" she asked.
"Same as you. Same as everyone." Liam glanced back at the field, checking the front rows with Gyo. Machi's aura hovered at roughly fifty. Kurapika's read the same. Whatever Menchi had done with that rice, it was consistent in its cruelty. "Nobody's broken out yet."
"How long does it last?"
"That's a good question."
It was a very good question. One he did not currently have the answer to, and which had significant tactical implications for the rest of the exam.
He filed it and kept running.
The finish line was the entrance to a valley: two rock faces narrowing to a passage, the afternoon sun cutting long shadows across the road. Knuckle stood at the threshold without a shirt, which seemed like a stylistic choice on his part, still steaming from the exertion of keeping pace with a sprint marathon for an hour straight. He had a stopwatch in his hand and the professional calm of someone who had done this before.
He looked up at the first two figures crossing the line and nodded.
"Number forty-two. Number forty-three. Passed."
He pointed. "Food and rest over there. Second phase starts in thirty minutes."
Liam looked where he was pointing.
Menchi was sitting in a folding chair with her legs crossed, phone in one hand, looking completely unbothered by the fact that she had just supervised a fifty-kilometer sprint and then apparently teleported a food truck to the finish line. The truck was parked behind her, stocked and running.
"Why is it you again?" Liam said.
Menchi looked up from her phone. "You can't leave an impression that my cooking causes permanent side effects and then not show up to fix it. That's bad for my reputation."
"Your reputation."
"I'm a food Hunter. Reputation is the whole job."
Shizuku had already wandered over to inspect the food truck. Menchi tilted her head in a nod of permission and stood up to serve.
She came back with two bowls of mushroom soup, the surface dusted with fine green powder. Liam recognized it immediately: a condiment Menchi had developed herself, reverse-engineered from the recovery effect of the Star Mark, calibrated for aura restoration without the associated restrictions. It worked at about seventy percent of the efficiency of the real thing, which was still impressive.
He took the bowl and drank.
The warmth moved through his chest with genuine intent. Even at fifty aura, there was something to restore.
"So," he said. "How long does the suppression last?"
Menchi settled back into her chair. "The enhancement effect of the red seasoning isn't absolute," she said, with the tone of someone explaining something they had spent considerable time working out. "The aura boost only raises capacity by about half again the baseline. Some people can hit comparable numbers through emotional spikes alone." She paused. "Which means the crash isn't a fixed outcome. It's a probability."
"But everyone crashed."
"Everyone in that room had a strong enough reaction to cause it. So: yes, everyone crashed. But the suppression duration isn't fixed either." She turned the phone face-down in her lap. "My working estimate is that suppression lasts roughly one hour per ten thousand aura in your baseline."
Silence.
Liam ran the numbers.
He had sixty-two thousand aura at his real ceiling. Even accounting for the Nen beast's share. That meant somewhere in the range of six hours of sitting at fifty aura. Give or take whatever variables Menchi's estimate hadn't accounted for.
Shizuku, twenty-five thousand: two and a half hours, approximately. Still suppressed for the entire second phase and likely into whatever came after.
Kurapika arrived at the finish line while Liam was still absorbing this. His candidate number was called. He walked directly toward Menchi's food truck with the careful economy of someone managing their remaining calories, caught the tail end of the explanation, and stopped.
"Twenty thousand," he said, mostly to himself. "Two more hours."
"About that," Menchi agreed.
Kurapika stood with this for a moment. Then he got food and sat down, because there was nothing to do about it and the second phase started in thirty minutes regardless.
Machi reached the line a few seconds later. Knuckle called her number. She did not go to sit down. She went directly to the food truck, collected a plate of whatever Menchi had prepared in advance, and worked through it standing up with the focus of someone refueling rather than eating. The green seasoning hit. She set the empty plate aside.
"The second prince," Liam said, not quite to anyone, "had roughly seven thousand aura by my read before the crash. Which means she would have been among the first to fully recover once the hour mark passed." He looked at his soup bowl. "She'd have had full aura while most of the vanguard was still running on fifty. Most of the heavy hitters suppressed, most of the ordinary candidates recovered. Perfect window."
Menchi glanced at him with mild curiosity.
"If nothing unexpected had happened," Liam added, with the specific tone of someone for whom nothing unexpected was ever actually unexpected.
The purple-gold gourd was tucked out of sight. Camilla, second prince of Kakin, was currently stored inside it with her aura draining at ten units per second. Liam estimated she would remain cooperative.
The window she had been heading for was closed. Unfortunate for her.
The next twenty minutes proceeded in the calm, organized manner of survivors who have done a hard thing and earned a break before the next hard thing begins.
Candidates crossed the finish line in pairs and small groups, each one announced by Knuckle and directed toward the food and rest area. They arrived looking like the last thirty meters had cost them something they weren't getting back, and most of them sat down immediately and didn't speak.
The green seasoning soup moved efficiently. Menchi had prepared enough, because of course she had.
"Number thirty-three. Number sixty-six. Number ninety-nine. Passed."
"Number one hundred eighty-nine. Number three hundred sixty-nine. Passed."
Shizuku watched Knuckle work through the list and said: "Special exam design. The president put a lot of thought into specifically targeting people like us."
Menchi almost choked on her own drink. "Don't say things like that about President Netero."
"It's accurate."
"It's also not the kind of thing you say out loud at his exam."
Shizuku considered this. The consideration did not visibly change her position.
Fifty-seven minutes.
Fifty-eight.
With three seconds remaining on Knuckle's stopwatch, two more figures hit the finish line.
Pariston loosened his suit tie with the air of a man who had just concluded a mildly inconvenient business meeting. He rolled his shoulders. He looked at the remaining candidates already resting and gave the assembled group a smile that implied he had found all of this very charming and slightly beneath him.
Hisoka was putting a deck of playing cards away, apparently having used the last few kilometers to practice sleight of hand. He slowed his pace to a walk, looked around with mild interest, and found nothing he considered worth his full attention.
The two of them glanced at each other. The moment held for exactly as long as it needed to. Then they walked away in opposite directions.
Knuckle clicked the stopwatch and announced the close. The candidates who arrived after that mark were eliminated. He was pleasant about it in the way that examiners are pleasant about delivering finality: straightforwardly, without elaboration.
Thirty-seven candidates had passed.
"Rest here. In thirty minutes, enter the valley. Second phase begins."
Thirty minutes passed with the particular speed that rest periods have when you know something is waiting on the other side of them.
Liam stood and stretched. His aura was still fifty. He had stopped noticing.
The group moved into the valley passage single file, the rock walls close on both sides, the afternoon sky a narrow strip above. Then the passage ended, and the rock walls fell away, and everything opened.
A lake.
It was not a pond with aspirations. It was not a scenic feature. It was a body of water so large that the far shore was a faint suggestion at the edge of distance, surrounded on all sides by mountain walls that rose straight out of the water's edge and left nowhere else to be. The surface was still. It reflected the sky with the indifferent perfection of something that had been doing this for a very long time and intended to continue.
Hundreds of football fields. Easy.
The candidates stood at the water's edge in silence and looked at it, and the lake looked back at them without comment, and the second phase had begun.