Chapter 11: 90 Degrees Is a Wall, 91 Degrees Is a Slope
Ross knew perfectly well what sushi was. He had simply never had any intention of making it.
The main issue was that Menchi, as an examiner, had a fundamental problem.
As established: Hunter examiners operated with enormous personal discretion — broad enough to pass or fail a candidate based purely on their own preferences, with no explanation required.
And once Ross understood that Menchi's assigned dish was still going to be sushi, he already knew the outcome for everyone in the room. Every last one of them was going to fail.
The reasons were two-fold.
First: Menchi had arbitrarily narrowed the category to nigiri sushi specifically. Nigiri required saltwater fish as its primary ingredient. They were at Biskan Forest Park. There was no ocean anywhere near them — only rivers. Every fish available was freshwater. Setting aside the issue of freshwater fish parasites entirely, the ingredients were wrong from the start at the most basic level.
Second: Menchi's attitude as an examiner was off from the beginning. She had apparently decided to evaluate the candidates' work by the standards of a professional chef.
Hunters had an enormous range of specializations — Bounty Hunters, Rare Object Hunters, Beast Hunters, and many more. Gourmet Hunter was one path among many. Not every candidate in the room was pursuing that path, but Menchi had decided to judge all of them as though they were aspiring Gourmet Hunters in waiting. That was her fundamental problem.
What the test was actually supposed to evaluate was more straightforward: whether candidates had the knowledge base to recognize sushi at all, or the observational skill to infer the correct answer by watching others work. Meeting the basic form of a sushi should have been enough to pass.
But then —
Hanzou, badge 294, walked his nigiri up to the judging table. The man was bald, and his sushi, at minimum, had nothing to criticize visually. Menchi sent it straight back with six words: "Not good enough. Do it again."
That was the moment Menchi forgot she was an examiner and began thinking of herself as a culinary professional.
Nigiri looked simple: shape the rice into a rectangle, lay a piece of fish on top. But in the admittedly shallow understanding of someone whose entire sushi experience came from conveyor belt restaurants, even the basics still had requirements. The rice had to be seasoned vinegar rice, blended to the right ratio. The fish varied in texture and fat content depending on which part of the cut you used. A small amount of freshly grated wasabi went on top of the finished piece. The rice itself had to hold its shape without the grains compacting into a solid block.
And that was only the minimum standard for a specialist sushi restaurant.
With a palate like Menchi's, a sushi grandmaster could walk in and fail on the spot. Ordinary candidates who had barely cooked rice in their lives, were working with the wrong fish entirely, and hadn't even washed their hands before touching the ingredients had no realistic shot.
Ross had seen the ending from the beginning. So he did the sensible thing: he retreated to a corner, sat down, and worked steadily through the entire basin of rice at his station, eating it with the roasted pig organs and pork cracklings he had set aside earlier. He had no involvement in any of what was happening around him.
He'd had nothing but fat and protein up to that point. Now he had carbohydrates to add to the equation. Almost no dietary fiber anywhere in the mix, but Ross was genuinely satisfied — teetering on the pleasant edge of a carb coma, even.
Not that he had gone entirely unobserved. Buhara, who had consumed seventy-two whole pigs and appeared open to further discussion on the subject, had noticed. So had Satotz, watching from outside through the window.
If not for the obvious awkwardness of approaching him, both of them would have gone over and asked a simple question: had Ross known from the start that it was going to play out exactly like this, or was he just hungry?
Ross's honest answer was: both.
Events unfolded exactly as the original story dictated. Menchi, who did not possess a David Tae-type ability specifically built for culinary evaluation, ate barely enough sushi — most of them only marginally acceptable in shape — before announcing that she was full. Every applicant in the room had failed. Every single one of them, including the candidates who had worked genuinely hard, ended up in exactly the same position as Ross, who had spent the exam eating roast meat and organs over rice.
After that came the candidates' objections. Then Menchi holding the line. Then the standoff atmosphere that settled over everything. And then, roughly two hours later, a Kirov — wait, a passenger airship bearing the Hunter Association's special insignia — appeared in the sky above the second phase venue.
The airship was hovering at roughly a hundred meters and hadn't yet descended to dock when a figure launched off the deck and dropped freely.
The crowd made noise. The figure landed clean. The shockwave of displaced air that rolled outward from the impact was strong enough to leave people reeling.
A white beard worthy of a mountain sage. Eyebrows to match. Large, prominent earlobes. A high topknot bun. The first impression was of someone pleasant and unthreatening. And yet the instant this person appeared, Menchi — who had been loudly throwing her weight around and refusing to budge moments before — visibly snapped to attention, her expression and posture stiffening in ways anyone could see.
"It's been a while, Chairman Netero."
Menchi brought her fists together and performed a formal martial artist's salute toward the old man who had just stepped off a hundred-meter drop without a care in the world. Netero responded with a single quiet nod.
Netero. Chairman of the Hunter Association. Chairman of the Hunter Exam Selection Committee. The most prestigious figure in the Hunter world, and — by the original canon's accounting, at least — the single most powerful individual among all of humanity. Whether that still held in this stitched-together world of theirs was something Ross was no longer quite ready to take for granted.
What followed stayed on script. Netero affirmed Menchi's standing as examiner. Menchi voluntarily admitted her failure of duty. Netero offered a retest as a way forward, and Menchi accepted on the spot, taking the graceful exit she had been handed.
"Then the new test subject — the new menu item — is..."
"Boiled egg."
Menchi announced the new second-phase challenge.
There was a small detail worth noting. When Menchi had first announced sushi, the word she had used to introduce the dish was "menu." Now, announcing the second challenge, she used "subject" instead. That single word swap was enough to confirm that Menchi had finally corrected her posture — her self-image had shifted back from culinary professional to Hunter examiner.
The eggs in question were not ordinary eggs. Candidates would need to leave the forest park and travel to a location called Frog-Tiger Mountain, where they would collect eggs produced by a creature classified under the academic name of Grape Spider — which, despite the name, was actually a beast-type bird that secreted silk — and then boil those eggs.
The mountain itself had an interesting shape: like an upturned egg pudding cut cleanly down the middle, with a gorge running through its center. The gorge was strung throughout with silk threads, and eggs hung suspended from them in clusters.
The gorge was effectively two sheer ninety-degree cliff faces dropping straight down. At the bottom, the water ran fast and deep enough to swallow a person without any effort at all. It was a serious test of physical ability and reaction time.
For many of the candidates, though, this kind of bungee jump without the bungee cord was considerably more manageable than anything involving a kitchen. Over twenty of them went over the edge within the first few moments of arriving.
Some landed on the silk threads, which held. Some missed by a margin and went straight into the water. At that height, hitting the surface was roughly equivalent to hitting concrete. Even those who survived the impact were going to be carried by the current to wherever the river emptied into the sea, dozens of kilometers away — a different outcome from death in name only.
Ross moved with the first group. The difference between him and everyone else was this:
He ran straight down the vertical cliff face.