Chapter 13: The Old Rascal and the Little Gamer
The Hunter Association airship moved steadily through the clouds.
Perhaps because of the extraordinary physical recovery that came with Nen awakening, Ross came back to himself after approximately six hours of dead sleep, unprompted. The stretch that followed produced a chain of cracking sounds from every joint in his body, and his throat let out a low, involuntary groan of pure satisfaction.
The time was just past one in the morning. Over six hours remained before they reached the destination.
He found the washroom, splashed water on his face, and went looking for the airship's crew.
His goal was simple: borrow a television to play games on.
There was plenty of time, he wasn't hungry, and he would rather use the hours doing something he actually wanted to do. It was also a good opportunity to finally see what the other two modes of his Little Tyrant actually did in practice.
Real Mode mapped the game's protagonist onto his own body via the controller. Entertainment Mode, on the other hand, required a television as the necessary medium for video and audio output. That was a consequence of how he had built the original console — he had never thought to design it as a handheld unit with an integrated screen, and so none had been included when the ability materialized. If he didn't want to be borrowing televisions or carrying a portable one every time this came up, he was going to have to figure out how to add new peripherals to the setup at some point.
Candidate areas were concentrated on the airship's first floor: a large room that could hold over a hundred people, a cafeteria with tables and chairs that operated on a pay basis, and benches along the corridors. The second floor was cabins — candidates could use those too, but like the cafeteria, they cost money.
In practical terms, the two places on board with televisions were the cafeteria and the cabins. The cafeteria had one mounted above the counter to the left of the menu board — a large, chunky old CRT set that appeared to exist primarily to loop sponsor advertisements and catch breaking news. The cabins presumably had the standard room setup, one television per room.
As expected, his request was refused. The crew dismissed him as a broke candidate with too much time on his hands and nothing useful to do with it.
That word was accurate. The mental category they had created for Ross came with a prefix: broke.
If he had been able to produce a fistful of cash and put it in front of them, they would have opened a cabin without hesitation. But Ross's total assets at this moment amounted to fifteen hundred jenny — enough on ground level for a bowl of ramen with a fried rice on the side, and on this official airship enough for exactly one hand-drip coffee. A cabin was not in the picture.
Being refused, however, was not the same as giving up.
Homeroom teachers doing midnight dorm checks. Four-story dormitory buildings. Glass shards embedded in concrete along the perimeter wall. None of those had ever stopped a player who had committed to an all-night session. This was not going to be the thing that did it.
After several deep, slow breaths — concentrating on the particular sensation of his Zetsu state, recalling what that restriction felt like from the inside — Ross's presence quietly dropped out of the world. He had entered Zetsu.
Not bad at all. By the standard of Zetsu alone, he was running ahead of quite a few people who had been at this for a year or more.
His plan now had exactly one step: find an empty cabin, get inside, find the television.
What Ross did not know was that every move he made was being captured clearly by the surveillance cameras distributed throughout the airship.
The vessel carried, beyond one old-rascal Chairman in search of entertainment, one overworked Chairman's aide, and three examiners currently off duty and at rest, a substantial number of ordinary Association staff. Their responsibilities included maintaining the airship's various systems and monitoring the candidates at all times to prevent incidents.
Every surviving candidate had made it through two phases of a process that filtered ordinary people out as a matter of course. Several of them were legitimate Nen users capable of causing real damage. Leaving them to wander freely was not a realistic option.
With professional Hunters on board, the staff operated under a protocol that included an escalation step. When the monitors showed badge 406 moving down the second-floor corridor in Zetsu and beginning to work on an empty cabin door lock, the staff watching had exactly the expression of people who were thinking: please, not in the middle of the night. One of them, clocking the number on the badge, reached for the line connected to the Chairman's end of things — more precisely, to an aide currently working alongside the Chairman.
Strictly speaking, this was not the kind of thing worth interrupting the Association's highest-ranking official over. But after learning about badge 406's particular situation from Satotz, Netero had issued a standing instruction: elevate surveillance priority for that candidate, and report anything unusual immediately.
His instinct was telling him badge 406 was carrying secrets. And entertainment.
At this moment, the Chairman was playing a ball-grabbing game with Killua and Gon. The reason barely mattered — he had found a convenient excuse to get two promising young candidates to keep him company for a while. As long as it wasn't going back to meetings, he was content with anything.
It had to be said: the stamina these two twelve-year-olds were running on was genuinely alarming. They were approaching forty hours without sleep, and neither of them showed the faintest sign of wearing down. Worse than machines.
"Chairman."
The aide approached and leaned in with a quiet word. The Chairman's expression shifted in a way that made his curiosity plainly visible.
The report had covered not just the current door-picking attempt but the earlier TV request refusal as well. Connecting events into a coherent picture was basic professional competence at the Association's level.
"You two, take a short break. This old man has something to take care of."
Without giving either of the sweaty twelve-year-olds a chance to respond, he took the ball and walked out.
Gon and Killua looked at each other. Then they followed.
Neither the aide nor the Chairman made any move to stop them. That counted as implicit permission.
Meanwhile, Ross had gotten into the cabin and was moving through the setup with the ease of someone who had done it before: console positioned, controller plugged in, outlet located, cable selected. His video cable had connectors at both ends — modern HDMI on one side, the old composite yellow-white-red on the other. The cabin's chunky CRT set ran on composite, so composite it was.
With everything in place, Ross reached into his jacket and produced the Sonic 3 cartridge with a faint sense of ceremony. He blew on the contacts — serving no demonstrable purpose, as it never had and never would — and pressed the cartridge into the slot with precisely the right amount of force.
Heart pounding, hands faintly trembling, his right index finger pressed the power button.
Old hardware started with a speed that newer systems had long since abandoned any interest in matching. The screen went from black to a 4:3 white in an instant, and from the center of that white field, four familiar letters assembled themselves —
"SE~GA~"
Hearing that startup sound again brought an indescribable wave of familiarity. And somewhere underneath it, a faint and inexplicable sense of betrayal. The Little Tyrant's shell was a knockoff of Nintendo's Famicom. It was running a Sega game cartridge. If you know, you know.
Then the blue anthropomorphic hedgehog that Sega had built specifically to rival Nintendo's Mario came skipping out from behind the enormous logo, growing larger until he was nearly filling the screen.
[You have activated "Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement" — Entertainment Mode.]
[Because the power source your console is currently using is "electricity," you will be unable to activate Entertainment Mode's additional bonus effects.]