REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!
Chapter 19: Written as Delinquents, Actually Morally Sound
The Hunter Association airship settled gradually onto the roof of Trick Tower, and the forty-five candidates who had spent the overnight transit recovering — most of them back to something close to full — filed out in a steady stream, shifting by degrees from the loose ease of free time back to the focused readiness the exam demanded.
At the same time, the Chairman's aide Beans clasped his hands behind his back and delivered the ground rules in his soft, unhurried voice.
"This is the top floor of Trick Tower, and the official venue for the third phase."
"The rules for this exam are straightforward."
Beans paused, then raised one finger.
"Any candidate who reaches ground level alive within the seventy-two-hour time limit will be considered to have passed."
There was an old principle that applied here: the bigger the thing, the fewer the words. Rules this simple, stated this briefly, were practically a guarantee that whatever was waiting inside the tower was considerably less straightforward.
The candidates absorbed the announcement and started moving immediately.
But at that moment, Netero — who had come down from the airship purely as a spectator — waved in Ross's direction.
Ross pointed at himself, looked baffled, and jogged over.
When Ross got close enough, the old man leaned in and dropped his voice.
"Kid. If you can make it through Trick Tower by ordinary means, this old man will write you that letter of introduction to Genkai — even if you don't pass the rest of the Hunter Exam. What do you say?"
Oh, so that's how it is. Caught, am I.
Ross went still for a moment, then looked at the smiling old rascal with an expression that mixed mild exasperation with something close to resignation.
From the moment he had used Sonic Speed Movement openly at Frog-Tiger Mountain the day before — running straight down a ninety-degree drop without any hesitation — Ross had stopped pretending his ability wasn't visible. He had also known, from that same moment, that anyone who had played the game the night before would have no difficulty connecting his behavior on the cliff face to Sonic's movement mechanics on the screen. Netero especially. And it was right then that he had already settled on his plan for the third phase.
His plan: ignore the interior route entirely and run straight down the outside of the tower using Sonic Speed Movement's vertical surface capability.
Admittedly, the original story had placed a candidate here at this exact moment — Badge 86, a free-solo climber — who had demonstrated with his own person what happened to anyone who tried to cling to the tower's exterior for any extended length of time. The flying creatures native to this area hunted in groups and had very flexible definitions of what qualified as a meal delivery. In the old TV version, Badge 86 had even been voiced by Togashi Yoshihiro personally. And by the time Netero had waved Ross over just now, that unfortunate individual had already been collected and was presumably serving as something's breakfast.
But viewed from a different angle: fast enough was fast enough. If the descent was over quickly enough, the creatures never got their opening.
And Ross was fast enough.
If he wanted the thrill of it, he could go straight vertical — a clean headfirst plunge down the side. If he wanted to be cautious about it, he could spiral down the cylindrical outer wall in a long descending helix. Either way, Sonic Speed Movement made it viable.
None of this was a surprising conclusion for the old man to reach. That was fine. What Ross couldn't deny was that the condition Netero had just put on the table hit exactly the right pressure point.
Because yes: the 287th Hunter Exam had a pass rate that was, by any historical measure, extraordinary. Previous exams averaged roughly one passing candidate per exam across every three years. This particular one, in the original story, passed seven at once.
But Ross, standing inside this situation rather than watching it from outside, was not going to pretend that the four-hundred-plus eliminated candidates had all walked away with their health intact. The casualty figures in that number were real.
Getting a Hunter license came with genuine advantages. That still wasn't the same as saying an underdeveloped Ross was going to stake his life on it. If he ran into something he genuinely couldn't handle, he would pull back and protect himself — and there were still people in this exam who qualified as walking disasters, the kind who had never once hesitated before killing.
Against that backdrop, Netero's offer was genuinely difficult to turn down. What ordinary Nen teacher was going to compare to Master Genkai?
...Come to think of it, hadn't Urameshi only ever managed to scratch the surface of the Spirit Wave Style? Never quite gotten to the real core of it?
Ross let that thought pass. He drew a slow breath in and let it out, then gave the old man an OK sign.
The old man, having thoroughly played him, looked smug in exactly the way someone who has gotten what they wanted looks. Even his back, retreating toward the airship, had an extra lightness to it.
Ross muttered something unflattering about old men under his breath, turned around, and faced the test.
Seventy-two hours. That was a genuinely long window, which meant the route system inside the tower was going to be correspondingly complicated.
He didn't waste any time. The moment the airship lifted off, he was already doing what most of the candidates around him were doing: pressing himself close to the floor and knocking systematically across the surface.
The top floor of Trick Tower was paved with stone blocks of varying sizes, and certain ones were trapdoors — the legitimate entry points into the tower's interior structure.
"There we go."
When his knocking came back hollow, Ross knew he had found one.
A light jump. A short drop. The brief weightlessness of freefall, and then the solid feedback of both feet hitting stone.
As he landed, the bare stone room lit up with incandescent lighting. He was the only person in it.
He swept the space quickly: on a stone pedestal roughly the size of a trash can, five wristbands with a distinctly technological look sat arranged in a row. Above them on the wall, a sequence of characters in the Hunter world's distinctive script ran in a clean line.
This presented no real obstacle for Ross.
The same way some Western fans of fantasy and science fiction invested serious time into learning Elvish, Dwarvish, or Klingon, Ross had gone through his own version of that phase — heavier on games and animation than anything else. He had picked up a working knowledge of Hymmnos, the constructed tower language from Ar Tonelico; the Wyverian script and Shakalaka dialect from Monster Hunter; and several others along the way. Within that particular hobby, the Hunter world's script was actually one of the more accessible ones. What looked like pictographic gibberish at first glance was, at its core, the standard Japanese syllabary in a different visual skin — each symbol with its own memory hook. Anyone willing to put in the time could learn it without much difficulty.
That said: even if someone couldn't read a single character, anyone who had seen the original story would have recognized this room the moment they spotted the five wristbands.
This was the Majority Rules path. It only activated once five candidates had gathered. Every route decision from that point forward was put to a vote and decided by the wristbands — minority lost, majority won.
This was also the exact path from the original story. Gon's path. Killua's path. Kurapika's path. Leorio's path. Tonpa's path.
Which means — did I just take one of their spots?
That thought had barely formed when something happened at the ceiling above him. A disturbance, a short startled sound, and two nearly simultaneous impacts against the stone floor behind him.
Ross turned around.
What he saw was not any of the five people he had just been thinking about.
It was two delinquents he recognized from an entirely different context — one in green, one in blue.