REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!Chapter 20: Written as Psychos... And Yes, Actually Psychos
The two of them had spotted Ross the moment they landed. They paused for a second, because the badge numbers on their chests were a perfect sequence with his.
"Hey, you're the guy with the arrow on his head!"
Yusuke Urameshi, Badge 408 pinned to his chest, called it out immediately.
Without waiting for Ross to respond, Yusuke walked straight over, easy as anything, and clapped him on the shoulder with one open hand.
"Those footprints you left during the wetlands run in the first phase really came through. I might actually have gotten eliminated without them."
Ross hadn't expected that to be the first thing out of his mouth.
As it turned out, during the fog that had rolled in across the Numere Wetlands in the second half of the first phase, Yusuke had let a few misleading plants and creatures throw him off course and lost his bearings entirely. The thing was, for all that he had no interest in academics, Yusuke had a gift for anything involving a fight — he absorbed battlefield details almost instinctively. Since he had been running near Ross when they started, he had caught the wheel-rut pattern that Sonic Speed Movement left in the ground almost by reflex. Those tracks had guided Yusuke and more than a few other lost candidates through to the other side.
"Wasn't getting eliminated outright exactly what you were hoping for? You only showed up because someone dangled front-row tickets to the Heavens Arena two hundredth floor in front of you."
Kuwabara came in the moment Yusuke finished, pulling the floor out from under him without a second's hesitation.
Unlike most of the candidates, Kuwabara had actually left the main group before the fog came in, following some instinct down a path no one else had taken. But his sensing ability was on another level entirely — the route that looked like a detour turned out to have zero dangerous encounters from start to finish, and he had arrived at the second phase venue barely behind the front group.
"I'm already here, aren't I? Going home with nothing would just give Botan something to laugh about."
He said it with his mouth. His expression said he was furious enough to bite through something.
Because Botan had baited the hook with something that had no business working on anyone — and he, a fighting enthusiast of the first order, had taken it completely. And he had run the full distance, killed the pig, collected the egg; at this point he was getting that license if it killed him, and he was going to throw it in her face when he did.
"I'm Ross. What do I call you two?"
The three of them hadn't actually been introduced until now, so Ross took the natural opening.
"Kuwabara Kazuma. Number one delinquent, Sarayashiki Middle School."
"Urameshi Yusuke. Super number one delinquent, Sarayashiki Middle School. Occasional part-time detective."
Both of them seemed genuinely proud of the delinquent part.
From their introductions, Ross had a rough read on their timeline within the original YYH story. The period they were probably in: the Genkai discipleship trials. Which meant Yusuke had most likely already awakened and become a Nen user. And the mention of Botan meant the Spirit World setup specific to the YYH universe had been incorporated into the Hunter world in some form — possibly as a special organization, possibly as a structural layer of the world itself. If it was the latter, this world ran considerably deeper than it looked.
Kuwabara's background was cleaner. He was probably in that narrow window just before a breakthrough — the kind where the awakening was already imminent, waiting on a single right moment to tip over.
"Unless something goes wrong, we're going to be working together from here."
Ross pointed at the stone panel on the wall. The two delinquents looked where he was pointing.
"Majority Rules?"
Yusuke's unhappiness was immediate and transparent. What he had been hoping for was a straightforward hundred-floor descent — enemies lined up along the way, fists into faces, done. A voting mechanism was not the path he had come here for.
Kuwabara didn't react immediately. He went quiet, thinking it over.
Ross was already way ahead of them. On a path that came down to gut instinct and judgment calls, Kuwabara's reliability was in a completely different league from Yusuke's. Decision made: from here on out, wherever Kuwabara voted, Ross voted the same way.
"Hold on. If nobody else comes in and we can't get to five, doesn't that mean we're just eliminated on the spot?"
Yusuke had no patience for studying, but his actual reasoning was solid enough, and he had gotten to the biggest problem with this path quickly.
"Exactly right."
A stranger's voice came from inside something that looked like a cross between a trash can and an R2-D2 unit.
In the central monitoring room of Trick Tower, a man with a slightly short build and a distinctive rooster-comb hairstyle — Lippo, bounty hunter and warden of the Trick Tower prison facility, and the examiner for this third phase — was speaking into the microphone on the table in front of him. His monitors were packed with surveillance feeds, every candidate currently inside the tower mapped out in front of him. As both warden and examiner, Lippo could intervene in any candidate's route at a moment's notice.
"Trick Tower contains a large number of branching paths, each with its own clearing conditions. The path the three of you have chosen is the Majority Rules path — theoretically the most complex route available.
As Badge 408 has already noted, if you fail to reach five candidates in total, your path cannot be opened. Of course, if any of you feel that your physical condition simply isn't going to hold through the remaining seventy-two hours, you are welcome to forfeit at any time — though doing so will result in your teammates being eliminated along with you.
Good luck."
The voice cut out. The room was quiet.
"Three down, two to go. Waiting on the others."
Ross had already reached over, taken one of the wristbands from the pedestal, and snapped it onto his left wrist.
"Tch. Annoying..."
Yusuke, visibly unhappy but with no real argument against the rules, did the same. So did Kuwabara.
Ross turned the wristband over in his hands and found himself genuinely curious. The path that was supposed to belong to Gon and Killua's group had already been claimed by him and two delinquents — three spots filled. Who was filling the last two? Some of the canon five? Or candidates with no connection to the original story at all?
He was still thinking about it when the ceiling moved again.
Two trapdoors — nearly simultaneous — swung open. Two more tall figures dropped into the room.
Ross kept his expression under reasonable control. Yusuke and Kuwabara reacted like cats who'd been stepped on: a visible, physical wave of discomfort that went straight to their faces before they could do anything about it.
"My, my~ Long time no see~"
Badge 44. Hisoka. His gaze swept once across all three of them, and the delight and excitement on his face were entirely unconcealed.
On the other side of the room, not far from Hisoka, a man with Badge 301 pinned to his chest stood in a silence that was somehow worse than noise. His upper body and entire head were covered with a dense arrangement of round-tipped protrusions. He produced a sound like malfunctioning machinery — kak-kak-kak-kak — that had no obvious source and no obvious purpose.
In the most literal possible sense, the two most dangerous and most deeply wrong individuals among the remaining candidates had just filled the last two spots in the Majority Rules five-person lineup.