If you like this Fic, and want me to continue translating it. Pls leave a review
Chapter 21: My Arrow Just Moved — There Has to Be a Game Cartridge Around Here!
Ah, if only he hadn't been baited by that letter of introduction, he would be on the ground floor already instead of being forced to walk a narrow corridor alongside two psychos...
Ross watched the hidden door — now slowly swinging open because the five-person requirement had finally been met — with the expression of someone who had largely given up on life.
How to put it. Ross could invite Hisoka to play video games. Hisoka the person was another matter entirely — someone he intended to keep at a respectful distance.
Who in their right mind enjoyed the company of someone whose personality swung between extremes without warning, who could be smiling warmly one second and moving in for the kill the next, and who developed an actual fixation over a green apple that wasn't ripe yet? That was an emergency services call, full stop.
Having a live explosive within arms' reach — there was no version of that where Ross wasn't tense. Nobody could predict what would set it off.
Badge 301 was a different kind of problem, though.
The strangely built figure was, in reality, Illumi Zoldyck. Eldest son and heir of the Zoldyck assassin family, and Killua's older brother. His particular brand of wrong was a little-brother obsession so severe it had curdled into something pathological. Anything connected to Killua, he controlled absolutely — hence his current situation, having used his ability to reshape his own body and pass in disguise, openly surveilling his brother under everyone's noses.
The counterpart to that was equally straightforward: as long as nothing and no one touched Killua, Illumi simply didn't engage.
Back on the airship, Illumi had apparently tried his usual approach of watching from the shadows — but Killua had been spending that time with Chairman Netero, and even Illumi wasn't arrogant enough to openly antagonize the man who sat at the undisputed top of human combat capability. So he hadn't known about the Little Tyrant session. Hadn't known about the Zone 2 promise.
Because there was no connection between Illumi and Ross at all, Illumi was, paradoxically, the safer of the two.
"I was so looking forward to your game, and then you woke up and never came to find me. That hurt~"
Hisoka delivered it in his usual register, the probe wrapped so neatly inside casual conversation that it almost wasn't one.
"The owl carrying the invitation must have got shot down somewhere along the way," Ross said, spreading his hands with a look of genuine helplessness.
No television meant Entertainment Mode couldn't run. Even if he had wanted to invite him, there was nothing to invite him to.
"You really do know exactly where the line is... but if you stand me up again next time, I can't promise I'll still be this composed~"
Hisoka had caught his meaning immediately. It was acknowledgment and warning in the same breath.
Then his gaze moved, unhurried, to the two young delinquents standing off to the side — both of whom were already bristling.
"The two of you look quite delicious as well~"
The words landed, and Kuwabara and Yusuke took a simultaneous step backward, putting themselves level with Ross before either of them had consciously decided to move.
They were, for all their rough edges, people who had already brushed up against the real face of the world. Courage wasn't something either of them lacked. Given the right reason, they'd throw punches for the things they believed in without a second thought.
But when the person in front of you was operating in clearly wrong territory, the visceral recoil won out. In that moment, the only thought running through Yusuke's and Kuwabara's heads was identical to the one in Ross's: get as far away from this clearly problematic individual as reasonably possible.
What they felt, though, was different.
Yusuke — with the combat instincts he had been born with — could read the killing intent coming off Hisoka with perfect clarity. It wasn't directed at any one target. It was a broad-spectrum provocation, something more like "whoever wants a fight, come and get me~" radiating outward in every direction.
Kuwabara, whose sensitivity ran deeper than killing intent, felt something else in Hisoka — something underneath the surface, something that hadn't been fully drawn out yet, already showing its shape: twisted, malevolent, and deeply wrong in a way that had nothing to do with ordinary murderous intent.
The sheer amount of space Hisoka occupied in everyone's attention had, incidentally, covered for the fact that Illumi was also extremely strange. That was simply how it worked.
Either way, this five-person lineup for the Majority Rules path had divided itself into the functional group and the dangerous ones before the route had even opened, and Lippo — watching through his surveillance monitors — felt the atmosphere from the other side of the screen clearly enough that his attention had already drifted, almost instinctively, toward this particular room.
"First choice," Lippo said, stepping in helpfully as a live announcer. "Circle to open this door. Cross to decline."
"Do we seriously have to vote on that?" Yusuke muttered immediately, then pressed circle on his wristband without waiting for anyone to respond.
Four prompts followed in succession. The door displayed its result: Circle 5, Cross 0. Unanimous. It swung open.
Not a surprise. Someone like Tonpa — who made a habit of actively sabotaging the exam from the inside and personally eliminating promising candidates for fun — was actually the anomaly. Hisoka and Illumi were both their own varieties of wrong, but as long as nothing touched their individual sensitive areas, their decision-making was perfectly ordinary. From that angle, the two of them were, temporarily and ironically, better teammates than Tonpa would have been.
Not quite twenty meters past the door, though, a real choice appeared.
A T-junction. Right was circle, left was cross.
The group was about to vote when something happened to the top of Ross's head.
The navigation arrow appeared — sudden and clear — pointing firm in one direction. The same arrow he had used openly on the way out of the underground tunnel in the first phase.
"My, my? A Nen user? And from the manifestation shape — a pathfinding type, perhaps?"
Lippo, whose area-limited En developed through years of resonating with every corner of the prison below him had given him a reach well beyond what any camera could capture, was visibly surprised. The cameras couldn't record the arrow. But through En, he had caught the ripple and shape of Ross's ability activating the instant it happened.
"Ross! Does that thing of yours actually point the right way?" Yusuke asked, immediately and with complete lack of tact about whether asking someone's ability was any of his business.
"Not exactly." Ross shook his head and explained.
"In theory it points toward things I want or need — not necessarily the correct path. But since we're stuck in here for three days either way, it doesn't cost anything to try."
He paused, then tilted his head back and looked up.
The arrow was pointing firmly in one direction. Not the slow clockwise scan it had been doing on the airship — that idle sweep of a receiver with nothing to lock onto. This was the locked-on version.
In that instant, something in Ross's expression flipped.
The low-key, detached, quietly-reclusive quality that had been sitting on him since the start of the exam disappeared. What replaced it was the particular intensity of someone who has just spotted exactly what they came for — bright-eyed, hungry, fully awake in a way he hadn't been a second ago.
To put it without any exaggeration at all: Ross in that moment was no different from Gollum catching sight of the One Ring, the Elder Jinchi laying eyes on the golden kasaya, or Hisoka spotting a green apple he'd decided was worth the wait.