Chapter 22: Nekketsu New Record
From the moment the arrow locked on, the exam dropped to second priority. Getting the cartridge moved to first.
Five beeps.
Circle 4, Cross 1. The iron bars on the right side slid open.
"Ugh, not picking left at a moment like this just feels wrong somehow..."
Yusuke scratched his head and said something that was almost word for word what Leorio would have said. Probably some kind of personality resonance among Emission types.
Kuwabara had voted right as well, but he was frowning, his head tilted slightly, looking uncertain. The feeling this time was hard to pin down. He could vaguely sense that right was the correct path — and at the same time he could feel something in it, some kind of danger he couldn't quite identify.
The Hunter Exam wasn't going to stay as manageable as the first phase all the way through, was it.
Roughly thirty seconds of walking, one right-angle turn, and the path ended. More accurately, it interrupted itself.
Twenty meters ahead, a square platform sat in the middle of the space. Flame-resistant torches at all four corners provided most of the available light. Around the platform on every side was a bottomless black abyss — nobody could see the bottom, and nobody was expecting the bottom to contain anything reassuring. On the far side of the platform, separated by the central platform and the surrounding drop, a corridor held five people waiting in prisoner's clothes and handcuffs.
There was a real difference between watching something through a screen and seeing it with your own eyes. The instant Ross took in the layout, his first instinct was to think of the Four Corners arena from Meteor Butterfly Sword. If only he had a full-rage hammer right about now.
A clean metallic sound. The handcuffs on the largest of the five convicts — the one standing at the front — clicked open via remote control.
He reached up and stripped a piece of rough cloth from his head, revealing a shaved skull covered in old scars. Then he raised his voice.
"We are special examiners commissioned by the Hunter Exam Selection Committee. If any of you want to pass, you'll need to compete against each of us individually."
"The basic rules are one-on-one. Our examiners and your candidates each take the floor once. First side to win three bouts passes. Candidates choose their own lineup order.
There are no draws. When one party voluntarily surrenders or loses consciousness entirely, the other party wins."
The scarred bald man spoke clearly, with the kind of lung capacity that suggested his body had been through a great deal and kept going. In the Hunter world, committing a crime serious enough to land you in prison rather than killed on the spot meant you had at least something going for you.
Lippo's brow came down immediately. This wasn't what had been agreed.
The five of them were commissioned examiners — that much was accurate. But they were also actively serving sentences in Trick Tower, and the deal was that every hour they delayed a candidate's progress meant one year off their sentence. The shortest sentence in this current group was well into three digits.
The original plan had built itself around one specific phrase: voluntary surrender. Under the agreed rules, a win was only recorded when a party explicitly said they gave up. Which meant that if any examiner on their side was the type who would refuse to surrender even while being killed — the way Gon had been in the original — the test would just stall out indefinitely. Take it to its extreme: an examiner who decided to die rather than concede would effectively seal the candidates' path entirely.
In practice, of course, an examiner willing to go that far would probably push the candidates past any interest in following the rules either. The deliberate ambiguity of the surrender rule was designed to maximize time consumption, nothing more.
The rule the scarred bald man had just announced was noticeably more favorable to the candidates.
Lippo didn't call it out immediately. He wanted to see what this man was actually doing.
"And the subject of this bout will be—"
At that moment, something happened that had no business happening.
In the original story, this scarred bald man was physically formidable but had no real connection to the world of Nen. And yet a surge of Nen energy erupted from him — distinct and unmistakable.
Lippo shot out of his seat. His expression said he could not believe what he was seeing.
Every single prisoner in Trick Tower had been personally investigated and interrogated by him. Anyone who had reached Nen-user level was categorically outside the prison's holding range. The only explanation that made any sense was that this scarred bald man had, on one of the days Lippo was off-shift, quietly completed his awakening and developed an actual ability without anyone noticing.
And in the man's hands, a circular roulette wheel had already taken shape — a dial with a rotating pointer, divided into five equal sections.
"The wheel will select one of these five events at random as today's competition subject. We choose our representative first; your side chooses second, using majority vote the same as your other decisions."
He finished speaking, then tossed the wheel in a clean arc toward the center of the platform. It hung there in midair, perfectly centered, and the pointer began to spin.
Click. Click. Click.
The pointer decelerated. It stopped. The fifth of the circle it was pointing to lit up, and a line of Hunter script resolved itself into readable text.
Competition Subject: 400-Meter Combat Hurdles.
The instant Ross saw those words, something went through him like a jolt. The look he turned on the scarred bald man was nothing short of blazing, and the navigation arrow on top of his head began flashing at a noticeably faster rate.
From just two pieces of information — a one-in-five randomized event wheel and "400-meter combat hurdles" — he had already figured out with reasonable certainty what his second cartridge was.
What he didn't know yet was what the acquisition condition was going to be. A straight win in the competition? Or would it be like the Man-Faced Ape — requiring him to take down the Nen user personally?
"I'll go first! Who's coming out from your side? Make a decision, quickly!"
The scarred bald man stepped forward, shouting, and managed to casually show off the kind of muscle definition that only came from consistent nutrition while doing it.
The food in Trick Tower was apparently excellent.
"I get what four-hundred-meter hurdles means. What are the combat part? You run and fight at the same time?"
Yusuke looked genuinely confused.
"Maybe you beat one person down first and then run the four-hundred-meter hurdles?" Kuwabara offered.
Hisoka said nothing. Illumi — currently going by the name Gittarackur — said nothing either. Both of them had the same instinctive wariness toward anything that was clearly a rules-based Conjuration ability.
And then Ross moved.
"...Nobody knows the four-hundred-meter combat hurdles better than I do."
He said it standing straight, chin up, with a level of flat confidence in his voice that made people look twice.
"Oh? I hope you can back that up when we're actually competing."
The scarred bald man looked Ross's lean build up and down and smiled in a way that was not remotely kind.
There was going to be a first representative from their side regardless, so nobody hesitated. All votes cleared Ross's volunteer.
The two of them crossed to the central platform via a temporary extended narrow bridge. The moment both feet were on the platform, the suspended wheel blazed with light — and a strange Nen aura spread outward and swallowed the entire room.
When the light cleared, the scene had changed completely.
The black abyss and the platform were gone. In their place was a small commercial street, surprisingly vivid in color, laid out in front of them.
Looking up, five enormous characters — the kind the Hunter world kept in its restricted script — hung in the air overhead, clearly legible:
Nekketsu New Record.