The fishmonger's gaze flicked from the small green bird perched on Kevin's shoulder to the three men standing before his stall. His weathered hands continued to arrange ice around a glistening display of morning catch, but his posture shifted almost imperceptibly—shoulders squared, eyes sharp.
"The red sea fish," he repeated slowly. "Caught at six o'clock. You understand, such a specific request comes with a price."
The little bird hopped impatiently. "The Association's credit is always good, you old scoundrel. Don't keep them waiting."
A faint smile cracked the fishmonger's sun-worn face. He reached beneath the counter, not for fish, but for something hidden—a worn leather satchel that he slid across the stained wood.
"Identification papers, route maps, and your numbered tokens." His voice dropped to a near whisper. "Phase One begins at the naval dry docks, Pier Seven, exactly three hours from now. The maritime commander has been compensated for his cooperation, but his men have not. They will treat you as trespassers until you present these tokens to the examiner."
Kevin took the satchel, feeling the weight of three ceramic discs inside. "Trespassers."
"A simulation," the bird explained, pecking at another nut. "Invasion of a restricted military zone. The 'enemy' is the naval garrison. Your objective is to reach the examination ship undetected, or at least uncaptured. Capture equals elimination. The commander gets a bonus for every applicant delivered to his brig." It chirped, almost cheerfully. "Fair warning: last year, seventy percent of this phase washed out before lunch."
Bajiao swore under his breath. Goreinu's face had paled. Kevin simply nodded, cataloguing the information. Trespassing, evasion, infiltration—these were not unfamiliar exercises.
"One more thing," the fishmonger added, his eyes flicking to Kevin. "Your particular token has an... annotation. From the examiner." He leaned forward, lowering his voice so that only Kevin could hear. "He said to tell you: 'The vial's choice awaits. Do not waste it on the first wave.'"
Kevin's pulse quickened, but his expression remained impassive. The prophecy, spoken weeks ago by a child in a garden, now echoed from the mouth of a stranger in a foreign port. The choice of vial, a breath of frost—will crown a victor, or see all lost.
He pocketed the satchel. "Understood."
The little bird fluttered its wings. "My job here is done. Good luck, sharp-eyed one. Try not to get shot." With that, it launched itself into the salt-tinged air and disappeared over the rooftops.
The three of them moved away from the stall, melting back into the flow of morning shoppers. Goreinu was muttering about naval patrol schedules and his terrible luck with water-based phases. Bajiao was cracking his knuckles, visibly itching for a confrontation.
Kevin was silent, his mind already running tactical simulations. Pier Seven. Three hours. A garrison of armed, professional soldiers who expected intruders. And a cryptic warning about a choice yet to be made.
The Hunter Exam had officially begun. And somewhere in this port city, on a ship or in a command post, an examiner was waiting to see how this particular applicant would answer the riddle he had been handed.
Kevin turned his face toward the distant masts visible above the rooftops. The north wind carried the scent of diesel, salt, and coming conflict. He began to walk, his two reluctant companions falling in step behind him, toward the docks where the trial awaited.
Kevin observed Tonpa from across the room. The man had returned to his drink, seemingly harmless, but the way his eyes swept over new arrivals—assessing, calculating—told a different story. Thirty-five exams. That wasn't persistence; that was predation disguised as failure.
"He targets rookies," Kate said quietly, following Kevin's gaze. "Pretends to be friendly, offers them 'juice' laced with a powerful laxative. By the time they realize what's happened, they're too weak to continue. He's eliminated hundreds over the years."
"And the Association allows this?" Kevin asked.
"The exam is designed to test more than physical strength. Awareness, skepticism, the ability to read people—these are also Hunter qualities." Kate's tone was neutral, neither approving nor condemning. "Tonpa exploits a weakness. Those who fall for it fail the test. It's brutal, but it's not against the rules."
Kevin nodded slowly. He understood. The world outside didn't play fair, and neither would the exam. Tonpa was simply a very obvious, very predictable version of that lesson.
As if sensing he was being discussed, Tonpa caught Kevin's eye again and raised his juice box in a cheerful toast. Kevin didn't acknowledge it. After a moment, Tonpa's smile faltered slightly, and he turned his attention elsewhere.
"Smart," Bajiao muttered approvingly. "Don't give him any opening, not even a polite nod."
The basement continued to fill. The murmur of conversations rose to a dull roar, a mixture of languages and accents from across the globe. Kevin catalogued faces, postures, equipment—practicing the observation skills Mori had drilled into him. Most were nervous amateurs, their grips too tight on their gear, their eyes too wide. But there were others: a tall woman with tribal scars and a bone-white spear; a man whose hands never strayed far from the twin pistols at his hips; a group of three who moved in perfect synchronization, clearly military trained. And Kate, the white-haired anomaly, leaning against the wall with the patient stillness of a hunter who had already tracked his prey across continents.
This is the filter, Kevin thought. Two hundred will become fifty. Fifty will become ten. Ten will become one. The Association doesn't want the desperate or the lucky. They want the survivors.
A heavy door at the far end of the basement groaned open. The room fell silent.
A man walked in. He was tall, gaunt, with hollow cheeks and eyes that seemed to look through rather than at. His suit was impeccably tailored, but his movements were stiff, almost mechanical. He carried no visible weapons, yet the air around him shifted palpably.
"Good morning, applicants," he said, his voice a dry rasp. "I am Examiner Masta. You will address me as such, or not at all. The first phase of this exam will test your ability to follow instructions without hesitation, deviation, or sentiment."
He raised a bony hand and pointed to the far wall. "Behind that wall is a staircase. You will ascend it. At the top, you will find a single door. You will open it and proceed to the second phase. That is all."
A long pause. No one moved.
"That is all," Masta repeated. "Why are you still here?"
A ripple of confusion passed through the crowd. Kevin's eyes narrowed. The wall. Not a door, not a passage—a solid wall of aged brick and mortar. No handle, no hinges, no visible mechanism.
A few applicants rushed forward, pressing against the brick, searching frantically for a hidden catch. Others stood frozen, their minds refusing to process the obvious impossibility. Someone began to argue with the examiner about the "mistake." Masta did not respond, his face a mask of patient emptiness.
Kevin didn't move. He watched. He listened.
Brick and mortar. Old construction, probably original to the building. No seams, no discoloration suggesting a concealed panel. The wall was exactly what it appeared to be: a wall.
But the examiner said there is a staircase behind it.
He thought of the green bean creature, of the passage that had appeared in the seafood shop wall. He thought of the little bird, of the fishmonger's coded phrase. The Hunter Exam was not about accepting the surface of things. It was about seeing what others missed.
He walked forward, not to the wall, but to Masta. The examiner's hollow eyes tracked him with detached interest.
"Examiner," Kevin said calmly. "May I inspect the wall?"
"You may attempt to pass through it," Masta replied. "That is the instruction."
Kevin nodded. He placed his palm against the cold, rough brick. He closed his eyes. He released En—not as a pulse, but as a slow, patient wave, extending his senses into the dense material.
And there, buried beneath the mortar, he felt it. Not a void, not a staircase. Something else. A presence. A Nen signature, faint as a dying ember, woven into the very structure of the wall.
Conjuration, he realized. Or Manipulation. The wall isn't hiding a passage. The wall is the passage. The Nen creates the door—but only for those who perceive it.
He opened his eyes. To his normal vision, the wall remained solid. But with Gyo, the bricks shimmered, their edges softening, revealing a faint, door-shaped outline of pulsing aura.
He stepped forward.
His body passed through stone as if through heavy water—resistance, then release. On the other side, a narrow stone staircase spiraled upward into darkness. The air was cool and still.
Behind him, he heard Kate's soft laugh. "There it is." Footsteps followed as the white-haired Hunter stepped through the illusion.
Then Goreinu's voice, shaky but determined: "Wait for me!"
And Bajiao, muttering: "This is why I hate magic tricks."
One by one, the applicants who looked began to find the door. Those who only saw brick remained on the other side, their arguments with the impassive examiner growing more desperate, more irrelevant.
Kevin began to climb. The staircase wound upward, each step taking him further from the basement, from the failed applicants, from the comfortable illusion that the world was made of simple, solid things. It wasn't. It was made of perception, will, and the hidden architecture of Nen.
The Hunter Exam had just taught him its first official lesson: Reality is a suggestion. Only those who question it earn the right to pass.
He climbed toward the unseen second phase, the weight of the prophecy in his pocket, and the growing certainty that this exam would demand far more than physical endurance. It would demand he unlearn everything he thought he knew about what was real—and what was possible.
The examiner's smile widened, a predatory gleam replacing her earlier theatrics. "Oh? Did I forget to mention?" She pressed her fingers to her chin in an exaggerated gesture of recollection. "That's right! The entire island is a restricted naval zone. Trespassing is punishable by immediate detention. The commander is very cooperative with the Hunter Association—he gets a nice bonus for every applicant he catches."
She tilted her head, her frog headdress bobbing. "Of course, if you're caught, your exam ends. Simple, right?"
A ripple of panic moved through the crowd. Kevin watched the expressions shift—shock, disbelief, calculation. The beach, which moments ago had been a simple starting line, now felt like the edge of a trap.
"But—but that's insane!" a voice cried out. "Swimming to a military base at night? They have patrol boats, spotlights, probably radar! We'll be picked off before we even reach the shore!"
Wa Hachi's cheerful demeanor evaporated instantly. Her face went cold, flat, utterly devoid of the manic energy from moments before. "Then don't get picked off."
The temperature on the beach seemed to drop. No one spoke.
"This is the Hunter Exam," she continued, her voice quiet, precise. "Not a merit badge jamboree. The Association doesn't need people who crumble the moment the rules aren't handed to them on a laminated card. You want to be a Hunter? You want the license that grants you access to classified information, immunity in seventeen countries, and the right to walk where kings kneel?" She paused, letting the weight settle. "Then earn it."
She turned her back to them, facing the dark sea. "The first wave of patrol boats cycles every eighteen minutes. The spotlights have a blind arc of approximately seven degrees at the northeast corner of the island. The water temperature is thirteen degrees Celsius—cold enough to induce hypothermia in forty minutes for an unprepared swimmer. There are rip currents and, occasionally, great white sharks who have learned that patrol boat lights mean easy prey."
She glanced over her shoulder, a ghost of a smile on her lips. "I've given you more information than most examiners ever do. What you do with it is up to you."
The silence held for three full seconds. Then the beach erupted.
Applicants sprinted in all directions—some toward the water in desperate haste, others back toward the passage, already calculating their retreat. A few dropped to the sand, frantically unpacking gear, inflating flotation devices, adjusting goggles. Arguments broke out. Someone was crying.
Kevin didn't move. Neither did Kate. Bajiao was swearing steadily under his breath, but his feet were planted. Goreinu had gone pale, but his jaw was set.
"You've done this before," Kevin said quietly to Kate.
"Similar. Last year we had to cross a canyon on a rope bridge that the examiner kept cutting with a flaming sword." Kate's tone was conversational. "The Association has a type."
"Which is?"
"People who don't panic."
Kevin nodded. He was already analyzing. Eighteen-minute patrol cycles. Seven-degree blind arc. Northeast corner. Cold water, predators, currents. The examiner had handed them a puzzle, not a death sentence. The question was who could solve it fastest.
He turned to Bajiao and Goreinu. "You two staying or leaving?"
Bajiao snorted. "I didn't spend a year regrowing my dignity just to let a frog woman and some sailors stop me." He pulled a waterproof case from his pack, extracting what appeared to be compact swimming fins and a dive mask.
Goreinu's hands were shaking slightly as he checked his own gear, but his voice was steady. "I didn't come this far to quit on a beach. I'll make it."
Kevin looked at Kate. "You're going northeast."
It wasn't a question. Kate's faint smile confirmed it. "The blind arc is the obvious play. But obvious doesn't mean easy. The currents around that corner are brutal, and the sharks know the patrol schedules better than we do." He paused. "I'd wager the commander expects most applicants to target that spot. Might be a secondary trap."
"Then we don't all go the same way," Kevin said. "Divide their attention. Create multiple incursion points." He was already mapping it in his head—three vectors, staggered timing, using the patrol cycle to create windows.
Kate's eyes gleamed with interest. "You think like a tactician."
"I think like someone who doesn't want to fail."
Around them, the beach was thinning. The first desperate swimmers had already plunged into the black water, their splashes quickly swallowed by the waves. Some would make it. Most wouldn't. The spotlights from the distant island continued their slow, indifferent sweep.
Wa Hachi had perched herself on a large rock, seemingly absorbed in examining her nails. She didn't watch the applicants. She didn't need to. The sea would do its work.
Kevin stripped off his outer layers, packing them into a waterproof seal. His Nen-enhanced physique would handle the cold better than most, but hypothermia was a physiological fact, not an opinion. He needed to move fast, but not recklessly.
"Kevin."
He looked up. Kate was holding out a small, disc-shaped device. "Sonar jammer. Limited range, short battery life. But it'll buy you thirty seconds of confusion if a patrol boat locks onto your position." He smiled crookedly. "Consider it an investment. I'm curious to see how far you go."
Kevin took it. "Thanks."
"Don't thank me yet. Thank me when you're on that island, still dry and not in handcuffs."
Kevin turned to face the sea. The moon had slipped behind a cloud, deepening the darkness. The island was a silhouette against the stars, its single lighthouse beam a patient, circling eye.
He thought of the prophecy. The choice of vial, a breath of frost. He had vials in his pack—some for healing, some for enhancement, one designed specifically for cold environments. The decision of when and how to use them was his alone.
He thought of the forge back in Lutto, of three pairs of scarlet eyes waiting for his return, of a mafia don who had bet his family's future on a child's poetry.
He thought of the white-haired man beside him, a guide not just to this exam, but to an inheritance still shrouded in fog.
No pressure, he told himself. Just the sea, the dark, and four hundred desperate competitors.
He stepped into the water.
The cold hit him like a fist. He didn't flinch. He began to swim, his strokes long and efficient, his breath steady. Behind him, he heard Bajiao curse as the waves crashed over his pompadour, heard Goreinu's rapid breathing, heard Kate's near-silent entry.
The spotlight swept past, missing them by yards. Somewhere to his left, a patrol boat's engine growled to life.
The Hunter Exam had claimed its first victims on the beach. Now it wanted those who dared to swim.
Kevin swam faster.
Kate moved through the dark water like a seal—fluid, nearly silent, his white hair a pale ghost trailing behind him. Kevin followed at his flank, observing the subtle shifts in Kate's trajectory, the way he adjusted for currents and used the patrol boats' wake as cover.
They surfaced briefly behind a cluster of rocks, just beyond the reach of the nearest searchlight. The shore was fifty meters ahead, but between them and the beach lay a gauntlet of patrols, motion sensors, and the constant, sweeping glare of the lighthouse beam.
"Pattern," Kate whispered, his voice barely audible over the lap of waves. "The foot patrols are synchronized with the searchlights. When the beam passes north, the guards turn their backs to the water. That's our window."
"Duration?" Bajiao asked, treading water.
"Eleven seconds. Maybe twelve."
A beat of silence. Eleven seconds to cross fifty meters of exposed beach, scale a seawall, and find concealment on the other side. For normal humans, impossible. For Nen users, merely very difficult.
"We split," Kevin said. "One group draws attention, the other slips through."
Kate nodded. "I'll be the decoy. You three go."
"Wait—" Goreinu started.
"You have the most to prove," Kate cut him off, not unkindly. "Me, I'm already a Hunter candidate in everything but title. This exam is a formality. You need the license more than I do."
It was pragmatic, not sentimental. Kevin recognized the calculation. Kate wasn't sacrificing himself; he was optimizing the group's success rate.
"Fifty meters," Kevin said. "Eleven seconds. We'll make it."
The searchlight swept north. The guards turned.
"Go."
Kevin exploded from the water, his Nen-enhanced legs propelling him across the wet sand in a blur. Bajiao and Goreinu were half a step behind, their own auras flaring as they pushed their limits. Footsteps pounded, breath tore from lungs, the seawall loomed—
Kevin vaulted it, rolled, came up in the shadow of a stacked cargo container. Bajiao crashed beside him, his pompadour a complete disaster, but his grin fierce. Goreinu stumbled over the top, caught himself, and collapsed into the darkness.
Behind them, a splash. Kate had emerged on the opposite side of the patrol zone, drawing shouts and running boots. The guards were converging away from them, toward the decoy.
"Move," Kevin said. "That won't last long."
They slipped through the base's periphery—past fuel depots, maintenance sheds, a row of decommissioned naval guns pointed at a sky they'd never fire at again. Kevin's senses were extended, his En a thin, invisible web detecting the heat signatures and heartbeats of patrols before they rounded corners.
A building emerged from the darkness: low, windowless, with a single reinforced door. No markings. No guards. That alone made it suspicious.
"The next exam stage should be inside," Goreinu whispered, consulting a mental map from last year's briefing. "But there's no examiner, no sign—"
The door slid open.
Wa Hachi stood in the frame, her frog headdress slightly askew, her expression one of bored impatience. "You're late. I've been waiting for seven minutes."
Seven minutes. They had crossed a military base under active surveillance in seven minutes. Kevin wasn't sure if that was impressive or merely adequate by Hunter Exam standards.
"Inside," she said, stepping aside. "Don't touch the walls. Don't touch each other. Don't touch me. The second phase starts when enough of you have stopped being useless."
Kevin stepped through the threshold. The room beyond was vast, industrial—a converted hangar or assembly bay. At its center stood a series of strange, glass-walled chambers, each one humming with contained energy. Other applicants were already there, some dripping seawater onto the concrete, others being processed by Association staff with clipboards and clinical detachment.
He turned to watch Bajiao and Goreinu enter behind him. Bajiao was already attempting to reconstruct his pompadour using seawater as styling gel. Goreinu was simply breathing, his face pale but his eyes bright with survival.
Kate arrived ten minutes later, slightly damp, utterly composed. He caught Kevin's gaze and offered a small nod.
Phase One: complete, that nod said. Now the real test begins.
Wa Hachi climbed onto a crate, clapping her hands for attention. "Congratulations! You didn't drown, get shot, or arrested. That's the good news." Her cheerful mask slipped, replaced by something sharper. "The bad news is that was the easy part. Phase Two will test your Nen. All of you who have it, and all of you who don't."
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Nen. The secret art, the hidden power. Many applicants had heard the word; few understood what it meant.
Kevin felt the weight of the prophecy in his memory. A choice of vial, a breath of frost. His hand drifted unconsciously toward his pack.
Wa Hachi's eyes found him in the crowd. Her smile was not kind.
"Let's see which of you are actually worth the Association's time."
The glass chambers began to glow.