Chapter 3: Makyou Touitsusen Got Pulled In Too
"I forgot to introduce myself. I am Satotz, the examiner responsible for the first phase of this year's trial."
"Starting now, I will be leading everyone to the venue for the second phase."
"I trust you have all already realized it: successfully reaching the second phase venue is the challenge I have set for the first phase."
As the Hunter examiner with no visible mouth explained this — apparently through some form of ventriloquism — his seemingly ordinary walking pace grew steadily faster. Before long, the mass of applicants trailing behind him had no choice but to break into a run just to keep up.
Nobody knew how long the tunnel ahead of them was. Nobody knew how long they would have to run. It was a test of both mental and physical endurance, more punishing than any optical illusion of distance. You could see the path stretching out in front of you and still have no idea when it would end.
What surprised Ross, however, was the state of his own body.
The stamina that should have been dropping steadily with each passing minute of running was, if anything, going in the other direction. The forced Zetsu state had come with its own incidental benefit, and the result was something close to the opposite of exhaustion. As long as he had food and water and kept his current pace, he had the distinct feeling he could just keep going indefinitely.
It wasn't quite defying physics — energy conservation still applied somewhere in there — but it was real enough that Ross genuinely felt, for the first time, like he'd crossed some line separating him from ordinary human limits.
If I went back and ran a full marathon right now, I could probably break four hours without trying.
"Mr. Tonpa! If you've taken the exam thirty-five times, you must know a lot of people here, right?"
The thought was still bouncing around in his head when Gon, two spots ahead of him in the running pack, spoke up.
"More or less~"
A flash of pride crossed Tonpa's square-nosed face before he even seemed to notice it.
Whatever could be said about Tonpa's nasty habit of trying to eliminate newcomers, he had something going for him. Thirty-five consecutive exam attempts, and he was still here — no missing limbs, no serious injuries, still cheerfully upright. His self-preservation instincts were clearly exceptional.
"Then could you introduce us to some of them? There must be some really strong people here!"
Gon's eyes lit up the moment Tonpa answered, his interest completely undisguised.
Coming from anyone else, that kind of straightforward pumping for information might have looked calculating. Coming from Gon, it was so plainly genuine that a few of the veteran applicants nearby who had been quietly sizing things up actually stood down.
"Alright, sure. Let me run through a few."
With the mild satisfaction of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment, Tonpa began rattling off names without any noticeable change in his breathing. Ross turned an ear toward the conversation and started cataloguing.
Badge 103, Bourbon, snake handler. Badge 76, Cherry, martial artist. Badges 197 through 199, the Amori Brothers. These were all faces that had made appearances in the original story — background players, but established ones.
Then the names that followed were something else entirely.
Ross actually dug a finger into his ear twice, trying to make sure he was hearing correctly.
"Badge 75, Musashi. Word is he's the acting grandmaster of the True Battōjutsu school. Fourth dan in kendo — don't underestimate him."
"Badge 293, Kazemaru. A ninja. He was in last year's exam too. Seems like he and this year's newcomer, badge 294, Hanzou, trained under the same master."
"Badge 23, Kibano. A martial artist. Exceptional in both close combat and sensing. Rumor has it he can pinpoint people with his eyes closed."
"Badge 145, Kuroda. Apparently a professional hitman. Not as frightening as badge 44, but still someone you'd want to keep your distance from."
"That's about all the familiar faces in the immediate area."
Once Tonpa finished showing off, Ross glanced sideways.
The two badges directly behind his own — the pair who looked every inch like textbook delinquents — had been listening to every word of Tonpa's rundown. They were already talking over each other in low, carrying voices.
Badge 407. Kuwabara Kazuma.
Badge 408. Urameshi Yusuke.
Not just those two. Including the four veterans Tonpa had just named, every single one of them — all six — came from the same source: the other completed work by Togashi, the old rascal who had apparently decided one perpetually unfinished manga wasn't enough. Yu Yu Hakusho.
And Yu Yu Hakusho happened to be the exact series his handbuilt cartridge had been running during his final test before he transmigrated.
The spirit-ability framework of Yu Yu Hakusho — spirit power users, demons, spirit energy, demon energy — was practically a direct ancestor of the Nen system in the Hunter x Hunter world. But for all their similarities, the two were fundamentally different works with different rules.
And yet, from everything Tonpa had just described, the people who should have belonged to Yu Yu Hakusho had been formally absorbed into this world's continuity. Some of them were even veteran exam participants.
Was it a coincidence? Or was their presence here somehow directly connected to that Yu Yu Hakusho: Makyou Touitsusen cartridge that hadn't made the trip with him?
Well, he had crossed entire realities to get here. Might as well go ahead and make a bold guess.
He hadn't just transmigrated as a single person. He might have brought something with him — some kind of patch big enough to alter the entire world.
And one possible expression of that patch was his cartridges.
Yu Yu Hakusho had been fully absorbed into Hunter x Hunter. The world's foundations remained HxH. The YYH characters had slotted in seamlessly. Spirit power users had become Nen users. Demons had taken the form of beast-class creatures, spirits, or Nen constructs.
Following that logic — if the other cartridges that were compatible with Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement had also materialized somewhere in this world, what form would they take?
The three operating modes of Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement surfaced in his mind, and his attention landed on the third one.
Secret Realm Mode.
That was it. Secret Realm.
Ross, who until about thirty seconds ago had had no clear direction for his future in this brand-new world, suddenly knew exactly where he was going.
A console without any cartridges was useless. If he was right that game cartridges and Secret Realm Mode were connected, then the path forward was obvious: become a Secret Realm Hunter. A Game Hunter.
The instant that thought formed, the Little Tyrant console nestled inside him pressed its own power button.
"Ah~ha~ Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement!!!"
The boot chime rang out in his ears again, every bit as absurdly infectious as the first time.
As the last note faded, something appeared in the upper edge of his field of vision.
An arrow.
The kind that showed up in side-scrolling games — a directional pointer paired with the letters GO, usually flashing to drive the point home, sometimes with its own audio cue. The kind that told you which way to go when you weren't sure.
The direction it was pointing matched exactly the direction the entire running pack was already heading.
Then, the same style of text that had accompanied Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement's initial introduction materialized in front of him, slow and deliberate.
[When "Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement" is powered on without a cartridge inserted, in any state (materialized or not), it will play one complete boot chime and then, at the cost of a continuous drain on available power (aura or electricity), permanently indicate the direction of the nearest uncollected game cartridge from the console's current position.]