Chapter 4: The Fake Examiner and the Real Cartridge
Nen was a remarkable thing. Beyond its obvious function of honing the body and pushing a person's limits, it carried a secondary property that bordered on wish fulfillment. If the user's will, intent, or desire was strong enough, Nen had a way of moving on its own toward whatever would satisfy it — and in extreme cases, the drive could outlast death itself, persisting as a post-mortem Nen construct to fulfill what the user never managed to accomplish in life.
Ross had no idea whether the navigation arrow overhead was something Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement had always been capable of, or whether it had materialized purely because he wanted to play games badly enough. He also didn't know whether other Nen users could see it. But one look at the expression on his own face would have told anyone watching that he had stopped caring about all of that. He had completely disappeared into his own world.
"I wonder what game it's going to be."
The grin was impossible to contain. Ross had already started speculating about the first cartridge he was going to find in this world, and the feeling was something like the anticipation of cracking open a blind box. You had no idea what was inside, and that was the whole point.
If he had any say in it, he hoped the cartridges would come through intact — same content as the originals, exactly as he remembered them. He wasn't even asking for anything impressive. He could happily accept the throwaway filler games packed into bootleg hundred-in-one cartridges just to pad the count.
The excitement hadn't clouded his thinking, though. When he noticed the power transformer connected to the console inside him was continuously drawing from his aura — which Zetsu was slowly restoring — he quietly started running some tests.
He cycled the power on and off several times. The navigation arrow rebuilt itself each time he switched it on, with no apparent restrictions on how often he could do it. He confirmed that, then switched it off.
The tunnel was a straight shot anyway. He could afford to flip it on at any intersection to check direction and leave it off the rest of the time. No reason to keep it running and drain his aura for nothing.
His working theory: if the exam route hadn't been altered by the Yu Yu Hakusho integration, the cartridge was either tucked somewhere in a side branch of this tunnel or waiting in the tropical wetlands that connected to the far end of it.
As for whether the other Nen users nearby had noticed the arrow — he'd stopped worrying about that too. If he didn't explain it, they wouldn't know what it was. Let them stay on edge.
When there's something to look forward to, time has a way of compressing. The marathon run that should have been grinding him down physically was being absorbed by Zetsu's passive recovery, and the psychological weight of not knowing how far the tunnel went was being quietly dissolved by his speculation about what the first cartridge might be.
Not everyone was holding up as well.
Around the five-hour mark, people started dropping off in ones and twos. The ten-hour mark turned out to be the real wall — applicant numbers fell off a cliff, and somewhere between seventy and eighty people were scattered across the tunnel floor in various states of collapse.
Everyone who had made it to the first exam venue was already exceptional by ordinary standards, but people had different strengths and different ceilings. The ones now lying on the ground were the ones whose physical endurance or mental resilience hadn't been enough. What waited for them was elimination and a rescue team from the Association — no malice, just the math.
What they didn't know was that getting cut here was actually the lucky outcome. In the next stretch of the exam, falling behind didn't mean a rescue team. It most likely meant death.
After running for nearly twenty-one hours — covering a distance roughly equivalent to six full marathons without any significant slowdown — the endless tunnel finally gave way to a series of undulating rises in the terrain, the overall grade tilting upward. And at the top of those ascending steps, natural light poured down from the exit like something had been injected directly into the bloodstream of every applicant still standing. Ross was not immune to it.
He came through the tunnel mouth into open air, took his first breath of humidity and wet earth, and the world opened up.
Blue sky. White cloud. Dense green. Grey marsh. The constant ambient noise of wildlife too varied to name. The whole scene assembled itself into a stretch of wetland that felt like it hadn't changed since before anyone thought to put a name on it.
"The Numere Wetlands," Satotz said, looking completely unwinded, without so much as a bead of sweat on him — mouthless, in the most literal sense of the word. "Also known as the Swindlers' Swamp. It is the only route to the second phase venue."
Most of the applicants who had followed him out of the tunnel no longer had the energy to complain about there being more ground to cover. They were using the pause to recover whatever they had left.
Behind them, the shutter door at the tunnel exit rolled slowly closed, cutting off the last handful of applicants who had been close enough to see the light but had run out of legs on the final steps. No appeals, no exceptions.
The rules of the first phase had apparently been two-tiered from the start: surviving the tunnel run was one pass, and actually reaching the second venue would be the other.
Nobody spared much attention for the ones who didn't make it. In a practical sense, their failure just reduced the competition.
"Are you serious? It's still not over!? How much further do we have to go!"
Urameshi Yusuke looked like he had received genuinely devastating news.
That was because, in his case, he was only here at all because someone had dangled a front-row ticket to a match on the two hundredth floor of Heavens Arena in front of him. Becoming a licensed Hunter had never been his goal. Caring about the Hunter Exam had never been his idea.
"Hey! Kuwabara, why aren't you saying anything?"
Yusuke, whose outburst had drawn a small ripple of sympathy from the people nearby, looked over and found Kuwabara standing completely still, staring out at the wetlands.
"...This place. Something's really wrong with it. It feels like — like a spider web stretched across a huge open area, and every thread has a poisonous spider sitting on it."
Kuwabara was trying to put into words something his senses were giving him, using the closest reference he could find.
He had been picking up on strange things since he was young, a sensitivity that had only gotten sharper as he got older. He had no money to hire a professional Hunter to deal with the problems that brought, so he had taken his older sister's advice and decided to try becoming one himself. The friendship between him and Yusuke was the kind built on punching each other, where the other person's fist was the usual greeting but also the first thing that showed up in a crisis. Of the two of them making it to the actual exam venue, Kuwabara had done considerably more of the work.
"This young man's instincts are correct," Satotz said, his finger swaying slightly in a gesture that sat somewhere between explanation and warning. "At its core, this wetland is a massive natural minefield. It is home to a large number of rare creatures found nowhere else in the outside world. The majority are aggressive predators capable of hunting humans, highly skilled at concealment. The terrain itself presents additional dangers at every step. A single moment of carelessness can be fatal."
A few of the applicants whose attention had been fully on Satotz noticed something odd in that moment: his line of sight was drifting upward, not staying level with the crowd.
When they quietly tracked his gaze, they understood what he was looking at.
A large directional arrow, clearly constructed from Nen — invisible to anyone without the ability to sense aura — was hanging steadily in the air, pointing downward at badge 406 standing beneath it.
Their first impression of badge 406 had been simple: a complete Nen newcomer who had apparently awakened spontaneously about twenty-one hours ago. But this complete newcomer had gone and developed an actual working ability.
That was something many fully awakened Nen users who had been training for a significant stretch of time still hadn't managed to do.
Setting that aside, what they were more immediately curious about was what the arrow was pointing toward. Some kind of guidance function — but guiding toward what? Wait. Why was the arrow moving?
Ross was just as puzzled, and it was his ability.
He wasn't moving. The arrow was adjusting direction anyway. Which could only mean one thing: whatever that game cartridge was, it had legs.
Then a voice cut through everything — exhausted and furious in equal measure.
"Liar! This man is a fraud! I'm the real examiner!"
The crowd turned toward the sound. A man came staggering out from behind the low wall at the tunnel exit that had been blocking the view — covered in wounds, face lit up with outrage. In his hand he was carrying the corpse of a primate-type creature whose face and hairstyle bore a notable resemblance to Satotz.
The applicants erupted.
But in that same instant, every Nen user present — Ross included — had turned to look at the exact same thing.
The floating navigation arrow had stopped adjusting. It had swung around to point straight down, head toward the ground, locked directly onto the furious self-proclaimed examiner who had just appeared from behind the wall. And it wasn't just pointing. It was flashing at a rapid, insistent frequency, and playing a sound effect that resisted any reasonable description.
GOGOGO.