Chapter 5: The First Game Cartridge — Sonic 3
Ross had imagined many different scenarios for his first encounter with a cartridge. The one where it ran up to him on its own had not made the list.
Not that it mattered, because Ross already knew exactly what he was looking at. The self-proclaimed examiner and the primate bundled in its arms were the same creature — a Man-Faced Ape, an animal unique to the Numere Wetlands. It could reshape its body and face into a human likeness, speak human language, and actively hunted people. In some ways, it was the single most fitting representative of everything the wetlands' nickname — the Swindlers' Swamp — implied. A creature written into the original story.
Right now, this one and its partner were trying to run a con on a group of applicants who were physically and mentally drained from the underground marathon, brains running well below capacity. All they needed was for one person to take the bait and turn suspicious eyes on the real examiner — once the herd mentality kicked in, the rest would follow. And once the group was sufficiently riled up, one well-placed provocation would steer the whole pack somewhere dangerous, at which point dinner would serve itself.
The timing was sharp, Ross had to admit. Right after a grueling experience that had forged a sense of shared suffering across the group — that was exactly when suspicion spread fastest and people were most likely to stop thinking independently.
He'd even entertained the idea that the Man-Faced Ape might be a deliberate obstacle planted by the Hunter Association or Satotz himself.
And sure enough, the moment the fake examiner flung its partner — dressed up as a corpse and wearing a face shaped to resemble Satotz's — into the crowd, a faction led by Leorio, who had never exactly been famous for keeping a cool head in a crowd, got their emotions spiked and began closing in on the real examiner. Part of it was probably just a release valve for twenty-one hours of misery.
Then, without warning, several sharp whistling sounds cut through the air.
Before most people had time to process what was happening, six playing cards had already shot out simultaneously, three aimed at the fake examiner and three at the real one.
Satotz's fingertips moved in a rapid flicker and caught all three of his with pinpoint precision. The fake examiner, which in truth was a creature that lived by imitation and whose actual combat ability was minimal, took the first card directly through the nose bridge.
Then things got strange.
The instant that first card hit, the fake examiner's entire body became briefly translucent — and the two follow-up cards passed straight through its skull without making contact. At the same moment, as if absorbing a blow it couldn't absorb, the creature's body jerked backward uncontrollably and it went down.
And when it hit the ground, more than a dozen coin-shaped objects burst from it and scattered across the dirt.
The applicants with sharper eyes looked closer and realized the scattered coins were all hundred-jenny pieces.
"Hmm~~??"
Hisoka had already known which was real and which wasn't from the start. He had been using the situation as a pretext to poke at the real examiner, which was why he had thrown cards at both simultaneously. But watching the fake take that hit and do whatever it had just done — that involuntary sound caught in the back of his throat, and genuine curiosity surfaced behind his eyes.
Was that body-phasing ability an innate Nen talent of the creature?
Or did it have something to do with that unripe fruit who had been generating the arrow overhead?
By the time Hisoka was working through that question, the fake examiner had already recovered from its one-second phase state. And the card wound that should have been lodged in its nose bridge was completely gone, which made Hisoka narrow his eyes.
The phasing hadn't just let it escape the follow-up cards. It had rolled back the damage from the first hit too.
The wound was gone. The attitude was shattered.
Any trace of the righteous outrage the fake examiner had been performing was gone. It scrambled to all fours and bolted.
That settled it for everyone watching. No applicant, however slow on the uptake, could look at something fleeing on all fours and still believe it was the real examiner.
Unfortunately for it, its running speed from a dead stop was no match for Hisoka's throwing speed. It barely managed to cover ten meters during the brief window while Hisoka was still thinking, and then it pitched face-first into the dirt and stopped moving. Its partner — the one that had been posing as the corpse — didn't even get the chance to stand up before taking a card to the head.
"Individual variation, I suppose..."
Hisoka turned one of his joker cards between his fingers, looking faintly disappointed at the double kill.
And at that moment, Ross, who had been watching with calculated patience until now, finally moved.
With the eyes of most of the surviving applicants tracking him, he trotted over toward the two Man-Faced Ape corpses with an enthusiasm that was entirely sincere and entirely undignified, and started picking up the hundred-jenny coins scattered across the ground.
In the Hunter x Hunter world, jenny was functionally comparable to the Japanese yen of its era. A single hundred-jenny coin was roughly enough to buy one small bottle of mineral water. The three-hundred-and-thirty-milliliter size, specifically.
Did Ross need money? He desperately needed money. He had arrived with literally nothing in his pockets.
The dozen-plus coins on the ground were enough to get him a decent bowl of ramen at some small shop somewhere. But that wasn't the main reason he'd moved. While his hands were sweeping up coins, they were also running along the corpse of the fake examiner — the one with a vertical row of playing cards still embedded in its back.
Everyone else in the vicinity had experienced the faint impulse to go through the corpse themselves. But the moment that impulse leaned toward action, a pressure arrived from somewhere nearby that was difficult to put into words, and the impulse quietly died.
Hisoka had stepped forward. Deliberately.
He was too curious. He wanted to see what this piece of unripe fruit was doing — what it was trying to extract from a Man-Faced Ape that had clearly been behaving in ways that didn't add up.
He wasn't the only one watching. Satotz and the other Nen users scattered through the crowd had also silently agreed not to interfere, and were observing every move Ross made.
Almost the moment Ross's hands made contact with the corpse, the floating arrow overhead shrank down on its own and descended, sweeping across the body like a metal detector being waved across a surface — and then stopped on the area around the creature's navel.
Ross's hand closed and pulled.
From the creature's navel, he drew out an object.
"A black... game cartridge?"
From among the applicants — someone who had had almost no interaction with Ross up to this point — a white-haired boy wearing badge 99 stared at what Ross was holding and spoke with unconcealed surprise.
A game cartridge.
The applicants around them, the vast majority of whom had no particular connection to video games, looked collectively baffled. Meanwhile, text had appeared in front of Ross that only he could see.
[You have successfully recovered one incomplete standalone game cartridge: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Zone Limited: Angel Island).]
[Your game cartridge collection +1. Your collection slot +1. You can now store a maximum of two cartridges (1 in the console slot, 1 in the collection slot). Cartridges stored in the collection follow the same rules of existence as the console itself.]
[You can now insert a cartridge to activate and use the three operating modes of Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement.]