Chapter 9: PERFECT!!!!!
Bang!
At exactly noon, the mouthless examiner Satotz squeezed the trigger on the signal gun in his hand.
"Time's up~ Well done, everyone."
"This is Biskan Forest Park, and the venue for the second phase of the exam."
"With that, allow me once again to congratulate all of you — every applicant present has officially passed the first phase. I offer my best wishes for the second phase as well. May fortune favor you~"
A perfectly acceptable congratulatory speech, all things considered. Before anyone had a chance to respond, Satotz, having completed his assigned duties, turned and walked directly into the trees — and disappeared into the shadows.
Technically, with his work done, he was free to leave. But he had checked his schedule and found nothing pressing. So he had made the rational decision to stay and watch.
"Let's see how many of these hundred and fifty manage to get past Menchi and Buhara~"
He activated Zetsu to mask his aura, and in a single unhurried movement settled onto a tree branch with the quiet patience of an owl, eyes on the building.
The wetlands crossing had cut the applicant count in half again. A hundred and fifty remained. Most of the ones who hadn't made it were not coming back.
The world of Hunters was exactly that blunt about it. People died, and there was nothing to soften the fact.
Then again, the Hunter Exam had always been something you staked your life to clear. A Hunter License — recognized virtually worldwide, granting free access to ninety percent of public facilities, clearance into seventy-five percent of restricted areas, and usable as collateral for a hundred-million-jenny interest-free loan — was not the kind of thing you earned without cost.
While the surviving applicants were still puzzling over whatever had been making that low rumbling sound, the building's sealed doors finally opened.
The first thing they saw was a woman lounging on a sofa with her legs crossed — long boots, shorts, a fishnet top, and a bra that wasn't trying to hide anything. Her pink hair was twisted into five vertical buns that radiated upward from her head. It was the kind of hairstyle that looked less like a deliberate aesthetic choice and more like something you might see magnified under a laboratory microscope, and it was difficult, in good conscience, to call it attractive.
Behind her, sitting on the floor, was a man whose exposed upper body alone was pushing close to two meters. His stomach was enormous.
The rumbling that had been audible from half a kilometer away had been coming from that stomach.
"As you can see, the second phase will be conducted by myself, Menchi, and Buhara — both Gourmet Hunters."
The moment she said it, the crowd stirred.
A Gourmet Hunter was a Hunter who dedicated their work to tracking down exceptional ingredients and dishes across the world, in pursuit of the highest levels of culinary experience. The presence of Gourmet Hunters as examiners meant only one thing: the second phase was a cooking test.
Most of the applicants made their dissatisfaction immediately obvious. They had come to terms with the possibility of dying in the course of the exam. Being eliminated for not knowing how to cook was something else entirely — especially given that the entire evaluation standard would be based on the personal preferences of two people.
That was how it worked, though. The Association gave its examiners broad authority. If they said you failed, you failed, and no further explanation was required.
Endure it.
Once the applicants had reluctantly processed the situation, the two examiners gave them their assignments. Like the first phase — which had been split between the tunnel segment and the wetlands segment — the second phase ran in two stages. Clear Buhara's challenge first, then qualify to face Menchi's.
Buhara's challenge was as follows.
"Whole roast pig! Made from the world's most ferocious animal — the Pork de Roa! My absolute favorite!"
The examiner who had given the immediate impression of being built entirely from appetite stated his requirements while visibly drooling.
"Pork de Roa?"
While a number of applicants repeated back the name of a species they had never heard of, the ground started shaking.
A herd of creatures built larger and more solidly than adult rhinoceroses, each distinguished by a single massive nose, crashed directly into the applicant group.
"Second phase — officially underway~"
Menchi smiled as she watched the unlucky applicants launched into the air by the impact, and made the announcement.
Cooking was the stated objective. What was actually being tested was comprehensive capability.
For applicants who had just completed a twenty-four-hour non-stop ordeal through the tunnel and the wetlands without sleep, food, or water, preparing a whole roast pig was the minor part. The real challenge was figuring out how to hunt the thing.
The initial stampede alone had immediately taken out roughly ten to fifteen exhausted applicants who hadn't managed an effective response in time.
Ross, for his part, had already slipped into the trees before the charge reached him. Woodland terrain didn't lend itself to a straight charge, which was where he wanted to be.
His physical state at this point was a precise and awkward kind of tension. His body's base instincts, shaped by twenty-four hours of continuous activity without rest, kept pushing toward sleep. But the forced Zetsu state that had been running in parallel for the same twenty-four hours had been restoring his aura and stamina at a constant rate. That recovered stamina had then been spent by running Sonic Speed Movement through the wetlands, which left him with aura in abundance but hunger and thirst that had climbed to their limit.
One other thing worth noting: the twenty-four-hour forced Zetsu period tied to his first materialization had just expired. His aura did not go haywire again. The full day of forced adaptation had embedded Nen deeply enough into his instincts that he had passed the dangerous window where an untrained user's aura leaked uncontrolled. He was stable.
He was still, however, very much a beginner.
The four fundamentals of Nen practice — Ten, Zetsu, Ren, Hatsu.
Ross currently had access to two of them. Zetsu, through the practical experience of twenty-four forced hours of it. And Hatsu, through the muscle memory built from his deep familiarity with Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement.
Ten — the foundational aura flow used for general strengthening and defense — was beyond him. Ren — the amplified output used for enhancement and offense — was equally unavailable. Both were complete unknowns.
In normal circumstances, Ten was the first thing any Nen user learned. Everything else followed from that foundation, including Hatsu, which under standard progression was something a person only considered after a meaningful period of proper training.
By that measure, Ross the unguided, self-taught Nen user had wandered slightly off the standard path. Not dangerously off — not irreparably — but off.
The Pork de Roa had a charging ability on par with a rampaging boar out of Monster Hunter, but its weakness had already been spelled out in the original story: behind the high, solid architecture of its massive nose, the crown of its skull was comparatively fragile.
One of them was bearing down on him right now.
Heart hammering, adrenaline already fully engaged, Ross looked at the wall of pig coming at him and arrived at a decision.
"Like I'm supposed to dodge!?"
He pressed the directional button forward and accelerated straight at it.
When the distance between them had closed to ten meters and his speed had reached its peak, he slammed the B button.
His body launched upward in a single explosive arc — something between a running leap and a triple jump — and he cleared the top of the pig's enormous nose with room to spare. His left hand, wrapped around the controller, pressed flat against the back of his right fist. His right arm pulled back, and then he drove the point of his elbow downward, hard, directly into the Pork de Roa's exposed crown — the spot it couldn't redirect away from in time.
PERFECT!!!!