Chapter 64: The Exam Was Rough. Treat Yourself to a Fight.
The next morning. Hunter Association headquarters, lecture room.
Excluding Gon, still unconscious, and Killua, who had already left the building, the remaining eleven candidates were spread in small groups around the room, each with a textbook in front of them. Class was about to begin.
Class. Getting the card in hand did not mean doing whatever they wanted. The material had to be worked through properly, and the real scope of the license's uses would continue to reveal itself through practical experience.
Ross took the card Beans handed across to him: red background, black pattern, white border, double-X emblem, made from a material that felt unusual in the hand.
His Hunter license.
The back carried a twelve-digit number. The final three digits read "287," marking him as a passer of the 287th Hunter Exam.
Once the cards had all been distributed, Beans transitioned smoothly into orientation mode.
"To start: simply by holding this Hunter passport, you may freely enter and exit more than ninety percent of countries normally off-limits to the general public, as well as more than seventy-five percent of restricted special zones.
You may also use ninety-five percent of all public facilities free of charge.
This card also grants you a credit line equivalent to that available to major corporations.
Sell it outright, and you have seven generations of comfortable living guaranteed.
Calling it priceless is not an overstatement.
For that reason, the most immediate priority for each of you is learning how to hold onto your license."
No lost-and-replaced procedure existed for Hunter licenses. Accessing any of the above privileges depended entirely on having the physical card.
According to Association data, roughly twenty percent of new Hunters lost their card within the first year.
The record of having passed the exam remained recognized regardless. The loss was limited to the practical access tied to the card itself.
For anyone who had already built up sufficient financial resources, influence, or connections, the card mattered less. What the license primarily provided was early-stage support for newly qualified Hunters: a way of removing certain material constraints and stepping into the world of Nen users from a more stable starting position.
Some candidates listened attentively and took notes. Others had already collapsed face-down on their desks.
Yusuke was predictably in the second group. He had never paid attention in a classroom in his life, and this setting was no different. Beans's voice registered to him at roughly the level of ambient sound. That he was still physically present in the room was, by any fair measure, a form of progress.
The contrast with Ross and Kuwabara on either side of him was stark. Both were listening closely and marking up the distributed materials.
Ross was running on pure instinct, university habits reactivating without prompting. The Hunter license usage guidelines genuinely warranted this level of attention.
Kuwabara had forced himself to engage and then found, somewhere along the way, that he had actually gotten absorbed.
The section he was currently underlining was transportation privileges. The Hunter Association maintained priority reserved seating with transit providers across the world: convenient to book, essentially free of charge, and for any destination within those ninety percent of accessible countries, identity verification was processed simultaneously with the booking itself.
And that was just the baseline.
"Typically, Hunters develop expertise in a particular field according to their own interests, becoming Gourmet Hunters, Bounty Hunters, Ruins Hunters, and so on. There is no need to rush this decision. Take time, think it through carefully."
Beans's voice carried on across the room.
"Hey. You said you wanted to be a Secret Realm Hunter, right?"
Yusuke aimed this at Ross in what was technically a whisper. Netero was sitting to the side of the podium with his legs crossed, apparently dozing. This had a mildly restraining effect on Yusuke, not out of any particular respect for age, but more because the old man was too dangerous to casually antagonize.
"Yeah. Secret Realm Hunter. Roughly a sub-branch of Ruins Hunter."
Ross nodded, then turned it back.
"What about you two?"
"No idea. Haven't thought about it at all. The one thing I know is that when I bring this home, my mom is going to be thrilled."
Yusuke, slumped fully across his desk, had given exactly zero thought to life after becoming a Hunter. He had originally only shown up for the Sky Arena ticket; taking on the detective job had been incidental.
Was his family short on money? Come to think of it, probably not really.
He remembered the time his mom went to the principal to get him readmitted to school. A line of black luxury cars had surrounded the building and the principal had apparently agreed while crying. His mom always brushed it off as friends' cars, but Yusuke had always felt there was something more to that story.
If that was how things stood, maybe he would not even need to go back to school. Possibly.
The face of a certain childhood friend flashed through his mind.
"I haven't thought about it either. But at least I don't have to worry about tuition anymore."
Unlike Yusuke, Kuwabara came from an entirely ordinary background in every sense of the word. Stepping into the world of Nen users had left him with a degree of uncertainty about what came next. Beans's claim that the thin card in his hand was worth more than an ordinary family could spend across seven generations without repayment had hit with real force.
Neither of them had any idea that compared to what the original timeline had in store for them, this entire period was little more than a warm-up. The events that were coming for them would find their way to these two regardless of whether they went looking for them.
"So you're both heading home first?"
Somewhat to Ross's surprise, Yusuke shook his head. He reached into his pocket and produced a physical ticket that had been folded and refolded until it was thoroughly crumpled, held it up between the three of them, and said with a trace of feeling:
"This is what dragged me here in the first place. I figured if I got knocked out early I would just go catch the match on the way. Didn't expect..."
"Didn't expect to accidentally walk out with a Hunter license?"
Kuwabara finished the sentence.
"Yeah. Walked out with the license. And the final phase didn't even give me a proper fight."
Yusuke was genuinely unhappy about that. But almost immediately his expression shifted, energy returning to it.
"Since the Hunter license covers free transit and I've still got travel money left, I might as well go straight there. I have been wanting to see the Sky Arena's two-hundredth floor and above for a very long time."
As someone who followed combat sports with genuine passion, when Yusuke talked about the Sky Arena, his eyes lit up in a way that was hard to mistake.
In the original story, after barely scraping through against Rando, he had been immediately handed off to Master Genkai for an entire holiday's worth of intensive training with no gap in between. The tournament ticket had gone to waste.
In this version of events, his time was entirely his own.
After an exam that demanding, treating himself to a fight seemed more than fair.
"Hey. You two want to come?"
Going alone was starting to feel less interesting. Yusuke's invitation went out to both Kuwabara and Ross.
***
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