Every single year, anywhere between several hundred thousand and ten million people scattered across the globe register for the Hunter Exam. The exact number constantly fluctuates depending on how well the Association has managed its public reputation that particular year, how many wild rumors are currently circulating about the legendary benefits of a Hunter License, and exactly how many people globally have reached the highly specific, dangerous combination of vast ambition and incredibly poor risk assessment required to actually attempt it.
The number of professional Hunters actively willing and available to serve as official examiners sits, at its very best, somewhere between three and four hundred individuals. The math simply does not work. It has never worked. It will never work.
Even if Chairman Netero forcibly pressed every single licensed Hunter into service simultaneously, each examiner would be personally responsible for processing between twenty and thirty thousand hopeful candidates. That is not an examination. That is a natural disaster response effort. Nobody has the time to individually evaluate thirty thousand people on their combat readiness and moral character. So, what the Association actually does is quietly outsource the brutal first cut to hired professionals across the world. They employ people with enough gritty street experience to identify a lost cause at a single glance, giving them a strict mandate to eliminate roughly ninety-nine percent of the applicants before the official exam even begins.
This was the preliminary screening phase. It was the brutal part of the process most candidates did not even know existed until they were already drowning in it.
During the year Gon had taken his exam, the preliminary examiner for his specific group had been a weathered boat captain. He seemed old, apparently friendly, and completely normal. He had simply sailed his passenger ship directly into a maritime region famous for generating severe storms, let the crashing waves and crippling seasickness do the initial sorting for him, and then used an approaching super-typhoon to make a very persuasive case for voluntary withdrawal. By the time the battered ship finally reached the port, only three candidates remained standing. The captain had completed his brutal assessment efficiently and without wasting anyone's time.
Liam's preliminary examiner, however, had chosen a slightly more direct approach.
She was currently explaining the logistics of her method, speaking matter-of-factly over her shoulder from the driver's seat.
"The five of you are now confirmed candidates," she called out over the heavy rumble of the diesel engine. "The ones who ran off my bus earlier? I have already notified the Association's review department about them. Their registrations are permanently canceled. Even if they somehow manage to walk all the way to Broken Sakura by other means, it will not matter. They are done."
Kurapika processed this information, his expression entirely flat. "The entire test was simply the exact moment you walked on board with a gun?"
"You want something more complicated?" The woman did not bother to look back, keeping her eyes fixed on the dusty road ahead. "I had to drive a long-distance bus completely alone for three hours today. The absolute least these people can do is give me something somewhat interesting to work with. Driving an empty car is depressing."
Shizuku tilted her head, considering the situation from a different angle. "If someone was completely frozen with fear and simply forgot to move out of their seat, would that count as staying on the bus, or would it count as failing?"
She received no verbal answer. However, in the rectangular rearview mirror, she caught the sharp flash of a very dark, amused grin.
"Even if a professional Hunter kills someone out in the open street entirely without provocation," Machi stated, her tone possessing the cold certainty of someone reciting a known, unchangeable fact, "civilian law enforcement has absolutely no legal jurisdiction to arrest them."
"And this situation," Liam added smoothly, leaning forward in his uncomfortable seat, "is technically happening during an active exam. Which provides a massive amount of additional legal context."
"This is not during the official exam," the woman corrected him sharply.
"The preliminary screening is absolutely part of the exam," Liam countered, his voice perfectly pleasant over the rattling of the floorboards. "The exact moment a candidate registers, receives their official confirmation, and sets out for the venue, they have legally signed the relevant Association waivers. That is the rule."
"Even if the preliminary phase officially counts, I am not actually a professional Hunter," she argued.
"You are actively working under Association authority for a strictly defined period," Liam pointed out. "You are a provisional examiner from the exact moment you accepted this assignment until the official exam formally begins at noon on the fourth. You have limited duration, but full legal authority." He offered her a polite smile to the back of her head. "You have a legal mandate. You can do whatever you like out here. Nobody is going to be filing a formal complaint against you."
Hearing this, the woman's heavy boot came down hard on the accelerator with renewed enthusiasm.
The cheap, long-distance bus was absolutely not designed to be driven this aggressively. The heavy vehicle expressed its mechanical opinion on the matter through violent vibrations and a deafening roar of road noise. The driver appeared not to care in the slightest.
Ahead of them, a group of large kangaroos crossed the dusty highway, moving in the slow, deliberate fashion of wild animals that have never had a valid reason to reconsider their casual pace.
She did not even tap the brakes.
Several kangaroos violently departed the asphalt at terrifying speeds and awkward angles they had certainly not anticipated when they woke up that morning. The heavy bus was already four kilometers down the road before any of the poor animals actually landed in the brush.
Liam calmly turned around in his seat, looking back through the dusty rear window until the small, dark shapes completely disappeared from view. He checked his internal reserves. His death energy count had not moved a single point. The sheer physical distance they had covered before the impact killed them had been enough to keep him safely out of range. Satisfied, he turned back around and sat down properly.
In the very last row of the rattling bus, the strange girl with the twin braids sat in exactly the same rigid position as she had twenty minutes ago. She maintained the exact same stiff posture. She wore the exact same expression, which was to say, the complete absence of one. The cheap fabric seat might as well have been entirely empty for all the human presence she actively projected into the space around her.
"Has she even blinked yet?" Liam asked quietly.
Kurapika kept his eyes closed, his head resting against the vibrating window glass. "I haven't been watching her."
"Her aura flows exactly like an ordinary, civilian person's aura," Liam observed, keeping his voice pitched low over the engine noise. "It is loose, completely untrained, and just naturally dissipating at the surface of her skin."
"That is exactly the same as yours," Kurapika noted.
"That is the same as all of ours right now," Liam agreed. "Anyone with actual, lethal field experience knows much better than to walk around in public with their raw aura radiating off them like a glowing neon target sign. The real question here is whether she is highly trained to hide it this perfectly, or if she is just naturally like that."
Kurapika finally opened one gray eye. "Her mental state is absolutely not ordinary."
"No," Liam agreed softly. He resettled his weight in the seat and prepared to get some sleep. "She is either very, very good at this, or she is very strange. Possibly a dangerous mix of both."
He closed his eyes. The heavy bus drove on through the wasteland.
When the vehicle finally slowed down and the air brakes hissed loudly, Liam opened his eyes again.
Outside the smeared glass of the window sat a city. It was definitely not Broken Sakura, judging purely by the modest scale of the skyline, and it was not somewhere Liam recognized from his maps. The street they had parked on was ordinary enough. It was the kind of bustling commercial strip found in literally every mid-sized city, packed tightly with small storefronts, heavy pedestrian foot traffic, and the greasy, savory smell of street food drifting over from somewhere nearby.
The front and back doors of the bus opened with a loud, hydraulic hiss.
The scarred woman pulled a crushed cigarette from a hidden pocket somewhere in her vest, placed it briefly between her teeth, removed it without ever lighting it, and finally turned around in the driver's seat to face the remaining five passengers.
"There is a small grocery store directly across the street." She pointed a calloused finger at it through the dirty windshield. "Go inside, find the owner, and say the following phrase exactly: I want a map to Women's Paradise Island. Then, you must do this."
She raised her right hand into a loose, curled grip, slowly extended her tongue, and made a highly suggestive, rhythmic gesture that vaguely implied licking a melting ice cream cone, or perhaps something in its general anatomical neighborhood.
Liam was already standing at the front door, one foot on the steps. "The secret map and the ridiculous passphrase I completely understand," he said dryly. "But that specific gesture is entirely yours."
The woman bared her teeth in a mocking grin. "I am the official examiner for this specific leg of the journey, aren't I? The rules of the test are mine to set. If you disagree with my methods, there is always next year's exam." She waved them off the bus with a dismissive flick of her wrist and aggressively slammed the heavy gear shift into drive.
They stepped down onto the busy concrete sidewalk. The massive bus immediately pulled away from the curb, the driver laughing at a booming volume that carried easily for half a city block.
The five of them stood together in front of the rundown grocery store. Kurapika looked at the faded awning with deep dread. Machi looked at the glass door with flat indifference. Shizuku was already walking straight toward the entrance without a second thought.
The strange girl with the twin braids walked right past Liam as he stood hesitating at the threshold. Without ever turning her head to look at him, she spoke. Her voice came out entirely flat and mechanical, sounding exactly like an automated text-to-speech system that had somehow learned human cadences but had not fully committed to using them.
"I do not need to blink."
Liam watched her back for a second, then followed her inside the store.
At the cramped front counter, Kurapika had just finished flatly stating, "I want a map to Women's Paradise Island," to a middle-aged female shopkeeper who was visibly biting the inside of her cheek, working very hard at maintaining a straight, professional face. With a look of profound, soul-crushing defeat, Kurapika slowly began to arrange his right hand into the required ice cream gesture.
Liam stood near the candy display and watched this humiliating display with the absolute solemn attention it deserved. He waited patiently for Kurapika to complete the agonizing motion in its entirety, and then casually flicked an invisible Star Mark bubble directly toward the shopkeeper.