"Is that the Second Prince?" Kurapika asked, his voice low. His frown was slight, but it was entirely genuine. "The way she looks at people... it is exactly like she is casually deciding whether or not they are even worth categorizing as human."
"Try to consider it from her incredibly warped perspective," Liam muttered without moving his lips. "Camilla Hui Guo Rou actively treats absolutely everyone as entirely beneath her. Her older brother. Her own father. The sitting Prime Minister of a sovereign state. They are all just dirt to her. If she applies that exact same brutal standard to every single human being she meets without exception, that is arguably a very pure form of consistency."
Kurapika was entirely unmoved by this philosophical reasoning.
Shizuku, standing nearby, tilted her head, considering the situation from a completely different angle. "She is technically a princess, but her official royal title is Prince. The gender conventions of the Kakin Empire are genuinely interesting."
"What are you all whispering about?"
Menchi's voice cut through the quiet. They were currently gathered in the private staff rest area hidden behind the main kitchens. Menchi already had her pristine white chef's jacket off, and was lounging with her long legs stretched casually across the length of a leather sofa. She had asked the question without any particular interest in actually receiving an answer.
Before anyone could even attempt to provide one, she waved her hand lazily across the room at Machi. The pink-haired woman had just returned from wherever she had been lurking, carrying a silver tray loaded with tall glasses of cold drinks. She set the heavy tray down on the center coffee table with absolutely no expression on her face and immediately stepped back against the wall.
"Machi's homemade refreshments," Menchi announced with a burst of cheerful energy that was almost certainly designed to be deliberately provocative. "Consider this a live progress report on her ongoing culinary development under my expert tutelage."
Liam stepped forward and picked up one of the sweating glasses. He looked at the pale liquid for a long moment. "Well, it is probably not going to kill me."
"If she ever intentionally poisoned absolutely anything in my kitchen, I would personally settle that unforgivable offense with the heavy plates, the wooden cutting board, and every single sharp knife in the immediate vicinity." Menchi sounded completely, terrifyingly sincere.
Liam took a tentative sip.
It was actually genuinely good. He drank the rest of the glass in two long gulps and set the empty crystal back down on the silver tray.
Watching him survive the experience, Kurapika picked up a glass. He took two very cautious sips, mentally reassessed the flavor profile, and then confidently kept drinking.
Shizuku bit down softly on her plastic straw, her dark eyes looking directly at Machi over the rim of her glass. Machi ignored her, keeping her flat gaze locked entirely on Liam. Liam simply held up the empty glass in silent acknowledgment.
"Why exactly are you standing there thinking about what specific kind of poison would actually work on my system?" Liam asked mildly, catching her stare.
"I am currently thinking about exactly when I need to leave this awful place for the Hunter Exam," Machi replied flatly, ignoring his question entirely.
She reached into the inner pocket of her dark jacket and produced a neatly folded piece of paper. Liam, Shizuku, and Kurapika each possessed the exact same document hidden somewhere on their persons. It was the official faxed confirmation that had come through the hotel's secure line when their Association registration had finally cleared. It contained the basic, mandatory exam details: the starting date, the general location, and the strict arrival requirements.
Moving with unspoken synchronization, the three of them pulled out their own copies and unfolded them at roughly the exact same time.
January 4th, 1997. Noon sharp. Arrive at the city of Broken Sakura.
Menchi let her head loll back against the sofa cushions, staring up at the ceiling tiles. "Today is the twenty-fourth of December. Give yourselves a full week to travel, and you will easily make it there without having to rush."
"Do you have any useful inside information from the examiner board you want to share with us?" Liam asked, folding his paper back up.
Menchi smiled, a sharp, dangerous expression. "Plenty. For instance, I am officially one of the primary examiners this year."
Liam looked at her for a long second, his face completely blank. Then he simply closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the wall, and devoted his entire mental attention to actively digesting the two new death energy points that had mysteriously accumulated over the past few days somewhere inside this heavily guarded hotel.
They had arrived quietly in his reserves, exactly as they always did, without any fanfare or announcement. He possessed absolutely no hard, undeniable proof about the source of the deaths, but absolute certainty wasn't necessary in this line of work. He had a very reasonable, highly probable hypothesis, and its name was Tserriednich.
Because all six of his core Nen types were currently capped at their maximum developmental thresholds, the refined death energy automatically routed directly into his raw aura capacity pool and absolutely nothing else. He sat quietly with the growing power, letting it settle into his system.
The remainder of December moved at the sluggish, unremarkable pace that all years eventually achieved in their final, dying week, as though time itself was already exhausted and simply coasting toward the finish line of the calendar.
Menchi finally wrapped up her highly stressful royal cooking commission on the third of January. She left the hotel immediately ahead of the group, citing her strict examiner obligations and the undeniable fact that she was thoroughly, aggressively done with the Kakin delegation regardless.
On the morning of the fifth, Liam, Shizuku, Kurapika, and Machi sat down together around a small table with a laptop to seriously research their transportation options to the city of Broken Sakura.
Every single commercial train was completely booked full. Every commercial airship flight was booked full. Every single available ticket on absolutely any commercial travel route leading toward Broken Sakura had already been bought up months in advance by someone who had also registered for the Hunter Exam this year.
"Exactly how many people actually apply for this thing each year?" Kurapika asked, staring blankly at the long column of red 'SOLD OUT' notices on the screen.
"Millions," Liam said simply.
"Right."
Liam pulled up a digital map of the continent. Broken Sakura was located just under a thousand kilometers away from their current position at the hotel. He looked around the small table at the three people sitting with him. All three of them were capable of maintaining continuous, high-output Ken for well over two hours each. They had rigorously trained their physical output to completely absurd, superhuman levels, and they had been running brutal, exhausting combat drills in the castle's back garden for the past several months straight.
"We could honestly just run there," Liam suggested casually.
Shizuku looked up from the glowing screen of her cell phone. "I found a long-distance charter bus. It takes a direct, overland route. The nearest departure time is in exactly fourteen minutes. The bus terminal is located thirty-two kilometers away from this hotel."
Everyone at the table stopped and looked at her.
"You want us to cover thirty-two kilometers of dense city traffic in exactly fourteen minutes," Liam clarified slowly.
"Yes," Shizuku nodded.
"Fine." Liam cracked his knuckles loudly. "Can everyone make that pace?"
He didn't actually wait for an answer. None of them waited for answers.
Four blurs of motion exploded out of the hotel building and vanished into the crowded city streets at speeds that turned the morning commute into a smeared, horizontal blur of color. They bypassed traffic signals entirely. They vaulted over crowded pedestrian crossings, drifted sharply around blind corners, sprinted up sheer flights of concrete stairs, and utilized a long stretch of elevated pedestrian walkway that was mathematically faster to cross at a sharp, dangerous angle than to politely follow the metal railing.
Other ordinary people existed only in their peripheral vision, registering first as vague shapes and then instantly becoming distant memories left in the dust. The sprawling architecture of the city seemed to physically compress itself around them as they ran.
The dangerous thing about moving this incredibly fast in a densely populated urban environment was that it required absolute, unbroken concentration, or it ended very, very badly. One slightly misjudged step on slick pavement, one unexpected obstacle darting out from an alleyway, one fraction of a single second of reaction delay, and the physical consequences scaled proportionally to their terrifying speed. It was exactly the kind of brutal, high-stakes running that rapidly separated the truly trained from the purely theoretical.
Exactly nine minutes later, all four of them were standing casually in the center of the bustling bus ticket hall.
Shizuku raised a hand and calmly smoothed her dark hair back into place. The wind had blown it entirely flat against her skull, and then violently sideways.
Kurapika was breathing with slow, deliberate control. His pale face was only slightly flushed, which was the only visible physiological evidence of a person who had just sprinted thirty-two kilometers of complex, jagged city terrain at very close to his absolute top speed. He had managed the grueling pace without once using a borrowed Wind Transmutation talisman, simply because asking Liam for one felt vaguely embarrassing to his pride. He hadn't asked for one. He had made the brutal time limit anyway. He would be perfectly fine.
Machi's absolute only visible concession to the insane sprint was a very faint, almost imperceptible displacement of her pink bangs. She fell into step right at Liam's shoulder as though she had been casually walking the entire time.
But internally, she had been watching him very closely on the approach, and something highly specific about the exact way he moved kept nagging at her trained assassin's instincts.
Most people who ran incredibly fast still physically looked like they were running fast. There was always intense effort involved, whether it was visible in their strained muscles or hidden beneath their aura control. Liam, however, moved exactly like a highly advanced mechanical system that had somehow solved the biological concept of running as a simple engineering problem. The faster he actually went, the less physical energy he seemed to be spending. He didn't look like he was aggressively riding the wind so much as he was seamlessly using it, effortlessly working with the brutal air resistance instead of fighting pointlessly against it.
She filed the disturbing observation away in her mind without deciding what to actually do with the information.
They quickly bought four standard tickets from the automated kiosk. The massive charter bus was still actively loading passengers in the bay. They boarded in a single file line.
The ambient noise inside the cramped carriage dropped noticeably the moment they walked down the narrow center aisle. Forty-two other passengers had been right in the middle of various loud conversations, and all forty-two passengers noticed the silent, intense new arrivals at roughly the exact same moment. The collective assessment was lightning quick and mostly entirely wordless. It was the sharp look of paranoid candidates instantly recognizing serious, lethal competition entering the confined space.
Absolutely everyone on this bus was here for the exact same reason.
Kurapika and Machi took a window and an aisle seat together on one side of the bus. Shizuku claimed a window seat directly across the aisle from Machi's position with a polite, soft-spoken request for space from the large man sitting there. Liam settled into the aisle seat beside Shizuku and let his head rest back as the heavy bus finally pulled out of the terminal bay.
He was, technically speaking, a multi-billionaire. He thought about this absurd fact occasionally, and then usually forgot about it again five minutes later, which was possibly a deep psychological personality quirk worth examining at some point.
The cheap, long-distance bus smelled strongly of nervous people, stale, recycled air conditioning, and whatever greasy lunch the guy three rows back had brought onboard. It was incredibly cramped, and the cheap fabric seat was clearly designed for a human body that was absolutely not built to his particular, trained specifications. Yet, surprisingly, he found he honestly didn't mind the situation at all.
Physical discomfort was just sensory input. It meant nothing.
He closed his eyes and sent his aura awareness straight down through the metal floorboards of the bus.
His primary Nen beast was currently located directly under the bus. She was not literally physically attached to the undercarriage, but was smoothly tracking the vehicle from below at exactly matching speed. Jade moved effortlessly in the dark road shadow cast by the bus, exactly the way a silent stray cat moves along the top of a narrow fence.
He had been maintaining the Nen beast's physical manifestation continuously for months now, and the heavy extraction process had finally become entirely subconscious in the exact same way that breathing was subconscious. He simply didn't have to actively think about feeding it aura anymore. It was just there, a permanent extension of his will. He had recently started wondering whether the next logical step in his development was letting the beast make minor tactical decisions entirely autonomously, essentially running a kind of background combat protocol that could instantly engage threats without ever interrupting whatever complex task he was consciously doing at the time.
He was still deep in thought about this potential upgrade when the air brakes suddenly screamed, and they came on hard.
The massive bus lurched violently forward. Forty-two unprepared bodies rocked aggressively against their seatbelts. Several unfortunate heads found the hard plastic backs of the seats directly in front of them in the absolute least comfortable way possible.
Liam braced his weight evenly with both feet flat on the floor and looked sharply toward the front of the bus.
The driver had both of his hands raised high in the air in surrender. The dark, ugly muzzle of a heavy submachine gun was framed perfectly in the open doorway of the bus, pointed directly at his chest. Someone standing outside in the dirt was loudly directing the terrified driver to get out of his seat immediately.
The driver complied without a word of protest. He was visibly trembling. He stumbled down the steps and got off the bus.
A woman stomped heavily up the steps and into the carriage. She possessed the rugged, battered physical presence of someone who had completely stopped caring about making good first impressions sometime right before she started regularly carrying live grenades, a half-dozen of which she currently wore on a heavy tactical ring clipped securely around her waist.
The heavy submachine gun was gripped tightly in her right hand. A massive, bloodstained machete occupied her left. Her rough face possessed the distinct, ugly character that only truly accumulates from years of thick scar tissue and terrible life decisions. She swept her gaze over the forty-two terrified candidates trapped in the bus with the cold, flat assessment of a blue-collar worker simply doing a tedious job.
"You all have exactly three options," she announced, her voice rough like sandpaper. "Option First: You quietly leave all your official Hunter Exam registration materials right here on the seats, and you get off my bus alive. Option Second: You get shot full of holes, then I take your materials off your corpses, and I throw your bodies out into the ditch. Option Third." She casually raised the heavy, stained machete. "This is an alternate, slightly messier variation on option two."
Someone sitting in the exact middle of the bus foolishly asked about the specific details of the third option in a very small, trembling voice. The man immediately received a highly graphic, terrifying verbal demonstration involving the dull edge of the machete and his kneecaps, and he very quickly seemed to deeply regret asking the question.
The trapped carriage processed this brutal information at lightning speed. Shaking hands went deep into duffel bags. Coveted registration forms came out and were slapped onto the seats. Several panicked candidates desperately added thick stacks of cash to the pile out of a general, misguided sense that thoroughness and bribery might help them survive. People rapidly exited the bus in a single file line, adopting the hunched, terrified posture of those desperately trying to present a much smaller target profile to the woman with the gun.
Within exactly three minutes, the massive bus was mostly empty.
The scarred woman stood at the front, looking down the aisle at the four remaining passengers sitting together in the middle rows, plus one other person in the very back she hadn't actually noticed yet. She lazily aimed the muzzle of the submachine gun directly at Liam's group.
"You lot. Have you decided how you want to die yet?"
Liam's relaxed expression had not changed a fraction of an inch since she boarded. Neither had Kurapika's cold glare, Shizuku's blank stare, or Machi's flat, dead eyes. Absolutely none of them had moved a muscle to reach for their bags.
The woman looked at the four of them in utter silence for a long, tense moment. Then, surprisingly, she simply lowered the gun, letting the strap catch the weight.
Her scarred, hostile face slowly rearranged itself from genuine murderous intent into something that was almost, but not quite, a friendly smile. "Only five of you left with the spine to stay in your seats. That's a workable number."
She casually walked right past them without another word, sliding into the empty driver's seat. She tossed the heavy machete onto the overhead luggage rack, jammed the key into the ignition, and fired up the massive diesel engine.
Kurapika watched the back of her head. "The Hunter Exam has already started."
"That is a very good guess, kid," she called back over the roar of the engine. She pulled the heavy bus out of the dirt roadside stop and back onto the highway without ever bothering to look back at the people she had just abandoned in the wilderness.
Shizuku stood up halfway in her seat, turned completely around, and looked intently toward the very back of the bus.
Across a long stretch of empty, discarded seats, abandoned luggage, and the lingering, sour ghost of other people's blind panic, there was a single young girl sitting completely alone in the very last row.
She had twin braids. She was sitting perfectly, rigidly upright. Her eyes were wide open and entirely, terrifyingly vacant. They were not vacant in the erratic, unfocused way of someone who was badly frightened or actively dissociating from trauma. They were vacant in the exact same cold, empty way of a room with absolutely no furniture in it. She was physically present in the cheap fabric seat in the exact same way an inanimate object was present—taking up physical weight and volume, but utterly devoid of any actual human engagement or spark.
Shizuku watched the strange girl in absolute silence for a long moment.
She slowly sat back down in her seat, facing forward, and said absolutely nothing to the group. But she didn't take her dark eyes off the girl's reflection in the dusty bus window for the rest of the ride.
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