"Hello. We would all like a twenty-percent-off coupon. Nine of them, please."
The fishing tackle shop on the second floor of the shopping mall had exactly one employee. He had been asleep behind the glass counter when they walked in, and he woke up wearing the specific, exhausted expression of someone who already knew exactly what kind of afternoon this was going to be. He looked at the long row of people filing through his doorway, smelling faintly of rubber lures and dust, and made a private assessment of the situation.
Apparently, people were coming to the Hunter Exam with their entire extended families now. They had even brought the children.
Akane and Aoi were wandering the aisles, looking at the colorful displays of fishing lures and weighted lines with genuine, wide-eyed interest. This did not help the shopkeeper's mental image of a hardened mercenary group.
He reached into the deep pocket of his canvas work apron without a single comment and produced a thick stack of paper coupons. He peeled them off, laying exactly nine of them on the glass counter one by one. Then, he sank back down onto his stool and closed his eyes again.
Aoi walked over and looked down at the coupon. She looked at Akane's identical coupon. Then she looked at the sleeping shopkeeper. "Then what do we do?"
Leorio picked his up and examined the cheap printing. "Are we supposed to actually buy fishing tackle to get to the exam?"
Battera's expression brightened with genuine interest. "I honestly wouldn't mind. I have never had very good luck with fishing. Buying some brand-new equipment might change things for me." Alice smiled warmly and patted his arm.
Shizuku simply flipped her coupon over.
The back of the small slip of paper had a detailed floor plan printed on it. It was small, clean, and clearly reproduced. A bright red arrow pointed directly from the front counter to a plain wooden doorway at the very rear of the shop.
Machi looked at her coupon for approximately one second, dropped it, and started walking toward the back of the store.
The plain wooden door was just a facade for a heavy metal elevator. Liam had known it was going to be an elevator before he even rounded the last display rack of fishing rods. The Hunter Association clearly had a specific design sensibility, and they were rigidly consistent about it.
"There are no buttons," Shizuku observed, looking at the smooth metal frame.
Akane found the small, recessed scanning device mounted flush in the door frame almost immediately. She held her coupon up to it with the printed barcode facing outward, and a sharp beep echoed in the quiet shop. The heavy metal elevator doors smoothly slid open.
Kurapika had just been opening his mouth to tell her to flip the paper around. He noted the successful outcome, closed his mouth, and said nothing.
They filed inside. Cramming nine people into a standard commercial elevator was a bold philosophical position on the concept of personal space. Liam scanned his own coupon at the digital reader on his way through the doors. He operated on the working theory that if the scanner actually possessed a hidden registration function, deliberately skipping it was exactly the kind of small administrative failure that could cause massive headaches later on. Following his lead, everyone behind him did the same.
The elevator doors closed, and the carriage began a long, smooth descent.
Liam stood near the back, watching Battera and Alice exchange quiet words over the low hum of the machinery. He looked at the subtle way they were standing together. It was the involuntary, natural orientation of two people who had spent the past year becoming more themselves through the presence of each other. They had both visibly aged backward since the last time he had seen them, and they were both significantly more dangerous than their civilian clothes suggested, which was a very pleasant development. He had also briefly noticed Alice's aura control when she had violently ended the mugging situation earlier. Her movements had been ruthlessly efficient in a way that proved she wasn't just improvising.
"If you want to withdraw," Liam said quietly, his voice carrying over the mechanical hum, "you can do it at any time. This is technically an official exam. But in practice, it can turn into something considerably less structured and much more lethal very quickly."
He didn't need to spell out exactly what that meant. The bloody massacre in the fountain square had spelled it out for them already, in a visceral way that was completely impossible to misread.
Battera and Alice shared a brief, silent conversation. It was partly conveyed through a few quiet words, and partly through the deep, intuitive shorthand of people who simply didn't need full sentences to understand each other anymore.
Alice finally looked at Liam. "He told me before we came here that he wanted to do things he had never done before. He has gone this far. If he turns back now, he will lose the nerve to ever try again as he gets older. We do not want that." She looked up at Battera, and he looked back down at her, his jaw set with determination. "We are ready to leave if we truly need to. We just want to make the choice ourselves."
"That is reasonable," Liam said.
Kurapika turned his head to look at Akane and Aoi squeezed into the corner. "The exact same warning applies to both of you."
Akane offered a serene smile. Aoi just glared and made a tight fist.
The digital floor counter above the door ticked steadily downward. Finally, the elevator slowed, the gears grinding softly before coming to a complete stop.
Liam casually flicked two fingers just as the metal doors began to slide open. Two tiny, invisible bubbles of aura drifted out from his hand. They were completely silent and visually unremarkable, floating through the cramped space to settle gently against the backs of Battera and Alice's necks, right below their hairlines. The couple was already focused intently on the opening doors. Neither of them noticed the Star Marks sinking into their skin.
Shizuku caught the motion and glanced at him.
Liam just shrugged slightly. "After-sales service. They were good clients."
The underground space beyond the elevator doors was massive. It was approximately five hundred meters wide and stretched for a full kilometer in length. It was brightly lit by humming fluorescent tubes, looking and feeling exactly like a sprawling commercial underground parking structure. At the far end of the concrete cavern, a heavy, rolling steel security door blocked the path. Along both sides of the long room were five evenly spaced metal doors leading to smaller rooms with no visible identification. At the elevator end where they currently stood, there were only basic bathroom doors and emergency exits.
This was the official exam venue. The air smelled of damp concrete and old dust.
Roughly thirty candidates were already inside the massive room. They were scattered widely across the open space, maintaining the careful, paranoid distances of people who had each independently concluded that close proximity to strangers was a massive tactical liability. A few candidates were sitting silently against the cold walls with their eyes closed, conserving energy. Several more were doing the slow, methodical environmental assessment typical of people highly trained to always know exactly where their exits were. Nobody was talking to anyone they hadn't already arrived with.
Aoi scanned the large room, her eyes quickly settling on a fixed point near the far wall. "The princess is here."
Camilla Hui Guo Rou sat casually against the concrete wall with her long legs extended. She was looking at absolutely nothing in particular, wearing the bored, detached expression of someone who had not yet decided whether this filthy environment was actually interesting enough to engage with. Two of her private, heavily armed soldiers stood at rigid attention on either side of her. A third soldier was positioned directly across from her, completely covering the third tactical angle. They were fully dressed in their royal military uniforms, making absolutely no effort to blend in or look civilian. The other candidates who had arrived earlier had clearly taken the hint, arranging themselves with a very generous, empty clearance radius around the Second Prince's little corner of the room.
Battera looked at her with immediate recognition. The man who was formerly the richest person in the world certainly knew exactly what a dangerous foreign royal looked like.
Liam let his gaze drift across the room and noted the strange doll-girl. She had found a dark corner of her own and was currently sitting in it. She held the rigid posture and total lack of presence of an inanimate object placed on a storage shelf. If he hadn't spent the last few hours watching her move and punch through a man's chest at speeds he genuinely hadn't been able to visually track, he would have simply continued assuming she was a decorative piece of furniture. Her energy-saving mode, apparently, was a continuous, baseline state with no minimum activation requirement.
"There is barely anybody here," Leorio complained loudly. He turned in a slow circle with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. His booming voice echoed off the concrete walls, clearly showing he had not yet calibrated his volume for the cavernous room's acoustics.
"You are wrong," a rough voice said from right behind him.
A man stepped out of the nearby bathroom. He had the bizarre physical proportions of someone who had been violently condensed vertically without actually reducing their total body mass, which produced a very particular, heavy density of presence. He had flat-cropped hair, a wide, heavy face, and a short, scruffy beard clinging to a round chin. He looked at Leorio with the casual simplicity of someone delivering a genuine, helpful correction to a factual error. "There are not too few people. You simply arrived too early."
He had a round, white number plate pinned securely to his chest. It read 13.
Before anyone could even finish processing this new arrival, another strange figure appeared. He seemingly materialized from the empty space between the scattered exam candidates rather than walking from any specific location. He had a perfectly round head. It was entirely smooth, pale green, and possessed no visible ears. He had a nose that was much more conceptual than anatomical. He was carrying a wicker basket full of numbered plastic plates balanced on one shoulder, and he was rapidly dealing them out to the new arrivals with the brisk, silent efficiency of a casino card dealer.
He handed plate number 41 to Kurapika, then continued smoothly down the line. Liam received 42. Shizuku, Machi, Leorio, Akane, Aoi, Battera, and Alice followed in exact sequence.
"Netero's secretary," Liam murmured under his breath, carefully reading the creature's physical description against a hazy memory from over two years ago. "The Bean Men."
He couldn't entirely confirm if this was the exact specific individual from the back of his mind. It was a perfectly reasonable problem to have when the relevant category of person possessed an appearance that simply didn't map cleanly onto any biological reference library he had built in his previous life.
The first man, who had loudly introduced himself to the room's general attention as Tonpa, had meanwhile produced a set of canned drinks from somewhere inside his bag. He was currently distributing them to Leorio, Kurapika, and absolutely anyone else in the new group who would take one.
"The official exam formally starts at noon tomorrow," Tonpa explained with a friendly, welcoming smile. "We are all going to be staying here overnight. You should have something to drink."
Leorio received the cold can with the immense, unbothered enthusiasm of someone who had been very thirsty and had now graciously been given a free beverage. He popped the tab and drank deeply.
Tonpa almost smiled. He fought hard to keep his face completely steady and friendly, but the malicious satisfaction bleeding through was a very near thing. He moved smoothly down the line, offering his hospitality.
He reached Machi.
She slowly turned her head and looked at him.
The bright can of juice stayed frozen in his outstretched hand. The friendly, welcoming expression he had been carefully holding completely evaporated from his face. He stood frozen, staring at her flat, dead eyes for a slightly too long moment. He possessed the very particular, paralyzed focus of someone who has just accidentally touched an electrified fence and hasn't fully processed the lethal voltage yet. A bead of cold sweat rolled down his temple.
The drinks finished distributing themselves very quickly after that. Tonpa suddenly found something incredibly urgent to do on the exact opposite side of the massive room.
Machi looked down at the bright can of juice he had nervously shoved into her hand. Without a single change in her expression, she simply set it down on the concrete floor beside her foot, completely untouched.
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