Seen
By the time Tonpa and Leorio dragged the boars back toward the testing grounds, Tonpa had stopped believing in dignity.
He had left it somewhere in the forest.
Probably near the rock.
Possibly under a dead pig.
Each step was an argument between pain and embarrassment. His arms felt stretched out of their sockets from hauling one side of the carcass, his back throbbed with every uneven shift of weight, and his ankle had developed a personal hatred for the earth. Sweat ran down his face in slow, irritating lines. The dead Great Stamp smelled like hot hide, blood, and a level of animal musk that should have required a warning label.
Leorio was not in much better shape.
His suit had lost the argument with the forest a long time ago. Mud streaked up one leg, leaves clung stubbornly to one sleeve, and his hair had given up pretending to belong to a civilized person. Still, somehow, he kept pulling.
Mostly through stubbornness.
Possibly through spite.
"Tell me," Leorio said between breaths, "that if I ever suggest becoming a Hunter again after this, you'll hit me."
Tonpa adjusted his grip on the carcass and nearly lost feeling in two fingers.
"I'll do worse," he muttered. "I'll encourage you."
Leorio barked out a tired laugh.
It came out half-broken, but it was real.
They crested the last rise toward the testing grounds.
The moment they entered clear view, the reactions began.
A few examinees turned first.
Then more.
Then enough that the shift spread through the grounds in visible waves.
People stared.
Not at Leorio.
At Tonpa.
At the boar.
Then back at Tonpa.
For one brief, stupid second, Tonpa considered dropping the carcass and pretending it had somehow followed him home out of personal affection.
Instead, he kept walking.
The dead alpha dragged behind them with dull weight and a trail of dust and leaves. The smaller Great Stamp followed beside it, tied awkwardly enough to prove that whatever system they had used for transport had been invented by exhausted men with no training in animal logistics.
They crossed into the testing area under open scrutiny.
Tonpa felt every eye like a hand.
There was confusion in some faces.
Disbelief in others.
A few looked annoyed, as if reality had failed to consult them before changing shape.
That was fair.
Tonpa had similar feelings.
Buhara saw the boars first.
His eyes widened, and then his entire face split into something close to delight.
"Well!" he boomed, stepping forward with obvious approval. "Now that's what I call effort!"
Tonpa nearly dropped his side right there out of gratitude for the sentence being addressed to the carcasses instead of his soul.
Leorio let go first. The boar landed with a heavy thud that shook the ground.
Tonpa released his grip a second later and had to stop himself from collapsing beside it.
The silence around them lasted exactly one heartbeat.
Then the murmuring started.
"That's Tonpa, isn't it?"
"No way."
"He actually brought one back?"
"Two."
"Since when does he do his own work?"
Tonpa kept his face flat.
Internally, he considered death again.
Not seriously.
Just enough to stay humble.
Leorio rolled one shoulder with a wince and pointed lazily at Tonpa without looking at him.
"The big one was mostly him," he said.
Tonpa turned slowly. "Why."
Leorio gave him a tired grin. "Because watching their faces is the first good thing that's happened to me in hours."
That, unfortunately, was fair.
The effect was immediate.
The murmurs shifted again. More eyes moved to Tonpa, this time with sharper focus. Some skeptical. Some suspicious. A few openly disbelieving.
Tonpa hated all of them equally.
Nearby, Gon had gone completely still.
His gaze moved from the larger boar to Tonpa's face, then to the torn branch marks still visible along the animal's forehead. His expression was not disbelief so much as fascinated recalculation, the look of someone who had expected one shape from the world and found another.
Killua stood a little behind him, hands in his pockets, eyes narrowed slightly.
That was worse.
Gon being impressed was dangerous.
Killua thinking was catastrophic.
Kurapika's reaction was quieter. He looked at the carcasses first, then at the mud on Tonpa's clothes, the set of his shoulders, the condition of his ankle, the way he was standing just slightly off balance.
Tonpa noticed the assessment instantly and disliked how good Kurapika was at it.
Leorio, naturally, made everything worse.
"There was another one too," he said casually, because apparently the concept of mercy meant nothing to him. "Bigger than the rest."
The grounds went still again.
Menchi looked up sharply. Even Buhara blinked.
Tonpa turned his head with deep reluctance.
Leorio, sensing the attention and choosing violence anyway, gestured toward the larger carcass.
"Alpha type, probably. Scarred face. Mean temperament. Tried to turn us into a memory."
Tonpa stared at him.
Leorio shrugged. "What? They asked."
"No one asked," Tonpa said.
"That's true," Leorio admitted. "But they were thinking it."
A pause.
Then, from somewhere behind the group, Killua spoke.
"You killed that?"
His tone was light.
That meant absolutely nothing good.
Tonpa looked in his direction. Killua was staring at the larger boar with the kind of calm interest he might have shown a strange machine or a knife made from a rare metal.
Tonpa rubbed one hand over the back of his neck.
"'Killed' is a generous word," he said. "I mostly survived until it made mistakes."
Killua's eyes shifted to him.
There was no mockery there.
Just attention.
Again.
Too much of it.
Gon stepped closer to the boars, crouched briefly near the larger one, and touched the hide with open curiosity.
"It fought hard," he said.
Tonpa said nothing.
Because yes.
Yes, it had.
Gon straightened and looked at him. "You smell like fear."
Tonpa blinked.
Around them, several examinees looked confused.
Killua snorted once.
Leorio looked offended on Tonpa's behalf for reasons Tonpa did not fully understand.
Tonpa stared at Gon for a moment, then said, "That's because I was there."
For one second, Gon only looked at him.
Then he grinned.
A quick, bright expression, almost absurd after everything that had happened that day.
It hit Tonpa harder than it should have.
Not because the line had been kind.
Because it had been accepted.
No suspicion. No dismissal. No laughter in the cruel sense Tonpa's borrowed memories knew too well.
Just simple understanding.
That was dangerous too.
Maybe more dangerous than mockery.
Before anything else could be said, Buhara clapped his massive hands once.
"Excellent!" he boomed. "You both pass the first cooking task."
A visible shift ran through the examinees.
Some relaxed.
Some looked relieved.
Some looked as though they had only just remembered this phase involved food and not simply organized humiliation.
Buhara crouched by the boars with open approval, already inspecting the quality of the meat like a man greeting old friends. Tonpa, meanwhile, was busy trying not to let his body fold inward in front of everyone.
One task down.
Good.
That should have improved his mood.
It didn't.
Because Menchi was still there.
And Menchi was the problem.
He looked at her.
She stood apart from Buhara in both posture and presence, arms crossed, glasses catching a pale glint of light. Her expression had not softened even slightly at the sight of actual successful hunters returning with acceptable prey.
If anything, she looked more severe now.
Tonpa's stomach tightened.
Right.
This part.
The first task had only ever been the easy one.
Buhara rose with visible satisfaction and announced the pass results. Around the grounds, examinees who had managed to roast their Great Stamp properly let out breaths of relief. Others, injured or empty-handed or too slow, wore expressions ranging from bitterness to disbelief.
Menchi stepped forward.
The atmosphere shifted immediately.
Buhara's warmth left with him, or rather, it stopped mattering the moment she opened her mouth.
"The second task," she said, "is sushi."
Silence answered her.
Not the dramatic kind.
The confused kind.
Tonpa closed his eyes briefly.
There it was.
The disaster.
When he opened them again, the expressions around the grounds had already begun changing shape. Confusion curdled into annoyance. Annoyance sharpened toward resentment.
A candidate near the middle frowned. "Sushi?"
Another said, "That's it?"
Leorio stared openly. "You've got to be kidding."
Menchi's gaze cut toward him like a sharpened blade.
"I do not joke about food."
No one in the room doubted that for a second.
Tonpa exhaled slowly through his nose.
He remembered this. At least the structure of it. Menchi naming a dish the examinees barely understood. Candidates attempting to imitate something they didn't know. Menchi rejecting them with growing contempt. Tension rising. The phase collapsing under the weight of her standards.
In the anime, it had been a scene.
In person, it felt like watching people walk toward a trap while arguing over the sign.
One examinee raised a hand halfway. "What exactly is sushi?"
Menchi looked at him as if the question itself had lowered the air quality.
"A dish prepared with vinegared rice and fish."
That was technically helpful.
It was also nowhere near enough.
Candidates began moving almost at once, some toward ingredients, others toward the preparation area, several with the air of people determined to bluff their way through culture itself.
Tonpa did not move.
Not yet.
Leorio glanced sideways at him. "You know what that is?"
Tonpa made a face. "I know enough to fear this."
"That's not reassuring."
"It's not meant to be."
Nearby, Killua had already gone still again, watching Menchi with a narrow, measuring expression. Gon, for his part, looked more intrigued than intimidated. Kurapika's eyes had shifted from the ingredients to the examiners and back again, reading the structure of the problem rather than the problem itself.
Tonpa hated how reasonable that was.
Because the structure was the real danger.
Not sushi.
Menchi.
This was never about the dish alone.
It was about standards, identity, pride, and the fact that she did not seem built to tolerate failure from people she already considered beneath her.
Tonpa could feel the disaster coming the way one felt pressure before a storm.
He had a choice.
He could say nothing.
That was safer.
The original flow would continue. Menchi would reject everyone. Netero would intervene. The exam would reset itself.
Probably.
That word had become unpleasant recently.
Or he could intervene somehow.
And if he intervened, what then?
More attention.
More suspicion.
More cracks in the story.
Leorio was still looking at him.
"You've got that face again," he said.
Tonpa frowned. "What face?"
"The one that says you know something annoying."
Tonpa almost smiled despite himself.
"That's a very specific face."
"You make it often."
Wonderful.
Absolutely wonderful.
Around them, the first attempts had already begun.
Candidates chopped.
Burned.
Assembled.
Guessed.
Some worked quickly, too quickly. Others tried to imitate one another with the desperate confidence of people who believed copying motion was the same as understanding technique.
Menchi rejected the first plate in under ten seconds.
"No."
The second fared worse.
"This is not sushi."
The third received a look of such cold offense that the examinee visibly regretted being born.
Tonpa watched the pattern lock into place and felt his shoulders tighten.
There was no flexibility in her.
No interest in teaching.
No intention of meeting the candidates halfway.
Every failed plate fed something in her expression—not pleasure exactly, but confirmation. Confirmation that she had been right to expect so little.
One by one, the rejections came.
"No."
"Wrong."
"Awful."
"Did you even listen?"
At first, the examinees tried harder.
Then they started making the kinds of mistakes frustration always produced: forcing speed, losing precision, talking back, submitting dishes out of irritation rather than hope.
The atmosphere soured by degrees.
Tonpa could feel it happening the way one watched water rise.
Leorio slammed down his own attempt harder than necessary and muttered, "This is ridiculous."
Tonpa looked at the plate, then at Menchi.
"Yes," he said quietly. "That's the problem."
Leorio frowned. "What, the fish?"
"The exam."
One of the nearby candidates overheard enough to scoff. "Easy for you to say. You already passed the hard part."
Tonpa looked at him.
The man's tone had been more bitter than hostile, but it still scraped against borrowed memories in all the wrong ways.
He let the feeling pass.
"Trust me," Tonpa said, "this part is worse."
The candidate opened his mouth, then thought better of it when Menchi rejected another plate with visible disdain.
The failures kept coming.
Gon tried next.
He approached the task sincerely, which did not help him in the slightest.
Menchi rejected his plate too.
Not cruelly.
But decisively.
Gon took the loss with open curiosity, not wounded pride, and stepped back after only a moment's confusion. That probably saved him.
Others were not so wise.
Raised voices began to appear around the edges of the grounds.
Not shouting yet.
Soon.
Tonpa's eyes moved to Menchi again.
There.
A small shift in her jaw. A cooler set to her shoulders. A tightening in the way she took each new plate.
She was no longer just judging.
She was irritated.
And irritation, in someone like her, did not fade. It escalated.
Kurapika approached with a far more careful attempt than most. The plate was clean. Deliberate. Respectful.
Menchi looked at it.
Then at him.
"No."
Kurapika held her gaze a fraction longer than most people dared.
"Because it is poor," he asked calmly, "or because it is not what you wished to see?"
That made several examinees go still.
Tonpa shut his eyes for half a second.
There it is, he thought. The beginning.
Menchi's expression chilled another degree.
"If you have to ask," she said, "then you do not understand the dish."
Kurapika did not argue further.
Smart.
But the question had already entered the room.
And once it was there, others followed.
"This is impossible."
"She's just rejecting everything."
"What does she actually want?"
"Is this even an exam anymore?"
The tension thickened.
Leorio crossed his arms and looked ready to become a problem on principle alone.
Tonpa stared at the preparation tables, mind racing.
He knew Netero would come.
Or should.
That was the old certainty talking again, and he no longer trusted it the way he once had.
Still, some tracks in the story were too deep to vanish from one changed side character.
Weren't they?
He hated that even his own thoughts now needed that question mark.
More failures.
More sharp dismissals.
One examinee snapped and argued back. Menchi cut him down so quickly and so coldly that several others lost the nerve to protest out loud, though not in silence.
Buhara had gone still.
That was telling.
He looked uncomfortable, but not surprised. Like a man who had seen storms form from clear skies before and knew better than to stand under the tallest tree.
Tonpa watched Menchi reject another plate without even tasting it.
That decided something in him.
Not a full plan.
Just a line.
A point beyond which silence became its own kind of stupidity.
Leorio noticed the shift instantly.
"Oh no," he said.
Tonpa turned. "What."
"That was your bad idea face."
"I don't have one of those."
"You absolutely do."
Tonpa looked away.
"That feels unfair."
Leorio pointed toward Menchi. "Whatever you're thinking, I'd like it noted in advance that I'm against it."
Tonpa considered that.
Then said, "That makes me feel a little better, actually."
Leorio stared at him. "Why would that—"
A plate shattered against the floor.
Everyone turned.
An examinee stood stiff with anger, breathing hard. Menchi had just rejected him too, and whatever restraint he had been carrying through the day finally broke under accumulated exhaustion, humiliation, and hunger.
"This is nonsense," he snapped. "You were never planning to pass us."
The grounds went still.
Menchi's expression became very calm.
That was worse than anger.
Tonpa felt the moment sharpen.
Yes, he thought. Here it is.
The point where this stopped being about food.
Leorio muttered, "Great."
The examinee kept going, because tired people were bad at recognizing the exact second disaster became real.
"We're hunters, not chefs."
Wrong thing to say.
Wrong person to say it to.
Menchi stepped forward once.
The room seemed to tighten around the movement.
"If you cannot understand why food matters," she said, voice level and cutting, "then you are not qualified to become a Hunter."
No one answered.
No one sensible, anyway.
Tonpa felt the coming collapse like thunder in bone.
This was it.
The phase was breaking.
And somewhere above them—or soon, if the old story still held at all—Netero would arrive to clean up the mess.
He drew in a slow breath and fixed his eyes on Menchi.
The air had changed.
The exam had moved past difficulty and into something personal.
And Tonpa understood, with a clarity that made his stomach tighten, that the next few minutes would matter.
Not because he could stop what was coming.
Because whatever he chose to do when it happened would decide who he was becoming in the eyes of everyone here.
The old Tonpa would have stepped back and let the room burn.
Tonpa looked at the candidates. At Leorio. At Kurapika's stillness. At Gon's open attention. At Killua's unreadable calm.
Then back at Menchi.
He had a very bad feeling that standing still was no longer the safer choice.