Chapter 7: Sonic Rules!
The Numere Wetlands drew their shape from the Pantanal — the largest tropical wetland system in the world, spread across South America. Bottomless marshes. An ecosystem's worth of wildlife. Vegetation with lethal intent lurking inside every form it took. The result was a self-contained and deadly environment almost entirely unlike the world outside it.
Visibility, at least, was no longer the problem. The open terrain meant nobody had to endure the psychological weight of the tunnel run — that particular torment of not knowing how far they had left to go. What the wetlands had instead was difficulty. The tunnel's floor had been flat and man-made. Out here, the best ground you were going to find was muddy, uneven, and riddled with holes. There was no comparison.
And that was before the fog.
About ten minutes into the wetlands, it started to roll in. Then it kept going. Visibility dropped in stages, one cut at a time. Satotz, leading the group from the front, ran exactly as he had in the tunnel — perfectly level stride, no reduction in pace, as if the terrain and the fog were beneath his notice. Which meant the pack following him had no choice but to keep up or fall behind.
Falling behind, out here, was a different proposition than it had been in the tunnel.
The Hiccup Daze Butterfly beat its wings to spray narcotic scales that put a person to sleep on the spot. The Rogue Strawberry Tortoise had a shell covered in lure growths that mimicked the scent and shape of ripe strawberries to perfection, and it swallowed the people who came close. The Grumble Rock Frog burrowed underground and could take in five or six people along with chunks of rock large enough to crush a house. The Boom Landmine Mushroom detonated on contact with the force of a fragmentation grenade and seeded the air with spores that colonized the human body and rapidly multiplied.
Creatures like these — far more dangerous than any Man-Faced Ape — were everywhere in the wetlands, and they had begun working through the applicant pack with varying degrees of patience and aggression.
Screams came and went. Impacts shook the ground with regularity. The three hundred or so applicants who had entered the wetlands had been cut down by roughly a hundred in under half an hour, and most of those hundred were permanently out of the picture — no recovery team required or applicable.
Ross could only read the situation from the sounds coming from behind him, because this time he had taken a completely different approach than anything he had done in the tunnel.
He was running with both hands gripping the 1P controller held up at chest level. His legs, meanwhile, were moving so fast they had lost the appearance of individual steps and taken on something closer to a single continuous spinning blur.
Holding that bizarre form, Ross had wedged himself into the first group and was staying right behind Satotz through the fog without any visible effort.
The examiner ahead of him had been glancing back at regular intervals. More precisely, he was looking at the marks Ross's feet were leaving.
"Footprints" wasn't quite the right word. "Wheel ruts" came closer.
The second stage of the first trial was a cross-country run through hostile terrain. Its intended challenge was route awareness and threat management. What Ross had inadvertently done by leaving an unbroken line of those ruts through the ground was hand the applicants behind him a navigation track. Anyone following it just had to deal with the natural hazards and manage their own stamina — the routing was already solved.
Satotz, as a fully credentialed Hunter with broad discretion over how each applicant performed in his exam, had been building a mental roster of people who warranted closer attention. Hisoka had been on that list from the start. But Ross — the apparent spontaneous awakening back in the elevator — was, if anything, more interesting.
Nen users were both rare and dangerous. Left unguided and pointed in the wrong direction, they were capable of harm that ordinary people had no means of defending against. The Hunter Association existed, in part, as the world's largest organization for the formal management of Nen-capable individuals. Guiding new Hunters onto an appropriate path was part of its mandate. The custom of assigning instructors to newly licensed Hunters after the exam existed for exactly this reason.
From Satotz's read of the situation, Ross hadn't reached Nen through years of training — he lacked the whole-body conditioning that path produced. He also hadn't been forced open through external contact. That left the third option: natural awakening, no prerequisites needed.
And in less than one day as a Nen user, Ross had already visibly demonstrated two distinct abilities and implied a third.
The navigational arrow that had been floating over him since before they entered the wetlands. The unusual running form he was using now, which had let him keep pace with Satotz without apparent strain. And whatever the third ability was — the one Satotz was inferring backward from the forced Zetsu state, which had the hallmarks of a Nen vow that consumed everything the user had to pay for its first activation.
If that didn't qualify as exceptional natural ability, Satotz genuinely wasn't sure what would.
He had already decided: once this exam was over, he was filing a report with the Association immediately. Whether or not Ross passed, he needed to be flagged for close monitoring. Ideally, a reliable instructor should be assigned before any bad influences reached him first. Talent like this couldn't be wasted, and it couldn't be allowed to go sideways.
As for why Ross was running the way he was — four words covered it.
He had become Sonic.
[Nen Ability Name: Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement — Real Mode]
[Ability Type: Conjuration + Manipulation]
[Activation Conditions and Description: Real Mode can only be operated when a cartridge is inserted and the console is powered on. Whether or not the user is in Zetsu does not affect Real Mode's operation.
While Real Mode is active, some of the passive abilities, active abilities, and governing rules of the currently controllable game protagonist unit in the running game will be mapped onto the player's actual body, in a manner consistent with the underlying logic of Nen.
During active mapping, the player must press the corresponding button on the controller to use the corresponding ability. The player's body responds with full synchronization — in other words, the player can control their own body through the controller.
One hand must remain on the 1P controller at all times during operation. Running Real Mode continuously drains the user's aura. Aura depletion triggers an automatic shutdown and terminates Real Mode. The player may also manually interrupt Real Mode by pressing the power button or disconnecting the power transformer. None of the above affect the console's ability to be restarted and operated again.]
[Currently running game cartridge: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Incomplete Version).]
[Currently mappable game protagonist: Sonic.]
[While Real Mode is active, you temporarily gain the following abilities:
Transmutation Affinity (Grade A) / Sonic Speed Movement (Grade E) / Golden Ring Lifeline (Grade C)]