Chapter 33: The Majority Rules Path — Final Fork
The Majority Rules path required a full group of five to run, and it held the distinction of being the single most demanding route in all of Trick Tower — by combined difficulty and by theoretical time cost both.
In the original story, Gon's group had still made it through, but Leorio's weakness for a pretty face had them losing fifty hours to a bet they didn't need to take.
This group had cleared the whole thing in under two hours total. Sixty-two hours still on the clock, no urgent need to rush anything.
After the one room built for direct confrontation, the route that followed was essentially an endurance sequence — rolling boulder corridors, laser trap sections, walls designed to close in and crush anything that didn't move fast enough. Add in Trick Tower's total absence of natural light, a sealed interior that let in nothing from outside, and the overall experience gave Ross a faint nostalgic pull toward Dark Souls.
The phase-one marathon had probably done something lasting for his stamina, and the Nen that had bedded into his system since the awakening was handling its own share of the recovery. None of the trap sections had actually stopped him.
Eight hours after leaving the combat platform, with more than sixty-two hours still remaining on the clock, the group walked into a room with noticeably different decoration. Both walls were lined with cold weapons — blades and blunt instruments mounted in rows, the kind of display that was either aesthetic or a message.
Lippo's voice came through.
"This is the final fork in the Majority Rules path."
"Already?" Yusuke looked genuinely caught off guard. By the seventy-two-hour clock, they had been inside for barely ten hours combined.
"Don't get too comfortable~"
There was something distinctly off about Lippo's tone. Not threatening — just the specific quality of someone who was enjoying what came next.
"In front of you, two choices. The first is a route all five of you can take — long, difficult, and forty-five hours minimum even pushed to the limit. Vote circle for that one.
The second is a route only three can take — short, simple, three minutes end to end. Vote cross for that one.
If you go with the second option, two of you will need to be shackled to the wall chains before the door will open. Those two stay shackled until the exam clock runs out."
He continued before anyone could process it.
"The three-person route is a straight shot. Nothing in it. Three minutes. The five-person route, pushed to the absolute limit, still costs forty-five hours minimum. Not that it matters — you've got sixty-two hours left either way.
But don't forget: this is the Hunter Exam. Right now you're acting like a team. At your core, you're still competitors. Using this moment to eliminate two of them is not an unreasonable play."
The reminder was deliberate. Whatever sense of group loyalty had built up over the previous ten hours was exactly the thing Lippo was pressing on.
"What kind of garbage is that! After everything we've been through, of course we all pass together!"
Kuwabara shouted it directly at the speaker.
"Exactly! We've come this far! Who wants to spend sixty-plus hours chained up in here! What do you do about food and water? What do you do about the bathroom?"
Yusuke followed at equal volume.
That last part actually stopped Ross for a moment.
He was right. Sixty hours chained to a wall — food and water were things you could probably push through. Bathroom needs had no workaround at all.
Yusuke's angle on this was surprisingly practical.
"One more thing."
Lippo again, same tone.
"I'm aware some of you could break those chains without much effort. On my floor, my rules: if you choose the three-person route, those chains are not to be damaged by any means whatsoever. Anyone who breaks them — shackled or not — gets disqualified by examiner authority. Both of them."
"Tsk."
Yusuke clicked his tongue and pulled a face. He had clearly been running calculations on exactly that option, and having it closed in advance was a specific kind of frustrating.
Then Hisoka spoke.
"The examiner isn't wrong... This is, without question, an excellent opportunity to eliminate the competition. Isn't it~?"
Whether it was genuine or testing the room, the delivery gave nothing away.
At the same moment, the killing intent Yusuke had first registered in the entry room — the kind that felt like a direct challenge to everything standing in its radius — began spreading from Hisoka again, slow and clammy, filling the room from the edges in.
It wasn't just Yusuke this time. Ross and Kuwabara both felt it: that particular cold weight raising the hair on their arms.
Ten hours of uneventful company had done good work at making people forget. Ross had let it lull him into not properly accounting for the fact that Hisoka was a more volatile pressure point than Illumi — less bounded, quicker to ignite. The behavior right now was unambiguous. He was done waiting. The fork had handed him a frame, and he was going to use it.
The target wasn't going to be Illumi. It was almost certainly not Ross himself, who had nothing to offer in a straight fight. That left Kuwabara — freshly Nen-awakened with a weapon — and Yusuke, who had already shown exactly the kind of raw combat instinct Hisoka specifically looked for.
Both of them had gone tight, weight shifting without thought into ready stances.
"Warden."
Ross spoke.
"Yes?"
"As long as we don't damage anything — that's the condition, right?"
"...That's correct."
"Then we're fine."
While Hisoka stared and the others froze, Ross pressed the cross on his wristband — vote for the three-person route — walked to the wall, and locked the nearest shackle around his own wrist with a clean click.
Was he actually volunteering himself?
He didn't give anyone time to think about it.
"Yusuke, Kuwabara — one of you come chain up here with me. Get that door open. I promise you: nobody in this room knows more about getting out of shackles than I do."
The two of them — a friendship with roots deep enough to operate on a glance — exchanged one look.
Then:
"Rock, paper, scissors!"
Kuwabara threw scissors and won without contest. Yusuke lost and ground his teeth.
In the lifelong competition of rock-paper-scissors between these two, Yusuke had probably never once beaten Kuwabara and was not going to start today.
They hadn't known Ross long. But the impression both of them had formed was of someone who said exactly what he meant and didn't put knives in backs. Kuwabara's gut said to trust him. Yusuke went with instinct, same as always.
Three crosses in a row, and then two people voluntarily locking themselves in chains — Hisoka's killing intent cut off like a switch had been thrown.
He seemed to have worked out, roughly, what Ross was about to do.
Cross five, circle zero. With two candidates in chains and the condition met, the door for the three-person three-minute route opened slowly.
Illumi didn't engage with any of it. He walked straight through the door and disappeared.
Hisoka followed almost immediately, half his body already in the dark, one eye staying on Ross at the door.
Yusuke stood with his shoulder against the doorframe, positioned to block it with his body the moment anything started to close.
"Ross! Whatever you're doing, do it now!"
"On it!"
Ross made a quick gesture with one hand. Inside the Little Tyrant's storage, the cartridge slotted into position. The power button pressed itself.
The next instant, the Competition Roulette — something everyone present had already seen once before — materialized in the air and began spinning without prompting. In full view of everyone watching, the pointer slowed, and settled.
Swimming Combat King.
"Four minutes. Wait for us."
The words barely finished before Ross and Kuwabara — still in their chains — vanished from the spot simultaneously. Eight shackles hit the stone floor with a scattered clatter, nothing left inside them.
The door meant for three people only — the door Yusuke was holding open — stayed open.