Chapter 37: Monopolizing Battleship Island?
"Time's up!"
"Candidates who cleared the third phase: thirty-two!"
The seventy-two-hour countdown hit zero. The door from Trick Tower's ground floor to the outside opened slowly, letting in morning light that looked almost identical to the light they had walked into three days ago.
Ross stepped out with the others and stretched, pulling in fresh air thick with sea moisture and feeling the morning breeze on his face.
The two and a half days of free time had been spent almost entirely on Nen fundamentals. Before the second-tier candidates started arriving, he had worked on Ten. Once they appeared, he switched to Zetsu practice — continuing when he felt it, sleeping on the spot when he didn't. He talked through ideas occasionally with Yusuke and Kuwabara. Hisoka never came over to bother him again. All things considered, it had been peaceful.
There had been a few incidents along the way. A candidate who had been running on spite the whole way down arrived at the ground floor, sat down, and never got up — wounds too severe, too long ignored. At some point, someone in an Infinite Four-Blade Style came looking for Hisoka and got dispatched before the attempt registered. And Gon's group — who had somehow switched routes and still ended up as last-second deadline warriors — arrived at the wire with absolutely nothing to spare.
They had added some texture to an otherwise uneventful stretch.
Lippo, who had spent the entire phase behind the monitoring room glass, finally came in person to stand in front of the candidates.
"I'm Lippo, Bounty Hunter and examiner for this third phase of the Hunter Exam."
"First, my congratulations to everyone who made it out of Trick Tower. That leaves only the fourth phase and the final phase."
As those words came out, something about the framing didn't sit right with Ross. This wasn't the progression he had been expecting — the one that should have been heading toward the anime-original Battleship Island storyline.
"I will also be the lead examiner for the fourth phase, which will be held on the nearby island of Zevil."
"Before we proceed, however..."
At Lippo's signal, one of his prison staff assistants produced a box with an opening at the top and six printed arrows all pointing directly toward that opening.
"Please line up to draw."
Ross put it together almost immediately. The fourth phase was starting now.
Which meant the Battleship Island arc he had been quietly looking forward to was off the table entirely.
This was, in all honesty, a slight disappointment. Ross was a committed supporter of the older version, and the Battleship Island storyline — anime-original as it was — had never felt like filler to him. There was a specific quality to the scene where all the exam candidates worked together to fight their way off a sinking warship, the unlikely cooperation of it, and the way that atmosphere then made the mutual predation of the fourth phase hit harder by contrast. He had never spotted a single problem with it when he first watched it.
He could see the problem now: the arc broke the exam's momentum and, more critically, threw off the candidate count between the third and fourth phases.
But the disappointment lasted exactly one second.
Because the arc not happening didn't mean the island didn't exist.
Ross remembered this clearly: sunken around that island's seafloor — down there for assorted historical reasons — were substantial quantities of treasure.
Without the storyline, that island had never entered anyone's field of view.
Which meant there was potentially an opportunity to help himself to all of it.
As a dedicated gaming enthusiast and collector, Ross understood money's importance with complete clarity. A copy of Greed Island, the game console that Ging Freecss and his team had built, had an original price of 5.6 billion Jenny. Auction floor price: 8.9 billion. Actual transaction prices, every single time one changed hands, came in somewhere between ten billion and several hundred billion Jenny.
He looked at what was currently in his pockets.
One thousand five hundred Jenny.
At this precise moment, Ross had already mentally annexed the Battleship Island treasure as his own.
"Please form a line in the order you exited the tower."
The candidates were somewhat puzzled, but they followed the instruction.
By exit order, Ross was third in line. He reached into the box and pulled out a tag marked with the number 66.
Who was that?
Ross pocketed the tag without changing his expression and ran his gaze along the candidates still in line, looking for the badge 66 holder — someone who, by the logic of the original story, had no business being here at this stage.
The moment he found badge 66 in the crowd, Ross's body went briefly still. He couldn't keep the small frown from showing. He covered it quickly and moved to the side, expression neutral.
The draw concluded. Lippo continued.
"The number you've drawn is the badge number currently belonging to another candidate here present, and these numbers will determine —
who among you is the hunter, and who is the hunted."
"Specifically: the fourth phase challenge is for candidates to take each other's badge numbers. The number you've drawn is your individual hunting target for this phase.
Taking the target's badge earns 3 points. Keeping your own badge earns 3 points. Any non-target badge earns 1 point each. To advance to the final phase, you must have 6 points when time is called."
The announcement detonated through the group. The congratulatory atmosphere of a moment ago evaporated. Every candidate immediately reached for the badge on their chest and began looking for somewhere to hide it.
With a few notable exceptions. Hisoka, for one, simply stood there.
Ross removed his badge as well. While he did it, a slightly absurd thought crossed his mind.
Was this, technically, the earliest recorded version of the name-tag-ripping game?
Watching the candidates' exaggerated but extremely rapid scramble, Lippo — a man with a clearly well-developed appreciation for this kind of spectacle — was visibly delighted. Behind his sunglasses, his eyes curved into new moons.
He let them sort themselves out for five or six seconds, then continued with the final point.
With the rules fully laid out, the easy relief of three days underground meeting open air had lasted about four minutes. In its place was a charged, wordless wariness, every candidate reading the people around them with the same careful eyes.
This was exactly what Lippo had wanted to see.
The ship that carried all thirty-two candidates rocked gently southward, toward Zevil Island, due south of Trick Tower.
The real fighting was about to begin.