Chapter 62: The Miracle-Working Doctor!
By any measure, whether raw combat ability or the particular warped psychology the Zoldyck family produced through its methods, Killua had no path to winning against Illumi. Not even a fraction of one.
Illumi had fully committed to the role of older brother as surrogate father, and his desire for control over Killua had always sat at the top of the family hierarchy. He treated Killua as something very close to a marionette, and he saw nothing wrong with this.
What Killua actually wanted was not something Illumi considered relevant. All he needed was for Killua to become a hollow instrument that existed only to kill.
Even so, no one can endure sustained suppression without the urge to push back eventually. Despite the pressure bearing down on him hard enough to put sweat across his forehead, Killua forced out his honest answer: he had no interest in being an assassin. He just wanted to make friends with Gon.
"Is that right. So the other one has already started thinking of you as a friend."
Illumi looked faintly surprised. After a brief moment of what appeared to be genuine consideration, he clapped his hands together with an air of resolution, and delivered a conclusion that hit Killua like a thunderbolt.
"Got it. Then we'll just kill Gon."
At that exact moment, Ross, standing among the spectators, shifted his attention to Hisoka leaning against the wall nearby.
The instant those words left Illumi's mouth, the temperature around Hisoka seemed to drop by several degrees. Killing intent landed on Illumi like a nail being driven in, and it stayed there.
There was no ambiguity to it. If Illumi followed through on that threat, if he reached out and removed the fruit the farmer had spent so long tending, the fruit he had been waiting to harvest at its peak, every bit of their history and cooperation would be reduced to ash. What would replace it was the kind of hostility that ended only when one of the two parties stopped existing.
Illumi would fight anyone for adequate payment, including Hisoka. The reverse was also true: without payment, a pointless fight was something he would never engage in.
So when Hisoka's killing intent hit him without any attempt at concealment, Illumi understood the message clearly. Gon could not be touched. Not while Hisoka's attention was on him.
Bad business.
But none of this prevented Illumi from continuing to use the threat as leverage on Killua.
As expected, under that weight, Killua came apart. Barely keeping himself together, he conceded, stumbling through the words.
What a thing, the permanent damage an upbringing like that could leave behind.
Having a biological sibling who regarded you as a puppet on strings was a special category of misfortune. Killua had it for life.
Ross took a moment to reflect on that, then stood up from the floor, brushed himself off, and started moving.
Because if nothing went wrong, something was about to go wrong.
Match 11: Candidate 191, Bodoro, versus Candidate 403, Leorio.
Both were carrying injuries, but Bodoro's were visibly worse. Kuwabara had held back throughout his fight with Leorio, some degree of mutual respect operating between them, and had not used the Spirit Sword. Hisoka, even while trying to control himself, had inevitably gone a bit harder than was strictly necessary against fruit he considered overripe and well past interesting. The damage gap between the two men was real.
What it produced, coincidentally, was rough parity.
And it was at this moment, as the match was just being announced, that Killua, who had been standing in a near-dissociated state since conceding and had shown no reaction to anything around him, suddenly moved.
The instant the match was declared open, Killua's fingernails, sharpened through physical self-modification to an edge beyond an ordinary blade, drove through Bodoro's torso from behind without resistance.
There were people in the room who had already seen Killua's shift in posture before it happened. None of them moved to stop it.
Under the pressure that had been applied to him, Killua had chosen killing as a release valve. Whatever remained of his rational mind had pointed him away from Leorio as a target. Bodoro became the unlucky outlet.
Bodoro barely managed any sound at all before the penetrating chest wound dropped him into critical condition.
Killua stood motionless for a moment after it was done. Then he pushed the hall doors open and walked out slowly, like a shell with nothing left inside it.
The Association staff moved fast. Medical personnel who had been on standby outside came in immediately to control the bleeding and stabilize what could be stabilized before transport. But everyone in the room understood what they were looking at. Bodoro was not going to recover from this.
Then something drew attention. Ross, who had spent the entire time since his own first-round pass sitting on the sidelines watching, had stood up when the medical team moved Bodoro and was now following them. He went all the way to the emergency medical room nearby.
Not long after that, one of the medical staff who had gone with Bodoro came rushing back into the main hall and bent down to whisper something in Netero's ear.
The old man had sat through Illumi crushing Killua psychologically and Bodoro being run through with barely any change in expression. When he heard what the staff member said, his eyes went wide.
"Hold things together here. I will be right back."
He was out the door and gone before anyone could respond.
When Netero came through the door of the emergency medical room at full speed, what he found was: a cluster of medical staff in confused, anxious disarray, a bed with bloodstains still on it, and floating in mid-air, a roulette wheel needle sitting at rest on the segment marked "400-Meter Combat Hurdles."
Before following the medical team out, Ross had left the staff a message to relay to the Chairman word for word. Then he had activated Competition Roulette and pulled Bodoro, near-dead but not yet dead, into the arena by force.
Once inside, Ross had hauled the poor man with the cleft chin straight to the pharmacy. By this point Bodoro had no consciousness left and no response to anything, one step from gone. Ross was not alarmed. He dug out twenty gold rings without hurrying, the reserves he had rebuilt over multiple rounds during the wilderness survival days on the island, pressed them into Bodoro's palm, then braced the man's arm up and used the rings in hand to hammer the first item on the counter: Vitality Surge Y.
The instant the Arale-lookalike shopkeeper reached out and accepted all twenty rings, something that should not have been possible happened.
The catastrophic penetrating wound in Bodoro's chest sealed itself. In an eyeblink. Aside from the deathly pallor left behind by severe blood loss, nothing about him looked like someone who had been one second from dying.
By blood volume, though, Bodoro had only recovered to just over half. Vitality Surge Y restored fifty percent of vitality, nothing more.
This was not a matter of Ross being unwilling to spend the extra five gold rings on Vitality Surge Z and complete the recovery. He wanted to leave a margin. Because unless things went differently than expected, he was about to be registered in Association records under something like the designation "Healing Hunter."
He had done this deliberately.
Exceptional Nen aptitude alone was not sufficient to secure the Association's sustained attention and internal cooperation. What was needed was a quality that could not easily be replicated: something that made him irreplaceable rather than merely impressive. A rare healing capability that could drag someone back from the threshold of death and get it done in the middle of an exam was a clean, safe identity to establish.
"...Hm?"
Then something felt wrong.
Bodoro, who Ross was still holding upright, had started making sounds. Low, involuntary sounds. His closed eyes began to tremble.
And from Bodoro's body, faint but unmistakable, Nen energy was beginning to emanate.
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