"Do you want to know how I got these scars?"
The red-haired man smiled down at the candidate standing in front of him. Thick, jagged scars ran directly from the outside corners of his mouth all the way to the base of both ears. The harsh lines gave his face a permanent, geometric quality, looking exactly as though someone had made a deliberate, brutal design decision about his bone structure.
The candidate he had addressed possessed a sullen, heavy face and the rigid body language of someone who had long ago decided that blind aggression was a universally useful social tool. He opened his mouth to say something loud and dismissive.
Partway through the very first syllable, his jaw simply stopped cooperating. Then, it kept opening. He found he couldn't close his mouth again because a pair of playing cards had already sliced cleanly through his cheeks at the corners, violently extending the existing geometry of the man's smile all the way to his own ears. Warm blood spilled down his chin, hitting the concrete floor with soft, wet drops.
The surrounding candidates took a sharp, involuntary collective step backward, the sound of their boots scraping against the stone.
"Look, we match perfectly now," the red-haired man said pleasantly. He reached up and pulled his own chin downward. His mouth opened to the exact same unnatural width, the exact same horrifying shape, executed with the same geometric precision. He held the grotesque expression there for a long, silent moment.
Then, he hit the bottom of his chin upward with the heel of his hand, exactly like someone resetting a heavy door latch. His jaw snapped shut with a hollow click. The jagged crack lines on his face were only visible if you were specifically looking for them, sealed tight by something invisible that held exactly like an industrial weld but moved and flexed just like living skin.
Standing a short distance away, Kurapika possessed enough cold composure to actively analyze the horrific display while it was happening. The gruesome seam lines on the man's cheeks were being seamlessly maintained by highly compressed aura. It was a very specific type of advanced Nen application that was physically holding the wet edges of the wound together exactly the way tight stitching held heavy fabric. The wound itself had never actually healed. The man was casually walking around with his face sliced open, held together entirely by deliberate, constant effort. It was either a terrifying statement about his personal relationship with physical pain, or an incredibly specific, deranged aesthetic choice.
Transmutation, Kurapika concluded silently. Something highly adhesive.
Leorio had gone entirely white, his skin resembling a sheet of old paper. This visceral reaction was partly due to witnessing Hisoka's casual brutality, and mostly due to the fact that Leorio had spent the entire night actively contributing to the underground building's plumbing infrastructure. He currently had absolutely nothing left in his hollowed-out system except pure stubborn willpower and a long string of bad decisions.
Battera and Alice frowned at the exact same time, a synchronized physical reaction that strongly suggested a long, deeply shared history of reacting to terrible things together.
Akane and Aoi were actively scanning the panicked crowd with the alert, bright curiosity of people who had just realized that this miserable concrete venue contained considerably more dangerous material than the previous twelve boring hours had initially suggested.
Shizuku moved a half-step closer to Liam, her shoes scuffing the floor, and said absolutely nothing. Liam was currently staring blankly at something that wasn't actually located in the physical room.
"The death count," Liam murmured quietly, his voice barely carrying over the ambient noise. "Something is still wrong with the math."
He looked closely at his internal mental panel. The number was still 7. It had been exactly 7 since the stealthy overnight killings, and there were currently two cooling bodies slumped in the far corner that accounted for exactly two of those recent additions. The arithmetic simply wasn't resolving cleanly in his head.
He turned his head to look at Machi. "Last night. The killings in the dark corner. Exactly how many bodies did you see drop?"
Machi looked sideways at him, her face a flat mask. "Why ask me?"
"Because you have much better eyes than most of the people standing in this room."
She didn't answer him immediately, mostly because the dense crowd had suddenly developed a wide, empty gap directly in front of them. Hisoka was casually walking through the parting sea of people. He possessed the highly specific quality of movement that organically causes terrified crowds to part, not because he was using obvious speed or outward aggression, but because of something much more fundamental and instinctual. He moved through the space exactly the way a foul smell clears a small room long before anyone actually makes the conscious decision to leave.
He was looking directly at Liam.
"I have learned a fun new trick," Hisoka announced cheerfully. He was shuffling his deck of cards with the rapid, automatic dexterity of someone whose hands performed the complex motion entirely without conscious instruction. The deck moved faster and faster between his palms, the individual paper cards becoming a solid blur. It produced a sharp, continuous sound exactly like heavy cloth tearing slowly down the middle.
Alice leaned back slightly toward Battera. Battera immediately put a comforting, heavy hand on her arm.
"Does cheap street magic usually require a verbal countdown?" Liam asked, his tone perfectly flat.
Hisoka's narrow eyes crinkled slightly at the corners. He clearly liked that dry response. The rapid shuffle accelerated to a frantic blur, and then sharply decelerated. Suddenly, his large hands were perfectly still. There was exactly one single card pinched delicately between two fingers where an entire deck had been a fraction of a second ago. Absolutely no one in the immediate vicinity had managed to visually track the transition. Even Shizuku had been watching his hands intently, and she had completely missed the sleight of hand.
Hisoka slowly turned the single card face-outward. The ornate design printed on the back was absolutely not a standard playing card.
"Negative zero zero four. Repatriation. Immediately sends targeted individuals currently located outside of Greed Island directly back into the game."
He smiled pleasantly, his eyes locking onto Liam. "Repatriation."
Shizuku's hand moved instinctively toward Liam's wrist. She stopped her motion halfway when absolutely nothing happened to the air around them.
Liam looked at the piece of cardboard and sighed. "Cards with negative numbers are strictly reserved for administrator use only. If you are going to try and bluff me using Greed Island material, you should really read the technical footnotes first."
Hisoka smoothly turned the card once between his long fingers. He smiled down at it in the exact same way someone smiles at a passing compliment they have been deliberately fishing for all day. Without another word, he turned and walked away. The dense crowd instantly found very compelling reasons to rapidly redistribute itself far away from his chosen path.
Shizuku adjusted her glasses. "His face. Was that damage caused by the dice?"
"It is highly possible," Liam said, watching Hisoka's retreating back. The magical DICE card on Greed Island randomly scattered players to incredibly strange, highly dangerous places and often left even stranger permanent marks on the survivors. Shizuku herself had been forcefully sent to a highly secure V5 containment facility. Other unfortunate players had landed in the middle of killer family basements and terrifying, Nanika-adjacent infrastructure. If something ancient and connected to the Dark Continent had touched Hisoka during his forced transit, at whatever point his ruined face became a permanent design statement, at least the final outcome was technically survivable. He was obviously still here. He was still performing cheap card tricks and happily decorating other people's faces with their own fresh wounds.
"Greed Island," a familiar, smooth voice said from behind them. "So there are actually administrator-only cards hidden in the code. A real game with real, hidden special mechanics. That does sound incredibly entertaining."
"It really isn't," Liam said, and slowly turned around.
Immaculate blond hair. A sharp, expensive suit that looked exactly like it had been carefully pressed by someone who held very strong personal opinions about fabric quality. A bright, shining smile that was structurally indistinguishable from genuine human warmth, but was functionally a completely different, much colder thing entirely. Pariston Hill stood casually to Liam's left, carrying the easy presence of someone who had always been standing there and was currently mildly surprised that anyone else was surprised to see him.
Shizuku looked at the blond man. She looked at Liam. She silently mouthed a question.
"We met very briefly," Liam explained to her. "On a commercial airship. Some time ago."
Pariston's bright smile did exactly what it always did, which was heavily suggest that this brief acknowledgment was the absolute most pleasant thing anyone had said to him all week. "You actually remembered me. I am genuinely touched by that. I must have made quite an impression on you."
"A very moderate one," Liam corrected smoothly. "If you happen to fail the exam today, I probably will not remember which dead candidate you were."
Pariston chuckled softly, keeping his voice projected at full room volume. "Fail? A simple Hunter Exam? Surely there isn't anyone standing in this room who cannot easily pass."
The perfectly enunciated sentence carried effortlessly across the three hundred tense candidates currently occupying the underground space. It did exactly what it was meticulously designed to do. The ambient, simmering tension in the cavernous room instantly shifted from the diffuse, generalized wariness of strangers toward something much more specific, pointed, and highly personal. Angry glares turned toward the blond man in the suit.
Pariston looked around at the immediate, hostile effect with the mild, contented satisfaction of someone who had just pressed a shiny button and successfully confirmed that the machinery still worked perfectly.
Deep in the far corner of the room, Tonpa was currently muttering quietly to himself against the damp wall. His pale face still carried the sickly, grayish color of a man who had just eaten an incredibly difficult year in a single night.
A nearby veteran candidate, who knew the man well by his long reputation, leaned over with a cruel smirk.
"Is something wrong over there? The exam is starting very soon. Aren't you going to run your usual, pathetic tricks on the fresh newcomers?"
"My usual tricks," Tonpa repeated softly, his voice completely devoid of any inflection or life.
"Are you getting treated exactly like a scared newcomer yourself this year?" The veteran let out a harsh laugh, drawing the attention of a small group of other exam veterans who happily shared the mean joke.
Tonpa didn't answer them. He felt incredibly, suffocatingly tired, and he hadn't drunk absolutely anything questionable since the previous evening, so there was no obvious biological reason for the sudden, crushing exhaustion weighing down his limbs. He simply leaned the back of his heavy head against the cold concrete wall and closed his eyes.
In a hidden, spiritual dimension that Tonpa had absolutely no access to, a pristine white kitten the exact size of a man's fist was currently lying comfortably across his right shoulder. Its long, fluffy tail was looped securely against the side of his sweaty neck, and its small white paws were tucked neatly under its chest.
The creature was very comfortable with this resting position. It had been perfectly comfortable with it since sometime deep in the middle of the night, when it had silently drifted away from Second Prince Camilla's manicured hands without her even noticing, and had gone prowling through the dark looking for the absolute most interesting, vulnerable energy signature in the entire room.
Far away, in the quiet solitude of the Hunter Association President's office, a glowing laptop screen displayed a private, secure email. The subject line was a simple, grim obituary. Terry Linen Aguilar, the grand sect leader of the Ryusenryu martial arts school, had died.
Isaac Netero read the short text and sat perfectly quiet for a long moment, slowly turning the pointed end of his white beard between two calloused fingers. There were fewer and fewer faces he actually recognized in the world every single year. Even for someone operating on his vastly extended timeline, the brutal, inevitable arithmetic of outliving absolutely everything became painfully apparent eventually.
"President." The green Bean Man stepped up to the desk and pointed a stubby finger at the wall clock. The hands read 9:55. "The first phase of the exam begins in exactly five minutes."
Netero picked up a small remote control and aimed it directly at the massive wall screen. The static cleared, and the live security picture appeared. It showed three hundred and some odd candidates trapped in the underground venue. The stale air between them looked incredibly dense with the particular, heavy atmosphere of paranoid people who had spent the entire night performing various stressful combinations of pretending to sleep and actually sleeping, all while being acutely aware that their dangerous neighbors were doing the exact same thing in the dark.
Netero looked at the silent screen for a long, calculating moment.
"Let's begin."