The massive underground space could comfortably hold four hundred people standing shoulder-to-shoulder with plenty of breathing room between them. What it absolutely could not comfortably hold, however, was four hundred people who had each just violently become, by varying and terrifying degrees, something considerably larger and heavier than they had been thirty seconds ago.
The hidden Nen users scattered throughout the room had suddenly grown. Not in physical size, of course. But the metaphysical space they now occupied in terms of raw, crushing aura pressure had violently expanded well past their fragile physical dimensions. Even the ignorant civilian candidates who couldn't consciously use or see Nen could physically feel the sudden shift in the atmosphere, reacting exactly the way wild animals instinctively feel the crushing pressure of approaching severe weather.
The terrifying something that had suddenly woken up in the room wasn't just one thing. It was a dozen different, massive things, all waking up at the exact same time, in an underground concrete space that had suddenly become very, very small.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
Several dozen civilian candidates had nervously gripped their cheap silver spoons with the sudden, terrifying strength they now inadvertently possessed, rather than the meager civilian strength they'd had a moment before. They immediately found out the hard way that the cheap silverware had absolutely not updated its structural expectations accordingly.
The jagged pieces of broken metal flew in several different directions. The confused candidates stood frozen, staring blankly down at the broken pieces in their hands with the profound, baffled confusion of people who had never accidentally broken solid metal just by holding it.
Other overwhelmed candidates violently spilled their red rice all over the table in panic. Desperate to pass, they frantically picked up each individual grain from the dirty wood, painstakingly replaced them on the porcelain plate, and terrifiedly waited for the next ten-second count rather than accept elimination for a simple spill.
Those were the composed ones.
The candidates unfortunate enough to be standing near Liam's section of the long table began rapidly backing away. It wasn't because Liam was actively doing anything hostile. It was simply because standing directly beside a monster radiating that staggering quantity of pressurized aura—while you yourself had just surged to perhaps double digits above your previous maximum capacity—felt exactly like standing naked next to a roaring industrial generator when you were only used to holding a small candle. The brutal physics of the power comparison were visceral, suffocating, and entirely involuntary.
Someone unfortunate enough to be standing near Hisoka made it exactly eleven frantic steps away before their trembling legs completely stopped agreeing with the escape plan, and they collapsed heavily onto the concrete floor, gasping for air.
Hisoka calmly took his next required spoonful of red rice. The sickly pink aura violently churning around him moved exactly like something alive. It expanded massively again with the new fuel, and then slowly contracted back to roughly the same staggering volume it had been before, which was still considerably more pressure than absolutely anyone standing nearby wanted to be near. His painted expression remained exactly that of a wealthy man leisurely evaluating a very good, very expensive vintage wine.
Approximately 100,000 aura capacity after the 1.5x multiplier, Liam calculated silently, watching the clown from the corner of his eye. Which puts his actual, everyday baseline somewhere around 66,000. Liam mentally filed this crucial tactical information away and kept moving smoothly through his own rhythmic count. Third spoonful. Fourth.
After the fifth forced bite of red rice, roughly a hundred civilian candidates were either passed out cold on the floor, desperately crawling toward the glowing emergency exits, or actively being hauled out of the room by the Association medical staff. The specific causes of failure varied wildly. Several had simply experienced the combined, crushing aura pressure of Liam, Hisoka, Pariston, Machi, and Shizuku simultaneously, and their untrained minds had simply reached their breaking point and shut down. Some were actively foaming at the mouth. One terrified man had definitely urinated himself and was currently being attended to by the staff with appropriate professional discretion. Several others had gone totally pale, swaying in place in the slow, descending way of people whose failing bodies were desperately maintaining basic biological function through sheer, stubborn willpower alone.
Shizuku's aura, factoring in the 1.5x multiplier, currently sat comfortably around 37,500 units. It was a perfectly manageable pressure for her. She ate her rice with the exact same quiet, thorough attention she gave to most tedious tasks in her life.
Kurapika's aura read at roughly 30,000 units after the multiplier. It was a highly notable increase for him, but it still sat well below the terrifying, blinding intensity of what his legendary Scarlet Eyes could produce when fully activated. He physically adapted to the sudden, burning surge with the steady, cold composure of someone who had already experienced significantly more alarming and painful aura fluctuations inside his own body, and had long ago learned to treat those spikes as simple tactical information rather than terrifying biological events.
Machi: 60,000 plus.
Pariston: 80,000 plus.
Liam narrowed his eyes at the smiling blond man. Which puts his actual baseline somewhere securely in the mid-50,000 range. That was significantly more raw power than Liam had initially expected from the politician. He hadn't thought about Pariston's combat capabilities specifically, but if he had bothered to think about it, his working assumption would have been that a manipulative person with Pariston's particular, indirect approach to the world would naturally be the type whose massive aura was entirely disproportionate to their apparent, smiling priorities. This massive reading completely confirmed that dangerous hypothesis.
After ten spoonfuls, another massive wave of eliminations swept the room. Pale faces, cold sweats, and the gradual, miserable depletion of stubborn candidates who had desperately held on through the first five bites, but simply could not maintain the physical and mental overload of sustained intensity for the required duration. The human body could carry enormous, unnatural weight briefly. Carrying that crushing weight for twenty consecutive minutes was an entirely different, brutal discipline.
In the far corner, Tonpa ate his rice mechanically, spoonful by slow spoonful. He moved with the rigid, jerky quality of a broken machine forced to perform a repetitive maintenance task. The pale, sickly color in his cheeks had absolutely not recovered from the trauma of the previous night. The tiny white kitten perched comfortably on his right shoulder slowly stretched its front legs and resettled its weight, looking bright-eyed and increasingly comfortable with the bizarre seating arrangement.
The Second Prince, however, was absolutely not comfortable.
Camilla ate her rice without a single physical deviation in her perfect posture. Her facial expression remained exactly what it always was, which was rigidly composed to the point of being purely architectural. But the cold sweat beading on her flawless face was undeniably real, and the slight, painful tension in her sharp jaw between swallows was real. Liam, who had spent an entire evening carefully watching her hold court at the hotel banquet, and deeply understood exactly how she held herself when a situation was costing her absolutely nothing, could easily read the stark difference now.
She desperately wanted to use Zetsu. She wanted to forcefully suppress her rising aura completely, to get a firm handle on her spiraling biological system. Menchi's red seasoning was making that basic defensive technique categorically difficult to execute. The burning aura was moving and expanding whether Camilla consciously wanted it to or not. It was violently pressurized far beyond its normal, obedient behavior, and trying to forcefully force it to stop right now was exactly like trying to manually close a small, fragile valve against a massive, roaring flow of water that vastly exceeded the valve's physical design parameters.
Her three elite private soldiers ate their rice in perfect, rigid sync with her. Their individual auras had aggressively spiked from the 10,000-range up to 15,000-20,000 units each. They did not break their eating pace for a second, and they absolutely did not show their mounting physical discomfort in any visible way that Camilla would have found politically objectionable. They were highly trained soldiers eating rice in a difficult, hostile situation. They would successfully finish the meal, or they would fail and die trying, and either way, they would absolutely not make any embarrassing noise about it.
On the tenth synchronized spoonful, Liam finally actively noticed what absolutely everyone else in the room with functioning Nen awareness had also noticed since the very first bite, and had been quietly, terrifiedly thinking about since the very first bite.
When the very first spoonful of red rice had gone down everyone's throats, there had been a massive, impossible spike of aura in the room.
It had not been Liam's spike. It had not been Shizuku's. It had absolutely not been Hisoka's, which had been large, violently pink, and very, very loud about its own terrifying presence.
This was an entirely different spike that had simply appeared out of nowhere, registered on their senses like a physical blow, and then instantly disappeared. It was one single, apocalyptic pulse of pure aura that had violently expanded to fill the entire underground cavern exactly like a massive, drawn breath. It had pressed down crushingly against every single surface and person simultaneously, and then, in the blink of an eye, it had simply gone completely quiet.
It was not suppressed by Zetsu. It was not cleverly modulated. It was just gone, erased as cleanly and easily as flipping a light switch in a dark room.
160,000.
Liam's internal estimate was only approximate. But the terrifying ballpark figure was sitting right in the exact same neighborhood as the time Bisky had fully transformed and demonstrated her true, unrestrained ability back on Greed Island, when the actual, physical weight of what she truly was had landed heavily on Liam's awareness like a falling concrete building.
The strange doll-girl calmly ate her fried rice exactly ten seconds at a time. Her current, visible aura fluctuated only slightly, staying perfectly within the totally normal, civilian range of someone simply doing the normal biological work of digestion. Absolutely no trace of the monstrous 160,000 spike remained around her body.
A very small, quiet electronic sound suddenly came from her direction.
Beep. Balance mode: active.
A faint, brilliant corona of visible electrical discharge ran rapidly around the outline of her small body. It was as brief and sharp as static electricity, and then it completely disappeared into her skin.
Standing at the front of the room, Menchi had been actively watching the struggling candidates with the professional, detached attention of an examiner who needed to know exactly when to formally stop the lethal test and when to cruelly push it further.
She was currently staring at the doll-girl with an entirely different, deeply alarmed kind of attention.
Knuckle, standing right beside her, did the terrifying backwards calculation quietly under his breath.
"That puts her at roughly 110,000 units at her normal baseline," he muttered, speaking mostly to himself in shock. "And that is before the red seasoning's multiplier even hit her."
His own master, Morel, was a legendary, veteran one-star Hunter with decades of brutal, accumulated combat training, and he only carried a total capacity of roughly 70,000 units. Everyone knew that raw, total aura capacity didn't automatically determine the outcome of a Nen battle. Technical skill mattered, brutal field experience mattered, and specific ability design mattered immensely. Everyone in this dangerous business knew the standard, comforting speech.
But it was incredibly, terrifyingly difficult for someone walking around with that kind of massive, apocalyptic foundation of raw power to ever be genuinely considered weak in a fight.
Menchi breathed out very slowly through her nose, trying to steady her racing heart. She had personally watched Liam rapidly accumulate terrifying things over the past few years. She had stood there and watched Master Bisky casually demonstrate what real, unfettered power actually looked like. She had honestly thought, walking into this underground exam venue today, that she had a very reasonable, accurate sense of where the absolute power ceiling in this world sat.
She had been completely wrong.
The room continued to eat in tense, sweating silence.
Thirty-plus required spoonfuls later, the silver plates were finally cleared, and the spoons were placed down on the wood. Liam sat back and waited. The agonizing wait lasted for approximately ten silent minutes, and then the invisible floor completely dropped out from under the entire room simultaneously.
The burning aura came crashing down. It did not happen gradually. It did not fade as a slow, manageable decline. It happened exactly like a violent, catastrophic puncture.
The massive, unnatural energy that the red seasoning had artificially added simply drained away in a flash, and it greedily took the users' natural reserves with it as it went, exactly the way a rapidly deflating tire takes all the internal warmth with it into the cold air.
Liam went instantly from a towering 108,000 units down to the thin, hollow, deeply depleted feeling of someone who had been forcefully using Zetsu for an extended, exhausting period, only to come back to their own body to find the gas tank registering on pure fumes.
Hisoka sat down heavily on the floor. For the absolute first time since casually entering the room, he actually looked like a normal man who was experiencing something genuinely, physically painful, rather than simply staging a dramatic performance for a captive audience.
Pariston shakily reached up and adjusted his silk tie, his breathing slightly uneven.
Shizuku gripped the hard edge of the wooden table with both hands to steady herself.
Kurapika immediately straightened his back and went perfectly, rigidly still, fighting the crushing exhaustion.
The surviving candidates who had miraculously made it through all thirty spoonfuls were now violently discovering that the hidden exit tax for passing the test was approximately absolutely everything they had left in their biological reserves. They went down screaming and collapsing in massive waves. Knuckle moved quickly through the chaotic room, shouting orders and gesturing frantically to the medical staff, and unconscious people were rapidly carried out on stretchers.
Then, someone standing near Tonpa's section of the wall suddenly yelled out, calling for immediate medical attention.
Tonpa had absolutely not fainted from the exhaustion.
Tonpa had not been overwhelmed by the crushing aura pressure in the room. He had not broken his spoon in panic. He had not urinated himself, or fainted, or needed to be carried out at any single point in the previous thirty spoonfuls.
Tonpa was simply sitting with his back propped up against the heavy table leg. His eyes were wide open, and he had absolutely no further plans to ever use them again.
The tiny white kitten was still sitting comfortably on his cooling shoulder. It slowly turned its small head to look at the panicked staff member who had just discovered the corpse, twitched its fluffy tail exactly once, and completely disappeared into thin air.