"This is quite a remarkable group of candidates this year, President."
The green Bean Man delivered this quiet observation with the earnest, heavy gravity of a seasoned meteorologist formally reporting the formation of a deadly hurricane. He was standing rigidly beside the massive oak desk, holding a simple remote control in his stubby hands. He was looking up at the glowing wall screen with the intense, unwavering attentiveness of a person who fundamentally understood that his sole purpose in life was to notice dangerous things and report them clearly to his boss.
Isaac Netero stood barefoot on the plush carpet, his hands clasped comfortably behind his back. He was slowly, rhythmically turning the pointed end of his white beard between two calloused fingers. He simply said "Hm," without ever looking away from the flickering screen.
To the untrained, ordinary eyes of a civilian, the live security feed simply showed several hundred anxious, exhausted people standing around a massive, damp underground space, doing absolutely nothing particularly interesting.
To Netero's highly trained, ancient eyes, however, the exact same concrete space was currently lit up exactly like a military-grade thermal map.
Raw aura clung tightly to every single living body in that room, and every single aura signature was as unique and complex as a human fingerprint. Some of the aura was incredibly messy and diffuse, the uncontrolled, wasteful leak of ignorant people who had never once stopped to think about the philosophical question of their own life energy. Some of the aura, however, was incredibly dense and heavily compressed, burning quietly and efficiently at a perfectly controlled, lethal temperature.
And some of the aura down there was actively performing the flawless illusion of civilian normalcy with obvious, strained effort and considerable, terrifying skill.
"This one right here has completely stopped trying to hide what he is," Netero noted softly, pointing a weathered finger at the screen.
On the live feed, the neon red-haired man standing in the exact center of the candidates' involuntary, terrified clearance radius was actively producing a specific quality of visible aura. It strongly suggested he would vastly prefer it if someone in the room found him threatening enough to actually try and do something violent about his presence. The sickly pink color dominating Netero's specialized vision wasn't a poetic metaphor. It was the highly specific, undeniable signature of a very particular kind of bloodthirsty appetite. It was patient, hyper-alert, and eagerly waiting for sufficient lethal stimulation.
The man absolutely wasn't hiding anything about his nature. He was aggressively advertising it.
Every single conscious candidate trapped in that room had independently reached their own individual conclusion about Hisoka within exactly thirty seconds of looking at him. The internal conclusions varied wildly in their specific phrasing, but they all rapidly converged on the exact same piece of practical, life-saving advice: Avoid at all costs.
Toward the far opposite side of the cavernous space, Pariston Hill had just murmured something quiet and polite to a small, tense cluster of rival candidates. Netero watched with mild amusement as three of the men suddenly began aggressively arguing with each other over the comment. Pariston simply took a smooth, casual step sideways, slipping entirely out of the blast radius right before the very first physical push was thrown. He stood back and watched the violent escalation unfold with the focused, delighted appreciation of an audience member at a very good theatrical performance.
Liam, currently watching the exact same interaction unfold from a completely different angle in the same physical room, noticed the subtle manipulation and said quietly under his breath: "This arrogant grandson is so incredibly mysterious. Casually showing up at the lethal Hunter Exam with absolutely nothing to hide. I honestly don't know what the hell he is planning to do here."
He turned around sharply, sensing movement behind him.
Menchi's raised hand paused awkwardly in mid-air, right before she could tap his shoulder.
"There are over four hundred people packed into this single room," Menchi said, crossing her arms and sighing, "and you are somehow still acting exactly that jumpy." She finally brought her hand down and patted his tense shoulder reassuringly. She offered a quick, casual wave at Shizuku and Kurapika standing right behind him.
Then, she took a moment to look around at the full, assembled group. Battera and Alice were holding hands. Akane and Aoi were glaring at the crowd. Leorio was miserably returning from his most recent, agonizing bathroom appointment. Machi was lingering silently in the deep background, acting more like an established physical fact of the room rather than an actual human presence.
"Why exactly are you standing here?" Liam asked, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. "I thought you told us on the phone that you were strictly handling an entirely different phase of the exam."
"That is technically mostly true," Menchi said, managing to look completely, innocently reasonable about the blatant contradiction. "It wasn't originally my phase, but then there were some sudden scheduling changes, and now it is my phase. So: mostly true."
Kurapika silently considered the deeply suspicious logistical question of exactly why a high-level examiner assignment would conveniently shift at the absolute last possible moment. He did not manage to reach a satisfying, non-paranoid conclusion.
A booming voice suddenly cut through the heavy tension of the room from somewhere elevated. It was not loud in the strained, annoying way of someone desperately fighting to be heard over a crowd. It was loud in the effortless, terrifying way of someone possessing the specific vocal equipment of a predator who had firmly decided the entire room was going to stop and listen to them immediately.
"Everyone shut the hell up and pay attention!"
The ambient, nervous noise of four hundred anxious candidates doing nothing instantly dropped to absolute dead silence. It happened in the involuntary, instinctual way that crowded rooms always respond to a register of sound that sits just barely below the threshold of an active physical threat.
Standing casually on top of a long, heavy wooden table that had been silently assembled against the wall at some point in the last hour, was a boy. He possessed the slouched posture and wild hairstyle of someone who had never once been successfully told to change either. He stood looking down at the massive sea of assembled candidates with the absolute, chilling composure of a person who was either vastly experienced in mass slaughter, or had simply completely bypassed the normal developmental stage where other people's opinions registered as significant to his survival.
"My name is Knuckle," he announced, his voice echoing off the concrete. "I am one of the official examiners for the first phase of this trial."
Several arrogant candidates in the front of the crowd immediately started whispering the highly predictable series of cynical observations. They muttered about his young age, mocked his unkempt appearance, and quietly wondered aloud if the legendary Hunter Association had made some kind of massive administrative error in hiring him.
Knuckle slowly stopped scanning the room. He looked directly at them.
The specific candidates who had been whispering suddenly found that the air in the underground room possessed a vastly different, heavier quality than it had a fraction of a second ago. It was the highly specific, terrifying quality of having something incredibly large and hungry notice you from very close range. Nobody's shaking knees actually touched the concrete floor, but for a few seconds, it was a reasonably close thing.
"Every single examiner here is a fully licensed, professional Hunter," Knuckle stated coldly, returning his bored attention to the room at large. He pointed a finger downward. "Including her."
Menchi sighed heavily and stepped out of the crowded mass of candidates. She walked around to the examiner's side of the long table and looked up at Knuckle, who was still standing obnoxiously on top of it. She wore the deeply irritated expression that clearly said she had specifically, explicitly asked him not to introduce her this way, and yet, here she was doing it anyway.
She stepped to one side, facing the crowd.
"I am Gourmet Hunter Menchi," she announced, her voice carrying easily. "I am entirely responsible for administering the first half of the first exam. After my specific section concludes—" She paused, letting her sharp gaze travel slowly across the sea of assembled candidates. She moved her eyes at the unhurried, calculating pace of a butcher making a genuine assessment of livestock. "—I officially estimate roughly half of you will still be alive to continue to the second half."
Four hundred desperate people processed this brutal statement at four hundred wildly different speeds. They eventually arrived at four hundred slightly different, panicked versions of the exact same internal reaction, ranging from arrogant dismissal to blind, sweating alarm.
Hisoka's terrifying, painted expression remained exactly what it had been. Pariston's bright, empty smile remained exactly what it had been. Second Prince Camilla and her three rigid soldiers remained exactly what they were, which was completely, arrogantly unmoved by the threat.
Shizuku leaned in and said quietly to Liam: "Isn't this setup really just two completely separate exams lazily layered on top of each other to save time?"
Menchi clapped her hands together twice, the sound cracking like a whip. The heavy metal doors located on both sides of the cavernous space suddenly groaned open. A long, orderly line of uniformed servers emerged from the darkness, pushing heavy stainless-steel dining carts. They moved efficiently to the long wooden table and began rapidly placing covered silver plates in a massive, neat row.
The table, Liam finally noticed, was exactly long enough to easily accommodate exactly four hundred of them.
He smiled, a genuine look of amusement crossing his face. "A lovely catered brunch. How incredibly thoughtful of the Association."
The servers lifted the silver lids in unison.
The heavy smell arrived first. It was the specific kind of overwhelmingly savory, rich food aroma that completely bypassed the rational, thinking mind entirely and went directly, violently to the primitive part of the brain that simply remembered being starving.
Then came the visual confirmation. There were more than four hundred steaming portions of fried rice sitting on the table. Each individual mound was an identical, unnerving shade of deep, bloody red. It looked incredibly vivid and slick, gleaming under the harsh fluorescent venue lights.
The bright color was absolutely not from crushed chili peppers or natural spices.
Liam narrowed his eyes, focusing his vision. He used the deliberate, highly trained attention he always applied when something in his environment didn't quite resolve correctly at a casual glance. The red color of the rice was physically real, but the actual source of the pigmentation was completely off. It looked exactly like a high-budget film with excellent production design that still fundamentally doesn't look exactly like the real world when you force yourself to look at it directly. There was a faint, lingering unreality to the food. It possessed a slight, unsettling quality of something that was physically present in the room, but in a way that differed just slightly from the way normal objects were naturally present.
It was Menchi's Conjuration ability. The strange, red seasoning had been fully materialized as a Nen construct.
He looked over at Machi out of the corner of his eye. He found her staring intently at the steaming red rice with the exact same slightly sharpened, highly suspicious attention. She had noticed the unnatural aura too.
"The first exam," Menchi announced loudly, gesturing grandly to the table, "is incredibly simple. You must completely finish your plate. Anyone who successfully clears a full serving of this fried rice moves on to the next round. Anyone who doesn't finish, or refuses to eat, is instantly eliminated."
The four hundred anxious candidates stared at the red rice. Then they looked nervously at each other. Then they looked back at the rice.
The vast majority of the people in the room, the ones who had never actually seen the brutal reality of a Hunter Exam before today, were currently thinking: Is this honestly it? A stupid spicy food eating challenge?
These confident, foolish people had not yet actually tasted the red rice.