Chapter 1: Ah~Ha~ Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement!!!
A faint wave of weightlessness passed through him, and then a young man with black hair and black eyes — who looked somewhere around seventeen or eighteen — came back to himself.
The moment awareness returned, Ross dropped instinctively into a half-crouch and swept his gaze around the space. What he found was a perfectly square, sealed enclosure. The platform beneath his feet was sinking at a slow, even pace.
A large elevator. Carrying him deeper underground.
Something hard sat in his hand. Ross looked down and saw a plain circular badge resting in his palm, stamped with three digits:
[406]
He spent about ten seconds running the facts through his head, then stretched out a hand that was noticeably younger and softer-looking than he remembered, and pinched the back of his other hand. He twisted hard. The pain was real. He stopped.
Pale yellow walls. A sealed elevator in descent. Badge number 406. And just a moment ago, he had been sitting in his apartment watching the sixth episode of the old Hunter x Hunter anime for the twenty-fourth time.
The conclusion was obvious: he was on his way to the first venue of the 287th Hunter Exam.
But that wasn't what was really bothering him.
"...Great."
He patted himself down. Nothing. No sign of what he was looking for. Ross let out a long sigh, the displeasure plain on his face — because less than thirty seconds ago, while he'd been rewatching the show, he had just pressed the power button on the custom game console he'd built by hand.
Ross was an old-school gaming enthusiast, and he had a specific soft spot for hardware that predated him by decades. The Nintendo Famicom. The Game Boy Advance. Sega's Mega Drive and Saturn. Sony's PlayStation and PSP. Arcade cabinets in every size and configuration. He loved all of it.
By now, any player could run those old systems through emulators, multi-game boxes, or handheld devices without much trouble. Ross knew this. He simply didn't care. He wanted the physical experience — the feel of sliding a cartridge in and having the game come to life the instant the power turned on.
About a month earlier, he'd come across a video of someone who'd handbuilt a multi-platform console from scratch, and that had been enough to push him into trying it himself. He kept the scope reasonable: just the Famicom, the Mega Drive, and a few arcade platforms, all consolidated into a single unit with a multi-adapter cartridge slot. Build a custom cartridge for any game you wanted — each one a hand-soldered miniature circuit board — slot it in, and you were playing.
Compared to those all-in-one retro boxes loaded with tens of thousands of titles, his setup was not convenient. He had to fabricate every cartridge from scratch if he wanted to play something new. But that was the point. The direct, tactile experience. The ritual of pulling the cartridge out, blowing on the contacts even though it never actually did anything, and pushing it back in.
For the console's physical form, Ross had made the unusual choice of building it into the body of a full standard keyboard. The cartridge slot sat centered at the very top, above the function row. And pressed into the upper-left corner of the casing was a logo: two red boxing gloves slamming into each other.
Anyone who recognized that emblem would have heard it in their head immediately — that tinny, infectious electronic jingle:
Ah~ha~ Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement!!!
Ross went still.
That sound — the boot chime of the SB-486D Little Tyrant Chinese-English Computer Learning Machine, something that should have existed only in the back of his memory — detonated inside his skull without any warning. Not a hallucination. Something genuinely real.
And then, without preparation, without ceremony, Ross simply opened.
Aura began pouring from every node across his body.
In the world of Hunter x Hunter, aura exists within every living person. Those who can sense it and learn to wield it are called Nen users. Among the general population, Nen users are extraordinarily rare — practically every one of them could be called a prodigy or an exceptional individual. In some fundamental sense, the gap between a Nen user and an ordinary person represents a difference in the basic quality of life itself. For many powerful Nen users, an ordinary person is something to be crushed underfoot without a second thought.
There are three ways a person can awaken to Nen.
The first is through training: developing one's physical and mental abilities through practice, discipline, and meditation, building sensitivity to aura gradually until the breakthrough comes naturally. This path is stable, builds a solid technical base, and is the orthodox route.
The second is through external force: a hostile Nen attack, a gentler procedure to clear and open the aura pathways, or some ability that triggers the awakening from the outside. This method carries serious and unpredictable risks, varies wildly from person to person, and holds a genuine chance of death. It is the dangerous route.
The third belongs to a rare few who need neither years of training nor any triggering event. They simply awaken on their own, in their own time, surpassing genuine prodigies in their specific area without ever having worked toward it.
Ross was apparently that third kind.
He hadn't seen this coming. But in that same instant, he snapped his eyes shut and did the only thing that felt right: he started remembering. Every detail of building that console. The texture of the circuit board under his fingertips. The smell of the soldering iron. The material of the 3D-printed casing. The layout of the schematics. The progress bar ticking along while game files loaded. The sound of his own breath when he blew on the cartridge contacts. The fist he pumped every time a component test ran clean. The design document for a light gun peripheral sitting open on his desktop.
The aura that should have scattered and been lost — wasted because he had no idea what he was doing — gathered instead, pulled inward, drawn between his hands. It took shape from nothing.
When he felt something solid and angular pressing against his palms, Ross opened his eyes and looked down.
Sitting in his arms was a complete set: a keyboard-composite console, a rectangular single-player controller, an HDMI cable, and a USB-C power cable with plug. His handbuilt console, materialized from thin air.
Alongside it, text took shape in front of him, forming into readable words with deliberate slowness.
[Nen Ability Name: Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement]
[Ability Type: Conjuration]
[Activation Conditions and Description: The first activation requires aura reserves at 100% capacity. Upon activation, all current aura reserves are consumed and the user is forced into a Zetsu state lasting 24 hours.
The set of components that can be materialized on first activation consists of four items: the "keyboard composite console," the "1P controller," the "video cable," and the "power cable with plug."
Once materialized, these items exist permanently and can be called out or recalled at will even while the user is in Zetsu. Different methods of use have different power requirements.
Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement has three operating modes: Entertainment Mode, Real Mode, and Secret Realm Mode.
Due to the absence of the "game cartridge" component, you are currently unable to operate this console normally.]