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Chapter 38: The Fourth Phase and the Human-Form Demon
"This vessel is expected to arrive at Zevil Island in approximately two hours."
"Additionally, all thirty-two passengers aboard today will receive complimentary return transportation to next year's exam site, so if any candidates don't pass this year, please don't be discouraged — we'd love to have you back and—"
The Association staff member in her uniform, delivering her lines in the bright professional tone the job called for, found her voice trailing off without meaning it to.
Because the candidate group had produced no functional response whatsoever. Every one of them sat like a pressure cooker parked over an open flame — just stewing in silence, not making a sound.
That said, it wasn't hard to understand. The enthusiasm was easy for someone on the outside. The candidates standing on the other side of it had fought through more difficulty than most people would believe to get here, and none of them had any interest in treating it as something they might accept losing.
Which meant that right now, every candidate was looking at every other candidate the way you look at a natural enemy. Even the ones who had been lucky enough not to forget someone's badge number — and therefore knew who their target was — had absolutely no idea who had drawn them.
By the six-point rules for the fourth phase, the theoretical maximum number of candidates passing was sixteen. Factor in the predator-and-prey format, and that number was likely to compress to twelve or fewer.
Most candidates had already scattered, going solo. Only a handful — those connected by shared training, family, or the kind of trust that had actually built up over time — remained in small clusters. That included Ross and the two delinquents.
Ross, Yusuke, Kuwabara. The three of them sat together in a cluster, looking serious. Then:
"One, two... three!"
All three held up their drawn target numbers simultaneously.
Ross had 66. Yusuke had 23. Kuwabara had 75. None of them were each other's targets. All three of them let out a quiet breath.
Not having to go against each other was the best possible outcome.
"Who are any of these?" Yusuke immediately started scratching his head. The badge numbers hadn't stayed mapped to faces in his memory.
"Same. I only kept track of the ones near our numbers and the two obvious ones — 44 and 301."
Kuwabara agreed.
"I know all of them."
Ross did not.
"Badge 23 is Kibano. Martial arts uniform, beard, scars across his face and eyebrows, medium-length hair, heavily built and wild. He may show up wearing some kind of specialized headgear that covers his eyes and ears. Almost certainly Enhancement type. Physical reinforcement techniques. Watch his throws and his arms."
"Badge 75 is Musashi. Easier to spot — eyepatch, kendo uniform, wooden sword on him. That sword has Nen compatibility. Worth taking if the opportunity's there; it might be useful for you, Kuwabara."
Both delinquents stared. Ross didn't just know who they were — he knew what they looked like, what they were good at, and what to watch out for.
"What about yours? Who's your target?"
Kuwabara leaned in, the specifics of his own target now clicking into place.
"Badge 66. Goes by Shaolin. Looks like a young monk. No real presence throughout the exam — almost invisible the entire way through—"
The two of them could tell Ross wasn't finished.
"—and I'm seriously convinced that Shaolin is actually a demon in disguise."
Ross dropped it like a stone.
"A demon. Like the thing from the first phase? The one Hisoka killed and you pulled the cartridge out of?"
Kuwabara's mind had gone directly to the Man-Faced Ape.
Yusuke's reaction was completely different. He blinked once, like something had just come back to him, snapped his fingers, and reached into his pants pocket. He pulled out something about the size of a watch and started working with it.
"What's that now?"
Kuwabara, who at this point in his life had simply accepted that he was always going to be the most straightforwardly uncomplicated person in any room, needed to know.
Yusuke paused. But Kuwabara had awakened to Nen, and Ross was basically half a mentor to both of them at this point — not much reason to keep it buried.
"Demon aura sensor. It picks up the demon aura leaking off nearby demons and monsters, measures the—"
The watch-sized sensor did not wait for the explanation to finish.
It produced the kind of mechanical shrieking that a device that small had absolutely no business generating, followed by a rapid series of sparking bursts, and then detonated.
...So blowing up the sensor is apparently a hereditary condition.
The blown-out dial with its needle already launched into parts unknown was also, from a different angle, confirmation: Shaolin was almost certainly the human-form spider demon from the YYH original story — the one who had competed against Yusuke for succession to the Spirit Wave Style.
Rando.
In hindsight, it made sense. Kibano and Musashi were already here. One more transplant from that world shouldn't come as a surprise.
Ross had already mapped the situation: the Genkai succession storyline had been relocated from its original context and dropped into the Hunter Exam.
"Let me take a guess. Your boss sent you here because they didn't want this particular demon getting a Hunter License and then having the legal right to wander around human territory doing whatever they wanted — including eating people?"
"Yes! Exactly! How did you — were you there?!"
Yusuke stared at Ross like he'd just performed a magic trick.
Ross looked at him with open contempt.
"Obviously not. Just a reasonable conclusion."
"...Was that an insult?"
Yusuke blinked and turned to Kuwabara with the question, genuinely uncertain.
"No," Kuwabara said. "Ross was stating facts."
"You son of a—"
The two of them immediately dissolved into their usual exchange, which involved approximately equal parts shoving and insults. Kuwabara was visibly starting to get the worst of it — unsurprisingly. Enhancement types had the numbers advantage in every category, and against a Transmutation user that tended to be a permanent condition.
Enhancement types had the stats where you wanted stats and the stats where you'd normally expect mechanics to be doing the work. That was the Enhancement experience.
Meanwhile, the thought running through Ross's head was: Kurapika already reacted to ordinary spiders. If he ever saw Rando's actual form — a human-shaped spider demon — would he completely lose control on the spot and put on a live demonstration of the Kurta-clan Amaterasu?
The joke lasted about one second.
Because there was a very real problem sitting right in front of him.
If Shaolin was Rando, what Ross was now facing was a demon with a physically powerful body, a full reserve of demon aura, silk threads that matched Hisoka's ability for elastic toughness, dedicated special techniques covering both Transmutation and Emission, and on top of all of that, curse abilities.
Ross was self-aware about this. He had two cartridges, and the recently acquired Nekketsu New Record could even map Kunio — a well-rounded athlete with solid performance across all five events — onto him through Real Mode. But his base physical condition was a ceiling that the mapping couldn't fully clear. He genuinely did not believe he could beat Rando in a straight fight, let alone finish it permanently.
But waiting around and doing nothing about it wasn't in his nature either. Better to sharpen a blunt blade before the battle than show up with nothing.
On that thought, Ross's gaze drifted to the Little Tyrant's Secret Realm Mode.
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