The Hunt Was Over

The seven-day hunting trial of the Hunter Exam had finally come to an end.

For seven days, candidates had clashed across Glasses Island, hunting one another and stealing number tags.

Leorio had recklessly lost his tag early on and nearly been eliminated. Kurapika negotiated to get it back. After that, Leorio stayed with him, stopped taking risks, and steadily earned enough points. Both qualified.

By the sixth day, the remaining candidates had gathered enough points to qualify, and the trial's outcome was all but settled. Yet deep within an rocky plateau in the island's west, unknown to anyone else, Netero and Saitama had quietly fought. The 100-Type Guanyin had shaken the earth and blasted the plateau into a vast circular crater, leaving its walls covered in palm prints and its reefs shattered. It became a hidden ruin no one dared investigate.

On the seventh day, mist filled the mountain forest, and the hunting trial on Glasses Island officially ended.

Gon sat beneath a cedar near the boarding point, two number tags resting on his knees. Kurapika sat beside him, while Leorio dozed against the trunk.

Hanzo dropped from the treetops, casually tossed a one-point tag from an unrelated candidate beside his feet, then darted into the dense forest.

Bodoro crawled out of a cave before dawn and staggered toward the boarding point, muttering over and over that he would never take the Hunter Exam again.

Killua was the last to emerge. He sat down beside Gon.

The airship's hatch opened, and the candidates boarded one by one. Hisoka leaned beneath the farthest cedar, turning a playing card over and over in his hand. Not far away, Illumi stood expressionless in the shade, his face full of Nen Needles and his movements as stiff and mechanical as ever.

Saitama had not appeared on the island since the first day. After the short assembly whistle sounded, Hisoka was the last to climb the gangway. He found a window seat.

The airship lifted off. Masta's voice came over the speakers. "We'll make a temporary stop en route to pick up Chairman Netero and his party."

Hisoka looked west through the window. A tiny black speck floated alone amid the glittering waves on the horizon.

An image flashed through his mind.

Hisoka passed the edge of the dense forest. The sea breeze was still salty, tinged with the smell of rotting leaves peculiar to Glasses Island.

The farther he went, the drier the wind became. The salt gave way to something sharper: the mineral smell of rock scorched by intense heat and then cooled, dry and acrid like the trace left in the air after repeated strikes of flint.

The trees began to fall. At first they leaned, then they were snapped in half. The breaks were not clean cuts. Something blunt had crushed them, squeezing the fibers inside the trunks into fine strands, as though an invisible giant palm had pressed down from above.

Farther on, cracks appeared in the ground. Fine fissures widened into grooves that could fit a finger, then into chasms deep enough to swallow a whole foot. Shattered stone radiated in one direction, as though someone had detonated something worse than a bomb at the center of the plateau.

He reached the plateau's edge.

He stopped dead.

The playing card slipped from his fingers and fell straight onto the gray rock dust. His golden pupils shrank to pinpoints, and the color drained from his face, marked with a star and teardrop.

His heart seized in his chest as though an invisible hand had gripped it tight. He could hear it pounding—thud, thud, thud—each beat heavier than the last, heavy enough to threaten his ribs. His chest ached with pressure. He even forgot how to breathe.

The entire plateau had been hammered into a vast circular crater, wide enough to swallow the whole airship.

The crater walls were too smooth to seem like rock. Palm prints were embedded in every inch. The single prints were deepest, their outlines clearest.

Paired prints mirrored each other on the left and right, twice as deep. The densest, most chaotic prints overlapped in layers, some struck repeatedly in the same spot, as though the same palm had crushed them again and again.

A stone pillar stood at the center of the crater floor. The rest of the plateau had been blasted several meters down, but the pillar had not budged. Two faint footprints marked its top, set shoulder-width apart, their depressions smoother than the stone around them.

The reef split by Zero Hand lay directly in front of the footprints. It had been cleaved lengthwise in two, the cut surfaces smooth as mirrors and coated with a thin layer of glassy crystal. Its edges had neither exploded nor crumbled. There was only glass formed by intense heat and then cooled.

The corpses of Bloodthirsty Butterflies were lodged in the reef's crevices. Zero Hand had not knocked them from the air. Earlier, palm winds had swept them down one wave at a time, then pinned them against the rock wall before they could take flight again. There were more here than anywhere else on the island. Like a thin layer of dark-red fallen leaves, they filled the hollows between the palm prints.

He stood at the crater's edge for a long time. It was not that he did not want to leave; his legs had forgotten how to move. His fingertips were still trembling, but not from fear. Nor was it excitement.

He touched the edge of the nearest palm print with his fingertip. The rock was cool, with no trace of Nen remaining. Then he withdrew his hand, bent to pick up the card he had dropped, and turned back. He told no one where he had gone.

When he returned, Hanzo spotted a torn Bloodthirsty Butterfly wing on his shoulder near the boarding point. Hisoka neither explained nor brushed it away. He let it remain there, a mark of a battle beyond anything he had ever known.

The airship descended slowly en route to pick up Netero and his party.

The hatch opened. Saitama came in carrying half a bowl of sesame sauce, followed by Beans, who held a record board with only a few pages left. Netero came last. His yukata was draped over his shoulders again, and his steps were much slower than usual. He did not stroke his beard or grin mischievously. He simply found a window seat, folded his hands on his knees, and closed his eyes.

Saitama sat by a window, dipped the last slice of wagyu into the sesame sauce, and put it in his mouth. After chewing twice, he glanced at the bottom of the bowl and rested his chopsticks across it.

Hisoka's gaze moved from Netero to Saitama. One man breathed so shallowly it was almost inaudible, the veins on the back of his hand more prominent than usual. The other had an intact T-shirt, a straight collar, and not a scratch on his bald head.

Hisoka licked his lips. Slowly—so slowly that his tongue traveled from the left corner to the right, then lingered there.

On the sixth day, he had crouched on the crater wall and counted the palm prints layer by layer. From the first to the last, every blow had struck directly above the two footprints on the pillar. Now the man who had thrown more than a hundred palm strikes sat before him by the window, so weak that even his breathing had grown shallow. And the man who had taken them all was looking down at an empty sauce bowl as if nothing had happened.

His throat shifted as he forced a low, hoarse chuckle back into his lungs. He had held it in so long that his shoulders began to tremble beyond his control. He was like a big cat teased for six straight days, finally glimpsing, in the last frame, an arc of light that had yet to fall but would one day bite into a throat.

He drew the creased card from the innermost pocket, held it between two fingers, and did not lick it. He let it rest there a moment before sliding it back into the deck he had arranged by layers, leaving only the corner bearing the star and teardrop exposed.

Outside the window, Glasses Island grew smaller and smaller.

Gon slept in his seat, hugging his fishing rod. Kurapika handed Leorio a compressed biscuit. Hanzo played with the hard pellets of monkey feed in his ninja-tool pouch. Killua leaned back in the seat beside Gon, his fingertips absently rubbing the seam of his trousers. A barely perceptible gravity lurked in his eyes.

Saitama set the sauce bowl on the empty seat by the window and closed his eyes. His right hand rested loosely clenched on his thigh, his knuckles faintly red. More than a hundred palm strikes had left no wound, but a faint trace of exhilaration remained.

Hisoka watched that slightly curled fist and gathered the cards into his palm, his five fingers slowly closing around them. He rested the reordered deck on his knee and shut his eyes. He neither licked a card nor murmured a word.

Outside, the sea had grown calm again. Hisoka still leaned against the cabin wall. He had put his cards away, keeping the Joker out of the deck he planned to use today. He spread the cards into a fan, then slowly gathered them again, his movements gentler and slower than usual.

The airship passed through the sea mist. The first true ray of sunlight tore through the clouds in the east, turning the windows gold. Gon's eyelids stirred, but he did not wake. He only hugged his fishing rod a little tighter.