Hunter and Hunted

The running continued.

But the fog grew thicker and thicker.

Even the sense of the horizon had been stripped away. Every step felt like landing on ground that did not exist, making it impossible to tell whether they were still moving "forward."

The sounds of breathing, panting, and splashing mud blended into a chaotic sea of noise that overloaded the nerves.

And in this nearly unbearable environment, Hisoka vanished again. Like the end of a dream, with the nightmare returning to the darkness along with it.

Ryan remained in Zetsu, maintaining his rhythm. He knew the danger had not gone away. Hisoka would not abandon his "hunt" because of one minor accident.

If anything, he would begin looking for new prey.

"I need to lower my presence." Ryan hid himself deeper within the group, neither fighting for position nor getting close to anyone else, always keeping a safe distance of three meters from the other examinees.

At that moment, a familiar voice sounded again from ahead and to the left.

"Ahh—you guys, don't run around! I just heard that way was the safe route!"

Tonpa.

Him again.

He approached another group of young examinees whose movements had become chaotic due to the hallucinations, waving his hands with the face of a perfect good Samaritan.

"This fog is too thick. It'd be better if I led the way—come with me. If everyone keeps their breathing in sync, you won't panic."

"Really?"

"I think he saved someone earlier..."

"Let's listen to him. We can't see anyone else anyway."

After hesitating for a moment, several young people actually began following Tonpa as he changed direction.

Ryan noticed the scene, but he did not speak. He merely adjusted his angle and studied the terrain beneath Tonpa's feet.

"The ground is swelling, with a slight backflow... He's leading them into a mud trap."

It was a patch of sinking mud repeatedly eroded by underground currents in the wetlands. Once someone stepped into it, their feet would be completely swallowed, making escape impossible for a short while. Combined with the hallucinations, it could cause panic and trampling within seconds.

Tonpa was not trying to set up one person. He was trying to cause a mass elimination all at once.

Ryan's gaze turned cold.

He was not about to let Tonpa quietly rack up more victims.

The fog became even denser, reducing visibility to less than three meters.

Just as Tonpa was about to lead those young examinees into the mud trap, a noticeably raised voice suddenly came from the distant left.

"This way! Listen to my instructions! I'm an Association assistant examiner, responsible for guiding you!"

Ryan looked up and saw a man of average build wearing a hat, the lower half of his face hidden behind a scarf. His identity could not be made out, but his gait was stiff, while his voice was hurried and unsteady. Everything about him felt wrong.

Two young examinees beside him were preparing to approach him.

—A fake examiner.

Almost at the same time, Ryan saw a red figure slowly emerge from the fog.

It was Hisoka.

He stood there without saying a word, still wearing that nearly unchanging smile. A playing card spun between the fingers of his right hand as though he were weighing something.

"And who did you say you were?" His tone was light, but his voice carried through the entire fog bank.

The man froze. Just as he was about to repeat himself, Hisoka flicked his fingers.

The playing card flew from his hand.

"Crack."

Amid a brief whistle through the air, the card instantly buried itself in the man's throat. There was no struggle, no scream. He fell backward like a ruptured pipe, blood spraying into the fog and quickly fading in color.

The two followers fled in terror, crawling and scrambling away. Someone screamed, "He killed someone! He's insane!"

"It's Hisoka!! Stay away from him!!"

The crowd erupted into chaos, but Hisoka did not pursue them.

He merely stood there and said calmly, "It's an exam. Don't mess around."

Ryan did not move.

He merely looked at Hisoka once more, silently committing the scene to memory.

This man was not here to take the exam.

He was here to choose prey.

Ryan reinforced his principle of "avoiding being targeted" once again.

Then his gaze shifted back toward Tonpa, and he continued with his own business.

But he did not want to expose himself. Nor could he rush out like some hero to warn everyone.

He lowered his eyes to several broken logs concealed beneath the fog, a horizontal branch, and a protruding stone—calculating, judging, composing the layout. It took only two seconds.

Then he moved.

He stomped hard on the loose mud by his feet, stirring a small current of water that immediately carried a fallen branch sliding toward Tonpa's side, where it struck a floating stone at the edge.

"Clack."

The crisp, abrupt cracking sound shattered the oppressive silence in the fog.

A boy following behind Tonpa jolted in alarm. "W-wait—the ground seems—"

His foot slipped, landing on that floating stone. With a wet squelch, he and Tonpa both slid into that patch of ground.

"Hey! Why did you push me—!!"

"Ahhh! It's a trap!!"

"Don't move! The more you move, the deeper you sink!!"

Chaos broke out, but this time, Tonpa was not controlling it. He had fallen into the trap himself as well.

"Damn it... How did this happen..." Tonpa's face was full of disbelief and resentment, while Ryan maintained his rhythm and ran onward.

He did not wait for the chaos to end. He slipped onto another branching path and circled toward the edge of the fog.

He would not look back.

Nor did he need to see the outcome.

Tonpa had not been eliminated yet, but his mask of "kindness" had already been shattered.

And Ryan... kept running, calm and silent, as though he had never existed.

The sounds around him grew increasingly unreal. Some people cried, some shouted, some muttered to themselves. Some even stopped abruptly, staring into the empty distance as they murmured, "That's my home... I can see my mother waving at me."

Ryan's gaze remained steady. The illusions before him sometimes formed false paths, sometimes took the shape of familiar people, and more often became nothing but a chaotic stream of information that completely disrupted direction and judgment.

He did not fight them. He chose not to look, not to listen, not to respond.

The state of Zetsu was like armor. Sealing off his Nen aura shielded him from most mental disturbances. Combined with the combat mindset forged through years of training, it allowed him to control his sensory feedback better than any other examinee.

But the others were not like him.

A low, hoarse sound of breathing came from his left.

Ryan turned his head and saw a face covered in sweat and fear.

It was Ponzu.

She was an examinee with average stamina and decent intelligence, yet she had always lacked mental resilience. In the original story, she was a "key fringe figure" who nearly broke down several times but was guided to persevere.

At that moment, her face was pale as paper, her lips trembling, and her eyes unfocused.

"...Are we... not there yet...?"

Her voice came out in broken fragments, as if something were lodged in her throat. Her steps swayed, her leading foot dragged along the ground, and her fingers kept scratching at her shoulders—clear signs that she was being overwhelmed by hallucinations and stood on the verge of mental collapse.

If this continued, she would stop within a minute. And stopping meant elimination.

She might even die.

Ryan did not approach her. He was not a savior. He merely observed, judged, and decided whether to intervene—changing the outcome in the smallest possible way.

He altered his breathing rhythm and took one small step closer, narrowing the distance between himself and Ponzu without making any contact.

Then, in an extremely low voice, he ran alongside Ponzu, sounding as if he were talking to himself, or perhaps muttering:

"...What's ahead isn't the end, and it isn't a wall... It's just light reflecting off water vapor... Just look at the real shadows beneath your feet. Don't look into the distance... Don't stop."

Ponzu did not respond.

But her body trembled slightly.

Her eyes began to focus. Her previously wandering gaze returned to the ground, and she took a sharp breath, clenching both hands into fists as if encouraging herself.

"Not the end... not a wall... I have to... I have to keep up..."

Her steps gradually steadied, as though her earlier stumbling had only been a brief illusion. No one noticed the change in her. The people around her were all trapped in their own worlds, completely unaware of her recovery.

No one heard those words. They had been a whisper as light as a feather, yet they stirred towering waves in her heart. Ryan's figure flickered in and out of sight within the fog. Like a ghost, he quietly departed and once again blended into another formation shrouded by mist.

In the distance, an examinee suddenly began laughing wildly as if he had gone mad. His laughter echoed through the silent fog, sending chills down the spine. Then, without warning, he jumped into a pond. The splash was instantly swallowed by the mist, and his body sank like a stone to the bottom, never surfacing again.

At the same time, another girl, her face filled with terror, ran blindly in panic and slammed headfirst into a tree trunk. She fell to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. The group behind her surged forward like a raging tide, ruthlessly trampling over her. Her screams drifted through the fog in every direction, unable to find a path, before finally being drowned beneath the chaotic footsteps.

Yet amid all this chaos, Ryan quietly left this layer of the "hallucination resonance zone." He turned a blind eye to the misery around him, with only one thought in his mind—the most dangerous stretch of the road was almost over.

That did not mean he was about to escape his current predicament, nor was it the end of the first stage of the trial.