N. E. N. [ H U N T E R X H U N T E R ]

Chapter 7 - ハンター 試験 | パート4

"And that's why..." we arrived in front of the cooking station she used. There were five bowls of her meal hidden in the closed oven, for them not to be stolen by other examinees, "I kept some for you and our friends!"

She smiled sweetly, and I smiled back. She's so cute and innocent!

We called up the boys and gave them their respective dishes. They were all happy to get some of Hiroe's food. After all, it's delicious!

Of course, Hiroe prepared me another bowl, making Leorio complain a little.

"Thanks for the meal!" We all dug in, happy.

N. E. N. POV

There was a huge commotion when the female examiner stated that no one passed this phase since Kotono quit to stay with her sister. Personally, I thought Kotono had better arguments than the girl.

In the end, to many people's surprise, the chairman Netero himself visited the young turquoise-haired examiner. He didn't seem to see me, though it was just him fooling around again. There's a huge difference between seeing and noticing.

After all, I am invisible...

In the end, the applicants had to re-do the phase, so they entered the Hunter Association's airship along with the examiners of the second phase. The skinny woman requested to go to 'Mount Split-in-Half', which is a large crevasse where spider eagles weave their nests.

I lazily hung out in the corner of the large room in which all of the applicants patiently waited to arrive. Gon seemed to be very excited to try whatever this phase was going to be, while Hiroe was also becoming pumped up. The others laughed at their cute behaviours and everyone ended up happy.

This made the corner of my lips go up a little bit.

'Huh? What was... that?' I was very confused at what my mouth just did, though I decided to ignore it and put my attention back on the kids.

Yeah, I'm going to call them kids even if they are technically all older than me. I'm just like that.

The airship started to drift down, slowly approaching the ground. We had arrived.

Everyone exited the airship and, curious, approached the big crack in the mountain. We could hear a click in everyone's head, meaning they finally understood why a mountain separated in two was called mount Split-in-half. Good job, idiots.

As I wasn't in the mood for listening to instructions, I entered the hole and went passed the webs to explore the bottom. There was a river, about half a meter wide, slithering through the ground.

Skeletons, human skeletons of men who failed to catch the drift, were sitting or laying in uncomfortable-looking positions. An instant death for most, but one of them... The person fell into the river, and many of his bones broke, just like the others. Though the hit couldn't have killed him: he must've laid there, in an awful pain, waiting for death to ease his pain.

There was also a highly decomposed corpse, I'd say three months old, which gave to the wind a smell that would make anyone want to gag. Anyone, except maybe for me.

Sudden shouts broke the thick atmosphere that hung over the bottom of the hole. Joyful shouts.

Going back up, I stopped at the height where six familiar figures hung. They were all waiting for an air drift, and, apparently, Gon was the lead for that. I did notice he has quite sharp senses.

Some people went down, to their dooms. The rest listened to Gon. When he yelled "GO!", no one hesitated to let go of the white string to grab one of those white eggs. A sudden poof of air made all of the fallen humans abruptly shoot up high in the sky.