Someone really was watching him.
Tonpa didn’t need to turn around to know where the gaze was coming from.
He could feel it over his left shoulder, steady amid the movement of hundreds of applicants, as though its owner wasn’t watching him so much as waiting for him to do something interesting.
He maintained his pace and kept his breathing as steady as he could.
Ahead of him, part of the crowd was reflected in a metal panel bolted to the tunnel wall.
Scratches warped the image, but it revealed enough.
Red hair.
A pale face.
And a playing card spinning between long fingers.
Tonpa’s stomach clenched.
‘Hisoka.’
The magician ran effortlessly, completely unaffected by the distance the group had covered.
His usual wide grin was absent, replaced by a slight curl at the corner of his lips.
His eyes, however, were fixed directly on Tonpa.
For a moment, their gazes met through the reflection.
Hisoka’s smile widened slightly.
Tonpa looked away at once, but he neither accelerated nor slowed down.
Any sudden change might confirm that he had noticed the scrutiny, and showing fear in front of a predator wasn’t much different from bleeding in the middle of the ocean.
‘Why is he looking at me?’
He reviewed everything he had done over the past few minutes.
He had approached several applicants, moved between groups, and whispered different pieces of advice until people either drove him away or warned others about him.
Perhaps his movements had looked suspicious, or perhaps Hisoka had sensed that something about Tonpa had changed.
The worst possibility was that the magician hadn’t needed a reason at all.
Hisoka was the kind of person who might kill you because he found you interesting—and might kill you because he decided you weren’t interesting enough.
There was no correct answer when dealing with him.
The game was already lost from the moment he chose to look at you.
Tonpa gradually drifted toward the right side of the tunnel, using the jostling applicants as cover.
He didn’t immediately plunge into the thick of the crowd.
Instead, he moved from one opening to another until two burly men and a cluster of runners stood between him and Hisoka.
Nearly a minute passed before he dared to check the next metal panel.
He could no longer see the magician.
That offered little comfort.
Hisoka disappearing from view didn’t mean he had stopped watching.
It only meant Tonpa no longer knew where he was.
‘Wonderful.
Out of hundreds of applicants, I’ve managed to catch the attention of the one man who can turn boredom into a funeral.’
Tonpa continued running within the crowd, keeping his head slightly lowered.
He had to stop behaving as though he were searching for victims.
Nen points wouldn’t help him if his head ended up separated from his body before he had the chance to spend them.
Easy targets had become scarce, and Tonpa’s reputation was spreading among the applicants faster than he could run.
Persisting with the same tricks wouldn’t be ambition.
It would be stupidity.
And a con man who reused an exposed trick didn’t even deserve to be caught.
‘I need to watch more and move less.
No random lies, and no drawing attention I don’t need.’
A familiar chime rang inside his head.
[Ding!]
Tonpa nearly cursed aloud, but settled for clenching his jaw.
‘What now?
Has Hisoka decided to kill me, and the system is giving me three minutes to write my will?’
A blue window appeared at the edge of his vision.
[A new side quest has been generated.]
The system’s timing did not bode well.
So far, it had never sent him a notification that ended with good news.
He opened the quest cautiously.
[Side Quest: The Protagonists’ Trust.]
[Description: Earn the trust of the main characters during the Hunter Exam.]
[Required Objectives:]
[Gon Freecss: Required Trust Level — 20%]
[Killua Zoldyck: Required Trust Level — 20%]
[Kurapika: Required Trust Level — 20%]
[Leorio: Required Trust Level — 20%]
[Time Limit: Before the end of the Hunter Exam.]
[Penalty for Failure: Forced transportation to the Dark Continent.]
Tonpa lost his rhythm for a moment, and his foot nearly clipped the heel of the man ahead of him.
He quickly regained his balance, then read the quest again, hoping that oxygen deprivation had somehow tampered with his eyesight.
The words remained unchanged.
He raised his gaze toward the front of the crowd.
The four of them weren’t difficult to find.
Gon and Killua ran lightly, as though they were out for a casual stroll, while Kurapika maintained a steady pace beside them.
Leorio, meanwhile, was putting far more effort into concealing his exhaustion.
Four targets.
And he had to make every one of them trust him.
‘This isn’t a test.
It’s a demand to rebuild a house after its owner burned it down and handed the ashes out to the neighbors.’
Asnos had arrived in Tonpa’s body immediately after the juice incident.
The Rookie Crusher had offered the group cans of juice laced with laxatives, only for Killua to see through the trick effortlessly.
So Tonpa wasn’t starting from zero with them.
He was starting below zero, with the rest of the evidence still sitting inside his bag.
His gaze settled on Gon’s name.
The boy was friendly by nature, but he possessed an irritatingly sharp instinct when it came to other people’s intentions.
He might be the most willing of the four to forgive a former enemy, but gaining his trust through deception would not be simple.
Then his eyes moved to Killua.
A child of the Zoldyck family.
A trained assassin who had identified the laxatives by taste and remained completely unaffected by them.
Trying to deceive him directly would be like attempting to steal someone’s wallet while they held a knife against your wrist.
Kurapika was calm, highly observant, and unwilling to give his trust easily.
He would analyze any sudden change in Tonpa’s behavior and likely conclude that there was an ulterior motive behind it—even if he couldn’t determine what that motive was.
As for Leorio…
Tonpa remembered his short temper and the look he had given him after the juice trick was exposed.
‘At least I won’t have to guess whether he hates me.
He’ll tell the entire tunnel.’
Another window appeared.
[Current Trust Levels:]
[Gon Freecss: 0%]
[Killua Zoldyck: 0%]
[Kurapika: 0%]
[Leorio: 0%]
Tonpa stared at the four zeros.
The result wasn’t surprising, but seeing the system display it so bluntly still felt insulting.
Surely, by sheer accident, at least one random lunatic should have trusted him by one percent.
He tried to dismiss the window, but it remained in front of him.
‘And what exactly counts as trust?
Is it enough that they don’t expect me to poison them?’
[Trust reflects the extent to which the target relies upon the host and believes the host’s intentions to be genuine.]
It was the first direct answer the system had given him, and it only made him hate the quest even more.
Believing his intentions?
Even Tonpa didn’t trust his own intentions until he knew what he stood to gain from them.
‘And why these four specifically?’
The system offered no answer.
‘What happens if one of them dies before I reach twenty percent?’
Silence persisted.
The question probably didn’t matter.
His knowledge of the original events told him that all four would survive, but his presence here could change the details.
Simply being forced to approach them might create consequences that had never occurred in the anime.
And being forcibly transported to the Dark Continent wasn’t some vague threat he could afford to ignore.
He knew enough about that place to understand that appearing there in his current condition wouldn’t be called transportation.
It would be food delivery.
Frustration began building behind Tonpa’s eyes.
A short while ago, his greatest problem had been gathering one hundred Nen points for a single draw.
Before that, he had needed to pass the Hunter Exam to avoid being thrown into the Dark Continent.
Above all of that, the main countdown still demanded that he become the strongest Hunter and conquer the continent itself within five years.
Every time he began to understand one of his problems, the system dropped another on top of it.
Even so, he didn’t allow his frustration to turn into panic.
The quest didn’t demand genuine friendship.
It only required twenty percent.
That was a relatively low number, and it could be manufactured if he chose the right moment.
Trust wasn’t some sacred emotion.
It was an impression shaped by carefully chosen words, assistance offered at the perfect time, and danger that appeared to be shared.
He didn’t need to become a better person.
He only needed to convince them that he had.
But first, he needed to understand what each of them wanted, what they feared, and what kind of image of Tonpa they might be willing to accept.
Apologizing now would appear cheap, while approaching them immediately after his other scams had failed would only make them more suspicious.
He needed a crisis.
Something that would allow him to offer help they couldn’t ignore, then convert that usefulness into trust.
Tonpa moved slightly farther ahead among the runners, making sure several bodies remained between him and Hisoka.
In the distance, he saw Gon laughing at something Killua had said while Leorio protested loudly.
Four targets who already knew he was a con man.
A mysterious predator watching him from behind.
And a system that threatened him with the Dark Continent whenever it decided his life wasn’t miserable enough.
Tonpa’s old, friendly smile spread across his face, while his eyes remained cold.
‘This system isn’t trying to help me survive.’
He watched the group ahead and began searching for the first opening he could exploit.
‘It’s trying to find the most entertaining way to kill me.’