Hunter x Hunter Vol. 2: Hunter x Hunter, Vol. 2
- ISBN
- 9781591167853
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 192
The Hunter Exam continues in this second standard paperback. Its licensed opening chapter finds candidates separated from their guide in the mist, so it assumes the journey and examination have already begun. Standard Vols. 1–3 are also collected in the first omnibus; this book is not a separate sequel to that edition. The discussion below is limited to Hisoka's conduct in the opening preview, not the full examination sequence.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
The missing examiner gives Hisoka an opportunity to invent authority. Other stragglers assume that losing the guide means everyone has failed. Hisoka excludes himself from that conclusion because he has appointed himself to judge their acceptability. Nothing in the scene establishes that this is a legitimate appointment. The threat works because he can kill the people who dispute it. His magician's patter is less revealing than this change of role: the cards are visible weapons, and the opening attack needs no elaborate misdirection. Our reading is that the scene exposes how easily an unsupervised test can be seized by someone powerful enough to impersonate its rules. That is a claim about this encounter, not evidence that the official examiners authorized his killings.
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Lines from this volume
“A true magician never runs out of tricks.”
“Yes, you've failed, but I haven't.”
The examinee's logic is sound on its face. The examiner has vanished into the mist with the leading runners, nobody knows which way they went, so every straggler has failed, Hisoka included. Hisoka does not dispute the geography. Nowhere in these pages does he claim to know the route, or look for it. He disputes the category. Moments earlier he announced that the first phase was unutterably boring and that he would assist in the selection process and judge their acceptability, so by his own appointment he is now an examiner, and examiners do not fail. The scene builds exactly the conditions that make the claim workable: a lost guide, a field of candidates nobody is watching, and one man who reads the absence of supervision as a vacancy. The cruelty of the joke is that it comes true on the page. By p. 15 only three people are left standing to hear him count down.
The patter comes before the protest. Hisoka opens with a lesson before dying, then this, and only afterward do the armed examinees close in to tell him that a homicidal maniac has no right to be a Hunter. Patter promises misdirection. The pages deliver none. Page 9 has already shown men lying in the grass with playing cards stuck in their faces while he shuffles the deck, and once the protest is over he picks out one card, calls it sufficient, and cuts through the crowd with it on pp. 12 and 13. Everyone can see the method and nobody can stop it. That is plain superiority dressed as sleight of hand, and the sentence takes credit for a subtlety the scene never needs. The magician act is costume, a quick way to make a killer theatrical before the story has shown what else he is. The more revealing line is on the previous page, where he admits he meant to hold off until the second phase and started early because the first phase bored him.