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"This was bought with your clothes."
The girl with pale violet hair noticed Morin's puzzled look. Folding her arms, she tapped the white outfit she was wearing and said calmly, "See? This."
"My clothes…?"
Morin blinked, then it clicked.
The clothes he'd been wearing when he crossed over were gone. In their place was a ragged hemp robe, full of holes. It barely qualified as clothing. Another tear or two and he'd be living the caveman aesthetic—Tarzan chic included.
"You traded my clothes for that?"
Morin studied the violet-haired girl in front of him, and the more he looked, the stronger the sense of familiarity grew. A shadowy figure in his memory slowly overlapped with her face.
Then he remembered where he was now: a barren wasteland, mountains of garbage piled high…
"Where is this?" he asked, swallowing hard.
"Meteor City," the girl said, brushing a hand through her short hair, her voice steady.
"Meteor City…"
Morin muttered under his breath. "So it really is."
"Great. I've landed in the worst possible place."
Meteor City. A massive dumping ground at the northern edge of the Hunter world's Yorubian continent.
Fifteen hundred years ago it had officially been designated as a landfill. Any country could throw anything here: trash, corpses, industrial waste—even unwanted babies.
But Meteor City was no ordinary slum.
Outside its borders lay endless garbage heaps, but inside the city, the streets were surprisingly clean. The houses, mostly pale yellow and white, were built from decent materials. Strip away the wasteland outside, and you'd think it was a normal town.
Its residents were all people the world had abandoned—without legal identities, without pasts anyone could trace. They survived by salvaging whatever they could from the mountains of waste.
And despite living off refuse, they carried on with a kind of rough vitality.
But their rules of life had nothing to do with the outside world's morality. Meteor City lived by one law: survival of the fittest. The weak were prey, the strong endured. Simple. Brutal. Fair. And from it was born the blunt, unpretentious nature of its people.
Morin hadn't expected this. He'd wanted to take it slow in the Hunter world, stay safe, grow steadily. Instead, he'd dropped straight into hell mode.
"So if this is Meteor City… then you must be—"
He stared at the girl who had stripped him of his clothes and walked away with them, only to return wearing a crisp white martial arts gi.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Machi," she replied without hesitation. Then, just as calmly, "And you?"
"…Morin."
The answer came out awkward, because now he was sure.
It really was her.
He hadn't expected to run into a canon character so soon.
Meteor City. Violet hair. A gi like that. No one else fit the description in his memory but Machi.
Right now she looked like nothing more than a cute little loli, the type to trigger protective instincts in a thousand anime fans.
But Morin wasn't a loli-con. And he knew full well this girl was anything but harmless.
In the future she'd be one of the Phantom Troupe, a member of the infamous thieves who left chaos and bloodshed in their wake. Whatever she looked like now, she would become dangerous. Very dangerous.
"…Why did you save me?" Morin asked, genuinely curious.
"Two reasons."
Her tone didn't change. "Clothes. And instinct."
Short and to the point.
Morin understood.
Clothes, obviously. As for instinct—Machi's sixth sense was ridiculously sharp. Her intuition, especially as a woman's, was almost supernatural. Once she got a feeling about something, she was rarely wrong. You could treat it like a power in its own right.
"Anything else?" Machi asked, watching him still lost in thought.
"If not, I'm going to sleep."
"Sleep?"
Morin glanced around and finally realized—it was already deep into the night.
"Guess I woke up just in time," he muttered.
Machi ignored him, climbed onto her hammock, and lay down without another word.
Morin shook his head and stretched out again on the broken wooden cot.
"Rest. If I don't, my brain's going to explode," he told himself.
The past day had been too much: crossing worlds, awakening nen, memories flooding his mind, and a headache that still hadn't completely gone away. Even with his newfound ability, he was exhausted.
Flat on his back, he glanced once more at the girl in the hammock.
"Machi looks about eleven, maybe twelve. In canon, when the Troupe first appeared in Yorknew, she was twenty-four…"
"So this must be twelve or thirteen years before the main story starts."
"Has the Phantom Troupe even been formed yet? Judging by how she's alone… probably not."
His thoughts blurred as his eyelids sank heavier and heavier. Within moments, Morin slipped into sleep.
As for the dangerous girl beside him, the future criminal who'd one day be feared across the world—he didn't give her a second thought.
For now, she was just a kid.
"....."