#jyuanka

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jyuanka replied to your post “Dry the River - No Rest”

hmmm try Draw your Swords by Angus & Julia Stone

ooh absolutely, the lyrics are basically perfect from Griff’s pov. ty for the suggestion!

@seisans said: IM SO READY FOR THEIR LOVE STORY 

ikr just gimme like a few chapters worth of flashback just for SK and Void. I need to see their tragic breakup in detail.

[xyliane]

for the writing prompt: leodle + susurration

summary: susurration, n. whispering or rustling, murmuring. 

notes:  @jyuanka (fyi scrivener didn’t think this was a word, but scrivener doesn’t think scrivener is a word sometimes, so take its spellcheck with a grain of salt). also hey @ikarikari, who draws leorio smoking (hot). 900 words, leodle, includes smoking, questionable methods of dealing with uncontrollable circumstances, and child death mention. (so, it is a fic focused on leorio lol)

—

Leorio’s not sure how, but he somehow hasn’t sat down in years, or at least it feels like. He’d thought the entrance exams, and then the accelerated coursework his teachers put him through, had been bad enough. He’d thought that fucking hell ship had been bad enough. But here he is, on solid land with barely any time left in his residency, no murder lurking around any corners that he can sense or see, no friends out for vengeance or teenagers with a nose for trouble, and today has been so, so much worse than he could have ever wanted.

Which is how he’s ended up on the roof of the hospital, still in his scrubs and slippers on his feet, the stench of death sunken into his skin so far he can practically taste it. And the taste of smoke, acrid and burning, dancing across that, almost but not quite drowning it out, whispers of a slow painful destruction he doesn’t care to ignore.

Leorio has to stop from twirling the cigarette between his fingers, flicking it over his knuckles like he saw the Zoldyck butlers do that one time years ago, back when it felt like his friends were friendly monsters and he was just a future med student with the world at his feet. Before he watched one of his best friends all but die and another one utterly lose himself to a hatred worse than death, and all he could do was sit around. Too little, too late, too useless.

God, it’s been a long day.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” a quiet voice says, and Leorio nearly drops the cigarette.

“Cheadle! Uh, Dr. Yorkshire, I didn’t—” He leans back against the railing with a sigh. “Sorry, I thought I was alone.”

She smiles up at him, an unpleasant curl to her lips. She’s in her usual dress, hat snug around her ears and boots as far from hospital standard as possible. The streetlights reflect off her glasses, hiding whatever thoughts she might have. She hadn’t been in the OR proper, not part of surgery today, but that doesn’t mean she hadn’t been watching. “Nothing to worry about. We all need space every once in a while. Although most students don’t break into the roof. It’s usually just us old hats who didn’t have a nice garden during our residencies.”

“Old habits, sorry,” he says, flashing a few thin pieces of metal he always keeps on him, like the knife he only rarely uses these days for anything besides opening letters or trimming loose strings. He could have picked the lock with nen—usually does, with an ease that surprises him most days—but tonight isn’t… It’s not…

That’s the problem with emission, with a technique meant to save lives through ripples and echoes. Leorio can feel every breath his patients take bounced back to him, so he can feel the exact moment when they stop taking any more.

He offers Cheadle a grin he doesn’t feel. “I needed to do something a little destructive.”

“Breaking and entering, or the smoking?”

He shrugs. “I’m hedging my bets.”

That wins him a snort, a genuine puff of amusement that comes straight out her nose. “You did your best. We can’t save everyone, Leorio.”

“Best is for shit,” he says, and takes another drag. The burn of nicotine isn’t enough to smoke away the smile the little boy had given him before going under, a smile that was fully content with whatever happened even if it meant not waking up again—a smile that no boy, hell, no person, should ever have to wear, not until they’re old and toothless, having lived a life so full it’s overflowing. It’s a smile he’s seen on too many familiar faces that have yet to really, truly live, a silent susurration of lives unspent he hears far too often.

So far, Leorio’s pretty content with his own life, screw-ups and successes and everywhere in between. But there’s so much more to be done.

He blows out a cloud of smoke, little circles in the air more for show than anything. “I didn’t become a doctor just to do my best,” he says. “Just because you or anyone else can’t do it, doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.”

Cheadle stares up at him from behind her bottle glasses, green eyes unreadable except for a little wrinkle between her eyebrows. “Sometimes I forget you’re a Hunter, Paladiknight, and then you go ahead and say stupid shit like that,” she mutters. “Just as bad as the rest of us. Maybe worse.”

He splutters a little, more out of habit than any actual protest. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“We’re bullheaded as a group, but it takes a special diamond-headed stubborn to hunt death like it’s some magic beast.” The cigarette is tugged out of his fingers before he realizes what’s happening, his hand pulled downward to reach Cheadle’s much shorter mouth. “Give me that, please.”

He relinquishes it reluctantly. “You smoke?”

“Not at all.” She pulls too hard and all but hacks her glasses off. Leorio has to put a hand to her back, gentle vibrations easing the sandpaper roughness he knows is in her throat, and she still nearly loses her hat over the side of the roof. When she’s done, eyes bleary and still not loosening her hold on the cigarette, she says, “But a little destruction isn’t so bad now and then when there’s nothing else we can do.”

The whispers of her smile are canine-sharp, and Leorio smiles right back.

[komatsunana]

For the prompt: Nana and Hachi talk on a roof, or, first kiss

thanks!! choosing first kiss... I had an idea to combine them but that woulda ended up a full-fledge fic and no one wants that lol :p

“It was on the train!”  Hachi repeats the same words she has been for the past five minutes, arguing with Nana.  They’d gotten to Jackson Hole twenty minutes early and were tiding themselves over with tea while they waited for Nobu to trade drop off the kids after taking them for the day.  “We were getting back from your concert at a club and we both leaned in at the same time and we kissed!  It was our first - I can’t believe you’ve forgotten it.”

“And I’m telling you, that was our third,” Nana says with a snort, scowling at her empty tea cup and her phone’s clock.  “Our first kiss was during the firework show.  And it was you that laid it into me!”

Hachi elbows Nana, but her rebuttal dies on her tongue as she sees Nobu, Satsuki, and Ren.

Their argument is placed on pause, but only momentarily as it only takes so long for the five of them to order their burgers and for Ren and Satsuki to share everything they’d done with their Uncle Nobu.

Nobu quirks an eyebrow and listens for a moment before breaking in, “Did you seriously forget?  Your first kiss was way before then - back when Hachi found Shin.  Nana kissed you.  I should know.  I was there.”  Nobu lets out a very put-upon sigh as both Hachi and Nana turn to each other.

“Oh,” they say together.  The children, who had been miming retching the entire time their mom and her girlfriend argued about kissing, finally duck away and escape to try and talk Koichi into letting them try a sip of beer.

“I forgot about that,” says Nana.

“I didn’t,” Hachi says with a sigh, “But we weren’t dating then, so I don’t think it counts.”

“Hmm,” says Nana idly.  “I dunno, I think I started falling in love with you around then.”

“Eh?!?!” Hachi clasps her face, as her face grows warm.  “Seriously?!?”

Nana just snorts and cracks into a laugh.

“Hmm,” Hachi says after some contemplation. “I think maybe I was pretty smitten with you too, by then.  We slept in the same bed that night, didn’t we? I remember feeling like I was falling in love for the first time... but we were both girls, so...”

Nana rolls her eyes.

“This makes me feel so great,” says Nobu with a feigned-pained expression. “We dated after that.”

Hachi giggles and Nana wraps an arm arm around Hachi, winking at Nobu, and leans in.  Hachi closes the gap and she kisses her.  It isn’t their first kiss and it is far from their last.

[icharchivist]

you say gon picked kurapika's disguise outfit i say leorio picked the glasses (fight me).

Okay but I wouldn’t fight I agree it makes total sense! 

Listen up, Gon brought up the wig and the hat and he was 100% thinking about Kite, meanwhile Leorio just looked at the disguise and just though “ye nah still not enough” (especially if Kurapika’s eyes turn red, that’s the kind of things Leorio would completely think about. Although it’s probably mostly aesthetics) and he bring out the biggest glasses he can find.

That’s completely canon really *nods nods*

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jyuanka replied to your post “soft breeze, check. leaves, check. casca gets a starry/campfire-y...”

tbh, as i was reading the manga, i thought that guts developed complex and complicated feelings for both of them (which involve romantic love, certainly). i don't think that casca was somehow a "replacement" for an unavailable griffith. moreover, i think casca herself was guilty of trying to understand and get to griffith through guts, not really the other way around.

That’s fair but honestly I actually do rly think that, while it's probably an accident of Miura shoving a ton of repressed feelings into the love triangle in just about every direction, and/or maybe just a side effect of the fact that Guts and Griffith are still the central relationship in the story and most other relationships in Berserk serve as support for it in some way, Guts’ feelings towards Casca do come across as redirected feelings for Griffith to me. Not so much Guts using Casca to try to get to Griffith or understand him, but more a sublimation of his subconscious feelings for someone he perceives as unavailable (for reasons that include both the stupid speech and the fact that he’s a dude) to someone who is available.

Like ik that sounds like a giant stretch so I can argue for my otp lol, and I mean yeah I’m ngl I’m biased, but eg here’s my favourite observation I’ve made about it, specifically about their sexual encounter, and it feels like a genuinely solid reading to me.

I also have a much longer thing on the same topic here that covers a lot more ground but like, that’s five thousand words lol so I’m just adding it for posterity’s sake, not actually telling you to read it (or the other post for that matter, I just linked them for curiosity’s sake, and bc I’ve already said p much everything I can think of to say about Guts and Casca and their feelings for Griffith in those posts so I’m being lazy lol)

[xyliane]

11 __ 14 __ 15 __ 16 __ 27

wheeeeee more salt times. 

11: Is there an unpopular character you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?okay serious confession time: I like tonpa. I mean, he is a useless sack of flesh, but as the first “villain” for the series he is both a fascinating and totally understandable choice: the more obvious villain (hisoka) is supportive to gon even at his most vicious, while this bag of slime of a human is more villainous. he’s there to provide an example of how a “hunter” can “hunt” even the most inconceivable things (tonpa hunts screwing over newbs to make himself feel better), and how the main four overcome that through a mix of talent, stubbornness, friendship, and gon’s determination and ability to think outside tonpa’s (or the reader’s or the committee’s) expectations. and his last act, to screw over leorio, gets his ass kicked but also affirms just how far leorio is willing to go for his own goals: that is, not near as far as any of the other three if it means permanently harming someone else. 

I like tonpa because he makes for the perfect starter villain for the boys, because he--like every other villain in hxh to some degree--thinks he knows who he is, and that he never really “loses” even if he drops out of the exam via a kick to the face. he’s already gotten what he wants, and he’ll come back next year to do it again. (well, he’ll come back and get his ass kicked by killua, but the year after, if the association hadn’t changed the test... you just know tonpa had his heart broken when he couldn’t fuck people over anymore. so I guess he does lose in the long run, too.)

14 and 15: answered here!

16: If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?shorten and sharpen up the chimera ant arc. the payoff for the arc is so, so good, but it is so, so long, and there is a fairly decent stretch leading up to the finale where the useless characters/ants are slaughtered just to get them off the page. this would also include a clearer character arc for palm, truncating some of the pre-mereum ant stuff (or at least streamlining it), and including more dogs for knuckle because I say so.

27: Least shippable character?I was gonna say tserriednich because that guy is the fucking worst but then I remembered bikini bunny man ant who only exists to measure killua’s power ups and be a creep and rammot is the fucking worst. togashi what the everliving fuck were  you thinking.

getcher fresh sodium chlorine right here!

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jyuanka replied to your post “you can tell that guts and griffith are meant to be ambiguously gay bc...”

i like to think the woman on skullknight's horse armor is a depiction of flora, flaring her wings for protection, being there as a good omen

yeah i always assumed it was flora too. i kinda figured it was just a token of whatever their relationship was, but i like the idea that it’s for protection, whether symbolic or actually magic.

[xyliane]

the hunted dragon

summary: pen 's been running for six weeks, hunted for four, and now that she finally thinks she’s free of the hunter pursuing her, she can take a moment and rest. she’s wrong, but at least there are waffles. (a gon character study)  

notes: @jyuanka​ left some super amazing tags on a gon headcanon post a while back about my headcanons of him as a lost hunter, and it spun into thoughts about what gon would look like from the pov of someone he’s hunting. long story short, green sunshine boy is a scary person. also ethics and morality for hunters is weird and complicated. gen (brief mention of assault), OC-pov, gon freecss. 2700 words. (sorry this is kind of super not what was originally intended)

also on ao3!

---

Pen thinks she’s finally lost him when a man built like a half-ton of well-used muscle and gravity-defying spikes of black hair drops into her booth with a pleasant smile on his face. It’s a really nice smile, surprisingly straight white teeth against freckled brown skin, especially for someone who’s been hunting her across the last four weeks. Nice enough that in other circumstances, Pen would believe him to genuinely be a pleasant person by his smile alone.

But she’s caught few enough glimpses of him over the last month that Pen knows, whoever this man is, he is the opposite of pleasant. Anyone with the sort of calm, cold, deliberate stalking, circling her in until she’s caged herself like a rabbit hunted by a wolfhound until it is stuck frozen and shivering and only able to wait—someone capable of that can’t be pleasant. That he did so while wearing a bright orange shirt under a forest green vest is more embarrassing to Pen than anything else. She should have seen that.

“I promise I won’t stop you if you try to leave, but at least let me pay for your lunch,” he says. “You haven’t had a good meal since you noticed me following you.”

She folds the rabbit shivers into the pit of her stomach and hopes they stay there. She’s a Hunter, dammit, not some meek prey. “And whose fault is that?”

“Yours, I think.” He flips open the menu, front teeth gnawing on his bottom lip as he looks over the diner’s fairly mediocre selection of salads and sandwiches. “And mine, and the person who hired me. But I’ve been eating less, too. You’re really hard to keep track of!”

He says it like it’s a massive compliment, beaming at her with an absolutely ridiculous amount of pride. Pen wants to punch it off his face, but the scars on his arms and the healed break in his nose make it obvious that a punch won’t do more than annoy at best and infuriate at worst. She doesn’t catch any feeling of aura, not more than any other well-trained tracker, but that scares her even more than his smile.

Pen doesn’t actually hate being scared. It’s served her well in the past, made her sharp, kept her alive at the worst points of her life. But a month of being constantly on that edge has dulled it until it’s useless and painful. She’s tired. And right now a hot meal sounds really, distractingly tempting, especially when—”Waffles?”

The man’s smile changes briefly into something warm and brilliant. “With whipped cream and chocolate chips. They’re really good. My best friend would love it.” He closes his menu and signals the waiter, who waves cheerfully. The few other customers are out of earshot, studiously munching on oversized sandwiches and slurping soups rather than trying to listen in on any conversations. Pen realizes with growing dismay that she didn’t just get caught in a diner in the middle of nowhere, she got caught in a diner that her hunter has been to before and befriended the staff. He may as well have planned this. Hells, he probably did.

Danger danger danger! cries the little rabbit in her stomach.

“So?” he asks. “Would you like lunch? Or do you want to leave?”

This is a bad idea. One with damning consequences if Pen doesn’t play her hand right. But it has been so long since she had warm food and the waiter is coming over anyways.

She orders the waffles with extra blueberries. They’re out of season. She’s not paying. The Hunter gets a funny look on his face, like he’s trying not to laugh, and orders a salad in a way that is probably meant to be argumentative. Whatever it is, it’s an argument Pen doesn’t hear and doesn’t care about. If he wants to talk, he can talk.

Instead, he reaches into his backpack and pulls out a small file and an old phone, a thick one with unbreakable glass that weigh almost enough to be used as a weapon without even bothering with nen. It’s not the phone Pen would pick, but it probably could pick up a cell signal in the middle of a desert or buried under a missile silo. He sticks his tongue out at whatever message he’s received before tucking it back into a pocket and rifling through the file. “Did you get the tattoos after the Hunter Exam?” he asks.

She bristles instinctively and does not slap her hands over her tattoos, partly because at least a few of the marks would take offense and try to stab her. Instead, the bear and dragon whisper across her skin, fangs and claws bared. They’re hers. They are her. “What’s it to you?” she demands.

He grins, eyes tracing the dragon as it loops around her left arm from her shoulder all the way to her wrist. It originally came from her back, so there’s more of it than can possibly fit on her arm. Unleashed, it’s almost unstoppable. For now, it’s content to be color dyed into her skin. “I just thought it was pretty. It’s not like a lot of hatsu, you know?”

She doesn’t bother to answer that. It’s not his right. She doesn’t even know this man’s name, doesn’t know anything about him other than he’s more powerful than he seems and has been chasing her. “You were hired to find me,” she says.

“Mm-hm.” He sips at one of the cups of ice water.

“Then you know why I ran.”

He nods. “You’ve killed ten people in Padokea, including one administrator and most of his staff.”

“And I’d do it again if I could,” Pen says. She sets her jaw defiantly, the tattoos on her skin crawling with the desire to get out and restrain this man, this Hunter. But he still has that pleasant, almost vacant look on his face, shifting only slightly to thank the waiter as they set down a stack of waffles nearly up to Pen’s nose and a massive salad. The sheer smell of butter and syrup alone is almost enough to make Pen forget where she is or who she’s talking to—a veritable pillow of waffles, golden brown and fluffy and this is not at all what she should be focused on.

The man shrugs and slips the papers back into his bag, plopping it into the corner of his side of the booth before stabbing at his lunch of rabbit food dressed up with chicken. “I know. And I’d let you, I think.”

Those are words she doesn’t expect to hear, least of all from a Hunter. She shoves half of the waffles into her mouth to give herself time to think, and the man laughs a little, hand rubbing the back of his neck. “Why would you do that?” she manages once most of the food is down her throat.

“Well, this has been a fun hunt!”

Pen chokes. She blames the whipped cream. “Fun.”

“Sure! You are pretty good at staying off anyone’s radar, although you’re a little better at it in cities than forests, so you shouldn’t have left Yorknew. But this has been way better than most things the Association hires me for. I normally get hired to deal with tax evasion—some Hunters hate that the Association can tie us to them with finicky rules, so they hide where they think no one can find them.” He makes a face, nose scrunched up in displeasure. “The worst ones are the ones who don’t want to be paid.”

“Who wouldn’t want to be paid?” Pen asks incredulously.

“My friend Leorio says idiots, mostly.”

Pen bursts out laughing, then immediately remembers she’s not supposed to be even talking with her hunter, let alone laughing with him. “So if you wouldn’t stop me from murdering those people in their offices, why can’t you let me go?”

“Oh, I’m not here because of the murders!” The genuine warm smile is back on his face, a little sheepish. “I’m sorry. That would have made things easier if I could have explained it.”

“So it’s my fault for running?”

The man takes a long slurp of water, ice cracking. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to either.

“I didn’t have any other choice! If I hadn’t run, then someone else might’ve been blamed. I did it, it’s my fault.” She jabs her fork into the table hard enough that the cheap metal goes right through the thick plastic with a resounding crack, and the few other people in the diner all jump in their seats.

The man doesn’t even blink. “Okay,” he says.

“They deserved to die.”

“It’s not my call.”

“But it was mine?”

The man sets down his glass and looks Pen in the eye. His eyes are level, and calm, and horrifyingly cold, like they’ve sucked all the warmth out of his face. “If you made it, it was yours. If someone else told you to do it, you had a choice too. If you think it was worth it, and you still think so, then that’s what you think.” Pen can’t fight the shivers crawling out of her stomach. “If I was hunting you for your murders, I would have found you much sooner and asked you about them. And if what you said isn’t true, then there’d be a problem.”

Problem. Hunters have good instincts, most of the time. Pen’s have kept her alive for her whole life, helped her dye her skin with nen-laced ink and let her fight her way out of worse places than a diner booth. And her instincts are telling her this man has killed over problems—not liked it much, maybe, but he has, and he won’t hesitate to do it again, and then he’ll move on as simply as though squashing an ant.

“Am I a problem?” she asks, hating how small her voice sounds. Her tattoo made of bladed teeth circles from its place around her bicep and loops around her wrist, tightening worryingly over her pulse. Problem or not, scared rabbit or not, she won’t let anyone take her without a fight.

He laughs again, and light returns to his eyes as though it had never left, easy smile on his face open and genuine once again. “Just for the person who hired me. But I don’t think she minds. She did hire me, after all.” He passes over a small card. Pen’s picture is on one side, a rare smile on her own face and hair a different color than it is now. She doesn’t remember having this picture taken, but she recognizes the festival, colorful lanterns illuminating the dragon dancing across her neck and shoulders. It had been right after the Hunter Exam, when things seemed good, before…

On the other side is her name scrawled in a familiar hand, and the words Please bring her back.

“We can keep going, if you want. I meant it when I said this has been fun.”

“I…” Pen clenches her fist over the photograph. Her heart aches—not for the first time, but more sharply than it has in weeks. Maybe she hasn’t completely drowned her sorrows yet. “How did she find you? Syl’s not a Hunter, she can’t afford someone like you.”

The man shrugs. “Friend of a friend. I think? And a hunt this good pays for itself.” He grimaces. “This is much better than the Association’s jobs. I charge them as much as I can because most of those are about yelling loudly at other Hunters, not about hunting. I like hunting, or I wouldn’t be a Hunter.”

“Makes sense.”

“Do you like being a Hunter, Pen?”

Pen drops the photo of herself. It settles, crumpled and smiling, against the cheap diner table. The man simply watches with the sides of his lips turned up, attentive and patient like he actually cares about this. And the scary thing is, even scarier than the unsettling conviction lurking inside his smile, is that Pen believes he does. She wants to tell him how she always looked up to Hunters as people who could do anything they wanted. That the Exam had been everything she’d ever dreamed. That when she had seen that asinine twit take advantage—

Hunters can do anything they want. Pen’s a Hunter. She did. For a while, that’s all she did, not caring about anyone else except what she wanted. And that’s still what she did, taking matters into her own hands when no one else would stop her. So she doesn’t regret the feeling of teeth and claws and chains tearing through his flesh, filtered through her tattoos made real with nen and fury. That man, his accomplices, all of them, they deserved what they got.

She regrets the look on her sister’s face as she stood there, blood covering even the darkest ink of her tattoos, sirens blaring and people shouting.

Pen wants to tell this strange, terrifying, kind-seeming man that she’s a Hunter because of that. But she doesn’t.

Instead she says, “It’s not your business, Hunter.”

He holds her gaze for another moment, staring straight through the back of her head to the blood that’s long since washed off, before breaking away with a small sigh. “I guess not,” he says, and just like that, lets it go. Pen’s almost jealous at how easily it slips away from him, water off a duck or under a bridge.

They’re quiet when the check comes, and the Hunter counts out a scattering of cash, coins rattling around in circles. “So? Do you want to keep going?” he says.

“Going?”

“You never answered my question earlier, if you want to keep going on this hunt.” He props his chin up on a fist, wistful smile on his lips. “But I think Syl misses you.”

“I—” Pen carefully picks the photo back up, turns it over to look at the scrawl her sister calls handwriting. “Do you have people you miss, Hunter?”

He smiles brightly, almost brilliant in the afternoon sun. “Yeah, I do. But sometimes, you need to go hunting, you know? Find something new. Make new friends. Chase something exciting.” He holds out his hand. “I can go home whenever you’re ready.”

She takes it, and his hand is warm and solid and scattered with callouses and scars. “I’ll think about it.”

“Promise?”

She smiles before she can stop it. “I promise.”

“Then I’ll wait at the airship for a day. There’s a seat for you if you want it.” Her hand shakes up and down three times before he drops it.

They’re most of the way out of the diner (the server and the waitstaff stop him to shove a massive takeaway box into his hands, despite his protests) when Pen finally asks, “If I’m accepting the ticket—maybe,” she adds hastily, because she has to think about this, and the man’s wide grin is not enough to convince her. “If I do, what name is it under?”

“Oh, sorry!” He rubs the back of his head bashfully. “I’m really bad with introductions, and I already knew your name too. My name’s Gon. It’s nice to meet you, Pen! Formally, at least.”

“You are a very strange Hunter, Gon—” Pen halts, half a foot still in the diner. The man—Hunter—Gon stops and stares, about to ask what’s wrong when she blurts out, “You’re Gon Freecss???”

He blinks innocently. “Yeah?”

She’d had Gon Freecss after her. This whole time. There are stories told in the Association, rumors and tall tales and things that can’t possibly be true. But Pen’s tattoos come to life, and there is a Hunter with no nen who is somehow all the more terrifying for it. Pen almost feels relieved, that it took someone like him to track her. But that means her sister knows someone who knows Freecss, and Pen…can’t really consider that right now.

“I’m going home,” she says, and storms past him, perfectly aware that the dragon on her back loops up her neck to hiss at the very confused Hunter left standing in the dust.