Every ability question chapter 419 left open was about what happens when Laplace's Demon meets someone who can use Nen. No.420「遭遇」 — Encounter — answers it, and the answer is not a fight. Tserriednich activates the ability on a man in the casino, and comes out of it with a wound he does not have, two numbers he did not have before, and a decision to run.

The numbers are the news. The ability has a finite charge, which no chapter has ever indicated, and Tserriednich cannot currently switch it on fast enough to use it in combat.

What 419 established

  • The name: 刹那の10秒, read ラプラスデビル
  • A radius of roughly 36 m from the activation point
  • Anyone outside at activation stays unaffected
  • Tested only on ordinary soldiers
  • Roughly 2.92 s to re-enter Zetsu

What 420 adds

  • First use against someone who is not an ordinary soldier
  • A finite charge — spend-to-recharge estimated at 23:1
  • Reserve almost gone; one more use if he drops Zetsu
  • Needs sub-0.1 s Zetsu to fire from a combat stance
  • He fears the opponent noticed his Nen beast

What happens

Tier 1 is sealed under the First Prince's special martial law, and the public-address system is telling passengers to stay where they are. Tserriednich reaches the casino floor and finds it empty of soldiers — then finds the soldiers. They are dead across the aisles, throats opened with a sharp blade. He notes there are no spent casings anywhere: they were killed before anyone could fire.

Then he hears something, and finds a man sitting alone at a machine called SWAMP BALL, playing it, in the middle of a lockdown. Tserriednich does not recognise him and gives him a working nickname — 沼男(仮), printed with the reading Numawo, roughly "Swamp Man (provisional)".

  1. p. 433The bodiesKing's Army soldiers dead across the casino floor, throats opened with a blade. Tserriednich notes there are no shell casings — they never got a shot off.
  2. p. 436The planClose to inside 36 m, hold Zetsu, presence fully suppressed. Fire one shot by way of a greeting, then activate the ability and watch the reaction.
  3. p. 438ActivationLaplace's Demon fires. It is the first time the manga has shown it used on someone who is not a rank-and-file soldier.
  4. pp. 439–440The ten secondsTserriednich is opened up, bleeding, on the floor. The man standing over him is disappointed, and says so.
  5. p. 441Back to the roomThe same lines play a second time. This time Tserriednich is standing, untouched, silent — and the man walks past him.
  6. pp. 444–447The retreatHe runs, laughing, admits the level gap out loud, and starts costing out what it would take to close it.

He sets up carefully: inside 36 metres, Zetsu holding, presence fully erased. The plan he states is to fire one shot as a greeting, trigger the ability, and read the reaction.

What follows is the chapter's whole trick. We see Tserriednich cut open and bleeding on the floor while the man looks down at him, bored, and calls him a corpse. Then the same conversation runs again from a wider angle — and this time Tserriednich is standing, silent, unmarked, and the man simply walks past him. The last panel of the sequence is the prince's face behind his sunglasses, breathing hard, with no wound at all.

What the chapter confirms outright

Everything here is printed on the page.

  • The ability has a charge, and he is nearly out of it. Tserriednich estimates the ratio of consumption to recharge at 23:1 and concludes his Nen beast has almost no reserve left. He also says that losing because the battery died would be humiliating.
  • Dropping Zetsu buys exactly one more activation. He works this out, considers it, and refuses.
  • He needs sub-0.1-second Zetsu. The chapter prints コンマ0秒台 with the reading サブワン — sub-one. He calls it mandatory, because without it the ability cannot be triggered from a combat stance in a real fight.
  • He is terrified the man saw his Nen beast. He talks himself out of it in three beats — impossible, an ability the opponent can perceive would be worthless, there is no way it can be seen.
  • The man weighed killing him and declined. "Prince-killer" has a decent ring to it, he decides, but killing these people would not be a thrill.
  • Tserriednich is unhurt, and knows he was killed. Looking at the dead soldiers afterwards he thinks: the same way "I" was killed — it's him.
  • The ship is sealed from outside. Completely surrounded; nothing gets out or in.
  • 420 ends the run. The chapter closes with "No.420 おわり" and a note that the next instalment will be announced when it is decided.
A bar split 23 to 1 between spent and regained aura, beside two panels: reserve remaining, almost none; and if he drops Zetsu now, one more use.
The limit the ability never had until this chapter. The ratio is Tserriednich's own estimate, and he says so. Diagram: ABYSS CURRENT · from HUNTER×HUNTER No.420, Weekly Shonen Jump 2026 issue 41

The battery nobody knew about

Until this chapter, the only cost attached to Laplace's Demon was the Zetsu requirement. 419 gave it a radius and a blind spot; nothing gave it a fuel gauge.

The 23:1 figure is worth handling precisely, because Tserriednich handles it precisely. He prefaces it with おそらく — "probably". This is a man estimating his own consumption from a few days of use, not a rule the narration hands us. What is not an estimate is the conclusion he draws from it: he has almost nothing left, and he plans his next move around that rather than around the enemy.

That reframes the whole ability. A foresight power with no stated limit is a solved problem waiting for an opponent. A foresight power with a spend-to-recharge ratio somewhere near 23:1 is a resource that runs out mid-arc, and the Succession Contest now has a clock on it.

Two bars. The first, roughly 2.92 seconds, is what chapter 419 measured for re-entering Zetsu. The second, under 0.1 seconds, is what chapter 420 says he needs.
He does not describe this as a goal. He describes it as the condition for the ability working in a fight at all. Diagram: ABYSS CURRENT · from HUNTER×HUNTER No.419–420, Weekly Shonen Jump 2026 issues 40–41

The second number

The other figure is the one that decides matchups. 419 measured roughly 2.92 seconds for Tserriednich to re-enter Zetsu. 420 has him state that he needs to get that under a tenth of a second — about thirty times faster — or the ability is simply not usable once a fight has started.

Read against the encounter, that is an unusually clean piece of self-diagnosis. The ability worked. It bought him the ten seconds. What it could not do was let him act on them against this particular opponent, and he understands why well enough to name the missing variable on his way out.

The man is never named

This matters, so we are being exact about it: the chapter does not print his name. What it prints is a set of markers.

His speech bubbles carry ♠, ♦, ♥ and ♣. A playing card appears in the exchange. He says he assumed Tserriednich might be the 旅団 — furigana クモ, the Spider — because he was holding Zetsu, which means he is aboard hunting the Phantom Troupe. He measures a potential kill purely by whether it would give him a thrill.

In HUNTER×HUNTER, that combination belongs to one person. We are calling him Hisoka, and you should know the identification rests on those markers rather than on a caption. It also settles the casino theory we scored at 4/10 last week: he was still there.

What is not answered

Four things, and the hiatus means we may wait a while for them. Chapter 421 has no announced date; we track the status, and what Togashi has already reported finishing, in when will HUNTER×HUNTER chapter 421 release?

Whether Hisoka actually registered the Nen beast is left hanging on Tserriednich's panic and one look back. Whether the ten-second sequence we watched was a prediction, a rehearsal, or something the ability did to Tserriednich's own perception is not explained — the chapter shows it and moves on. How much reserve "almost none" actually is stays uncounted. And which of his two roads he takes — back up to the 王子居住区 (printed with the reading ペントハウス, Penthouse) or into hiding to recharge — is the note the chapter ends on, unresolved, under a caption calling him the fourth prince who does not stop.

Our read on the matchup itself was published before this chapter existed, and the rows that held up are the ones about what happens on contact: Can Tserriednich beat Hisoka? For where this leaves him against his siblings, see the strongest Kakin princes ranked.

Read directly from HUNTER×HUNTER No.420「遭遇」in Weekly Shonen Jump 2026 issue 41, on sale 7 September 2026, pages 429–447. Every fact above is from the printed page rather than a secondary summary.