Spinoff about Pariston's youth until he met Netero.
Pariston lives in a wartorn country, two nations that kill each other since forever in a bloody stalemate. His foster father is a general, he and his brother are brought up to be soldiers. His real mother was the general's sister, but she was insane and tried to kill pariston at birth, so pariston got taken away.
Pariston gets raised as a soldier. While he is not openly disobedient, early on he tries for wriggle room in this severely rigid and controlling system. He plays games, but he respects his father because like netero, his father is the only one who can really play with pariston.
The blindspot of his father is that he really is a good man who loves his family. He notices something is off about heavy sabotage, people defecting and so on, and while he is able to properly combat it, he does not suspect it to be pariston who is responsible for it. That makes Pariston ever angrier. He wants to be seen by his father and wants his father to really react to him. He wants to see what his father would do once he really pushes him over the edge.
Some day, Pariston has enough and to get a proper reaction, he creates a situation where the general's wife (his foster mother) dies. He is thrilled to see what the general will do. Pariston framed it like it were foreign agents. Will he lead an all out war? Will he finally see it was pariston's doing? But instead of doing something extreme, the general just breaks down in tears and sobs in front of pariston, trying to have a genuine moment of grief with his son. The general is out cold and does not even know why he is fighting anymore.
Pariston is thrown into a deep crisis by that. Its like his father just abandoned him. How can he just stop? The last person that could play with pariston is left as a sobbing mess and Pariston is completely empty and devoid of any relief for his boredom.
He lashes out more and more and just lets the war escalate in the pursuit of ever more chaos to find something to play with, until finally V5 steps in along with the hunters org to cease the situation. At a peace meeting, pariston has an easy time negotiating freedom for himself so he can just leave the region and do whatever he wants. Nobody suspects that he was the mainculprit for the all out escalation of the battle, except netero.
Netero confront him about it, in a nice way. He lets pariston know he knows what he did and belittles him in a teasing way about leaving tracks. Pariston is thrilled by that old man. Netero asks him to take the hunter's exam if he wants to continue that conversation some day, pariston says he will.
But i am glad at least the premise is good.
