Serial monitor displays ASCII, not binary.
If you wanted to you could pipe the Arduino output straight to file and then read that with a hex editor.
Using Arduino write to transfer values as binary saves cycles and buffer by not text-translating to ASCII.
16 bits unsigned.can be 0 to 65536. That's 6 bytes with terminating NULL for what 2 bytes can transfer.
But it's a good idea to CRC binary serial message strings. Check is good.