Tserriednich Hui Guo Rou knew something was wrong the moment he woke up.
Half his security detail was simply gone. Not reassigned. Not rotated. Gone. When he pressed the survivors for details about the previous night, every answer came out fragmented, hesitant, full of gaps that no amount of shouting could fill.
He had survived assassination attempts before. None of them had left him this completely in the dark. A full-scale attack had torn through his hotel, bodies had piled up, and he himself remembered nothing after walking through the front doors.
That absence of memory sat wrong in his gut.
Newspapers kept arriving. The television never stopped looping the same grainy footage of shattered café windows and blood-slick pavement. Official reports, tabloids, anonymous tips—he read all of them. A low, persistent urgency had taken root behind his ribs, the kind of instinct that had kept him alive this long. Ignore it, and something far worse than a failed hit would find him.
One cheap tabloid finally caught his eye.
According to an unnamed customer who had been inside the café at the time, every single hotel security officer who entered the building died at the hands of one young man. Yellow hair pulled into a single high ponytail. Moved like something out of a comic book. Bullets never touched him. A grenade went off at close range and left him unharmed. He finished the entire squad with his bare hands, then walked into a side alley and vanished.
One man.
Bullets useless. Explosives useless.
Tserriednich's first reaction was disbelief. Even the monsters who fought at the top floors of Heaven's Arena still died when enough high-caliber rounds found them. No one simply walked through concentrated gunfire and walked out again.
Yet the official releases kept circling the same conclusion. One attacker. One sketch. One bounty—one hundred million Jenny—for a single face.
If the reports were even half true, the man who had nearly killed him was operating on a level Tserriednich had never personally encountered.
He needed to know whether that level was real.
After a long silence he reached for the phone.
An hour later he left the palace compound—not for his own hotel, but for a private residence deeper in the capital. The man waiting for him there had handled his dirtier problems for years and always turned a profit doing it.
Duru, current head of the Ai Family, one of Kakin's three great underworld powers.
If anyone in this country could tell him whether human beings like the one in the sketch truly existed, it would be Duru.
While Tserriednich was making that call, Ronin reunited with Kurapika on a quiet rooftop overlooking the city center.
Kurapika already knew every detail of the previous night's failure.
"Tserriednich's collection could be anywhere," he said. "But if you want to test how the other princes are being guarded, I have a clean target for you."
"Who?"
The royal family's overall posture after the attack had been surprisingly loose. Most of the princes still moved around the capital with the same casual arrogance as before. Ronin had options. The fact that Kurapika was volunteering a specific name meant there was more attached to it.
"The Third Prince," Kurapika said. "His background and resources are almost identical to the Fourth's. If systematic ability users exist, they are most likely to appear at his side."
Ronin frowned. "Wouldn't a weaker prince be a better test? If Nasubi is the one planting these people, the softest targets should still have them."
"Under normal circumstances, yes." Kurapika nodded once. "But the two men who protected Tserriednich last night had complementary abilities. One detection-type that flagged anyone who could see Nen, one emergency extraction that required the prince to be unconscious. That kind of pairing doesn't happen by accident."
Ronin went quiet. He hadn't considered the possibility of deliberate, standardized training.
Then the memory of something else surfaced.
"Untouchables," he said.
"Exactly. Camilla has already proven that even limited control over Untouchables is enough to produce specialized counter-abilities aimed at the other princes. Nasubi has far greater resources and far longer to work with. If he decided to mass-produce protective specialists, the result would look exactly like what you ran into last night."
Ronin accepted the logic. Testing the Third Prince therefore served two purposes at once. Matching ability sets would confirm systematic training under the king's hand. Different ability sets would still reveal whether Nasubi had seeded protectors among the other heirs.
Either outcome was useful. The Third Prince simply carried the highest chance of exposing the most dangerous version of the truth.
Kurapika's mouth curved slightly. "There's a secondary option as well—the Eighth Prince. No talent, no ambition, spends every night drinking and buying company. If even he has dedicated Nen protection, then the king is deliberately shielding all of them. And that means the people we have already seen are only the visible layer."
He let the implication hang.
There would be a second layer. Quiet. Hidden. Waiting for anyone who managed to breach the first.