"Where exactly are you looking?"
Bisky frowned, crossing her arms and staring up at Liam exactly as if he had just completely failed a highly basic perception test.
A moment ago, Shizuku had silently raised her hand and pointed a pale finger directly out across the sprawling, moonlit grassland. She was pointing at a specific spot over ten kilometers away in the dark, indicating the exact direction where someone was currently hiding and secretly watching them.
Liam, however, was currently looking in the complete opposite direction, staring blankly at a dark cluster of trees.
Realizing his mistake, he turned around naturally, pointed a finger in the correct direction alongside Shizuku, and nodded as if he had known all along. "Oh. Right. Over there. I see it."
Bisky sighed heavily. She hopped down gracefully from the broad back of Lumos, casually brushed off the imaginary dust from her pink princess skirt, and asked suddenly, "Kid, tell me the truth. You haven't actually been fighting for very long, have you? Your real, life-or-death combat experience is still pretty limited."
Liam shrugged, answering honestly. "From the exact moment I first awakened my Nen nodes until right now? No matter how generously I calculate the timeline, it has barely been a single year. And before that? I was just an ordinary guy living a completely ordinary life."
It was the absolute truth. As his raw physical strength and his total aura capacity had skyrocketed to monstrous levels, his natural senses, reflexes, and combat intuition had also sharpened dramatically. But he still entirely lacked the kind of gritty, ingrained street experience that veterans like Bisky and Shizuku possessed. Hell, even Shizuku, who had grown up in the brutal environment of Meteor City and traveled completely alone around the dangerous world before finally meeting him, had vastly more practical, real-world combat experience than Liam did.
He could easily sense the heavy, spying gaze resting on them. But pinpointing its exact, precise location in the dark? That required a specific type of tracking experience he simply did not have yet. Of course, the vast distance did not help his case. If the hidden watcher had been lurking within a mere kilometer or two, Liam could have easily locked onto the source by feeling the physical pressure of the aura alone, no tracking experience necessary.
Bisky shook her head, commenting flatly. "You simply got too strong, far too fast. You entirely skipped all the necessary growing pains, the brutal beatings, and the hard, painful lessons you should have learned along the way to reaching your current level."
Shizuku looked over, adjusting her glasses. "How do you suggest he makes up for that lack of experience?"
Liam rubbed his chin, thinking about it for a second. "Honestly? If you can always reliably depend on raw, overwhelming power to simply brute-force your way through any problems you face, you don't really need to think too hard about the details."
After all, would a massive tiger ever bother to sit down and study exactly how tiny rabbits and foxes fought each other in the dirt?
"That right there is the real question, isn't it?" Bisky pointed out, her tone sharpening. "Can you actually guarantee that you will always maintain enough raw power to completely outmatch every single opponent you ever meet?"
She paused for a moment, letting the heavy question sink in.
"And besides that," she continued, "there is always someone stronger out there. There is always someone sitting exactly at your level. There is always someone aiming higher. When you eventually face those specific opponents, if they have decades of combat experience and you have absolutely none, then you will suffer horribly for it. You will get ambushed. You will get outmaneuvered. You will be led into traps. As a proper Hunter, you should constantly strive to learn and understand everything about combat, even if you only understand a little bit of each field."
She reached up and tapped her forehead with a small finger. "The deeper your Nen practice becomes, the stronger your aura grows, and the stronger your fundamental life force becomes. Because of that, your mind naturally gets sharper, brighter, and faster. At the absolute minimum, your base thinking speed should currently be vastly faster than that of an ordinary person. If it isn't, how can you possibly execute complex tactical thinking and rapid strategy in the middle of a high-speed, fierce battle?"
Liam nodded slowly, absorbing the lecture and accepting the harsh lesson. The professional Hunter community really did have a lot of incredibly knowledgeable people worth listening to.
With the lecture concluded, the three of them began walking steadily across the nighttime grassland, heading directly toward the distant source of that spying sensation. They chatted casually as they walked through the silver-frosted grass.
Lumos padded softly alongside them, his massive paws making almost no sound on the dirt. His crystal-white fur shimmered beautifully in the darkness, illuminated by the pale cyan glow of his natural stripes. He looked completely mysterious and magnificent. Jaku flew in lazy circles overhead for a while, acting as a scout, before finally fluttering down to land comfortably on the wide head of the tiger, hopping curiously along the glowing cyan stripes.
The vast prairie at night held only the biting, cool breeze, the soft rustle of shifting grass, and the occasional, rhythmic chirp of hidden insects. The sheer silence of the empty landscape felt almost oppressive.
As they walked, Liam vaguely remembered reading in the manga that there was a designated starting town located very near the exact spot where new players first spawned into Greed Island. That was probably where the spying sensation was currently originating from. It was likely just a group of veteran players camping outside the landing site. It was the most classic, basic strategy in any online game: camp the spawn point and aggressively bully the defenseless newbies.
Suddenly, a bright streak of white light tore across the dark night sky, arcing directly toward them.
Ah, Liam thought with a smirk. Here comes someone who really wants to bully the newbies.
As Liam, Shizuku, Bisky, Lumos, and Jaku all stopped and watched quietly, the white streak of light—which looked exactly like a character flying straight off the animated set of Dragon Ball—slammed down heavily onto the dirt directly in front of them with a loud, dramatic crash, kicking up a cloud of dust and frost.
When the dust cleared, it revealed a distinctly fat man. He had thick, sneering lips, narrow, cruel eyes, and a massive, heavy card album floating magically in the air right beside his hand.
The fat man immediately focused a surge of aura into his gaze for a second, confidently sizing up the fresh meat he had just blocked from leaving the starting zone.
Yes, he thought, grinning. Definitely fresh newbies.
He had just flown over aggressively and pulled out his glowing card album right in front of their faces. They had clearly seen his entire intimidating approach. And what was their immediate reaction? Absolutely nothing. They were just standing there, staring at him blankly. It was a textbook, flawless performance from people who had just stepped foot into Greed Island for the very first time. These types of players were always still heavily reeling from the profound shock of the environment. They were always thinking: What kind of insane, god-like Nen ability could possibly create a physical game this incomprehensible? They had only been in-game for a very short time. They were still deeply confused. Still entirely overwhelmed by the sheer novelty of it all.
Looking closely at the group, the fat man quickly made his threat assessments. The little girl wearing the frilly pink skirt was absolutely nothing to worry about. She was obviously just some arrogant genius kid type. It wasn't entirely uncommon for young kids to miraculously awaken Nen abilities, but they rarely ever had any real, practical combat experience. The short-haired girl wearing glasses with the vacant, unbothered expression didn't look like much of a threat either. The tall young guy standing in the middle, however—nearly two full meters tall and built like a fighter—he looked kind of physically intimidating. But the fat man had always deeply disliked guys with incredibly good looks. What was the point of being tall and handsome in here? On Greed Island, the cards came first!
As long as you got hit squarely with a powerful spell card on the very first move, what difference did it make if you were some martial arts master or a beautiful, talented genius? Could you possibly escape the absolute, hard-coded rules of the game on this island? No! As long as you were physically trapped in this game, you had to strictly follow the rules of the cards!
The fat man sneered twice, highly confident in his victory, and dramatically raised his hand to pull a devastating spell card from his floating album.
He opened his thick lips, taking a deep breath to read the activation name of the card.
And then he froze.
He was completely, entirely frozen in place.
He couldn't move a single muscle in his body.
The tall, handsome young man standing casually across from him smiled, waved a hand, and said in a highly pleasant, friendly tone, "Come here."
A wave of absolute, freezing horror washed over the fat man as his body suddenly jerked forward. Moving completely against his own will, his legs carried him directly toward the group, perfectly obeying the casual instructions of the young man.
"Wow, you have certainly got a lot of cards in there, don't you?" The young man noted casually. He glanced down at the glowing pages of the card album spread open in the trembling hands of the fat man. Then, the young man simply stretched out his own empty hand and shouted clearly, "BOOK!"
With a loud, magical bang, a large, heavy tome materialized out of thin air and floated obediently right in front of him.
Damn it, the fat man screamed internally, his eyes wide with panic. Why is he so incredibly practiced at summoning the book? You are not a clueless newbie at all!
The young man calmly turned his heavy book completely upside down, displaying every single empty card slot on every pristine, untouched page. "Transfer the funds. Come on now. Fill them all in yourself."
The fat man then watched entirely helplessly as his own hands moved independently. Completely beyond his control, and even though his heart was metaphorically bleeding from the sheer financial loss, his fingers reached out and pulled out the highly valuable cards he had collected through so much immense time and effort. One by one. His hands were perfectly, terrifyingly steady as they meticulously slotted each and every stolen card directly into the album of the young man.
The very last thing the fat man saw before the lights went out was the young man suddenly appearing directly at his side, moving like a teleporting ghost. The hard edge of a hand grew rapidly larger in his peripheral vision, striking him cleanly on the neck.
Tell me, Liam thought, touching his chest and complaining silently to the beating heart inside him. If it weren't for you constantly suppressing my urges, I absolutely would have just killed him right here and earned myself a nice, massive chunk of death energy for free.
Before the fat man had even landed from his dramatic flight, Liam had already quickly flicked out a tiny Flying Star Bubble and hidden it perfectly in the tall grass where the man was about to step.
Liam's natural aptitude for Manipulation was sitting firmly at the sixth tier on the Nen hexagon chart. His Emission affinity was currently at Level 3. He could easily release and maintain incredibly fine, precise control over aura entirely separated from his body within a massive five-kilometer radius. Add in his incredible natural talent for Conjuration, and his abilities were staggering. Originally, when he first developed his power, he had needed physical hair and fresh blood as a necessary medium to draw the pentagram symbol inside his Flying Star Bubbles. Now? He could directly use his pure aura to instantly materialize the pentagram out of thin air. Making and deploying Flying Star Bubbles had become absolute kid's play for him.
After the arrogant fat man had landed in the dirt, the hidden Flying Star Bubble had quietly drifted up from the grass behind him, violently burned itself directly onto the back of his thick neck, and instantly taken absolute, direct control of his central nervous system.
After cheerfully accepting all the valuable cards the opponent had so generously donated to his collection, Liam chopped the fat player cleanly on the back of the neck with the edge of his hand. He knocked the man completely unconscious and simultaneously removed the glowing Star Mark from his skin. It was two birds with one stone.
"Wow, I am just so incredibly lucky today. I only walked a few steps into the grass and someone literally flew over just to deliver high-level equipment directly to me. Is this some kind of hidden newbie bonus system?" Liam joked.
He casually examined the many cards he had just acquired as he resumed walking across the prairie. As he flipped through the pages, he noticed that the game system integrated into his card album meticulously kept records of every single player name you had encountered since logging in.
Harvest Tooth? Liam read the name and scoffed. What kind of incredibly stupid, edgy name had that fat guy given himself? So many names in this strange world were genuinely weird and incredibly hard to pronounce. Liam made a deeply disgusted face. Meanwhile, he noticed that the names for Lumos and Jaku hadn't been entered manually by anyone. The automated game system must have just automatically defaulted to using their exact species' scientific names to identify them.
He ignored the names and continued examining the massive stack of cards he had just received.
Twelve designated target cards. Not a bad haul at all.
Thirty-three of the forty-five free card slots were completely filled. Nineteen of those thirty-three were highly useful spell cards. Of the remaining fourteen slots, ten of them were filled with local, island-specific banknotes that had been turned into cards simply for easier carrying. The other four slots were obviously just filled with random tree branches and smooth stones picked up off the roadside, likely just to fill the slots and test the mechanics.
"Talk about being incredibly lucky!" Liam said, stopping to read one of the nineteen spell cards aloud, carefully checking its description text. "Number 1014, Leave. Transports a player directly off the island. It is a short-range spell card. Rarity level: B-30." He grinned broadly. "That fat guy actually had a card sitting right in his pocket that would let him log off and leave the island safely anytime he wanted. No wonder he was acting so incredibly arrogant."
Very arrogant? Shizuku raised a mental question mark, not quite understanding the joke.
Bisky sighed and shook her head. Since this game apparently allowed players to easily seize cards from one another through raw physical force, the overall difficulty of the island had instantly dropped to nearly zero for her. She had already quickly lost what little genuine interest she had held for the mechanics. "Don't you want to actually train? Let's just focus on our practice while we slowly try to clear the game and get that Blue Planet gem."
"Sure, we can do that," Liam replied, closing his book. "But first, we need to find Tsezguerra and the other Hunters that Battera hired to clear this thing. All the JoyStation game consoles sitting in that castle belong entirely to me now. Why should I generously let them occupy my valuable resources for free?"
Liam shouted "BOOK" again, and the heavy card album vanished instantly in a puff of white smoke, exactly like a shadow clone disappearing in a ninja manga.
He looked over at Lumos, whose natural stripes glowed with a beautiful cyan light in the dark night, and then at the little gray bird barely visible perched on top of the head of the tiger.
He chuckled softly. "Also? I really don't like playing games the exact way the arrogant designers intended me to play them. They tell me to move forward? I want to move backward. They say I need to strictly collect a hundred designated cards to properly clear the game? I'm going to look for exploits. I am going to find the bugs. I am going to break the loopholes."