"Our Minds Are United."
The words were spoken as a quiet murmur. Surrounded by Kurapika's relentless attacks and the sweeping strikes of the Nen beast Jade, Chrollo Lucilfer was already bleeding. Yet, the moment the phrase left his lips, his physical body dissolved. He instantly turned into a concentrated sphere of aura, shooting downward through the concrete floors to escape.
Deep in the secure shadows of the underground parking garage, the sphere collided with Yonger. The little white-haired girl acted as a living anchor. In a grotesque twist of Nen, the two merged, forming a bizarre, fleshy construct: a figure with only one leg, a torso, but entirely lacking a head or arms.
This was the true nature of Yonger's Conjuration ability. However, once the ability was activated, she only served as a central hub connecting the incoming parts. The actual control of the fused form did not belong to her.
Phinks stood nearby, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his tracksuit. He stared blankly at the one-legged, headless thing that had just materialized on the damp concrete.
"Is that you, Chrollo?" Phinks asked, his voice steady. "Do not dissolve the fusion."
"Why?" The voice echoed strangely, emanating directly from the chest cavity of the headless figure. It was Yonger speaking.
"Have you forgotten how Uvogin and Feitan were taken by the enemy?" Phinks replied. His tone was completely indifferent, as if he were not talking about companions who had just been sacrificed one after another, but merely noting the loss of two disposable spider legs. "Chrollo, if you cancel the transformation right now, you will most likely encounter the exact same situation. That is assuming the opponent you just fought upstairs is the same one tracking us."
The single leg of the figure shifted, and this time, Chrollo's calm, measured voice projected from it. "If you mean the blond boy with the red eyes, yes. It is him."
Through the strange connection, Chrollo carefully asked Phinks for every available detail regarding their previous encounter with Kurapika. He listened in silence, processing the tactical data, before murmuring his conclusion.
"It seems this person imposed a strict oath against Spiders upon himself," Chrollo deduced. "To be able to take away Uvogin and Feitan so irresistibly, bypassing their defenses entirely, he must have taken an oath backed by the absolute determination to die."
"What should we do?" Yonger's voice trembled from the chest, panic bleeding into her tone. "Chrollo, you absolutely cannot cancel the fusion."
But even as she pleaded, the fused body began to glow. A blinding white light seeped from the seams of the construct, signaling the release of the ability.
"In that case, I should let myself be caught. If his goal is not immediate execution, I will try my best to buy you all time to escape."
Chrollo's calm, unwavering voice echoed from within the brilliant white light. A moment later, the light silently dissipated into the cold garage air.
Where the grotesque fusion had stood, there was now only the small, white-haired girl. Yonger dropped to her knees on the concrete. There was no trace of Chrollo left behind.
"Chrollo..." Yonger whispered, tears spilling down her cheeks, completely devastated by the sudden loss.
Phinks's expression did not change in the slightest. He stared at the empty space for a long moment, then stepped forward, scooped the crying girl up under one arm, and walked away into the shadows without looking back.
When Chrollo opened his eyes again, the damp walls of the underground garage were gone. He found himself looking at a desolate scene that Uvogin and Feitan had already witnessed: the sprawling, ash-covered ruins of a dilapidated mountain village. The sky above was a heavy, suffocating gray.
Sitting on the dry, cracked earth a few yards away was the back of a blond boy.
However, there was a stark difference from what Uvogin and the others had seen when they were suspended in this space. Placed carefully at Kurapika's feet were two distinct things. One was the pale, lifeless corpse of a man. The other was a clustered pile of glass jars, filled with clear preservative solution.
Floating inside the glass jars were pairs of fiery red eyeballs.
Chrollo was bound high in the air, his arms and torso wrapped tightly in massive, heavy iron chains that clinked softly in the dead wind. He looked down at the scene, his dark eyes analyzing the information, and suddenly spoke.
"So you are a survivor of the Kurta Clan. Here for revenge? That makes sense."
Kurapika stood up slowly. He turned around, his face a mask of cold fury, and pointed a finger at the corpse lying in the dirt beside him. "He seems to have been called Omokage, and he was a member of your Spiders. Do you have anything you want to say to him?"
"What should I say?" Chrollo asked, his voice entirely devoid of emotion. "What else can you possibly say about a corpse?"
He shifted his gaze away from his former Troupe member and looked at the pile of jars instead. "Oh. But you obviously have quite the habit of collecting things."
At those words, the heavy chains wrapped around Chrollo's body tightened with a sickening crunch. The metal ground against his ribs, strangling him in mid-air and pulling his limbs backward until his joints were almost completely deformed.
Kurapika raised his head. The fiery red color burning in his eyes was so intense it looked as though it could ignite Chrollo where he hung. Wherever Kurapika directed his hateful gaze, the chains moved in response, twisting and crushing Chrollo tighter and tighter against the gray sky. In this isolated world of The Abyss, every single Spider who entered could only be slaughtered at his whim.
Kurapika waved his hand sharply. A heavy book materialized in his grasp, the word Judgment stamped across its cover.
"You must accept my conditions right now, or you will die," Kurapika said, his voice echoing like breaking glass.
As soon as he finished speaking, a sudden, razor-thin wound opened on Chrollo's pale cheek. A single line of crimson blood flew out from the cut, drifting down through the air to land directly on the open page of the Judgment book, staining the paper red.
"Condition one," Kurapika declared. "You will immediately disband the Phantom Troupe, forever separate yourself from the identity of the Spider, and you will never be allowed to speak to or contact any other Troupe members again. Condition two: You are never allowed to use any form of Nen ability. If you violate either of the above oaths, your blood will literally burn throughout your entire body, and you will die in the most agonizingly painful way possible."
Kurapika's tone was absolute and freezing cold.
Yet, despite the crushing pain of the chains and the lethal threat, Chrollo's expression remained completely unchanged. He looked down at the boy and even asked a genuine question. "I do not think that is the most painful way to die."
Kurapika responded by tightening the iron chains around Chrollo's chest even harder, forcing the air from his lungs.
Chrollo paused for a moment to catch his breath, then continued his inquiry. "Is the basic technique of Ten not allowed either?"
Kurapika simply stared at him, responding with silence.
"You said I am never allowed to use any Nen ability," Chrollo pressed, his analytical mind picking apart the phrasing. "In a narrow sense, Emission or Conjuration is a so-called Nen ability. However, even when a person simply uses explosive muscle strength, their aura condenses unconsciously around the working muscles. This biological reaction is essentially the foundation of Gyo and Ryu. Does this natural situation count as using Nen under your rules?"
Kurapika remained completely silent.
"You must have made similar mandatory oaths to Uvogin and Feitan when you dragged them here, right?" Chrollo asked, his eyes half-closed. "What about Nobunaga and Machi? The others will probably act rationally and accept your request to survive. But as for Uvogin... knowing him, I think he has already violated your oath and died."
Kurapika remained silent, looking up at Chrollo with eyes like burning stones. Finally, unable to stomach the casual conversation from the man who ordered the slaughter of his family, Kurapika pressed his own thumb over the bloody fingerprint on the page of Judgment.
"I have absolutely nothing to negotiate with murderous thieves," Kurapika said, his voice shaking with hidden anger. "You have no choice but to accept these conditions unconditionally."
Chrollo did not react at all to the hostility in his tone, or even to the biting chains that were currently tying his body into a painful knot. He just hung there, thinking quietly to himself. Seeking revenge, but ultimately unwilling to kill the target. Forcing an oath of death, but leaving the phrasing loose enough for interpretation. Humans are so ridiculous, and yet so endlessly interesting.
"It is meaningless."
Probably thinking of something broader, just before Chrollo realized the ritual was complete and he was about to be released from the dimension, he looked down and spoke to Kurapika one last time.
"Your fundamental purpose for all of this, let me think about it... it is probably not just simple revenge. Your true goal is to completely eliminate the Phantom Troupe from the world, to prevent this so-called tragedy from ever happening to anyone else again, is it not?"
Before Kurapika could answer, Chrollo's body began to glow.
"Since it is a phantom, how can it ever truly disappear? It is ridiculous."
Carried by his calm, echoing voice, Chrollo was forcefully ejected from The Abyss after accepting the oaths and restrictions, his body disappearing into a flash of blinding light.
Kurapika was left completely alone in the endless gray ruins of his nightmare.
He stood there in the ash, knowing deep down that everything he had done today would most likely be in vain. Because if there was a Nen ability in the world capable of imposing such heavy restrictions, there absolutely must be another Nen ability out there capable of removing them.
Kurapika stared blankly down at his trembling hands.
No matter how incredibly hard he worked on crafting the perfect restrictive conditions, as long as he refused to cross the line and become a cold-blooded murderer exactly like the Phantom Troupe, everything he tried seemed ultimately futile.
His core nature simply was not willing to kill in cold blood. But if he could not bring himself to execute the spiders, how could he ever be worthy of the dead Kurta Clan members whose eyes stared blindly at him from the dirt?
Kurapika slumped down into the ash, pulling his knees to his chest. He sat there in the dead silence, dazed, just staring at the pairs of fiery red eyes floating aimlessly in the glass bottles.
Later, back in the real world, the desert sun beat down on the quiet alleyway.
Liam stood leaning against a brick wall. He had just listened to Kurapika recount the interrogation, taking note of Chrollo's final, cryptic words before the Troupe leader had been banished. Liam crossed his arms, thinking deeply about the metaphor, and noticed Kurapika looking deeply worried and confused by the parting message.
"The spider has twelve legs," Liam reasoned aloud, trying to make sense of it. "If one breaks off, new ones will naturally grow out to replace it. Do you think that is what he meant by a phantom never disappearing?"
Shizuku, who had walked over to join them after cleaning up the street, had a completely different view on the matter. Or rather, she looked genuinely puzzled by Liam and Kurapika's deep, philosophical doubts.
"It is because of Meteor City," Shizuku said strangely, adjusting her glasses as if stating an obvious fact. "As long as Meteor City exists as a dumping ground for the rejected, there will definitely always be a similar kind of troupe rising from the garbage. Whether its official name is the Phantom Troupe or something entirely else, whether its symbol is a spider with twelve legs or a snake with nine heads, the core result is exactly the same."
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