"Association headquarters?" Menchi sounded genuinely surprised on the other end of the line. "I am not there at the moment."
Liam held the phone to his ear, slowly processing this new information. "Didn't Chairman Netero specifically assign you to act as an official examiner this year? The exam starts in less than two weeks. Why on earth are you still traveling around?"
"Oh, relax," Menchi sighed, the sound of pots clanging in the background. "The Chairman might make a huge, dramatic fuss about your little group participating, but he is not going to take that petty frustration out on a bunch of ordinary, innocent candidates. Besides, the start date is still more than half a month away. I have plenty of time."
"Fair enough," Liam conceded. "Where exactly are you right now? I just want to know if it is anywhere near the designated exam site."
He waved his free hand at Shizuku, gesturing for her to dig out their official registration confirmation. When they had successfully filed their applications weeks ago, the Hunter Association had sent back a formal faxed notice with the exact exam date and starting location printed clearly at the top. Shizuku dug through a stack of papers and found it in about four seconds flat.
"Me?" Menchi's voice dropped slightly, taking on the distinct, tight tone of someone feeling mildly aggrieved and highly stressed about their current situation. "I am currently cooking. For foreign dignitaries. It is incredibly busy, the kitchen is annoying, and the client is extremely picky."
She rattled off her current location. Liam checked the city name against the bold text on the fax.
It was not close to the exam site. In fact, it was significantly further away from Battera Castle than he had originally hoped.
"Well, that definitely complicates things," Liam muttered, his mind already spinning with logistics.
Menchi had absolutely no idea why he said that. "What complicates things?"
"You have a sharp kitchen knife on you right now, correct?" Liam asked smoothly, entirely ignoring her question. "I need you to make a very small cut on the palm of your hand. I will handle absolutely everything else from here."
There was a long, heavy pause on the line. The clanging of pots stopped.
Then, Menchi simply said, "Alright," in the deeply resigned tone of someone who had learned through extensive personal experience that asking Liam to actually explain his bizarre requests first usually took far more time than just doing the ridiculous thing he asked for.
She had been carrying his rose-gold Star Mark on her sternum for months now. She understood the basic terminology of his abilities. What she completely failed to understand was how activating that dormant mark would accomplish anything remotely useful across thousands of kilometers of physical distance.
Still holding the phone between her ear and shoulder, she picked up a small, incredibly sharp kitchen paring knife. She pressed the fine tip directly to the center of her left palm and drew it back in a short, clean line. A thin string of bright red blood welled up instantly, small and neat.
She felt the Star Mark on her chest respond immediately. A soothing warmth spread outward from her sternum, rushing down her arm. She watched in mild fascination as the shallow cut on her palm seamlessly closed over and healed in the exact time it took her to exhale a single breath. The Star Mark's passive healing was entirely reflexive at this point, reacting far faster than she could even think about it.
And then, before she could even mentally process whether the tiny cut had been open long enough for Liam to somehow react to the blood, she completely lost control of her own body.
Her hands moved without her telling them to. Her visual perspective shifted violently, mimicking the exact, stomach-dropping sensation of stepping off a high curb you weren't expecting. It was that brief, terrifying internal lurch of realizing your physical body is no longer entirely yours to command.
Trapped behind her own eyes, she watched her left hand, the palm still slightly damp from the fresh blood, slowly rise up until it was directly in front of her face.
Liam was inside her.
"Menchi," she said aloud. The voice was physically hers, but the cadence was completely wrong. It carried a slight, formal adjustment of tone she had never used herself. Her facial expression settled into a look of calm detachment that she couldn't actually feel from the inside.
He was actively borrowing her physical proprioception and clearly finding her body slightly inconvenient to pilot, she could tell, because he aggressively blinked her eyes twice just to adjust to her specific field of vision.
Then, he deliberately dipped two of her fingers into the smear of blood still resting on her palm. He drew a quick, precise circle in the red fluid. A closed ring of blood. He pushed a surge of her own aura into the crude drawing, and the blood instantly shifted, burning into the complex, flame-like symbol of the Sun Mark. It glowed a faint, brilliant rose-gold against her skin.
He pressed both of her palms tightly together, let the newly formed mark act as a conduit for the aura, and spoke clearly through her mouth.
"Kurapika."
The Sun Mark on Menchi's palm flared violently. Her aura poured into the glowing symbol and rushed out the other side all at once. The entire hotel room instantly filled with something she could physically feel but couldn't see—a massive, rushing current of energy that felt exactly like a large window suddenly blowing open during a windstorm.
Her knees buckled under the sudden, massive drain. He released her body just in time for her to grab the heavy wooden window frame to keep herself from collapsing onto the floor. They were currently stationed on one of the upper floors of a very tall, luxurious hotel. The tiled courtyard below was far enough down that the fall would be entirely academic.
More than 20,000 units of her aura, completely gone in the span of a single breath.
Across the room, a physical shape rapidly assembled itself from absolute nothingness. First came the blurry outline, then the solid weight, and finally the bright gold of Kurapika's hair and the steady, serious gray of his eyes.
He arrived fully formed, perfectly solid. He looked calmly at Menchi, then at the window frame she was desperately leaning against, and made an immediate, silent assessment of her physical state.
Liam fully released the possession, his consciousness retreating. On his way out of her mind, Menchi heard something echo in her head that might have been him thinking out loud, broadcasting loudly enough that it bled across their psychic connection. It was something along the lines of how incredibly draining it really was, being forced to use someone with the lowest total aura capacity among the current Sun Mark holders as a primary summoning relay.
Menchi's teeth ground together audibly.
She slowly recovered her balance, pushing off the window sill, and looked down at her left palm. The glowing Sun Mark had already settled into a pale, permanent imprint. It wasn't quite a scar, but it wasn't quite a normal tattoo marking either. She understood perfectly now, having been forced to use the ability from the inside, exactly how the terrifying thing worked. The underlying logic was brutally straightforward. She filed the terrifying realization away in the back of her mind for later.
Then she quickly looked up, realizing there was someone else currently in the room.
Machi had just walked in through the suite door.
The pink-haired woman was leaning casually against the wall beside the closed door, her arms folded across her chest. She possessed the particular, chilling stillness of a seasoned assassin who had entered a room without making a single sound and had absolutely no intention of announcing her presence. Her cold eyes moved rapidly from Kurapika to Menchi and back again, flat and calculatingly measuring the situation.
She had been permanently stationed in the hotel alongside Menchi, working a separate security assignment for the VIP client in the exact same building. When she had sensed the massive, abrupt spike of aura in Menchi's room, she had immediately come to check. She had been fully expecting an active threat or an assassin. Instead, she had found the Kurta survivor from the Phantom Troupe's old hit list standing casually in the middle of the room.
Neither of the three spoke for a long moment.
Kurapika looked at Machi for a few seconds, his expression unreadable, then turned his attention entirely to Menchi. "You should sit down and rest first," he suggested, his voice quiet and perfectly reasonable. "If we both try to continue the summoning chain right now, we will both deplete our reserves completely before we finish. With her standing right there, that is simply not a tactical risk worth taking."
Menchi did not disagree with his assessment. She sat down heavily in a plush armchair and reached deep into her chef's coat pocket for the small metal tin she carried absolutely everywhere. She pulled out a plain, dry biscuit and carefully dusted it with a pinch of the specialized, bright green seasoning she had recently developed. She ate the dry biscuit in three quick, aggressive bites.
The Star Mark's constant, passive recovery current, combined perfectly with the green seasoning's immediate, potent restorative effect, pushed her aura reserves back toward functional levels far faster than either process would have managed alone. She was essentially a full-stack recovery build, and she knew exactly how to abuse it. Within twenty minutes, she was standing steadily again.
Kurapika had waited by the window with the practiced patience of someone who spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen. Machi had not moved a single inch from the wall.
He walked over, placed his hand firmly on Menchi's shoulder, and simply said, "Shizuku."
Menchi felt the Sun Mark on her palm immediately respond to Kurapika's aura feeding directly through the residual connection between them. Then, she felt herself get caught up in the violent pull of it, her own recovering aura being forcibly drawn into the exact same current and directed outward together. She hadn't actually expected to be included in the cost this time. Apparently, the group summoning feature was exactly what it sounded like—a shared burden.
The combined aura rushed out. The hotel room filled with the exact same directed wind pressure as before.
Shizuku materialized significantly faster than Kurapika had, due to two people contributing raw power rather than just one. She arrived, blinked slowly behind her glasses, pushed the frames up the bridge of her nose, and looked around at the luxurious hotel lounge. She noted Machi standing against the wall, and Menchi sitting slumped in a chair wearing the thoroughly exhausted expression of someone who had been through far too much nonsense this afternoon.
"Hi," Shizuku said mildly.
Menchi reached into her tin, handed Kurapika a second seasoned biscuit, and watched him look at it suspiciously for a moment before finally eating it. His personal aura recovery was noticeably slower than hers had been. He didn't have a Star Mark actively pumping energy into his system. He was running entirely on natural, slow regeneration plus whatever minor boost the green seasoning could manage on its own.
So that is the real difference, Menchi thought, observing him closely. She silently held out the tin and made him eat another one.
She was rapidly beginning to understand the terrifying math behind the ability, having now watched the Sun Mark successfully summon two people. The required cost was exactly symmetrical with whoever you were actively trying to bring through the portal. A strict one-to-one ratio. Kurapika's 20,000-something aura capacity had cost exactly 20,000-something aura to summon. Shizuku's arrival would have been proportional to her own total capacity, with the massive cost split evenly between the two contributors.
Liam had around 60,000 aura at his last official count.
She looked down at the pale Sun Mark on her palm. Then she looked up at Kurapika. Then at Shizuku.
Shizuku seemed to arrive at the exact same terrifying mathematical conclusion at roughly the exact same moment. She adjusted her glasses again. "We will definitely need all three of us contributing simultaneously for Liam. At an absolute minimum."
"The three of us working together should just barely manage to cover the cost," Kurapika agreed, his face grim.
Menchi had absolutely no particular objections, mostly because she didn't have a choice in the matter. She handed out the last of the restorative biscuits to the group, waited patiently for Kurapika to get some actual color back in his pale face, and then gave a firm nod.
All three of them raised their hands toward the empty center of the room. Their auras poured together in a massive, swirling current, and Shizuku called out the name.
It felt exactly like trying to push something impossibly large and heavy straight uphill. Menchi had moved heavy furniture before, dragging solid oak antique pieces across massive castle rooms on her own. This sensation was more like trying to physically move the entire castle itself. The air inside the hotel room became incredibly dense with directed, pressurized aura, thickening until it was hard to breathe. From deep within that crushing pressure, a shape slowly, agonizingly began to accumulate.
It took a considerable amount of time. All three of them broke into a heavy, shaking sweat. The shape was there, and then it was almost there, and then it was there again, appearing faint and present in rapid, flickering flashes. It looked exactly like a weak television signal from a very long distance trying desperately to resolve itself through heavy static noise.
Then, with a final surge of power, it resolved completely.
Liam stood in the center of the lounge, fully present and physically solid. He looked slightly windswept and disoriented by whatever the transit process felt like from the inside of the portal. He looked down at his own hands, slowly flexed his fingers to ensure they worked, and then turned in a slow, full circle, taking in the opulent room and the exhausted people in it.
Menchi let out a long, shaky breath and sat back down heavily in her chair, wiping sweat from her brow.
"You look very pleased with yourself right now," she noted dryly.
"I am just adjusting to the sensation," Liam said, patting his chest. He sounded genuinely interested in the experience, not smug. "That was actually my very first time being successfully summoned instead of being the one doing the summoning. The physical sensation is completely different than I originally expected."
He immediately began explaining the complex physical sensation in highly technical terms that were probably entirely accurate, but were definitely not of any immediate practical concern to Menchi, whose arms currently felt like they had just been used to deadlift a truck.
However, she did force herself to listen to the specific part about why the bizarre experience felt vaguely familiar to him from the inside. He muttered something about how the Sun Mark's underlying spatial logic shared deep, foundational roots with the Star Mark's physical possession mechanics, and how the two vastly different abilities were actually just separate branches of the exact same fundamental Nen system.
She supposed she believed his theory. She had briefly felt the connection from the inside too, when he possessed her. There was a distinct, undeniable continuity to the overall experience that strongly suggested the marks weren't entirely different things after all.
Machi watched all of this unfold from her rigid position against the wall. She hadn't spoken a single word since she entered. Menchi cast a brief glance at her. Machi's face gave absolutely nothing away, which was its natural, default resting state. But Menchi had spent enough time working closely alongside the former assassin, bound under the strict terms of their vow, to easily read the subtle differences between her specific types of silence.
This particular silence was the dangerous kind. It meant she was actively memorizing absolutely everything she saw for future tactical use.
"Right," Liam said, finally looking directly at Menchi. "You mentioned on the phone that the client is difficult. What exactly is the job?"
Menchi sighed, fully accepting that this chaotic mess was going to be her entire afternoon now. "The Kakin King. He is currently in the area on a state visit, he is notoriously picky about his meals, and he heard through the grapevine that I was available. The Hunter Association officially relayed it to me as a formal, high-priority request." She paused, narrowing her eyes at him. "You don't know how to cook."
"I absolutely do not," Liam agreed cheerfully.
"So you can make yourself useful in some other way to pay me back for the aura drain." She pointed a commanding finger directly toward the massive, stainless-steel suite kitchen. "Come on. Get in there. I desperately need another pair of hands for the prep work, even if you have absolutely no idea what you are doing with a knife."
"That is a very low bar to clear," Liam noted.
"You clear it," she said flatly. "Barely. Now wash your hands."
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