December twenty-fourth. The twenty-ninth floor of the Holy Hotel, Kukan'yu State's primary venue for receiving foreign delegations.
The sprawling banquet hall had been dressed for the occasion with the sort of coordinated excess that required a full event planning team three days of sleepless work to achieve. Heavy white tablecloths draped over round tables, reflecting the warm, golden light of the massive crystal chandeliers above. The air smelled of expensive floral arrangements, a rich, overwhelming scent that mingled heavily with the savory aromas drifting from the hotel's sprawling kitchens.
The guest list was a highly concentrated gathering of money and political power. It included the Prime Minister of Kukan'yu and his wife, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Science and Technology, and the highly anticipated visiting delegation from the Kakin Kingdom. Kakin had sent King Nasubi, First Prince Benjamin, Second Prince Camilla, Fourth Prince Tserriednich, and a massive supporting cast of aides and elite bodyguards, all carefully calibrated to impress and intimidate the host nation.
The evening formally welcomed the Gourmet Hunter Menchi, representing the Hunter Association, who had been heavily compensated to oversee the banquet menu.
All the excitement and luxury belonged entirely to the politicians and royals. Liam, Shizuku, and Kurapika had simply been slotted into the outer security rotation as temporary hires at the standard professional Hunter rate. It was the highly predictable outcome of showing up at Menchi's current assignment with absolutely nothing better to do, only to be handed earpieces and put to work immediately.
They were stationed at strategic intervals around the perimeter of the room. Liam stood near the far wall, his hands clasped loosely behind his back. His posture suggested alert, bored professionalism, but his eyes were busy doing something entirely different.
Kurapika, standing fifty feet away by a set of heavy double doors, noticed the exact moment it started. A young waiter passed Liam on his way to refill a tray of champagne glasses, paused for a fraction of a second, and then continued on his route as though absolutely nothing had happened. It was incredibly subtle. If you were not watching Liam specifically, and if you did not know exactly what his abilities looked like, you would never catch it.
Kurapika lowered his gaze, carefully watching the waiter's hands and the cadence of his steps. The movements were just a little too precise, a little too measured.
He quietly counted the people in the room. Then he looked more carefully at the serving staff weaving through the crowds.
He stopped counting at twelve. Twelve compromised individuals.
Kurapika stood perfectly still with his arms folded, making another quiet, sweeping pass across the banquet floor with his eyes. He watched as another waiter drifted casually toward the tight cluster of politicians surrounding King Nasubi and the Kukan'yu Prime Minister. The waiter's path possessed the unhurried, natural arc of someone simply doing their job. But Kurapika tracked the specific angle of the approach and calculated that it would place the possessed server within easy, direct conversational range of King Nasubi in approximately forty seconds.
Shizuku finished her assigned circuit of the room and stopped beside Liam, her dark suit blending into the shadows of the wall.
"You are still very interested in Kakin," she said softly. Her tone was flat. It was a statement of fact, not a question.
"Everyone is here in one room. I am just being sociable," Liam replied, his lips barely moving as he stared straight ahead. "If I walk past a prince or two without dropping something on them out of basic professional courtesy, I will feel like I have wasted a perfectly good opportunity."
He paused, his eyes darting to the right. Something in his peripheral vision had caught his immediate attention.
"Am I being obvious about it?" he asked.
"People who know you can easily tell," Shizuku said.
"That is fine."
The waiter carrying the hidden Star Mark finally reached King Nasubi's inner circle. He politely offered to refill a glass, and Liam tilted his own head slightly, seamlessly using the borrowed vantage point to listen in. The king's ongoing conversation with the Prime Minister was perfectly pleasant, highly formal, and completely devoid of any tactical interest. Disappointed, Liam shifted his attention to the other side of the room.
Four other waiters had quietly drifted into the gravitational orbit of First Prince Benjamin.
Benjamin was physically imposing in the specific way that only certain dangerous people were. He possessed the kind of massive, muscular build that simply refused to shrink to fit formal wear. The fabric of his expensive jacket sat entirely too tight across his back because his broad shoulders simply declined to be contained. He was speaking to a small cluster of wealthy guests with the relaxed, heavy authority of someone who found high society social events easy and slightly beneath him. His face showed absolutely nothing except appropriate, polite attentiveness.
Then, one of the controlled waiters crossed an invisible threshold, stepping within five meters of the prince.
Benjamin stopped speaking. He turned.
It was not a dramatic, sweeping motion. It was just a slow quarter turn of his head, the terrifyingly casual movement of a predator responding to a stimulus completely below the conscious threshold of normal people. His eyes, small and incredibly sharp, fixed directly on the waiter's approach.
Liam read the look immediately through his puppet's eyes. Benjamin was using Gyo. He was looking straight through the polite social surface of the room and reading the raw aura underneath it.
From Benjamin's perspective, Liam knew exactly what the prince would see. He would see a normal waiter carrying the faint, chaotic aura signature of an ordinary, untrained human. There was no hostility. There was no concealed murderous intent. Which was entirely accurate, because the waiter himself possessed neither of those things. The only thing remotely unusual about the man was a very faint, rose-gold mark, but that symbol was buried deep below the surface of the skin, not something a cursory Gyo sweep from across the room would easily catch.
But the waiter's physical body was actively producing the microscopic, biological tells that untrained humans always produced under the invisible pressure of a master's scrutiny. Elevated heart rate. A light sheen of cold sweat. Slightly accelerated, shallow breathing. His life energy was leaking at the edges in the jagged, uneven patterns of someone whose aura nodes had never been properly trained to withstand stress.
Liam watched through the connection as Benjamin's large hand moved in a short, dismissive gesture, silently ordering the waiter to back away.
An untrained physical body was a massive liability in this specific context. There was no elegant, clever way around that hard truth.
Liam could have walked over there himself. He would have produced absolutely none of those biological tells. But having a completely unknown security guard abandon his post to stand directly behind a foreign prince in a room packed full of elite bodyguards, with no cover story and no valid pretext, would draw far more attention than a waiter's mild nervousness ever would.
He could have used Zetsu through the waiter to suppress the leaking aura completely. But an ordinary, living person suddenly producing absolutely zero aura signature in a crowded room was arguably much more alarming to a seasoned Nen user than a nervous one.
Liam carefully noted the positions of Benjamin's three closest guards. They were Nen users, all three of them. Benjamin himself was clearly practiced enough to run a visual aura check mid-conversation without breaking his polite social expression for even a second. This was absolutely not a soft target.
With a quiet mental sigh, Liam removed the Star Marks from every single waiter in the room, releasing his hold on them.
Hunter license first, he thought to himself, watching the servers blink and shake off the mild disorientation. We need legitimate, unquestionable access to these circles. Then there will be plenty of time to have a proper, intimate conversation with the Kakin royal family about our various outstanding matters.
Shizuku gently poked his arm. She pointed across the crowded room without raising her hand or making it obvious she was pointing.
Kurapika was standing alone in the far corner. His physical expression was exactly as composed and polite as it always was. But Liam had spent enough time living and fighting alongside him to easily read the rising temperature boiling just underneath that calm surface. It was a contained, terrifying kind of heat. The kind of hatred that burns clean and long.
Kurapika was staring directly at the Fourth Prince.
Tserriednich Hui Guo Rou was comfortably holding court at the exact opposite end of the grand hall from his older brother Benjamin, an arrangement that was almost certainly deliberate. Where Benjamin projected a sense of heavy, restrained military authority, Tserriednich projected the comfortable, sickening ease of someone who didn't take absolutely anything seriously and had arranged his entire life so that nothing ever required him to. He had a lean build, dark stubble, and the general, repulsive energy of a man who firmly believed he could charm anyone in the room and thought that arrogant confidence was a sufficient qualification for handling most situations. Several of the wealthy women standing nearby seemed to readily agree with him, laughing at his jokes.
His two personal bodyguards stood at appropriate, professional distances behind him. The woman, medium height and wearing a dark headband, appeared to be scanning the room on a slow, continuous rotation. Her methodical scan reached Kurapika's position in the corner, paused, and held there for a fraction of a second longer than was strictly necessary for a professional threat assessment.
By the time she narrowed her eyes, Kurapika was already looking at something else.
Liam reached up, pressed two fingers against his earpiece to look busy, and pushed his aura into the Moon Mark channel rather than speaking aloud.
[Why are you staring so hard at the fourth one? Do you think he is the winning bet for the succession war?]
The Moon Mark telepathic ring system functioned exactly like a radio operating on a very unusual, silent frequency. Liam had originally set it up for simple one-to-one communication and hadn't thought too hard about what happened to the mental acoustics when three highly perceptive people were all wearing the exact same mark configuration at the same time.
Kurapika's cold response came back instantly on the shared channel.
[Because I can smell the rot on him from all the way across the room. The fourth devil. I paid an underworld broker a hundred million Jenny for exactly that specific phrase as a positive identification.]
Liam silently processed the heavy weight of this information. The Kurta clan. The scarlet eyes. Then he sent his reply.
[And the powerful, untouchable people you warned me about early on. The ones you told me that I shouldn't be going after alone. Is he one of them?]
There was a long, tense pause on the mental network.
[Is he?] Kurapika finally asked back.
Liam shifted his weight, turning his attention inward. He looked closely at the dark death energy count sitting in the back of his awareness. The number had moved. Two brand new points had been added to his reserves in the past few days. The energy had arrived quiet and sudden, exactly the way deaths always felt when they happened in highly protected, luxurious spaces where no one was ever supposed to die.
He had absolutely no doubt about the source of those two deaths.
Tserriednich had casually committed two brutal murders somewhere inside this very hotel, with the entire Kakin royal family in residence and every single floor heavily guarded by professional security. He had done it simply because he could, and because he knew no one would stop him.
[I can confirm he absolutely qualifies as a monster,] Liam sent back, his mental tone grim. [A hundred million Jenny for that confirmation is honestly not a bad price for solo detective work.]
[If that is the case, can you handle him?]
[Yes. But taking down someone like that takes time. It takes meticulous preparation. And it takes significantly more raw strength than I currently have ready to deploy against a man whose personal protection detail includes a reigning king and a private, state-funded army.]
Shizuku's quiet voice unexpectedly joined the mental channel from where she stood right next to Liam. She sounded entirely casual, like someone politely raising their hand in the back of a slow board meeting.
[What else does it take?] she asked. [Does it take the necessary determination?]
Kurapika was quiet for a long moment. Then his voice echoed in their minds again.
[Also, it takes your help.]
[Fair enough,] Liam replied smoothly. [Though it should be stated clearly right now that we would be actively helping each other. Kakin royalty and I have our own massive outstanding balance sheet to settle, Tserriednich included. The only question left is the timing and the approach.]
Kurapika received this promise and said nothing further on the channel. But his rigid posture shifted slightly against the far wall. It was the small, almost imperceptible physical adjustment of someone who had been carrying a crushing, impossible weight completely alone for a very long time, and had just agreed, quietly, to finally put some of it down in a shared space.
On the far side of the banquet hall, standing near the Second Prince's elite circle, two close guards were murmuring quietly to their principal.
"The first prince's Nen ability seems to have grown significantly more difficult to read from a distance," the taller guard whispered.
"The fourth prince still shows absolutely no trace of aura," the second guard reported. "He registers as an ordinary human, exactly the same as before."
Second Prince Camilla did not appear to be listening to a single word they said. Her guards were forced to deliver their careful tactical assessment directly to her back.
She was standing with perfect, terrifying posture in a palace-formal dress. The garment was the kind of complex, rigid construction that required actual architecture rather than simple sewing to put together. She was silently watching the crowded room through the curved rim of a crystal glass of dark red wine, which she held gracefully just below eye level.
She possessed a very particular way of looking at things. It was not overtly hostile. It was more akin to the way a person looks at an interesting object they haven't quite decided what to do with yet.
Her dark gaze moved slowly across the banquet hall on its own unhurried, calculating route. It swept over the Prime Minister. It lingered on a cluster of wealthy dignitaries. It passed over the hired security personnel standing at their assigned intervals. Her eyes passed over each position smoothly, returned briefly to the dark wine in her glass, and then swung back to one specific point in the room and stayed there.
Liam felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck prickle sharply.
He reached up and casually rubbed the back of his neck, checking the sudden uncomfortable feeling the exact same way a person checks for a crawling spider. Finding absolutely nothing there, he turned his head to look at Shizuku on his left.
"Has something about my face miraculously improved in the last few days?" he asked her, sounding genuinely curious. "Because there has been a very dangerous woman staring directly at me for the last three minutes, and I honestly cannot work out why."