"Please give me one. Actually, make it five. Five maps to Women's Paradise Island."
The middle-aged shopkeeper produced five neatly folded paper maps from somewhere beneath the dusty counter. She moved with the dull, practiced efficiency of someone who had already been handing out ridiculous maps to strangers all morning, and fully expected to be doing the exact same tedious chore all afternoon. She laid them out in a neat row on the glass display case.
She added in a monotone voice: "When you finally arrive at the destination, take the main escalator up to the second floor. Look for the fishing tackle shop. Walk inside and ask the clerk for a twenty-percent-off coupon."
Shizuku picked up the first map and calmly unfolded it. The designated location marked on the paper was absolutely not an island. It was a large, multi-story shopping mall located several city streets away, helpfully labeled with a cheerful, poorly drawn circle in red ink.
Machi silently took a map from the counter without a single comment or change in expression.
The strange girl with the twin braids reached out and took the fifth map from the glass. She produced a sound that was technically the phrase "thank you," but it came out in the exact same flat, synthesized, mechanical register as absolutely everything else she had said so far today.
"If you honestly want to thank me," Liam said, turning to look at her, "you can explain your bizarre situation to me. You clearly don't physically move a muscle when you can easily avoid it. You absolutely don't talk when you can avoid that, either. Is this total lack of human engagement a deliberate, active training practice, or is it just your general philosophy on life?"
"Yeah," the girl said simply.
It was energy conservation in its absolute purest, most terrifying form. She confirmed the question, supplied the absolute minimum viable verbal acknowledgment required for the social interaction, and instantly returned to her cold baseline. She had somehow refined human communication down to a strict, mechanical protocol.
The genuinely interesting follow-up question, which Liam wisely chose to keep entirely to himself, was whether all of that rigorously conserved mental and physical processing capacity actually went somewhere useful in combat. A Nen ability that actively ran on perfectly stored, hoarded efficiency would be incredibly formidable if she could actually deliver on the premise when forced into a fight.
Shizuku looked at the strange girl over the rim of her glasses. She observed her with the light, focused curiosity she usually reserved for things she found genuinely, mechanically interesting, rather than just politely notable in passing. "Conjuration-type? Some form of total body transformation?"
"Yeah," the girl replied. She glanced down at the map in her hand. Something deep in her vacant eyes shifted for half a second. It was some faint, rapid internal activity that wasn't quite visible from the outside, and then she made a very small, quiet electronic sound in the back of her throat, sounding exactly like a digital device successfully completing a complex scan.
It made perfect logical sense, once Liam mentally assembled the pieces properly. Deliberately transforming the fragile physical body into an alternate, durable form was Conjuration operating at its most advanced, architectural level. It meant actively creating an entirely new, functional version of the self from absolutely nothing, and then constantly maintaining that complex structure against the crushing, continuous pressure of natural aura flow. If her chosen alternate form was strictly mechanical rather than biological, then all the messy, unnecessary biological functions that the mechanical form simply didn't need—like blinking, ambient facial expressions, and restless micro-movements—simply didn't run. There was absolutely no tactical need to fake the appearance of humanity when you weren't currently wearing it.
Machi looked at her, her eyes narrowing slightly. "Your Nen is clearly very strong and highly refined. Why are you even bothering to take the Hunter Exam?"
The girl's blank eyes moved to Machi. The motion possessed the slow, deliberate, mechanical rotation of a security camera finally reaching the absolute edge of its panning range. The empty look clearly said: You are seriously asking me this question? Machi understood the silent insult perfectly and wisely chose not to physically acknowledge it.
Kurapika finally picked up his map from the counter. He turned, walked straight to the glass door, and said over his shoulder without ever looking back, "I successfully completed all the required steps of the examiner's stupid test. If there had been absolutely no outside interference from you, I would have received this map entirely without your assistance."
"You would have successfully received exactly one map," Liam corrected him smoothly. "I got us five."
Kurapika let out a sharp breath and stepped outside into the cold air.
Behind the counter, the shopkeeper shifted her weight to reach for a stray pen. As she moved, she accidentally caught the sharp tip of the pen against the side of her own neck, a small, clumsy jab that barely broke the skin. For a fraction of a second, she felt something strange settle deeply into the sore spot. It felt faint and oddly warm, and then it was completely gone. She blinked in confusion, touched her neck with one finger, found absolutely nothing unusual there, and simply went back to her tedious work.
The five of them crossed the busy street toward the distant shopping mall in a loose, jagged formation. They looked exactly like a badly organized group tour, assuming group tours typically contained at least two highly trained assassins who were obviously, constantly counting their exits, and one bizarre person who appeared to have fully delegated her spatial awareness to internal navigation software.
At the next major intersection, they stopped and waited for a red pedestrian light. A large, crowded city bus pulled into the stop, discharged a dozen passengers onto the sidewalk, and immediately pulled away with a roar of diesel. The people who had just gotten off stood around the bus stop, looking lost and frantically consulting various maps and navigational resources. Two of them, a well-dressed middle-aged couple, loudly mentioned Women's Paradise Island in the frantic context of desperately trying to find it before noon.
Kurapika was actively tracking the busy street on general, paranoid principle when a rough-looking man suddenly appeared directly behind the couple. The thug had thick, angry eyebrows and a massive, hulking build. Something heavy and undeniably rectangular was pressing hard against the thin fabric of his jacket pocket. He positioned the hidden weapon squarely against the middle-aged couple's lower backs with the particular, terrifying intimacy of an experienced mugger.
"Don't move a muscle, or I shoot," the thug growled.
Kurapika immediately started to take a decisive step forward to intervene.
Before his boot even hit the pavement, the middle-aged man calmly stepped to the side, completely clearing the line of fire.
The middle-aged woman instantly spun around. With terrifying speed and precision, she drove her sharp elbow directly into the gangster's sternum. The brutal strike possessed the perfect angle and flawless timing of someone who had practiced the violent maneuver thousands of times before and retained the deadly muscle memory perfectly.
The heavy pistol flew completely out of the thug's pocket as she violently kicked his shin, shattering the bone. As the massive gangster fell screaming toward the pavement, the middle-aged man calmly stepped down hard on the thug's other hand, pinning it to the concrete.
In the chaotic process of falling, the gangster's desperate finger somehow found the trigger of his own dropped gun. The weapon went off with a deafening crack. The gangster accidentally contributed his own thigh to the escalating situation, and immediately started bleeding heavily all over the dirty pavement, howling in agony.
The middle-aged couple casually high-fived each other directly over his bleeding, thrashing head.
"Battera?" Liam asked, his voice cutting through the noise.
The middle-aged man spun around, his guard up. When he saw Liam, his tense face instantly rearranged itself into an expression of genuine, profound pleasure. "Mr. Liam! And Miss Shizuku, what a wonderful surprise! You're here too!"
Liam stood frozen on the sidewalk, looking at the man in stunned silence for a long moment.
The broken, grieving billionaire he clearly remembered from months ago had looked exactly like a fragile old man who had spent twenty agonizing years absolutely not sleeping, and had grimly accepted that slow decay as a permanent, terminal condition. The vibrant, healthy person currently standing in front of him looked thirty years younger, at an absolute minimum. His thin, brittle white hair had miraculously come back thick and dark. The deep, exhausted lines carved into his face had smoothed out and eased into something that strongly suggested a person who had finally found a very good reason to eat regularly and sleep soundly again.
Liam slowly shifted his gaze to look at the beautiful young woman standing right beside him.
She was beaming, her face flushed with adrenaline and joy. Liam had only ever seen her lying completely unconscious, trapped inside a glass medical tank, hovering on the very edge of death.
"Alice?" he asked quietly, almost unable to believe his own eyes.
She smiled even wider, her eyes shining. "Mr. Liam. I truly haven't had the proper chance to thank you in person for what you did for us."
Shizuku, standing slightly behind Liam, had very little actual memory of Battera and Alice. She had been physically present for the relevant events at the billionaire's mansion, but the emotional details of the drama had simply not stuck in her pragmatic mind. She looked at the happy couple with the polite, empty blankness of someone actively trying to reconstruct context from available evidence. She immediately noted, with clinical interest, that both of them were currently radiating raw aura at a volume that considerably exceeded their totally normal, civilian appearance.
The woman's brutal elbow strike had been perfectly clean. Incredibly professional. Nobody simply learned how to move with that kind of lethal, explosive power from reading a self-defense book.
"You two have been training in Nen," Liam stated, his shock fading into calculation.
Battera's hand automatically found Alice's, their fingers intertwining. "We went back home and immediately hired a proper, highly expensive instructor as soon as we got settled. What we've learned about ourselves is, to put it simply—"
"Do not ever detail the specifics of your Nen ability to a group of dangerous people you've just met in the middle of the street," Liam interrupted sharply, raising a warning hand. "It is a very good survival principle to learn early."
Battera chuckled warmly, accepting the blunt advice, and glanced curiously at the strange group surrounding Liam. "Are you all here for the Hunter Exam?"
"It is easy access to an incredibly useful piece of paper," Liam shrugged. "Are you two honestly taking it as well?"
Battera and Alice looked at each other, their smiles widening.
"It is our honeymoon," Battera declared proudly.
Alice's glowing expression completely confirmed this insane statement without a single trace of irony.
Liam silently considered the horrific, historical mortality rate for the Hunter Exam, compared it to the concept of a romantic honeymoon, and wisely decided not to do the terrifying math out loud.
Alice gestured vaguely down the street. "The preliminary examiner who dragged us all the way out here mentioned something about finding a place called Women's Paradise Island. Do you happen to know where it is?"
The sadistic people organizing this specific preliminary phase had apparently decided that forcing route convergence among the surviving candidates was far more efficient than handling individual travel logistics. Liam waved casually at the red circle on his map. "We are heading to the exact same destination. Come with us."
Battera agreed immediately without a second thought. He and Alice happily fell into step right behind Liam and Shizuku. They walked hand in hand, moving with the comfortable, easy synchronization of people who had deliberately arranged their new lives so that they were usually in constant physical contact.
Kurapika watched the strange, powerful couple join their group with the cold, calculating expression of a man rapidly updating a mental threat register.
Machi watched them join with absolutely no expression at all.
The strange doll-girl walked slightly behind everyone else in the group. She was navigating the city streets by the paper map, and whatever complex internal system she was currently running. There was a very faint, highly rhythmic clicking sound coming from her direction at regular intervals. It wasn't quite a mechanical sound, but it wasn't quite organic, either.
At roughly a thousand meters below the concrete street level, her internal sensory display suddenly registered a massive anomaly. It was a terrifyingly large aura signature. It was currently stationary, completely passive, and it was perfectly, silently following their exact route from deep underground.
She briefly analyzed the data, filed the terrifying monster under low-priority observation, and simply kept walking.
She returned her internal processing power to analyzing the couple walking ahead of her.
Battera: Manipulation-type Nen. Cooperative Hatsu. His specific ability monitored Alice's physical state at every single moment, and perfectly duplicated any injury, illness, or fatigue she experienced into an equivalent physical reality within Battera's own body. It was the staggering cost of true love made entirely literal, perfectly balanced, and mathematically exact.
Alice: Enhancement-type Nen. Cooperative Hatsu, mirrored. In return for his suffering, she shared her boundless vitality, her massive aura pool, and the biological surplus of her youth with Battera continuously and unconditionally.
They were two powerful abilities pointing directly at each other in an infinite loop, each one flawlessly reinforcing the other's foundation. The combat arithmetic of them fighting as a pair was considerably more interesting and dangerous than either one of them fighting alone.
She flagged the tactical assessment, moved the complex calculation to her background processing, and obediently followed the paper map.
The wide, sunlit fountain square finally opened up in front of them. The massive shopping mall rose on the far side of the plaza. It was exactly the kind of sprawling, generic commercial structure that seemed to exist in literally every major city, completely regardless of what else the city's architecture was doing. Battera and Alice excitedly moved toward the grand glass entrance.
Liam stopped dead in his tracks.
Machi stopped immediately beside him. The doll-girl stopped a second later. Shizuku turned around slowly.
Kurapika, who had been actively watching the sky and the perimeter the entire time, was already looking straight up.
Four massive, terrifying shapes crossed the clear blue sky from somewhere distant, moving incredibly fast. They were absolutely not birds. They were far too large, and they were carrying heavy cargo. The bizarre shapes rapidly resolved into sharp focus as they approached the plaza. They were foxes. But they were foxes built on entirely the wrong biological scale, the exact kind of terrifying magical beast that simply shouldn't exist by any reasonable evolutionary budget. There were four of them, actively flying through the air, and each one had a human being suspended precariously from its massive, razor-sharp claws.
"Is that them?" Kurapika asked, his eyes narrowing against the glare of the sun.
He possessed good enough eyesight that the tense question was entirely rhetorical. Even at a distance of a few hundred meters, he could already clearly see the faces of the people dangling from the beasts.