The four massive shapes rapidly resolved into sharp focus as they descended from the clear sky toward the crowded fountain square.
The Kirikos. They were classified as Warcraft within the Hunter World's complex taxonomy, which was simply the practical, polite term for highly intelligent, non-human creatures that had successfully developed their own language, distinct culture, and in some specific cases, a lucrative business relationship with the Hunter Association. The kiriko variant possessed the sharp, angular facial structure of a wild fox seamlessly attached to the massive, towering body of something much larger. They had the heavy, coiled musculature of apex fighting animals, and they wore expressions of permanent, cold calculation. Their wide wings folded neatly against their broad backs, tucking away exactly like a second set of arms.
The four beasts landed heavily on the paved stones of the square, the downdraft from their wings displacing the water in the fountain. They gently set their human passengers down and immediately shifted their physical forms. They did it the exact same way certain advanced Nen users did, not with strained effort, but with the fluid, easy comfort of a daily habit. The four towering foxes seamlessly melted into four tall humans with unusual, whisker-like marking patterns on their cheeks. They stood casually in the center of the bustling square, delivering what appeared to be standard orientation information to the people they had just carried in.
Liam stood near the edge of the plaza and quietly observed the new arrivals.
The first group consisted of three people. Leading them was a tall, lanky young man wearing a sharp business suit, his dark sunglasses pushed casually down the bridge of his nose. He wore the specific, slightly overwhelmed expression of someone who had found the magical flight exciting right before it had been exciting for a little too long. It was Leorio.
Standing right behind him were a pair of teenage sisters. One had bright blue braids, and the other had short pink hair. Both girls were actively looking around at the towering city architecture with the wide-eyed, unguarded interest of people who simply had not spent enough time in massive metropolitan hubs to find them unremarkable. They were Akane and Aoi. Liam had last seen the two of them when they were actively picking pockets in a crowded building that also happened to contain Leorio, which was exactly how Kurapika had eventually crossed paths with all three of them in the first place.
The second group, however, was the one that made Liam and Kurapika silently look at each other.
Camilla Hui Guo Rou, the Second Prince of the Kakin Kingdom, was currently standing in a public fountain square in a city hosting the brutal Hunter Exam. She had three people in crisp, uniform military attire standing rigidly behind her. She moved her head and observed the city like someone who had firmly decided a very long time ago that whatever physical space she happened to be walking through belonged to her by absolute default. It gave her a very particular, heavy quality of presence that was incredibly difficult to ignore, and was clearly not intended to be ignored by anyone.
Shizuku looked at the arrogant royal with polite, empty blankness. She had absolutely no memory of seeing the woman at the hotel banquet.
Machi looked at her with absolutely no expression at all, which was just Machi being Machi.
The demonic foxes or kiriko cheerfully delivered their final, practiced briefing to Camilla and Leorio's respective groups. Appearing to be in incredibly good spirits, the disguised beasts leaped into the air, shifted back into their massive animal forms, and departed upward into the clouds with visible enthusiasm. The Second Prince immediately turned and walked directly toward the glass entrance of the shopping mall, her heels clicking sharply against the stone. She didn't bother making eye contact with a single person in the square.
"She literally just bought them," Leorio said, pulling his sunglasses down and watching the royal entourage walk away. "The entire mountain range near their home territory. She just bought the land and handed the deed over to the foxes. She also arranged a highly lucrative, permanent position for the fox family within the Kakin government. They accepted the massive bribe before her people even finished their second sentence."
It was the hidden examiner route, skipped entirely through a massive real estate transaction. It was the exact kind of brute-force solution that only actually worked if you possessed very specific, limitless financial resources and had absolutely no particular interest in experiencing the intended spirit of the trial.
The fox family's unique role in the exam, Liam understood, was a deliberate design decision by whoever had originally built this chaotic process. Most preliminary examiners made themselves highly visible and applied psychological or physical pressure directly to the candidates. The Warcraft examiners, however, were entirely optional. They only appeared to the candidates who actively managed to find them, not the other way around. If a candidate passed the specific test they set, the beasts simply flew them straight to the official venue. There was no terrible bus ride, no convoluted map chain to follow, and absolutely no humiliating ice cream gestures required.
It was a brilliant shortcut designed strictly for people who actually knew to look for it, or for the rare few who stumbled onto it with enough presence of mind to recognize exactly what they had found. It operated exactly like a hidden, secret level in a video game that someone had sadistically designed to be played by millions of desperate people simultaneously.
Leorio finally spotted Kurapika standing across the crowded square. His face lit up with the profound delight of someone encountering a familiar, comforting landmark in highly unfamiliar, hostile territory. "Kurapika!"
"Your baseline skill level is still far too low for you to be attempting this exam," Kurapika said bluntly as the man approached.
Leorio sighed loudly and turned to look at the two sisters trailing behind him. "See? I specifically told you not to come here. There is still plenty of time for us to turn around and go back home."
Akane smiled warmly, radiating the deep serenity of someone who had already firmly made up her mind. "New life experiences are always valuable."
Aoi scowled, raising her small hands and making a tight fist. "I am absolutely not weaker than you are, old man."
The three of them crossed the paved square to officially join the group. Leorio's boundless social energy was currently functioning at maximum capacity. He distributed loud, cheerful greetings efficiently to everyone in turn, before finally leaning in close to Kurapika. He lowered his voice by a very small amount that wasn't quite a subtle whisper. "The terrifying person who completely possessed that giant tiger back then. Is he here with you?"
Akane had already stepped forward and extended her hand directly to Liam. "Long time no see. I am a huge fan of your work."
Liam shook her hand, looking mildly curious. "How exactly did you manage to recognize me in this crowd?"
"I just knew," Akane said simply, tapping her chest. "It physically felt exactly like you."
Aoi crossed her arms and looked at her older sister with the deep skepticism of someone who required a much more logical mechanism to explain things. "How does that even make sense? How does a feeling work like that?"
Akane clearly didn't have a better, more technical explanation to offer, and she didn't appear to feel the need to provide one.
The suffocating wave of murderous intent arrived a fraction of a second before Liam could even process the source.
It came from somewhere behind them. It was not directed at him specifically, but it was incredibly broad and blistering hot. It was the terrifying kind of violent intent that wasn't aimed at a single, specific person so much as it was aimed indiscriminately at absolutely everyone currently present in the immediate vicinity. The dense crowd gathered around the splashing fountain reacted physically before their brains could even understand why they were moving. It was the crushing social pressure of a hundred ordinary people simultaneously deciding they desperately needed to be somewhere else.
Then came the screaming.
And then came the terrible, wet sounds that immediately followed the screaming, the sickening noises that were infinitely worse because they were highly specific and undeniably physical.
A crazed man had charged through the outer edge of the square wielding a massive, jagged long blade. He was using the weapon wildly and indiscriminately, swinging it in wide, chaotic arcs the way some broken people used violence when the very concept of indiscriminate destruction had become their entire, poisoned relationship with the world. He was shouting something completely incoherent about the Hunter Exam, screaming about how absolutely none of them were going to be allowed to participate. It was the kind of chaotic, destructive goal that required a much broader theory of change than his unhinged mind appeared to have successfully developed.
A heavy pulse of cold death energy slammed directly into Liam's heart. Then it hit him again. A second point. The screaming crowd violently split away from the bloody path of the swinging blade, trampling each other to escape.
Liam shifted his weight. He was just about to move.
The doll-girl was already standing directly behind the man.
She had not, as far as Liam's highly trained eyes had observed, actually run. She had been standing perfectly still in her previous position near the crosswalk, and then, without warning, she was simply standing right behind the screaming attacker. The physical distinction between those two states of being had occurred without any visible transition, blur, or displacement of air.
Her small arm was fully extended straight out in front of her. Through the gaping, wet wound she had just punched directly through the center of the man's chest, the brutal geometry of her strike was clear enough for anyone to see.
She was casually holding his heart in her bare hand.
The wet organ was still beating, briefly, pulsing against her small fingers.
The crazed man's eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell heavily to the stone pavement.
Liam slowly lowered his hand and immediately recalibrated his internal threat assessment of the girl.
She had clearly loaded a vastly different capability set than her extreme energy-conservation protocol had initially suggested. Or, perhaps, the rigid conservation protocol itself was simply a terrifying form of continuous preparation, actively storing up massive amounts of kinetic output for a single, devastating deployment rather than simply choosing not to spend it. The physical movement she had just executed had been fast enough that Liam genuinely hadn't been able to track it visually, which instantly placed her combat speed in a highly dangerous category worth noting for the future.
Another cold pulse of death energy reached him.
He looked around the chaotic square at the bleeding victims scattered on the stone ground, quickly counting the faces that were no longer organized into recognizable human expressions. He then checked the new number glowing on his internal mental panel.
Six total.
The murderer made one, which meant five innocent bystanders had died before the doll-girl had stepped in and violently removed the immediate problem.
He looked at those five still bodies for a long moment amidst the screaming crowd. He did the grim, cold math he always did. He noted the final number.
The doll-girl casually opened her hand and dropped the ruined heart onto the pavement. She meticulously wiped the dark blood from her skin against the fabric of her sleeve, turned around, and began walking toward the shopping mall entrance without altering her slow, mechanical pace in the slightest.
From the surrounding city streets, the high wail of sirens was already rapidly converging on their location. Bright red and blue lights reflected off the fountain water as police cruisers and heavily armed response vehicles moved aggressively toward the square from multiple different directions.
"Let's go," Liam said, his voice cutting through the panic.
They moved as a group, walking away from the slaughter. Behind them, the massive square rapidly filled with emergency response vehicles. Shouting police officers frantically established a yellow-tape perimeter to hold back the morbid onlookers, while frantic medical personnel with folding stretchers moved quickly toward the bleeding bodies on the ground.
A young police officer kneeled heavily beside the nearest victim, pressing two fingers to a bloody neck, and spoke rapidly into her shoulder radio. "Command, in addition to the armed perpetrator, I have six civilian casualties confirmed dead at the scene."
The towering glass entrance of the shopping mall was only forty meters ahead of them. The decorative fountain continued running smoothly in the background, the clear water cycling endlessly through its mathematically designed pattern, completely and utterly uninterested in the tragedy that had just happened in its immediate vicinity.