Inside the cave in the rock wall, a woman was eating soup.
She had long, wavy red hair, and from the top of her head rose a pair of ears that were very clearly not human in origin, long and slightly tapered, currently standing straight up with alarm. She had a bowl in both hands and chopsticks raised and she was facing Liam with the expression of someone who had been hoping this specific thing would not happen and had been let down.
"Don't hit me!" she said.
Liam glanced at the bowl. Whatever the broth was, it smelled decent.
The Dragon Fist chain completed its delivery: Shizuku arrived on his left, Aoi on his right, both slightly breathless from the sequential teleportation. Akane came in last through the cave entrance at a run, Nimbus dissolving behind her.
The Dragon Fist ability needed to be discharged or it would discharge itself. Liam stretched his arm out and very gently touched one of the long ears with his knuckle.
The mark was already forming as he made contact, rose-gold lines settling into the ear's base. The woman relaxed fractionally and put a large spoonful of soup in her mouth.
"That's good," Shizuku said, leaning in slightly to smell the broth. "Better than you'd expect up here."
"How did you do all of that?" Liam asked, looking around the cave. Plain rock, a small fire, the bowl, not much else. "The desert. The forest. All of it. That was you?"
"Are you a rabbit?" Akane asked.
"Rabbits eat carrots," Aoi said. "You're eating meat soup."
The woman took two more aggressive spoonfuls, licked the bowl edge, and then fixed Aoi with a stare that communicated several specific feelings.
"I," she said, "am human. Not a rabbit."
She threw the bowl.
She threw the chopsticks. And then, in the same motion, she launched herself at the rock wall.
Liam caught her ankle mid-leap. She came back down, hit the cave floor feet-first, and disappeared.
Not into the rock this time. No entry point, no visual effect. She was simply gone, the way a thought is gone when something interrupts it.
Aoi punched. The Dragon Fist fired, the ability tracking forward to where its target had been established, and she arrived next to Liam. Which was where the Dragon Fist had locked on to, because Liam was the one who'd applied the initial contact.
She blinked.
"Oh," she said.
Liam caught her punch with his palm and redirected it into his own forehead, gently, with the resigned expression of a man who had made a tactical miscalculation.
"She disappeared without going into anything," Akane said, studying the spot. "I didn't see her phase into any surface. She just—"
"Emitter?" Shizuku said. "But she integrated with the ice before. She was inside the rock wall." She looked at Liam.
"Let's ask her," Liam said.
He hooked one finger toward the ground.
The cave floor obliged. A shape pushed up from the stone the way something pushes up from water, and the rabbit-eared woman emerged with the involuntary expression of someone being carried somewhere against their will by their own legs. Aoi and Akane saw it clearly now: the rose-gold pentagram on the base of her left ear, small and precise.
"What is she?" Shizuku asked him.
Liam opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "It's—I can tell there's something. I just can't quite—it's like trying to describe a color to someone." He looked at the woman. "Tell them yourself. What's your name?"
She complied with the specific resentment of someone who had learned that resisting was temporarily unavailable. "Aria."
"Liam. Shizuku. Akane, Aoi." He pointed around the cave. "We didn't come here to bother anyone. You're the one who started with the sand tidal waves and the moving paths and the ice monument. If you'd run a little slower I wouldn't have had to do this." He tilted his head. "How did you disappear just now?"
Aria blinked. She had clearly been expecting a different question. "Don't you want to know why I was trying to drive you away?"
"Sure, why were you trying to drive us away?"
"You humans aren't welcome here!" She drew herself up with genuine indignation. "We just want to be left alone. Is that so complicated? Why does everyone keep—" She stopped.
Aoi pointed at her with the focused energy of someone who had just caught something important. "You said 'you humans.' And before you said you were human."
Aria's expression confirmed this had been an error.
"If you're human," Aoi continued, "why are you talking about humans like they're a different group from you?"
"I didn't say—"
"You did."
"How can a human have rabbit ears?" Aoi pressed.
Shizuku said, without inflection: "People are born with all kinds of things. Cleft lip, for instance. Unusual cartilage formation is not outside the realm of possibility."
Aoi considered this.
"There's enormous human variation," Shizuku confirmed.
"Okay," Liam said, before Aoi could continue cataloguing the limits of her anatomical education. "Ears aside. The part I don't understand is this: I thought you might be some kind of creature with an innate ability, which would explain the no-aura-trace situation. But if you're human, then no innate ability. And you clearly don't use Nen." He spread his hands. "So what was all that?"
Aria stared at him. At all of them. Eight eyes waiting for an explanation she apparently found either obvious or annoying.
"How should I know?" she said.
Aoi made a noise. "Nobody just does things without understanding how. If you didn't understand it, you couldn't develop it, and if you couldn't develop it—"
"Can you breathe?" Aria interrupted.
"What?"
"Can you breathe?"
"Obviously."
"How do you breathe? What mechanism do you employ? How does your heart pump blood around your body? Your liver filters toxins, doesn't it? Do you study how it filters? Do you try to use it more freely?"
Aoi opened her mouth. Closed it.
"I can merge with the natural environment," Aria said. "I have always been able to. When I am part of the desert, the desert is part of me, and when I want to move, the sand moves because I am the sand. It is not 'controlling' the sand. I was not controlling anything. I was just—moving. Walking. The way you walk. The way you breathe." She looked at Liam. "You don't explain how you digest food. Don't ask me to explain how I integrate with stone."
A small silence.
"Understood," Liam said. He was already noting the implications. No aura signature because it wasn't an aura-based ability. The Yin Nen Sword found nothing to cut because there was nothing to cut. Something born into the organism, operating below the level of learned ability entirely. He'd compare notes with the bone wolves later. "So you merged with the desert and you were doing what you described as moving. You were, in effect, chasing us off personally."
"We don't want anyone here," Aria said, and now there was less anger in it and more something else, flatter, tireder. "We aren't asking for much. Just to be left alone. Every year more tourists come to look at the oddities and take photographs and disturb everything and every year we have to—" She stopped again, the same spot she'd stopped before.
"We," Akane said carefully.
"Are there others like you?" Shizuku asked.
Aria pressed her lips together.
"Rabbit clan?" Aoi tried.
The look she received was withering.
"Rabbit-eared people?" Aoi revised.
No improvement.
"We can talk about that later," Liam said, before the nomenclature discussion ate the rest of the chapter. "We came here looking for something. Or someone. Possibly not a person, I'm not sure." He pulled out his phone and showed her the text from Netero. "The person who sent us here. Goes by Netero. Have you heard of him?"