The book appeared first: a dolphin-shaped shelf summoning it in a single fluid motion, the pages already opening as it settled into position before Kurapika. The cover read "Revelation" in the particular ink that meant something was stored in it rather than printed.
His eyes were already red.
The Absolute Time state came with certain costs that Kurapika had learned to treat as operational overhead: one hour of his lifespan per second active, the clock running the moment the scarlet hit his irises. He had learned to be efficient with it. He reached both hands toward the open pages and let the aura flow.
On the blank page, something like an image formed. Not a photograph, not a drawing in any conventional sense. More like a memory of a place, assembled from inference: desolate hills, three military trucks on a mountain road, dust rising in their wake. Through the window of the second vehicle, visible in profile, was the fourth prince of Kakin in sportswear, looking at something outside the frame that the divination hadn't bothered to show.
And in the background, behind the convoy, barely visible at the edge of the image: a bald, unremarkable peak. The kind of peak that appeared on no tourist maps and had no official designation.
"Where is this?" Liam said, in Ellie Abby's voice.
Camilla leaned in to look. Her expression shifted through a brief sequence: recognition, confusion, something sharper. "That terrain is unusual for Kakin. Check the north."
She was reaching for her phone to pass the image to her technical staff when Kurapika took a single measured sip from the gourd.
The aura that came out of it was concentrated and dense, refined past the point where the original source was recognizable. He absorbed it, felt his available output rise by a noticeable increment, and placed his other hand on the left-side blank page.
The image zoomed. Not like a camera zooming, but like memory expanding outward as more context became available. The hills and convoy shrank to a small mark on what now resembled a map, a top-down view with enough detail to read borders: a small nation bracketed by larger ones, pressed against the northern edge of the Kakin Kingdom's territory.
"Krafua," Camilla said, immediately. "That's a buffer state. Multiple factions have been competing for it for decades. It's been functionally ungoverned for fifteen years." She paused. "What is Tserriednich doing in Krafua."
"Nothing that's above board," Kurapika said. He released the Revelation and exhaled. "The gourd helped. More aura available than expected meant I could push the divination further. The base consumption for divining that distance without fuel would have been limiting." He rolled his collar. "I'm tired but functional. We should move."
Liam stood up in the borrowed body. "Agreed."
The changing-out-of-combat-uniforms portion of the operation was brief and practical. Kurapika put on a wig and contacts that made him look like a different kind of nondescript. Liam's borrowed body was already nondescript. Camilla arranged transport north with the specific efficiency of someone who had an entire logistics apparatus and had simply neglected to mention it.
In Camilla's province of Telida, the street-level reception was instructive. The people who lived here, the ones Camilla had given education and identity and employment to from the group Kakin law classified as having none of those things as a right, moved out of the second prince's path without hostility and with something that looked nothing like performance. The bowing and the clearance of space was reflexive, the way people move for someone whose authority they have actually internalized rather than merely acknowledged.
Kurapika watched this and said nothing.
"It could be worse," Liam observed, in Ellie Abby's voice.
"Nearly anything could be worse than Tserriednich," Kurapika agreed.
They boarded the airship north.
The jeep was waiting at the landing point, keys thrown by a driver who immediately boarded the departing airship without speaking. Professional handoff. Liam took the wheel on the grounds that Ellie Abby's body was the one with muscle memory for this region's road conditions, a calculation she hadn't made when she volunteered for today's assignment.
Krafua's terrain was exactly as hostile as its recent history suggested: unpaved roads that existed in the geological sense of being depressions between trees, tree cover that started thick and got thicker, the occasional distant sound of something that was probably not machinery. Kurapika had the map open in his lap and the Revelation book floating beside him, actively updating.
Second divination: forest. Tserriednich's convoy had moved. The image showed him outside the vehicles, in a clearing, with what appeared to be crated equipment being unloaded. Still in sportswear.
"Changed location from the hills," Kurapika said.
"Heading to or from something?" Liam asked.
"The divination doesn't show transit. Only current position." He took another small sip from the gourd and pushed the second page. "Here."
The satellite view settled. Not far. Maybe forty kilometers at the current heading, then northwest.
Third divination, from the edge of the forest: Tserriednich was stationary. Close enough that Kurapika could produce both views simultaneously without additional fuel.
Liam found a rock formation, parked the jeep nose-in, and covered the remaining gap between the vehicle and the stones. Kurapika helped without commentary. They went into the forest.
The discipline of moving quietly through dense tree cover was its own practice, separate from combat ability, and both of them had it for different reasons. They moved by halves: advance, observe, advance. No aura leakage. Kurapika had compressed himself into the closest thing to Zetsu that didn't require complete aura suppression.
A rat came through a gap in the roots. Yellow-furred, roughly the size of a large fist, nose twitching at them with the optimistic assessment of something that had not yet met consequences.
Liam timed it and kicked. The rat tumbled, bounced, looked back with the expression of profound betrayal. Before it could act on this emotion, a star pentagram settled at the base of its tail.
The rat blinked. Reoriented. Set off into the forest ahead at a ground-covering sprint.
It was followed by two birds: a crow that had been watching from a low branch and a smaller thing in the undergrowth, both marked as the rat passed below them and as the birds fell within range.
"Ahead," Kurapika confirmed, tracking both his own divination and the angle Liam's attention had shifted toward.
They moved parallel to the rat's path, the Star Mark providing passive positional feedback: where it was, the quality of the terrain it was moving through. The birds fanned out wider, gaining altitude.
Liam felt the rat slow. Something in the feedback quality changed, the difference between an animal moving freely and one that had reached proximity with something it wasn't sure about.
Then the feedback ended.
Not the gradual fade of a mark moving out of range. The instant cut of something being destroyed. Followed, half a second later, by a sensation that traveled through the Star Mark's connection the way a current travels through a wire: the lingering echo of sharp teeth closing on something small, the physical reality of being consumed transmitted in compressed, abstract form to the person holding the mark.
Liam stopped walking.
"What happened?" Kurapika said, very quietly.
"The rat," Liam said. The sensation was fading. He held it at arm's length mentally and tried to identify the quality of what had done the consuming. Not a natural predator's strike. The grip had been too deliberate, too structured. The teeth had been arranged in a configuration that teeth weren't usually arranged in. "Something ate it."
He looked at the tree line ahead.
"His Nen beast," he said.