"Déjà vu," Liam said.
They had just finished hiding the car in the rock formation. Kurapika was brushing dust from his palms. The yellow-furred rat was sitting in a gap between the roots a few meters away, watching them with the alert attention of something that had been here before.
Liam stood with one foot on the rat, had been about to reach for the Star Mark, and then stopped.
Kurapika looked at him. The expression on Ellie Abby's face was somewhere between blank and somewhere else. Eyes present but slightly unfocused, the specific quality of a person with a gap between what their brain was reporting and what they knew.
"Liam?" He put a hand on the borrowed shoulder. The muscle density was still surprising. "What's wrong?"
"I'm asking," Liam said carefully, "whether you have a sense of déjà vu."
"I don't," Kurapika said.
"I do." A pause. "But it's not déjà vu. Between my consciousness and this body, there's a ten-minute discrepancy. My memory has content that this body's brain doesn't."
Kurapika processed this for exactly two seconds. Then he materialized Book Four.
The divination came out wrong immediately. Not wrong in the sense of a failed result, wrong in the sense of a result that contradicted what the approach to the forest should have produced. Tserriednich was not in the trees ahead. He was in a convoy, moving north on a road, the image showing a vehicle interior and the prince watching something through the window.
Kurapika added more aura and pushed the view out. Sweat appeared on his forehead. The satellite view resolved: the convoy was forty-something kilometers north, already clear of the forest region entirely.
"Why did he move?" Kurapika said. The timing was wrong. Too fast, too coordinated, no obvious trigger.
"He moved because of what happened ten minutes ago," Liam said.
He explained it while they ran.
The wind-no-resistance field expanded outward to include Kurapika as Liam converted aura to the technique, the bubble of still air carrying them both through the forest at a speed that moved dead leaves in a perfect radius around them without disturbing a single one. Talking while doing this was possible if you were used to it.
The ten-minute reversal, as Liam laid it out, was not time travel. Tserriednich didn't send his consciousness backward or fold the timeline. What the ability actually did was reverse the entropic movement of matter within a fixed radius: everything in that sphere of effect returned to the physical state it had occupied ten minutes prior. Every molecule, every particle, all of it rolled backward like a recording being rewound.
From outside the radius, the world had simply continued. From inside it, ten minutes had not occurred.
"That's not actually time manipulation," Kurapika said, and there was something grudging in his voice that suggested he was annoyed at having spent months being confused by something that resolved into a mechanics problem.
"It's mass entropy reversal with a range limit," Liam said. "Disguised as time manipulation because the effect is identical from the inside. His consciousness gets pulled out of the material world during the reversal, which is why he retains memory of the reversed events. Everyone else in the radius just... didn't have those ten minutes."
Kurapika ran and thought. "That's why I kept losing him. Every time I got close enough to matter, he triggered the ability, and afterward I had no memory of what happened. He cleared the board, retreated, and I started over without knowing I'd already played."
"Probably several times," Liam agreed.
"And you remembered this time because—"
"My consciousness isn't in this brain. It's connected to my body on the other side of the world. The reversal rewound Ellie Abby's neurons back to ten minutes ago. My actual mind was never inside the radius." He tapped Ellie Abby's temple. "I'm using this brain as a terminal, not as the source. The reversal put the terminal back to factory settings but didn't touch the original machine."
Kurapika absorbed this. Ran another hundred meters.
"What happened in those ten minutes?"
"We found him. I confirmed his ability. I also confirmed something else." Liam's hand went to his pocket. The Nine Yin talisman should have been there, and wasn't.
He had felt the depletion the moment he checked: one talisman consumed and not restored. A Nen-built object he had used during the reversed interval, physically destroyed in a process the reversal had then nominally undone. But the talisman hadn't come back.
"His reversal rolls back physical matter," Liam said. "It does not restore Nen constructs that were spent. The talisman I used in those ten minutes is gone. Which means next time I use one, he can rewind the physical consequences but not return what I burned to cause them."
"So every reversal costs him something he doesn't know he's trading," Kurapika said.
"And costs me one talisman per attempt, which I know I'm trading."
The mathematics of this were not comfortable, but they were at least defined.
The forest gave way to rocky mountain terrain and then, in the distance, a figure on a peak. Standing, with a telescope.
The same ten minutes, accelerated. Beatle came from the side without preamble, moving at the speed of something that had been bred for this and nothing else. Kurapika gathered aura and hardened in time to deflect the first pass, took a cut along the abdomen that would have been worse without the deflection, and stepped back.
Liam had already reached into his pocket.
The Nine Yin talisman crushed in his palm. The dark pressure built immediately behind Ellie Abby's shoulders, black circles solidifying, the multiplicative weight of the Enhancement output stacking against a borrowed body that had not been designed for this but was going to manage it anyway.
Beatle came back.
It missed.
Not by skill on Beatle's part: by the specific absence of Liam being where Beatle expected him to be. Wind aura converted on the fly, Liam went diagonally upward past Beatle's trajectory and continued up the rock face in a line that had no logical relationship to gravity and moved too fast for the prince on the peak to recalibrate before the hand arrived.
The wind blade was the edge of the technique, transmuted aura concentrated to a cutting edge. It met the line of the fourth prince's neck.
In the same instant, Tserriednich closed his eyes.
The grinding sound came.
The blood running from the wound returned. The wound sealed. The hand blade passed through air that hadn't been cut yet. The private soldiers who had raised their weapons had not raised their weapons. Beatle was still alive and approximately forty meters away, head intact.
And Liam was back at the base of the rock formation, standing next to Kurapika, in a configuration that was ten minutes old.
He checked his pocket.
Two Nine Yin talismans instead of three.
He looked at the note he had pressed into the crack of a stone before the second attempt, written in the seconds between identifying the trajectory and committing to the move. He pulled it out. The handwriting was his, using Ellie Abby's hand, in the shorthand he used when writing to himself: confirmed ability mechanics, confirmed weakness, confirmed talisman expenditure persists through reversal.
"You already knew," Kurapika said.
"And now you do too." Liam folded the note. "He'll have moved the convoy again. About forty kilometers north."
Kurapika manifested Revelation without being asked.
Liam sat with the inventory he was running in the background: talismans remaining, the borrowed body's aura reserves, the distance to where Tserriednich was now relocating, and in a different, quieter corner of his awareness, the faint sense of something wrong in the connection to his main body.
Not danger, exactly. Something changing. Something that hadn't been there this morning.
"What is the situation over there?" Kurapika asked, watching Ellie Abby's face go briefly distant. "Your actual body. You said it might not be good."
Liam considered the most accurate summary.
"I'm at sea," he said. "With a Food Hunter, a rabbit-eared person, and a group of fishmen, heading toward something Netero considered a prize. Linnie told us before we left the shore that it would be dangerous, and specifically warned Aria." He paused. "And I have a feeling that my right shoulder is doing something it wasn't doing before."
Kurapika looked at him.
"Something unexpected," Liam clarified, which was not meaningfully more helpful.
Somewhere in the fog on the northern sea, Shizuku sat beside Liam's body where it lay on the boat's floorboards and looked very carefully at what was happening to his right shoulder.
The arm that was growing there was not the same as his original one. The color was different. The proportion was slightly off. It was, in all relevant respects, a second arm, and it had not been there an hour ago.
She looked at it for a long moment.
Then she looked at the fog ahead of the boat, where the fishmen were pulling them toward whatever Linnie had been working up to saying.
Her expression, as expressions went on Shizuku, was relatively unchanged. But her hand found Liam's wrist and stayed there.