Catching Tserriednich at the seam between one ability and the next was not a task suited to a human being.
The reversal mode and the cut-off mode alternated. The gap between them was real. It had to be real, because the alternating rule required a transition, and transitions take time. But the gap was also extremely short, shorter than reaction time in any normal sense, shorter than the window a trained Nen user could reliably exploit with any kind of targeted strike. A person would need to identify the precise moment the reversal ended, in real time, with enough lead time to initiate an attack that would land before the cut-off engaged.
People could not do this. They were simply not built for that resolution of timing.
The question Liam had been working with was: what is?
He had pressed the Sun Mark's activation the moment he left the safe house, while still moving through the corridors at a run. The Sun Mark operated at solar-range distances in daylight; the late afternoon sky was more than sufficient. Aria had been on a boat north of the continent, which was irrelevant, because the Sun Mark did not negotiate with geography. She arrived beside him mid-stride, looking mildly startled, holding nothing, ready.
He explained the plan in the time it took them to reach the street. She didn't ask clarifying questions, which he appreciated.
While running, he drank the accumulated aura from the Purple Gold Gourd talisman. Months of refined death energy concentrate, dense and cold, flooding Ellie's frame with far more than the body had been built to hold comfortably. He let the discomfort be the discomfort and kept moving. He had work to do and a narrow window to do it in.
He had been a Manipulation-type Nen user his entire career in this world. He had used the Star Mark on single targets with surgical precision and on crowds with careful management. He had never simply opened the tap and emptied everything he had into an area, trusting volume to solve problems that accuracy alone could not. It felt, as a method, aggressively wasteful. It was also the correct answer to this specific problem.
The flying star bubbles poured out of him in a cloud he could feel but not quite see, dispersing through the air around the airport in a radius seeded so densely that anything moving through it would make contact with something. They were the smallest constructs he had ever made, each one carrying the absolute minimum required to register as a mark on skin contact. Dust. He scattered them the way a storm scatters rain and told them to wait.
Aria, beside him, was meanwhile becoming the airport.
He had been uncertain whether her ability would function in an urban environment. Freier Mountain had been stone and sand and open sky. The airport was steel cable and asphalt and ventilation systems and the specific aura of hundreds of strangers in contained transit. There was nothing natural about it by any definition he could think of.
Aria did not slow down.
She touched the ground once, and the ground became part of her. Not metaphorically. Not in the manner of a Nen construct merging with matter. The ground simply extended the range of what she could perceive and influence, and then the buildings did too, and then the air columns between them, and within thirty seconds she was everywhere the airport was, and the airport knew everything she knew.
The dense cloud of flying star bubbles drifting through the air had not been noticeable to anyone present. They were genuinely invisible at normal perception levels. But Aria was not perceiving them at normal levels. She was the air they were floating in. She could feel where each one was the way a person feels where their own fingers are without looking, and she could move them the same way.
When Tserriednich's motorcade reversed back into the airport zone and the cars stopped at the drop-off point, the reversal was still active. Everything within its radius was running backward, including the air, including the invisible cloud. Aria felt the boundary of the reversed space as a direct sensation, a zone where part of herself was running in the wrong direction. She knew its edge the way a person knows the edge of their own palm.
She knew exactly when it stopped.
At the moment the reversal ended, in the instant before Tserriednich's consciousness fully returned to his body and the alternating mechanism engaged the next mode, Aria moved every bubble in range simultaneously, placing them against skin, against any exposed surface on Tserriednich and his retinue, guiding them to contact at the precise moment the window was open.
The Star Mark landed on all of them at once.
Liam locked the guards and moved them away from the target with the calm efficiency of someone rearranging furniture. He pulled Theta to two hundred meters and placed her facing the wrong direction. He moved the civilian population to the perimeter. He left the Fourth Prince of Kakin standing alone in the airport plaza, unable to move, unable to speak, watching the air around him and finally understanding the mechanism that had taken his father.
Liam activated the Nine Yin Enhancement.
Six dark circles solidified behind Ellie's back, one after another, compressing in sequence as the multiplier climbed. The wind aura condensed in Ellie's palms. It would have been elegant to use exactly what was needed. He used significantly more than that, because Tserriednich's abilities were structural and strange and he had no interest in discovering new edge cases.
The first spiral shuriken hit the Fourth Prince from directly above.
He counted ten seconds. Then he sent the second one, larger than the first, enough to open a crater in the plaza stone. When the debris settled, there was nothing left of Tserriednich that would have been recognizable as having previously been Tserriednich.
Liam stopped.
He released the aura from Ellie's frame and let the Nine Yin compression dissolve. His hands, Ellie's hands, were shaking slightly, which was the frame's problem rather than his, but he noted it as a relevant data point about current aura reserves.
Kurapika came across the plaza at a controlled walk, surveying the crater, surveying the sky, surveying Liam's Ellie-shaped silhouette, and assembling the evidence into something coherent. He arrived and said: "How did you do it?"
Aria materialized from the air at his left elbow, holding two packaged items from the airport convenience shop. She had apparently found a few minutes during the operation for personal errands.
"The boundary," she said. "I could feel where it ended. So I put the marks there."
Kurapika processed this for a moment. Then he nodded. "Thank you. It made the difference."
Aria shrugged. "Then I'll go play." She was gone before the sentence was fully out, absorbed back into the environment with the thoroughness of something that had never quite been separate from it to begin with. Kurapika focused his Nen, concentrated on sensing, and found nothing. No aura signature. No warmth of a living presence. Just the concrete and the air and the distant sound of the terminal.
He stared at the space where she had been.
"What on earth," he said.
Tserriednich's private guards came back to themselves in ones and twos, released from the Star Mark's hold as Liam let the marks go inactive. They found themselves standing at various points around the airport exterior with no clear memory of how they had arrived there, and no Fourth Prince visible anywhere. The scene in front of them had a large hole in it that had not been there before.
They looked at each other. Some of them looked at the crater. Some of them looked at the people moving normally through the terminal entrance, none of whom appeared to have noticed the crater, because the Star Mark had given them a collective suggestion to regard the area as unremarkable.
Theta stood two hundred meters away and did not look confused.
She looked at the crater with the steady attention of someone who had already done the arithmetic and found it balanced. A colleague moved to her side and touched her shoulder and asked where the prince was.
"The prince lost," Theta said. "That's all."
She said it with the quiet finality of someone filing something away for the last time, then turned back toward the terminal.
Kurapika identified Ellie sitting in a corner near a departure gate, upright and comfortable and entirely asleep, the way people sometimes sleep who have been asked to hold a very large thing for someone else and have simply run out of capacity. He had suspected as much from the moment he heard about the number of bubbles deployed. The aura cost of seeding that density across an area that size, combined with the Nine Yin strikes, would have been extreme even by the standards of Liam's current reserves. Ellie's body was simply resting.
He stood nearby and did not disturb her.
Camilla's voice arrived in his earpiece without preamble. "Liam found what you've been looking for. Camilla sending the address."
Kurapika was already moving before she finished.
The address brought him to a property registered under the A-family's organizational structure, one of the many holdings the Tserriednich had kept at a comfortable remove from his public profile. A room that had been described as a library, which was technically accurate in the sense that it contained shelves and the shelves contained containers and the containers contained things that had been collected over time.
The fat body of King Nasubi was already inside, seated in the room's single chair, facing the shelves.
Kurapika's footsteps stopped.
One wall. Floor to ceiling. Row after row of sealed glass jars, each one filled with fluid and each one holding a pair of eyes. Scarlet. All of them scarlet, the specific red that existed only in the Kurta clan, the color that had cost every person who had ever carried it more than anything should cost. There were more jars than he had expected. There were always more jars than he expected.
In the middle of the wall, at eye level, a jar that was different from the others.
It did not hold eyes.
It held a head. A boy's head. Preserved, suspended in fluid, the face slack and peaceful in the way of things that had been beyond fear for a long time. A face Kurapika recognized. A face he had been eight years old with, twelve years old with, fifteen years old with, before the clan and the age and the everything.
His childhood friend looked back at him from the jar.
Liam, in the king's body, knew what Kurapika was seeing. He said nothing. There was nothing to say that would be the right thing.
He simply waited.