He spent three days after his return doing nothing that looked like preparation.
This was deliberate. Voidshard's intelligence, accessed fully after the twenty four hour containment, had revealed that Bael maintained observation of the mortal world through the residual connection to his Avatar's extracted shadow. The connection was passive and the Avatar was in Liu Yun's Register rather than intact, so the observation was limited, but limited was not zero.
He ate normal food. He walked in the city in daylight without the shadow army deployed. He went to the Association building and filed two run reports for the Gates he had cleared in the past month, completing the administrative trail that any legitimate A rank Hunter would maintain.
He also, on the second day, received a visit from a Hunter he had not expected.
Her name was Jin Hara. He knew her. He had known her since childhood, two years older, C rank Hunter with an earth type ability, someone he had grown up alongside in the part of Veramore that produced E rank Hunters and convenience store workers in roughly equal proportions. She had been one of the few people who had not changed toward him when the E rank registration came through. She had not pitied him, which he had appreciated. She had not stopped believing he was capable of more, which he had appreciated even more.
She came to the safe house because Sera had apparently sent her the address, which Liu Yun filed under Sera's judgment about interpersonal matters is better than mine.
Jin sat across from him at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and looked at him with the expression of someone who has seen a great deal and is in the process of revising their model of what a great deal means.
'I watched the footage,' she said.
'Most people did,' he said.
'Liu Yun. That was you in the middle of it. In your E rank jacket.'
He looked down at the jacket. He was still wearing it, in fact, because he kept forgetting to buy better. 'Yes.'
'The thing in the sky with twelve wings. You made that?'
'Extracted it from a Gate formation. It's in my Register now.'
She absorbed this.
'There's a Shadow Sovereign,' she said. 'The international Hunter forums have been discussing nothing else for three days. Some people think it's an S rank Hunter with an army type ability. Some people think it's a new class of entity entirely. The Association hasn't confirmed identity.' She looked at him. 'Is it going to stay unconfirmed?'
He thought about what the Oracle had said. About being seen. About what happens after the Avatar and the consequences that extended beyond Bael.
'Probably not for much longer,' he said.
Jin nodded slowly. She drank her tea. She looked around the safe house with its analysis equipment and training space and the specific lack of personal items that characterized a space organized for function rather than habitation.
'What do you need?' she said.
'I need to go to the Seventh Layer and confront the Demon King,' Liu Yun said.
'Before or after you get a coat that isn't E rank issue?'
He smiled for the first time in several days.
'After,' he said. 'Probably right after.'
Jin stayed for dinner. Sera joined them and the three of them ate in the kitchen and talked. Not about Bael or the Seventh Layer, but about the neighborhood they had grown up in, the teachers they remembered, the small daily facts of lives before Gates and Hunters had defined everything. It was the kind of conversation that exists to remind people what they are fighting for when the abstract concepts of the city and the world become too large and general to feel like actual reasons.
He needed to remember the actual reasons.
After Jin left, Sera looked at him across the kitchen table.
'She loves you,' Sera said. Not as a statement of romance. As an observation about the kind of loyalty that predates categories.
'I know,' he said. 'She's always been better at it than I deserved.'
'You're going to come back,' Sera said. Not a question. A statement of intent, directed at him as much as at herself.
'I'm going to come back,' he agreed.
He meant it. He meant it the way his father must have meant it every time he left for a dungeon, the way every Hunter who had someone to come back to meant it. Not as a guarantee, because nothing was a guarantee, but as the absolute refusal to accept the alternative as the plan.
He was going to come back.
He was going to finish this.