"Run, Forrest, run!"
In the silence of the Eternal Library, miles away from the chaos, a man suddenly bellowed the line at the top of his lungs. The other patrons jumped, glare-laced "shushes" and raised fingers immediately targeting the source of the noise.
"Sorry! My bad!" the man mouthed, his expression crumbling into a slumped, defeated mask. He shoved the book he'd been holding—upside down—back onto the shelf and hurried toward the exit.
Damn Phantom Troupe. They actually killed them...
Outside, the man pulled his hood low, his jaw set in a hard line. He walked briskly toward the front desk.
The librarian saw him and offered a professional smile. "Sir, that package you were asking about just arrived. This is the mark you mentioned, right?" She held up an envelope-sized parcel, pointing to the bold "DIO" printed on the label.
The man snatched the package without a word and pushed through the glass doors. He hadn't gone two blocks before he realized he was being tailed.
Looks like these guys got caught in the rain, too. Doesn't matter. It's all because of those damn Spiders!
I'm Liam. I might not be the fastest person on the planet, but I'm definitely the luckiest.
The second those pillars of flame bloomed in the wedding garden hundreds of meters away, Liam knew he had to move. The air itself seemed to shudder under the weight of the blast. An explosion of that scale meant a massive, instantaneous body count, and for someone with his Nen curse, proximity was a death sentence. If he stayed within range of the fallout, he'd be submerged in a tidal wave of death energy.
His heart was already thumping erratically, strained to its current limit. If he underwent another forced growth spurt here, he wouldn't just age; he'd likely slip into a coma—or worse, become a liability that would get Shizuku and Kurapika killed.
"Liam, go! Now!" Shizuku's voice cut through the static of the B-ring communicator, sharp and commanding. "I'll handle her."
"We'll kill her together!" Liam shot back, his teeth gritted against the rising heat.
His legs were already churning, muscles screaming as they propelled him in the opposite direction of the carnage. The brutal, repetitive training of the last few days was manifesting in every stride. He felt like the wind itself, a blur of motion tearing through the manicured estate, the smell of scorched grass and ozone trailing in his wake.
"Did he really just bolt?" Bambie muttered. Her eyes narrowed, tracking his retreating form for a split second before she dismissed him. She didn't hesitate, redirecting the shimmering swarm of bubbles surrounding her toward Shizuku.
Shizuku knew the drill. Blinky couldn't vacuum up living beings or complex Nen constructs, so she relied on raw mechanical force. She swung the heavy vacuum, launching a volley of conjured chainsaws to intercept the incoming spheres. The air filled with the frantic whine of engines and the sharp pop-pop-pop of colliding Nen.
But there were too many. Without Liam's Spirit Gun to pick them off with surgical precision, Shizuku could only neutralize about half. The rest drifted through the drifting smoke, homing in on her from every angle like silent, translucent predators. Another cluster began to circle behind her, cutting off her line of retreat toward the villa.
Shizuku ducked and wove, her boots skidding on the turf. A group of bubbles slammed into the dirt where she'd been a heartbeat before, but they didn't detonate on impact. Instead, they rolled across the grass like heat-seeking marbles, relentless and hungry.
She lashed out with a chainsaw, clearing a path with a thunderous crump of displaced air. She was being herded, cornered against the stone walls of the villa. The once-elegant open courtyard now looked like a crater-pocked moonscape, wisps of acrid black smoke rising from the deep gouges in the earth.
Hard to dodge? For a normal person, maybe.
But then, a sapphire glimmer flashed in Shizuku's eyes.
Her movements shifted instantly, losing their rigid mechanical nature and becoming fluid, eerily precise. She waited until the bubbles were a hair's breadth away—the most dangerous, volatile moment—before contorting her body at a jagged, impossible angle. She slid across the grass, her back barely an inch from the ground, as the cluster collided behind her in a deafening roar of fire and pressure.
Before the smoke could even clear, Shizuku was lunging at Bambie. She wasn't just surviving anymore; she was hunting.
Liam had been sprinting for nearly twenty seconds when he felt the first wave hit.
He had activated the star mark on Shizuku's leg, projecting his consciousness to keep a ghostly eye on her while he ran. He was coming up on a high perimeter wall, his inertia far too high to stop. He didn't even try. He hit the stone shoulder-first, the masonry shattering under his Nen-reinforced weight, and tumbled out toward a small, rushing river. He caught his balance on a slick stone, leaped across the water in a single bound, and rolled onto the opposite bank.
Then the death energy truly hit.
Two distinct pulses of freezing, searing air slammed into his chest, vibrating straight into his heart. Through the rock bird's eyes, a thousand meters away, he saw the horror unfolding in the garden. He didn't know the exact names of the fallen, but those two pulses were just the vanguard of a much larger harvest.
His heart didn't just twitch this time; it palpitated, a frantic, uneven drumming against his ribs that made his vision swim.
If I take a few more of those, I'm out, Liam realized, his breath coming in ragged gasps. How old will I be this time?
The threshold of his "little heart" had risen along with his overall strength, but this felt like a dam about to burst. He was terrified he'd skip adolescence entirely and fast-forward straight into his retirement years.
Beside him on the riverbank, the eight-armed Reflection appeared. It lay on its side, limp and frail, looking like a paralyzed old man casting a shadow in the mud.
Liam managed a bitter, strained smile as he felt his skin tighten and his limbs lengthen with an unnatural, painful ache. "Shizuku... I hope you don't mind supporting your brother through his golden years."
Bambie watched the bespectacled girl charge her and felt a sudden surge of contempt.
Does she think getting close will help?
She stepped into Shizuku's guard, her hand stiffening into a lethal blade aimed straight for the girl's carotid artery. Shizuku's eyes didn't seem to track the movement, yet her body reacted automatically, twisting away at the last millisecond. She planted a hand on the ground and flipped forward, a gymnast's grace fueled by a warrior's instinct.
As she moved, the sapphire light in her eyes flickered and died. Shizuku was back in the driver's seat.
She used the momentum to lash out, three chainsaws spinning with a high-pitched whine as they swiped at Bambie's throat. Bambie huffed out a sharp breath, a few small bubbles detonating against the metal gears to stall the blades.
Then came the heavy vacuum. Shizuku swung Blinky like a medieval mace, the spiked end aiming straight for Bambie's temple. Bambie wasn't an Enhancer; she had no intention of tanking a direct hit from that metal monstrosity. She leaped back, but Shizuku stuck to her like glue, her expression vacant but her intent deadly.
A stray drop of blood from the earlier explosion sat on Shizuku's fingertip. Under the subtle influence of her aura, it began to twist and lengthen, trying to form the shape of a five-pointed star.
"You want my blood?" Bambie hissed.
She didn't know about the marks, but she had a predator's instinct for being touched. She flared her aura—a violent burst of Ken that blew Shizuku back and scattered the blood droplet into a fine mist before it could take shape.
She's sharp, Shizuku noted internally. The star mark was a stealth tool; in a head-on collision against a Nen user this experienced, it was nearly impossible to land.
These were the strongest opponents they'd ever faced. Chrollo and Machi were mysteries, and Pariston was a nightmare wrapped in a suit, but fake Uvogin and Bambie were raw, intuitive power. Their aura reserves were massive—easily double Liam's own. In the world of Nen, the weak could kill the strong, but you couldn't ignore the sheer gravity of a massive aura pool.
Bambie exhaled a stream of bubbles toward Shizuku's face. Shizuku dropped into a bridge to let them pass, but they pulled a sharp U-turn in mid-air, diving after her. She rolled, the bubbles hot on her heels, as Bambie closed in for a kick meant to shatter her glasses and her skull in one go.
Suddenly, Bambie paused. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flicker of movement.
That octopus thing again?
Boom!
Shizuku swung Blinky behind her head, detonating the chasing bubbles in a blind, desperate arc. She took Bambie's kick to the shoulder, the force sending her sliding across the grass. She wiped a trickle of blood from her nose with her sleeve, leaving a long pink smear across her chin.
The Reflection, now anchored to Shizuku, hissed at Bambie. Its eight arms danced with a frantic, hungry energy, its form more solid than before.
"That thing needs my blood to work, doesn't it?" Bambie said, surrounding herself with a protective, rotating ring of bubbles. She'd seen what it did to Omokage. "Don't bother. I won't let you scratch a single inch of my skin."
"I don't need to scratch you," Shizuku said calmly, her nosebleed already drying as her body's heightened metabolism went to work. "Distracting you is enough."
Bambie didn't respond. She just began to blow larger, slower bubbles, filling the air around her until it looked like a deadly ballroom. Then, with a sudden, lateral snap of her head, she spat a single, fist-sized bubble toward the perimeter.
"You think I didn't see you come back, kid?"
Liam ducked, the air pressure from the bubble's passage ruffling his hair like a passing gale. He didn't slow down. He cleared ten meters in a heartbeat, throwing a punch aimed squarely at Bambie's nose.
She leaned back, the fist whistling past her face. She countered with a side kick, but Liam twisted mid-air, their strikes colliding with a bone-jarring thud. Bambie didn't budge, her feet cracking the pavement beneath her. Liam was thrown back, his cheek blackened and stinging from a micro-explosion from a bubble she'd spat during the exchange.
"I thought you ran," Bambie said, glancing between Liam, Shizuku, and the floating Reflection. "Why come back to die?"
She paused, her brow furrowing as she looked at Liam.
She studied him more closely. Shizuku's movements had been too precise earlier—too much like his. He was a Manipulator, just as Omokage had guessed. He'd been using the girl's body as a puppet to test her, trying to find an opening for his mark.
She felt a surge of confidence. She'd seen through the trick.
But Liam just smiled. It wasn't the smile of a man who had been caught; it was the smile of someone who had just finished setting the board. He raised a hand, a ball of pure, rotating aura swirling in his palm.
"It's exhausting, isn't it?" he said, his voice steady despite the sweat on his brow. "Let's stop fighting and play a game instead. Catch."
Inside the rotating ball of aura, a number appeared, glowing with a soft, neon light: 100.
Omokage slowly opened his eyes.
The first thing he felt was the weight. Heavy, cold iron chains were wrapped tightly around his limbs and torso, the metal biting deep into his skin.
He was suspended over a gargantuan canyon, the wind howling through the chasm with the force of a gale, tugging at his clothes. The chains extended from the sheer, jagged cliffs on either side, holding him precariously over the infinite void.
He tried to struggle, to call on his Nen, to transform his body—but there was nothing. No spark, no flow, no heat. He was in a state of absolute Zetsu. Forced, total, and suffocating.
"What kind of Spider gets caught in its own web?" he whispered into the wind, his voice thin and hollow.
He remembered the boy. The book.
As if responding to his consciousness, the chains began to groan and slacken. He plummeted toward the darkness of the canyon floor, the stomach-flipping sensation of the fall lasting an eternity. When the chains finally jerked him to a violent halt, he saw what lay at the bottom.
It was a graveyard. The charred, skeletal ruins of a village.
And there, sitting beside a pile of blackened tents and broken dreams, was the blond boy. He was facing away from Omokage, his silhouette small and lonely against the wreckage of the abyss.