Liam spread his palm and stared at the Sun-Moon mark etched into his skin.
Nothing came back.
He tried the Moon Mark ring channels. He tried reaching through the Star Marks. He might as well have been pressing buttons on a toy phone, because the silence on the other end was absolute. No Shizuku. No Kurapika. Not even a faint pulse from any of the nineteen marks he'd distributed over the past two years.
The universe had, apparently, placed him on hold. Indefinitely.
He stood on a hillside and assessed his situation with the calm practicality of a man who had already been killed, resurrected, aged backward, age forward. The hillside was red rock and sharp gravel. Cold wind cut across it. He was completely naked.
He did a slow three-sixty.
Red rock mountains. Clear sky. And at the foot of the range, straddling the border between wilderness and civilization, a city. Or what used to be a city. Every building that remained standing had holes in it. Every street was a geometry of craters. The skyline looked like a mouth with most of its teeth punched out, and the teeth that remained were cracked.
He'd seen war zones before. This looked like someone had used a war zone as a warm-up.
"Liam," said a small voice near his ear. "You're not wearing clothes."
He turned his head. A palm-sized girl hovered at eye level, wings beating lazily, big round eyes blinking up at him with the expression of someone personally offended by his wardrobe choices. Or lack thereof.
"Akane," he said.
"Yes! It's me." She did a little spin, seemingly delighted by this confirmation. Her chibi proportions made her look less like a student and more like an accessory someone had forgotten to attach to a keychain.
Liam looked down at his bare feet on the gravel, then back at her. "Where did your Hatsu take us?"
The question was rhetorical. He already had a guess. He just didn't like it.
Half an hour ago, Akane had tracked him down at the residence and launched into a rapid-fire explanation. Her Hatsu was crystallizing. That was good. The condition was that it could only activate on him, specifically. That was interesting. The effect was that it would transport them into "the world that exists in Liam's eyes." That was the kind of vague, impossible-sounding Specialization language that Bisky had warned him about: conceptually beautiful, logistically terrifying.
He'd said yes because he was curious and because he'd assumed the worst case was some kind of mental landscape. A dream architecture. Something internal.
He had not assumed he'd end up standing on a literal mountain, in a literal alternate dimension, with no clothes and no Moon Mark reception.
"I don't know!" Akane spun again, genuinely thrilled. "But this place is incredible. Liam, what is this place?"
"I just asked you."
She didn't seem to register this as the problem it was.
He needed clothes. He needed to move. He needed, desperately, to know which specific flavor of terrible this situation was. All his Nen worked: he ran a quick inventory. Aura, full. Taoist Nun, present. Star Marks on twenty-odd people, operational locally. Hatsu responding normally. The wind transmutation surrounding him felt identical to the way it always felt, which was reassuring.
The Memento Mori panel was gone.
He tried three times. Nothing. The death-energy interface that had haunted him since waking up in a mass gravehad simply ceased to function, like an app crashing in a foreign operating system.
He filed that under "problems to panic about later" and jumped off the hillside.
His aura condensed into flowing wind around him before he'd cleared the first ten meters. The currents caught him, shaped themselves into something between a glide and controlled descent, and carried him down toward the city. Akane shot after him like a hummingbird, perfectly happy to treat dimensional displacement as a field trip.
The closer he got, the worse it looked.
He landed at the city's edge and walked in through what might once have been a main street. The buildings on either side had been caved in from above, punched through, or simply collapsed into rubble heaps that blocked the road every thirty meters. Streetlights bent at wrong angles. Entire sections of road had dropped into whatever was underneath. The wind moved through it all without resistance, because there was nothing left to slow it down.
No bodies visible. No living people. The silence was not peaceful. It was the silence of somewhere that had already finished being bad.
He found clothes in a car that had been thrown through a ground-floor wall and was now embedded there like a filing cabinet someone had given up on. The door was warped beyond opening with hands, so he just pulled the roof off and rummaged through the back seat. A vest that was slightly too large. Shorts. No shoes anywhere that he could find.
He wrapped his aura around his feet in a tight layer, hardened it enough to walk on broken glass without noticing, and moved on.
"Can we go back?" he asked.
"Anytime!" Akane confirmed cheerfully from somewhere above his shoulder. "I can return us whenever. I just don't know if I can come back here after. The Hatsu might not form the same connection twice."
"So this is a first and possibly only visit."
"Probably yes."
He thought about that. A Specialization Hatsu that punched through to a different world, used him as the navigation system, and might be a single-use door. That was either the most useless ability in history or the most terrifying, and which one depended entirely on which world it opened into.
He looked at the ruins around him and started to form a theory.
The scale of destruction was wrong for any Nen user he knew. The Ant King could have done this, maybe, at full capacity over a sustained period. But this looked systemic. City-wide. Like it had been happening for years, repeatedly, by something that could do this casually.
The world in his eyes. What had he been thinking about before Akane arrived?
He'd been reviewing what he knew about the Dragon Ball continuity. Specifically the future timeline. Specifically the one where two Androids killed almost everyone.
He stopped walking.
"Akane," he said slowly.
"Yes?"
"How literally does your Hatsu interpret 'the world in my eyes'?"
She tilted her head. "Very literally?"
He stood in the ruins of what he was now almost certain was Future Earth and thought about the life choices that had led him here.
Then the ground kicked under his bare feet.
Not an earthquake. Rhythmic. Percussive. Something enormous, happening at distance. A second later, the shockwave arrived, slow and rolling, and then the sound caught up, a thunderclap that had no right being as loud as it was. The horizon lit up, orange and white, and then a column of smoke and debris lifted into the sky like a slow-motion monument to something going catastrophically wrong.
The dried corpse he'd accidentally stepped on earlier rattled in the updraft.
"Interesting," Liam said, which was what he said when he meant the opposite.
He was already moving.
The aura around him thickened and accelerated, wind-channels extending in every direction, shaping the ambient air into something he could ride. The explosion's pressure wave hit him and he absorbed it instead of resisting, letting it add to his speed, surfing the shockwave toward its own source like the galaxy's least sensible wind surfer.
The smoke was still rising when he crested the fresh crater's edge and looked down.
Two people. The pit was deep, maybe fifteen meters, walls of vaporized concrete still glowing faintly at the edges. And at the center, on a floor of compressed rubble, a young man with short black hair had wrapped himself around a boy with purple hair, shielding him with his whole body. The black-haired man's left arm was simply gone below the shoulder. The exposed bone was white and jagged. Blood ran into the dust in multiple streams.
The purple-haired boy was pinned under him, crying, staring at the missing arm with the specific expression of someone who had just had something permanently removed from the world.
And the black-haired man was still breathing.
Akane pressed herself behind Liam's ear. "Under an explosion like that," she whispered, "he's still moving?"
Liam was already calculating. The Star Mark could heal this. If he could get it applied before the blood loss became irreversible. The arm was gone, which meant it was a "rebuild from nothing" situation rather than reattachment, but the Star Mark had done that before. He remembered the late Fenrir head. He remembered his own arm in three different incidents.
He dropped into the pit.
The impact sent a crack through the debris floor. The purple-haired boy's head snapped up, eyes red from crying, going immediately hard and hostile.
"Who are you? Are you with those two demons?!"
Akane poked her head out from behind Liam's ear to look.
Liam stared at the boy. Purple hair. Sword hilt visible over one shoulder. Eyes that had seen too much of the specific thing that makes eyes look like that.
"Trunks," Liam said. He looked at the man pinned over him. Short black hair. One arm. Protecting someone smaller than himself with the last functional thing his body had. "And that's Gohan."
Trunks went still. Not calming down, just recalculating.
Liam didn't wait for him to finish. He snapped his fingers, let a Flying Star Bubble form at the fingertip, and flicked it in a gentle arc. It floated across the gap like a dandelion seed, slow and unthreatening, and settled against the back of Gohan's neck. The rose-gold pentagram bloomed there, quiet and immediate.
The healing current found the injury and started working.
Then something hit Liam from behind with the force of a falling building.
The energy beam went through his chest cleanly, entered between his shoulder blades and exited through his sternum, and the shockwave threw him face-first into the wall of the pit. He bounced off it, spat blood, and landed flat.
"Ah," he said, into the dirt.
He lay there for a moment and did a damage assessment. Complete penetration wound. Pulmonary involvement, certainly. Cardiac, possibly. He couldn't feel his left hand. The Star Mark on the back of his neck was already working, which was good, because the list of things currently wrong with his thoracic cavity was extensive.
He heard Akane somewhere above him, a small sound of surprise. He heard Trunks scream something that involved the word "demons" again. He heard two voices up at the crater's edge, casual and amused, discussing whether there were any interesting people left on Earth worth keeping alive for entertainment purposes.
Liam decided he hated them already.
The healing accelerated. Tissue knit. The Star Mark ran through its sequence of small miracles, and after what felt like entirely too long but was probably ninety seconds, he pushed himself upright.
He spat out the last of the blood that had collected in his throat, looked at the hole in the front of his vest, and experienced a specific, deeply familiar feeling: the universe had decided to complicate his day again, and there was nothing to do about it but proceed.
"Damn," he said, prodding the fabric, "couldn't at least let me finish looking at the scenery first? What kind of opening difficulty is this?"
Trunks was staring at him.
Gohan was waking up, the Star Mark's work visible even from here, new tissue forming at the shoulder, bone drawing itself back from the clean air.
Up at the edge of the crater, the two figures had already lost interest and were drifting away, side by side, toward whatever remained of the city's other districts. They moved like people who had never had to hurry for anything in their lives, because nothing alive had ever required them to.
Trunks watched them go with an expression Liam recognized. It was the expression of someone who had memorized what helpless felt like and hated every second of the reminder.
Akane descended from the smoke like a very small person who had just been detonated and found it rude. She was intact. The explosion had thrown her, not harmed her. She hovered at Liam's eye level and looked at him with considerable feeling.
"Who was that person," she said. "That was extremely rude."
"Extremely," Liam agreed.
"Gohan!" Trunks's voice cracked. He was staring at his teacher's shoulder, at the new arm still forming, pink and fresh and impossible. "Gohan, what is—"
"Trunks..." Gohan's voice was low and rough. He blinked. Looked at his shoulder. Looked at Liam.
From the lip of the crater above, a motorcycle engine cut through the silence. A woman's voice followed it, sharp with relief and desperation:
"Trunks! Gohan!"
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