Netero stroked his beard and thought about mermaids.
"I don't know specifically," he said. "The Mythical Beast Hunters in the Association would be better placed to answer. That's their specialty."
"Mythical Beast Hunters? Humans are animals too, technically. Does that mean halfhumans are Mythical Beasts by classification?"
"Rare, unusual, not commonly categorized. That covers halfhumans reasonably well." Netero seemed entertained by the question. "As for mermaids, if they exist, the classification probably depends on the configuration. Upper body human, lower body fish, that reads as demihuman. Upper body fish, lower body human, that's probably a category of magical beast."
"That can't be right," Liam said. "Genetic testing exists. You can't classify someone as nonhuman just because their face looks like a fish."
"Chimpanzees share most of their genetics with humans," Netero said pleasantly. He clapped his hands twice. "Small talk is over. Let's see what the last few months have done for you."
"I have a name," Liam said. "I'd like to use it occasionally."
He said it without real heat. He had stopped expecting the situation to change. Several days after receiving his Hunter License, he had gotten a letter from Netero with the formal language of an appointment, and the appointment had turned out to mean that Netero intended to grab him whenever he was available and nearby and use him as a training partner. Apparently this was what Netero did with approximately twelve people at any given time. The terminology he used was "professional companions." What it actually meant was that Liam had been adopted into the role of sparring dummy for a man who could fold space with his hands.
He stretched his calves, rolled his shoulders, and tried to think of this as a learning opportunity.
"How about a condition?" Liam said. "If I can make you step outside that circle, you find me something worth hunting."
Netero looked down at the half-meter circle he'd drawn on the floor with his foot, then back at Liam.
"You're a Death-and-Life Hunter," he said. "If you can put me outside this line, I'll find you something appropriate." He settled into his stance, which looked nothing like a stance and was therefore extremely dangerous.
Liam's aura released.
The training room was large, designed for exactly this kind of thing, with reinforced walls and the distinct absence of anything fragile. The wind transmutation ignited around him immediately, the converted aura shaping the air into something directional and powerful. Furniture that had been sitting near the walls decided to be somewhere else instead, bouncing off the reinforcements with a series of increasingly annoyed sounds.
Netero stood in the center of it and didn't move.
"You think a wind blast is going to move me," he said.
Liam's fist came through the wind at a different angle than the wind, and Netero turned sideways and the fist missed his face by the width of a thought. The momentum carried through, and Liam converted it into a kick at ankle height. His foot connected with Netero's calf and produced a sound like kicking structural steel, and the feedback traveled all the way up to his hip.
He stepped back.
Checked the panel.
Total Aura: 100,000.
Four small black suns materialized behind his back. The Nine Yin multiplier stacked to four times, combat aura spiking, and he drove a palm strike into Netero's guard with the kind of force that could shatter a reinforced door. The wind pressure alone billowed Netero's beard up into his own face.
"Not bad," Netero said.
He gathered himself and threw Liam across the room.
Liam rolled to standing, oriented, and sent a Flying Star Bubble out as a sidearm throw while Netero's attention was tracking his main body. It floated in its lazy dandelion-seed arc toward the back of Netero's hand.
Netero exhaled, a sharp controlled breath, and the aura pulse dispersed the bubble before it landed.
Then there were five black suns.
The multiplier hit five times and Liam went back in, faster, stronger, and Netero handled every approach the way water handles a thrown stone: not by stopping it, but by redirecting it, the energy in his body responding to each attack with something automatic and perfectly calibrated. He was giving Liam a simultaneous lesson in what he was doing wrong and a demonstration of what right looked like, with the same set of movements.
"Control the flow," Netero said, parrying twice and dissolving a knee strike. "You're hemorrhaging aura. Multiplied power needs to travel through technique, not replace it. Four or five times the force means nothing if you're spending four or five times the aura on every exchange."
Liam heard this. Filed it. Kept going.
He charged the Spirit Gun while the engagement continued, building the Emission in his right hand through a sequence of feints that served double duty as actual attacks and cover for the charge time. Forty thousand units. The ball of condensed force was approximately the size of his head, dense enough that the air around it warped visibly.
He fired it.
Netero's expression changed, briefly. "If I move, that goes through the wall," he said, conversationally, "and then through several more walls."
He slowed his breathing. The Hundred-Type Guanyin materialized behind him, enormous and composed, one massive palm extending forward to intercept the shot. There was a muffled concussion, the floor vibrated, and a cloud of green energy dissipated against the Guanyin's palm in a way that suggested the palm had found the experience moderately effortful.
The room went quiet.
"Don't just stack the quantity," Netero said. He was stroking his beard again. "You're not an Enhancer. You're using borrowed tools at elevated cost. A genuine Enhancer converts that multiplied energy into sustained fighting strength. For you, at this scale, the aura cost per exchange is too high to maintain. You'll empty yourself before you cause meaningful trouble."
"I know," Liam said.
He pressed both palms to either side of the room.
The Manipulation went outward, not into a person but into the air itself, the room's atmosphere his target, every molecule of it between himself and Netero. He pulled.
The air evacuated.
The silence that followed was the specific silence of a space without atmosphere, immediate and total. The wind around Liam's own body converted to compensate, his transmuted aura filling his lungs with what they needed while the rest of the room offered Netero nothing at all.
Netero's face registered the change. The loss of atmospheric pressure was a problem even for someone at his level, blood pressure spiking, cardiovascular system responding to conditions it was not designed for. His aura surged inward and outward simultaneously, hardening his body against the effects, buying time.
Liam dropped to one knee, pressed his fist to the floor, and sent the wind along the ground at high speed.
The cyclone materialized in front of Netero as a fist.
It connected with his chin.
The impact came from the wrong direction entirely, carried through the extended aura channel like a punch transmitted through sixty feet of compressed air, and it knocked Netero back, one step, two steps, the heel of his boot crossing the half-meter circle on the floor.
The air came rushing back in.
Liam collapsed onto his back.
He stared at the ceiling while his aura systems ran their emergency refill protocols and his lungs remembered what normal oxygen pressure felt like.
"I think," he said to the ceiling, "that took everything I had."
The Nen panel read:
Enhancement: 100%
Transmutation: 100%
Conjuration: 100%
Specialization: 100%
Manipulation: 100%
Emission: 100%
Netero stood outside the circle, chest still, breathing deliberately, one hand pressed to his sternum. After a moment he shook his head with the expression of someone who had genuinely not seen that combination before.
"The vacuum was Emission and Manipulation together," he said.
"The punch through the floor was Transmutation," Liam said, still examining the ceiling. "The wind carries force along the channel. I borrowed the idea from somewhere."
"You said you're not an Enhancer."
"Manipulator."
Netero looked at him for a moment. "The Six Types maxed at those levels without Enhancement as your primary category, and you just knocked me out of my circle."
"Barely," Liam said. "You could have handled it with more warning. I got lucky with the timing."
"Luck is technique applied at the right moment," Netero said. He walked over and crouched down to look at Liam on the floor, the thoughtful expression of someone recalculating something. "Two choices for your prize. The first, I know the location but not whether you'll find it. The second, I know who's there, but I need to ask an old friend where exactly."
Liam raised his eyes to Netero's face.
"What's the first one?"
"Tell me which one you want to hear first," Netero said, which was not an answer.