The staff entrance to the Tianshang Cup venue was not a glamorous location. It smelled of industrial cleaning fluid and the particular stress of people who had been setting up chairs for six hours. Liam leaned against the wall and scrolled through his phone, and none of the venue staff passing by had any idea the tournament existed because of him.
He divided his attention the way he usually did, the front of his mind on his phone while the background ran through the NGL surveillance network. The drug factory demolition had produced no visible ripple. No search parties, no elevated activity around the cave entrances, no trace of Zazan in any of the villages his birds covered. The factory was gone and its absence had apparently not yet reached anyone with authority to respond to it.
The mermaid, or whatever it had been, remained a mystery. The oystercatcher was a seabird. It couldn't speak. The hand had grabbed it, a wet human-shaped hand from below the waterline, had held it for a few seconds while the possessor experienced secondhand the sensation of being grabbed from underwater, and had then let go. The oystercatcher had taken off and spent ten minutes at altitude, thoroughly insulted. No second sighting.
He heard shouting.
A tall, thin man with his wrists bound behind his back was accelerating through the foot traffic with the specific energy of someone who had recently concluded that his situation could not get worse. Pedestrians scattered.
Aoi materialized beside him at roughly the point where he'd built to full speed.
She hit him in the stomach.
He flew sideways and compacted himself against the wall in the shape of someone who had deeply reconsidered his afternoon.
Aoi looked at him, then at the posture he'd achieved, and sighed.
"If you absolutely had to run," she said, "waiting until after the police collect you would have given you better odds."
Behind her, Akane and Shizuku caught up at a normal walking pace. Shizuku had her phone out. The police call had apparently already been made.
Liam put his own phone away. "I thought you were busy catching him."
"We did," Shizuku said. "They found it boring at home."
Akane made a small scissors hand gesture in Liam's direction. "Where's the famous Gungi player?"
"Finals just ended. I was about to go in." He looked at the three of them. "Since you're here, come along. Aoi, leave that one for the police."
A patrol car had already pulled up, which confirmed that Shizuku had made the call before the thief had finished collapsing against the wall. Two officers in tactical gear approached the crumpled suspect with considerably more caution than the situation required and loaded him into the vehicle with the careful energy of people who had been told this person was dangerous and were taking no chances. They saluted Shizuku with the formal respect owed to a professional Hunter who had just done their job for them.
Leorio wasn't there. Two months ago, he'd reached a stable functional level in his basic Nen training and gone back to medical school. He'd rejoin for the Hunter Exam next year. He had priorities, and those priorities involved becoming a doctor, and Liam had decided to respect this rather than argue with it.
They walked the staff corridor toward the players' lounge.
"You won the bet with the hacker hunter," Liam said to Shizuku. "What software did she promise to build you?"
"A Gungi analysis program," Shizuku said. "She wanted to know if she could make a version that plays at the level of the current champion."
Liam stopped walking.
Shizuku continued forward without slowing. "I'm curious whether the current champion can actually lose. She's never lost a match in her professional career. I want to know where the ceiling is."
"So you're going to answer that question," Liam said, "by having a hacker build an algorithm that plays Gungi at superhuman strength and then having it play against a blind teenager."
"That's the general idea."
The specific word he was searching for was "ruthless," but it wasn't quite accurate because Shizuku had no malicious intent. She was simply curious, and her curiosity was very well-funded now.
He opened the lounge door.
The girl sitting inside was maybe fifteen. Slight, underweight in the way of someone who forgot to eat regularly, hair that hadn't been introduced to a comb recently, clothes that were clean but had been selected without much conversation between her and her own aesthetic opinions. She was sitting with the restless energy of someone waiting for something to end and not knowing quite how to sit, and when the door opened, she was on her feet and bowing before anyone had finished entering.
"The prize you provided, and that, the residency in the, the, in the—"
"Saherta," Liam said.
"In Saherta, I'm so grateful!" She was bowing emphatically. Her forehead caught the corner of the coffee table. She made a small pained sound and covered the spot with both hands and kept talking through it. "There are rarely prizes this large in Gungi. The residency especially. My family is very happy. I wasn't going to refuse. Please don't misunderstand, I'm not ungrateful—"
"You don't seem particularly happy about it," Akane said.
Komugi lowered her hands from her forehead and looked, or aimed her face, in Akane's direction. "Honestly. The only thing I'm good at is Gungi, and back home there's always someone to play with. I was worried that in a foreign country I'd have no one to play against." She paused. "My family was thrilled. And the little girl doesn't intend to refuse. I just..." She started bowing again, sensed the coffee table this time, and redirected the bow to a safer angle. "I'm sorry."
Liam reached under the coffee table and set a Gungi board on top of it.
The sound of it landing, the specific weight of the board on the surface, stopped Komugi mid-apology. Something changed in her posture. Not dramatically, not a sudden transformation, just a settling, the way a compass needle settles when it finds north. The restless energy went still.
She sat down in front of the board. Both hands went to the pieces by instinct. She selected one without hesitation, her unseeing eyes tracking the board with something that wasn't sight.
"Excuse me," she said, and her voice had changed registers entirely. "What should I call you?"
"Liam." "Shizuku." "Akane." "Aoi."
"Liam," she repeated, testing it. "I'm honored. If you'd like to play, I'll go second."
Shizuku noticed it immediately. The aura that had been drifting loosely from Komugi's head during the conversation had condensed. Not dramatically, not with the deliberate precision of trained Ten, but the aura was concentrating upward, gathering at the crown of her skull, the body recognizing that it needed everything in one place and drawing resources accordingly.
Accidental Ten. Running on pure instinct. Probably had been for years.
Liam played the opening. He was not good at Gungi. He played with Shizuku occasionally and lost with reliable consistency. He had not come here to challenge anyone. He watched the aura above Komugi's head as he moved pieces, watched the way it shifted and tightened with each development on the board.
Then he deliberately placed a piece in a position that violated the rules.
Komugi's hand paused over the board. Her brow furrowed. She tilted her head, found the piece, and held it.
"Mr. Liam," she said carefully. "This position..."
"Can you see the board?" Liam asked.
She flushed. "I'm really blind, I promise. But when I'm playing Gungi, I can... know the positions. I don't know how. At first I asked my opponents to tell me each move and I memorized them. Then I started being able to remember more moves, replay entire games in my head. Then I could play games against myself in my head. And then, sometime after that, I could just know where the pieces were, even without being told." She held the illegally placed piece and set it back down off the board. "The little girl doesn't know why. She just can."
Shizuku and Liam arrived at the same conclusion at the same moment through different routes. En, applied to a Gungi board. The aura that Komugi was concentrating in her head without training, without intention, without any framework for what she was doing, was extending outward across the board surface in a narrow, precise field. She wasn't seeing the pieces. She was sensing them.
"I can explain why," Liam said.
He smiled at her, and tapped a Flying Star Bubble into existence between two fingers. It drifted across the table in its lazy arc, quiet and unthreatening, and settled on the back of her neck.
The rose-gold pentagram bloomed there, small and certain.