The call with Kurapika was brief and practical.
Ordinary soldier ants in Kakin were being handled by the special operations teams Camilla had assembled from the standing army. What those teams could not handle, she redirected to Kurapika. Since acquiring the natural system and the Swift Wind technique Shizuku had developed, his mobility across the capital had become the kind of thing that made conventional deployment planning feel unnecessarily elaborate. A Nen user who moved like weather did not need backup for a standard soldier ant.
Division commanders were a different category. The handful that had entered Kakin's territory were being sedated, transported to the capital, and delivered to Camilla personally.
She hung up and returned her attention to the room.
The crab-type chimera ant was locked in a reinforced bulletproof glass jar, the interior maintained at a precise anesthetic concentration that kept it alive and motionless. Its shell was a dull orange-brown. Its eyes, visible through the glass, were open but unfocused. On the curve of its shoulder, settling its paws with the unhurried confidence of something that had been doing this for a while, sat a white kitten the size of a large paperweight.
Camilla sat cross-legged on the cushion across from the jar, eyes lowered slightly, expression doing the thing it did when she was concentrating and did not want anyone to know she was concentrating.
Her natural energy allocation currently sat at 2% of her total aura. Thirty thousand units in reserve, six hundred redirected toward the ambient field. By ordinary Nen logic, six hundred units should not have been enough to do anything particularly interesting. The Three Thousand Reincarnation Cats was not an ordinary Nen ability, and it was not an imitation of someone else's work. It was hers. The natural energy had not created a new ability. It had extended the one she already had into the space its original design had always been capable of reaching.
She no longer needed Liam within range for the kitten to function. She could receive what the kitten collected in real time, a continuous drain rather than a timed transfer. The vitality moved through the connection between herself and the cat with the quiet efficiency of something that had always been meant to work this way and had simply been waiting for the right conditions.
She took a slow, measured breath and opened her eyes.
"Your Majesty."
The second queen Duazul was standing at the correct distance behind her, posture composed, eyes lowered in the manner of someone who had spent a long time learning which expression produced the best outcomes in a given room.
"Your father," Duazul said. "He won't see anyone. No one can reach him. He won't leave the house, and he won't let anyone in." A pause with something careful inside it. "If anyone could get him out, Camilla, I think it would be you."
Camilla rose from the cushion in one movement, effortless and final, the way someone stands when they have already decided what they are doing next and the standing is simply the first part of doing it.
She left without answering.
The house was secluded. Beyond had found it in the way he found most things he needed, which was with the methodical efficiency of a man who had been planning around his own restrictions for long enough to have become expert at working within them. He had been drinking since late morning, which was not unusual, and the wine was good, which was.
He looked up when he heard footsteps on the path.
His father entered the yard.
If you removed Netero's white hair and the particular curvature that a century of gravity had applied to his spine, the resemblance was direct and unflattering in equal measure. Beyond had inherited the face and the build and the specific quality of stillness that preceded action. He had opinions about this inheritance and kept most of them to himself.
"Rare of you," Beyond said, "to come to me."
Netero settled himself in the yard with the unhurried ease of a man who had long since made peace with his knees. He stroked the brush of beard at his chin, turning it over between his fingers in the manner of someone who had a question ready and was deciding on the approach.
"The King of Kakin has changed," Netero said. "Your plan there. Did it fail?"
"A few pieces on a board I was playing to pass the time," Beyond said. "Went nowhere interesting. You could call it a failure."
Netero made a sound that was not agreement and not disagreement. "My memory is not what it was. Refresh me on the terms of your restriction."
Beyond did not answer. He drank instead.
"Ah, yes." Netero answered himself with the pleasant clarity of a man whose memory was functioning perfectly. "As long as Isaac Netero lives, Beyond Netero cannot depart the known world. Correspondingly, when I die, the restriction lifts entirely, and Beyond inherits my full accumulated technique, including the 100-Type Guanyin Bodhisattva." He paused. "Comprehensive arrangement."
"It is an unhinged arrangement," Beyond said, "designed by a man whose idea of a reasonable parent-child relationship involves using his son as an ability storage device until he is ready to retire." He set the wine down. "Everyone who knows you knows whose will that restriction came from. I am not the one who inserted a clause about posthumous inheritance into a binding Nen oath. That was entirely your idea. Don't look at me like I'm waiting for you to die."
"You're not waiting for me to die?"
"I am waiting for the circumstances that would make going to the Dark Continent worthwhile," Beyond said, with the clipped precision of a man who had clarified this before and found the distinction insufficiently appreciated. "Your continued good health is a bureaucratic inconvenience, not a personal objective."
Netero laughed. It was a short, genuine laugh, the kind that appeared without warning.
"The chimera ants," he said, after it passed. "The ant king. Where is it now?"
Beyond looked at him. "Why ask me? You have hunters in the field. Interrogate your way up the hierarchy."
Netero smiled and did not answer. He was watching Beyond the way he watched things that interested him, which was with the full, comfortable attention of someone who had seen enough of the world to know what was worth paying attention to.
Beyond turned his wine glass. He was doing a quiet calculation: Pariston had approached him before this had started, before Beyond had any indication that the man's particular brand of creative initiative would produce a result at this scale. Whether Netero had information confirming the Pariston connection, and how he had obtained it, were questions with implications Beyond preferred to map before the conversation continued.
He reached into his jacket. Patted several pockets. Finally extracted a business card from somewhere near the bottom and tossed it across the gap between them.
"One-time use," he said. "I can't guarantee it leads to the ant king specifically. But it's more than your field teams will reconstruct from evidence alone."
Netero caught the card without looking at it.
Beyond poured himself more wine and did not elaborate.
Duazul paused in the doorway on her way out.
Behind her, arranged along three walls in rows, dozens of reinforced glass coffins reflected the room's light back in thin, even lines. Inside each one, a chimera ant lay as it had been placed: motionless, collapsed in on itself, the color and texture of something that had burned and been left to cool. Shell or skin or carapace, each one drawn tight over whatever had been inside it. Still. Empty in the specific way of things from which everything useful had been extracted.
The white kitten was not visible from here.
Duazul looked at the room for a moment. Then she turned and walked down the corridor, her footsteps measured and even and entirely silent on the polished floor.