"Yes, she's on her way, the airship is almost there, so..."
Liam lowered the phone. He looked at the mountain view through the villa windows for a moment, then hung up and turned to Shizuku.
"Move quickly, or Bisky will get there before we do."
Aoi looked up. "Is she flying? Over an ocean?"
"She chartered an airship." Liam glanced at Camilla, who was standing nearby with the expression of someone who has already decided what the next action is. "I'd fly there directly, but that's a large ocean. Even for us."
Camilla called for one of the villa staff and gave the instructions. The special airship would be ready shortly.
"Your seclusion is finished?" she asked Liam.
"Death energy is clear. Natural system is at forty-nine percent." He paused. "Be prepared, Your Majesty. The Dark Continent departure may not be as far away as it seems."
Camilla was quiet for a moment. Not the silence of someone who had not heard, but the silence of someone who was already calculating.
Akane learned Liam was not bringing her and Aoi before he had a chance to say it directly. She had the particular expression of someone who has arrived at a correct conclusion through unwelcome arithmetic.
She did not say anything about it. She looked at Akane's current Butterfly ability instead, the hex gate sitting dormant in her ring, the single-destination passage that led back to the Twin Cities. The ability had a return address. Liam was not, to her knowledge, planning to use it. But the fact that it existed was something he seemed to find genuinely interesting.
She filed this under things to watch.
Liam flicked her forehead lightly.
"Task," he said. "Watch Shiva. She has a kingdom to run and an organization she's still part of. Those are two different jobs and they're both real. Make sure she doesn't let one swallow the other."
Aoi touched her forehead and nodded.
They boarded the airship.
As they walked up the ramp, Shizuku raised her hand and waved at a point in the air beside the path where nothing was visible. The air shimmered slightly. A hand appeared briefly and waved back, then was gone.
The airship lifted off. The Kakin capital arranged itself below into the geometry of streets and rooftops and the distant gleam of the palace, and then receded into the general shape of a large city and then into something smaller, and then into the texture of the landscape.
Kakin sat on the Azian Continent. Watters, where Bisky had been waiting with gradually diminishing patience for two weeks, was on the far side of a genuinely large body of water. Even at airship speeds, this required some commitment.
Liam looked out the porthole.
"This time we shouldn't fall into the ocean," he said.
Shizuku was reading. She turned a page.
"We can both fly now," she said. "It would be inconvenient, but it would not be catastrophic. The situation is different from before."
"I'm aware. I was reflecting on growth."
"Oh." She turned another page. "In that case, yes, meaningful progress."
He settled back in the seat and checked his phone. A streaming update notification for the second season of a show called Twin City Wars, which everyone in the Hunter World who followed animated serials seemed to have opinions about. He opened it.
The HxH world was, in this specific respect, a genuinely strange place to live. Dragon Ball existed here. League of Legends existed here. And Arcane existed here, as a serialized animation set in a fictional twin-city universe, which Liam had personally visited, in which he had introduced six people to Nen and helped an engineer build a working hextech gate years ahead of schedule.
He watched the first episode of season two.
When Shizuku looked up sometime later, he had put the phone down and was staring at the cloud layer outside the porthole with the expression of someone working through a moral question at moderate speed.
"The Arcane Gate," he said. "In this season, it's the source of most of the problems."
Shizuku closed her book on a finger.
"We told Jayce to go to the undercity," Liam continued. "We helped him build the working prototype. Essentially we accelerated the entire hextech timeline." He thought about this. "Did we make things worse?"
Shizuku considered.
"He would have invented it regardless," she said. "The materials were available. The knowledge base was available. We moved the timeline, we didn't create the capability." She paused. "And if Jayce hadn't succeeded before we left, Akane's Butterfly randomization would not have produced a hex gate. We would have no return address for that world."
Liam looked at her.
"You're saying our interference was self-serving and also probably inevitable."
"I'm saying those two things are not mutually exclusive."
He thought about it for a moment longer. "I should show them season two at some point."
"Mm."
The ocean passed below them, blue and enormous and entirely indifferent to the question of hextech ethics.
Watters was a mid-sized city on the Yorbian Continent, the kind that had a park system and a reasonable density of elementary schools and a population that had found a workable arrangement with the concept of Sundays. On this particular Sunday, many of those people were in the grass with their children.
In the park beside one of the schools, a girl in a princess dress was sitting on a bench looking at her watch.
Liam and Shizuku came up the path from the gate still discussing the season two finale.
"Hex Gate is actually the root of all of it," Liam was saying. "If you trace the causal chain back, every major disaster in the second season has that thing at the center."
"The council had it built regardless of what any individual engineer wanted," Shizuku said. "Removing Jayce from the equation doesn't remove the council."
"Sure, but—"
"What are you two muttering about?" said Bisky.
She was sitting up very straight on the bench, and her expression had the specific quality of someone who has been patient for two weeks and has used up that patience in the last fifteen minutes. She was wearing a ruffled dress and her hair was done up in a style that was either a personal aesthetic commitment or a professional necessity, depending on the context. In this context it was the latter.
Liam looked at her. "Is the young-girl disguise a career choice or are you actually feeling nostalgic?"
Bisky's eye twitched. Then she stood up and reached out and pressed two fingers to Liam's sternum, and went quiet for a moment in the way of someone reading a very surprising document.
"Are you actually Liam?" she said.
"I shouldn't look any different."
"It's not how you look. It's something else." Her fingers stayed where they were. "Inner. Something's changed in there."
Shizuku said: "Liam has gotten stronger."
Bisky looked at her.
"Stronger than you," Shizuku said.
A brief pause.
"Yes," Bisky said. "I can feel that."
She said it with the flat, factual acceptance of a master who has been waiting for a specific student to become genuinely interesting and is now updating their assessment.
Liam held out his palm.
The natural energy gathered in it, shaped by the Minor Formless Art, and took a form he had seen deployed against him a long time ago in a training context and had spent considerable time understanding the structural logic of since. The elastic adhesive quality of Hisoka's Bungee Gum, reconstructed from memory and natural energy, sat in his palm with the slightly wrong color that came from having built it from a template rather than from a primary type.
He formed it into a sphere. Stretched it out. The material extended like pulled dough, snapped back, extended again. He changed the tension. Changed the surface quality. Pulled it into a flat sheet and then drew it back into a ball.
Bisky watched this with the focused attention of a Transmuter observing another Transmuter's work. Every aspect of her professional background was being applied to what she was seeing and arriving at the same conclusion from multiple directions.
Liam let the construct dissolve.
"You want to learn?" he asked. "I'm available as an instructor. Limited time offer."
Bisky looked at her own hands for a moment. Then she took a step back, planted her feet in the precise configuration of someone who has been hitting things professionally for decades, and threw a punch.
Liam stopped smiling in the casual way he had been smiling.
He looked at Shizuku. Shizuku indicated with a tilt of her head that there was more open space further into the park, away from the Sunday afternoon families.
They found it.
On the roof of a building in a city three time zones away, Meruem stood with his hands at his sides and let his aura radiate outward.
Not En in the usual sense. En extended outward like a held breath, a sphere of maintained perception, and was felt by anyone with sufficient sensitivity as a pressure in the air. What he was doing now was different: he was releasing rather than extending, letting particles of his aura disperse into the surrounding atmosphere in a continuous stream, too fine to register as a deliberate technique.
They scattered through the city like pollen. Through streets and windows, into rooms, across the faces of the people moving through the afternoon. Each particle was minimal, incapable of independent function. But each one fed back what it touched, and the aggregate of what they fed back was comprehensive.
He had been counting.
At a certain point the count stopped being a list and became a map, and the map stopped being a map and became something more like a single impression of a very large and complicated thing. The city below him existed in his awareness the way a room exists in awareness: known without being examined piece by piece.
Three million, four hundred and sixty-five thousand, and the count was still incomplete, because the particles were still moving.
He had been sitting here since the sun was high. Now it was setting, the specific amber light that existed at the seam between afternoon and evening spreading across the city's rooftops. As the light went, the other signals emerged.
The electromagnetic spectrum was not empty. He had known this abstractly from the laptop research. He had not known it as a direct experience: the radio frequencies and broadcast waves and communication signals that moved through the air of any human city were a constant river, dense and invisible and carrying the cumulative output of millions of people's need to tell each other things.
He reached out.
His aura, shaped by instinct more than technique, caught the edge of the signal stream the way a hand catches water. It ran through his awareness like light through glass, refracting, resolving into structure. He pulled at it gently and more of it came, organizing itself into something he could read.
He stood on the rooftop, surrounded by the lights of the waking city, and learned the shape of the human world's nervous system.
He was not sure yet what he intended to do with it.
He was certain it was worth knowing.