Killua had not seen the escape.
Not the vulture leaving, not the shot that had been fired, not Kite moving to the position he had fired from. He had been looking in the wrong direction when all three of those things happened, and the realization of this sat in the back of his mind with the particular quality of information he needed to process at some point when there was time.
"Iron-lined vulture genes," Kite said, dissolving the short-barreled shotgun back into aura with the unhurried ease of someone returning a borrowed pen. "Hunting behavior: it watches. It finds a target, any hunter strong enough to be worth eating, and then it doesn't stop. You can't exhaust its patience."
"So it's still up there," Killua said.
"It will always be up there." Kite pulled the brim of his hat against the afternoon light and turned toward the neighboring city. "Come with me for now. It's better than the street."
Killua took Alluka's hand and followed. "You know a lot about these things."
"Countries started hiring Hunters when the situation spread. I'm one of them." A short, flat laugh. "Professional opinion."
Killua glanced at him. "That laugh is completely fake."
Kite did not argue with this.
The first time the aura feathers came down, they came four at once, angled for all three of them simultaneously. Killua pulled Alluka clear with one arm and moved sideways before the angle fully resolved. Kite had the Crazy Slots conjured before Killua had processed that he'd seen the clown-head manifest. The weapon that came out was a sword.
An invisible sword, as it turned out: no visible blade, no visible edge, but the four feathers hit it and their trajectories ended, the aura constructs separating cleanly at a boundary that could only be inferred from the results.
Kite swung twice to clear the remaining pieces and let the sword go.
"That ability," Killua said, while they kept walking. "What exactly are the rules?"
"Completely random. Whatever number the clown lands on, that's the weapon. I can't influence the result and I can't redraw." Kite's voice had the particular neutral quality of someone who had made peace with a restriction and was providing a factual account of it. "Whatever comes up has to be used until it's done, and then it goes. If I want the next draw, I dismiss the current one first."
Killua thought about this. "So if you need a ranged weapon to hit that thing in the sky and you keep drawing close-range weapons, you're stuck."
"That's the situation."
"And you need me and Alluka because—"
"Your Transmutation gives you the speed to bait the dive. The vulture won't expose its position to attack something it doesn't think is worth the risk. You're worth the risk." A pause. "It's a compliment."
"Oh, good."
Alluka, on Killua's back, had been listening carefully. "Brother, am I making this harder?"
"You're the whole reason I'm doing anything," Killua said immediately, and shifted her higher on his back. "Don't be ridiculous. You weigh nothing."
She weighed very little for a person who had recently helped push a delivery truck back onto level ground, which Killua filed under the specific surprises that came with having a sister whose origin was outside the standard biological categories.
The second Crazy Slots draw produced a whip, which was sufficiently flexible to knock the feather attacks out of the air as they came but entirely insufficient for reaching a target maintaining altitude. Kite used it efficiently and with visible philosophical acceptance of the result.
They kept moving.
The third draw, Kite turned the roulette and the clown produced a weapon that Killua had not seen before: a short, thick barrel on a heavy stock, the proportions of something that was not interested in elegance and was interested in output.
Killua looked at it.
He ran several mental calculations about what kind of aura investment could make a projectile travel usefully at altitude, and arrived at an estimate that made him feel retrospectively better about the earlier strategy problems.
"Are you ready?" Kite said.
"For wha—"
Kite kicked him.
It was a precise kick, not violent, delivered to the center of his back at an angle that carried Killua and Alluka into an immediate forward trajectory. He adjusted in the air on instinct, curled around Alluka, and landed three meters away with her protected and his aura flaring involuntarily across his skin.
"Go," Kite called. "Different directions. Draw it out."
Killua looked at the back of his boot. He had not seen the kick coming. He had been standing next to Kite for the better part of an hour and he had not seen it coming, and that specific fact was more relevant information than the kick itself.
"Did he hate us?" Alluka asked, looking back.
"No." Killua got her onto his back properly and let the electricity build the way it built when it was serious. "He's doing his job."
He ran.
The lightning speed drew the vulture immediately. It had been watching them long enough to have catalogued Killua as the most useful target, and the moment he separated from the others and opened speed, the targeting logic engaged and the altitude dropped.
The feathers came in high volume now, no longer probing, the quantity of something that had stopped experimenting and made a decision. Killua ran at full sprint and angled through them, reading each incoming trajectory and placing himself somewhere else, Alluka held against his back with both arms locked.
The death sense arrived before the sound.
He dropped into a roll, tucked Alluka against his chest, came up moving. Whatever the attack had been, it had been significant: the air where he had been shook from the displaced force of something that had not expected him to move.
The time switch happened in the second he spent recalibrating. Alluka's features settled back to themselves and Alluka looked around at the speed and the open road and the feathers scattered across the pavement behind them.
"Brother," she said, "what is—"
The sound came from behind them, several kilometers away, enormous in the specific way that indicates the object producing it has moved very fast through compressed air. Then the half-second silence that follows a result.
Killua turned.
At a point in the sky above him that had been occupied by a vulture, there was now a brief disturbance and several feathers falling in different directions. A substantial portion of the chimera ant was no longer accountable.
The rest of it fell in a wide area and settled in the road.
Alluka looked at it with curious interest.
Kite arrived on foot two minutes later, unhurried, the cannon dissolved back into aura, a specimen bag already out. He crouched beside the remains with the efficient attention of someone working a professional routine and began collecting.
"The last shot was a little much," Killua said.
"The aura investment scales with the distance," Kite said, not looking up. "At that range, less power would have missed."
Killua watched him work. "Where are you going?"
"The city." Kite sealed the bag. "Organization that coordinates body disposal. I need to file this."
"That's where we were going."
"Then it's on the way."
The commercial district of the neighboring city had the permanent mid-afternoon density of a street that served as the main artery for three shopping centers. People moved in both directions at the pace of people who had places to go and were going to them.
In the middle of this, at approximately the width of an intersection ahead, stood a figure that required some adjustment to process.
It was large in the way that suggested the concept of a large person had been given significantly more resources than usual. Dark red, the color of something that did not occur in ordinary human biology. The lower legs bent backward at the joint in the configuration of animal rather than human architecture. It stood with its arms loose at its sides, looking at nothing in particular, and the crowd moved around it in the specific pattern of people who have registered that something is there and have made a collective decision not to engage with the fact.
"Chimera ant," Kite said, very quietly.
From the crowd, enormous dark eyes turned toward them.
Menthuthuyoupi, who had been standing in a city commercial district for reasons that were his own, looked at the Hunter with the long white hair and the hat, and at the white-haired boy next to him, and adjusted his assessment of the afternoon.
On the roof of a building on the same street, forty meters above the foot traffic, Meruem was rotating a sphere of organized electromagnetic signals between his hands.
It had taken several days of careful practice to arrive at this: compressing the ambient radio frequencies and broadcast waves of a populated city into a physical construct he could hold and read directly. The information density was considerable. He could feel the outlines of the communication infrastructure below him, the radio calls, the broadcast transmissions, the signals that moved between devices. It was a very large amount of data about what human beings considered worth transmitting to each other.
He was still forming his position on whether the data was interesting.
"Get out," he said, without turning around. "I'm not interested in you."
In the corner of the roof behind him, Isaac Netero stood in a fitted training outfit and said nothing.