The good thing about living in a world that contained people with holes in their bodies used as musical instruments, Nanika had once been told, was that most things were not the strangest thing happening at any given moment.
The waiter had recovered and brought their food. Nanika did not need to eat. She was a gaseous life form, and the only thing she actually required was love, which Killua supplied without thinking about it and in sufficient quantities that she had never once been in a state of want. But the food arrived at the table, and Killua had ordered something for her, and when the materialized body tasted it, the warmth of the gesture moved through the food and into the experience in a way that was difficult to categorize but was unambiguously good. She ate the whole plate.
Killua noted this with the satisfaction of a person who had been waiting for his sister to enjoy a restaurant and had achieved the objective.
He crossed another entry off his list on the way out.
Neither "Whale Island" nor "Shark Island" had produced anyone matching the description Liam had given, which was not a particularly detailed description. A person who would be a good friend to Killua. It was the kind of description that raised more questions than it answered, but Killua had learned by now that asking Liam follow-up questions about his predictions tended to produce answers that were technically accurate and practically unhelpful.
He took Nanika's hand and they went out to look at the town.
Nanika navigated a horizontal bar like a balance beam, arms out, feet placed with the careful attention of someone experiencing this specific physical problem for the first time and finding it interesting. Killua walked beside her with his hands in his pockets and watched and felt no anxiety at all, which was a state of being he had not had a great deal of experience with until recently.
In front of a delivery vehicle that had parked at a steep angle and was beginning to develop opinions about gravity, Nanika placed one hand against the side and pushed. The truck settled back onto level ground. The driver sat in his cab and looked at his mirrors for a while.
"Killua," Nanika said, holding an ice cream cone and looking at him.
"Yes," Killua said, holding one as well. "It is."
They continued down the street.
The panicked crowd came from ahead of them. People running in the direction that people run when something in front of them is killing other people, which is any direction that is not that direction. A man covered in blood stumbled past and Killua pulled Nanika sideways.
He looked at her. She was already looking ahead.
They moved against the crowd.
The town square had a fountain in the center. The water was red. Around it, in the positions they had been in when the thing at the top of the fountain had decided to pay attention to them, were several people who were no longer going to be going home. Each had a small, specific hole in their head.
The thing at the top of the fountain was a chimera ant with a frog's head, crouching in the spray, watching the remaining pedestrians flee and selecting which one to practice on next. Its tongue shot out at intervals, punching through whatever it aimed at with the casual efficiency of an entity that had recently discovered it was the most dangerous thing in the area and was taking its time with the discovery.
Killua licked his ice cream and looked at the holes.
He felt the electricity build in his body without asking it to, his nervous system running at the particular elevated speed that physical threat produced, slowing the world around him to something more manageable. The tongue came for him at a trajectory that was clever in the specific way of something that had been doing this for a while: it passed his cheek and was already angled for the smaller target on his back.
He swallowed the ice cream, took the cone between his teeth, and bent down and scooped Nanika onto his shoulders in one motion.
The tongue punched a hole in the road.
The frog's head looked at the two of them and revised its assessment of the situation.
Killua put his free hand in his pocket and walked around the edge of the square, heading for the street on the other side, and the frog launched four tongues at once. All four found empty space. He moved like someone who had been trained since childhood for exactly this environment and found the speed of the attacks genuinely unimpressive. The frog tried to angle for Nanika. The frog found that the moment it had a malicious intention toward Nanika, it was no longer looking at the two of them.
A cold hand reached through its chest from behind.
"The heart is in an odd spot on this one," Killua said, from behind it. "I had to look twice."
He was standing at the fountain's edge with Nanika on his shoulder and a beating heart in his right hand, which did not have a drop of blood on it.
The frog-type chimera ant fell into the fountain and the water got redder.
"Killa," Nanika said, looking down at the heart.
"You can't eat it." He tossed it in after the body. "Come on."
They had been walking toward the larger city adjacent to the town for about ten minutes when Killua noticed.
Not a person. A sensation. The feeling of being watched by someone who did not want to be seen. He had received extensive training in anti-tracking and had always been told by the people responsible for that training that there were two reasons you felt like someone was following you: either someone was following you, or you were about to have a very bad night from anxiety. His record suggested it was usually the first one.
He varied his route. He backtracked through a market. He used the shopping district's multiple exits. The feeling came back each time within minutes.
Not Illumi. Illumi always let him know, eventually. That was the point of Illumi. Illumi's surveillance was a message, not an operation. This had the quality of genuine concealment, which meant the person was good. But then why could he feel it at all?
He thought about it in the Nen framework that had become his default for problems with no obvious physical solution. A skilled person using En to observe him could not be shaken by physical evasion alone. But En usually felt like pressure, a passive field, not like this specific directional attention.
He looked up.
A feather made of condensed aura hit the road in front of him. The impact left a clean crater. He stepped back, pulling Nanika with him, and looked at where it had come from.
The sky was very far up. At the edge of what he could see even with his aura gathered into his eyes, something moved against the blue. A dark shape. Small, at this distance.
He started running.
The vulture chimera ant had been hunting this city for three days, and it had developed strong opinions about how hunting should go.
The primary opinion was: height was everything. At the altitude it maintained, no one below could threaten it. It had tried several humans who had demonstrated unusual physical capability, and the result had always been the same: they could move faster than expected at ground level, but they could not reach it, and eventually they either ran from the feathers or they stopped running from the feathers.
The white-haired boy was faster than the others had been. The feathers kept missing, which was unusual. He was also throwing things upward, which was more unusual still: stones wrapped in electrical discharge, launched at high speed. The vulture dodged these without much difficulty. The electrical component was a Transmutation ability applied to physical projectiles, which was a type of Emission application that was not a Transmuter's strongest range. The stones were fast. They were not fast enough.
"Don't run, human," it called down, with the patience of something that had nowhere else to be. "You're going to tire yourself out, and then I'll have to eat you tired. Such a waste."
"Great eyesight," Killua called back, not stopping. "Congratulations."
"The best. Nothing escapes me."
Another stone. The vulture rolled aside with two wingbeats of effort.
Killua was running at full sprint, Nanika on his back, and calculating the problem. The electricity was most effective at contact range or close range, where the Transmutation was doing the direct work. Projecting it outward meant asking his aura to do something that was adjacent to his type but not central to it, and at this distance, against something that could see every stone coming, it was producing acceptable results in the category of annoying the target rather than stopping it.
He needed altitude. He did not have altitude.
He felt the death sense before he understood what it was warning him about. The signal came from above and to the left and was already close, and he gathered his aura into his right arm and raised it and took the impact sideways, and the force of it sent him rolling across the road, Nanika held against his chest, three full rotations before he caught himself.
He looked at his arm. Intact. His aura had held.
He looked at Nanika, who had held on.
Then he looked at his watch.
Three hours.
Nanika looked up at him with her dark eyes and smiled, and then her features shifted back to Alluka's, and Alluka blinked and looked around at the road and the running and the distant vulture circling overhead and said, "Brother, what is that?"
The vulture settled on the dead branch of a roadside tree with the composure of something that had been waiting for its prey to stop and had found it acceptable that the waiting was over.
"Now," it said, and the wings opened, and the first feather formed at the tip.
The shot came from somewhere down the road.
The sound of it preceded the result by enough time to be confusing about the sequence. What had been a vulture became a brief disturbance in the air and then a scattering of feathers that drifted down across the road and the dead branch and the surrounding street with the unhurried pace of things that are no longer in a hurry.
A young man was standing about forty meters away. Long white hair falling loose to his waist. A wide-brimmed felt hat. A weapon Killua did not immediately have a reference for, long-handled and short-barreled, with a wisp of smoke from the muzzle that the afternoon air took away slowly.
"Don't relax yet," the young man said. "It got out of the way in time."
Killua looked at the scattering feathers. "You missed?"
"It moved." The young man said this with the specific equanimity of someone who finds the result disappointing but not surprising. "It's fast. Stay alert."
Killua stood up, still holding Alluka, and looked at the young man down the road.
Kite looked back.