Bisky's earlier question echoed in Liam's mind as their boots crunched against the dry dirt of the road. The premise of everything is based on human identity. But what if you are not human from the beginning? The answer felt obvious enough to him. He was a transmigrant. The consciousness piloting his body had arrived in this world trapped inside a dying infant in a mass grave. The self that navigated the Hunter Association, formed alliances, and cracked jokes had not grown from this world's biology. His soul, his self-awareness, belonged to another place entirely.
Nanika functioned on love. She consumed the raw emotional energy of genuine affection, channeling it into phenomena that completely bypassed the established rules of Nen. So what fueled him?
Bisky snapped her fingers inches from his nose, breaking his focus. "Come back," she demanded.
"Thinking," Liam replied, blinking the dust from his eyelashes.
"About what?"
"Nanika uses love as the medium to interact with natural energy," Liam said, keeping his eyes on the winding road ahead. "Pe argues that consciousness should escape the physical entirely. Netero claims the yin component makes natural energy usable. If the theory holds that I can interface with the natural system because my consciousness is already disconnected from my physical form, the lingering question is what anchors it. Nanika has love. What do I have?"
Shizuku tilted her head, her glasses slipping slightly down the bridge of her nose. "Hate?" she suggested.
Liam dragged a hand down his face, feeling the grit clinging to his skin. "What exactly would I hate?" He gestured toward the empty horizon. "I have lived a long time. Most of it has been highly entertaining. The things I disliked were usually resolved or mutated into something far more interesting. Hate does not even begin to cover how I feel about my existence."
Shizuku offered a slow nod. "Then that is probably not it."
They fell back into silence. Over the next ten minutes, Bisky's strides lengthened. Her boots hit the dirt with sharp, deliberate thuds, steadily widening the gap between them. Liam tracked the subtle stiffening of her shoulders.
"Auntie," Liam called out, his voice casually cutting through the dry air. "Last time you were out here. Your arm. What actually happened?"
Her pace accelerated into a brisk march.
"Bisky. You materialized at Meteor City with a shattered arm and zero explanation. Netero had to personally retrieve you. Whatever occurred out there is a subject both of you tiptoe around with extreme caution."
Bisky kept her eyes locked straight ahead, her jaw clenched.
"Were you disoriented?" Liam pressed, shortening the distance between them. "When you showed up with the broken bone, were you confused about your location? I was trying to piece together whether—"
Bisky pivoted on her heel. Her leg snapped up in a blindingly fast, lethal arc aimed directly at his ribs. Liam's body blurred sideways. The kick tore through empty air, producing a sharp crack of displaced wind. Bisky lowered her leg, turned her back to him, and resumed her march without uttering a single syllable.
"Noted," Liam murmured, brushing imaginary dust from his shirt. "Sore subject."
Shizuku reached over and gave his arm two light, rhythmic pats.
The stench hit the back of their throats long before the skyline became visible. It was a suffocating wall of decay overlaid with harsh chemical burn, the concentrated byproduct of decades of trapped, rotting refuse.
"We are getting close," Shizuku noted, adjusting her grip on her vacuum cleaner.
The settlement bordering the waste zone felt entirely hollowed out. A sparse scattering of residents drifted through the narrow, unpaved streets, their eyes cast downward, completely untethered from their immediate environment. An old man sat slumped on a crumbling stoop, methodically pulling gray smoke from a long wooden pipe, his gaze fixed on a patch of dead weeds. Nobody lived near Meteor City by choice. Even those entirely stripped of options maintained a wide, cautious buffer.
They bypassed the village outskirts, stepping onto the main access road as the towering garbage mountains finally dominated the horizon. Up close, the sheer volume of discarded civilization was suffocating. The mountains loomed over the cracked asphalt, their peaks disappearing into a thick, low-hanging smog. The smell evolved from an odor into a heavy physical pressure pushing against their lungs.
The road itself was completely devoid of the heavy transport trucks that usually funneled the world's trash into the city. The silence felt unnatural, heavy with sudden abandonment.
"Something happened," Shizuku murmured, her pace quickening into a light jog.
Liam and Bisky matched her stride.
The primary artery leading into the residential sector was completely walled off. Spanning the entire gap between the final trash heap and the first row of dilapidated buildings was a dense, interwoven lattice of Nen threads. The strands vibrated with lethal tension, catching the dim light in sharp, silver glints. The web stretched deep into the alleyways beyond, anchored with flawless precision.
Machi stood just behind the barrier. Her pink hair fell in messy, unkempt strands across her forehead. She kept her fingers resting lightly against a primary anchor thread, her posture radiating cold exhaustion.
"Prove your identity before you take another step," Machi demanded, her voice flat and raspy.
"You first," Liam replied, coming to a halt just inches from the razor-sharp lattice. "When did you move back to Meteor City? Is Menchi not still teaching you your kitchen skills?"
The rusted metal door of the adjacent building shrieked open before Machi could respond. Menchi stepped out onto the debris-littered street. Several younger residents peaked out from the dark hallway behind her, quickly reconsidering and retreating into the shadows. Menchi wiped her hands on a heavily stained apron, looking at Liam, Bisky, and Shizuku with a bright, welcoming smile completely at odds with the desolate surroundings.
"She mentioned she was returning to her hometown to practice her cooking," Menchi explained cheerfully. "I was curious. What kind of culinary dishes can you construct out here? The environmental constraints are fascinating."
Liam glanced over Menchi's shoulder, taking in the endless, rotting wasteland in every direction. He firmly decided to drop that specific line of questioning.
"This is not a good time," Machi warned, her fingers tightening on the thread. "You should turn back."
"I am just visiting my girlfriend's hometown," Liam said, casually throwing an arm over Shizuku's shoulders. "Is that against the rules?"
Four icy spikes bloomed inside Liam's chest simultaneously. It was not physical pain. It was the distinct, hollow chill of death energy rushing into his core from the ambient field. Four lives terminating within his immediate radius at the exact same fraction of a second. He dropped his arm from Shizuku and snapped his head toward the city interior.
"Something is horribly wrong here," Bisky stated, her fists clenching at her sides as she swept her gaze across the silent rooftops.
The wind whipped violently around Liam's boots. He shot straight up into the smog, ascending rapidly.
As he rose, Menchi called out from the street below, her cheerful facade dropping into a grim, hollow tone. "To be completely accurate, roughly half of Meteor City is still Meteor City."
Three more invisible spikes of death energy struck Liam's chest mid-flight. He breached the smog layer and looked down at the sprawling settlement.
The devastation was absolute and perfectly bisected. To the west, the familiar, chaotic sprawl of Meteor City remained intact. Tightly packed churches, open-air markets, and haphazard residential towers built from rusted corrugated metal and scavenged concrete clung to each other in a desperate, functional mess.
To the east, the city had been swallowed. The underlying structural skeletons of the buildings remained, but the alleyways, streets, and lower floors were entombed under a thick, pulsating layer of dark, organic resin. It crawled up the masonry like a fungal infection, transforming human infrastructure into a massive, heavily fortified breeding habitat. A nest.
"It happened not long ago," Menchi shouted over the rushing wind as Liam drifted back down toward the perimeter. "An ant declaring herself the Ant King. A female insectoid, much smaller than you would anticipate, but the absolute horrors she could unleash..." Menchi trailed off, her hands gripping her apron tight enough to turn her knuckles white. "She brought a massive army. The soldier drones are swarming the entire eastern sector. She assimilated half the city before anyone even registered the invasion."
Chelich. The second birth. Meruem's sister, harboring the twisted memories and sociopathic patience of Tserriednich Hui Guo Rou, backed by the full terrifying might of the late Queen's royal army.
Liam dropped back to the asphalt, landing softly just outside the narrow gap in Machi's lethal web.
The small opening in the threads was choked with gore. Piles of dismembered chimera ant drones bled dark, viscous fluid into the cracked asphalt. The scattered limbs and severed torsos bore the clean, geometric slice marks characteristic of Machi's razor wire when utilized for slaughter rather than containment.
Nobunaga sat slumped against the scarred brick wall just beyond the threshold. His katana rested bare across his knees. The tight topknot he usually wore had completely unraveled, leaving long, sweat-soaked black hair plastered against his pale face. The steel blade was coated in thick layers of blue and green insect blood, the foul liquid pooling at the tip and dripping onto his sandals. His chest barely moved. He radiated the profound, hollow exhaustion of a man who had fought well past the absolute limits of his endurance and was simply waiting for the next wave to break over him.
As Liam's boots touched the ground, Nobunaga's survival instincts bypassed his conscious mind entirely. His muscles twitched. The katana flashed in a blinding, horizontal arc, aimed to sever the intruder cleanly in half. It was a reflex carved into his bones through thousands of desperate battles.
Liam leaned backward, feeling the cold steel slice through the air a millimeter from his throat.