In the silent, sunlit pocket space of Misty Valley, by the massive roots of the ancient tree whose bark had finally ceased its unnatural swirling, Link remained perfectly still. She crouched in the exact spot she had occupied moments before, staring blankly at the empty space where three towering figures had simply vanished into the wood.
She slowly stood up, turning her back to the colossal trunk. Her eyes drifted toward the invisible boundary separating the pocket dimension from Meteor City. Even through the heavy spatial isolation of the Nen construct, she could feel the suffocating, atmospheric pressure bleeding through the walls. Two unfathomable concentrations of aura were colliding out there. The scale of the friction defied any comfortable comparison in her extensive experience. The resulting devastation to the already ruined, ant-occupied half of the city would be absolute.
"Since you are so concerned," a voice murmured beside her, "you could just go and look."
Link whipped her head around, her breath catching in her throat.
He was standing right there. Liam. He had absolutely not been standing there a fraction of a second ago. He generated zero sound upon arrival, displacing no air, no dust, and projecting absolutely no aura. He stood so close she should have felt the ambient heat of his skin long before he spoke a single syllable.
She almost failed to recognize him.
The foundational geometry of his face remained unchanged. His height had not shifted. The superficial physical markers were all identical. But the fundamental nature of his presence—the literal, physical interaction between his body and the surrounding environment—had been completely rewritten. He stood just inches from her shoulder, yet she could not shake the terrifying, persistent illusion that he was not physically occupying the same reality as the dirt beneath his boots. Looking at him felt like staring directly at a solid object, while simultaneously perceiving the raw, unfathomable light making the object visible.
She had to avert her eyes after a single second, entirely unable to hold his gaze.
Liam swept his unreadable stare from her, to the smaller Link clinging to her side, and finally up the massive trunk of the ancient tree. He processed the visual data with the cold, detached efficiency of an architect finalizing a structural stress test, absorbing the totality of the design before addressing the individual load-bearing flaws.
He perceived the horrific truth with absolute, terrifying clarity, utilizing the specific visual spectrum unlocked at 99.9% integration. They were two shattered fragments of a single soul. Both pieces were genuine and highly individualized, but they were entirely parasitic. They depended completely upon the crushing, accumulated natural energy hoarded inside the ancient tree to maintain their physical coherence. They were not simply residing near the tree. They were actively feeding on it. The colossal burial mound was not their sanctuary. It functioned as their external skeleton.
"Ah," Liam murmured softly. "If I do this—"
He reached into the empty space directly between the masked woman and the ancient bark.
He did not reach with physical fingers. He extended the deep, terrifying connection he had actively cultivated since the island: his absolute dominion over the natural field as a malleable medium. He easily isolated the invisible, pulsing threads of the tree's hoarded energy binding the two women to the trunk, serving as their structural scaffolding. He effortlessly severed the lines.
Both women began deteriorating immediately.
The color violently drained from the masked woman's face. The solid boundaries of her physical form began to blur and smear into the surrounding air, exhibiting the horrifying, specific visual decay of a complex pattern suddenly stripped of its organizing code. The smaller Link gasped, her tiny hands grabbing desperately at empty space as her fingers began to dissolve.
Liam was already reconstructing them.
The raw natural energy flooded his palms, instantly bending to his absolute authority. He rapidly forged two dense, self-sustaining shells composed of highly concentrated ambient field energy. He designed them to function as flawless, independent replacement substrates, severing their parasitic reliance on the ancient tree. He firmly pushed the dense energy shells directly into their chests. The blurring edges of their physical forms instantly sharpened back into reality. Their flesh flushed with color.
The smaller Link stared up at him, her jaw hanging slack.
Liam tilted his head, studying the top of her skull. Her floppy, pointed hat had completely disintegrated the moment he severed the tree's connection. He tapped his chin, processing the visual discrepancy for a fraction of a second. He simply reached his hand back into the invisible, ambient field, casually hooking his fingers into the raw energy. He hauled a solid shape directly out of the nothingness, forcing the concept to materialize into physical reality between his palms. He dropped the floppy hat directly onto Link's head. It settled perfectly, looking exactly like the worn, personalized item she had possessed her entire life.
"See you later," Liam said.
He vanished completely before the final syllable finished echoing in the quiet clearing.
Bisky was marching up the dirt path from the forest perimeter just as the masked Link turned around.
Bisky looked different.
It wasn't a sudden, monstrous deviation. She had occupied the tiny, delicate child's form for so many decades that those specific features felt permanently burned into her identity. But the physique she possessed now completely bypassed the violent extremes of her previous transformations. She was no longer trapped in the humiliating, involuntary child's body, nor was she utilizing the terrifying, hyper-masculine King Kong output. She was simply tall. A towering, elegant height, projecting the supreme confidence of a warrior who had finally decided exactly how she wished to exist in the world, and had restructured reality to match that desire. Her blonde hair fell in soft waves. Deeply defined, athletic muscle corded her arms and narrowed her waist, creating a sleek, lethal silhouette entirely unique to her. Her long legs carried the terrifying, dense power forged through decades of brutal training, but the raw mass was perfectly sculpted into the exact, flawless form she had deliberately chosen.
Bisky radiated absolute, profound satisfaction. Surpassing the natural system threshold had completely dissolved the rigid, biological constraints dictating her transformations. It allowed her to effortlessly construct the exact physical vessel she had always idealized. It was the purest, most perfect iteration of herself—not merely the largest, but the definitively correct one.
She halted beside the masked woman, staring intently at the empty air where Liam had just vanished.
"He has transcended something," Link murmured, her muffled voice thick with awe.
"Obviously," Bisky replied. She casually flicked a speck of gray ash from her immaculate sleeve—the distinct, heavy ash generated by a massive accumulation of ancient natural energy being violently disturbed. "The real question is exactly which threshold he decided to stop at."
Shizuku stared blankly at the glowing, translucent panel Liam had violently jammed directly into her consciousness just before yanking her out of the suffocating tree. He had forced identical panels into both her and Bisky's minds before forcefully extracting them from the colossal, skeletal palm. She had been meticulously studying the data ever since.
It was the exact statistical layout he had verbally described to her over the years, now rendered as a flawless, direct internal perception completely bypassing her optic nerves.
Total Nen: 60,000. Death energy reserve: 0. Conjuration: Excellent, second tier. Specialization: Extreme, fifth tier. All other types: not developed. Natural system: Excellent, third tier, 14%.
The Specialization metric had skyrocketed the exact millisecond the panel fully integrated into her mind. It bypassed every intermediate level, jumping straight from zero to the fifth-tier Extreme classification instantly, completely devoid of any incremental practice. She tilted her head, analyzing the impossible leap from every conceivable logical angle.
Blinky was a vacuum fish. It possessed a highly specific, cartoonish design that no one in their right mind would ever actively conceptualize. It was simply the absurd form her Conjuration ability naturally defaulted to the very first time she activated her aura. The absolute, foundational rule of Conjuration dictated that the practitioner must produce a flawless, mechanically accurate physical replica of an object they thoroughly understood on a molecular level. Blinky violently violated this fundamental law in almost every single capacity. The internal storage dimensions were mathematically incalculable. The retrieval mechanism functioned entirely independent of conscious, explicit instruction. The bizarre method it utilized to communicate its current inventory held absolutely zero commonality with the established mechanics of Conjuration.
Blinky was, and always had been, a Specialization ability poorly disguised in a Conjurer's cheap suit.
The glowing panel merely confirmed a profound truth she had unknowingly lived with her entire life. Liam, she realized with a slow, heavy blink, had likely deduced this fact years ago, patiently allowing her to unravel the mystery at her own methodical pace.
She turned her head, looking out past the forest edge toward the ruined, ant-occupied sector of Meteor City.
The ground beneath her boots had stopped trembling.
Whatever catastrophic clash had occurred out there appeared to have reached a definitive conclusion.
The eastern half of Meteor City, previously swallowed by the massive, resin-coated chimera ant nest, no longer existed as a nest. It barely existed as geography. It was the horrifying, pulverized aftermath of two unfathomably powerful Nen users operating at absolute maximum output for a sustained, brutal duration. The dilapidated human architecture that had somehow survived the initial ant infestation had been completely vaporized by the ensuing crossfire. The devastation carried a terrifying, mathematical precision, brutally applied to a sprawling slum utterly unequipped to survive it. Colossal, perfectly shaped palm impressions crushed entire city blocks into dust. Massive, perfectly circular craters dotted the landscape. Staring out through her shimmering razor-wire net, Machi coldly noted the terrifying, repeating geometric patterns carved deeply into the slaughter.
Menchi stood firmly in front of the traumatized Meteor City children she had been feeding, utilizing her own body as a physical barrier. The concussive shockwaves of the battle had been deafening, but the suffocating, absolute silence that followed was vastly more terrifying. It was the distinct, heavy quiet of total annihilation, not a temporary lull in combat.
Nobunaga stood near the perimeter, staring out at the destruction without uttering a single word.
Deep inside the pulverized kill zone, near the completely leveled center of the former nest, one figure remained standing. The other did not.
Netero lay mangled in the dust. The upper half of his torso remained somewhat intact and identifiable. His lower extremities, however, had been forcefully relocated to several different impact zones during the final, frantic seconds of the exchange, entirely failing to reconvene. What little flesh remained attached to his spine was heavily charred, radiating thick, foul-smelling steam. It possessed the sickening, brittle quality of a biological vessel that had violently detonated every single ounce of its available thermal energy in one suicidal burst.
He could no longer see the ruined sky. His optic nerves had completely liquefied. But he could clearly sense the terrifying presence standing directly over him.
"If you had not been actively dying from poison," Netero wheezed, forcing the words through his crushed windpipe utilizing the absolute last ragged scrap of air in his destroyed lungs, "you still—"
"Even without the genetic weapon actively destroying my cells," Meruem interrupted smoothly, his voice devoid of any arrogance, "I would have been forced to burn every single fraction of my remaining life force to defeat you. The ultimate price of securing this victory remained identical in either scenario." Meruem let the silence stretch for a fraction of a second. "You would have killed me, otherwise."
A short, wet sound tore its way out of Netero's ruined throat. It vaguely resembled a dry, breathless laugh. His mangled chest hitched, drawing three more ragged, agonizing intervals of air.
Then the intervals ceased completely.
Meruem stood perfectly still, letting the profound silence wash over the pulverized city.
His own biology had been catastrophically failing long before Netero even launched his first strike. The raw, foundational life force he had violently cannibalized to reach his absolute peak for the engagement represented the absolute bottom of his reserves. The highly targeted genetic agent, finally freed from his active, suffocating suppression, surged through his bloodstream. It operated with the terrifying, lethal efficiency of a weapon that had patiently waited for this exact moment of maximum vulnerability. Deep, bleeding fissures violently ripped open across both of his arms. His muscular torso began splitting apart at the seams. The stark, white bone of his knuckles breached his rapidly liquefying flesh.
He desperately attempted to gather his aura.
He fully understood the precise mechanics of the required technique. Pe had painstakingly detailed the entire sequence in her logs. At this exact stage of biological death, the consciousness became loose enough to successfully initiate the digital transfer. The fatal flaw in his current reality was that the massive burst of aura required to violently force the transfer simply no longer existed within his rotting frame.
He kept desperately pulling at the empty reserves anyway. The only remaining alternative was surrendering to the dark, and surrendering simply did not exist as a viable option within his absolute psychology.
A pair of immaculate boots casually stepped into his fading peripheral vision.
"Dead," a voice noted casually, heavily analyzing the charred meat resting on the ground. "Completely, irreversibly dead. That is highly unfortunate."
Liam crouched down directly beside Netero's smoking remains. He meticulously inspected the carnage with the cold, clinical efficiency of a coroner taking inventory, immediately concluding the results were incredibly disappointing but absolutely definitive. He casually rummaged through the scorched debris, nudging a blackened rib with his index finger. The bone and muscle tissue had completely carbonized together, fusing into a brittle, useless mass devoid of any viable structural information.
He sighed, sitting back on his heels.
"So," Liam stated, shifting his gaze toward the other ruined figure bleeding out in the clearing. "You are the Ant King."
Meruem's knees finally buckled.
He pitched forward, catching his massive weight on his hands. His trembling arms now provided the sole structural support for a biological system actively shutting down. The exposed bone of his knuckles scraped violently against the pulverized asphalt.
Liam watched the King slowly die, remaining completely silent for several long seconds.
"Old man," Liam called out, addressing the empty air directly above the corpse. "What exactly is he attempting to do?"
Liam lazily reached his right hand into the empty space hovering just above Netero's shattered remains.
The soul of a freshly deceased individual does not instantly evaporate into the ether. The hyper-complex pattern defining their identity—a century of peerless Nen mastery, deeply ingrained philosophies, and highly specific, stubborn preferences—lingers nearby within the ambient field. The shattered fragments helplessly circle the rotting biological vessel they originally commanded. Liam simply gathered the invisible pieces, moving his hand with the casual, methodical efficiency of a man sweeping scattered coins toward the center of a poker table. He displayed zero urgency. He merely collected the components.
He flawlessly reassembled Isaac Netero.
He did not reconstruct the charred biology. He forcefully reassembled the raw, spiritual pattern. He gathered exactly what remained when the physical flesh was violently violently stripped from the equation.
Netero's translucent, spiritual projection stared down at his own smoking, pulverized corpse.
He slowly shifted his gaze toward Liam.
Netero did not utter a single syllable. The deep lines around his translucent eyes tightened as he desperately searched his vast, century-spanning intellect for a philosophical or martial framework capable of explaining his current existence. He found absolutely nothing.
"He is attempting to finalize the digital upload," Netero finally stated, his voice echoing with a strange, hollow resonance. "He successfully converted his Royal Guards and the dying queen into pure digital consciousness. He was desperately trying to follow them into the network before his body failed."
"He can forcibly convert biological entities into pure light?" Liam asked, tilting his head.
"Yes. He—"
Liam casually rotated his left wrist.
The Ant King's agonizingly slow biological decay, which had been stripping his structural coherence for several long minutes, instantly accelerated to absolute completion in a single microsecond. The remaining physical matter comprising Meruem instantly dissolved. His raw, overwhelming energy remained perfectly intact and sharply defined, retaining his exact, terrifying identity, merely transitioning into a completely different, non-biological medium.
Liam stood up. He casually held Netero's fully assembled, glowing spiritual pattern in his right hand. In his left hand, he gripped the fiercely concentrated, blinding energy that had been the Ant King just a fraction of a second prior.
Netero's translucent jaw tightened, his expression indicating he was simultaneously rewriting several hundred deeply held assumptions regarding the absolute limits of reality.
"I almost crossed the 100% threshold," Liam murmured casually, seemingly talking to himself. He closely examined the two glowing spheres of energy resting in his palms, displaying the intense, meticulous focus of a master craftsman inspecting raw materials before initiating a complex project. "Still, this is not terrible work. Kneading dough is ultimately just kneading dough, regardless of whether you have completely memorized the final recipe."
He slowly brought his hands together.
He deliberately flooded the merging energies with a massive surge of raw natural power. It acted as the absolute, binding catalyst—the final, critical element forcing the restructured entity to permanently cohere, exactly how extreme heat permanently glazes fired clay. He worked the energies with agonizingly slow, deliberate precision. He possessed exactly one opportunity to successfully execute the fusion, and he afforded the procedure the absolute, undivided respect it demanded.
The newly forged entity resting in his palms was definitively not Isaac Netero. It was equally not Meruem. It was a flawless, terrifying amalgamation of both, completely transcending the limitations of either original host. The distinct, overwhelming spiritual patterns that made each individual so terrifyingly recognizable remained perfectly preserved within the new structure, completely entwined yet fiercely independent. The two dominant consciousnesses had silently negotiated an entirely new, terrifying equilibrium within the impossible space Liam had violently carved out for them.
The new entity slowly opened its eyes.
The left eye carried the profound, twinkling depth of a man who had spent an entire century finding absolutely everything in the known world completely fascinating and entirely worth punching.
The right eye burned with the cold, absolute certainty of an apex predator born inherently understanding its divine supremacy, spending its brief, violent existence testing the absolute limits of that terrifying awareness.
Both eyes locked onto Liam.
Liam stared back, entirely unbothered.
"Hello," Liam said smoothly. "I do not currently have a name for you. But given your combined egos, that is almost certainly a detail you should hash out between yourselves anyway."