Chapter 125: A Salute to Every Man Who Had the Nerve to Go After an Ice Maiden
This one started on Hiei's end.
The person Hiei was looking for was named Yukina, his fraternal twin sister. Racially, she belonged to the demon subcategory known as the Ice Maiden clan.
Yes, tracing it back to racial origins, Hiei himself was technically half Ice Maiden, or at the very least a divergent branch of the same lineage.
Under normal circumstances, the Ice Maiden clan's reproduction worked more like cell fission. They could only produce female offspring through self-division. Occasionally, though, some Ice Maidens would take part in what the clan called "consorting with outsiders," conceiving through biological birth with males of other races. In those cases, the resulting infant would fully inherit the father's traits, a male child, and die immediately after birth.
This is as good a place as any to acknowledge that any man who actually managed to produce offspring with an Ice Maiden deserved genuine recognition. We are clearly not talking about the level of dropping a hot thermos into a freezer here. Special mention goes to Nueno Natsusuke, a teacher at a certain institution, on account of his having actually married one.
In Hiei's case, the result appears to have been some kind of biological glitch between natural birth and self-division mechanics. The male infant who should have died on the spot instead survived, arriving in the world as a fraternal twin alongside his sister Yukina. He was born with complete self-awareness and fully formed memory, and though he couldn't speak, he instinctively learned to observe everything in silence from the very beginning.
The black demon flames that accompanied his birth were enough. The Ice Maiden clan branded him Child of Curse and declared, on the grounds that he would inevitably bring catastrophic disaster to the clan, that his birth mother was required to execute him and cast him out.
At the last moment, they couldn't go through with actually killing him. Execution became abandonment. That's the only reason Hiei was standing at all.
And through quite a long journey after that, Hiei eventually set out to find the one family member he still had left in the world.
The human world, though, turned out to be considerably more complicated than the demon world. Ross had given Hiei thorough and detailed intelligence on Tarukane, the gem dealer holding Yukina prisoner, including the name and location of his villa complex. But in this timeline Tarukane was part of an organized crime family operating under the Ten Dons, which meant what should have been "Bone Rot Village" wasn't located on a small island anywhere. It was hidden inside a minor nation that ordinary channels didn't permit entry to.
Getting detailed information on that location, let alone actual entry clearance, was not something someone with zero legitimate identity like Hiei could arrange easily.
His first thought, interestingly, wasn't Ross. It was Kurama. For reasons Hiei himself probably couldn't have fully articulated, he simply didn't want to add to what he already owed Ross.
But Kurama, who at this point only held a Sky Arena floor-200 fighter's credential, had nothing useful to offer there. He did, however, give Hiei a precise redirect to Yusuke, who was a properly licensed, if decidedly delinquent, Nen ability user with an actual Hunter's license.
Going to Yusuke apparently sat better with Hiei than going to Ross. So Yusuke got recruited without any real question being asked.
Hiei didn't disclose his actual relationship to Yukina. Yusuke simply ran a license query through the Hunter database. As it happened, someone on the Hunter network had used a remotely operated flying Nen beast to barely manage a single photograph of Tarukane's villa compound from a distance.
The photo showed a woman with long green hair, wearing a pure white kimono. Features delicate and somehow both beautiful and pitiable, but her expression was utterly, thoroughly cold. She was sitting behind iron-barred windows plastered with talismans.
Yukina. Hiei's twin sister, without any question.
When Kuwabara saw that photograph, he got hit.
By something called love at first sight.
Kuwabara had a well-documented reputation for falling for whoever crossed his path. But this time he seemed particularly serious about it.
Worth noting: the moment Hiei registered Kuwabara's reaction, his hand was already on his sword hilt.
The three of them used the Hunter license's high-clearance access to bypass the hard entry restrictions, entered the small nation, and stormed Tarukane's villa complex without hesitation, going directly up against his hired demon mercenary group, the Dark Brokers.
The standard enemies and elite combatants, skipped over. Straight to the actual boss fight.
The Toguro Brothers.
Elder Toguro was short, with a body transformation ability even more extreme than Illumi's. He could contort his entire body into inhuman configurations, and in combat he demonstrated sword and shield forms.
Younger Toguro was tall, capable of multiplying his muscle mass for straightforward brute-force enhancement, and used his contorting elder brother as a weapon.
Of course, everything they showed was deliberate, surface-level only. And the two delinquents had no idea what they were actually dealing with. Yusuke in particular hadn't thought to consult Ross beforehand, which meant he walked into the fight with absolutely no advance information.
Yusuke and Kuwabara immediately took on the boss fight, sending the fastest of the three, Hiei, to find Yukina.
Both of them had progressed well past their original-timeline capability through proper training under their respective masters. Even so, they still got into the hardest fight either of them had ever had.
At the end of it, they barely managed to secure the kill. And afterward, Yusuke's mood hit the floor hard.
Which brought things back to the phone call.
"So you're saying you and Kuwabara killed Younger Toguro."
Yusuke caught something in Ross's voice he hadn't expected.
Before he could respond, the other end of the line produced noise that nearly blew out his ear.
"What are you dreaming about?! At your level, you two actually killed Younger Toguro? He was playing with you!"
"...?"
"What do you mean 'what'?! After 'killing' someone, you didn't confirm the death!?"
"...Oh."
Yusuke went still.
At the time, Kuwabara's Spirit Sword had run through Younger Toguro's abdomen. Younger Toguro had performed the full routine: a standard villain's dying reflective monologue, then collapsed. The atmosphere in the sealed arena at that moment had been unmistakably one of victory.
Yusuke was naturally careless about things like this. The idea of verifying someone was actually dead had never crossed his mind.
Kuwabara, who had been under Wing's instruction for over two months, should have had that awareness. But at the moment Yukina appeared, freed by Hiei, Kuwabara's entire attention transferred completely to the person he had fallen for at first sight. The Toguro Brothers' actual status got left completely behind.
As for Hiei, right up until everyone had evacuated the area, he had apparently been watching Younger Toguro's "corpse" the entire time with an expression that mixed wariness with something closer to dread.
At the time, Yusuke had just written it off as Hiei being Hiei. Now he finally understood.
"Damn it! Hiei! He didn't say anything to warn us!?"
Yusuke's emotional state came rocketing up from rock-bottom to full fury in a single instant.