Among all things, there was a difference between the ordinary and Nen.
And between Nen and gods, there was just as much of a difference.
They weren't lifeforms on the same level of existence, so how could they possibly be compared?
To do so would be blasphemy against a god—and an insult to the Zoldyck family's true pillar that held up the heavens and propped the seas.
Roy agreed deeply with that.
He remembered how, in the original story, Grandpa Zeno had once evaluated Maha's strength by saying, "Netero is the only person who ever fought Maha and lived."
He felt pride, yes—
but along with it came a heavy grief he couldn't suppress.
The rise of one great general comes atop ten thousand bones.
He could not forget the endless sea of graves in Maha's dream, stretching all the way to the horizon.
Nor could he forget the men, women, old people, children, parents, and descendants standing within that ruined royal court in the mind-world.
So that's why people who worship individualism will never understand the greatness and sacrifice of collectivism...
Roy murmured inwardly.
And in that instant, his aura changed.
A vague figure appeared behind him.
At times it was dressed as a child, at times as a merchant, at times as an oiran, and at times as the demon king who ruled over all demons and the night itself—the kind of nightmare whose very name could stop a crying child in its tracks.
Then Roy suddenly lifted his gaze and glared at Silva, activating his Blood Demon Art—
[Whip Pipe]!
Crack—whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Bones burst savagely out from all over Roy's body...
The instant they appeared, they transformed into hundreds of pipe-swords and shot toward Silva without warning!
It caught him off guard immediately.
"What is this?!"
"Is this another application of Nen too?"
From the tree a thousand meters away, Kuraging held up the telescope and stared in shock as Roy suddenly turned into a hedgehog, every spike on his body becoming a sword stabbing toward Silva.
The old butler's wrinkled face visibly changed too. Her pink twin-tails hung behind her as she slowly shook her head.
"I don't know either."
Keeping her eyes fixed on the battlefield, she watched Silva's aura shell get punctured with one hole after another—more than a hundred of them in rapid succession—until he had no choice but to retreat explosively, abandoning the Hard that had been locking down Snow Walker and Eclipse.
What she could say for certain was this:
that definitely wasn't one of the Four Major Principles, nor was it any advanced application of Ten, Hard, En, or Flow.
If anything, it looked more like...
another Nen ability the young master had never shown before.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
The pipe-swords whipped through the air like lashes. Roy had opened his En to keep tracking Silva's position, and the blades pursued him as if they were fitted with some kind of tracking system.
A hundred flying swords. A hundred streaks of light.
Carrying Roy's aura, they howled through the forest and became a vast torrent of swords, refusing to let Silva escape.
At one point they swept past the very tree Netero was standing on.
In a single instant, they split it down from the roots, and the whole tree collapsed!
"Chairman!"
Beans cried out as he suddenly felt empty air beneath his feet and started plummeting toward the ground.
Luckily Netero reacted in time, snatching him by the scruff of the neck and leaping over to Zeno's side, sparing him the fate of being smashed into meat paste.
"Zeno, this doesn't look like Conjuration..." Netero's eyes followed the pipe-swords while one corner of his attention flicked toward Zeno.
Turning your body into a hundred swords should have been Transmutation, if anything...
But with that boy—
"It's not the first time you've seen him cross categories," Zeno said coolly, suppressing his own shock as he watched Roy wield bones as swords and relentlessly pursue Silva.
Netero gave a low grunt in acknowledgment.
He recalled how Roy, during the Hunter Exam, had once imitated the Man-faced Ape in the Trick Tower and performed deception. That too had been a Transmutation-like application. With a trace of emotion, he said, "The ones who walk that path sure do have a lot of tricks... but—"
"At this level, it's still not enough to seriously hurt Silva."
Skill lay in refinement, not variety.
Netero's eye was as sharp as ever. With one glance he could tell that although Roy's pipe-swords were fierce and numerous enough to be frightening, his control over them was nowhere near as polished or intimate as his control over Snow Walker and Eclipse.
At best, this was just a side path Roy had pulled out to force Silva back.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
The hundred swords swept across the lake, plowing up curtains of water.
Silva moved like a phantom, stepping through the dark with his footwork. At first, Roy's attack had caught him off guard, but now he had fully calmed down and was already probing the limits of the pipe-swords.
At one point he stopped, turned, and flicked out a Nen bullet the size of a human head.
It shot straight into the torrent of pipe-swords—
and judging by its power, it was no less fearsome than something fired by a top-tier Emitter like Razor!
Boom!
The Nen bullet collided with the sword-torrent and exploded instantly!
The circular shockwave sent scattered aura flying like a hail of bullets, punching through tree after tree after tree.
A few unlucky shots even hit the tree where Tsubone, Kuraging, and Kurapika were standing, leaving holes as big as bowls in the trunk.
Tsubone's face changed. She immediately grabbed Kuraging in one hand and Kurapika in the other and leapt deeper into the forest behind them.
Pitifully, she had thought a thousand meters would be safe enough.
Now it was obvious—
for the master and young master, a thousand meters wasn't remotely enough!
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The scattered aura from the explosion spread toward Zeno and Netero as well.
The two men merely flicked their sleeves and dispersed it all. Then they looked back to the battlefield.
At the center of the aftermath, Silva and Roy stood facing one another in silence. At the same moment, they both raised a hand again—
Nen bullet after Nen bullet slammed head-on into one flying slash after another, driving the brightness up and up until the whole sky turned white. It was so bright, so blinding, that for a moment it was impossible to see what was even happening inside it.
Until a quiet voice said—
"Open!"
A searing red beam suddenly pierced through layers of sword-light and aura, struck Silva square in the chest, and blasted both him and his Nen bullet backward!
Netero and Zeno's eyes flashed.
Only then did they realize that Roy's pupils were glowing with a red heat—like laser beams.
That is, radiance.
Netero gave Roy's eyes a strange look.
"Oh... Emission."
Stroking his beard, he glanced again toward the Kurta siblings who had just been moved away by Tsubone and thought to himself, Those eyes of his are even redder than Scarlet Eyes.
Then he withdrew his gaze and glanced at Zeno.
"Looks like that butler of yours has become one of Roy's followers too."
"That's right," Beans cut in after Netero's reminder, only just realizing it. "How come I haven't seen that bearded guy with the gold-rimmed glasses, the polite one who's always following Roy Zoldyck around?"
"You saw him yesterday," Netero reminded him lazily. "He's inside the cocoon."
Beans froze.
Then Zeno, hands behind his back, said flatly, "A Zoldyck butler is loyal only to the Zoldycks. There's nothing surprising about them becoming followers."
Beans instinctively edged even closer to Netero.
The more he saw of the Zoldycks, the more uncomfortable he felt. His own role around Netero was that of a secretary, but Gotoh, Tsubone, even that girl who seemed to be from the Kurta clan...
Compared to Roy or Silva, they didn't feel like secretaries or butlers at all.
They felt more like dead men walking—
retainers willing to die for their masters.
Crash...
Back at the battlefield, on that small mountain pool—
Silva, struck by Roy's sudden radiance beam, skipped and rolled across the water like a stone, carving a trench almost five hundred meters long across the lake surface before finally crashing into the shore and snapping four or five trees in a row to stop himself.
He was soaked from head to toe, as if embedded in the broken trees.
Feeling a burn in his chest, he looked down. The Hard coating his body had been punctured with a small hole, and the flesh beneath was scorched bright red where the radiance beam had seared him.
How long had it been?
Silva himself couldn't remember how long it had been since he had last been injured.
He stared blankly at the burn on his chest. Then he looked up, through the wrecked forest, across the lake, and saw Roy—almost like a younger copy of himself, carrying that same striking silver hair—walking calmly toward him.
Silva slapped a hand backward, shattering the tree behind him under sheer force.
Then, amidst the flying wood chips and dust, he straightened back up and spat out an arrow of blood.
"Too bad," he said, rolling his neck, "the force still wasn't enough."
He stepped out of the dust with his silver hair spilling around him just like Roy's and walked slowly toward his son with a feral grin.
"Congratulations. You managed to injure me."
Step... step...
As reflections of light drifted across the lake, Roy walked out of the dawn glow with the now-calm lake behind him. In the glimmering reflections, he smiled slightly at Silva and asked:
"Father... do I qualify now?"
Silva said nothing.
He simply threw one slow, casual straight punch at Roy's face.
This time, no matter how Roy moved, no matter that he had already opened the Eye of Truth and the Transparent World to read Silva's path in advance, that slow, almost lazy straight punch still broke through Roy's prediction and smashed him directly in the face, blasting him backward!
Bang!
Roy flew like a kicked ball and crashed back into the lake.
His head plunged beneath the icy water, dazed, unable to understand how such a slow punch had hit him—especially when he had seen it coming with the Eye of Truth and had Light Release ready to pull away at any time.
"It's a force field."
"Silva... has stopped playing around."
Zeno, standing on the tip of a tree, had already released En. After seeing Silva's punch connect with Roy's face, then watching him dive after the falling point in pursuit, he said in a deep voice,
Netero's expression shifted slightly.
"So his heart's not small either."
If it was a force field, then Silva's object of contemplation was force itself.
And what was force?
It was interaction between objects—the external cause that gave them acceleration and deformation.
Its three essential factors were magnitude, direction, and point of application.
From the posture Silva had just used, Netero instantly understood: within his own force field, Silva had shortened the force lines and directly applied the impact point of his punch to Roy as the receiver.
Put simply—
as long as you were inside Silva's force field, his hit would land without fail.
"I told you," Zeno said, as if he had read Netero's thoughts, "Silva's stubbornness has never been any less than Roy's."
Using En, he watched Silva emerge from the water, then drive a brutal high roundhouse kick up under Roy's chin, blasting him from the lake bed into the air. He tilted his head up to watch Roy's jaw shatter, exposing torn gum and teeth as blood and flesh flew out, and continued:
"That's why he's always been this competitive. He trusts only his own strength. That's how he became what he is now."
"Hm. No wonder you lost back then," Netero admitted with clear approval. "Though if he hits this hard, he'd better be careful the old man doesn't get angry."
Zeno dismissed it.
"Grandfather won't."
"Why not?"
"Just watch. For Roy, this kind of injury is nothing."
"Hm?" Half his jaw was blown apart and that's 'nothing'?
Netero glanced toward the dim little room in the Zoldyck castle.
On the television mounted against the south wall, Roy's situation was shown clearly. But Maha and Betty both remained expressionless, still leaning together on the rocking chair, rocking away as if nothing was wrong.
Netero slowly turned his gaze back, now more puzzled than ever—
just in time to see Roy flying through the air, half his jaw in pieces, when suddenly flesh-tendrils sprouted out, wrapped around the bone shards, broken teeth, and torn tissue, and wriggled them back together into a brand-new lower jaw beneath his exposed gumline.
Netero: "..."
At last, he understood exactly what Zeno had meant by "nothing."
"That child is a monster!" Beans blurted out, eyes wide. "He can regenerate injuries on his own?!"
"No need to make such a big fuss," Zeno said, casually glancing at him. "You should've seen the time he exploded into meat paste."
The memory of Roy blowing himself apart in the shower into a puddle of minced flesh right in front of four generations of Zoldycks was still crystal clear. Compared to that, this was nothing.
Beans stared in visible disbelief. He didn't seem to believe Zeno at first, but then he looked back at Roy—already restored as if Silva had never shattered his jaw at all—and went completely blank.
Still—
"If he can't get out of Silva's force field, he'll just keep taking a one-sided beating."
Netero narrowed his eyes.
Silva had suddenly burst up from the water again, his huge fist raised high. Closing the gap in an instant, he threw a punch straight toward Roy's chest and said bluntly,
"Once his aura runs dry, that'll be the end of it."
Zeno was silent for a moment.
Then, just as Silva's fist reached Roy's chest, he said gravely,
"Then all that's left is to see whether Roy has any other methods."
And the moment the words left his mouth—
suddenly—
a smear of blood-red slowly crawled out across Roy's eyes.
And then—
crack—
a gigantic blue arm burst out from behind him and blocked in front of Roy!