Beyond Netero.
The son of Isaac Netero, the man who had more or less single-handedly been running the Hunter Association for longer than most countries had been countries. The son nobody in the Zodiacs knew about.
That man was standing in a basement room under a hotel by a lake, acting as examiner for a hidden level of the Hunter Exam.
The family resemblance was architectural. Same underlying framework, same proportions, scaled up by about twenty percent and wrapped in more beard. Where Netero was compact and precise, Beyond was the same design at an expanded scale, broader through the shoulders and chest in the way that happens when someone has been training seriously for decades and has not stopped.
Liam assessed the aura. He assessed it carefully, with full Gyo, and came to a conclusion he did not enjoy very much.
He needed more information before he started swinging.
He began to walk a slow circle around Beyond, watching how the man tracked him.
"You recognize me," Beyond said. Not a question.
"You look like someone," Liam said.
"The old man?"
Liam kept walking. The room was empty in all directions, which meant every angle was equally bad and equally good. "If I kill you, I pass?"
"If you can beat me, you pass." Beyond stroked his beard with one hand. "Killing is also technically sufficient, but the bar for beating is lower."
"Generous."
He stopped circling and took stock.
The Ginseng Fruit gourd required calling Beyond's name and waiting for a response. That was a conversation he was not confident about having in a small room with someone at this aura level. The Universe in the Sleeve had the same problem and no particular lethality attached to it even if it worked. The Star Mark needed skin contact, which required closing distance that was not yet safe to close.
That left the direct toolkit: Enhancement, Transmutation, Manipulation.
The Star Mark also provided a passive structural benefit in that it prioritized self-manipulation over external sources. But primarily he was going to be hitting someone who had three or four times his aura ceiling with the contents of his fists, which was not a plan so much as an opening statement.
He stepped in, pushed the wind transmutation into his feet, and threw a roundhouse at Beyond's jaw.
It landed.
Beyond turned his head about two degrees from the impact. "Very fast," he said pleasantly. "The power is a bit low."
He reached out, caught Liam's ankle with one hand, and threw him at the wall with the effortless economy of someone relocating furniture.
Liam converted everything in his body to wind before he hit. The buffer formed. He landed on the floor instead of the wall, redirected the momentum into a ground-level rotation, and came back up low with everything he had concentrated into his right fist, the aura dense enough behind the knuckles to be visible as distortion.
The fist hit Beyond's chin.
This time Beyond's head moved. He took half a step back.
"The strength increased considerably," he said, brushing his beard to one side. "Enhancer?"
He swung one hand. Not a punch. An arm motion, casual, like clearing smoke from in front of his face. The gust that came from it picked Liam up and deposited him on the far side of the room.
Liam landed and felt the wind transmutation on Beyond's side.
Not similar to his. Identical.
The same distribution pattern. The same integration layer between the aura and the body's movement. He watched Beyond standing in the middle of the room now also wrapped in airflow, the technique sitting on the man with the comfortable fit of something worn in over years rather than learned five minutes ago.
Shizuku had not been exaggerating.
"Transmutation, wind attribute," Beyond said, rotating one wrist, watching the airflow spiral. "Reducing resistance during movement. Acceleration. And the punch used a rear-thrust application, correct? To add velocity to the fist directly." He looked at Liam with genuine interest. "Original?"
Liam said nothing.
"The chainsaw girl earlier couldn't teach me her main ability," Beyond said, conversationally. "Too complex. Too much internal logic. But yours is elegant. Simple concept, versatile application." He flexed his hand once. "Though the success rate will take time. Right now my instinct is fighting what I just learned."
Liam processed the timeline.
Shizuku had gone in first, depleted, fought hard enough to tear her clothes in multiple places and empty her aura reserves. Kurapika had gone in after. Machi, most recently. Three different Nen types, three different ability frameworks. All of them had demonstrated something and come out the other side with their secrets intact but their surface visible.
And now Beyond was standing in the room with a copied wind transmutation, a partial understanding of Shizuku's chainsaw mechanism, and whatever interesting data Kurapika and Machi had contributed.
The divine script ability in the number plates was designed to bring strong Nen users here. Beyond was designed to study them.
Liam started hitting harder.
He did not hold back on the Enhancement multipliers. He pushed until the concentration behind his fists felt wrong, past the threshold where the aura was sitting in a shape the body's normal output ratio was not designed to sustain, and then past that. The dark circle behind him was not a technique he had named or formalized. It was the shape that accumulated when the Enhancement multiplier crossed the point where the aura had to go somewhere it didn't usually go.
First visible shadow. Second one starting.
Six times multiplier. The number was approximate and theoretical and he was working it out in practice by seeing how hard the punch landed.
He hit Beyond in the chin again.
Beyond moved. Not half a step. A full step, absorbing the impact properly, and the suit jacket he wore had a new crease in the lapel from where the shockwave had gone sideways.
"The power keeps climbing during the fight," Beyond observed, with the tone of someone noting that the soup is quite good. "Is that continuous development or preparation?"
Liam answered by pushing the multiplier to seven and hitting the nearest available target, which was Beyond's torso, at what he estimated was thirteen thousand six hundred aura behind the impact.
Beyond went backward until the wall stopped him.
He pressed against it for one second. Then he straightened, dusted off his sleeve, and looked at Liam with the exact expression of a man who had just received exactly the data point he was looking for.
"Can you push it further?"
Liam was about to say something when a rose-gold star mark appeared on the back of his own neck.
He froze.
A Star Mark. His own technique. The five-pointed mark, small and precise, sitting exactly where his own original Star Mark sat. It had come from nowhere, applied in the half-second between one exchange and the next, while his attention was on the multiplication math.
He checked the activation status.
Nothing. The mark sat there. It did not activate.
Beyond looked at him, and the casual pleasantness of his expression shifted into something more careful and more curious. The assessment behind his eyes was no longer a teacher watching a student demonstrate a technique.
"You and I are similar," he said.
The system panel behind Liam's eyes opened without prompting, because the Memento Mori mechanism registered when something unusual adjacent to Nen happened nearby. Three entries loaded, crisp and unhurried:
Specialization: Broad Sea and Sky. Beyond can make a Nen oath with any person, provided both parties agree to the terms.
Specialization: Glorious Years. Beyond made an oath with himself. He can cultivate any Nen ability in any system to one hundred percent proficiency, but must begin each new system at one percent from zero. Ordinary Nen users training adjacent types still have an eighty percent success rate as a starting point. Beyond, by oath, has a ten to a hundred times harder baseline for every system that is not his primary.
Transmutation: Aura Blueprint. Beyond can transform his own aura into any Transmutation-type aura that has attacked him. Current success rate: seventy-two percent.
Liam looked at the panel and looked at Beyond.
Beyond looked at the back of Liam's neck where the failed Star Mark sat and said, thoughtfully: "The same principle. Highest priority. Established first claim." He touched his own chest, where whatever served as his equivalent mechanism was presumably located. "Someone taught you that approach."
The Star Mark he had applied had not activated because the one already there had seniority.
He had tried to mark Liam with Liam's own technique and the technique had declined the duplication.
They stood in a large empty basement room looking at each other, and outside through several walls and a lake there was a Hunter Exam running on its normal schedule, and neither of them moved for a moment.