Finding fifty keys in eighty-two square kilometers of lake.
A needle in a haystack. Yes. Factually accurate. No argument available.
By the time Liam had finished that thought and checked his surroundings, the other candidates had already distributed themselves across the water with the efficiency of people who understood that standing near each other and finding the same key were mutually exclusive goals. The lake swallowed them. In the span of a few minutes, the surface showed nothing but the occasional ripple.
He went under.
Underwater, Hakagon Lake was its own ecosystem, operating according to rules that had nothing to do with Hunter Exams. The light filtered down in long green columns. The rock faces of the mountains continued below the surface, dropping into dark water that implied depth with the confidence of something that had never needed to prove it. Patches of river sand alternated with boulder formations. Small fish moved in coordinated clouds that rearranged themselves around intruding humans and then closed back into formation.
A hand tapped his shoulder.
He turned. Shizuku's black hair had spread in the water like ink dropped into a glass, framing her glasses and her lavender eyes. She pointed left.
Two shrimp. Each roughly the size of an eight-year-old child, which suggested Hakagon Lake had strong opinions about aquatic scale. They faced each other with their oversized claws raised in what was either a threat display or the beginning of a genuinely committed duel.
Liam raised an eyebrow at her.
Shizuku considered the shrimp for a moment with the focus she typically reserved for tactical problems. Then she held up one finger and pointed at the left-hand combatant.
He looked at the shrimp. He looked at her.
She looked back at him with complete seriousness.
He could not tell the shrimps apart by any visible characteristic.
Kurapika appeared behind them, already moving on. He made a brief underwater gesture: going to search separately, that direction, good luck. Liam gestured acknowledgment. Kurapika disappeared into the green murk, heading toward deeper water with the purposeful quiet of someone who had a plan and was not going to be deterred from executing it by whatever was happening with the shrimp.
Liam looked at his own aura for a moment. Fifty. Still sealed.
There were two search strategies available. The first was to start applying Star Marks to aquatic creatures and build a network. With the Star Mark's passive recovery, even at fifty aura he could inscribe a few marks, and once inscribed they cost nothing to maintain. Two shrimp become four shrimp, four become eight, eight become sixteen. Each one a sensor. Each one reporting what it found. With his Manipulation training at the level it sat, the number of targets he could manage ran into the thousands without degradation of control.
The second strategy was already executing itself.
Somewhere below, Jade moved through the lake bottom in her light blue Taoist robes, drifting between rock formations and river sand, checking angles and surfaces and crevices that a swimming human would need to be extremely lucky to locate. Her command range extended five kilometers in any direction from Liam's position, which covered the entire lake with room to spare. She operated at the edge of autonomous, requiring no active instruction for search patterns, needing only a direction from him to change behavior.
Both strategies were active. Neither required him to surface any time soon.
There was, however, the small matter of having pushed Kurapika into the lake ten minutes before his aura suppression would have lifted on its own. With the suppression cleared, Kurapika could have used the Revelation volume to divine the location of a key directly. That would have taken thirty seconds at most.
Liam had pushed him in anyway, on impulse, because the afternoon was good and the water was there.
He was not going to think about this.
Shizuku tapped him again. She was holding the left-hand shrimp in both hands. The duel had apparently concluded. She gestured a question: cooking preferences?
He gestured: improvise.
They swam for a shoal.
The shoal was small, room-sized, a sandbar that barely cleared the water line and had reeds growing in a defensive ring around it. They hauled out onto the dry center and regarded the shrimp.
Shizuku had also acquired a second creature: something large and red-gold that was not quite a fish but occupied roughly the same ecological niche, and which Liam had no name for but which smelled, even raw, like it would be worth eating.
"Tools?" she asked.
"Blinky can't pull from Nen constructs," he said, meaning the smoke keys, which she already knew. "What about the cooking tools you had stored?"
"In the big-eyed fish." She looked at the water, then at the shrimp. The big-eyed fish was a Nen conjuration, currently unavailable.
They stripped reeds from the water's edge, sharpened the ends on a nearby rock, and skewered the shrimp and the unnamed fish. The shrimp fit easily on two reeds apiece.
The fire was the problem.
Liam gathered dry weeds from the higher ground of the shoal, balled them together, and found his hands making the instinctive motions of starting fire without the tools to do it. He looked at his fingers. He had fifty aura. He could produce a small Emission shot, roughly grain-of-rice scale, with the aura he had available.
He tried to produce a tiny aura ball. Thought about it. Concentrated.
The ball was about the size of a grain of rice. It left his fingers on a careful arc, dropped into the weed bundle, and caught.
The fire took.
Shrimp and fish over flame.
The smell that came off them in the next few minutes was specific and immediate and the kind that travels across water without apology. It moved out in all directions over the lake surface, announcing their presence to every candidate within several hundred meters.
A pair of figures had hauled out on the far edge of the shoal while Liam was arranging the fire. They appeared to be about to do something unpleasant to the food situation. One of them got a look at Liam's face.
They were back in the water before the other one had fully processed the decision.
He watched them go.
At the fried rice stage, Menchi's red seasoning had briefly revealed everyone's aura ceilings. Whatever those candidates had seen at that point had apparently been filed under permanent memory. Nobody who had registered Liam's name during that phase was volunteering to revisit the experience.
The result was that the grilled fish and shrimp smell spread across the lake, and all thirty-something candidates in the water smelled it and none of them came close. They were in there eating raw aquatic life and pretending they weren't, and out here were two people with a fire and a meal, and the gap between those two situations was one piece of information nobody wanted to test.
Liam ate prawn claw and looked at the water.
The big fish arrived and landed on the shoal with a wet slap.
Machi was right behind it, pulling herself onto the sandbar with the economical motion of someone who found swimming practical but not interesting. She was comprehensively soaked. She looked at the fire with the direct assessment of someone identifying a resource.
"Is there hay?"
"I'll get some," Liam said, and rolled backward into the lake.
Machi settled beside Shizuku. The fire was still going. She pulled a handful of lake reeds, laid them out to dry in the sun, and sat with the patience of someone who could wait.
After a moment, she said: "Do you have his mark on you?"
Shizuku was wringing water from her sweater, having pulled it off over her head to deal with it properly. She looked at Machi. The question hung there.
She said nothing.
She was not stupid. Answering in either direction gave Machi a data point. Not answering was also a data point, but a less useful one. She worked the sweater with both hands and maintained the expression she wore when she was thinking about something completely different.
Machi watched her with the flat attention of someone who had asked the question to see what happened, not because she expected a direct answer.
"Strange," Machi said, still looking at the lake rather than at Shizuku. "That a troupe killer would leave me walking around."
Shizuku thought about this. She turned it over. As far as she was aware, Liam had no particular position on the Troupe as a concept. Kurapika wanted them gone, and Liam helped with the things Kurapika needed, and that was different from having an opinion. She was fairly sure Liam's primary interest in the Troupe had always been adjacent to Kurapika's goals rather than independent of them.
She said nothing. She continued saying nothing with complete consistency.
Machi looked at her lavender eyes for another second and appeared to decide this line of inquiry was finished.
"The weeds are dry," Shizuku said.
Machi glanced at the pile. She pulled two threads from her fingertips, one from each hand, and drew them between her fingers like a cat's cradle pulled taut. Then she accelerated. The threads moved at speed between her hands, friction building at every crossing point, the energy accumulating in the gaps with a low hiss. Within seconds, the heat at the thread intersections was sufficient.
She touched the thread bundle to the weeds.
The pile caught with a sound like a small exhale.
Transmutation threads used as a fire-starting mechanism. Liam would have found this more interesting if he had been present to observe it. He was not. He was somewhere in the lake, apparently not concerned about the timeline.
They divided the fish. They ate. The lake was quiet.
Liam surfaced eventually, shook water from his hair, and climbed onto the shoal.
"Kurapika?"
Shizuku shook her head.
He looked at the water. He looked at the sky. The suppression on Kurapika's aura had lifted some time ago by any honest calculation, which meant Kurapika should have used the Revelation volume, found a key, and either come up to confirm or gone directly for the hotel. He had done none of these visible things.
He was also not findable underwater.
Jade had been running circuit patterns through the lake bottom since they entered the water. She had not located Kurapika either, and Jade's search pattern was thorough.
Kurapika did not have a Star Mark. He had made that choice intentionally, and Liam had respected it. The absence of that connection meant no passive sense of location, no healing channel, no recovery thread if something had gone wrong.
He catalogued the worry, noted its shape, and set it aside for now. Kurapika was not weak. Suppressed or not, he was not the kind of person who lost to basic threats in a lake.
Machi wiped her mouth, stood, and threw herself back into the water without particular ceremony. Gone.
The lake was quiet again.
Liam looked at the surface for another moment.
Then the surface broke, maybe four meters from the shoal's edge.
Jade rose from the water in her light blue Taoist robes, completely unbothered by the fact that she had been operating at the bottom of a lake for the past several hours. She was holding three keys, one between each pair of fingers on her right hand: gray-green, smoke-solid, shaped like ordinary door keys and made of something that was very much not ordinary material.
In her left hand, dangling by their collars, were two candidates. Both unconscious. Both breathing. Both having apparently encountered the Nen beast at the wrong moment in the wrong section of lake.
She set the two unconscious candidates on the sand with the deliberate care of someone who had decided they were not a disposal problem, merely a consequence.
Liam took the three keys and looked at them.
Fifty keys total. He had three. Forty-seven remained somewhere in eighty-two square kilometers of water and reef and island and shoal.
He looked at the far shore, four kilometers across still water.
He looked at Shizuku.
"Let's head for the finish line," he said. "These are enough to get us started."