The text appeared to delete itself before it finished sending.
Meruem watched his question character by character back out of the text field, erased sequentially from the end. When the last character was gone, the original question in the window turned red, went bold, and began to shake, in the specific way of an interface element designed to communicate that the user has not followed instructions.
He considered this.
He tried the close button again. The window remained.
He typed: I am neither a program nor a human being.
The window processed this. Then a new question appeared: So this is your real body?
Before he could answer, the window opened a secondary frame. His own laptop camera. He found himself looking at himself: the ant body, the tail, the tail needle positioned at the keyboard, the slightly surprised expression that he had not intended to make visible but apparently had.
There are 1,296 pieces of information about chimera ants in the material you've reviewed. 180 of those contain the keywords "large chimera ant" or "giant chimera ant." Are you a large chimera ant yourself?
He did not answer. He typed: Who are you?
Someone with a little curiosity.
The window shifted again. Surveillance footage, multiple feeds, cycling through different cameras from different locations. Street cameras, shopping center cameras, bank ATM lenses. All of them showing the same category of event: chimera ant soldiers in urban environments, moving at speeds the camera resolution had not been designed to capture, demonstrating to the surrounding population exactly why normal predator-prey calculations did not apply to them.
One feed showed Shaiapouf airborne over a school campus. His wings moved and something dispersed from them, a powder that caught the light wrong, and below him the people who had been running stopped running and began directing other people toward a specific street, which subsequently developed a traffic crisis. Sirens in the distance. Smoke at the frame's edge.
Another feed caught what appeared to be Neferpitou's face at very close range, her expression suggesting she had found the camera interesting, and then the frame became static.
The footage kept coming.
I found these by accident. After paying attention for a short time, I found you, who had been searching intensively for chimera ant information.
Meruem waited. He typed: What do you intend to do? A perceptive human who has identified the crisis comes to negotiate with a chimera ant?
Negotiate? The window's text carried the quality of a raised eyebrow. A species that will be exterminated soon doesn't require negotiation. I said I'm just curious.
Here: since you seem to be the type who believes their species is superior to humans, let me leave you a small test. Computer technology is the fruit of human intelligence. If you want to challenge that intelligence, learn it.
The window interface changed. The laptop screen, which had been browsable, locked down into a programming environment containing extensive tutorial material. The test was presented at the bottom: crack the learning program that was currently locking the laptop. The tools to do so were somewhere in the tutorials.
Meruem sat in front of this and was still for a considerable time.
The person on the other side was arrogant in the specific way of someone who genuinely believed what they were saying. Not performative arrogance. Not the arrogance of someone who needed to feel superior. The flat, casual confidence of a person who had assessed a situation and filed it under problems with obvious resolutions.
But if the conclusion was "obvious extermination," why leave the programming challenge? Why waste anything on a species you've already written off? Meruem scrolled back through his own recent search history, which he could access from memory. 1,296 results about chimera ants. And below those searches, several hundred more: the meaning of the ant king's birth. The nature of the chimera ant succession cycle. The question of what the ant king was supposed to do after leaving the nest.
If the person had seen those searches, they knew he was asking questions about purpose rather than strategy. That was a different kind of mind than a conqueror looking for tactical intelligence.
He pulled up the first programming tutorial and began reading.
Chelich found Youpi in the antechamber, where Youpi had taken up a defensive position that had not been requested by anyone and had apparently materialized from Youpi's own assessment of the situation as requiring one.
"I need two division commanders sent to Kakin," Chelich said. "I'd prefer you to go directly, but I'll take division commanders if you won't."
Youpi scratched the back of his head. "I can't go. Pitou and Pufu are out. Someone has to stay with the King."
"I am also the King."
Youpi looked at her with the earnest difficulty of someone doing several things simultaneously with limited available processing. He went down on one knee. "That's exactly why I can't leave."
She stared at him.
He looked back at her with complete sincerity, apparently having resolved whatever internal conflict the two-kings situation had created by concluding that the presence of two kings simply doubled his guard requirement rather than halving it.
There was genuinely no arguing with this.
"Division commanders," Chelich said. "Two. Kakin. Do whatever creates the most inconvenience for the current monarch. Don't let them get killed if you can manage it." She thought about this. "If you can't manage it, the queen can produce more."
She went to speak with the queen about production schedules.
Above, Meruem was reading very fast.
On the island, the three heads were gone.
Not all at once. The extra heads had retreated incrementally as Liam experimented with the suppression, finding the gradient between the full three-headed form and the standard single-headed one. The process of maintaining the natural energy interface at 7% while simultaneously housing less physical apparatus for receiving it produced, as he had suspected, a trade-off. In the full form, the perception was clear and detailed and immediate. In the reduced form, it was there but diminished, like switching from a high-resolution signal to something that was technically functional but had clearly lost information.
Shizuku was running her own experiments beside him, with the focused patience she brought to anything she had decided to understand.
She had found that the red fox transformation was not entirely a passive process. She could induce it, partially, deliberately, by releasing her hold on the natural energy calibration he had given her and letting the island's ambient field do what it preferred to do with her body. When her face had lengthened slightly and the first fur appeared on her cheeks, the perception sharpened. She was keeping her glasses on through this, which required periodic adjustment.
"About 360p," she confirmed. "Maybe slightly above. When the form is stronger it's clearer."
"Your ratio went up," Liam noted. He could see the number in his perception of her Nen. She had started at 0.1%. On her own, in the past hours of experimentation, she had pushed it to 2%, approximately 1,000 units. He had not coached this. She had worked it out from first principles, the way she worked out most things.
He released his own suppression and let the form return. The secondary heads extended from his shoulders, the additional arms followed, and the perception snapped back to full quality, the natural energy suddenly as clear and present as weather, the ambient field readable at a level that made the suppressed version feel like trying to see underwater.
7% of 100,000. 7,000 units. Inexhaustible as long as the island's supply held.
He looked at the edge of the island where the fog met the sea. The small boat was still there. Linnie had not moved from the bow. She had the quality of a landmark, something that had been in its position long enough that the environment had started to treat it as permanent.
He could not determine how long they had been here. The light did not change. The fog carried no information about time of day. He had sent consciousness to Kakin and back multiple times, but that told him nothing about the duration being experienced at this location.
Wood was at the second stone tablet. Not the one with the dense ancient runes. A new one, blank, which he had been carving steadily since they arrived, the same divine script characters appearing line by line under his enormous hands. He worked at the consistent pace of something that did this regularly and expected to continue doing it.
Liam watched.
"The dark continent," he said. "The natural energy concentration there. Is it higher than here, lower?"
Wood did not stop carving. "Lower."
"And less dangerous."
"Much less. What the island is now would be unremarkable interior landscape in most of the dark continent." He paused to examine a rune he had just completed. "Though the interior varies. Some places are worse."
Shizuku's fox ears angled toward Wood. "You want someone to help you with something. We guessed that much. What is the help?"
Wood put down the carving tool. He looked at them both, the two-headed Liam and the partial fox Shizuku, with the amber patience of something that has been waiting long enough to have stopped urgency about the topic.
"Revenge," he said.
The word came out with a weight that suggested it had been sitting in one place for a long time.
"There is a human," Wood said. "Named Don Freecss. I have a particular issue to resolve with him, and resolving it requires going somewhere that I cannot go alone."
The name landed in Liam's internal archive and found connections immediately.
The series bible of what he knew about this world: the giant arrow that the True Martial King had fired toward the Dark Continent in his final act. The target that the arrow was aimed at, which the records described with ambiguous shorthand. The man who was simultaneously a legend and a rumor, the explorer who had gone further into the Dark Continent than any confirmed source, who had been described variously as the most dangerous person alive and the most interesting problem in geography.
Don Freecss.
Ging's father.
Gon's grandfather.
The man who, if the timeline of this world followed anything like the canon shape he half-remembered, had gone somewhere and not come back, or had come back changed, or had not come back at all.
He looked at Wood and did not ask any of the twenty follow-up questions that had just formed.
He turned to Shizuku. "Did you bring your phone?"
She looked at him.
"I'm wondering," Liam said, "whether Bisky has her own opinions about Don Freecss."