Bisky was blowing on her nails when the phone rang.
She answered it with the hand that was dry, balanced it on her shoulder, and listened to the greeting with the expression of someone who has received enough flattery to recognize it by its opening notes.
"A missing arm," Liam said, from whatever distant location the call was coming from. "Someone casually cut the arm of a beautiful and lovely girl. If Bisky herself can endure it, which I doubt, I personally cannot, as her future organizational superior, allow it to pass without response. This is a matter of institutional principle."
"Hahahaha," said Bisky, because she had also received enough bad flattery to recognize good flattery, and this was good flattery. "Beautiful and lovely."
"The most important gemstone in the Barbie collection. Obviously."
She told him a time and place. He told her he would be there. She hung up and went back to her nails.
On the boat, Liam put down the phone and looked at the island. The fog had not changed. The island sat in its blood-red shroud and gave no indication of caring about any of this.
Behind him, Linnie ate from a container that Shizuku had retrieved from Blinky, her jaw moving at the same measured pace she applied to everything, watching Shizuku's face with the clinical attention of someone who has seen unusual things and is adding this to the list. The red fox state was half-present on Shizuku's face, maintained deliberately for the demonstration. Linnie ate and observed and said nothing.
"Three vacancies," Shizuku said, when Liam asked about the organization's current roster. She listed them mentally: Heaven, Dora, Suzaku, Delicious, Shiva, Barbie-pending, Aria-in-process. "Three unfilled positions after Aria selects her designation."
Liam stepped off the boat.
Not into the water. The natural energy that had been moving through him since the island did things that his transmutation had always been capable of in theory but had previously required more effort than the results justified. The golden cloud formed under his feet as his aura shifted, Akane's technique reproduced from memory with the natural energy providing the gap-filling that pure transmutation would have required more concentration to bridge. He rode it back across the water to the island's edge and disappeared into the fog.
On the boat, Linnie finished her food and set the container down precisely where she had found it.
When Liam returned, approximately twenty minutes later, the cloud under him was slightly larger.
"He agreed," Liam said. "But only when we actually depart for the Dark Continent. Until then, he stays on the island."
Shizuku considered this. "That describes most of our members."
Liam laughed. It was true. Menchi was traveling as a Food Hunter on the opposite side of the continent, as she had been doing before she joined and continued doing after, the organizational ring a formality that had not materially altered her daily existence. The Ten was an organization that operated primarily by having members continue doing what they were already doing while maintaining contact through the communication system.
He thanked Linnie with the proper weight the gesture required. She accepted it with a small nod and returned her gaze to the water.
He held out a hand for Shizuku. She took it. He shaped the cloud to two-person width and they crossed the water at speed, the island receding into the fog behind them. The boat grew smaller. Linnie stood at the bow, a fixed point against the grey horizon, until she was indistinguishable from the fog itself.
Akane and Aoi had been waiting on the shore where Shizuku had left them with supplies. They had been talking to the fishpeople who had come back to the shallows at some point during the wait, and the fishpeople saw the golden cloud coming and dove immediately, leaving a surface of small rings.
Akane started to ask a question and stopped herself when she saw Liam more carefully.
"Master, you have—"
"Come up," Liam said.
"Okay," Akane said, in the tone of someone filing the visual information away for later processing.
He lifted them both onto the cloud with the extra arms that had extended as they touched the coast, one per student, efficient. The cloud accommodated four. He turned east and pushed the speed up.
On the way, he pressed one palm each to the tops of their heads without ceremony.
Not the full transfer. Just contact, and through the contact a thread of the natural energy's current, the minimum required for the perceptual door to open slightly. He had given Shizuku 0.1% as a baseline and she had worked it up to 2% by herself within a day. He was curious what the starting point would produce in people who had been training their own Nen for a while.
Both of them went quiet.
The quality of the quiet was different from ordinary quiet. It was the specific silence of people whose perceptual field has just gained a new channel and are processing the incoming information before generating any output.
Aoi looked at her own hands. Then at the air around them. Then at the horizon, where the sky met the sea, with an expression suggesting the sky met the sea in a way she had not previously seen.
Akane touched her own face and said, "Oh," and then said nothing else for a few minutes.
Liam merged his transmuted wind aura into the cloud.
The effect was immediate: the gold faded to white, and the white accelerated, and the windshield effect settled over all four of them, the transmutation absorbing the friction and speed pressure that would otherwise have converted their faces into wind-related problems. The cloud became a line. The line became a streak. The landscape below resolved and dissolved in the same second, towns appearing and sliding under them before the eye could find detail.
With 7,000 units of natural energy cycling continuously, replenished as fast as it was spent, he could hold the speed at the edge of what the Emission output could maintain and keep adjusting the balance. The ceiling for this was higher than anything he had previously achieved in the air.
He had not previously been able to fly and maintain a four-person platform at this altitude and this speed without the output beginning to drain him. Now the aura pool held steady.
They passed over the coastline. Then the lowland plains. Then the first of the southern cities, a dense arrangement of buildings and roads and traffic and the specific aura texture of a large number of people in close proximity.
Then, from somewhere below and extending rapidly outward:
Death energy, incoming.
Not one. Not three. Not the gradual accumulation of a conflict resolved at distance.
Death energy +1. Death energy +1. Death energy +1.
The notifications came the way rain comes when a storm front arrives: first the individual drops, and then the mass, and then the sustained downpour. The accumulation counter climbing in increments that stopped being individual increments and became a sustained current, a torrent of the specific cold-hot sensation that had been in his chest since the first time he had absorbed it from a mass grave.
Death energy +1, +1, +1, +1, +1, +1, +1, +1—
He had been at 39 before he left for the island. The number moved past 50 before he processed that it was moving.
The cloud pitched.
Not from wind. From him, losing the fine output control that the accumulation was overwhelming, the way a signal is overwhelmed by noise. The transmuted wind dispersed. The platform dropped fifteen meters in a second, corrected, dropped again, and the building was already there, the side of it filling the space in front of them, and he had approximately half a second to decide what to do with the remaining natural energy.
He converted it.
The pink adhesive construct was not elegant. He had assembled it from the template of Hisoka's ability, which he had observed once in a training context and had understood at a structural level through Bisky's subsequent explanation of what made it function. The natural energy poured into the template and produced something approximately correct, a mass of high-density adhesive aura that deployed between them and the wall at the last available moment.
They hit. The cushion stuck.
All four of them were attached to the side of a building, approximately twelve floors up, in what had recently been a functioning business district of a southern city, looking at each other and at the wall and at the city below.
The city below was not currently functioning.
Aoi turned around to look at the building behind them and saw the broken glass, the scattered papers, the computer screens displaying the specific blankness of things that had stopped mid-task. At the emergency stairwell door, wedged half-open by something that was no longer moving, an individual in office attire who had recently ceased to be an individual in any meaningful sense.
"Zombies?" Shizuku said, with the expression of someone genuinely asking rather than using the word as shorthand.
Below, a siren. Below, a scream. Below, movement on the street that did not move the way human movement moved: too fast, too direct, too certain of where the other things on the street were going to be before they were there. A figure on the street below had limbs in a configuration that suggested mantis rather than primate, which was correct. The smoke from something three blocks east rose in a way that indicated the three blocks to the east had recently experienced a structural problem.
Death energy +1. Death energy +1. Death energy +1.
The counter settled at 59 and kept moving.
Liam pressed one hand against his sternum and looked at the city and recalibrated his assessment of the afternoon's priorities.