"Hey. You there."
The mantis ant had been having an excellent afternoon. The city had proven remarkably cooperative as a hunting environment, with good sight lines, numerous exit routes, and a prey population that had not yet developed an organized response beyond running. It looked up from its current pursuit to find a person floating at approximately third-floor height, calling down to it.
"Do you have a name?" the person asked.
"Name?" It considered the word. The human memories in its blood had a category for names but not a strong intuition about why the category mattered. It raised both scythes and grinned. "Why would I need one?"
"You don't," Liam said. "I was just being polite. I'll call you Mantis."
The scythes came down. Behind the mantis ant, from a direction it had not been attending to, Jade extended her sleeves.
The mantis ant found itself inside the sleeve.
Jade smoothed the fabric with professional serenity and disappeared back into the ring on Liam's hand.
Nearby, the prey the mantis ant had been chasing got to their feet and looked at the empty space where the threat had been, then at the young man landing on the pavement nearby, then at the woman behind him, then decided that all of these things were in the same threat category and ran in a direction that did not contain any of them.
Fair enough, Liam thought.
The screen at the shopping mall entrance was cracked diagonally across the upper right corner but functional. It was showing a news broadcast from a city somewhere east of here, and the presenter was performing the specific control of someone who has been trained to deliver information calmly and has been testing that training for several hours.
Simultaneous attacks. Multiple cities. Kukan'yu, Bergrose, Ochima, smaller nations. The casualties counter had crossed 80,000 and the estimate was flagged as preliminary. The Hunter Association had responded. Netero had formally accepted the V5 commission. Several smaller nations had issued a joint statement pointing out that the prioritization of V5 territories in the response deployment left other regions exposed.
Shizuku read the Kakin entry in the broadcast ticker. "The capital had an incident this morning."
Liam thought about the division commanders Chelich had sent. He thought about a Kakin palace that was currently being managed by Camilla, with Kurapika somewhere in the building and the king's spirit beast recently destroyed and the succession war legally concluded. He thought about what a chimera ant division commander walking into that environment would encounter.
He filed this under simultaneous problems and added it to the queue.
An explosion from the east side of the city. He was already moving before the sound registered as significant, the wind carrying him three blocks in the time it took to identify the source, and the pangolin-type chimera ant that had just walked through a gas station wall and created a cause-and-effect situation found itself inside Jade's sleeve before the secondary fire ignited.
Shizuku arrived a second behind him, the beginning of her natural system control visible in the way her movement had shifted, the wind cooperating with her rather than simply being navigated.
It took them forty minutes to clear the city.
Most of the civilian population had done what civilian populations do when faced with something entirely outside the threat models they had been given: they had found the most solid-seeming structure available and stayed in it and waited. The chimera ants that remained active were the stragglers, the ones that had separated from whatever the original coordinated push had been and were now operating on instinct in a cleared field. None of them had distinguishing characteristics. No special abilities. No remarkable aura. They were miscellaneous soldier ants, the baseline production that the queen built before moving on to anything more interesting.
Liam put them in the sleeve one by one.
Jade accepted them with the calm of someone who has seen stranger things than miscellaneous soldier ants and is not in the mood to discuss it.
The count settled at nine.
He checked his death energy inventory from the top of what remained of a building that had previously had a functioning upper floor. 65. He had been at 39 when they left for Freier Mountain. The slope of the accumulation over the past several hours had been steep enough that he had felt it hitting him mid-flight, which was a category of experience he had not previously encountered and did not want to repeat.
He called Netero.
The line connected after two rings. In the background: the specific acoustic signature of the Hunter Association building at operational intensity.
"Liam," Netero said. "Where are you coming from?"
"I'll explain later. The unknown monsters are large chimera ants. You already know this."
A brief pause. The pause of someone who had been hoping this was not going to be said with such confidence by a person with good information. "Yes. They appeared simultaneously across more locations than our monitoring systems anticipated. The distribution suggests coordination."
"Have you located the ant king?"
"Not yet. There are professional hunters working on that track."
Liam looked at the smoke rising from the next city's skyline, visible at this altitude. He thought about Meruem sitting in front of a laptop. He thought about Shaiapouf with his wings loose over a school campus.
"You need to talk to your son," he said. "Beyond knows more about the ant king's origin and location than your hunters will be able to reconstruct from field evidence. This was his project."
A different quality of pause. "I see."
"The butterfly-winged one is Shaiapouf. One of the royal guards. He's been operating in at least three cities in the past six hours based on the news coverage. The other guards are Neferpitou, cat-type, and Menthuthuyoupi, large and physical. If any of your hunters encounter any of the three guards before the ant king is located, tell them to treat it as an extinction-level personal threat."
"That assessment carries some weight coming from you."
"It's not modesty. The guards are built around the king. The king is something else." He paused. "Also, your hunter deployment to the V5 countries first is creating a coverage gap in the smaller nations. The ants in those regions aren't staying put."
"I'm aware of the protest statement."
"I know. I'm saying the protesters are right."
Netero made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite disagreement, the sound of a man doing multiple calculations simultaneously. "What do you need from me?"
"Gel's contact information. The Snake."
The call ended. The contact information arrived as a text message approximately forty seconds later.
He landed on the rooftop of a research facility in a city two hours' travel east, carrying nine chimera ant soldiers in a sleeve and a specific request in mind. The city here had not been hit. The rooftop was intact. Gel was standing near the edge checking her watch, wearing her coat against a wind that her aura did not require her to notice but she noticed anyway.
She watched him approach and land, and whatever she had been expecting, it was not quite what arrived.
The aura had changed. Not the quantity, which was always difficult to estimate at a distance. The quality. The texture. The way it occupied the space around him without announcing itself, the way something large in a forest is detectable not by its presence but by the absence of everything else's normal movement.
She had met Liam twice before. He had been impressive in the way of someone with unusual natural talent and unusual development speed. This was different. This was someone who had found the edge of a system she could map and walked past it.
He released Jade. The sleeve opened. Nine chimera ants of various configurations stepped out and stood in a loose group on the rooftop, not running, not attacking, attending to the star marks on their bodies with the passive compliance of marked things.
"Research specimens," Liam said. "I need someone capable of doing serious biological and Nen-structural analysis. The star marks keep them compliant. They're renewable if you consume or destroy them. I'd appreciate not destroying the marks, but the marks can be reapplied."
Gel looked at the nine chimera ants. She looked at Liam.
"I can do the analysis," she said. "I need to be honest: what you're describing is well outside standard poison hunter methodology. The biological work is manageable. The Nen-structural work is going to require frameworks I'll probably need to develop as I go."
"That's why I'm asking you instead of someone with a standard methodology."
She nodded, once, in the way of someone accepting a commission that they know will be complicated.
He pressed his palm to her forehead.
She went still. Her pupils contracted. The move had been faster than she was able to react to, which was information she filed under things to think about later, but the contact was not hostile. Through the palm, something moved. Not the star mark, nothing constraining. A door, opening, and through the door the air becoming something other than air: visible, textured, present in a way it had never been present, the natural energy moving through the rooftop and the city and the sky like a current she had never known she was standing in.
He took his hand back.
"Conjurer," he said. "This should make your research more precise. The specimens will follow your instructions. Try not to startle them unnecessarily."
He turned to leave. Then turned back.
"Summon."
The word was spoken at normal volume. It was not for her. She understood this and stepped back slightly.
In Kakin, in a palace that now operated under a different name, two Nen signals responded to the Moon Mark in the same instant. The first one arrived sharp and controlled and coloured with the specific flavour of someone who has been working steadily and would like an update on the broader situation.
The second arrived with the direct, unhurried authority of someone for whom the palace is no longer a political landscape to navigate but simply the place they live.
Both of them said his name. Both at the same time.