"The Ten?"
It was growing dark. Sitting by a crackling campfire in the wilderness, Bisky looked up at the sound of the name. She raised a hand to catch the lunch box Liam tossed to her.
Across the fire, Liam picked up the last bento box that Shizuku's vacuum Nen beast, Blinky, had just spit out. "Yes," he said casually, popping the lid open. "The dawn of a new era. Including myself, I plan to recruit exactly ten people. How about we all go explore the Dark Continent together? Sounds like a fun trip, right?"
Bisky opened her own lunch box, her expression perfectly calm. "The Dark Continent is not a good place."
Liam smiled around a mouthful of rice. "Exactly. That is why we need an experienced senior like you, Bisky, to protect us."
"Are you officially inviting me to join?"
"I am," Liam said honestly. "At present, apart from me and Shizuku, there is only one other member. We still have seven vacancies to fill."
"I assume this other member is the person you plan to give your practice notes to?"
"That is right. Our organization uses alphabetical codes like A, B, C, and so on. I am A, Shizuku is B, and the other person is C."
Bisky raised an eyebrow. "Why alphabetical codes? Is it because the Hunter Association already uses the twelve Zodiacs, so you decided to just make up your own set of letters?"
"Hey now. Do you think I am that crazy?"
"Why crazy?" Bisky offered a slight, knowing smile. "That old man Netero is not included among the twelve Zodiacs. You just listed yourself at the absolute top of your own system, which tells me you are actually not crazy enough yet."
Liam chuckled. "I care about my face. I would not dare compare myself to Chairman Netero. So, what do you think? Will you consider it? D, E, F, G, H, I, J. You can take your pick."
Bisky's smile widened. "Old man Netero certainly does not use that kind of casual tone when he wants to make someone a Zodiac."
Liam scratched the back of his head. "Didn't you literally just tell me I can't be compared to Netero?"
Bisky's gaze sharpened. "Did you invite me to join on a whim, or is this something you have been planning for a long time?"
"This..." Liam hesitated for a fraction of a second, then answered calmly, "It really was on the spur of the moment. I mean, we are already hanging out. Since we are all so familiar with each other, we might as well get even more familiar."
Bisky took a bite of her food. "We are not that familiar yet."
"Ah?" Liam blinked, clearly surprised by the rejection.
Bisky set down her half-finished lunch box and looked at him slowly. "At dawn tomorrow, you will fight me. Shizuku, you can sit back and watch."
Across the dancing flames, Bisky's clear eyes sparkled like cut gems. "Aren't you incredibly proud of your self-healing, recovery, and treatment abilities? Let's test them. Tomorrow, I will not show you any mercy."
Shizuku thoughtfully bit the end of her chopsticks, looking back and forth between Bisky and Liam.
Liam mentally checked the total aura on his Death Energy panel. He currently held five points of unspent death energy. If he completely refined those five points, his total aura pool would increase by at least five to six thousand units, pushing his maximum capacity close to forty thousand. On top of that, his Nen beast—the Taoist nun—was still not fully perfected, and Jaku's Transmutation ability was right on the verge of a breakthrough.
"Okay," Liam agreed without a moment of hesitation.
"Then get some rest," Bisky ordered.
Shizuku summoned Blinky and had the vacuum release three simple canvas tents. They quickly set up camp, and all three crawled into their respective tents to sleep.
In the dark silence of his tent, Liam lay still for a while before slowly closing his eyes. His main consciousness drifted into dormancy, but his external CPUs continued to grind away in the background.
Far away, "Lumos" prowled along the edge of a sparkling lake, the dark stripes across his massive white body shimmering in the moonlight like veins of precious jade. Meanwhile, "Jaku" folded its small wings and perched at the very tip of a towering pine tree in a pitch-black forest. Through the mental link, Jaku briefly watched Lumos pacing by the water before pushing away all distracting thoughts. Jaku focused entirely on the small rock bird in its sea of consciousness.
Feel this carefully. Remember the sensation. This is how aura is meant to be used.
Tweet. The rock bird chirped a perfunctory, slightly annoyed response.
With a focused thought, "Jaku" seized control of the weak, natural aura flowing around the little gray bird's tiny body. With a sharp mental pull, the aura flared, forming a condensed layer of Ko over the feathers. But the bird's reserves were too shallow; the Ko shattered and faded in less than a minute.
How do I change aura into wind?
"Jaku" launched off the branch, flapping its wings to ride the night thermals. It paid intense attention to the physical sensation of the air rushing over its feathers. It felt as though a pair of invisible, gentle hands were physically pushing up against the wings, carrying the bird's weightless body higher. Perhaps because the rock bird was so naturally light, when "Jaku" closed its eyes and glided, it felt exactly like a human swimming through water. It could almost hear the currents of the airflow swirling and eddying around its body.
I feel it. I feel it!
"Jaku" circled back and landed on the treetop. A portion of the aura wrapped around the bird's body suddenly dispersed, shifting like smoke. It seemed to vanish entirely, transforming into an invisible, rushing airflow that danced between the bird's primary feathers. But the transformation was far too brief. The aura-turned-breeze dissipated into nothingness in the blink of an eye. The experiment ended without any solid results, effectively evaporating a chunk of the bird's already meager aura supply.
But I have the concept down. This bird's body is perfectly suited to practice wind-attribute Transmutation. It really is a low-effort, high-profit vessel.
"Jaku" settled its feathers as the first glimmer of the rising sun caught the top of the bird's head.
Without realizing it, Liam had spent the entire night silently practicing Transmutation through the body of a gray bird. It was incredibly fortunate that Jaku possessed the blessing of a Star Mark, which granted impressive recovery abilities. Without it, the tiny bird would have collapsed from sheer exhaustion hours ago, entirely unable to squeeze out a single drop of aura to continue the struggle.
The gray bird tilted its head twice, its dark eyes locking onto the two figures fighting fiercely by the edge of a lake in the distance. Nearby, Lumos lay comfortably in the tall grass. Shizuku sat on a large roadside stone, hugging one knee to her chest, watching the fight with intense focus.
The calm, early-morning surface of the lake shuddered, ripples constantly crashing into one another from the sheer force of the shockwaves.
The air around the lake felt thick, heavy with a suffocating, palpitating pressure. The silence of the morning was continuously shattered by the muffled, brutal sound of flesh colliding with flesh.
Bisky moved. Her footwork was so blindingly fast, and her strikes so rapid, that even when Shizuku focused all of her aura into her eyes using Gyo, she could only track a blurry, shifting shadow. It was terrifying to imagine the sheer, crushing pressure Liam was facing firsthand at that exact moment.
She was simply too fast. If Liam had to rely solely on his own conscious fighting instincts and natural reflexes, Bisky would have shattered all of his limbs and trampled him into the dirt in less than twenty exchanges.
He could only survive by completely surrendering to the Star Mark's automated self-control. Liam let his conscious mind float away, relying purely on the programmed instincts of his body and his aura to react to Bisky's relentless, unpredictable assaults.
Bisky's figure blurred directly in front of his eyes. Liam's conscious mind screamed to raise his arms for a frontal block. But the defensive instinct hardwired into the Star Mark instantly overrode him, throwing his elbow sharply backward just in time to intercept Bisky's devastating roundhouse kick aimed at his blind spot.
Crack.
The sickening sound of Liam's arm bones snapping echoed across the water.
White stars exploded across his vision. But within a fraction of a second, the shattered bones knit back together, fully healed.
Liam thrust his fingers forward. Several invisible Flying Star Bubbles shot toward Bisky from a completely blind angle.
I have been waiting for those.
Bisky offered a sweet, terrifying smile. The aura surrounding her body boiled like a pan of dangerously hot oil. Suddenly, several drops of "oil" snapped outward, intercepting and violently detonating the incoming Flying Star Bubbles before they could even get close. She delicately pinched the edges of her nonexistent skirt and landed gracefully on the grass.
Liam lunged forward, reaching out to press his palm against Bisky's forehead.
Bisky's eyes narrowed dangerously. She immediately spotted the bloody, five-pointed star-shaped wound deliberately cut into his fingertips.
Bang.
The moment the soles of her shoes touched the grass, Bisky violently kicked Liam's outstretched hand away. But as her foot connected, a bizarre sphere of aura suddenly attached itself to her. What made the aura so strange was that Bisky could clearly see the number 100 glowing inside the sphere.
Oh? Is this some sort of trick designed to drag the opponent into a battle of attrition and recovery?
As the thought crossed her mind, Bisky had already calculated several steps ahead to counter the effects of the debt ball.
...
An hour later, Liam lay flat on his back in the dirt, completely exhausted.
The shoreline was devastated. The ground was littered with deep craters and jagged, spiderweb cracks. A massive, gourd-shaped trench had been blasted into the earth near the water's edge, and lake water was currently bubbling up to fill it.
"I never expected that I would be the one to collapse from exhaustion..." Liam panted heavily, staring up at the bright morning sky.
The deep purple bruises and the network of cuts covering his body were slowly fading, the Star Mark's self-healing function still grinding away.
The problem was that every last drop of aura in his body had been violently squeezed out. He had even completely drained the thirty thousand units of backup aura stored within the Yin Nen Sword. Without aura to fuel it, the Star Mark's normally broken, instantaneous self-healing ability was severely handicapped. His recovery speed had slowed to a painful crawl.
Shizuku turned her head to look at Bisky.
Unlike Liam, who looked like a ragged corpse, Bisky looked exactly the same as she had before the fight started—like a young, pristine porcelain doll.
Hearing Liam's complaint, she crossed her arms. "The exact second you decided to try and beat me in a battle of endurance, you had already lost."
The dense aura lingering around Bisky's body flowed smoothly, like a thick, exotic essential oil covering her from head to toe.
Shizuku had watched the entire exchange closely. Throughout the brutal fight, it looked as though Bisky had been completely submerged in a special Nen oil that possessed terrifying restorative properties. Not only was Bisky's overall aura consumption drastically lower than Liam's, but any physical damage or fatigue caused by Liam's debt ball was immediately soothed and healed by the oil at a frightening speed.
While it had been difficult to see the full effect during the chaos of the battle, Bisky's current state made it painfully obvious. She was in absolutely perfect condition. From her physical body to her mental sharpness, from her stamina to her aura reserves, Bisky seemed completely untouched. It was impossible to tell if she had even broken a sweat.
"This is incredibly unscientific," Liam groaned, propping himself up on his elbows to stare at Bisky, who had just dropped the aura oil and returned to her normal state. "Is your aura actually endless? No matter how strong you are, you should still have to recover after a fight of that intensity, right? Wouldn't that be more reasonable?"
Bisky scoffed. "In the world of Nen, what exactly constitutes reasonable or unreasonable? Are you honestly asking me that?"
Shizuku hopped down from her rock and walked over. "Bisky, you didn't even use..." She paused, searching for the right words. "Your true form."
It was true. From the very first strike to the last, Bisky had fought entirely within her petite, princess-like body, and she had utterly crushed him.
Bisky waved her hand dismissively. "I already have a very solid understanding of Liam's Nen abilities, so there was absolutely no need for me to transform. And besides—" She paused, offering the two younger hunters a rare bit of honesty. "Regardless of which physical form I am currently using, my actual total aura capacity remains exactly the same. Because of that, I wasn't technically hiding my true strength. So Liam, please wipe that pathetic expression off your face."
Liam blinked, his curiosity momentarily overriding his exhaustion. "Your total aura is exactly the same? Then there has to be some kind of massive difference between your two forms, right?"
Bisky hummed thoughtfully. "How can I best describe it to you? Imagine a massive, fully grown tiger, but all of its limbs and muscles have been forcefully compressed down to the size of a tiny kitten. The raw physical strength and the power of the tiger haven't actually weakened, but being trapped in that tiny frame inevitably makes it feel incredibly constrained and awkward when it tries to stretch or fight."
"Wait a minute. Didn't you literally just say you weren't hiding your strength?" Liam yelled, throwing his hands in the air.
Bisky patted him on the shoulder sympathetically. "Didn't I just say that to make you feel a little better about losing?"
"How is that supposed to make me feel better?" Liam muttered darkly, dropping his head back into the dirt. "Just you wait. Give me a few more days to perfectly refine my Nen beast and develop some new abilities. Just wait, Auntie. I will get you next time."
Shizuku looked at Bisky. "So?"
"So what?"
"Now that you have officially finished fighting Liam, do you have a new answer to the invitation he gave you yesterday?"
Bisky did not answer Shizuku directly. Instead, she looked down at Liam. "Those players we met yesterday, the ones threatened by the Bomber. They were all professional hunters hired by Battera. Why didn't you use them to track down the rest of the hired hunters and force them all to leave Greed Island? If I remember correctly, wasn't that your entire plan when you first entered the game?"
"Ah?" Liam blinked, genuinely confused for a second. "Oh. Right. It seems there was something like that. Hey, I guess I completely forgot about it."
He rolled his head to the side to look at Shizuku. "It is your fault. I have been infected by your forgetfulness."
"Huh?" Shizuku tilted her head, a visible question mark practically hovering over her hair.
Bisky pointed a finger sharply at Liam's nose. "You are a person who has absolutely no goals."