While Liam was projecting his consciousness to Shizuku and reeling from her completely unexpected encounter with Menchi, his attention was simultaneously split across the world. In a remote suburban town, inside a dusty residential building, his possessed tiger Nen beast, Lumos, was dealing with its own bizarre situation.
Lumos stared in surprise at the young, brown-haired girl who had just plummeted through the ceiling.
Leorio stood in the corner of his bedroom, clutching a medical stethoscope like a makeshift weapon. Plaster dust drifted heavily through the air, coating his furniture and his clothes. He stared up at the jagged, gaping hole in his ceiling, his face twisting in absolute agony.
"Asshole! Do you have any idea how much this is going to cost to repair?" Leorio yelled at the ceiling.
The brown-haired girl climbed out of the rubble on the floor. She casually patted the white drywall dust off her oversized lab coat and offered a polite, practiced bow. "I am so sorry for the intrusion."
When she straightened up, her eyes landed on the massive tiger resting on Leorio's collapsed bed. Her face instantly lit up with pure joy.
"Wow! It is a Misery Moon Tiger!" she cheered, using the local term for the beast.
Leorio lowered his stethoscope, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Hey, what is going on up there? I know you. You are the kid from the apartment upstairs. Your name is Yuna..."
Before he could finish his sentence, a deafening bang ruptured the air.
The entire bedroom, and the residential building itself, shook violently. The floorboards vibrated with the force of a localized earthquake. Leorio immediately dropped to the floor, covering his ears with his hands. "An earthquake?!"
Yuna was knocked off balance by the shockwave, tumbling right onto Lumos. She did not look scared in the slightest. Instead, she happily buried her hands into the big tiger's soft, thick fur, rubbing her face against its flank. "A real tiger," she murmured contentedly.
Through the tiger's eyes, Liam looked down at the carefree little girl in the white coat. You are quite the free spirit for someone so young. The name Yuna felt vaguely familiar to him, but it was not a major name in the Hunter world.
Lumos raised a massive, heavy paw, gently reaching toward the giggling girl. But before the paw could land, a slender hand caught the tiger's wrist.
Liam looked up. A quiet, gentle-looking woman in her early twenties with a long black braid stood there. Despite her soft appearance, her grip on the tiger's heavy limb was completely unyielding. Ignoring Yuna's loud complaints, the woman named Mai pulled the child safely away from the beast.
"I want the tiger!" Yuna whined, stomping her foot. "Mai, look at him!"
"No," Mai said, her tone perfectly even but leaving no room for argument. "It is too dangerous."
"Explosions are dangerous too!" Yuna shot back.
Shouts began echoing from the street outside.
"Catch the thieves!"
"It must be those rats sneaking in from Moju Village again!"
The tiger's pupils narrowed. Through his aura network, Liam had tracked the source of the chaos. Two girls had caused the explosion upstairs and were currently fleeing the scene, carrying several large and small bags. The taller one, around fifteen, had long blue hair. The shorter one, maybe twelve, had short red hair.
Leorio picked himself up off the floor, completely lost in the rapid sequence of events.
Lumos ignored the arguing humans and turned toward the window, an almost thoughtful expression on his feline face. Leorio stared blankly as the several-hundred-kilogram beast leaped toward the glass. Light as a swallow, the tiger slipped through the broken window frame. It bounded effortlessly down the exterior surfaces of the tall building, landing silently on the ground before rushing off into the distance.
Leorio watched it go. It was heading straight toward Moju Village.
"No, Yuna. It is too dangerous," Mai repeated behind him, still trying to physically stop the girl from climbing out the window to chase the tiger. Her attitude remained firmly polite, which only made Yuna slump her shoulders in defeat.
Leorio was even more stressed than the kid. He tossed his stethoscope onto a dusty chair and tugged nervously at his collar. "Can somebody please tell me what is going on? What happened in your apartment? And did that giant tiger have anything to do with you?"
Yuna raised her hand high in the air. "I really wish it did!"
Mai gently pressed the girl's hand down and turned to Leorio with another bow. "Two thieves broke into our home. They tampered with things they absolutely should not have touched, resulting in an accident. The doctor was not injured in the blast. Thank you for your concern."
Leorio blinked. "The doctor?"
He looked down at the eight-year-old girl in the dusty white lab coat.
Yuna raised her hand again, beaming. "I am the doctor. Pretty amazing, right?"
Leorio rubbed his temples, a headache forming. "What exactly did they steal that they shouldn't have touched?"
"A bomb!" Yuna declared proudly. "It is my newest invention. Isn't that awesome?"
Leorio froze, his mind turning to mush. He looked at his heavy medical textbooks scattered across his desk, and then back at the tiny girl. It suddenly clicked. The person living directly above his bedroom was the local rumor he had heard about. The genius child inventor, Yuna Gray.
Mai, clearly her long-suffering guardian, calmly assured Leorio that they would cover all expenses for the ruined ceiling. Leorio just waved his hands feebly. He was already calculating the logistics of breaking his lease. Living beneath a child tinkering with live explosives meant he was probably going to get blown up in his sleep eventually.
Mai and Yuna prepared to climb back up through the jagged hole in the ceiling. Just as they reached for the edges, a slightly hoarse woman's voice drifted in through the broken window.
"Do not leave just yet."
Leorio snapped his head toward the window, his patience completely gone. "Listen here, my apartment is not a public transit station. You cannot just come and go whenever you want."
Yuna pointed an accusing finger at the long-haired blue girl who had just appeared at the window frame. "Thief!"
The blue-haired girl offered a slight, empty smile. She did not defend herself against the accusation. Instead, she spoke in a flat, almost mechanical tone. "I, along with a few others, was instantly transferred to this specific bedroom from a remote island by a mysterious force."
Leorio's face contorted with confusion. He stared at the bizarre teenage girl. "What kind of nonsense are you talking about? A mysterious force? Teleportation? Magic tricks do not exist in the real world, kid."
Mai remained silent, her dark eyes shifting. She glanced toward the closed bedroom door. Despite the tiger, the explosion, and the intruders, the door had remained completely untouched.
A sharp click echoed through the room. The bedroom door opened from the outside, and the younger girl with short red hair walked in. Her expression was just as blank and calm as her blue-haired companion's.
"As far as I know," the red-haired girl said, picking up the conversation without missing a beat, "the target location of the teleportation trap is directly related to a certain quality. A specific, dark trait possessed by someone nearby."
The red-haired girl and the blue-haired girl slowly scanned the room. They looked at Leorio, the maid Mai, and the child inventor Yuna, carefully observing their reactions.
"On the way back here, I surveyed the perimeter of this room," the red-haired girl continued. "I found no trace of this specific trait outside."
"In other words," the blue-haired girl said.
"If this trait exists," both girls said in absolute, seamless unison, their voices overlapping perfectly, "it must be among the five of you."
Leorio felt like his brain was going to explode. What was this crazy talk? And what did they mean by the five of you? There were only three people in the room besides the two thieves. If they were including themselves, it should be the five of us.
"Hey, are you two from Moju Village?" Leorio asked, his face pale with frustration. "Did you breathe in so much of that poisonous swamp gas that your brains stopped working?"
"Do not worry. I can probably rule you out," the two girls said together, glancing at him dismissively.
Yuna held her chin, deep in thought. Suddenly, she tilted her head back and looked up at the ceiling. Poking out from the edge of the broken plaster hole was the massive, furry head of the tiger, Lumos.
Yuna let out a small gasp of realization and pointed up. "The one who is actually doing the talking is the tiger, isn't it?"
Leorio stared at the ceiling, then at the synchronized girls, and let out a long, exhausted groan.
Deep underground, miles away from the suburban chaos, the air was cold and damp.
Harsh, bright artificial lights illuminated a scene inside a massive cavern that made the skin crawl. A well-proportioned, naked woman was hanging completely upside down, her limbs spread wide and pinned to the damp rock wall. Her pale skin was covered in dense, pitch-black runes that twisted and converged tightly over her lower abdomen. Her eyes were sealed shut, her breathing weak but steady.
"I have to admit," a tall, burly man with thick black hair said, a cold sneer on his face as he stared at the suspended woman. "Whoever managed to pull this off is really something."
Beside him stood a blond young man dressed in a crisp, perfectly tailored suit. Pariston Hill kept his hands casually tucked into his pockets, admiring the sleeping woman as if she were a museum exhibit.
Pariston smiled warmly. "What if I told you that this woman was a daughter who was horrifically abused all her life? She was starved and frozen. Her father tortured her, beat her, and degraded her. As a punishment, he used a needle and thick thread to physically sew her mouth shut. And in the end, he poured boiling oil down her throat, melting her respiratory tract and esophagus until she finally choked and died in absolute agony?"
The burly man did not say a word. He just turned his head and looked at Pariston.
Pariston let out a bright, cheerful laugh. "Just kidding. I completely made that up. However, I have seen a mother who was far more hateful than the father in my little story."
As the two men conversed, a tiny pair of eyes watched them from the deep shadows of the cave floor.
Liam, currently projecting his consciousness into a small field mouse, felt a chill run through him. Pariston? What is that smiling pervert doing all the way out here?
Before Liam could process the information, a shadow blotted out his vision. He turned the mouse's head just in time to see a massive, terrifying, insectoid mouthpart snapping downward with lethal speed.
It was an ant. But it was entirely the wrong size.
Liam's consciousness was violently violently severed.
High up in the sky, far away from the subterranean nightmare, the gray bird named Jaku suddenly spasmed. The bird tumbled through the cold wind, nearly losing control of its specialized Riding the Wind technique.
Jaku leveled out, banking hard to stare back toward the distant, untraceable horizon where the cave was buried. The bird's gray eyes flashed with deep, unsettling uncertainty.