Specialist was the type nobody could give you a training manual for.
Liam had thought about this while watching Akane think about it. He knew two Specialist well enough to study: Kurapika, whose type was normally Conjurer and shifted to Specialist only when the scarlet eyes activated, and himself, whose Specialization had emerged from a death oath and produced a panel that functioned like a system interface. Both cases shared something: the ability had not been designed. It had grown from something they already were, finding the shape that fit.
Kurapika's Absolute Time burned lifespan to purchase perfect command of all six Nen types. The cost made the ability possible. The ability existed because Kurapika was someone who would pay that cost. One could not be separated from the other.
"If a Specialist ability doesn't achieve something no other system could achieve," Liam said, "then you've wasted the type." He ruffled Akane's hair once, lightly. "So let's start there. What do you want?"
Akane thought about the Star Mark. About what it had done to Leorio without being asked.
She nodded slowly and went to sit with the rice maze.
Leorio and Aoi set themselves up in front of their respective piles of stones with the competitive proximity of two people who have both decided they are not competing and are both lying.
Leorio broke stone ninety-nine and the stone in his hand made a very clear announcement about its structural limits before he had committed to the actual strike. He stood there with the pieces and looked at his palm.
Aoi broke stone two hundred and forty-four before her hand gave her the same announcement.
Shizuku watched this from the garden wall and thought: Aoi wants a combat Hatsu and keeps describing it as an Emission ability, but her stone count suggests her natural body reinforcement is running ahead of her aura projection. Enhancement might be doing more work for her than she knows.
She filed it and said nothing.
The dead energy was not going anywhere. It had been patient for this long and it could continue to be patient while Liam established a training schedule, got everyone settled, and found a moment that was not already occupied by something requiring attention.
Nineteen units. At standard refinement rates, converted into aura over ten to fifteen days of consistent work, the result would be an increase from his current ceiling toward something that would have alarmed him considerably a year ago and now felt like a reasonable next step.
He started the process in the evenings, when the house was quiet and Shizuku was reading and the three students had reached the point of exhaustion where training becomes counterproductive. The Memento Mori mechanism was quiet and thorough and required no active management once initiated.
He let it run.
Kakin. Capital city, Heicoro. The airport had a name involving a wild boar.
The convoy moved through the special lane and turned toward the palace. Kurapika sat in the co-pilot seat and memorized topography from the briefing documents Camilla had handed him. Palace layout, protocol, the specific rules governing which personnel could enter which sections of the royal grounds. Every detail that might create an opening.
Camilla read her own documents in the back seat with the focus of someone catching up on time lost to a Hunter Exam she had been persuaded to take for reasons that were now stored inside a jade-green gourd somewhere.
The convoy slowed for a turn.
A convertible sports car came the other way, moving fast, someone laughing through the open roof with the specific ease of a person who has not yet had a reason to stop.
Camilla looked out the window. Her expression shifted. "Tserriednich. Just ran into him while he's out enjoying himself. He won't return to the palace for another week at least."
Kurapika was looking at the car as it moved away. He said nothing for a moment.
"You mentioned he doesn't use Nen," he said.
"He doesn't know how to read. It's beneath someone of his tastes to study something so laborious."
"The aura coming off him doesn't read like someone who doesn't know Ten." Kurapika leaned back and kept his voice level. The black contact lenses over his eyes were the only thing keeping the color from showing through. "The natural dissipation above his head. There was none. Someone who doesn't practice Ten lets aura leak constantly, you can see it in the air above them like heat shimmer. He had none." He paused. "He's been practicing. And he's been doing it long enough to have the basics solid."
Camilla was quiet for a moment. Then: "After I left for the Hunter Exam, he could have started asking questions. If someone in his circle knew the subject, they might have taught him." She picked up another document. "Whether he can use Nen is not the strategic issue. The issue is you."
Kurapika watched the road ahead.
He thought about what kind of Nen ability grows from someone like Tserriednich. What emerges from a person for whom other people are collections of interesting parts rather than people. What Specialization or Conjuration or whatever type it turned out to be would look like when it reflected that back.
Nothing he imagined was reassuring.
His eyes, under the contact lenses, were the color of fire.
Menchi left after one day.
She had been in the kitchen for most of it, which was where she was happiest, and she had cooked things that made the house smell like something worth coming home to, and then she had picked up her bag and her knives and said she had places to be and ingredients to find.
Liam and Shizuku saw her off at the front gate.
Across the street, leaning against the wall with sunglasses on and her hands in her jacket pockets, Machi was waiting.
Menchi crossed over with her bag on her shoulder and immediately started talking about where they were going and what she wanted to find there, and which regional ingredient traditions she had not yet explored, and Machi fell in beside her without comment and listened with the complete attention of someone absorbing everything for reasons she was keeping to herself.
The master and the student walked away down the street, one talking and one not, both useful to each other for entirely different reasons.
Three weeks in.
Liam was on the sofa. This was a factual description rather than a character flaw. He had spent the morning on Ken practice and the afternoon running training sessions for three students who were making progress at different rates and needed different corrections, and the evening was his.
Shizuku was in the crook of his arm, her head against his neck, watching the wall screen play whatever it had found on its own. Their hands were doing the specific thing hands do when two people have been next to each other long enough that the contact becomes ambient: not deliberate, not absent, just present.
He had his fingers along the line of muscle along her side and was thinking about nothing in particular.
Then the screen changed and he started paying attention.
A young woman kneeling at a Gungi board. Dressed simply. The posture of someone who had sat at a board for so many thousands of hours that it had become a kind of home. She moved a piece with the unhurried certainty of someone who already knew what the response would be and what her answer to that response would be and how the game would end from here.
She was blind.
She had just won her seventh national championship in eight years of professional play.
The host explained all of this with enthusiasm and several statistics. The young woman in the interview afterward was clumsy and flustered in the specific way of someone for whom the camera was foreign terrain but the board was native ground.
"She's doing Ten," Liam said.
Shizuku had already noticed. She pressed two fingers against her own temple in the pattern she used when she was detecting something. "More aura in the head than anywhere else. The concentration is up there."
"Enhancement. Brain-specific." He watched the game clips on the screen. The way she read the board: not visual, not memorized patterns, something faster than either. "She made a restriction at some point. A serious one."
She had also, somewhere along the way, said something to the effect of: if I lose a game, I will not continue to exist. Not as a formal oath necessarily. But said with enough conviction and enough Nen behind it to do what conviction with Nen does.
He thought about what level of Enhancement that produced, applied specifically to the cognitive structures involved in reading board states.
He thought about the Ant King.
"We have money sitting in accounts that doesn't have a specific use yet," he said.
Shizuku waited.
"Gungi invitational tournament. Large prize pool. Invite her." He looked at the screen where she was explaining, clumsy and genuine, how she thought about the game. "Aoi has been doing well and needs to understand there are levels above hers. And I want to see this in person."
"Agreed," Shizuku said. "What about Akane?"
Liam made a sound.
"She said she wants to see the world the way you see it," Shizuku said. "That was her answer when you asked what she wanted from the Specialization."
He had thought about this intermittently since she'd said it. What it would take to build an ability that gave someone access to Liam's perspective. The sensory architecture: six Nen types, the Star Mark's healing sense, the death energy panel, the multi-body awareness of simultaneous possession. The conditions required to replicate all of that in another person.
"The prerequisites alone," he said.
"At least ten," Shizuku said. "Maybe twenty."
"Twenty minimum," he said, with the sincere conviction of someone defending the complexity of their own construction. "Who's looking down on who."
She smiled against his neck.
The television moved on to other programming. Outside, the city was doing what cities do in the evening: settling into its own rhythms, indifferent to the two people on the sofa and the three students asleep upstairs and the gourd on the shelf with a princess inside it.
Kakin palace. Private quarters. Fourth prince.
Theta stood two meters back with the specific stillness of someone who has been in professional service long enough to know when to be invisible, and she was currently doing her best to be invisible while her assessment of every decision she had made in the past month collapsed in real time.
The fourth prince, Tserriednich, stood in the center of the room. Casual clothes. The easy posture of someone who expected the world to arrange itself comfortably. He was looking at something.
The something was coming from him.
It extended from his body in the manner of a Nen beast but differently: ominous, dense, the shape of something that had been formed by the accumulated weight of a very particular kind of person's very particular relationship with other living things. It had thin wings. It had the proportions of something between human and insect and not entirely either.
It existed because he did, and it was shaped like him.
Theta's hand did not move. Her expression did not move. She was a professional.
Inside: the recognition that teaching him had been, of all the things she had done in her career, possibly the one she would most wish she could revisit.
"Did I do something wrong?" Tserriednich said, looking at his own creation with the light curiosity of someone inspecting a new acquisition.
"No, Your Highness." Theta's voice was steady. "Your progress far exceeds expectations."
She did not say what exceeded expectations meant, in this specific context, when the person in question was who he was and the ability taking shape was what it was.
She had taught him. That was true and could not be untrue.
The beast extended one of its wings.