Komugi had been born into a large, poor family in East Gorteau. Large meaning roughly a dozen children. Poor meaning the kind of poor where another mouth to feed is a crisis, and a blind mouth is a catastrophe.
She had never been taken seriously. She had never expected to be. The only thing that had ever made her feel real, genuinely present in a world she couldn't see, was Gungi. Not the trophies. Not the titles. The game itself: the weight of a piece in her fingers, the soft click of it meeting the board, the geometry of positions unfolding in her mind like a quiet conversation with someone who finally understood her.
Telling a person like that how to improve at Gungi was, objectively, absurd. She was the reigning champion. She had not lost a single game in her professional career. Liam was fully aware of this. He told her anyway, in the simplest terms he could manage.
"I'll teach you something," he said. "Study hard, and every day I'll arrange for you to play Gungi against someone very strong. Deal?"
Komugi tilted her head. She processed the offer with the careful, literal honesty of someone who had never had reason to be otherwise.
"I'm is quite clumsy," she said, with genuine concern. "I'm afraid I won't be able to keep up with your lessons..."
"We'll find out," Liam said.
He turned to Shizuku. "Your turn."
Shizuku sat down across the board from Komugi, collected the pieces, and looked up.
The girl across from her had transformed. A moment ago she had been apologetic, fidgety, overwhelmed by a room full of strangers. Now she sat perfectly still. One hand resting in her lap. The other turning a piece between her fingers with practiced ease. Her expression wasn't blank so much as elsewhere, tuned to a frequency nobody else in the room could receive.
The game was not close.
Shizuku asked for a rematch immediately. Komugi's posture didn't change. She collected the pieces with quick, accurate fingers, not hesitating once over black or white, sorting them by touch alone into their correct bowls.
Aoi and Akane watched from across the room.
"She can actually tell them apart," Aoi said quietly. "Just by feeling them."
Komugi won again without any visible effort.
Shizuku's phone was propped against the edge of the board. The call had been running the whole time. The screen showed only a stylized symbol, a simple "Pe" glyph in clean electronic lines, no face, no background.
"Another game." The voice from the phone was synthesized, flat, faintly melodic.
This was Pe. Full designation: Ickshonpe Katocha. Hacker Hunter. Self-described resident of the online world who had, by his own account, shed his physical identity so thoroughly that only his original given name remained as a relic of a life he'd filed away.
He had been watching Komugi play through Shizuku's camera. He had been silent through both games. Now he wanted his turn.
What followed was different in texture from the previous matches. Komugi moved at her usual pace, neither rushing nor dawdling. Pe's move times started reasonable, then stretched, then stretched further. The thirtieth move took four minutes. The forty-second took eleven. The final move took twenty.
Then Pe conceded.
"The software I want you to build," Shizuku said into the phone, "is the kind that can play Gungi against her."
Komugi blinked. "Software?"
Liam stepped in before the confusion could deepen. "Think of it as a machine that teaches itself. It memorizes every Gungi game ever recorded, then calculates the probability of every possible move on the board. Under normal circumstances, no human brain should be able to beat something like that."
He paused.
Under normal circumstances, though, was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Factor in a Nen ability built around reading a board with inhuman precision, and the math changed considerably.
Komugi listened to all of this with a thoughtful frown. Then she said, with complete sincerity: "That machine sounds a lot like Komugi, actually."
Liam looked at her. Then he considered it.
She was blind. She'd been memorizing Gungi records since childhood, running games in her mind, replaying every simulated match in complete detail. Her brain had effectively been indexing and cross-referencing strategic patterns for years. She even ran Nen during play without knowing what Nen was, extending it along the board to sense positions she couldn't see.
She was, functionally, a human Gungi engine with a vow-powered Enhancement ability she had never once consciously activated.
The original. Before anyone built the machine.
"Fair point," Liam said.
"I'll build the AI," Pe's voice came through the phone. "Simple enough. But before that, I want another game in person." A pause. "What's your current address?"
Shizuku gave it. Pe said "wait" and cut the call.
"Ickshonpe Katocha a woman?" Liam asked.
"Yes," Shizuku said.
"Huh." He looked at the phone. "She gave up her name, her face, her physical existence, her entire real-world identity, including her gender as a social category. So why does she still tell people she's a woman?"
Shizuku thought about it for a moment. "When I first met her, I said I'd agree to consider her invitation if she told me her original identity. She said everything had already been erased and I couldn't verify any of it anyway. She said 'Ickshonpe Katocha' was still technically her real name, so there was no reason to hide it. I suppose the gender came with the name." She paused. "Oh, right. I was going to mention this. She's one of the founders of Greed Island."
Liam stared at her.
"Ike... Ickshonpe Katocha." He said it slowly. "Ik. Is she the I in Greed Island?"
"Yes," Shizuku confirmed.
Across the room, Akane's head snapped up. "Wait. Wait, wait." She waved her hand and looked at Shizuku. "Shizuku, does that mean you actually agreed to that invitation? You want to go live in some virtual world?"
"I agreed to consider it," Shizuku said. "I told her that if I found I couldn't live in the real world anymore, I'd be willing to join. I didn't say I was leaving immediately."
Akane stared at her for a long moment, processing this.
Liam reached over and lightly pinched Shizuku's chin. She batted his hand away without looking up.
A knock at the door.
He went to answer it. A delivery worker stood in the hallway next to a package roughly half his own height, stamped with no return address.
Shizuku signed for it. Liam let his aura out in a thin current, riding it through the gaps in the cardboard.
Inside was a doll. Approximately child-sized. The character "Pe" was written neatly on its forehead in marker. A note was taped to its side: "Switch is on the back of the head."
Shizuku reached around and found it. She pressed it.
The doll's eyes lit up. A faint data-stream flicker ran through them, like it was loading. It held still for a few seconds, then climbed out of the packing material on its own, looked around the room, gave Shizuku a small nod of acknowledgment, walked directly to where Komugi was sitting, and settled across from her.
"Another game," it said, in Pe's synthesized voice.
Liam glanced at the back of the doll's head. Below the switch was a small stamped number. A production date. The delivery had been fast. Very fast.
Which meant Pe had pre-positioned bodies like this in multiple cities, ready to go.
He was still thinking about that when his phone buzzed in his pocket.
A text from Netero. No greeting, no context. Just a single line: an address.