"Just one line?"
Shizuku leaned over to look at the phone. The text from Netero contained no photo, no contact details, no context of any kind. Just an address: Freier Mountain.
"Old man loves a good treasure hunt," Liam said. He pocketed the phone. "Classic Netero. Show you the picture, let you figure out what you're looking at."
"What are we looking at?" Shizuku asked.
He realized he hadn't actually told her about the prize. He filled her in: the match with Netero, the two targets offered as reward, his choice of the northwest option over the Meteor City lead. He kept the framing casual, but the underlying logic was clear enough. Whatever Netero had lined up in the northwest, he'd considered it comparable to the unknown Nen user who'd broken Bisky's arm without leaving a single trace. That was not a low bar.
Shizuku listened without interrupting.
Then she turned toward the doll sitting across the Gungi board from Komugi. "Pe," she said, "can you check Freier Mountain for me?"
The doll hesitated before making its next move. On the board, Komugi responded instantly, a soft click, piece placed, hand already retreating. An arc of static crackled faintly across the doll's forehead.
"Information's in your mailbox," Pe said, without looking up.
The data-stream in the doll's eyes was moving fast. Very fast. Processing at a rate that would have been impressive even for a dedicated system, running probability trees in parallel, recalculating board states with every move. Komugi played through all of it without any visible effort, the way water flows downhill: not because it's trying, but because that's simply what water does.
The game ended. Komugi won.
Pe sat very still.
"Impossible." The synthesized voice had gone flat in a way that suggested genuine confusion trying to express itself through a sound system not built for it. "Even a general-purpose AI assistant should outperform the computational ceiling of a human brain. How could I lose that quickly?"
"You've been in cyberspace too long," Liam said. "Actually look at her."
Pe turned the doll's head.
Komugi was waiting for the next game with the patience of someone for whom time worked differently. Her hands rested in her lap. Her face was still. There was something about the quality of her attention that registered as almost architectural: load-bearing, structural. And around the back of her head, faint but unmistakable to anyone who could read aura, something was quietly glowing.
Not metaphorically. Actually glowing.
Pe stared at it for a long moment.
"A personal restriction," she said finally. "That level of Enhancement output from an untrained user doesn't happen any other way. She must have made a vow. Something existential." The electronic voice was slow and careful, like someone doing math out loud. "That's why she can't be beaten. The vow keeps the Enhancement running at a ceiling a trained user couldn't maintain deliberately."
"Dead right," Liam said. "And I haven't even started teaching her the basics yet. Once she understands what she's actually doing, no one knows what the ceiling becomes."
He looked at the doll. "So. Can you build a Gungi AI that beats her?"
The doll's eyes flickered. Pe took a long moment before answering.
"It isn't a question of if," she said. "Human brains are human brains. Even a vow-powered Enhancement ability is still operating inside the skull of a biological organism. A sufficiently powerful AI doesn't get tired, doesn't lose focus, can enumerate every legal board position in parallel. The question is when."
Aoi had been listening from across the room. She leaned forward slightly. "Is there actually a limit to how much Enhancement can strengthen the mind?"
Pe considered this with the same processing delay she gave complex Gungi positions.
"Enhancement itself may have no ceiling," she said. "But the mind it's strengthening does. Human self-awareness has a structural limit. Push past it and the thought process accelerates past the point of coherent function. Like a train that keeps adding speed without adding track. Eventually it derails." She paused. "What's on the other side of that derailment, whether it's still the same person or the same train, there are too few examples to say."
"Few examples," Liam said. "Meaning you've heard of them."
"I argued about this topic with someone, once."
"Were they an Enhancer?"
"No."
"Were you?"
"No."
Akane glanced between them. "Neither of you are Enhancer, and you spent time arguing about Enhancement limits?"
"Does the person you argued with," Liam said carefully, "happen to have similar character for 'gold' in their name?"
Pe went quiet. Not the processing-delay quiet, the other kind.
She didn't confirm it. She didn't deny it either. The doll simply stopped responding to that thread of conversation entirely, which was, in its own way, a very complete answer.
"So," Liam said pleasantly, "the result of that argument was that you gave up your physical existence entirely and ascended to cyberspace. That's quite a conclusion to reach." He tilted his head. "What's the actual mechanism? AI-simulated consciousness? Memory copy? Full upload?"
"The door to the online world," Pe said, "is only open to residents of the online world. Even if I explained the method, it wouldn't apply to you."
Akane sat up straighter. "But if you could live there without a body, that would basically be immortality, wouldn't it? That's incredible."
The doll's head turned toward her. Something in the posture suggested Pe was choosing her next words with unusual care.
"Define life," she said. "From where I stand, people in the physical world are living inside biology. Hormones. Structural defects. Chemical gradients that reverse self-perception in seconds. You are, at any given moment, significantly at the mercy of processes you cannot observe or control. What you call 'being alive' is, by that reading, closer to being a well-animated object."
She paused.
"But the argument runs both directions. From the physical world's perspective, the moment a person uploads, they die. What persists in the digital world isn't life. It isn't immortality." Her voice was steady and entirely without self-pity. "It's more accurate to call it eternal death."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"Is that what the person you argued with said?" Liam asked.
Pe did not answer.
"Quite a lot of feeling there for a philosophical disagreement," Liam said quietly to himself.
Before he could follow that thread further, a small voice cut through the room.
"Does anyone else want to play Gungi?"
Komugi had been sitting perfectly still through the entire conversation, patient as furniture, waiting for someone to remember she existed.
Liam made calls. By the end of the afternoon, Komugi's settlement was arranged: residence, paperwork, and her family in transit. The prizes from the tournament had already covered most of it.
The reason Pe had to use the doll at all was straightforwardly absurd: Komugi was blind and could only play Gungi face to face. No screen, no phone, no digital interface. In a world of wireless communication and hacker hunters who lived entirely in cyberspace, the greatest Gungi player alive required a physical opponent sitting across a physical board.
The universe occasionally had a sense of humor, and it was exactly the kind Liam had come to expect.
He picked up the mailbox attachment from Pe's research on Freier Mountain, gathered Shizuku, Akane, and Aoi, and headed for the address Netero had sent.