Chapter 144: A Perfect Misdirection
Every Phantom Troupe member carried the spider tattoo. It was the mark stamped on you when you officially joined, and because Castlevania's soul capture preserved its subjects in the peak state of their living selves, the tattoo that represented Troupe membership came with them.
The Zoldyck family had taken a job against the Phantom Troupe once, and afterward the family head at the time, Illumi's father Silva, had assessed the Troupe as: difficult, combat intensity not proportionate to the pay, a net loss. They had clearly investigated the Troupe's strength in depth after that job.
Even that idiot with the botched plastic surgery from Trick Tower had known to use the spider tattoo as an intimidation tool. Illumi was not going to be less informed than him.
He had also seen the spider tattoo on Hisoka's back during the Hunter Exam, and knew from that that the tattoo alone wasn't enough, there also had to be a corresponding numbered position on it.
In an instant, Illumi had tagged Phinks as Phantom Troupe.
He couldn't work out why a member of an A-class criminal organization would be standing guard in a place like this like some kind of posted sentry. But the loss of Alluka had stripped away enough of his rational functioning that he was no longer in a position to dismiss even the smallest possibility.
If anything, in Illumi's reading, the Troupe had every logical reason to target the Zoldyck family. His father had genuinely killed a Troupe member, even if it had only been a job.
As for how the Troupe could have found out about Alluka's existence, Illumi couldn't work that out and simply filed it under some kind of investigative Nen ability he wasn't aware of.
"The Phantom Troupe..."
He repeated the words like a haunting, and the demonic pressure radiating off him intensified further. But it was a performance.
Seeing the Troupe mark on Phinks had snapped the logic chain into place for Illumi in an instant. His suspicion had shifted entirely onto the Troupe, who would steal or grab anything that wasn't nailed down, and at that point the majority of his rational mind had in fact already returned. He was just continuing to perform the unhinged act to keep his opponent off balance.
As an agility-based type, Illumi's needles could find openings and land on Phinks. But breaking through wasn't easy, because Phinks was using Ken for targeted defense and In to shift his aura to the relevant positions as needed, and he was applying both well enough.
After an extended failure to break the stalemate, Illumi pulled out cleanly and ran without a moment's hesitation.
Once he had put enough distance between himself and the compound, Illumi pulled out his phone and dialed a stored number.
"Hisoka. I want to trade Gon's life for whatever intelligence you have on the Phantom Troupe."
"Already leaving?"
Phinks, whose Ripper Cyclotron had been strong but consistently denied a close-range opening by the needle suppression from range, looked thoroughly unsatisfied.
But it didn't matter. Ross's misdirection had almost certainly achieved its purpose. Now the question was whether the Zoldyck family, operating on deliberately wrong information, would actually move against the Troupe.
Illumi's overall combat capability put him somewhere in the middle tier of Troupe fighters, and his role was an agility-support type without the capacity for direct frontal assault. Under ideal conditions, with the needles already in the target before the fight started, there was nothing more to say. But in a straight head-on confrontation, he and Phinks couldn't easily resolve it either way.
So if the Zoldycks genuinely committed to a move against the Troupe, the playbook would probably look like what they had done to the Ten Dons in the original story: full family mobilization, clean one-shot operation, ensure the target was dead before it could respond.
Of course, Illumi had retreated partly because he simply didn't know that Phinks in his current state was running HP and aura on the same bar. If he had just kept firing needles from range, even passive defense on Phinks's end would have drained him dry eventually, and once the aura hit zero, total collapse.
"Good work."
Ross offered a brief verbal acknowledgment. The Post-Mortem Nen Beast Phinks responded to the sky with a raised middle finger and was dismissed on the spot.
With the hostile intrusion resolved, the Nostrad compound reverted from enclave status to its default state, and Ross's spectator view was automatically redirected back to Castlevania.
Meanwhile, Light Nostrad, who had been burning through phone calls, finally heard that the attacker had withdrawn. He collapsed back into his leather chair.
By appearances the Nostrad family had taken significant losses in this attack. In practice, everyone who died was rank-and-file. For a criminal organization, low-level muscle was always expendable. Lose some, recruit more. The Nostrad family's liquid assets remained entirely healthy.
Neon's divination service collected in cash, which meant Light's actual available cash flow was more robust than most people would have guessed.
The compensation owed for the dead was minimal, because the people who chose to become crime organization members were almost universally the type with no family worth paying out to anyway.
In keeping with his standard operating approach, the one that had him pulling back and absorbing it when people mocked him, insulted him, or even physically attacked him, choosing patience over retaliation every time. Light had no intention of putting a bounty on the person who had broken in. More problems were the last thing he needed. Better to put that energy toward finding his daughter, who had apparently run off with some blonde.
White-haired, actually.
But the combination of his daughter apparently running off with someone, and then the compound attack landing right on top of it, pulled Light's thoughts back to the divination involuntarily as his car rushed back toward the compound.
Neon's poems typically ran four or five stanzas of four lines each, with each stanza covering one week's events, and only covering things that hadn't happened yet.
The compound attack had in fact been mentioned in the monthly divination poem Neon had given him at the start of the month. But because the poem contained no words relating to sleep, it didn't indicate any deaths among people who mattered, so Light had only increased compound security slightly and moved on.
In other words: in the divination his daughter had written for him, both "daughter runs off with a white-haired someone" and "compound comes under attack" should have been in the same stanza's time window. The attack was there. The daughter was nowhere to be found in the poem.
That was, the more he thought about it, genuinely unsettling.
Was it possible that the white-haired person who had taken his daughter away had something about him that would benefit Neon or the Nostrad family?
Once that thought surfaced, it refused to stop.
If Neon was going to be stubborn enough to go with this person regardless, then Light Nostrad decided that a white-haired person with actual prospects was considerably more tolerable than a white-haired nobody tearing around on a motorbike making noise.
He had no way of knowing that his daughter's white-haired companion was, in practice, a walking disaster.