December 21st. The Chengyong Hotel, thirtieth floor. A corridor in the Kakin royal family's residential wing.
Camilla heard him coming before she saw him. The smell arrived first.
"Tserriednich." She looked at her half-brother with the flat disgust of someone encountering a spill they hadn't caused. "Camilla understands your particular artistic interests. What Camilla does not understand is why you would approach her afterward without washing first."
The Fourth Prince smiled. He had the easy manner of someone who had concluded long ago that the opinions of other people were entertainment rather than input. "A stupid pig like you wouldn't understand what constitutes art. Don't read too much into it. A man attempted an assassination downstairs. I went to observe the result. Purely as a spectator."
"People who go out of their way to watch someone die are qualified to discuss art."
"Which is exactly why you remain a stupid pig."
They passed each other in the corridor with the practiced choreography of people who had been navigating each other's existence for years and had reached stable, mutual contempt as the equilibrium point. Both of them took their private soldiers with them in opposite directions.
Tserriednich waited until the corridor bend and let the expression on his face do what it wanted to do. "When father announces the succession, you and Benjamin and every other pig in that family will be removed from the equation."
Camilla, walking the other way, showed nothing. She was already thinking about something else.
A black cat detached from the space near her feet and landed on the carpet, meowing twice with what could only be described as unease. Camilla stopped, looked at it, and crouched to let it jump into her arms.
"What's wrong?"
She looked at her Nen beast properly for the first time since the previous day. The Million Reincarnation Cat, her primary ability: as long as she could be killed, the ability would activate after death, channeling the cat's accumulated power to kill whoever had killed her and resurrect her afterward. A dead man's switch built from Nen. The practical meaning was that anyone who wanted Camilla dead needed to have a plan for what happened after Camilla died, which was not a common capability.
But the cat was different today. Fuller. Heavier in her arms. Something about its eyes.
She couldn't name the change precisely, which bothered her.
The elevator at the corridor's end opened. Liam, Shizuku, and Kurapika stepped out, talking to each other in the easy way of people who had spent too much time together to need to manage the conversation.
Camilla watched them pass. The cat watched one of them specifically.
The next day.
Whatever irritation Tserriednich had been carrying from the previous evening's exchange found its outlet in his private quarters, in ways that did not bear detailed inventory. Two women were brought up. The process followed its usual course. The first died partway through. The second died before the process completed, from the anticipation of what was coming. Tserriednich examined the results, found them somewhat unsatisfying, and had the remains distributed to appropriate staff for disposal.
In the Second Prince's room on another floor, Camilla felt it hit her like a cold splash of water, involuntary and precise. Her body knew before she understood why. She cleared the room of her attendants, and the energy in her chest pushed outward without asking permission.
The Million Reincarnation Cat flew out of her and sat on the floor in front of her looking bloated, the way an animal looks after eating something too large too quickly. It produced an expression of profound physical relief and then opened its mouth.
A white kitten fell out. No larger than a fist. The black cat looked at it with the uncomplicated affection of an animal that had just produced something and had decided immediately to be fond of it.
Camilla looked at the white kitten. The white kitten looked back at her.
An ability deriving a subsidiary ability was not unheard of in Nen theory. It was uncommon. The conditions that produced it were poorly documented. She understood her primary ability well enough to use it but not well enough to explain why it had just done this.
She needed someone who understood Nen. Preferably someone who understood Conjuration-type abilities and wasn't connected to the Association politically.
She thought of the food Hunter working in the hotel, engaged for the royal family's visit. A Conjurer by trade, which put her ability in the same broad category as whatever had just happened. She would ask her.
By the 22nd, at the banquet on the twenty-ninth floor, she'd changed her mind. She walked into the room, the white kitten Nen beast manifesting in her hand before she could prevent it, and the kitten woke up.
It had been sleeping since it appeared. Now it opened its eyes, looked around with the unfocused attention of something newly conscious, and then found a direction and fixed on it the way a compass needle finds north. It stared across the banquet hall toward one specific person in the security rotation.
Camilla spent the next two hours in the room attending to diplomatic conversations while tracking, in her peripheral vision, the young man working a security post near the far wall.
After the banquet, she ordered his information pulled.
The file arrived ten minutes later. One page. Limited detail.
Name: Liam. Age: 19. Temporarily employed as security. Professional Hunter equivalent, vouched for by gourmet Hunter Menchi.
She read to the last line. He had registered for the Hunter Exam starting in one month.
She stroked the white kitten. It pressed its head against her hand.
"You like him," she said. "Don't you. Camilla wonders if your birth had something to do with him."
On January 3rd, the Kakin royal delegation departed the Kukan'yu Kingdom. Camilla did not board the return transport.
Tserriednich noticed. He was three vehicles back in the convoy and he noticed immediately, because Camilla was not the type to miss a scheduled departure without a reason, and she was not the type whose reasons were ever small.
A stupid pig like her, participating voluntarily in a Hunter Exam. Submitting herself to evaluation by strangers. Accepting the non-trivial mortality rate that came with the territory. None of that fit the model he had of her, and the model was accurate. He'd been studying her for years out of professional necessity.
Something was drawing her. And according to a fairly reliable heuristic, anything that drew the Second Prince's genuine interest was something that would be useful in the succession.
He couldn't afford to be uninformed.
"Little Tita." He addressed his personal guard without particular urgency. "What do you think is drawing her? Is there anything in the Hunter Exam worth knowing about?"
Tita considered the question carefully. The Prince's threshold for deception was zero and his memory was long. Speculation presented as fact was a poor strategy.
If there was a single category of Hunter Exam content that could attract the Second Prince's specific interest, the kind of interest she would consider worth the risk of entering a competition with a known body count, the answer was almost certainly not physical challenge. It wasn't money. It wasn't the license itself, which she could obtain through other means.
It was Nen. Something about Nen.