Three weeks before any of this, deep in the mountains.
The Kiriko had answered the Second Prince's question about compensation with the honest discomfort of people who knew exactly how strange their answer sounded.
"We're allowed to live in these mountains without being bothered," the eldest said. "That's the arrangement."
Leorio stood slightly behind the two sisters, processing this information about the Hunter Association's labor relations while also being aware that the kiriko family, although now apparently friendly, was the type of creature that could carry adult humans across mountain ranges in their claws, and this context had not entirely left his body.
Camilla had looked at the foxes for approximately two seconds.
"Take us to the examination venue. The mountains are yours from this point forward." She'd turned to her private soldiers. "Note that they're permitted to come to Kakin for employment. Camilla's household, if they choose."
The Kiriko family had looked at each other with the expression of people receiving a gift they hadn't expected to deserve.
This was the thing about Camilla that didn't fit the obvious read of her. She was arrogant in the way that went all the way down, that didn't distinguish between human and non-human as categories deserving different treatment. The lowest-status people in Kakin's rigid hierarchy, the ones the system had decided weren't fully people, the ones her peers treated as furniture: she'd recruited them into her private army anyway, given them equal standing, taught them Nen. It wasn't warmth. It was a kind of thoroughgoing consistency. She held everyone in contempt from a position of complete equality.
Monsters qualified.
The foxes had been delighted. They'd packed efficiently and flown.
From altitude, over an hour later, the city spread below them and the fountain square was visible. The city sounds reached Camilla before they landed, and with the sound came something else. The white cat Nen beast, which had been dormant since the hotel, flew out of her aura and landed on her shoulder without asking permission.
It pressed its face against her cheek. Then it looked at the fountain square.
Camilla followed the direction of its attention and found the person it was looking at.
The man from the banquet. Liam. Standing in the square below.
"So you only activate when he's nearby," she said.
After landing, Leorio and the two sisters had run toward Liam's group with the enthusiasm of people encountering familiar faces in unfamiliar territory. Camilla had let them go. She'd watched from a distance and thought about what the white kitten's behavior meant about her own ability.
Then the murderer had appeared.
The chaos in the fountain square. The girl moving faster than tracking. The man's heart removed with professional efficiency. And in the space before the screaming started, the faint breath of something specific: cold and warm at the same time, gray at the edges, the particular quality of energy that crossed the boundary of something.
The white kitten had caught it out of the air with one paw. Played with it briefly. Swallowed it. Turned to Camilla with an expression of complete satisfaction.
The vitality that moved through the cat into Camilla was clean and immediate. Not the distant secondhand feeling of the Million Reincarnation Cat's resurrection process. This was like being told, very precisely and efficiently, that you were alive.
She'd understood everything at once.
Liam had that kind of energy in him. The kind that touched the boundary between living and dying and came back. It was because of that specific energy, encountered at the hotel when the two deaths had occurred in the building, that the Million Reincarnation Cat had spawned a new ability. The subsidiary ability had grown from proximity to something it recognized as relevant to its own nature.
She'd named the white kitten Three Thousand Reincarnated Cats in the fountain square, holding it in her palms while the police sirens approached from several directions.
That night, in the underground venue with the lights out, she'd done her testing.
The private soldiers had handled the two candidates in the corner. That was housekeeping. The white cat was the experiment.
She'd released it after midnight, sent it across the dark space to Tonpa, and watched it settle. The ability was designed for patience. Long attachment duration. Passive drain. The target wouldn't notice until it was too late to matter, and by then the question of whether they'd notice was academic.
By morning she'd had her results: the drain worked. The vitality transferred cleanly. The feeling it produced in her was worth the setup cost and then some.
After killing the two candidates and draining Tonpa, the count had been one death energy registered, not three, which meant the ability consumed the energy before it could disperse into the environment. The cat was eating what the deaths produced.
The only variable she hadn't pinned down was the timing mechanism. Did it drain continuously until the target's remaining lifespan was exhausted? That would imply months or years of attachment. Did it drain a fixed amount and then release? Did it take everything it could access within a defined window?
Tonpa had survived from midnight to the end of the first exam phase, which put the window at roughly ten hours. His death after the cat withdrew suggested either that the cat's departure triggered termination of something that had been keeping him functional, or that the combination of the cat's drain and Menchi's post-seasoning crash had pushed him past a threshold he might have survived individually.
She was playing with the white cat when Liam looked over from across the room.
She smiled at him. He looked away quickly.
"You noticed something," she said, to the white cat rather than to him.
A kilometer underground, the Nen beast was moving through the building's shadow with the automatic tracking of a habit that had become instinct. Liam was considering having it drift upward and behind the Second Prince, approaching at an angle she wouldn't register as a threat, and applying a Star Mark before the next phase began. Clean, low-profile, immediately useful.
He pressed the mental pause on this. Unknown Nen type. Unknown ability structure. If she was Manipulation-type, the Star Mark's first-Manipulator-wins rule wouldn't override her ability, it would announce his. If she was anything else, the exposure was still asymmetric: she'd learn something about him and he'd have gained a mark on someone with uncertain reliability and a demonstrated willingness to drain people in their sleep.
He pulled the Nen beast back to its holding depth.
Knuckle climbed onto the dining table.
"Originally," he announced, "the second half of the first exam was a 1,000-kilometer ultra-long marathon."
He paused. Menchi rolled her eyes behind him with the patient energy of someone who had been informed of a change to a plan she'd worked out carefully.
"Due to temporary adjustments, the format has been modified. 50 kilometers. Sprint. Racing challenge."
The 140 remaining candidates looked at him. Then at the bowls they'd just emptied. Then at their own hands, which were currently operating on the reserves available to someone who had experienced a thorough aura purge and had not yet had time to recover.
50 kilometers, immediately after that.
"Anyone here planning to drop out?" Liam looked sideways at his group.
Now I have all the context I need. Let me write the chapter.