The wind tasted wrong.
Gon Freecss noticed it first—standing on the dock of Whale Island at 6:47 AM, watching fishing boats return with their morning catch. The salt air that usually carried the clean scent of ocean and freedom now held something metallic. Copper. Like eating a coin. Like blood in your mouth.
He was fourteen now, though some days he felt ancient. Felt like the bones in his body had been replaced with lead, heavy with the weight of what he'd done. What he'd become. The ocean breeze pulled at his spiky hair—still short, still defiant, still trying to be the person he used to be—and for a moment, he closed his eyes and pretended nothing had changed. Pretended he hadn't transformed into that thing. Pretended he still had his Nen.
Eighteen months. That's how long it had been since he'd felt that warm current of life energy flowing through his body. Since he'd sacrificed everything—his potential, his future, his very soul—to destroy Pitou. The cost had been absolute. His Nen, sealed away by his own unconscious guilt and the price of his transformation, remained as unreachable as a star.
Kite was alive. The Chimera Ant incident had ended with Kite's resurrection. That should have been enough. Should have made the sacrifice worth it. Should have brought Gon at peace.
But it didn't.
Because Gon remembered what he'd become. Remembered the hatred that had consumed him so completely he'd traded his life away just for the power to make Pitou suffer. And Kite—the real Kite, the one who'd taught him what being a Hunter meant—was gone. This new Kite was alive, but different. Smaller. Changed.
And Gon had lost everything to save someone who didn't need saving anymore.
But wow, he'd tried to move on. Every morning for eighteen months, he'd sat in the forest behind Aunt Mito's house and attempted to feel his Nen again. To sense even the faintest flicker of aura. Nothing. Just emptiness where power used to live. Like reaching for a limb that had been amputated—phantom sensations of something that no longer existed.
The fishing boats docked. Old gramps Katsu waved at him, calling out something about the morning's catch. Gon waved back automatically, his smile practiced and hollow. Everyone on Whale Island thought he was doing fine. Going to school. Helping with chores. Being normal.
They didn't see the four-hour training sessions in the woods. The pushups until his arms gave out. The sprints until he vomited. The desperate, clawing need to be strong enough that when his Nen finally returned—if it returned—he'd be worthy of it.
They didn't see him wake up screaming, that form's face staring back at him in mirrors that didn't exist.
Gon turned from the dock, heading toward the forest path that led to his secret training spot. School didn't start for another three hours. He had time to—
The air changed.
It was subtle. A pressure shift, like right before a storm. The birds in the nearby trees went silent all at once. The fishermen's chatter seemed to fade, as if someone had turned down the volume on the world.
Gon's instincts—honed by years of hunting and combat, still sharp even without Nen—screamed danger. He spun toward the forest just as the first scream erupted from the village center.
Then another. And another. High and terrible and wrong. Gon ran.
He burst into the village square to find chaos. People running, stumbling, falling. But not from an attacker. They were running from something they couldn't see. Something invisible that left devastation in its wake.
Mrs. Tanaka—who ran the island's only grocery store—collapsed in the middle of the street. Her body convulsed once, twice, then went still. Her eyes were open. Staring. Blood leaked from her nose, her ears, the corners of her eyes.
Dead. Just like that. No wounds. No visible cause. Just... dead.
Three more villagers collapsed in the same manner within seconds. The panic intensified. Gon stood frozen, his mind trying to process what he was seeing. This wasn't a physical attack. This was—
"Nen," he whispered, the realization hitting him like a fist to the gut. Someone was using Nen to kill these people. And he couldn't see it. Couldn't sense it. Couldn't do a damn thing to stop it without his aura.
Another villager fell. Then another. The invisible attack was spreading through the square like a plague, dropping people where they stood. Gon's heart hammered against his ribs. His hands clenched into useless fists.
Aunt Mito! The thought struck him with perfect, crystalline terror. She was at the house. If this attack spread that far—he ran.
The forest path blurred past him as he pushed his body to its limits. His lungs burned. His legs screamed. But he ran faster than he'd ever run without Nen enhancement, terror lending him speed that physics shouldn't allow.
He burst through the front door of his house. "AUNT MITO!" She appeared from the kitchen, dish towel in hand, eyes wide with alarm. "Gon? What's wrong? I heard screaming from the village—"
"Get down!"
Gon tackled her to the floor just as the front window exploded inward. Not from physical force. From pressure. Pure, concentrated malice that shattered glass and splintered wood. The house groaned under the weight of an aura so massive it distorted the air itself.
Gon covered Aunt Mito's body with his own, feeling the pressure wash over them like a wave of hatred. His teeth clenched so hard he tasted blood. Without Nen to protect him, the hostile aura felt like being crushed under an ocean. Every cell in his body screamed to run, to hide, to surrender.
He didn't move.
The pressure faded after what felt like hours but was probably only seconds. Gon raised his head cautiously. The house was destroyed—furniture overturned, walls cracked, the ceiling sagging. But they were alive.
"Stay here," he told Aunt Mito, his voice rough. "Lock the basement door. Don't come out until I come back." "Gon, you can't—" "I have to."
He didn't wait for her response. He was already moving, out the broken door, back toward the village. Back toward whatever nightmare had come to his home.
The village square was a graveyard.
Bodies everywhere. Twenty, maybe thirty villagers, all dead from the same invisible attack. No wounds. Just blood from their facial expresions and those terrible staring eyes. Gon's stomach twisted, bile rising in his throat.
And in the center of the carnage, standing perfectly still with his back turned, was a figure that shouldn't exist.
The figure—tall, impossibly thin, almost skeletal—wore flowing crimson robes that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Long black hair fell past his shoulders in elegant waves that moved without wind. Even from behind, even without being able to sense his aura, Gon knew this person radiated wrongness.
"Fourteen seconds," the figure said, his voice calm and analytical. "That's how long it took for this trash pile to stop moving. Slower than the last village. Disappointing."
Gon's fists clenched. "Who are you?"
The figure turned slowly, revealing a face that would haunt Gon's nightmares for years to come. Pale skin marked with self-inflicted scars that formed patterns—deliberate mutilation turned into art. Eyes the color of fresh blood—not metaphorically red, but actually, impossibly crimson, like looking into pools of living gore. And when he smiled, it was the expression of someone who'd forgotten what genuine emotion felt like.
"Names are for people who matter," the figure said. "I'm not people. I'm the correction. The inevitable conclusion." His red eyes fixed on Gon with disturbing intensity. "But you can call me Rakshas, little trash pile. Since you'll be screaming it soon anyway."
"You killed them," Gon said, and his voice was shaking. Not with fear. With rage. The same rage that had consumed him during the Chimera Ant war. The same rage that had cost him everything. "You killed all these people for no reason."
"Incorrect." Rakshas tilted his head, the motion too fluid, too serpentine. "I killed them because they were here. Because their suffering creates beautiful data points. Because in a world of meaningless existence, at least their deaths had aesthetic value." He took a step forward, his bare feet making no sound on the blood-soaked ground. "Would you like to know what it feels like? I can show you. I'm very good at showing people things they wish they could forget."
Gon's body moved before his brain caught up. He charged.
It was stupid. Suicidal. He had no Nen, no aura to protect him, no enhancement to make his attacks meaningful. But he charged anyway, because that's what he did. That's what he'd always done. When faced with evil, with cruelty, with the kind of wrongness that made the world bleed—he fought.
His fist connected with Rakshas's face with all the force his eighteen months of desperate training could muster. Rakshas's head snapped to the side. Blood trickled from his lip.
Then he laughed in amusement. It was a quiet sound. Almost gentle. Which made it infinitely more terrifying than any scream.
"Oh," Rakshas said, wiping the blood away with one long finger, examining it like a curious specimen. "Oh, you're interesting. No aura. No Nen. Just raw human desperation compressed into violence." His smile widened, revealing teeth that were slightly too sharp. "I haven't felt a non-Nen punch in years. It's almost nostalgic. Like being a child again. Before I understood what I was. Before I killed my family at age two."
Red energy erupted around Rakshas's body—visible even to Gon's Nen-blind eyes because it was that powerful, that wrong. The crimson aura writhed and twisted like a living thing, pulsing with malevolence that made Gon's primitive heart scream to run.
"Let me show you something," Rakshas said, his voice dropping to something almost intimate. "Let me show you what real power looks like. What happens when Nen evolves beyond your pathetic Hunter Association rules. Beyond humanity. Beyond the pretense of mercy. Beyond me seeing through you and already knowing your a stupid hunter just by looking at trash heaps like you. I've seen enough hunters to tell that after all."
He moved.
Gon barely registered the motion before Rakshas's hand was around his throat, lifting him off the ground with casual ease. The crimson energy flowed from Rakshas's palm into Gon's body, and suddenly every nerve ending in Gon's body was on fire.
Not metaphorical fire. Actual burning agony that made his adult transformation seem like a massage by comparison. He felt his cells beginning to break down. Felt his blood vessels crystallizing from the inside out. Felt his own body turning against itself, eating itself alive at the cellular level.
He screamed.
It was involuntary. Primal. The kind of scream that comes when pain transcends the ability to process it rationally. His hands clawed at Rakshas's wrist, but it was like trying to move a mountain. The Red Nen continued to pour into him, and Gon realized with perfect clarity that he was going to die here. On Whale Island. In front of his home. Just another corpse for Rakshas's collection.
"Do you feel it?" Rakshas asked, his voice curious. Clinical. Like a scientist observing an experiment. "Your body consuming itself? That's my Marionette Entropy. It turns your own Nen against you, makes you your own executioner. But you don't have Nen anymore, do you? So it's just eating your cells directly. Slower. More painful. More artistically satisfying." He leaned closer, his blood-red eyes examining Gon's face with disturbing intensity. "The screams are always different. Unique. Like fingerprints made of suffering."
Through the agony, through the red haze of suffering, Gon managed to choke out: "Why?"
"Why?" Rakshas considered the question, tilting his head like a curious hunter. "Because I was always wrong. Because at age two—barely able to walk—my Nen activated on its own and killed my entire family. Mother, father, brother, sister. I watched them deteriorate over weeks as my unconscious malice leaked into them. My mother begged me to stop while her brain melted. She knew I was killing them. She knew, and she loved me anyway. Until she didn't. Until she tried to strangle me in her last foolish moments."
His grip tightened fractionally. "Because the world decided I was a monster before I could speak, so I decided to be the best monster possible. Because if I have to suffer remembering what I am every single time I use my power—if I have to watch my mother's face again and again and again—then everyone should suffer. That's fair, isn't it? That's justice. That's the only law that matters in a universe that creates darkness like me."
Something in those words penetrated Gon's pain. Something familiar. The logic of someone who'd been broken and never learned how to heal. Someone who'd turned their trauma into a weapon and wielded it against a world they blamed for their suffering.
Gon had been there. Had felt that. Had become a monster himself when rage consumed everything else. But he'd also had Killua. Had people who refused to let him drown in his own darkness. People who saw him at his worst and still called him friend.
"You're..." Gon gasped through the pain, blood trickling from the corners of his mouth. "You're alone... aren't you? No one... ever told you... it wasn't your fault..."
Rakshas's eyes widened fractionally. Just a flicker of surprise. Then his expression hardened into something colder than before. Something that had forgotten temperature existed.
"Wrong answer, trash pile."
The Red Nen intensified. Gon's vision started to fade. His body went limp in Rakshas's grip. This was it. The end. He'd survived the Chimera Ant invasion, his own self-destruction, the impossible resurrection—only to die here, powerless, unable to protect his home.
I'm sorry, Killua. I'm sorry I wasn't strong enough. I'm sorry I wasted the second chance you gave me. A sound cut through his fading consciousness. Sharp. Metallic. Familiar.
CRACK.
The pressure around his throat vanished. Gon collapsed to the ground, gasping, his body still burning but no longer actively dying. Through blurred vision, he saw a figure standing between him and Rakshas.
Silver hair catching the morning light like starlight. A posture radiating barely controlled lethality. And crackling around his body, electricity that made the air itself taste like ozone and fury.
Killua Zoldyck had arrived.
But this wasn't the Killua Gon remembered. This was different. Evolved. The electricity surrounding him wasn't the blue-white of Godspeed. It was deeper. Richer. More violent. Lightning that looked almost purple in its intensity, arcing between his fingers like captured thunder.
"Get," Killua said, his voice colder than Gon had ever heard it—colder than when he'd removed Illumi's needle, colder than when he'd faced his family, colder than anything human should sound, "away from my friend."
The electricity around Killua's body intensified, shifting and coalescing into something Gon had never seen before. The air temperature dropped. The ground beneath Killua's feet began to crack and scorch simultaneously from the sheer pressure of his aura.
This was Electric Blaster. This was what eighteen months of running from Illumi, protecting Alluka, and surviving assassination attempts had forged.
Rakshas touched his cheek where Killua's attack had struck him—a speed-blitz punch that Gon hadn't even seen, moving faster than lightning itself. Blood welled from a cut beneath his eye. The first real wound anyone had managed to inflict.
"Now this," Rakshas said, and his smile returned, wider than before, "is interesting. An assassin with evolution. How artistic." His red aura flared to match Killua's display, crimson energy meeting purple lightning in a collision that shattered windows in nearby buildings. "Shall we dance, silver-haired trash pile? Shall we see whose power is more beautiful?"
"I don't dance with trash," Killua snarled, his voice barely recognizable. Behind him, Gon saw another figure approaching—smaller, wearing a kimono, with long dark hair flowing behind her like a cape. Alluka. Killua had brought his sister.
Which meant whatever had brought him here was serious enough that he couldn't leave her behind. Serious enough that he'd risk her safety to reach Gon faster.
"Killua," Gon croaked, forcing himself to his hands and knees despite his body's screaming protests. "He's different. His Nen—it's not normal. It's—"
"I know," Killua cut him off, not taking his eyes off Rakshas for even a microsecond. "That's why I'm here. I've been tracking him for three days across eight villages, because he seemed to dangerous to let on the loose. He's killed two hundred and forty-seven people. Criminals, the innocent, Nen users. Doesn't matter. He kills everything. And now he's here. And I knew which direction he was going as soon as he headed this way with his Nen energy. So I'm here to protect you.... Gon. Because that's what friends do!" His hands crackled with intensified electricity, the lightning forming into distinct shapes—claws, blades, weapons made of pure voltage. "I'm ending this. Now."
Rakshas laughed—that same quiet, gentle laugh that was somehow worse than any scream.
"You can't end me, assassin. I'm not like the others you've killed. I'm not some criminal or target or obstacle to remove from your path." He spread his arms, crimson energy swirling around him in a vortex that pulled at reality itself. "I'm the future of Nen. I'm what happens when power evolves beyond morality. Beyond humanity. Beyond the comfortable lie that strength should be used for good. I'm what all Nen users secretly fear they might become."
Rakshas laughed—that same quiet, gentle laugh that was somehow worse than any scream.
"You can't end me, assassin. I'm not like the others you've killed. I'm not some criminal or target or obstacle to remove." He spread his arms, crimson energy swirling around him in a vortex. "I'm the future of Nen. I'm what happens when power evolves beyond morality. Beyond humanity. Beyond—"
Killua moved.
The Electric Blaster form activated fully—visible lightning surrounding his body, the ground beneath him scorching from the heat of his aura. He closed the distance to Rakshas in a literal flash, his speed surpassing anything Gon had seen before.
The fight that followed happened too fast for Gon to track without Nen. He saw flashes: Killua's electrified strikes connecting with Rakshas's crimson barriers. Red Nen tendrils trying to ensnare Killua, missing by millimeters as the assassin's speed kept him perpetually in motion. The earth splitting. Buildings crumbling. The air itself tearing from the pressure of their clashing auras.
Killua was carrying Alluka's weight in his heart—the need to protect her amplifying his Electric Blaster form by forty percent. His speed became something inhuman, something that broke the sound barrier with each movement. Thunder cracked across the sky with every strike.
But even through his Nen-blindness, Gon could see the truth: Killua was fighting perfectly, and it still wasn't enough.
Not because he was weaker. Not because his technique was inferior. But because Rakshas's Red Nen was wrong in ways that broke the rules of normal combat. Every time Killua landed a hit, the wound would heal by consuming something—ambient aura, pieces of the environment, reality itself seemed to bend to keep Rakshas alive.
And worse, Gon saw tendrils of crimson energy creeping toward Alluka's position while Killua was distracted by the main fight. Moving through the ground. Invisible to everyone except Gon, who'd learned to read battle patterns when he couldn't sense Nen.
"KILLUA!" Gon tried to shout a warning, but his voice came out as a wheeze. The Marionette Entropy was still working through his system, shutting down his body piece by piece.
Killua saw it. Broke off his attack. Blitzed back to Alluka's side, putting himself between her and the reaching tendrils of Red Nen. That moment of distraction cost him everything.
Rakshas's Red String Autopsy technique activated—invisible threads of malicious Nen that pierced through Killua's lightning aura like it wasn't even there. They embedded in his nervous system, his muscles, his very aura pathways.
Killua's body seized. The electricity around him flickered and died. He collapsed to one knee, every muscle locked in place, his face twisted in agony as the strings began to puppet his body against his will.
"Fascinating," Rakshas said, approaching slowly. "An assassin trained from youth to resist poison, torture, manipulation. And still my strings found purchase. Do you know why?" He crouched in front of Killua's paralyzed form. "Because you're afraid. Deep down, in the part of you that you hide from everyone—even yourself—you're terrified that you're exactly what your family made you. A puppet. A tool. My strings simply reminded your body of the truth it's always known. Even if you've thought you've gotten over it."
"I'll... kill you..." Killua managed through clenched teeth, blood leaking from the corners of his mouth.
"No," Rakshas said gently, almost kindly. "You won't. But you'll watch what happens next. That's the art of it. The helplessness. The knowledge that you failed." He turned toward Alluka. "Let's see what this one's insides look like."
Everything that happened next occurred in the space between heartbeats.
Gon's body moved on instinct, on desperation, on something deeper than conscious thought. He threw himself between Rakshas and Alluka, knowing he had no Nen to protect him, knowing this would kill him, not caring about anything except that Killua's sister would not die. Not here. Not now. Not while he had breath in his body.
Rakshas's hand punched through Gon's stomach with the ease of a knife through paper. The world went silent.
Gon felt the Red Nen flooding into him again, but different this time. Deeper. More invasive. Rakshas was trying to preserve him—to turn him into one of those living corpses, conscious but unable to move or die, trapped in agony forever as punishment for defiance.
But something else happened.
Deep in the sealed well where Gon's Nen had been sleeping for eighteen months—deeper than conscious thought, deeper than guilt or shame or fear—something stirred.
A voice that wasn't his own but was: You cannot protect them without me. And another voice, his own but older, wiser, more terrible: I know. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for what I did. But please. Just one more time. Let me save them.
The seal cracked.
Golden light erupted from Gon's body—pure, raw, massive aura that had been compressed and building pressure for eighteen months behind that unconscious seal. It exploded outward with the force of a small sun, blasting Rakshas backwards through three buildings, disintegrating his Red Nen where it touched.
Gon fell to the ground, gasping. But he was glowing. His aura had returned. Not the innocent warmth of his twelve-year-old self. Not the apocalyptic rage of his adult transformation. Something in between. Mature but not monstrous. Powerful but controlled.
He looked at his hands and saw them wrapped in golden energy threaded with crimson veins—echoes of his transformation, permanent scars in his aura, but no longer consuming him.
The Red String Autopsy binding Killua shattered under the pressure wave. The assassin collapsed forward, free but gasping. "Killua," Gon said, and his voice was different. Mature. Steadier. "Get Alluka out of here. Now."
Killua stared at his friend, his blue eyes wide with something between awe and terror. "Gon, your Nen—"
"I know." Gon stood, facing where Rakshas had been thrown. "I know it's back. And I know I'm going to lose it again after this. But right now?" His aura intensified, the golden glow becoming almost blinding. "Right now, I'm ending this."
Rakshas emerged from the rubble of the destroyed buildings, his crimson robes torn, his pale skin marked with burns. But he was smiling. Genuinely smiling for the first time, and it was the expression of someone who'd finally found something worth experiencing.
"Finally," he breathed. "Finally, someone interesting. Someone broken who found their way back from the abyss." His red eyes gleamed with genuine excitement. "Show me, trash pile. Show me what desperation looks like when it evolves into hope. Show me if you're strong enough to kill a monster like me."
"I'm not trash," Gon said quietly, his aura stabilizing into something focused and dangerous. "I'm not a monster. I'm not a weapon. I'm just someone who protects his friends. And you—" His fists clenched, golden energy condensing around them. "—you're going to regret coming to my home."
New Hatsu formed in his right hand—Jajanken: Liberation. The concentration of all three Jajanken types merged into a single point, amplified by eighteen months of sealed pressure and unleashed desperation. The energy was so dense it looked black, rimmed in gold and crimson.
Rakshas summoned every technique he had. Red Nen formed barriers layered ten deep. Puppet strings spread through the air like a spider's web. Arterial Bloom created crystalline blood formations to intercept. Marionette Entropy saturated the space between them with cellular decay. The full gallery of his horrors unleashed simultaneously.
Gon's punch shattered all of it.
The Liberation technique connected with Rakshas's guts, and for one perfect moment, the world held its breath. Then the energy released, not as an explosion but as an annihilation—reality itself seemed to bend away from the point of impact, space distorting, the very concept of distance becoming meaningless.
Rakshas's body was launched backward through the forest, through the mountain beyond, his red aura flickering and failing for the first time. Trees exploded into splinters. Emotionless face shattered. The impact crater where he finally stopped was fifty meters wide.
But it didn't kill him.
Gon collapsed to one knee, the Liberation technique having drained him completely. Already he could feel his Nen beginning to seal itself again, the temporary reprieve ending. His aura flickered, faded, began to die.
In the distance, Rakshas stood up. Broken. Bleeding. Most of his ribs shattered. His left arm hanging at an impossible angle. But alive. And still smiling.
"Beautiful," he called out, his voice carrying across the destroyed village despite the damage to his lungs. "That was beautiful. Thank you for the data, trash pile. Thank you for showing me what happens when hope and despair collide in perfect balance." He coughed blood, examined it with fascination. "I'll see you again. When you're ready. When you've matured further into your suffering."
He vanished into the forest, leaving only crimson petals falling from the sky—his calling card, his promise. Then he was gone. The silence that followed was profound.
Gon knelt in the ruins of his village, surrounded by the bodies of people he'd known his entire life, his Nen sealed again, his body broken, his hands shaking.
Killua appeared beside him, Alluka safe behind him. "Gon—" "I couldn't save them," Gon whispered, staring at the corpses. "I had my Nen back for three minutes, and I still couldn't save them."
"You saved us," Killua said firmly. "You saved me and Alluka. That matters." But it felt like failure. It felt like Kite all over again—power arriving too late to prevent tragedy.
Aunt Mito emerged from the basement, alive and unharmed. Other survivors began crawling from hiding places. Twenty-three people had died. But eighty-two had survived because Gon's aura blast had disrupted Rakshas's attack pattern.
But Gon couldn't see that yet. All he could see were the bodies. All he could feel was the familiar weight of inadequacy settling back onto his shoulders.
"He's going to come back," Killua said quietly, helping Gon to his feet. "That wasn't a threat. It was a promise. He sees you as... something. A specimen. An art piece he's not done creating."
"Then I need to be ready," Gon said. His Nen was gone, but his resolve remained. "I need to train. Need to be stronger. Strong enough that when my Nen comes back next time—"
"It will come back," Killua interrupted. "It did once. It will again." "But when?" Gon's voice broke. "How many people will die while I'm powerless? How many villages will he destroy before I can stop him?"
Killua put a hand on his shoulder. "That's why I'm staying. We're staying." He glanced back at Alluka. "We're not leaving you to face this alone. Not again. Never again."
Gon looked at his best friend—at the boy who'd pulled him from darkness before, who'd refused to abandon him even when he'd become a monster—and felt something crack in his thoughts. Not his seal. Something else. The wall he'd built around his guilt.
"Thank you," he whispered.
"Don't thank me yet," Killua said grimly. "This is just the beginning. If Rakshas is as strong as I think he is, if his Nen is really that evolved..." He trailed off, then finished: "We're going to need help. Real help. The kind the Hunter Association can't provide."
"Who then?" Killua's expression hardened. "I have an idea. But you're not going to like it." Before Gon could ask what he meant, Alluka's voice cut through: "Big brother... someone else is coming."
They both spun, ready for another attack. But the figure emerging from the forest wasn't Rakshas.
It was a young adult, maybe nineteen, with green dreadlocks and flowers growing in his hair. He was missing his left eye, covered by an eyepatch with a lily design. And he looked exhausted, terrified, and determined in equal measure.
"My name is Makito Suja," he said, his voice rough. "I'm a Botanical Hunter. And I've been tracking the threat who just attacked you for six months." He looked at the destruction around them. "He killed my entire team. Left me alive to... to watch. To suffer." His remaining eye fixed on Gon. "You hurt him. Actually hurt him. That's... that's the first time anyone's ever managed that."
"Who is he?" Gon demanded. "What is he?"
Makito's expression darkened. "His name is Rakshas. His legacy was always involved with Nen already active at an earlier age than most—a genetic anomaly that happens once in millions. At age two, his unconscious aura killed his entire family instantly. The Hunter Association tried to study him, to help him, but..." He shook his head. "They only got hunters killed for no reason. And now he's loose in the world, killing anyone who catches his interest, collecting data on human suffering like it's art. Because he thinks he's the king of all humans. Causing them to suffer if he finds them strong even more than weaker humans."
"How do we stop him?" Killua asked.
"I don't know if we can," Makito admitted. "His Red Nen violates every principle of Nen we understand. It's Transmutation and Specialization combined in ways that shouldn't be possible. He can heal by consuming other people's aura. He can preserve consciousness after death. He can make your own body kill itself." He looked at Gon. "But you did something I've never seen. You forced your sealed Nen to unlock through pure will. That might be the key. If your Nen responds to protecting others—"
"Then I need to find a way to control when it unseals," Gon finished. "Need to make it respond faster. Be ready when he comes back."
"He will come back," Makito confirmed. "You're his new obsession now. He won't stop until he's collected you for his Final Gallery or you've killed him. There's no middle ground with Rakshas. Only death or worse than death."
Gon looked at the destroyed village. At Aunt Mito organizing survivors. At Killua and Alluka standing beside him. At this stranger who'd tracked a monster for six months out of grief and determination.
"Then we train," he said. "All of us. We get stronger. We figure out how my Nen works now. And when he comes back—" His hands clenched into fists, and for just a moment, a flicker of golden light sparked around them before dying. "—we end this. For everyone he's killed. For everyone he'll kill if we don't stop him."
"Agreed," Killua said. "I'm in," Makito added.
Above them, the sun was rising fully now, painting Whale Island in shades of orange and gold. Beautiful colors. Hopeful colors. A stark contrast to the nightmare that had just unfolded.
But in the forest, barely visible if you knew where to look, a single crimson petal drifted on the wind. Rakshas was watching. Waiting. Growing stronger than ever. The game had begun. And the stakes were nothing less than the future of the world.
TO BE CONTINUED... [Next Episode: "The Flower Hunter's Despair"]