The original airship exploded like a small sun at twenty thousand feet.
Fire bloomed outward in a perfect sphere, shockwave rippling through the cloud layer. The blast wave hit like a physical wall, turbulence slamming into everything in the vicinity with enough force to flip cars.
Machi's aura threads shot out instantly, transmuting into a web of nearly invisible filament. They snagged Chrollo mid-freefall and hauled him back toward the copied airship like a fish on a line.
The replica beneath her feet bucked and rolled in the violent air currents. She had maybe three seconds to make a decision.
Her threads multiplied, dozens becoming hundreds, wrapping around the entire hull of the copied airship in overlapping layers. She anchored herself and Chrollo to the outer surface, binding them so tightly to the metal that they couldn't move even if they wanted to.
Chrollo had almost died. Plummeted thousands of meters into the ocean below and drowned or splattered across the surface, whichever came first.
He didn't look remotely bothered by this.
Strapped to the airship's outer hull like cargo, Chrollo lay on his back and stared up at the original vessel. It was coming apart in slow motion, hull splitting open along stress fractures, flames pouring out of every gap. Through the cracks in the burning wreckage, he caught glimpses of bodies. Charred. Bloody. Some still moving.
"Machi," he said, tone conversational. "Why are you still tying me up?"
"So you don't fall to your death." Machi's voice was flat. "Get inside."
She didn't spare another glance at the dying airship. Her threads shifted, becoming a safety tether, and she swung Chrollo toward the broken window like a yo-yo on a string.
The copied airship was the version Kortopi had manifested right before everything went to hell, which meant it was the version with the shattered viewing area window. Perfect entry point.
Machi hauled Chrollo through the gap, then followed him inside. The moment they were both in, she extended her threads across the broken window, sealing the opening with a makeshift web.
The turbulence from outside still rattled the hull. The whole airship shuddered and swayed like it was caught in a storm.
Inside, the vessel was completely empty. No passengers. No crew. No luggage. Just an exact hollow replica of the original, frozen in the state it had been in when Kortopi touched it.
The airship was still flying on autopilot, same trajectory as before the explosion. Whether that autopilot would hold without manual correction was anyone's guess.
"Two hours until we reach land," Chrollo said, already walking toward the front of the ship. His footing was steady despite the shaking floor. "Based on the original flight plan. Kortopi's copies last twenty-four hours. In theory, that's more than enough time to land safely."
"In theory?" Machi followed, expression dark.
"Who knows if Kortopi dying would make his copies vanish immediately."
Chrollo's tone was the same as if he were discussing the weather.
He kept walking, boots clicking against the empty corridor. "Three possibilities. One: The copied items exist for the full twenty-four hours regardless of Kortopi's status. Two: If Kortopi dies, the airship disappears instantly and we drown in the ocean. Three: Post-mortem Nen activates, the copy becomes permanent, and we're fine."
They entered the cockpit. Chrollo immediately started examining the control console, fingers trailing over switches and displays.
Machi stood in the doorway. "Are we really not going to worry about Kortopi?"
"Do you think Kortopi would betray the Troupe?" Chrollo asked without looking up.
Machi went silent.
"At the last moment, someone on that airship took control of him. Probably a Manipulator." Chrollo's tone remained perfectly neutral, like he was analyzing someone else's problem. "Which raises another question. Can you or I determine who's controlling Kortopi right now?"
Machi said nothing.
"If Kortopi died in the explosion..." Chrollo paused, glancing out the cockpit window at the sky. "Or if he died when the airship hit the ocean, then whoever controlled him is dead too. No reason for them to survive. Even if we wanted revenge, there'd be no target."
He turned back to the console. "If Kortopi survived, his ability makes getting back to land trivial. He'll contact us when he can." His fingers traced a series of controls, testing responses. "Worst case scenario: he survives but remains a puppet. In which case, he's no longer a Spider."
"So our priority is reaching land, contacting Shalnark and the others, and then figuring out what happened to Kortopi."
Chrollo looked at Machi directly. "Is my judgment wrong?"
Machi was quiet for a long moment. She stopped looking out the window. "No, Boss."
The copied airship stabilized its flight path and continued toward the Sahams Continent, where the Kukan'yu Kingdom waited.
Back in the airspace where the explosion occurred, the original airship was dying.
Fire gushed from every opening. Smoke billowed in thick black columns. The hull groaned and shrieked as metal twisted and structural supports gave way. Flames licked out through blast holes, and pieces of debris tumbled away into freefall.
And scattered throughout the wreckage, mixed with the flames and smoke, were bodies.
Copies of Pariston. Hundreds of them. Mangled, burned, torn apart by the blast. They fell through the burning holes in the hull, trailing blood and fire as they plummeted toward the ocean far below.
Explosion. Fire.
The memories hit without warning.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
A younger version of himself, crouched in the rubble. Concrete and rebar twisted around him like broken bones. His parents' severed arms lay nearby, still wearing their wedding rings. A business card holder, cracked and blood-stained. His father's cards scattered across the ground, edges curling in the heat.
Explosions mixed with gunfire. Screaming. So much screaming.
Pariston blinked, and the memory vanished.
He was surrounded by corpses. His own corpses. Three or four "Paristons" with caved-in skulls and glassy, staring eyes. Blood everywhere. Dead faces looking at nothing.
And that was just what he could see in his immediate vicinity.
The entire airship's interior was packed wall-to-wall with Pariston copies. Hundreds of them. Kortopi had filled every available space with duplicate bodies at the last possible second, creating a massive buffer of human flesh to absorb the Nen bomb detonations.
The copies were mindless, of course. Just meat. No consciousness. No awareness.
Pariston found this fascinating.
He looked around at his own "tragic deaths" with genuine interest, cataloging the various ways he'd been destroyed. The Phantom Troupe member definitely wasn't trying to save us out of kindness, he thought. Which means...
The airship lurched. Still falling. Nose angled down toward the ocean.
Most of the Pariston copies were unrecognizable now. Burned beyond identification. Some had been blown into chunks.
And squeezed between the layers of human shields, protected by walls of copied flesh, were Liam and Shizuku.
They'd locked themselves together in a cross-formation, each protecting the other's Star Mark. Shizuku's hands covered the back of Liam's neck. Liam's body pressed against Shizuku's stomach, arms wrapped around her to shield the mark on her inner thigh. Both of them had pumped maximum Ken into their defenses just before the blast.
The Pariston copies had absorbed most of the explosion's force. Liam and Shizuku hadn't taken much direct damage from the Nen bombs.
But they were being crushed. Suffocated. Buried under hundreds of corpses in a falling airship, weightless and tumbling, unable to breathe or move.
Liam could imagine what the civilians went through. The ones who didn't have Ken. The ones who were just... people.
In the split-second before detonation, Liam had commanded Kortopi to copy as many Paristons as physically possible. There were still gaps. Not every space got filled.
Which meant people died.
The cold-hot spike of death energy slammed into Liam's heart like a frozen nail. Then another. And another.
About ten of them, he counted through gritted teeth. Maybe more. And there are definitely serious injuries. If this drags on, the death toll's only going up. We're all on the same damn ship.
So just hold on.
The airship was still falling, tumbling through the air, and moving in this environment was nearly impossible. Weightless. Crushed. Bodies everywhere.
Liam focused through the chaos and activated the Moon Mark on his Ring A.
[Shizuku. You okay?]