"Okay. But I probably can't beat you yet, Liam." Shizuku's voice crackled through the phone. Static hissed in the background. "I'm not there yet."
She must have pulled the phone away from her ear, because suddenly Liam could hear the ambient rattle and hum of a train car. The rhythmic clack of wheels on rails. Muffled conversations from other passengers.
"Be careful," Liam said. He'd made it back to town, walking past the same tourist trap gift shops and overpriced restaurants that lined the road down from Kukuroo Mountain. "I'm about to leave too."
A soft hum of acknowledgment came through the line before Shizuku hung up.
Liam pocketed his phone and scanned the street. He needed food first. His stomach had been growling since he'd pushed those gates, and while Nen could sustain him for a while, he wasn't about to test his limits on an empty stomach like some kind of idiot shonen protagonist.
He found a small restaurant tucked between a souvenir shop and a pharmacy. The kind of place with plastic menus and checkered tablecloths. Perfect. He ordered something fried and filling, wolfed it down in ten minutes, paid, and headed straight for the train station.
The station was one of those old concrete buildings that looked like it had been standing since the 1950s. Faded paint. Flickering fluorescent lights. A departures board that clacked and shuffled every few minutes.
Liam grabbed a handful of regional maps from the info desk and spread them across an empty bench in the waiting hall. Everika Continent stretched out before him in faded print. He cross-referenced the maps with the afternoon train schedules, tracing routes with his finger.
The straight-line distance to Heavens Arena was almost 8,000 kilometers. If he took the most direct train route, he'd still need at least three or four transfers. Possibly more.
He was calculating the total travel time when he noticed it.
Eyes.
Lots of them.
Liam glanced up casually, pretending to adjust his baseball cap. Around the waiting hall, scattered among the regular commuters and travelers, were clusters of pale, nervous-looking people. Tourists, by the look of their cameras and fanny packs. And they were all staring at him.
Oh, right. The bus group from this morning.
The ones who'd watched him casually push open the Testing Gates like he was opening a slightly sticky door.
One of them, a young guy in a Kukuroo Mountain souvenir T-shirt, looked like he was working up the courage to approach. His friends were egging him on, whispering and nudging him forward.
Liam's phone buzzed.
He pulled it out. Text from Shizuku: "I'm almost there."
"Roger that," he typed back. Then he folded up the maps, stood, and walked straight to the ticket counter, leaving Souvenir Shirt Guy deflating behind him.
Not today, buddy. No autographs, no explanations, no "how did you do that?" conversations.
The train rolled out of the station twenty minutes later. Liam found a window seat in a half-empty car and settled in, watching the Republic of Padokea's endless forests blur past.
His phone buzzed again.
Shizuku: "Heavens Arena. (photo) It's really tall."
The attached photo showed the Arena from street level: a massive cylindrical tower that seemed to pierce the sky itself. Even in the grainy phone picture, it looked impossibly high.
Liam smiled and typed back: "Each floor has prize money for winning matches. Don't skip floors. Go one at a time. You'll earn more that way."
A few seconds later: "I'll wait for you to arrive before we register."
"Doraemon, I'm so moved."
"I'm not moved anymore."
"Boss's orders. You have to call me."
"Fine."
By the time Shizuku found a place to stay near Heavens Arena, Liam's phone battery was hovering at 3%.
"What are you doing this afternoon?" Liam asked. The train had stopped at another small station. He watched passengers shuffle on and off through his window.
"Shopping," Shizuku said. Then, after a pause: "And training. Where are you?"
"Wandering on a train. And training."
"Okay."
The call lasted another two hours. Liam plugged his phone into a portable charger he'd bought at one of the station kiosks and kept it on speaker while he practiced. The sound of Shizuku's breathing was oddly comforting. She wasn't saying much, but knowing she was there, doing the same thing he was, made the endless train ride feel less isolating.
When the call finally ended, Liam set the phone aside and dove back into his exercises.
He'd gotten used to training anywhere now. It didn't matter if he was in a hotel room, a park, or a rattling train car. The routine was the same: maintain Ten until it felt like breathing, cycle through Ren until his aura burned, practice Gyo until his eyes ached.
People came and went in the train car. A businessman with a briefcase. A mother with two young kids. A student hunched over a textbook. None of them noticed the twelve-year-old sitting cross-legged in his seat, perfectly still, aura wrapped tight around his body.
Liam felt his aura reserves stretch and grow. It was slow, incremental progress, the kind you only noticed when you looked back weeks later. But it was there. Like a seedling pushing through soil, bit by bit, day by day.
The train rattled on into the night.
When the sky turned dark, Liam had already crossed the border into the Mimbo Republic. Another V5 nation. One of the five superpowers that theoretically ran the world.
He switched trains at a massive transit hub, barely pausing long enough to grab a packaged sandwich from a vending machine before boarding the next one. This train was faster, sleeker. An express line heading east across the continent.
Liam kicked off his shoes in the small private compartment he'd splurged on and sat cross-legged on the narrow bed. He held up his left hand and stared at the ring on his index finger. Ring A. The character 甲 glinted in the dim cabin light.
He focused, reaching through the Moon Mark inside the ring, sensing the other mark thousands of kilometers away.
The night outside rushed past the window like spilled ink.
"It's based on my perception," Liam murmured to himself. "Just like Kurapika's oath. The Phantom Troupe's identity is determined by his judgment, not some objective cosmic standard. My subconscious can't lie to me. But what if I couldn't tell day from night? Would the Moon Mark fail? Or would it work anyway, like Kurapika's Scarlet Eyes, detached from conscious thought? Maybe it'd run on my biological clock instead."
He paused, frowning. This was getting philosophical.
A gentle tug at the edge of his awareness. The Moon Mark activated from Shizuku's end.
[Liam, what are you thinking about?] Her voice echoed in his mind, clear as a phone call but more intimate somehow. Like she was sitting right next to him.
[Just wondering how the Moon Mark actually works,] he replied. He explained his theory about perception versus biological clocks versus objective reality.
[That makes sense,] Shizuku said after a moment.
[But there's another problem,] Liam continued. He formed a small sphere of aura in his palm and rotated it with his fingertips, like a miniature globe. [What if we're in different time zones? If I'm in the day hemisphere and you're in the night hemisphere, whose Moon Mark takes priority? Does it work? Does it fail? Do we both need to be in nighttime, or just one of us?]
Silence.
Then: [That's not possible.]
[Why not, Doraemon?]
[Because we can't have one in day and one in night,] Shizuku said matter-of-factly. [Also, I've never heard of "day hemisphere" and "night hemisphere" before.]
Liam blinked.
[It's like you said before,] Shizuku continued. [The world we know is inside a huge Lake Mobius in the Dark Continent. If the Dark Continent is one planet, or even if there's something bigger outside, the six continents we know are probably too small to have half in day and half in night. We'd need to be really far apart for that to happen.]
Right.
Because the "known world" wasn't even a real planet. It was a weird isolated region in a much larger, much more terrifying place. Time zones worked differently when your entire civilization was basically living in a snow globe.
Liam dismissed the aura sphere and changed the subject. [How was your afternoon shopping? Is the area around Heavens Arena nice?]
[I don't know.]
[You don't know?]
[I wanted to wait until you got here,] Shizuku said. [So we can go together. You'll be bored on the train for days. It'll be more fun if I wait.]
Liam felt something warm flicker in his chest. He smiled despite himself.
[That's actually really considerate. Okay, Dora. I'll be there soon.]
He cut the connection, twisting the ring off his finger and setting it on the small fold-down table next to his phone. Then he pulled the thin train-issued blanket over his head and curled up on the narrow bed.
"Tsk. Stop messing with my focus," he muttered to no one in particular. "Go to sleep."
The Mimbo Republic was a big country. Really big. The train ride stretched on well into the next day.
By mid-morning, Liam was back in his compartment, practicing. The small space was filled with dozens of floating Flying Star Bubbles. Tiny, translucent spheres of aura drifting lazily through the air like soap bubbles.
He formed an aura bullet on his fingertip and flicked it forward.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
The bubbles burst one after another in rapid succession, each one disintegrating the instant the bullet grazed it.
Liam frowned, analyzing his technique as he worked. The Flying Star Bubbles were fragile by design. No durability, no offensive power. Just enough substance to carry the Star Mark and stick to a target. Which meant they were great for stealth, but terrible if the enemy was alert and ready to swat them out of the air.
Still, their lack of presence was an advantage. No killing intent. No obvious threat. Easy to overlook until it was too late.
He was preparing another round of bubbles when he felt it.
A Star Mark activating.
Liam's focus sharpened immediately. "What's going on with this girl? Did she get stabbed again?" he muttered. His consciousness snapped forward, projecting into the distant carrier of the mark.
The world shifted.
Suddenly he was sitting on a toilet, pants down around his ankles, holding a freshly opened package in his hands.
Wait.
What?
Is this still the case?
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