Author's Note:

Make sure you read to the end

Thunder rumbling above, rain was on the sky's mind as Knov departed for the cloudless world of his Nen space. Neferpitou's En had disappeared for some unknown reason, which made this the perfect—and, perhaps, the only—opportunity to infiltrate the palace and place the portals for the coming invasion. The attack would occur a mere three days from now, and everything rode on his ability to get the team inside the enemy walls. He could not afford to fail.

This was what was on Knov's mind as he poured over the blueprints for the palace layout. Within the palace, he'd lay three exits at varying distances from the throne room, and they could use whichever one the situation called for when the time actually came. That would give them a degree of adaptability, but was it enough…?

"… Er, Knov-Sensei?"

He turned a page of the map. "What is it, Palm?"

"A-are you sure it's a good idea? To have that man Kite fight Pitou with us?"

"Why do you ask?"

She shifted demurely before his gaze. "I… doubt his dedication."

Palm certainly had a problem with Kite, he knew. After the battle royale they'd fought, Knov had caught her plotting to kill him on more than one occasion, the injuries he'd dealt her like a flamethrower to all the tinder of Palm's spiteful nature. None of Knov's reprimands had stayed her bloodlust for long, despite her obsessive desire for his approval. Previously, that was a feat only her hatred of Ging had managed—really quite incredible.

"Are you saying that he'll run away from the invasion?"

"Ah, no," she mumbled, eyes downcast. "But his priority will be selfish: to keep himself alive. He won't endanger himself for the mission or his allies, which means we're better off not relying on him."

"… Palm."

She startled at the word, flustered by the impression of having Knov's full attention. "Y-yes?"

"When you believe the worst in people, you create a world that'll only bring out the worst in yourself."

"Oh…"

"Let yourself have hope in others, when the only thing holding you back is hate. I think you'll find Kite more than worthy of the effort."

Knov could tell that all this was flying way over her head—or, rather, bouncing off of it; she simply refused to envision Kite as anyone but the bastard she made him out to be. Well, Palm had always been a… selective thinker. It didn't really matter so long as she did what was asked of her when the time came, which she always did.

"We all may die, soon," he sighed, giving up on the conversation. "Let's try to face death without any grudges, shall we? I'd like it if we could all go out as friends."

This was what was on Knov's mind as he looked upon the bodies of Knuckle and Shoot, their lifeless hands still clasped together.

—and the man tackled Pitou with enough force to throw them both through a window, falling onto the courtyard below with a mist of broken glass.

… Twenty-four seconds, then. It shouldn't take any longer than that for Pitou to dispose of the intruders—although, that number might increase a bit if some of them band together before it can finish picking them off. Maybe… a minute. A minute and a half?

Well, hopefully not that long. The sooner Pitou could join his journey to the King, the better; Pouf's real body had been following Him, the old man, and the dragon this whole time, of course. Unfortunately, he had to keep a few kilometers away for fear of being spotted, knowing that the King might kill him if He learned of his disobedience—which Pouf would deserve, of course, but it'd be a disservice to die while use could still be made of him. So he stalked them from afar in wait of the moment where things start to happen and he could ambush their enemy.

Life had a way of working itself out, it seemed. There was reason to be grateful.

Shaiapouf turned away from the window and looked back at the unlit room. The corpse of the girl was a dark blob in the corner, and the boy stood a ways away, staring at him.

Just… staring.

The ways of humans were as many as they were bizarre. Indeed, the boy's heart had abandoned its previous meter and now beat quite slowly, the gaps of stillness between each beat growing wider—each drawn breath lagging farther and farther behind the next. And then Pouf realized that he couldn't quite discern the boy's emotions, which was an interesting phenomenon. Perhaps he was truly feeling nothing at all?

No matter. There was only one thing left to do, here.

"Ready to drag me back to hell?" Pouf mocked.

"I think we're already there," the boy answered.

The Royal Guard shook his head at the short-sighted opinion. Hell was a world without the King's order, and this world had a King. However, he knew there was no way to impart this truth on the human, so he simply said, "Then I imagine what awaits you now must be truly terrifying."

So Pouf rushed at the boy, aura sharpened into a knife, but his target was surprisingly quick on his feet and swerved out of the way. Their subsequent bout was akin to a game of tag, with Pouf diving back and forth while the boy did whatever gymnastics were necessary to preserve his life. As a mere clone, he couldn't really overturn this stalemate through brute force alone, so he resigned himself to the task of feeding other, smaller clones through the boy's throat and choking him to death.

And while he initiated that process, he stopped their chase-around to hover near the ceiling; there was no need to do anything more, after all. His foe could neither run nor hide nor fight back in any capacity. It was over.

"… He played dead."

The boy waited for him to elaborate.

"Your friend, with the blue eyes," Pouf said. "He played dead. That's how he got away from us. I had no idea that humans could stop and restart their hearts, like that. Or that they could temporarily silence the autonomous portions of their brain activity. He certainly had some tricks up his sleeve."

The boy was quiet.

"So he played dead. And we left his body unsupervised with the rest of the meat waiting to be processed for the Queen, so nobody noticed when he woke up from his coma."

Still quiet.

"The meat locker was also far enough underground to be out of range of Pitou's En—very lucky, to wind up in such a covert pocket of space. The stars were aligned to save him, it seemed."

And quiet.

"However, the En made it so there was no way to slip out of the nest undetected, so he did the next best thing and hid. Yes, he dug a deep hole in the ground and hunkered down in it, hoping that someone would someday rescue him."

And quiet.

"And a person did end up getting somewhat close—an interesting woman who appeared as a young girl, at first, but transformed into quite the muscular specimen in battle. Pitou couldn't stop talking about it for weeks!"

And quiet.

"Ah, but do you really think we wouldn't eventually find him?"

And quiet.

"We dug up his hole. At that point, he was terribly dehydrated, to speak nothing of the starvation. He couldn't fight back much."

And quiet.

"When I say 'we,' I mean a group of soldier ants, of course. I myself didn't know about it, at the time."

And quiet.

"The soldier ants devoured him right then and there. It's an unfortunate outcome, really; 'rare' humans were a favorite of the Queen. If there had been some higher authority present, his body might've been rightfully delivered to Her. But the lower ranks are so unruly! They just couldn't help but take a few bites."

… And quiet.

"Oh, well. No use fretting over what could've been."

Pouf had not garnered the reaction he'd been hoping for, which was a shame. The boy just stared and kept staring. Soon, though, there should be a telltale whistle on his breath as the clones finish plugging his gullet. Pouf was in the middle of listening for the sound when—

Suddenly—

There was a mushroom cloud over the King.

There was—

A—

How had the old man known Pouf was following? How had—a bomb—in his chest?

No time to think. All the legions of clones in the palace filtered out of their crevices and took off for the explosion, filling the skies with their numbers.

All but one, that is.

Because the clone that'd been deployed to kill the girl didn't leave his post. He tried to leave—oh, yes, he really tried.

But he couldn't look away from the boy.

Neferpitou followed the wave of Pouf's clones toward the King, with Youpi soon joining the pack. Pitou ran; Youpi flew; and Pouf swarmed, but then…

Just before he came in range of the explosion, Pouf's real body turned around and rushed back toward the palace, bolting past the other Royal Guards as the masses of his clones… fell apart.

What happened next would be seen by only two creatures, a human boy and a chimera ant. The boy's second Hatsu—the ability known as 1v1: Final Encounter to Kite, named Killua by Gon—activated like the drop of a guillotine, reducing their world to one that only held the two of them.

Killua was a technique meant to end conflict, to break the exchange of hostility between the user and the target. It did this through bringing about one of two outcomes: it could either heal the rift between two people or kill the weaker among them. Simply put, Killua was both a death match and peace accord, both the only option and the last resort. It forced all discord to take its course and reach a conclusion from the viewpoint of at least one participant. It settled all differences for the "winner" chosen, stopping only when someone is satisfied.

In this case, however, Killua was not only a state of being, but a deadly weapon as well. Being a hive mind, Shaiapouf had a thought process like the spread of branches from a tree; it stretched out in a million directions, entertaining the infinite variance of a million independent perspectives. To have all these perspectives suddenly overlap, converging on his counterpart in Killua's duel… it upheaved the mental ecosystem between each Pouf and the rest.

So when Gon used this Hatsu on the clone he faced, the clone had only a moment of stunned confusion before his cells pulled away from each other and flew back to their progenitor. The effect spread like a disease through the rest of his hordes, all clones losing control of their functions and returning home, and Pouf's real body found itself hurtling toward its new point of focus.

But though the loss of his clones would weaken him greatly, it wasn't the worst of the side-effects he came to suffer, because his psyche was also fatally crippled. As a Royal Guard, the King was, in some way, shape, or form, rooted in his every thought—a concept as integral to his being as the rest of his identity—and Killua cut him off from this fundamental loyalty. It was a change he could not understand, a change that damaged and disturbed him, a change that attacked his greatest strength: his ability to think.

So Pouf's real body tumbled through the doorway to stand before Gon, who in turn stood before Pouf's real body, whose brain was an unstable, pseudo-lobotomized mess.

Gon walked up to him. Pouf did not react.

Gon extended a hand and curled a finger toward himself, beckoning Pouf to crouch down to his height. Pouf blindly obeyed.

Gon cupped Pouf's cheek with his hand. Pouf leaned into the touch.

Gon slid the hand down to rest on Pouf's shoulder. Pouf blinked slowly.

Above all else, Killua was a technique that accounted for a world without Killua. Gon could no longer know how he'd come to be here, why he was doing this, what had led him to be this way. While Killua was active, the memory of Killua was locked away in a dark recess of his mind, kept safe from his contemplation. If life is hell, why live it at all?

So Gon closed his hand around Pouf's neck and abruptly ripped his head off.

(Some hatreds run too deep for even Killua to resolve.)

"I can—I can do it. I can fix Him," Neferpitou sobbed to Youpi while Dr. Blythe picked away at the charred husk of their King. "I can—I can—I can—I can—"

As things were, neither of them had the intellect or presence of mind to realize that feeding themselves to Meruem might've done the trick.

The poison killed Youpi before he could exact revenge.

Neferpitou died two hours later, wondering why it had ever been born.

Several nights later, all was quiet at the Zoldyck estate, but seeing as this was its usual state, Illumi found nothing of substance to note. The passageway to the lowest level was completely normal in its dungeon aesthetic, melting with its usual ease into the armored corridor of their most secure facility. He'd already gotten permission from his father, of course.

He had the codes to each of the five doors. They all opened with a hiss of air untouched for the last three years, stale and faintly industrial to the nose. On this level, there was only one room with any form of ventilation, and that room was lined with the stuffed animals of one highly-monitored child.

"Illumi!"

Illumi regarded his second youngest brother with a featureless stare. "Hi, Alluka."

"Where's Killu? I wanna play!"

"That's a good question," he said. "I'd like to know as well."

His only reason for joining the Ant Extermination Team had been to look for Killu. He'd made the executive decision not to fight any Royal Guards, since he wasn't actually getting paid; Netero had used Killu to extort him into working for free, so why should he do more than the bare minimum of what was outlined in his contract? Once Grandfather had sent the message confirming that Netero (and the bomb) had been delivered to the King, he could technically consider his job to be over.

But although the main job had been successful, Illumi had failed in his mission to find his brother, and thus they had to resort to their fail-safe. A regrettable development, but one he knew was necessary.

"Hm… Illumi, break your toe!"

It might've been best to leave the request-granting to a butler, but he knew that he'd derive a great amount of personal satisfaction from doing it on his own, so he allowed himself this indulgence. At such a low request-difficulty, there was no way he could fail.

So he sat down, removed his footwear, and let Alluka watch him break his pinky toe with a clean snap.

"Illumi, spin around until you throw up!"

That might be hard to do, given that he'd long since lost the ability to experience nausea. However, he was able to vomit on command, so he spun around for a bit before upheaving his lunch.

"Illumi, give me two pints of blood!"

Oh, a slightly dangerous one. Illumi slit his wrist with the tip of a needle and let the blood pour onto Alluka's outstretched hands, using a strand of hair to sew the wound shut when enough had splashed onto the floor.

And there it was, the Something that had invaded his family. How could Killu be so fond of this thing? Illumi just didn't see the appeal; honestly, the mask-face was just creepy, and its voice grated on his ears—not to say that it actually bothered him, but still. It simply wasn't a pleasant creature.

Regardless, if what Pouf had said about Killu was true, then this next part should be interesting to watch.

"Bring Killu here."

"'Kay."

First came the skeleton, white specks appearing out of thin air and spilling out like spurned milk into their properly fitted anatomies. Then came the tissues of the organs, the red cords of the muscles, the spiderweb of capillaries, the tendons and ligaments and cartilage and fat. The pale skin and paler hair. And then there was Killu, lying on the floor, naked as the day he was born.

The still body jolted to life, and the younger Zoldyck began to gasp for air, an exertion which quickly devolved into a fit of sputtering coughs. Illumi kneeled down beside him and tilted his head until their noses bumped; the long, black tresses of his hair fell like a funeral veil all around them, blocking out the rest of the world as Killu's blue, blue eyes twitched and fluttered open.

"Welcome home, little brother."

Author's Note:

Haha, yeah... tried my best to make this a surprising outcome. Don't worry; the story's far from over! ! !
Please let me know what you thought... or not. It's up to you, of course